Best TV catch-up on Freeview Play: Robot Wars, Kinky Britain and more
Over the last few months we’ve suggested some cracking shows that you can catch-up with for free using Freeview Play and this week is now different.
Freeview Play devices give you the ability to scroll backwards through the electronic programme guide and instantly play retrospective TV programmes from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 that you might have missed.
Just click on a show from the last seven days on the respective channels’ listings and it will automatically spark up the related app and play.
UKTV Play is also coming to the platform this summer, with shows from Dave and other channels added to the mix, plus Channel 5’s On Demand service is headed to Freeview Play too.
For now, check out our top picks from the week to give yourself some prime entertainment, even when there’s nothing else on.
- What is Freeview Play, when is it coming to my TV and how can I get it?
BBC
Robot Wars
BBC Two (BBC iPlayer) – broadcast on Sunday 24 July
It’s back. After a long hiatus the 90s show returned to the BBC with new house robots and more fierce amateur competition than ever before.
The presenting cast has changed, with comedian Dara O’Briain stepping into the shoes of Craig Charles and original presenter Jeremy Clarkson. He’s also more than ably assisted by fellow Irish native, Angela Scanlon.
BBC
The Secret Agent
BBC One (BBC iPlayer) – broadcast on Sunday 24 July
The second episode of this intriguing period thriller aired this week, but if you missed the first it is still available on BBC iPlayer, accessible through your Freeview Play device’s app hub.
An adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel, it stars Toby Jones, Vicky McClure and Stephen Graham in a tale of espionage in the 1800s.
BBC
Panorama: Trump’s Angry America
BBC One (BBC iPlayer) – broadcast on Monday 18 July
Screened in the week Donald Trump was officially confirmed as the Republican Party candidate for the next US Presidential election, this self-contained documentary tries to get to grips with why he has engaged so much with voters.
It also speaks to those who fear his rhetoric and policies.
ITV
Dickinson’s Real Deal
ITV (ITV Hub) – broadcast on Thursday 20 July
Anyone who has been sick off work or at home between lectures when a student will be fully au fait with Dickinson’s Real Deal.
It’s great fun, like a low rent Antiques Roadshow, and even away from the pricing of tat, it’s worth a watch to see just how orange David Dickinson can become.
Wheels and Waves
The Motorbike Show
ITV 4 (ITV Hub) – broadcast on Wednesday 20 July
The Motorbike Show is sort of a Top Gear for bikers. We say “sort of” because it takes the subject matter a bit more serious, but is still as entertaining.
In this episode presenter Henry Cole puts his life on the line by riding “the Yellow Peril”, a 1960s drag bike with a fearsome reputation.
Channel 4
Man Down
Channel 4 (All 4) – broadcast Wednesday 20 July
The third series of Greg Davies incredibly funny comedy continues with more madcap fun this week. Be warned though, it’s definitely not for children.
You might want to also check out previous series on All 4 if you’ve not seen them before, especially the first, which also starred the late Rik Mayall as Davies father.
Channel 4
Kinky Britain
4seven (All 4) – broadcast on Thursday 21 July
Brits get up to all sorts of weirdness in the bedroom, which has created quite a niche industry.
This documentary follows a few amateurs paid to act out peculiar sexual fantasies, including close ups of a lady’s mouth while she eats Gummy Bears. No, really.
Get catch-up and on demand TV for £0 per month with Freeview Play. Click here to find out more.
‘Star Wars’ drones can do aerial stunts and shoot lasers
When Propel releases its official Star Wars drones this fall, fans could challenge fellow fans to a space battle in their own backyard. The RC toy company has launched small replica quadcopters of the Millennium Falcon, an X-Wing, a TIE fighter and a speeder bike. According to Wired, their propellers are clear and are attached to their underside to be as inconspicuous and true to the movies as possible.
We’ve got a feeling quite a few collectors would simply keep them in display cases. But if you want to get one to actually play with, you’ll find that they can reach speeds up to 40mph and can do 360-degree aerial stunts at the push of a button. They also have a battle feature, which you can use to play a game of mid-air laser tag with up to 24 friends. Wired says the Millennium Falcon is the fastest of the bunch, though, and can outfly them all with a max speed of 50mph.
The bad news? They won’t be available in the US and Canada when they launch this fall — you’ll have to wait for Propel to bring them over. The company is taking reservations for every model right now with no need for a downpayment. You simply have to register and save between $200 to $300 for each drone, so you can grab one as soon as they come out.
