King of the Mountains

I’ve been watching with interest the debate as to how video games should be classified. At present, there is a voluntary code that most games manufacturers follow. Calls have been made for the BBFC to be given the job of applying age ratings to games.

None of the commentators have mentioned the obvious problem, in their haste to wring their hands about "evil video games corrupting our youth". The problem, as with many things, is witless parents.

Games are already clearly marked. A game marked "18" contains content that is not suitable for those under 18. It’s the same as films. You wouldn’t, for example, buy an eight year old a copy of Reservoir Dogs. But when a parent caves in and buys Grand Theft Auto that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Just because it’s a game, doesn’t mean it’s aimed at or intended for children. It’s the same problem faced by writers of graphic novels. That may sound a pretentious term, but the only alternative is "comic" and they’re not writing comedy. We don’t have the terms bande dessine or manga to describe pictoral works that aren’t the Beano.

As for the claims that video games make people violent, I would suggest that anyone who cannot differentiate real life from pixels has bigger problems. I’ve played GTA, for example, and not once have I felt the urge to run real people over at random or steal cars.

I agree with the voluntary age ratings but feel that an education campaign would be a far better use of time and money than adding to the BBFC’s workload. Make it clear that not all games are for children, and that age ratings are for content, not difficulty. Have shop staff remind the purchaser of games with an age rating that it isn’t suitable for people under that age. 

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… 

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. 

Every other media outlet has managed to make some cheap stories from this site, so it must be my turn now.

I’m not however talking about the cases of people being refused a job or sacked after their drunken antics appear. That’s their own fault for posting the photos, and not being bright enough to tighten their security settings so that their boss can’t stalk them. Instead, I’m talking about groups.

Most groups are harmless. Some are rather tedious, some are imcomprehensible, a rare few have a lively user base who form friendships.  However, a worrying trend has caught my eye: The clueless rant group

These groups have different aims, but tend to have one uniting factor. They are usually brought into being by uninformed rantings, and will frequently continue to exist even when proof is found that their premise is complete nonsense. 

One that first caught my eye, the "Get Huntley off Facebook" group. This group claims that the murderer Ian Huntley has a Facebook account and demands that it be shut down. This despite the fact that there is no way he would be allowed to operate one from within a prison cell, and that repeated searches have completely failed to find him. I have known otherwise sane, intelligent people join this group and have wondered why, especially as it seems to attract the sort of people who would have considered Stalin to be "too soft". While Huntleys’ crimes were beyond despicable and he should spend the rest of his life behind bars, those screaming for him to be killed in the most painful way they can imagine are equally disturbing. 

Secondly, a group claiming that UK-born individuals "have less rights than an immigrant". Leaving aside the atrocities against the English language ("fewer", not "less") the premise is a complete falsehood. The various human rights legislation on both British and European Union statute books applies equally to all. There may be several high-profile cases whipped up by the tabloid media in which "immigrants" have secured a particularly cunning legal representative, able to use legislation to secure their clients’ ability to stay, but the fact remains that this is not a problem with human rights or immigration.

I would argue that the same sort of mass hysteria that drove the Salem witch trials is alive and well there. People refusing to believe the evidence of their own eyes, or to do any more research. Instead they happily swallow the pre-formed opinions of the tabloid media, all of which are pushing a political view for their own agenda. We now have a situation where Ministers are terrified to make changes that would be effective due to the screaming response it would get from certain right-wing papers owned by tycoons who have, oddly enough, never held British citizenship. I suppose in that respect we do have fewer rights than one immigrant in particular…

As if the incomprehensible emails weren’t enough, I’ve now had five or six "people" attempt to add themselves to my instant messaging service. "People" in inverted commas because I’m not aware of any legitimate individuals who use a single digit as a callsign and have addresses like "ktr-jkh8". The stupidity of scammers never ceases to amaze me. If they honestly think I’m going to click "accept" when confronted by an email address I don’t recognise and have had no prior contact with then they really need to grow a brain…

For ages, I had that incredibly rare thing. A spam-proof email address.

I have no idea how I managed this. It could be that I did not use a recognisable name or name of a person, it could be that I wasn’t daft enough to leave my address publicly visible. But now I’m getting spam. Not a deluge, one or two every few days.

The really puzzling part is trying to make sense of the spammer mindset. Do they honestly expect people to respond to messages with subject lines that appear to have been filled in by opening a dictionary at random? 

If you want to be a mildy successful con artist, at least learn the language. What part of the world these bizarre messages hail from is anyones’ guess, however they have clearly yet to learn that merely spouting random English words will not get you much in the way of response from the West.   

As Garmin seem less than enthusiastic about offering a USB charge/data cable for the otherwise excellent Foretrex 201, I decided to do something about this. Note that this device will probably void your guarantee and I take no responsibility for any adverse effects. It worked for me however!

Firstly, obtain your parts. A cheap USB A-B device cable and a 0.7mm/2.5mm DC power plug (I bought mine from Maplin - their code L43AY). Cut the "B" end off the USB lead and strip about 1cm of the outer insulation from the now bare wire. You’ll find four wires wrapped in foil and wire shielding.

Pull the shielding away and separate the wires. Two of these are 5v power, the other two are for data transfer. Cut the data wires and shielding away, then bare the ends of the live and neutral wires. In my cable these followed conventional wiring colours with the live being red and the neutral black. If in doubt, check with a multimeter. Pinouts for USB plugs can be found in many places on the internet.

Before you go any further, dismantle the new plug and slide the housing over the cable. Make absolutely sure that this has been done before soldering the new plug in place, as failure to do so can lead to scorched fingers, swearing, and more work than you really need to do.

