Day Jar View

The ridiculous EU has decided, in all their ill-conceived wisdom, that tungsten filament bulbs are to be phased out. The 100W one was killed off last week, and by 2012 even the lowly 40W will be consigned to the dustbin.

Their replacements are those ghastly, expensive, “eco” bulbs, which apparently last for years and use a quarter of the power of Edison’s equivalent. This is all very well and good, but what they don’t tell you on the box is that when you turn them on, you feel like you are in an operating theatre.

Gone will be the cosy nights by the fire, reading by the horrendously inefficient light of the bulb that has served us perfectly well for the past 100-odd years.

Ok, they may give off only 5% of the energy they use as light, and the rest as heat – but is that so bad? Surely that means you can turn the boiler down a bit.

Stockpiling has already started, apparently, and thinking about it I will probably be joining them as the date draws nearer; particularly as my missus has previously not allowed the eco bulbs in the house.

As Edison spins in his grave, start your hoarding now – and show the EU that when it comes to how we light our homes, they really should keep their well-fed snouts out.

Back in 1998, when I worked for a company in Harrow that had a US supplier, I once went to a trade show where we were exhibiting some of their products.

I’ll never forget what one of the American guys said to someone regarding digital capture technology, when the discussion came around to how wonderful it was. “When you digitise shit,” he said matter of factly, “you don’t get gold: you get a digital shit.”

His point, buried in that surprisingly un-American-like comment, was of course that unless the source material is good, digitising it won’t help – you’ll only end up with a more-or-less exact copy that won’t get any worse.

I was reminded of this the other day when I carted two boxes of CDs down from the loft. My plan is to digitise them all as audio files and then ebay/car boot/charity/sling them accordingly. Having finally made the big decision to get rid of them all, the thing is, I was then faced with an even tougher choice: what format to choose?

I plumped for Windows Media Pro Audio at 192KBps, which means that I am technically sacrificing half of the audio information somewhere. Lost forever, never to be heard again.

Will it matter? Probably not, but the loss of the music data will probably be easier to take than saying goodbye to some of the discs; one of which was my first ever CD single bought in 1990 in HMV Oxford Street – Adamski’s Killer.

That’s the price of progress I guess.

I’m well pleased with my new Sony Bravia KDL-26T3000 LCD television. I previously had a 17″ DMTech with built in DVD, but this failed early on (although predictably just after the guarantee had expired), so I couldn’t use the internal DVD player.

This time round, to go with the new kitchen breakfast bar, we splashed out on a 26″ LCD to go with the separate DVD player, and chased the cables into the wall. I can now work with a whacking great TV to my immediate left and watch the women’s beach volleyball. Heaven.

The launch of the new iPhone has seen a predictably hysterical reaction in the more media-friendly press. It promises much of the same as the original version launched last year, with the addition of 3G promising fast internet access, and a GPS receiver, allowing navigation software to run on the unit.

The software glitches that have blighted the launch of the new unit have been the focus this week, but I wanted to point out something that I think makes the whole thing more of a fashion accessory, rather than a useful tool.

It’s called the iPhone but, in reality, from the very beginning the phone seems to have been included almost as an afterthought, in order that it can be marketed as a genuine catch-all alternative to the already ubiquitous and ground-breaking iPod and your current handset.

I say this because the keyboard of the iPhone is still a problem in my eyes. The problem with most phones is that the keyboard does not lend itself very well to typing, simply due to its physical size. Compound that with the touchscreen technology, and you have a keyboard on the iPhone that is considerably slower and more error-prone than those with conventional keys.

In their haste to produce a thing of beauty (and in that respect, incidentally, I think they have succeeded), they have taken the iPhone down a cul-de-sac that has hamstrung its desirability as a useful communication tool.

Sure, it looks great, will play music and apparently even makes phone calls, but try and use it to email, blog or compose a document, and you will find yourself yearning for an old-school keyboard that not only collects dust and crumbs, but means you can work faster. Surely that should be the point of these things?

No doubt Apple will shift orchard-sized piles of these things, in spite of my nit-picking, and good luck to them. But I will be sticking with the decidedly and resolutely old-school keyboard of my BlackBerry Curve, in all its crumby, dusty glory.

Read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7501321.stm