Sky on demand - on my PC!

One of the things that came as a surprise in Windows 7 was the announcement that it would include a Sky player as part of Media Center - and more excitingly Sky subscribers - such as myself, would be able to access content for free.

Disappointingly, the Sky Player wasn't initially available, but it is now!

This evening, after reading about it in my PC Pro RSS feed, I opened up Media Center and got the update. The player requires you it install Microsoft's Silverlight, a web application framework (no I don't understand it either).

After the update and Silverlight install which took all of about 3 minutes, I logged in to Sky (I already had a registration), and bingo! Live Sky TV on my PC.

I was expecting a few random crappy channels, but no - Sky News, Sky Sports News, Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Sports Extra, ESPN, British Eurosprt, Gold, MTV, some kids channels including Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel (please God don't tell my daughter).

Amazing. I tested it out on Sky Sports 1 which is showing the Preston v Newcastle game. Full screen I got some initial buffering messages. The picture quality wasn't bad, but you can choose from High, Medium and Low. I eventually settled for low, and re-sized the pic to about a 5 inch x 3 inch box, and it was highly watchable. The High quality setting suffers from very occasional buffering but the quality is superb, although the buffering did settle after a while. Here you can see it running top right of my screen, with Blogger and Tweetdeck also running.

For info, my broadband connection isn't very fast - I'm supposed to get up to 8meg, but in all the time I've had this I scratch around just over 2meg.

I'm well chuffed with this - especially as it ain't going to cost me any more than my normal Sky sub. If you're not a Sky subscriber, you can still access this, but it'll cost you - £15 a month I think, but better check.

Once I whack this on my other W7 PC, We'll be able to watch Sky on 4 different device in the house. Overkill? Maybe, but very cool.....

Oh, oh...growing up

Reached a big watershed moment today. Went shopping for jeans for Min-Stats, and found the biggest junior ones went up to 14 years. He's 15, and they'd have come half way up his legs!

So over the the adult section, where the smallest sizes are marginally too baggy and too long (but he'll grow into them).

Bizarrely, the biggest junior size we could find would have cost £18. The adult ones.....£9.50. The shop...M&S!

Freshen up

I thought it was about time I gave the blog a bit of a freshen up, so I've smacked a new template on it. Hope you like it. I think it needs a change every now and then to liven it up a bit.

Camcorder suggestions

Ok, next up in the shiny gadget stakes is a replacement camcorder. Currently, I've got two camcorders - a JVC VHS-C model of many years vintage that's about a foot long and half as high, which hasn't been used in anger since about 2003, and a Sony TVR19E Mini DV model of about late 2003 vintage which is still used as our main camcorder.

Intrinsically there's nothing wrong with the Sony. It's relatively compact, I've got an extended battery so I can get 3 hours shooting out of it, and the picture quality aint bad. But it is still heavy if you're carting it about all day. We're off stateside at Easter to the land of the Mouse, and as we'll be on our feet for a fortnight walking around the parks I think it's time to upgrade to one of the newer HDD or flash based compact units like the Samsung F30 pictured at the top of this post. These are barely larger than a compact camera, and are very light, and can easily be slipped into a pocket.

The trouble is, I don't know which one to get. Typically I'm up to my ears in users reviews from Amazon and other sites, and have been trawling the displays in Curry's and Comet. I don't want to spend a fortune - I'm not Steven Spielberg - I want something that I can shoot basic video with, transfer it to my PC (or Mac - and that's not always straightforward looking at reviews because of the format some of these things record in) and edit it and burn the resulting output to DVD for playback on a PC or TV (for those luddites in my family that haven't embraced the digital age).

The Samsung is only about £140 which seems like real value (if it's any good), but I'm also looking at the Panasonic SDR26 units and lower end Canon Legria series.

Has anyone out there got one something like this who can give me some feedback ?

Dull, wet and windy and a last minute loss. Barnsley 1-0 City

Dull wet and windy. And that was the game. The weather not much better.

And to cap it all, City concede in the last 15 seconds of added time. AAAAARGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

Not much to say really, and I'm not in the mood, so I won't.

Nuff said.

Hurrah for our lads!

A bit of a "big up" for our cricket club, as this week our Under 13's were crowned champions of their indoor league campaign, having won all seven of their matches against some mighty opposition.

In context, Dinas Powys is a very small club (with big support), and we don't have the resources of the big clubs around this area. Our junior section is coming in from the cold, having really only got back on it's feet three or four years ago, and we're way behind most of the bigger clubs in this respect.

However, on their way to the title our U13's dispatched Cardiff, Newport, Pentyrch and Lisvane (amongst others), some of which claim not only county, but international level players.

As Chairman of our club I'm hugely proud of the lads achievements this year. They made the final of their outdoor league campaign, and now have gone one better with this title.

Our club should be safe in their hands.

Up the Dinas as we say.

You can read more about us at www.dinaspowyscc.co.uk

Obvious caption of the year

This picture appeared on the BBC website regarding Children in need. The caption read:

"Terry Wogan (centre)...."

'That' handball - update

Thierry Henry now says the right thing to do would be to replay the match against Ireland.

Well he would say that wouldn't he, knowing full well there's not a snowball in hell's chance of it ever happening.

'That' handball

Ok, let's get things out in the open. People cheat. They do it all the time. There are very few of us who could honestly say we've never cheated at anything - ever. I can't.

(Before I go any further and get sued or accused of nefarious activity of my own, on the basis of cheating by nicking this photo from the BBC website, I'd just like to give a shout to them, and AFP.)

