All VOIPed up

Yes! No longer will Optus charge us nearly $30 a month for the privilege of connecting a phone to their copper wires. We've gone to VOIP. More specifically, I bought a VOIP analogue phone adapter, Cisco PAP2T, and have subscribed to MyNetPhone for service.
Its brilliant, and will save us loads of money. It does mean a new home phone number though, but that's no big deal.

PC Transplant Pain

Oh dear. I ripped out the guts of my PC home Ubuntu server and replaced them with the old guts of my main desktop PC which I upgraded recently.
This all seemed to go quite well, the guts-ripping was completed in style, and the dust-cleaning of the existing case completed to satisfaction. Then I put in the power supply and motherboard from my old desktop. The mobo still had processor, heatsink, and RAM attached, no big deal. I used the existing hard drive to keep the Ubuntu install as my network server, and added some extra SATA drives from my old PC, made redundant by the awesome new RE3 RAID 0 twins.
Started it up, and after some initial BIOS shenanigans, got Ubuntu up and running nicely. Then. After 10 minutes. CRASH. Black screen, PC speaker waiting WEEE-WAH-WEEE-WAH like a desperate siren looking for a wreck. I don't think it's heat as I've checked the BIOS heat levels for CPU and mobo and added a case fan. Its not the video card, because I swapped it with another for the same result after 10 minutes. How can it be the mobo/RAM/CPU after I've been using it for five good years??
I don't know. I have sent mail to ABit tech support hoping for joy.

Bugger.

Jupiters L4, L5

Check this very cool animation of some asteroids orbiting within Jupiter's L4 and L5 lagrange points. The yellow dot at the top is Jupiter, and the fast green on in the middle is Earth. See how huge an area Jupiters L4 and L5 occupy! I assume the main rotating circle of asteroids is the asteroid belt. You can also see the glomming of asteroids around Jupiters L3 as well.
Linked from here.

Fibre to the Home

This is great news today for Australia. Laying fibre optic cable to most homes and businesses in Australia will mean we get internet access speeds of 100Mb/s and better - expanding up to around 1Gb/s. OK, many websites can't feed you that sort of speed, so if it were in tomorrow, it wouldn't make a huge difference. However, this will take 8 years to complete (todays guess), but I'd say most of us will have it in around half that time. Do my street first!! This really is an investment in the future and I applaud the decision.

Back from Canberra

Just back from Canberra and we had a great time. We took the kids round

• Questacon
• Parliament House
• Canberra Space Centre
• Cockington Green

Questacon had loads of really cool experiments and interactive science displays including an earthquake simulator, giant animated Funnel Web spider, optical illusions, holograms, lightning cage etc.