UPC (Ireland) upgrade [edit: FUCK UPC TECHNICOLOR]

They insisted on giving me a new modem. hopefully these Technicolor modems aren't a pile o shite n start crapping out on me like the dodgy Cisco they tried to peddle to me until i got it replaced with an older model...

...so far so good.

[EDIT: NOPE! they suck.]

Change local IP address range

They've changed the local IP range from 192.168.1.x to 192.168.0.x
This can now be changed back to the familiar 192.168.1.x range. There seemed to be an issue with it initially, and then after that it would come up with the error
"Error converting one or more entries: 
Make sure the Primary Network and Guest Networks do not overlap IP pools:"
I was able to change it by doing something strange.
First I moved the router's IP to 192.168.0.200 and starting address to 192.168.0.210, without googling the subject I was just guessing that that may not 'overlap'? Then after it rebooted itself I was then able to move the LAN to 192.168.1.1 etc. like I wanted in the first place.
Also, I would suggest temporarily changing the subnet mask on the router and your current PC from 255.255.255.0 to 255.255.0.0 to prevent headaches of not being able to access the router during the change over.

Device quirks

Certain things it will give the appearance of changing but they do not *actually* change. If this happens try making the change and then reboot the router yourself after each individual change (maybe even rebooting after each step if it involves a few changes in the router GUI). Not guaranteed to work for everything, some stuff is just plain broken on this unit.
I am convinced that the firmware has been remotely updated since I first got it on my own unit as the unit now reboots itself after certain changes where it did not before, and generally the router GUI seems a little smoother.

There is a mysterious device set up on 1st DHCP lease at 192.168.0.10, cannot get rid of this, seems to be something on the router itself. x.x.x.10 is where i traditionally put my main pc so that is annoying also.
[ EDIT#2: just did a quick check on (http://aruljohn.com/mac.pl) for the MAC 00:10:95:DE:AD:07 it's coming up as a "Thomson Inc." device. so this arsehole device *is* a Thomson. I had heard a rumour. Having worked in telecoms troubleshooting Thomson network devices I can tell you Thomson are absolute fucking garbage, cheapest, shittiest pieces of crap out there. RANT!! ]
[FIXED: Whatever this Thomson thing is it always moves with the starting DHCP IP address plus ten, so if you want 192.168.x.10 free, just move all DHCP addresses somewhere arbitrary like 192.168.x.200 or whatever and the Thomson device will be on 192.168.x.210]

Port forwarding

Port forwarding is weird. the boxes insist you put in port ranges like 60000-60100. but it does not open port ranges, only the lowest port on the range, so you have to create multiple entries for each individual port to actually create a range.
[EDIT: At this point, when I was initially setting up the router, I lost the rag here and wanted to throw the router out the window, as my ftps server needs a large range open to work and had taken a bit of work to get up and running in the first place. 
... This edit replaces quite a lot of CAPS SHOUTING AND SWEARING!!! I was pretty angry!]
[EDIT 18/03/2014: Was just setting up port forwarding for a program and lo and behold four months later you can now enter IP address ranges like you are supposed to. No reboot required, just need to hit save changes. I do not know if they update the version information but currently the status gives: Software Version STD6.01.27 ]
[EDIT 25/03/2014: In the last week I have had to restart and reset the modem a number of times. I was unable to restore my configuration backup after resetting modem -??? BUT! uPnP is now working, so no need to go opening ports for software that avails of uPnP. The Software Version number reported in the status has not changed, ..maybe this particular box, as opposed to in general, is a bit dodgy? ]

Get your own router

Obvious answer would be to fuck all this bollox and set it up in bridge mode and get my own router to do what I want. oh wait! NO YOU FUCKING CAN NOT BECAUSE THEY DO NOT HAVE A GODDAMN BRIDGE MODE ON THIS FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT MODEM.
[EDIT: Yeah yet more anger here! But here is a workaround:
Turn off WiFi.
Put you own nice, working, stable, store-bought router in the DMZ.
????
Profit. ]

WiFi is Rubbish

I have not experienced this yet as I live in a small flat, but apparently the WiFi is shit as well, drops out and pretty weak. It comes up as a pretty low signal anyhow at about -70dBm compared with the signal from my neighbours at -60dBm, and there is no external aerial on the thing.

[EDIT: Update on WiFi. It sometimes just stops completely. As in that part of the modem just ceases to function and will not come back, ethernet is fine during these episodes however. Box has to be power cycled to get going again. There is no WiFi interference, any other WiFi connection runs perfectly (tried other router, ad-hoc laptop to laptop). Also, I noticed movies were buffering while streaming across the WiFi to my laptop, so I ran iperf for 5 minutes to check the speed. Maximum speeds were good, but the WiFi completely drops out quite often. In the 5 minute test the WiFi completely cut out over 30 times. I have switched over and tried many different combinations of machines and it's simply the Technicolor/Thomson cutting out constantly. From reading forums and speaking to others it seems to be the general consensus that the WiFi is incredibly unstable.]

