I’ve been a guest on Tech News Today a couple of times, but always via Skype. This week I got to make my first in-person appearance on the show at the TWiT booth at the Consumer Electronics Show 2012. It was awesome to hang out with Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane and Iyaz Akhtar in the flesh. We discussed gaming consoles, Google TV, Intel-based smartphones and bunch of other stuff.

On Tuesday I tweeted that I was pleased with DStv making it simple for subscribers to cancel their accounts. This prompted replies from people wondering why I cancelled my subscription. I can’t answer that with a character limit of 140, so I decided to put my answer here instead.

About a week before the 2010 FIFA World Cup I bought the new HD PVR 2P decoder for DStv. I had been without DStv for almost two years but made an impulse buy of the decoder when I saw the price – R2000. I wanted to check out DStv’s high definition channels and thought it would be worth having for the World Cup. I set it up myself, after returning the decoder because the first one I was sold had a mismatched smart card.

Watching the World Cup in HD was totally worth it – mostly because it was a great excuse to have friends over. Now, about a month after the event, I have cancelled my subscription. These are some of my reasons:

• There’s nothing on. I really can’t think of anything on DStv that I have an interest in watching. Now and then Discovery HD Showcase will have a decent enough documentary that’ll keep me interested for a short while, but that’s about it. I can’t stand puerile, imported-and-knocked-off reality bullshit like Idols and TV series that are outdated.
• TV is a waste of time and cognitive energy. It’s depressing how much time our species spends lying in front of televisions with our brains idle. I like making things, reading, spending time with my kids and fitting as much productivity into the finite time I have on earth as possible. What do I get from watching television? Even documentary channels have been dumbed down with shows like Ice Road Truckers on History Channel. How the fuck can watching barely-literate Canadians driving trucks in the snow be classed as History? And if you tune into Discovery you get to watch a fat guy building a motorbike. Seriously?
• It’s expensive. Considering the return – null – paying close on R600 per month is just too much for subscriber television. Some things are a waste of money no matter how rich you are. Television is one of them.
• It makes my kids sad. Gone are the days when children’s television consisted of 30 minutes on a Saturday morning. Now there is 24/7 content across multiple channels and the sprogs know it’s on whenever they want it. Thing 1 (my oldest son – I have two) is addicted to CBeebies. As kids’ content goes CBeebies is brilliant and educational. But it’s on all day – and he knows it. It makes him tense when he isn’t watching and he nags for it. I’m sure that CBeebies has its shows available on DVD. I’ll use the money I’m saving to buy him a few. Tonight our house was quiet and Thing 1 spent time playing with his brother, who fell asleep soon after. Win.
• I don’t like sports. I enjoyed the World Cup, but I don’t get sports in general. Grown men watch other grown men throwing balls around and then either celebrate or get depressed based on the outcome. I am yet to hear a cogent argument for why sport matters. I choose to get happy or sad based on meaningful events. There are enough real things to worry about in the world without having to care about who kicked a ball more accurately. I know a vast majority of people will disagree with me on this, but let’s get back to DStv – without sport, what else does the service have going for it?
• I get my news and entertainment on-demand, online. I don’t think I need to do much explaining on this point. We all know how iTunes and YouTube works. I also love watching next-level online broadcasts like This Week in Tech where I can engage with hosts and other viewers in real time.
• Content licensing is retarded. It’s 2010. The world is connected. And yet we still have douchebags in suits that think it makes sense to license things by country and roll out content to different territories at different times. I want to buy my content online and download it at will. Legally. The way content is licensed for pay television windows (an industry term) is silly.
• There are better things to do with 42 inches. Plug a modern gaming console or a Mac Mini into your television and put all that screen real-estate to better use. Even the most inane of video games are more mentally stimulating than Idols and contain a more accurate view of reality than Oprah. Your HD TV makes a really good screen for your computer.
• DVDs are cheap. If I really want to see something I can get it on DVD or Blu-ray and watch it with better quality and less advertising. For less money.

These are just the most front of mind reasons for why I don’t see the value of having a pay television subscription. If television channels were provided as part of a triple-play telecommunications package I might take them. In their current form there is just no value. I’m not a TV guy.

What are your reasons for not having pay television? And, if you disagree with me, why do you see value in having it?

