Today at 11am, walk away from whatever you are doing and fall silent for just two minutes and spend the time thinking about those who have died in conflicts around the world…
These brave men and women fought and died for us as individuals so it doesn’t matter if you are having a bad day at work or feeling grumpy, that is nothing compared to the sacrifice they made.
So today just one simple thing, just remember them….
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OK this is something I see springing up quite a bit on various forums so I thought I would write a simple how-to to make sure you are getting the most out of your ADSL broadband connection.
Check Your Line Quality
First things first, you need to check your line quality as this is the biggest influencing factor on your speed. It’s very simply to do just locate the master socket for your BT line where it enters your home.
Carefully unscrew the master faceplate and ease it off the retaining box. Behind the faceplate there should be a socket that is for testing purposes. Plug an analogue telephone into the socket and dial 17070 and hit option 2. You will then carry out a quiet line test. There should be no or minimal hissing, crackling or popping noises on the line. If there are, ring BT and complain until they sound out an engineer to sort it out. Don’t mention your ADSL speed, just the noise on the line.
Set a Benchmark Speed
Assuming you’ve done the quiet line test, we next need to set a baseline speed to measure against. First plug your modem directly into the test socket above and run a speed test at somewhere like www.speedtest.net. Do a couple of tests to get an average and note the result. Next do the same with your faceplate screwed back together and make a note.
There’s a good description of this here:
http://adsl.yesyes.info/modules/edito/content.php?id=3
If the second set of results is significantly lower then the problem may be down to your internal wiring so read on…
Remove Your Bell Wire
This is used for older style bell ringers which if you don’t use are pretty useless. Its simply an orange wire in the back of your faceplate and removing it can improve your speed:
http://www.draytek.co.uk/support/kb_vigor_linefaults.html
Fit a New Filtered Faceplate
The standard face plate that comes with the socket is unfiltered. Most ISPs will supply a micro filter but it is well worth replacing the master faceplate with a filter built in. They are not expensive and can be purchased here:
http://www.adslnation.com/products/xte2005.php
Filter All Other Extensions
On all your other extensions, make sure you either fit a faceplate as above or add a micro filter to the line. This especially important if you have a sky box.
If you carry out all of the above then you should see an improvement in speed. The biggest factor outside of your control though is the distance to the exchange will can dramatically reduce your speed.
An excellent way of checking the location of your nearest exchange is to use Sam Knows:
http://www.samknows.com/broadband/search.php
This will tell you all sorts of handy information about your local telephone exchange.
Finally look at your provider and consider whether they are giving you the best possible service for your money. http://www.thinkbroadband.com is an excellent resource for switching…
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Well that s what I did with one slip of the command line. Instead of typing crontab -l for a list of the root cron jobs I used the -r switch by accident and poof, off went my root crons…
Dopey I know but I needed to reset the cPanel default cron jobs so after a bit of searching I found the following which should be suitable for anyone else who has fat fingers like me…
Access the root cron:
pico /var/spool/cron/root
And now add the following:
2 0 * * * /scripts/upcp
0 1 * * * /scripts/cpbackup
*/15 * * * * /usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/bin/dnsqueue > /dev/null 2>&1
2,58 * * * * /usr/local/bandmin/bandmin
0 0 * * * /usr/local/bandmin/ipaddrmap
30 21 * * * /usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/docroot/cgi/cpaddons_report.pl
--notify
0 6 * * * /scripts/exim_tidydb > /dev/null 2>&1
*/5 * * * * /usr/local/cpanel/bin/dcpumon >/dev/null 2>&1
Ctrl + X to save and you’re done.
Moral of the story: put your fingers on a diet and think before hitting enter 
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OK I actually completed this project some time ago but hadn’t got round to posting the last section which was simply putting the last few bits together and tidying up.
