My love is bigger than your love - we take more drugs than a touring funk band - sing it

[zotz]

I'm camping out in a flat on the Royal Mile (just round the corner fron Laputa) for a couple of weeks until I can move in properly to the Marchmont flat that currently doesn't have a kitchen floor (but does have a pair of joiners living and working in it). It's quite noisy there at night. Today it's quite noisy dring the day. There are some people sitting outside the Bank hotel at a table, drinking and every so often cheering or breaking into song. This was annoying until I suddenly realised they were singing Guantanamera - I felt more forgiving after that. They were all wearing numbered shirts when I went past. Odd.

I went into a record shop and found something a friend's looking for. I really wanted something for myself to take my mind off the fact that I don't have any mclusky to listen to, but I was kidnapped by some unexpected stock. Ho hum.

It's been an odd week. I haven't done a great deal (apart from sit around a couple of pubs all evening and caught Max at the cinema) but it has at least been quite relaxing. drpyrojames was here at the start of the week, which was most pleasant. I never did find out whether he finally got his laser working again.

There's an article in the Grauniad today about the major labels and filesharing. No new information, but amusing enough. It's by their music editor, so I guess the paper don't disagree with the line too strongly. Unless you hear tomorrow that he's been fired, of course.

Question: ADSL modems. Are they all much of a muchness? Is there much chance of sticking the POTS line in at one end and the ethernet in at the other, and finding that the particular model doesn't talk to the outside? The magic letters PPPoA appear at both ends, which is encouraging, but is there anything else I should look out for?

I notice that a week or so ago one of Piero Manzoni's "Merda de l'Artista" cans went for 18 000 quid at auction in London. I saw a pile of them (a great big pile of them, in fact) in the Serpentine Gallery a few years ago with my friend Kaija (goodness - she's googleable at work. Hasn't changed trade, then).

I went to a very good club on Monday at the Wee Red, called The Primitive Urge. Guitar bands, almost entirely, and very good. Included Blondie, mclusky and similar. The poster mentions everyone from Beefheart to Guitar Wolf. Adele apparently has a DVD of a film featuring Guitar Wolf riding motorbikes and killing zombies. I don't know if I want to know, but I know that I'm going to find out.

I've told LJ that I've moved now. This makes it feel no more official at all. Interestingly, very few people - about 15 - have put Edinburgh down as being in Midlothian. 86 have put it in Scotland. What a very nationalist bunch we are. However, 287 just locate it in the UK. Including ciphergoth.

Life is good. More soon.

And we're all going straight to hell.

Comments

[lproven.livejournal.com]

What do you want to know about ADSL modems?

One thing: if it's got Ethernet on it, it's not a modem, it's a router, technically. Almost all cable "modems" are thus routers, really.

Me, I run an Alcatel SpeedTouch USB on Smoothwall 2.0 ß4 on an ancient 486, and it works great. I never could get it running on SW v1. On the Windows server there's a ZyXel 630 which AFAICT has no Linux support, but many others do these days - Fujitsu ECS chipset devices, most modem SpeedTouches &c. On Windows, oh, whatever. The BT Voyager USB has particularly crap drivers which I've seen kill W2K stone dead, though, and which you cannot uninstall. Avoid.

[reddragdiva]

Nuh-uh. The bit that talks to the phone line is a modem - modulating and demodulating a digital signal onto an analogue line. So if it's got ethernet ports, it's a modem with a router in one box.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

Nope. They're not mutually exclusive.

A router can decide which packets go from one of its network interfaces to another; a modem just takes data from one port and sends it, reformatted, over another.

Some routers route ethernet-ethernet, some route ethernet-PPPoATM, some route ethernet-SONet or who knows what. They may include a modem; they may not. But you wouldn't say that a modem includes a router.

But FFS, it's hardly that important. Soddit, I'm off to the pub.

[reddragdiva]

Modem: avoid the Speedtouch 330 "frog" like the plague. It's cheap and it's utter shite.

We have the Speedtouch 510, which has four Ethernet ports. You can set it up with a Web browser (it appears at 10.0.0.138) and even telnet to it. And it was actually easier to set up on my FreeBSD box using the web browser than it was on Liz's Win98 box using the control application, which doesn't work.

[skx.livejournal.com]

To be honest I'd avoid all the USB modems, as a source of grief.

But then I use Linux and things may be better nowadays - I always have the idea that the USB bus is doing something all the time to keep the link up, and that without that drain the machine would be more responsive.

I'm not sure how accurate that is.

[zotz]

I am definitely avoiding USB, yes. It sounds too mch like hard work.

[mr-purpleduck.livejournal.com]

The original speedtouch (aka frog) USB ADSL modem now has good user space drivers for both Linux and BSD. I used it on my old setup and was stable and this was getting better. From what I've seen from the mailing list the 330 was supported but had a number of problems.

The only problem would be tracking one down as there no longer in production. I managed to get a replacement off someone I know after I left mime in my running the connection in my old flat.

[bootpunk.livejournal.com]

I strongly suspect I'll be spending a few months in the Auld Toon meself. I'll let you know what my plans are in due course. See you in the Southsider for a (decent) pint.

[zotz]

Definitely. Caley 80/- seems much more common than before I left. I don't think it quite makes up for a decline in Addlestone's, but I'll take what I can get.

