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Damn Eclipse Broadband

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

My broadband has been all over the place again recently, back in March Eclipse my ISP, suggested they would move my broadband line onto a different line card/circuit in the exchange, the Technical Support Engineer’s never really gave away anything tecnical as to what they are actually doing. But today after another discussion it now becomes clear that before I was on a Tiscali LLU circuit, I suspect but I cannot confirm, this, I was moved to this in January 2009, when all the issues started (maybe), although now being moved to a BT circuit, the same issues occurs, extreme hot or cold, the Signal-to-noise ratio rises, and the sync speed drops, and hence throughput is very very slow. Today was the final straw, my broadband speed was as follows at 15:30 GMT. I was told, that because my sync speed had dropped the Profile on the line was slow, and I would have to wait 72 hours before it would speed-up!

Router is reporting this G.DMT SHOWTIME 448000 192000 14.5 49.0

and then later it gets worse…

I’ve not done anything, I’ve just returned from a Parish Council Meeting, and now the speed is backup to 2.2 – 2.4MB/s, this is the fastest it’s ever been, apart from that strange blip and changeover!

I put this here, so I can find it later, and refer Eclipse and BT to it! (it’s there test results!)

For your connection, the acceptable range of speeds is 600-2500 Kbps.

Tags: broadband, bt, eclipse, llu, tiscali
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Gremlins

Monday, April 19th, 2010

I’ve been suffering a spate of Gremlin attacks…

One of my TiVo’s stopped working.
Alba Freeview Set Top Box wouldn’t turn on.
Two hard disks failed in my production workstation.
One hard disk failed in my NAS.
Engine management on the car, is having an “off” day!

I’ve repaired the TiVo, it needed a new power supply, the Alba STB went in the bin, and I’ve ordered new hard disks for my workstation and NAS.

Tags: freeview, NAS, STB, tivo
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Garden Casaulty of the Winter Frosts

Monday, April 12th, 2010

Yesterday we dug out a casualty of the hard winter frosts we had, where the ground remained frosted for many weeks, lots of garden Hebe’s around this area have died in the area due to the hard winter frosts. Lindsey was thinking of replacing it anyway, because it had grown too large and straggly.

Dead Hebe, frost damage

After removing the dead Hebe

Tags: frost, hebe, winter
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Salavaged from the tip BBC Micros BBC Masters Spectrums

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

A friend of mine is moving house in a few months, and has decided not to take vintage computers he’s collected over many years, and he was going to scrap them and take them down the skip, unless homes were found. So I collect a car load of vintage stuff

BBC Micros, BBC Masters, Telextet, Prestel and 6502 2nd Processors

I collected the following:-

10 BBC Micros ‘Beebs’
4 BBC Masters
3 Cumuna dual 5.25 floppy disk drives (horizontal)
2 Cub Monitors
2 Spectrum+3 128k
2 Cherry Teletext keyboards
Teletext Adaptor
Prestel Adaptor
6502 Second Processor

Teletext, Prestel and Second Processor for BBC Micro

Prestel Adaptor

6502 Second Processor

Teletext Adaptor

Tags: 2nd Processor, 6502, BBC Master, BBC Micro, Beeb, Prestel, Teletext
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Four Goldfinches on nyjer feeder

Saturday, April 10th, 2010

I’ve managed to capture four Goldfinches on the nyjer feeder. The feeder was moving in the breeze like a pendulum, so a little difficult to manual focus with me gear! Photographed at a distance of 50 feet. Not as crisp a focus, as I would like, I’m waiting for an additional eyepiece which will magnify the viewfinder image, so I can sharpen the focus on the ‘scope before remotely firing the shutter. The viewfinder produces a small, dark image and I cannot be sure if it’s in focus.

Tags: Goldfinches
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No Electricity today!

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

I’m without electricity today, and again YEDL hide behind notifying you 7 days before the electricity is due to be turned off, and you have to make your own arrangements. I understand this is the minimum requirements an electricity provider must meet.

A few weeks ago, every third house in the hamlet, didn’t have any electricity. I have repeatedly notified YEDL about the state of the transformer supplying the hamlet!

As you can see it’s covered in ivy! That cannot be good!

A few more exciting pictures…

: Wattson 389 Watts

The water in the holes with eletricity cables canot be any good! Water and electricity don’t usually mix! Also a picture of the generator in the generator shed, supply electricity to the fish house.

Wattson 389 Watts

Not been this low for a while, with everything in the house, unplugged, just fridge on!

‘YEDL – Sorry for any Inconvience’ – Umm, me don’t think so!

Tags: electricity, generator, YEDL
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WiFi Charger software for PDA, iPhone and Smartphones

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

I found this new software app on the Internet that converts WiFi signals to electricity to charge your PDA, I understand the iPhone, iTouch applications will be in the AppStore shortly. I’m just having issues with using it with my old 802.11b access points, it doesn’t charge very well, but if I use on my new Belkin ‘N’ series, as you can see in the screenshot, it charges very fast. The only issue is my battery gets very hot, because it says it blast charges it, I think the instructions are not very well laid out, not written in good english. The software vendor WireFree A/S is appearing at Gadget Show 2010 Live next week on stand OZ56.

Tags: iPad, iphone, itouch, pda, Smartphone, WiFi, WiFi Charger
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BSOD on my Production Workstation!

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

I returned home this evening to find my main production workstation had hung, I left it to restart, went off to attend to other business, and when I came back it was looping with the dreaded BSOD (“Blue Screen of Death”)

… and nobody to telephone and helpme, other than me! Odd because last night I noticed that the Vista would stall with an hour glass, randomly, indicating a disk retry – disk fault, but on checking he Event Log, no errors were logged.

I should practice what I preach and backup more, after 30 minutes of chkdsk, I managed to get Vista working again, but now the Eventlog is showing a dying hard-disk and lots of disk errors are clocking-up, time for an emergency backup to one of me NASes!

I use Drive Snapshot a very simple small application, that doesn’t cost the earth. I hoping I can get all the data off before it fails completely.