Daily Archives: 15/01/2008

Looking For a New ISP

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I use a business ADSL line at home provided by my employer, but since I’m changing jobs, that’s going to go away so I need a new ISP. My blog and mail are also hosted at work, so they will have to hang off the end of the new line while I change and configure my new hosting. My current ISP is, well, work, as an Entanet reseller and I’ve been exceptionally happy with Entanet, but business lines aren’t cheap so I’m not going to migrate it to my private telephone number.

So, I solicit your opinion. I need the following things:

  • Static IP
  • No blocked ports
  • Free setup and activation

Now I know these things are provided by a lot of ISPs and certainly my previous ISP before I got a business line provided my company, Freedom2Surf, do this and so do pretty much all of the other Entanet resellers do, so this isn’t a problem really.What makes the choice difficult are the following:

  • I’d like ~800KB upload speed which is only available on the business connections with all of the above, as I’m going to have to host my blog and mail on the end of this line for a week or 4
  • At least ~50GB download allowance, preferably with extra allowances off-peak
  • Around £25 on an ongoing monthly basis, ignoring discounted months up-front

Extra bonus points for being able to provide extra no-NAT IP addresses either cheaply or at low cost. F2S used to charge £5 for an extra IP, I can’t see the situation now. Freeola (Entanet reseller) are offering 8 IP no-NAT free and are the clear winner at the moment, but none of them offer an 800KB upload without paying for the business package, which is on average a third extra.

Answers to this Dear Lazyweb in the comments. I’m willing to listen to people telling me to get cable, but Virgin Media support are said to be clueless, though if the price versus speed ratio is high enough that it’s worth me junking my BT line and ADSL kit for a wireless cable router, then I’ll think about it and hope I never have to speak to them. Ooh and Entanet and therefore their resellers are trialling 24Mb ADSL, though sadly my exchange isn’t due for this til 2011.

Dates for LugRadio Live USA 2008 Announced

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Yes. I am going to San Francisco with my 3 fat LugRadio friends to spread to good word. That’s right, LugRadio Live is happening in the USA this year and nobody is going to be able to understand my accent or any of my jokes.

This season of joy will take place on the 12th and 13th April 2008 at the Metreon in SF. This means all you Americans should be thinking of pre-registering as there are limited tickets, see here for details as they emerge. We’re lining up some fantastic big-name speakers but we also want to hear from the little guys on the street doing cool stuff for BOFs, the exhibition and the 3 minute lightbulb talks. If you want to lead a BOF, promote your cool (ideally interactive) project or do a quick lightbulb talk, let us know by emailing show at lugradio dot org.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Lost Hours

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I thought I would point out that I keep coming around, after what feels like several lost hours, staring at my Linux desktop and not really knowing what just happened for the last few hours. It’s happened quite a few times since the weekend and I was getting quite concerned, so I set up a web cam so I could tell the camera that it had just happened and then rewind the video to see what had happened in the preceding few hours.

The results were quite surprising. It turns out that these lost hours, and I mean periods of between 1 and 4 hours, have been spent playing Slam Soccer 2006 (aka Bolzplatz) 🙂 It’s a fun, cartoony 5-a-side soccer game, in the mould of, say, the old Spectrum and Commodore Matchday game series, with a kind of fun Nintendo feel, as opposed to say EA Sports’ Fifa soccer games.

Essentially you control the players as you might expect but you can pick where you start, in a village league, or another division and build up your stadium with the money you earn (if you start in the village league, you start with a mud patch and trash cans for goals), or you can quickstart a single game or World Cup tournament. And yes, this runs on Linux (the Mac and Windows too).

It’s not perfect however. It’s quite hard, or at least I’m not very good, even after about 8 lost hours of playing. The sound is a little crackly on my uber-powerful laptop, but fine on my ~4 and half year old desktop. And my wrist hurts too from playing too often (not the kind of wrist problem you were thinking…). Also, it requires Java and the Sun Java still isn’t completely Free (in the Open Source sense, for non software Freedom people). I haven’t tried a Free Java, like GCJ, but the game itself is Free under the GPL, though you can donate 10 Euros and get the Gold Edition with a built in team and stadium editor. The other downside is that there don’t seem to be proper Linux packages, just a tarball of the game binaries which you run manually. It also seems to leave my desktop resolution in the game resolution, which I have to change back.

All in all it’s a really fun, addictive game and I’ve lost hours so far, you should too. (Thought: online multiplayer would be nice :))