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.]

Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ V2 (RND4000)

Just bought one of these for €200. It's a compromise on price performance. I wanted 1 gigabit read/write, but would have to shell out a lot more to approach these figures. The unit looks good. As you may have read in other reviews the drive bays are way too accessible and easy to take out. The drive comes bundled with power cables and a CAT5 cable. Why is this gigabit ethernet unit not bundled with at least a CAT5e cable? Just installed a 3TB drive in the unit. Powered it up and was pleased to see it was updating it's own firmware automatically. Had to quickly install Radar Utility as the NAS was giving me 10 minutes until assumedly it would do a default configure on the drive/system. The choices were set up XRAID2 or some regular RAID system. I'll be buying my disks one at a time so I'm going to try out their XRAID sytem I've been reading about. Dissappointed to note there is no FTPS option, only vanilla unsecure FTP sever available. [Explicit FTPS available, be careful not to use plain FTP by accident if you wish your password to be secure.] Speedtests to come... folder -quick write test coming in at a lowly 25MB/s to write to NAS thru SMB, 4GB folder of videos files. -rough read test comin in at 40MB/s, same folder of file. caching may have occurred. -write 1GB file 39/MB/s -read 1GB file 42MB/s looks like caching again maybe. Tried folder write again, now writing at ~40MB/s, definitely caching occurring. Copying large 11GB file to NAS 32MB/s. Something strange occurring. Tried connecting direct using only CAT6 and staic IPs and began copying 11GB file. was getting less than through my shitty UPC router. Came in around 30MB/s, definitely less than though router anyhow. ================================================= OK, several days just passed there. got locked out of web control for NAS kept saying "Device is Offline", reinstalled OS, did factory reset, finally was sayin corrupt root. after much searching found that my Seagate drive ST3000DM001 had firmware CC4C. In the readynas hardware compatability list it was recommended to upgrade to CC4H. -and fuck seagate for being so awkward in the update, but that's another story, just make sure you have a bog standard pc hanging around if ya wanna upgrade seagate firmware, with an intel chip, working optical drive, no raid array, and on my annoying set up i basically had to unplug everything to disconnect the PCs own hard drives, or else the upgrade utility would mercilessly try and upgrade every HD it came across. i had to do this about 3 times in the end, was getting pretty pissed off. finally got firmware -> CC4H. still getting "Device is Offline" AAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! next factory restore -> err: partitioning failed / corrupt root hooked the drive back up to PC (3rd time disassembling PC :-/) tried deleting any partitions on HD -> nothing found motherboard cannot read 3TB drives, created new empty partition windows prompts for MBR or GPT, do some interesting reading and go for GPT (Guid Partitioning Table). Discover some interesting shit about these new >2TB drives, they're all secretly aligning on 4k bytes instead of 512. can cause double write if misaligned blocks! does this explain my slow write speed in initial testing? put HD back in NAS, left to test drive overnight -> err: could not mount root RAID d / corrupt root factory reset -> err: partitioning failed OS reinstall -> auto does factory reset >> test disks >> installs FW >> installs X-RAID!! >> creates volume!! >> does normal boot :-) did a quick test there with 11GB file, writing at 40MB/s thru router no problems. reading at 42MB/s. top speed of the routers switch was measured at 50MB/s with iperf. May have to invest in switch if i can justify the expense, will need to do some more testing direct thru cable and when i get more HDs installed in the NAS. Pretty bumpy ride so far, i bought the NAS so i wouldn't have the bumpy ride and expense of building my own NAS. The joys of IT eh? It's always a learning experience.

I'm back with UPC!

O joy of joys! In the last 10.5 months I've had to suffer with a data connection ranging from 40k thru my nokia phone with bad drivers, to ADSL on a 2Mb connection that at best connected at 1800kbps and was completely intermittant.
But finally I'm back with UPC!!! check it:

Prepare urself UPC, acceptable usage policies are about to be fully tested!

