Broadband Speed Checker

You may have seen that last year I carried out a speed test for internet connections via a Nokia E51 and a Huawei 530 dongle from T Mobile.  I've just carried out another speed test between a Nokia E75 and a Huawei E160 dongle also from T Mobile.  The tests were carried out within 10 minutes of each other around midday today (Sunday).

This time upon connecting the Nokia to the laptop a different option appears on the phones screen, previously Nokia's would ask you if you wanted to connect in "PC Suite Mode", "Mass Storage Mode" etc etc, this time "Connect PC to Internet" appeared.  I selected that and a little screen popped up on the laptop asking to install a small piece of software to control the connection. As you can see below its a pretty unobtrusive piece of software and tells you how much data has passed through your connection. It automatically detects your service provider and sets its self up for use.

So to the tests...
With the dongle the following speeds were achieved

with the Nokia E75 the following speeds were achieved

the dongle still wins although the E75 performs a lot better than the E51 did.

Dell Streak charger 2...

Well, after adapting a fag lighter USB charger, I decided that I'd make something up that I could use with any existing USB charging ports that I had.

I found an old USB extension lead and cut it in half, then soldered the white and green wires together and reattached, and then reattached the black to black, and red to red, then finished it all off with trusty insulation tape.

Its not the neatest thing in the world.. but it sure beats forking out £25 for another charger from Dell.

Dell Streak car charger!

I recently did a crazy thing and took out a 24 month mobile phone contract with O2 in order to get my hands on the Dell Streak... I'm glad I did as its a very very funky phone. I will go into more detail on the handset at some point on here. The only things that have really annoyed me about the phone is the poor battery life, think of your charging lead as an ambilical cord and you're getting pretty close, and the deliberate method of stopping you from using already existing methods of charger to get the thing going.

It'll trickle charge from a computers USB port, which as far as I'm aware gives less that 1amp however, it will not charge from any other USB power port I had (ones that had been used to charge mobile phones, GPS devices etc.. No fag lighter USB charger would work either.. I bought a couple of 2amp chargers and neither did the trick..then I came across the following article which explained all.  To cut a long story short, you need to bust open your USB charger, (the bit you insert into the fag lighter socket) and carefully solder a joint between the middle 2 USB pins (there are 4, the middle two aren't used). I've done it and it works perfectly!

Which means... Dell have deliberately designed their phone not to charge off any other USB charging device. How very grown up and to top it off the rip off merchants wanted to charge you £50 for the privellage of using their own car charger...

Its a shame that such a nice device has such a murky background.

Tincam and why I ended up dealing with the trade union covering TCPs

I'm currently running a website that basically features photographs taken by a series of setup cameras across a stretch of water near my home.  Its quite busy and has lots of naval ships as well as tankers etc.  The weather can also get a little extreme as well.

I have one streaming camera set up.  I've spoken of it before, the Linksys jobbie, well since replacing the power supply for it, its run quite happily.  I am planning on setting up another but didn't really want the expence of another wireless camera.

I discovered a piece of software at www.tincam.com which enables you to stream video or pictures (as well as motion detection) from your webcam via a PC.  It involves portforwarding (hence previous adventure) if you're working behind a router.  You can use if for free for 30 days and then its $19 to buy.

Its fairly easy to setup (once you've dealt with your TCP trade union) and with a little extra research I managed to find some HTML code that allows you to embed the footage into your webpage rather than Media Player opening up.  Follow this link and go straight to the last post.  It works a treat!

Port forwarding...

This seems to be a such a hit and miss affair!  I'm currently running two routers.  One that filters straight off the DSL (Virgin Media) modem and a second in line with the first in my hallway.  I put in a second as my kitchen is in an extension meaning there's a bloody great external wall between my kitchen and the rest of the flat.  The second router is setup to act as an access point thus enabling a nice strong signal throughout the flat.

I use www.portforward.com for a lot of my router info, its very well put together and the people/person who hosts it writes in an easy to understand way.  I won't go into how I setup the routers to work together other than to say you need to switch of DHCP on the second and assign it an IP address.   The previously mentioned website will explain this far better than I can.  (s/he also includes a downloadable port tester)

The only discrepancy I've noticed so far is when it comes to port forwarding.  Having setup remote desktop and an FTP server I've had a bit of experience of port forwarding and have found it to be a little temperaMENTAL to setup.  The site suggests that port forwarding through 2 routers involved pointing the port from the first router to the second, then from the second router to your intended recipient PC.  I tried this and it didn't/wouldn't work.  Then I skipped the routing from first to second router and just directed from the first router to the intended PC.  This worked?... I left the port forward settings on the second router so maybe thats playing its part in some way... I would have to say that this is the most human part of computing that I've found so far.  Some bits work in some ways... and other bits don't.  There does not seem to be a clear cut "this will definatley work" method, so don't give up if you're trying it.  Just remember to be mythodical in your efforts, otherwise its very easy to end up going round and around in circles.

Other other thing I've noticed is that opening your desired port in the Windows Firewall won't always open it straight away.  I've often found that you need to allow the port to open, close the firewall, test the connection, then restart the firewall...

I get the sence the TCP section of a computer has its own trade union.

Lightning detector!

 http://www.boltek.com/stormtracker.html

Whilst searching around for extra things to add to my site, I came across lightning detection equipment!  I thought it would be a great addition to the site if I could set this up along with some sort of subscription service whereby you could sign up to receive an email when a storm was on its way and be able to watch it on the streaming camera link...

Telescope...

... I have a feeling bad things will happen if I point this at any Royal Navy ships..

I'm a little out of my depth with this..I have absolutely no idea how to use it... I did very little research into these things and was a little surprised to find it worked on mirrrors and not lenses.. I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting..  Although having done a little retrospective research it seems this will be able to produce much clearer pictures than a regular telescope... plus I might even be able to take some night time shots of the sky over the Plymouth Sound!