OneGuyFromBarlick

lbhfarm user OK now as well Ian.

You're doing well Wendy, that's my speed on fibre and it's rock solid. It sounds as though you have solved your problems all round! I'm so pleased for you.
Hassan, the BT engineer from Blackburn, arrived on time yesterday and soon solved the problem. The old master socket had a fault, It was fine before fibre but the connection must be more sensitive now, hence the chirp on incoming calls. He made the socket next to the computer the master socket, hard wiring it direct to the BT copper coming in at the old box. Everything is fine now. He said that the original master socket, put in after the house had been rewired, was a good installation. No water ingress or corrosion which are evidently common. He was a good lad and told me that if Talktalk tried to apply the £60 charge for an internal fault I was to refuse it and refer them to his report identifying the BT equipment as the cause of the fault. A good man! Why can't all service people be like him. We got talking and I asked him whether he was born in Blackburn and he said yes, and so was his father. People tend to forget that just because someone is a different ethnic origin they are often as British as anyone else. Lovely bloke and a good sense of humour. He wouldn't believe I was 80.....

Speed on fibre was down a touch yesterday but is back at almost 39mps this morning.
I am still getting my glitches when navigating the site but have found that they are invariably cured if I scroll the page a fraction up or down. I've come to the conclusion that it is perhaps something in the graphics programme on the FM3 but as (if I remember rightly) it's a dedicated card on the mother board it's doubtful if anything can be done about it. Any thoughts Pluggy?

Its a problem if it occurs on everything you do, one site misbehaving in the wee hours of the morning doesn't mean anything. I got the email you sent this morning saying nothing worked and the one saying 10 minutes later it was all fine. No one else has reported any problems. Problems between 3 and 5 AM aren't problems if they only occur on one site. At that time its almost certainly maintenance/backups taking place Do you have problems when you post in the afternoon ?

Only problem I have all the time is the graphics one. I understand about the outages early in the morning but if there is any problem at all I will always report it, information is power! The worst example of early morning staggers is Firefox and the connection via Talktalk. It does very strange things in the early hours...
Was I right about the graphics card?

The FM3 has a separate graphics card (A Geforce GT210) but the main board has onboard graphics as well. If you think it might be a graphics problem, an option might be to remove the Geforce card and see what happens when its running on its onboard system. A further option might be up upgrade the OS to Ubuntu 14.04, It still has Ubuntu 12.04 which was the current LTS version when I built the machine in March 2013. Its a suck it and see, I don't have a sure fire fix.

Sky BB has dropped out a couple of times this evening (21:30 - 22:00). Not sure if it's md or them yet

TT over BT I have quite a lot of problems with internet (and sometimes the ADSL line) dropping out, also now getting it at the plusnet router site (over independent telecomes provider but effectively BT ). There are historic reasons why I have TT only as ADSL service , mostly due to whom pays the BT bill - its a cheaper rate ). Seems to occur more when viewing videos / catch up telly

Thanks for that Pluggy. I have got to the point where I don't see it as a problem, it's just a glitch and I have found the on screen cure, scroll a bit and make the screen refresh itself. For instance, when posting Shed Matters, when I reach the capacity of the text box text I have put in is garbled but as soon as I open the gallery for the next pic it cleans itself up.
As for changing anything on the FM3, I shall stick to 12.04 as long as they are supporting it and then I shall shout for you and we will move on to the next version. When you tell me SSHD and a new board will make it even faster we'll build a new one and get in front of the curve again..... You did a brilliant job when you designed this one, it is still brilliantly fast, you should see how it handles searching through the big archive of images..... If I had had this speed when I was doing OCR on those big rare texts and the LTP it would have saved me years of watching those bloody blue blocks creeping across the screen. I used to run solitaire and play with it while I waited.....
Kev, I think all the 'broadband' services are coming under increasing strain as use for streaming increases. Talktalk have what they call a Premium Fibre Service. I suspect that means they give you more bandwidth so less drop outs....

Lady from Plusnet called today - just to see that everything was OK. There's a month left on my contract - I'm sure this has nothing to do with it. She asked a lot of security questions - so I interrupted her, and did the same. This was resolved by her sending me an email from their official address.

