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Possibly another global news scoop for Bedlington.co.uk? Amazingly, Simply Movies old transponder is transmitting a "THE HOME OF GREAT ENTERTAINMENT" caption together with the website address www.simplymovies.co.uk as I type right now. Amazing because the venture had been written off by all in the industry (see Wikipedia link below), and coming after weeks of blank screen followed by a "Trailor Park" (sic) caption purporting to mark the start of another new service from some Pty company or other. On the other hand the SM website doesn't reflect any new developments. A last vain flicker of protest from some soon to be out of work technician, or a rescue just cobbled together? Stay tooooned. The technicals are here: http://en.kingofsat....ory.php?ch=6863 and of course it's a free to air transmission else I wouldn't bother with it - don't have/want a Sky box. Commercial details here: http://en.wikipedia....i/Simply_Movies

Great performance Neil! Lots of changes going on at the moment and I understand Andy removed the link in a recent edit. He's PM'ing it to you now so make sure you add it to your bookmarks.

Haven't we already got one - right here by the looks of it! Either way the local politicos will still ignore it - until election time, of course! Try gathering a crowd at the Market Cross and you'd probably get arrested for disturbing the peace. A quaint term which often meant simply upsetting the local squire. Anyway the only ones that would gave the guts to use it would be the BNP (complete with minders). So in current thinking that sort of rules it out completely.

http://www.expansys.....aspx?c=samsung Told you the market was awash with 15" ones, so they're giving them away! The answer is: C) Windows Vista Home Premium Wouldn't bother with the vouchers/mailing list myself. Expansys are often quite expensive (except when they have a special) and you're unlikely to be able to use them smartly. If you win you must post the fact here though - fair do's!

Sound advice from JohnD. What's the name of the critical file? <rant> This is what happen when you patch patches to the n-th degree. All in the interests of selling you the same code again - which you happily pay again for in order to break free of the mess. The service pack concept must have made countless billions for MS. Issuing sub-versions of the entire O/S would have done the World a favour. But, MS isn't in the business of making things easy, it's in the business of screwing the World for every last buck! Meanwhile the regulators focus on all the wrong things - like browser choice, where no one makes any money out of browsers anyway. </rant>

On the right of the main forums page you now have a bit of "white-space". Don't waste this valuable screen space; other's would have crammed ads in there, but not on super-user-friendly new Bedlington.co.uk! In part it's there for you to fill with your Watching short cuts. Next time you visit a particular forum that interests you then click on the black [Watch Forum] button up top right. It's that simple - or almost. And in a similar way there's a [Watch this topic] button up top right on every thread. Try it right now and Watch it grow into a useful habit.

Just noticed the Nokia N810 price slashed to £130 - less than half the £280 odd it was selling at a few months back. This generally indicates that Nokia has a new model entering production. In this case a "Maemo 5" one with a much faster CPU and graphics support in hardware. Worth Buying at £130? Is the tiny tiny N810 worth buying at this price? It depends what you want it for. Nokia launched it with the slogan "It's what computers have become". But the truth is that it's what PDA's have become, because the ARM chip at its core is little more than powered the PDAs of a few years back. Although it has WiFi and Bluetooth it needs to connect through a phone for Internet on the move - there's no 3G or HSDPA module. It's far better than a smartphone or PDA fo pocket internet browsing and e-mail, and the slide-out keyboard is almost usable. It also has built-in GPS and you can get the maps over WiFi for free. But the GPS takes just as long to acquire as the average GPS featured mobile phone - often five minutes or more to lock in. In my limited tests of this feature I found the indicated position to be spot-on; as good as anything I've ever used. Instead of a Netbook? To use it effectively day to day you need to invest a lot of time, and if you have room for a small netbook in your bag or case you'll get a lot further a lot faster with email, word processing, etc. Like all Nokia devices of this generation it is short on RAM memory and this can't be expanded. This can result in long pauses in response, and sometimes it's just alltogether quicker to reboot it than wait for it to sort itself out. It has one flash ROM memory socket (unlike the larger keyboard-less N800 which has two), and this does support High Capacity SD flash cards. But the bad news here is that they chose the miniSD type rather than the now much more common microSD. miniSD can be hard to find at the right price and in the larger capacities. 4GB is all I've been able to find recently, and they aren't anything like as cheap as standard or even microSD. As a Personal Organiser It's not the best personal organiser as there is no one bit of (free) software that does it all. And so, if you want more than a basic address book you'll probably need to install more than one utility. But then it was never meant to be a pure personal organiser. That said this isn't App£e or Micro$oft, and so the software (and updates thereto) are all free! Battery and Connectivity The battery life is quite reasonable considering the size of it. Like Nokia phones it seems to vary enormously from day to day. But it's not the same battery as used in the N800, E61 phone etc. being much smaller. A mini USB lead lets it plug into your computer and you can transfer user files without transfer software on most modern operating systems; just like an mp3 player really. Yes, it will play mp3's, and there's a nice little utility that you can install to download YouTube videos so you can catalogue them and carry them around with you. If you are in to Linux you can hack into it, even home network over WiFi to make it visible to your other computers. Most users won't want to break into the operating system, but this isn't frowned on, and lots and lots of technical information is availabe for the so inclined. Extras It comes with a car holder and car power lead. There's an acceptable slip cover that's good enough to protect it from scratches in your pocket, but not from being sat upon. A spare stylus - they're not easy to get - a disgrace for such a high profile manufacturer as Nokia! The Bottom Line(s) In summary if you're thinking of using one instead of a portable computer (however small) then forget it. If you want to carry something around in your top pocket for occasional access to the Internet and email that beats your smartphone hollow - indeed that works with your phone - then grab one at this price whilst they last. It's also still has a high cool factor to impress people that have never seen an Internet Tablet before. Link to Offer: http://www.expansys....18&sbadd=158518

