With the house move up and coming, Hannah and I looked into getting Sky. Now, I’m a huge advocate of High-Definition (HD), so I would only really be interested in Sky HD to benefit from Sky Movies HD 1+2. The costs of this are high – £249 for the Sky HD receiver, £30 standard installation fee, and then for the package we would want it would cost £44 a month (Variety mix, Movies mix, Sky HD subscription). That’s a whopping £807 for the first year of Sky service, and a still huge £528 for each consecutive year.
I’m glad we didn’t even bother calling because we’ve decided on something a lot cheaper. Introducing the wonder of Top Up TV! Currently, TUTV is offering a free 160GB receiver with a 12-month subscription at £10 a month (ends June 30th). This gives you all the decent extra channels that Sky gives you (UKTV Gold, Paramount etc.), and the recording/playback/pause etc. ability for a quarter of the price. What about the HD movies? Something like Lovefilm.com would be ideal. For £12.99 per month, you can have up to 2 DVDs/Blu-Ray at any time. So I can satisfy my urge for HD content with unlimited rentals just as I would’ve with Sky HD. This totals at £22.99 a month, and we get the same features we want out of Sky for half the price.
To summarise:
Sky HD: £807 for first year, £528 after
TopUp TV + LoveFilm.com: £276, every year.
On the first year, we will save a massive £531, and after that £252 per year compared to the equivalent Sky package. This also leaves us open to getting a service like freesat in the future… I know which option I’d prefer to take…
Who said a bit of consumer research never hurt anyone!
I’ve decided yet again to re-write the Total Carnage website. As mentioned yesterday, Kelvin discovered Ext JS which I will be using to form the bulk of the new website. I’ve decided I’m going to make the progress on this one a bit more public so you can see how it’s going (probably very slowly now I have a job!).
A few other things I want to do for this project is to make it XHTML 1.1 and CSS valid. It’s going to be mostly AJAX based anyway, so it should look pretty swish. I also want to completely seperate content from design by using CSS properly – until now I’ve just used CSS to enhance. You’ll notice the XHTML in the source is as simple as divs – no style=”..” or anything (aside from the ExtJS-added stuff which I am not really responsible for…). Lets see if I can get to the end of this project…
Have a look here: http://www.total-carnage.org/beta/
I also just noticed that IE7 dislikes that strictness. I’ll have a look in IE8 later…
I was sent a link to a Microsoft KB article which related to IE8’s new standards compatibility mode. When I read through it, I don’t know why or what made me laugh, but I found this quote amusing and just had to make a picture out of it.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 end-users can work around these issues by pressing Emulate IE7 on the menu bar in the browser window. When the Emulate IE7 button is depressed, Web pages will display in Internet Explorer 7 Standards mode.
Oh noes! The Emulate IE7 button is depressed! Must get him some prozac…
I just remembered a dream I had from last night – I was in someone’s garage (he wasn’t present) and this guy was building a Bugatti Veyron from a car kit (not possible in real life…) and he had a Haynes manual to instruct him. He had a small box of parts, one of which was a throttle cable. I attached the throttle cable, then thought “Oh no! I’d better take that off in case he notices and wanted to do that himself”… so I removed it, but wanted to get my own Veyron build-it-yourself kit…
Probably the only thing that impressed me about .NET was a third-party set of controls made by ComponentArt. Very slick controls and (fairly) easy to implement. Now I’ve found something that’s made just for Javascript – discovered by Kelvin here at Netbasic, a cool set of controls called Ext JS. I’ve not had a look at the code behind it, but it’s available on an open source license, so I’m considering having a gander tonight and I might start re-writing the Total Carnage site from scratch… the controls just look so shiny!
