Author: Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

Categories
fun stuff travel Weekend

trefor.net is on holiday

trefor.net is on holiday

trefor.net is on holiday.

Sometimes you just have to kick back and relax. This August trefor.net is on holiday.

That isn’t to say nothing is happening. Lots going on in the background. Under the hood (bonnet). We have an active programme planned for the Autumn – check out the events calendar.

In the meantime I may stick up some holiday snaps. First off is this picture of the new sign for the Morning Star beer garden. Seems a sensible place to hang out when you are on holiday and the sun is shining. A nice cold pint of San Miguel served by Daniel the Spanish barman. Shut your eyes and you can imagine you are on the terrace of a bar in Mallorca, looking out on the Mediterranean blue.

The sound of the seagulls, smells of barbecue sizzling outside the bar. Squeeze some lemon juice over the lamb, a sprinkling of salt over the fries, a tomato and basil salad with a drizzling of olive oil and aged balsamic vinegar that drips like syrup from the neck of the bottle. Finally some fresh bread to mop up the juices.

You get the drift. It’s important to have some downtime. If anyone wants to do some guest posts telling us about their own holidays feel free to drop me a line. I’ll be online wherever I go. Pics are the order of the day. No mountains please1. Make it interesting. Wine labels, menus, colourful market scenes, palm trees silhouetted against pearly white sands and azure seas, interesting local characters, unusual birds never seen at home, yachts under full sail racing down the wind, the sea spray rising up over the bow. etc

trefor.net is on holiday. Relax…

1 I have lots of photos of mountains taken whilst on school trips. Seemed like the right thing to do at the time:)

Categories
bitcoin Business

George Osborne Bitcoin speech – BBC writing the news before it happens

george osborne bitcoin speech

BBC website carrying article on future George Osborne Bitcoin speech

Our next door office neighbour Dan from Bitcoin company Coinative pointed out a BBC article to me this morning that covered a George Osborne Bitcoin speech. The thing is the George Osborne Bitcoin speech hasn’t happened yet and whilst the BBC talks about it in a knowledgeable manner it is all futures.

You really have to ask yourself why the Beeb has bothered. Usually news websites are dead keen to be the first to get news out about an event because the first to print gets the highest spot in the Google search rankings. The BBC however has such huge global presence that surely it doesn’t need to do this.

The government approach to Bitcoin is going to be an interesting one to follow because in reality the virtual currency runs contrary to how a government wants to work. They need to know what you are up to financially so that they can tax you. The whole point of Bitcoin is that you can remain anonymous. How therefore would a government be able to grab your cash. Moreover it would have to grab a bit of Bitcoin (if you get my drift). The one thing a public purse needs with its finances is stability and Bitcoin is nowhere near stable.

Notwithstanding that, George Osborne is right to be taking a look at Bitcoin. Bitcoin does represent innovation and the possibility of introducing new ways of working for businesses. We are a long way from a government endorsement of Bitcoin but this is a step in the right direction.

Getting back to the BBC, the whole article basically just says that George Osborne is going to announce that they are going to look at Bitcoin. This afternoon. Seems to me that the Beeb could have waited until this afternoon and announced it after the speech! What have they gained?  Oo they rank #1 on Google for “George Osborne Bitcoin“.

Categories
Engineer ipv6 scams

IPv4 leasing & IPv6 penetration into networks

ipv4 leasing or move to ipv6?

IPv4 leasing offer from broker but uses gmail address.

Got an email at my LONAP address yesterday asking if we had any spare blocks available for IPv4 leasing. I used to occasionally get them when at Timico as I think did most of the industry. This time it’s prompted me to look a little deeper into the issue. After all it is over 3 years since the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 address space – you may remember the Move over IPv4 Bring on IPv6 party which was a huge success even if I say so myself.

I looked at the google keyword stats for “IPv4 leasing”. The UK averages only 10 searches a month for this term. Doesn’t really smack of an industry getting desperate. The “brokers” of IPv4 addresses do appear to exist in somewhat of a twilight zone. For example the email I got was from an Adam Green with an address of [email protected]. If he was kosher he would use a proper business address. It isn’t a kosher business model anyway.

These guys swipe email databases from the likes of RIPE. The one I got didn’t address me by name which in the gmail world normally leads to automatic spam labelling. In November we have RIPE69 coming to London and I’ll be looking for guest posts on the subject of IPv6. The subject of IPv4 leasing will almost certainly come up at the meeting although to be honest people should be focussing on moving their infrastructure on to IPv6, something that still isn’t particularly mainstream.

It would be interesting to hear from anyone with an IPv4 address space problem although I doubt anyone would put their hand up to admit it.

Taking a look at some LONAP stats, out of 152 connected networks 113 or 74% of them have registered IPv6 blocks with the IXP.  At the LONAP AGM we ran a little exercise with prizes for those who registered using an IPv6 address. Of the 50 or so attendees and excluding LONAP staff we had 8 people register using an IPv6 address. Suggests that use of IPv6 is still somewhat limited even amongst the network engineering community you would think would be early adopters.

Taking the exercise a little further we looked at the websites of LONAP members. Of the 149 checked 74 of them have no IPv6 enabled site. If you have no idea what I’m talking about with IPv6 this info will be of no interest whatsoever. However those in the game should find the stats v interesting and probably not a surprise.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more IPv6 stuff as it hits my screen…

Categories
End User Regs spam

Electoral register online makes opt in to open register default

electoral register online

Electoral register online makes opt in to open register default – they are trying to make money out of spammers

I have just finished filling in my  details for the electoral register online.  I don’t know why I have had to do this. Kid3 has also had to but Wife1 and Kid2 have not. Wossthatallabout? The bumpf they sent says “For all sorts of reasons, some people will not match against existing records (!?) and therefore cannot automatically be transferred automatically to the new register. For example, they may have moved home since the record was last updated, or there may have been a difference in the spelling of the two records“.

Well I haven’t moved home for 17 years – since Kid3 was born and it isn’t as if Huw Trefor Davies is an uncommon name, innit?!

It didn’t take me long to fill out the electoral register online stuff but it would appear that you do have to take care when it comes to the government. They set as default that you want to join the open register. In leaving the box unticked you are giving them permission to sell your details to anyone who wants to spam you.

This is not setting a good example. No wonder the Telephone Preference Service  doesn’t work when you have your own government making it easy for people to get hold of our details and to say that you opted in. I didn’t give them my phone number or email address as contact info. If they want to send me something they can do it by mail. I don’t trust them to not give these data to the spammers as well.

Loads of spam related stuff on this site – follow the spam category here. Also check out this post on Tesco spam more expensive than ham. I like the meat variety of spam.

Categories
broadband End User

Home broadband deals – how to choose?

home broadband deals from EE

Home broadband deals for consumers getting very competitive – help needed

I’ve been spending some time preparing for the launch of broadbandrating.com. This is a new trefor.net site we are working on to make affiliate advertising revenues from the broadband market. In doing so we’ve been signing up with ISP partners and getting an eyeful of the home broadband deals available. The offers are primarily for consumers but very eyewatering. You’re talking to someone who never looks at his own comms charges.

On Friday I walked past the EE shop in Lincoln and noticed this home broadband deal – see featured image above. £21.25 for unlimited landlines (whatever that means), unlimited broadband, 1000 mobile minutes, international calls (uhuh) and Now TV (I could look it up).

