It’s been a short while since my last blog entry; I have been hurriedly coding my mons­trous hunk of a new web­site, Auc­tion Ear­ners. In bet­ween fran­tic key bashing I have also par­ta­ken in Christ­mas fes­ti­vi­ties, sett­led in at work (care­fully omit­ting key­words to pre­vent this being flag­ged in a Goo­gle Alert), tur­ned 23 and grown a little over­weight. Who’d have thought that typing was not suf­fi­cient daily exer­cise to keep one healthy? When it gets a little war­mer those calo­ries will be burnt off as I take to a regime of sun tan­ning and cycling.

Now, in taking a break from my still unready ad ser­vice, I feel that I need to rant about a cou­ple of things. Come New Year and my splen­did get-together come shin­dig in my flat – (with Tex-Mexican nice­ties (tacos, enchi­la­das, dips, chi­lli con carne) spread among 8), whilst purcha­sing the tasty treats I deci­ded to embark on a Free­view adven­ture. Back in Novem­ber I bought myself a Phi­lips Free­view box (a DTR220, digi­tal terres­trial recei­ver) for £35. Plug­ging it into the aerial atop of my flat lead to the dis­co­very of 40 chan­nels, with an almighty 3 of these being vie­wa­ble (bid up TV, sky three and a radio sta­tion), the rest degra­ding into some sort of glitch-ridden mad­ness. This didn’t bother me too much; I took the box back and grab­bed my refund from Curry’s, one hour after purchase. In late Decem­ber I pic­ked up my sig­nal boos­ter from Bris­tol, bought the same box again and hey presto – 40 vie­wa­ble channels.

It’s been a month or so since I got the box, and a num­ber of things have star­ted to annoy me. The main nig­gle is the cons­tant crashing of the firm­ware – I’ll be merrily flic­king through chan­nels and all of a sud­den it will turn itself off and on again, expe­rience a con­trol freeze up (the TV sig­nal shall con­ti­nue but all con­trol is remo­ved – for­cing me to switch the unit off and on at the switch) or sud­denly cease ren­de­ring the back­ground image ele­ments for the EPG and info bar – which again do not return until a reset. Tem­po­rary in-viewing pro­blems also inc­lude a perio­di­cal five to ten seconds of black and white, cross chan­nel inter­fe­rence (par­ti­cu­larly anno­ying if the inva­ding chan­nel has scro­lling text) and all on top of the ugly low sig­nal digi­tal pau­sing and image dis­tor­tion that occurs during bad weather. The remote con­trol inter­face is also enti­rely unin­tui­tive, although it is slick – if I had to give a posi­tive point to this pseudo review.

In conc­lu­sion, do not buy the Phi­lips DTR220, it is a hunk of junk with a brand name.

To con­ti­nue in the same vein, my tele­vi­sion comes equip­ped with a soli­tary SCART con­nec­tor. I regu­larly switch bet­ween my Xbox 360, Wii, PC out­put and Free­view box. This wouldn’t be a pro­blem if an affor­da­ble yet decent switch-able multi SCART adap­ter exis­ted. Fin­ding a manual switching device that doesn’t use auto­ma­tic sig­nals to change the dis­play is dif­fi­cult enough – given that my PC is on all the time this isn’t an option. Robert and Dyas do stock one, a 4 con­nec­tor with push but­ton switch – fan­tas­tic. Up until the point you plug it in and get hideous inter­fe­rence bet­ween all the SCART chan­nels and inces­sant screen flic­ke­ring. Pro­duct retur­ned and I’m still looking.

Ideally I would upgrade my 20 inch CRT to a flat screen LCD, but the TV isn’t that old and it does its job well enough – except when it comes to Xbox 360 gaming, but that isn’t its fault. Of the 4 games I have, only one has legi­ble on-screen text – the others all result in tiny blu­rred text that is impos­si­ble to read – ren­de­ring it use­less. This is enti­rely a design flaw – expec­ting all users to own an LCD is an outra­geous assump­tion that con­ti­nues to thwart me. Gah!

Ok, elec­tro­nics rant over, time to get back to fixing some ses­sion stuff.