Via: Wired
Source: Propel
Apple Targeted in China by Anti-U.S. Protestors
Apple became a target of anti-U.S. protest in China this week, following an international ruling against the country’s controversial territorial claims.
Reuters reports that a “handful” of unofficial Apple stores were picketed and social media users encouraged each other to destroy their Apple products, as the company became a symbol of perceived injustice in its biggest overseas market.
Earlier this month, The Hague declared that China has no legal basis for its claim to most of the South China Sea, prompting state media to call the international court a “puppet” of external forces, and accuse the U.S. of turning the Philippines (which filed the case) against China.
About a week later, on Tuesday, over 100 protestors picketed four unofficial Apple dealers in the eastern province of Jiangsu, urging customers not to buy the genuine Apple goods on sale.
“They chanted, ‘boycott American products and kick iPhones out of China,’” store owner Zhu Yawei told Reuters. “But nothing really happened: no fights, no smashing.”
Meanwhile, anti-Apple sentiment flooded Chinese social media as people took to microblogging site Weibo to upload pictures of what they described as their smashed iPhones.
Not all Apple users shared the same view, however, and state media called for restraint following the limited protests.
“It’s cheap nationalism and outright stupidity,” said Shan Mimi, a 23-year-old assistant at a Shanghai law firm. “But if you were to offer me an (upcoming) iPhone 7, then I would gladly smash my iPhone 6!”
“I didn’t smash my iPhone,” one Weibo user told Reuters. “All I did was find a photo (of a smashed handset) on the internet and let off some steam. Boycotting Apple would only make Chinese people lose their jobs – many work for Apple.”
Though the protests were small, some observers expressed concern about the impact they could have on Apple in the longer term, citing protests over the country’s territorial dispute with Japan in 2012 that turned violent. Japanese automakers suffered plummeting sales in China as a result of the unrest and cut manufacturing in the country by half.
“There’s not much Apple or any other foreign firm can do to prevent such patriotic protests,” Canalys research analyst Nicole Peng told Reuters. “These incidents happen every few years.”
Apple has faced a number of setbacks in China in recent months, including patent disputes, online rights infringement cases, product security reviews, and iTunes store closures. The company has also seen it lose market share due to increased competition from domestic rivals such as Huawei, Vivo and Oppo.
Despite the challenges, Apple continues to expand its retail presence in the country and strategically invest in the market to better understand its wider potential.
Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
Tag: China
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Regulator: Tesla crash shouldn’t hinder self-driving research
If you thought that officials would halt progress on self-driving cars in the wake of a Tesla Autopilot crash in May, you’re in for a surprise. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration lead Mark Rosekind told guests at an event that he and other regulators don’t plan to slow down the development of automoous vehicle hardware. To him, the car business “cannot wait for perfect” — people have to be “desperate” for any technology that could save lives. He isn’t touching the Autopilot crash specifically (the NHTSA is still investigating), but it’s reasonable to say that he doesn’t currently see the tragedy changing his stance.
The statements suggest that Tesla won’t face significant regulatory battles in the future, at least not with the NHTSA. Elon Musk largely shares Rosekind’s opinion: that autonomous driver assistance features save more people as a general rule, even if they’re not completely ready yet. There’s some supporting evidence, too, So long as tech like Autopilot doesn’t create a rash of incidents, any serious delays will come from the companies themselves.
Source: Wall Street Journal
FCC chief asks telcos to offer free robocall blocking services
Tom Wheeler, head honcho at the Federal Communications Commission, has fired off letters asking the country’s biggest communications providers to offer robocall blocking services for free. The FCC is still fielding a barrage of complaints from people sick and tired of robocalls a year after it passed a proposal that should have helped the situation. If you’ll recall, the commission made it perfectly legal for carriers to block automated calls before they reach subscribers back in 2015. Unfortunately, telcos are still reportedly telling customers that they have no authority to those calls. As a result, they still make the up the biggest number of complaints filed with the agency.
Wheeler wrote on the commission’s website:
“In regard to the Commission’s expectations that carriers respond to consumers’ blocking requests, I have sent letters to the CEOs of major wireless and wireline phone companies calling on them to offer call-blocking services to their customers now — at no cost to you.”
According to Consumerist, he sent the letters to AT&T, CenturyLink, Frontier, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular and Verizon. The ball is now in their court, and it’s up to them to grant the chairman’s request.
