dynanti offer web cam services

Having installed and run a web cam facility for the Southport & District Amateur Radio Club for the last two months, dynanti is now offering its clients a web cam installation, setup and hosting service.

dynanti will supply the hardware and software, install the camera inside or outside and setup the local server to upload images to the client's web site - and if the client doesn't currently have a web site, we're happy to help there too.

The hardware needn't cost an arm and a leg either - the local server need be nothing more powerful than a 500MHz Pentium III with 512Mb of memory, a copy of Windows 2000 and access to the Internet using a Broadband connection.

You can view dynanti's demo web cam at http://www.dynanti.co.uk/services_web-webcams.html. Further details can be obtained by contacting us by phone, or email.

Do you suffer from poor Broadband Internet performance?

Just a couple of days ago we were reporting how the future of Broadband lay in the sewer in terms of performance and today we're discussing the age-old problem of pathetically slow and unreliable Broadband connections. What goes around, comes around as they say.

We have had an 8mbps BT Business Broadband account since it came out, relying on a 2mbps connection before that and a 512Kbps connection before that again. However, there was never cause for complaint until we got the latest and fastest connection and, since then, we've suffered really poor performance (sometimes down in the slow hundreds of kilo-bits-per-second) and dropped connections on a regular basis.

I go through the usual ritual of ringing BT and starting at the bottom with the lowest common denominator support staff, work my way up to the highest level over a few weeks of constant ringing, get an engineer to come out, only for him to test the line and find that it's absolutely fine. I then get bored, suffer the poor performance and start all over again a few months later.

Well it appears that there may be an answer to this terrible service that we all have to put up with. It's been 18 months since Davey Winder upgraded to an 8Mbps ADSL Max Broadband connection. He's suffered all the usual poor performance, drop-outs, and the like - but it seems he's hit on the solution and published it in the February edition of PC Pro. Apparently the majority of routers we can buy use Texas Instruments' (TI's) AR7 chipset inside them - so much so that it's hard to find one that doesn't, especially since manufacturers rarely tell the consumer which chipset they use. However, when BT sends out an engineer they are equipped with a non-AR7 router, declare the line fine and charge the customer for the privaledge of doing absolutely nothing at all.

There appears to be some form of incompatibility issue between AR-7 equipped routers and ADSL Max, claims Davey, but neither TI nor BT are breaking their silence on the issue. Grossly unfair we think and, in the meantime, we have to battle with fluctuating speeds, dropouts and disconnections.

Ah well, roll on 16mbps Broadband - that should be a riot. I think I'll go back to 56kbps dial-up, it should prove to be quite a bit quicker.

High speed broadband down the loo

Broadband that’s faster, cheaper to install and environmentally friendly!! Surely this isn’t possible? Over the last 5 years H20 Networks has been in negotiations with water companies to implement it's fibre-via-sewers network known as Focus (Fibre Optic Cable Underground Sewer).

A handful of universities including Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Bournemouth are already seeing the benefits of high connection speeds of up to 20gbps. The new phase plans to roll out the fibre network to businesses and consumers next month.

Benefits of using sewers allow costs to be kept to a minimum and no disruption to the roads being dug up. Managing director Elfed Thomas explained that Napier University implemented a 1.2km fibre network that cost £80,000 comparing this to a traditional fibre network that would have cost around £400,000.

This BBC video demonstrates the implementation of the cables.

Compact, attractive, affordable laptop with 3+ hr battery life - it's not possible!

Why would anyone want a laptop? Well, apart from looking good and being a status symbol, there are a number of good reasons for wanting a laptop; you don't have the space for a large desktop/tower setup, you need to take one with you when you go out/away, you need to demonstrate things to clients, you need a second PC for when the spouse/kids are using the main PC, or you just want to spend half an hour in bed doing some work before you nod off.

These are all perfectly good reasons for wanting such a machine, but want do you want out of your laptop? You might want it to be small and light (too many laptops are large and heavy these days), attractive (Sony and Appple aside, few laptops are nice to look at), cheap to run (you seen the size of some of the power supplies which come with modern laptops?), decently built (yep, there are plenty of poorly made laptops around), well equipped (laptops shouldn't need anything else to be plugged in, where you going to put them when your using it on your lap?), tough (well it's going to be carried around here there and everywhere) and, most of all, cheap (no, £300 is not what I call cheap).

This seems like a pretty tall order, all those features in one box! Hmm, well I think I've found the answer to your problems. You can get an attractively styled, apple-like white, 920 gramme, well equipped, solid laptop with a 3.5 hour battery life for just £220 - yes, you heard me right, £220.

The Asus Eee PC 4G comes complete with a 900MHz Celereon processor, 512Mb (expandable) of memory and a 4Gb hard disk. Now that sounds naff, I know, but wait...it runs Linux so it doesn't require all the latest processors with 2Gb of memory and a 120Gb hard disk. Linux? Yep, it's a really easy to use operating system (as easy to use as Windows these days). What's more, it comes complete with OpenOffice, fully compatible with MS Office, together with a host of other applications.

That 4Gb hard disk is worth of note, it's solid state with no moving parts - rendering the laptop pretty shock proof. There's 1.2Gb of space left on the disk for data and the installation of your own programs, which is useful, but if you need more this it can be doubled up to 8Gb by inserting the largest, currently, available secure digital card in the SD slot. The three USB and one VGA monitor sockets allow further expansion and there's cabled and wireless network connectivity, web cam, high-definition audio, modem and Windows XP compatibility (there's a driver disk supplied) built in.

