JetSet

O.K, I'm in (provisionally) 350Z , CW55EEF, Blade Silver, Museum and Evening meal. Will confirm in the next 24 hours.

Pete

O.K, It's up and running . At first it kept dropping the internet connection so the engineer added a wifi booster which cut down the number of disconnections. I then accessed the engineers hidden menu and turned off the 2.4ghz connection and that looks to have done the trick. I'm very impressed with the whole setup apart from the remote which is far too small and it's really difficult to make out the markings on it but I guess I'll get used to it. Overall rating, 9/10 . Engineer told me to cancel my Sky insurance so that saves me a tenner a month 

Next job is to strip out the 300gb hard disks and stick them in caddies (once I've got them formatted)

Pete

Yep, same thing happened to me a few weeks ago 

Pete

12 hours ago, Paul K said:

Apparently. Although it hasn’t been activated yet. But the sky system has power line “built in”

O.K, just looked this up and it seems like it can be activated via the engineers menu. This is probably what the engineer was talking about. How does the Sky 2TB box access the internet, by wifi or ethernet cable?

Pete

5 hours ago, Paul K said:

I'vee had mine for over a year now, and its fine...one thing though, is that it works best if you have Sky broadband as well, as it forms a Mesh network between the router,skyQ main, sky q Mini.  also each box Main, and Mini, becomes a wifi hotspot, so your household wifi should be quite good after install.

 

i have friends who have tried to work it with a BT infinity router, and lets say its been....problematic!!

Cheers,

Hope it works with my main Netgear router which I've just spent a small fortune on! Talking to an engineer he says that they can as a last resort run a Powerline connection but I don't think that'll be needed.

Pete

Hi guys, I've bitten the bullet and ordered Sky Q now I have a decent internet connection. I'm getting the 2TB box and 2 mini boxes to replace the HD boxes (which I believe I can keep?)

I've also recently purchased a 65" Panasonic 4K TV so I'm expecting wonderful things, especially as I've watched a few 4K videos on YouTube. Are there any known issues with these boxes? What sort of range do the mini boxes have? Also, should I cancel my insurance contract with Sky Protect as these new boxes will actually be owned by Sky and therefore they will have to maintain them, will they be covered by my home insurance should they be stolen or damaged?

Cheers,

Pete

Gun Metal 52 reg at Broughton retail park on Thursday , square rear number plate so probably an import and today a black roadster, 54 reg and also most likely an import, this one in Tesco, Mold.

Pete

A fair few wood pigeons around here plus a few pairs of collared doves. The numbers never really get out of hand as they are predated on by Sparrowhawks, Cats and juveniles often fall prey to Crows.  I can see why town dwellers get annoyed with them but let's face it they do a lot less damage than a handful of feral youths.

Pete

O.K, I purchased a Netgear Nighthawk X6 router and that has solved my ping time, it's down to around 25-30 now. As far as connections go, I realized that nearly all of my devices were using 2.4mhz so I enabled 5.0mhz on those that I could and bought a few dual frequency USB network sticks and that has alleviated the connection problems 

Pete  

Thanks for the help and suggestions . I've used Netgear routers and WAP's in the past, in fact I'm using one as a bridge right now. My main problem is the sheer amount of devices I need to attach. There's Laptops, TV's and Sky boxes, Printers (Caroline has some specialized hardware for her crafting hobby), a tablet, several desktop computers and mobile phones.  I need to look into powerline adapters but the layout of my house and the thickness of the walls mean I'd need several of them (and more cables). Anyway, priority number one is a decent router, the one supplied by TalkTalk is rubbish. Interestingly, I'm seeing a BT router pop up now and again on my  network, they must put out an amazing signal as the nearest possible one would be at least 120 yards away !

Pete

On 11/23/2017 at 20:41, Ekona said:

Also with a ping of 130 you'll be terrible at CoD

Yeah, I've added a dual band wifi extender and that's reduced the ping to 80 . 2 problems here, our house is old and has solid interior brick walls and secondly, I'm banned from laying any ethernet cables . Next step is to get a better router, looking at the Netgear Nighthawk range.

Pete

Back in the day it was simple......remove rotor arm, job done 

Pete

O.K, so I went live this morning, only the second customer on that infinity box according to the OpenReach engineer. Should have been live on the 21st but BT either forgot or weren't informed. For now I'm using the crappy router provided by TalkTalk as the settings on my regular router need to be changed. Anyway, first initial speed test was 5mb, 10 minutes later it was up to 12mb and after a few hours it settled down to 39.5mb. I do need to look at why the ping is around 130 which means web pages don't load as fast as I would like but that can be sorted in time. Did a couple of test downloads of around 150mb and everything looks good.

Pete

I would say on my side of the country The North starts in Cheshire...... Shropshire, Staffs Derbyshire, Lincs and Notts are Midlands ( even though geographically some of those counties have towns that are further North than parts of Cheshire or even Merseyside. The South starts roughly from a line from Gloucester to Luton and the South West from a line from Bristol to Weymouth. Some places like Hereford are neither North, South or Midlands, same for Norwich...just my take on it.

Pete

Yes, we've just had another batch of speed limit changes around here, all downwards of course. The one that made me laugh is the 50 mph average speed limit (with cameras) they've put on Sealand Road from Sealand to Chester, about 6 miles or so. I use this road on a regular basis and can't recall the last time it was even possible to reach 50 and there's also a set of traffic lights to navigate and overtaking is near impossible. How some 300 or so drivers have been caught speeding on that stretch is something of a mystery. On the plus side, they're giving serious consideration to removing the 50 limit on The A55 around Colwyn Bay.

