Tag: internet Posts

Finding Free Wireless Internet in New Zealand

New Zealand

Unless you are coming from Australia, you’ll likely arrive in New Zealand and be instantly surprised with how hard it is to find usable Internet, or how much money you have to pay to get online. Sure, some coffee shops give you 30 minutes of free time with the purchase of a coffee, but that’s hardly enough time to send a few emails or check in with friends and family on Facebook. If you want to do anything useful, such as upload photos or do a few online chats with people back home, you’re going to find it very difficult all over New Zealand unless you’re willing to shell out $3-$5 an hour whenever you do find it. Even if you do shell out any money to get online, you will likely have a bare-bones data-cap to contend with, often only 50MB or so for a one hour session. I […]

How To Beat Time Or Bandwidth Limited Internet Connections

 Travel

One of the hardest parts of working remotely and traveling is the need to find reliable internet from time to time. In some countries free internet is almost as ubiquitous as beer, and often advertised as prominently. But in some countries (I’m looking directly at you Australia and New Zealand) almost all the internet you will find in the wild is either time limited or bandwidth limited. It’s not unusual to be in a coffee shop on only be given 10MB or so, which is hardly enough to check your email or Facebook feed. The Solution If you’re using a Mac computer (and I’m sure the procedure is fairly similar on Linux) and have root access, you can easily work around these types of internet connections by changing your network adapter’s MAC address. Since these services usually tie the time or bandwidth consumption to your computer’s MAC address (which is […]

I’ve Got The Internet Blues

ArgentinaTechnology

I’m not sure why, but the internet in all of Buenos Aires seems to be on its knees. It’s definitely worse in my apartment, but it’s sporadic all over the city right now too. The first two months I was here it was slow, but reliable for the most part. It would take me 10 hours to download something that would take me 1 or 2 back home, but you could always get online when you needed to. It’s been getting worse over the last two weeks, and these last few days have been pretty brutal. The internet in my apartment went down this afternoon for a while, so I went across the street to a coffee shop. It worked better there, but it was still a bit spotty. I left there and went to Starbucks, where the internet didn’t work at all. In fact, Starbucks probably has the worst […]

How SSL Works

Technology

It’s been a long time since I did a technology post, but I’ve recently had security on my mind and thought I would give a quick primer for SSL. For those of you who don’t know, SSL stands for secure socket layer, and is the technology on the internet that makes all eCommerce and web security possible. And here’s how it works. First, you need to understand the two different types of encryption. Symmetric Encryption Symmetric encryption is any encryption that involves one key and can be decoded in exactly the same manner that it was encoded. In fact, often decoding a message is simply the result of encoding an already encoded message, which produces the original plain text. For example, one could simply replace the letter “e” with the letter “i” in a document (and vice versa) and send it to a friend. Obviously it’s a pretty crappy form […]

Shaw Cable Internet Update

 Journal

It’s been over a month of me trying to get some resolution to my problems with my Internet at home, and I’m happy to say that I’m a step nearer today. I imagine it’s due to everyone’s help on Twitter to be honest, since a few people made a few calls internally on my behalf. So thanks if you helped out. I got a call a while ago from someone within Shaw who was informed of my problems. Right away, she said she was going to make some price adjustments to reflect the fact that my service has been sub-par. First, she lowered my monthly internet fee from $45/mo down to $10/mo for a full year. Second, she lowered the price on my digital cable box from $12/mo down to $2/mo for a full year as well. So if you do the math, that’s a savings of about $540 for […]

Why I Hate Shaw Cable

Technology

Seriously. It’s a massive slap in the face to be on hold for over an hour with a company while they’re playing on-hold advertisements talking about how much better their customer service is than everyone else’s. My internet has been slowing down consistently month after month to the point where it’s become nearly unusable. I’m paying for one of their higher end packages which is supposed to give up to 15 Mbps downstream and up to 1 Mbps downstream. Here’s what it’s been like for the last few weeks: Right now I’m getting 4 Mbps downstream, and only 76 kbps upstream, with ping times of around 400ms – absurd. The plan below me offers 10 Mbps, so at the very least I should be guaranteed that, otherwise what am I paying for? The upstream is completely pathetic, and doesn’t even allow me to start up video on iChat anymore. I’ve […]

Today The Internet Made Me Angry

 Journal

It doesn’t happen very often, but today was one of them. The main reason I was frustrated today is because more and more people seem to be treating each other (or at least me) as simply a marketing target. I used to get inquiries on my site of a personal nature via my contact form. That still happens, and I always enjoy that when it happens (in fact, I think that’s one of the biggest positives about blogging — being exposed to and forming relationships with people you may never meet), but more and more I’m getting random press releases from Vancouver marketing companies and other firms that want me to start using their services or pitching their products on my site. On Twitter I saw the other day someone complaining about the lack of people to target on Twitter in the Vancouver area, and it kind of made me […]

The Case Of The Disappearing Bandwidth

Technology

This morning I went to use my internet and was redirected to a page that indicated I had exceeded my bandwidth for the month. Granted, with my recent purchase of Apple TV, I have been using more bandwidth. But as far as I’m concerned it’s not anything crazy (the odd TV show), and it’s strange to me that I hit my limit. I upgraded to the next plan up which is a small SoHo package for now. The part that concerns me is that my upstream bandwidth was larger than my downstream, which makes no sense at all based on the things I do with my computer. My NAT is locked down, so it’s basically impossible for someone to be stealing my bandwidth from me, and I rarely torrent. So for now, I really have no idea what’s going on. I’m going to keep a watch on it from my […]

Name That Blogger

 Journal

Ok, clearly you guys are full of awesome today. The last person was indeed Rebecca Bollwitt. Let’s see if you get this one. If you know it 100% for sure (as I bet some of you are), then please save this for people who aren’t and want to guess!

Name That Person

 Journal

Ok, you guys nailed round one. That cat is indeed Cid, part of the Raymi and Phil family. So, I have a harder one for you. Name this person. Bonus points if you can point me at the original photo or blog entry.