When Mobile Computer magazine tested this mini-beast of a computer they concluded that the Eee was a "complete and utter" bargain and we can't help but agree - so much so that we've got an order in for one and we'll tell you how we get on with it when it arrives. And don't forget, VAT regisered business users will pay just over £195 - what a bargain.

Happy birthday texting

There will be many of you out there who cannot image a world of personal communication without texting. Well, the truth is, that texting is a relatively recent innovation and it just celebrated its fifteenth birthday. The first message was sent by Neil Papworth over the Vodafone network on the 3rd December, 1992.

I well remember my first mobile phone around 1994, a Motorola MicroTAC 5200. It was small for it's day, but huge by today's standard, nicely styled with a flip down mouth-piece, but I'd be lucky if I could get through the day without having to recharge it. Being a first generation (1G) phone it was analogue, the signal was variable in quality and strength to say the least, and it suffered terribly from interference from inconsiderate CB operators who insisted on operating illegally on whatever frequency their shiny new boxes from the US would allow them. However, it was the start of the personal communication revolution and the start of me always being available to everyone that wanted to contact me, 24 hours a day.

Back then there were less than 5 million mobile phones in the UK [1] and many of them were used by employees who handed back in at the end of the work day, so you couldn't ring up your mate and ask them if you wanted to go down the pub - you had to use one of those old fashioned land-line telephones thingies. I was part of a rare section of the public that had a mobile phone and for us it as much a status symbol as a communication device. Now there are more than 70 million phones and almost every adult and, if my son's school is anything to go by, child over the age of twelve owns at least one, some owning more (yep, I fall into that category too - I have three contracts on the go at the moment).

By 2004, texting had become the accepted method of sending quick short messages, with the number of text messages exceeding the number of voice calls made for the first time [2]. But it didn't stop there, texting has mushroomed and it is now reported that over 1.2 billion text messages are sent every week in the UK - up 25% over 2006 [3].

However, the next new thing is always just around the corner and my new phone (no it's not an all singing all dancing PDA brick with mobile phone pretentions - it's a proper, really small, mobile phone) gives me full access to my email account wherever I am in the world and I find myself using it more and more. The day is coming when all mobile phones will simply be mobile internet terminals and we'll all be talking over VOIP connections, similar to Skype, and emailing (not texting). The mobile internet revolution has already started, it's just a matter of how long it will take to become the norm. So texting has it for now, but not for long.



[1] History of cellular mobile communications, Mobile Operators Association, http://www.mobilemastinfo.com/information/history.htm.
[2] Report on Popularity of SMS Text Messaging, SMS.ac, http://searchwarp.com/swa4269.htm.
[3] One billion text messages are sent every week in the UK, Mobile Data Association, http://www.text.it/mediacentre/press_release_list.cfm?thePublicationID=0F3FA21C-15C5-F4C0-99335F38D7517452.

Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate for £12.95 - genuine offer from MS

Yesterday we reported on a free Office compatible suite of software from Lotus - and a great deal it is too.

However, if you just have to get the latest version of Office 2007 Utlimate, and you happen to be a student, it can be yours for just £12.95. This gets you a copy of the software and a license key to use it for 12 months. Alternatively, you can pay just £38.95 and get a copy for keeps.

Ultimate is at the top of the Office 2007 range and features Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook, Publisher, Groove, OneNote and InfoPath.

If you must have Office 2007 and you're a student this is a good deal. However, we just can't help thinking that OpenOffice and Lotus Symphony represent particularly good value for money (they're free) and you'll be up and running in no time at all. The choice, as they say, is yours.

New competitor for Microsoft Office

Before Windows was the operating system of choice a company called Lotus was one of the few software companies that had an office suite running on good old fashioned DOS computers. Sure, Microsoft had a word processor and spreadsheet, but Lotus' Symphony was the forerunner of today's integrated suite of applications.

When Windows arrived, Microsoft still didn't have it all it's own way as Lotus was still king with its new generation SmartSuite, and very good it was too. Its word processor (AmiPro) was just so easy to use, 1-2-3 was the daddy of spreadsheets, Freelance was THE definitive presentation software and Approach was a really excellent database that was both powerful and easy to use - something that Access never has been.

Sadly, Microsoft took over the world and, with it, the office suite market. Well almost; recently the free OpenOffice suite has made in-roads into the market place and I'm sure will continue to do so as Microsoft pushes its Office 2007 which requires so much re-training as to have been shunned by many large corporates.

Well Lotus is back, with a name from the past decorating, what it hopes, will be the office suite of the future - strangely enoufgh called Symphony. Based on OpenOffice, IBM's software arm has come up with an application that bares an uncanny familiarity with previous SmartSuite versions. Being based on OpenOffice we know that it is powerful and file compatible with it's Microsoft competitor. However, whereas Microsoft has tried to re-define the user interface and, we believe, failed, Lotus has stuck with the tried and tested menu system.

What an innovation - using a technology that almost every PC user understands. And for this reason alone, we think Symphony deserves to succeed - it is a credible alternative to Microsoft's offering from one of the biggest names in computing history; Lotus.

Of course, dynanti is offering training courses for Symphony - contact us for further details.