Quentin etc

The ongoing search for ADSL performance

sm3rt — Sun, 15 May 2011 01:05:32 +0000

In trying to work out why my new DLINK ADSL router is going slower than my old one I have done some diagnosis.

Went back to the Telecom demark point to the house, disconnected the internal wiring and managed to gain 2Mb in speed. Checking the internal wiring I found two master sockets connected so after removing these have better performance back at my desk.

However I still think I can do better (and the old DLINK is faster than the new still).

I found this great tool http://www.kitz.co.uk/routers/DMTv8.htm after enabling telnet on the 2730B I can now get a visual on line noise etc…

But should there be those gaps? Does this mean interference or something?

Here again but bypassing the internal wiring..

D-Link takes me backwards?

sm3rt — Thu, 12 May 2011 10:28:10 +0000

I have just upgraded my trusty DLINK DSL-G604T to a new DLINK DSL-2730B with the hope of faster WIFI, faster ADSL (perhaps) and time control for my kids.

Well what a disappointment, the web UI for this (in all three browsers I tried) is erratic in responsiveness going from fast to slow to no response at all.

The big issue however is the ADSL speed..

Speedtest gives me 3.94 Mb/s on the old router and then plugging in the new one directly provides a poor 1.3 Mb/s… I cannot blame this one of Telecom NZ or the International link. What’s going on DLINK???

Here’s the old beast…

and the new…

Old DSL604 straight after plugged in 2730B

Any ideas? Anyone..

Apple TV – Take 2

sm3rt — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:01:43 +0000

The next step appears to be to install Nito TV…. I followed the actions here http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Take_2_Full_Update from “Alternate 3 to 8″

AppleTV – more useful

sm3rt — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:23:36 +0000

I needed to make the appleTV (I have borrowed) do more… It appears that you do not have to take it apart to change the software. You can make it boot off a USB key.

http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Patchstick

http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Booting_from_a_USB_Thumbdrive

Installed ATVFiles http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/ATVFiles

http://users.pandora.be/bruno.keymolen/hmedia.html

This didn’t work however following this… http://forum.awkwardtv.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1896&p=10941

I did this
but the script was not able to create to symbolic links…
$ cd /usr/local/lib;sudo ln -s libthreadutil.2.2.2.dylib libthreadutil.2.dylib;sudo ln -s libthreadutil.2.2.2.dylib libthreadutil.dylib

$ cd /usr/local/lib;sudo ln -s libixml.2.0.4.dylib libixml.2.dylib;sudo ln -s libixml.2.0.4.dylib libixml.dylib

$ cd /usr/local/lib;sudo ln -s libupnp.3.0.3.dylib libupnp.3.dylib;sudo ln -s libupnp.3.0.3.dylib libupnp.dylib

MYTHTV 0.21 on VIA EPIA SP13000

sm3rt — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:11:09 +0000

I’ve had a mythtv box for some time but it was running on Fedora 7 (FC7) and the RPM’s for mythtv were depreciated so I could not loger just use YUM to keep up to date.

I tried FC10 (beta) as an upgrade, FC9 clean install, and MYTHDORA 5 (FC8) none of these would work properly with the XVMC accelleration of the VIA video card. The symptom was poor CPU utilisation and a buffer allocation error from MYTHTV.

So now I’m doing a fresh install of FC7 to hopefully get back my working system.

FC7 install – (I wish they’d make an ISO image that included all the current updates!)

To try and cut down on updates I celaned out some of the installed software to get just the following

yum grouplist

Installed Groups:
MySQL Database
Administration Tools
Editors
System Tools
Text-based Internet
X Software Development
Network Servers
Hardware Support
X Window System
Web Server
Windows File Server
Printing Support
Mail Server
Server Configuration Tools
Development Libraries
Development Tools

yum update yum

yum groupupdate

required?

Grabbed the latest compile VIA drivers from here http://washington.kelkoo.net/epia/ and added the epia.repo for yum

Mounted my existing video volume mkdir /mnt/store, mount /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-myth /mnt/store

Made sure that the file /etc/X11/XvMCConfig has the line “libviaXvMC.so.1″ in it.

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
# wget http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/atrpms.repo
# rpm –import http://atrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
# wget http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/freshrpms.repo

yum -y install ivtv-firmware

/sbin/chkconfig mysqld on

/sbin/service mysqld start

# yum -y install lirc-kmdl-$KVER
# yum -y install lirc

Changed the atrpms to force it to use F8 seeing F7 is depreciated

Added fresh RPMS as a repository

rpm -iv http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/9/freshrpms-release/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm

LIVNA

http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-7.rpm

yum install libmp3lame –disablerepo atrpms

yum install lush (for fftw)

http://www.mmalson.com/mythtv/

yum install qt3-devel

I have a Twinham Starbox 2 USB DVB-S receiver

downloaded http://www.gamesrant.com/linuxjunk_pics/dvb-usb-vp702x-02.fw

cp dvb-usb-vp702x-02.fw /lib/firmware

Digital cameras and Timezones

sm3rt — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 09:09:32 +0000

On our trip we ended up with three Digital cameras on the go. Now I’m trying to sort them out we had three timezones! I’ve used JHead.exe which is a command line program to fix this.

The syntax I used to change the EXIF data in the files and reset the creation date of the file was

jhead -ta+1:00 -ft “d:\my pictures\europe trip 2008\paris\dsc05*.jpg” You can also use wildcards eg * for directory names as well.

See the application web site for more detail.

Test Post on Trip

sm3rt — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:18:34 +0000

Elijah takes up Karate but not smoking

Sliceforms

sm3rt — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 23:11:11 +0000

I like being able to turn something 2d into 3d, so when I found a few posts on Sliceforms I thought I’d need to make one. After having a go with one of the ones here

I created my own.

Here’s the plan, as you can see above originally the width of the slices were a bit small, they are scaled up in the plan. If you try making this print it 4 times.