TOCPCs – The Elite Geeks Blog

We haven’t got the bill yet, but being the curious person I am, I must know the full results of all that we have done in the realm of saving power.
So, I started a few days ago, reading the meter to the house.
The readings were rather surprising.
Previously (months ago) I measured and we were [...]

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Here’s one sure way of knowing it is the jolly (or is it silly) season.
The idiots on the road increase EXPONENTIALLY!
Today, I did a few Ks, we went to the local shopping centre, and collected a few items.
On the way there:
1. The car in front was going slow as. Almost like they were trying to [...]

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I spent a bit of today RAIDing through the internets and digging for RAID info.
Specifically what I want to do is upgrade the physical disks on my RAID array.
Unfortunately, I can only have 2 physical disks, and both are used by my RAID setup, which mirrors data.
So I sorted through some Google posts on RAID. [...]

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I can’t find any reliable information on how to ADD larger disks to a SCSI RAID array.
Essentially its only capable of 2 disks, and it has 2 disks.
I’m unhappy with the sizing of those looking long term, so I want to fatten it up now.
I can’t fatten it up now, because I’m unsure how one [...]

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This Christmas-New Year period on Australian roads has been better thus far then previous years, with the road toll down to 2 from 7 last year in New South Wales.
That’s great news in the face of the busiest period on the roads, but perhaps the rush will be on the way back home?
Or has Kevin [...]

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I feel like I have driven 150Ks in just 1 day.
Oh wait. I did!
None the less, the trip today was a safe trip to a nearby location celebrating Christmas with much of the extended family (as is the tradition).
This year however, it is realised more that my little one is growing up. He enjoyed playing [...]

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As we start to apporach the end of 2007, a few things occurred to me.
1. The year is flying faster than most broadband connections.
2. The next year is going to be more interesting, but not as interesting as the one after.
3. Next year I should be finished my IT studies completely, ready for 2009, the [...]

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.. and much more is likely to be possible in 2010.
This is a little old news (from IT Wire, Thursday), but I thought it was worthy to revisit, mainly because it’s all likely to be second nature to us when 2010 rolls around.
Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) claim they can get 173Mbps off a wireless internet [...]

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Some fool decided to park directly in front of my house on my way back from a celebration tonight. There was a row of cars parked in front of our place, so I couldn’t get a park. Not even in the drive way (I know I should start towing cars for parking there heh).
Anyway, realising [...]

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….so, Merry Christmas.
For those who are going to have one, and aren’t affected by the Chrisco problems, resulting in 30,000 Christmas Hampers being undelivered (yes, I know I’m a bit slow in catching up in the news, well, posting it here anyway).
I’ll be short on this topic, got more I want to catch up on.
Chrisco [...]

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Telstra has approached the ACCC to legislate against Optus’s usage of ULL networks, where they refuse to connect buildings such as flats, units, etc.
Optus refuses to connect such customers, but will happily connect them to ULL based infrastructure where Optus supplies the internet service and phone line to customers.
Such a move means that Optus [...]

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In a move that might see rapid deployment of WiMAX technology on the Unwired network, Seven has finally finished its takeover of Unwired.
They reached the 93 percent threshold where they could perform a compulsory acquisition of the remaining 7% of shares, and have done just that.
Seven’s ownership of Unwired will result in at least 2 [...]

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That was a question put to me today. Well not exactly that, but a version of it.
I got thinking.
Do I code simply because its ’something to do’? Nah. Not really. There’s plenty of other stuff I could do. Locally, I could do more and earn more, surely.
So it’s not “something to do”.
Maybe it’s because I [...]

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The ACCC decided today to reject the G9 proposal of offering FTTN at realistic prices to the Australian public.
The rejection wasn’t due to prices.
It wasn’t due to technology.
It was due to a simple issue identified in the Special Access Undertaking, they didn’t commit to any auditable process for the medium and long term of the [...]

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I decided it was time to stop writing out 5 lines or more per MySQL query and instead, create a function to encapsulate that query, and run some tests on the result to determine a result to be returned back.
The query is multi purpose, just like the original mysql_query. But, instead of, after the query, [...]

