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| I just wanted to share this fantastic Pink Floyd-esque (with a hint of Ozric Tentacles in places) reworking of the Doctor Who theme tune from Traffic Experiment as it doesn’t seem to have been getting the love it so obviously deserves. You can also download this track for free as an MP3 or FLAC at the Traffic Experiment website. I hope you enjoyed this interval, normal service will be resumed shortly.       
Late last year Virgin Media announced they would be partnering with TiVo for their new PVR, nice to have new TiVo hardware in the UK after all these years but not everyone wants or can get Virgin cable. Still, we had our old series 1 boxes still didn’t we… but not for much longer if TiVo had their way, in a spectacular show of disregard for their loyal fanbase they made the unfortunate decision to cut off all existing monthly and lifetime subscribers, rewarding them for their loyalty by effectively leaving them with a useless box. The King is dead. Long live the King. Step forward the AltEPG project. A team of people from the tivoland forum decided this wasn’t going to be the end of our beloved series 1 TiVo so they got together to set up their own EPG service, gathering data from free sources around the net and compiling it into a compatible format. Getting modified TiVo boxes to connect to the new service would be easy but what about all those unmodified boxes out there that could only dial up to the preconfigured TiVo number? Well fortunately the TiVo software allows the entry of a dial prefix, eg. a number the box might have to dial to get an outside line, this prefix will take enough digits to allow a full phone number to be entered, the TiVo then dials the prefix and connects to the new number with the original number being dialled afterwards but ignored by the phone system. A nice trick. With only one line available during testing it was hard to get connected but since then several individuals who run their own companies have stepped forward to provide lines for use with the AltEPG project with one recent number having 60 lines meaning you should no longer struggle to get a connection. To connect your unmodified TiVo to AltEPG follow these steps.
Most people will have been exposed to Delia Derbyshire’s work even if they aren’t aware of her name as she created the original 1963 arrangement of the Doctor Who theme tune. Her interpretation of the original score by composer Ron Grainer left him so stunned that on hearing the finished version he asked “Did I really write this?” to which Delia replied “most of it”. Grainer was so impressed with the result that he even tried to get her credited as co-composer but BBC bureaucracy prevented it. The documentary explains how creating such other worldly sounds in those days was a laborious process involving recording individual notes on magnetic tape which were then spliced together to make up the final tune. The show also includes various interviews and recordings with Delia and other examples of her music that demonstrate how far ahead of her time she was. In particular the 1968 White Noise album “An Electric Storm” made with David Vorhaus and fellow Radiophonic Workshop member Brian Hodgson is one of my favourites and is now considered an important and influential album in the development of electronic music. Sadly Delia died in 2001 at the age of 64 as a result of complications from breast cancer treatment. After her death her private collection of the material she recorded was bequeathed to Mark Ayres, archivist for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who has worked with Manchester University to create a digitised archive of her work. If you missed the documentary you can hear it on iPlayer here or it is repeated on Monday at 3pm on Radio 4.
The shows included in 3D Week are “The Greatest Ever 3D Moments“, a compilation showing some of the best 3D clips from over the years, some of the world’s greatest magic tricks in “Derren Brown Presents The 3D Magic Spectacular“, Paul Morrissey’s wacky 70s take on Frankenstein, “Flesh for Frankenstein“, horror film “Friday the 13th Part III“ plus “The Queen in 3D“, a showreel of the Queen filmed in her coronation year and “Best of Both Worlds“, a Hannah Montana concert. Something for almost everyone. There is some more information about the programmes here and some tips on how to get the best 3D effect. If you can’t wait for Monday you can view some 3D video clips and images on the ColorCode 3-D website or on YouTube. The snake video is excellent.
You can view the rest of the pictures on Flickr here and the full Wisteria Lodge episode can be watched on YouTube in 6 parts starting here or you can jump straight to the parts filmed in Grappenhall here and here. Taking the piss with this on screen logo or what! All the way through a 2.5 hour film
Well it might be an IE only DRM’d piece of crap but does it have any redeeming points? Not that I can find. Had a play with it last night and can’t say I was impressed. 30 mins show at 142Mb, not bad but took ages to download and quality was piss poor on my big telly, loads of artifacting. With that and the max 28 days to watch (7 days once you’ve watched it once) I will definately be sticking to torrents if that’s all they can offer! Expected better of the beeb Here is a good site with detailed instructions for building your own TARDIS. A here is a guy who has built his own TARDIS, console, console room, Daleks and K9, with loads of pics of them in progress Guess what I got of UKNova last night! Only the first episode of the new Dr Who!! It’s not even due to be broadcast till the end of the month. Wasn’t on there for long though, bit likely to draw the wrong sort of attention methinks Post viewing report coming later! I’ve had some good bits of televisual geekery off UKN last week as well, two of which were the “Beeb VT Christmas tapes” from 78 & 79 (made by the guys in “VT” and not for public consumption), lots of comic Dr Who clips in there amongst other stuff! Update:
Ofcom proposes to allow local religious and community organisations to operate within the UK Citizen Band allocation, to begin with, by licensing a number of such organisations to transmit services in a limited number of pilot areas. Can see trouble when mic keyers and worse key over the vicar though! and how about this, they said it wasn’t possible – a GSM mobile phone interceptor – a scanner for GSM phones, a snip at £228,000 Law enforcement agencies only so looks like I’ll have to give it a miss :p | 
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Starting on Monday 16th November Channel 4 will be showing a 
I recently found some old photographs that I took of parts of the 
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