Monthly Archives: December 2014

Missing cat Garfield reunited with owner after being lost for 7 years – Telegraph

31 Dec 2014 By in News Tags: ,

A ginger cat missing for seven years has found its way home for the first time ready for 2015.

Garfield disappeared after going on the prowl from his home in Bridgend, South Wales, in 2008.

Despite not going far Garfield’s CAT-nav apparently malfunctioned and he eventually ended up going back to a different home in the same area.

He was taken in by another family who believed he was a stray before they decided to take him to the Cats Protection Bridgend Adoption Centre.

There it was discovered Garfield had a microchip and despite an old address being listed the centre was able to track down his original owner Julie Calder.

Missing cat Garfield reunited with owner after being lost for 7 years – Telegraph.

Steam Holiday Sale

31 Dec 2014 By in Video Games Tags: , ,

Steam have been running a sale with different games discounted every day. Current collection includes the original Final Fantasy VII. A classic game, although now showing its graphical age (this was during the time of the original PS1/PSOne/PSX console, and I played that game to death on my original brick/fat/phat PS2 — which I still have, mind you.) So take a look if you want.

Link to news article here.

Link to game page here.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

29 Dec 2014 By in Video Games Tags: , , , , ,

Experimenting with video game capture, and here’s my capturing of the pre-game movie. This is referred to by Square Enix as the “Prologue” video. For those (like me) who joined the game late, this short movie connects the first version of the game (Final Fantasy XIV) with the second version of the game (Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn). The end of the first game showed the first part of this movie (up until where the heroes get teleported), and it cliff-hanged there. With the release of the new version, they released this updated version of the movie, which added the ending to the movie.

Tethering and Routing

29 Dec 2014 By in Linux, Technology Tags: , , , ,

As you may recall from an earlier post, I discovered my broadband connection at home was horrendously slow compared to my 4G/LTE connection on my phone. Now, I regularly tether my laptop to my phone and enjoy download speeds in excess of 1.2Mbps, compared to 300-400kbps over my home broadband. However, if you try to turn the phone into a WiFi hotspot, then my MNO (Three) doesn’t like it and asks me to pay £5 for a 2GB allowance. However, there doesn’t appear to be a restriction on physical tethering (and I’ve downloaded more than 2GB).

So, the question is, is it possible to tether my phone to my laptop and share that connection to other machines on the network? I suspect so, but it will involve me tinkering with my internet settings, and disabling settings in my broadband router, so it behaves more like a hub than a router.

My thoughts are (and this is subject to my tinkering):

  1. Configure my broadband router to not issue IP addresses — not necessary if you have static IPs on your network.
  2. Configure my laptop (which has the phone tethered) with a DHCP server so that it does issue IP addresses. Again not necessary if you have static IP addresses everywhere.
  3. If you have static IP addresses everwhere, change the default gateway to be the IP address to be the machine with the tethered phone (laptop in my case)
  4. Configure my laptop to route out packets via the gateway — notably, to switch on IP forwarding. From brief researching, this might require kernel recompiling, or at the least, module inserting via insmod or modprobe
  5. Make adjustments to the firewall (ipchains) to allow IP masquerading/NATting, preferably utilising security lock down, so not anyone can access the net via my phone.

If I can tear myself away from my newly found Final Fantasy XIV questing, I may try messing with my settings and see if I can get this to work.

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