4G conference

Attended a 4G conference at Trerice on Friday. Unlike the one back in November, this was solely for the Government bodies and other parties involved in the future of the 4G spectrum. MPs were supposed to have been there, but due to a late sitting in the House on Thursday, they didn't attend. On the other hand, there were several senior Civil Servants plus Ofcom members as well as some other bodies.

The event was most interesting and four of us "Trialists" gave our views on the technology, equipment and what the 4G connection was like for us.

Met up with several BT and Everything Everywhere management people who I have met before - which allowed me to push for extension of the trial (especially when Ofcom were there too!).

No, Google, no!

I hate the "new look" Gmail. I do not want it, yet Google have enforced this eyesore upon us.

Perhaps Google's top designers didn't get the message when so many people commented about how ugly and unpleasant to use the new look was when first produced. Or perhaps they did - after all, they held back on making it compulsary to change until now. But surely, the number of people hitting the "revert to old look temporarily" button if the new look sneaked in, should have warned the designers that people hated it.

Now it is here - forced upon us with no "revert to old look..." button.
I suppose Google will just ride this backlash out - after all, most Gmail users will not find it a practical option to delete their accounts and move to an alternative. Although I have several email accounts, the Gmail one is the one I give out to general contacts - keeping my others for specific uses.

A good example of why "cloud" computing is dangerous. The guy with the server can call the tune and you dance as requested. I cannot understand why so many computing people are being sucked into the idea that storing files and data on some remote server is a good idea.

Can I also point out to Google that changes for the sake of it on other products is bloody stupid. They are messing with the Blogger interface now as well.....

I hate change for the sake of giving someone something to do - if it adds a missing required feature, then fair enough; but change simply to keep idiots employed in doing something is crap.

Laptops

Anyone who has read my previous stuff about laptops will know that my old Acer with its broken hinge threw its hand in a while ago. Being without a laptop is pretty frustrating as I am forced to use my main old desktop machine which is upstairs.
Luckily, my mate is a bit of a magpie when it comes to computer bits and, having been notified about my predicament, he has delivered a couple of lappies around to me.
Not state of the art, but not exactly old slugs either. The one I am currently using is a Toshiba Satellite M30, which has a 1.6 gig Intel M processor and an  nVidia graphics chip - so not too bad for a freebie! I have upped the RAM from the 512Mb which was in it to a gig (I had some old sticks here so put in what I could find). The only snag is a broken hinge on one side - which seems to be a common fault with these things doesn't it! It is possible to fix, but a nightmare involving stripping the entire lappie down.... so it might just stay broken!

The other laptop is actually much higher spec - it is a HP one. Unfortunately,  that one is currently awaiting repair. It works, but seems to shift into a "limp mode" where it slows to a crawl (e.g opening Windows Control Panel just gives the torch thing for literally minutes and minutes before - if you are lucky - it displays the CP). Three or four indicator lights on the laptop also flashed each second....
We did some research and it seems this is a fault which can be caused by power supply issues. Several folks report that another AC power supply (or running on battery) fixes it. I can't try the battery as it is dead, but we did have another HP laptop available with the same power adapter! Connected that one and booted the machine - only to discover the same problems were still there....
Initially confused by this, we looked at the actual sockets on the two machines to see if there were any differences. Surprise - the faulty laptop socket was mashed completely. The plastic parts were broken off (one bit fell out as we looked) and the connectors were broken and bent. Seems the laptop was limping with good reason!  Luckily, my mate happens to have a similar laptop available for spares (it has a busted screen) and he has pinched the socket from that one to fit onto my laptop. A small snag has arisen meantime - his soldering iron isn't man enough for the job, so a new one is ordered. Hopefully we can sort the laptop with this socket!  Fingers crossed - I will report back once it is up and running (or not!)

Sony- piss off

Seriously - Sony racked up the prices for two "greatest hits" type albums by the late Whitney Houston?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17039076

Sony claim they were "mistakenly mispriced"!  Hmmm... Robbing bastards is how I view it.

Whitney's music isn't my thing - but I appreciate her amazing vocal talent (and her looks too if I am honest!) - but Sony - a company which has fallen foul of alleged rootkits in the past - are taking the piss

Mini distro fun

Just been playing around with SliTaz, a tiny (and I mean tiny) distro.
Although ridiculously small (around 30Mb download), it is actually a really useable little distro.
I installed it onto a 1Gb USB stick for now to play around a little (as well as having a live version in a virtual machine) and have been updating it, adding Firefox 10, Flash etc to bring it up to the spec which my wife would want on her EeePC (she is pretty cheesed off with the Xandros install on her 701 and wants an alternative on a SD card). We have tried various other light and mini distros - LXDE versions of the main distros mostly, but they all need well over 1Gb of disk space to install in - which on a little 4Gb drive isn't really useful.

Check out SliTaz - I think you will be impressed!

http://www.slitaz.org/

4G down!

Horror at our house in the last 24 hours!  The 4G signal had been turned off by the trial team so they could presumably sort out the problrms being experienced by a small number of triallists. But of course, that meant ALL of us were then left with no service - which, here, means lots of wailing and complaints from my daughters!

