The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

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Pricetracker/-watch/-drop alters/-history charts for Newegg.com, Amazon.com, Best Buy, BackCountry.com, Zzounds.com

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/08/06

Cool: sites that allow you to do track prices, get history charts, get alerts for price drops, etc. Got there through SSD prices in steady, substantial decline – The Tech Report.

Your account works at all of our price tracking sites:

And your account will work at any new sites we launch!

The SSD price drop together with the HDD Prices Not Expected to Decline Until 2014 makes me think: if/when I should finally ditch my RAID 5 storage server and build an ZFS server with server hybrid storage (which is totally different from desktop hybrid storage).

Many of the great references at Understanding how to use SSD as Hybrid Storage Pools for ZFS point to the old sun.com site, and suffer from link rot. A few I found back: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Hardware, Internet, LifeHacker, Power User, SSD | Leave a Comment »

Asus RT N66U: steps to get “Tomato Backup Settings & Log to USB Drive Script – TomatoUSB” working on an Asus RT N66U @AustinStAubin

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/07/27

Below are some steps to get the  Tomato Backup Settings & Log to USB Drive Script – TomatoUSB by Austin Saint Aubin working on an Asus RT N66U router.

I presume you are using a Windows system (hence the FAT/FAT32 formatting of the USB stick) for doing the edits and copying of files to an USB stick. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, ASUS RT-N66U, Internet, Network-and-equipment, Power User, TomatoUSB | Leave a Comment »

Addendum to Guide to “Install Tomato firmware on Asus RT-N66U / RT-N16 / RT-N12 B1 / RT-N12 C1 / RT-N10U router 韌體教學 | Moonlight Knight”

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/07/23

I had a bit different experience getting the Tomato Shibby firmware loaded on one of my Asus RT-N66U routers than the description from Guide to Install Tomato firmware on Asus RT-N66U nor this Video of the Asus Routers Rescue Mode Tutorial.

Somehow, the Asus Firmware Restoration Utility kept indicating “The wireless router is not in rescue mode”, no matter what I did.

This might be due to that I run VMware Workstation with some virtual LAN adapters on most of my machines.

Or not: the web-interface on the Asus RT N66U would not get into the firmware restoration mode either.

This worked though:

  1. pull the power plug on the RT N66U
  2. press and hold the reset button
  3. insert the power plug on the RT N66U
  4. wait for the power led to slowly blink
  5. release the reset button
  6. wait a few minutes for the modem to become stable
  7. in the mean time set your PC to these IPv4 settings: – host = 192.168.1.100 – mask = 255.255.255.0
  8. start your web-browser
  9. point your web-browser to http://192.168.1.1 (it will time out, don’t worry)
  10. press the power button to turn off the router
  11. wait a few seconds
  12. press the power button to turn on the router now your router gets into rescue mode
  13. refresh your browser so it goes to http://192.168.1.1 again
  14. upload your Tomato firmware

–jeroen

via: Guide to Install Tomato firmware on Asus RT-N66U / RT-N16 / RT-N12 B1 / RT-N12 C1 / RT-N10U router 韌體教學 | Moonlight Knight.

Posted in *nix, ASUS RT-N66U, Internet, Network-and-equipment, Power User, TomatoUSB | 2 Comments »

WiFi/WLAN security: for personal/PSK mode, choose WPA2 with AES and a strong password and SSID name. Don’t use TKIP or WPS PIN

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/07/20

To make WPA2 as secure as possible in PSK mode aka personal mode, make sure you don’t trap into the major WPA2 weaknesses:

So this is what I did on my TomatoUSB flashed Asus RT N66U router:

  • strong and different passwords for 2.4 Ghz and 5Ghz WiFi
  • unique SSIDs for both the WiFi bands
  • AES encryption
  • no WPS PIN

Easy to setup: follow the WiKi here, using the basic link from the link list.

