whizzy.org

I like to play Call Of Duty online. I find it’s a really good way to get angry and frustrated at inanimate objects. I also run a Bit Torrent client on my network.

I don’t suck at MW2 and I’m not too bad at Black Ops either, but on the PS3 Black Ops has been very unstable to the point of hanging the console.

Anyway, what really gets me cross is Lag. You can tell a match is going to be laggy the second the game opens. It feels as if you’re running through treacle. “GET A MOVE ON” I scream. And then it starts; you get shot while behind brick walls, your shots fail to connect even though “IT WAS CLEARLY A HEADSHOT WHY WONT YOU JUST DIE?”. And so on. You know what I’m talking about.

Originally I had a written a script to ping the PS3 and when it came online and tell Transmission to pause all the Torrents. When the PS3 went offline again it would start them. I thought this would be enough, but it isn’t. Even with Transmission paused and the bandwidth limited to zero kBps it still maintains a connection to other peers.

While this isn’t a significant amount of traffic over the WAN – it really does cause lag. Presumably having something like 1000 NAT sessions in the memory of my router is a bit of a stretch, so now I simply kill Transmission when the PS3 comes online. It takes a few minutes for the sessions to get pruned but it’s made a noticeable difference to the quality of my matches.

Of course, you’re still at the mercy of the internet connection of whoever hosts the match – but that’s beyond your control.

There are loads and loads of free-to-air channels available on the Astra 28 constellation, the vast majority of which I do not watch.

So to make things a bit easier for me after a full re-scan, I’ve put together a list of the channels I don’t watch and with a tiny bit of SQL I can trim them from my channel list.

To make things a bit easier for you here is a SQL dump of my “unwatched channels” list:

unwatched_channels

And here is the SQL to trim these from your channel list:

update channel set visible=0,useonairguide=0 where name in (select name from unwatched_channels)

You’ll probably want to edit that list yourself to remove and add the channels as you prefer. Generally speaking, my list trims:

• Regional variations
• Specialist interest
• Shopping
• Games and other text based services

I’ll update this list occasionally, this page will always have my most up to date information.

• UPDATE: 6 Sept 11.  Refreshed channel list
• UPDATE: 8 Oct 11. Refreshed channel list
• UPDATE: 14 Dec 2011.  Refreshed channel list

Why is one of my boxes reporting SMART data in the LogWatch and the others not?

I’d installed smartmontools but it just doesn’t seem to be working.

Finally sussed it. Have a look at /etc/default/smartmontools and enable deamon

The Nova-S Plus is a  good card.  http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/site/products/data_novasplus.html

But, it would appear there is a defect in these boards, or at least a strange design, which means that they won’t lock on to some frequencies which require the 22kHz tone sending to the LNB with new drivers because there’s no link between the flange and dolphin-points.  There’s plenty to read about here:

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9476

And there’s a patch which fixes the problem by controlling the tone generator directly but it’ll never get in to the main kernel.  For your convenience here is a link to a binary driver built for Ubuntu Lucid kernel version 2.6.32-23-generic:

http://www.whizzy.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/isl6421.ko

Replace the current isl6421.ko from /lib/modules/2.6.32-23-generic/kernel/drivers/media/dvb/frontends/isl6421.ko with this one.  It might also work for newer kernel versions, or not.  Who knows?  Not me.

I’ve also got a Hauppauge S2 HD and this patched driver doesn’t seem to effect it.

Search hints:

Hauppauge Nova S plus linux won’t lock horizontal 22khz tone can’t pick up some channels

ZonEdit are suffering from a DDOS attack or something and their default free servers have stopped responding. (See: http://www.zoneedit.com/status.html?)

This has caused me a few problems, the main one being that my MX records are held at ZoneEdit and so my email has effectively stopped working.  Initially I was thinking of a quick workaround, but actually this is working rather nicely.

What I’ve done is:

• Created an account at http://www.web-dns.co.uk and added similar entries as I did with ZoneEdit.  Namely, my MX records pointing back to Google, the A record for this site and a few others and some CNAME records for other Google services.
• Updated the nameservers for the whizzy.org domain at my registrar to have ZoneEdit’s two free DNS servers as 1 and 2, and then the first web-dns server as number 3.

That’s it.  If ZoneEdit stop working, then once the old cached entries have expired new DNS requests start being serviced by web DNS while the ZoneEdit servers are down.   I could in theory have three different DNS services listed with my registrar but ZoneEdit have been really good, so I’m happy to stick with them for now.  If this sort of thing happens in the future then maybe I’ll host the DNS myself.

Web DNS gives you much rawer access to the zone file compared to ZoneEdit, but a bit of googling and you’ll be fine.  For example, for an MX record:

1. Leave the first box (the name box) emtpy.
2. Leave the TTL as 3600
3. Change the IN to MX
4. Set the number (auxiliary information)to zero for the first mail server, and 10 for the second, 20 for the third and so on.
5. Set the data (the last box) to, in the case of Google Mail (e.g. Google Apps for Domains) to ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.  (note the trailing dot, very important)
6. Add the other mail servers in the same way

For a straight forward hostname resolution e.g. www.whizzy.org:

1. Set the first box to WWW
2. Leave the TTL as 3600
3. Change the IN to A
4. Set the number to zero
5. Set the data to your server IP address, e.g. 174.133.50.212

And good riddance.

During the lunchtime news on Radio 4 the other day was the story of the beginning of the process to phase out cheques.

The usual neigh-sayers were there. ‘Boo hoo – how am I going to pay my bills now?’ they said. ‘Cheques are so convenient’ they said.

Balls.

Cheques are an outmoded, out dated pain in the arsehole.

How come I was listening to the lunchtime news on Radio 4? Because I was in my car – driving 10 miles to the nearest Post Office (30+ to the nearest branch of my bank) to stand in a line for 20 minutes to pay in a bloody cheque. Now I’m waiting for it to clear. For the next month or however long it takes.

Cheques are fine if:

• You live near your bank branch or a Post Office
• You can get to said office at a time that suits you and a time they will be open.
• You don’t have anything better to do with your time than stand in a line nattering about the price of cat food and hair nets.
• You don’t have anything better to do with your money than leave it stagnating in a zero percent interest current account

Online banking, BACs transfers (Faster Payments even better), Direct Debits, Paypal, Google Checkout.  All much more convenient, much faster and much better than cheques.

Now – if we could only get rid of cash as well.  I mean, come on – it’s just bonkers.  Carrying around a piece of paper and a metric tonne of nickel which, if you drop is gone forever?  Crazy.

Contactless payment?  Yes please.