Category: Life

There are lots of useful hints and tips around – often relating to fiddling around with your MTU, for instance – few of which I’ve found give any benefit. However, here’s one that even gets the backing of BT.

It would appear that in many people’s master BT socket (the one that all your other extension cables and phones are plugged into) there is a wire still in use that, well, isn’t really needed – the bell wire. And it can often cause interference resulting in slower internet connections.

The DIY answer is to open up this socket and remove the wire. The safer option for those who are terrified of pulling on a limp cable that’s barely held in place by anything, is to buy the iPlate from BT. Yes, BT have created a replacement front for your master box that essentially does this for you. And for less than £6 (inc P&P).

Zen Internet, my ISP, have been quotes as saying…

In a small scale trial we performed… the results [were] varied from no increase up to 1Mb/sec

You may not see immediate improvements because BT automatically limits the speed of your line to match your sync speed to improve connection stability. This is known as your BRAS profile (Zen Internet have an excellent support site for customers where you can check your current BRAS profile) and it can take up to three days for BTs automated equipment to adjust this profile.

Personally, I was disappointed – not by the results but the fact that the wire was already missing from mine when I checked, so I have nothing to try. Drat.

It’s almost daily at the moment that something goes wrong.

Today, after my wife accidentely left the Wii on all night, I realised that a lot of the online facilites aren’t working. The two events are unrelated, just simply that after being left on I decided to test it. And I didn’t test all the Wii online functionality when I changed the router recently.

The web appears to work. And that’s about it. If I do a connection check, it says it’s working but then can’t do a system upgrade check. The news won’t work, and I can’t get on the Nintendo Channel (I assume the Shop Channel is the same).

On top of that my SoundBridge (this streams music from a NAS hard drive that I have) refuses to communicate with the router too. Again, something I didn’t test when I changed the router.

In the case of the SoundBridge, it may be a port change that needs to happen.

My laptop can connect to the internet fine too – it seems to me that internet traffic (port 80?) works fine. But then again, my PC (which isn’t connected wirelessly, but if the issue is the firewall on the router, it shouldn’t make a difference) has no issues at all. It’s all very confusing I have to admit.

If anyone out there has any ideas, I’m open to them. Once I register my router with Netgear I’ll submit a query to them about this. I also have active posts on Wii, SoundBridge and Netgear forums (but so far the responses haven’t been too useful).

Now, without going into the wrongs and rights of it all, most of my websites follow a familiar theme of being a set width. This blog, even though it’s WordPress, is, as is BMTG and Copy+.

This width is designed to fit on the width of what I deem to be the smallest screen that a reasonable number of people are using (on PC’s – not going into mobile phone handsets and the such). That size, in my belief, is 800×600 (according to Google Analytics this was the 5th most popular resolution used by visitors to the BMTG site)- the initial Asus PC’s, which sold so well this year, were exactly that.

However, the width I’ve been using has been very much a “finger in the air” affair – so much so, that the appearance of a vertical toolbar causes the horizontal one to appear in some cases. Yep, I got it wrong.

I’ve therefore, recently, been doing some research – I wrote a JavaScript program to display the current browser size, and display a horizontal bar in varying lengths. This allowed me to work out how much “real estate” the browser was using up – e.g. launch IE7 and it takes up 21 pixels horizontally. That means whatever your screen size is set to, the web page will 21 less to play this. In fact, IE7 was the worst offender (along with IE6), so that’s become the benchmark – 779 pixels (IE does something that the other browsers don’t – it has a permanent horizontal scrollbar. So whether it’s needed or not, it’s there using up the same amount of space all the time).

Firefox uses 17 pixels and Opera, well, god only knows – I got strange results. Without a vertical scrollbar, it took up (strangely) 1 pixel horizontally. However, introduce the scrollbar and it took up – the same. It would allow my image to be 799 pixels wide and not bat an eyelid. Make it 800 though and the scrollbar appeared. Why this happened I honestly don’t understand. But I’ve tried a 779 wide page and that works, so Opera is certainly not using up more than the “magic” 21 pixels.

Konqueror uses 19 pixels and Safari (on Windows) is the slimmest at just 15 pixels.

The Copy+ site has already been converted to this new width, and the BMTG site will be soon too.

I’m struggling with a Foxmarks problem – I’ve become pretty dependant on this useful utility synchronising my Firefox bookmarks. After sorting out an initial problem it’s now working until the point that I add a new bookmark. Then I get a bizarre error (bizarre in that I can’t find anyone else who’s had it)…

[2008-09-29 17:42:43] Exception in AcceptNodes: Error: Places error calling function untagURI() {
[native code]
} with args [{}, [""]] Original error: [Exception... "'Illegal value' when calling method: [nsITaggingService::untagURI]"  nsresult: "0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE)"  location: "JS frame :: chrome://foxmarks/content/foxmarks-places.js :: Call :: line 100"  data: no]
[2008-09-29 17:42:43] Returned error: Synchronization error(3)
[2008-09-29 17:42:43] Will retry at Mon Sep 29 2008 18:12:56 GMT+0100 (GMT Standard Time)

Weird. Anyway, I’ve emailed Foxmarks now – I hope this gets sorted out.

But, hey, as much as that made me tear my hair out last night, that’s nothing to the feeling of loss when I woke up to find my internet access missing! I’ve a red light on my modem against “Internet” (but a green against “ADSL”). I’ve rang my ISP and they’ve run some tests – it’s either the modem or a BT line fault. They want to check the former before logging a fault with BT and I’m work now. So it’s an evening job… all without my internet access. How will I cope :p