Philip Nicosia

I’ve never felt the need to buy an iPod before as the only music I tend to listen to is what I hear on the radio but now I have had a change of heart.

There are so many great podcasts available which I do try to listen to but find it distracting to listen to these on my PC. So now I’ve decided to order an iPod so I can download the podcasts onto it and hopefully I’ll have more of a chance to listen to them when I’m on the move.

Some of the podcasts I listen to regularly are:

The Best of Chris Moyles
Scott Mills Daily
Webmaster Radio

I’m sure I will be listening to more once my iPod arrives.

When I first got my Sony PSP I noticed in the menus a link to “LocationFree”. I didn’t have a clue what this was so I searched on the internet and found that you could watch TV wireless on your Sony PSP if you had a LocationFree base station. How cool is that? Unfortunately these were only available in the US at the time.

Sony have now released these in the UK a short while ago and although they were out of  stock on their online store I found one on Ebay which was also a bargain and I couldn’t resist the temptation to buy it.

Setting up my PSP to receive TV was a piece of cake and took less than 5 minutes. All I had to do once I had connected the base station to my Sky+ box was to put it into setup mode then get the PSP to find it and register itself and I was set. I have to say I was a bit dubious how well it would work but to my amazement the picture quality received on the PSP was excellent.

Next thing to do was setup the remote control by downloading the codes to my PSP. This again was a simple exercise and now I can happily control my Sky+ satellite receiver anywhere in the house or garden.

Now I had got the PSP working the next task on my list was to get it working with my Sony UX180P. This wasn’t quite as straightforward as the PSP and took a little longer. Mainly because I don’t think the instructions were all that clear or I wasn’t reading them properly.

The confusing thing to start with was that I couldn’t connect to the base station. It turns out that unless you have the base station connected into your router by cable it won’t work. It wasn’t a problem for the PSP but the pc was a different story altogether.

This is one thing that I had overlooked when reading the specs before I bought it. Being a wireless device I had thought it would connect to my router wirelessly but this isn’t the case. It needs to hard wired in with a cable. Now this was going to be a problem for me as the location of the base station was going to be in a different room to where my router is. Luckily this didn’t turn out to be such a big problem after all. I bought a Netgear wireless game adapter and plugged it into that and it worked straight away.

Picture quality on the PC was equally as good as the PSP and again was excellent. My only disappointed is that on the PSP there is a button to control the picture format so if you are feeding it with a widescreen signal you can stretch it out to fill the whole screen as it should be but this feature isn’t available yet for the PC. I only hope they support this in the future with an upgrade to the software.

Now for the tricky part. I wanted to set it up to watch TV over the internet. This involved setting up port forwarding in the router to the base station which wasn’t such an issue as I had done this before with my wireless camera. The only real problem I had was finding out how to setup the dynamic dns service in the base station. This part got me scratching my head a lot as it wasn’t that clear in the instructions. The problem I had was I was looking in the wrong place. Instead of the advanced settings it was actually in the easy setup menu. Once I had found the correct menu it was as simple as can be. You don’t need to sign up to anything and the dynamic dns service assigns you a web address to connect to the base station with.

In the specs it says that the minimum requirements are a broadband connection with upload and download speeds no less than 300kbs. As my current provider only gives me a maximum of 256kbs and probably doesn’t achieve that I was a bit dubious to whether it would actually work or not. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it did and although the picture quality wasn’t anywhere near as good as connecting directly to the base station it was perfectly viewable. I would say it was as good as watching a program recorded on an old VHS video tape.

Things can only improve when TalkTalk finally let me go and I get a different provider with 3 x the upload speed I’m currently getting.

So now I can happily watch anything on TV from home including all recorded programmes on my Sky+ box anywhere in the world where I can connect wirelessly to a hotspot or a 3G connection with my Sony UX180P.

I have to say it is pretty amazing and if anyone had told you ten years ago that you would be able to do this you would have laughed in their face. Imagine what we will be doing in another 10 years?

Pete wins Big Brother and quite deservedly so. There was no doubt in my mind that he would win and was the clear favourite right from day 1 to win the £100,000 prize.

Glyn came in second followed by Aisleyne in third, Richard in fourth, Nikki in fifth and Jenny in sixth place.

Although this is the 7th series of Big Brother it is the only one I have been able to watch. It was the most controversial series yet with Big Brother constantly changing the rules but for me that only added to the appeal of the program.

I’m sure we will be seeing a lot more of the instant celebrities from this series in the near future.

The Robots.txt protocol, also called the “robots exclusion standard” is designed to lock out web spiders from accessing part of a website. It is a security or privacy measure, the equivalent of hanging a “Keep Out” sign on your door.

This protocol is used by web site administrators when there are sections or files that they would rather not be accessed by the rest of the world. This could include employee lists, or files that they are circulating internally. For example, the White House website uses robots.txt to block any inquiries on speeches by the Vice President, a photo essay of the First Lady, and profiles of the 911 victims.

How does the protocol work? It lists the files that shouldn’t be scanned, and places it in the top-level directory of the website. The robots.txt protocol was created by consensus in June 1994 by members of the robots mailing list (robots-request@nexor.co.uk). There is no official standards body or RFC for the protocol, so it’s difficult to legislate or mandate that the protocol be followed. In fact, the file is treated as strictly advisory, and does not have absolute guarantee that those contents won’t be read.

In effect, robots.txt requires cooperation by the web spider and even the reader, since anything that is uploaded into the internet becomes publicly available. You aren’t locking them out of those pages, you are just making it harder for them to get in. But it takes very little for them to ignore these instructions. Computer hackers can also easily penetrate the files and retrieve information. So the rule of thumb is—if it’s that sensitive, it shouldn’t be on your website to begin with or it should be in a password protected folder.

Care, however, should be taken to ensure that the Robots.txt protocol doesn’t block the website robots from other areas of the website. This will dramatically affect your search engine ranking, as the search engines rely on the robots to find and register the pages.

One misplaced hyphen or dash can have catastrophic effects. For example, the robots.txt patterns are matched by simple substring comparisons, so care should be taken to make sure that patterns matching directories have the final ‘/’ character appended: otherwise all files with names starting with that substring will match, rather than just those in the directory intended.

To avoid these problems, consider checking your pages with a robots.txt analyzer. Google has a free one within their Google Webmaster Tools.

Pete had a vision where his friend who died told him he would be the winner. He is worried that if he doesn’t win how that would affect his believe in his vision and heaven.

Pete is the nicest most genuine person in the house by far. He deserves to win and I for hope he does so his belief in his vision remains intact with his faith.

To vote for Pete:

Text PETE to 84444
(Texts cost 50p, plus std msg rate)
Call 09011 32 33 11
(Calls cost 50p, mobile and other network rates may vary)
10p from every vote will go to charity

Pete to win!