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            <p>For while now many disgruntled former Blogshares addicts have claimed that all is not well at Blogshares. Those hooked on the game have always dismissed those allegations as sour grapes. I am also a disgruntled player, so I will not be surprised if my allegations suffer the same fate.</p>
            <p>there are two kinds of players at blogshares, the insiders and the others. If you are an insider, you can get away with blue murder, you can violate any blogshares rule and get away with it, if you are not one of the insiders you are going to have a tough time. Even the slightest indescretion and the group at calls itself the BSEC will be after you.</p>
            <p>If you are not an insider, you might yourself suspended, temporarily or permanently. Else you might find that some of your B$, ideas, artifacts or what not have been wiped off because you have violated some rule or other. It's fine to violate those rules if you happen to be an insider. reminds one of Sri Lankan politics.</p>
            <p>What I really found annoying is that they charge their membership fee even if you are suspended. They collect their payments through paypal so I complained to them. Unfortunately paypal can reverse a transaction only if tangible goods are involved. If Blogshares doesn't return the money, I am going to file a chargeback with my credit card. The amount involved really is just peanuts, but it's the principal.</p>
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Someone should investigate the Blogshares BSEC

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            <p>Trying to see if the Huawei ETS 1001 phone which came with my Dialog CDMA connection is any good. Well even without opening the box I can tell you that it's no good, it's a Huawei, but none of the CDMA services providers here in Sri Lanka seem to offer anything else. ETS 1001 is the best out of a bad lot, pretty expensive too by comparision. This is what you get when you connect it to a linux box.</p>
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Huawei ETS 1001

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            <p>My home network is supposed to carry all kinds of stuff including data, video and voice. The <a href="1320.html">voice bit is causing trouble</a>. There aren't any licensed VOIP providers in Sri Lanka (yes , our politicians are dragging us into the dark ages). So if you buy a phone it's a POTS terminal or a mobile. And the only kind of connection you can get is a POTS connection or a mobile connection.</p>
            <p>The simplest solution then is to wire up your home with plain old twisted pair telephone cables, but that is consenting to live in the same dark ages as the politicians. A solution from Graham Bell's or Queen Victoria's time, would be to use cat 6 cable instead of phone wire but that like the Victorian moral values that Sri Lankans have embraced as our own would be extremely stupid.</p>
            <p>So the proper solution is to use a combination of FXS to Ethernet and FXO or Ethernet adapaters. The wall socket would be connected to the FXS to Ethernet port (or is the other way round I always mix up FXS and FXO). That would allow the voice data to travel over TCP/IP with in the house. You will need an antique phone to answer the call. Thats where the FXO to Ethernet (or is it the FXS to Ethernet) adapter comes into the picture.</p>
            <p>Of course it would be much simpler if you could use an IP phone and much better if you can use a WiFi phone. Unfortunately wired IP telephones are not easy to come by either. Same goes for WiFi phones. If you rule out the high end N Series phones by Nokia, or equally expensive imates and pocket PCs, you cannot find any WiFi phone at all. Obviously it's stupid to use an expensive PDA as a substitute for a cheap cordless telephone.</p>
            <p>So what's the solution? Stay tuned, I will let you know.</p>
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IP Telephony at home.

