Seeking Nerdvana

Topfield Australia has finally released a high definition Personal Video Recorder, yesterday announcing the TF7000HDPVRt sporting twin high definition tuners and HDMI output. The 250GB hard drive holds roughly 70 hours of SD or 30 hours of HD recordings.

Topfield's long-awaited high definition TF7000HDPVRt.

Read the full post at http://www.hydrapinion.com/index.php/play/2006/11/17/topfield_s_high_definition_tf7000hdpvrt_

* NOTE: This post is on Hydrapinion, an opinion-based, multi-headed blog - or hydrablog - I've started with four other freelance technology journalists. My topic is Play and my day is Friday so from now on I'm going to point to Hydrapinion every Friday, but Friday is also the day I'll post TechVidReviews here at Seeking Nerdvana and reprints of my magazine products reviews that don't appear online elsewhere.

If you're sick of television networks dictating what you watch and when, a Personal Video Recorder could be your dream lounge room companion.

=> Read more!

Following on from yesterday's rant, it's easy to find disc or hard drive-based recorders that will do the job of a VCR, but the point of these new digital recorders is they have the potential to do so much more. I'm yet to find one that does everything I want, although here is my list of demands.

Topfield's TF6000PVRt almost gets a tick in every box.

I've looked at quite a few and the Topfield TF5000PVRt or TF6000PVRt are probably the best choice if you want a hard drive recorder. They have digital tuners but you need to be a bit tech-savvy if you want to subscribe to the IceTV seven day program guide. The downside is they don't have built-in DVD recorders for archiving recordings, much means you can't tape something for a friend. They also don't have high definition tuners yet.

If you've got Foxtel then a Foxtel iQ is probably your best bet, although they were having trouble working out the bugs.

A digital tuner is really essential if you want to use your new recorder for more than five years when analogue is switched off. DVD recorders are coming out with digital tuners, but I wouldn't touch a recorder without a hard drive. I consider a DVD just a big VHS tape, you're still going to fill up pretty quickly and they you'll end up hunting through a pile of discs for a blank one - the same scamble you do now for a blank VHS tape when your favourite show is about to start. At least with a hard drive recorder you can just hit record and not worry about where you're recording it or if there's enough room. Combination HDD/DVD recorders are the way to go, they've starting to come out with digital tuners but you won't see many with high definition digital tuners until the move up from DVD recorders to Blu-ray or HD-DVD, which has the capacity to hold a movie in high definition. While most of them have the ability to extract a seven day program guide from television broadcasts, it isn't much use because the Australian networks refuse to broadcast one. If you want to manually set your device to record the same show every week, stay away from the LG recorders until they fix this problem.

If you're ready to take the plunge, all this should help point you in the right direction. If it all sounds too confusing, probably best to stick with your VCR for a little while yet. Digital recorders will very quickly get cheaper, better and easier to use in the next few years - so if you're not in a hurry perhaps hold out and see what comes along.

Is it time to throw away your VCR? A friend posed this question to me the other day and it's probably one other people are starting to ask. Most people are unlikely to through away a perfectly good device if it still works (with the exception of mobile phones) so I guess the question is; is it worth replacing your VCR when your current one gives up the ghost?

Is it worth sending your VCR to the scrap heap?

The answer depends on a few things, particularly your own usage habits and technological savviness, but in Australia today I'd say it's almost time to abandon the VCR. It took a long time for people to stop buying turntables, even after CDs had decimated LP sales, because people had old records they still wanted to listen to and didn't see why they should have to pay for the same content again just so they could listen to it in a new format. Some people also have a sentimental attachment to analogue technologies. Eventually time came where most people under 50 or 60 no longer felt the need to own a turntable, and I'd say we're on the cusp of that now with the VCR. If you do replace yours today, I wouldn't spend much.

If you've got VHS tapes you still watch then obviously it's worth keeping a VCR in the house. Commercial DVDs are now so cheap that you've probably bought everything you like to watch again on DVD now, but if you've got kids or grand kids then a VCR can still come in handy if you've got old episodes of Bob the Builder or Postman Pat lying around. Rather than end up on the scrap heap, old VCRs are likely to migrate to the bed room or rumpus room for this very reason.

