artiss.blog

Blog

  • Broadband Speeds

    I’m not a fan of all the recent bleating about broadband speeds and how we’re apparently being “conned” by our ISP’s. The wording is already clear… you get “up to” 8 Mbps. You can’t then complain that you only get 2 or 3.

    However, testing your actual connection speed is something else entirely. How do you know what speed you are actually running at? Using 7 different online speed testers I’ve just received an upload speed of anything between 537 and 960 Kbps and a download speed between 2498 and 3494 Kbps. That’s a rather big difference and the kind of thing that will cause more people to write to Watchdog, Ofcom, and whoever else.

    Is there a definitive way of working it out?

  • Firebug and online banking

    Over the last few days I’ve had a problem accessing my online banking (in this case Alliance and Leicester) from Firefox. Internet Explorer was fine.

    After running Firefox in safe mode (run firefox -safe-mode) I realised the issue was with one of my add-ons. With a hunch I launched Firefox normally and disabled Firebug. Sure enough, I could now access my banking.

    I don’t know why this change has occurred – possibly A&L have upgraded their site security. Anyway I can live with FireBug disabled until I need to use it.

  • I Spit My Last Breath at Thee

    I Spit My Last Breath at Thee

    Ricardo Montalbán, better known to me as Khan Noonien Singh, has died. Very sad.

    He was possibly one of the best Star Trek “baddies” and made Wrath of Khan what it was – the best Trek film they made.

    And no, that wasn’t a false chest – that was really him.

  • MD5 Hash

    Another day, another online tool.

    This time a quick and simple one – an MD5 hash generator. It doesn’t generate them from a file, but rather from a text string. Simply type in your text and it will return the MD5 hashed equivalent.

    If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you probably don’t need it 😉

  • Tired, angry and emotional

    Tired, angry and emotional

    And I have no idea why I feel like this.

    Last night I got home to find one the headlight bulbs in my car had blown. To make sure I got the right one, I thought I’d take the blown one out. Then I thought that maybe I should test it was the bulb (as it looked okay), so should swap it with the other one. That proved it was the bulk. All fine so far. So I now go to put the good bulb back… will it go. No.

    45 minutes later and I’m still trying. The bulb is battered to death (but still working) and I’m shouting and ranting at this point. It’s dark and it’s cold and neither of my headlights are now working.

    At 5:40pm I drive my car up to Kam Servicing. They’re closing but as a favour help me out and replace both bulbs and fit them in for me. They charge me just for the bulbs (although they’d cashed-up and closed the PC down, so I’ve got to nip back tonight to pay) but ask me not to come back again just for a bulb replacement. This makes me wonder what I’ll do in future if a bulb blows (apart from doing it in the light).

    By this time it was 6. I hadn’t had any tea and I was due to leave an hour later for rehearsals.  I decided to stay in and have a long bath instead.

    But why I’m feeling so tetchy and emotional right now, I don’t know.

    I need a holiday!