Home Repair Hints: How to fix a broken router

Lunch at Thieving Harry's at the marina. Great stuff.

I've noticed for a while that our broadband at home has been a bit poor. Today I did a speedtest and found I was getting around a third of what I should have, data rate wise. So we did some more testing and were on the cusp of deciding that it was a problem with the line when I remembered that I might have a spare router up in the loft. 

Turns out I did. We plugged it in and instantly the speed was restored to something that is very nearly good enough to watch 4K video. In fact we were able to view some of the rather good Harry Bosh series from Amazon in quite sparkly detail.

Oh, and how to fix a broken router? You just need two things. A new router. And a dustbin.

"Remember Me" is Well Scary

This is the perfect time of year for a ghost story. And Remember Me is a perfect ghost story. Lots of secrets and weird goings on. And a few unhappy endings. If you'e not seen it before, find a way of catching up on the whole thing before the final episode goes out next Sunday. 

Veronica Mars now Available in UK

For anyone that thinks that TV with smart, sassy dialogue and well drawn characters starts and end with shows written by Joss Whedon I'd like to draw your attention to Veronica Mars. It first came out a while back with an astonishing first season which sagged a bit into seasons 2 and 3 (although they were always watchable). 

Such was the dedication of the fans that earlier this year a Kickstarter funded movie was released which apparently holds together quite well. If you are new to Veronica, or want to re-live the whole thing from proper region 2 DVDs you can now get all three seasons, plus the movie from Amazon for a reasonable price. 

If you liked Buffy, you will love Veronica...

No Gas

At least we have electricity

Came home tonight to no gas. Which in my case (gas central heating) means cold house. A water leak had somehow got into the gas supply and as a result it had shut down.  They are having to dig up the road to find out where the problem is and we’ve turned on the PS3 and are watching Fringe to try and warm up.

Fringe is absolutely top notch telly. Where else do you get lines of dialogue like “So why do you think shape shifting soldiers from a parallel universe are stealing frozen heads?”. Why indeed?

Update on 2012-10-14 08:14 by Rob

We got our gas back at 8:00 on Friday.

Dollhouse Sunday

By gum, it really rained today. Far too wet for gardening. Much more sensible to stay indoors, play with the Zune software and watch a couple of episodes of Dollhouse, the new show from the pen of Jos Whedon, who created Buffy.

I’m starting to really like the program a lot. Some people reckoned that the early episodes were a bit weak, but I enjoyed them and it is starting to get very interesting as the characters develop.

The program itself is a sort of cross between Joe 90 and Probe.  “Dolls” or “actives” have their brains filled with the person they need to be to do their assigned job, be it escort, private eye or assassin (but never pool cleaner – or at least not yet). They are then sent out into the field to fulfil their task and then hauled back to be wiped and reused. 

When not at work they live in the Dollhouse of the title as amiable blank slates. Of course things don’t always work quite right, and so there are back stories of NSA investigations and rogue actives and the whole setup has a moral ambiguity which means you are never sure whether or not the Dollhouse itself is a force for good or evil.

The series aired on the Science Fiction channel in the UK, but I don’t think it made it to terrestrial, which is a shame. Fortunately you can pick up season one at a reasonable price,  and I reckon it is well worth the investment.

Big Bang Theory

Big Bang Theory is a sitcom. It is a kind of “Nerds meets Friends” kind of format, where the blokes are all nerdy in different ways. Number one daughter got me the first season on DVD and it is great. If you like sharply written American comedy then this one is for you. Great stuff.

Who’s Captain Kirk?

For Father’s Day I received a box set of the original Star Trek season one. It looks fantastic because even though it was filmed years ago they used proper 35MM film. I started watching the first ever broadcast episode (The “Man Trap”) last night. When I saw this the first time it gave me nightmares for ages. It is not quite as scary now, but still darned good fun.

If you’ve not seen it before (although I find this hard to believe) you are in for a treat. If you have, it is still worth a look because of the way that they have redone the shots of the Enterprise. It now looks really good.

Shaun the Sheep Rocks

My Media Centre PC is now settling down nicely. I've stopped using the cable that crashes it and, guess what, it doesn't crash any more. I've just ordered another gig of RAM for it which should give it a bit more room to move around in.

A tip, you can get 10 quid off any order more than 30 quid at Ebuyer at the moment if you sign up to the Google ordering thingy. I've used it twice now, I'll take money from anyone...