Google Search is one of the last major international internet services accessible in China after the government in that country banned Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and several other sites in 2009, making them inaccessible to local internet users.

Google begrudgingly agreed to play ball with the great firewall of China in order to officially operate in the country, but after some of its users’ accounts were hacked – apparently from within China – Google said it had had enough and would pull out of the country if internet filtering was not relaxed.

I travelled to Beijing last year as a guest of Lenovo and got to experience the Great Firewall firsthand. It was eery not being able to access Twitter or Facebook, but I soon found ways around this. One method was to use SSH tunneling and apparently VPN access works well too – some companies are even making money out of selling this kind of access to internet users in China.

Another less obvious method was to use the browser on an Amazon Kindle. The Kindle connects wirelessly to cellular networks around the world thanks to roaming agreements with AT&T – Amazon’s network partner. Using the Kindle Browser I could hit Twitter, Facebook and other banned sites. The Kindle experimental browser is terrible – but it worked. And it’s free.

Obviously there are ethical issues with content filtering and I don’t believe governments have any right to apply such controls, but the reality of internet usage in China is that the filtering isn’t a big deal for users. I’m reminded, again, of infamous libertarian and computer scientist John Gilmore’s quote – “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Google will still be accessible from China, but will not have a dedicated Chinese service, which is the gist of this latest news. This will provide new incentive for the Chinese to provide their own services, just as they have come up with their own alternatives to Twitter and Facebook.

I live in a country with problems-a-plenty, but at least freedom of speech and censorship laws are progressive and protected by the constitution.

The ‘LTE Connected Car’ is one proof of concept that has been developed by Alcatel-Lucent and its ng Connect partners, including Chumby, LG Electronics and Toyota. The car shows what is possible when you integrate a real broadband connection into a vehicle. It has four autonomous touch-screens for each passenger that enable a number of in-car features such as gaming, listening to music, watching movies and using internet applications. Under the hood is an LTE (Long Term Evolution – or ’4G’, if you will) modem from LG and a central computer.

Gaming can be against other passengers in the car, or against other gamers on the internet. Because LTE offers ping times of around 20 milliseconds  it allows for low-latency gaming that wasn’t possible over 3G. The screens can also stream HD video from the internet without buffering, or you could watch Youtube videos and listen to music from services like Pandora or Spotify, all of which are ng Connect partners.

As an internet broadcaster I find the prospect of being able to stream into people’s cars an appealing one, but it’s uncertain at this time when we’ll actually be able to buy connected cars of this nature.

According to Alcatel-Lucent the connected car concept will lead to products that can be retro-fitted to older cars – but it is amazing to see what is possible when the integration is done by the vehicle manufacturer. For example, in the Toyota Prius I was shown on a trip to Paris to view the LTE Connected Car, one can use the touch-screens to access the vehicle’s internal sensors and check on things like engine oil levels, brake-pad wear and engine condition. You can also make an appointment to have your car serviced right from the display. And, of course, there’s the GPS with all the features you’d expect from that.

The LTE Connected Car is exciting – although I suspect it might be preempted by personal tablet devices that will offer much of the same functionality without the need for fitted computers in the car. Nonetheless, I’m all for the progress. Bring on the LTE.

Below is a video I put together while messing around in the car:

A few weeks ago I posted about Flock – a browser based on the Mozille engine (like Firefox) that mashes up your social networks. Flock does a decent job but still needs lots of work and I found that it was pretty bad with keeping Twitter updated. This, of course, could have more to do with Twitter’s recent server overloads than Flock as such. Nevertheless, while Flock came close, it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.

I also tried Mugshot from Red Hat – but Mugshot is better at showing other people what you’re up to on all your social networks, not the other way around.

I still need something that allows me to mash-up my friend’s feeds from the various networks, so that I can view them all in one place. I’m hoping that a future release of Flock will answer that requirement.

But for posting to all of my networks what I need is a way to ‘carpet bomb’ them all with my updates.

Enter Ping.fm. This new service collects your credentials for each social network you subscribe to and then allows you to use a range of web applications or your instant messenger to jet out messages to all of them.

Ping.fm is currently in beta testing, but if you write to the developers they will send you a promo code to get you started. I have a code that I will send you if you drop me a mail. If you’re a social networking whore like me then it’s probably worth checking out.