Jul 25 2008
You’d think something as basic as syncing with a network disk would be available to everyone… but no, one of those annoying things I’ve found about Home Premium is this:
The ability to sync with network folders is not included in Windows Vista Starter, Windows Vista Home Basic, and Windows Vista Home Premium.
It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t cost £100 odd quid to upgrade! I don’t have that sort of money, damnit!
Jul 25 2008
I’ve finally managed to get the last remaining websites I used to run on my home servers up and running. Hannah and Tom’s blog are now online and raring to go…
Check them out! 
Jul 25 2008
I just had a little rant post on a forum and I thought I’d post it here. The mentioned argument happened last Thursday.
I had an e-mail argument with Matthew Evans, the Assistant to the Chairman & Chief Executive, but they literally don’t care. He shoved all responsibility to BT Wholesale, and said they can’t do anything about it… I said why not, BT Wholesale is part of BT, and you’re the assistant to the CEO, surely you have some say over what BT Wholesale says - and to that he replied with the standard crap I’ve heard before - they’re non customer facing,and he doesn’t have access to the results and reasons why BT Openreach would not give me copper overlay… what does that say about BT??
Basically, you can’t complain to BT about this kind of thing, you have to complain to the ISP, because BT simply do not care.
BT Wholesale’s customers are the ISP’s i.e. BT Retail, Be Unlimited etc. Wholesale liaise with their customer’s only. Unfortunately you cannot liaise with Wholesale directly as you are a customer of the ISP. If you have a complaint re Wholesale you would make that to your ISP. Your ISP would then liaise with Wholesale to resolve the complaint and would then come back to you with the answer.
As far as I can see this process has now been followed and you need to accept that unfortunately, at this current period in time, it looks like a broadband service is not available to you. However in the future, as technology advances, this may change.
You really can’t take this matter any further.
Which translates to me as:
I couldn’t care less you can’t get internet, you didn’t go with BT as your ISP so we won’t bother sorting you out with internet. If you had gone with BT, we would’ve actually given you a copper overlay, but then screwed you over with a 2KB download limit. Haha, consumers are so stupid, look at my BIG PILE OF CASH SITTING ON MY DESK.
Grr.. BT annoy me. Supposedly they were supposed to fix my line yesterday, that never happened. Supposedly they are doing it today. I might get internet one day.. I might not.
Jul 24 2008
Here’s what I got up to today:
Jul 24 2008
I’ve managed to sell the server cabinet now, but I’ve still got a few things to sell. If you might know who would like a server for their birthday… please send them this way:
Please buy them, we have a wedding to fund, and they don’t come cheap!
Jul 24 2008
Now, even though I still don’t have Internet due to BT crossing my lines, I am already singing Newnet’s praises. Their customer service is simply supreme. The difference is quite simple… call centre in England, with English speakers, but the important part is this, so I will emphasise this a lot:
The technical support know what they are talking about.
I have never had such a pleasurable experience being told I can’t get internet just yet. It was simply bliss. The good thing is, they explained the problem clearly, in simple-to-understand language, and without just repeating what BT Wholesale just told them, or just reading from a script!
So, here’s to Newnet, possibly the best ISP in the UK.
Jul 24 2008
Pesto is quite a strong flavour, but I think it goes with Salmon just excellently. You can do whatever veg you like with it, but this is the meal I prepared last night.
Prepare the Salmon by using a spoon to spread Pesto sauce on top in a thin layer (or if you really love Pesto, a thick layer!). Add a touch of salt & pepper. Slice courgettes, and dice up the garlic into tiny little bits, or use a garlic press… Peel and chop up potatoes into quarters.
Boil potatoes as normal until soft (I usually boil them slightly longer so they fall apart a bit easier). Mash with a tad of milk (or cream if you feel adventurous!), and butter. Salmon should be grilled for some time - I’m not sure how long as I undercooked ours last night, but use common sense here! Finally, fry the courgettes in butter for a minute or so, add the garlic, and turn up medium-high.
It’s a simple dish, but I still managed to undercook the salmon, oops!! Very tasty though.
Jul 23 2008
Here’s what I got up to today:
BT messed up our phone line! (2008-07-23 19:16:25)Jul 23 2008
Inspired by this tiny gadget, a thin client in a wall socket, I got thinking about hiding away your computer in the wall. I came up with this solution…
You could probably hack the Jack PC thin client so that you have the corresponding connection on the wall-facing side of the socket. That would enable you to run cables down from the attic and simply plug into the wall socket, and install.
With that sort of setup (although slightly hacky), as opposed to being a thin client and requiring a Terminal Server, you would literally have a PC in the wall that you can just plug into. You could even have a whole network of PCs.
Of course, the original design of this is meant for thin clients, so converting it into a solid PC would defeat the point of the thin-client-ness. Thin clients are there to save money, and my idea basically just hides away your ugly PC case, and puts it into a nice neat wall socket where you just plug in your monitor/speakers/keyboard/DVD/Blu-ray drives.
Jul 23 2008
An issue thats been annoying me a little over the last few days was trying to get my nVidia nForce RAID array working. I’d taken 4x 300GB hard disks out of one of my servers as I wanted to keep them. Initially I tried to set up the array using my shiny Adaptec 2410SA. Alas, on a brief check, Adaptec don’t have Vista drivers. I tried hacking it a bit, but didn’t get it to work.
I gave up on that and tried setting up the array using the onboard RAID device… which actually makes more sense as it’ll probably be a lot faster and efficient than using a PCI RAID device. Anyway, I enabled RAID in the BIOS, set up the array in the nForce BIOS, and it was happy and existing as a nice big striped 1.2TB (!) array. Then it came to Vista, and the annoyance began.
The array appeared in Disk Manager as four seperate drives. My first instinct was to reinstall or upgrade drivers. I tried re-installing, to no avail. Having no internet meant I had to go round a friends house and download the latest nForce drivers (and get exceedingly drunk in the process…). I installed these, and still the same result. I did a lot of Googling, and some people recommended upgrading the BIOS. I managed to get my mobile phone to connect my PC to the internet just long enough to get on the ABit site and download the latest BIOS. No difference…
I tried various hacks that were suggested, and I finally gave in and posted on the nVidia forums. A bloke called Fernando responded telling me that the latest nForce drivers (15.17) didn’t support nForce 4 for RAID. Nice one, nVidia. This guy has obviously done a lot of work on this issue as he’s actually made a driver pack (even WHQL’ed!) for nForce 4 systems that worked straight off. If anyone has any issues at all with nForce 4 boards, I highly recommend installing this driver pack at the first instance. I am now happy with my 1.2TB hard drive… now I just need to fill it!
More detail, and the download links can be found here.
And lastly, thanks to Fernando for putting the effort in and making the solution so simple.
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