David North

Reader, are you an idiot? Let me quantify that slightly. Are you the sort of person who gets up on a Saturday morning and puts a load of washing on without checking the pockets? And realises that your Fitbug is getting a wash it could have done without? I am.

I’ve done this before, and in the past, got away with replacing the battery. This time, though. pushing a new battery in made all the segments on the screen come on, and brought forth no response to the buttons.

So I took the whole thing apart and found it covered in white crud, presumably washing powder. Spraying the innards with WD40 drove that out, and re-assembling brought it back to life and saved me spending £30 on a new one.

Having booked myself the obvious three days off work in December to join up the bank holiday weekends for Christmas and New Year, I thought I might as well book the train tickets back home too.

Logged on to RSH (one of the few operators still willing to post you the tickets for free) and bashed in my dates and times. The cheapest single from Oxford to Macclesfield on 23 December after 1700 (with Railcard)? £39. No sign of an advance single.

Hmm. Maybe RSH being weird. Try East Coast? Nope, same prices, same problem. Same deal with trying the morning of the 24th.

The National Rail Enquiries journey planner’s calendar doesn’t go up to the 23rd of December, and if you enter that date manually, it says you can only book twelve weeks in advance.

So, do we think RSH and East Coast would have told me that? Or taken my money? Being a regular reader of Private Eye’s Signal Failures, the whole thing smells like shameless profiteering to me, but I’m not about to risk £20 finding out. I’ll report back in two weeks.

Paying BT or Virgin Media £10-£15 per month for a landline telephone seems like a waste of money when I have a mobile phone contract which gives me 300 free minutes per month. But it still costs more for other people to call me on t’mobile, and not everyone has a contract phone (do they, Mum?). So I’ve been looking around for VOIP providers who could give me a geographic UK phone number which I could take calls on via my home internet connection.

There are quite a few providers who’ll do this for £3-£4 per month, but sipgate are doing their best to disprove the theory that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, offering UK numbers for free (at least for the moment).

Within a couple of minutes of signing up, I was the proud owner of a ‘real’ 01865 Oxford phone number and some SIP credentials for registering a device to make/receive calls via it (obviously outbound calls cost real money, it’s just that there’s no line rental or monthly charge to have the number which people can call at their usual geographic rate).

I managed to set up Linphone as follows:

Under Linphone > Preferences > Manage SIP Accounts, hit ‘Add’ under ‘Proxy Accounts’, set “SIP Identity” to sip:1234@sipgate.co.uk, “SIP proxy address” to sip:sipgate.co.uk. OK out and you should get a prompt for your sipgate password; put it in and the status bar should read ‘Registration on sip:sipgate.co.uk successful’.

I’m pleased to report that incoming calls come with the caller ID information – the incoming caller will be “01234 567 890″ <sip:01234567890@sipgate.co.uk>. As far as I can tell, it only supports one incoming call at once, but for £0/month, that’s not too shabby

Next on my list is to buy an ATA and hook up my real cordless phone to sipgate. Watch this space!

On Monday 1 August, we moved into our new house.

On Monday 22 August, we got an internet connection.

Fortunately, I have a shiny Android phone with WiFi hotspot capability these days, and it turns out the 500MB of data O2 give you lasts almost exactly three weeks if used carefully. They even send you a text when you hit 80% of it, and don’t automatically bill you when you reach 100%.

All very civilised, which is more than can be said for the process of getting an internet connection in central Oxford. First, we tried to get some ADSL via our BT line. There is a master socket in our lounge (carefully hidden behind a curtain, half way up the wall, natch), but the previous tennants had been on Virgin Media, and the BT socket was dead.

It took several phone calls to BT and the Post Office to establish that re-activating the line would cost us £130 for an engineer’s visit – even though the wiring and socket looked perfectly intact to me. Oh, and it would take three weeks. The process of arguing with BT Openreach about reactivation is apparently so tedious that the vast majority of ISPs offering ADSL don’t bother, insisting on your line having a phone number and a dial tone before they’ll talk to you (even if you want to pay them for the line rental too).

Having eschewed the BT monopoly’s attempt to gouge us for £130, we turned to Virgin. More promisingly, their bog-standard 10Mbps broadband (with no phone or TV) didn’t come with an up-front connection fee, but guess what – it would take three weeks to send their bloke to install it. Why they can’t offer self-installation in cases where the house is already wired is beyond me.

Our connection is currently showing a pretty respectable 9.71Mbps downstream and 0.5Mbps upstream – pretty close to the 10Mbps we’re paying for. The two annoyances so far have been that the engineer was obviously getting a bonus for conserving coax, as they gave us a 60cm length just long enough to put the modem/router on the bottom shelf underneath all our DVDs and books, rather than on the top shelf where it would give a better signal to the top two floors. Luckily some past installation of Virgin had left a lot of coax and splitters in a drawer, so I deployed some of those.

The other fly in the ointment is that our modem/router is Virgin’s superhub, much maligned by some as flaky and unreliable. I’ve not found the wifi range great on ours, but positioning it on the aforementioned top shelf has helped a lot. The main problem so far has been that, after a brief power blip on Monday, it came back on but disabled the WiFi, leaving me to plug into it with an ethernet cable in order to turn it back on.

The noddy web interface on the superhub also worried me, but it turned out there’s a well-hidden ‘advanced settings’ link back to the good old Netgear web interface with all the knobs and buttons for the advanced user.

I’ll report back if we experience any serious problems.

Meanwhile, here’s hoping that by the next time I move house, some geek will have achieved a landmark victory at the European Court of Human Rights, mandating that internet is a basic human right and must be installed within 48 hours of a person moving in to a new house. Not holding my breath, though.

Over lunch with some colleagues last month, the subject of why Microsoft is paying $8.5bn for Skype came up. “Simple”, I replied, “for years, governments have been looking for back doors into encrypted communication systems, including Skype. The US government must be secretly subsidizing Microsoft’s takeover in return for access to all the Skype traffic”.

Consensus round the table was that my theory sounded just a bit too plausible for comfort. If I disappear suddenly, you’ll know why…