Sar's Yarn » Gadgets http://www.the-yarn.net Sat, 31 Dec 2011 19:13:28 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Speeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed! http://www.the-yarn.net/2011/09/18/speeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed/ http://www.the-yarn.net/2011/09/18/speeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed/#comments Sun, 18 Sep 2011 01:41:17 +0000 Sar http://www.the-yarn.net/?p=521 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!

4.52Mbs per second! Holy shit!

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 :D

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 :P

]]> http://www.the-yarn.net/2011/09/18/speeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed/feed/ 1 New phone! Host move! http://www.the-yarn.net/2011/08/14/new-phone-host-move/ http://www.the-yarn.net/2011/08/14/new-phone-host-move/#comments Sun, 14 Aug 2011 15:27:00 +0000 Sar http://www.the-yarn.net/2011/08/14/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 :)

 

 

]]> http://www.the-yarn.net/2011/08/14/new-phone-host-move/feed/ 2 It takes a Hero to bite the Apple http://www.the-yarn.net/2009/11/18/it-takes-a-hero-to-bite-the-apple/ http://www.the-yarn.net/2009/11/18/it-takes-a-hero-to-bite-the-apple/#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:25:17 +0000 Sar http://www.the-yarn.net/?p=176 HTC's latest phone beats the iPhone 3GS and I've got one!

Yep, finally decided to get a new phone, and decided to go for a contract phone this time. I've been on PAYG for the past 10 years, but the offer I managed to get for this one was too good to pass up.

£20 a month, plus another £5 monthly for virtually unlimited internet usage any time of the day. So £25 a month for what has been judged to be a better phone than Apple's latest iPhone model, the 3GS. It's an Android phone, which if you've been living under a rock the past year is Google's mobile OS. It's also a good look at the direction their new desktop OS may head eventually, built over the Linux kernel as it is.

As for the phone itself, it's excellent. Loads of customisability with 7 homescreens to flick between, which can be further altered and saved to themes (or Scenes as HTC call them) which alter how/if/where your applications and widgets are displayed.

I got it on the Orange network, which has better coverage apparently than my old provider T-Mobile. Just glad I wasn't a contract customer there...

So far so good with it, and being able to Twitter and Facebook during work is a lot handier I can tell you :)

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