Communications networks, Tunisia, Egypt, Lieberman, UBB, and you.

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Recently, revolts in Tunisia and Egypt have caused the governments of those nations to shut off access to the Internet, to try to prevent protest groups from communicating.

Also, various politicians in the US have been proposing an “Internet kill switch” that would disable access to the Internet, if our infrastructure is threatened. Of course, there’s no checks and balances on that…

In addition, major ISPs in Canada are forcing smaller ISPs into a nasty “usage based billing” scheme that threatens to ruin the Internet for Canada. Of course, US ISPs are seeing if they can get away with it.

So, in light of that, I think it’d be a good idea to set up infrastructure to work around any potential shutdowns or restrictions – both by the government and by ISPs. Continue reading “Communications networks, Tunisia, Egypt, Lieberman, UBB, and you.”

Oh noes, moar computers, and amateur radio!

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So, let’s start with the computer stuff…

I managed to get an Acorn RiscPC. For those not familiar with the machine, it’s an ARM-based machine running RISC OS (a cooperative multitasking ROM-based GUI OS originally developed by Acorn.) My particular machine has a 233 MHz DEC StrongARM, 96 MiB of EDO RAM, 2 MiB of VRAM, an ethernet card, and a DMA IDE card (faster than the on-board IDE, and more compatible.) I’m currently running it with a 4 GiB CompactFlash card for storage.

It’s amazingly useful, despite the fact that this CPU came out in 1997. Word processing, e-mail, all that. Hell, even web browsing – it’s not great, but it works, with NetSurf. There’s also a Firefox port, but it’s uselessly slow, unfortunately – Firefox bloat plus a twelve year old processor equals dog slow.

Oh, and with a program called Murnong, it’s actually possible to watch YouTube videos. Of course, it takes almost half an hour to convert a 5 minute video to be playable.  😆

But, it’s still a quite interesting platform to use… best bet is to read the Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club’s introduction to RISC OS.

Now, what else is there to talk about… oh, yeah, amateur radio. So, I was at Notacon 6, and they had amateur radio exams. Decided to go for my license, and now have a Technician class license. (Next year, I’ll probably go for General, but I hadn’t studied for it this year.) KD8KXK is on the air.  😀

I think that’s all for now…