I can’t keep up with the pace of competition in this game. In fact faced with so many offers how on earth do people make their minds up?

I recently booked a family holiday in Mallorca. I spent hours online looking but gave up in the end and remembered there was a Coop travel agent in the nearby Carlton Centre. I popped down there and within ten minutes had opted for a hotel in Cala D’Or. The travel agent had been there and was able to recommend it.

Also a couple of weeks ago I was chatting to a pal of mine who had recently had an agonising six months getting his new office networked with the main one in town. He was crying out for good advice (he should have asked me 6 months previously).

The world is is crying out for good advice. Holidays, business connectivity, even insurance – ever tried to decide on how to choose an insurance policy. There’s small print everywhere!

Where comms are concerned there are so many home broadband deals with tons of stuff bundled in its bewildering. It’s no use going to a comparison website. All you get is a list of deals. These guys just work on volume. They spend a fortune getting themselves up the Search Engine rankings and then rely on a percentage success rate on a high volume of clicks. The consumer isn’t really helped. They still have the problem of staring at the page trying to decide which deal to choose.

We aren’t ready to go live with broadbandrating yet but when we do I’m hoping we will go some why towards helping people with their buying decisions on home broadband deals. It’s long overdue.

Coming back to the blackboard outside the EE shop the offer sounds good but the devil is in the detail and I ain’t going in to that detail right now because I haven’t got it.

Stay tuned…

Categories
Engineer gadgets peering

BYOD strategy revealed at LONAP board meeting

lonap board notebooks byod strategy

BYOD strategy revealed at LONAP board meeting.

Lonap held its regular board meeting on Wednesday at Will Hargrave’s house. These are very long days but worthwhile. We have a lot of stuff to plough through. LONAP operates a BYOD strategy. The IXP is very leading edge especially when it comes to HR and IT.

The featured image illustrates the byod strategy at work showing Will, Andy (Davidson) and Rich (Irving) sat around the board table in front of the various notebook computers. Andy is a Microsoft guy. He has a Windows computer with a touch screen Needs to be to get the most out of Windows 8 or so I’m told. Will is an Apple fanboi. He is actually sat in front of my Chromebook but you can see his Mac on the table next to Rich. The various makes of notebook have a white letter near them to denote flavour.

Rich has a letter T next to his. That’s because his notebook is made of tree. It’s quite nifty. Comes with its own advanced carbon based stylus which has a neat way of erasing mistakes. The stylus has a soft plastic top to it which when moved back and forwards across the lines on the page left by the carbon erases the carbon marking, or most of it anyway.

Tree based notebooks aren’t perfect but nobody expects the finished goods so early on in the product lifecycle. The stylii for example still have some way to go. The sharpened front end does have a tendency to break although Rich seems to have mastered the art of applying just the right amount of pressure to avoid damaging the tip. These stylii do represent a marketing opportunity to sell accessories. The product team must have all worked at Apple at some point in the past. They seem to know their stuff.

Available for purchase are a sharpening device (v handy in the post 9/11 security conscious world of the global internet executive) together with a nifty case that can hold multiple stylii. Rich pointed out that you can get them in a huge range of different colours. They also sell storage containers known colloquially as bookcases. These are also made of carbon although like in any market there seem to be cheap imitators on sale made of something called MDF.

Being a fan of cloud technology myself I did ask Rich whether there was a virtual version of his Tree technology. He mentioned something about Carbon offset which I didn’t completely get and not wanting to look stupid in front of the others I kept shtum. There’s bound to be a cloud version available or at least coming soon.

Readers looking to implement their own byod strategy should at least take a look at Tree technology when considering notebooks. The one at the LONAP meeting certainly had a nice feel to it. They have the weight just about right and Rich says it is totally customisable. You adjust it by simply tearing out pages until you get to the weight that suits you. I should warn you that this process is irreversible so you do need to take care. If in doubt consult a qualified Tree surgeon.

That’s in regarding the LONAP byod strategy. Lots happening in the Autumn. Stay tuned for loads more useful tips’n stuff though not necessarily anything to do with LONAP’s byod strategy.

LONAP is a Global top 20 Internet Exchange. Read about them here. Also loads of LONAP content on this site – check it out here.

Categories
fun stuff Weekend

Lincoln car fire outside University STOP PRESS

lincoln car fire

Lincoln car fire has fire engine in attendance

A Lincoln car fire is not that common I’d say, though I’m not an expert on these things. I was sorting out the aircon in the office. The vent had dropped off so it was blowing cold air out one side of the office and hot air out of the other. Doh. Fixed it but Rob the developer mentioned that he thought he could smell fire.

I went out to wash my hands after eating an orange and blow me down from the office balcony I could see the fire engine putting out the fire. It was a fair distance away so what you get from my phone camera is indeed what you get – no telephoto lens.

I can still hear sirens wailing as I tap in this post. Gotta get it out before the BBC find out about it:) STOP PRESS, hold the front page.

Hopefully nobody was hurt. I like fire engines but unfortunately they mostly have to deal with bad incidents rather than rescuing cats from up trees and cutting railings to release little boys who have got their heads stuck. When I was a kid I went on a scouts visit to the fire station in Caernarfon. They all do it. Scouts that is. I wanted to have a go sliding down the pole but they wouldn’t let me. Insurance or something. Huh!

Talking about sirens my mum used to work at a hospital in Cardiff. The ambulance men used to run her home through the rush hour traffic with the blue light going, just to get there a little more quickly. Those were the days:) Nowadays when I see an ambulance rushing by it makes me pause for thought. Having a family changes your attitude on life.

Ciao amigos.

Check out this pic of the back of a fire engine. Could be the same one for all I know.

Categories
4g Business

Manx Telecom 4G launch

phonebox Manx Telecom broadband

Manx Telecom 4G launch around 12 years after being first 3G trialist

Quite excited to see the Manx Telecom 4G launch. I periodically go to the Isle of Man to see me dear old mam and dad. They live around the corner from the telephone exchange in Peel. One of my old school chums Richard Fletcher works for Manx Telecom and we occasionally get together for lunch when I’m over.

It was Richard who introduced me to 3G at Manx Telecom. Before 3G was available in the UK it was trialled in the Isle of Man as Manx Telecom were then part of O2. The IoM is a nice place to conduct telecoms trials as the population is really the equivalent of a smallish town in the UK.

The 3G trial must have been 13 years or so ago. It’s taken a while to get 4G out. The lack of competition in the Isle of Man doesn’t make for speedy rollout of new services. It’s nice to see it happen now though. The Manx Telecom 4G service may even tempt me to get a PAYG sim – I’m over for the week in August. The family is used to seeing me doing mobile speed tests wherever I go. In fact my daughter, who now lives in Spain, instinctively tells me how fast her broadband is when we hangout of an evening.

Whilst over I usually do a few IT support jobs in the paternal household. This time it will include upgrading the folks to FTTC and getting them a new router. The WiFI is a bit dodgy on the old one as you will recall from this here post. Now that the Isle of Man finally has 4G I’m thinking that the conversation on this blog is going to move to 5G. After all if Mayor of London Boris Johnson is talking about it it must be the right thing to do 🙂

Categories
Engineer google

Lost in translation – Google Translate Ukrainian, Chrome and The Huffington Post cc@tonyhatfield

google translate ukrainian

Google translate Ukrainian offer is v odd reports reader @tonyhatfield

Today, using my Nexus 7 running KitKat and the latest version of Google Chrome, I clicked on a link to the Huffington Post. A page appeared asking me if I wanted to translate from Ukrainian. Here’s a screenshot. V odd considering the page is clearly in English. Not sure if the Huffington Post has an Ukrainian edition!

google translate ukrainian

Then I tried accessing the page using my Vaio Win7 again using the latest version of Chrome browser. This time no translation request.

no google translate ukrainian

As a tiebreaker up to my Dell desktop again running Win7 and latest Google browser.Again the Google translate Ukrainian offer appeared. This time with no reference to ‘Ukrainian’.

