Apparently my local exchange gets onto 21CN in November which means I can start hassling ISPs to give me 24Mbps ADSL. Not that I know what I would sensibly do with that much bandwidth:
BT Wholesale has set an enablement date of 18/11/2008 for their 21CN Wholesale Broadband Connect product at the Brentwood exchange
If you want to find out what ADSL/SDSL services you can get, take a trip to SamKnows.
But then again, maybe 21CN won’t make any difference.
After cracking how to get movies onto the Nokia N95, my employer has issued me with a Blackberry 8310. So I have to start all over again. Luckily it didn’t take too long.
If you want to rip from a DVD, don’t forget to copy it to your hard disk first using this tool. Next, ask Handbrake to compress the movie down to something that will fit on your Blackberry before just copying it over using USB.
I’ve tried a few settings and got the following to work:
Filename = whatever-you-want.mp4
Encoder = MPeg4
Audio = AAC
Width = 320 Height = 128 widescreen or 240 TV (untick everything else on picture settings tab)
Video: 2-pass Frame-rate = auto (nothing else ticked on video tab)
Average Bit Rate = 700 Audio Bit-rate 160kbps (or lower if you want to save space)
I had trouble when I ticked the chapter markers box but it may work for you.
You can squeeze a DVD down to 500-750MB which gives you some idea on what you need to put in that little microSD slot hidden under the battery.
Nice.
A very good question. There are lots of options out there and contrary and conflicting advice. You can keep a good level of security inexpensively and by following a few golden rules. This article provides advice for the home user using low cost or free software as experience tells me that most novice users want exactly that. (more…)
So we’ve seen three cable systems fail this week. I work for a major Australian telecoms company that sells amongst other things, capacity on these cable systems. Good old SMW3 is holding on well even though its newer, more robust cousin SMW4 has fallen over. The trouble with international Internet comms is that it all fires down a handful of cables.
The days when we all envisaged a Borg-like mesh of cables spanning the globe or a handful of major players providing competitive rates for core backbone have largely fizzled away into memory. Instead, a few consortium build cables and sell capacity to other providers who in turn resell or provide direct Internet and private services over them.
If you want to get to Asia from Europe fast, you’ve really got to be considering SMW4 but as it is unprotected, SMW3 capacity is needed as well to provide some resilience. Luckily in this case, the thinking behind making SMW3 and SMW4 take slightly different routes has paid off. FLAG and FALCON unfortunately aren’t on the same plan.
Of course if the mysterious “ship anchor” or whatever it is takes out SMW3 as well then many countries may see the Internet disappear or become unusable altogether.
Keep everything crossed and spare a thought for those guys on the cabling ships in freezing cold seas working hard so that your Facebook account becomes available again.
So we’ve seen three cable systems fail this week. I work for a major Australian telecoms company that sells amongst other things, capacity on these cable systems. Good old SMW3 is holding on well even though its newer, more robust cousin SMW4 has fallen over. The trouble with international Internet comms is that it all fires down a handful of cables.
The days when we all envisaged a Borg-like mesh of cables spanning the globe or a handful of major players providing competitive rates for core backbone have largely fizzled away into memory. Instead, a few consortium build cables and sell capacity to other providers who in turn resell or provide direct Internet and private services over them.
If you want to get to Asia from Europe fast, you’ve really got to be considering SMW4 but as it is unprotected, SMW3 capacity is needed as well to provide some resilience. Luckily in this case, the thinking behind making SMW3 and SMW4 take slightly different routes has paid off. FLAG and FALCON unfortunately aren’t on the same plan.
Of course if the mysterious “ship anchor” or whatever it is takes out SMW3 as well then many countries may see the Internet disappear or become unusable altogether.
Keep everything crossed and spare a thought for those guys on the cabling ships in freezing cold seas working hard so that your Facebook account becomes available again.
Unfortunately although Virtualbox runs very well, it does not directly support SCSI devices. So I need to try VMWare instead. Darn it. Oh well. At least I know now.
I attended a one-day Microsoft training event about Server 2008 and IIS7. Looks like a great bunch of technology strides for the service provider space. If I had the money, I’d build a server and start selling it myself. But anyway. One thing that did occur to me was how far virtualisation has come along. The trigger for this was the fact that each of us was supplied with a laptop for the day loaded with three virtual servers. It made the practicals very straight-forward and it got me thinking.
You see a few years ago we didn’t have a digital camera but instead an APS one. We still have all hte negatives in the natty little cartridges. At the time we bought a Canon film scanner in order for us to scan straight from negatives. I needed to do just that the other day but Vista doesn’t like the scanner and Canon don’t seem bothered about it. So there I am. Stuck.
But I remembered VirtualBox. Virtualisation for free. So now I should be able to dig out an old Windows XP licence, build a virtual PC and run the old Canon software inside it. I’ll let you know how I get on.
And I do like IIS7. PHP on IIS7 fixes a few problems for me. Apache on WinXP is still a lot cheaper for my home setup. Next time I need to build a web server for a customer. Apache won’t be an automatic choice anymore. Have a look for yourself if you are interested.
There is a new sneaky horrible piece of code about. Check to see if you have it and clean it up here using GMER.
Mebroot also known as Sinowal.
Warner Bros. are to stop supporting HD-DVD. So is this the end of the format and has Blu-Ray won ? Well it looks that way.
The expected XBox 360 with inbuilt HD-DVD support seems to have been a rumour or has been quietly killed off. So it looks like there is only one show left in town. This will sort out a load of problems where some movies are only in one format in some regions and the other format in other places.
Personally I don’t care who wins (or who has won) so long as one of them does and the consumer doesn’t have to be a spectator at this bun-fight anymore.
I guess there will be a fire-sales on HD-DVD movies and players soon now as well.
woo-hoo!
Well after writing about my Christmas wish-list it seems pertinent to give any fellow Nokia N95 owners out there a little present. For those who have got hold of a copy of Handbrake and used the settings I previously suggested I really should have let you in on a little secret. You can’t just drop your legally-owned DVD in the drive and handbrake it over to the Nokia as it is copy-protected.
I was lucky enough to get (amongst other things) a new 6GB memory card for the Nokia and Die Hard 4.0 on DVD. Well, the next step was obvious. Ripping the DVD first requires getting the content onto the Hard Disk in a format that HandBrake can deal with. So if you legally own a movie on DVD and want to get it onto your Nokia, you need this Useful DVD tool. When you install it, decline any new updates. The reason behind that advice is probably best found on Wikipedia.
Once you have your folder, run Handbrake and create your MP4 file. Copy to your memory card and your commute just got a lot more enjoyable. You can even rip those music videos you have on those Special Edition CDs in your music collection and have your own version of MTV rather than have to look at your fellow passengers whilst listening to your MP3 collection.
Happy New Year.