Anyhoo, I told the Media PC to get all the showings of Shaun the Sheep 'cos I think it is ace. It is aimed at kids, so it goes down a treat with me. Just simple farmyard antics with the character from the Wallace and Gromit "Close Shave". My present fave is the one with the bees. Catch it if you can.

The Apprentice and bad hearing

"The Apprentice" has started again. This is a gameshow/reality TV thing where a bunch of people pretend to be interested in working for Sir Alan Sugar whilst playing to the camera as much as possible and preparing for a career in daytime TV. But it is quite compulsive viewing.

I had a weird moment where I thought I heard the announcer say "..all the contestants are competing for a single bacon seat...". I had just conjured up this a very strange vision of what they were after when I realised I had misheard.

Retro TV

With number one wife out for the evening number one son and I had free access to the big telly, and so a night of retro TV was in order.

First up was Thunderbirds, a puppet series which had me enthralled in the 1960's. I must admit it looked pretty darned good on the large screen, and the remastered sound was fantastic. Even after all these years it still packs a punch. In the episode that we watched all the trouble was caused by a "World Navy" exercise which went wrong when a missile strayed off course. Until now the idea of a world navy seemed quite sensible, but tonight I was wondering just who they would be fighting against. Anyhoo, it all ended well, although there were some rather large explosions. The really weird thing was that as we were watching a story of a gas rig in peril there was a real life drama of the same ilk playing itself out in the North Sea less than a hundred miles away.

Next we fired up "The Prisoner", a strange spy series of the sixties which was filmed in the wonderful Portmerion (which I really must visit one of these days). This stands up pretty well, it seems no more or less silly than things like "24" or Prison Break, with a cast of all the greatest TV actors of the time. Familiar faces kept popping up all over the place. Great fun.

Horizon: The Rise of the machines eh?

When I was younger the summers were longer, grass was greener, beer was cheaper etc etc. And the BBC science program 'Horizon' was worth watching. Against my better judgement I watched it again tonight, mainly because the subject was Artificial Intelligence or how modern computer science, brain research and general stuff means that in precisely 22 years we will be downloading our consciousness into hyper intelligent machines to make a Human Vsn. 2.0 which will then wage a war with the remaining klutzes on the planet in which billions will be killed.

 What complete and utter rubbish.

Apparently, one of the reasons that this all makes perfect sense is that around 20 years ago a nutcase sent a bunch of bombs to people in America to stop it happening. Yeah, right.

I kind of lost it when the narrator mis-quoted Moore's Law. Then we had a bloke who had managed, by plugging wires into the brain of monkey, to capture and replicate the moment of the monkey arm. Apparently this was a big advance. Along the lines of "Hey, we've made a tape recorder. Now we understand music". Do we heck.

Then we were whisked to another laboratory, where another man with bad hair and a big vat of liquid helium told us how he could make computers which can do this and that at the same time. I used to have one of those but I scrapped it for a machine which actually worked.

Before they could explain what this meant we were sent off to see a bloke who is taking lots of pills and walking on a treadmill so that he can survive the next 22 years, whereupon he can download his consciousness into the machines we will be making by then. He was doing this with such smug assurance that I ended up hoping that he would get knocked down by a bus in 2028 on the way to get his brain recorded.

Then there was the chap who was taking rat's brains to bits so that he could put them into a pile of Sun computers. And the scientist using the Basic Stamp (in the shops for fifty quid folks) to remote control a rat.

 By now my own consciousness was making a valiant attempt to crawl out of my ears and reach the TV remote.

There was nothing here that made me more scared of the future, and quite a lot which made me scared of the present. If these are the kind of people we are giving money and resources to I can see trouble ahead.

I'm sure that I've missed the point (definitely Human Vsn. 1.0 me), and that all these professors and well funded genius types are going to succeed in making something with a higher level of consciousness. I for one will welcome the day. I'll give it a camera and put it in charge of making better science programs. Then again, I reckon the monkey could have probably done that.

Torchwood

The BBC launched its new "Dr. Who for grown ups" today. Called Torchwood, it follows a team of alien artifact experts working to understand strange technology which has fallen through a gap in space/time and landed in Wales.

Or something.

It is high grade, imaginative hocum with a big budget look and I'm signing up. It is certainly not for kiddies, but this grown up likes it.

The first episode is very nicely plotted with a lovely twist at the end. The second overcooks things a little bit, but is still worth watching.

And it looks like there are some lovely plot arcs being slotted into place.

BBC 2 is repeating the program on Wednesdy night. Worth a watch.