Why NBN Fibre?

Ok, I've been a bad blogger again.  But this is not written for public audience.  It is written to remind me of 'stuff' and as a reference for a few friends.  If others find things that are useful - great.

In Australia we are undergoing the process of replacing our old copper wire based communication system with optical fibre, wireless and satellite.  The overhaul will do a number of things. 

Firstly, and most important, it will remove the issue of privacy across the communications network.  Anything and everything will be able to be tracked, traced, recorded and stored for future reference.  It is not as if this was not done in the past.  but the new technology makes it easier and faster to access and store pretty well everything that happens in a the life of a person or organisation.  George Orwell's 1984 just happened to mature thirty years later than it began.

People think the loss of individual privacy has been sneaking in for the last dozen or so years, especially with the advent of smarter phones and devices which provide location information about users.  But even before we had the Internet, it was possible to track users of computer systems using more primitive means to connect to each other.  Internet Protocol simply made it easier and the availability of Internet services to the general public, which happened in Australia around 1991, has opened up our daily lives to snooping.

Ok, so much for the privacy issue.  What about the good things NBN will bring.

Mention the NBN and people almost immediately think 'faster Internet'.  But that is the tail end of the puppy.  The first thing that the NBN should do is provide clearer and better voice connections.  There is a trade off in that because where the copper network will continue to run in an emergency as long as the exchange is operating, the NBN only has backup power for about 5 hours.  That can easily be remedied by connecting a 10 Watt solar panel to your backup battery.  Quite illegal, but easy enough to do.

It is on the Internet side of things though, where it gets interesting.  ADSL2+ was a great leap forward, because over the years the Internet has grown so much it began to slow down.  With the emergence of Google's advertising system, it has slowed to a crawl. 

Google is the biggest bottleneck in Internet speed.  Every time you open a web browser and look for or at a page, Google and various other advertising entities are there trying to find out where you are, where you have been, and guessing where you might go.  There are programs and add-ons available for your browser that allow you to see this happening, and it is scary to watch all the computers connected to yours at any one time.

So as the Internet is choking, speeds are increasing.  Our ADSL2+ was supposed to take us from 1.5Mbps to 20Mbps, but the best we ever saw from it was around 11Mbps.  Moving to the NBN, we pay the same amount for Internet and voice line rental.  By moving to a 100% Australian company called AUSBBS, we habe also more than doubled the amount of data we can use, again, for the same price we were paying for a 50GB download limit.

Now two things that stand out in real terms in our plan, are the speed and the data flow.  First, the speed we can connect is fairly consistent. and second, the data is there to make use of the new exciting things that the Internet can now be used for.

Speed:
The NBN does not magically make web pages appear instantly.  In fact many people are disappointed when they first open their browser and see that pages still load slowly.  This is not the fault of the NBN connection.  It is mostly a function of the servers you are connected to and how fast they can get the information out to you.

But as soon as you connect to a fast server you will see the difference.  For example, I often download iso files of operating systems.  Each file is about 1.2 Gigabytes in size.  on ADSL2+ at supposedly 20Mbps, it takes around 20 to 30 minutes to download one of these  files.  On NBN supposedly at around the same speed, the reality is that the fibre network lets me download that file in around 7 to 10 minutes!

It doesn't stop at file downloads.  Using things like YouTube to watch video suddenly becomes practical at higher definitions.  And having more than one person watching a video and downloading stuff is suddenly viable.

All this is at the relatively low 25Mbps download speed.   The Internet now becomes a proper entertainment delivery service.  Computer to computer communications using tools like Skype are much clearer (as long as both parties are on NBN fibre).

There's another bonus.  Upload speeds are, in y case, about 10 times as fast as they were on ADSL2+  That means if I still had my web building business, I could maintain customers' sites far more efficiently.  And in a private home situation, I can make use of those handy things like cloud storage at last, because I no longer have to wait half a day for a file to upload!

Overall, the NBN experience is worthwhile.  You can get a lot more than you have been paying for by switching from ADSL to NBN.

More about Applications as Desktop Wallpaper

Since I wrote about setting a video as wallpaper for Linux with KDE and mentioned it was possible to use other programs, not just videos, I have been asked about using Web Pages, and whether it affects the use of the browser for normal tasks.

Others have asked why anyone would bother setting a browser as a wallpaper.

Here are my thoughts.

I used to develop web sites and later, blogs as a business.  Now that I am retired from active duty, I still mess with that side of computing, but simply to get my mind working because I am unable to complete a normal work load.

So sometimes I want to see the results of what I did, but unobtrusively.  Other people might just want to use a news feed, a blog or even their Facebook Page as wallpaper.

The first and most obvious thing is - yes, it will interfere with use of your browser, if you set it as wallpaper.  But this is Linux.  You can install a low overhead browser like Qupzilla, and set it as your wallpaper.

Simply open the page you want, set it as your home page, then:
Right click the title bar
Choose More Actions > Keep below Others
Choose More Actions >  Fullscreen

REMEMBER - to get out of this, you need to hold ALT and press F3 to bring up the same menu you used to set the wallpaper.  Then More Actions and turn Fullscreen OFF.

By using something like Qupzilla, you still retain full use of your main browser without interference.

You do need to remember though, that you lose the right click desktop menu on that workspace.  To access it, use your pager to move to a different workspace, or use ALT +F3 and leave fullscreen mode for a while.

