Sunday, December 04, 2011

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.

Friday, November 25, 2011

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!

Thursday, November 03, 2011

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

Friday, October 07, 2011

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!

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

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"....

Monday, October 03, 2011

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.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

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.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

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....

Thursday, September 22, 2011

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....

Thursday, April 21, 2011

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.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

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!