Yay, NBN is here at last.

Got the nbn hooked up on Friday - and fortunately i'm still in an area they're doing fibre to the home even if it is coming in over-head. Of course most of the country should be getting that too but the total fuckwits running the country decided to show their complete lack of intelligence and add a ton of future cost and grief by changing it to 'fibre to the node' so they can maintain 50 year old copper pairs until they need to go back to the original plan at double the expense, ... but i digress.

It was something i was kind of excited for a few years ago but then I kind of cooled on the idea since the internet is mostly just a pointless waste of time. But then again so is most human activity isn't it? The NBN is mostly just going to be used for ip-tv i'm sure.

The ADSL I had before wasn't too bad so for the most part there isn't much difference so far since most sites were bandwidth limited their end rather than mine but it should be more reliable during wet weather if nothing else (the old modem was getting flakey too and needed a weekly-or-so reboot). I guess the peak (i'm willing to pay for right now) is 2x download and much higher upload (10x or 20x, not sure what it was before) compared to my ADSL, which is better than a poke in the eye.

I am getting a fixed ip address this time and will be setting up a local webserver - mostly because I can and want to but also to play with some web software and move away from google's advertising-supported services. I'm going to try to write my own cms/server/thing based on some experiments I did a few years ago; but it could be a while before I get anywhere because i'm just not in any rush and the weather is too nice over summer (and it's a fairly large undertaking together with me being a bit rusty on the technologies involved).

I'm also going to try to run it on my beagleboard xm too just for kicks - after a bit of a search i found where i'd left it and it seems to be working fine. It should be fast enough for the "expected load".

I'm too lazy to take a picture of it right now but yesterday I finally worked out how to fit the beagleboard and a usb harddrive into a tidy & compact case. I have an old/dead 3.5" USB HDD enclosure made of extruded aluminium that I cut out and filed down some holes for the usb/network slots and had a portable 2.5" HDD I filed down a bit to slide into the other end (retaining all the shock mounting and external case). I have the connecting cable running externally but since it's already got a network cable coming out the same side it sort of "works" and is a lot neater than anything I could come up with when trying to shoehorn the cables into any other reasonably sized box (usb cables are so bulky in a confined area).

I didn't add any holes for the audio/video panel but there should be room for some right-angle plugs should I need it. I guess if i ever replace my burnt out amp I could set it up near that and use it for a radio too.