The catalogue is basically full of brief reviews. Better yet, it shows you how they go about reviewing:

Yes, you are seeing this correctly. France’s giveaway in-store glossy pamphlets have more scientific and reasoned reviews than specialist British AV magazines. I seriously wish I was making this up.

I can’t understand much of the content, but most of the brief blurbs they’ve written seem pretty decent. There are no mentions of “insight” and they don’t try to sell you expensive HDMI cables. Sacre bleu – just when you thought beheading royals was the best thing France ever did…

I’m amazed these sorts of magazines don’t also try to sell advertising space for green highlighters to colour your CDs in with. (Please nobody tell me they’ve done that.)

Well, forget that. Nowadays, to delete files, you need permission from this guy:

Can someone get me S-1-5-21-1963050595 on the phone? I need to make sure that he’s OK with me deleting my files from my hard drive.

Thanks to some friendly forum punters, I was able to enter this command to “take ownership”:

takeown.exe /f e:\2windows /R /D Y

This was a huge success – now when I try to delete the files, there is no mention of S-1-5-21-1963050595whatever. Oh no – now Windows tells me that I need to get permission FROM MYSELF. Is there a little box I can click or somewhere where I can type in a password to say “Yes, that’s OK, you have my blessing, go ahead?” (See: Mac OS X, Ubuntu, probably countless others).

No, of course there isn’t. That would be too simple.

No doubt if enough users complain about this pissing competition, the next version of Windows will address the problem by adding a brand new wizard and more dialog boxes which complicate the issue rather than solve it (see: networking from Windows XP onwards).

UPDATE! I have found two revolutionary commands that can be entered from the Command Prompt that let you delete files on your hard drives. Here’s what you have to type, substituting “E:\2WINDOWS” for the folder you want rid of:

takeown.exe /f e:\2windows /R /D Y
icacls e:\2windows /grant Users:(CI)(OI)F /T

Well, of course that’s what you have to type. What sort of dumbass wouldn’t figure out intuitive usability like that?

Wake up, Microsoft.

I bought one of these, to use on my PC. The keys are soft and squishy and it is very nice to touch-type on.

Bizarrely, my computer refuses to start with the keyboard plugged in – a known issue with the ASUS P5KE motherboard. The solution is to plug the mouse into one of the USB ports on the keyboard (like an actual Mac), which solves the issue.

By the way, did I mention that I’m reviewing over at HDTVTest.co.uk these days? I should really link to my reviews there more…

Apparently people buying HDMI cables are not as gullible as they used to be, because one manufacturer is lowering its prices “To Reflect New Market Conditions”. Quoth QED,

We constantly strive to offer high performance products at value for money prices. Our leading market position and many product awards clearly attests to the success of this policy.

Of course, I’m sure that QED make a great product, and they are not the only people selling expensive HDMI cables. The unfortunate reality (I assume that’s the “new market conditions”) is that the cheap 99p cables you buy on eBay do the same job as QED’s “Signature HDMI” (which can be yours for £75 for the 1 meter version). The on screen image is the same. The only difference is that well-built cables like QED’s will be able to survive tugging and constant unplugging better than no-name ones. I mean, don’t you like to unplug and flex your video cables every day? No?

One of my most painful memories regarding this favourite industry scam comes from back when I worked for AVForums.com, where I was on the stand at the Bristol Sound and Vision Show. Some poor member of the public visited the stand and was showing off the expensive HDMI cable he’d just been sold (at a discount, no less), genuinely believing he’d scooped the deal of the century. The cable was packaged in in a ritzy box which did its job of making the person who’d just paid money for it feel like the member of some sort of elite concierge. Fittingly enough, at the stand we were promoting video calibration and industry standards (you know, things which make an actual difference to the quality of viewing).

To be fair, it is more likely that well-built cables like these are more likely to handle any more bandwidth-heavy HDMI formats that appear in the future. Some 2005-era cheapo cables had trouble handling 1080p/60 when 1080p capable products came along. Of course, my solution in that case was to replace the one dud cable with a new 99p cable from eBay, still keeping me in happy savings territory. And to give QED credit where its due, they don’t seem to tell any lies regarding their HDMI products; rather, they leave that job to Britain’s tabloid AV press and the assumptions of gullible buyers.

Their many product awards come from crackerjack reviews from the aforementioned tabloid AV press, who make false claims about more expensive HDMI cables producing smoother motion and better black levels (what a crock of utter shit). If you want to see some examples of the utter crap that they write, take a look here.

FWIW, I have my self-calibrated projector (JVC 750) rigged up with a grubby “giveaway” HDMI cable that came with my first ever upscaling DVD player in 2005. The cheap piece of crap cable (which works perfectly) has outlasted a few other AV products I’ve owned over the years, and it happily pipes 1080p video around without so much as a hitch.

What I didn’t know was that LG actually have a passive-based 3D TV which I believe they’ve distributed to pubs in the UK, meaning that the reader’s observations could be entirely accurate.

D’oh! I’ll test and see if/when I get the chance to review one.

Anyway, I read this little nugget a few weeks ago on the free crappy newspaper you get on the bus.

Nice moneysaving tip, Bigstuartie, only that doesn’t work at all, because the 85p 3D specs that you get here at Cineworld (who are using Real-D) are passive polarising glasses which do absolutely nothing for home-use displays requiring the “rip off” active shutter glasses. (By the way, yes, I have tried it).

Did the person who wrote into the letters page honestly think that they were seeing 3D just because they’d put the glasses on and their view of the world became dimmer? Just look at the conviction the writer uses when he describes the amazing 3D effect that he wasn’t experiencing.

My discovery of this letter means that a What Hi-Fi review is no longer the silliest AV-related article I’ve ever read in the British press.