Wheeler also sent letters to intermediary carriers, companies that connect calls from internet services like FiOS to carriers’ lines. He asked them to retain the original caller ID info for calls made through those services, since spammers and scammers typically spoof their phone numbers. Consumerist says the letters asked those companies to create a list of local entities regularly impersonated by robocallers. That would make it easy to flag and block suspicious calls, especially those made from outside the United States.
Via: Consumerist
Source: FCC
‘Gears of War 4’ will have plenty of PC-specific features
The history of Microsoft-backed Xbox One games coming to the PC isn’t exactly stellar. When Remedy’s Quantum Break reached Windows, it was saddled with limitations that were partly dictated by the Universal Windows Platform’s own limits, such as frame rate issues and an overall lack of features. You shouldn’t run into those problems when Gears of War 4 rolls around, though. As part of a Eurogamer interview, The Coalition has revealed that the cover-based shooter will have ample PC-specific features. You’ll get much deeper video settings that include dynamic resolutions, so your ultra-wide display won’t go to waste. It’ll also take advantage of many-core PC processors, higher-resolution textures and UWP’s recently unlocked frame rates, offering a distinct visual advantage to playing on a brawny computer.
Other perks? There’s a benchmarking mode to make you feel good about your hardware upgrades, and you have full control over the keyboard and mouse input. In short, this should feel like a PC-native game even though it’s likely to be the definitive Xbox One title for 2016. That’s still not going to make everyone happy (developers have railed against UWP’s closed ecosystem for years), but it beats having to deal with console-like limitations just to play some big Xbox hits on your Windows gaming rig.
Source: Eurogamer (1), (2)
Ben Heck powers on the Nintendo PlayStation’s CD drive
When we got our hands on the legendary “Nintendo PlayStation” prototype last November, the device worked fine as a Sony-branded SNES console sans audio, whereas its CD drive — the part that eventually led to the birth of the PlayStation — failed to be recognized by the system. The device has since been handed over to hacking maestro Ben Heck, who has just revealed that he finally got the CD drive to power up. First of all, Ben cleaned the contact pins on the Super Disc driver cartridge to get its 256KB of extension RAM talking to the console, then he removed one of the mod wires on the logic board, which got the CD drive to make a ticking noise and even pulling its tray back in.
It was a nice “wow” moment for everyone, but the ticking noise suggested that the CD drive was struggling to move its optical head, plus the screen was flickering. Ben figured this was to do with a power glitch caused by three leaky electrolytic capacitors on the logic board, so he replaced those with modern ones, and boom! The CD drive is alive! The diagnostic software gave all the green ticks, and the CD player’s control panel appears to be working. As a bonus, the audio function has also been restored since that’s part of the CD drive’s decoder, so we can now fully enjoy SNES games on this super rare device as well.
What’s left to do now is to find some compatible disc games and see if they’ll run on the Nintendo PlayStation — prototype owner Terry Diebold believes he may have one in the boxes he bought from that fateful auction. We also came across a homebrew game called Super Boss Gaiden based on the Super Disc cartridge’s software dump, so here’s hoping they can get that to work on the device.
Source: The Ben Heck Show (YouTube)
Google Play starts showing apps’ actual download sizes
Google Play now displays the actual storage space a whole app or an upgrade will take up, so you don’t accidentally download anything too big. If an update is only 2.91MB, it will show that exact figure right there in each app’s detail box. That will give you the chance to reconsider your download or to free up some space before getting a particularly large game or VR experience.
Besides displaying more accurate file sizes, Google also tweaked its Play Store algorithm to make updates even smaller. Most Android apps (98 percent of them) only download changes to their APK files when you update them, and those new files merge with the old ones. The updated algorithm will make those updates up to 50 percent smaller.
Finally, Google’s improved compression algorithms will reduce big games’ file sizes, which could be as huge as 2GB, by around 12 percent. Those with high-end phones might not get much out of these changes, but they could make a big difference for those who own more affordable devices with limited storage.
Source: Android Developers Blog
Yahoo must explain how it got a drug trafficker’s deleted email
Were you wondering how Yahoo managed to recover deleted email that was supposedly impossible to retrieve? You’re not the only one. A judge has partially granted a motion that orders Yahoo to explain how it recovered deleted email from UK drug trafficking convict Russell Knaggs. It won’t have to detail more than how it dealt with the email account in question, but that still means having to say just how it grabbed six months of message drafts when its own policies suggest this should have been impossible. The company has to provide both documents and a relevant witness by August 31st.
