I’ve had problems with Sky Broadband lately. Basically, it’s been dropping out every evening around 8pm to 10pm. It starts off with a lot of packet loss, followed by pages taking ages to load, and so on.

I’ve worked out that the reason for this is due to the noise margin the router is synced at. I initially turned my router on in the morning where the noise on the line is pretty low (less traffic, etc.). The Netgear DG834GT router syncs with the ADSL2 service at this noise margin.

However, noise margin increases during the evenings. The router doesn’t seem to adjust to this and keeps attempting to connect to the service at the lower noise margin. This results in packet loss, etc. The fix is to reboot the router in the evening when the noise is high and then to leave it on.

Hope this helps someone!

Hi guys!

I hope you’ve been enjoying your summer! I saw it all… flash floods in the UK and 115 degrees over in the ever-changing weather in Florida.

The floods in the UK made international news a few weeks ago. Oxford was badly hit; we had a lot of torrential rain fall upstream. This then flowed down the river and it burst it’s banks along the Thames. Luckily I survived without much damage, although I did end up walking for 3 hours back from work due to traffic chaos!

I visited Florida this summer which was as wonderful as ever. I was trying to avoid the theme parks as much as possible, and Florida sure has a lot more than just theme parks!

I was lucky enough to be able to see the launch of the space shuttle Endeavour from the Kennedy Space Centre. It was a wonderful sight and I feel very priviledged, given the uncertain launch schedules of the shuttle and it’s impending retirement. I think it’s totally inspiring hearing about the history of the United States space programme and I look forward to the day we return to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Even if you don’t manage to see a launch when you visit Florida (and I highly recommend it, even given a 3 hour wait in 115F), the Kennedy Space Centre is a fabulous place to learn about the history of space exploration. There is a Shuttle Launch Experience simultator which is really cool and allows you to get a feel for what it’s like going through the launch (albeit with lower g-forces!) 

The main reason of my holiday, of course, was to visit the Apple Store in Florida. I played around with the iPhone and it’s a nifty piece of kit. It works as advertised really! To say it’s a revolution in mobile phones wouldn’t be an understatement. But I can’t see me wanting one – apart from being a thief magnet, I don’t see myself actually wanting all these elaborate features. My current phone already fulfills my needs by a long way!

I tend to hold my phone horizontally which confused the iPhone a bit as it wasn’t sure which orientation to display the pictures and web browser, but I suppose this would require some minor changes in usage habits. The whole experience of using the phone is nice though. Typing was one thing I found a struggle on the iPhone, but again this is probably something which improves with time.

I posted an image that I took in Florida to my Flickr account which I’m really proud of. It’s of a sunset at Clearwater Beach. 

One final thing: being a non-US citizen, I signed one of those green visa waiver forms when entering the US. Basically you’ve just got to tell the government where you’re staying, say you ain’t a foreign spy, etc. One thing which caught my eye was the condition of not reporting for foreign media.

I know that there is currently a debate in the USA about whether blogs count as media and whether bloggers are protected by the first amendment (or something along those lines). Now the question is this: would posting to your blog whilst on vacation in the USA count as reporting for foreign media? 

An interesting post at Google Blogoscoped about the Push vs Pull gradient. How do we prioritise tasks? Nobody will tend to interrupt a face to face conversation to read the next chapter of The God Delusion, but almost all of us would interrupt an e-mail we were writing to answer a call.

Here’s 10 activities – reorganize these in priority order; then feel free to post your thoughts on the comments.

Book
Doorbell
Email
Face to Face Conversation
Instant Messenger
Phone Call
Radio
RSS Feeds
Television
Text Message

My Priorities 

1. Doorbell
2. Phone Call
3. Face to Face Conversation
4. Text Message
5. Instant Messenger
6. Television
7. Radio
8. Email
9. Book
10. RSS Feeds

I’m ashamed to say that I’d probably interrupt a face to face conversation to answer the phone; yep. It’s probably worth asking yourself where you’d put things such as dinner, work deadlines and sleep. 

The Greenpeace ranking of the "greenness" of computer companies is interesting and quite a nice way of deciding how "green" the technology you purchase is, especially as climate change seems to have become such a trendy issue recently.

Best 5

• Lenovo – 8.0
• Nokia – 7.3
• Sony Ericsson – 7.0
• Dell – 7.0
• Samsung – 6.3

Scores out of 10.  Higher is better.

Worst 5

• Apple – 2.7
• Panasonic – 3.6
• LGE – 3.6
• Sony – 4.0
• Toshiba – 4.3

Scores out of 10; lower is worse.

I’m actually quite surprised that Apple is the least green out of all the technology companies. Apple have consistently come very low on the rankings. Greenpeace on Apple: "low scores on almost all criteria and no progress".

With Apple putting so much of an emphasis on a quality and how "cool" their products are, it’s a shame they’re not taking much notice of the environment. After all, with climate change becoming a hot issue (ha), more and more people are going to be taking notice of these ratings.

