Windows 10 Anniversary Update

I have used 95, 98SE, ME, XP, 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 (pre-anniversary update). Each had their foibles and advantages. Windows 10 Anniversary Update has made my quad core 6 GB RAM machine sluggish and has killed or wounded the sleep function which now works 50% of the time (monitor doesn’t wake up sometimes). Any MVP reading this PLEASE do not copy/paste your scripted “solution” about drivers, DISM etc.

I beg you not to.

I know what I am doing. Let me spell it out for anyone who has got this far; Windows 10 was the best OS MS has ever released and without hyperbole I think that the Anniversary Update is the literally the worst as it has slowed down my PC (and my laptop too incidentally). If it was really good why not have confidence that users will not want to roll back to a previous build? You “allow” this for 10 days (down from 30 days) I know but why put any time limit at all? And here’s the big one, why did the team slyly set system restore to off by default as part of Windows 10 Anniversary Update?

Top Tech Podcasts of 2016

First of all thanks to all those creative people making the podcasts listed below.

However good or bad I claim the podcasts reviewed below to be, their creators are doing something I couldn't do; which is to make a podcast.

And here we go...

The 361 Degrees Podcast

http://feed.361podcast.com/361Degrees?format=xml

Ben Smith, Ewan MacLeod, Rafe Blandford

This has maintained its high standard this year though the 'seasons' thing where they disappear for weeks on end is disconcerting. How dare they go out there to earn their livings instead of supplying us with weekly podcasts? If you have never listened to this before imagine what would happen if the BBC decided to put out a programme about technology on Radio 4. It would sound like this.


All About Windows Phone

http://rss.allaboutwindowsphone.com/media-feed.xml


Steve Litchfield and Rafe Blandford

One remarkable thing is that many other tech podcasters listen in to this podcast despite their stated misgivings about Windows Phone because the standard of broadcasting is so high. Another remarkable thing is that Windows Phone still exists at all despite Microsoft having a mobile phone marketing strategy designed, apparently, for them by their competitors. Microsoft should send these genial presenters oodles of money for their efforts to keep the Microsoft flag flying in the mobile phone world.  

The Phones Show Chat

http://stevelitchfield.com/sshow/sshowchat.rss

Steve Litchfield and Ted Salmon

Another favourite of mine. One hour or so of interesting chatter about mostly Android phones. A particular enjoyable feature is that these presenters can talk about the iPhone without a trace of fanboyism and adulation.

CNET UK Podcast

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CnetUkPodcastmp3?format=xml

Rich Trenholm and Andrew Hoyle

This podcast has turned a corner with the departure of a previous presenter and it is now a really good listen. There is the occasional welcome visit from the equally knowledgeable Katie Collins.

Tech Talk UK podcast

http://techtalkuk.com/ttukpodcast.rss


Kevin Wright, Nick Robinson and Richard Yates

It has gone weekly. When there was a dip in listener figures "Kev" recently asked his followers what was wrong. Various people pointed out to him that the constant clock-ticking warmth expressed about Apple was getting tedious and to their great credit the presenters have reigned all that in. Updated on Jan 10 2017 - Well, a few weeks on and the podcast has reverted to being mostly a hymn of praise for Apple and its products. This is a pity because the lead presenter has what Steve Litchfield rightly called "a good radio voice". Updated on Feb 17 2017 The iPhone has now slipped in the charts to number 2 and the Samsung Galaxy S7 Plus reigns supreme for this exasperating but entertaining presenter.


Wired.co.uk podcast

Matt Burgess and others

I had to stop listening this year because of uptalk or upspeak or HRT whatever this vile vocal tick is called. I mentioned how I disliked this habit on Twitter and was chased down the street by sweary females because it is apparently a woman's right to talk in upspeak? I hate hearing it used by men too? I wish everyone would stop speaking like this?

Tech Tent

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01plr2p/episodes/downloads.rss


Rory Cellan-Jones

A tech podcast as fascinated by the world of AI, VR and drones as the public isn't. An occasional programme is worth a listen.


Coolsmartphone

http://feeds.feedburner.com/coolsmartphone/thepodcast?format=xml


Review to come.

Tech's Message

Nate Lanxon, Ian Morris

http://rss.acast.com/techsmessage

Review to come.

The TechXpats Podcast 

Stephen Penny and others

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheTechxpatsPodcastPodcast?format=xml

Disappeared rather disappointingly in June.

The PC Pro Podcast

Darien Graham-Smith, Tim Danton and Barry Collins

https://soundcloud.com/pc-pro?feed=rss2

After a hiatus it's back and literally better than ever because they have their best presenters on the show. This podcast deserves to be much better known and the team ranges far and wide over different fields of technology. The sound quality is variable but the content is very good.


The Tech Addicts Podcast

http://mobiletechaddicts.libsyn.com/rss

Contains teeth-grindingly awful uptalk and I had to give up listening which is a pity because otherwise the programme is worth catching for its well-informed content. 

