A new feature appearing in Google’s Gmail (and Google Hosted Applications) very shortly will be offline access to your Gmail account. It’s still very much in development and is only accesable via the “Google Lab’s” system as it is not a fully fledged feature yet.
It is exciting to see, and this is a major step towards a wider acceptance of Google’s communications system.
It is yet to be turned on for our hosted app’s domain, but I look forward to trying to Sync all 6Gb of my mail…
I have added a new feature to the site, you can access it via the “Feedback” link that should be stuck on the left side of your screen.
Use it to provide me feedback about content or articles in the site, to ask for clarification or help on the things that I write about, or to give me ideas on things to rant about. 
One thing that should be noted – it is not a forum to contact me personally. If it’s not related to the site – email me directly – troy@purpleoranges.com
IMPORTANT UPDATE: Torrent Privacy software has some serious issues that will expose your details (not hide you). Until these are fixed DO NOT USE Torrent Privacy.
For those of us amongst us who like to download files online utlising the amazing technology that is torrents, there is always a bit of an underlying concern about just what might happen to you if you accidentally download the wrong file and some nasty chap gets a hold of you.
That’s where the most excellent folks at Torrent Privacy can help. They provide a subscription service that allows you to securely channel all of your torrent data to their servers and then in to the big cloud. This obfuscates your computer, and affords you a large level of protection.
On another note, if your ISP is (either by admission or your suspician) filtering your torrent traffic and potentially slowing you down, then this traffic will appear as completely legitimate SSH traffic. Something that an ISP would be very foolish to mess with. As an aside – if you want to test to see if your ISP is blocking / slowing your Peer-to-Peer traffic – then have a look at this amazing test tool.
The only current draw back with Torrent Privacy is that they currently only provide a windows ready application. They have other platforms on the way, but as yet their is no release date.
One thing to keep in mind is that ultimately if “big brother” (what ever form it takes) really, really wants to know who you are – they can probably work it out. But the level of protection that Torrent Privacy affords should suffice for most users just wanting to download items for personal use.
For those of you here in Australia that are disappointed about Kogan’s decision to “delay” the sale of their Agora Android Phones, there is still a 100% legitimate way to get your hands on a phone running Google Android.
To purchase a legally unlocked, fully working Android handset – you simply need to be a member (a publisher) of the Google Android Marketplace.
To sign up – just express your interest here. It costs $US25.
Once you have signed up, you will be able to log in to your market place account, and you will be permitted to purchase your very own “development only” handset.
It will cost you around $US399 all up to get the phone into your hands you won’t walk away with change from $US550.
Citing “potential future interoperability issues” Ruslan Kogan has this morning apologised to the many people that had pre-paid for their very own Kogan Agora Google phone.
Immediately after telling customers that the current version of the hardware has been completely scrapped over concerns that developers are writing software that already will not work on the device, Mr Kogan expresses remorse over the “delay” to the release of the Agora device.
Telling customers that forwarded money (in some cases as much as twelve weeks ago) “You will receive a full refund for your pre-order of the Kogan Agora. This will be processed within 7 days and automatically credited to your account.”
Conspiracy theorists amongst (see responses on CNet Article) us could be forgiven for thinking that this was all just a ploy to generate some capitol for Kogan.
I personally would love to see some independantly audited financial statements showing what happened with the money depostied in to Kogan bank accounts.
I would like the interest that is surely generated credited back to my account in addition to the original investment made in a product that now appearently was not even in full production, yet was due for delivery in under 9 days.
To me, it seems that the product was not even a reality and citing ongoing compatability concerns is a pretty transparent attempt at keeping the geek masses happy.
I look forward to Kogan making a clear statement showing evidence of where all the prepayment money was stored, and what the interest that money generated was used for.
I think if Kogan is unable to prove that they actually had a device under development and ready to ship to Australia, then they should at the very least have to refund the initial payment – please reasonable bank interest.
For those of you that have ended up here looking for somebody else, let me send you in the right direction. There is also a professional golf player appearantly doing quite well on the PGA tour sharing the same name as me. He was born on the second of August, 1978 in Tacoma, Washington but now lives in Bremerton. I can’t seem to find a site dedicated to him, and his golfing excellence. But a search has yielded pages on CBS, ESPN and Yahoo!
After a little over three hours on the phone today, I ended up speaking to “Matt” at an Australian call center. He introduced himself as the floor team leader, and then looked over my account.
Long story short, my phone went flat after arguing with him for a little over 40 minutes. He would not reimburse me for my outstanding incorrectly billed amounts, and would only log a fault – after which – Telstra may refund the overcharges.
Here’s a breakdown of where I have been over-charged (mostly for my own record… but also for your entertainment).
Breakdown of overcharges by Telstra for Prepaid Data
My data usage should have cost around $3.60 so far since I created the account less then a week ago. I have however been charged over $115. I am completely lost as to how Telstra can allow this to go on, if the tables were turned – I am sure this would have been fixed a long time ago.
Given that I haven’t had any love from Telstra – I have had to lodge my complaint with the TIO.
