[Dave Rice]

Not sure how you worked that out from what I said above, and neither would I call it a rant. But you seem to enjoy provoking anyone who doesn’t agree with you. Still it distracts from facing the negative issues I suppose.

[Dave Rice]

4 years ago for a project for the local nick I needed a load of PCs to run a remote desktop client and play low res MP4 via VLC, but it had to be 24/7. So I bought some Lenovo ThinkCentre M58p Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz SFF desktops from them.

They must be 10 years old at least but they just sit there chugging away. The same can be said for the Ubiquiti APs that join them all together.  I’ve never had to touch any of it since the day it was commissioned.

[Dave Rice]

Glad I’m not in my old job.

[Dave Rice]

I didn’t think you were ? They are like nothing else, much derided, still going and not just churning the old hits out. There is still a new album every year plus side projects and the style changes.

A few years ago they re did the Space Ritual in London, then toured the 1974 Warrior on the Edge of Time album. It was mad, dancers on 6 foot stilts, and the light show is always something else. Last year they were their own support band. They did an hour all acoustically and I heard stuff I never thought I’d hear them do again.

[Dave Rice]

Musical prowess was never the point ? A lot of the punks, John Lydon especially, cited Hawkwind  as an influence. You didn’t have to be a Rick Wakeman with a musical degree to do something meaningful. Get up there and have a go and if people don’t like it that’s their problem.

The musicality and especially the lyrics took a step upwards in the Charisma years but they lost some of the things that made Hawkwind Hawkwind. They still do a fantastic stage show.

[Dave Rice]

No, no, no, you cannot say any of this because no-one knows what the future holds. You’re just talking the country down. You’re all Remaoners who just want to ignore the will of the people. This is all Project Fear Part 2.

Personally I couldn’t give a stuff about tariffs, trade finds a way around prices. BMW still sell cars here after the 20% drop in the £. I’ve always said it’s everything else that will bugger us up, especially the paper work.

I don’t think people knew just how entangled we are with every part of our lives. Some are only going to understand when it’s too late. What it will also show is just how much of the bad part of our lives comes from Westminster, not Brussels. What it’s already shown is the politicians, Conservatives especially, are quite willing to tear this country apart for their own dogma. They do not have the interests of the country in mind, purely their own.

[Dave Rice]

I’ve got all the important stuff. There’s a lot of crap out there as they never banned taping, indeed they did a lot themselves.

New album is out 14th September. They will be in Bath in 24th November with a full orchestra – yikes!

[Dave Rice]

Doremi is the height of the old original Hawkwinds powers. Funnily enough I’ve been listening to In Search of Space a bit lately. That and Hall of the Mountain Grill are of that era. The epitome is the Space Ritual Live double album, the tour being paid for from the proceeds of Silver Machine. So my recommendation would be Space Ritual as you then get Sonic Attack as well as In Search of Space & Doremi songs.

There is also a compilation called Stasis: The U.A Years 1971-1975 which contains highlights of all those.

Links:

• Space Ritual Live http://tinyurl.com/ydyfhaqp
• Stasis http://tinyurl.com/y8oeerg4
• Their next phase – Spirit of the Age – An Anthology 1976-1984 http://tinyurl.com/y8ljnv7u

[Dave Rice]

I had the Manhattan Plaza box in the kitchen. Picture wise it’s perfect but the GUI isn’t very good. The new SX may be better.

Replaced it with a Humax HB-1100S which has a much better GUI, catch up TV (via the backwards planner), WiFi and the ability to record to an external USB if you want. I have one plugged in but it’s never been used.

I will be giving Sky the heave-ho soon and will probably get a Humax HDR-1100S 500 GB for the living room. The difference is twin channels and an internal HDD.

The loss of some HD channels doesn’t bother me.

[Dave Rice]

It turns out one of the most important parts of the recent CAD mega machine was the graphics card processor.

Having said that it was “only” a 6GB 1050 Ti

[Dave Rice]

Automation has been replacing many IT jobs for years. I could upgrade 25,000 Office installs in a managed way inside a week all by myself (same goes for MS updates etc.). It would usually take 2 of us to mop up the failures, in the case of spectacular problems – usually Adobe related – we’d have a task force of 6 – 10 but the need for any physical hands on a box was very rare. It took only 2 of us to manage the AV for the same number of seats and that was mainly because you’d need cover for absence.

When I first started it was all hands on. I remember spending all day in Truro installing W95 and Office on 2 PCs via a box of floppies. But then the number of PCs in the organisation was probably measured in (many) hundreds not tens of thousands. Especially when you had to write a fully costed business case to get one!

[Dave Rice]

Cheers Bob, my Sky contract comes to an end in a couple of months and they’ve already bribed me with a reduction but I think it’s time to go.

I have a single channel HB-1100S in the kitchen that will record to the USB drive that’s attached to it, but I’ve yet to bother with catch up being so good. The £129 HDR-1100S 500GB should replace the Sky box very nicely.

[Dave Rice]

Please do Bob.

IIRC you have some Cat 5 in the loft? That’s the perfect place for an access point (on the landing ceiling) and being Power over Ethernet you don’t need mains up there.

[Dave Rice]

That reminds me of what this house used to be like. A mixture of wired, homeplugs and independent APs and extenders. I think I’ve tried them all.

