Tag Archives: internode

Internode are AWESOME!

Yes, the return of “is AWESOME!” posts.

Finally, you might say.

In any case: Internode. New levels of awesome every day.

Unmetered content, including Linux distros, files, and more. An impressive 16 TERABYTES of content in all, if I remember correctly.

Now they’ve gone and raised my usage limit again, with their new Easy Broadband plan. On this plan, I get 50GB of usage to use every month, at 1500/256 speeds, or the fastest available at my exchange (so theoretically I could be getting ADSL2+ speeds if Telstra lifted their game), all for $50 a month.

Too easy.

Internode. New levels of awesome.

This post brought to you by Blogtober 2009. Yes, this is the third time I’ve been late, but there were other considerations, okay?

Internode Easy Broadband

Internode is well-regarded amongst serious tech users for its plans and customer service, but offers such a large range of plans that casual users might well be put off. The new Easy Broadband option costs $49.95, and involves pretty much a no-brainer installation with the fastest available speed from the exchange, and a 30GB data quota. The plan doesn’t include a standard hardware option, the notion being that users might well already have one.

The big catch, though, is that unlike most other Internode plans, the 30GB total includes uploads as well as downloads. Internode argues that this makes it easier to compare with Telstra and Optus, which both have the same approach. I still reckon it would be better not to endorse that kind of dodgy behaviour by emulating it.

via Internode Easy Broadband Has One Catch | Lifehacker Australia.

Yet another reason I love Internode.

The deal pretty much goes like this: I’m paying $50/month for 1500/256 with 10GB downloads.

This easy broadband plan from Internode will change that to a minimum of 1500/256 (the plan itself offers the fastest speed available on the exchange), with 30GB “usage”, for the same price.

What’d that, you say? Uploads are counted against quota?
Meh, that’s fine – when my largest month in terms of uploads was the small side of 7GB, I’ll be getting an extra 13GB of downloads for free – and a possible speed upgrade to boot. Factor in the fact that I’m getting all this for the same price that I’m paying now, and you can see why this choice is a no-brainer – you’d have to be nuts to not take it 🙂

Now, if only Internode started building ADSL2+ on the Kingston exchange… 😉

iHaz iPhone 3G

So the first day I tried to get an iPhone was Tuesday the 16th September 2008. I woke up, go ready, and was totoally pumped to be getting an iPhone today.

I caught the 8am bus out of my place of residence, and right after I had been to see Wall-E with a friend at 9:30, I popped into Next Byte in Hobart with the plans of picking up an iPhone there and then. By that time it was around 11:30ish.

Unfortunately, this didn’t happen as the guy that was most familiar with the sign-ups wasn’t there. I did, however, get a look at the new iPod Nanos, Touch’s, and Classics! Win – but no iPhone 3G for me. Strike one.

The next morning, I woke up bright and early to go have another crack at attaining this mythical device they call the “Second Coming” – also known as the iPhone 3G.

Once again, I caught the 8am bus. This time, a friend who also lived nearby caught the bus with me – he had a 9am driving lesson. While this made my bus trip considerably more enjoyable, it wasn’t until yet another friend caught the bus that things started to become really scary. Coincidence? Or something more…

Speaking of bus trips, there have been bus trips that could have been something life changing – but that’s for another time.

Anyway, I dropped into Next Byte again, at 9am sharp – my thinking behind this was that I would catch the guy that was most familiar with the iPhone sign-ups. Of course, there was no way I could miss him at 9am, so I managed to catch him. We filled out all the forms, and were on the phone to Telstra about to activate my phone, when they dropped the bombshell that I had to be 18 to start a post-paid (plan) contract. I knew this was going to be a problem beforehand, but I thought we could give it a crack anyway. Didn’t work.

A quick call to my mum later, and Dad is now standing in the store with me. By this time, it is about 9:30ish. The plan from this point was to sign me up in my Dads name – but alas, no! It was not to be.

Since I was on a plan before I changed to pre-paid, the current account was in my Mum’s name, with my password (which I didn’t know at the time). So naturally when I tried to transfer the name of the account to my Dads name, it didn’t work. Obviously, the next logical step was to get the account transferred into Dads name – which I needed the password for. D’oh!

My Mum rang up Telstra, confirmed her details, and the person from Telstra gave her the password to my account. All good, right?

Wrong. We tried to put the post-paid sign-up through again, and once again, it didn’t work for some unknown reason. By this time, it was around 10:00 and so it was time for breakfast. My Dad and I headed off to Banjo’s where I enjoyed a toasted Bacon and Egg pita with BBQ sauce – yum! 10:30 came, and it was time to go back to the store.

By this time my Mum had rang Telstra and confirmed exactly what needed to happen for the account to be transferred into my Dads name – my dad had to apply for the transfer (by ringing Telstra), and then my Mum would confirm the transfer by ringing Telstra. So it was only painfully obvious that when we rang Telstra to apply for the transfer, that Telstra had got it wrong and my Mum needed to authorise/confirm the transfer before it actually happened – WTF, Telstra.

