I don’t understand this one. My phoneline is dead, it “doesn’t work” in that if I pick up a handset and listen, there’s no dialtone. All I can hear is whatever the speaker picks up, which seems to indicate there’s current running down the line - although it’s not enough to power a normal plug in phone, that just sits there dead.

And yet, here I am, on the Internet through the same phone line. Admittedly I am connected at 2Mb/sec, and the line is mostly full of CRC errors, but it’s working and that makes me really confused. If I pick up my phone there’s a burst of static that dies away and then the line is quiet.

I now know there are no public payphones to the right of my house for at least a mile, the nearest one being to the left, about half a mile away. I knwo this because I set off on a walk to find one to ring BT to report the fault on my line (ring an 0800 number from a mobile? I think not). The phone I eventually found had a large sticker on it saying it was due for removal because not enough people use it.

That’s just great that is. OK so they get vandalised, tramps sleep in them/use them as toilets and they now cost 40p for a call, but when your own phoneline is broken, they’re a really handy way of calling BT for free. Dialling 0800 numbers from a mobile is not free, which is stupid.

The BT fault checker found a fault with my line and after a lot of checking, some more checking and a little bit of looking at the state of my line, told me it’d be fixed by Thursday. Isn’t that wonderful! I hope there’s something expensive wrong that keeps people busy for hours tonight, and that in fixing it they make my ADSL run faster afterwards.

Well they’ve made this a bit easy! I’ve spent the day following the beginner’s tutorial and have a rudimentary spaceship shooting game working. It shouldn’t have taken all day, but the tutorial videos are aimed at someone who’s never used Visual Studio or C# before. I know what an “if” loop is now, at least

MS appear to have made it quite straight forward to get things moving around the screen, which is good.

In other news, my Internet connection is having problems and is currently grinding along at 3MBits after spending the past half-hour having a fit and disconnecting every two minutes.

I took my N810 for a walk to test its GPS capabilities. It’s been raining quite hard and I was hoping the river would be up and interesting to look at. Unfortunately the river was low, but my N810 worked very well. Having a built in GPS is very useful.

I have Maemo-Mapper installed, and because it was raining I sealed my N810 inside an Ortleib map case. I found this a really good combination, the map case being totally waterproof and yet flexible enough to allow the touchscreen to be used.

Locking onto satellites is something often commented on with the N810, with reports of it taking five minutes or more to achieve an accurate lock. While it did take a few minutes to find the satellites it wasn’t any great inconvenience - if I were driving and wanting to use my N810 for navigation a few extra minutes wouldn’t really be an issue; I mostly use GPS navigation for long journeys.

Once locked I noticed a strange thing. The GPS always thinks its moving at a speed between 0.1 and 0.3MPh. This is probably part of the way GPS works, but it’s quite odd watching the track drawn by Maemo Mapper. The track ends up looking like a random walk algorithm, centred around a midpoint.

This randomness doesn’t impede normal operation though, I followed a path and the track drawn in Maemo Mapper accurately followed where I was walking, right down to the junction of the path and a main road, and a canal. I followed the same route home and the return track was fairly close to the first.

The other new feature of the N810 is its slide-out keypad. Having experienced the amazing convenience of Skype and Google Chat from anywhere in my house on my N800, making these two things work on my N810 was the second thing I did. Skype text using the onscreen keyboard is just awful, its impossible to get any decent typing rhythm going. The slide out keypad of my N810 has sorted this, I can now tap away at a respectable rate, knowing the device is keeping up. I know you can pair bluetooth keyboards with the N800, but that isn’t half as convenient as having a permanent keyboard attached. OS2008 even has keyboard shortcuts too.

The screen’s “sunlight readable” (that’s transflective TFT to techies) screen really helps when trying to use the N810 outside. Often when driving it was very difficult to follow the map because even a dreary UK day could wash the screen of my old N800 out.

Originally I moaned that I’d have to bin all my memory cards and buy yet more, but in a different format. While this probably will happen, it’s not a complete negative point. Already I can buy a 4GB card for less than what I paid for a 2GB card last year. And since the N810 comes with 2GB internally (of which I have 1.5GB available - my Maemo-mapper cache and a swap file taking up the rest) I’ve not yet needed to buy a memory card. I found it hard choosing 2GB of music to take with me before.

My other domain, piku.co.uk was up for renewal at the start of the year. I filled in the required forms and gave away a whole £15 to my hosting provider.

Last week I got a letter from Nominet asking when I’d like to pay them £80 to renew piku.co.uk for another two years. Eh? £80? and why when I have just renewed it? I set an email off to my hosting provider.

It turned out that my domain hadn’t been renewed because my card details were incorrect. I phoned them back, getting through in about five rings; I like my hosting provider, they employ intelligent humans who can actually help you. I supplied card details and after an hour received an invoice by email. Job done.

… or so I thought …

I got another email off my hosting provider asking me to ring them to renew my domain. Now I was confused. I wrote them a reply saying I’d paid it, had an invoice and that also the money had gone out of my account. They then went “ah… ok then sorry” and told Nominet to renew it for me.

As you can tell I’m not particularly bothered. At no point was my domain unresolvable, and since I was speaking to humans who knew what was going on (just seeming to have internal problems telling each other) everything was fine. Also the year before last I forgot to pay them for my hosting and they were very good about it, turning my account back on for two days so I could use their web service to renew it.

Oh damn…

Hey piku org uk! About your photos…

You’ve run into one of the limits of a free account. Your free account will only display the most recent 200 photos you’ve uploaded. All of your photos beyond 200 will remain hidden from view until you either delete newer photos, or upgrade to a Pro account.

