No, not to a Mac. I already have one of those.

But I've been a DVD Unlimited customer for around a year; they're one of several NetFlix clones that seem to have appeared in NZ. When I joined up, they took 2-3 days to get DVDs to you after you returned things, due to the lag in mail. It would have been worse if they didn't use FastPost.

Fast forward to 2005; they allow you to tell them that you've returned stuff, and then they send the replacements immediately; they typically arrive the next day! This is good. But they also get bought by Sky.

Now they're not using FastPost. So you still have to tell them you've returned stuff, but they're as slow as they were originally. This sucks, especially if you tend to forget to return things; when you do, you still have to wait several days.

Helpfully, DVD Unlimited have competition. My simple test today revealed that DVD Unlimited didn't pick up their phone and let me whinge about the lack of FastPost, while fatso did answer the phone, and told me that yes, they use FastPost, and let you flag DVDs as returned, and that I could expect to get my replacement DVD the next day if I told them I returned the previous one in the morning.

Therefore, I'm switching. Ha!

Update #1: and I've switched again, this time to Movieshack.

Update #2: It's interesting to note that of the few positive comments about DVDunlimited, those by "Stig" and "Belinda" come from the same IP address (in layman's terms: the same household, maybe the same computer) within half an hour of each other. Not that I'd ever accuse anyone of astroturfing...

It would appear that trying to run a Duron 600 with four HDDs off a 200W PSU is not a terribly good idea. I'm fairly sure that power supplies aren't supposed to produce a smell like that.

I've recieved mail from from the Elections people telling me how to go about voting. This seems like a good idea; I don't recall if something similar appeared in the mailbox last time.

Useful stuff gleaned from reading the contens of this envelope include

• An understandable description of MMP (which I didn't realise I'd misunderstood until around six months ago).
• If you're going to name a party, digits come before letters in the party lists pamphlet. Try to call yourself the "0 credibility party" if you want to end up at the top of the list.
• No party has a list longer than 65 candidates. So if there was a landslide victory for one of the major parties, and they got over 65 seats, what would they do?
• This time we get an EasyVote card! Which is a piece of cardboard listing your name, address and electorate. And a magic number. No doubt this makes it easier to look you up when you go to vote.
• There's a polling place at the bottom of my street. This is convenient. No walking up hills for me.

And it seems that in exciting, dynamic Wellington Central we get local candidates for several of the guaranteed-no-seats parties: Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis, Anti-Capitalist Alliance, and the Libertarianz. No one like that's standing in my old electorate. Although lucky voters there do get the chance to vote in garages.

Some guy from Act keeps on sending me "personal letters" via email. I wish he'd stop.

It would appear that a good way to increase hits to a website is to get linked to by Russell Brown, several times. Hits yesterday for the site in question were about twice normal, and we did about 3.5GB of traffic. Which is quite a bit.

It's interesting to see how Webalizer copes with this. As the site's hosted in the US, a reasonable amount of traffic comes from NZ ISP's transparent proxies. But webalizer, useful as it is, seems to think that IP addresses correspond to users, so it claims that (for example) there have been around 240 hits per visit this month from nc2.akl.callplus.net.nz, which seems rather high.

This also highlights, of course, how much cheaper it is to host this sort of thing in the US. If you're going for cheap, you can find people who will lease you entire computers with a traffic allowance of several hundred GB of traffic a month for less than USD50/mo, or about half that for a virtual machine (usually with a rather smaller traffic allowance). But it would be much nicer to host New Zealand-specific content locally; it's just that doing so when your primary concern is saving money, as opposed to reliability, still doesn't seem to be much of an option.

I walked to VUW again today. The weather was not as appealing as it was on Monday. But it was, as usual, relatively easy -- once I passed the bus stop and just kept going, I just kept going until I ended up at Vic.

It was nice not to listen to my Rio Karma, or read a book, or consume any other media. Instead, I had a mostly uninterrupted hour of avoiding traffic and thinking, with no other tasks vying for my attention. Which was nice. Maybe I should do this more often.

I walked in to VUW yesterday, because the alternative was waiting ten minutes for the bus. I saw it just before I got to the Braithwaite/Messines intersection, but couldn't be bothered madly running to the stop at Birdwood St to catch it.

While walking through Kelburn, chatting on IRC, I ran into sitharus, who was going to get a new CMOS battery for an old Pentium Pro. Just before I continued on, I thought I saw Eleanor on the path some distance behind me, but when I looked back before turning into Glasgow St, she still hadn't appeared. I've seen her on buses and stuff a couple of time since I arrived in darkest karori, but I've never actually spoken to her, which is kind of weird.

I also left VUW early yesterday in order to journey to the Newtown Library and borrow a book. So far, it seems fairly good, but I've only read about seventy pages. This is, alas, the first book I've borrowed from any library this year.

Are not me. Just in case you wanted to know. Although I did fix some of their code. And some of their users have produced some fairly funny billboards.

Hi, I'm Donald Gordon. You may have seen me roles such as Interface president and, further back, school librarian. But today I'm here to tell you about why VoIP over GPRS is not worth the effort.

No, the answer is not "it'll lose the telcos lots of money". This is probably the reason they think it would be bad. But there is evidence that there are more problems then their average revenue per user figures.

For the first time today, I tried VoIP over GPRS. Using the Xten Xlite softphone on my iBook, a bluetooth adapter and a SonyEricsson P900. I had two choices in codec. GSM, which was breaking up too much, or iLBC.

iLBC worked for me; I could hear what the other person was saying, mostly. But upstream was not so good. Quite frankly, I sounded like a detuned guitar being played in a drain. Read that description again carefully; you will notice there is no hint of the sound of a human voice. Likewise, the odd echoey sounds emitted from a friend's cellphone bore no resemblance to a voice saying "So can you actually hear me?"

In conclusion: the telcos have nothing to fear. VoIP over GPRS doesn't work. And Vodafone NZ's new 3G service, which probably has sufficient upstream bandwidth, specifically prohibits VoIP usage.

...attached to a portable ECG thingy, which is apparently a Holter monitor.

The monitor in question says it's a "FLASHCORDER". It looks a bit like this. It's got a Kingston 64MB CF card in a CF-to-PCMCIA adapter, and two AA batteries. Alas, no visible chips on the board, although I didn't get a very good look at it before the lid was put back on.

No, I'm not going to disassemble it; the hospital want it back tomorrow. But I have no idea how I'm going to be able to sleep with a bunch of wires wrapped around me without them coming off.

Update: No, it doesn't play Ogg. And it is indeed difficult to sleep with it on. You're stuck with lying on your back, and I kept waking up. Still, at least it'll be off in a few hours.

...and listen. It's funny. Well, to me anyway. If you don't know what these old-fashioned phone things are, you could listen to the recording I made of a call to the number in question. The call was of course recorded by tcpdumping a VoIP connection. Would you expect anything less?