I’ve just added a new top-level page named Downloads in a first-pass attempt to provide the framework to allow the migration of all of the data from my (old, off-line) O2 server to this new Mini-ITX system. For nostalgia purposes, I’ll probably migrate all of the content at some point in the future – but right now the downloadable content is probably the most relevant.
I have a somewhat complex home network setup consisting of seperate 802.11n and 802.11b/g wireless routers, HomePlug AV (which is supposed to present a maximum throughput of 200Mb/s to 100Mb ethernet jacks), and a mixture of gigabit ethernet and fast ethernet devices – but I’ve never actually checked to see how these connection methods differ.
I noticed recently that when certain house-mates turned on their computers, suddenly my internet connection would become very slow and highly unreliable – ah, the joys of Bittorrent and P2P traffic <sigh>
Rather than just trying to ban people from using these services (like that’d ever work… and anyway, BitTorrent has legitimate uses and they’re all paying towards the cost of the connection anyway, so it’s not my place to get all dictatorial) I decided to be a bit smarter: a packet-filtering system which can prioritise certain traffic whilst holding-back other types would not only allow people to run P2P software with abandon, but also keep everyone’s connection steaming along whilst hopefully improving subjective responsiveness.
Perhaps WordPress has become slower in recent releases, perhaps I’ve broken something by running a non-prelinked system – but in any case, running this blog from my trustworthy SGI O2 was just getting too slow.
Some of the guys at work have been reporting for several days that they haven’t been able to send email when working off-site and connecting to the internet by their Vodafone 3G dongles.
Specifically, Thunderbird was saying that it received an invalid server response of “421 too many connections”.
Just wait…
I’ve just seen this image on the the UK Government’s Consumer Direct Trading Standards website, here.
Sometimes, you discover things that realy make you blood boil – especially if apparently motivated by thoughtlessness rather than by design…
Take, for example, the Nintendo DS: an excellent handheld games console (and web browser 😉 ). At first glance, it has an excellent pair of screens, it has lots of innovative an interesting games, and it really has hearts and minds behind it. In addition, the battery life is just incredible. The coup de grâce is that the console is not region-locked, so imported games (which are invariably released months sooner than UK games) can be played without problems… or so it seemed.
We “upgraded” our Vodafone PCMCIA data cards for USB versions when we bought new laptops with ExpressCard rather than PCMCIA sockets, only to find that the rebranded Huawei E220 was not recognised by Vista at all 🙁