Tag Archives: experiment

Posted on
by

Over the past year we’ve had our share with internet slowness, phone outages and whatnot. Our internet providers help desk never was able to find it and had solutions like upgrading our package to get a different signal, new modem, blaming Apple, replace cables… All the default stuff.

On my own I have replaced both Airport Extremes, bought new switches, new server hardware, endless reconfiguring and resetting of devices.

In the past month or so the speeds were so bad we *actually* made a fuss and demanded that some expert come take a look at it. So they send over a technician. After a 5 minute streak of mumbling and following cables he concluded that my Airport Extreme was the culprit. Explained me how it was not the Internet providers fault and left.

Obviously that didn’t solve the problem for us. So I called support again and got through to their tier 2 support who said they would run some tests. If I could monitor when it was slow, note the time and ping the site we were trying to reach and write that down too. That sounded constructive. We set a date to talk over the results of that a week later.

So we did. Meanwhile the issue had been bumped to tier 3 support because “something was fluctuating the signal” which was cause for some alarm apparently. 2 days ago the Tier 3 guy called, asked me for the results. He also shared his results. Seeing spikes in our signal every so much seconds. If I could confirm this with a endless ping from my end to various points on my network and the internet. We did and indeed saw the spikes on my end too.

If I could go into my modem and restart it, he told me the address 192.168.1.1 or something. To which I replied that I had changed it to 10.0.0.1 to coincide with my network and avoid conflicts with VPN connections to clients.

ohhhh, but that’s a problem!

uh oh…

“Why?” I asked.
His reply; “Well, our VOIP system runs on that segment.”
“But how does that conflict? Does the router run on linux?” I ask.
“Yes, at the core it’s a basic linux OS.” He says.

And that’s it then. As some of you may know. Linux/Unix systems always have trouble separating interfaces which run on the same/similar IP address ranges and what’s worse in the same size subnet. Thus, creates a addressing conflict. Causing phone outages in that network (not just our phone apparently) and every time an address conflict popped up, which was every minute or so, there would be a spike in our Internet signal.

So as a test we reset the modem to factory defaults. And *poof* no more spikes and a much more stable signal. Sooo I was kindly advised to reconfigure my network to something that doesn’t conflict with their stuff. Which I did and things seem better so far.

Now hope it actually works faster… But for now it seems resolved :) yay!

Posted on
by

So over the past few weeks (months?) I’ve been amazed by how Facebook seems to be able to find everyone i don’t know and label them as potential friends by suggesting i add them as friends. All the while failing to suggest people i actually DO know. I’ve been over the lists repeatedly over the past weeks and rarely saw anyone i knew, or cared to know about for that matter.

Until today that is. I’ve decided Facebook must be totally right on this and I’m 100% convinced I’m the socialite they think i should be. Thus i know everyone. And everyone is my friend. As far as friends go on Facebook. And anything is interesting.

So earlier today I took it upon me to add everyone on my Facebook as a friend. Simply going to the suggested friends list and adding everyone on it. a bunch of requests later a message pops up. “You’re going too fast. Please re-authorize your account” and i had some captcha to solve. Fine, they think I’m a bot… So i answered their question and went on with adding all my friends. a few more and another popup. “You’re going too fast. If you add more friends, your account will be disabled!” And another captcha to solve. Which i did. And went on with adding my buddies. But after one i got the last warning not to add more people or they would indeed disable my account.

Me not wanting to miss out on all your updates and other fascinating rubbish stopped adding friends. So why don’t you help the awesome cause by adding me! It’ll be the best thing you do all day, I promise! My account!

Posted on
by

For a marketing experiment we needed some broken products at work. So we peeled apart an LCD in a macbook to make it appear broken. We destroyed software on a harddisk. And a few other things. We also tried to break the digitizer of an iPhone. And we succeeded eventually…

Since a broken digitizer (the glass front and touch screen) of iPhones is the most popular repair here we decided we needed a broken iPhone. We had some old devices lying around and thought to simply smash the screen in and be done with it. As the most likely cause for it to break was to simply throw it to the ground we tried that. It didn’t really work. We then tried hitting it to the narrow end of a steel pole. All we accomplished was a small budge and a scratch.

A colleague then thought to use a alarm hammer, used to break car windows with minimum force. Basically what this thing does is shoot out a steel pin shattering any glass it touches. Not so for the iPhone. It didn’t even get scratched. When we tried it on the steel pole a big budge was there. So the hammer indeed worked. Just not for the iPhone.

We ended up using a wrench. Simply beating on it would destroy the iPhone too much we thought so we took it apart by removing the actual phone and LCD. So we would just break the glass.

And break it did:

And we used this tool:

It took some effort but the digitizer was thoroughly broken. Too much really. Since the touchscreen stopped working also. Which is part of the glass. But for our experiment we needed it to work. We destroyed 2 digitizers with the wrench and they both broke too much.
Finally we just took a used digitizer and smashed it’s edge to the table’s edge… The table is damaged now, but so is the digitizer. A neat little crack. Just enough to justify the need to repair it.

I wonder how all those people break their phones. Since, if they’re to be believed they dropped from a table or from their pockets… We dropped a fully assembled iPhone from 2 meters high and it didn’t even scratch!

Posted on
by

On the forums Olaf under the name Topsys made an interresting hack to AdRotate.
He wrote some code that allows unlimited widgets for AdRotate and posted it on the forum with instructions.

I find this an interresting enough feature to include in the plugin but as he states it needs some testing. You can find the thread here:
http://forum.at.meandmymac.net/topic/code-for-unlimited-widgets

Obviously using this hack is as of yet, unsupported. If things will work out i will include it in a later version.
So if you’re interested and like the way Topsys made things work try it out and let us know in the thread what your experiences are. Also suggestions for improvements are welcome ofcourse!