I am still here - and faster than before!

 So, long time since I last posted. And, at last, I am actually connected to the FTTH - fibre to the home - interwebs!

Instead of the sub 1 meg rubbish I had, I now get 59 meg. I could get 1 gig if I was prepared to pay for it, but the 50 meg speed is still fine - after all there are only two of us here now. At last I can watch films and other stuff online without buffering issues constantly. I can download system updates in seconds which used to be an overnight event!

We are still getting used to the modern ways of integrating the technology back into our lives. It is strange to think that we were at the forefront of things back in the day - we had PC's here when they were still very unusual, had 14.4k dial up (using XStream for free connectivity if we could get on!) and building computers back in the days when the cd-rom was only on the top end machines and had a separate driver card. All good fun.

Ryanair seating

A bit offf my usual topics today.
Just returned from a holiday abroad, so thought I would comment on the flight.
Ryanair invite their customers to pay extra to pick seats - say a window seat or aisle seat, and also to sit with their loved ones. Should you choose to not accept the extra fee, Ryanair seem to take delight in offering the worst possible options - middle seats, where you are hemmed in on either side and seperating couples, not just a few seats, but other ends of the plane!
Today, there were around ten to fifteen spare seats that I saw - and Ryanair still chose to sit my wife at the opposite end of the plane. When we checked in online a day before, there was plenty of option to sit together as long as we paid the extra.....
A bit mean of them I feel. Todays cabin crew were really nice and accomodated many customers with needs such as a young baby (who seperates mum and dad with a baby?) but there were still disgruntled passengers moaning in the aisles.
Ah well - I rarely travel unless I am driving but they don't do themselves any favours.

I dooooon't believe it!

Quite apart from this being my first post in about a thousand years, my favourite source of frustration - the internet speed here - is going to be souped up to beyond the UK average! Amazing!
As I have mentioned so many times, my internet is below 1mb/s which is pretty poor. Living in the sticks means that the upgrading of my line is not economically viable apparently.
Well, it seems that if the 30 odd households who live on the lane all set up a community group and ask nicely - with a little effort collecting agreements in principle and some work to get funding sorted - then BT may decide to install something better.
Yes, they are installing fibre! And not just fibre to the cabinet, but fibre to the premises - yes, fibre through the wall into my home! So we are in theory going to be in the top few percent of the country!
I guess that sort of speed will cost mega-money, but nice to have the option! Even if I can get the "up to 20meg" speed I pay for now, I will be happy!

Lets see what happens. It should all be in place before this time next year apparently!

Yet another broadband rant!

So, Mr "Call Me Dave" Cameron announces that all UK homes will be able to request and get a minimum 10Mb/s broadband connection by 2020 - and it will be - in his words - "affordable".
Not exactly sure what affordable will be. I guess the ISPs will add a premium on for us poor rural types - even though I pay for "up to 17mb/s" now..... Of course, I don't get that - in fact, this morning, in a somewhat ironic way, I get this -

 

0.13mb/s????
It has been pouring down here and that always affects the internet in the rural backwoods, but seriously? 

And does Dave really consider 10meg a decent guaranteed speed? Yes, its better than my usual speed and better than the 2meg we are all supposed to have had by now (do you see a pattern?  Promiser a faster speed, move the promised date forward then no need to deliver it ever! Just keep moving the date on!)
The problem with any increase in speed is that many websites simply add extra media and crap to their sites which need more speed and it becomes a vicious circle. I am from the era of 14.4k modems. Sites were just text - or, if really cool, they may have had a rather low quality picture. No videos etc. Media might have included a tinny looped tune but nothing much else.
Now, many sites expect you to sit through HD video before you can even use them....

As the connections improved, so the websites became more "featured". This always happens. Designers try to cram in every trick they know - to the detriment of those with slow internets. We are already punished - for example, the various streaming services are not available to us. Even the good old TV catchup services - which incidentally used to allow you to download them overnight so you could watch an episode of a programme - are unavailable because they just buffer and buffer until you give up.

Bored of the internet now. When we all had 56k dial up, everyone was on an even field.

Ha Ha Fecking Ha!

"Average download speeds in the UK are still around 23 megabits per second (Mbps), so viewing SVOD on more than one device at the same time can lead to jerky, stuttering pictures, says Michael Underhill, an analyst at media consultancy Enders."

That hilarious quote is from the Beeb.

23 Meg? And that means jerky, stuttering pictures?

Try less than 1 megabit per second you clever arses!

Fuck You.

All Pis in action!

All three of my Pis are currently up and running.

