234 new of 290 responses total.
I agree with Marc that this does sound like some extreme interference. You could always call the FCC and tell them there is some equipment nearby that is interfering with your network. Who knows, they might have plenty of spare time now that Howard Stern is off the air.
Re resp:8: Right now the cable companies seem to be using the switch to digital cable as a way to try to force people to pay more money for the same content. If it had price parity with analog cable I might be more tempted, but otherwise it just looks like another rate increase. I also haven't been terribly impressed with the demo HDTVs at places like Best Buy. Yeah, the picture is really sharp when there's nothing going on, but when there's much action on screen the JPEG blockies start to show up. Re resp:19: There are two problems with predictions like that. One is that they're solutions looking for problems. How many consumers have actually *asked* for their refrigerator to tell them when they're out of milk, or their toaster to tell their washing machine when they make toast so it can pre-configure itself to remove jelly stains? The other problem is that most people can't or won't deal with complex systems like that. Sure, it's possible to load all your DVDs into a central computer and watch them anywhere in the house, but the average consumer, who can't even program his VCR timer, isn't going to want to fuss with trying to figure out how to use it. Until it can be made easy and reliable, at least. There are horror stories of people who have bought "smart homes" and have never been able to get everything working right. Think about how often your computer doesn't behave properly. Now imagine the same unreliablity applied to your lights, heat, and garage door opener, and you have an idea of the problem. Re resp:31: Maybe the older X10 stuff was better. The stuff I've bought in the last ten years or so has all been unreliable junk. Re resp:57: The 2.4 GHz band that wireless network stuff operates on is unlicensed. The tradeoff with not having to have a license is the FCC won't help you if you have an interference problem -- they only care about interference to licensed services. If you look at the documentation for any given wireless device, you'll find this verbiage: "This device complies with Part 15 of the FCC rules. Operation is subject to the following conditions: (1) this device may not cause any harmful interference, and (2) this device must accept interference received, including interference which may cause undesired operation." The 2.4 GHz band is sort of a combination of the Wild West and a garbage dump. You may get interference from cordless phones, amateur radio operators, microwave ovens, and even weather radar. WiFi uses spread-spectrum technology to avoid most interference from other services, and it actually works pretty well, but the potential for problems is built in.
Sorry about the crummy formatting. I forgot that "lazy HTML" ignores line breaks. I'm too used to LiveJournal.
re #58: > Right now the cable companies seem to be using the switch to > digital cable as a way to try to force people to pay more money > for the same content. And don't forget: less convenience. Set-top boxes suck, but they're what we're going to be stuck with for at least this generation of TV technology.
Re #58: I'm not sure what cable company you're talking about, but Comcast (as an example) generally provides digital versions of its standard "analog" content for no extra charge, including HD versions of local channels. You'll need to provide your own tuner, of course, and it won't be as polished a viewing experience as you could get with a Comcast STB or DVR. They're certainly hoping that digital cable will be a way to bump you up to a "more channels" package and that they'll make money off you with VOD and other services, but the digital content itself isn't encrypted on the wire and so you don't have to pay anything extra to see it. So I don't really think it's accurate to say that you're being charged more for the same thing. Best Buy (and other stores of that genre) is famous for having crappy HD feeds. But the underlying point is true -- there is a lot of mediocre HD content out there. All the DBS providers downres and recompress into mediocrity, and a fair amount of NBC OTA is mediocre because they suck away bandwidth for their stupid "Weather Plus" channel, and so on. We can hope that when HD movies on disc come out later this year they'll be able to take advantage of the medium's storage capacity to allow fewer compromises. Re #60: True enough. Alas, the alternative to STBs seems to be CableCARD, which (so far) sucks more.
I dispute both of those. I find digital cable to be more convenient because of the built in guide. I also get more content with digital cable because I'm able to get a bunch of digital channels that aren't available on standard cable, like ESPNNews, DIY, and my daughter loves Boomerang and Toon Disney. I also get a ton of "on demand" channels free where I can watch shows at any time.. Food Network On Demand is great, DIY On Demand, Golf on demand, cartoon network on demand, etc. And I often also listen to the digital music channels when I'm cleaning the house or doing other kinds of work. Lately, I've been tuned into the Arena Rock channel. Most important though, is that my digital cable box has a built in DVR, which I could no longer live without.
(#61 slipped in) i do pay extra for my HD cable box... which included the HD local stations and Discovery HD and TNTHD. I pay extra for the "HDSuite" which includes HDNet, HDNet Movies, inHD, inHD2, etc.
re #61 Whats a good tuner(decoder) and where can I get one? >;)
If you crunch the numbers I suspect you'll find it's better to rent than buy at this point. For example, if you want a digital cable DVR, you can buy one for between $500-1000, or you can rent one for like $10/mo; renting is a no-brainer. The only reasonably-priced QAM tuners I've seen have been PCI cards. Someday all TV sets will be DCR (digital cable ready) but we're not there yet, and by the time we get there they will probably have developed some new modulation technique which will make them obsolete anyway.
Thanks. It looks like for now, there are QAM tuners built into high end televisions but there is no guarantee that the channels aren't scrambled or set to only be received by their receivers...
Part of what makes digital cable such an uninspiring idea is that I have three TVs, so having to use a set-top box is kind of a non-starter. I also work in some casinos that use Comcast's digital cable feed for background music (as well as for video), and I've noticed the digital channels are less than reliable. There are long stretches of time when the music feed channels are silent, with a black screen that says "this channel will be available in a few minutes." In light of that, I find their ads about the unreliability of satellite service pretty funny.
re #62: your mileage may vary depending on your own cable company. Here in Ketchikan when our cable company went all-digital they actually removed channels from their basic line-up and began charging their customers an extra $5 per television per month to cover the costs of the set-top boxes needed to provide this "improved service." Meanwhile their quality is notably bad and gets even worse whenever a vessel with radar passes through the harbor.
Yup, more money for no improvement is a pretty good example of how not to deploy things. Re #67, I've seen occasional audio dropouts for a couple of seconds but haven't experienced what you describe. Sounds lousy. Cable companies are kinda stuck. On the one hand, they have early adopters whose main priorities are digital transmission (way better for DVR) and lots of high-quality HD content. They are willing to pay a premium price but they expect a premium product, and when they're forced to watch a crappy analog static-filled feed of the SciFi channel they're not happy. On the other hand, you have foot-draggers who still use analog cable with old cable-ready TVs. They enjoy watching whatever their favorite channels are, CNN or ESPN or whatever. They don't particularly care about picture quality as long as it doesn't totally suck, and they're not particularly interested in new services. Their main priority is not seeing their bill go up; they already feel like they pay too much for the service they get. I don't particularly envy the kinds of decisions that cable companies are forced to make in figuring out how to service both crowds. Soon DirecTV will roll out local feeds in HD, and a ton of new HD channels will launch (National Geographic-HD, MTV-HD, HGTV-HD, and so on.) Early adopters will expect their cable systems to make at least some of them available. Foot-draggers will expect nothing to change. Not sure it's possible to meet both expectations.
re #69: it gets even more complicated when you throw the demands of the content providers in.. Ever wonder why your cable system carries a whole bunch of really crappy channels you can't imagine anyone watching? Well, if they want to offer you a popular channel like, say, MTV (god only knows why it's still popular, but it is..) then they've also got to carry, say, Gameshow Network, and the Flannel Channel. So after you've agreed to carry two or three crappy channels for every channel that's in great demand you get to bundle the cost of each channel into the customers' bill. And of course you've got to offer premium content of some sort.. Well then you'd better be prepared to pony up $100K for the new software every time the networks decide to change to a new transport encryption. The cost of providing the content adds up to an appalling share of the monthly bill and that's before paying off satellite dishes, receivers, video head end systems, the access platform and cable plant, installer labor, set-top-boxes, and everything else.. We're about to start offering cable-TV-like service and I find the business plan to be pretty baffling. Perhaps giants like Comcast have economies of scale and more bargaining power to work with but I wonder how anyone makes a profit providing cable service.
Yup, the power of a brand. Consumers don't just want any music channel, they want MTV (wait, do they still play music?) Can't Stephens and Young get you some more pork in the form of a federal "Rural Cableification Act" or something to help provide this vital infrastructure? I don't think the city of Ketchikan is going to be able to grow and prosper without Bravo and TvLand, and it hardly seems fair for your cruise ship passengers to have better entertainment options than the people on land. Digital technology does allow, at least in principle, a more grainular pricing model where channels are served a la carte instead of in a handful of tiered packages. This seems like a better arrangement -- the content providers set the prices, the consumers pick what they're willing to pay for, and the service provider is just a common carrier who enables the transaction. But DBS providers haven't exactly rushed to embrace that model, and cable companies look like they'll only do it if forced. Lately I've kind of surprised myself by wishing that I lived in Verizon country, so I that their fiber-optic service (FiOS) was an option. I have my doubts as to whether Comcast will ever offer something like this, and Qwest's idea of TV service is offering price bundling discounts with DirecTV.
