Still As Life

In continuing on from my blog the other day where I was wondering what would happen if I were to run a second router on our phone line.

Well, I picked up a Netcomm NB5 yesterday for $45 at Umart Online, brought it home and hooked it up.

After a fair amount of fiddling around, I found the following things to happen consistently:

1. For reasons I can only guess at, the NB5 will not attempt to connect when the old D-Link is connected.
2. When the D-Link is unplugged from the phone line, the NB5 will sync near instantly.
3. As soon as the D-Link is plugged back into the phone line it will boot the NB5.
4. The NB5 will not attempt to sync again until the D-Link is unplugged.

Now, I figure that only one will connect at a time due to the static IP provided by TPG, what I don’t understand though is why the old router will consistently kick the new one off every time it is plugged in but the new one will not affect the old one at all. The only thing I can think of is that the old ADSL router firmware is much more aggressive than the firmware on the new adsl2+ router. So I’m guessing the NB5 checks the line, determines there is a connection, and leaves it be until the connection is gone, whereas the old router doesn’t.

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What would happen if you run two ADSL router’s on one phone line, with the same connection details?

Now, a DSL connection splits the phone line into two channel, one for voice communication and one for the data transmissions.

However, I have been talking with an engineering friend of mine, and to his understanding, a single ADSL router will not use anywhere near all of the frequencies available to it on a phone line. So logically, a second router should not greatly interfere with it.
The biggest problem I can see is that TPG provide us with a static IP which means there would most likely be an IP clash.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

I’m thinking about buying something like a Netcomm NB5  since they are reasonably cheap at Umart at the moment since the NB6 is due to arrive soon and just trying it and seeing what happens.

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Since upgrading to Windows Vista, I have found more problems with the Vodafone software for the 3G broadband modems.

On Windows XP or Mac OS X, when you unplug the modem without disconnecting the connection first, it will act the same way as if you unplug an ethernet cable and unplug a USB device.

On XP, the network connection changes to a disconnected icon, it makes a disconnected USB sound and says the device has been disconnected. The Vodafone software then displays the “Searching for Hardware”  message.

On OS X, the network connection simply disconnects

However, on Windows Vista it complicates it entirely. If you unplug the modem without first disconnecting the connection, you have to reboot the computer before you can use the 3G modem again.

When you unplug it, it performs the normal disconnected USB notifications, however, it doesn’t change the network status to disconnected, and the Vodafone software just sits there, counting the time connected. If you press disconnect, it does nothing, if you try to close it, it does nothing, even forcing it closed and reopening it doesn’t fix it, it straight up starts counting the connected time again.

Even if you manually disable the network connection it keeps doing this.

Plugging the modem back in doesn’t change anything, you simply cannot press the connect button again because it will not come back up until you reboot.

I am using the latest version of the Vodafone software that is meant to be Vista compatible.

Vodafone have been no help either, the software works, it just does not work correctly unless you remember to disconnect it before unplugging the modem.

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I finally got fed up enough with my phone that I went and got a new one on Sunday when I ran out of credit instead of getting more credit.

I have been looking into a new phone for a while now as my old Panaxonic X700 has been playing up, switching itself off for no reason at all, there were quite a few days where every time I looked at it I would have to switch it on first and so on. It was getting quite painful.

Now, there have been a couple of phones that I particularly liked the look of, the Sony Ericsson K800i, K810i, K850i, and the LG U990 (also known as the LG Viewty).

I have been a fan of the Sony Ericsson’s for a while, they always seem to be very nice phones, and they are also one of the few manufacturers now that has a reasonable variety of phones that are not flip or slider phones. Rhi has the K800i and it is a very nice phone. I was particularly interested in this one because it was only $200 outright with Optus, so it could be pre-paid and I could continue to use my Optus sim card without changing anything.

However, despite it being listed as a current model on the Sony Ericsson website, Optus informed me that it has been discontinued, and to buy it direct from Sony’s online store, it is $500, which is far more than I want to pay outright for a phone, especially a phone that Optus was selling for only $200. None of the other phone providers had the K800i either, so that counted out this one.

The K810i I would have gotten on a plan, I was looking at the $49 cap with Optus, but they told me that this one as well has been discontinued, despite Sony still selling it. It was the same story at other phone providers as well. So this one was also out.

That just left the K850i and the U990. Pretty much every mobile phone provider has the LG U990 in stock at the moment as LG is giving it a huge push, and I can understand why given that in my opinion, it is a better phone than the more expensive LG Prada. The K850i is available pretty much everywhere as well at the moment.

All the different providers have these both at similar prices. Optus have the K850i and U990 available on the $49 cap + $15 a month in handset repayments. 3 have them both for that price as well. Telstra is around the same. Vodafone have the U990 for the same price as well, but they have recently dropped the price of the K850i to be free on the $49 maxi cap. Note that all of these ones are on 24 month contracts. According to the Vodafone website, the reason for this is that to buy the K850i outright, the cost has come down from $999 to $749.

