I am so fed-up with BT .. everything I ever got from them fails.

Last year I decided to drop SKY .. they where charging me about £60 per month for SKY/+/HD .. so I decided, since now I had the AppleTV, to drop them and just get a PVR for Freeview instead.

Until I learned about BT Vision .. great concept, basically a Freeview PVR, with on-demand via Broadband .. the idea is great, so since I needed to have Broadband with BT in order to sign for Vision, I dumped Bulldog and signed for BT Vision (Broadband included)

Well .. thats when my problems started, I got from BT the following

- BT Vision Box

- BT Wireless Hub

- BT Vision Phone (VOIP)

I have now gone thru 4 BT Vision boxes .. these are PVR’s that can record from Freeview and on-demand .. they simply fail, Hard Drive and software failures plague the damm thing, on demand shows rarely work properly (fail half way) .. etc etc

I am on my second Phone .. the first one’s speakerphone was a dud, crackling and loss of sound made it impossible to use, and since I do allot of conference calls at home, I must have a speaker phone

And . I am on my 3rd Wireless Hub .. the hubs wireless is a nuisance .. they drop constantly .. so replacement number 3 is now being used .. it’s version v1.5 (new style) .. we shall see if it holds

But to make matters really worst .. I am now on day 6 of virtually no Broadband .. and BT does not seem to have a fix anytime soon ..

Since Sunday night, my broadband stopped working .. occasionally it would come back to live, at speed raging from 126K to 512K .. quite ways from the 8MB I am suppose to get, I called BT, they say our account was suspended by error (??) .. apologized and said it would be back to norm soon .. that was Monday ..

But thats just BS .. we are able to connect if we do the following .. take the phone off the hook, let it sit for a minute until a audible warning is heard and try to connect to broadband .. presto .. it connects .. at very slow speeds .. but it connects .. at least for a few minutes .. then it goes down again.

Another indication of trouble, the phone line is incredibly noisy when broadband is trying to connect, there is definitely something wrong between broadband and the phone line

Anyway .. 6 days now, 3 calls a day to them to piss them off, and still, no fix .. they have done the whole “lets go thru the troubleshooting steps” routine a few times now .. it just does not work .. I even try a different router .. simply does not bloody work .. but BT .. they still oblivious, not a clue and not a single engineer visit to troubleshot.

Dang it…. yes .. I am pissed off.

Popularity: 42% [?]

Last month, when i got my iPhone, it took me less than 24 hours to decide I wanted to Jailbreak him (So I could run other Apps, no need to unlock since I am on O2 anyway)

So I did, and sure enough it was great, but then Apple introduced v. 1.1.3 and there was no Jailbreak for it, I decided to upgrade and go back to having no Apps.

But it did not took long for a new jailbreak to show up, and a few weeks back I try to jailbreak my 1.1.3 phone, and sure enough, it was the same old routine, I had to downgrade to 1.1.1, download almost 300MB worth of firmware from the web, etc etc .. the entire process was similar to 1.1.2 jailbreak as described HERE .. certainly allot of work and took 1 - 2 hours to do.

But I had no luck, for some reason, my Jailbreak 1.1.3 was complaining I had a “unauthorized” SIM (funny, since I actually had a O2 on O2 Iphone contract, card) .. so it was back to 1.1.3 .. non-jailbroken

Until today, when I read about iJailBreak .. the program made some bold claims … 1 minute Jailbreak ?, no downgrade needed ?, surely I was reading it wrong ..

So I downloaded it and fired it up

Firth thing one notices is that it actually calls for the phone to have 1.1.3 (preferably) .. cool, so I clicked Jailbreak, the iphone went to a restart, then I saw a bunch of code being processed on the iPhone, less than a minute later the iphone rebooted and … it was Jailbroken .. WHAT ?

No downgrade to 1.1.1, no fiddling with contacts to access the installer URL, no re-installing 1.1.3 .. no downloading of large firmware files, nothing at all, just worked as a “patch” and it was done.

……. nice

Popularity: 43% [?]

