Scargill

Archive for May, 2011

As regular readers will know I’ve been struggling with Orange incompetence for years now, if it’s not been poor customer service, it’s been lack of signal (there is no Orange signal in my village, hasn’t been for the last decade and now I understand they have no plans to do anything about this – despite claiming they put applications in on more than one occasion for masts – I just don’t buy this).

Anyway having discovered that someone has already successfully won a legal case to get out of their contract because of lack of signal, I convinced Orange to let me go without a penalty.

Armed with that freedom I headed off to the THREE store. Why THREE? Well, I already use (and recommend) their MIFI units and perhaps contrary to what you might think, they have quite an impressive coverage in the UK, at least everywhere I’ve tried up to now. They are also FAR more realistic with data, offering up to 15GIG a month data on their MIFI units. Better, on their iPhone deals, the offer a flat-rate package at £35 a month that gives “all-you-can-eat” data.

Now, we’ve all heard that from the other operators who until recently claimed “unlimited” broadband then when you read the fine print it’s a con – they have “fair use” policies which means the claim of unlimited is really a downright lie.

So I checked – according to THREE, “all you can eat” means unlimited data with no fair use policy.  Further, unlike Orange who charge an extra TEN POUNDS a month to share phone data with a laptop, sharing with the laptop is INCLUDED in the deal.

For reasons well beyond me the fellow at the THREE store thought this did not include iPads which would not work – but I remember standing outside the store thinking “But if you share over WIFI how on earth would it distinguish an iPad from a laptop?” and sure enough I was right, the iPhone will take in 3G, spit out WIFI and share it with any device that works on WIFI AND yes it will handle VPNs for those who need to log into work.

So, armed with my new phone and new company I headed off from Hexham for a trip to Blackpool, Internet radio (the American BIG CHEESE radio station) running on the phone…  and in a trip taking over 2 hours, I lost no more than a couple of minutes of radio time. Bye Bye BBC!

This is so impressive. We might not have colonies on the moon but the 21st century isn’t doing so bad up to now… if only we could manage climate control as well…

It’s not uncommon for people to read the headline figure on their broadband connection “8 meg” and think they have a good deal then wonder why SKYPE gives them problems!  Here’s a simple guide to getting wise.

Most standard Internet connections in the UK use what is called ADSL – all you need to know is that this means you don’t get the same speed in both directions.  When you’re told you have an “8 meg” connection that usually means the maximum DOWNLOAD (data coming to you). The reality is usually less than that and depends on CONTENTION (how many other people are sharing your connection at any moment in time) and UPLOAD (data going FROM you).

Also important is the PING time – i.e. if you send a bit of data out – how long before it actually gets to the other end.

Fortunately there are some free tools to help you get to the bottom of this without being a rocket scientist. These sites are easy to use and more or less self-explanatory. When I get a minute I’ll go into more detail but for now, consider this.. you have your sparkly new 8 MEG connection and Skype doesn’t seem to work well. In reality it’s your upload speed that is important together with any delays… you SEND video/audio to the other guy and he SENDS video/audio to you – the download speed doesn’t really come into it as long as it is faster than the upload speed.  Of course all of this assumes your kids are not downloading war and peace…

Have a play with these tools – out of interest the results you see are my own rural broadband results.

Testing Upload and DOWNLOAD speeds

Two excellent sites are….

http://www.speedtest.net/

and

http://www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk/

Testing PING and JITTER

Try this out – it’s pretty self-explanatory.

http://www.pingtest.net/

I’ve been thinking about aliens and UFOs recently – mainly because every time I go channel-hopping on Sky there’s some conspiracy program or other trying to prove the government is covering things up.

I’m afraid after many years of thinking about this subject, I’ve come to the conclusion that UFOs fit into the same categories as gods – i.e. wishful thinking, nothing more.

Why?

Well, that’s not to say I don’t think there ARE UFOs – a long way away minding their own business. I just don’t think there are any here – and I think SETI are wasting their time looking for radio broadcasts from space.

Part of the problem is our inability sometimes to see out of the box.. take UFO sightings for example. It’s absolutely DEAD CERT that UFOs do not come from any planet in our solar system – if that doesn’t make sense to you I’m not going to explain other than to say – go and watch Discovery channel – we’d know if there were any massive factories on these planets creating UFOs. So where does that leave us? Well, other solar systems of course.

There are so many star systems out there with planets that there are BOUND to be advanced civilisations out there and they’d need to be a pretty advanced civilisation to send out a UFO into our star system. Why? Because unless their main goal in life was wasting time, they’d have had to figure out how to go faster than light by some way – and our science says that’s pretty much a non-starter.

That’s not to say that faster-than-light travel is impossible – it’s just to say that if it is both possible and practical we won’t be doing it in the near future – and that’s the point… they would have indeed to be so far ahead of us that we could not possibly hold anything other than novelty value for them. This is real life, not Stargate (much as I like Stargate).  Indeed that’s the central plank of my argument – anyone SO advanced would be very unlikely to accidentally leave the lights on so we could spot them at night.

But more’s the point, we’ve been serious about technology for less than my lifetime – lets face it back in the 50’s we had, what BAKELIGHT and VALVES and most devices were that simple that it was actually possible for one very bright person to know pretty much how everything works. Those days have long gone. In 60 years we’ve transformed this planet and our technologies beyond recognition and we’ve only just STARTED…  We USED to send out Megawatts of easily digested signals which would go off to other worlds in time but today we send highly encrypted digital signals – mostly by methods that don’t involve powerful wide-angled radio waves. In time everything will be a mix of optical and short range radio – so we won’t be sending ANYTHING significant out to space and what we do send out will be so well compressed and encrypted – that it will look just like – well, noise. Background noise in fact. 

Any aliens likely to be within range will:

a. likely have no use for us other than as zoo specimens

b. be transmitting data so complex we could never hope to read it – just as someone from the 50s would never hope to do anything useful with a DVD.

c. Be watching us from a safe distance just the military can watch us from satellites so far away you can’t tell them from stars – only much much further away and with much better resolution.

and if they do need to pop down to pick up samples – they’re CERTAINLY not going to leave the lights on. 

I trust that knocks aliens on the head!

Peter Scargill