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            <p>Quadruple play is a favorite telco buzzword to describe the integration of Mobile and Fixed telephony with broadband internet plus television and their delivery through one network. It seems an appropriate term to describe the setup I have planned for my new home.</p>
            <p>Perhaps it's better to use the term quintuple play because Radio will also be over the network. This home network will be a mix of wired and wireless elements. The wired bits will use Cat 6 cabling and wireless of course will be Wi Fi. A security camera and intercom at the gate, several phones and of the macbook will be served through a wireless access point.</p>
            <p>An FXS to Ethernet adapter (also known as a VoIP interface to Analog Telephone) will be needed to connect the POTS to the network. The handsets will all be VoIP phones. I don't know a great deal about PBX systems, so I am going to set one up with software. Asterix is the most likely choice at the moment.</p>
            <p>The POTS will not be really pots either. It will be a Dialog CDMA phone, which is a 3G system. I haven't quite decided wheather to use Dialog WiMax or SLT ADSL for broadband. Wimax is faster and more expensive while ADSL is slower and cheaper. The drawback with ADSL is the long waiting list and SLT's lack of reliability. It's tough decision because my mobile phone (and the phones belonging to evey member of my family) happens to be a Dialog. The satellite television system will be through a Dialog subsidiary. It doesn't pay to have an over dependence on one provider.</p>
            <p>Television itself will be through a Tivo like system powered by MythTV or something similar. Heck MythTV is much better than Tivo. You don't have to pay anything. The fact that I don't watch TV except for the odd cricket match is totally immaterial. As a geek i have to do this.</p>
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Quadruple Play at Home

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            <p>Made a second visit to the Apple Store (yes it was open this time) and bought my self an Airport Express Base station. A non mac user might ask what on earth is that? Well it's apple's fancy name for Wireless Access Point. So why buy one from Apple instead of from any old vendor? well no particular reason but i like the fact that it has a print server built in.</p>
            <p>Most of the cheaper routers do not have a USB port, so the 13,800 Rupees that i coughed up for the Airport Base station was well spent. It was rediculosly easy to setup. I just powered it up , unplugged my network cable and inserted the jack in the RJ 45 socket on the base station. That's all there was to it.</p>
            <p>The airport manager, which is included on OS X makes it really easy to configure the router for security. I set it up to use WPA two and added a list of allowed MAC addresses (MAC as in Media Access Control and not as in Apple Mac). So the network is deemed secure until the next exploit is discovered.</p>
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Airport Extreme

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            <p>he previous weekend I took my <a href="1251.html">Bigma</a> to Seru Kele. I had a little bit of fun managed to shoot a few good ones. before I bought this lens, I was told by several experts that 500 mm isn't really long enough for birding. I readily agreed with them, but then I get a 1.5x multiplication because of the Nikon D crop factor. That means the lense is a 75-750 lens rather than a 50-500mm</p>
            <p>Even so 750mm isn't really good enough if the bird small and is a fair distance away. It's pretty good for Comorants, Egrets, Pelicans and darters. Not so good for King Fishers, Pipits and Lapwings.</p>
            <p><a href="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/blog/archives/000955.html">Seru Kele</a> is a place in the dry zone with a few small lakes, lots of birds and few people. They are all interrelated. Obviously the dry zone is not as comfortable to live in as the wet zone and it doesn't have enough water to sustain a large population.</p>
            <p>There are thousands of small man made lakes scattered around the dry zone to help these people whose primary source of income is cultivation. Rice cultivation in particular needs a lot of water, followed by a dry spell before the harvesting season.</p>
            <p>Birds find paddy fields and lakes, specially ones that are just about to dry up, specially attractive.</p>
            <p>Also see : <a href="http://photos.raditha.com/">http://photos.raditha.com/</a></p>
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Bigma for Birding.

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            <p>Finally hardward vendor in Colombo has realized that there is a lot of money to be gained by selling Macs. The company, Epsi, is not the first and hopefully it will not be the last. They have shown a complete lack of imagination by naming their outlets as 'iStores' but heck the prices seem to be cheaper than what BT Options offers. Let us hope that it's not just an introductory offer and will last.</p>
            <p>I was passing by their new store (which is actually a re-labled old shop, They used to sell Viewsonic Monitors (probably still do)), so i stopped to pick up a mouse and an Airport Express base station. But they were closed since today is a Sunday (So why have full page ads on sunday papers?)</p>
            <p>How are things priced? An entry level macbook seems to be 10% more expensive than in Singapore but that's only to be expected, nothing is cheap in Colombo. In contrast the price of an Airport Express base station (which is just a fancy name for a wireless access point) seems to be comparable to the price in Singpore. It's only marginally higher than other access points but the Apple version has 802.11n (for home use that's as usefull as a third nostril) , and you get the 802.11n software update for your macbook free.</p>
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New Apple Store in Colombo

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            <div style="float: right; clear: left; margin-left: 20px;"><a href="http://blogshares.com/blogs.php?blog=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.raditha.com%2Fblog%2F&amp;user=54474&amp;referer=54474"><img alt="Listed on BlogShares" height="23" src="http://blogshares.com/images/blogshares.jpg" width="117"></a></div>It's nine days since my last post. I blame blogshares for that. The topic of that post itself was about blogshares. It certainly eats up too much of your time, specially if there is a corporate war going on. Fortunately the corporate war that started on <a href="1250.html">Friday the 13th</a> ended yesterday.<p></p>
            <p>When the blog shares war started the first to run was our miss know it all admin. I wouldn't be surprised if she returns to the game now. As for me, I left the untouchables corporation today after the war ended. I only fought through it, out of a sense of loyalty. During it's height six of us (myself, jin jirrie, MNO, semar, del and LKK) were fighting off around 20 of them.</p>
            <p>This silly fight was about the 0.5% interst that blog shares corporation offer to their members. 0.5% is insignifcant in the first place and to achieve that rate, you need to own 50 billion B$ worth of blogs. The Renegades corporation which had a very low rate tried to steal our blogs to push it back up. We were taking them back and they were stealing them again, this continued for a month until both corporations called it quits. The end came when both sides managed to aquire the 0.5% though various means.</p>
            <p>During this time i had just 0.01 B$ invested in untouchables. That 0.01 was put there to express my disgust at the obsession with corporate interest.</p>
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Corporate Wars and Three Months of B$

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            <p>Been a long time since my last post, That's because all my spare time (and a bit of time that wasn't spare) has been taken up by Blog shares. I am appalled by the number of typos in my previous post (which was on <a href="1251.html">july 25th</a> and typed in a hurry). I blame B$ for that too!</p>
            <p>In my <a href="1250.html">previous entry about blogshares</a> i had mentioned that not all RPI members resort to PRDs. That comment was made at the specific request of Curtis. Who wasn't a PRD user at the time. Now he has changed his spots and is very trigger happy when it comes to PRDs. But as the picture on their home page shows, they are shooting blind with their eyes closed.</p>
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Monthly Archives for 2007 08

Quadruple Play at Home

Airport Extreme

Bigma for Birding.

New Apple Store in Colombo

Corporate Wars and Three Months of B$

B$ bogeys