I often share stories on Google Reader. Is there anyone else who shares on the G'Reader? I'd like to follow you.

One of these days I'm going to catalogue and post the blogs and podcasts I subscribe to.

Well, I've got my own dedicated Internet connection now. I've got a 5Gb download limit.

Today is the 16th, just over halfway through the month. My uploads are so far 209.02Mb and downloads 1.70Gb. This is very definitely less than half. So I have the capacity for another podcast, or for YouTube use.

*happydance*

It turns out I'm a pretty demanding Internet consumer. I've been using up the household download limit by the middle of the month with my podcasts and so forth.

But I've now got an Optus wireless broadband modem with a 5Gb plan. It's fast enough to watch YouTube in realtime.

Installation was literally plug-and-play. I plugged the device in and had to click on a button or two, and it was ready to go. I haven't had that kind of "computer works" experience since the first time I installed a new CDRom drive on Windows 95.

Let me say now:

W00t.

That is all.

Interesting article, courtesy of Skepchick:

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway

I've gone back to Firefox. I was using Google Chrome for a while, but there are still a bunch of things that don't work properly, and I'd rather have the certainty of Firefox. I've added a bunch of plugins as well. There's a nice one called Speed Dial, which gives a Chrome-like page of thumbnails, but you have to set it up with specific pages - Chrome shows you the pages you've visited the most. I've also got LiveJournal add-ons, so I'll be notified if any of you make a post, comment, or have a birthday (heppy birthday, ozgenre!). I also have StumbleUpon and Digg, as well as something called WebMynd which seems to be something like an enhanced History feature, but which also plugs into Google searches. Not too sure about that one yet. And of course there's the plugin for the Free Download Manager that I use - it intercepts downloads and manages them efficiently. It's pretty good. Google "Free Download Manager" and you'll find it.

Google has a new wireless broadband service

Very impressive. Make sure you click on the "get started" button to see an explanation of how it works.

I'd sign up for it, but we're not connected to any nodes.

I have Skype. If you want to Skype me, my ID is the same as my LJ username.

I can't guarantee quality, due to the well-known crappiness of my internet connection, but you never know.

My Internet connection right now is uttely crappy. It's worse than dial-up. I have to reload pages three or four times to get them to load, and if they have images, I may never get them. I don't know whether this post will actually load at all.

Apparently Optus wireless broadband is in our area now - faster and cheaper. So with any luck, things will be improving. Sometime.

The Trolls Among Us.

Do you have any idea how to set up Pidgin to access an IRC channel? I can enter a user ID and the server name (which gets added as arthwollipot@server.whatever.irc), but I can see nowhere in the account settings to put in the channel name.

Ok, I've set up Pidgin, and I've got my MSN and LiveJournal accounts working through it, so all my LJ friends should be able to connect to arthwollipot in LJ Chat. I also remembered that a very long time ago I used to have a Yahoo account. I haven't used it in at least five years, but I set it up, and lo and behold it still works.

So now the list of things you can use to chat with me is up to three. All of them should be either arthwollipot or my email address.

EDIT: Unfortunately it appears that Google really doesn't like my connection. Google Talk won't connect. I even got a gmail account set up and tried getting Thunderbird to connect to its POP, and it didn't connect. So sorry for those who are on google chat, it looks like I won't be able to get you.

I've installed Pidgin, which can connect to a variety of different IM accounts. If you would like to chat with me, let me know. I'm signed in under my email address, which is saturn at rocketship dot com.

I've been moving away from Microsoft products for normal use. I use Firefox for web browsing now. I also use Thunderbird for mail.

Ever since we changed over to our satellite connection, I've been unable to use the POP3 mail that I pay for from mail.com. Turns out that I need to use our service provider's SMTP server instead of the one provided by mail.com. Thunderbird likes it - Outlook doesn't. Interesting, that. The best part about Thunderbird is that I downloaded an add-in which allows me to swap signatures. In fact, it automatically chooses a sig depending on the address I'm sending to. So any email that I send to the AAF yahoo list, the Living History yahoo list, or any address @aaf.org.au, it automatically switches to my AAF signature. How cool is that?

