Author: Mosh

Orange LiveBox wifi

livebox 1.
Orange - please tell your staff that this thing does have wi-fi

I’ve just spent the night at a friend’s house. She “doesn’t have wi-fi“, apparently. Well, she didn’t. Now she does.

She’s using Orange for her internet and her LiveBox never gave her wifi. She contacted Orange over a year ago and was told that her connection was “wired only” and that she couldn’t get it. Strange, then, when I looked at the router and it had a nice green light next to the wifi icon on the front and another button at the back with a wifi icon next to it. Pressing this made the light on the front flash for a bit.

Long story short, she does have wireless. She always had it. It’s just that nobody had told her how to use it or provided her with information on how to configure it.

So, here’s what you do:

  1. Look on the label on the router – you’ll see a long code on the bottom line made up of seemingly random letters and numbers. This is your wi-fi key.
  2. Press the button on the back of the router next to the wi-fi icon. You have about a minute to make the connection from now – basically while the light on the front is flashing.
  3. On your computer, go through the usual routine for adding a new wireless network. Enter the wi-fi key from step 1 without spaces between the characters.

You should now have a working connection. This was done on the Orange Livebox Thomson D700.

Yes, it was as simple as that. Over a year with no wi-fi because Orange either lied to her, or the several people in the call centre simply didn’t know what the hell they were talking about when she called.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Do not buy from…

At the risk of giving them some free publicity will dragontshirts[dot]net kindly stop trying to spam my blog with comments? Every single one gets collared as a spam, none get published and nor will they.

In addition I would heartily recommend that none of my readers remotely considers buying anything from them. After all, who wants to promote the use of comment spam as an advertising medium?

Daybreakers

Well, today’s movie blow-out became more of a wash-out. I got lucky with the trains into Glasgow, just catching one that had been delayed by 45 minutes to get into the city. I then arrived at the cinema in good time to buy my ticket for Daybreakers only to be told that the cinema was shut due to a small fire and would hopefully re-open around 4pm.

Poop.

With a couple of hours to spare, I grabbed a McD‘s cheeseburger to warm my hands on and walked up to the uni where I sat and watched a couple of episodes of Dexter. A worthwhile way to spend the time, I thought.

A quick juggle of the times and I opted to catch a later showing of Daybreakers rather than the previously-scheduled Spread. This was the film I’d most wanted to see today.

Well… plot-in-a-nutshell: Vampires rules the world, humans are farmed for blood and… they’re running out of people.

I loved the idea for this film from the moment I saw the trailer. It’s as if the bad guys in Blade won. Only this time it’s due to a virus originally spread by one bad in 2008. The whole world is now vampire with a few pockets of rebelling humans. Those precious humans are being rounded up for their blood as there is only enough to last a few more weeks.

Ethan Hawke plays Edward Dalton, a Senior Hematologist (sic – blooming Americans) with a massive company. They make money farming humans for blood, and aim to create a replacement product so that the demise of the humans is no longer an issue. Dalton, though, is a bit of a softy and is more concerned with preventing the humans dying out.

There are so many metaphors in the film that it’s hard to keep up with them all. One man amongst a race trying to stop a genocide seems very Nazi / Jewish. A world concerned with controlling a limited reserve of a vital resource is so obviously about our use of fossil fuels. Vampires slowly turning bat-like and losing their minds as they fail to get enough blood screams of drug abuse allegory.

Thankfully none are overplayed. They’re the theme of the film, not messages battered into the viewer. Instead we have a very interesting story which has something not often present in films these days – a spark of originality. It is a nice twist on the current vampire theme, although there are a large number of plot holes. I’ll detail the major ones at the end under a nice spoiler heading.

Credit is also due to Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill. Neill’s nicely slick and evil as the guy who runs the company, while Dafoe gets to play a bit of a rough-around-the-edges mechanic. Actually, he’s vaguely similar to Kris Kristofferson‘s Whistler in the Blade movies…

It wasn’t as good as I was hoping, thought there was far more gore and some good creature effects than the trailer let on about. A bizarre thing to say, but I also found the sound good. The gunfire was lovely and meaty rather than sounding like oversized firecrackers.

Enjoyable – a good way to spend the time out of the snow. Eventually.

SPOILERS

At the start of the film, Dalton is show in his car mirror. Or not. He looks like the invisible man, as vampire’s don’t reflect. This is fine, only the same “legend” states that they also don’t appear on film. So how does the news have footage of all the vampires rioting? Indeed, how do the newsreaders not look like empty suits?

And why are they running out of humans? They have hundred, thousands of them in banks where they’re kept suspended to gush blood. I swear there was even a pregnant woman in one of the scenes. Surely it wouldn’t be hard to harvest eggs and sperm, then use them to artificially grow new humans? The machines seemed to manage something similar in The Matrix.

I swear I had more, but that’s the lot for the moment!

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

KFC are at it again

KFC Corporation
Cotton pickin' colonel

Sky News reports that KFC are being pilloried for an advert that was released in Australia which found its way onto YouTube where Americans watched it and jumped on the “racist” bandwagon. I won’t go into more detail here, just read the story.

However. This isn’t the first time KFC have done this, only the last time the internet was a little smaller and I don’t think anyone noticed. In fact, I blogged about it back in 2005! It’s at the bottom of the quoted letter and about another advert that appeared in the UK for a brief period.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Posting multiple blogs to facebook

This icon, known as the "feed icon" ...
More feeds, please, vicar!

Yes, OK. I gave up and started using facebook because so many of you don’t bother to reply to emails or use Twitter. It’s all your fault. You all suck. Fine.

One (of several) annoying things I’ve found with facebook is that it will only let you publish feed from one blog on your wall. I have two that I want to put up there. I started off with one of them, which it popped up as “notes” well enough, putting the complete blog post up. But that wasn’t enough so I started digging.

I found a few feed “aggregators” which effectively take multiple RSS feeds and create one merged feed from that. Yes, I know that’s not the correct term for them, bit it does make sense. Unfortunately, none of them published the entire article. Instead they’d publish the first few hundred words followed by a “click here to see the rest” link to the original page.

In honesty, this did the job although I know personally that I often won’t bother. And I wanted people to read everything.

For the record, the aggregator I settled on was Feedoor which did the best job with the most ease. It’s also set at my favourite price point, i.e. it’s free. [NOTE: Mamod from Feedoor saw this blog post, replied and sorted out my feed from them so that the next step wasn’t needed! Please see the comments]

As luck would have it, I just found another website. What this one does is takes partial feeds from anywhere, locates the original posts and creates a complete feed from it. This web page is Five Filters.

Popping my feed from Feedoor into Five Filters generates a complete RSS feed containing posts from both this blog and my travel blog. I put the full URL given my by Five Filters into my “notes” page on facebook and *ta-da*, the whole shebang.

Yes, only a few lines show on my wall, but it now includes the images from the blog posts and it means people can stay within facebook if they don’t want to hop out to another page. Clicking on the article takes you to the entire blog post as a note within facebook.

A bit of a long way around, but finally the job is done.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]