King of the Mountains

The headphone socket on my MP3 player has become somewhat unreliable. Now, most people would just bin a four year old device. But I don’t intend to.

The battery still holds a charge. The hard disk is still turning quietly. The broken part, and I know this because I’ve managed to buy one or at least something similar in Maplin, costs 80p. As opposed to over £200 for a new player of the same standard. So in a few minutes I’ll find the soldering iron and start fitting it. 

Widget manufacturers have become very cunning at the repeat business game. From iPods where you have to return them to Apple for a new battery (another reason to buy a Creative instead) to devices that obviously have a design lifespan after which they will break in a manner that makes them unrepairable. But ehre is another insidious trick they’re pulling, and more people need to notice it. Enforced obsolescence.

A couple of years ago one of the big chains announced that due to lack of demand they would no longer stock floppy disks. Think briefly, when was the last time you saw a new PC with a floppy drive? Manufacturers have engineered a lack of demand by leaving the drives out of PCs.

I accept that a USB drive is a better bet, but for those of us who like messing around with old hardware a supply of floppy disks is somewhat essential. I even have a pile of the old 5.25in floppies, which are good for innuendo if nothing else.

The same thing is happening with CDs, although here it is slightly more sinister. One major high street chain has already announced that they will not be selling CD singles due to downloading, and commentators have been forecasting the death of the CD for some years. Mind you, they’ve been saying the same about vinyl since the 1980s and new pressings are still being released.

The sinister part is that once we move away from buying a hard copy to buying an intangible collection of data we lose a lot of control. With music or software on a CD we have a hard copy. In the event of a system crash we can just reinstall it from disk. If the data exists only on your hard disk and cannot be copied due to protection measures then what happens? Do you have to buy it all again? What happens if the media company decides to change their policy and lock all the stuff you have paid for, making it unusable unless you pay extortionate subscription fees?

It is obviously in their own interests to escape from hard copies. Making, transporting and selling a CD costs far more than putting the contents on a paid for download site, where almost all of the track price will be profit. It also gives them more control over how the consumer is able to use the music or software they have paid for. 

We seem to have turned into a society of mindless consumers who don’t care about the deeper implications of these things so long as we have our shiny new iWidget before the rest of our clique. If you’ve ever tried explaining why DRM is a bad thing for consumers to the average airhead then you will understand what I mean. People just don’t want to know, and giving a damn now makes you uncool.

Because it’s cool to spend £200 on a new device rather than 80p on a spare part… 

I’ve been watching with interest the truckers attempting to march on Parliament in protest against the outrageous fuel prices we now have to pay. Good on them I say. About time some people in this country did stand together and showed a little backbone.

What it has brought to light is how supposedly "counter-terror" legislation can be manipulated to suit whatever government wants to use it against. For example, the convoy from West Wales will not be allowed to visit the Welsh Assembly and hand their petition over. Likewise, any attempts at an effective protest will be illegal, as counter-terror legislation seems to have been written with a view to enabling government to stifle dissenters using the legal system. A bit odd in what is supposedly a liberal democracy.

The situation would seem to be that, as ever, a London-centric government and media hasn’t the faintest idea of what life is like for the rest of the country. They may be noticing the increased cost of food and iWidgets due to haulage companies having to charge retailers more to cover fuel bills, but in their cosy little world of buses and a reliable tube system it really doesn’t matter that diesel has hit £1.32 a litre.

Try putting yourself in this position: You live in the middle of nowhere. The only things you can buy locally are food, medicine, DIY supplies, stamps, and for some reason spectacles. If you want anything electronic then you have a forty mile plus drive to the nearest large retailer or you have to take the risk of buying online and unseen. Buses are either non-existent or on a twice daily basis, so you have to arrive at your destination at some unearthly hour and wait around all day to get home. Trains were mostly cancelled by a certain Dr back in the 1960s, those remaining seem to have been designed by a sadistic dwarf as revenge on tall people. Neither form of public transport would respond well to your turning up at the station with a large flatscreen TV.