By now I’m getting sick of explaining to the guys in India about my situation, not to mention dialling 1258880. On the off-chance that I managed to reach someone in either Sydney or Melbourne, they were very helpful (and I could actually understand them).

So the end result was that my Mum confirmed the transfer via conference call between her, the Telstra guy, and my Dad. Finally! The account was in my Dads name and we could continue on… This was at 11:15.

Now I had some pre-paid credit on my phone before I made the switch to post-paid – this disappeared into the ether as soon as I made the switch to 3G post-paid. I rang Telstra once again, and they said they didn’t have any record of any credit against my pre-paid account. Of course I had tried to transfer as much credit as possible using the *125# thingo – but alas, a $10 limit per 24 hours applied. Again – WTF, Telstra. I tried to manually transfer the credit when I was on the phone with the Telstra guy, but since the person I was transferring the credit to didn’t know her password to her account, I couldn’t. By the time I had come home and she had found out the password, it was too late – the credit had disappeared.

We finally got out of Next Byte at around 12 – a little over 3 hours had been spent there. I’ve never been one to complain about Telstra’s service – for which you get what you pay for, in this case mobile coverage all across Australia, and second to none 3G data speeds – but seriously, they need to get their act together.

So, why Telstra? Their coverage is indeed, second to none. I went with Telstra as I knew I was always going to have coverage (unless I ventured into the 2% of Australia that isn’t covered by their excellent NextG network), and unlike some Optus users, I wasn’t going to have massive headaches with 3G/GSM coverage in capital cities, for instance.

Sure, I’m in total agreement of the fact that I do pay a little more than I would if I went with Optus or any other carrier – but seriously, in Tasmania it’s probably worth it. How much more I do pay isn’t as much as people think it is. No, I don’t have to sell my firstborn son/kidneys/any body parts to pay for my iPhone.

However, if you take a look at Google, you’ll find that there are multitudes of forum-ites (forum-goers?) who are complaining that the government shouldn’t have sold Telstra off as a whole company as it did – as now that non-government owned Telstra has complete monopoly of the telecommunications network in Australia, leading to the fact that shiping data from Melbourne to Hobart costs SIX TIMES more than it does than from Melbourne to the US.

I blame Telstra.

I Love WINE!

Well, as some of you may already know, I’m one of those people that game on a Mac. One of the select few, who, despite crappy integrated graphics, try their best to game (CS: Source being the FPS of choice) on what hardware they have.

Now for some strange reason I can get Source to run under Steam (the gaming portal of choice) under Windows, under Apple’s way of Bootcamp – which is pretty much an emulated BIOS, since Mac’s use EFI nowadays.

However, under native Windows it runs great – as a slideshow. I get maybe 5-10fps – totally unplayable.

I even took the step to borrow and upgrade a computer that was just lying around to be able to run Source – something it now does a LITTLE better than it did. Only thing I did was up the graphics card from a Nvidia MX440 to a FX5500 – however, the mobo’s audio is screwed as a direct result of me giving the board a good shock a couple of years back – luckily, the processor, ram, HDD, and all the other parts are still fine. We replaced the case, PSU, and the board now works – albeit loudly as the fan for the PSU is attached to the heatsink by 4 different screws, none of which quite fit properly. Result? Massive vibrations and noise.

Luckily, I’m an advocate (glorified beta-tester) for this great app called CrossOver, by CodeWeavers. It’s basically a cross-platform app that emulates a VERY BASIC Windows environment so that your Windows apps like Office, Internet Explorer *shudder*, and other productivity-based apps. I use their derivative product called CrossOver Games, their Windows emulator designed purely for games (and Mac/Linux gamers!) in mind. From their website:

Based on the latest Wine Games development work, CrossOver Games allows Mac and Linux users to run their favorite Windows games in the environment of their choice. No rebooting, no switching to a virtual machine, and no Windows Operating System license required; CrossOver gives you the best performance possible if you’re not running on Windows.

For those of you that don’t know, it’s based on the WINE package – one of those recursive acronyms for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”. Basically it uses X11 under OSX for GUI stuff, and then wineloader is the process that makes the magic happen in the background.

Again, those of you that are in the know would have heard that WINE 1.0 was released not too long ago – CrossOver games was updated as a result of this. Now before the update to WINE 1.0, I had a couple of strange issues – things that I put down to WINE incompatibilities.

However, one particular issue frustrated the heck out of me – in Source under CX Games, I couldn’t play on Internode servers.because of their “server start screen”, that screen when you join a server, and says things like “Don’t Cheat!”, and “The player of the week is NOT YOU!” Now for some strange reason, I couldn’t click on the “OK” button underneath that screen on any Internode server. Bizzarely, GameArena (BigPond’s gaming portal) servers didn’t load the “Don’t Cheat!” screen either, but I could just hit OK and then all would be, okay.

With the WINE 1.0 update, and the corresponding CX Games update to 7.1, I am pleased to report that Internode servers on Source, under CX Games on OSX, now work.

Here blogs a happy, integrated-graphics card, Mac OSX gamer, all thanks to CodeWeavers and Crossover Games. And, of course, the WINE dev crew. Kudos to you, guys!

Comments below.