I've switched to using Winamp for music. It's got really funky visualisations. The best thing is that I can customise how it synchronises tracks with my MP3 player. In recent years I've become a fan of the "musical non-sequitur", so I set everything to random play. Windows Media Player (booo!) when synchronising tracks sorted them into folders. Since I don't listen to whole albums, this was bad. My player requires all of the tracks to be in a flat folder so that it can randomly select between them. In Winamp, I can set it to copy tracks in a specific format - specifically, put them all in the /Music folder. Automatically. How cool is that?

So now we come to the point of my post. I am still using Windows Messenger for chat. I know there are better IM clients out there that can talk to various systems.

Which IM client should I use?

So I've been using the Google Reader to catch up on the blogs and podcasts that I like to frequent. I suggested that a friend also use it so that I could share cool things.

However: I found that in order to add a Friend (with whom I can share cool stuff) I need to either use Gmail (which I don't) or invite them to chat using Google Talk.

So I downloaded Google Talk and set it up. Problem. It seems to consistently fail to connect. I tell it to connect, and it just hangs. You know the shit - fails to refresh the screen in the window so that it shows the last thing that was being displayed. It fails. IT FAILS bigtime. Right now it appears to me to be pretty much completely useless. And that's a really annoying thing for it to do.

Courtesy of Nyerlothep. You know who you are.

http://it.slashdot.org/it/08/06/17/1941200.shtml

Have you ever seen a website that is so awful that you just wanted to blow it off the face of the earth? I know I have.

http://www.netdisaster.com/

Well, we have finally switched over to a non-dial-up connection at home. It's a full satellite broadband connection, and while it's not as fast as a landline broadband, it's a damn sight better than the connection we used to have. I can now browse picture-heavy sites without having to wait half an hour, and I can watch YouTube videos in almost-real time. It's pretty good. It does suffer occasional unexplained dropouts, but it is squirting the bird, after all. And the dish is HUGE!

Anyway. Since swapping over, I haven't been able to use Outlook for email. And before you say "oh it's that evil Micro$oft shit" let me say that I have tried it with Thunderbird as well with absolutely identical results. The problem, basically, is that I can't connect to my SMTP server. I can connect to POP, which means that I can download my mail, I just can't send it.

I've been emailing my technical support, and they appear to be just as stumped as I am - they just won't admit it. They told me to switch my SMTP server settings from port 25 to port 587. When I did that, Outlook appeared to be able to connect to the SMTP server, but not the POP. I've sent them screen dumps of the settings and the errors. Their latest effort is to ask whether out satellite ISP is blocking the port, but Beth can connect to her SMTP server fine on the same workstation, with the same satellite connection, using Outlook, under a different profile.

For now I'm accessing mail through the browser, which works just fine. I like having Bayesian spam filtering and offline storage though. If any of my techie friends have any idea at all, I'd welcome it about now.

...of the internet connection that's gone to the dogs.

So, you remember our so-called "satellite" internet connection, which
since September hasn't been a satellite connection at all? Well, we've
been experimenting with wireless broadband. kriian has a USB
stick-style wireless connector that she uses successfully with her
laptop and her desktop machines. She has also connected it to the
primary computer in the lounge room and it works perfectly. So far, so
good.

Unfortunately, such a device is more expensive than the larger
modem-style device, even though they provide exactly the same service. I
don't know why, but it is. We got one of the larger devices sent out to
us in January, hoping that we can get something like a reasonable
connection speed. And we did. For about two minutes, after which it
completely failed to download anything even though it still reported as
connected.

We contacted the vendor, and ran through a number of options, the
conclusion of which was that the device was faulty. They sent us another
device. It took a month to get here, and when it finally did it behaved
in exactly the same way. The vendor seems to think we need an external
antenna. Odd, since the stick-style device does not require such a
beast.

Even worse, we appear to have lost the onboard common-or-garden modem in
this computer as well. So now we have no internet connection on it at
all. We unduobtedly have an old external modem hanging around somewhere
that we can connect, so we're not likely to have to suffer internet
withdrawal for very long, but still. This is all quite remarkably
frustrating.

And for those who are curious: Telstra.

Email post from Arthwollipot
http://www.arthwollipot.com/