Andrew Ferguson's Blog

Car rental is always a nightmare, did you miss a ding when you picked the car up and will get charged for it when you bring it back!!!

Got caught out at Avis Dallas Fort Worth airport at Christmas, had booked a car in a 4 door group, and was informed on arrival at the desk that one was not available but would a Chevorlet Impala be OK? I said yes, sign form in its myriad of places, which is never easy after a 10 hour flight and proceeded on my way.

Then a few weeks later I get a bill for an extra $85.32, on top of the pre-pay voucher of $88.71 that I'd already paid for. I queried this as I had taken no extra's and got sent a copy of the invoice highlighting where I had added initials which was apparently consenting to the upgrade cost from my B group to a C group. 

At no point during the original rental had the Avis rep pointed out that there was an extra €70.01 charge for the Impala. So spent a total of $170 for 22 hours of car hire - ouch.

Avis refused to budge, so that seems to be it, and the beauty of it was I also got a call in January asking if I'd wanted to extend the rental as they thought I still had the car, by which time I was back in the UK, and they had rang a UK number, did they think I'd exported the car!!!

Moral - I will not be going back to Avis, who also managed to not file the British Airways mileage bonus for this and another hire. 

Rant over.

I remember the days when webcams cost over £150, but now Tesco's do one for £5, okay its really only a 320x240 resolution device but thought it may be worth a little go. 

USB cameras tend to be easier to use with chat software than things like network camera, or DV devices which generally have the best optics.

So why the blog entry - well Tesco box claimed to have drivers, but alas nothing other than camera. Ok so you think find them on the Tesco's website, and they have drivers for a TechWeb1 device - but these did not work.

More digging around, and eventually found out the guts of the camera are shared with a the Q-TEC Webcam USB, and I've put a set of the drivers onto my server which you can download from:

http://www.farina1.com/Drivers/Webcam100/14081_01.exe

No warranty is offered for the download, while I'm confident it is virus free, as ever check everything you download  from the Internet.

To use the drivers simply download file and run it, this will create the folder C:\download\driver\14081 and then automatically run the setup.exe that is in this folder. Once all this is done you can plug the USB camera in and it should find the drivers.

During my hunt for the driver, it seems like Tesco may have used various cameras in the past, so to ensure your camera is meant to work with these drivers, goto Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager button, expand Imaging Devices node, right click the Single Chip CIF camera, select properties. Then the detail tab and should see a Device Instance ID my values are
VID 093A - the vendor ID
PID 2460 - the product ID

After a busy time developing the thinkbroadband bandwidth meter (tbbMeter) we finally launched it today.

It has been an interesting journey, and feature requests are flowing in, so it looks like the software will be far from static but hopefully will grow to be useful for many people.

We have lots of plans of things to add, but that would be cheating if we revealed them now. 

While some may see tbbMeter as just yet another network connection monitoring bit of software, with the access it has to a server, it already has built in test files it can download, without the user having to worry about where to download, and we plan to add more in the future, including the ability to carry out an upload test.

After the comments from Ofcom about take-up in rural areas, the data we published on thinkbroadband.com shows that the digital divide is still out there but is more on the availability and ability to get a decent speed broadband service.

The day got off to a wonderful start with the phone going at 7:15am with a request for an interview on BBC Radio Berkshire at 7:30am. Usually like to have my morning coffee before engaging brain, but managed anyway.

Reading the comments both on the BBC site and our own are interesting, the demographic of readers to the BBC site is very different to our own broadband centric site and broadband providers along with those controlling the networks would do well to read a range of the comments.

What would be nice to do is visit a number of homes and see whether connection speeds can be improved dramatically with just a few adjustments. Only this week I pointed someone towards the solution of removing the ring wire from the master socket and they saw connection speeds jump from 4Meg to 8Meg. It is worth noting that the imbalance due to the ring wire has a bigger effect on ADSL2+ services.

One wonders how much work it would be for the providers to run some checks on their database logs and perhaps send a help sheet to those who seem to have slow connection speeds. The cynics amongst us will of course say this is not in the providers interests because the peak usage spike may be bigger if people are connecting faster - but then this is balanced by making customers happy, and a happy customer is probably more likely to stay rather than be tempted away by the myriad of broadband offers we see everyday.