All back up today though!

We could have resorted to the old half meg "broadband" but with one of the daughters watching (or attempting to watch!) streaming TV stuff, there would be no point.

Alan Turing

For the few who have no idea who Alan Turing was, I suggest a quick "google" or "wikipedia" to enlighten you.

I was one of those who called (via one of the UK "e-petitions") for a posthumous pardon for Mr Turing.
Now, today, the UK Government has refused to grant this because apparently, in the 1950's, homosexuality was seen as a criminal offence and Turing was "properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence"

Without the efforts of Alan Turing and others, we would be living under the rule of the Nazi party today. I. for one, appreciate the work of this hero of Britain.
Shame the UK government.

Yet 2012 will see the issue of Royal Mail stamps commemerating the centenery of his birth...So they are happy to make money from Alan Turing, happy to live free from oppression because of Alan Turing and colleagues, but not write off the trumped up charges he faced (and the horrific "chemical castration" he suffered) simply because of his sexual orientation?

Pretty pissed off to be honest. I am not "gay", but this man was a major player in the UK war effort and in computing (who hasn't heard of the Turing Test?)

4G extended!

Great news for me here in the depths of mid Cornwall! The 4G trial - which was due to end at the end of January - has been extended until the end of June.
Like to think that those of us who attended the Trerice demonstration for the press and Ofcom helped a little bit in Ofcom taking the decision to keep us in the 21st Century for a little longer!

Blast from the past!

Downloading the latest Yoper Linux distro to see how my old mates there are getting on.

As I have probably mentioned, I used to be one of the development team on Yoper (back in the days of 2.1 and 2.2). Over time, with things changing to use a new package manager and various other changes - and with poor health, I dropped out of the team and moved on. I still watch the distro and download the current iso from time to time to see how things are going. Tobias and the guys are working hard, but with a small distro it is hard to keep up with the corporate might of the big three or four main distros.

One of the reasons I use PCLinuxOS as my main distro is because it follows the ethos of the old Yoper - and still uses Synaptic as the package manager with the rpms!

Anyway, off to play - I shall report back once I have given Yoper a run.

Updates

Not much to update as such.

4G -

Well, the speed has dropped down to 8Mbps download now as the BT guys decided that upping it affected stability for those further from the base stations. I had good reliable speeds of 15Mbps +  but others apparently suffered.
Went to the open day to demonstrate the technology to the press and Ofcom - and did lots of interviews. Spoke to various local press people, T3 magazine, The Register and all sorts of other folk. Very interesting day, with good demos of the technology in action.

Mobile phones

Well, my rather nice little Orange San Francisco (a re-badged ZTE Blade) Android phone decided to stop working correctly. The microphone has failed. I can use the hands free stuff, but if I try to use the normal mic, I get the faintest noise possible.

 So, I decided it needs to be repaired. One small snag is that I rooted the phone and installed Android 2.2 in place of the awful Orange badged and themed locked down version of Android 2.1, which is stuffed full of Orange's own "apps" - all intent on taking cash from users. So of course I rooted it and removed all the excess crap - which speeds it up as well as improving the looks of the phone.

Anyway, the general concensus was that Orange would check the phone and refuse to fix it because it had been modified - even though the phone hardware was untouched and at fault!  I was prepared to argue the toss as a technician (but not for phones I must admit). There have been similar things with other companies in the past - e.g Asus and their "adding a stick of RAM voids the warranty" claim with the early EeePC. These attempts to take money from users by having their own people do upgrades etc are always found to be unacceptable when challenged.

Anyhow, I didn't want the hassle, so I wiped the phone and re-installed the basic Orange software back on (and boy! was it fugly!).
I then rang them - expecting a load of arguing and tales of how many months it will take to repair and how I would need to deliver it to the only service station in the UK which is situated in the Mull of Kintyre and I will need to deliver it wearing just a pair of boxer shorts ..... etc etc.
Amazingly, they apologised for the faulty phone, asked when would be convenient for the courier to collect the old phone and hand me a new one tomorrow!

Normally  I complain about these companies, but this is great customer service. Well done Orange!

Speeding Up -oh, and Movember

Looks like the trial for 4G has upped the cap on our speeds. Folks mentioning 11, 12 and 15Meg speeds, so I ran a speedtest.

Got 11.78Mbps down and 6.74 up, so yes, it does seem they have upped the download speeds.
Seems very reliable too - haven't had any probs.

On the Movember thing - I decided to join this charity thing to raise awareness of male cancer problems. It involves growing a moustache for the month of November, but of course, I already had one - so I shaved it off and began from a hair free face! Feel free to donate if you like - or just watch the page to see how I get on!

http://mobro.co/kernowyon

Country fixed

Well, the 4G team have fixed the problem where attempting to access a website which redirected based on country of user (e.g Google.com or youtube.com for example) were sending us to German sites (e.g google.de instead of google.co.uk for UK residents). Not sure what they did, but at least I can now watch youtube videos which are blocked for some crazy reason in Germany (why is Kickapoo, the Tenacious D song blocked for example?).

Edit:  Not apprently fixed Blogger! I still get .de there!

Weather affected?