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Ever had a McDonald’s Big Mac? – What a stupid question, I’m sure you’d have had one by now.
Anyway, McDonald’s Big Mac has been increasing in price, repeatedly.
One thing remains to increase, and instead, sees a decrease, and that’s the actual burger.
A Big Mac used to be fairly large when they first came out. [...]

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Bigpond have dropped prices across its NextG network from the excessively high prices they were to the mildly lesser excessive prices they are now.
The plans have seen price drops from what in comparison can be considered a tiny $30.00 a month, to a below medium $70 a month in price drops.
The plans now range in [...]

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Exetel have come up with a great idea to help an endangered bird from hitting extinction.
The bird being the Gouldian Finch, is currently facing extinction, to remove the threat, it would cost an approximate $100,000 a year in donations to assist, over 3 years.
$300,000 over 3 years. Seems pretty easy to generate that sort of [...]

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Seeing the site run more today, has revealed that the accuracy of the monitoring is increasing considerably, to the extent that outages are at new lows.
The outage log shows that in the last 24 hours, there have been just 3 outages in total, with the most notable being VitalTel, who went down at 9am today, [...]

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Telstra will be facing tough competition in the 3G arena, after Vodafone announced it will boldly go where no one else has gone to yet.
Creating a competitive, fairly priced 3G mobile network that will rival Telstra’s.
Amazingly, reports from Vodafone indicate such an upgrade to the Voda network would cost less than $500 million. Cheaper than [...]

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After getting my changes live last night, and making some changes to the VoIP Monitoring outages this morning, it seems the system is improving significantly.
What happens is if the first packet doesn’t appear, fine, we’ll check for another, so a maximum of around 3 seconds is spent on a provider to get a response per [...]

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At last. It’s taken many weeks to progress on this update to the website.
But. It’s live.
Running right now is a complete different system for testing for outages. It fixes many of the failures of the previous system, by testing DNS, by allowing for a simple missed beat, by testing in details finding any problem it [...]

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I didn’t really post these up before, didn’t consider them relevant, and was too busy getting a licence to drive to actually run the tests.
But today, out of curiosity, among others, I decided to determine what uses how much power, and found some rather interesting results.
We did the testing by finding the base load, that [...]

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It seems that no matter what is dangled in front of Telstra, they won’t have a part of it.
And whatever moves are taken to control Telstra’s unlawful actions in the industry, they simply push harder for more.
They seemingly are declaring war on everything.
- ACCC: Apparently they do the job of protecting consumers very well. Too [...]

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It’s almost certain that sooner or later, the ISP market will cave in on top of itself and pave the way for a stack of consolidations. Companies buying other companies, and building up huge customer bases.
A recent false news announcement stated that Soul was planning on selling, it was later revealed that is not the [...]

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In what can only be seen as clear proof of Telstra’s unwillingness to work with the new government to ensure the future of broadband for Australians, the telcos loud mouth, Phil Burgess has decided to reveal that Telstra plans to not only not work with the government in an equity arrangement or in a public, [...]

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Telstra has publicly confessed to its dirty tricks that it tried to play against the Howard Government, and in a pure demonstration of its clear greed to rid the industry of competition and charge its own excessive prices, which would essentially push telecommunications prices up, beyond their wildest possible levels.
A recent news article (that has [...]

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News out of the Optus pricing arena, seems to suggest they are trying to fight an inevitable network saturation issue.
Recently, the optus website has new conditions added which state that you will be charged excess usage on new signups to fusion plans, before shaping to 64kbps is applied for the 2 and 7GB plans.
Virgin, which [...]

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I’ve progressed on OzVoIPStatus’s new system, the changes however, are such a pain to implement that I’ve decided to take a different road and instead setup my own local version of the full website, and migrate changes there, once all is displaying and working well, I’ll move it over!
We do have it working, and there’s [...]

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Over the last week, not a lot has arrived in the news. Some might say its a slow news week, but that’s not true, because I know what a slow news week is like in the media, and the quality of journalism hasn’t dropped that far as yet.
For me, I spent the last week helping [...]

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