Click 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002w6r2/episodes/downloads.rss

If the Blue Peter production team decided to start making tech podcasts they could sound like this. Unerringly, excruciatingly worthy and then some. Recent topics include using Twitter to promote social justice in India, launching a plan for an online map to show innovation and curb loss in the food chain, gene sequencing machines and sourcing tech component minerals from ethical mines. Yes, I know they're all important. Yes, I know. I feel I have to mention Click because it is a tech podcast and it is produced by the Beeb but I remain forever astonished that a tech podcast could make technology sound this dull.

These are my top four tech podcasts of 2016 in no particular order.

  The 361 Degrees Podcast

  All About Windows Phone

  The Phones Show Chat

  The PC Pro Podcast

Apologies for some of the uncontrollable bonkers formatting caused by the otherwise good blogger.com.  

Many thanks for reading my blog.

Corbyn, Brexit and Trump - oh, twenty-teens, what did we do to you?

Sadly anyone who doesn't think Trump will win in November, and he will, doesn't get populism.

What has become important is to fizz credulous people into a frenzy and crush all political nuances.If you are a populist you will regard the following as good things.

1. Corbyn will be Prime Minister. The hijacking of the Labour Party by the extreme left is well underway and is going to plan. Cleverly the socialists are hoovering up any anti-establishment votes - sticking it to the toffs and showing parliament and the meedya no one's goona push them around etc.

Of course, there will be a fight to the death between UKIP supporters and Corbynites for the votes of the credulous but the latter will win (in both senses). By the way, in case anyone doesn't get just who Corbyn is, he is supported and endorsed fully by the Morning Star. (It's funny. I never thought it was still going but it very much is.)

https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/about-us

And to quote them, "The paper’s editorial line remains anchored in the political programme of the Communist Party of Britain."

2. Britain will leave the EU. The Brexit vote was another fine manifestation of a protest vote spinning out of control.

3. Trump will be President. The message is 'I can make America great again.' Whether what Trump says is true or not doesn't matter. 

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/hlmencke129796.html

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/hlmencke129796.html

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/hlmencke129796.html

What H.L Mencken was misquoted as saying once has been distilled over time into, "For every complex human problem, there is a solution that is neat, simple and wrong."

What is true in every case above is that simple people are being offered simple solutions to difficult problems and how well the clever know how to do that.

Trident Renewal

It's the new political football folks. Here's how you play the game.

1. Make a scramble for the moral high ground. YOU would never retaliate even if the UK were under attack because people would be killed.
2. Dream of a world where there are no weapons at all. You can make John Lennon sound like a hard-nosed realist as you do so.
3. Trumpet how much you more would spend on hospitals or your own particular good cause instead of buying Trident. It doesn't matter particularly what good cause it is as long as it's a very good one.
4. Despise loudly anyone supporting Trident renewal as bloodthirsty fiends longing to kill lots of people.
5. Feel smugly superior.

Buying Trident is insane but it is an insanity we must stomach to live in the real world.

We are about to spend billions on a weapon we hope we will never use.

And why are we doing this? Because in a survival endgame Putin could not defeat the UK by simply THREATENING to use his nuclear weapons against us. If the UK possessed no nuclear weapons with which to retaliate against Russia then all Putin needs to do to win is threaten. No more than that.

I am guessing that deep amongst the throng of all the outraged, shocked, indignant and righteously moral, if misguided, people baying against Trident there is one person who is only disappointed but alas just his disappointment is more important, sadly, than all the angst of all the anti-Trident people combined.

His name is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and I wish the world were not as it is.

Selling the Sausage not the Sizzle - How Redmond Got It All Wrong

N.B. I own a Lumia 925 and 640 XL and I love them. I love Windows Phone and its 8.1 interface and the Windows 10 Mobile interface even more and I am angry at what has happened. 

It was all easily avoidable too. 

So, it is time sadly to reflect on

 Windows Phone - What Went Wrong

Sausage one

Lumia 950 and 950 XL

The release of these wannabe flagship phones to "disappointing sales" was treated as a tactical error by some commentators who forgave Microsoft their squeaky plastic finish and rushed OS. I think the error was not tactical, it was a big, fat, strategic one. For two years MS kept its loyal Windows Phone fans waiting. The design of the physical object was left in the hands of the back room boys and girls. They concentrated on getting the hardware innards right then wrapped them in something they all understood, a fine mid-range Nokia plastic case. Thus, the sausage had been cooked and was ready to serve. The trouble was the market wasn't waiting for jazzy new specs and your average Joe couldn't give a toss (of a sausage) about them. The people out there had seen the sizzle in the guise of the sleek brushed aluminium fashion life-style statements that were the iPhone and Huawei and they couldn't get enough of them. 

MS side-stepped all the market wisdom of making your competitors' proven products but making them even better-looking and cheaper. Don't believe me? Well, try to imagine how good that beautiful Windows 10 UI would have looked running on an iPhone 6 Plus clone. Yes, I can too.

