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I recently had an ISP service interruption at home, leaving me without a working Internet connection for a few hours. I used my iPhone to tether into my 3G connection, did a few speed tests, and wondered how it compared to my regular (cable modem) internet connection. Here are the test results.

For the longest time I've been renting a cable modem from my ISP for about $5-6/month. As DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems (capable of 400Mbps D/l and 108 Mbps U/l) have become widely available I've decided to upgrade my cable modem and also purchase it.

Not long after we played around testing our connection here in Canada over broadband (cable) vs iPhone (3G) , Akamai releases its 2009 Q3 report.

After wasting time and intense frustration, I have decided that waiting for videos of photos to upload to online services is not something I want to do from my laptop. I shall thus explore alternatives..

When working on the CLI (command line interface) or, as it is widely known, "the prompt", most people prefer to set certain shortcuts as typing the same thing over and over is not something anyone enjoys. In Linux, such shortcuts are called aliases. This is a continuation from choosing and then setting up your first VPS .

Have you noticed your Internet connection getting sluggish even while your Speed-tests show no slowdown? Are your VoIP conversations breaking up and becoming unintelligible especially when torrent downloading? If your answer is yes, you might benefit from the following tips.

For a long time I’ve been toying with the idea of running a TOR relay for my own privacy reasons and to give back to the community as well. Though my router and NAS (and possibly even my WD Live box) have enough chutzpah to run it, I prefer to use a very old computer instead for reasons of separation (security). For a while, I even considered buying a Raspberry Pi or some other similar cheap gizmo, then I remember I have a bunch of old computers I've never used..

Youtube is a wonderful platform and its creators deserve to be able to make a living. Many of them actually do by serving Google ads (with Google keeping a significant portion of ad revenue) or, via some Youtube subscription model that was first called Red and now is Premium (this may be inaccurate, I’m not following it closely). If, like me, you dislike a model where Google decides who is worthy of support and who’s not and gets to keep the lion’s share of ad revenue, this article might be for you. If, on the other hand, you have the means to purchase YouTube Premium and don’t have time to waste, go ahead and get it, it’s definitely worth it!

I have recently resurrected some older devices with flaky connectivity and while ssh-ing into them had to use some terminal tricks (aka multiplexers ) to restore connections if disconnected (or to purposely disconnect/reconnect on long commands). I used tmux where possible, but occasionally only GNU screen was available, making a summary of features opportune.

This is Winter Wonderland season and while some can’t wait for it to end, others would like to keep it going for the rest of the year. For them and all those who just can’t get enough of its magical power, here is a list of Christmasy things you might enjoy.

After my RAID-0 has recently failed catastrophically, the time has come to set up another pair of HDDs in my DNS-323. I figured a step-by-step howto on what I've done would not be useful only for me if I had to do it again, but to any other owner of this extremely popular unit. This is a rather long article, as it contains several smaller articles, but it is hopefully complete and suitable for a reinstall, cuz that’s the way I roll.

Now that we recovered passwords and we're in, it's time to do a little clean up of this older Win XP / BT5r1 box.

We recently needed an older computer and discovered we had forgotten a login password. Our development server for designing and testing a website will most likely reside on an older laptop running in dual boot with Windows XP SP 3 and Backtrack Linux 5.

I recently found myself needing to record the sound coming from a program such as a VOIP or SIP client. Unlike Windows, which has specialized apps to record any and all sound output, in linux you have to work a bit harder.

After a few attempts which ended in failure, I managed to format my 2 x 2TB 4k Western Digital drives . Now that it’s done, it seems incredibly simple. It is also “sticky”, meaning it does not need to be performed on each reboot (DUH!).

After successfully formatting my 2 new Western Digital 2TB discs properly, with the "advanced 4k option" , the time has come to move all the data from my existing 2TB array (1 TB + 1 TB in RAID 0) to one of the new drives. The quickest way to do this is to connect the drive via the NAS unit USB port.