This was actually the easiest bit in terms of jumper identification as the Asus motherboard manual is so clear and concise so it didn’t present any great difficulty. Some parts like fitting the cables round the case to help airflow were tricky but the pictures below show the system with the final few parts added:
Sound card fitted into motherboard
Wiring looms hidden behind the back casing
The finished interior
Another view of the completed interior
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Well the motherboard finally arrived so I now have all the parts to crack on and finish this beast! A pic of the motherboard contents is below…
Motherboard
Fitting the fan above the CPU was very tricky as I had to use some force to ensure the fan was secure over the CPU so I’m glad I did that before installing the board into the case. I also fitted my 4×1GB RAM sticks before wiggling the board into place on the built in risers and aligning the rear ports.
As you can see from the pic below, there wasn’t a lot of space left after I did this!
Motherboard fitted into case
Now it’s just a case of plugging all the bits into the right place!
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How do you get a square peg into a round hole? With great difficulty!
This is what I found today trying to squeeze this puppy into the case.
Although the Antec case has excellent routing and ducting to allow cables to move around the case without disrupting airflow, getting the bugger into the PSU cage is a feat of endurance!
On the plus side it’s incredibly solid and fully grommeted to eliminate vibration. Plus it has oodles of power for all the fans and the processor so this will all help keep the speed up.
PSU Fitted
The pic above shows the two raptors installed and the cables looking a little messy at the moment.
I’ll be tidying it all up tomorrow when the motherboard finally arrives…
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Now surprising as this may seem from a geek like me but I have never actually built my own computer system from scratch although this has always been one of the things I’ve always wanted to do.
Faced with rising temperatures and sluggishness in my current system, I made the decision to upgrade the core components and custom build my own system.
Now before starting I decided to draw up a list of wants and needs. This obviously dictated what parts I purchased and the spec so…
With the fantastic help of Simon at Computer Products Limited, who also supplied all the parts at an excellent price, I settled on the following spec for the new machine:
The remaining components such as the RAM, graphics cards and two other disks were taken from the existing system to be added to new beast.
At the time of writing I’m just waiting for the motherboard to appear and then I can really crack on. I’ve have made a start and took some pics though:
Side view of the empty Antec case
Front view of the case with the hinged door open
Next job, fitting the PSU…
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Three years ago Alex Tew of www.milliondollarhomepage.com fame cam up with a fantastic and simple idea that made him a boat load of cash. He even popped up on a business forum I use when at the time I said it was a great idea:
http://www.shell-livewire.com/forums…?threadid=8598
His next idea www.pixellotto.com flopped miserably but now he is selling a limited run of 1,000 posters of the MDH home page with 100 signed by him:
http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/poster/
This will easily net him a cool £25,000 in sales so is he a shrewd entrepreneur or is just lucky and flogging a dead horse?
Personally I think he had a great idea but just failed to capitalise on it’s success.
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We use one of the countries leading payment gateway services to download a small text file for updating currency rates for eCommerce stores.
This morning I downloaded 5,863 alert emails telling me the service had failed!
Logging onto their site someone has dropped a massive spanner and forbidden access to the text file! Ringing them got a “Oh thats odd, we’ll get onto it straight away” response.
Why the bloody hell do they change such critical stuff with no notice or thought?? It drives me nuts when companies as big as this just break stuff and then wait for someone to ring them. Idiots…
Now I can’t name and shame but lets say they operate a Secure environment for when you are Trading online….
And breath…
I feel better now
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The latest realease of WordPress (v2.6) has a rather odd bug that is not only annoying but a massive show stopper. I came across the bug myself when I recently upgraded the blog last month and it’s popping up all over the place so I though a quick post would help…
In essence, the problem lies with how the permalinks are rendered by the Wordpress code. After upgrading to 2.6 your permalinks may simply go to a built in 404 page. The problem is within the rewrite rules to produce sexy links and the fix is very quick and simple.
Log in to your Wordpress admin section and then go to:
Settings > Permalinks
Scroll down and at the bottom under the optional section simply add /category in the category field and /tag in the tag field.
Click save and your permalinks should then start working again with no change to the actual structure of the URL itself.
And that’s it. Next week, how to save the planet from global warming and also a 10 second guide to becoming irresistible to women…