Category Archives: Computers

Online Safety Act 2023

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I have disabled new comments on this blog, because I don’t want be fined up to £18 million by the UK communications regulator, Ofcom, for not complying with the virtually-impossible-to-comply-with rules of the Act and the soon-to-be-ratified Illegal Harms Codes, unless you happen to be one of the Big Tech companies. The Codes, if approved by Parliament, come into force on 17 March 2025.

For the same reasons, I may have to also soon decommission my Mastodon and Matrix servers, if I can’t find an easy way to comply, and at the present time I don’t expect to be able to do so.

For those interested, you can read Ofcom’s latest statement on this at https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/statement-protecting-people-from-illegal-harms-online/

Bluetooth woes on Windows

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So I learned something today. I’ve just bitten the bullet and bought a no-name generic Bluetooth 5.0 USB dongle off the Internet which arrived this afternoon. What I wanted it for was to be able to transfer files between mobile phone and PC without having to scrabble around for a USB A-to-C cable I can never seem to find when I want it. So I plugged the dongle in, Windows auto-installed drivers, the Bluetooth icon appeared in the system tray and I was able to pair my phone with it.

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Project PVR (Part 3)

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So, just the remote control to do now.   A few weeks ago, I bought an FLIRC USB dongle and a One For All remote control, which can work as a Microsoft Media Center (sic) remote if you use the code 1272 on it.  Configuring the FLIRC device was pretty much as simple as plugging the dongle into a USB port and running the supplied software on it (I used the Windows version, but there is also a Linux version too). Continue reading →

Project PVR

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Hopefully soon all the parts should arrive for the latest of my little projects, building my own DVB-T (Freeview) & DVB-T2 (Freeview HD) Personal Video Recorder (PVR).  So far I have in my hand the Noctua CPU cooler, which on its own won’t record TV programmes very well, and the rest is (at the time of writing) due to be delivered early next week. Continue reading →

Latency

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For those of you that read my last article, you’ll know that I had to turn the power management off on the PCI slots to make my sound card work properly.  Well tonight I’ve been comparing the new WASAPI drivers vs the ASIO drivers on my RME HDSP9632 sound card using SONAR Platinum, and the effective latency results were quite surprising:

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Why I hate computers, part 335,123,232

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When it comes to computers in my house, it never rains but it pours.  Microsoft released their monthly Patch Tuesday updates on 8 November 2016, which I duly installed and rebooted, and turned the computer off.  When I turned it on the following day, the computer failed to boot.  It didn’t even get as far as the blue Windows logo that appears when you try to boot Windows 10.  “Very odd”, I thought, “I wonder what caused that?” and went to do some digging.

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