Further on BT (Residential) Broadband

Further update. Still on BT (Residential), my speed has dropped to 5MB/s as opposed to 10MB/s on O2. Service so far is woeful. DNS servers timing out and still can’t change the hub settings. Pages take an eternity to show up when browsing.

If anyone is thinking of shifting to BT I’d seriously advice against it.

So, my “port” to the business service is due to complete by midnight Friday, I’m hoping I should be ok at that point, if not, sod the termination charges, I’ll pay them and be off, this service is simply not good enough as it stands.

Anyone got any good recommendations? Seriously hacked off that O2 (BE Broadband) have sold out to Sky (although I can understand why), but my last experience with Sky wasn’t good, but at the moment I’d consider anything other than BT. PlusNet? Zen?

M.

Jupiter in Taurus

Since it was a nice clear night, I thought I’d take the opportunity to have a play with the camera to see what images I could capture of the night sky.

The obvious candidate was Jupiter, shining very brightly in Taurus. I took several images at various ISO settings and exposure times, but this one seems to have come out the best. Alderberan (the red star) can also be seen.

Light pollution as ever a problem, but doubt that will change at least while I try and take photographs from home. Very tempting to take the camera to some lovely dark countryside locations. Could have done with it in North Sweden a few weeks back!

M.

CyanogenMod on an HTC Desire

Many moons ago I acquired an HTC Desire, at the time, it was the “smartest” of the smartphones I’d ever owned. Sure, there were issues, specifically the severe lack of application memory and (as ever), the woeful upgrade path to more recent versions of the Android operating systems, but nevertheless, I was very happy with it. As with all Android, I loved the fact you could tinker with its innermost workings, something (unless you were prepared to jailbreak), that was not possible on IOS. As I saw it, Android was an “open” system, and IOS very muck “closed”.

Then the problems started, since applications are really vetted as such, on Android, all sorts of crap became available that when installed essentially crippled the phone, excess data usage, flattened batteries, it all appeared to be out of control. I elected to “root” the device and install a custom rom. In some respects that helped, more application space, but the roms themselves were developed (I guess) by people like me, and some were very flaky indeed.

Result? I wanted stability over an open OS so went for iphone. I’ve been with one ever since and still never regretted it. Sure they may not be as cutting edge as some devices, but they just work, and battery life aside, and work very well.

So, the other day, clearing out my top drawer, I came across the old HTC Desire and decided to give it a fresh lease of life. I always have two phones, one for work and one my own, which until recently was either the Windows 8 phone or iphone 4. But I’m selling those now and needed something else.

In short, if you head over to the XDA developers forum at http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=594 you’ll find all you need to flash the very latest and greatest ROMS. Due to issues mentioned previously I’m after stability, so trying to run the very latest Android software on a platform it wasn’t designed for is madness. I chose Cyanogen 7.2.0.1 which is a gingerbread build. If you follow the instructions you can set the partition size, install all the various loaders, download the ROM, install it and you’re away. At one point I did think I’d “bricked” it, but again, following the troubleshooting guide, managed to recover nicely.

I can report that it all works very well! OS is lovely and stable, and since I’m only putting the “standard” apps on, battery life at least at the moment, appears quite acceptable. All in all, a good result!.