Ed Stoffel

Traditional television is struggling to hang on to an audience, as more and more turn to the internet. That’s where the audience can get what they want, when they want it, without filters. There’s plenty of commentary too, not just one view like the mainstream media dispenses…

Over the next four years, it is thought that the number of videos watched over the internet will quadruple, with people moving from short clips to hour-long programmes. Broadband companies claim that the service will cause “traffic jams”, which will cost millions of pounds to sort out and that customers will ultimately end up paying the bill. But Vint Cerf, who helped to build the internet, dismissed the warnings as “scare tactics”, saying that critics had predicted 20 years ago that the net would collapse when people all around the world started to use it en masse.

  TV is dying, says Google expert, Telegraph

I love my iPod mini, which I bought only 3 months ago. My daily route trip commute takes 3 hours, so I listen to lots of audiobooks from Audible.com. I used to burn them onto CDs, but after several hundred of those, I decided to try the iPod when the iPod minis became available for $199. It’s been working great until yesterday when it became less responsive to button presses. While listening to one book, I wanted to go back a few minutes to relisten to the passage. But when I held down the back button, it cued the book to a point about an hour prior. The rewind and fast-forward buttons would no longer skip back or ahead a minute at a time. How long is my iPod warranty good for, I began to wonder? Probably 90-days since that’s how long it’s been and the problem just started. I looked through my saved emails from Apple but couldn’t find anything about the warranty. Then I checked the website, hoping something would be there. But before finding warranty information, I saw a link to solving iPod problems. This handy information explains how to perform a reset of the device, and that did the trick. (For my iPod, I hold down ‘menu’ and ‘select’ together for 6 seconds.) My skip ahead/behind buttons work just fine now. And it turns out, the warranty did just expired. I could have bought the Applecare Protection Plan for an additional $59, but I’ve always disliked those extended warranties. I would rather choose to buy quality products which last on their own, and refuse to return to brands that don’t. I don’t like buying things that sit in the service shop. Make it right and I’ll be a loyal customer.

I also woke up this morning to find my laptop screen’s video has shrunk… no longer filling the space to the edges of the screen. Changing to the highest resolution expands the video to the edges, but the setting I prefer (1024 x 768) no longer does. It used to. Now why did that suddenly change? UPDATE: The fix was to right-click on desktop, graphic options, panel fit, enable…. this after playing for awhile with screen resolution and refresh rate. It was just the “panel fit” needing to be enabled; not sure how it was disabled.