Got a model number? 2.6GH/z is not at all slow (unless you are running Vista). 40GB is more than plenty if you are not collecting HD movies. I'm using a 1GH/z CPU on this pre-netbook at this instant and it's plenty fast for what I'm doing. It probably pre-dates yours by a year or two. Wouldn't swap it for the latest cheapo notebook. Anyway at first viewing it looks like a bad case of Windoze bloat rather than a hardware problem. Bring it up with -FREE- Ubuntu and it will rock. Ubuntu will run OK with 512MB or even less, and even with all the freeware take up about half the disk space of Windows. You'll also learn that you don't need to keep shelling out for O/S upgrades, and buy (or steal) application software. You know it makes sense! Viri will be far less of a problem too. Virus writers seldom target Linux users because there's no mileage in it.

Some really great bargains of recent weeks. The Aspire One netbook has been on sale as low as £120. A price-cut I simply couldn't resist was a brand new one of these for £390 all inclusive from laptopsdirect. Spotted them last weekend but they seem to be sold-out now. Full review coming of the R50A coming. But I won't write one on first impressions, and need to use a machine daily for at least a month before I feel able to give an honest opinion. One thing I'm likely to be changing is the Vista o/s though. May leave it on - less a lot of the bloatware - and set the machine up for a dual boot. I'm anticipating driver problems with Ubuntu, due to all the gismos (like the fingerprint reader, TV, and GPS). Will be interesting to see if these can be worked around, and probably the strongest reason to leave a Vista boot option available for just now. The market is awash with unsold 15" machines, so if you really can stand something so large then shop around - a lot! I think the netbook has done for this class of machine, and although it might not always be the same customer base buying them, netbooks make laptops this big look like dinosaurs. So 12" is becoming the new 15" - unless you want a bargain!

On Linux systems that key combo switches desktops - which I think is slightly more useful!

Yes, and it says Bayer on the box. In the case of the box in the picture it used to say Hewlett-Packard.

According to the early editions he has now been reunited with his brain. My question is why this took so many years?

Amazing, you're very nearly right Pete! Toffee for sure, but it was more local than Sharps - Welch's Toffee. Were they just down the road from City Road in Byker? If so not a too difficult sell for the TTTV ad rep. Maybe the business association was even closer, enabling them to secure the "sweet spot"? I recall that I used to go to school with a cousin of the proprietary family, though I couldn't class him as a friend as he was in a different year, and memorable for being disabled and getting around everywhere on a tricycle - which he did at considerable speed. I think that actress Denise Welch could possibly be related too. I used to be able to recall the second ad too. If only it had been ten years ago... but I've now forgotten. Of course this wasn't just the first TV ad. in the region, it was the first broadcast ad. of any description. The only broadcast ads. prior to that came from Radio Luxembourg; pirate broadcasting was unheard of! Your recollection of the schedule is better than mine though. All I can remember is the opening sequence of Robin Hood; probably after being bored by the opening ceremony bit. Anyway that is now documented in more than one place - including here: http://www.transdiff.../firstnight.php 10-4 ----------------------- Update: Further East than Byker it seems, and the only reference to location I can find on the web (and very few references to the sweets even!) - together with an oh dear! There have been toffee factories at Byker in the past by the looks of it; hence my likely source of confusion.