This would probably be a good point at which to give a round of applause to our local post office. They’re brilliant, and without them mail order would be a non-starter. Unfortunately many even more remote villages have had their local post office close, which is not helpful to put it mildly.

City dwellers will also have trouble grasping the concept of needing a larger engine. It’s not macho posturing. It’s a simple case of a rubber band not being up to the job. An 1100cc Corsa will not carry four people and a bootload of shopping up steep hills in comfort at a steady 60mph. You need a medium sized to large car with ample power. Power needs fuel. While the advent of 150bhp two litre turbodiesel engines that return 50mpg has been welcomed, they are not a huge amount of use to those who need to haul outsize loads. For that, you need a 4x4.

They are not fashion accessories or compensation for anything, despite what oh-so-cool and oh-so-sheltered media types may try to tell you. They’re a response to a world where you might well come around a corner to find half an earth bank on the road, and where due to the lack of van hire firms you will have to bring that new shower cubicle forty miles home from B&Q yourself. That vast majority will be diesel, around ten years old, and returning around 30mpg. It costs over £100 to fill up with diesel now locally, which works out at close to £20 for a return shopping trip. Meanwhile Londoners balk at the fact that the Circle Line is running a few minutes late. You really don’t know you’re born.

We’re probably due another news story about this, so I’m getting in early. GPS confusion.

By this I mean those "special" people who manage to get themselves onto a railway line, or wedged halfway down a narrow back road after blindly following the directions of the little box on their dashboard. When they get stuck or their car is turned into an interesting metal sculpture by a train they will invariably say "the satnav told me to do it" as an excuse.

I think what particularly gets to me is the fact that media outlets, on the whole, nod sympathetically. With the exception of a few commentators nobody says the obvious response that we all had drummed into us at school: "If (insert person/gadget here) told you to put your hand in a fire, would you do that too?"

In the case of the nitwit on a railway line, you do have to wonder how on earth they ended up there. This wasn’t a case of stalling or breaking down on a level crossing, they had actually turned onto the line and driven up it a short distance. Did the fact that they were now bumping over sleepers on gravel not register? If they don’t notice something that obvious their ability to notice something like a phone-wielding idiot wandering aimlessly in front of them has to be questioned. Poor observation is the cause of a huge number of accidents, regardless of what the camera apologists will tell you.

It seems that a satnav reaches right into the hindbrain and flips a little switch. Armed forces the world over spend some time flipping this switch in their troops during basic training. In their case, unquestioning obedience is a safer bet than a division deciding to attack the enemy by whatever method they’ve just thought of. In the case of civilian satnav users, the unquestioning obedience switch can be lethal. Obeying these things sheep-like without using your own eyes and judgement will eventually lead to you becoming one of the plonkers who ended up bogged down in a field.

I think it says something depressing about the state of the world that people are now obeying the instructions of small plastic boxes without thought or question. Speaking as someone who is used to proper digital maps I find the average satnav annoying. It just doesn’t have the detail I want.

For that reason, I came up with a solution. It involves an old laptop living in the boot with a GPS receiver and a touch screen on the dashboard. It not only provides a 1:50k OS map display centred on my current location, it will also play music and browse the web if I find a WiFi hotspot. The best part? It cost less than a conventional satnav and I don’t have an irritating voice telling me to "turn right" while the lights are red… 

I was pleasantly surprised recently by the discovery that Google Earth has finally noticed the existence of Wales. We now have high-resolution imagery across even the darkest depths.

It has turned up a few interestingly oddball bits of information. Such as the clearly visible route of a railway line that was torn up by Beeching in the 1960s for example. You find yourself wondering where you could get a few miles of track from, and a handful of girders to replace the missing bridges.

It also cleared up a few mysteries regarding what, if anything, is in various dead spaces in town. You can see that the answer is usually either nothing, or a scruffy yard space.

I’ve probably mentioned before that Google Earth is a wonderful tool for the industrial archaeologist, as rather than risking the attention of dubious individuals in run down areas you can survey sites quite safely from home. While this is less of a problem here, many of the chunks of railway line mentioned earlier are on private land and would probably provoke a decidedly unfriendly and quite possibly armed response if you were to investigate in person.

