I’ve been seriously looking at the Google Play Store for my source of Movies & TV viewing. The range is great - and the prices usually fair. There is one catch in the system though. HD doesn’t mean HD.

When you go to purchase something - you get two options - SD or HD. They usually differ in price - the HD item being a few dollars more than the SD version - which makes some sense - as it requires more bandwidth and storage for the HD version.

The interesting part is when you go to watch these purchases. You’ll note on the buy options, you’ll see the magic phrase “supported devices”. This is where it gets interesting. If you purchase from the web interface, you’ll see this:

So - even if you buy HD - you can’t watch HD in your web browser. So what does play HD?

Good question - and Google do a very bad job of explaining this. The Google Support page says:

There we go with the ‘supported devices’ part again. This answer doesn’t give any decent information either:

So what does Google actually mean? For the moment, it seems that purchasing in HD format only gives more of your money to Google. My conversations with Google Support over the phone seem to indicate that the only ‘supported device’ that will play HD is the Chromecast.

Thankfully, Google seem to be quiet happy to refund your purchases if you point out that you’re unable to watch them in HD on your PC - being the reason you purchased them in the first place. I got caught out on this again with my purchase of Parks & Recreation as shown above - and only being able to watch it in 480p - and the video quality looks awful - even for 480p. So, we have more refund requests waiting.

Play Store is a great idea, and implemented well - but the phoney restrictions on quality vs devices cripple its usefulness. It’s still easier and better to download via a torrent and get a properly formatted and encoded 720p video that you can do anything you wish with - and more importantly, watch on any device.

And they say piracy is killing the industry….

The more I dig into the proceedings of the Senate Committee focusing on the NBN, I am more and more convinced that the Liberal Party has intentionally sabotaged NBN Co to fail.

When the Abbott lead Liberal Party won the election in September 2013, Malcolm Turnbull gutted the board of NBN Co and (with sadly little review) installed a heap of his mates to run the company. Since then - looking at the many hours of Senate hearings, very little has been achieved. There is no financial plan for beyond 6 months from now. There is no rollout estimate.

I could say many words on this - and it could easily be seen as bias. The best way is to highlight via actual footage from the Senate Committee overseeing NBN Co.

This is the first NBN Co board answering questions to the Senate Committee - starting with the Chief Financial Officer:

In contrast, this is the current NBN Co CFO doing his best to not answer anything:

The problems don’t stop here. In the first video, you notice the rest of the board of NBN Co willingly answering questions with as much detail as possible. In recent times, the board of NBN Co have been trying their best to avoid any solid answers to any questions put to them.

Again - I don’t wish to imply and of my own bias here - I suggest that anyone interested watch the actual videos of proceedings directly from the Parliament of Australia web site. If you do end up watching the whole proceedings from the 2nd December, notice how Bill Morrow (the CEO) gives some not-so-subtle hints to the HFC Expert hired by NBN Co to stop answering questions in detail.

Below is a list of a few recent sittings: 2nd December 2014 - National Broadband Network - Part 1 (NBN Co Board) 2nd December 2014 - National Broadband Network - Part 2 (NBN Co Board) 4th December 2014 - National Broadband Network (Stephen Rue)

Sadly, you can’t make this stuff up.

In the recent Senate hearing for the Environment and Communications Legislation Committee on the 20th November, Senator Conroy launched into some scathing details of how Malcolm Turnbull has hired his mates to oversee the NBN Co implementation.

Lets put some context in here… Justin Milne was the CEO of Ozemail - of which, Malcolm Turnbull was a part owner. Malcolm bought in to Ozemail in 1994 for $500,000 and sold his share to Worldcom in 1999 for $57m.

Now, Malcolm Turnbull is the Minister for Communications, and Justin Milne ends up on the NBN Co board of directors. That isn’t the whole story however - it gets even more incestuous.

CICOMILNE PTY LTD was awarded a contract for $14,000 for advice in 2013 between September and December for “Provision of advice in NBN transition issues”. The consultant and 100% owner of CICOMILNE PTY LTD is Justin Milne. This contract was awarded one week after the Liberals were elected. What the advice was is still missing - as at the moment, nobody is sure what services were actually provided.

Senator Conroy rightly inquires “So out of nowhere, the Ministers absolute best mate gets a $14,000 contract a week after being appointed, is that correct? … Who gave Mr Milne’s name to Mr Clarke or Mr Robinson given that Mr Clarke had never met him?”

This is even more interesting when Justin Milne was appointed onto the NBN Co board in November 2013.

So, how many other contracts are awarded to Malcolm Turnbull’s mates to get his way with NBN Co?

Recently, I purchased a new Dell Inspiron 15 (3537) - however one of the worst things about this laptop was the fact it only had a 2.4GHz wireless card. While my first change to this system was to replace the 750Gb hard drive with a 256Gb SSD - to get a massive performance boost, the slow wireless was a killer. To make matters worse, the wireless card was also tied into the bluetooth adapter.

After a bit of hunting around, I found that the Intel AC-7260 was a PCIe Half Mini Card with bluetooth onboard. This would make it a drop in replacement for the card that Dell shipped with the laptop. It would also allow me to connect at the full 300Mbit speeds of my WD MyNet N750.

I ordered the card and it arrived quickly, but I soon started to find issues with this card. The main one being that randomly fails to work properly when the laptop resumes from sleep.

When I did some searching about this problem, I was very surprised to find that this and many other problems seem to plague this range of card from Intel. There are threads on whirlpool, and multiple threads on the Intel Communities support site.

This seems to be either a hardware problem that Intel refuse to admit (as they’d have to replace all these cards with OEMs), or a driver problem - either way, it seems to have been ongoing for over a year.

I specifically bought an Intel wifi card thinking that a big name like Intel would make a decent wireless card - but it seems that I was mistaken :(

I’m going to make this brief.

Rest in peace you wonderful man.