It’s also a surprise to see Chinese company Lenovo at the top; just last year, they came last.

Criteria used by Greenpeace for determining how green technology companies are include the chemicals used in products, end-of-life disposal management and the amount of waste equipment recycled.  

A few picks from YouTube.

Infinite Solutions

Infinite Solutions with Mark Erickson is a pretty genius and funny video channel. He makes video tutorials about some pretty stupid stuff but makes it look so real that most people will actually believe it.

View YouTube Channel

Kiwi

This is a really nicely done animation, which has been viewed over 6 million times.

The Dawkins Delusion

If you’ve read The God Delusion, you’ll find this absolutely hilarious.

Penn & Teller – Water Banning Petition

The Dihydrogen Monoxide prank is quite famous. It sounds dangerous; perhaps because of monoxide’s association with the deadly carbon monoxide. It’s just water. Penn and Teller asked people to sign their petition to ban DHMO (Water) to show that in fact, too many of us sign petitions without knowing what it’s even about.

Unkle – An Eye for an Eye

This is quite a strange anti-war music video. It’s a powerful video and could either confuse or stick with you for the next few days.

A bit of a mixed bag today.

Free MSN phone calls: Just 6 minutes

According to Mess.be:

All users of the Windows Live Messenger 8.1 Beta from Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom or the United States are offered two free calls lasting three minutes maximum to almost any fixed line or mobile number in the world. Just click the little telephone icon in your dashboard and you’re off.

It’s not a lot – I remember a while back Skype gave 20 minutes of free calltime every week for a month. But it’s free! You can get free calls on many broadband packages in the UK now and even on the O2 mobile phone network – more on this later.

Microsoft Word Challenge

I first posted this challenge one year ago and I think it’s pretty interesting so I dig it out of the archive. 

It’s possible to select half of a letter in Microsoft Word. The following image has not been altered:

 

Leave a note if you’ve worked out how to do it. You can’t do cool things like that in OpenOffice.

WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks is an interesting project. 

Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact; this means our interface is identical to Wikipedia and usable by non-technical people. We have received over 2.1 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources.

We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. Many governments would benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information. Historically that information has been costly – in terms of human life and human rights. Wikileaks will facilitate safety in the ethical leaking movement.

Wikileaks encourages the leak of information. It uses the Tor network to protect users who leak information onto it. It’s powered by the same software as Wikipedia but there is no connection between the two.

The Wikileaks page on Wikipedia has a bit more information on how it works. 

In brief…

• Youtube is considering launching a linear TV channel. The vice president of Youtube says, "We’ve had a lot of conversations with networks that want us to do shows and companies that want us to do linear YouTube channels. At the moment we’re looking at the options, but we’re in more of a strategy mode right now."
• Does anyone remember the ITV Digital monkey and Al? Well, he’s back and now he sells tea bags! See the PG Tips advert on Youtube.

The whole world is now in 2007! We managed to get through 2006 even with all the doom-sayers predicting the end of the world. London really welcomed 2007 with an impressive display of fireworks and pyrotechnics this year even though the weather caused much of the celebrations in the UK to be cancelled.

To all, I wish you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2007.  

My predictions for 2007: 

• We see some real action on climate change. At the moment, we’re sleepwalking into disaster. Something has to change, and 2007 is the year.
• Windows Vista gets released but adoption is going to be slow as Microsoft isn’t communicating improvements in Vista particularly well to the normal person (yet, anyway)
• The death of personal blogs on sites such as Blogger and WordPress. Personal blogs integrated with social networking on sites such as MySpace and LiveJournal will become more popular.
• The blogosphere/"techies" will begin to turn against Google as they begin to expand into even more areas. Google won’t be getting the same stupid amount of attention they’ve been getting in the last few years.
• VoIP won’t take off especially as almost every broadband provider provides free phone calls through your standard phone line.
• Video on Demand will continue to grow. It’ll make inroads into TV (Wii allows you to watch Youtube on TV for example) and possibly mobile.
• Consumers will finally encounter DRM in more ways and turn against it. Similarly, record labels encumbered by Apple’s DRM will turn to selling DRM-free music.
• Apple becomes the new Google in terms of press attention and blogosphere attention.
• Even more crazy weather.
• Services such as Pandora and Last FM become more mainstream as they are discovered by consumers. These personalized radio services will eat into the market share of traditional radio services.
• Linux will still be going nowhere. There is no benefit to the average consumer and although free, the cost to the consumer is still too high.
• Death of reality TV and manufactured pop stars; music returns to grassroots with sites such as MySpace and the internet.
• People begin to realise the privacy implications of the internet and there will become a group of people who actively resist it due to privacy.
• Whilst "normal" blogs may begin to fade out, video blogging or photo blogging may take off. Especially with the ease of taking photos or making videos with mobile phones these days.
• Explosion in even faster broadband in the UK. 10mbps or up to 24mbps could become the norm with LLU.

