I bought my monthly copy of “Stuff” magazine yesterday. It’s about the only monthly publication I buy with any frequency, and it has nothing to do with the scantily-clad women on the front cover. Honest.

I’d heard quite a bit about Spotify before, but I still didn’t really have a clue what it was. I hadn’t been terribly bothered to look, and while I’d heard it was cool, neat, revolutionary, and seriously neat; I still had no idea what it did. Well, no excuse now. A double-page review of it can be found in the current mag… and now I’ve downloaded it, I agree with everything its reputation suggests it is.

Combine last.fm with iTunes, and you’re half-way there. It’s an on-demand, peer-to-peer, 100% legal, streaming service. Give it a track name, artist, album or anything along those lines, and it starts playing. Instantly. It’s entirely free (if you can suffer 60 seconds of adverts for every 60 minutes of music), and advert-free if you don’t mind paying a few quids a month. Personally, I can handle a few ads in an hour!

The interface is simple to use (if you can use iTunes, you can use this without any difficulty whatsoever), and even if you’ve never tried iTunes before, it’s dead simple. You can even create playlists within it to stream your favourite stuff. If you like the material enough, you can pop it into iTunes to buy it, or grab via your preferred means of obtaining music.

This may just change the world. Get your free account today!

81.

Good effort, Sir. Good effort.

Just received this delightful email from the complaints department:

Dear Me,
Thank you for contacting Sky Help Centre.

I am sorry to learn that you are having picture problems with your Sky box. On checking your account, I note that an engineer visited in April to find no fault with your equipment.

However, I have arranged for another engineer to attend free of charge on Tuesday 9 June 2009 between 8am and 5pm to finally resolve the issue. If this date is unsuitable, please contact Customer Services on 08442 41 41 41and they will rearrange for you.

The engineer will contact beforehand and give an estimated time of arrival and if you require further assistance please contact the number above quoting job number: 56005731.

I hope that this issue with your Sky box is resolved with this service call and that you experience no further problems.

Kind regards

Georgie

Sky Help Centre

http://www.sky.com

We shall see, won’t we.

Ever since we started struggling to watch Sky (see my earlier post on the topic!) I’ve been making best use of my LoveFiLM subscription instead. They have the UK’s largest selection of films, TV shows and series; over 65,000 titles in all! It’ll take me a while to run out of things to watch. But what I like the most is the sheer simplicity of it; no late fees (keep them as LONG as you want and watch as many times as you want!), no postage costs or fuel costs to take them back to the store. Just watch, pop in the pre-paid envelope to return, and they send you your next title or titles the next day. Absolutely brilliant.

I have 119 titles currently queued, and that was without putting much effort into it. Films I want to see, but don’t want to pay £10 to go and see it in the cinema, or pay £15+ for the DVD itself. Prefer blu-ray? They’ve got that covered, too.

With plans starting from £3.49, you’d be insane to miss their present offer of a 30 day free trial AND a £5 eShop voucher to go with it. Click the banner below to find out more. If you decide to go for the offer, I’ll get some pennies as well from their “refer a friend” scheme, that’ll be going towards my divorce and “get debt free” funds. Go on, for 30 days you can even cancel on day 29 and pay nothing at all.

So it’s been 24 hours now since I submitted my complaint to Sky, with a link to the YouTube video. Aside from an automated response, I’ve not heard a thing. Of course, I wasn’t expecting to. But I’m annoyed all the same to have had my private doubts confirmed by a multinational behemoth.

Perhaps I’ll receive a reply tomorrow? I shall not be holding my breath.

I’m annoyed.

I’m more than annoyed actually, I’m f**king livid. Rather than re-type the whole story, let me share an email I just sent to the Sky Complaints department via their website:

Dear Sky,

I’m sure you get quite sick of people whining on a daily basis, so I’ll try and keep this brief. I upgraded my parents to Sky+ in January, and since that time their TV watching pleasure has deteriorated to the point that “Sky” has become a synonymous with a swear word that rhymes with “duck”.