Yep, it’s valentines day today, me and the wife celebrated it yesterday with some wine and shellfish, but anyway, we have been now together for 10 years .. quite a milestone for a guy that used to consider a 2 week relationship a “long one” ..

On a different note, and the reason for this post, on my travels on the web, I have come across the following two “Valentines Logos” today .. if I find more I’ll add them later

Popularity: 29% [?]

On March of last year, Ash from BMM posted a howto on modifying the SMD box to work with the Losi 8IGHT-T

Since then, it’s been countless times that I have had to dig for it to help somebody on the various forums that ask how to do it, so I decided to just post it on my forum, this way I know how to find it in a Hurry .. this is Ash’s (Ashalak ) guide, not mine.

Firstly you need to remove your motors and starting assembly from underneath the starter box, this is easily done by removing the 3 screws as shown:

Once removed you will note that there is actually a second set of three holes on the underside of the starter motor assembly, you need to re-attach the starter motor assembly with the three alternative three mounting holes. This moves the motor assembly more into the centre line of the starter box which helps align the starter wheel much more accurately with the centrally mounted engine in the 8T.

Next we move on to adjusting the guides, first of all the front guide needs to be positioned all the way down toward the edge of the box, and then tighten up the two screws securing the bracket to the lid:

For the rear guide we need to completely remove it in order to remove some material from the underside, this is best achieved with either a very sharp hobby knife or my personal favourite method - The Dremel! The section which we need to remove is the small plastic lug on the underside of the guide, you need to remove this lug entirely ensuring that you make this area entirely flat in relation to the rest of the guide:

Finally you can re-attach the rear guide onto the starter box lid, however you are only required to mount the inner most securing lug on the underside of the lid. Don’t forget to put the nuts in on the underside of the guide for the mounting pegs as you will be required to remove the guide completely again to do so. With the rear guide secured with only one lug slide the guide all the way back and align the whole in the top guide, with the hole in the rear switch mechanism on the starter box. Rather than having an individual screw for securing the lid to the mounting switch, we need to use a slightly longer screw to mount through the rear hole in the guide and into the hole in the switch mechanism:

The final step is simply adjusting the front and rear mounting pegs on the guides in order to secure the chassis. You are also able to move the complete starter motor assembly forward or backwards in relation to the opening in the chassis, this is easily done be loosening off the three screws shown in the first step and positioning the wheel so that it is central with the flywheel opening. Here is what everything should look like when setup correctly:

Hope this helped!

it sure did

Popularity: 85% [?]

I sold a Fioroni Turbo Sliding Clutch to George about 4 - 5 days ago, upon receiving it, he reported that when he mounted it, the flywheel jammed to the engine and would not turn, and even worst, he now could not remove the flywheel nut, when he turned it, the shaft rotated with it and the flywheel remained in place.

Since George is a bit inexperienced, I suspected perhaps he forgot to put a collet in, I was further sure of that when he seems not to know what a collet is ..

To avoid damaging the engine, I asked him to send it to me and i’d take a look, well, it just arrived today…

Here is the beast, it’s quite a large engine, the Hong Nor RTR’s comes with them by default .. I can only imagine how insane a CR Buggy must be with one of those, anyway, back to the topic on hand.

You can definitely see how tight the flywheel is to the engine, I am at this point 99% sure the collet is missing (or is just way to small), I noticed George had done some superficial damage to the flywheel (some mole grips perhaps) .. I wanted to avoid doing further damage to it, so it was time to pull out the big gun … the piston locker

Now, I am ashamed to say so, but I actually never used one of them before, so I puled one off the shelf, it’s a good toll to have in my pitbox anyway ..

For those who dont know, this is how it works, you screw it into your glowplug socket, the protrusion on it will sit nicely on top of your piston head, preventing it from traveling upwards, therefore locking the piston and allowing you to tight or un-tight a flywheel with no need to use any mole grips or anything else on the flywheel itself, or in this case, since the flywheel had no grip, be able to remove the nut .. period.