Sausage Two

The full-featured bargain basement Windows phone didn't happen in time

 

Don't underestimate the number of cracked screen, past-their-best phones out there. I recently had the pleasure of spending a few days on public transport and took a close look at the phones people were carrying. I was surprised to see how many phones of yesteryear were still in service. The Lumia 520 had it all or rather it could have had it all if someone at MS hadn't decided to release it without a flash or front-facing camera. The bargain basement smartphone market fell obligingly into the pockets of Motorola and its successive imitators and it's still going their way as dumpy old phones are begrudgingly replaced by their owners. The full-featured bargain basement Windows phone took ages to arrive. MS should have worked 24/7 on getting it to market but no, they knew better; they were busy cooking up their third strategic error (sausage) - Continuum.

Sausage Three

Continuum 

Continuum is an advertiser's dream. It enables a phone to be turned into a laptop. Wow! All you need is a foldable keyboard, a dock, a spare screen (a hotel room always gets mentioned at this point. Heaven knows they've always got nice flat screens with easily accessible ports), patience while apps run s-l-o-w-l-y and you're there. The public wasn't, isn't and won't be there though. Fiddling around to connect all this paraphernalia together to perform its functions better than a modestly priced laptop can, was never a good idea except to MS advertising teams. Real people outside that niche of enthusiasts didn't want Continuum, don't want it and won't want it. This will not stop MS from pouring millions of dollars into this Sinclair C5 of a project.

Sausage Four

Replaceable batteries

Replaceable batteries. These black slabs mean you need to wrench off the back of the phone and this procedure has an overwhelming (devastating) implication for the design of its hardware. Well, replaceable batteries are needed, aren't they, because people are always buying new batteries and swapping them in aren't they? Only they are not. Like hundreds of millions of smart phone users I have never bought a battery to swap in and don't intend to. Designing a smartphone around its replaceable battery was a self-imposed burden as bad as trying to run a 100 metre Olympic sprint while carrying a suitcase. To those few battery swappers out there I say there are hundreds of millions of us who outnumber you. 

And how.

Sausage Five

"Concentrating on the corporate market."

I'll come clean. I don't know what that means but I have heard the phrase bandied about and I have made a genuine attempt to understand. You buy all your employees a discounted Windows Phone and everyone including MS are happy. But they're not. Your average Samsung and iPhone toting employee cannot understand why she or he has been lumbered with a phone from the joke end of market share. Your employees are not just that. They are consumers. At best you'll get wry acceptance from them and at worst resentment at the imposition of a plastic fantastic Windows Wonder. Once again, if only the sleek brushed aluminium fashion life-style statements Windows Phones had been there to supply to the corporate market. 

It is with irritation and sadness that I predict the Windows Phone Goose is finally cooked. All right, two years tops, then. Still we have Android with its bewildering smarties-scattered-on-a-plate  interfaces and tiny system fonts or the deeply intimidating walled garden approach that is the world of Apple products. 

It could all have been so different. 

Off to cook some sausages.

The Long Descent into Luveedom - a Critique of the Kermode and Mayo Film Review programme on BBC Radio

I’m an LTL...and all that.

I think I’ve heard every episode of the programme since it began, from the days of the all-too-brief slot where Mark used to give his quick, deft reviews when both presenters were more or less strangers to each other, through the strange period when the programme divided into two for no readily apparent reason (oh yes, it was the separate interview thing) right up to modern times when the show goes over the two hour mark quite often. Yup, although it is just a guess I think I have heard every single episode. This longevity shows how much I have enjoyed a lot of the programmes.

However, having heard, I think, all the episodes, I can and do say I’ve listened to my last. 

As I have become now a non-listener there is some telling truth to power I think is necessary but that the “good doctors” will never hear because sadly there exists now an "adoring throng" (to borrow a phrase from Blackadder).

Sorry to say, the programme has grown cute and over-ripe and too self-referential and far, far too pleased with itself. 

The programme has become a great endless, crowded traffic jam of moments for the cognoscenti. It has reached the station stop of Luveedom. But, it won’t stop because it’s too un-self-critical and unless I am mistaken will get worse and worse until the future brings us a hamster-owning filmgoers corner, or whatever.

I realized that I wasn’t enjoying the programme any more when it recently had guest presenters who presented a fun show (programme) but sans all the LTL, first-time e-mailer, I’m-an-anaesthetist-with-a-25-yard-swimming-certificate corner and its accompanying in-the-know baggage.

Enough's enough.

Good luck but sadly also good bye.

 

Review of Radio Four's 'Home Front'

The whole "Home Front" project should be abandoned but given the dogged promotion of the series by the BBC who have shrugged off all criticism of it and granted the BBC's determination never to admit they are wrong Satan will be donning ice skates for his morning commute before this happens.

I am interested in WW1 and a long time listener to radio drama so the series should have been for me a marriage made in heaven.

After giving the series a good, long listen and time to settle in I gave up when I realized it was an exercise for A-C-T-O-R-S. The dull cast sound as though they are reading it off the page and the voices and intonation are 21st century fresh.

Know wot I mean?

Not the slightest attempt is ever made to make the dialogue sound as if it came from a different age which it does, for heaven's sake.

The introduction of the uptalking vicar in one episode should have been a hangable offence.

The war drags on and there's two years more of this tosh to go.

Ora pro nobis. They know not what they do.