For the majority of the day and into the evening, none of the televisions in the house are watchable at all. We have Sky+ in the lounge (which is then distributed around the house via RF eyes), as well as two dedicated Sky Multiroom boxes in the conservatory and master bedroom. The issues described and demonstrated below, occur on all three TV’s, regardless of the box selected for viewing.

Initial troubleshooting by telephone to the Sky helpline revealed nothing untoward. Countless hours researching potential interference sources online have been checked and where necessary rectified, with absolutely no positive effect whatsoever.

An engineer visited in (April? From memory), spent 20 minutes scratching his head as the problem wasn’t evident on his arrival – quite typical – so had to go on my description of the fault alone. After much blustering, he suggested that a software update on all boxes would cure the issue, and proceeded to do exactly that. 20 minutes later, he left. Five minutes after leaving, all boxes were again unwatchable.

I have given up trying to explain the fault verbally or written, so please view the uploaded YouTube video that I think nicely shows what we have been trying to put up with for the last 6 months. After my mother had been unable to watch “Britain’s Got Talent” when it was first broadcast on Saturday, I was pleased to find it being re-broadcast on Sunday. I popped it into the Planner to record for her, and settled down to watch it myself. As you can see, I was unable to do so. I eventually switched to terrestrial, but as I have no means to be able to record that Mum has again missed out. Having watched it diligently for the last 7 weeks – as best as able anyway – it was a significant blow to her to have missed out on the final. Twice.

This clip is just over a minute long:

I, nor my parents, can take this any longer. I fail to see the point in paying £41 of my hard-earned money for something that only causes frustration, disappointment and raised blood pressure. Help!!

Kind Regards,

Me.

I hit “Submit”, only to be greeted by “The highlighted field above has an invalid value. Please correct it. Maximum length of query is 1000 characters.”

WTF? You want me to make a complaint in 1,000 characters or less? So in the end I sent this:

Apparently I am limited to 1,000 characters, so the nice email I have just written has been kindly discarded for me. Forgive me if I am now slightly more irritated than I was 10 minutes ago.

I have given up trying to explain the fault verbally or written, so please view the uploaded YouTube video that I think nicely shows what we have been trying to put up with for the last 6 months.

This clip is just over a minute long:

I, nor my parents, can take this any longer. I fail to see the point in paying £41 of my hard-earned money for something that only causes frustration, disappointment and raised blood pressure. Help!

Amazing. They can’t even take a complaint without generating an error.

On an almost daily basis, I am deluged by phishing emails. GMail catches all of them; until today. I woke up to find an email from the United Nations in my inbox (from unitednationsfightingfraud-85@msn.com) – yeah, right.  Anyway, either I was one of the first recipients, or Google were asleep when that one came in, because there it was sitting pretty in my inbox. It had been sent to an email address that hasn’t been used for over 4 years, but I still forward all emails from the domain to my master Google Apps account just on the off-chance someone tries to email me using it.

Dear Beneficiary,

Find and read attachment carefully.

YOUR PAYMENT HAS BEEN APPROVED BY UNITED NATIONS.

Attached was a Word document (“Viewed as HTML” in GMail, just in case), containing the following:

UNITED NATIONS ASSISTED PROGRAMME FOR SCAMMED VICTIMS.

UNITED NATIONS COMPENSATION UNIT, IN AFFILIATION WITH THE COMPENSATION UNIT FIRST NATIONAL BANK, SOUTH-AFRICA.

Our Ref: FNB/WB/NF/UN/XX023.

Dear Beneficiary,

How are you today? Hope all is well with you and family?, you may not understand why this mail came to you.
We have been having a meeting for the passed 7 months which ended 5 days ago with the then secretary to the UNITED NATIONS. This email is for just 10 selected people from our raffle draw ballot the people that have been scammed in any part of the world, the UNITED NATIONS have agreed to compensate them with the sum of US$ 500,000.

This includes every foreign contractors that may have not received their contract sum, and people that have had an unfinished transaction or international businesses that failed due to Government problems etc. We found your name in our list and that is why we are contacting you, this have been agreed upon and has been signed.