Re resp:69: I'm definitely in the "foot-dragger" category. I only watch half a dozen of the fifty or so channels I get, as it is. I'm not particularly interested in movie channels, which seem to be the main draw of digital cable, currently. (I have a Netflix subscription that nicely satisfies my movie-watching needs.) Re resp:71: A la carte pricing is actually a big issue right now. The FCC Commissioner is making noises about asking Congress to let him regulate smut on cable unless cable companies start offering plans where people can opt out of buying non-"family-friendly" channels. It's more likely we'll see a "family friendly" bundle instead of a la carte, though. The content providers are opposed to it because of what mcnally points out -- very few people are going to pay to watch QVC or The Game Show Network, given the choice. In fact, Pat Robertson recently argued against a la carte pricing because he's worried it would reduce the number of homes that religious channels get into.
re #71: > Can't Stephens and Young get you some more pork in the form of a federal > "Rural Cableification Act" or something to help provide this vital > infrastructure? I don't think the city of Ketchikan is going to be able > to grow and prosper without Bravo and TvLand, and it hardly seems fair > for your cruise ship passengers to have better entertainment options > than the people on land. Don't worry, because we're a rural telephone company we're already immune to the laws of economics as you know them -- the invisible hand isn't just invisible for us, it's nonexistant. Market forces have practically no direct effect upon our business revenue, whereas arcane regulatory decisions are the life or death of our company. It's horrible. re #72: > Pat Robertson recently argued against a la carte pricing because he's > worried it would reduce the number of homes that religious channels > get into. Pat Robertson, cable-TV welfare queen? Gotta love the irony..
Re #72: I think most people only watch a handful of channels out of the number available, no matter whether they're technophiles or neo-luddites. But yes, movies and sports are two big things for which many viewers are willing to pay extra for improvements in content and/or video quality (though I do know people who got digital cable just so they could watch BBC America.) I got it mainly so that I could get movies in HD. Channels like QVC would have a negative a la carte price, since they actually pay the cable companies to be carried. I suppose that the Jebus channels could also get carried under similar terms if that's important to them. But, oddly enough, Pat seems to be the only one complaining about it. I haven't heard the homosexuals complain that a la carte pricing would reduce the reach of Bravo and Logo. Re #73: Does that mean DBS isn't a viable solution in southeast Alaska? I know that the terrain is rugged and the satellites would be pretty low in the sky...
re #74: Not a lot of homes have the necessary low-angle south-facing view needed for satellite reception.
Mine doesn't. I had to build a crane looking thing to extend it out off the garage..and not a very stable solution.
I have Comcast's unadvertised $11/mo option. I got it after I realized that I mostly only watched broadcast channels so I called and asked about it. Digital cable costs around $80/mo which is way more than I want to spend on TV. I do most of my TV watching with netflix anyways. I love renting TV shows from them because there are no commercials and one can watch it whenever one wants to instead of being a slave to a schedule.
re #77 Ditto on both
Does Comcast offer anything cheaper than $80/month for nonprofits selling used TVs? They are gouging Kiwanis, which uses the cable to sell TVs 12 hours/month, and has to sell a TV every week to pay for it.
Why not just hook the TV up to a VCR or DVD player?
I dont' know. They could also hook up to a dish on the roof. I think he wants to prove the TVs will work with cable.
Re resp:74: I think Pat's problem with it may be that only the already-converted would buy his channel, thus eliminating his chance to preach to unbelievers. I understand some minority-targeted channels also worry that their audience buy-in would be too low to support their programming. (Side note: Just heard today that UPN and WB have folded. The most popular stuff from the two of them is going to be merged into a new CBS-Warner channel called CW.) Re resp:77: That's cool, but it wouldn't work for me. I need my Daily Show. :)
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resp:79 Do the Kiwanis need digital cable or can they sell tv's with analog cable? Comcast has an $11/mo analog option that only includes broadcast channels. Even if you need digital, they may have something similar. Call them and ask.
Comcast's basic option generally includes digital versions of the broadcast channels, but I find it hard to imagine that the Kiwanis are reselling almost-new expensive televisions. Most likely they just want to have cable at their facility, and "testing TVs" is the excuse to justify it. It's pretty easy to tell from the configuration options whether a TV is cable-ready, and virtually all TVs for something like the past twenty years have been cable-ready. Do the Kiwanis resell a lot of TVs from the seventies?
I tried to ask earlier about some properties of WiFi networks but I guess I asked in an unclear manner as no one answered. Here are my questions. Can others detect my "closed" network (i.e., I have SSID broadcast turned off)? If so, how? And, if they can, how difficult is it to them connect to my network (apart from security options like WEP)?
WPA is much more secure than WEP.
re #86: > Can others detect my "closed" network (i.e., I have SSID broadcast turned > off)? If so, how? Yes. Basically just by having their cards listen for traffic using a utility designed for the purpose.. > And, if they can, how difficult is it to them connect to my network (apart > from security options like WEP)? I've never bothered but my impression is it's comparatively easy.
(My base station doesn't offer WPA. What's wrong with WEP if the key is changed frequently?) Can that utility learn my SSID? Doesn't another system need that to connect?
Yesterday, Time Warner dropped off my 24 port fiber switch and a rack mount ups to go with it. Fired it up and I've got servers running today!
Kiwanis sell TVs from the 70s and even the 60s (with tubes). Nobody watches TV there, they are just sold. Is there some way I can look up online the cheapest possible business option? The person who decided to pay for this cable service won't pay for an ISP for himself (but does pay for grex). His logic escapes me. He could get broadband for kiwanis at 1/4 the price, set up computers with adsl modems, and sell those for more than TVs.
Yeah, www.comcast.com. I don't think they support lynx though. I'm trying to think of what the free market price of a forty-year-old TV with no remote, a 300 ohm antenna input, a fussy tuner that requires constant adjustment of knobs that nobody has heard of like "horizontal hold", and so on. Unless it's some sort of collector's item, I'm thinking it's negative since it's full of hazardous materials that cost money to have disposed. I certainly hope they're not selling them to people who lack the money (or the willingness) to properly dispose of it when it breaks.
We sold one turqouise one maybe from the 50s (when was turquose faddish?). And they still sometimes get in small portables BW (7 or 9" diagonals). People come to Kiwanis looking for antiques. Reel-to-reel tape decks fetch a lot, as do good turntables. There is a jukebox for sale.
Sindi, the broadcast only option is not one they advertise. You have to call them and ask about it specifically.
It's not advertised, but it is listed on their web site (in my area anyway) as "limited cable service." Turntables are an example of an old technology which is still of some value, and also which is sufficiently durable that old ones are still useful. Television is not.
I heard somewhere that sales of turntables are actually increasing. Old TV's not usable? Au contraire. Until High Definition Digital Television stomps all over bog-standard analogue transmissions, even old black and white televisions will be USABLE, if not particularly desirable.
I didn't say they are not usable, I said they are not useful. Relic TVs may still work, but they don't do anything that can't be done better by newer TVs. They have parts that tend to wear out over time and can't be serviced in a cost-effective fashion any more. Newer TVs are better in every way and are very cheap. Turntables, by contrast, don't have consumable components like tubes and may still be possible to fix basic parts like needles and such. New turntables are not readily available, and what there is caters to the high end (DJs who scratch records, or audiophiles who don't mind paying $1000 for a really good turntable.) That means an old turntable is still useful for some people.
Well. I have a couple of seriously old tv sets. One of them, I have had for over 10 years and it was already so old when I got it that it had been placed in the bathroom in my parents master bedroom. My Dad said that he wanted to be able to watch TV while taking a bath but I have a feeling based on how quickly my mother was willing to give me the set that that wasnt actually the case. It wasnt so old that it had tubes though. Anyways, it is still working and is up in my guest bedroom. I currently have four TV sets in my house. I am thinking about buying a new one though because all four are pretty old. Then, I think I will get rid of three of the others and just have two.
Old TV sets are cheaper than cheap new ones - they are free. We gave away our only TV set last week to Kiwanis. It worked fine but there was nothing we wanted to watch. And lots of good books in the library.
Dont the older TV's suck more electricity?
They're the SUVs of televisions.