–jeroen

via:

Posted in *nix, Internet, Power User, TomatoUSB | Leave a Comment »

Fonts in Microsoft products; Lucida; Microsoft Typography; fonts on other platforms

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/06/25

19941123 - Polyvroom - Failissement

19941123 – Polyvroom – Failissement

Historically I have an interest in digital typography: in the early 90s, I used to freelance for Polyvroom in Lisse (that went belly up on 19941123, the remains bought by Trip Productions) that digitized (together with the still existing Visualogik) many of the TrueType and PDF fonts for Mecanorma and Monotype (now acquired by Agfa and – after Agfa acquired ITC as well –  renamed into Monotype Imaging).

I even have the whole set of Lucida Fonts that beta testers got for testing a Windows version (I think it is Windows 95, but it might be earlier as TrueType was introduced in Windows 3.1). (sidenote: most of the Lucida fonts got designed by Kris Holmes, the rest by Charles Bigelow, so now you know where Bigelow and Holmes stems from; they don’t run their own site any more).

There are many good articles on screen fonts, but that’s not the point of this post, maybe in a future post.

Historically, I kept an eye on the Microsoft Typography website (I have backups from early this century) because of the information quality and cross platform information.

Back in the default.asp era, they had a few pages with fonts for certain platforms:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/atm.htm Adobe Type Manager
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/mac.htm Mac OS 
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/unix.htm Unix/XFree and GhostScript
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/win2000.htm Windows 2000
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/winxp.htm Windows XP

Since then, they redesigned the site, and now their http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts fonts page is aspx based, and contains lists with links for:

  • virtually all Microsoft products showing which fonts ship with that product
    (alphabetically from Age of Empire till Windows XP)
  • fonts from families indicating in which product ships which version of the font
    (an odd thing: Office 2010 ships with older versions of mosts fonts than Office 2007)

All individual fonts referred on those links (like Vladimir Script) have a sample as well.

The fonts page also contains a few bonus links:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/web.aspx Core Fonts for the Web
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/cleartype.aspx ClearType Font Collection
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/windows7.aspx New Fonts in Windows 7
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/popular.aspx Most Popular Fonts in Microsoft Products
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/cs4.aspx Adobe Creative Suite 4
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/unix.aspx UNIX / XFree and GhostScript
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/macosx.aspx Mac OS X 10.5

The really cool thing is that they kept the old links, thereby preventing link rot. Well done!

Another cool thing is that the vast majority of Ubuntu users have the mscorefonts installed. I learned something new there too!

Now they should include some more information on the Metro design language, that is heavily based on the use of typography.

One of the fonts that has Metro like look and is available in many Microsoft products is Century Gothic. I love the geometric design of it!

–jeroen

Posted in Font, Internet, link rot, Power User, Typography, WWW - the World Wide Web of information | 1 Comment »

[Links] Asus RT-N66U (N900) dual-band router

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/06/08

Just came accross an interesting ethernet router: The Asus RT-N66U (N900) dual-band WiFi router.

It has quite a bit of horsepower, is passively cooled, might handle dual-WAN from the stock firmware, and it it doesn’t: it is supposed to run custom firmwares like Tomato, DD-WRT, OpenWRT, etc.

Interesting…

–jeroen

Dual / Triple WAN How To – InfoDepot Wiki.

Posted in ASUS RT-N66U, Internet, Network-and-equipment, Power User, TomatoUSB | 2 Comments »

15 years of xs4all internet provider membership

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/01/15

Today it is the 15th anniversary of my xs4all membership.
Even though (see some history below) xs4all was not my first provider, it has been the provider of choice ever since:

  • Technically very knowledgeable
  • Very stable connection
  • Highly much aware of privacy

Back in December 1998, when xs4all was sold sold to the Dutch Telcom (KPN), lots of people were afraid that xs4all would start scoring less points one ore more of the above points.
They didn’t, and that is the main reason I’m still client with them.

This despite the  fact that I can get faster internet where I live.
My ADSL connection is quite a long distance from the telco DSLAM, so I can’t get a very high ADSL speed.
As some of the ADSL versus distance speed graphs show, your ADSL connection needs to be close to the telco’s DSLAM.
I’m not, so my maximum ADSL1 speed is slightly less than 8 megabit, and my current ADSL2+ speed is less than 16 megabit, so xs4all light is the best I can get.

