Archives

Feb
21
2011

Mostly365 Participation

Mostly365 is designed so that you can share a photo with the world every day! As someone who has wanted to get into Photography I find the idea of taking a photo worthy of such a project daunting. However, it doesn’t have to be, the idea is actually to get people taking more photos and sharing them on twitter, flickr or instagram for example.

So I decided to participate in this project, now although it started on 1st January 2011 I only started mine on 21st February 2011.

Here is the first image of the project, which is one of my sons GoGo’s. Taken on an iPhone 4 and edited with Camera+
Go Go

 

Jan
21
2011

A new career in Football!

I play Football Manager 2011 and currently three seasons into running Sunderland AFC and second in Premier League with a few games remaining. I have the same points as Arsenal who are first as they have scored over 10 more than we have.

Looking around various forums people start out with a Sunday league experience and unemployed. Starting the game like this is pretty frustrating as it can take a long time to be offered a job – even if at all lol. The key is to ensure you include the lower leagues.

So, this is exactly what I am going to do. I normally struggle with Football Manager games, and although I am quite pleased with the way my Sunderland game is going I imagine this is going to be highly frustrating for me. I will try to keep it up but who knows how it’s going to end up lol.

I plan on posting monthly updates (that’s game months not actual months) on how I am getting on, so for those non-football supporting readers – sorry and I will try to post random crap as usual lol. I plan on creating a background history to it too, to make it a bit interesting hahaha – yeah right.

More to follow…

Jan
18
2011

Moving to Sky….

Last year Sky installed their LLU equipment in my telephone exchange. I had thought about moving to Sky but with reports of poor connections and the fact that I was more than happy with ADSL24 I elected to just leave it as is.

However, after a recent phone bill from BT I decided to look at LLU providers again. I cannot and will not ever move to BT Broadband due to their traffic shaping policy. I am not what I would call a heavy broadband user but BT classed me as one as I downloaded around 14Gb per month – which is nothing compared to many.

The companies on my exchange are as follows :

  • Sky
  • Orange
  • Talktalk

As I do not have a mobile phone with Orange and don’t want to be with Talk Talk I decided to look into Sky. Being a Sky customer already, Sky offer Unlimited broadband for £12.50 per month or £7.50 per month (free for first 3 months) if we sign up to their Sky Talk service.

Their online checker reported my line being able to support a maximum of 0.5Mb which concerned me considering I already had a 2.8Mb connection but I decided to take the risk and duly signed up for Sky Broadband, Sky Talk with line rental.

My activation was 14th January 2011.

I am a few days into my 10 day line test and so far my connection has risen from just under 3Mb as shown below

to just over 5Mb!

So far in my limited tests I am really impressed with Sky. No speed slow downs, not too much lag in online games (though ping is not as low as it was I plan on moving to a gamer profile later if it does cause me a problem) and web pages are displaying instantly.

My phone line transfers to Sky on 31st January 2011 so I will know a lot more then on how things are going. However, with saving at least £12.10 on broadband costs and the saving compared to BT line costs I really think I made the right move 🙂

Time will tell 😉

Sep
21
2010

Is 3 better than 2?

Since the original Apple iPhone came out back in 2007 I have always been with O2.

Having signed up for a 18 Month contract with the Original iPhone I was over the moon with O2 when they allowed me to upgrade to the iPhone 3G when it was released by Apple and duly purchased the iPhone 3G and more recently the awesome iPhone 4. In the beginning every thing was fine, 3G internet access, calls, text everything worked perfectly.

However, things started to go wrong last year with O2. Their 3G network was terrible for internet access whenever I was at the football. What I could not understand was why one season it was ok and the next it wasn’t  so blamed it on a combination of the Stadium of Light and O2! After asking my followers on twitter who they were using and their experiences I discovered a bit of a pattern :

O2 – Woeful once at the Stadium
Orange – Not as bad but does fail
Vodafone – As Orange
Three – No feedback
T Mobile – No feedback

So I guess that there were simply too many people in one location for the mobile operators to cope with.

Recently on twitter a couple of people had mentioned a Three MiFi and how they use it as an alternative connection to O2 as they could get a better connection whilst on the road or wanted an internet connection for their iPad whilst out of range of a WiFi network.

As I have not been happy with O2 for sometime due to their connectivity problems I decided to purchase a PAYG MiFi from Three in order to trial the Three network and see what it’s like compared to O2. After checking the pricing I opted to buy a MiFi with 3Gb data which lasts 3 months on PAYG, and costs £69.99, so that I can “trial” the Three network and see what it is like. I also used topcashback.co.uk (referral link) to get £12.00 off the cost.

MiFi

For those which don’t know what a MiFi is it’s basically a 3G dongle with built in WiFI, this clever little device allows up to 5!! devices to share a 3G connection on the Three mobile network. You can either get the MiFi on a 12 month contract or on a PAYG basis.

As you can see from the information above the MiFi on Three is MUCH better than O2’s network on my iPhone. I suspect that the O2 network simply cannot cope with the the massive increase in smart phones, be it Apple iPhone’s, Andriod driven phones or even those strange Windows driven things 😉

So far in my testing the Three network seems far superior to O2’s and once my contract expires in June 2011 I will be migrating to Three with my next iPhone!

Sep
20
2010

New design…

Thinking that the previous design was out of date I decided to do a quick scan on what WordPress themes were available. After trialling many and being frustrated with nearly all of them I have finally settled on this one. God only knows how long it will last as I am still looking due to the fact I am not 100% happy with it.