Yeah, more hazmats too. And I don't understand how this organization makes money by giving away TVs for free; volume maybe?
Maybe it's a loss leader. You give the television away but charge a nickel for the coaxial cable that goes with it, thus practically guaranteeing a nickel in revenue for each one you sell.. ;-)
Not coaxial, 300 ohm twin-lead (the stuff that was obsolete twenty years ago.) You can get a 2m Monster Cable twin-lead cable for $85. I think you can still use it to hook up your Pong game (but you shouldn't, since sets of that era had horrendous burn-in problems.)
re #102 The free section of craigslist tends to do the same thing..give away TV's and monitors The reasoning behind it is that usually these are broken items which cost you money to properly dispose of.
Kiwanis does not give away free TVs, we do. We find them at the curb. This one only needed the power cord replaced. Jim spliced on a plug end instead. One time he found a TV/DVD player at the curb, with a little note from the garbage collectors saying they could not take it for free. So he took it home to fix and was really disappointed that it already worked. I use it to watch library DVDs.
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What do you do with TVs you find on the curb that are too broke to fix?
Hook them into Jones the dolphin.
We don't take home TVs from the curb normally, just if a friend wants one, which only happened once and that one was fixable. The cut cord was a giveaway.
Re resp:98: I once replaced a 1990 RCA TV that had already died with a 1980s Sylvania one that still worked. (This was in about 1996.) I find that newer TVs give a better picture but the build quality is lousy. RCA, in particular, has apparently forgotten how to solder properly.
Lots of the TVs donated to Kiwanis get fixed there by soldering some bad joint.
What happens to the ones that can't be repaired?
They get put behind the dump truck. I don't know where they go next. The unsellable or unusable computer monitors and computers get sold at 5 cents/lb to someone who reuses or recycles them. THe printers go in the dump truck along with books and floppy disks and cables. (We recycle our own cables as copper, and books as paper, and printers we spend 30 min taking apart into unrecyclable plastic, and recyclable steel, copper and aluminum).
Those prices would make me very concerned about whether the un-sellable monitors are being properly disposed of. Normally it costs more money to properly deal with the hazardous materials in an old monitor than you can get out of recycling and/or salvage. On my own front, I had to have a Comcast service call over the weekend for a signal outage issue. Over the course of analysis I discovered that the ground loop isolator I put on my cable TV line is responsible for introducing ghosting and other signal degredation, and the amplifer I put on the line (to try to reduce the degredation) seemed to be over-driving my cable modem. The service tech wanted to remove them both, but unfortunately that re-introduces a ground loop and the famous 60 Hz hum. This is on a setup where everything is relatively new and is done "right"; the electricity and cable TV both enter the home at the same point, and both are properly grounded to the same point. Unfortunately something still causes a loop; I guess it's a mismatch in impedance and/or resistance, I'm not an EE so I was never totally clear on the point. It appears that the only cost-effective solution is to lift the ground on my amplifiers, which solves the problem perfectly but is a bad idea. About the only other thing I can think of is trying to add some shielding around the isolator in the hope that it will lessen the degree to which it's allowing OTA to leak into my CATV signal. Anyway, the lesson of all this is that the future of home networking is lots of annoying conflicts. I consider myself somewhat above-average in terms of the amount of time, money and knowledge I'm willing to bring to the table and yet I still feel stymied. So, in the future, everything will work together, except that it will have little niggling problems that make it all come crashing down.
Are you using your water lines for true ground? I'm assuming if you have a newer home with proper fuse box wiring then you are but what about the loop? Is it wired to an AC outlet ground or water pipe?
I also had a Comcast service outage over the weekend. I eventually had to shut everything down and bring them back up in the order cable modem, WiFi router, and WiFi adapter. I didn't contact Comcast, but this is what they had suggested on previous outages. What causes Comcast outages?
A friend of ours thinks he has to get a dsl line ($20/month plus $77 for the DSL modem) so his wife can use the phone. What is the cheapest cell phone service he could get instead, for light use?
7-11 Speak Out
Re #118: I have a Tracfone, which is something where you buy only the minutes you need, though you have to keep it activated by periodically buying more. I'm not sure how much the phones themselves cost, since I was given mine by a coworker of my dad's. If your definition of "light use" is as low as mine that's probably best -- I've probably been on the phone maybe forty minutes since I got it in August.
Both electicity and cable are grounded at the entry point, not using any water pipes. But I'm hardly surprised that there are other leaks to ground. Re #117, if shutting down your modem and restarting it fixes the problem, then I don't think Comcast would consider it an outage. An outage is where you do that several times and it still won't work.
What does the Tracfone cost?
I have a ground loop problem with my cable TV, too. I'm not sure what to do about it. The problem comes of having a computer as part of my home entertainment system, since the computer is grounded through its power supply and the cable is grounded somewhere else.
Re #122: I don't trust my memory. Look at tracfone.com .
I have a t-mobile cell phone plan that costs $20 a month for 60 anytime minutes and 500 weekend minutes. It works for me but the pay as go plans might be cheaper for someone who uses their phone even less.
If I recall, we paid something like $80 or $90 for a year's airtime when the time came, which incidentally came with a hundred-some minutes (when I got it it had three-hundred-some on it already, and I hadn't used more than twenty).
Our friends don't need any weekend minutes because they have internet service only 9-6 M-F, and they are usually home on weekends. $20 for 60 minutes is too much. Is there some plan without weekend minutes, but more weekday?
Unfortunately M-F before 6p is the most expensive time with almost all cell phone plans. I guess that is when demand is the highest
In general cell phone plans tend to be priced around a "sweet spot" in the neighborhood of $40-50/mo; there exist plans that go for less than that but usually they have lousy value (e.g. for $20 you get 60 minutes, but for $40 you get 1500.) Providers aren't particularly interested in competing for the highly-frugal demographic; I think they either don't care about it or figure that they should go prepaid. I ended up removing the ground loop isolator from my cable; not only did it allow analog leakage from OTA but it also did not cleanly pass some of the digital channels recently introduced as part of digital simulcast. So, at least for the moment, I lifted the ground on my amplifiers and found that to be the only workable short-term solution until I can find a better one. But at least now all of my channels are better quality than I could get via DBS.
resp:129 Yeah. I found that really frustrating when I was shopping around for a cell phone provider. I hardly use my cell phone and I mostly use it on weekends. t-mobile was the ONLY company that has a plan in the $20/mo range. Everyone else has lots of plans at $40/mo with lots of minutes. I fully expect t-mobile to drop this option at some point and then I will upgrade I guess but not without a lot of whining first!
I now have 4 Sprint PCS phones, costing me a total of $80 per month. I could get one more for $10 per month. They all share a pool of 550 minutes per month, but calls between Sprint or Nextel phones are free, and weekends, holidays and evenings after 9 pm are free. My teenage stepdaughter spent over 2000 minutes on the phone last month, she told me, but it was all to other Sprint phones. Thank goodness.
I have a 7-11 Speak Out rechargable phone and put $5 on it every few weeks.
How many minutes do you get for $5 and where do you get the phone?
I think its 25 minutes for $5 and you can get the phone at any 7-11. It has all the bells and whistles of a typical cell phone and you can receive/send IM or voicemail, etc...check your balance anytime, etc Mine also has a built-in flashlight. It is way more than adequate for my minimal cell use.
Do you also pay for the physical phone before paying for minutes? This sounds ideal. Someone could phone for 1 minute and ask for the husband to get off the computer so his wife could use the phone.
Sindi, do you need the portablity of a cell phone or are you just looking for really inexpensive long distance or what? Maybe VoIP service would do some of what you want and it's free if both parties connect over computers and dead cheap if one computer calls a land line. Check out Skype. We used it to call our son in Scotland without charge. It's how Bruce Howard sometimes connects for long Grex board meetings.
They are looking for a way to get phone calls when the husband is online. Their kids and grandkids give them lots of free long distance minutes in the form of phone cards. SOmeone told them to get a DSL line to free up the phone. He does not need broadband, just a way for his wife to get phone calls when he is online for maybe an hour a day, early morning and late afternoon. In West Virginia you can pay $5 a month for a phone line that you can only receive calls on, not make calls from.
Gotcha. Nevermind. ;-)
If their friends had computers, they could email instead. That is how people get hold of us.
re #135 I think its normally $69 which includes the phone, charger, ear piece, and 10 or 20 minutes of phone time included. When I got mine, it also included a $30 rebate. The phone that came with mine is a Nokia 1100. I like the fact that I was able to pay cash and stay out of a contract let alone remain anonymous.
