Goodbye Sky

We were paying c. £80 per month for Sky (satellite) TV, and, with the two Eurosport channels closing, we were left basically replicating access to just the Freeview channels. Tell me about bloated monopolies.

Outraged, we signed up with EE for their TV Pro service, which is Internet delivered. We're also taking the subscription sports channels (TNT Sports) for professional cycling (monuments, week stage races, grand tours) which Clare is particularly attached to (£23 per month in total).

Was this going to be easy to install? The stuff in the box was labelled 'self-install' but I've been bitten before - in fact almost always.

Carefully and methodically I de-wired the Sky box: ethernet cable, HDMI cable, satellite leads, power cable and stashed the ensemble into a heap in the corner: eventually it will all be shipped back to Sky.

Then, equally methodically, I connected the EE-provided ethernet cable, HDMI cable and power cable to the EE TV Box Pro, configured the remote and pushed the box's power button (having already turned the TV on using the Sky remote).

Amazingly, the screen displayed the first setup screen, the 'continue' button tantalisingly lit up. 

Naturally I couldn't affect it in any way: the remote was dead in my hands.

I called customer service.

There followed a comedy of errors. Batteries out and then back in again; the remote woke up. It then proceeded to wrongly pair with our ancient DVD player rather than the EE box. I took the DVD player away entirely - mothballed it - and eventually (batteries out; batteries back in again) the remote began to speak to the set-top box.

Success! I logged off the customer support call; played with the TV Channel Guide.

No BBC channels at all. 

Back to customer service and routed through to technical support: a long and obscure journey through multiple settings screens to reboot the box and reacquire stations. Finally it all seems to work. End the call to customer support.

So this is self-install in March 2025: how do pensioners cope? 

[Full disclosure: I am a pensioner - I mean other pensioners who don't have science degrees and who haven't worked in telecoms for thirty years].

"The City & The City" on TV: (episodes 3 & 4)

Amazon link

This penultimate episode was better. The series still feels more constricted than necessary (should have been six episodes!) but we're beginning to see the wood for the trees.

About episode 2 I said, " Borlú  is a grumpy, slightly sleazy ESTJ headmaster who could never have pulled his liberal, idealistic ENFJ wife." In this episode the dynamics of a failing marriage are more clearly portrayed: Borlú in his mundane sensor way worships his fey and fragile wife; she, on the other hand, sees him as a clodhopping bear whose unimaginative stolidity imprisons her free spirit.

Could it really have lasted two years?

Isabel Briggs Myers noted ("Gifts Differing") that as you ascend the social scale the proportion of Idealists/liberals (NFs) and Rationals/intellectuals (NTs) increases. This is plainly due to the IQ correlation with N:  a capacity for abstraction is an entry ticket for elite participation with heart-on-sleeve Idealism more prevalent in the arts and media.

Watching ESTJ Borlú blundering his way around as lead character is therefore a bit of a novelty. But the fact that many viewers may find him as irritating as does his wife Katrynia doesn't mean that he's not well acted, or that his personality doesn't fit the role. So I stand corrected, a little.

Borlú's Ul Qoman counterpart, Senior Detective Dhatt, (a more sympathetic figure) was revealed last night to be in a lesbian relationship with a less 'policey' partner - but both are SJs so their prospects are good.

So where do we stand now? The evil American corporation has come into the picture, spouting its vacuous homilies about 'learning from the noble inhabitants of the third world' (very well done, the very lightest touch) while Borlú's Guardian protective instinct for 'his people' has finally and irrevocably clashed with his Guardian respect for the principle that you shall not Breach.

The denouement is next Friday.

---

Update: Sunday 29th April 2018.

The final episode was perhaps the best. The banal, sleazy truth underlying Orciny was unveiled while the denouement flirted with magical realism. I liked it - I understand the sensors switched off in droves.

Throughout the episodes I understood the intellectual salience of 'unseeing' those social realities which power-brokers have made forbidden. What I didn't appreciate enough was the lure of Orciny, the fabulous secret-city soaring above the mundane.

The role of Borlú's wife, Katrynia was to capture that idealistic and utopian longing .. and then to follow the trajectory of Orciny into the abyss. The actress Lara Pulver didn't carry that arc too well: too self-possessed, not quite enough fragility.

Our forebears were peaceful and pious - as are we

The presenter is beautifully turned out. She started her career on a well-regarded archaeology show but has blossomed into every public broadcaster's dream of a popular science presenter. She's attractive, well-informed and of impeccable views.

As befits a photogenic media star, she is also a professor at one of our better universities.

