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Sea Change

After mentioning broadband earlier this week it looks like some exciting developments will start to move fast internet access forward in the UK. ADSL has been for many the only way to get broadband access, and has always looked a slightly poorer cousin compared to cable. NTL but more so Telewest have always offered faster download speeds for a comparable if not cheaper price than ADSL providers. Indeed Telewest now offer 4Meg downloads with NTL offering 3Meg.

However Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) is now starting to happen across the country and not just in London and the South East. UK Online and Bulldog are offering ADSL speeds of up to 8Meg with an increased upload of 400k. BT has also announced they will be trialling 8Meg download speeds from April this year and also testing ADSL2+ this year which can see broadband speeds go up to 18Meg (depending on line length from exchange). All this is great news but the pricing structure of broadband will have to change radically to support these speed increases.

This is where (I think) Max DSL comes in. From April BT will launch Max DSL which allows ISP’s to set your download speed to the maximum available on your line. Initially this will be to 2Meg but hopefully by year end it will be whatever your line can take up to 8Meg. This is great for the customer as it can be done transparently by the ISP but how will the price of your connection change? I think most ISP’s will move to a pricing structure that gives you bandwidth rather than speed. So £20 gives you 50Gig per month, £25 70Gig and so on. This will allow then to charge the heavy users who use up bandwidth the most money and likewise charge less for the smaller users who only use a few gigabytes per month. Most of the big ADSL providers have been introducing download caps and indeed NTL will be doing likewise for their broadband users. This is all well and good as long as the ISP provide clear guidelines and allow users to track their usage which is something my provider, Plus Net, has done since day one.

Indeed Plus Net is seemingly going to make an announcement next week on their future pricing structure for premier account holders. I’m hoping it will include details on upgrades, their fair usage policy and also future plans for the year ahead but it may just detail price and speed changes. I’ll just need to wait and see but finally the UK market is starting to catch up with the rest of Europe…but not the Swedes who can get 100MBit/s for 54 US dollars a month. Drool.

Mac Mini

Finally saw the Mac Mini in the flesh last night (cheers Graeme) and it was very impressive. The first thing that strikes you is the size – it really is small. Certainly a lot smaller than the standard Shuttle pc cases that have been doing the rounds for the last 18 months or so. When switching the Mini on you get a nasty sound playing (like a chime) which was slightly disappointing but then the second impressive feature hits home – it makes no noise. When up close you can hear a small noise and certainly when the superdrive is accessed it makes a din but in normal operation….silence.

The Mac OS itself looks jaw dropping. Through the 17inch TFT the OS looked amazing. It initially was quite confusing compared to the Windows OS but I’m sure after a few days it will feel normal. The speed was also impressive – the Safari web browser opening quickly and displaying web pages with ease. iTunes opened in a comparable time to my pc as did Photoshop – this really is a great machine for under £400.

After 40mins the third impressive feature hit home – the case of the Mini was still cool to touch. This was partly down to the aluminium case but is still tantamount to great design and the careful selection of components. The overall impression is of a good personal computer that will definitely meet anyone’s needs as long as they aren’t a gamer. I still maintain that this hooked up to a plasma/lcd tv would be a great way of browsing the net/checking e-mails from the sofa. If I had a plasma I would be buying one without hesitation – as I have a pc (and no plasma) I’ll be leaving it on the shelf but make envious glances from time to time.

Ellen

ellen
After 72 days at sea Ellen MacArthur has broken the record for the fastest solo round the world voyage. Just under an hour ago she broke the current record with one day and hours to spare. This has been a gripping challenge to follow and you cannot have anything but admiration for what she has achieved. It’s hard to imagine being alone (with on shore support team) for that length of time, grabbing 15 minutes of sleep where possible and keeping a massive boat together. During the voyage she has repaired a generator, a mast and also replaced a hard disk on a laptop. I could maybe have managed the last one but certainly not the other two.

Does put into perspective what I have achieved in the last 30 years! Well done Ellen.

 

Giving up Broadband?

Read an article on the BBC news site about a user giving up on broadband. Now that I’ve used broadband I just could not do without it. In some ways that’s a fairly sad statement to make and obviously there are more important aspects to life. But to go back to dial-up, wait an age for a simple page to come up, watching the minutes that I’m online, worry about receiving large e-mails and a total lack of online gaming would be unacceptable. When I moved house last year one of the first checks was could I get broadband!

It can no longer be a cost issue either. PlusNet are now doing a lite broadband package for £14.99 – and that’s for a 2Meg connection. Many dial-ups are either the same price or only slightly cheaper. Even AOL has just announced an unlimited 2Meg package for £29.99. In my book connections, I hope, can only get faster and hopefully they will address uploads as well.

Speaking of broadband, to see what’s available at your exchange check out the Broadband Availability Checker at The Broadband Resource. You can also see what capacity is like at your exchange (mines is full and been awaiting upgrades since November).