Thanks. Can you use your own cell phone and put minutes on it, if you happen to get a used one somewhere? Kiwanis has a boxful, cheap.
Does she get so many phone calls that she really can't do without the phone for an hour a day while he uses the computer?
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What would be the total cost of cable modem and Vonage? Right now they pay $25/month for the phone, probably nothing for long distance since they are given phone cards as presents, and $6/month for internet. I thought Vonage was something like $15/month and required being in the room with the computer to talk on the phone.
re #141 I think Verizon and a few other carriers have rechargable plans. Phone models vary by carrier.
Re resp:144: I think Vonage offers a little widget that plugs into your network and has an ordinary phone jack on it, so you can use whatever regular phones you own. I'm not sure, though. I'm required to have a cell phone for work, so I just use it for everything.
I used Vonage and basically they send you a modem. The LAN connector goes in and then there's an output for phone jack and output for fax machine jack. Vonage wouldn't work sometimes if there was heavy traffic in my neighborhood and with moderate to high traffic the phone audio sounded like talking into a long tube. You had to program your 911 through their webinterface. The webinterface was nice though because it gave you extensive auditing of all your inbound/outbound calling. Plus, the modem is portable to anywhere in the world that has a decent pipe.
Yeah, they do. My impression is that Vonage (and other VoIP services) still haven't yet reached the point where they're seamless, and you still end up with niggling annoyances like what shows up on caller ID when you call somebody else using it. But we may be heading toward a world where the only people with POTS are poor people who get their rates subsidized (although if everybody else opts out of the system there won't be anybody left to do the subsidizing.) On the other hand, many people are willing to make those trade-offs. Using a cordless phone reduces quality and reliability in exchange for convenience, but tons of people have used them for decades today, often using them exclusively (which means they have no phone that will work in a power failure.) A fair number of people are also willing to put up with the reduced reliability and quality of VoIP or other digital services. Comcast now offers digital phone service in my area, but I'm not sure I want it because one of the main uses for my landline is to wait on hold for a Comcast service representative during outages. :-) Heck, why have a coax OR twisted pair going into your house? In principle all of that stuff can come over the same wiring you use to get your electric power. Once we master the art of matter replication that same wire can also handle water, natural gas, sewage and garbage.
Is it true that if you have your POTS line disconnected that 911 service is always still available on it?
It was true for me. A year after I disconnected my land line, I could still call 911 or the phone company using that line.
Well, then there you go. There are cheaper VoIP providers out there if you provide your own equipment. Load up an asterisk system and plug your disconnected POTS line into an FXO card. Program the PBX to route 911 to the POTS line and everything else through VoIP.
Incidentally, faxing is pretty unreliable over VoIP, even on services that claim to support it. The digital compression messes with the signal too much. Modems have the same issue.
If you buy rechargeable phones from other companies, is there a monthly fee or minimum?
POTS is useful for more than 911 when power goes out. You may want to contact the power or gas company, or city utilities, and friends or relatives for assistance, etc.
re #153 My understanding is that there is an expiration date due to inactivity.
re #153: Many pre-paid rechargeable cellular plans are structured to cheat you out of your minutes by expiring them aggressively if you don't use the service. They want you to pay them lots of money, not use the phone once every month for two minutes..
I am trying to look up 'rechargeable minutes' and 'cell phones' and I just learned that some school has banned cell phones for kids (they need to go through a metal detector and a body search every day) because they might use them for bomb threats or drug dealing. And that most children now carry them everywhere. The school is in D. C. and the hired security staff is no longer authorized to confiscate the phones, meaning they have to have an (assistant) principal at the front door. 30% of the children have cell phones and use them to call their parents for taxi service. (I would that thought they would live close enough to walk in such a big city, or have bus service). I found www.wirelessguide.org/plan/prepaid.htm (prepaid, not rechargeable). The minutes expire in 30 to 90 days. You can sometimes automatically recharge via credit card, or pay by phone or online. Tracfone has cards valid up to 1 year. Verizon has 10 cents/minutes. Liberty Wireless lets you use then pay. Verizon also costs $1/day on top of the per-minute charge, but you can call free at night. Liberty seems to be $30/month including 300 minutes. Virgin Mobile (associated somehow with Amazon.com) has no monthly charge, but you need to pay at least $20 every 90 days, and use it at least once every 60 days or it expires. Long-distance is no extra charge. They let you automatically charge to your credit card via the phone. 25 cents/minute first ten minutes of any day, then 10 cents/minut. text messages received free, sent for 10 cents each. Reviews indicate that coverage is spotty. 7-11 seems to be cheapest for low usage - how is reception around Michigan? ZD Net reviewd 7-11 Speak-Out prepaid phone service. No contract. $50 after rebate for the Nokia phone. Cards must be used within 45 days and cost at least $25. This comes to about $15/month. Virgin Mobile is half that. Someone's blog mentions that they use their cell phone as a PDA, for email, and to send watch and listen to music and movies. Now they want 1GB storage and a USB port so they can read mpeg4 videos from a flashdrive. How big are these LCDs.
re #156
*The recharge of SpeakOut minutes is good for 1 year from date of purchase.
Here's what my 7-11 SpeakOut booklet says:
Your prepaid system will notify you to refill your account when:
-Your account balance is at or below $2
-Your account has 10 days left before it expires
-Your account balance is too low to pay for a call
-Your account does not have enough value to continue an existing call
(The notification is a text message. After every call I make, I get a text
message telling me how much the last call cost me and what my remaining
balance is. Also, I can always hit *777# and get sent a text message of the
remaining balance.)
Minutes carry forward when you buy more time. When your account expires, you
have 45 days to refill it before your phone number is cancelled. (That means
you have 55 days to recharge your phone before your phone # expires.)
* Again, the recharge of minutes is good for 1 year from date of purchase.
Another feature I like is someone can send you a text message
{your ph #}@mobile.mycingular.com
or via SMS from their phone to your phone #..and vice versa..you can send an
SMS text message to someone else's cell phone.
I only use the phone to receive/place the rare personal call.
re #158 I rescind my last statement. SpeakOut minutes are only good for 120 days. The main thing to remember though is that they don't charge you for "roaming". Others (like AT&T Free2Go) will suck up your minutes if you go out of area. Plus, others will make your minutes expire sooner than 120 days if you buy less time. Examples: Verizon "Free-Up" $15 refill only good for 30 days or $30 for 60 days TMobile "EasySpeak" $10 refill 30 days and $25 to 90 days These guys will kill you on roaming charges. There's a good Forum review at http://forums.wirelessadvisor.com/southern-us-wireless-forum/2079-7-eleven- spe ak-out-wireless.html
Thanks for the info. I found also Net10, 60 days of 300 minutes $30, which comes to $15/month if you don't use more than 5 min/day. 5 cents per text message. No other fees. Your $25 for 120 days is certainly the cheapest for very low usage, but twice the cost per minute. I don't know if Net10 lets you use your own phone. Kiwanis has very cheap used phones. Net10 offers $30 used (refurbished) Nokia phones with a choice of cover colors and 37 ring tones. (So you can hear yours in a crowd?). No roaming charges for Net10.
I have mine set to vibrate and ring in crowd situations. Work hours, its set to only vibrate. Boeing Surplus has a big box of used cell phones, too. They're maybe $3 each. I think its much easier to just use the phone that comes with the plan though because they use SIM chips and providers may charge you a setup fee if you bring your own..plus batteries might not last as long on older phones, etc.. I have a boeing surplus phone in my wife's car with no service plan. Its there if she needs to call 911.
re #146: > I think Vonage offers a little widget that plugs into your network > and has an ordinary phone jack on it, so you can use whatever regular > phones you own. They do. Those devices are commonly called "ATAs" (for "Analog Telephone Adapter.")
SIM chips can be moved from handset to handset *if* the handset is "unlocked." Most handsets that are sold with cellular phone service are locked to one particular network, and another network's SIM card won't work. eBay is a good source for unlocked phones.
re #163 The first thing I did with this 7-11 SpeakOut was jam it up with crack attempts. Then, I called customer service at Nokia and get the PUK #'s. Yay me. ;)
Jim pointed out that you can get call-waiting, which is $6/month, and knocks you off the computer when someone calls (unless you have a tone phone and dial with *70 before the ISP number). However you don't get any signal that this is happening ,and would need to watch the little black square in icewm that indicates a connection. But sometimes it puts garbage on the screen instead of knocking you off and you have to hangup the computer and answer the phone before the caller gives up. .
I handled that problem by running the modem with speaker continuously on. (AT M2).
