Sar's Yarn

Speeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed!

Finally bit the bullet a few weeks ago, and decided to cease service with Be Unlimited. They were a fantastic ISP, but sadly their faster speed connections look like they won't be out near me for quite a while yet.

So in the quest for proper broadband speeds (over and above the "ok" speeds I'd had with Be, which in themselves were a HUGE improvement over the 1.5Mbs I'd had previously!), I went back to BT.

Yep, the dreaded BT

The reason?

Fibre Optic connection bitches!

Yeah, you read that right: 4.52mbs per SECOND. BOOM!

No, that's not the speed of my connection, that's the speed of my downloads. Or put it another way: 16.36Gbs an hour. A Gb of data takes 3mins and 40 seconds on average to download.

My connection speed is somewhere around 36Mb/s, and uploading I'm getting just over 8Mbs per second.

Regretting it? Not so far. There were a few issues with Battle.net connectivity during the week, which meant the last 15 minutes of my raid in WoW was more or less an early night. That aside it's been brilliant. I can watch 1080p videos on Youtube no problem. No buffering, no pausing at the start for 5 minutes, just load the page and watch in realtime

Plus that and the deal for the FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) connection and the phone line works out about £30 a month cheaper than what we had previously.

Win-Win-Win

New phone! Host move!

Finally it was time to pick up a new phone. After having used the HTC Hero for the past 22 months it was time to start looking around for my upgrade and I decided to plump for what is largely considered to be the world's best smartphone atm.

Yes, better than the iphone 4

The Samsung Galaxy S2 is gorgeous. It has a MASSIVE 4.3 inch screen with a Super Amoled display running at 800 * 480. It also is a dual core beast with currently the world's fastest mobile browser. It loads pages near instantly. Faster even than a desktop PC.

I've attached a screen-shot from the phone from my gear list over on Wow-heroes.com, just to show you how black the blacks really are on this thing.

It also has a great 8mp camera and a 2mp camera facing the user for video calling. Throw in the ability to play any media file you can throw at it, including mkv files which is commonly used for blu-ray rips and you have a mobile film experience bettered by none that I know of.

In addition to the above I've also moved webhosts this weekend. So hopefully things should be a bit nippier and less prone to going down. As usual, any screw ups anywhere let me know