At the start of the year, I made a few predictions for 2006:

Crazy Frog crazyness will cease.
Well, this has kinda happened. I mean the ringtone isn’t on TV all the time and nobody has it as their ringtone anymore. He released a single this Christmas and it went nowhere…

Less "AJAX"/"Web 2.0" hype as most people realize that most "Web 2.0" products aren’t really that great.
Hasn’t really happened. The Web 2.0 bubble still seems to be going strong.

People will begin finding more useful uses of XmlHttpRequest and related rich internet application technologies.
A lot of the stupidity has disappeared and people are now using XmlHttpRequest for some great things.

Internet Explorer 7 gets released to reviews of "a big improvement but not doesn’t match Firefox". Firefox continues growing. Opera will probably gain some marketing share too.
IE7 has been released but most critics still prefer Firefox. Opera has gained some market share on mobiles and the Wii and has launched a marketing campaign for the PC browser.

Freeview continues to get better. Five are planning a multi channel launch with Five.2 (general entertainment) and Five.3 (movies) whilst ITV plan to launch a kids channel. More great TV shows and if I had my way, X Factor would be cancelled. However, I doubt it’s likely.
X Factor is still around. Freeview has got a bit better over the last year.

Sunny Boy starts blogging more and stops getting Mozilla Corporation and Foundation confused in Links.
Kinda true…

Microformats!
Nothing much has happened on the microformat front. 2007 could be a big year for microformats though as there is talk of integrating it into Firefox.

No one can be bothered to upgrade to PHP 5 because there is nothing new which is particularly useful. Talk of PHP 6 also slows down PHP 5 adoption.
PHP 5 hasn’t seen mass adoption by the market. Haven’t heard too much talk about PHP 6.

More people stop waiting for XHTML 2 and go back to HTML 5 (or use the corresponding XHTML-ized version, XHTML 5.0).
Nobody cares about XHTML 2 anymore.

Blogs get even more popular.
Blogs still growing.

RSS becomes more mainstream with it’s introduction into Vista. Attempts at adding adverts to RSS will fail.
RSS has been adopted in all the major browsers now. RSS advertising hasn’t taken off. Vista still isn’t out of the door…

More crazy weather.
We had some stupidly hot weather over the summer.

Apple are going to continue charging crazy money and their products are going to become more popular.
Yep…

Intel revival.
Intel is no longer seen as if they are following AMD’s lead. Core Processors are great.

Google keeps on adding new features and becomes more like Yahoo! doing everything from music to video.
They do cinema reviews, maps, word processing and finance.

The island of Samoa adopts PageRank as it’s national currency.
Hasn’t happened… not yet.

I love Christmas. It’s a time for meeting up with friends, family and giving. This Christmas I hope to meet up with several friends and family members who I haven’t seen in quite a while and I’m really looking forward to it. White Christmases are really nice too, but I doubt we’ll be blessed with that luck this year.

I’m going to take a bit of a break from the internet and blogging over Christmas.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! All the best for a happy and prosperous 2007!

I got a little bit of a shock whilst browsing Amazon earlier.

You can now get a Viking 512MB Secure Digital memory card for £2.99. Brand seems pretty decent and SD memory is now more or less standard for use in cameras, mobile phones and I’m told the Nintendo Wii uses SD memory.

This was quite a shock; when I bought SD memory for my camera earlier this year it cost about £8 plus P&P for 512MB. I ran out of memory on holiday and looking around the department stores, the SD cards there cost about £25 for 512MB. 

SD memory is now cheaper than film, even if disposed. On a 512MB memory card at insanely high resolution and filesize (say 6MB per image), you could fit 85 photos. It’d cost about £9 for the same amount of pictures with traditional film (around £3 per 28 photo film) 

A few years ago a 64MB Memory Stick Duo for my mobile set me back £45. My camera came with a 8MB memory stick and buying 4 64MB memory sticks in order to get a decent number of photos cost quite a bit. A 512MB Memory Stick Duo today costs £7.72 through Amazon Marketplace and £17 through Amazon.

A 1GB USB memory stick costs a tenner. Since I’ve been stuck with my 512MB USB drive for a while and often been annoyed at how a CDs worth of data couldn’t fit onto it this could be a worthwhile investment. This is a far cry from the cost of even a 128MB memory stick few years ago. 128MB USB drives seem to have become the standard freebie from every company now.

A rough comparison of memory costs from a search on Amazon: 

• Hard Drive: £0.18 per GB
• CD-R: £0.28 per GB
• Blu Ray Rewritable: £0.55 per GB
• CD-RW: £1.90 per GB
• SD Card: £6 per GB
• USB Drive: £10 per GB
• Sony Memory Stick: £15 per GB

Seeing as an SD card for my camera now costs less than my lunch, I don’t think I’ve ever got another excuse for running out of pictures on holiday.