Pete

Interesting. I bought my first house, a semi, for £6,600 in 1973 and sold it for £8,100 in 1978. I then stretched myself to the absolute limit to buy my present property for £16,500 . also in 1978. With interest rates going as high as 17 or even 18% in the early 1980's it was something of a struggle and I dread to think what would happen if interest rates shoot up again even to the 7 or 8% which was the norm right through the 70's and late 80's through to the early 2000's.

Pete

I retired just before my 54th birthday. The company I worked for made me a good offer so I took the chance while it was there. During my time there I saw several guys that I worked with that had the option to retire early on full pension (at 62) with the company making up the state pension for 3 years! Quite a few of those who turned down the offer never made it to 65 and that swayed my decision to go while I had the opportunity.

Pete

10 hours ago, Adrian@TORQEN said:

Welcome to 2008-2009. Still a few years to catch up...  

 

Bastards are spending money on football matches rather than improving the backbone of the economy in a digital era! Internet speed in UK, which is supposed or used to be one of the top economies in the world, it's absolutely ridiculous. 

They did offer me a faster package, 75mb but I didn't think it was worth the extra £ . Its true though, The U.K lags well behind the rest of the world.

Pete

Update!!!!! Cabinet has now been upgraded, connected and I'm going live on The 21st of November. I would have thought I'd have seen an increase in speed just by the box being connected but not at all. BT are offering 2-4mb as I stand or 30-40mb on the fibre line.

Pete 

Some recent news. First of all the bad, we lost one of our Tabby Cats aged 13 with kidney failure a couple of months ago and just a few days later the feral cat we'd been feeding for several months was knocked over about half a mile away and sustained fatal injuries. I found him still alive but he passed away within a few minutes and I buried him in our garden.

Now for some amazing news, one of our cats, a full male Bengal no less, that went missing on January 19th returned to us exactly 7 months to the day !! No idea where he has been during his absence, he had lost a bit of weight and now has a slight rip in his ear but is in remarkable condition considering. You do hear of cats going missing and returning but considering there are only a couple of houses within a mile of us you do wonder where he's been. Was he abducted and escaped or maybe abducted and returned by whoever took him as Bengals can be a real handful and he certainly is. Anyway, I guess I'll never know.

Pete

Should have and could have been a great race on Sunday. I don't mind having one track where overtaking is impossible (Monaco} but to have 2 is crazy as barring accidents, a poor pit stop or a breakdown the racing is over after the first few corners. 

Anyway, next up is Spa, let's hope it piddles down 

Pete

13 hours ago, Kev said:

I don't doubt that. 

 

But the common car has to be the main consumer. It won't be long before they target aviation too. 

 

Yes, 65% of a refinery's production is either gasoline or diesel. This is something that is actually rather alarming. Currently there are 5 major oil refineries spread across The U.K plus a couple of smaller ones. Now then, once demand for gasoline starts to diminish how many refineries will we need to supply The U.K?  Probably just one, two at most. While its possible to adjust the crude oil blend to make other things, chemicals, lube oil or even aviation fuel it's no good making the stuff if you can't sell it or even store it.  So I can see most of the refineries just closing down and us having to import things like heavy fuel oil, bitumen, lube oils, etc. If as expected the rest of Europe goes all electric then they will be in exactly the same boat as us, overcapacity for gasoline/diesel and refineries right across the Continent closing down and just look at what happened to Octel when we went lead free in the 80's.

Then there's the question do we have the capacity in our power network to support the extra power needed to charge all of these electric cars up? Well, estimates say we could need as much as 8 GigaWatts more and to put that into perspective , the new Hinckley Point reactor when completed will supply just 3.2 GigaWatts so we need possibly as many as 5 new nuclear reactors to replace the old coal and oil fired power stations that will be closing down in the next few years. I just hope that the government have thought this through properly and have plans already in place.

The only good thing is that crude oil stocks will last a lot longer as demand will drop like a stone as more and more countries go all electric later this century.

Pete   

3 hours ago, Kev said:

Saudi will make sure the world never stops consuming oil. £1.7 trillion buys a lot of influence.  

Crude oil can be blended in a way that can reduce the amount of gasoline/diesel produced and increase for example the amount of aviation fuel.  You can do a lot more with crude oil than you would imagine such as producing solvents ,chemicals, waxes, etc so there's no need for The Saudi's or any of the OPEC countries to get concerned at all.

Pete

No mention of HGV's then? From what I've read the best a 40 ton all electric HGV can currently manage is around 60 miles and a 26 ton HGV around 100 miles. Now then, I live fairly close to the main trunk route to Ireland (A55) and many of the HGV's I see are from places as far away as Bulgaria, Romania and Poland and many, many more from Continental Europe. As we all know, HGV's are a major source of pollution, but on exiting The E.U we will pretty well have no influence on these countries to switch totally to all electric. Of course, we can refuse to allow non electric vehicles into The U.K and build massive rail terminals at our major ports but quite frankly we just don't have anywhere near the rail infrastructure in the rest of the country to cope. 

Sure, there be a period when petrol and diesel will be readily available but keeping in mind how quickly leaded petrol vanished I would expect maybe 10 years max before fossil fuels will be (A) Hard to get hold of and (B) Bloody expensive.

As others have alluded to, there'll be a cost to all of this, anyone continuing to run old vehicles past 2040 will be priced/taxed off the road and new vehicles will have all sorts of taxes inflicted upon them.

Pete 

A new one on me, parked in Tesco in Mold a modded Chilli Red DK 54 *** with an enormous  bolt on rear wing, square rear number plate bolted onto one side of the rear bumper but probably not an import.

Pete