Seems very odd!

Can anyone enlighten us on why this may be happening. My first thought when hearing about the Ukrainian translation bit was that maybe his ISP was using a block of IP addresses originally allocated to a provider in the Ukraine. Sounds like some Ukrainian mobster has latched on to the black market for IPv4 I thought.

I recall a few years ago seeing the Swedish version of the Google search page when travelling on the Eastcoast train to London. This was because the train’s satellite link connected to a ground station in Sweden. Not seen that since so whatever that glitch was clearly temporary and is now fixed.

However when hearing that it only happened on 2 out of 3 devices that seemed to rule that scenario out. The mix of Operating Systems also seems to rule out an OS related issue.

Anyone out there got any thoughts on why this might have happened? Something to do with the Huffington Posts page maybe?  Answers on a postcard, comment (pref) or tweet. I’m sure there will be a few people interested in finding out what was happening.

Google translate has other useful uses – check out this post about bypassing Virgin Media web filters to access Pirate Bay.

Update Sunday 27th July: Just surfing Majorca related subjects on my droid and found myself at an olive oil related website (fwiw – off there on hols in August). To my delight I was offered a translation from Ukrainian. I thought this screenshot would serve as a worthy update to this post.

Ciao bella…

Ukrainian google translate

Categories
food and drink Weekend

Morning after the night before

night before snail drinks pint of cider

Morning after the night before – mollusc gets legless.

The night before: We had a BBQ at our house last night. Sending off for Kid2 before her departure for foreign climes and her year abroad. Festivities began at around 5pm and the kids left to go clubbing at 10.30. Couldn’t do it meself.

After they had gone with a parting shout of “don’t worry about the mess, I will clean it up in the morning” we set to to bring the garden back to semi respectability. To our surprise one reveller had stayed behind to finish his or her pint of cider. The snail shown in the featured image was getting totally legless.

Must have finished off the whole pint, glass and all, because this morning when I got up there was no sign of snail or glass. Perhaps Mrs Davies who got up “just” before me had cleared it away. I will never know because I prefer not to ask leaving me with the notion that there is now a giant bloated snail sheltering under a bush somewhere in the garden. Sleeping off the cider no doubt.

Of course said snail could have been eaten by a bird in which case I expect to see one flying erratically around the garden.

morning after the night before

The morning after: It’s a bit of a slow start this morning. Something to do with the Stella Artois. Or maybe it was the margarita, or the red wine or calvados, or Carlos I Spanish brandy. It was one of that lot I’m sure.

The morning after the night before I stuck some bacon and mushrooms on the George Foreman Grill and made a spot of breakfast which was taken outside for consumption. In the garden I found we had a lot of designer cider left over plus a day’s supply of Stella. Gawd knows when we will get through the cider as Kid2’s departure is firmly fixed for Tuesday.

Looks like a red hot day in prospect in Lincoln. Had to come inside to write this post as it was already warming up. Before I wrap up and maybe go out an clean the bbq it is worth noting the gas supply dilemma.

The last thing you want when having a BBQ is to run out of gas. Especially if it is your daughter’s leaving bash and she is entertaining her “bezzie mates” (or words to that effect – I’m sure the colloquialism has already moved on, keep up Tref Dad).

There is a dial on our gas canister that lets you know approximately where you are in the gas supply stakes. However what it doesn’t tell you is how much actual barbecuing time you have left based on 3 jets firing at full throttle for most of the time. One could just refill the canister anyway but that would of course mean paying for a full refill whilst only needing a partial refill, if you get my drift.

The safe bet is to go out and buy a spare canister. That way if you run out of gas in the main canister the auxiliary can be switched in with very little loss of cooking time. That is what I did. Sod’s law of course dictated that we did not run out of gas in the main canister but better safe than sorry eh?

 

Categories
travel Weekend

boats

River Patrol boat in Chester

rowing boats

 

pedaloes on the river in chester

river patrol

Boats on the river in Chester

What do you do on a balmy July evening in Chester? You take a walk down by the river  to check out the boats that’s what you do. There’s a party going on on the bandstand with some cool jazz. Diners are sat outside at Hickory’s Smokehouse to the sound of Rhythm and Blues. The contrasting music styles seem to complement each other.

We have had our meal. Ribs smothered in bbq sauce. Couple of beers. There is no rush. We stroll along the river bank. The kids are being unusually amenable to being photographed. Eventually we grab a cab to go back to our hotel. The guy on the phone says 15 minutes. It comes in 5. We are on a roll.

Back at the hotel the kids hit the hay and I have a brandy before doing the same. The hotel bar is fairly empty. It is still early. I need my beauty sleep.

Categories
travel Weekend

Menfolk stood outside M&S Outlet Store

M&S Outlet Store

Men stood outside M&S outlet store waiting for their women

Was shopping with Kid2 in Cheshire Oaks Outlet Village on the Wirral. She is going to be working for Hilton in Spain for 6 months and needs some suitable attire for the job. On occasions like this the M&S outlet store is the place to be and there we went. We got all the things she needed plus some stuff she didn’t need (party dresses!) for about £66. And I got a pair of  orangey brown shorts for £7.

This free advert for the M&S outlet store does however come with a health warning. Even though it has a menswear section the shop is no place to go if you are a bloke. It is full of women and their daughters clogging up the aisles. Some women have husbands in tow. The man has to stand there obediently whilst his wife holds up shirts, jumpers, jackets etc against him to see it it is a suitable fit, colour design. Poor bugger.

Kid2 decided she needed to try something on. I could stand the waiting no longer and went outside in search of a decent mobile signal. I wasn’t the only one. Outside M&S is where the real men go. The men who can no longer take jumpers, dressing gowns, slippers or polo shirts.

Outside the shop I found I wasn’t the only guy who couldn’t take it. I took a few steps back and surreptitiously froze some pixels on my phone. There was no conversation amongst the blokes. We stood their in silent isolation. As well as me there was an older guy and someone who was probably still in his twenties. The younger guy kept peering in to see where she was and eventually succumbed to going back inside in the vain hope that she could be chivvied up.

Not a chance son. This isn’t just M&S we are talking about. It is the M&S Outlet Store. Bargains galore. My dear old Mam, who lives in Peel in the Isle of Man, can sometimes take three hours to get in and out of M&S in Douglas. Once in she keeps bumping in to people she knows and “goes for a coffee”. Fortunately the outlet Store doesn’t have a cafe. Would be a complete waste of time anyway. A woman knows that the window of opportunity at the Outlet Village is probably limited and she needs to stay focussed on the task in hand.

Ordinarily the right thing to do would have been to find a pub to go and sit in. On this occasion I was needed at “the kill” to hand over my credit card. Also I was going to have to drive back to Lincoln later that day so beer wasn’t on the agenda.