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            <p>Been looking for a good inverter for more than an year now. My search began well before I even the blueprints for <a href="http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/blog/archives/001122.html">my house</a> was drawn up, yet after tracking many difficult routes I am back to square one.</p>
            <p>Initially I was looking at Grid Tie Xantrex or Sunny Boy inverters. Unfortunately neither company has a local agent in Sri Lanka. Well sunny boy does have an agent but it's staffed by a bunch of idiots who probably cannot tell the difference between AC and DC.</p>
            <p>The second problem with these grid interactives inverters is that they are very expensive. In other countries governments are very keen to adapt renewable energy but here in Sri Lanka they are very keen on Solar power. So while Australia provides subsidies for inverters and solar panels, the Sri Lankan government is borrowing heavily to build a coal power plant. So grid tie inverters are out.</p>
            <p>I was then looking at inverter chargers that can switch between two or three sources depending on consumption and availability. The sources of energy of course being the PV panels, the grid and the battery bank (which you really cannot call a source in it's own right). Again Xantrex and Sunny Boy are not affordable. There are few cheap chinese versions avaiable but most of them aren't pure sine wave.</p>
            <p>Then I came across a local company (Vence) that offers a range of inverters and Online UPSes. One of their product has a feature they called 'Solar Power Server' and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg. I inquired about it and their sales rep told me that it can draw power from solar panels, I thought my search has ended.</p>
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Inverters for solar power (part 1)

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            <p>My <a href="1263.html">quadruple play at home scenario</a> was seriously stuck in a rut until a couple of weeks ago but finally things have started to move forward.</p>
            <p>One of the biggest stumbling blocks of course was the broadband connection but fortunately <a href="1313.html">Dialog Broadband stepped up</a> and connected me up with a 2Mbps WiMax connection. that's much more than the 512Kbps SLT ADSL I have in this house. Connecting up with ADSL is like pulling teeth without anesthesia and once you get your connection you get lousy service. I am relieved that I do not need to use their services.</p>
            <p>The second stumbling block was the fixed line itself. Fortunately Dialog Broadband does not need a fixed line. You do need one for an SLT ADSL connection and you need to wait months before the wire you up. Again it was dialog broadband that came to the rescue. I apealed to them to provide me with a CDMA connection. And they listened. I am their first customer in Colombo (where they have not started commercial operations yet)</p>
            <p>Getting the CDMA line doesn't solve all my problems though. I still need WiFi phones for use as terminals. Much to my chargrin I have not been able to find a single supplier for them here in Sri Lanka. This is rediculous. Apparently you need a license to import anything with a radio transmitter in it (Sri Lanka is a failed state after all). No one seems to have bothered to obtain a license for WiFi phones because hardly anyone is likely to buy one. Some importers haven't even heard of them.</p>
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Two steps closer Quadruple Play

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            <p>After returning from an overnight stay at the Club Palm Bay in Marawila I was extremely disappointed to find that the Compact Flash Card (Transcend 1GB) on my Nikon D70S was corrupt. I have lost about 25-30 photos because of this.</p>
            <p>I had a sniff of trouble while taking some night photos close to the pool. All of a sudden the shutter could not be activated. In plain old terms, no matter how hard you press the button, it would't click. Of course if the subject is not in focus, the D70S will not click (unless you are in Manual Mode (I wasn't)). You can override that by holding down the AE-L button. Even with the AE-L button pressed, the shutter refused to activate itself.</p>
            <p>Thinking that the CF card had become unsettled due to movements, I switched off the camera, took out the card and put it back in place. Now I could click. I went on my merry way taking many more photos and thought no more about it till I got home. That's when I found a lot of file names with wierd characters in them.</p>
            <p>These filenames were plain old illegal (according to filenaming rules for FAT (the card has a FAT file system). Worse still of the 211 files with valid names, only about 200 could be copied. Then I decided to run <em>fsck</em> on it. In order to avoid further possible data loss, I first created a mirror of the flash card on my hard drive ( <em>dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=flashcard</em> ) then it recovered 220 files but out of those 220 nine could not be read by any image editor. So I am back to 211 images.</p>
            <p>On closer inspection I found that the loss is even worse than it appeared at first. Looking at the original files list, all the images from DSC_0563.JPG to DSC_083.JPG are missing. And as usually happens in photography the missing ones are the best ones.</p>
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A Corrupt Compact Flash card

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            <p>Well folks, I have been kicked out of blogshares. Supposedly for exploiting a bug or loophole. At the moment the ban is temporary. I hope they make it permanent. I have wasted too many hours of my life at that site.</p>
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