Monthly Archives: February 2003

rg58 cable and dab

Posted by on 23Feb03 Comments Off

Just in case anyone else has a DAB receiver (I don’t – this was done for a friend), you can use RG58 50ohm network cable for long runs from an antenna with very good results.

Ok, so the starting point was poor (an indoor dipole), and the final installation has a Yagi in the loft space, but running the signal down the inside of the house via 17m or so of RG58 and into a rubbish ‘screw in’ 50ohm BNC connector gave full strength on every station that the unit could pick up.

Previously, only around 50% of the stations that could be identified had a signal that was useable, and we never got around to aligning the antenna, or even trying to mount it – I simply laid it down on the insulation pointing towards the least number of houses opposite, and went to check the setup. It was that good we just left it there :)

I would like to state that I wanted a crimp connector, but when I went to the store on Saturday morning they only had 75ohm BNC connectors with a crimp fit. We’ll just have to wait and see if the connection oxidises over the next few months.

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recent upgrades

Posted by on 17Feb03 Comments Off

In an attempt to speed things up, my Qube now has more RAM and a larger hard drive.

The RAM has been bumped to 196KB total (from 96KB), and the drive is now a 120GB Maxtor DiamondMax 16. Preparing the drive was fairly easy – I’ve partitioned many drives to Qube format by now, thanks to NetBSD Live and Knoppix – but the cpio from the old 17GB Fujitsu took *ages*.

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mod_bandwidth implemented

Posted by on 10Feb03 Comments Off

Ok, so things ought to be a little smoother now, as it’s far less likely that any one download can fill my outgoing bandwidth.

I was having lots of trouble getting mod_throttle to work for me, but after reading a tip over at MacOS X Hints, I’ve added mod_bandwidth and got it working without any trouble. So far, only Nicci’s music site has any restrictions, with files under 18KB having no limits, and everything else being capped at around 8KB/s.

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broken-ness and other facts of life

Posted by on 09Feb03 Comments Off

Ok, so I’m now using my own XML/PHP based solution, but things are not fully restored.

Some items have been broken for a long time (like the gallery), but other items are freshly stuffed, like the blog search, uptime, virus/exploit logs and archives.

I’m working my way through these items, but getting the gallery fixed is ahead of a lot of little tweaks. Actually writing the rest of the video section is also on the ever-growing todo list…

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odd site view

Posted by on 09Feb03 Comments Off

I’ve finally got fed up with the poor performance of the site and my machine, and have ditched the database blogging software. I’m most of the way through gamma[*] testing my own XML/PHP based software, and the date related problem that has held me up since the middle of January turn out to be a mis-reading of a PHP command (it wanted US date format, which conflicted with my idea of how it should work). Things ought to perk up a bit over the next week or so, with the new gallery nearing completion and a bandwidth module coming into effect for the large .mp3 downloads.

[*] It’s already been alpha and beta tested…

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