Just got a Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000 !!

Just received this by courier! Fantastic, it's huge!

Right hand side is level with a UK / IRL size electricity plug.

Viewsonic VG2436wm-LED

My awesome new Viewsonic VG2436wm-LED monitor (pics pending). Another fantastic gift to myself ;-) Thanks Ros! No problem, anytime Ros.

24" 1080p, colours look vibrant, contrast ratio is high. Viewing angles are no great shakes, but no worse than other monitors. The most stand-out feature is pivot support (rotation) so that monitor can go into portrait mode. This is great for reading long articles, and should be fantastic for writing long functions when I get around to programming again. I have only tested this function on my laptop so far with Intel drivers, works great! Simply put mouse pointer on screen you desire to be rotated and then use the CTRL+ALT+arrow-direction keyboard shortcuts to rotate to desired screen orientation, very quick and easy to apply. The height can be adjusted to quite an exteme to allow for easier rotation, it makes the unit a little prone to shaking about slight vibration though, and may need a sturdy desk/worktop surface.

All in all, a nice little number, and the cheapest 24" monitor with pivot adjustment support built in and decent screen specs.

[UPDATE]
New monitor in action:

OCZ Agility 3 60GB

Santa's been! Actually I bought this one myself. I have a Lenovo R400 Thinkpad, it takes about 4/5mins to boot up and hard drive always seems to be thrashing. Seemed to be getting 40-60 MB/sec moving large files off the hard drive which is pretty shit. Bought myself an OCZ Agility 3 60GB and fuck me it's fast! Seem to be getting impossible speeds. It has SATA 150 interface (i.e. 150MB/sec theoretical upper speed limit) but testing with numerous softwares are getting figures of 200MB/sec and over???

It's booting and shutting down breathtakingly fast, i'm actually stunned as to how fast it is, PLUS the drive is designed for SATA 600 interface! I have SATA 300 in my main PC, i will run some tests on that machine at a later date, but stunning results so far! SSDs really do live up to the hype!

[UPDATE]
In retrospect, clearly the Lenovo spec sheet was wrong. Laptop must have SATA300 interface. Getting contiguous large file reads of 250MB/s during testing, but have recorded burst rates of ~298MB/s by monitoring actual system performance using HDTune Pro. Impressive stuff! Alas now, in the inevitable race ever upwards, I am noticing the limiting factor of my laptop's CPU power, and my once proud RAID disk system is beginning to feel a little challenged, regular defragging is now needed and the once seemingly quick boot times seem to take an age as I restart my laptop several times for fun as it does one single boot..

Firefox v4

Upgraded to Firefox v4 there last night. Seems to want to crash all over the shop. It's also using
a whopping 400+ MBs of ram. I'd recommend any Firefox users delay their upgrade until next
incremental release, at least (version 4.1?). Other than that, the GUI interface
now resembles Google Chrome. There is also built-in support for roaming browsing, i.e. save
your tabs+history+watever to a server so they open up on whatever machine your using. I also
have a lot of custom settings in "about:config" which have been left unchanged by the
upgrade. That is good =) I haven't snooped around much apart from that.

--

700GB of data gone :-(

The hard drive in my Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive (hmnhd) has died with the loss of 700GB of data. This is extra annoying as i was in the middle of collecting data from all of my machines into the one place (the dead drive) with the idea that i'd then make a backup of that. Suffice is to say i'm gutted. This is the first hard drive that has completely gone on me with catastrophic data loss. FML.

Alternative to "The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie"

Found a great book for learning C. Lesson 1 is the usual "hello world", but literally the next example dives into using it as a CGI script. It teaches all the usual C console output stuff, but concentrates on web programming with C and apache web server. This is great, as the terminal is a bit boring looking for the uninitiated, and most ppl are used to booting up and instantly firing up the web browser to click aimlessly on social networking sites.