Another solution, for $8/month, would be voice mail with SBC, but people would still need to wait 3 hours to be called back.
Net10 says you have to buy their phone, you can't move over the SIM. Our friends have a cell phone already, they bought it 2 years ago used ($2?) with cradle/charger) and once put some minutes on it with Verizon and used it once or twice and lost interest. I think we can get them another rechargeable lithium battery in some shell for another cell phone, for $1, at Kiwanis, and charge it so they can use it for 911. He is on the computer 6-7 am and 4-6 pm and she is used to this. He forgot there was no problem. Today we stopped at Kiwanis to get a ride with him and Jim went to get a modem and he asked me 'what am I waiting for?'. 'Jim'. We tried to set him up to browse without images and turn them on only as needed, and cache them for 24 hours, but he likes to see the latest stock charts and can't remember how to load images so now we are back to the slow method again. We made him a script 'e' to go directly to email, but one to go directly to a login page sent Opera into an endless loop (99.9% cpu usage). He has four bookmarks and is happy. We told him to tell all his friends to write him at his webmail instead of grex but also made him a 'g' script to ssh to grex, where Jim set him up to go straight into Pine email. Now we are all set to make another such computer for anyone else who wants to go on the internet in 30MB or less.
Jim charged for two days the Motorola cell phone from our friends that they had not used for 2 years. The battery reads 3.3V now. How does he test whether it is working? Where would he look for an ON or POWER button, or how else can you test it short of phoning 911? The LCD screen has nothing on it.
He should be able to turn it on and get a message from the local provider's network.
HOW does he turn it on and who is 'the local provider'?
dial a # the voice message should tell you who the local cell provider is
How do we dial a number without turning it on first? If it is sitting in the cradle it is lighted and has some writing on the screen, but when removed from the cradle it is blank. Does this mean the battery has too little current?
push the red button and hold it down for 10 seconds, it should turn on. You wouldn't know anyone who has a used bike for sale cheap.
Kiwanis has used bikes for $10. Reuse Center has used bikes for negotiable prices, probably $10. If you promise to keep the bike indoors when you are not using it, Jim could tune up whatever you bought if you biked it to us, which is easy to do from Kiwanis. Look for something with the newer style of brakes that does not say Murray or Huffy or Sears on it. Aluminum wheels are also better quality, lighter and don't rust. Jim might be willing to meet you at Kiwanis some time. We gave away our extra bikes already.
Tracfone (and probably other prepaid mobile phone companies) use phones with custom firmware that prevents their use with a different provider and prevents people from using phones from other service providers. Keesan: let me know if you need a Tracfone.
Thanks, but our friends appear to have given up on the idea of a cell phone. They tried one 2 years ago and left it recharging since then.
I should post a rant to the electronics conference about equipment designed with defective charge circuits that can cook a battery. A wireless LAN should be a feature of my next home. I will even install one here if I am able to arrange broadband service. DSL would probably be least expensive, but as mentioned in the telephone wiring item I'm struggling to get a phone jack installed. :-/
Jim asks, if you have DSL and a network, does the main computer need to be left on all the time in order to use the DSL on another computer? If so, I presume you don't need monitor or keyboard, and maybe you can run it from RAM and have the hard drive powered down. How much power would a server like this use? He is thinking about using one wireless PCMCIA network card to share a neighbor's DSL, then cabling a couple of other computers to that one. We have a desktop PCMCIA slot for the card.
I would think so as how else would the wireless card get power? We also have a Ethernet LAN for two Macs, but have a separate wireless adapter on the network - i.e., not in one of the computers but plugged into the LAN.
Re: #179. To use DSL on more than one computer, the best idea is to get a router which allows you to connect it to an ADSL "modem". The router then connects to the computers; either by wires, or wirelessly. (Some routers have both wireless and wired connections, typically 32 of one and 4 of the other).
We don't have DSL service, the neighbor does. We want to pick up his service wirelessly and then wire our computers together with network cable. We have a hub. We don't need 32 connections. Someone gave us a box with a wireless router and a wireless PCMCIA ethernet card and we have a PCMCIA slot in one desktop computer. Do we need the router or just the card? We can connect our computers via nullmodem cable and share a phone connection that way (telnet from one to the other, or use kermit to connect). This is not important, we can just try to make DSL work on one computer in the living room and listen to streaming audio with it. I am giving up on the Detroit classical station, it has too many 30 sec noisy commercials and traffic reports from 3:30 to 7:00 pm, which is when I would have listened to it because the other stations stop playing music then. We could run the sound from the sound card to the digital piano as Aux in, but I think it is optimized to sound like a boomy grand piano. First we need to get ndiswrapper working to use this wireless card in linux.
I would be very carefull about setting up a wireless network with a neighbor in order to share broadband internet. Without said neighbor's permission, this is clearly illegal. However the law concerning a neighbor sharing such a connection is still a bit hazy and I wouldn't want to be the first person to have to defend myself against a phone company's lawyers.
A different neighbor was going to let us use his but he moved. They were thinking of Pringle antennas between houses a few houses away. Of course we would have permission. How would it hurt the ISP? The neighbor might experience a slightly slower connection if we listened to the radio at 32K/sec on their 1.5MBit/sec connection. Jim points out that if people don't want to share their connections they can set up a password to use them. We have udhcpc, they would probably run some server for udhcp with password required. How does this work with wireless connections at libraries? We are still nowhere near having a usable wireless network card since the stupid thing was designed to require Windows. SOmeone in our group tried to compile ndiswrapper to let linux use the Windows driver for the card. There may also be a linux module for a new kernel available.
> How would it hurt the ISP? Lost revenue. The question is, whose service is your internet connection? Is it the ISP's, or is it your's after you have bought it? This is quite a grey area, but precedence is on the ISP's side, and theft of service laws do have some teeth. > Jim points out that if people don't want to share their connections > they can set up a password to use them. I think that is a dangerous attitude to have. You cannot trespass onto someone's property because they left the gate unlocked, just as you cannot trespass onto someone's computer network because they didn't know to set a password. This is something I tell kids who think "war driving" is cool: Do you really want to be at the mercy of some old guy who doesn't know how his wifi works being told by the police that he needs to press charges because that will prevent these things from happening again? For them, its a good way to ruin their lives.
Actually, you can enter someone else's property if their gate is unlocked. In order for there to be any reasonable chance of a trespassing charge, the owner has to somehow ask you to leave. This can be done in person, or can be done by posting signs, or any number of other ways. Heck, if you leave your front door unlocked someone can even enter your house and you can't charge him with breaking & entering (since there was no breaking) or much of anything else unless you can somehow show intent to do something illegal. Unlike homes, however, ISPs do have terms of service, and they typically permit sharing the service only within members of the same immediate household living at the same address (that's what Comcast's says, for exaxmple.) Tapping into your neighbor's ISP isn't any different from tapping into your neighbor's cable signal because you don't want to pay for HBO.
I imagine there are ways to set up a shared network though. I know that there was a woman who was going to buy the house next door and she had a plan where she was going to get some super fast connection and then share it with me and with the neighbor on the other side of her. I dont know what kind of connection she was thinking of getting but she thought it would cost $150/mo. I imagine that would have been a different situation than DSL or Cable.
re #184 Yagi pringle antennas are neat if you can mount them well. Good luck with that.
I got a wireless network router (Linksys) and some adapters, and have networked a couple of Windows 98 computers in the kids' rooms. My stepdaughter is getting a computer from the Rotary Club in a couple of weeks. When she gets it we'll move the router to her room, a more central location for our network, and then it should work a little better for everyone. I don't know anything about network security. The network is wide open right now. How risky is this, and how should I deal with it?
re #189 Setup WEP on your router and the Wireless machines. You're basically broadcasting everything you do on your computer and also opening yourself up to who knows what.
Re #179: Generally you would leave your DSL modem and router on all the time and power up computers as you use them. I would guess about 20W max. continuous. Re #190: WEP is trivial to crack, so offers no significant protection.
re #191 Car door locks are also trivial but they deter most that may be tempted. Defense in depth starts with simple security. Why would you not recommend a simple configuration? Does jep live in Fort Knox or something?
Re #189: also choose a more cryptic SSID and create a closed network (so that the SSID is not brodcast to any passing computer). I keep hearing different opinions about the security of WEP - if the password is changed now and then I thought it was pretty secure.
re #193 The neighbors were leeching bandwidth off my wireless router for several months before I realized it. When I put the clamps down on the WEP setup then there was a noticable difference in performance. Normally, I SSH for most of my online transactions but for the layman I'd recommend securing your entrypoint to the router.