Micro$oft no longer supports Windows Gadgets

So apparently Microsoft no longer supports windows gadgets AKA windows sidebar AKA desktop gadgets. But why? The reasons stated are that they present the possibility of posing a security threat. (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ie/windows/gadgets) Upon further reading of the security threat posed (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-GB/security/advisory/2719662) they basically describe the same threat that installing ANY PIECE OF SOFTWARE WHATSOEVER poses. Microsoft have an extremely bad track record of fucking over software developers who learn and use their frameworks, for example in database access programming you used to have OLE, they completely changed and revamped this into ADO with a huge apology and a promise that they wouldn't change it again, pretty much straight away they changed this to ADO.NET with a re-apology and a re-promise that it wouldn't happen again. So that was annoying. Personally I wouldn't bother with any of that win8 shit til at least win10 when ya can be sure to get a bit of longevity out of your efforts. Rant off.

If this is a catholic country, she died for irish sins.

If "this is a catholic country", she died for irish sins. 
one year since Sativa's death and it's still a shitehole. the massive support for outdated religious doctrine makes it depressingly clear how inbred most irish people still are. turf cuttin, daughter rapin, relic worshipin retards. just kill yourselves now.

Want to know what dd is doing?

From another terminal type kill -USR1 $pid, where pid=`pidof dd`. This causes dd to spit out data speeds and amounts transferred so far. you might wrap it up in something like:  
pid=`pidof dd` 
while [[ -d /proc/$pid ]]; 
do kill -USR1 $pid && sleep 5; 
done
Apparently pidof is deprecated or something?? If you only have one dd process running on your machine you might try pkill -USR1 -n -x dd the problem here being that you will keep asking for the pid of dd, and might get new ones. The -n is for the newest process, -o for the oldest, and leave it out completely to send to all running dd processes, like this:

pkill -USR1 -x dd 
enjoy.

High Impedence Burnt Out My Soundcard?

So one channel on my laptop's soundcard has gotten faded volume levels with no bass.
I recently got a pair of KRK Rokit 8s but they are hardly the problem if functioning correctly no?
I also did start using my AKG K601 headphones a little which have a high impedence @ 120 Ohms. Could this be the amplifier killer?

Bricked my Galaxy Note (Soft Brick Phew!)

Very intense day today as I luckily only soft bricked my GT-N7000. Got stuck in bootloop after an unsuccessful rom upgrade when returning to nandroid backup. And no i didn't use stupid stock ICS kernel. Reflashed stock rom with Odin and it decided to fail :-O, redid it and felt very lucky when it worked! back to stock JB 4.1.2 not going to flash for a whiles now.

Cool workstation

Adding one of these to my wishlist:

Anyone want to buy me one of these?  ;-)
http://www.mwelab.com/index.php/en/products

Rosdroid

Web Spider

Grab a website with all links. First get GNU's wget if you don't have it installed already.
I used this to grab a copy of my router's GUI:

wget --http-user="" --http-password="1234" --recursive --convert-links -e robots=off 192.168.1.1

Obviously replace usr/pwd and URL where necessary. This grabs all pages and links that 192.168.1.1 leads to. For websites with external links it is highly advisable to set the recursion level to something sane or you risk downloading the entire Internet ;-) using the option --level=NUMBER where 'number' is the depth of the links you wish to follow. Be careful with -e robots=off as this tells wget to be a bad bad spider and go against website's wishes and trawl through pages and files they probably shouldn't be in. Do not forget --convert-links if you wish to browse your freshly grabbed site offline as this converts links to relative links.

Taking Apart a Microsoft Wireless Keyboard 800

I got some beer or cider under a couple of keys on this keyboard. seems like a lot of screws to open it, i count 13, seems excessive. I googled, as opening these things can get tricky, but couldn't find any guides, hence this post, so i'll let ya know if ya need to take em all out.

too many :-/ and they are all very slightly different lengths, so don't mix em up.

OK, so far I've had to take *every* screw out including the 2 tiny ones in the battery bay, pretty annoying. but guess what? IT STILL WONT OPEN. Yes there is yet another screw hidden behind the health warning sticker. it came out easily enough though.

It comes apart with a small amount of prying into top and bottom halves. the bottom half contains all the electronics, and the top half all the mechanical parts of the keys. The mechanical keys were getting stuck so i soaked the upper half in warm soapy water then rinsed off with some more warm water. and left to dry. the bottom half seemed OK, there was some residue in what looked like a little run off area in the design which i wiped off with a warm soapy towel. by all means use something like a pure alcohol cleaner if ya have it.

I'll let update this if anything goes wrong after it dries and I put it back together.