[Dave Rice]

Or PayPal.

[Dave Rice]

I’m afraid the turkeys will only believe it’s Christmas when the axe is falling. Until then the farmer is just part of Project Fear.

[Dave Rice]

Since Windows 10 was released.

[Dave Rice]

But what version of leave?

We know some of the detail now, so what is the answer to dealing with coming out of the customs union? How do you deal with Northern Ireland? Queues at Dover, etc. How do you deal with disputes? If, under WTO rules, we decide to have no tariffs or checks with the EU we must have that with all countries as you cannot favour one over the other.

[Dave Rice]

I believe she’s gone porking in China or something.

I see Lord Snooty has put the knife in, could well be General Election time.

What I don’t understand is that if you’re worried about Northern Ireland, how does crashing out with no deal do anything other than guarantee a hard border? Because under WTO rules that has to happen.

[Dave Rice]

Doesn’t much matter what happened before, you have (and always have had) the right to cancel. Indeed each email should have a link in it to do just that.

[Dave Rice]

This is what angers me when we are told there are X thousand missed appointments. I have been accused of it and it’s rubbish.

I now get confirmation and reminders by text message as well as by letter, it’s much better.

[Dave Rice]

Just ask them to take you off their list.

[Dave Rice]

Good luck Bob.

[Dave Rice]

God knows why it does it, but it does. If I change the order of the downloads folder from alphabetical to date (or back again) you can almost guarantee the next time I open it the green bar starts…

Just found a potential way to exclude the folder BRB.

EDIT Followed the instructions here and it seems to have worked, and how!

[Dave Rice]

And at the other end Integral 120GB P Series 5 SATA III SSD Drive – 560MB/s £18.99 inc P & P from My Memory.

[Dave Rice]

No, it’s not a hardware problem its Windows reindexing – drives me nuts.

[Dave Rice]

It may be that the M2 on a new extremely top end mobo was the key, because that was noticeably faster especially at boot.

[Dave Rice]

The M2 2280 is only £80 as is the msata. Hmm wonder if that would fit in the HP Elitebook?

[Dave Rice]

A change of modem will start it off training again. Sometimes the exchange side gets “stuck” on too low a figure and your ISP needs to get it reset.

If you have a router like a Draytek that shows you what’s actually going on, you’ll see before the “showtime” connection is made it’s “training”. That’s when the router and exchange decide what the line speed will be depending on current conditions.

[Dave Rice]

It’s not a myth, they do sync. On Monday I had a business customer moving from ADSL to Fibre so his Draytek would need reconfiguring.

Checked the line with the supplied cheap Chinese router, 27 mbps down, 10 mbps up. Got the Draytek going, 6 mbps down 10 mbps up. After two days it was running at 37 mbps down 10 mbps up.

[Dave Rice]

WiFi calling sorted out the family in Cornwall. Most of the buildings are in a sheltered bowl, about 20′ deep, surrounded by trees. Great when it was a farm but even 3G is no chance and ADSL is pathetic. Somehow they got BT to put in fibre to the premises and I installed a Ubiquiti Mesh network that covers the whole area, inside and out. They ditched some landlines too, so the whole thing will pay for itself in a year or so.

There’s a separate WiFi SSID for holidaymakers renting out any of the buildings and one for my cousins business. Easy to do when you buy the right kit and spend a little more on your mobile contract and get it from one of the big players.

[Dave Rice]

Nice one Mark.

Dell: I know the feeling but as a straight “office” machine you don’t want to do anything to they are fine. Microdream do HP and Lenovo too and you can have the HDD swapped for an SSD for £30.

[Dave Rice]

It’s the Vigor 130.

It depends on your ISP but for TalkTalk (which requires no authentication) it sets itself up and then “disappears”. You plug your routers Ethernet WAN port into it’s LAN port and set the router to obtain IP automatically and away you go.

This is what I’ll be doing on the weekend but with my 2760 set to bridge mode. I have an old non VDSL Draytek 2830N that will be doing the router work for the Home and Test LANs. Amazingly powerful piece of kit that would cost £250 now and fully understands VLANs. Indeed I can have 8 of them with 4 IP subnets distributed over any combination and mix of 4 LAN ports and 4 SSIDs. My I-O-T will be truly isolated ?

For BT or other ISPs that use PPPoE you set it up in a similar way but the router connected to it (still via Ethernet) has to be set to PPPoE and you put your authentication credentials in there.

It opens up all sorts of interesting devices, the Synology routers are truly awesome with a fantastic GUI (as powerful as a business wants but with the same features packaged as “home” too) but they’re expensive. However they are introducing their own Mesh system soon with the units – Synology MR2200ac  Simultaneous Tri-Band Gigabit – at £125 each level.

That will give Google, BT and Nest a real run for their money and it will be supported (at no extra cost) to the level businesses will expect, not a put it on the shelf and forget it consumer unit. Might be worth waiting for Steve.

EDIT – I’ve been talking Fibre (VDSL2) here but the same principals apply to ADSL, it’s just a slightly different set up of the V130. For Virgin cable I understand it’s easy to put their router into bridge mode.

[Dave Rice]

Yes it’s a pig of a GUI. Wait until you get to the firewall ports pages…

The biggest problem I had with it was connection dropping. I never used the WiFi but these units are not made for anything but light use.

Thinking about I-O-T I think it’s essential that they’re kept apart from the main network. That means multiple SSIDs with a proper guest function on at least one i.e. they can only access the internet on that SSID. You should be able to do that with any half decent router but again the price creeps up and you have all your eggs in one basket.

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