[Edit: More on Telstra's Rip Off here...]
Given the current state of the Optus network, I have purchased myself a Telstra pre-paid Wireless Broadband Card. Supposidly offering 7 megabit downloads and great coverage all over Australia.
I will admit, that the card does actually work, in places where Optus doesn’t offer coverage. It doesn’t however offer speeds any better then 1 megabit (as far as I have experienced in Brisbane and Sydney so far) and latency is quite a bit of an issue (over 150ms most of the time).
The thing I am most concerned with however is the ongoing over charging of my account. Every single time I have had reason to use the card, I have been fantastically over charged for my data. The first day I recharged the card with $100. That was meant to offer my 6 gigabytes of data transfer. I managed to download only a couple of hundred megabytes before I was disconnected.
So, I recharged with another $100 and after downloading 6mb only had $80 left. That roughly works out at 33 cents a Kilobyte ($3.33 a Mb). I called Telstra and their offshore call centre was most helpfull. After 49 minutes on the phone, I was credited back with my original $100 (I was happy to loose the $20 just to get it fixed up).
Last night, I used 60 megabytes, and was charged $4.88. That is roughly 8 cents a megabyte. That is a lot better then the $3.33 per meg that I was paying the day before, but still nowhere near the 1.6 cents per meg that I was meant to be paying.
Another call to Telstra this morning, and after 45 minutes of presenting my case, I was offered a credit of $3 as a compensation for my “inconvenience”. This insensed me a little, because it’s not for my invonvenience – it’s because I was overcharged. I know I am getting a little annoyed over $4, but ultimatly – its about the almost $400 that I would have to spend to get the full 6Gb of data that I should receive on the plan.
My recommendation to anybody wanting to use Telstra’s pre-paid offering… Check your usage… very, very closely. On the current plans you should be paying about 1.6 cents per Mb you download. To check take your usage on the site (it’s listed in bytes) and divide it by 1048576. That will give your usage in megabytes. Take what you were charged (in cents) and divide it by how much you downloaded. So – if you downloaded 63872136 bytes and were charged $4.88 your math would be…
63872136 divided by 1048576 = 60.91
488 divided by 60.91 = 8.01 cents per Mb (almost 500% of what should be charged)
This shouldn’t have been so hard, but given that I could not easily find an answer anywhere, here is a brief instruction on adding static devices to your Cisco 877 Router.
I am going to assume that you know how to SSH into your device (or connect via the console cable).
You will already have an entry in your configuration file defnining your DHCP IP Pool. It will look something like
ip dhcp pool sdm-pool1
import all
network 192.168.96.0 255.255.255.0
dns-server 67.15.64.15
default-router 192.168.96.254
domain-name tdk.testlab.ponw.net
lease 0 12
!
We are now going to define a single address pool, that will be just for the device that you want to have a static IP on.
ip dhcp pool STATIC-labpc01
host 192.168.96.10 255.255.255.0
client-identifier 0100.17f2.02aa.ff
client-name labpc01
lease 0 23
As you can see in the first line, we define a name for the static entry. We use the nameing convention “STATIC-<hostname>” you can call it anything you want that makes sense to you.
The next line defines the host and the subnet mask, and then the client identifier line is the MAC address of the device. Remeber, in this instance, the MAC always starts with 01. For example, if the MAC of your device is 00:17:f2:02:aa:ff then the client-identifier will become 0100.17f2.02aa.ff
The client-name is optional, you can leave it out if you don’t want to use it.
So you can see it in action, here is an example session adding a static ip for a device.
rt001#conf term
Enter configuration commands, one per line. End with CNTL/Z.
rt001(config)#ip dhcp pool STATIC-labpc01
rt001(dhcp-config)# host 192.168.96.10 255.255.255.0
rt001(dhcp-config)# client-identifier 0100.18c2.01a1.ca
rt001(dhcp-config)# client-name labpc01
rt001(dhcp-config)# lease 0 23
rt001(dhcp-config)#^Z
Don’t forget to copy running-config startup-config
With every passing day it seems Optus’ network seems to slip further and further in to dissaray.
In only two days in Sydney, I have been without coverage at least 25% of the work day. And at night, as Glebe has no coverage, my phone reverts to “paperweight” mode.
I thought it was bad that the Optus 3G network seemed to struggle with the gross over subscription that Optus has decided to subject the network to, and especially given comments like “Network Outages are a common occurance on a 3G network” after day long network disruptions – it looks like nothing is going to change.
Now that it seems that it’s not just a faulty network, but multiple systemic failures across all bands (GSM/GPRS to HSDPA) I think that Optus needs to be held accountable. No longer should they be able to hide behind regulations that dissolve their liability during outages.
I think that any failure causing impact at all to a user should be automatically reimbursed to the account holder. Given that the network can’t guess if a user was intending to use it’s services during a failure, I think that all devices that were registered at the beginning of the outage that then re-register within 4 hours of restoration of service should automatically receive a refund for the duration of the loss of service.