It is never going to be an effective substitute for getting out there on the ground with a camera, but you can save yourself the trouble of spending all morning figuring out to get to a particular location only to find the site completely levelled and concreted over. I’m still figuring out if I can convert Google Earth waypoints to a more useful format, although oddly enough Google seem keen that you should pay for the Pro version of Google Earth rather than converting files. Given I’ve already bought Memory-Map this doesn’t really appeal.

Speaking of which, a good GPS is very handy. I don’t use a conventional sat nav at all. It’s easier to glance at a moving map display from time to time and you can add any data you like to it. Plus it doesn’t hector you about turning right when you’re sitting at a red traffic light. Something of a bonus I feel. It’s just like having a paper road map that’s always open on the right page and centred on your position. While it does take a bit more installation than a standard satnav I challenge any other device to hold your entire music collection and maps for the whole country in one box. 

For some reason we seem to have lost summer within a week of it starting. Temperatures have dropped by ten degrees and it’s raining. At this rate I expect snow in July.

It would be good if it calmed the "Argh it’s global warming we’re all gonna die" crowd down a bit, but they just mutter about climate change rather than warming now which seems something of a handy escape clause. 

On reflection, apart from the rain it isn’t bad. Sun and I do not get on, and a bit of greyness will keep the annoying dawdling tourists and idiot bikers away for a little longer. My only complaint is that it’s lousy for photography.  

I recently came across a music channel on satellite TV, and being at something of a loose end settled down to watch. It was uniformly terrible.

I can only assume their target market was a male chav, judging by the number of permatanned plastic women in scanty outfits they seemed to feel the need to adorn it with. I realise that this is a common tactic for deflecting attention away from the lousy music, but it only works if the people you’re using are actually attractive. I’m reasonably certain "Bleurgh" was not the reaction they intended to get.

See, if you get it right you can do wonders with a music video. Treat it like a short film, make it funny, make it interesting. Bin the makeup, the hotpants, the gym bunnies, and follow the Stereophonics with their Italian Job-themed video for "Pick a Part That’s New" or the entertainingly lunatic Men at Work with "Land Down Under". I know there’s more money in appealing to chavs and cavemen but frankly, isn’t the challenge of making intelligent people laugh more fun? Posturing wannabe "gangstas" are comical, but we’re not exactly laughing with them…

On the plus side, we seem to have managed to get Men and Motors back along with large chunks of Channel 4, now this Freesat business has come on line. Whether we now get proper Channel 4 rather than S4C has yet to be investigated, but there was a great episode of The Saint on last night. 

I realise there are greater problems, such as zombies or somebody setting us up the bomb, but I feel one thing I’ve noticed of late does need to be mentioned: Ludicrous mark-ups.

I recently ordered, for £35, something that was originally priced at £105. Now, retailers do not make a loss. Neither do wholesalers, at least overall. So how much of a mark-up must there have been on these things to begin with? I can accept that there might have been some sort of thought process along the lines of "We’ve sold four thousand at full price, so we can afford to let these that won’t shift go for trade price" but still, what are they paying the people who put them together?

Which leads us to an interesting ethical conundrum. See, I think 98% of us feel at least a bit guilty about how some large companies have been seen to use sweatshop labour to make products, with the workers being paid a tiny fraction of the final price. The example I mentioned above won’t have been made like that, but this is one reason I won’t buy branded sportswear (apart from the fact that it makes you look an utter tit). 

The opposite end of the problem, that will be relevant in the case I mentioned, is that the cost of living in the countries where these things are made is much lower. If a Chinese plant were to start paying its workers the British minimum wage it would distort their economy, as suddenly everyone would be paid more and would cost more to employ. Outsourcing would end, and their economy would nosedive as production was shifted. We’re probably going to see that before too long anyway, as they seem intent on mixing brutal repression of political dissidents with a skewed free market economy. This is leading to some intriguing thoughts, such as the fact that the Chinese model railway market is now larger than that of the UK despite modelling being a very unusual hobby out there.  Clearly for those willing to knuckle down, cease thinking, and refrain from typing "Democracy" into Google there are rewards.