Re resp:191: It's "trivial" in the sense that it's been automated, but cracking WEP requires capturing a significant amount of traffic. Unless jep has a lot of network traffic going on, someone's going to have to capture data for several days before they'll stand a good chance of cracking his key. (And of course they'll be foiled if he changes his key during that time.) WEP isn't secure in the sense computer professionals use the word "secure," but it does act as a deterrent to casual leechers and eavesdroppers.
WEP - Windows Entertainment Pack? We don't have a router or ADSL modem. How much power would a computer draw with the monitor turned off and hard drive powered down? There would be no loss of service to an ISP if someone who would not buy broadband service borrowed a very small fraction of it. The phone company used to consider it illegal to have your own phone instead of renting a phone from them, or to have extension phones when it became legal to own your own phone, not that it cost them anything. People would turn off the ringers on the extension phones so the company would not know about them.
WTF? You said in #182 that you have a router, now you say you don't have one? Using someone else's broadband to check your email once a week would be using a "very small fraction" of the service. Using it to stream music for three and a half hours a day is not a "very small fraction."
You need both a router and some sort of network card. You don't usually get to pick and choose the number of connections your router can support other than by selecting one model over another. Just because your router supports 32/64/a gazillion connections doesn't mean you have to use them all.
We are not planning to use the router, just the wireless card, to learn how to use a wireless card, and play 32K streaming audio, which is a very small fraction of 1500K DSL line. Jim's 'ISP' connection is simply too unpredictable to listen to music with - anywhere from 5K to 0K/sec downloads and you get bumped off whenever they feel like it. 3/150 is about 2%. We succeeded in getting the digital piano to play through headphones (phone jack) and through the receiver (AUX out), and (badly) from the tape deck into the piano (AUX in) and recorded my playing directly to the tape deck. The AUX in has a great deal of static. Jim says we won't need radio now, we can just record all the great piano music after getting free sheetmusic downloads. He also plugged into the headphone jack a little gadget that broadcasts FM to the nearest receiver, and it sounded awful but recognizable. Does anyone know how to construct the cable that plugs into the round MIDI jack at the back and then into the sound card MIDI (game port) port (or does it plug into line out?)? I will look online for the wiring diagram. I want to try playing piano midi music on the piano from the sound card. Who needs broadband to check email when there is grex?
Re #192: I don't know jep's circumstances but I'm about to deploy two wireless LANs, one of which will be at home. I don't have anything top secret, but would still prefer to keep my information private unless I explicitly publish it for some reason. I have heard that WPA is less insecure than WEP, but I'm thinking of going further by using additional software to encrypt everything that gets sent over the wireless LAN. Re #195: My wireless LAN will see a significant amount of traffic. Re #196: I have a computer with a good power supply that burns 27 Watts most of the time it's switched on. Other machines may require more power. Re #199: This is a guess, but it's worth a try. Please let me know PC MIDI if it works, so that I can add it ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~ to my notes. Use sheilded cable 4 GND ---- RX- 5 and connect the shield to pin 2 12 TXD ---> RX+ 4 on the MIDI connector. Leave the shield unconnected at the PC end.
I do not rely on WEP or WPA for my wireless. Any encryption I need is performed in different layers.
Could you explain to me what RX means? Do we need only two wires connected? The midi port looks like a keyboard plug. Linksys (who made our wireless card) says they only support Windows. Realtek (who made the chip on it) has a lot of broken links to Mac and Linux (source code) drivers. Someone else posted an alpha version of a driver for this chip, source code, which requires that I have kernel source code for 2.4 or 2.6, which I need to get and unpack into about 100MB on my computer in order to be able to compile one little module (102K for Windows, by Realtek). Is there some way to compile a module without the entire kernel source code? Can I read the Makefile and just put in the parts it needs?
RX usually means 'receive'. TX is usually 'transmit'.
And here is a schematic of a midi cable: http://www.cryogenius.com/hardware/sbmidi/
re 202: most drivers can be built outside the kernel tree, but you might need at least the kernel headers installed - depending on the disrto, you might require the kernel-devel package or equivalent.
Slackware. So I install just the kernel headers for 2.4.31 and then do a 'make'? I followed a link at the URL cited for cryogenics and found the schematics for the SB $50 MIDI cable, which requires 1 diode, 2 resistors, an OptoIsolator and an IC (with transistors in them) and a plug ends for gameport, MIDI IN and MIDI OUT (5 pin) which we might have around but not the IC and OptoIsolator. I wonder if this would let me also record MIDI files to the computer (from MIDI out) with the right software.
For any compilation it's supposed to be the headers for the kernel libc was compiled under, and for compiling kernel modules I'm pretty sure it has to match the kernel you'll be trying to use the module under.
I'm not familiar w/ slack, haven't touched it in a dozen years at least, but I'd expect to unpack my driver source somewhere and be able to run make in the directory, maybe with a configure first (that might show some library dependency), unless it's one of those rare ones that actually use bits of ones existing in the kernel tree, then you'd need the lot. If my memory serves me correctly the MIDI interface use a current loop, hence the need for couplers, and is a serial interface, with one transmit loop (TX) and one to receive (RX).
The INSTALL file said to just 'make', not make config or configure. Do the kernel headers come with a .config file or would I need to get hold of the one used to compile the 2.4 kernel I will use with this module and copy that to /build along with kernel headers?
My circumstances are that I have a wireless network with 3 (soon to be 4) computers sharing cable modem service. I use the Internet a fair amount and so do the kids, for e-mail, music downloads, games, on-line banking, chat, random browsing and homework. If I need WEP, I guess I'll figure out what it is and how to install it or turn it on. If I need more than that, please someone let me know. I will appreciate it very much!
I installed kernel-headers and they did not go into /lib/modules/2.4.31/build, where .config was supposed to show up, so I also apparently need kernel source code, or at least the .config file from it. In addition, the 2.4.31 kernel headers overwrite the ones in /usr/src/linux-2.2.16/include/linux (because of the way the symlinks are set up, because they installed into /usr/include/linux, which is symlinked to /usr/src/linux-2.2.16/include/linux). Will this be a problem if I want to compile another 2.2.16 kernel some time? They are dated 1998-2005 and have no mention of the kernel version, so maybe they are just updates that will also work with older versions. I need to get hold of the 37MB of source code now.
/lib/modules/<kernel-version>/build, if it exists, should be a symlink to /usr/src/linux-<version>. Did you look there?
There is no such symlink on my computer, should I make one? I now have 2.4.31 kernel headers in the 2.2.16 directory. Should I rename it, and then reinstall 2.2.16, and make the symlink? I tried making the symlink and since I don't have kernel source on this computer yet there is no .config file. It would be easier to get an older wireless card from ebay than to get this stupid WIndows one to work with linux.
Orinoco wireless cards work very well with Linux.
Do you have an extra one you want to give us? It is against our rules to buy anything we can get for free. Jim is going to modify keyboard plugs to make 180 degree 5-pin DINs and maybe chop the 15-pin DB off a joystick. First he has to remove the rubber outer part of a roller to try to make a subpad out of it for a laser printer that feeds all the sheets at once. THe official replacement costs $10.50 plus shipping. In the meantime he has had it apart a few times to clean it, and I feed one page at a time. And someone returned a working laser printer we lent them in 2001.
It is against our rules to buy anything we can get for free. Amen!
Re #202: Only two wires connected all the way through, not counting the shield which you only connect at one end.
Sorry, all I have is a Linksys 802.11G card. It is why I have to run Windows XP on my laptop. :(
Grr. tell me about it. I have an internal card that is turned off and on via a switch that appears not to work in FreeBSD (or Linux). After days of trying to get the damn thing to work, I gave up and created a VMWare guest for it. Works great! Tip: set the applications priority in the task manager to "RealTime"
re#218: no ndiswrapper? #219: what card?
ndiswrapper is a resource hog and my laptop isn't that fast. :)
I have to buy a couple of wireless ethernet adaptors. One will be USB since my iBook doesn't have PC-Card or Cardbus slots. I could conceivably add an internal Airport card, but a USB adaptor is more portable between machines. It will almost certainly be a Linksys WUSB11, since that's one that NetBSD supports. The other could be PCI, but I don't know yet which to buy.
I may have the same Linksys card. Maybe those of you more knowledgeable can compile that rtl8180.o module for your own systems, if not mine. I just tried to recompile a 2.4.31 kernel and it no longer recognizes memory cards so I added back a few things I had taken out (having to do with USB storage) and recompiled it and now the modules again. If this works I will make one try at the module but I compiled a kernel without Wireless LAN support to make it smaller and would have to recompile it one more time. I had no idea which device we have in their list so I said N instead of Y or M. We do have a Win98 laptop computer from the neighbor and will try the card in there at the library, for educational purposes (and we can download linux kernel source code with it there via 98SE).