Following some issues with our stupid BT broadband, I have had no internet for a few days. This coming less than a couple of weeks since the last outage. Fortunately, this was fairly quickly (for BT anyway) resolved. Apparently, they were working on line faults and one of the engineers cut out line when installing another one....

So back to the Pis.

The blue Pi - which was my first Model B Pi - is currently up and running a fairly standard Raspbian install. By "fairly", I mean that I have removed stuff I personally don't use which has no bearing on the functionality of the Pi - so the programming Scratch tools and the Wolfram stuff. I don't use it, so no point in it being there.
The blue Pi is my "test" box. I like to try things out on it, so from time to time, it gets the SD card re-written from a stock image or from a backup. It runs headless, but I use VNC to see the GUI if I so wish on my main PC. It actually works quite well - and, just for fun, I also installed the VNC viewer on my Android tablet and I can use that as a touch screen interface for the Pi! Yep, it really works!

The clear Pi (and the blue and clear Pi's are named after their cases in case you were wondering!) is also a B and runs completely headless and is used as a simple server. Until recently, I ran lighttpd on it but, when the BT problems all occured, the SD card somehow went south and I had to spend quite some time trying to get the card to work again. It refused to allow me to use the wifi - or ethernet - which meant corruptions each time I wanted to edit the card...
Eventually, I had to reformat and re-install the system. Again, it is Raspbian, but this one is far more cut down. All x11 related graphical desktop stuff has been removed and I use SSh to work with this PI. At the moment, all it is doing is running a small database of my family tree, which runs in a program called geneweb. Geneweb runs a small server of its own, so I don't need to install a server for that. It is actually a pretty impressive program - I must write something on Linux genealogy programs soon. There are some really good ones.

The third Pi is one of the latest Pi 2 models. Quad core, twice the RAM of the Model B...
Originally, I had Raspbian on that and used it mostly for doing time lapse video with the Pi camera module. I did the processing on my computer though!
Currently, I have installed Ubuntu Mate on this Pi and, the odd niggle aside, it works quite well. It certainly looks lovely - especially compared to the LXDE of the standard Raspbian install! It even comes with LibreOffice installed - which, to be fair, runs quite well on the Pi!
Not sure if I shall keep it on the Pi or not, but for now, it is staying.

Only snag now is that I need another Pi 2 to stick the camera back on so I can do more time lapse and some stop animation!

Tonight, we have forecasts of thunder and lightning, so I suspect all Pi's will be off tonight to keep them safe.

Raspberry Pi and external USB drives

OK, for no other reason than I can, I wanted to add an external hard drive to my test Pi (I have three Pis - two of the older Model B and one of the latest version).

The test Pi is a Model B in a blue case (to identify it easily!). Originally, I considered moving the Root partition to the hard drive and just booting from the SD card as this is supposed to be quicker, however, I rarely reboot the Pi and to be honest, they don't take very long to get up and running anyway.

So the plan was to simply connect the USB HDD to the Pi and use the extra space for whatever my latest crazy idea may be. All the spare USB HDDs I have lying about are those ones which don't have their own power supply - i.e they are those "portable" type ones with two USB connectors which need to be plugged in to a USB source to get the power needed to run the things and to take the data to and from.

From my own experiments, some research and of course common sense, I knew that the Pi - with its two USB ports (one of which has the wifi adapter in it anyway) would not have sufficient power to run the drive - and that I would need a powered USB hub to do this.  Luckily, I happen to have two spare!

Armed with all the bits I needed - Pi and power supply, powered  hub and power supply, connections and the USB HDD - I connected it all together and fired things up.

Looking good - lights all on and I could ssh into the Pi.
However, nothing showing under the "dmesg" command to suggest the USB HDD was there.
Perhaps faulty kit? After swapping the powered hub for my other one, I repeated the command - still nothing.  Although the USB HDD worked when connected to my PC, maybe it was faulty? It was, after all, just an old SATA 2.5" drive from a laptop in a cheap caddy. So I swapped the HDD for a "proper" one - a Maxtor as it happens. This time, when I fired things up, I got a clicking noise from the drive whenever access was tried. As a techie, I know this means either the drive is failing (which was unlikely) or a lack of power.....

Surely I had checked all the kit - tried different powered hubs - and no luck. Then, as I was pulling it all apart, I just happened to pull out the powered USB hub power supply and casually looked at the power output. 1000mA. That doesn't sound a lot to me I thought. I know these external drives need a fair bit of power. This was the power supply from the more generic of the two hubs I have, so I dug out the other power supply - 2000mA, twice the power.

Using the more powerful power supply, I connected all back up and .... hurray!  Success!

Moral:  Be wary of using cheap, generic kit with the Pi. Yes, some works fine but these things are very low power and need all the help they can get to ensure stable running.