[skx.livejournal.com]

If you have a fortnight wait anyway I have a redundent AR-601 (http://www.seg.co.uk/products/ar601.html) ADSL modem which you can have for a pint.

It does DHCP for you if you like that, and can be plugged into an ethernet hub to power more computers; that's how I have it arranged.

The one downside is that it's not GUI based; you have to telnet into it to make changes - but that aside it does the job just fine.

(It will let you forward incoming ports from the outside to your LAN too - handy for running a webserver, etc).

[zotz]

Sounds like a possibility - should I just collar you about it next time I see you?

Cheers!

[skx.livejournal.com]

Sure that's fine by me ..

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

crazyscot seems to be having a phenomenal amount of trouble with our ADSL modem in that it keeps randomly resetting its firewall to unhelpful defaults.. not sure what make it is though.

[zotz]

Doesn't sound massively encouraging. Sounds like a brand name might be useful . . . ?


Thanks.

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

Thomson SpeedTouch 510, if I'm looking at the right small box of blinkenlit electronic randomness. I think we got this in some sort of deal off our ISP (Zen), though. Will prod crazyscot and check..

[reddragdiva]

Yeah, that's the one we've got. If the power goes off (there's a brownout or we kick the cord out or something), it doesn't log back in automatically. But I've told Mozilla to remember the password so I just click on 'connect'. It's been fine other than that.

[zoo-music-girl.livejournal.com]

I really wanted something for myself to take my mind off the fact that I don't have any mclusky to listen to, but I was kidnapped by some unexpected stock. Ho hum.

You'll get your reward in Heaven. Maybe sooner.

Think of the good karma or something.

Why on earth did you pack your mclusky recordings anyway?

[zotz]

Stupidity.

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

Is that Adele the scarey goth who organises the horror film festival? She was my secretary, sort of, for a bit ...
I knew there was another new LJer in Edinburgh. You'll have to join lj-north once I get round to creating the community...

[zotz]

Adele's not a goth. Adele's a dodgy rocker, and I'll prove it to you as soon as I remember what the stuff was she liked ten years ago . . .

[alixandrea.livejournal.com]

Just round the corner from *where*??

*Boggles*

;-)

[zotz]

Laputa. The place where purplerabbits and sibelian live. There was a tradition of naming flats. Where I'll be staying used to be called Pangolin, but if it gets a name now it'll be Thorn.

[alixandrea.livejournal.com]

Oh _cool_! :-) These are people I have to meet then! ;-)

[zotz]

You will if you [hint] come visit.

[darkstones.livejournal.com]

Blueyonder will supply ethernet modems if you ask, BT only supply usb ones for single user accounts. I used a zoom adsl ethernet modem to replace the crappy BT usb one with no problems. I would say that if you are planning on using more than one pc and want simultaneous connections on a single user account make sure your router can clone mac addresses.

I'm looking forward to the Durutti Column!

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Blue Yonder isn't an ADSL service though - it's cable. We only got one IP address off them, so we connected their cable modem to the PC via Ethernet and then had a second Ethernet card for the flat LAN, and used NAT.

No-one's mentioned PCI ADSL modems, any particular reason? They are the cheapest kind, and I would have thought they'd be ideal for a dedicated Linux hub.

[zotz]

Drivers?

[drpyrojames.livejournal.com]

. drpyrojames was here at the start of the week, which was most pleasant. I never did find out whether he finally got his laser working again.

I didn't as it happened, so I hung around all Wednesday waiting to get home, and then got a 3 hoyur delay thanks to EasyJet "running out of Captains".

[zotz]

Well, they should just promote one of their First Officers then, shouldn't they?

[damerell.livejournal.com]

The AMX-CA61E reviewed on www.adslguide.org.uk is cheap, it works, and it has an Ethernet presentation as well as the useless USB one. We've got one - it hasn't burst into flames yet.

Speaking of music...

[(Anonymous)]

I thought you'd like to know that I've found work in a commercial radio station. Our format is Hot AC, meaning it's mainstream music supposed to appeal to people ages 25-54. I'm the traffic manager and production manager. It comes to something when you listen impatiently through a song set because you're checking whether the commercials are playing right. We had a major crash a couple weeks ago and had no ads for a solid week, which isn't as much fun as you might think considering the amount of Madonna in our rotation.

Anyway the reason I'm hijacking your LJ for this is 'cause I don't know your email now that you're gone from the Sanger Centre, and I wanted to tell you that over the course of the last three weeks I've shoehorned two Magnetic Fields songs, one Mesh song and two Chumbawamba songs into our playlist out of my personal collection, most of which is your fault. Send more.

In other music news, I just got back from Westercon in Seattle, where I got to see Bloodhag. They're a speedmetal band who do songs about science fiction writers. Alas, I can't use them in the station, but I'm betting there's a place in your life for this band.

Cheers,

-X.

Re: Speaking of music...

[zotz]

Fantastic. Yes, I'll certainly send you some more stuff. For broadcast or just for yourself - whatever you like.

As for mail - zotz [at] zotz.demon.co.uk

I couldn't mail you from home for a while - AOL don't like mail from machines on some cable modem services. It shouldn't be a problem from now on.