Wasn't Country Life a rather up-market mag? There are websites devoted to this sort of thing. A few weeks back I surfed onto one which has been trying to establish for yonks the insurance company from way back in the 50's 60's that advertised "get the strength of the ... around you" with accompanying knock on the wall of a plywood castle. Everyone of an age can remember the ad but no one can rememeber the (long taken over) insurance outfit that produced the ad. There's a lesson in marketing in this! Anyway, can anyone remember what the very first TV advert in the North East was? I can remember it on Tyne Tees on the opening night in on January 15th 1959 . This moment has probably passed into the mists of history. So doubtless - like many other things - it's up to Bedlington.co.uk to record the detail for posterity I was in the privileged position (as a child) to have a bang up-to-date Ekco TV in our sitting room with a tuner that could receive channel 8. It was a non-event for most of Bedlington (including my parents, as I witnessed it alone) as most of the then TV's had to be converted for ITV with "turret tuners" and converter boxes in the subsequent months and years. So the TTTV adience on the opening evening must have been quite small. But shortly after that the growth of households with TV in our town was explosive.

Can I remind peeps that the slogan will be used to promote the website and not to trash the Town! I could remind some that even animals have the common sense not to Thomas Crapper in their own back yard.

Apparently we all live in Woodhorn! This is the missing key to our tight-knit but friendly Town. Bedlington's traditional market gets a brief mention; obviously because we all know that it goes back aeons in ye olde Tesco car park - watch out for the livestock as you drive in to pay the traditional parking toll. Ashington is hot-linked but Bedders is not. No more than we've come to expect. Worth begging for a traditional tight-knit but friendly link? I think probably not; will anyone but guide book author/publishers working out of Bombay read this anyway?

Thank you; I'm Passionate About Ones... :lol:

One Town - One Aim - One Voice

Its just a fad! Will go the same way as that Internet thing did.

OK, nominations are open for our slogan contest. The slogan chosen by the judges will appear around the place with more sickening frequency than Passionate About W......herever The star prize is to see your slogan with more sickening frequency than one dreamed up by some overpaid firm of consultants leeching on the public purse, and - almost without saying - your place in posterity. Runners-up will each receive a limitless supply of posters, a large pail of glue, a paint roller, an ample supply of bus tokens to get to Ashington (and back), and a black balaclava. Note: Local hoodies will not be deemed to require the last-mentioned accoutrement. Sloganise away...

Changed my mind, now I quite like it the way it was! It seems to have change since last night. Did you do anything? The text entry box extended well beyond the window (but was clipped of course) so entering anything more than a couple of words was working sort of blind. To add my longish tweet it had to prepare it elsewhere and paste. Even then I missed a few times and got some words of the pre-edit left in place. Update: Yes you have change it! But the text entry box could usefully take a 20% length increase. Works better now. Think the title should be changed to something more readily identifiable with its function though. It's OK once you find it and know where it is for the next time, but I expect it's more learning than the average poster will want to do. They will probably dismiss the info column never to restore it again - except by serendipitous accident. BTW I notice a considerable speed/usability increase on this early netbook. Didn't expect that!

Aaww.. I'd already decided to re-write the forum descriptions to give them a cleaner look! Maybe a bug (or more likely an unset setting): When I hit the vote post up/down I get a "Action failed: You have reached your quota of positive votes for the day" modal dialogue box. Maybe the New Posts should feature before the Top Posters? We know who they are likely to be anyway! All in all looking good P.S. Just discovered the tweet box doesn't side-scroll properly making input/editing VERY difficult. Using Fry-a-fox of course The disposable status column feature works very well - more sites should have this sort of thing to get rid of their clutter on netbook screens. Took me a short while to find the restore button though. It's not quite as obvious as the dispose one.

Like.. removing three layers of cloud? Seriously, that's an awfully clear sky for Bedders!

You've heard of the Mexican Wave? Well, this is a Mediterranean Wave! = The sort of cloud that gliders use.

Answer will be posted next week together with the names of the luck winners.