For its part, Yahoo has maintained that it scooped up auto-saved drafts using a “proprietary tool,” and denies the defense’s claims that it had to have had access to government surveillance to collect the information. At the same time, some of Yahoo’s own staffers allegedly contradicted each other with their earlier explanations of what happened. It may need a formal, thorough explanation if it doesn’t want to maintain doubt and raise Knaggs’ hopes for an appeal.
Source: Motherboard
Moto Z Droid or Moto Z Force Droid — which should you get?
Two phones, both alike in dignity. On fair Verizon, where we lay our scene …
The Moto Z lands on Verizon on July 28. And if even if you’ve made up you’re mind that you’re going be diving into this modular menagerie, you’ve got a decision to make. Verizon, as it’s been prone to do with its Droid line of late, has two Moto Zs from which you’ll need to choose.
In many ways, they’re exactly alike. Same software. Mostly the same internals. And they both use the new Moto Mods accessories.
Let’s take a look at the ways in which they’re different, though, and see if we can’t figure out which one is for you.
Better battery capacity
Should you ever turn down the opportunity to have more battery? The Moto Z has a 2,600 mAh battery. The Moto Z Force has a 3,500 mAh battery — that’s about a 34 percent increase. Along with that extra battery comes some extra thickness, however. The Moto Z is a svelte 5.19mm thick (or thin, I guess). The Moto Z Force is 6.99mm. That’s without the stock Style Shell back that comes in the box, however, so you’ll need to add a couple millimeters for those, too.
I’ve used both phones. You should never pass up the opportunity for more battery out of the box.
I’ve used both phones. And you should never pass up the opportunity for more battery out of the box. Even with external batteries and the 2,200 mAh Moto Mod Power Packs that are available for the Moto Z and Moto Z Force, that extra 34 percent can be the difference between having to top up toward the late afternoon, or not.
The extra thickness on the Moto Z Force means a few things. One is that I don’t mind using it without a Style Shell as much. That doesn’t mean I won’t use it without one, but the option is at least more comfortable. The other is that it’s going to fit larger hands better than the Moto Z. That’s subjective, but not unimportant.
Higher-resolution camera
The Moto Z and Moto Z Force have similar cameras. Same camera app, same f/1.8 aperture. They’re both pretty darn good in sunlight, and less so when it gets dark. They’re both what I’d call an above-average camera, though a few steps down from the best available.
The only real difference is that the Moto Z Force has a higher possible resolution — 21 megapixels — than the Moto Z, which is lower at 13MP. (One thing to keep in mind, however, is that both phones shoot at a wider, 16:9 aspect ratio by default, and don’t use the full resolution until you change the setting to accommodate their native 4:3 aspect ratios.)
For my money, I’d opt for the Moto Z Force because of its larger battery and better chance at surviving a fall.
For the most part this discrepancy hasn’t really affected me any. At least not in the way I shoot and share photos. For things like Facebook and Instagram and your basic social sharing, either one has served me just fine. It’s another differentiator for Verizon, I suppose. But merely adding more megapixels doesn’t necessarily improve the finished product that much.
ShatterShield
If a bigger battery didn’t do it for you, this one might. The Moto Z Force is the second phone to sport “ShatterShield.” The short version is that means some extra protection for the display. So you’ll be able to drop it without the screen breaking into a million pieces.
That doesn’t mean you might not kill the phone if it takes a bad fall. Here’s the important part from Moto’s fine print:
The display and embedded lens are warranted against shattering and cracking for four (4) years from the original date of purchase; scratches or other damage to the protective lens is not covered by this warranty, but should always be in place to prevent scratches and other damage to the underlying components. This phone is not shockproof or designed to withstand all damage from dropping.
We dropped the Moto Z Force until it quit working. Actually, let’s be more specific. The phone still works. The display, while showing signs of abuse, did not crack. It, uh, just doesn’t actually show a picture anymore. So the first four times it took a bad spill ShatterShield worked as advertised. That’s a pretty good insurance policy.
The bottom line
So which phone should you get? The Moto Z, or the thicker, longer-lasting, better protected, higher-resolution Moto Z Force? For my money, I’d opt for the latter. The upgraded camera sensor isn’t that big a deal for me. But more battery and a better chance at surviving a fall?
That’s worth my money just about every time.
Moto Z and Moto Z Force
- Our Moto Z review!
- Moto Z specs
- Moto Mods custom backs
- Moto Z and Moto Z Force will be Verizon exclusives until the fall of 2016
- The latest Moto Z news
- Discuss in our Moto Z forums
Motorola
Verizon
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