The long winter nights are well and truly gone, and the garden is coming along nicely.

http://www.farina1.com/gardenmay08 shows what the various plants are upto. The apple blossom was nice to see, but lasts for such a short time :-(

My ADSL calculator has had a makeover and now provides people with more information.

http://www2.farina1.com/adsl

The calculator will now provide the expected range of ADSL and ADSL2+ speeds based on the line attenuation. If you know your actual line length rather than the attenuation a very crude approximation is that 1km equals 11dB of attenuation.

The server hosting www2.farina1.com which is on the end of an ADSL line has had its upstream speed increased to 832Kbps, so content should be served out to people a bit faster.

Pictures from my garden with the snow from Sunday April 6th 2008.


Looking out from first floor window down the garden.


The snow sitting a top some flowers that don't normally see the snow.


An attempt to take a slightly arty shot of the snow

This server will be off between 20:00 and 21:00 GMT on Saturday 29th March 2008.

This is as part of Earth Hour, http://www.earthhour.org/

If that site is not working then http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/earthhour/ may be reachable.

Obviously turning our lights and other stuff for an hour is not going to save the planet, but in terms of building awareness about the amount of power we waste in lighting rooms it is a start.

Just maybe soon the fashion of having 300 to 400W of halogen lights embedded in ceilings will die away. The LED GU10 Halogen equivalents are not cheap, but the power saving is significant, the light output/colour is not identical to the halogens, but they are good for mood lighting. I prefer the LED over the compact fluorescent that is available since they switch on immediately.

So far I've had one negative comment and would just like to point out that the blog title suggests this will be an odd mix of comments and thoughts.

Certainly I am not forcing anyone to read this blog. It does provide me an outlet for the odd rant and occasionally praise for a product/service I am using.

Blogs are very different to traditional web news sites, and I have no great political agenda behind mine. Where it will go is anyone's guess.

Now I thought I kept track of everything but noticed today that my BT Retail phone bill was not what I expected. £12.22 rather than the £10.50 it should be.

It would seem while I had paper free billing and the free BT privacy option on the account, since I'd switched calls to another CPS provider that BT had started to charge the £1.48+VAT for caller ID.

The amount is relatively small and could be avoided if I made the occassional call via the BT network, but given people like Sky can do a wholesale line rental deal for £10 a month including caller ID it looks like they will now have my business.

£2.22 a month saved is not a massive amount but it does add up and means I've voted with my feet over something that many people will not notice and continue to pay.

After some fiddling the pages on www2.farina1.com are now hosted on a new server.

In theory all the old content should still be there, but some things are changing, e.g. there is a new search engine that will trawl a collection of ADSL articles and food recipies at http://www2.farina1.com/search This utilises ASP.NET and Ajax technology.

Some more work is planned on the ADSL estimator at http://www2.farina1.com/adsl to add some more intelligence to give people some automated feedback on the data they have input and the results. Also I hope to make the results bookmarkable, so people can copy the URL.

Had the choice of lending parents on old Epson Photo 830 or buying a new printer. The old Epson needed a new colour cartridge - though not 100% sure whether it is cartridge that is empty or printing playing up. Always had a habit of not seeing the colour cartridge.

Now I knew printers where cheap but when I saw the Canon Pixma MP210 for £47.74 at Tesco's it was a surprise and even more so as I'd found a £20 cashback deal from Canon on this printer (runs 1st March to 13th April 2008).

              

At a final cost of £27.74 you can just about buy a new black and colour cartridge set, and this will give them a copier at home. Hopefully with a little bit of showing how it works they may even start to use the scanner to grab old photos into the computer. 

The printing I've done so far is perfectly fine, scanning I'll try some today and report back, my old HP PSC 1210 all-in-one is not great for photo scanning, I've a standalone Epson flatbed for that which is much better.

Update: Sunday 30th March 2008
The cheque arrived on Friday, so not a bad turn around.

Overall it is nothing fancy but as a basic all-in-one as a first printer for parents it hits the spot nicely.

Not sure about everyone else but weather has been nice and sunny today even if a bit windy.


Click image for larger version


The above is a glorious set of daffodils that are brightening up the garden as it emerges from the dull winter months.