# adslctl info
adslctl: ADSL driver and PHY status
Status: ShowtimeRetrain Reason: 8000
Channel: FAST, Upstream rate = 1070 Kbps, Downstream rate = 10416 Kbps


For those of you who count in Unix time, at 23:31:30 today it’ll be 1234567890.

For those of you who haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about, it’ll be 1234567890 seconds since midnight on 1^st Jan 1970.

The DVD drive in this Lenovo laptop is fairly noisey, which is pretty annoying when you’re trying to watch DVDs on it.

I should have ripped them to the HD first.

In the interests of experimentation, I’ve encrypted the hard drive of my big laptop using TrueCrypt, partly to see how it works, and partly because I’m doing the ISEB Certificate in Information Security Management Principles course next week so I ought to start practicing what I’ll be preaching. So far the fact that the drive is encrypted doesn’t seem to affect the operation of the machine at all.

We already use SafeBoot aka McAfee Endpoint Encryption at work for it’s centralised management, but I’m somewhat underwhelmed by it, each new version seems to be slightly worse than the previous one.

Time to watch Santa as he traverses the globe.

Norad tracks Santa.

Thanks to a simple switch of microfilter, my ADSL is now running at 5.5Mbps instead of 3.5-4Mbps, and seems far more stable. The best tenner I’ve spent for quite a while.

You can also set Facebook to use “English (Pirate)” as a base language today.

Facebook like a Pirate

In honour of International Talk Like A Pirate Day, you can now Google Like a Pirate.

Google Like a Pirate

Google in one more language

I’m glad I bought my 160GB iPod Classic last year as they’ve now upgraded the 80GB version to 120GB, and dropped the 160GB completely. I wonder if it’ll become a sought-after collectors item?

My Asus EEE PC 900 turned up, and after a brief dalliance with Ubuntu 8.04, it’s now running a streamlined copy of Windows XP. Even with essential applications like Firefox and Open Office installed it only uses half of the 4GB flash drive leaving the additional 16GB drive free for porndata. It talks to my phone for mobile data via a USB cable at the moment, a Bluetooth doohickey is on it’s way to replace the old one I appear to have misplaced.

I also appear to have jinxed my back. After saying the other day that it’d been fine lately, I’ve been off work for two days with chronic back ache, I didn’t even make it out of bed until 5pm today. However this evening it’s been sufficiently better to hopefully go back to work tomorrow, there’s only so much daytime television a man can take.