Once you have a dependable AC network running, things like backup times are acceptable. My laptop’s daily incremental backup takes about a minute. The monthly 51GB full system backup takes 31 minutes. A 1.8GB Linux ISO copies from the NAS in 55 seconds ~ 300 mbps.

A mesh system may be the answer to your dilemma if a single central AP is a non starter. Either a totally wireless system like the BT Whole Home Wi-Fi or, if you have the Ethernet in the right place, Ubiquiti APs that will cooperate with each other to provide a seamless network.

I manage over 20 Ubiquiti UniFi networks now (and many more AirMax external point to point ones) and they just work. The family ex-farm in Cornwall is all joined together internally and externally by a mesh AC1200 system that also gives them a guest network for when a barn may be rented out in the summer. That only cost £300 and WiFi calling has taken the pain of crap mobile coverage away. They saved more than that by being able to cancel 2 BB contracts (although they kept one phone line for incoming calls).

Once you have a fast, dependable system in place WiFi suddenly makes sense.

[Dave Rice]

I predict a riot. Probably of laughter.

Farage has never managed to get elected as an MP and BoJo only got to be a minister due to a weak leader who needed him inside the tent, not because he was up to the job.

What have either of them actually contributed to the common good? Farage’s greatest moment has been to spook the Tories into the most divisive action short of civil war there’s been in modern times. BoJo? I can’t think of anything at all.

Let them both loose, split the Tory vote and let a central / left wing alliance in to at least get something agreed with the EU. The Tories have shown themselves incapable of anything remotely in the interests of the country, not least because they cannot agree what is in the interests of the country whether anyone else agrees with it or not.

What a time to have a weak opposition and no centralist view. Interesting times indeed.

[Dave Rice]

If the PC and it’s backup target are both wired a £25 gigabit switch would make a good backbone. If any speed critical part is wireless then you need to look at true 300N (most devices are 150) or preferably AC.

Here the newer laptops and phones are 5Ghz but for everything else I find that 2.4Ghz 300N isn’t far behind, certainly not enough to have me yearning for the AC equivalent. In the PC I use a £12 CSL – 300Mbps PCI Express (PCIe) WLAN card  .

I was using my sons bedroom as an office / workshop and I had the gigabit switch there connected to a £22TP-LINK TL-WA801ND 300 Mbps Wireless N Access Point and I use one on the Sky box. I can see the bedroom AP (same floor, 3 metres and one wall away from the Ubiquiti AC-AP-LR) is connecting at the full 300mbps. My son is a very serious competitive DOTA player and I get no complaints. The Sky AP is the floor below, 5 metres horizontally, 2 walls and the TV furniture and still connects at 243 Tx 216 Rx.

Looking at the rest of the “always on” infrastructure, the 1st Gen Chromecast is 65 / 65, the Fire TV 130 / 144, Canon MG6550 printer 150 / 150 and the Brother colour laser 65/65. So all on their specs as near as dammit. None of them have dropped a connection since the AP was rebooted for an upgrade 38 days ago. From those specs you can see that speed is not the be all and end all, most things need less than you think, but reliability is very important.

And that is what I tend to buy for, reliability and coverage rather than headline speeds.

[Dave Rice]

The 100mb router isn’t a total loss, it’s quick enough for any FTTC connection you get. Neither is it likely to hold up any wireless N networking by much, if at all. Streaming video will be no problem.

It really depends on what devices you have, how they connect and what you need them to do. I have wired NAS boxes that are capable of a maximum 800mbps and the newer laptops have AC WiFi so it makes sense to have a Gigabit switch as the heart of my network and an AC capable AP.

But all that does is reduce the time my backups and any large file transfers take, it doesn’t make any difference to streaming or surfing the net. There are a lot of wireless devices here so a robust WiFi solution makes sense. To me its worth the expense and I decided separate boxes were the way to go.

When it’s just me and the Mrs in a downsized house with a couple of laptops that will probably change.

[Dave Rice]

1. yes it’s still the same copper from the green cabinet to your existing BT socket. Nothing changes at your end.
2. the authentication method is very different, as are the transmission settings. The router has to be VDSL capable (you won’t get a white box these days). Anything that says “x”DSL means it can do ADSL and VDSL.

Most routers worth buying these days are xDSL and can deal with an RJ45 or Ethernet presentation. There are exceptions, usually aimed at the business world, that are Ethernet only and the Synologys fall into this category. If you wanted one of these you’d need a VDSL modem like the Vigor 130 to do the hardware business, the authetication would still be done by the router.

This is all I need to configure on my Vigor 2762 to get my FTTC physically working.

Which gets me this

But doesn’t get me an internet connection. That is what the previous screenshots were about. That’s why the physical connection and authentication can be provided by two different boxes. However you’d need a very good reason these days to use two boxes.

[Dave Rice]

It depends what you want to cure Bob. If you need better file sharing i.e. a small file server you’d be better getting a dedicated NAS to add to your network as the cost would be about the same and the result would be better.

If you were starting from scratch the Synology router might make some sense (it has a lot of the technology from the Synology NAS).

[Dave Rice]

I’m amazed Asus have screwed up the VDSL side, even the cheapest xDSL router I’ve bought has been OK in that department.

The DrayTek Vigor 130 does the same job and it’s a true bridge so you need a PPPoE or PPPoA device after it. This allows you to then use the likes of a Synology RT1900ac  router which is the dogs doo-dahs for USB drive sharing but is Ethernet only.

[Author]

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