Safety first? Knot on DIY Network

[Larry Jaques]

On 20 Dec 2004 17:05:51 GMT, [e-mail] (Charlie Self) calmly ranted:

If you want to enjoy a football game more, have someone record it for you, then watch the entire thing, sans the "color commentary" and beaufreakincoup commercials, in just over an hour. Choose your own instant replays, too. Cool, huh? (I gave up watching football after their second strike. Sports, who needs 'em?)

I can't get cable, DSL, or anything out here BUT satellite. They take me for $106/mo, but I have high-speed 2-way internet and 180 channels (165 worthless, 15 with good programs or commercial-free music) Now with the new TIVO receiver, I don't even need a VCR and it can record one program in the background while I watch another. It usually records old movies late at night and I watch them whenever. And since David Marks' Wood Works comes on at 5am, it gets recorded, too.

-------------------------------------------------------- Murphy was an Optimist ----------------------------

Comprehensive Website Development

[Upscale]

I've taken to watching HDTV lately. My favourite show is Holmes on Homes and watching him fix all the screw-ups that other contractors left behind.

[Mark & Juanita]

Haven't seen that one yet, going to have to check it out. HGTV and TLC are pretty much the extent of our TV watching anymore (along with generous doses of Sponge-bob and some cartoon network stuff when our son is watching TV).

[Charlie Self]

Larry Jaques responds:

The satellite turkeys around here offer high speed ONE way internet. I can download at high speed, but I'm stuck with telephone line uploads, which is, probably 70% of the time, where I really need the speed (as it is, I can upload an article for an editor, but I have to mail him, or her, a CD with the pix for the article).

For whatever reason, this phone line dropped from the original 56 to a 28 after I returned from West By God. Literally the same lines, one of the same computers and modem. Tried three other modems on both lines, same thing.

Charlie Self "It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable." Eric Hoffer

[Mike Marlow]

Don't feel too bad about that Charlie. Most DirecTV satellite hook ups are really only high speed one way. A look at their web site will reveal that it's around 500Kbs download speed, but only around 56Kbs upload speed. Most people think that because it's satellite upload as well as download that it's high speed each way, but it's not. It's really about the same speed as a modem upload. The DirecTV advertising would lead one to believe the upload speeds are fast since they're satellite uploads, but listen carefully - they really only state that you don't need an extra phone line anymore.

I'm feeling a little smug these days because after years of no broadband options except for satellite, we are finally getting DSL at the house. It took a lot of pestering to get it but we did finally get lucky. We were all set to install satellite internet service, but didn't after the installer showed up and told us he wouldn't be able to see the satellite without even getting on the roof. Told me I would not even be able to see the 119 satellite through the trees. Ahem... been a DirecTV subscriber for 4 years. So - we parted company, my dish still in the back of his truck, and me grudgingly stuck to 46Kbs connections, but $75.00 less encumbered. So... soon we should be enjoying the benefits that most moderately civilized households have enjoyed for years.

[Larry Jaques]

On 21 Dec 2004 09:33:59 GMT, [e-mail] (Charlie Self) calmly ranted:

My upload speed is only 55k through the sat, but that works for me. I can download a 13MB file in 3-4 minutes, so new apps off the Web are doable.

Have the phone man try another pair or six until you get good connections. And if you have one of the old carbon bar network interfaces, clean and dry them. DAMHIKT.

I have a normal 20k connect through QWEST's lines here. Ugh! It was hell for a week when Starband's sat went down last month, but I got the land line for a month for $10 so I was offline for only a few days and 134 spams/3 valid messages/6 joke emails.

-------------------------------------------------------- Murphy was an Optimist ----------------------------

Comprehensive Website Development

[Mark & Juanita]

I'm surprised Direcway 2-way wouldn't be universally available. (Not that I'm a big fan -- when it works, it works, when it doesn't, it is a major pain dealing with technical "support" at the "can't help" desk.

I haven't had any issues with upload, but I don't really upload large files very often.

His choice of words was probably poor, but just because you can get good DTV reception is no guarantee that satellite broadband performance will be good. Maintaining a good connection is very sensitive. It took a re-installation that included relocation of the antenna away from the tree (I live in Arizona) before I got a really good, reliable connection. So the installation technician was probably correct regarding the need to locate away from trees.