I must say, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy having the piston locker makes the whole ordeal ..

And voila .. once the flywheel was out .. the problem was quite visible .. indeed there was no collet

A whopping £2.99 later, and a nice new Hong Nor Collet (or taper cone as some call it) was in place

And there you have it, the flywheel is safely tight in place, and a nice gap shows between it and the engine, it turns just as it should … the whole repair costed exactly £2.99 and took 15 minutes … no sign of any damage to the engine, and the scrapes George did on the flywheel are just cosmetic .. in a few weeks of using it with the starter box, you wont seem them anymore

What did I learn from this ordeal ?, stop busting your behind with zip ties on the top of the piston or mole grips on the flywheel, definitely get a piston or crankshaft locker .. well worth it.

Popularity: 39% [?]

I have been looking for a new design for the blog non stop for 3 days now.

What happen was, I upgraded (finally) from Wordpress 1.5.x to 2.3.x .. in the process I lost my old (and tired) design .. so I went on the prowl for a new theme I can modify to my taste

Problem is, there are hundreds of themes out there, and most of them .. well, they plain suck.

I think I found something that will work for me, it’s a Theme called Purple Fever .. it only costed $49 .. I have paid, just waiting now for the download link.

Then the task of modifying it will begin …

Popularity: 62% [?]

I’m testing a few new designs for the blog..

Popularity: 31% [?]

I was checking today the stats for the RC NUT website, and man was I happy, according to the chart we keep on growing the number of visitors that visit per day (uniques) .. thats great news, as it means more and more people are aware of the site, we opened in September.

the Graphs really says it all ..

Technorati Tags: RC NUT

Popularity: 19% [?]

At my last count, I now have about 170 movies and over 300 TV episodes saved on my iTunes.

This of course means, I need space, lots of it .. I was using 2 external 500gb’s HD (1TB) for my iTunes library, but because it’s 2 separate drives, it created a bit of a problem for iTunes, I had to keep movies on one, and shows/music on the other, this made (for some reason) AppleTV very slow to load up, also I was always afraid, if one of the drives failed, I lost ether my movies or my shows .. either way, a huge loss.

I looked into some RAID solutions, but the problem was, I use a Mac Mini to stream to the AppleTV, the mini does not have slots for me to use a RAID card, I did found some self raid enclosures, and was about to buy one when I found out about drobo

What sold me on drobo was the ability to use different Hard Drives, and still you are on a raid 5 type of system where you have failover, if one of the drives dies, no big deal, jut replace it, your data is safe

Anyway, I am not a journalist, people can find about drobo on http://www.drobo.com

I have ordered 2 x 750GB drives, and will use one of the 500GB I have, this will give me about 1.1GB of safe data, as a single volume .. nice

Here are the pics of it .. I’ll post more about it as I set it up.

Technorati Tags: drobo

Popularity: 32% [?]

Got my iPhone today !!

I am genuinely impressed by how good it is, I was a bit weary that it would be a big gimmicky and the novelty would wear off within 5 minutes, but instead I am please and impressed by how good it functions, and how great it will work for my needs.

First thing I did was to setup my Exchange work mail, and it works like a dream, I love the ability to zoom in to get a closer look at the text, but I must say, the screen resolution is so good, that there really isnt much need to zoom.

The phone is set to check my main 3 email accounts every 30 minutes (I can set it for much shorter times), I set all my accounts to IMAP (and exchange) so not to get a false “new mail” on the phone if I have already got it on my laptop.

The wifi works like a threat .. it automatically uses the wifi when available instead of the gprs/edge connection.

I pay around with google maps, it’s not a GPS system, but it does come in handy, besides, I had the N95 a month or so back, and found it’s GPS system worthless, better leave it to TOMTOM

I still have lots to play around and discover on it, have not yet had the chance to check visual voicemail .. guess I better just leave a few messages to myself to check that part
I’m not a reviewer of hardware, and not trying to make this post into one, I am just so stocked at how great this thing works

Technorati Tags: iPhone

Popularity: 26% [?]