The 4G speeds tonight seem low - at least as far as downloading speed is concerned. From the 7.5 or more Mbps of other tests to 4.5 Mbps today....

However, the weather is pretty foul - with strong winds and plenty of rain and dampness. It may of course be simply the time I have chosen to test - around half past ten in the evening, which presumably means plenty of other trialists are using the connection. No idea if there is any contention ratio issues with this - but I doubt if there should be, certainly with the relatively small trial sample...

Uploading on the other hand seems fast - 9.34Mbps

Getting some interesting results. Still got problems with the German identification on many sites (e.g Google, Youtube....), but the 4G team are apparently "looking into this"....

More 4G reports

Well, still running at around the 7.8Meg up and down rate.
Interestingly, I did try booting my old XP install yesterday evening to compare with my usual Linux (I have XP on here as a dual boot for the very odd test) and I could not connect to the router with the USB dongle.

I discovered that dropping the encryption level from AES to TKIP allowed me to connect - so I guess my XP isn't running SP3 (which brought AES support) or my old dongle doesn't support it.

Seems at least one other triallist has problems with wireless, so I have passed on my findings - hopefully it will help.

Speed

Okies, the previous "broadband" speeds were -

Download 0.47Mb/s and upload 0.24Mb/s, which Speedtest.net claims is slower than
91% of the country (but I suspect is slower than a lot more of the country!)
That test was back in April.

Todays test, using the 4G broadband is -

Download 7.81 and upload 6.82

So it seems to be slightly better!
The speeds do seem variable - the BT engineers suggested that the speeds were being capped and changed around at the moment, so perhaps it will change later.

4G has landed!

Well, the 4G is here. Two BT Openreach vans, two BT guys to simply hand me a router and check the speed via their laptop and dongle.... hmmm...
Ah well, they were not here long and no aerial needed. First impressions - well, I did expect something faster on the download side, but upload is 8meg! Download is coming on for 8meg actual measured speeds, so not terrible, but I had read a bit before about this and speeds of 40Meg were mentioned. The BT guys said that they thought the speeds had been capped since yesterday - when it was a lot faster. So either it was unstable or the trial doesn't need us all downloading the whole interwebs!

I shall post some speed readings in a day or two.

My only main issues at the moment are -

1 Websites think you are in Germany! But this is because the router has a German SIM card in it apparently. No real problem, but a bit odd going to Google.com and getting Google.de in German!

2 And I can't blame the 4G for this odd anomoly - my ethernet card on the main PC stops my machine booting into Linux when I enable it in the BIOS! Even a live cd (and I tried with a couple of live cds from different distros) won't boot with the ethernet enabled. Disable it and the machine is happy. So for now, I have a wireless dongle stuck in there.

Strange but true....

4G

We are getting a trial of the 4G broadband next week! I shall report on the speeds we get ten - as well as any issues with it.
Will be interesting to see how it works with Linux....

All quiet

Not much has been happening of late. I finished the chemo in January, but have not been called back to see if there has been any recurrence of the tumours yet. I was told that I would be checked out in about 4 months, so I am not concerned - I expect to hear something in May.

Otherwise, health has been OK - a few chest pains on and off, for which I have been given a new medication - plus I was put on a different drug for my diabetes as the Metformin sucked and I had abdominal pains all the time. The new stuff seems better and, after they plonked me onto maximum dosage, seems to be controlling the diabetes fairly well. Hopefully that will avoid me having to inject insulin for a bit - I hate needles!

Distro wise, still using PCLOS in its KDE incarnation. Still fairly happy with it, although there are a few minor niggles (as with all distros of course!). For example, the root terminal which you can call from the user desktop fails - I know why and I can easily work around it, but it is something which really shouldn't happen. A new user would be completely stuck - which is a bad point. Also the disk editing tools - cfdisk for example - do not do as they should. These need fixing too.
Other than those niggles, pretty happy at the moment, but slightly concerned about the announcement that PCLOS intends to move from the Synaptic package managing system to a YUM based one. Not a fan of Yum myself - having used it years ago - but it is better than Smart or some of the other package managing tools. Apparently, Synaptic won't be compatible with the changes to the RPM system which PCLOS is introducing - hence the change. I will give the new version a good try out before making any decision - I like PCLOS and don't want to end up back with Ubuntu unless I am forced to.

More chemo updates

Well, coming up to the final dose which will be on Wednesday.

As previously mentioned, there should be less problems with my type of chemo as it is not IV.
I wouldn't say it is side effect free though....
The first couple of weeks I was OK - although I did start to get a bit itchy here and there on and off. But as time has gone on, I have noticed a definite pattern to the problems. For a couple of days, no real problems, but as I get to the mid-point between treatments, I can notice a tiredness creeping in as well as the itching which seems to happen anywhere. Not dramatic, but persistant and of course at night it is a real nuisance.
In the last couple of treatments I have also started getting some nausea. Nothing terrible, but a slightly queasy feeling which occasionally gets a bit worse - but nothing more than that.
Each treatment seems to increase the effects - so I am pleased that this Wednesday is the last one!

Hopefully the chemo will have the desired effect on the stupid recurring tumours!