It has to be said that I did very well myself not to spend any more than the £7 on the pair of shorts. I stood for a while in the Church’s shoe shop. I was half tempted but  I rarely have occasion to wear posh work shoes nowadays.

That’s all folks. M&S outlet store – hours of fun and a huge choice of socks.

Categories
food and drink Weekend

Sachets

sachets

Sachets, by Tref

Sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets sachets

Categories
Business business applications

Microsoft message to renegade professionals – Stephen Elop #uncompromise

Microsoft message to renegade professionals I'm not a big fan of Microsoft but in fairness to the company they are working hard on making their cloud products competitive. The latest is their announcement of free office 365 unlimited storage

Stephen Elop – CEO of Microsoft message to employees.

Stephen Elop’s message to Microsoft employees feels like an address to an army that knows not all of them will come through the coming battle.

The organisation is huge. In the Microsoft message Elop mentions Salo, Oulu and Tampere, Finland. Beijing, San Diego,  Hanoi, Dongguan. Manaus, Reynosa and Komaron, Hungary. It’s a massive job ensuring that the whole organisation operates efficiently. One of the contradictions of modern business life is that it would appear that you need to have scale to compete but with that scale it gets increasingly difficult to get anything done.

I was pushed an advert for Microsoft Surface recently – Twitter or Facebook maybe, not sure where I first saw the link.  There was no reference to Microsoft in the ad. Clearly they are trying to develop an identity for Surface but it suggests to me a lack of confidence in the parent brand. Surface is here being pitched at the office worker, the renegade professionals as Microsoft seems to want to call them. Leaves you thinking that Microsoft is concentrating on the business market, at least for the Surface.

The Enterprise is going to be the last stronghold of the Microsoft OS. Its Alamo maybe. Although I have recently bought a Windows laptop this was only to run one specific application. I have 4 kids. Two have moved away from Microsoft (Macbook Air and Chromebook). Of the other two one needs their PC for gaming and the other for video processing. Neither can afford a Mac which would probably be their first choice and if the games move entirely online as they inevitably will that barrier to using a Chromebook will be removed. I have no doubt that cloud based video processing will also become mainstream. Might already be able to do it for all I know.

Microsoft is trying very hard to stay in the game. It recently announced an increase in the bundled online storage to Office 365 customers from 20GB to 1TB. Office 365 costs anything between £60 and £380 a year per person, depending on what you go for (£220 if you take out Access and Publisher). I was going to say it is heading in the right direction but they have 8 different bundles – 12 if you count MAC. Not exactly simple messaging.

Compare this with Google Apps for Business which is £33 a year per user or £6.60 a month if you go for Vault. Couldn’t quite make out  what Vault offers and was not really interested enough to drill into the detail. Security stuff. The basic Google consumer account is free and includes all the apps (doc, sheets etc). These accounts give you 30GB of Drive storage. There isn’t a free Microsoft account other than the straight Outlook email service which comes without Office applications (natch).

A Google  1TB storage plan is about £6 a month – $10 – couldn’t find a GBP pricelist. The base Google price is roughly £70 a year for the free gmail account with 1TB storage. So now there isn’t much difference in pricing between Microsoft and Google (aside from the fact that you get apps with the latter and these apps are part of Microsoft’s core business so they can’t give them away for free) which is great because here competition is driving down costs.

There will inevitable be a market for Microsoft’s cloud services because they have such a huge installed base with their existing Windows OS’. I think it is going to be very hard going for them though. You only have to look at the action around the #uncompromise hashtag used in the Surface ads. There isn’t much. What does that tell you?

More as it happens… (ish)

Categories
End User travel

East Midlands Airport arrivals board and immigration fast track

East midlands airport arrivals board

East Midlands airport arrivals board and a fast track limo service

Sat in the services near East Midlands Airport waiting for kid2, my little girl now not so little to come back from a 3 week stint in Barcelona. It isn’t worth forking out to park at the airport. They sting you for a quid to just drop off and pick up with a 10 minute limit. Goodness only knows what an hour or two would be.

Kid2’s flight is scheduled to arrive at 17.10 but I can tell from the East Midlands Airport arrivals board that it actually going to be early (screenshot = featured pic).

Landing is in theory only 5 mins away and I feel myself looking up into the skies to see if I can see her plane. I can’t but that is because I’m sat inside using the free wifi.

Just waiting for the text to tell me she has picked up her case and is moseying towards the pick up spot. In my experience it is worth arranging for an exec limo (for in her mind such is my role) to pick you up from the airport.

A few years ago I flew to Istanbul for the HP CIO Summit. V useful get together of like minded ISP folk. I travelled out with a HP sales guy. He was sat further back in the plane and when we arrived I got off before him.

Waiting for me was a bloke with my name on a bit of cardboard. He escorted me on to a golf buggy and whisked me past about a thousand people queuing up in the heat to get through immigration. Flying through the priority line I picked up my bag from the carousel and stepped into a limo that whisked me to the Sheraton.

Around 30 minutes after landing I was just stepping into the shower when the phone rang. It was the HP sales guy. He had just cleared immigration and was waiting for me. Embarrassing. HP had paid for me to go through fast track but not him. That’s life Jim. Next time I go I’ll book the same service even if I have to pay myself. Well worth the 50 Euros.

PS took 30 mins for Kid2’s bag to arrive on the carousel. No fast track there!

Categories
food and drink Weekend

Lamb tikka masala recipe – part 2

lamb tikka masala recipe including clay tandoor oven

Having marinated the cubed lamb in step 1 we now move on to steps 2 and 3 for our lamb tikka masala recipe – the actual cooking.

This post continues part 1 of our lamb tikka masala recipe. The lamb will be nicely marinated having spent 24 hours in the fridge in the freshly prepared tandoori spice mix. I can confirm that in my own case the smell was heavenly (feel like I’m writing this for a woman’s periodical – next time I go to the dentist it’ll be there on the coffee table!).

The clay tandoor pot you are going to use to cook the meat needs soaking in water for a good hour or more. This is because when the meat is cooked in the tandoor the water steams our gradually keeping the lamb nice and moist. Heat the oven to gas mark 8 and place the tandoor containing the lamb, lid on, on a middle shelf. Give the meat an hour or so cooking time.

When the meat is cooked, remove it from the tandoor and crisp the outsides up under the grill. I discarded the liquid although something at the back of my mind tells me you can keep it for the next step.

I can only vaguely remember the next steps. I did research the lamb tikka masala recipe online before starting.  I’m pretty sure I chopped up some onions and mushrooms. I sauteed the onions in ghee in a wok. I bought the ghee specially. Never used it before but I now have loads of it in  tin in the fridge for the next time. Always handy to have some ghee in. Just like goose fat for roasties on a Sunday.

Some garlic, ginger and chilli mix I had left over from making the tandoori marinade were then added. With this I mixed in some tikka masala paste I had prepared earlier (in  jar  from Tesco – I lost the enthusiasm for doing it all from fist principles after the first night). After  bit of frying you add some tins of tomatoes (you decide how many – it’s a feel thing), tomato ketchup, turmeric and natural yoghurt. Other lamb tikka masala recipes have variants on this but fundamentally they are all the same.

i cooked the whole concoction over a low hear with a lid on the wok for around 60 minutes until the meat was tender and the sauce was just the right consistency. To finish off you toss in some chopped coriander leaves although I bought the wrong stuff and ended up with flat leaf parsley which does the job but isn’t quite as good. We kept the dish in the fridge and heated it up and ate it the next day. I think it always tastes better when the spices have had more time to infuse. Innit.

