AT&T 3G Coverage Updates in East Tennessee
This is an update to a few earlier articles concerning the status of the AT&T 3G network along the easter part of the Internet 40 Corridor in Tennessee. It would seem AT&T is slowly filling up the gap between Knoxville, TN and Lebanon, TN along I40. A year ago AT&T put out a press release indicating that they were building out 525 additional 3G cell sites. Within the last few weeks they have turned on towers extending west on I40 from the previous cut off at around mile marker 366 so that there is now complete 3G coverage from Knoxville west until around mile marker 339. This is the first noticeable east-west coverage expansion along I40 in the last 2 years. For the first time EVER I had bonafide 3G AT&T coverage in Cumberland County. Granted...
Adventures of the Orphaned App
Yesterday I purchased an iPhone App called iDOS. iDOS is a DOS emulator based on DOSBOX which allows you to run Naive DOS applications from Zork all the way to Windows 3.11. Having grown up in the DOS era, my childhood is filled with memories of games ran on my IBM PS1, and later my Home Built 386. I knew from the first moment I read the post announcing iDOS I would have to jump on the program, buying it for 99 cents. Apple has the inane and unprofessional MO of allowing a real cool/useful app on the App store, but the moment some big shot in a black turtle neck and blue jeans finds out, it’s pulled. Needless to say iDOS was pulled down within a few hours. (When I say “black turtle neck and blue jeans” I don’t mean Steve Jobs himself, but...
NVIDIA Class Action Settlement
Over the last several years we have helped many of our Clients with issues related to HP notebooks that mysteriously died. These where HP DV series notebooks. In some of these cases, we were able to get HP to “fix” the problem under a special extend warranty program. Of course we still had to cover the expense of shipping the units to HP and our techs time in diagnosing the program. The problem turned out to be the NVIDIA Graphic Processor, which had over headed and had become detached from the motherboard. After HP closed their special extend warranty on these units, we were able to save some Notebooks by reattaching the GPU to the motherboard. Sadly, others we were never able to save. There apparently has been a class action settlement with...
The Copyright Wars head to the US Supreme Court
It would seem that SCOTUS has decided to take up an appeals case for Whitney Harper, a Texas college student who was accused of copyright violations by the RIAA. A Texas federal judge award the RIAA $7,400 for the infringement or $200 per file for the 37 songs cited in the case. This was much lower than the $27,750 total the RIAA was demanding, themselves pressing for the maximum $750 per file infringement. The Judge in the case reduced the amount based on Ms Harpers defense of “innocent infringement”. Not happy with the $7,400, the RIAA themselves appealed the ruling, and a federal appeals court judge granted them the full $27,750. Now Ms Harper has filed with SCOTUS asking for a final ruling on the manner. The RIAA has mounted a sustained and dubious...
Asterisk AHOY!!
I just spent two days developing a new Asterisk System for the office. Asterisk is the open-source free PBX Phone system that has all the functionally of major and expensive systems from ESI, Nortel, Nokia, and AT&T. A year ago we installed a “virtual pbx” solution with RingCentral. We’ve been pretty happy with the system, although adoption of the 800 number has been rather slow. To be honest, the 800 number is unnecessary, 90% of our clients are just in 3 local calling areas, and one one really “pays” for long distance anymore. However because of the rural nature of Crossville, it’s almost impossible to “port” our local number numbers to any major VOIP service, ergo we had no option but to get an 800...
UT Football Games Online
Every year about this time I revamp my “online audio streaming” for UT Football. John Ward forever spoiled me on Radio Football, and when I was living far away from Tennessee my only source for UT games was the internet. Now, I pipe online broadcast games through my HOM (Home, Office and Mobile) media setup, so that no mater where I am, I can be assured that I have access to “Football time in Tennessee”, even if I’m on the far side of the world. Because radio stations change, I have to update my HOM Media system periodically to make sure I have a good source for the Audio. Fortunately UT Athletics publishes a list of radio station in their “Vol Radio Network” at: http://www.utsports.com/ot/radio.html I start by going...