The Garmin charging cradle is wired so that the centre contact of the plug is the live, and the barrel neutral. Solder the wires in place - red to the terminal in the centre, black to the terminal at the edge. Then bend the cable grip "horns" to clamp the wires in place. Note that they won’t go around the outer insulation! After checking that there is no chance of a short circuit, screw the housing onto the plug and give it a test.

All done. You can now leave that bulky mains adaptor at home and charge your GPS from your laptop (admittedly you will need the laptop power supply, but you still have one less adaptor to lug about). This should also work with those devices that plug into a car cigar lighter socket and provide a USB socket for charging MP3 players.

About a year ago I watched an episode of anime on a friend’s computer. Now, most anime has giant fighting robots. Initial D is something else entirely: For a start, it’s about streetracing.

In Britain this would raise thoughts of idiotic youths with oversized stereo systems doing handbrake turns in the local supermarket car park. Not so in Japan. Touge, or mountain passes, are the racetracks and racing is conducted at a semi-professional level. Obnoxiously loud stereos are not found, only modifications that improve performance. Likewise dangerous driving is frowned upon. These are not your local Novaboys, they have more in common with a rally team. Local areas have their own race team, which competes with others for prestige.

The story begins with Ryosuke Takahashi, a touge racer who realises that he does not have much time left before the adult world begins to impinge on his racing. He decides to start a new team, Project D, with the aim of beating every other team in Japan. He recruits his younger brother Keisuke and an uncannily talented young man by the name of Takumi Fujiwara as drivers, and in the best anime fashion the victories begin to pile up. Every race sees Takumi take on a far more powerful opponent and beat them by sheer skill with his 1986 Toyota Corolla (AE86, in racer lingo). Takumi’s skills improve with every race, as he learns from his opponents. Later in the series, his father buys a Subaru Impreza. Takumi uses this alternately with his AE86 to deliver tofu for the family business, effectively causing him to chase his Impreza times with the AE86 and develop his skills further.

So what’s the appeal, I hear you ask? Well, the idea of being faster in an old car than far newer models due to skill is very pleasant for those of us who through choice are still driving an 11 year old Land Rover (and before anyone says it’s not touge-ready, I’ll suggest you see it in action first…). The idea of developing your fast road abilities in the wilder parts of the country is also one I feel a natural affinity to, given that the vast majority of my miles are covered in terrain where the Project D crew would feel at home. Certainly I maintain that anyone who learned their car control in a Welsh winter will be a formidable opponent in all weather conditions, and very much enjoy showing clueless people in new Range Rovers precisely what a Series 1 Discovery is capable of.

I was recently looking for a USB Mass Storage Device, more commonly known as a pendrive or datastick. However, after a bit of rummaging on Amazon (usual disclaimer) I found that I could buy a 256mb MP3 player for £6. Essentially this is a data stick with MP3 playing hardware built in. My curiosity got the better of me again and I decided to see what £6 worth of MP3 player was capable of. In the worst case scenario it would always be a handy method of transferring files in an era when the marketoids seem intent on killing the good old floppy disk.

The package arrived within two days. The box appears well designed and lacks the excessive packaging frequently found on small electronic devices. Inside, the following items were found:

256mb MP3 Player

Short USB extension lead

In Ear Headphones

CD-ROM

User Manual

AAA Battery

Lanyard

The player itself is slightly bulkier than most datasticks but not massively so. You can comfortably wear it on the supplied lanyard. The casing has a slightly rubberised finish and the player feels nicely solid. The extension lead is supplied as the player may well be too big to fit into USB sockets alongside other plugs, or indeed sockets on more sculpted cases.

Testing was commenced within minutes of opening the box. First install the battery. To connect the player to a computer simply pull off the end cap and plug into a free USB socket either directly or via the extension cable. Assuming you are running MS Windows 2000, ME or XP the player will be recognised as a USB Mass Storage Device and will appear as an extra drive in the “My Computer” menu.

Those of us still using Windows 98SE need not panic, there are drivers for this faithful old OS on the supplied CD ROM. Once this stage has been completed, simply drag and drop MP3s to the player to transfer them. When you have added all the music you want/can fit, simply unplug, replace the end cap, plug in headphones and press play.

In audio terms this is a very impressive piece of equipment for the price. I would strongly advise users to buy a better pair of headphones however, those supplied were adequate, but suffer from the usual problems of sound leakage and poor bass. Switching to a pair of KOSS “Plug” headphones showed that the player itself is a fine piece of equipment. Bass was solid, and the differing equaliser settings could be clearly discerned. A variety of genres of music were used for testing, and in general the performance was excellent. Possibly a trained musician or Hi-Fi enthusiast would be able to detect a problem, but for those of us who simply ask that our personal audio equipment reproduce music in a crisp, clear fashion this device is more than adequate.

Ergonomically, the player is surprisingly good. Many cheap gadgets have displays that are difficult to read, or buttons that require very small fingers. The player is most satisfactory in both respects, with a clear display (backlit in blue when a button is pushed) and easy to understand buttons. Even the reviewer’s largish hands had no trouble with manipulating the controls.

After a month or so of use, it seems to be coping remarkably well. I’ve tested it in all locations, as both a USB drive and an MP3 player.  The screen has become a little scuffed but the paint has remained attached to the keys, and nothing untoward has happened to the rubberised coating. Amazon sold out of the device at that price within a week, and while they are now back in stock the price has climbed to £10. Not as much of a bargain, but still well worth a look.