Whichever angle you look at it from, the fact remains that some people are making outrageous profits on things that must cost them pennies to have made. Outsourcing hasn’t led to lower prices in many cases. The only thing that seems to lead to savings being passed on to the consumer is competition, in another case it was most instructive to note the price difference between products that faced competition and those (from the same manufacturer) that did not.  

Summer has finally hit this corner of Wales, and in general seems to have been a popular move apart from those individuals who seem determined to show things the rest of us really don’t want to see. The birdies are responding well though.

Apart from one minor problem. It looks to be either a Speckled Thrush or Mistle Thrush, and it’s a thug.

I have seen it chasing crows twice its size across three gardens, and it was trying to kill our Blackbird until I intervened (screw Starfleet directives, that Blackbird has a family to support). It makes the most appalling racket to boot.

Interestingly it seems to have no quarrel with Wood Pigeons, which continue to coo and do regular impressions of a strangled French Horn. Whether a strangled French Horn would leave "deposits" all over the gate is a matter for conjecture, but the Pigeons definitely do. I can only assume that the Blackbird suffered the fate of many who stand up to a bully and then find that nobody is going to back them. Mind you, judging by the noise it’s currently making I suspect a repeat bout may have gone in favour of the yellow-beaked defender.

Sparrows. Lots of them, and most likely more to come. Once again they are looking at our guttering for nesting potential and a Beech hedge seems to have turned into the Sparrow version of a hot nightspot and pickup joint. Despite the bird feeder having been removed they still resemble feathered tennis balls.   

A bit of an odd title, I’ll agree. There are more action films hitting the screen now than for some time. One snag though, the heroes all appear to have had their brains surgically removed.

We’ve got a James Bond who is only marginally more intelligent than his shoes, and some witless American on TV who keeps letting the enemy catch him and do all sorts of nastiness. I’m beginning to wonder if he enjoys it in some perverse way. What on earth is going on?

I’ve commented before on the fact that idiots with muscles seem to be more popular than sophisticated intellectuals at the moment, and that this trend extends to films. Timothy Dalton, for example, might not have been as tough as the current Bond but, the point is, he didn’t need to be. Dalton’s Bond was a sly, cunning fellow who leant heavily on any advantages he had, rather than just wading in.  He certainly wouldn’t have rolled his car after seeing his female colleague in the middle of the road. Dalton would most likely have jumped his Aston clean over her using the rocket booster, shot up the villains with the concealed missiles, then returned to pick her up. Home in time for tea and medals.

I grew up watching classic war films, Sink the Bismarck was a favourite for a while but doesn’t really fit here other than its portrayal of land-based commanders as heroes too. Where Eagles Dare, on the other hand, does fit.

I maintain that this film has a lot to do with the popularity of the Wolfenstein series of computer games. The number of people who bounced around those corridors muttering "Broadsword calling Danny Boy" must be pretty high. 

There has yet to be an escape sequence on a par with their approach of stealing a post bus before running rings around large numbers of Wehrmacht troops. I think everyone who has seen that film secretly wants to have a go at knocking over the trigger posts with that gigantic snowplough and watching the telegraph poles fall over in the mirror.  As for the more heroic parts, can you see any of the current crop of numbskulls knowing how to operate a cable car, or clinging to the roof with only one fully-functional hand? Staying completely calm and convincing their captors that they’re a double agent, right up until the point when they were able to shoot their way out?

Moving on, The Avengers. A wonderfully surreal British spy series of the 1960s with the superb John Steed and rather lovely Emma Peel, in the versions I’ve seen repeats of anyway. Between them, they foiled assorted dastardly plots armed only with a sword umbrella, bowler hat, and some nifty fighting abilities on the part of Mrs Peel. I’m wondering if there would be a way to have Steed frozen in Austin Powers style and then inserted into 24. It would at least make it watchable, if only for the current lead character crying behind his desk about the old British guy who just bumped off all the terrorists without even losing his carnation. Civilisation returns to the counter-terror business. Come back Steed and Peel, you are both needed.