None of your photos have been deleted, and if you upgrade, they’ll all come back unharmed.

That’s a bit irritating. I don’t particularly want to pay for someone to host “random crap I take with my cameraphone”. Think I’ll need to configure my own system and tell Shozu to use an FTP upload instead.

Like it says, this photo was uploaded from my new phone using ShoZu. Expect to see many more random photos now that I can do this

Ever since I created a server in my house with all my music on, I’ve been looking for ways to play this music throughout my house without having to put PCs all over the place. PCs are great inventions, letting us listen to music, watch video and communicate with fellow humans. Their only failing is they require time to boot up, and who wants a PC whirring away in their front room? It’s a front room, not an office.

So to begin with I had ideas of building a small “media PC” to put under my telly. I could stuff Linux on it and leave it on all the time. It’d work and I would be in my technical ability to make.

Then I got an Xbox, chipped it and put XBMC on it. The Xbox boots up in about ten seconds and works with a remote control. I can now listen to music and watch video in my front room without a PC. Problem solved. Now how can I do the other things I want like browsing the web or chatting to people…

Well obviously I could get a laptop, then I could do everything on that without a problem. I could Internet while on the toilet if the desire took me. Laptops are just PCs though, and when their batteries fail they require plugging into the mains. I’ve got two though, and I do sometimes drag them about my house when the need arises.

However, I also own a Nokia Internet Tablet. It’s tiny, it stays powered on all the time and runs Skype. It also streams music from the web and has a fairly good web browser. I can now do random web searches while watching TV, or in bed. It’s much easier to Skype with a small VCR sized box in your hand than an entire laptop crushing your legs.

Its music playback facilities are a bit… limited though, and streaming music off the web is a sure way to eat battery. This is where I discovered the world of “Internet Radios” and the Squeezebox 3. This magical device will not only stream music off the web, but also your local network, and they do a wifi version. So I could have one in my bedroom and listen to my music without needing another PC whirring away in my house.

They’re a bit expensive though. Cheaper ones exist, but they don’t play OGG which is the format all my music is stored in, and I’m not transcoding all my music into MP3 just to please some cheap music player. Last night this changed when I discovered the rather cheap Logik IR100. It plays OGG/MP3/WMA from the Internet or local network. It is also £40, which was cheap enough to make me get in my car and whizz off to PC World last night to buy one.

So now in my house I can either sit in my office and listen to music and watch videos, or I can sit downstairs and do the same, and now I can sit in my bedroom and listen to the exact same music. Should the urge take me I can also fire up my Internet Tablet and wander about chatting on Skype to people.

Convergence was something people were banging on about in the early 2000’s and it was going to revolutionise the way we live. Well I think it’s crept up without anyone noticing. Once I’ve imported some music into my server it’s available for playing on any of my network devices with no further effort. I don’t have to synchronise anything with a central server, nor do I have to use proprietary “server” programs. It’s all either standard Windows sharing/NFS or UPNP.

OK this is getting silly. At one time I had a single PC and it ran an IRC client and I could chat to hordes of random people on the Internet for a few hours, before running up a huge phone bill. I also had email, but nobody to email things to. This was back in 1997 just in case you were wondering.

Right now I’m signed on to IRC, MSN, Skype, Google Talk, GMail and a web forum. Oh and I have my mobile phone.

That’s just this PC. With my N800 I can do all of those too, and, as I discovered earlier tonight, I can MSN from my XBox 360 which is a painful experience without a keyboard (so get a USB keyboard and plug it in). These aren’t just little gimmicks I play with out of curiosity, they’ve now become quite important methods of communication. I use my N800 quite a lot as a portable Skype phone and web browser, since sometimes it’s nice to chat to your friends when making the tea or watching TV.

Now if only the mobile phone operators could make GPRS very very cheap so I could be on Skype permanently when not at home. Of course they’d hate that since I’d not be using their calling plans.

When not writing eye-melting games for popular home consoles those crazy Llamasoft people like to try and out-geek the rest of us. To quote from the forum:

.. and finally, after LOT of work and a lot of week ends spent ..

The Llamasoft weather station is up.

As you may remember or not more than 1 year ago we got “caught” in
all this thing about weather satellite images, it all started because our
instructor at the Ham Club told us “once I managed to pick up a satellite
with my hand held scanner close to the window”.

Whereas most people are content to watch the weather reports on radio or TV, Giles and Jeff took it upon themselves to grab the images directly from the satellites orbiting the earth. And no, they didn’t just stick a mast on their roof, this setup is much more interesting, involving bringing ethernet to a tree and installing a webserver in a field. Maybe it’s some sort of rural broadband initiative to bring the Internet to farmyard animals, who knows.

Follow this link to read about how it was done, and then click here to see the images that they’ve pulled down. Beats the usual things involving webservers and kitchen appliances, anyway

Yeah, I’m online again Am I screaming along at 24Mbits? No… I’m sort of running along at around 7-8Mb depending on many factors, the main one being the amount of copper wiring between me and the exchange, 3.1Km away.

After finding the wonderous DMT and connecting it to my ADSL router I managed to tweak my connection and increase the speed by an extra 2Mb/s but the error rate was rather high and things like streaming audio kept cutting out. I found my biggest speed problem was down to the two phone extensions in this house. Before removing them I was synching with the exchange at 4Mb. After removing the front of my BT master socket and connecting the ADSL router directly to the “test” socket inside I could sync at 6Mb and with fiddling coax 9Mb out of it.

I think that’s my limit though, DMT has a graph of the ADSL signal as it reaches the router and there’s an entire chunk of missing frequencies which is most likely down to the line length. It’s better than 2Mb though