Here's what Mint 17 KDE looks like runnign Qupzilla as wallpaper:

Here's the same thing with Firefox over the top of it.

Here's Firefox translucent to show the wallpaper through it.

Linux Ubuntu Mint - Get Rid of Double Extensions in File Names

One of the fun things about Linux is that you can do almost anything easily and quickly by writing short little programs that do things in minutes that would otherwise take hours.

I often edit digital photographs.  This usually involves opening GIMP (like Photoshop - but FREE) and applying various changes, one image at a time.

Setting almost any application as wallpaper in Linux KDE

I just replied to a post on a forum where someone asked about setting a web browser as the desktop background in Gnome.

Now I don;t use Gnome, just as people who know me also know I haven't used Windows since the 1990's.

But I have had video wallpaper and web browsers as wallpaper for years, and reading posts that say it is not possible, or talk about writing shell scripts that take photos of your browser and set them as a wallpaper slide show annoy me.

So here is the easy way.  I downloaded Gnome to test this and it does not work because Gnome has no option to 'keep a window Below Others, but in KDE it is dead easy and I suspect the others will also let you do this.

Ok, so in KDE all you do is:
1 - Right click the title bar of your browser.
2 - Choose 'More Actions'
3 - Choose 'Keep Below Others'
4 - Choose 'More Actions' again
5 - Choose 'Fullscreen'
6 - Read the warning that tells you you probably won't get back out of full screen.
7 - Take note of the 'ALT+F3' shortcut to get out of full screen.
8 - Click ok.
9 - See point 6. Make a text file in /home to remind you.

To get out of Full Screen use ALT+F3 Choose 'More Actions' then get rid of the 'tick' next to 'Fullscreen'. You might want to get rid of 'Keep below others' as well.

I have been using this method to set VLC to play videos as wallpaper for years, but now I see it has a built in "Wallpaper Mode".

It also works for other programs, but can be annoying when you accidentally erase the document you were working on in your 'Desktop Wallpaper Database'.

One program that does make good Interactive Wallpaper using this method is Google Earth.  Just go to View and set the Sidebar to OFF.

LINUX Grub-Customizer Background Image Not Showing

One of the fun things about Linux is customizing it.  Everything from window borders and backgrounds to transparencies and how individual programs behave on start up.

Printing a sample of all available fonts on your computer

I spend a lot of time messing with graphics and fonts in one way or another.  Often I am doing something that involved images and fonts at the same time.  Other times I might just want to work in ImageMagick and use the command line to create a fancy font effect without bothering to open a program to make changes one at a time.

When I am doing this though I sometimes need a particular font to turn an idea

Fresh Coffee Beans make a difference!

I've never really been a 'Coffee Drinker'.  Not really.  But that was because instant coffee tastes so insipid to me.  I cannot think of a single time that I actually enjoyed a cup of instant coffee.

Percolated, drip filtered and pot boiled coffee on the other hand I have enjoyed, along with the usual espresso flavoured milk drinks like cappuccino, flat white and latte.  But it took regular visits to a friend who actually enjoyed not only drinking coffee, but making it, for me to develop a taste for the stuff.  I'm still not a coffee expert and hope never to be, but I now know what I personally enjoy in a coffee.

Free Software for Drawing and Art

Following from yesterday's post, I decided to look a little deeper into what can be done using an ordinary 'Office Suite' for graphics.  So this morning I decided to have another look at LibreOffice 'Draw'.  This is the program I used to create the text that is filled in so it looks as if the letters are cut out of a photo.

This morning I read a post where someone was wanting to buy a graphic design program that would let him make a mockup of a mobile phone case that he could put various images on to show customers what the case would look like.

Linux Image to TEXT - use an image instead of colour

I'm writing this so I remember it can be done easily.

One of the neat things about Xara ExtremeLX for Linux was that it was fast, it worked with SVG files and it was easy to use.  For the last couple of releases of Linux Mint KDE, Xara has been able to be installed, but has failed to load.  A quick search on google show I am not the only one with this problem.

Now one of the simple things I used Xara for was to make things like logo graphics, maybe just something with a message, and instead of changing the font colour, I would put the text over the image, then use Xara to remove the image from everywhere except the actual text.

Linux MINT 17 KDE

I noticed that the KDE version of Linux Mint 17 was available, so I downloaded it and yesterday I got it up and running.

I noticed a few annoying things while I was doing this.  I run two versions of Mint on my computer at any given time.  I have a partition for the version I am currently using, and a partition for the old version.  If anything goes wrong or I don;t like the old version, or if I tweak something in the new version as I am doing now, and screw stuff up, i can choose the old version from GRUB boot menu and reinstall the new one.

Simple Accounting softare for Aussies using Linux!!

One of the annoying things about Australia is our tax system.  One of the annoying things about Linux is that almost everything is available for Linux except a simple small business accounting system that is designed for Australian and designed for Linux.
There is a partial solution however...

Quick aNd Easy Web Builder Update!!

QNEWB2 is being constantly improved.  What is already the best Drag And Drop and WYSIWYG web editor I have tried during many years of searching is even better. What is more exciting is that it works perfectly in Linux!

On June 2, 2014 Pablo added a number of new things to the program.  Some are for advanced users, but for beginners and those trying the program for the first time a couple are very important.