Oh, back on the issue of a la carte cable channels, recent news reports have confirmed what I've always suspect but hadn't seen in print -- the biggest single reason why basic cable costs so much is ESPN. It's the most expensive channel in the typical basic lineup, $2-3 per month even though only something like 30% of the households paying for it actually watch it, and the cost gets even worse when you bundle in the other critical add-ons like ESPN2 and The Golf Channel (myself I'd rather watch The Flannel Channel.) Apparently the FCC has started to warm up to the idea of a la carte, but I still suspect it will get derailed somehow. Disney will lose billions in market cap if they can't continue making money from people who don't watch. But I'll just put those extra costs on my mental list along with the taxes I'm paying to make payments on the Kingdome and such.
Re: #222. That depends on what drivers you want to use. If you want to use the madwife (aka madwifi) drivers (or their NetBSD equivalent, whatever that may be), then I suggest looking VERY HARD at compatbility and getting, if at all possible, a guarantee from the vendor that if the card does not work *on NetBSD* then you may return it. Given that I believe the problem with my broadcom internal wireless card was the on-off switch built in to th laptop; that an external card of any sort shouldn't have one; and that i downloaded broadcom chipset drivers from linksys which appeared to interface well with the card, i should say that linksys drivers with an external wifi card and ndiswrapper should work a charm. (ndiswrapper is a wrapper for proprietary windows network drivers which, by emulating the Windows Network Device Interface System, trick the drivers into thinking they are running on Windows instead of Linux or the BSDs.)
How much memory does ndiswrapper take up? Our best laptop has 32MB. Someone at my linux list will give another try at rtl8180 driver. My 2.4.31 kernel works with glibc but not libc5 linux, don't know why, and finds the USB memory stick, but I have no idea how to compile for PCMCIA so can't use the wireless card with it if I compile it for 2.4.31 (which INSTALL says requires hacking, 2.6 does not).
ndiswrapper sounds hideous. The vast majority of vendors, when asked about NetBSD, Linux or whatever will simply say "we only support MS Windows". My understanding is that the WUSB11 is supported by NetBSD's native atu(4) driver, but there is always the risk that a vendor will switch chipsets without changing a product's model number or packaging. Gits. I faced a similar risk with a recent webcam purchase. Happily the NetBSD people were kind enough to bring the spcaview in pkgsrc up to the latest version, which included support for my camera.
re #227: there's nothing particularly awful about ndiswrapper and it's very, very useful in cases where the manufacturer (I'm looking at *YOU*, Broadcom..) won't release details necessary to implement a native driver. The Dell laptop I use for work has a built-in broadcom wireless chip that isn't supported by Linux except through ndiswrapper. However with the hardware emulation mode that ndiswrapper provides it works very well (better, seemingly, than it does in Windows, as odd as that may be..)
Re: #226. Sorry, I've no idea how much memory ndiswrapper takes up, as I'm not using it at the moment. But my comments on the subject were addressed to ball. Re: #227. More hideous than running UN*X under VMware? More hideous than having no net access or not running UN*X at all? Re: 228, Broadcom: Let's look together. re: 228, ndiswrapper: Hah. Hahah. Hahahah. Oh, I larfed.
Somebody with ndiswrapper please let us know its memory usage before I bother with it. DSL (50MB of Debian on live CD) may support it if you download an extra package of applications. Ubuntu Live might support it too, but we don't have 128MB of RAM on our laptops to run that huge GUI in (it won't run at all with less, not sure if DSL will accept 32MB). I will try the card once in Win98 at the public library. My 2.4.31 kernel won't work at all with USB - crashes with uhci. I modelled it on something that works and just added usb-uhci (as module) and removed a bunch of things that did not look essential (various USB scanners, cameras, serial adaptors, ISDN modems). My kernel config is at http://keesan.freeshell.org/bl/2.4.31/configsy.431 - all help appreciated. And when I tried using this setup to compile rtl8180 it would not compile anyway and INSTALL says I need to hack Makefile for 2.4, and 2.6 is easier. 2.6 takes too much RAM and is ridiculous for a 100MHz laptop computer.
Re #229: More hideous than finding natively supported hard- ware, although in some cases (such as hardware built into laptops) I can see that's not always practical.
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> And Running Unix sucks. As opposed to what? Windows?
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I suspect Plan 9 has more scant hardware support even than NetBSD ;-)
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Out of interest though, what makes Plan 9 good?
Having more than one machine spare! And sorry, but they got the Plan 9 windowing system VERY wrong, unless they now believe in dictating policy as well as implementation. In which case, both the windowing system and they are wrong.
Re #238: ?
?[3~[3~
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> they get it in their heads that the way Linus et al do it is the One > True Way This is probably because Linux is the first unix-like operating system these people have ever used. It was pretty much that way with me.
Hey, at least Linux and X11 are actually used by lots of real people to get useful stuff done. Plan 9 seems to be mainly a platform for generating superior attitudes and academic papers on operating system design.
Re #241: I'm not so sure about Linux, but I like X. I like the ability to run a client program on whatever machine happens to be most appropriate and have its output display to (and keyboard/pointing device input from) whatever machine happens to be in front of me. I also like the fact X makes no attempt to dictate my choice of window manager. I imagine X predates Linux and it's developed by different people.
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X works for me. It's nice that it's cross-platform too. Is Plan 9's windowing system confined just to Plan 9?
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I think there's also an X11 wm that's meant to look like rio. You're right, Dan. X11 DOES suck. And so does UNIX, whatever flavour. The trouble is, they're SO much better than That Other System in SO many ways, and Plan 9 is SO little known, that its suckiness is (almost) irrelevant. Now, if I'm wrong about the window manager thing, then fine. But don't assume I'm just some ignorant Linux fanboy. I also use (and happen to prefer) FreeBSD on one machine. I can also see lots of areas where linux went wrong, like kernel module support. But I suspect that unless you're a kernel programmer (which I'm not), and/or you have a few machines kicking around that you can power constantly just to have a distributed OS (which I don't), then Plan 9 really wouldn't look much more attractive to you than Linux/BSD. (As an aside, imho Plan 9 still doesn't do device management correctly: /dev/dev/ and /dev/devctrl is certainly an improvement over /dev/dev/ and ioctrl, but the OS should include facilities for decoding whether what's written to /dev/dev is a command or data, instead. As for the bad old days; point taken. But I know that lots of people prefer, and always have preferred, developing for UNIX rather than Windows, and developing for Mac OS Classic (especially early versions) sounds like a nightmare. Let's face it, aside from some shining lights (now sadly mostly dimmed), programming graphical applications on just about ANY platform in the eighties must have been the GUI equivalent of batch-mode-only OSES. Did I mention it sounds painful?
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Is Plan 9 free software?
Re: 249. OK, maybe that ouldn't work! Re: #250. What's your definition of "Free software"?
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Re: #252. "Approved by the OSI" does not mean that it is approved by Richard Stallman and the GNU/Free Software Foundation people. The OSI-approved software stack *includes* (all?) software approved by the FSF, but the reverse is not necessarily the case.
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And I quote: "...There was a shakey start with Stallman and the OSI people..."
r#253: thankfully RMS hasn't got the right of veto for software worldwide.
I think I should network my next home with Ethernet (probably a combination of 10baseT, 100baseTX and perhaps 1000baseT over cat-5e and RS-485 (over Cat-3?)
)
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Re: #259. I see. For one, your original statement implied, or at least I took it as implying, that RMS and the OSI were "intimately connected" in the way that RMS and the FSF are. I didn't realize that the OSF had merely "taken his side". For another, RMS/FSF advocate free software, not merely "Open Source", which the OSF is "responsible" and which looser definition merely *includes*, but is not restricted to, free software. Re: #256. Why should Stallman, or anyone, give anyone the right to use, modify, and distribute software they've distributed *with source*, without requiring them to either (a) give credit to the original authors, (b) distribute either the original, or their modified, source under the same conditions as the source they got in the first place, (c) pay up, or (d) some combination of the preceding? Might as well work one's rear end off to buy a High Definition, Widescreen, Digital Television, then give it to the nearest beggar, complete with generator. The only people who really want to have the right not to distribute source are those who are interested in getting something for nothing and charging for the privilege.
Charging others for the privilege, that is.