This lamb tikka masala recipe was brought to you direct from the kitchen of trefor.net. The top ranking lamb tikka masala recipe on Google is on the BBC website here.

lamb tikka masala recipe by tref

lamb tikka masala recipe including clay tandoor oven

Categories
fun stuff travel Weekend

Lost in translation – google translate funny error

sombrero

Google translate funny error shows it doesn’t always get it right

Was browsing TripAdvisor with a view to going to Majorca on holiday. I’ve always associated Majorca with pile em high sell it cheap holidays I would be unlikely to take. However I’m told that the North and East sides are v nice so I’m checking it out.

TripAdvisor is the number 1 destination for this sort of thing and there indeed I did go. Clicking on the description of one attraction I realised I could do with the help of Google Translate. That’s when I came across this google translate funny error. The photos herein just show that Google Translate doesn’t always get it right. At least I assume that’s the case.I doubt it meant to say “the children not easily rectum curves” although I didn’t try interpreting the Italian original myself.

One imagines that there re millions of examples of this sort of thing. Innit. For those thinking where’s he looking at then I’m thinking Port de Pollenca. If anyone’s been let me know how it was for you. We have a very rare 10 day window in August and it has been a good 7 years since we had an overseas holiday.

In looking for a destination our problem is that none of us are lie on the beach types.Also we don’t want it too hot and don’t want to have to go long haul, at least for this trip. The med is a good bet but there isn’t anywhere in the med that isn’t hot at this time of year. Ah well.

We will probably spend the cash and get back to find that the UK has basked in the best sunshine in living memory with Skegness having record crowds. No chance. Couple of posts of interest: Skegness in winter and then 6 months later.screenshot of tripadvisor in italian pre google translate funny error

google translate funny error screenshot

Categories
Apps Engineer

Deleted plugins

plug hole for deleted plugins

Deleted plugins amassed over 6 years of blogging

Just deleted 33 plugins. These deleted plugins were amassed over 6 years of blogging. I didn’t need any of them. The new site still contains too many plugins but they were expedient in getting us up and running with the new design.

Over the next few months we will be changing how trefor.net works under the bonnet. This will be done in tandem with a few other projects that will hit the aether between now and Christmas (aargh only 163 shopping days until Christmas & I haven’t even booked a summer holiday yet!). Most plugins will go. Chief Developer Rob writes his own code instead. In the meantime there are a few niggles we will have to smooth over and a few features we will want slipping in. More on all this anon.

I just wanted to share with you the list of deleted plugins. I just deleted 33 of them. Took a metaphoric scythe to the software, pushed the red button and it was gone. The button wasn’t really red but it should have been.

Many of the deleted plugins came with various themes I’ve used over the years. None of the ones in the list were active and just cluttered up the site. It was especially annoying that I had to occasionally update them even though they weren’t being used. “Hello Dolly” came with the original installation of WordPress and I’ve never used it. Just kept it for old times’ sake. I’m a bit of a softie really. Also Hello Dolly is one of my fave jazz numbers.

As I sign off from this post I’d like to take the opportunity to thank all the plugin developers listed below for their support over the years. If we ever get to meet up there is a beer in it for you:)

That’s all folks.

Hasta la vista baby!

Deleted Plugins

You are about to remove the following plugins:

  • All-in-One Event Calendar by Time.ly by Time.ly Network Inc. (will also delete its data)
  • Comment Rating by Bob King
  • Easy Twitter Links by Josh Jones
  • Hello Dolly by Matt Mullenweg
  • IPv4 Exhaustion Counter by Geert Hauwaerts
  • Light Social by Alden Torres
  • OmniGallery by ColorLabs & Company
  • PHPlist by Jesse Heap
  • Polldaddy Polls & Ratings by Automattic, Inc.
  • Register Plus by Skullbit
  • Share Buttons by AddToAny by AddToAny
  • Simple 301 Redirects by Scott Nellé
  • Simple Twitter Connect – Base by Otto (will also delete its data)
  • STC – Comments by Otto (will also delete its data)
  • STC – Follow Button Widget by Otto (will also delete its data)
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  • STC – Tweet Button by Otto (will also delete its data)
  • STC – TweetMeme Button by Otto (will also delete its data)
  • STC – Twitter Dashboard by John Bloch – Avendi Media, Inc. (will also delete its data)
  • Social Sharing Toolkit by linksalpha
  • TwitterComments by <a href=”http://codebit.wordpress.com/”>Kyle Peterson</a>
  • W3 Total Cache by Frederick Townes
  • Widget Twitter VJCK by V.J.Catkick
  • WordPress Importer by wordpressdotorg
  • WordTwit Twitter Plugin by BraveNewCode
  • WP Photo Album Plus by J.N. Breetvelt a.k.a OpaJaap
  • WP Super Cache by Donncha O Caoimh (will also delete its data)
  • WPtouch Mobile Plugin by BraveNewCode Inc.

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Categories
competitions Weekend

Live world cup alternative commentary coverage of the Final – the Germans v the Argentinians

FIFA 2014

Live world cup alternative commentary coverage of World Cup Final – the Germans v the Argentinians – in an attempt to counter the deadly dull BBC commentary.

As the deadly dull World Cup final gets going we try and liven things up with a world cup alternative commentary. Hansen, Ferdinand and Shearer have spent too much time talking b0110ck$ nd have run out of things to say.

This is the alternative commentary.

Categories
Engineer events fun stuff voip voip hardware

England v India Trent Bridge – a tale of two Andersons & Yealink VoIP phone

Trent Bridge cricket ground England v India

England v India highlights – Root & Anderson  10th wicket world record, I am nearly knocked out by a cricket ball, Pamela Anderson gets cricketer autograph & I spot a Yealink VoIP phone.

England v India at Trent Bridge was the backdrop for  great day out with the kids yesterday. There are two ways to “do” the cricket. One is with your mates. This is a boozy day out beginning with a pint and “full English” at 10am in the pub followed by a steady day’s cricket watching and a curry to finish off. The other is with the kids.

It was with the kids yesterday that I was nearly knocked out by a cricket ball and saw Pamela Anderson getting an autograph from one of the English players fielding at the boundary.

Arriving early we took our seats and settled in to watch a bit of net practice. Sat at square leg the nets were just in front of us but after a while the kids wandered off to look around the ground. There I was minding my own business, not particularly watching anything, when suddenly I heard a cry and I was hit by a cricket ball.

The ball glanced off the side of my head, hit my shoulder and plopped down beside me. It took me a moment to realise what had happened. One of the batsmen in the net had hit it over the top of the side netting. A couple of inches to the right and it would have landed squarely on the top of my bonce with potentially lethal consequences.

Without thinking I picked up the ball and threw it back. I should have kept it as a souvenir. There is evidence of the incident however. My hat – pictured in the gallery below was somewhat damaged as you can see.

Test match cricket is a great day out. The entertainment is not just on the pitch. The crowd provides just as much fun as the players. In the gallery below you can see a steward trying to confiscate a “beer snake” which is a stack of empty plastic beer glasses. Much beer is drunk at these events. For some reason the stewards want to confiscate the stacked glasses. The snake gets handed around the stand, growing in size as more glasses get added on the journey. The steward trying to confiscate the snake provides great sport as each time he gets near the snake is passed along to someone else.