The archaeologist she is interviewing is old-school. His teeth aren't right, his clothes an afterthought and his accent atrocious.

"This hill fort," she says pointing to it, "There's the ditch and wall surrounding it, and this curious set of angled avenues making the entrance diagonal, with sharp turns before you can ..."

"Yes," replies the archaeologist, "An attacking force can't directly ..."

She talks over him.

"Many scientists believe it's to allow the children to get a good view of visitors bringing interesting and exciting goods to trade."

The camera now turns to a mass grave, excavated outside the walls. Skeletons had been dumped in disarray with missing limbs and cut marks to the bones, particularly the skulls.

"This grave shows how fascinating were the burial practices of our neolithic ancestors, ..."

"It's consistent with a band of attackers being repulsed with heavy casualties and their ..."

"On the other hand, many scientists think what we're seeing here are the results of a sky burial, where the bodies of the revered dead were offered to wildlife and then the bones carefully decorated and buried. There's been a great deal of time for ground-disturbance of course."

His face set, the archaeologist turns his attention to the table, where bronze swords have been laid out. But he's too slow.

"These swords, quite corroded now, show the beautiful craftsmanship of grave goods or perhaps marks of status for the most elite leaders. You can see how much effort has gone into them as prestigious works of art ..."

At this point, the set is invaded by a young man draped in a black flag and toting a Kalashnikov. He shouts religious slogans and brings his weapon to bear.

The presenter is unfazed.

"What a beautifully-designed artefact he's carrying. Clearly it's of great religious signif ..."

The tape ends there.

BBC Two and "The City And The City" - China Miéville

Something to look forward to later this year. BBC Two has commissioned "The City And The City" in four hour-long episodes. Inspector Tyador Borlú, of the Extreme Crime Squad, Besźel, will soon be investigating the murder of Mahalia Geary.

"The City & the City takes place in the cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma. The precise location of these cities is not described. However, various references in the book indicate that the cities are perhaps in the coastal Black Sea region of south-central Europe: Besź smugglers traffic in goods from Varna, Bulgaria and Bucharest, Romania; protagonist Tyador Borlú enjoys his coffee in the Turkish style.

"These two cities actually occupy much of the same geographical space, but via the volition of their citizens (and the threat of the secret power known as Breach), they are perceived as two different cities. A denizen of one city must dutifully 'unsee' (that is, consciously erase from their mind or fade into the background) the denizens, buildings, and events taking place in the other city – even if they are an inch away.

"This separation is emphasised by the style of clothing, architecture, gait, and the way denizens of each city generally carry themselves. Residents of the cities are taught from childhood to recognise things belonging to the other city without actually seeing them. Ignoring the separation, even by accident, is called "breaching" – a terrible crime by the citizens of the two cities, even worse than murder."

How will they deal with "unseeing"? Perhaps they'll 'fade out' the other city?

"The City And The City" is my favourite China Miéville novel. It has weaknesses in both plot and characterisation, but I have never seen 'the social construction of reality' better realised.

Update: 7th April 2018. They finally showed it - here's my review.

---

In other news, Arthur C. Clarke's 'Childhood's End' comes as a three-part series to Sky 1 at 9 pm this Thursday (repeated a few hours later, deep in the night, on Sky 2).

Mr Clarke's rather clunky fiction has largely gone out of fashion - who reads it any more? - but 'Childhood's End' is clever, has genuine plot surprises and is filled with a galactic sense of wonder.

I do hope they do it justice.

The onset of Christmas

The Market Square at Wells this afternoon

Clare and myself visited my mother in Swindon this morning and returned via IKEA in Bristol. The Christmas season is just getting underway, and we stocked up on candles, new bedding and other seasonal fare.

Clare thinks big thoughts about the next purchase

Do Swedes really drink alcohol-free Glogg?

We were watching the excellent Channel 4 programme "The Murder Detectives" last night so I offered Clare a drive-by tour of St Paul's, very close to IKEA.

She declined.

Humans (TV: Channel 4)

The 'synth' is the pretty one

From The Guardian review:

"Would you? Get one? That’s a discussion that will have been going on in the country’s living rooms during and after the first episode of Humans (Channel 4, Sunday). One meaning your own synthetic, or “synth”: a green-eyed humanoid robot.

On the plus side it will clean and iron and then cook you a nice chicken chasseur for tea, freeing you up for all the good stuff you never find time for. It might even provide some kind of companionship. Plus there are potential upgrades, including adult ones, if you know what I'm saying.

