As I mentioned previously, installing Leopard on my MacBook Pro gave me the opportunity to reinstall Windows XP and the new Boot Camp 2.0 drivers. This time (and again, for the benefit of my future self) I’ve compiled the list of what gets installed on a fresh machine: Continue reading ‘Reinstalling XP on the MacBook Pro’
At last! With the December update to the Xbox 360 dashboard, Microsoft introduced a feature that a good number of gamers (me included) have been clamouring for.
It is now possible to change the Windows Live ID attached to your Xbox Live account. This means that I can stop using the obsolete hdurdle@hotmail.com address and move the account - and all my Gamer Points - across to my main email address. Thus laying to rest the last service that had anything attached to my old Passport account. If you’re a 360 gamer, I’m “The BOfH” - note the space and the capitalisation.
Oh yes, and Microsoft also introduced Divx/Xvid support to the in-dash media player. W00t!
This post in which I collated (nearly) all the music used in series one of Life on Mars continues to be the most visited and most commented article on my site. The page has turned into a little community of 70s music lovers who have helped each other compile what must be the most complete list of music for the show. Thanks especially to “Sam” and “Mike K” who have contributed so much to the list. The post has proved so useful that I discovered recently that it is referenced on the Wikipedia article for the soundtrack album. Wikipedia fame!
Almost as impressive: there is now a BitTorrent floating around that contains all the series one tracks I originally collated for the page. I had always intended to create an iTunes “iMix” as per Richard’s suggestion - I still might if it hasn’t already been done. I can do the same for series two now my army of helpers has detailed all the tracks used.
Isn’t the web great?
In my last post, you discovered my obsession for generating statistics on my network usage and my use of MRTG to draw pretty little graphs. Writing that post got me thinking about my Counter-Strike server, and what data I could usefully graph from it. A bit of Googling led me to this page where a Dutch guy had used MRTG to graph the number of users and the network frames per second of his CS:S server - running on Ubuntu Linux.
Continue reading ‘Graphing Counter-Strike Source FPS/Users in MRTG on Windows’
The image on the left is just one of the graphs generated automatically for tracking the data usage on my home network. (Click through to see more stats.)
That particular graph shows the usage of my ADSL connection over time; green is downloaded data, while the blue line shows my uploads. It is generated by Tobi Oetiker’s outstanding MRTG - The Multi Router Traffic Grapher. MRTG is a free Perl script that connects to any device capable of talking SNMP and pulls interesting data from it.
I currently log DSL, Wireless and LAN use (Bytes per second), along with line noise and Noise Margin of the DSL connection. I could also log what the switch in my network is doing, and even what my various servers are up to. As you can see from the graphs you get a nice indication of traffic patterns over time - it’s very easy to spot peaks when BitTorrent kicks in and out, or when someone in a different time zone is playing on my Counter Strike server!
It gives me an “at a glance” overview of what most of my networked devices are doing - which was enough to make me notice the other day that despite having all my wireless devices switched off, something was still polling the Access Point. Turns out I’d left one of the laptops disassociated - but on - and it was sending a little chatter to the AP every few hours.
I was reminded today that my ISP (Zen) provide a portal where their users can check out their broadband usage. I’m on an unlimited plan (Zen Office 8000 Max) so don’t need to worry about it month to month, but I thought the stats were interesting: Continue reading ‘Broadband Usage’
I keep needing to do this - so once again to help my future self:
When you have a number of public IPs being translated through a router to an internal address space, a router’s dynamic translation can get full. I’ve got an 877W, and it seems that a combination of running BitTorrent and a CounterStrike: Source server can quickly cripple the router (even with a memory upgrade!). When it gets too full you end up getting timeouts on other connections, usually this is most obvious by my browser failing to return pages.
To clear the dynamic translation table before timeout occurs log in to the router via ssh (or telnet) and in enable mode, type:
clear ip nat translation *
That seems to do the trick on my network anyway.
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