Analogue television broadcasts will probably continue for another five years in Australia, and longer in regional areas, despite what the politicians say. As such less than $AU200 for a VCR that will last for five years doesn't seem an unreasonable price to pay.

You also might have old home movies on tape that you're not prepared to part with. My advice would be to transfer these to DVD or some other digital format as soon as possible, before the tape deteriorates to the point where you lose your precious recordings.

The big question is, if you do abandon your VCR, what are you going to replace it with? Stay tuned for the answer tomorrow.

The upcoming release of Office 2007 is getting plenty of attention, but online office suites may hold the key to the future....

Read the full review at http://www.theage.com.au/news/upgrade/whats-up-docs/2006/11/13/1163266481793.html

A recent night at the world's crappiest ever school reunion reminded me of three things;

1. High school sucked
2. The joke of exposing your genitals in a class photo never grows old for some people
3. Not everyone is as into technology as I am

Whose the nerd now, pretty boy?! Smuggling in a bat'leth would have made my school reunion a far more interesting night.

The first point is self-evident to those of us who weren't one of the "beautiful people" at high school. The second point was brought home during the night by a former class mate whose sense of humour never graduated from the eighth grade. It's the third point that made the biggest impression on me though. One person, after learning I'm "into computers and stuff" enlightened me with this pearl of wisdom; "You know what's going to be big - MP3 players".

I did my best not to laugh. My year 12 formal ended in a punch-up and I didn't fancy the 15 year reunion ending the same way. It just reminded me that not everyone is as into technology as we are. I say "we" because you are reading a blog, which puts you far ahead of many people - especially a lot of people I went to school with.

So next time you're screaming abuse at the television because some idiot doesn't know the difference between a PVR and an EPG, an android and a cyborg, or a mek'leth and a bat'leth, don't give up hope. You're not alone.

For digital kleptomaniacs who constantly feel the urge to "share" files when they're on the road, Nerdvana would be P2P software on a mobile phone. Adisasta software has released version 2.1 of WinMobile Torrent, a BitTorrent application for Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphones. Supporting multiple trackers, it lets you create, seed and leech torrents from within the application - as well as select which files you want to download from within a torrent.

WinMobile Torrent lets you download on the go.

Such fun isn't restricted to Windows Mobile users, with BitTorrent and Gnutella applications recently released for Symbian S60 smartphones. Once again, I can maybe understand why you might want to run these apps on a wifi-enabled phone, but running a file sharing app over a mobile phone network seems insane - at least at the pricing we pay for mobile data in Australia.

I'm writing this post from a notebook via a Bluetooth connection to a Nokia N73 on Australia's 3 network - a 3G network that I'm managing to squeeze 800 Kbps download speeds from. Thankfully I'm reviewing the phone and service so I'm not paying the bill. 3's cheapest data plan is $AU5 for 10MB a month - and I've easily gone through that is the last hour just mucking around, I mean testing. That means some poor sucker is now paying something like $AU1.65 per MB as I work on my blog - but it's all testing, of course. If you only need a few MB a month, such as for occasionally checking your email, this is still probably the best mobile data plan around. 3's next plan up is $AU29 cap for 100MB (or 200MB if you've paid for a PCMCIA data card), which is roughly the entry level plan of the competitors. If you don't want to be on a plan, 3 has a "casual rate" of an insane $AU4 per MB! At that rate, if you've downloaded two songs it would have been cheaper to buy the album. Telstra's rates are even worse.

I've been playing with a few phones recently in search of my next slice of mobile Nerdvana. I said back in August that it appeared every telco except 3 expects me to pay extra for a PCMCIA data card if I want to access the internet from my notebook. It seems that you can use phones with Telstra and Optus as 3G modems, but the don't draw attention to this because they want you to shell out for a separate card. At least the option is still there, apparently some telcos in the US actually lock phones so you can't use them as a 3G modem. I can't believe Telstra didn't think of that one first, it's probably only a matter of time. We'll see what Telstra has to offer with its NextG network. As usual, it will be fantastic as long as you're not paying the bill.