In the gallery below there is also a photo sequence where “Pamela Anderson” gets the autograph of one of the England fielders. Pam was there with a party of lifeguards sat quite close to us in the New Stand. Also look out for a couple of horses sat amongst the crowd.

As far as the actual England v India cricket match went we were treated to a world record tenth wicket stand of 198 runs between Joe Root (154 no) and Jimmy Anderson (81 and no relation to Pamela afaik). The game now looks like being a draw and the rain forecast for the last day will hopefully provide some respite for the English team, now fielding, who have another test starting in a few days time.

There is, as is often the case, a technology slant to this post. Hanging around the boundary at lunch I couldn’t help noticing a Yealink VoIP phone nestled in amongst the equipment of one of the cameras. I love spotting little things like this. The kids have got used to it. The Yealink VoIP phone is not dissimilar to the Cisco I spotted at the Harbour Lights cafe in Peel in the Isle of Man. I’m not sure what the Yealink VoIP phone model is. I’m sure someone out there will know:)

Categories
travel Weekend

James May Meccano Bike

james may meccano bike

James May Meccano bike in the back of a van in Skegness – surreal!

The Meccano bike as constructed by James May was of particular interest to me. I grew up on the Isle of Man and May rode his Meccano Bike around the TT Course.

We sat as a family watching the TV programme. We always do when there is a prog about the Isle of Man. Early on James May was stood over the road from the house of an old school chum of mine Paul Shimmin, near the bottom of Bray Hill. You could see Paul’s motorbike in his front drive.

Almost every kid in our class had a bike, except for me. I thought it was far too dangerous. In the IoM you can start driving at 16 and in the sixth form we would shoot off along the TT course on Fridays for lunch in the Creg Ny Baa pub. There was no such thing as asking for ID in those days.

Anyway there i was walking along the prom in Skegness, past the Embassy Theatre and there was this white van with the back doors open. I glanced inside and knock me down with a thirty pound sledge hammer if inside the van wasn’t James May’s meccano bike.

It was one of those surreal moments. Totally unexpected. Of course apart from taking a couple of pics what is there to do? I exchanged a couple of words with the guys loading it into the van. The meccano bike had been on display at the theatre and was now being taken back to the Beaulieu Motor Museum.

I was in Skegness to watch The Pylons. They are a terrific band  made up of five teenage kids and were playing the first of four Festivals this summer. Check out and “like” their Facebook page here. On Sunday it was the SO Festival with the BBC. The five kids in this band all play multiple instruments and show amazing promise. Buy their first EP “The Sun” available at all major online music platforms.

I’ll leave you with  few more sights from Skegness on Sunday.

Categories
broadband Business piracy

Kiwi ISP Slingshot promotes piracy amongst punters

skull & crossbones - broadband internet copyright infringement

Kiwi ISP Slingshot promotes piracy amongst  Antipodean punters – broadband internet copyright infringement

New Zealand based ISP Slingshot is providing pre-VPNed connections so that New Zealanders can watch BBC iPlayer or subscribe to Netflix etc for free. A VPN, or Virtual Private Network in this case allows users to tunnel across the internet so that it looks as if they are located somewhere else. Effectively corporate promoted broadband internet copyright infringement.

BBC programmes are made available to UK license payers on computers tablets and smart phones via iPlayer streamed over the internet. iPlayer is blocked from streaming to non-UK IP addresses on the basis that they are unlikely to be genuine UK residents and thus will probably not have paid their license fee.

Netflix is a paid service but not available in every country around the globe. New Zealand based subscribers wanting to sign up have to lie about where they live. Slingshot provides the IP spoofing, presumably via a proxy based in the UK which can then also be used to access iPlayer.

From a Netflix perspective the issue is likely to be the fact that Netflix themselves may not have the licenses to stream certain content in markets other than those in which they operate.

As a UK BBC license payer I am of course outraged that I am effectively susbsidizing the TV watching of New Zealanders. I can’t see how they have time anyway. One assumes that most of them are out playing rugby  every night.

It’s interesting as this sort of thing is probably legal in NZ. Slingshot takes no responsibility for the fact that customers may have told Netflix porkies about where they live.  It’s the way of the world of course. The internet doesn’t care (much) for national borders, unless you live somewhere the government is trying to control what you access…

Anyway that’s it. Interesting broadband internet copyright infringement snippet methinks.

Editorial note – check out our new site – BroadbandRating.

Categories
broadband End User fun stuff

Isaac Newton woz ere but no superfast broadband in Grantham

isaac newton and superfast broadband in grantham

Isaac Newton woz ere, according to the plaque on the wall but no superfast broadband in Granthan

I was picking up Kid3 from a gig in Grantham’s St Wulfram’s Church last weekend. Nice enough gaff as churches go, if you like that sort of thing. Kid3 plays in the Lincolnshire County Orchestra – it has a name but that eludes me as I write as it has changed over the years. Before picking him up I hung around the graveyard for a bit, as you  do and couldn’t fail to notice a plaque on the wall opposite.

It read “In this hall of the King’s School Isaac Newton was taught 1654 – 1660. This plaque was set up to mark the tercentenary of the visit of the Royal Society 1960”.

Another of those, “gosh was he really” moments, somewhat akin to me seeing the Meccano bike but different. Now I’m not really comparing Isaac Newton to a Meccano bike. He was a superstar of literally earth moving magnitude, having “discovered” gravity or at least being the first person to notice what it was he was looking at.

Interesting to muse that Newton lived in the 17th Century and thus would have had little conception of technologies that exist today. They probably didn’t even know what a virus was in those days let alone a computer virus. In the interest of fitting with this week’s broadband theme I did a broadband availability check on Newton’s Alma Mater, or at least of the church over the road. The results are given below:

BT BROADBAND AVAILABILITY CHECKER

For Postcode NG31 6RR

Featured Products Downstream Line Rate(Mbps) Upstream Line Rate(Mbps) Downstream Range(Mbps) Availability Date
WBC ADSL 2+ Up to 17 — 10 to 19.5 Available
ADSL Max Up to 7.5 — 6.5 to 8 Available
WBC Fixed Rate 2 — — Available
Fixed Rate 2 — — Available
Other Offerings
Copper Multicast — — — Available

 
For all ADSL and WBC Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) services, the stable line rate will be determined during the first 10 days of service usage.Throughput/download speeds will be less than line rates and can be affected by a number of factors within and external to BT’s network, Communication Providers’ networks and within customer premises.The Stop Sale date for Datastream is from 30-Jun-2012; the Formal Retirement date for Datastream is from 30-Jun-2014. The Stop Sale date for IPstream is from 31-Dec-2012; the Formal Retirement date for IPstream is from 30-Jun-2014.Note: Please note that postcode and address check results are indicative only. Most accurate results can be obtained from a telephone number check.Thank you for your interest.

I wonder if they knew it was Isaac Newton asking for superfast broadband in Grantham whether they would have accelerated the roll out in the area. After all with such a great mind what discoveries might be hindered by the lack of uplink speed. Hanging out with his scientific cronies would certainly not have been a great experience. Better maybe than the several months round trip time for a letter in those days.

Note the formal retirement date of 30th June 2014 for IPstream. This was the old ADSL backhaul network. BT moved ISPs on from this to it’s 21CN version years ago by making cost of bandwidth on the newer service far more attractive than IPstream.

