Category: Computers

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.

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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.

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Speedyfox

Speedyfox
Speedyfox

Recently I’ve been having problems with Firefox taking an age to boot up. I’ve more or less fully migrated to Google Chrome, but still need Firefox for some pages that don’t quite work properly in Chrome. Thing is, it’s taking about a minute to load what used to be a quick browser.

After a dig, I found this little solution called Speedyfox. It is a tiny download (0.3Mb) and essentially all it does it optimise the Firefox database. It’s Windows-only at present but it’s knocked my load time down to nearer 10 seconds. Much more acceptable!

Oh, yeah. How much does it cost?

Nothing. My kind of price point.

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Backupify

 

Backupify
Backupify

Another little utility I’ve started using is Backupify. Unlike such backup tools as the excellent Dropbox, Backupify doesn’t take things off your PC and store them online… it takes your online resources and backs them up. In this case, using the Amazon cloud.

 

There are little utilities for over a dozen common online resources including Google Mail, flickr, twitter, facebook, WordPress blogs and so on. The format the backup is made in with oft-times not be hugely useful (a massive xml file, for instance) but it’s better than nothing. In the event of a serious failure, Backupify technicians will help you restore it in some fashion.

The site is in beta and that’s one reason it’s operating at a very low price right now – free. As long as you register before January 31st 2010, you will get free lifetime use of Backupify for nothing. Including all upgrades etc. After the deadline they’ll be offering a free version with less features and scaled pricing depending on various factors.

It takes the briefest of moments to set up each backup (except WordPress which involves downloading an installing a plugin). These will run initially over a week so they’re not hammering servers anywhere and then become more regular as smaller differential backups are taken.

You can checkout your history, browse files and get a report via the online interface.

It’s simple. It’s free. It’s useful. As far as I’m aware, it’s also unique. Highly recommended.

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Why I use torrents instead of iPlayer

BBC iPlayer
Great... but not perfect

I watch a fair bit of stuff off the BBC these days, yet I still find myself using torrents to download programmes rather than using the BBC iPlayer. I don’t have a TV so the internet is the only convenient way for me to catch up.

But why do I use torrents rather than streaming or downloading from the BBC directly? Some of the reasons are a little picky, I admit. Others genuinely bother me or could be something the Beeb could work on. In the meantime, though, despite the fact I can often download faster from Auntie, I’ll stick to slower torrents.

I’d like to point out, though, that I watch the programmes once then delete them – usually within the same time-frame given for iPlayer downloads.

  • Torrents are generally smaller downloads. An hour’s programming is typically 730Mb compared to iPlayer’s 850Mb or so. This does mount up if you’re on a limited, throttled or capped ISP account.
  • iPlayer playback can still be stuttery on my laptop and netbook. It’s particularly bad under Linux. No such issues with AVI files taken from torrents. GOM and VLC play them easily enough.
  • I can download or convert AVI files for viewing on a PSP. This means really small downloads if I get them direct and portable viewing once I have them.
  • iPlayer won’t work for me when I’m abroad even though I’m resident in the UK. This is very annoying though I do understand the BBC’s reasoning for the restriction.
  • Some programs on iPlayer are only available for streaming, such as Match of the Day. Again, I appreciate the licensing restrictions being placed on them by the Premier League, but that doesn’t help when I want to watch it at another time. After all, I could record it on video, DVD or hard drive direct from the TV to watch any time I felt like it.
  • There’s only so much stuff you can get on iPlayer until it vanishes over time. I like to watch series all in one shot, not week by week. With some series this is possible (series catch-up), but with others it isn’t. Some series just disappear completely. I managed to catch three episodes of Casualty 1909 then went abroad. I couldn’t get the last three on iPlayer when I got home.
  • I run dual OS’s on my laptops and also run two machines. I’d like to be able to d/l on one machine and still watch on the other – but I can’t due to the DRM. I have managed to d/l on one OS and watch on the other on the same machine, though.

Again, please don’t get me wrong. I think iPlayer’s great. It’s just a little too limited for my personal needs right now.

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