Classic American Video

Americans are NOT dumb - with subtitles

Might be old, but I hadn't seen it before. One of the most funniest videos about the intelligence of day to day Americans. Just as a side note, I'm not implying anything and this is for humor purposes only.

Livebox Arrives

After almost three weeks since the application for getting a Livebox from Orange, they finally came a few days ago to set up the device. Now, to make things short, the Orange Livebox is a modem, wireless router, and VoIP. The Voice over Internet Protocol works by connecting any ordinary telephone into the port of the Livebox.

According to Orange, calling from the Livebox gives you free calls to all local landline numbers, and calls to mobile and international numbers for a greatly reduced price. All went well, the Livebox was set up, the two young men that came were friendly and helpful, and all was done in less than ten minutes.

Three weeks waiting for ten minutes set up. Typical Orange, but what can we do anyway. To be honest the VoIP seems no different from normal, the quality is excellent. According to Orange, this barely uses up speed and bandwidth. This is something we have yet to see, but all in all this a good offer.

However, there have been two problems with our Livebox. Sometimes the telephone light on the Livebox switches off and the VoIP is no longer useable until it magically switches on after a few hours later. Also there have been some problems connecting to the wireless connection from my fathers laptop, which is Windows Vista. This could be from the Livebox or from the laptop, so this may not count as a fault.

I also mentioned the lack of stability last time. This has improved a little bit, this time the connection speed will range from 1MB to normal and sometimes will go all the way to 3MB for sometime. All in all, the Livebox is good overall. However I must point out that the customer service of Orange, the 'international France telecom company blah', is totally rubbish. It is appauling, and when you have a problem, you must pray that the pro will magically fix itself.

Pickings from Makezine

I usually watch these Makezine weekend project videos, even though I've never done any of the projects, except this one. The maker of these videos is a guy nicknamed Kipkay, who has an interesting way of combining normal scenes of himself with scenes where he pre-records his voice, to make a superb how to.

Unfortunately, the Make magazine he refers to is in the United States and I'm still trying to figure a way to download it, maybe by a torrent or something. However the website of the magazine is rather good, but if you enjoy projects then be sure to visit Instructables as well. Here are two videos of the many I found.

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Simple Laser Communicator


Fireball Shooter

2008 In Pictures

After the help of Wikipedia, I managed to summarized the most important highlights of last year in many photos. If you hover over a photo, I have added a caption to briefly say what this photo is about. Please allow sometime to load the images if you just see a bunch of text.

...Happy New Year...

Prison Break Continues

The show took a break after the 16th episode, and will return supposedly on 6/1/2009, which is in three more days. Above is the tralier for the 17th episode, in which Lincoln and Micheal seperate, each to find Scylla but each with a different goal. Be sure to watch it.

Testing 2MB Internet

Since the new year was approaching and we had all agreed that our 128 kb/s connection was too slow. Since we had a yearly subscription anyway with Orange, with the help of my uncle Bilal, we agreed and ordered a new 2MB Surf and Talk package.

Now for the Talk part of the package to work, something called a Livebox would need to arrive. This is, according to Orange, a wireless router, modem and VoIP device, all in one. However this is yet to arrive, and knowing Orange, its going to take a while.

The Surf part has arrived though, and the 2MB internet, and downloads are fast and usually over 200 kb/s. There is only one problem, stability. The internet is not always the same speed, and speed tests are very unreliable as each test gives a different speed.

I can just hope the new modem will make it stable, although I don't know if this might be something common for higher speeds from Orange. Heres the only reliable test I could get from speed.io. Others would dip below 1MB or differ from test to test.