Categories
broadband travel Weekend

Cygnets seen during today’s walk to work

signets at Lincoln's Brayford Pool

Cygnets at Lincoln’s Brayford Pool

My walk to work always bring new sights. You see a lot more at my gentle strolling pace than when you are stuck in a car waiting at traffic lights, queuing at junctions and generally polluting the atmosphere.

This morning I came across this swan and her three cygnets. I can’t imagine the cygnets are more than a couple of weeks old although I’m no expert on this subject. The photograph was taken from behind railings only a few feet away. The swan remained calm but I’d like to bet that if I’d tried to get closer  to the cygnets she would have let me know it didn’t make a lot of sense. I assume it was a she but I’m not sure how you tell the difference.

At lunchtime on my way to the gym I spotted some blokes with a white van laying some fibre. I wanted to take a photo but felt this would have been a little conspicuous. Odd even (hey 🙂 ). Apparently we have a new building on campus that is being lit.

Around 5ish I set off for home. Didn’t notice if the cygnets were still there.  I have a very steep hill to walk up, called Steep Hill funnily enough. We are simple folk in Lincoln. Like to tell it like it is. Walking up Steep Hill is a challenge at the best of times but when you’ve been to the gym it is especially hard going. Must be doing me good, I’d imagine.

This is broadband week on trefor.net. So far this week we have had 12 posts, including this one which is nothing to do with broadband unless you count the fibre laying. It’s been noticeable that whilst on a typical day we get 15% return visits this week it’s been more like 20% per day. That’s more of our “regulars” coming back for the broadband themed week. As time goes by (You must remember this…) we will be having more themed weeks, now that we have the new site theme and hopefully will build up the visitor numbers.

There is still a fair bit to do before the site is finished. We are currently working on improving the sharing buttons – the plug in being used is a bit hit and miss with the shares. The comments system is also not as seamless as I would like. The previous design used the built in comment facility. This has been moved to Disqus on the basis that it is one of the leading systems in the game. However I’m not too impressed with it. Disqus adds more steps to the commenting process and whilst some of this week’s posts have attracted a reasonable level of comment I’d like to bet that some of you have abandoned the process due to the number of clicks you have had to make.

Anyway, more anon. Got a football match to watch. Ciao bebe.

Categories
broadband End User spam

Virgin Media Broadband Spam

Virgin broadband spam aka junk mail

Broadband Spam by Virgin Media – aka junk mail.

A week or three ago I whinged to Virgin Media on Twitter about their broadband spam. In other words they keep sending me junk mail pitching their broadband packages. I’m sure they are very good but sorry boys, if I want to look at your stuff I’ll do it online. The guy (gal?) at the end of their Twitter account promised he would take my details off their mailing list.

Alas twas a vain promise. Yesterday I got some more junk mail off them. I’me sure there must be a way of complaining about this. I can’t use the old send the junk mail back in the reply paid envelope because they don’t provide one. Maybe I’ll stick it in an unstamped envelope and send it on to Richard Branson. A few of those and they’d soon get the message: “Oy I keep getting junk mail off this bloke Tref. Doesn’t he know I already have Virgin broadband, TV, phone etc etc etc? Also I had to nip to the post office and pay the unpaid postage before finding out it was more junk from him. Who can I complain to?” Or words to that effect. I imagine. Probably.

One assumes Richard Branson uses Virgin, unless they aren’t in his area. They don’t bother providing services to areas of low population densities such as vast country estates, farms, villages and so on and so forth (just trying to avoid too frequent repetition of the etcetera word).

Having read umpteen mailings from Virgin (I am in the business – I don’t normally read junk mail) one has to admit that consumer broadband services are getting cheap. As a non TV watcher I’m not tempted by the TV bolt ons. Surely people can get everything they need on BBC1 and BBC2, oh and Yesterday although the adverts are a nuisance on the latter, aren’t they?

In the interests of research I did take a look at the Virgin Media website. Their broadband spam does work in raising awareness. It amazes me how much these people must spend on marketing and I wonder how much of your monthly subscription that accounts for?!

The big message seems to be in the bundle. A common thread in the pricing is the fact that you always have to add a telephone line rental to the total. It would seem to me that this function is rapidly becoming obsolete, other than to carry a broadband line but that is another story.

Categories
food and drink Weekend

Tandoori marinade – lamb tikka massala part 1

tandoori marinade lamb marinating in a jug

Tandoori marinade mixed with cubes of lamb fillet in a bowl and left overnight.

All broadband and no curry makes for a dull life. This post describes how to make a tandoori marinade which, mixed with lamb cubes, is left in the fridge over night before proceeding to part two of the process which involves cooking the meat.

In our house the boss, the lovely Mrs Davies has been away for a few days and us lads, me and kids 3 and 4 have been left to fend for ourselves. In times gone by we will have survived on takeaways and miscellaneous home cooked junk food protein and carbs. However Anne has been making numerous trips away and the takeaway existence has proved to be unsustainable. We have been yearning for proper cooked meals.

This trip/absence, in all fairness to me, we have done reasonably well. Yes we have had our fair share of bacon, sausages, beans and baked potatoes or toast. We are blokes after all. However I have been attempting to have the lads in a reasonably healthy condition for when their mum comes home, which is tomorrow.

Last night I cooked fresh tagliatelle pasta with a tomato and vegetable sauce. Tonight we have fended for ourselves from the fridge due to the intervention of a school cricket match (we won yay). Tomorrow however Anne comes home and it felt only reasonable that I have something decent waiting for her tea.

Tomorrow night we have escalopes of pork marinated for 24 hours in Levi Roots Reggae Reggae sauce. This will be served with Brazilian rice (whatever that is – it sounded alright) and green beans and broccoli on the side (not for me – I’m a grown up – I don’t understand the point of broccoli).

At the same time I have decided that on Thursday we will be eating lamb tikka massala. Nome of this pre-made sauce rubbish though. This one is going to be cooked from first principles, prompted largely by the fact that whilst  wandering through Lincoln Cornhill Market a few weeks ago I came across a stall selling Indian spices. Impressed with the range of ingredients available I bought an armful including a huge industrial bag of garam massala.

All this fine foodstuff has been sat in the cupboard. Until now. Waitrose this afternoon offered up some lamb fillet together with a miscellany of other ingredients. Back at home I dioscovered that I also needed root ginger, natural yoghurt and some fresh coriander so another trip, this time to Tesco, was initiated.

The intent here is to marinate the lamb overnight in a tandoori marinade and tomorrow I will cook the meat in a tandoor. I have a clay tandoori pot which you stick in the oven and which simulates a real tandoor. The tandoori marinade is simple to make. Dry fry some cardamon pods, coriander seeds and cumin, grind together with a couple of red chillies, garlic and the root ginger.  I’m not going to bother you with quantities – look it up – this is not a cookery blog. Chuck in some lemon juice,  turmeric, mix into some natural yoghurt and then add the meat.

This concoction, which btw smells wonderful, is covered with cling film and left in the fridge overnight. Look out for parts two and three tomorrow. I want to get the lamb tikka massala finished tomorrow night so that it can benefit from another night of spice infusion.

If you like your food you should check out The Burton Road Strip, a series of poems about food emporia on Burton Road in Lincoln.

Yowser…

Categories
broadband End User

Broadband Week on trefor.net

Gigaclear gigabit broadband broadband week image - Gigaclear speedtest showing 1Gbps broadband speeds in Appleton & Eaton

Broadband week on trefor.net brings a totally international set of posts that includes contributions from Australia, South Africa and Rochdale.

