Looking back on this blog I can see that I have not kept to my attempt to write at least once a week.
Let’s hope I can do better over the coming weeks!
I left off with a post about changing over from BT’s FTTC to Vodafone’s FFTP broadband. After nearly eight months, how is that going?
Pretty good I have to report, if you’re connected directly to the Fibre Hub/Router by cable from my desktop PC, averaging over 900mb download speed with very good upload speeds. (See image below)
However, the download speeds via Wi-Fi have not lived up to expectations. Yes, if you’re close to the Vodafone Wi-Fi router, then you can get nearly 300/350 Mb download speeds. But if you start to move away from the there is quite a quick drop-off in attainable speeds. This for me points to a very low power Wi-Fi transmitter in the Vodafone Wi-Fi Hub.
I have seen this mentioned in a few online chats as well. Have also mentioned this to Vodafone, but so far no feedback from them.
Now investigating an alternate Wi-Fi router to use in conjunction with the Vodafone Hub.
A few weeks ago City Fibre finally finished digging up our road and moved on to other places, a short while later we received an email list available Full Fibre providers and out of the list we went for Vodafone.
We had been a BT user for phone and broadband for many many years, from the early dial-up days right up to the latest speed that they could provide. Which only became available with their upgrade to their ‘Fibre To The Cabinet’ (FTTC) mechanism two years ago, which then delivered an average of 40Mb downloads.
Last Speed Test on BT Broadband
Although the FFTC did give a medium increase in downloading speed (doubling the previous speed) the last 50 meters from the cabinet to the house was still using copper wires. Despite a number of calls to BT over the last year, we were unable to get any kind of commitment that they were likely to replace that with ‘Fibre To The Premisses’ (FTTP). Hence, the move to another supplier for FTTP.
So how did the upgrade go? The actual physical connection work took around three hours to complete to a) run a sheathed fibre cable from the City Fibre connection port in the pavement next to the house, b) bury the cable under the front garden c) drill an access hole in the house wall to get the connection inside and finally d) to commission the connection via the new router which had been delivered a few days before.
No real issue with any of this except to say that Vodafone have been pretty cheap with the length of the cable on the mains adapter used to power the Broadband Router, it is only one meter long!! The mains adapter for the BT router is just over two meters long; so if you have positioned your previous router in a particular place for convenience/Wi-Fi reasons and you want to keep it there, then an extension lead will be required.
You will also need an extra power socket near to where the internal Optical Network Connector (ONC) box (a nice long cable for this) is located next to the access hole that has been drilled through the house wall. In the end, as we have a number of items running from original sockets, invested in a six-way surge protected extension lead which has covered everything.
The other thing that we are beginning to understand is that the Wi-Fi signal of the Vodafone router does not appear to be a strong as the previous BT router. Still testing using a number of tools and will give it a few more days to see if it improves before a calling in a report to Vodafone. We do have some Wi-Fi repeaters located around the house, but may have to look at some others if this is the standard strength.
All in all though, we do have some great download speeds, depending of course on where you are downloading from.
But after a week of settling in, today’s figures are…
The above speediest results are interesting, in that they show different speeds depending on whose test ‘app’ you are using.
So here is another test. Using a fixed sized (one GB) file located at Thinkbroadband.com and using the Windows 10 Task Manager Ethernet window, you can see that the download speed is nearly at the top speed of the promised spec.
Downloading to various devices
What speed should we expect on your devices from a Full Fibre connection? – This is a good question. The package we went for was the Full Fibre Vodafone 900 (900 MB) at a very good price of £30.00/month for 24 Months with a guaranteed service level minimum of 450 MB.
So many factors can determine the speed of download and of course uploading (but who cares about that!!) some of which include the age of the device such as smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop to name a few. The connection you have to the router, fixed or Wi-Fi. The distance you are from the router. The site from where you’re downloading and the number of people downloading the same item, such as a film for example and the number of people in your household using the connection. All in all, it can get quite frustrating if you’re not aware of the various pieces of the jigsaw.
For example, after the completion of installation, we could not get any faster than 95 MB download speed via a wired connection on an HP desktop that we have. It’s around five years old and we found that the on-board network connection on the motherboard itself was only rated for transfers of up to 100 MB. To overcome that restriction, we purchased a Gigabit PCI Express Network Adapter and as soon as that was installed, speeds then reach up towards the 700/850 MB.
