Most of my media experience has been with newspapers and magazines, but there have been a couple of short periods of involvement with radio, once with the ABC and then with community radio. That may explain why I was intrigued with the idea of internet radio and had been listening to the internet feeds of a few radio stations. Unfortunately that ties the listener to the computer unless you go for extensive wiring or set the volume excessively loud.
It is thus not surprising that my latest toy is an internet radio.
What is an internet radio? This one looks like any other "kitchen radio", somewhat bigger than a bedside clock radio, mainly so it can have a better quality speaker, though still just one; it picks up its signal not from normal broadcasting but from your own wireless router. That means it connects to radio stations for their digital online services but directly to their web address via the router/modem without needing a computer.
I'd been looking at what was on the market, but felt that the prices of from $299 up was too expensive for less electronics than in a $15 alarm clock. Then I saw that Aldi were offering one at $149. Still expensive but below my current mental limit for something I might play with and then discard.
I've since discovered that the current awareness of what these things are is so low that Woolworths were having a cleraance of Sagem models at some DSE and Tandy stores.
It did not take long to get it going, with only a couple of "switch off and start again" detours.
I was concerned that the manual says the date and time which show when switched on will not survive the power being turned off. Would the other settings hold? Answer: yes they do, switch off the radio, unplug from the transformer/power supply plug, reconnect, turn on and it automatically reconnected to my router (I'm using WEP) and to the station that was playing before.
So I can shift it from room to room and turn it off at the socket, which I'd need to if it is the bedroom as the backlit blue screen is as bright as Lunar Park (well, almost, definitely bright enough to keep us awake).
The other thing I miss is even a basic tone control. My office is somewhat reflective (lots of windows and vertical blinds, no curtains) so I'd like to knock the top off a little — but it seems this is a fault not only of the Aldi radio but of most models, and of internet radio on the PC too unless you go deep into software settings. Incidently it is clearly branded "Pure" despite the model number of AV-BT1506 indicating it may have been contracted out by Pure for the Aldi order. Pure's current internet radio as seen on their sites is more advanced but also more expensive.
The radio comes with an access code to the Frontier web site which works well as the radio picked up my new account listing there within a few seconds, and you can use folders to separate listings into genre or whatever. Apparently Frontier make the chips used in many brands of internet radios. There are around 7000 radio stations available from the two-line LCD display but it can be a lot easier to set up your own list of favourite stations on the Frontier web site and then allocate the best of those to the eight presets.
One of the first accidental finds was Australian Showcase on a station called CMR Nashville that seems to be based somewhere in Europe. (I'd prefer jazz but this is my wife's favourite kind of music and showing her that she can get the music she likes while the ABC was at this time obsessed with the football Grand Finals by simply pressing a couple of buttons was easily justifying the expense).
Since then I've found that CBC (the Canadian ABC equivalent) seemed obsessed with the US elections despite having one of their own, from the BBC London station that the jewish bakery/deli that my dad used to take me for a salt beef beigel on a Sunday morning when I was about 10 is still in business (alongside the more recent Bangladeshi curry houses), and that it is a novelty for most Londoners to be getting water meters.
So, what will be the future for internet radio? There seem to be signs that they may become much more portable. A battery operated version the size of the old transistor radios would be more portable around the home and garden even if restricted to the coverage of the user's wireless router/modem. And outlets for headphones and audio in general should become universal. Perhaps they can be combined with MP3 players of the iPod kind.
Tomorrow's internet radio may not be like the ones we have today but with many thousands of radio feeds already available and with dozens being added each week, my guess is that they'll become much more common.
Even in the past few weeks the number and quality of ads on a couple of stations listed among my favourites have shown a healthy increase, so the financial return to stations may also become better even against current trends. There are already network ad inserters offering ads on up to 600 stations but the best returns for advertisers are likely to be for those ads which are relevent to the listeners either by interest or region.
The other problem to overcome is the relationship in the music forms of internet radio between income from ads and the payments out to music rights owners. Currently there is a reprieve from high rates originally proposed for US law.
When someone asks me whether deleted files can be recovered, I have to ask why he or she wants to know. The reason is that sometimes the questioner wants to be able to because it is a file they've deleted in error and want to get it back, and sometimes it is because they want to give away or trade in a computer and do not want anyone to recover the files.