Broadband Week has, in all, over 15 contributors who have written material that covers a very diverse set of subjects. Editorially we do not ask specific contributors to write on particular subjects unless they can’t think of one themselves. This is our way of trying to achieve a wide coverage of broadband-related subjects on the site.

Guest contributors are invited because in general they are interesting people. We have CTOs, CEOs, Sales Directors, online comparison specialists, regulatory managers, University Professors, entrepreneurs, students, start-ups, community projects, small ISPs, large ISPs, multi-tenant broadband specialists and rear admirals1. Some are people I’ve know for a long time and some I’ve only recently bumped into. By and large, the posts are written by the named person themselves and not the “marketing” department. We don’t accept blatant sales pitches.

Although broadband technology is mass market it still arouses high emotions. This is particularly the case from those who can’t get access to it. This situation is set to continue as even with the Government funded BDUK (Broadband Delivery UK) project many households are being left out of the roll out. Something guaranteed to continue inflaming the senses of a highly vocal minority.

Broadband is with each passing year becoming more and more essential to our way of life and despite being a mature consumer technology always seems to surprise us with new issues.

If the electricity and water supplies were switched off tomorrow the nation would come to grinding halt. The time is surely not so far off where the same would apply were the same to happen to broadband networks. Our growing use of “the cloud” is predicated on the availability of broadband.

trefor.net as a business could not exist without it, even taking away the fact that much of what we do and talk about is related to internet connectivity. Our systems depend on cloud tech: virtual servers, Platforms As A Service (e.g., FreeAgent accounting software) and Google Apps. I have even, at the ripe old age of ahem £$%^^&* started to see the attraction of Spotify where before I have always wanted to purchase physical copies of music that I listen to.

My wife uses eBay WhatsApp, Google Calendar, gmail and now — and you’d better believe this — Snapchat!!! All this points towards broadband being mission critical to our lives and one deserving of regular coverage on trefor.net. This week, being Broadband Week on the site, means that regular coverage is very much what you are going to get.

I hope you will enjoy reading the Broadband Week posts, and please feel free to comment on anything that arouses your interest. We have also, as of last week, rolled out a new unique template on the site. This is an evolving, living entity which will gradually change over the next few weeks to what we hope will be an useful and interesting resource. Look out also for new specialist affiliate sites that we will be introducing during the course of the year.

1 Only joking.

Categories
Business UC

ITSPA Summer Forum

itspa summer forum drinks party

ITSPA Summer Forum and 10th Anniversary celebrations

ITSPA Summer Forum was a terrific success and a suitable tribute to the celebratory nature of the event. The afternoon AGM and series of talks and panel discussion went really well and we were lucky enough to have some serious industry players amongst the speakers.

The line up for the afternoon was as follows:

Keynote: Kevin Murphy, Head of Voice, BT

Market Update: Matt Townend, Director, Cavell Group

Regulatory Update: Pete Farmer, Head of Reguatory, Gamma Telecom

Provisioning Code of Practice:  David Cargill

Panel Debate – Retrospective and Futures for the ITSP industry in the UK: Trefor Davies, Matt Townend, Alex Kinch (Ziron), Dean Bubbley (Disruptive Analysis)

We were lucky to secure the services of Kevin Murphy who ran the highly successful BT London 2012 Olympics project and now runs the PSTN and all voice services at BT. That’s a big job. Also big thanks to Alex Kinch of Ziron for stepping in at the last minute due to the illness of another panellist. Alex is a contributor to trefor.net and was one of the founders of LONAP.

In the evening we adjourned upstairs to the rooftop terrace of Le Coq d’Argent. Top class it was fair play. The featured picture is of the crowd on the terrace – maybe one or two faces you might recognise? I don’t have any more pictures as I spent the afternoon chairing the meeting then afterwards at the bar I occupied myself eating and drinking networking.

All in all it was a fitting way to celebrate ITSPA’s 10th anniversary. The industry is in a healthy state and I think the next ten years are going to be full of excitement, if impossible to predict. Also impossible to predict is whether I will be around for the 20th ITSPA Summer Forum. Hey, one game at a time…

Categories
travel Weekend

Union of South Africa at Newark Northgate

Union of south africa A4 Pacific

Union of South Africa A4 Pacific steam engine seen at Newark Northgate train station

Was heading to London for a meeting with Telehouse in Docklands and had to change trains at Newark Northgate. The jackpot came up. These in the siding stood the Union of South Africa steam train in tandem with the  LNER class K4 Great Marquess. Magnificent.

The train had apparently stopped to take on water. Amazing how people know about these things because there were a number of trainspotting enthusiasts on the platform. When I arrived it had apparently already been there an hour having pulled in to take on water – there was a tender in attendance a little further on down the track. They obviously don’t have the trackside water towers any more.

It’s amazing how people find out these things. The enthusiasts were still clicking away after the hour. Presumably had big memory cards in their cameras. There was also a bloke in a suit taking photos with his iPad. Presumably was an actual rail traveller like me (though unlike me not dressed in tshirt and shorts).

Always bemused when I see fold taking pictures with iPads. Usually Chinese tourists outside the British Museum. Not the most convenient form factor.

For those of you who don’t know the Union of South Africa was the last steam engine to leave Kings Cross Station on a scheduled commercial passenger run. The A4 Pacifics, designed by Sir Nigel Gresley were the fastest steam engines ever built and include the world steam speed record holder the Mallard.

I don’t mind admitting I like steam trains and have a layout, now rarely used, in the attic which includes a Hornby 00 gauge model of the Union of South Africa, a train that I have also had the privilege to ride on on a day excursion to Scarborough (fair play).

Note the overhead electric cables in the photos – seem somehow out of place.

The great marquess LNER class K4

Union of South Africa

Diesel & steam

British railways logo

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Bad Stuff End User piracy security

Website Blocking Report

website blocking report

See if your website is being blocked by ISPs using the Open Rights Group (ORG) website blocking Blocked resource.

Had an interesting tweet this morning from @boggits pointing me at blocked.org.uk, specifically this link. It shows, as is seen in the header screenshot, that three mobile networks: 3, O2 and EE have blocked users access to trefor.net.

My only prior personal experience of website blocking is when the Timico firewall blocked access to the blog. V funny you have to admit but at least I had direct control over that situation and was able to report it to myself myself, if you see what I mean. It was simply blocking access to blogs rather than having noted lots of dodgy content.

Blocking blogs as a blanket act is now a somewhat naive and outdated activity.

None of the mobile networks are blocking access to trefor.net at the moment, as far as I know. Maybe hundreds of people complained. Don’t argue – it could be what happened:). Typically mobile networks block dodgy sites as standard although you can call them to ask for the blocks to be removed:

“ring ring (x20) … hello this is your mobile operator customer service executive here … oh you want the blocks removed (snigger snigger) … certainly sir, all done for you … ”

I had to do it once because the SIM in my laptop was being blocked from accessing the online portal I was using to manage my VoIP account. Also there was a fun scenario where our private APN service was being used to apply policies to corporate network access and I’d deliberately type in porn addresses to show website blocking in action. Jared the IT must have had a few eyebrow raises at that one.

Website blocking by court order for the likes of Pirate Bay haven’t yet been applied as far as I am aware. Someone is sure to point out my mistake if I’m wrong there.

Anyway that’s it on the website blocking front for today. Gotta go to Laandan. Ciao amigos.