In regard to Smartphones, Tablets and Laptops where you can’t physically change any hardware, you’re basically stuck with whatever hardware level it is at.
Here are some devices we have checked using Wi-Fi…
Device
Download Speed (MB)
Up Load Speed(MB)
Acer
90.5
80
Motorola G9
252
301
Galaxy Tab S5e
257
296
Galaxy Tab 10
51
39
HP Desktop (Wired)
680
550
HP Desktop (Wi-Fi)
420
380
Included the HP Desktop Wired Connection for comparison.
So that’s about it for now, but I think there is more testing and evaluation to be done, but with =out a doubt it is a very different world with FTTP.
I’ve been looking at the technology of AI’s over the past couple of years and I am amazed at how quickly they have grown and become publicly aware in the past few months. I came across this AI today – ‘BedtimeStoryAI‘ from AI developers in Sweden.
What does it do? Well, exactly what’s on the Can!
I tell my Grandchildren various stories during the school/club runs that we do together during the week, and this theme (see below) has run through one of those stories over a period of a few months. So I thought I would try this in the AI and see what was produced.
How did it do?, I’ll leave that to you to decide. But it is unnerving how good it was and potentially how it will improve.
Here’s the short outline of text I put in from my memory off the basic story line. I’m no author, by the way!!
The three children and their mother rushed through the orange door into a fantastic world of ice blue skies filled with marshmallow clouds and pink grass that looked just like candy floss. Mummy! shouted Poppy; look, it’s a Giraffe flying through the air. Sidney was not amused, he wanted to her first to tell her. Phillip the youngest, did not even look up, he was more interested in the pebbles that covered the path in front of them; or were they pebbles?
And here is what the AI produced in less than 90 seconds!
The Fantastic World of Mummy’s Three Children: Poppy Sees a Flying Giraffe and Phil Collects Pebbles
Poppy and her siblings, Sidney and Phil, were running around their house when they suddenly noticed a door that wasn’t there before. It was an orange door with a sign above it that said ‘Fantastic World.’
“Mummy, look!” Poppy cried out in excitement. “We should go through the door! Please let us go through!” She pleaded with their mother, who instantly saw the amazement in all three of her children’s eyes.
“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to take a look,” the mother said in reply. “Hold onto my hands and do not let go.”
The children complied and together they stepped through the door. As they did, their eyes widened in shock and awe as they saw a world blanketed in ice blue skies with marshmallow clouds and pink grass that looked like candy floss everywhere.
“Mummy!” Poppy shouted out loud, pointing towards the sky. “Look! It’s a giraffe flying through the air!”
Sidney sneered at Poppy’s enthusiasm, wanting to be the one to find something first instead of Poppy having all of the fun.
Phil, however, was not even paying attention since he was too interested in the small pebbles that littered the path that was laid out before them now that they had stepped through the door. He wondered if it were really pebbles or something else entirely
“Come on now,” Their mother said in an excited voice,”Let’s explore this new fantastic world.”
“Poppy can you show us around?” She asked her eldest child as she held onto Phil’s hand guiding him closer to his siblings while keeping an eye on them all at once too.
“Yes Mummy!” Poppy answered quickly as she ran ahead and started pointing out all the interesting creatures and sights around her brother’s and sister’s eyes widened further with each new discovery they made together at this amazing world just beyond their orange door!
End of the generated text.
Stunning is one word I would use, what is even more amazing is the image, conjured up out of nowhere simply by the AI analysing the text!
There is no doubt that AI is here to stay and will only grow exponentially in its usage over the coming years across all sectors of society, and at the same asking lots of serious questions about it use.
It’s all rubbish! — What do we do with all our rubbish? Yes, there is a lot of recycling that is carried out and perhaps we are on a track to solving out our wanton need to pollute.
However, what about the piles of rubbish left in old rubbish dumps. This recent article shows there is plenty still to do around the UK to deal with a vast legacy of buried rubbish that is slowly beginning to surface.
Windows 10 sales ending! — I suppose it’s a measure of time passing when your Operating System (OS) provider makes the announcement that they will no longer sell what you have been using for the past few years.
While Microsoft launched Windows 11 in October 2021 I am sure that many like me have yet to make that jump – partly due to my desktop PC’s hardware not being able to run Windows 11, so Microsoft says!
Having been a PC user since there were PC’s and they gave come a long way from those early days, much like the OS’s that make them do what they do.
Here are some interesting links to browse through.
Time to continue to sort out the numerous boxes of stuff I seem to have accumulated over the years. I’m a hoarder, so my wife says!
Opened a box the other day and found these! Do I really need to keep these? A bit of history though!
Also had a clear out of various cables that seem to go hand in hand with working in IT over the years, or is it that I just can’t seem to throw something out? Anyway, put these on a local recycle site and gone in 60 seconds, as they say.
AI has been very much in the news recently and its use (or potential use) seems to be increasing at breakneck speed.
There are plenty of serious discussion points about the subject on the web. However, with any newly emerging technology, many are based around how much money can be made from AI.
That said, there are numerous voices that have raised concerns about many aspects of AI, such as the ethics behind its use. Let’s ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help understand more by asking it to write something about AI and ethics.
Example of interaction with ChatGPT – About 2 seconds for the response to appear!
Could I have written a better opening? This leads on to writing in general, with this AI capability how will we know who (or what) has written the text that we are reading or whose opinions we are being subjected to. We are constantly having discussion about how much Social Media influences our live. How much will AI influence them. Here’s another interaction with ChatGPT, this time about Cyclists and Car drivers.
Example of interaction with ChatGPT – About 15 seconds for the response to appear!
Was this something I could have read in a newspaper/magazine/book? How good was its writing, did it copy something from the internet or was it truly a unique piece of work created by an AI.
Out of interest, I used a number of tools to check spelling, grammar, reuse and finally loaded it is to Word 365. Using Word’s latest spellchecker, apart from one small conciseness error, it reported it could not find any similar written piece on the Web.
Only one error found, but no copies found online!
This brings us on to another aspect of the use of AI that have many of those in education seriously worried. How will they be able to judge Students contributions when hand in their work and this is not something new!
I was looking at some other aspects of AI and came across a number of newly released AI’s that can generate Art on request! One I that I looked at with amazement was DALL·E2, which is another AI from OpenAI’s stable of AI tools. This and similar AI’s raise a whole series of questions around Copyright.
Who owns the copyright for AI generated images? The original artist, the AI, the person who commissioned the artwork, i.e. the person using the AI? It seems to be a bit of a minefield! Here’s a few articles on that subject.
Here’s some of the art that I had DALL·E2 generate for me from a simple one line description.
Time to generation, 3 seconds!
Time to generation, 3 seconds!
Time to generation, 3 seconds!
It’s one of those sites you could really spend time on, I did for a while!! But it is amazing what can be achieved with a few simple instructions. Art creation may never be the same again!
That said, Ai is here to stay and is already in use in a number of areas that you may not have released that you probably touch on a daily basis.
There will be many benefits (and drawbacks) from the use of AI in our lives. However, it is absolutely right that we need to question the advances and make sure that we control the AI’s before they have the ability to control us!
Energy Crisis – Just where is all my money going? A question that has often been asked when you received your energy bills and an even more important question today in light of the huge increases we have seen in energy costs over the past six months.
Marconi-Wireless Pioneer – Although he had a number of rivals (Nikola Tesla being one of them) Marconi has come out as the one who is best remembered for his work in developing Wireless technologies.
I recently came across this fascinating article on the Ofcom website about 100 years of radio since Marconi’s big breakthrough. For example, I did not know that FM was first used back in 1933! You learn something every day. Quite a bit in this article about BBC Radio.
Forty years on: The woman embedded with Thatcher’s Task Force – For those of us associated with the Falkland conflict in one way or another, this article from Forces Net documents how the artist Linda Kitson travelled the 8,000 miles alongside the Taskforce to document events though her drawings.
An amazing and talented artist who produced astonishing drawings under stressful conditions.
Soldiers practising with their rifles off a ship’s stern Scots Guards at Tumbledown by Linda Kitson
You can find more of Linda Kitson’s drawings depicting the Falklands War on display at the National Memorial Arboretum.
Fed up with having to keep retuning your terrestrial Freeview TV’s and Humax (yes, I still use one) box every so often?
Well, here some news announced about big changes to the way that we receive terrestrial TV (Freeview itself may even under threat) that will affect us all over the next few years.
Eighteen months (18 months, 13 days, 17 hours, 34 minutes and 43 seconds to be precise) since I last added to this blog! Where has that time gone? Part Pandemic, part other stuff, cycling, my allotments. But even so, where did all that time go!!
I must apply myself and stick to adding to this blog about anything that takes my eye. What to say about the last Eighteen Months? There would be too much to put in one post, so I will have to look back in my ‘to be blogged about‘ bin and pick out the items that I wish I had posted about.
In the meantime, here are some things that caught my eye in the first two days of 2023…
C/2022 E3 (ZTF)
An icy visitor (not a great name, I know) from way beyond. It seems that we have a comet bearing down on us! But it won’t get any closer than a million or so miles away.
You can find out more about the comet by looking at the full details at the Mashable website.
Industrial unrest still seems very much in the headlines, with more action being taken by a number of unions over the coming weeks. It’s like I’m looking in a mirror back to the 1970’s – yes, I’m that old!
The Guardian is publishing a ‘Strike’ calendar so that ‘you’ can plan any activities around the dates. Glad it does not include power outages, unlike the 1970’s!
Back to Space. In a fairly rare event, there is an opportunity to see many of the planets of our Solar System together in the night sky at the same time.
This sight was at its best in the last week of December 2022 if you had clear sky and a good view to the south. You can still catch them over the next day or so, but be quick. Full info on the Earth Sky website.
We first of all it seems that other stuff catching my eye has kept me away from this blog again for two long!! Where does time go?
A combination of more work on the Allotment; with the very strange weather over the last few months so there has been a lot of catching up to do. Including finishing off my new shed (a lockdown project) albeit the roof is still to on – shortage of roofing materials – and of course lots of planting.
So what has caught my ‘eye’ over the past few months…
World Wide Micro-Chip Shortage – Integrated Circuits or ‘Micro-Chips’ are in everything today from Toasters and Doorbells to the latest Games Consoles, Washing Machines, Smartphones and many other devices. Without ‘Micro-Chips’ the world as we know it today could and probably would not exist. So it is concerning that there is now a world-wide shortage of them.
The reasons vary from the COVID Pandemic slowing down demand in sectors such as Motor Vehicles and yet from a surge in demand for Games Consoles over the last 18 months. Unfortunately the manufacture of Micro-Chips can’t be switched on an off quickly, factories need to bring their production lines, costing hundreds of millions of dollar up speed as and when demands require and that takes time. These issues along with the fires at Renesas in March this year and at AKM late last year will put a big strain on the market and of course increase prices. Let’s hope were not going to see a shortage for too long.
What’s happen to the weather? – Clearly there is much more emerging proof that the climate/weather is changing and speed of it is gathering pace. Looking at the some of the weather over the last three months here in the UK, I am not surprised.
No we are told that the stratosphere is shrinking!! In a very worrying report, and contains some very stark comments that we all need to be very concerned about.
The UK Building Cladding Issue – How can a UK government utterly abandon a sector of society who through no fault of their own are placed in a situation not of their making that will leave them completely financially ruined. Does the government seem to care about ordinary people wanting to have a safe roof over their head, it would seem not!
In a recent decision by the government, an amount of money has been provided that falls far short of what is required to basically fix an issue that is completely the responsibility of the builders of high-rise properties. Clearly the current UK government is more interested in helping their business ‘buddies’ than the ordinary folk of the country.
The Royal Navy Ventures East – As part of Boris Johnson boastful Global Britain the UK’s Carrier Strike Group has begun an overseas deployment scheduled to last some seven months. With a number of nations making up the task group and a number of stops envisaged along the way, this will be a first for the UK in so much as the size of the fleet and massive logistics support involved.
With a proposed transit of the South China Sea, it will be a diplomatically tricky road that the Royal Navy has to tread showing China that the South China Seas are still considered ‘International Waters’ by the west. Of course, it has always been that way in the past, until China has grown to be the international power that it is today. I suspect that UK Task force may meet up with the latest USA Task Force transiting the waters.
I remember my very first trip with the Royal Navy on board HMS Devonshire as we spent just over a year on a journey that took us from Portsmouth to Tokyo and back, however, that’s a story for another post!!
Beasley's Place 