BTW: If you live in The Netherlands, here you can calculate that distance (which is called “afstand tot de centrale” in Dutch).
I wish they ran the telco cables under the canal to the neighboring village: I’m about 500 meter away from their DSLAM, in stead of the 2700 meters I’m from my own DSLAM.
Oh well :-)

For high speed things, I now also have a cable connection.
Even though they are deregulating that part of the broadband market, currently cable internet is bound to your cable TV provider.
In my case, that is UPC, and their high speed internet is marketed as Fiber Power.
I started with a 60 over 6 megabit service, that they increased to 120 over 10 megabit about a year ago while reducing the price (because they were merging their packages and wanted to increase their competetiveness).

While writing this, I’m still searching for a good dual gigabit WAN router to combine the two connections in one.

Over time, xs4all increased the ADSL bandwidth from a meager 1 megabit over 256 kilobit to 8 megabit over 1 megabit.
They increased mailbox and storage sizes too.
And finally, they were among the first to support IPv6.

So all in all, I’m still very happy for staying with xs4all.

A bit of history

xs4all was not where the internet started for me. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About, BBS, FidoNet, History, Internet, ISP, Personal, Power User, SpeedTest, xs4all, Ziggo/UPC/A2000 | 18 Comments »

UPC Speedtest – direct link

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/09/19

The direct UPC Speedtest link does not load all the fuzz the normal UCP speedtest page has.

Some tests I ran

At a client.

My Cable connection.

My ADSL connection.

Note the Cable connection is early in the morning. In the afternoon/evening it is much slower.
The ADSL connection is slower, but more reliable, has IPv6, and XS4ALL is way better at security and privacy than UPC.

–jeroen

Posted in Internet, ISP, Power User, SpeedTest, Ziggo/UPC/A2000 | Leave a Comment »

#KOMED internet experience: getting it to work is hard, but it is FAST

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/09/10

Highspeed internet at KOMED is quite a different experience from Swisscom hotel internet at the NH Köln hotel yesterday:

  1. Following the PayPal link at their [Wayback] datenwelt.de redirection site does not work: it times out.
  2. After twisting some peoples arms, I was allowed to get a “Konferenzpass”.
    That one works at once, and is blindingly fast compared to yesterday; see the screenshot below.

When trying to find my way towards the KOMED conference rooms, I had a weird experience: rooms 1..5 (called RAUM EINZ, ZWEI, DREI, VIER und FÜNF in German), you could see room 1, 2, 4 and 5 from the ground floor as they were marked with large friendly letters on the same wall as their doors, very well visible from the ground floor.

Not so with room 3 (where I had to be): that marking was on the wall 90 degrees off the door, not visible from the floor. Actually, it was only visible when you were actually standing next to the door. From the ground floor, the door looks like a fire door continuing the curved corridor in front of rooms 1 and 2.

Someone should put “RAUM DREI” above the door to Room 3 there.

Back to the internet at KOMED: the speed is a pleasant experience compared to what Swisscom provided yesterday.This was the attained speed:

–jeroen

Via: [Wayback] UPC Speedtest.

Posted in Internet, ISP, Power User, SpeedTest, Ziggo/UPC/A2000 | 1 Comment »

#swisscom hotel #internet #fail: breaks Google Mail, lousy internet rates, for EUR 18 per day!

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/09/09

See the images below.

This is what Swisscom hotel internet gets you when you pay them EUR 18 per day.

Swisscom internet has a transparent http proxy that is not so transparent: it breaks Google Mail.

Actually it is low-speed internet; for like EUR 40 a month, I get way more speed at home, with the plus that it always works and always is “high” speed.
Swisscom hotel internet could reach 6 megabit downstream (but it doesn’t), also the upstream is lousy:

What you actually obtain is more like 2 megabit, not 6 megabit.
That download at home takes like 20 minutes at 10 megabit ADSL speed.

This is what they promise (click on the image to enlarge):

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Internet, Power User | 2 Comments »

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