She agreed I had a corking deal at the moment, and said I should ring again next month, for the next negotiation. I said I was considering dropping the £6 phone call anytime add on, and putting the money towards a monthly SIM package where I would get lots of free minutes, and could call a mobile number without penalty. She seemed to think that was a good idea.

Stanley wrote: Kev, I think all the 'broadband' services are coming under increasing strain as use for streaming increases. Talktalk have what they call a Premium Fibre Service. I suspect that means they give you more bandwidth so less drop outs....

It wasn't a bandwidth issue it was a complete loss of service. It was fine the following morning.

David, ISP accounts and variations in the package are a minefield. I've just had my first bill since I went onto fibre, a bigger one of course because of the one-off charges but I noted that I had been charged for a weekend call which were free before. I shall wait until the next bill which will be 'normal' and then see if I can improve it. No charge for the engineer has appeared yet but I am watching the buggers!
I had a cold call from Talktalk yesterday but told the lady I would only trust a transaction over the phone if I rang the help line myself. I asked her if she wanted me to do that and she simply hung up..... I leave you to draw the same conclusion I did....

My ability to receive incoming calls has a downside. I got a cold call from the nice man at Microsoft yesterday morning before 10AM and picked the phone up. I expressed interest but told him that 'Our automatic tracking system was identifying his location'. Worked like a charm, he vanished immediately. I think that is pretty good evidence he was a scammer!

Stanley wrote:My ability to receive incoming calls has a downside. I got a cold call from the nice man at Microsoft yesterday morning before 10AM and picked the phone up. I expressed interest but told him that 'Our automatic tracking system was identifying his location'. Worked like a charm, he vanished immediately. I think that is pretty good evidence he was a scammer!

Glad you like it Pluggy, I think I may have hit on the perfect response for identifying scammers..... Old dogs for hard roads.....

I congratulate them and tell them they are the 1000th caller and as such qualify for their choice of a new bathroom or kitchen. All they have to do is give me their personal details and bank account information so that I can take a small administration fee from them. They invariably give up at that point. I have also been known to talk Russian, Polish or Klingon, I think they mark you up as deranged after a while, either way they never call back.

I love this, I'm going to try it.

It's my version of Russian or Polish Liz

I think I might have identified the cause of my 'graphic garbling'. For some reason my screen isn't refreshing itself. When it happens, if I scroll down or hit the refresh button in the address bar it sorts itself out. Any suggestions about getting it to refresh itself?

I bought a 'binary device' this morning from Lidl. It came with a twenty four page instruction booklet - though to be fair twelve of the pages were in German. A full half page was devoted to explaining how to switch it on. That's Teutonic thoroughness indeed.

Have you guessed what it is yet? - a reading light.

The main thing is, does it work?

Yes indeed - it's a ' white light' reading / sewing light. Impressive quality, fantastic light, and the bulb is just 20 watts. Good help for reading the small font of Mathew Engel.

No wonder Tesco, Morrisons, Waitrose etc are having a struggle to compete - though Choudhry's seem to have cornered the market in cauliflowers.



PS - I've just re-read the above. I hope everyone is keeping up - goodness knows what a newcomer would make of it.

Perfectly clear if you are following the thread David. Engels is pretty good isn't he. I sent a copy to Martha and Roger who have just settled in Somerset after retirement in the States.... I have told them it's essential reading!
I thought I'd cracked the garbled text problem this morning by going to reduced size and expanding the width of the image on the screen manually but it was an illusion..... I got a new version of Firefox yesterday but that has made no difference.....

Big upgrade from Canonical this morning which seemed to be mainly Linux and Nvidia which, if I remember rightly, is the video software. I wondered if it might cure my regresh graphics problem but no such luck! My favourite brain gym programme, Canfield solitaire is buggered now. Always been a bit dodgy but now it freezes part way into the game..... Bugger!

Pluggy, I think I need a visit and a professional opinion..... Remember to pop in in the morning before 10AM..... Usual terms.... forcing the screen to refresh doesn't work with Solitaire and I am fed up with having to do it all the time while I am on the web.