To the first type of question I can be encouraging. If the file has just been deleted and few other changes have been made, there's a good chance that some of the readily available recovery software will work. Normally deleting a file does not destroy the file, it just marks the main index entry as being ready for the space to be reused. Get in quick and it just needs the first character of the file name to be resored to what it was and you may have the file back.
If you just deleted it and use the recycle bin or trash can according to operating system, it is even easier, though I would not recommend the method of one office worker I heard of who cleared the desktop for a new task by just dragging everything to the recycle bin, to bring back when needed. Not a good idea.
On the other hand, if you want to delete everything because you are worried that your nephew to whom you are giving the computer will find something incriminating, then by all means use some of the deletion software that is around which will just write over each file with random zeros and ones of binary code.
If on the other hand you are really worried, then perhaps you should know that one of the reasons hackers can recover old files is that the alignment of heads on drives changes slightly over time. It used to be a major problem with floppy disks (well, it still affects floppies but we've stopped using them so it ceased to be a problem for most of us).
You can rewrite as much as you like but if the alignment of the head has changed there could be a tiny sliver of the old file peeping out at the edge of the track. Of course, provided you are not of interest to the security agencies of your own or another country or to major crime syndicates it is very unlikely you need worry about this problem, at least for a few years.
If anyone feels a need to really santize hard drives beyond the simple overwriting software I'd still suggest that destruction, with a hammer and hacksaw and deposition of the parts of platters in separate rubbish systems is more than sufficient. Then buy a new or even a secondhand hard drive -- the latter will ensure you are distributing someone else's problems.
Can't get a website, then another one fails, bringing up a message that your browser can't find the server? Yes it happens, and mostly you'll just think Google, or wherever the link came from, is out of date and you move on.
It recently happened to me but the site was mine, hosted on a server in Virginia and I had not received an SMS to tell me the server was down (which is a service I pay for). When I went to the site of the service which tells me whether my server is working, it was also unavailable, and that was the clue to what was happening. Most other sites I tried came up with no problems.
So I phone one of the firms whose sites I host and all was OK for them, at that time, but some hours later when my sites are working I get a call from that firm to say their sites are down. But I'm getting them OK.
It takes me a while but I track it to one of the dozen or so companies which provide the Internet backbone worldwide. One company's connections were on and off for periods of up to an hour.
ISPs buy their Internet connections from more than one supplier (or at least all the good ones do) but many who have two suppliers would not buy enough from each to carry their whole load if the other goes down. Some requests will be met from the ISPs own cache so if a site is static you might not know that the connection is down.
If anyone can be said to own the Internet it is the Tier 1 suppliers. They are the firms who get paid for the cable traffic they are providing to smaller providers, though they do swap their interconnected services among themselves, known as peering. The Tier 1 providers are AOL, AT&T, Global Crossing, Level 3, Verizon, NTT (formerly Verio), Qwest, Savvis (formerly C&W, Cable & Wireless) and Sprint. In the sense of their importance related to this part of the world, i.e. Australia, Telstra and SingTel (which owns Optus) are well down the tree and buy their connections for much of the world from the Tier 1 companies.
Most Tier 1 suppliers are owned in the US but NTT is part owned by the Japanese Government and Global Crossing is based in Bermuda. Cogent, used by many Australian ISPs, and a contender for Tier 1 status, uses Verio for many of its worldwide connections.
Problems with the Internet backbone are not common, but they do happen.
I can't understand how people use birthdates, pet names, children's names and so on as passwords on accounts which matter. Sure, I use a pet's name on some anonymous technical forums I've had to sign in for where I don't use my real name ayway but such passwords can be broken in minutes on email and web access.
And how many of you are still using the initial password given by a financial advisor, share broker etc and which could have even been sent to you originally in an open email.
And then there are people who'd get a shock if they opened their security dialog in a common web browser to discover that a couple of clicks away are all their passwords in plain view if they've chosen to let the computer remember it -- and therefore in plain view to anyone who ever has access to your computer.
We have a common promotion here that when you change the daylight savings time settings on your clocks is the time to change the battery in your smoke alarms. I'd add that twice a year, when the clocks change, is also the time to change all your passwords.
Recent Comments