It includes clean code examples, and moves rapidly on to interacting with mysql and creating images on the fly, while still learning about loop structures etc. At 84 pages of breakneck speed learning, I'd love to hear how a novice gets on with this book. I'm a relatively seasoned C/C++ programmer and I'm still getting mileage out of it.

"C Programming in Linux" by David Haskins.

Download pdf & examples (for free!) here: http://bookboon.com/external/computerweekly/it/c-programming-in-linux
(If your not a UK IT student just put "abroad" and "other" in drop downs).

Skyline (2010)

Great space monster b-movie, with plenty of action and other eyecandy. This is the sort of shit they wish they could've made in the 1950s.

Put Archlinux on my eee pc 901

I decided to wipe eeebuntu 8.04 from my eee pc 901. I have put on archlinux which turns out to be great! you have a lot more control of ur installation with archie, and i've gone for a very lightweight approach to suit my netbook. No desktop environment, just using openbox window manager, and carefully chosen each application to get exactly what i want.

A non-exhaustive list-
Programs)
Terminal: roxterm (mainly), xterm
Editor: vim (general), geany (IDE)
Network Manager: wicd (great! ncurses+GUI)
File Manager: pcmanfm (weaning myself off nautilus) nautilus, mc (ncurses)
Video Player: mplayer (no fancy GUI for me, plenty of shortcut keys) smplayer(FTW!)
[Video Editor: avidemux-gtk]
Music Player: audacious (haven't looked into this much seems ok screen space wise)(great!)
Office: openoffice, epdfview
Archive: xarchiver
Graphics: gimp, mirage [added eog as mirage a bit slow]
Browser: lynx, firefox (main), chromium
System)
Window Manager: openbox
Wallpaper: set with feh (extremely lightweight!)
System info: conky & tint2 various tray apps
Tray/Panel/Dock: tint2 lxpanel
Compositing Manager (transparency, effects): xcompmgr
Audio: alsa, alsa-utils (alsamixer)
GUI Configurators: obconf, obmenu, tint2conf

That's all i can think of right now.

TODO:
Network shares are not mounting automatically for some reason [-requires root?], [or SD card]
haven't thought about bluetooth,
must work on speeding up boot process (no autodetecting modules really speeds things up). [never switch off/reboot]
Must setup scripts to move ~/.mozilla folder to RAM on system start, and sync to disk on system shutdown. [Done! But for aforementioned reason sync it with cronjob, and logging in or out of bash for good measure. Use rsync as it just updates changes to disk rather than full copy (good for SSD drive)].

Otherwise coming together nicely.
Click for screenshot of 9.1 inch screen:

Have since dicked around with a custom minimal gtk theme, made the windows title bars as small as possible to save screen real estate -may just ditch em all together and use shortcut keys? Every program has been visually miniaturized as much as reason would allow.

Conky now calls a script that reads battery level values from the filesystem and colours the battery display accordingly, e.g. red below 5%.
TODO: add functionality to the script to send notifications and suspend2ram. Need to keep it simple as script is called every ~2 secs.

Predator Ultimate Hunter Edition

Nice 2010 50GB blu-ray remaster of the original 1987 arnie classic film. Not to be confused with the 2008 blu-ray version which was the mpeg2s from the DVD upscaled. Available for sale and download now from the usual outlets, e.g.
Soft-copy http://www.katzforums.com/showthread.php?t=2235921

Hard-copy http://www.amazon.co.uk/Predator-Ultimate-Hunter-Edition-Blu-ray/dp/B003JSRSR8/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1290466389&sr=1-1

My new wallpaper:


!blogger.com shrank my hi-res caps!

Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive Review

I've owned a 1TB Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive (hmnhd for short) for about a year now. It's damned handy for sharing media files between my computers (and housemates). In fact, if it was feasible, i would use a network hard drive for all my data across machines and OSes.

There are however drawbacks. The drive (server) is connected only by 1000Mbit gigabit ethernet. That would not be so bad, but my router has only 100Mbit ports and wireless-g @ 54Mbit -obviously my laptops are connected wirelessly. On top of that, all these max throughput figures are not represented in the real world.

