Author: chris

Pilot, sailor, photographer, skier, geek!
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O2: Simplicity for iPhone 20

Are you an iPhone user with an O2 contract? Is your contract about to, or already, expired? You should consider switching to the O2 Simplicity for iPhone 20 contract.

I’ve paid £35 per month since the iPhone was released on the O2 network in the UK, receiving for that 500 minutes, 600 texts, unlimited data and the Visual Voicemail service. If you’re within one month of your contract expiring O2 will let you switch to the Simplicity for iPhone 20 contract. Your monthly fee will drop to £20 per month, it becomes a rolling 30 day contract, and your text allowance doubles to 1200. Everything else, data, voicemail etc. remains the same.

O2 are keeping this a bit secret. They’re not calling people as they approach the end of their contracts. The O2 Simplicity page says nothing about the iPhone and if you sign up online you won’t be on the special iPhone contract and you’ll lose your data allowance and visual voicemail. So if you want to make the switch make sure to call them and emphasise Simplicity for iPhone 20.

Thanks to Don McAllister of ScreenCastsOnline for pointing this out.

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Broadband Speeds

We’ve been back in the London flat for a few weeks and the broadband speeds have been variable. Over the weekend my trusty Netgear DG834G router was reporting a connection (to Zen Internet) of 5617 kbps but the broadband speedtester on thinkbroadband.com was reporting actual download speeds of only 1027 kbps i.e. only one meg. Time to try to get some improvement.

Searching through the thinkbroadband forums I soon came across references to kitz.co.uk, a site dedicated to ADSL and broadband. There I found this page which explains the different kinds of BT telephone sockets and how to disconnect the ring wire if you don’t need extension sockets in your property. I duly disconnected the orange ring wire and fired everything back up. The router connection speed jumped from 5617 to 6653 kbps but the speedtest result jumped up to over 4000 kbps! Quite an improvement!

Speedtest Results
Speedtest Results

I’ve now got a BT Broadband Accelerator on order, which may improve the speed even more, and, since I’m in a Virgin fibre optic area, I’m thinking about signing up to Virgin Media’s XXL 50Mb service.

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Terrorist Escalation

Thanks to JH for passing this along:

The British are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have raised their security level from “Miffed” to “Peeved.” Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross.” The British have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from “Tiresome” to a “Bloody Nuisance.” The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was in 1588 when threatened by the Spanish Armada.

The Scots raised their threat level from “Pissed Off” to “Let’s get the Bastards.” They don’t have any other levels. This is the reason they have been used on the front line of the British army for the last 300 years.

Continue reading “Terrorist Escalation”

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Scales That Tweet Your Weight!

Losing weight always seems to be a motivational thing. What if you had some scales that broadcast your weight on twitter every time you weighed yourself?

Enter withings.com. These scales connect to your WiFi network and tweet your weight! As Leo Laporte says, diet by humiliation. Of course, Leo has one of the scales and has given it its own twitter account: leos_scale

I’m ordering one and I’ll report on my success (or failure) in a few weeks’ time.