Plusnet and getting decent download speed

I have had an ongoing issue with Plusnet and my download speed. I live about 6Km from the exchange so I am not expecting miracles but a DL speed of 300K was a bit much. After much back and forth (and to be honest the Plusnet folk were really good) I read somewhere that on a long line with it’s inherent loss, an ADSL2 connection was better than an ADSL2+.

Once I had got into the root of the router (see previous post) I forced the router to ADSL2 using the CLI and bingo my speed has settled just under 2Mb. Errors are pretty high but that is not noticeable, but the better download speed certainly is.

If you have tried everything else, try this.

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Posted in general | Leave a comment

Get Root Access to a Plusnet Thompson Router

This is blatantly plagiarised from several sources but if I have it here I can find it again!

Using a Telnet program such as PuTTY or similar, telnet into the router. The default address would be 10.0.0.138 and the default user name is “admin” with a blank password.

Once connected, copy & paste in the following commands, one line at a time. Note that each line starts with a colon “:” The router’s “admin” user does not have sufficient privileges to add a root user, but it can add a script which when run can do the trick. I’ve stuck with “guru” for both user name & password as before, but you can choose your own …

I would suggest pasting into Notepad first to make sure the lines don’t wrap as they are displayed here.

:script add name addroot command "user add name guru password guru role root descr ROOT"
:script run name addroot pars ""
:saveall

To test the new user, disconnect the Telnet connection and Telnet back in, this time using the user name “guru” and password “guru”. You should be able to get in.

Now using your web browser, go to your router at 10.0.0.138. Browse to “Toolbox”, then “User Management”, then “Switch to another user”. Enter “guru” and “guru” in the user name & password boxes. You should now be logged in as a root user. If you like you can change the default user by selecting “Set the default user” from the “User Management” page.

Note that a reset to defaults will wipe out this change. Also running the setup wizard restores some settings back to default – I’m not sure about the users.

Oh and the other thing you need is the CLI manual which you can get from here

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Posted in Computer, Cool Stuff | Leave a comment

test of mobile app.

Test

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Wildfire upgrade woes (nearly)

We now have 2 HTC Wildfire phones in our household so there was great satisfaction when Three eventually released Android 2.2 (Froyo). Upgraded the first phone no bother but when the second was done, on restart, we continually got the error

Sorry!
The Application HTC Sense (process com.htc.launcher) has stopped unexpectedly. Please Try Again.

Rang Three who of course did not know the answer. They did offer a replacement (as we had had the phone a couple of weeks) but in the end I didn’t need it as I found the solution while on the call.

http://myhtcdesire.com/tutorials/fix-the-application-htc-sense-process-com-htc-launcher-has-stopped-unexpectedly will lead you to it.

Basically what you need to do is this

1. Press the Search button on your phone
2. Type in Settings and select it from the results
3. Select Applications > Manage Applications > HTC Sense > Clear Data
4. Press the Home button
5. You should now see the default wallpaper and widgets
6. Try adding a widget. Either:
* Press the +icon in the bottom-right > Widget
* Press Menu > Add to Home > Widget
* Long-press an empty space on your homescreen > Widget
7. If you find that the HTC widgets are missing from the Add Widgets list go to Settings and repeat steps 3 and 4

HTH

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Printing from a mobile phone

One of the biggest issues I have had with my HTC Desire is how to print from it. The solution I found is by using Dropbox. There are several scripts around but frankly they didn’t work. So here is my solution for Ubuntu:

#!/bin/bash
 
export PrintQueue="/home/xxxxxxxx/Dropbox/printqueue/";
 
# Spaces in file names will cause havoc
IFS=$'\n'
 
for PrintFile in $(ls -1 ${PrintQueue}); do
 
# Print each file and delete it if the print is successful.
lpr -r ${PrintQueue}${PrintFile}
 
done

Download and install “Scheduled Tasks” AKA Gnome Schedule, and create a job that runs every minute and hey presto.

What I have not done is check to see what happens if the print fails. Does it add one to the queue every minute? That is for another time. For now works for me!

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