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The Linksys wireless card works in Windows (I think, we have no signal to test it on but the driver CD installed drivers and found the card). A neighbor lent us a Netgear card to try with linux, but it needs the same linux module. I got the source code at Driverguide (Realtek's links are broken) but can't compile it - I get lots of warnings and then an error. I downloaded the Win98 driver for it (about 100K) and unzipped to get a .sys and a .inf file. Obviously this is not the self-installing type of driver. How do we feed it properly to Win98? I want to test it before returning it to the neighbor so he will know if it works. (He sleeps until late afternoon). We also found a Yahoo camera setup exe that installed itself somewhere or other but we have no idea where. Jim fixed the camera somehow. .1 MP. Serial cable, not working with our DOS Photopc download software.
Is that a Webcam? What make & model? I recently got one that works with NetBSD (probably Linux too). Mine is a Logitech Quickcan Chat. Once I have DSL, I will try video- conferencing with it.
Tiger Direct Yahoo Digital Camera. Blue and yellow, 320x200, stores 20 low res photos. We installed the software (ran the .exe file) and I have no idea where it was put. An online review said to reboot to use it so we plugged in the camera and 10 min later got back into Win98 and still had no idea how to download a photo. 1.1MB .exe file, no instructions for use. We took the laptop computer with wireless card to the library. A librarian helped us fill in the same long number on two lines and we still have no connection. Jim plugged in his USB memory stick to a computer there and it does not work. The library said they will fix that eventually. There is a floppy drive but we can only get small files onto it and the whole point was to download things like kernel source. Win98 would not work with the USB stick so we used a 1-floppy linux to transfer 2.8MB of file for the other wireless card from my linux download. Win98 says it cannot find some files it needs. We seem to have Win98FE. The first card is said to have worked on a friend's computer, I wonder how. I am going to get out some paper books and go home now.
In case this helps, I found a few random pages on the Web that seem to suggest that uses the STM STV680 chipset. I don't know whether Linux drivers are available, but if the camera supports a removeable flash card (like my cheap digital still camera, which uses Smartmedia cards), you may be able to mount those cards in a suitable reader and read that way the pictures you take.
The card has about 100Kbytes of built-in RAM, not a flash card. The only mention I found for it for linux was that nobody had any idea whether it worked and to let them know if it did. My expensive Olympus digital camera uses Smartmedia cards (for which I have a reader that works in linux but not DOS) and it also comes with a serial download cable that works in linux or DOS (40K, fits onto a book disk). Can you find linux software for the camer? It apparently takes nighttime photos via infrared flash and Jim wants to try it for fun. A grexer gave it to us. It is reviewed under 'toys, other'.
My wife recently bought an Olympus digital camera. I suspect (althought I have yet to confirm this) that it supports the umass standard and should work directly with systems like NetBSD and Linux. I'll look for open-source drivers for your Yahoo Digital Camera.
The Olympus camera I bought 4 years ago worked as a USB mass storage device, as does the one I bought earlier this year. I'm sure yours will as well.
Nice job Olympus! ;-)
Mine is never going to work as a USB mass storage device because it only comes with a serial cable. The card reader is mass-storage. I found STV0680.c linux software but it seems to be for USB. I also found two other Win98 drivers to try next with the Yahoo camera. The camera is said to also need Video4Linux (maybe to act as a webcam? Maybe to take single photos while acting as a webcam?). Someone using it with Windows said just to plug it in and reboot to download photos, which is all we are after. Lots of other cheap cameras (spycam, pen camera) use this chip.
I don't know if this helps...
http://gkall.hobby.nl/stv680-aiptek.html
...or if it supports the RS-232 cable option.
Have you tried sane or gphoto?
I have SANE set up for a scanner. I deleted the qcam parts, which I think are for webcam. I read about gphoto - it is about a 5MB download with dozens of dependencies, and most things won't compile on my system. Today we tried three Win98 drivers and they all installed but there are no instructions about what to do next. This camera has a serial cable. Jim just wants to play with it a bit and take infrared flash shots and I am not going to knock myself out trying to compile a huge program, one little bit of which downloads images from this toy camera. How does one use a camera that is not USB in Windows? It installed a couple dozen files, I think. The third of these Win98 packages is 1.1MB. It put files stv* into c:\windows\system : cfg, dll, sys, drv. Ten files. Maybe the batteries ran down? It has stopped beeping when we reboot.
It's some time since I saw a digital camera with a serial interface. That was an old Apple QuickTake (I forget which model, but perhaps all of them had serial ports). If the supplied software doesn't work with your camera, I don't know what to suggest, since I doubt there's a serial equivalent of umass.
It probably does work, we just don't have any instructions how to use it. Our other two serial cameras work with 40K of Photopc software in DOS or linux, for downloads, or to list what is on there, remove it, rename it, etc. I don't know what the 1.1MB of Windows software is supposed to do, or how. umass - usb-storage? I will look into qcam (SANE).
I am about to try compiling a PCMCIA kernel to use with the 133MHz laptop and the wireless card. Can someone give a simple summary of how to go about this? I have kernel source code in /usr/src/linux-2.4.31 (linked to /lib/modules/2.4.31/build) and I think I put the pcmcia-cs package there and unpack it and run a make config on that package as well as for the kernel.
Re resp:222: Good luck finding a USB wireless adapter that works with MacOS. I never did. I found one D-Link model that was supposed to, but the drivers were terrible and made MacOS unstable. Re resp:248: Actually, I think a problem with X11 is that there *are* so many options. Instead of having one or two window managers that are really good, and one or two sets of widgets and interface standards to support, there are dozens of half-baked ones. The network-oriented operation of X also made it slow, which has since inspired three or four direct rendering methods, all of which are (of course) incompatible with each other.
Better dozens of half-baked ones to choose from than one half-baked one you're forced to use.
Jim mentioned to people that we were trying to get PCMCIA and modems working so someone in his Dawn Ducks group gave him two external 56K (probably v92) and a router with an Airwire 330TX Maxgate. Maxgate is made by Umax and I could not find any drivers for it there. I could not find Airwire 330TX on the web. I found Addtron AEF-330TX which uses the same chip as Accton EN1217 according to BSD, and the Macronix 98713 chip, which is supported by tulip but may need something special done during compilation. I will try it anyway, precompiled module from Slackware. This card plugs into a PCMCIA slot in a box that also has a printer port and two ethernet ports labelled PC and hub and one wider WAN? port. What gets plugged into each of these? Do we plug something from the ISP (if we have DSL) into one port and a hub into the other into which we can plug several computers (if we don't want to use wireless)? I presume we can take this same wireless card and put it into a laptop computer to take to the library. What is the WAN used for and how?
Re #277: I was really hoping to use NetBSD, but my iBook's firmware wouldn't boot from an ffs partition. I tried OpenDarwin, but it was dismal. Perhaps I'll try putting the NetBSD kernel on a small Darwin partition and making the rest of the disk ffs. Failing all that, I'll need to find MacOS X Panther on CD. Re #279: What is the make and model of the mystery box?
MaxGate UGate-3300 Wireless Sharing Router with Print Server.
UMax has links to linux drivers for its routers, but they are broken. I tried to write them and they returned my mail. THey use sorbs blacklist.
Re #277: http://www.macwireless.com/html/products/11g_11b_cards/11bUSB.php
Re #281: http://www.homenethelp.com/web/review/ugate-3300.asp
Re resp:283: Wow! That's steep! I think the D-Link model (which works fine with Linux, but not with MacOS) cost $60.
When compiling a PCMCIA kernel, if I am going to use precompiled modules do I answered N or M to CONFIG_PCMCIA? I tried both ways. If I don't have APM and PNP and I get messages about them being unresolved symbols while using precompiled modules, do I need to answer Y to them or compile my own modules?
I think you need CONFIG_PCMCIA to provide the framework the other PCMCIA modules work with. I'm not totally sure, though. I don't compile many kernels from scratch anymore.
I had to answer N in order to compile directly within the downloaded pcmcia package instead of using the precompiled modules. It works now except Cardbus has a bus and does not work. The precompiled modules for some reason did not work with the precompiled kernel so I had to compile kernel and modules in two steps. Answering Y would have compiled drivers into the kernel, M would have NOT compiled any drivers, N lets you compile them yourself afterwards. Very confusing, and now I need to learn to use /sbin/hotplug and maybe some other scripts in order to use regular PCI modules with Cardbus cards.
HACKED BY GNAA LOL JEWS DID WTC LOL
My networked home now has an 802.11g LAN in addition to a small 10baseT LAN in the study. The wired LAN connects via the wireless LAN and then DSL to the Internet. AT&T DSL registration requires access to MS Windows.
You have several choices: