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Mobile Internet Down Under
Anonymous Coward writes "A truck, a sat dish and a sunburnt country. When you absolutely positively need to connect to the Internet, why not carry your own broadband connection with you? One Aussie guy and his wife are doing just that -- packed up the lot and have gone on the road, so far roughly 3000km. He says 'Of course nothing is simple. The salespeople were convinced that I couldn't line up the dish -- it took me about an hour to figure out and now roughly takes about ten minutes each time I set up. They told me that the wireless gear wouldn't talk to the modem, they told me that my Debian workstation wouldn't be supported, they told me that the BOC wouldn't talk to me, they told me that I needed training, they told me that it wasn't done and it wouldn't work, they told me that I'd void my warranty, they told me so many stories..'"
Can you ping me now?
Sounds like this guy dealt with the modern day saleman. When people don't know the answer to your questions, it is easier for them to say "can't be done" than "I don't know, let me see if someone else does". At least he had the initiative to figure it out himself, though.
Most ISPs (and I would imagine Satellite ISPs are no different) operate wholly on scripts. If you deviate from what is accepted on those scripts, you're not supported. In most cases, simply running anything other than Windows or (occasionally) Mac OS/Mac OS X is enough to lose your support.
I had an ISP once who wouldn't even help me out when the link went completely down and the DSL modem couldn't even sync... because I ran Linux. They begged and pleaded with me, "Do you have a Windows machine you can use?"...
Given that things like this are the norm, do you honestly expect some guy in a truck with a Debian box to get support?
Amazing accomplishment. If I were the person who pulled this off, I'd send a long letter to the CEO of my ISP, telling them what people can do with "unsupported" setups. Not like it'd make much of a difference. The only way ISPs can find enough "qualified" techs is if the only "qualification" is "can read from a script and follow simple orders".
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
... where can one get 2-way satellite internet connectivity in various parts of the world; how much does it cost [he had a ton of trouble with some of these options]; and where do you buy it?
When I was looking at the Debian sat-dish mini howto, they had some lists of satellites, but I found no way to actually buy in. Even emails went unanswered.
For me, it's the Baltic region (Lithuania). But it could be Rotterdam, or Liverpool, or anywhere I roam. So a list of the different options might be useful.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
We even have broadband, despite how expensive Mr Richard Alston might have thought it was.
Most salesman I interact with will tell you that [whatever your buying] can do [anything].
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Celebrating 30 years of Electricity
:)
:)
In some cases, it really is that bad. In others, especially out where he's going, it's a lot less than that. I remember living several places within 3 hours outside Perth in the mid 80s which didn't have mains electricity. Fun times
And we have almost universal phone service. In many remote areas, Telstra, while sucking in oh-so-many-ways, has very cool payphones that have solar panels on the roof and satcom gear hidden up there too. They're basically an entirely self-contained payphone. You put them down somewhere, point the antenna, and hey presto, phone service. Local call area is the size of Europe in some cases, but has only 20 other phones in it, etc.
Funny how when someone tells you it can't be done, we often become more focused in getting it done and proving them wrong.
Though slightly off-topic (could have ben better illustrated), it reminds me of a friend of mine who, in 1995, used to sell radio-based internet services to third world countries.
the most interesting aspect of his story is that he was not allowed to offer his genuinely original AND cheap solution in Europe because of bandwidth reservation and licensing...
Anyway he might have retired before the dotcomcrash.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Yep, We in Australia are totally awesome.
who needs a segway, when you have kangaroos.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
Taking your reply into account, I can only conclude that you are the fine product of American education.
They told me that the wireless gear wouldn't talk to the modem, they told me that my Debian workstation wouldn't be supported, they told me that the BOC wouldn't talk to me, they told me that I needed training, they told me that it wasn't done and it wouldn't work, they told me that I'd void my warranty
Now really, what did you expect? Companies hate tinkerers. They don't like people who use their products in ways they were not intended for. They just want someone to buy their product and use it in the most boring way possible.
Hell, this morning I needed some one-pound coins to do my laundry but I was all out. So, I went to a vending machine and started dumping in my small change until I had one pound of credit and then hit the change return button. Bingo! A nice, shinny, one-pound coin. After about five min of this, the service guy for the machine came over and yelled at me to stop. "That's not what the machine is for." Well excuse me for doing something different.
Hmm... I think with some proper tools and software you should be able to auto-align the dish - I mean, Meade telescopes do it if you provide it with a proper reference point.
With a GPS, a level-sensor, some kind of direction sensor (since it's such a big antenna, differential GPS on two points might work out pretty good), and then some algorithm to "wiggle" the antenna toward the strong signal point once the aforementioned sensor array moved it to the general region, I think he should be able to park his van, unload the dish, and hit a "auto-search" and have internet connection in no time.
now, of course, to properly align a dish in the middle of nowhere under 10 minutes is no small feat, and maybe he is automating it all anyway... just random ramblings.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I can imagine the salesman giving him a blank look when he mentioned Debian. "Is that a Macintosh or something?" ;)
this joker is a well known troll (check his posting history), mod accordingly please.
Quote:I rest my case.
Australia has yet to be overrun by the scourge of your country...
Most USians I have met don't realise how big and empty the western and central parts of Australia are.
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
I don't know how powerful two-way telstra satellite is, but I know that satellite uplink stations are supposed to be taken very seriously. There are restrictions on power levels, aiming accuracy, signal polarisation, etc. It's my understanding that you only have to be out by 1 degree and you could really piss off some satellite company by interfering with their own uplinks.
Perhaps Telstra 2way is weak enough that no-one really cares...
...but the only way at those salaries. And, if you put qualified techs on the front lines of an ISP, they'd probably end up in the looney bin over all the incredibly stupid lusers. And no, it's not as simple as escalation. While qualified people might know whether something should be escalated to a qualified person or not, the monkeys on scripts don't have a clue, and aren't able to separate between technobabble and someone that really has a clue.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
we've been doing this for a while. In fact Reliance Infocomm has even marketed it into products like mobile POS, mobile ATMs etc
He's been told a lot of things, but did anyone tell him that divorce is imminent?
They told me that the wireless gear wouldn't talk to the modem, that my wife wouldn't talk to me...
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Yeah, eventually all your shit makes it's way here, McDonalds, Oprah, rap, Achy Breaky Heart, electricity...
What are the requirements for this type of device? I can bet that installers have to be aware of safety concerns (don't sit in front of these things...), and operational requirements for the reliable operation of the satellite itself.
I have aligned 1-way direcPC setups, and it is easy. The 2-way gear is also relatively straight forward, but the fine points (polarisation etc, which i believe will change as you move large distances) can have bad consequences for the satellite (or nearby satellites), even when it appears to be functioning for the end user
Americans seem to forget we have sheep stations bigger than Texas in Australia.
We've got a couple of trailer setups that we use for high-speed video conferencing anywhere in Australia. They're a ruggedised "4wd" trailer with a 1.2m dish and a 12V inverter, hanging off the back of one of the 4wd's. Takes about 10 minutes to setup from parking to surfing anywhere you can see up and north.
I thought it was a troll itself, but no. See here
Bah.
"Yes, I made those changes. Let me reboot. [3 seconds] Nope, still broken. Yes it rebooted, I have a really fast computer. Okay, I'll hold for level 2."
Once you get past the drones at level one, you can get to the people who are allowed to tell you things like "the router serving your entire county is down" (this actually happened). I asked why the level one guys couldn't simply say "Nobody in San Diego has service" - the level two guy claimed that they not only weren't allowed to deviate from the script but in fact would be punished if they were caught! (Hence the term "drone" - if you weren't one before you started there, just wait a few months...)
You're right, of course, about most tech support being scripted now. I take the "what they don't explicitly ask, I don't have to tell them" approach to support on unsupported setups. I've gone so far as to routinely tell my telco ISP that I'm running Windows 2000 when I'm running OpenBSD, and I just do the translation (ipconfig, IE, control panel, etc.) as we go and don't tell them what I'm actually doing in response to their requests. It generally gets me through all my IP address, DHCP, DNS, and DSL issues without them freaking out or claiming "no support". It's always (no exaggeration) their own fault that I'm calling in the first place (problems with DHCP server, flaky rented modem, DNS, etc.) so I don't feel terribly guilty deceiving them into some non-support.
... anywhere alone.
Management likes shorter calls, poor techs like shorter calls. I like longer calls. The more I can stretch it out, the better. As it is, I'm so far above the highest metric for CPH that I get told to slow down. Their reasoning is that I'm going so fast I can't possibly be fixing their problem, even though I have almost 0 callbacks. I'm pretty sure that deep down they think I figured out a way to trick the ticketing system, especially since I get ob'd literally 1 in 3 calls I take. It's a pain in the ass, because the ob software slows my machine down to a crawl. Meanwhile, techs taking half as many calls as me get ob'd like 1 in 50 calls. Probably doesn't help that I've testified against them a few times in our union lawsuit...
Start off every call with "OK, go ahead and restart your computer." That's a great one, because if they're not talkative it's like a mini break. Reinstall TCP/IP every excuse you get, that's 2 reboots unless they only have one phone line. Oh, and when the call starts, just let 'em talk. They'll usually go for about two minutes, and only the last few sentences usually matter, so you can tune 'em out and just kind of skim what they're saying. And if they say that you're being rude, just tell them, "I'm not being rude, ma'am." They always believe it. I don't know why, but they do.
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
As the guy who is doing the travelling, I figured, what better time to do some karma-whoring than when the story is about you:-)
:-)
:-(
While it took us a long time to get it all working, the payoff in life-style change was well worth the effort. I just fielded a phone call from a guy in Sydney who couldn't believe that I really existed, that I was in Australia and that he could phone me.
Next I'll be famous
I've gotta admit that my web-site is pretty bare at the moment, you can slashdot it if you like, because it's safely on the wired end of the net - but there is only a placeholder because I keep being asked to explain what it is I did.
You'll notice from the photos that the dish sits on a pretty big frame. That takes about an hour to bolt together - if I do it on my own, all in all 18 bolts, then I get some beefy guys to help me lift the dish on, then plug in all the bits, power it up and on average 10 minutes later I connect - that is if Optus hasn't changed satellites or frequencies without sending me an update first
Over the solar-car challenge during October 18-28, we'll travel down the middle of Australia and the Sungroper team will help me setup the dish every night.
If you have any questions, please feel free to email me, or post here, onno at itmaze dot com dot au.
--
|>>?
BONGO!!
;-)
:)
The salesguy told me that it had no TCP/IP stack and they do not support TCP/IP over Bongo
Heh, but what do salespeople know?? Now I can bing from anywhere in the world!!
I've had ISP tech support people develop that confused tone when I mentioned I was using Debian Linux ... so I just said "it's Red Hat" and you could almost hear the light come on over the phone. It doesn't happen so much now, though.
/var/log/syslog..."
;-)
Recently, I've had the pleasant experience of ISP techs asking what OS I was using, and when I responded with "the firewall/router is Debian, my desktop is Red Hat" they've (a) been pleased they're dealing with a user who knows what an OS is and (b) gone "aah.... good. OK, in
It's always nice to see that even in a job as bad as ISP tech support, some people are interested and know more than they absolutely have to. I tend to ask for particular techs now (the sort who when I say "my DSL modem just lost sync" don't respond with "OK, now click start->..."). Less frustration for me and them
You know, in some ways it's better to say "can't be done" or at least "you can try, but it's your problem" than the all-too-common "sure, sure, that'll work FINE, just buy the damnn thing".
I've had that experience more than a few times, and personally I'll take "can't be done" anytime. It's irritating, but nothing like as bad - especially when it's an ISP with a large monthly fee who doesn't actually care if you're getting service or not, you still have to pay.
You are basically correct. My dish is technically an uplink station, but I have no control over power. I can only control aim and polarisation.
Aim is achieved by using a set-top box in install mode, then I maximize the signal. Polarisation is read off a map and adjusted accordingly.
When I get online, I send an email to the BOC to get a cross-poll check done so I don't splat over other people's signal, but I've set it up seven times so far and have yet to get asked to change the polarisation.
The accuracy is waaay less than 1 degree. I could calculate it, but using a 16mm bolt, the difference between connection and not is 1/8 of a bolt-turn.
|>>?
"They told me that the wireless gear wouldn't talk to the modem, they told me that my Debian workstation wouldn't be supported, they told me that the BOC wouldn't talk to me, they told me that I needed training, they told me that it wasn't done and it wouldn't work, they told me that I'd void my warranty, they told me so many stories..'"
Of course they are not going to help you develop any kind of system like the one that this guy has made. Most ISPs are not going to have enough time to work with people that are going to take there internet connection a little overboard, somewhat like this. If they were going to spend time like this on everyone that wanted to do something like this they would be flooded with calls and it would be unaffordable, as they do not got extra funding for a huge increase in support calls. Most of the ISPs in my area don't even support *nix at all.
From a diffent perspective though great job to the guy for making this it is a very impressive accomplishment and I would feel pretty stupid if I was the guy now telling him that he needed training. I would love to get something like this going for myself so I could travel more and always communicate really easily with work. If this system was made more practical it would be put to use by many people. There do seem to be other implementations of this, some mentioned in the full article, however they all seem to be very expensive.
I had the "same" problem, but in europe. I was living in a "black hole", so no good internet was available. So i tried the sat-net. It is works, very well, but really have a lot of problems.
So what you need, and not just for sat, is a good provider, a good salesman, a good SUPPORT.
So first i checked the salesman, and the provider. I was asking questions by email, by phone, and I was just waiting for reply. Some provider answered after a couple weeks.. which is less then nothing.. but some.. yeah there are some! give me answere by email in 3 hours, and correct answare for all of my questions. This provider, or shops, salesman is usually expensier, but just think a bit. If you have a chip shop, but no support how many time will you (ooh.. sorry mate..) ya spent to figure it out why does not works what shoul be..
So first check the support, than by the best one.
There is only one good solution: The simpliest!
I have an Aussie mate who was on a plane home last year, and sat next to a middle-aged American lady. She was talking about TV, and asked if they have cable in Australia. He said his family had just got their first TV, but that the guy next door was going to get one that showed things in colour instead of black and white.
He then asked the lady what a video was, and she went into a long detailed explanation of how you could set it to record a program when you were out, then come back and watch it later. Much to the amusement of the twenty or so Aussies who were in hearing range of her explanation.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
top job mate.. :)
Damn! That must be a huge pringles can!
When i got my first cable connection in the netherlands, the engineers insisted on seeing an original windows disk before they would install the hardware to my home. At the time i was running one machine on a OEM (thus disc-less) Win2k and my server for the connection was on Mandrake (5? 6? i dunno, was my first an only linux install).
Oddly enough the engineer didnt seem to notice this when i presented a full version 95 CD i had borrowed from work, and proceeded to tell me my windows box was not working as he couldnt "winipcfg". He the got offended when i had the audacity to suggest he try "ipconfig" from a command line.
The next step was to call the support line and refuse to budge til i had a direct line number for a rep. in 2nd line. after that my cable experience was a good one as everytime i needed tech support i rang direct to 2nd line and the guy on the other end acceptedthe fact i had a fair bit of prior knowledge.
(as an addendum... i can never work out whther its disK or disC so i will use both interchangably and dang the consequences)
bah!*@%!
I'm 35. I was born in a country town, and back then, our oven was a wood burner. Our heating was by a kerosene heater - I still remember it. Utilities and services that we take for granted in the city take a while to get out to the bush because rural Australia is mostly quite sparsely populated. A large proportion of our population lives in a small number of cities, and the rest of the country could be categorised as 'mostly empty'.
Telecommunication capabilities in the more remote regions are still considered to be below standard. This issue is one of the major sticking points in the Australian government's attempts to fully privatise our (effective monopoly) major telecommunications carrier, Telstra. There is a fear that a privatised Telstra would not see value in providing service to remote regions, and would not install lines or would let maintenance go, further isolating people.
While in the military. A bunch of us were overseas for the war in Afghanistan, and were really hungry for some unfiltered internet access. We had mil access, but the military access rules were a bit too restrictive for our tastes, and everything was constantly monitored. (the thought of some E-1 laughing his ass off and showing my sweet sappy emails to my wife around to all his buddies bothered me... call me crazy). To be fair, however, it could have been worse... in the early portion of the war, we were under total communications blackout... no cell phones (or regular phones, for that matter), no computers... no fun.
We looked into some satellite internet access for ourselves (one guy in our group was a satellite 'net installer), but couldn't find a provider. We could have smuggled the hardware into the country, and even set it up, but we couldn't find a satellite to hit. We had the Innmarsat in our comm gear, but the guy in the article is right... it's extremely expensive to run, and the bandwidth sux0rs.
I wish we'd have known about this guy's deal.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I've heard Kangroos are good at not hitting Koala's like human drivers tend to?
what is it with satellite providers and their reluctance to reply back to customer sales inquiries? i've had nothing but slow responses, unavailability of sales persons, etc.
last one was satlynx, kept whacking at them for 2months, even calling every person i could get my hands on, just couldn't get a price quote out of them! gave up. what do i have to do? beg them to sell me a service?
Australia, electricity, haha, hehe....
2 5&tid=103
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/12/18492
US/Canada Power Outage Task Force Event Timeline
"The U.S./Canada Power Outage Task Force issued the Aug. 14, 2003 Sequence of Events at noon today. While no conclusions are drawn at this point, it does paint a pretty good picture of what happened and when it happened."
They're nice enough guys, and I think they were engineering students pre-rock.
Vote Quimby!
Lie. That's what I always did with Qwest. Their support constraints were amazingly stupid, so I'd just lie about what I had. The OS wasn't a problem, actually, since I run 2000 and they do support that. However they did NOT support the fact that I had a network. Now this might seem reasonable until you realise that I had professional class service. I had my own subnet of 8 static IPs and an external router (provided by them). Now any reasonably intelligent person would assume that the purpose of all this is to have a network of computers. Seems to make little sense to plug the router into one system and assing all the IPs to it.
Well, they steadfastly maintained it wasn't supported and I'd need to plug the router right in to my computer. This was not only not really possible (router was ina different room) it was outright fucking stupid. Since I could access the router via telnet, which went over my internal network, I could verify that it was NOT the problem. Also, I could ask the router what was the problem, and it told me that I lacked a DSL dignal. This I tired to explain to them to no avail. So I began lying about not having a network. This never stuck any of them as odd.
Next we got to the router reconfiguration. Every time they wanted me to blow away my router's config and redo it from scratch. I again tried to explain that the config had not changed. It was working with the config on it, and then it stopped working. I hand't changed anything, I was the only one with the password, therefore hte config was NOT the problem. Also, again I tried to explain that the router was telling me what was the problem (I was getting no signal since the DSLAM was broke). Again, no avail, so I simply lied about keying in their config they read to me. I wasn't, of course, because it was not only a waste of time, it was the wrong config, it setup a router for NAT operation whereas I didn't do that.
After dealing with this, I skipped the arguing and went straight to the lying with subsequent steps. I was asked to do retarded things like install a TCP/IP for a dialup adapter (yes, really) and so on. I'd claim I did them, and then let them try the next thing. Eventually they expended their little script and I got escelated.
Now the real solution, if you can do it, is to get on an ISP not run by retards. I've been happy with Speakeasy. They are happy to treat me like I know what I'm talking about, and answer my questions in a straightforward way. I can call and ask for information or status and get it, without some argument. Also they seem to be competent and can troubleshoot in an intelligent way.
However, if your ISP is dumb, and most are, just lie about your setup. It'll save you a lot of time.
We don't really realize how big and empty our culture is. Make that a double latte.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Direcway says, what, 10 times on their site that you cant use their dish for mobile internet? Then you pull up a business website and they sell a fully loaded mobile satellite internet truck... Its just that they dont want you to know that you really can use it anywhere and they just dont feel like offering it to home users or rv users or internet nuts.
*There's Klingons on the starboard bow, scrape em off Jim!*
It amazes me how ignroant Windoze keeps people about the actual workings of their computers. The owner of my computer store told me to "speak english" when I told him that a client's ISP was not resolving names and that the client needed an ISP that had reliable DNS or they needed to run their own. That few of my tech peers could even begin to trouble shoot such a basic problem was a shock to me, but I started to understand why ISP help desk jobs would be like hell.
Why anyone would give preference to software that is so unifomrative is beyond me. I'd much rather be able to walk someone through a simple text file edit than have to remember or script out a bunch of mouse clicks for each and every varient of windoze. "Right click on my computer", says the tech, "What's a right click and where is it on my computer?" a reasonable client might ask as they look for a button on the right side of their machine. That is hell. I don't even want to think of the reason ISP's seem to favor the vector for "I love you", "code red", klez, blaster and all those other nasties.
The world will be a much better place under free software. It's not just easier to run, it's easier to help people with too. Remote administration under free software actually works. I would be comfortable giving my cable company a user account on my packet filter. I'm not comfortable making them root on my computer with their awful windoze CD which is famous for breaking computers.
Of coures I'm not nasty about any of this to the poor devil on the other end of the phone. I play along as best as I can. When they say "reboot" I restart networking with "/etc/init.d/networking restart". This actually fixed a problem after a dhcp change of address. It's much easier for all concerned when I simply try to extract real information from their windozy script. The fact of the matter is that I know my software works, works well and is not subject to arbitrary changes sent via email or other worm. Nothing changes on my end, so it's just a mater of time before I figure out what changed on their end. I don't want to make getting there hard for anyone. It's rare I have to call anyway.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yes, what people forget is that level 1 service people are usually little better than meatware text ->speech algorithms. If your text->speech algorithm started saying anything other than what you told it to say, you would replace it.
Just lie, play along with the script, and wait to get to the level 2 people. Then, when you get to the level 2 people, DON'T act all cocksure - DON'T try to come across as an "expert". From a L2 tech support person's perspective, a person who is trying to act like an "expert" is usually a moron who knows just little enough to be difficult.
Just report, factually, what you are seeing. Don't try to conjecture, don't offer opinions. Just the facts, m'am - "I do a traceroute and after foo.bar.bax I get no response.", not "the machine after foo.bar.bax is down".
www.eFax.com are spammers
I hate USB.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
As soon as I read the description, I was reminded of BEHEMOTH, or "Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine ...Only Too Heavy".
The postman hits! The postman hits! You have mail.
It's "back-breaking". But Onno's ESL, so I'll forgive him that slip... but what about you? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Australia has yet to be overrun by the scourge of your country...
My country? Last time I checked I lived in England.
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
You mention having to setup a mount and then lifting and carrying the dish to it. Why not put the mount on a trailer and set the trailer up with legs to steady it. You then attach the dish to the mount and add some sort of fairing or enclosure for wind and precipitation protection. To set up you park the trailer, drop the legs, level if necessary, remove the fairing and then start your alignment procedures. It eliminates the manhandling.
You can't lump McDonalds and Achy Breaky Heart in the same group. One is a cornerstone of our so called culture/way-of-life the other was a passing fad most of us would happily love to forget. In fact, you reminding me about it has undone years of therapy. My lawyer will be sending you my bill.
That's been my experience too. I have SBC for my DSL and the couple of times I've hade to call for sync problems, the phone support people were completely unresponsive. It really is like interrupting a telemarketer... they start the script from the top again :-)
The two times I really had problems, I went to dslreports.com and almost immediately got help there, from SBC's own techs, no less.
Congratulations for a nice setup and not allowing the sales FUD get the best of you.
My other OS is the MCP!
"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it."
-- Robert Heinlein, from "The Notebooks of Lazaras Long," in Time Enough For Love
Be who you are...and be it in style!
Bart: [spying a kangaroo] Hey! We can get away in their pouches. [tries to climb in] Ew! It's not like in cartoons.
Homer: Yeah, there's a lot more mucus.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
A packet the size of a hard drive in a boot and a ping of 4 days by car.
;)
He'll be fine, the best players actually play better with high ping you know
A blog I run for the wealth
Amazon, $30 was the first thing on the list. I don't like Amazon, nor do I know if it will work. Sony's got issues with magic gate and all that.
If it works, it rocks. You will still have to open a prompt as root to mount the device, but any user can copy the files so you will be spared the "chown me ./files -R" amd chgrp strokes. I use gqview to look at and select my files for copy. It's been much easier for me do this than it has been to get any USB thingy working. The gphoto2 interface might change my mind, but I don't know it because I have not needed it. Card readers are generally faster than the cards themselves and much faster than USB1 and the configuration is already done. Open Zaurus has a neat automount set up. One day I'll figure it out and put it onto my laptop.
I'll bet your to-do list looks like more fun than mine. Keep on treking.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
... but it's not so much the ISPs ( I regularly deal with several - home DSL, work DSL, backup work service ) as a few good individual techs at the ISPs.
All ISPs I work with here have a sort of linux-neutral policy. Unfofficially, it comes down to "our customers want it, and because we don't have the knowledge we can't thoroughly support it, but if you're using it you should know what you're doing anyway." They'll talk to you, help diagnose issues, but if it's your end it's your problem. Reasonable as far as I'm concerned, especially since in reality they're usually more helpful than that once you find someone who knows what they're doing. My first ADSL setup was bridged, and I was walked (as a bit of a newbie at the time, 'twas years ago) through configuring a debian box for the bridged DSL service.
Basically, I remember people I've had good experiences dealing with, and tend to try to find them again - less pain for me, and hopefully one less brain-melting customer for them.
> Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Too bad it wasn't the poster...
they told me that the BOC wouldn't talk to me
Well, why did he want Blue Oyster Cult to talk to him in the first place?
- Leo
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
"The only thing they told me is not to put my head between the transmitter and the dish :-)"
:)
Who said that these things were only good for Internet?
Check out http://www.spitzlift.com/.
I saw this on TV last night, from some national (USA) hardware show. It's lightweight, ~30 lbs (13-14 kg), folds-up, and can lift 500-700 lbs (227-318 kg). It's made to mount in the bed of a truck, but I think you can mount it to your bumper and rotate it to swing your dish in/out of the back.
I don't know anything about the company and there are probably many similar competing products out there, but it seems like it might be just about right for your situation.
Good luck
Feeding Americans crap about Australia must be our favourite pass time besides watching sport and getting pissed. While on business in Tennessee a shop assistant got talking to me and a mate. He had said that a couple of Aussies had been in a month ago and told him about how we always go 'walkabout'. You know, just 'go bush' for a month or two without notice. We said yeah, us Aussies do that all the time. Additionally he now believes that only our three major cities have paved roads, we all drive 4x4s and every household has either a kangaroo or a koala as a pet.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
Usually an Aussie will find a way to do it...
And - how un-Australian for those knockers to tell that guy the he couldn't. They were practically provoking him to succeed.
What does ob mean?
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
I'm wondering if you have considered replacing the dish with a lighter model. A 100 kg satellite dish is obviously made for permanent mounting, and isn't designed for portability. You should be able to substitute a lighter dish somehow.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
KVH manufactures the "TracVision"(R) tracking antenna array for mobile KU-band satellite service reception. This should make "trekking" a more connected experience.
Product information is located here:
http://www.kvh.com/tracvision/A5/index.asp
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