In sport, it's rife and I think, especially football (which is sad to say as a supporter of the game). Watch any football match and you'll see shirt pulling (not allowed) diving (not allowed), people rolling around in agony (and then up on their feet in two seconds) and so on.

We're told by those in the know (people unprepared to take it on) that it's not cheating, it's about gaining an advantage (albeit illegally), and if the ref didn't see it well tough - let's all blame the man in black that someone else cheated.

And to a degree I accept this. Play hard (but fair). If the ref (in any sport) was to penalise every single breach of regulations, one of two things would happen.

1) cheating or undertaking nefarious acts to gain an advantage might just be eradicated as people come to realise that you just can't get away with it, and/or

2) matches would take so long a 90 minutes footie match would take a day to complete. So it happens and you live with it.

Think about the shenanigans that goes on in any penalty area at a corner. Anywhere else on the pitch the ref would blow for a foul. In the area pople get away with it because the ref would be giving 20 penalties a match. But why doesn't one of them (or the ref's association) say, OK we will. It would soon stop it.

But then there are instances like last night where Thierry Henry, so deliberately and obviously cheated to gain an advantage it's hard to stomach. But who's getting the flack?

Mostly, the ref. I heard Liam Brady, Assistant Irish Manager on the radio this morning effectively say you can't call what Henry did cheating, the problem is the ref didn't act on it.

Oh please. Come on. Give the ref some slack. He may have missed it. He may have seen it fleetingly and though it was one of those regular "handballs" rather than a Diego Maradonna moment. Whatever, if he saw it he should have given it. But he didn't.

But that doesn't detract from the fact that a role model to millions, deliberately cheated in a match being watched by millions, so blatantly to everyone (except the ref) and then had the gall (gaul?) to sit down at the end of the match and tell Richard Dunne, yes I handballed, but hey I'm sorry. Have a nice summer, I'll send you a postcard from South Africa.

Other notable Frenchmen have said how terrible this was and they're not proud of what happened. I'll bet they'll be cheering loudly when France play their opener next summer.

FIFA have done their usual retreating from the firing line issuing a statement saying the ref's decision is final. Gutless.

I don't accept this wasn't cheating at the most dreadful level at all. Henry should be retrospectively penalised. Make him miss the World Cup.

It's hard to argue that there are degrees of cheating. It should be black and white, but it aint. But there are some circumstances where someone should stand up and be counted. Henry, FIFA, the French Football Association, anyone.

Dropbox again, and other sync stuff

One of the cloud programs I've started using much more since getting my Mac is Dropbox. I've installed Dropbox on each of my desktop PC's, my Macbook Pro and even my Eee netbook. Now I have a Dropbox folder on each of these machines, and whatever I put in that folder is automatically synced to the "cloud" every time I connect to the net, and s therefore available on whichever machine I access it on.

I only have the free version of Dropbox at the moment, but that gives me 2GB storage, which is plenty for the use I need at the moment. For stuff that I need cloud storage for that's specific to the Mac I have iDisk via Mobile Me.

The other thing that's worthy of a mention is the Xmarks plugin for Firefox, again installed on each of my machines which means my Firefox bookmarks are automatically synced across all machines. Cool.

I still do have some concerns about cloud storage. It's fine until a) the cloud isn't available, and/or b) something else goes horribly wrong. I hope it doesn't, but it might. But in the meantime, it's working for me, and I'm getting quite excited by what the cloud can offer.

Mac news

I've downloaded Neo Office for the Mac to give it a try. So far I've used iWork's "Pages" for my wordprocessing on the Macbook. Although I haven't actually done that much WP, Pages does look fairly useful, and very much a page layout program in a desktop publisher sort of way.

However, neat and easy though it undoubtedly is, I've struggle with a few basic issues. Number one in this is that I need to access documents from other PC's apart from the Mac. I therefore want to save documents as MS Word format. Although I can do that in Pages, I have to specifically select that every time I save a document (unless there's a setting I can't find).
Neo Office, which is a free open source program based on the same code as Open Office provides the ability to always save as a particular file type.

In just a couple of minutes I already feels slightly more comfortable with Neo Office that I do with Pages. I'll continue to give both a fair crack of the whip, and see where I go.

Wales 3-0 Scotland

There will be some debate about whether Wales were good or Scotland were bad after this match. The truth is, it was a bit of both.

I went to the match expecting a tough game, even though it was a friendly. Scotland's performances of late have been decent, and Wales had a really young looking side - no Giggs, Bellamy and some of the other older players around.

The visitors could have gone two up inside five minutes slicing the Welsh defence open, only for Hennessy to make good stops. After that, it was all Wales, with the impressive former Bluebird Aaron Ramsey pulling the strings. He set up the first goal from Edwards after an impressive 1-2 and cross from the right wing. On half an hour, Simon Church slotted home after another good move to make it 2-0, before Ramsey ran through the Scottish midfield and defence to slot home past Cardiff City keeper David Marshall to make it 3-0. It should have been 4-0 minutes later but Marshall saved well, although Wales had a great shout for a penalty turned away by the Swiss ref.

In the second half the inevitable substitutes disrupted the flow of the game, but Wales almost scored another only for Marshall to foul outside his box when one on one with Vokes. In a competitive game it would have been red, but he got away with a yellow.

The introduction of Cardiff City hero Ross McCormack injected some life into Scotland, and he almost beat Hennessy with a sublime chip, but the keeper tipped over the bar. He then made two saves in quick succession to keep a clean sheet.

Scotland were poor - no doubt about it, but Wales's youngsters looked sharp, at ease with the ball at their feet and played some great football. They were by far the hungrier of the two sides. A great result for the boyo's.