[Charlie Self]

Larry Jaques responds:

And therein lies the rub: I just got a January/February issue of Smart Homeowner with my article on tools. Fourteen of the pix are mine, and the smallest, IIRC, was about 10 MBs. The largest was probably 17. Call the average

13 megabytes. Times 14. That's about 180 megabytes to upload, even if my machine decides to run at 56K all day, which it never does. Jumping it to 56K isn't that big a help, and if there's a blip anywhere, you have to be lucky not to have to go back to the beginning and start over.

No thanks. I sent a CD.

Still no word on DSL, but I think I'd prefer that to cable, if it worked better than the DSL I tried in Parkersburg.

Charlie Self "It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable." Eric Hoffer

[Mark & Juanita]

That would pretty much count you out on Direcway unless you went with the small business subscription ($90 vs $60 per month). Even if they would upload faster, the amount of data you are talking about would kick in their "fair access policy" on the home subscription which throttles your connection down to below land-line modem speed if you exceed a certain number of megabytes per hour and doesn't throttle back up for several hours after.

[Silvan]

You don't want to do that. It's more addictive than crack, man, and crack is probably cheaper.

[Doug Winterburn]

After a year and a half of dialup, Cox cable internet came to town. Can't say much for the support folks - the standard fix to everything is powerdown your modem, wait 5 minutes, reboot your computer, power up your modem. However the downloads speed runs around 4 megabits/second and the upload is close to 500 kilobits/second.

- Doug

[Tim Douglass]

Actually that is pretty good advice. Win98 loses it's mind when on high speed networks and has to be regularly slapped around. XP isn't as bad, but still will sometimes just drop to about one byte per minute for no discernable reason. When things get out of sync the power down thing is the first, obvious step. I find that probably 99 times out of a hundred it fixes whatever problem there seemed to be.

Tim Douglass

[Doug Winterburn]

The only problem with this is I have a linux firewall connected to the cable modem and at the moment it has been running without a reboot since:

[dlw@phoenix dlw]$ uptime 6:38pm up 60 days, 7:43, 2 users, load average: 0.13, 0.03, 0.01

and that was an intentional reboot to take an aircan to the innards of the 486 for the annual furball removal. Before I moved to a small town, I was on Sprint broadband wireless with this same 486 firewall without a reboot in over a year, and that was caused by a power outage.

Strangely, the problem I had with my Cox internet connection cured itself after 3 days on it's own....

- Doug

[Silvan]

It's annoying when you're running a real OS though. I just lie to them. Yes, I rebooted my computer. Didn't you hear the beep? Beep. OK, let's talk about the weather for five minutes, and then I will ifup eth0 and we'll try this all again.

Although I do have to concede that taking the interface down, powering off the modem for five minutes, then bringing everything back up usually really does fix whatever the problem is. It's upstream, not local, this trouble.

In fact, I've even done this on a Windows box. I forget what Windows for ifconfig is, but there's actually a utility to do this very job. Windows does need rebooting to cure brain damage from time to time, but in this particular circumstance I would not bother to interrupt my work to fix this connectivity problem without giving the ol' interface and modem cycle a try first.

[Silvan]

You'd be surprised. DSL actually depends on archaic technology to work. Because we have high tech fiberoptics linking us from here to there, we can't ever get DSL. My choices are cable, cable, or cable. Or, well, dialup. Ewwwwwww. :)

[Mike Marlow]

Finally - an advantage to being on an Alltel archaic infrastructure...

[Tim Douglass]

My guess is that there is a hiccup between the cable and the modem. I can often get mine to work by just taking the modem off line for a few seconds. If that doesn't work I power down the modem the finally cycle the various boxes. Because I have 5 computers on one cable connection through a router I can isolate problems a bit. It seems that the two win98 machines will suddenly lose their internet access but the XP boxes will still have it - so I'm not sure *what* is up with that. You might also check if the service glitches coincide with re-assignment of your IP address.

Tim Douglass

[Jeremy]

Anyone tried looking into WildBlue?

wildblue.com

Jeremy

[Charlie Self]

Jeremy asks:

Thanks. It looks good...if it reaches this area. Hell, DSL looks good, or would if I could get it. Satellite generally looks like a rip-off at nearly 100 bucks a month, but DSL is $40, and, supposedly, this Wild Blue will be comparable, though it is also satellite.

I'll wait and see and hope.

Charlie Self "Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." George Orwell

[Mark & Juanita]

It does look good, and at $49.99 would be $10 per month cheaper than home satellite service from DirecWay. If they have real customer support,this could be a winner.