I ordered O2 Broadband when we moved into our new flat. Promptly they sent us a Thompson TH585 v7 DSL router/modem. Within a few days the line was attached and the modem duly got connected. Yay.

Inital speed for the first few days was 0.5 Mbit/sec. Was a little disappointed when the 8 Mbit/sec line, which O2 estimated that at 0.3 of a mile from the exchange should have delivered 6 MBit/sec.

After a week, the speed did increase, nightly (between 8pm and midnight) gave me speeds of around 3 Mbit/sec. The other morning I tried testing at 7am, and got 6.2 Mbit/sec. Cool.

On the down side, the “O2 Wireless Box II”, that’s the Thompson TG575 v7, running firmware 7.4.20.5, seems to have a bad habit of spontaneously rebooting, around every 1 – 2 days! It is frequent enough to be annoying.

I spoke to the O2 support line (since the only “Ask Amy” KB was particularly useless), who advised me to re-flash the same firmware, which I’ll try in a  few days, but I don’t hold much hope. There’s a version 8.2.x release on the Thompson web site, but — as seems to b common with some DSL providers — the actual DSL login details are hidden, so changing to a non-branded firmware may prove difficult. Sky Broadband (a.k.a. EasyNet) did the same thing.

So, it’s now 2010 (almost). Two of the most heavily used non-Free programs on Linux would have to be Adobe Flash Player, and Skype VOIP client. While neither have open-sourced their offerings, both do offer Linux versions.

The down side is they only offer 32-bit versions.

After several years of AMD64 bit Linux (the Debian port to AMD 64 has a mailing list that started May 2003 – over 6.5 years ago). Skype have repackaged their 32 bit build in a package that has the correct dependencies to run on 64 bit Linux, but the executable is still 32-bit. So no clean 64 bit system! Boo hoo.

Come on Skype! Come on Adobe. Either keep up (6.5 years!) or set it Free!

Time for some more storage at home – the old 250 GB Freecom HDD was getting a little tight on space. So a quick stop on Christmas Eve at PC World (normally not a good experience) and I chanced upon a 1.5 TB Iomega drive at £80 or so. 6x the size – nice.
I was initially hesitant; the name Iomega normally is associated with the phrase “click of death”, a symptom of the old Iomega Zip disks of the 1990’s. However, the price point, and 10+ years of water under the bridge and them still being in business made me consider it a reasonable purchase.
The drive was instantly recognised by my Acer Aspire Revo (running Debian Linux). The disk auto-mounted with its VFAT file system no problem; however, instantly it started to… wait for it … click! Noooo!
I reformatted to make it a Physical Volume for LVM, and then made a new Logical Volume (LV) with an XFS file system. It seems the disk still does the clicking/ticking every once in a while, normally after some period of inactivity.
It’s about 4 – 7 clicks/ticks, about once every half a second, the entire episode lasting around 10 seconds.

So, it’s been a few weeks, and there still doesn’t seem to be any news about an HP supported SDK or even a hack to get into the HP DreamScreen. More interesting comments on this blog; I concurr with the timings for starting “apps” and navigating menus – way too slow to react.

I think the main point is nicely summed up – when “the community” gets inside this device there will be a possibility of realising the potential of an intelligent picture frame — the kind of self-populating, automatically updating, no-user-input required device that you would give to your parents and siblings to keep in touch. They shouldn’t have to navigate through my Snapfish albums manually – it should just happen!

Sigh.