You are advised to contact Mr. Alex Williams of First National Bank, South-Africa, as he is our representative in South-Africa, contact him immediately for your Cheque/ International Bank Draft of USD$500,000. This fund are in a Bank Draft for security purpose ok? So he will send it to you and you can clear it in any bank of your choice.

Therefore, you should send him your full Name and telephone number your correct mailing address where you want him to send the Draft to you. Contact Mr. Alex Williams immediately for your Cheque:

Person to Contact: Mr. Alex Williams
Email: fnbalexwilliams@gmail.com

Email: f_nbremittance@live.com

Thanks and God bless you and your family. Hoping to hear from you as soon as you cash your Bank Draft. Making the world a better place.

Regards,

Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

http://www.un.org/sg/

An incredibly amateurish attempt by any standard. But, having numerous untraceable domains in my portfolio and for having actually succeeded in getting through to my inbox, I decided to reply. I have throwaway phone numbers at my disposal courtesy of my VoIP setup, and I doubt they will actually send anything through the post, so the address is made up with the exception of it being in the same town that the phone number is from (should they bother to check).

I won’t paste my reply just yet, should Google Search be on the ball and it ruins the game. But this could be fun. Scamming the scammers, for entertainment and revenge!

UPDATE: Part 2 of ‘Scamming The Scammers’ can be read here.

Yes, it’s illegal in this country. I know that. But, to be honest, I don’t care. I’m not doing it to make illegal copies or anything, I’m doing it because I want to have a great Home Cinema setup. So far I’ve ripped about 50 DVD’s that were lying around the house using DVD43 and DVD Shrink. There are a couple of stuborn titles that required AnyDVD instead but for the most part it’s been a successful venture. Any films I get from my subscription service also get ripped rather than watched immediately.

A 1TB dedicated hard drive can hold around 200 titles. When I finally get round to purchasing or building a Windows Home Server, endless expandable storage will be available for just the cost of a new disk thanks to the way WHS handles drive space. Instead of individual drives showing up as C:, D:, E: etc it bundles them all together and the combined capacity of your 3 (or however many drives) shows up as C:. It’s not as dangerous as RAID-0, as individual folders (such as your DVD folder!) can be set to ‘duplicate’, and WHS will then store your rips on more than 1 of the drives. If one of the drives fails, just pop in a new one and WHS will rebuild. Super duper.

The problem I’m now facing is keeping track of what I’ve already ripped, what we already own on DVD and so on. I’m pondering setting up a new service to do precisely this, that will be available to everyone on the net. It’ll integrate (one day) with the NetFlix API so you can ‘authorize’ my service to add titles to your queue from just a button push from you, e.g. the “Top 10″ titles on my service you go down and think “Yeah, I want to see that!”, one click and it’s in your queue. The same for LoveFiLM users in the UK (when they finally finish their API).

Fun times ahead!

In the quest for having my new home planned out long before I’ve even got the deposit together, let alone having actually found somewhere, I’ve stumbled across Apple Remote. This allows you, for those who don’t use it already, to control your iTunes media library from your iPod or iPhone. “So what?” I hear you say. Well, let me explain…

So controlling your iTunes on your main PC from your iPod may seem a little redundant. Indeed, really, it is. But where this comes into its own is when you have one or more Apple AirPort Express’s in different rooms hooked up to speakers. You can then play individual tracks or playlists in different rooms, or indeed sync your entire house to one playlist. Want some peace and quiet in one room but music in the rest? No problem, just flick the speakers to ‘Off’ on your iPod/iPhone in that particular room. And because it works over your home wifi network, wherever you get a signal, you can use iTunes remotely and fiddle with your rooms musical pleasure generator.

Superb. Truly superb.

Want to do this yourself? You can find an easy to follow guide over at Lifehacker. Most people have a couple of stereos lying around, and with individual AirPort Express’s available as B-grade stock from Apple for as little as $70 ($99 new, and even cheaper on eBay), there really is no excuse not to do this!

It seems all I’ve done since my last post is work work work! Several 12 hour shifts and another to come tomorrow. A day off not near enough… It’s nearly 3am and I’m going to bed. Zzzz