Back to the review. I recently updated the firmware from 1.0.29 to 2.0.64. Luckily I backed up everything beforehand, as the update destroyed access to most of my files and folders. Previously, the drive was written to internally by a user with linux uid=254 and gid=254 (some sambauser account perhaps?). That user no longer exists with the update, and so many files/folders have permissions set like
-rwx------ 254 254 somefile
drwx------ 254 254 somedir
meaning I could no longer access them >:-[
After much messing around, the only thing I could think to do was format the hmnhd.

More Annoyances.
To expedite backing up the hmnhd, I directly connected the drive with a CAT6 (gigabit) cable to the gigabit ethernet port of my big PC. This took over 6 hours to back up ~580GB @ ~27MB/s (probably closer to 7 hours). I'm currently writing the back up *back* to the hmnhd, and am pretty fucking annoyed to notice that the average write speed to the drive after about 30mins is a disgraceful, disgusting, limp-dicked, ravaged-arsed, cock-faced 7.4MB/s. I'm writing back 541GB so this should take me about 21 hours! Lying win2008 server reckons it'll only take 12.5 hours. If your drive is totally full you can probably double these times.
[EDIT: ok it's settled at an average of 11.3MB/s, ~= 13.5 hours]

hmnhd specs: max values
read from 27.0 MB/s
write to 11.3 MB/s --corrected

Buyer beware. I would definitely consider a more expensive unit in the future with removable drives and/or USB 3.0 or other fast interface for large reads/writes.
Did a quick check there, 1TB units available ~€100 with both NAS+DAS interfaces (meaning both network+USB to you). Also no hard drive units with SSH access available -could make your own with a linux-plug or some such device, or forget NAS and get a decent router with a fast USB port and reflash it with DD-WRT or some such arrangement.

Stanton Final Scratch 2

have had the stanton box, timecode records, and a zillion leads sitting in it's box for nearly 3 years. just got the correct firewire lead for it, *and* ditched trying to get the software that came with it to work. i don't like using illegal software, but in this case it was actually the only way to get it to work, since both stanton and native instruments stopped supporting the hardware in 2005 -the registration software is no longer supported??? and you can only purchase newer versions of the software that don't work with the hardware apparently. so, H2O crew FTW!

thomann.de delivery!!!

excitement overload as this box appears


GOODS!


YAY!


playtime!
gotta fix up my big PC box first tho..

update: installed new system fan and disabled on-board graphics. still givin me jip.

unpacked my new AKG 601s. incredibly comfortable so far, nice big cushions, circumaural design covers the ears well. con: lead is well embedded in there, no replacing it without major surgery if / when anything goes wrong.

finally get to properly test out my new ASUS XONAR Essence STX soundcard's headphone amp, the cans are 120ohm so had to adjust the card's setting accordingly. tested it on some youtube videos i know, can hear all sorts of new glitches and artifacts in the audio. tested on a flac version of Animosity & Drumcorps - Altered Beast EP, -FUCKING AWESOME!!! unbelievably crisp and clear, all kinds of new sub-bass going on, incredible sound separation AWESOME AWESOME FUCKING AWESOME ARGH MY BRAIN IS EXPLODING SO MUCH CLARITY! -eh, yea, i think i like these cans.

can't help but wonder what the AKG 701s i was originally planning on buying would be like. probly wasted on me tho, as i'm too used to shit audio systems and these are already blowing my fucking mind. may have to start getting/making more flacs instead of mp3s tho. a whole world has opened up in terms of audio quality -thought it would.

[update] i've been busy`. oxygen 61 gen3 is savage. nocturn is a little disappointing -shoddy physical build quality, knobs look like they're about to break, and software is not seamless either. the novation launchpad is still in it's box.

Novation Launchpad Lunchpad -haha getit? .. uh ..ha..anyone?