This caught my eye in particular. Soul Mobile also have the U990 for free on their $49 cap. I am a bit dubious about Soul though as they are a much smaller provider, and while they use the Optus network, they do their own plans (which are fairly similar to the Optus plans) and billing and I have no idea what their reputation is like and I don’t know anyone that has a phone with them. So I would prefer to avoid them.

It was basically between these two options, and while I’m not particularly fond of Vodafone’s Customer Care service centre, I have found their service to be reasonably good with my 3G modem. I am much more inclined to go with the bigger, more well known company that maintains their own network than Soul, even if it is marginally more expensive.

So that made my decision for me, I was getting the Sony Ericsson K850i.

The Vodafone store at Garden City was reasonably quiet when I went in on Sunday so I got to speak to someone there almost straight away which was excellent.

Since I already have an account with Vodafone, I didn’t have to provide new information for my credit check, they just ran it off of the previous information which was much quicker, and I passed straight up.

Providing them with another copy of my license to prove I am who I’m pretending to be, and I had my new phone. I needed to transfer my mobile number from Optus though, this is where the painful part began.

According to the girl who was serving me, the number should have changed over to my Vodafone sim card in up to 3 hours. It didn’t.

It wasn’t until Monday morning that my Optus sim was deactivated. My Vodafone sim was activated at the same time, but no matter where I was, despite getting full reception, I could only make emergency calls, I couldn’t even call the Customer Care number. Since my old sim had been cut off, I couldn’t use my old phone either (not that I had any credit anyway).

I decided to wait for a day or so and see what happened. By the end of the day though, it still hadn’t changed, so I ducked into Vodafone at Queen St Mall on my way home from uni.

I was there for maybe 10 minutes, in which they determined that my sim card was faulty and they replaced it with a new one, and straight up my phone was working correctly.

On the $49 Maxi Cap, I get $310 worth of calls and texts a month, I also get 100 free texts to any mobile phone in Australia. So it actually works out better than the Optus $49 cap as well where I would have only gotten $300 worth of calls and texts. I could have chosen free calls to Vodafone numbers rather than the free texts, but I hardly call anyone on Vodafone so the texts are more worthwhile to me.

As for the new phone, well, I will write up my experienced with it as soon as I have some more time to play with it some more. It is a very nice phone though.

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It’s times like these that I am especially glad I have already upgraded my computer.

I have been re-rendering a bunch of fractals for print at 300 dpi on A0 and A2 sized paper. Even on the new computer, in order to get them done in time to have the high res images ready for printing for the exhibition I have had to cut the quality down compared to what I usually do them at. I’m looking at 15 hours on average for a fractal that is roughly half the quality of my normal renders, though once printed this won’t be so noticeable. This also results in around 3gb of RAM being used at any one time for the render. This is for A0. A2 I am averaging around 5 hours at half the quality with around 1 gb of RAM being used at any one time.

I’m not game to try and A0 on the old computer at all. I have had an A2 size one rendering though, it has an estimated render time of 40 hours at the same quality level as on the new computer, just so you have a comparison. I have also had to limit the RAM usage on the old computer since it only has 1gb of RAM. This means that instead of rendering the entire fractal, it will render it in 5 blocks which is slower, but it’s the only way I can do it on the old one.

Rendering A0 fractals on the new computer does render it virtually useless. While they on average use 3gb of the available RAM, they push the overall RAM usage up to an average of 98%, even when I close down the majority of things. Thus it is pretty pointless to even try to do anything else on it. Since I have limited the RAM usage on the old computer, it is still usable, but since I’m not rendering anything on the laptop, it doesn’t matter and I may as well let Apophysis have as much of the CPU time as possible.

While my laptop should do a reasonable job of rendering the fractals, since it is roughly half as powerful as Quadzilla (my Macbook Pro is a Core 2 Duo with 2gb of RAM, Quadzilla is a Core 2 Quad with 4gb of RAM), but I need the laptop to be usable all the time for uni and so on.

I would love to render all my fractals at these resolutions, but also at the quality I normally do them at. I’m thinking I’ll pick up another 4gb of RAM soon, though probably not for another fortnight or so since I have rent next weekend and the prints of these fractals are going to cost $56 each. If I get the extra RAM, that should make the computer usable whilst rendering, which means that it will be a lot easier for me to do them like this. Until then though, I could just limit the RAM usage to half and it should also be fine. I’ll just have to have a play around with it once these ones for the exhibition are done.

For those who have only seen my first fractal animation, the one I will be showing on Wednesday is a newer one that I did around September 2007. I also did the audio track for this one.

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