Spam Karma

Installed a new spam plug-in – Spam Karma. Since Friday night it has blocked 270 spam comments from being entered. 270 in just over 36 hours. It has many more options than the previous plug-in I was using and it seems to be doing a good job of picking up any new comments that shouldn’t be displayed. Like spam mail and spyware, spam commenting (and soon to be spam trackbacks) are ruining the net for the average user.

Gmail

I’m guessing they are either about to open this up to everyone or are at least in the final stages of doing so as most users have now got 50 invites to give away. I’ll never use them up and most folk I know have one now – if you need an account drop me a mail.

E4 on Freeview

Great news – Digital Spy are reporting that E4 will be on Freeview by the end of the year. For months (read years) I’ve resisted Sky. Too many channels, too little on said channels, too little time to watch terrestrial tv never mind 300 channels on Sky. But I want Sky One. I want E4. I want Sky Sports. More recently I want Sky+. This for me was almost reason enough to move to Sky.

But with E4 moving to Freeview I think I’ll make do with a new Freeview box with twin tuners and a hard disk. Probably cost £150-£300 but that will be it – no £31 to the evil that is Murdoch (childish but true). Just need to make my choice (or wait for the new Panasonic which has taken forever to come out). The only snag I can see is no matter which recorder you buy you end up with bugs and faults. That’s new technology for you. Now – where’s the video tape?

Blog Updates

Just a quick post to say that I installed Gallery a couple of weekends ago and it looks like it may have screwed up a bit of the site (dodgy htaccess rules) so apologies for any hassle cause and thanks to Graham for the heads up. My Gallery installation can be found here – it will be updated soon with some photo’s from yesteryear, including university days which are a very long 10 years ago. Gallery has been moved to Flickr which is far better than hosting locally, stores all image sizes possible and allows you to tag, comment and organise your photo’s. Should have moved ages ago..

I also seem to be suffering from some comment issues. Lewis had mentioned this ages ago which was fixed by refreshing my comment blacklist but Gordon was having issues earlier today (again thanks for the heads up). I’ll look into a different comment spam solution later in the week – I’m hoping the above issue may have caused comment issues as well.

Finally – some small updates on the right hand side including a sideblog powered by del.icio.us all in preparation for a WordPress 1.5 upgrade in the not too distant future. The links are pretty predictable but the Gran Turismo kid is my favourite so far.

Spyware

I helped out a friend from work today. “I’ve got adverts popping up from time to time and it’s starting to annoy me”. I cannot believe the amount of spyware I found and cleansed from his machine. Unbelievable. I started thinking…how did you let it get like this but after a while it was more…the majority of folks pc’s will be like this – spyware and spam are ruining the internet for the casual user. Therefore what follows is my quick guide to stopping spyware.

Firstly, use a firewall and a virus scanner. Preferably a hardware firewall but software will do. Win XP service pack 2 comes with a firewall but I would still recommend installing a separate program. As soon as you install windows make sure the firewall is up and running. Next install an anti-virus package. I still can’t see past Nortons Anti-Virus and probably Zonealarm but Nortons Security Suite will do both. PC Pro also recommended F-Secure Internet Suite as their recommended net security tool so that’s worth a look too.

That’s the pc secured but it won’t stop spyware from being installed and taking over your machine. The next best step is to install an alternative browser to Internet Explorer. You could try Opera but Firefox for me is faster, offers more features through extensions and is free. By doing this many of the spyware tools that takeover your browser will be eliminated from ever running on your machine. This however is still not enough.

Next I would download and install three different spyware detection and removal tools. They are Microsoft’s Spyware beta, Ad-Aware and Spybot. The reason why I suggest all three rather than one is that they all seem to detect spyware to a greater or lesser extent. The advantage of Microsoft’s tool is that you can have it running in the background so that new spyware threats can be trapped before they are installed. Ad-aware and Spybot are recognised as industry leaders when it comes to spyware – I would recommend running them at least once a month and deleting anything that they find.

The above should lead to a clean pc free of any nasties that are downloading in the background while you surf. However the key to hassle free pc is to make sure all the signature files and virus updates for the above software are downloaded as frequently as possible. It’s a pain but there’s no point having a virus scanner whose signatures are a year old.

Once final brownie point goes to the Microsoft Spyware beta. It has a couple of nice features that make it easy to track and remove other problems. One is the System Explorers. From here you can easily see what is currently running on your pc and what is started up each time you reboot your machine. In fact using this tool today I found a search bar that wasn’t automatically detected by any of the above tools but could easily be disabled and then removed from the System Explorer screen. The second feature is a tool to restore the default IE settings in case your browser has been hi-jacked by another search engine – very nice.

Arrogance

Couldn’t believe work today. A guy who is leaving this Friday decided to send round his own leaving sheet asking for contributions to his own gift. Not only that but he sent it round every department making sure that every office on both sites had his sheet. He even volunteered for one of the secretarys to collect in the money without telling her. Thankfully word got out before anyone contributed. The question is…what should we do in return? And will I get sacked for mentioning the word ‘work’ on a personal blog?