On the downside, there is a danger synths might make you, me, everyone redundant. They are already doing all the jobs people don’t really want to do, not just in the house, but street cleaning, handing out free newspapers, sex work etc (they are basically a bit like immigrants, I’m afraid). But it won’t be long before they’re doing the jobs you might want to do yourself – doctor, lawyer, politician, TV critic, footballer perhaps. The Singularity – when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence – isn't far off.

Also, returning to the basic domestic model, it might be a bit creepy having a machine that looks just like a person living in your house. It’s not good for the children either, it’ll mess with their heads. Plus you might be unlucky – like the Hawkins family – and get one, like Anita, that … who can think, and feel. Then things start to get really complicated.

One of the beauties of Humans is that, like Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, it really isn't such a big leap, or ask. Only last week there was a story about Ocado creating an army of humanoids with artificial intelligence. The online supermarket robots might not be as pretty as Gemma Chan, who plays Anita (very convincing as a semi-humanoid), but this stuff is happening. Tellingly, Humans is set not some time in the future, but some time around now. It’s sci-fi for the non sci-fi fan, sci-fi that has more than a foot in sci-fact."

Here's the video showing the state-of-the-art in anthropoid robotics, from the DARPA Robotic Challenge last week.

My best guess is that 'synths' as portrayed are 20-30 years away. And then the human race will go extinct.

System Integration

Yesterday I was cast back to a now sadly-familiar role: the family's systems engineer. My mother had reported that her ancient (CRT) TV had now evolved to sound only .. and indeed it was so. I didn't waste too much time with the old (2003) Sky STB, once turning off and restarting everything had failed to turn things around.

My first ploy was to attach her old aerial coax to a spare Freeview digibox I happened to have. This gave perfectly adequate reception for the channels she's interested in, but could I get that Flipper to control it? In despair I called digibox tech support: I paraphrase.

"Yep, the device you're dealing with is a cheap Chinese import we sell. We've never had any luck getting third party remotes to work with it. We don't know the codes and in any case you're wasting your time."

I was perseverant with the Flipper, manual in hand, but success eluded me. It was time to visit Currys/PC World. The tech assistants were entranced by my Flipper booklet.

"Hey," called my guy to his boss, have you ever seen anything like this?

These are folk who don't get out of bed for anything with less than 200 controls; the Flipper - with its minimalist on-off, channel +/- & volume up/down buttons - entranced and mystified them. The Samsung TV seemed most likely to be Flipper-friendly and so - eventually - it proved.

Samsung delivers the goods

I am so bad at manipulating physical reality, and tend to panic and hyperventilate when presented with two pieces of plastic and seven cross-headed screws. I did, however, finally get the stand assembled and connected to the TV.

Ab initio configuration is so much better now - no more diving through five layers of incomprehensible on-screen menus aided by a bulky manual written in microscopic font. So after no more than 90 minutes I was able to call the Sky people and close down her contract.

They were good about it.

Breaking Up

Having gone to all the effort to acquire BT Vision and the Sky Sports channels for the cricket, it has been a disappointment that the picture so often breaks up. For days we blamed the weather, but today I succumbed to an outbreak of rationality and called Dave from Wookey Aerials, a TV man of ten years experience.

I liked Dave. He was a stoutly-built forty-something with the odd tattoo - maybe ex-military - but he knew his transmitters and his multiplexes. The problem apparently is that on the digital auto-scan both the TV and the Vision box search from low to high frequencies. This means they pick up the Plymouth transmitter first (which is miles away) and then ignore the higher frequency Mendip transmitter which is on our doorstep.

However, we are so low in the sight-line of the Mendip transmitter that ever close proximity isn't giving us much signal strength for the low-power Freeview multiplexes, which include Dave (19) and Sky Sports (41, 42). As a consequence, Dave suggested I buy a Tesco signal booster (£9.97).

Then he showed me his trick. He set each device in turn on auto-tune, but with the aerial coax pulled out of the wall. He waited until the scan passed 50% (and was safely past the Plymouth frequency band) and then plugged it back in. Voila! The TV/Vision box acquired just the Mendip transmitter channels. It works better already.

As a bonus, he explained that both our SONY TV and our Vision box were HD-ready. All we needed to do was to buy an HDMI cable to replace the SCART one we're currently using and then we'd be able to watch the Freeview HD channels!

Sounds perfect. When I got back from Tescos this afternoon, the first thing I did was to plug in the signal booster pre-amp to improve Clare's already good Sky coverage of the England v. Sri Lankan test.

It made the picture worse.