Trying again, without munging all the songs into one long mp3

http://81.144.188.130/~pete/pizodcast/podcast.xml

Tried my hand at podcasting, except all I did was stick 5 songs together.

Results here:

http://yerma.org/~pete/pizodcast/podcast.xml

NTL Video on Demand

This may be old news, but it appears to have slipped under a lot of peoples radar. NTL have rolled out their video on demand service, filmflex in Belfast (and other places as well).
For those unfamiliar with video on demand, or, slightly worringly, unable to infer what it is from the name, this is a service where you get to pick what you want to watch (within a NTL approved, preselected subset), when you want to watch it (within a 24 hour from purchase period for premium content) and allows you you to pause, rewind, fast forward etc. A kind of modern day jukebox for the masses.
I've been playing with this a bit over the course of the last few weeks and have to say, overall, I'm impressed. I switched to NTL to get 2 meg cable after being unable to get ADSL any faster than 512 Kb due to the poor quality phone line running to my house. Getting digital tv was simply a byproduct of this, I'm not a huge TV watcher, and having been exposed to NTLs service in the past, I'm aware of its shortcomings - channel ordering that appears to have been picked out of a hat, why cant they group the different genres together like sky? The NTL digibox also annoys me, it's sluggish, and frequently fails to respond to the remote at all, even though a led flashes to indicate it has recieved a signal. Despite these and other small niggles, I have to say kudos to them for getting this out to people with what appears to be a minimum of fuss. I assume they've been planning this for a while, the "on demand" button which has been present on the (crap) NTL remote since day one would seem to lend weight to this, but there has been plenty of talk of this sort of thing for years, and up till now no one has made it happen.
Of course, the real lynchpin is the content, you get a decent selection of movies, both old and new, a fair amount of music - it's not John Peels old collection or anything, but theres enough there and it's 20p to listen to a song (and obviously watch its video) for a day. There's a kids section which I havent looked at much (my infant son prefers star wars to kids tv, yay!). Obviously there's an adult section, something I wouldnt be interested in at all - but when my finger slipped and pressed the wrong button, and another series of amazing events resulted in my pin number being entered and confirmed, I couldnt help but notice a surprisingly varied selection of porn, with sections to cater to every partiality, from fetish to chav (!). NTL are also advertising a feature to watch any BBC show up to a week after its been broadcast, but rather frustratingly, I've been thus far unable to locate the menu that allows you to do this. I hope when I do it's as good as it sounds, as I've also heard a rumour that the BBC archive will someday be available through this service - imagine having access to any of the wonderful BBC documentaries at the push of a button.
So much handier than having to go off and look for the torrents yourself....

Update: A few people have pointed out the BBC stuff is under "pick of the week", which I guess makes sense. Seems quite limited in that there are only a few programmes to choose from though, we'll see what the future holds.

For whatever reason, nokia advise that the largest mmc card you can use in a 6230i is 512 meg, this isnt the case. I purchased a 1 gig card from mplex for £55 and it worked straight away (the card is some random kingston one, can probably be got cheaper elsewhere, when I get an idea to buy something, I like to have it there and then - daft, i know.)
I transcoded some videos into 3gp to watch on the phone, watching a 700 meg xvid rip of return of the jedi shrink to 70 meg. The quality is better than you would expect for such a highly compressed movie viewed on such a small screen, though I imagine extended viewing would be headache inducing.
The software I used to do the transcoding was nokia multimedia converter, a java app nokia give out for free once they get to know you. It took less than 15 minutes to encode a movie on a 1400 mhz pentium m.
Link to a bad quality clip of a bad quality clip playing on the phone :)