Date: 2009-08-26 01:39 Security: Public Mood: optimistic Tags: big posts, corin, ferret, life, moving out, nall, the big move Subject: (no subject)

On Monday, we finally got our phone line working, and with it, our Internet connection, which had been activated on Friday but had lain dormant until the phone line was fixed. (Turns out this place had two separate phone lines running to it, and BT had activated the wrong one. We were completely unaware that this was the case, having not found the socket for the second line - which was in my room. Apparently that one had been working all along. The engineer who came out got it all fixed for us, though, by switching the service from one line to the other.)

Which means I have Internet access now - real, full Internet access. :D However, I'm currently having to go through some interesting routing since it's apparently not easy to find a USB wifi stick that a) works in Linux, and b) doesn't have a crappy range. My current USB wifi stick works in Linux, but has a bad range. When my computer is upstairs, but the wireless router is downstairs, this is significant - especially as the PCMCIA card I have for my laptop can pick it up just fine (but, of course, I don't use PCMCIA on my tower, just my laptop).

So I'm currently doing an interesting setup whereby my computer connects via wired network cables to a wireless AP of my own, which my laptop connects to, by way of the aforementioned USB stick. (Its range is crappy, sure, but not *that* crappy that it can't reach to the other side of the room. ;p) It also connects to the real wireless network using the PCMCIA card, and it acts as a NAT device between the two from my own little network and the real one. Then, by setting up my tower to route through my laptop... voila, I can haz Internets. It's actually a fairly decent speed too, especially as the laptop only does USB 1.1 natively. It's faster than I was getting at my parents' place through a direct wired connection, and that's because of the plan we were on, not any other problem.

In other news, nall and eclective arrived last week - Corin on the 17th, and Nall on the 18th (bringing an explodingferret with him). Ferret's been here all week and is still around for now, so we haven't yet seen how everything's going to go with just the three of us. Ferret has sorted several major problems for us so far, though, which I'm not sure we'd have been able to do ourselves. (Including replacing a hardwired wall socket in the kitchen with a standard three-pronged one, allowing us to replace our current washing machine with a washer/dryer that we had ordered and then failed to have connected due to the hardwiring.)

The graphics card in my computer is on the blink and has been since before I moved; I tried to get it fixed before I moved, but there doesn't seem like there's much that can be done. I do, however, have workarounds for this that allow me to carry on a semblance of a normal life, as long as I don't actually use my video card for anything more than basic functions. (So, no 3D, essentially, which rules out most games; even the ones which don't use 3D, because most of them use something like OpenGL, which has to be done in software rather than relying on the hardware acceleration I would normally get.) I also have disturbing patterns on the screen but I can live with those until I get a good card.

Examples of stuff I can do given the above:

* I can watch movies and YouTube, but I can't scale them without experiencing a drop in frame rate. Meaning, no full-screen movies for me. (The drop isn't actually too bad because I have a pretty good CPU, but it's definitely noticeable.)

* I can (as far as I can tell so far) play games in DOSBox fairly normally, though again I have the frame rate issue if I go full-screen. Scratch that; it depends on the game. Curiously enough, Quake is better in this regard than an old Mille Bornes game I have for DOS. It makes sense when you realise that Quake by default uses a lower screen resolution, whereas my Mille Bornes game uses a high-resolution mode. (DOSBox scales to get it to *my* full screen, though, so I still have that problem.)

* I can't do anything involving OpenGL at all without experiencing a massive decrease in frame rate from normal. This is because I'm having to rely on OpenGL from the software renderer included with Mesa, and while my CPU is good, it's not designed for this sort of thing; that's what hardware acceleration is for. (for those wondering, when glxgears is maximised on my 1680x1050, 32-bit colour screen (but with a bit of space taken up by the window decorations, kicker, etc), I get 14fps. You can imagine how much slower it'd be with a *real* app...)

* I can do everything that I could before that doesn't involve the card's advanced functions - IRCing, browsing the Web, Skype'ing, using virtual machines, etc. Most things, in other words.

So for now you can consider me back as normal for purposes of online-ness. I may be offline more than usual in the new home anyway because I have things I can do now rather than being on the computer all day. For example, I need to find laser hair treatment places, and I need to go shopping more, and such. (We're currently out of toilet paper, we're running out of milk again, I need to buy a dressing gown and some more shampoo...)

So, yeah, life's pretty busy. :)

I'll probably write more later but make it access-only for various reasons. For now, though, I'm off to sleep as it's now 2:40am and I've apparently spent a whole hour on this entry. ;p 'night!