Torrents on Metered ADSL

The house in which I live has a metered ADSL connection from slingshot.co.nz which, to be brief, sucks. Our download speed varies greatly based on time of day and how long slingshot's equipment has been up.

Everyone in the house shares the 10KB/s upstream we have which makes downloading files via BitTorrent very slow. Our upstream becomes saturated and the connection is unacceptably slow. I found TorrentFlux which is a web based BitTorrent client which will run on your dedicated server or, if you have a fat upstream, the file server on your local network.

All you need is a LAMP setup with Python and you get a great interface for downloading torrents to a remote machine. You can even create accounts for everyone in your house. Make sure to enable "Security Code Login" which displays an image with numbers in it to prevent people from using a brute force HTTP password cracker. (or at least make it harder)

The Brain and Sleep

In 1998 I was in Portland, OR talking with a fringer about various ways to avoid wasting time sleeping. One hypothesis that came up involved using an EEG biofeedback machine to record your own brain patterns while sleeping and then later attempting to match your REM patterns with meditation and other mental exercises. The end goal being that, with enough practice, one could concentrate in a certain manner to achieve the same benefits for the brain that REM sleep provides.

I checked on eBay at the time and the only machines available were used and somewhere in the neighborhood of $8,000USD. I quickly moved on to other ideas which mostly involved all coffee and cigarettes.

I recently revisited the idea while walking to the gym with a friend. When I came home I did a quick google search and game up with a project entirely devoted to DIY biofeedback with homemade EEG devices and OSS applications.

Wicked!

Hosting. Dedicated and otherwise.

Shared Hosting

I recently found site5's $5 deal which almost convinced me to become one of their customers. When they doubled the bandwidth and storage space I jumped on board. It comes with 110GB of rsync-able storage space and 5TB of bandwidth per month. You can host up to 110 domain names using named virtual hosts. The control panel is wicked powerful while still being easy to understand.

For $120 for two years I was skeptical that they were just selling off as many accounts as possible before going out of business. So far they have been awesome and their email tech support is the dogs bullocks.

Dedicated Hosting

Some of my other bandwidth intensive projects were choking our broadband connection at home so I started looking for a dedicated server a week after site5 temporarily disabled my account. After reading their ToS and a few cordial emails they enabled it again.

The Good
I found a few different providers with different disk sizes and bandwidth offerings but the one that stood out was the $49/mo server from Aplus.net which I decided upon only after initiating an order with iWeb Technologies.

The Bad
iWeb Technologies is a Montreal based company which offers a server with almost double the specs for only $20 more a month. I originally initiated an order with iWeb before I found the $49/mo server from Aplus. I immediately put in a request to cancel my order and then received two different introduction emails from my new account manager. I sent 3 emails requesting that he cancel my order.

Finally 7 days later someone from their billing department sent me an email explaining that I had to send them a photocopy of my credit card and sign some documents for them to issue me a refund. This was not a request that I felt comfortable complying with and I sent a reply to the billing agent and copied my account manager, the founders, and iWeb's lawyer.

9 days later I received an email from my account manager requesting me to sign and fax in contracts before they could provision the server. I responded and CCd every email address I could find for iWeb:

I have just escalated from irate to livid. I have sent you 4 requests
to cancel this order and refund my money. The last request was copied
to the founders and iWeb's lawyer.

I don't want to hear from anyone else from a different department. If
my money is not refunded by Tuesday June 12th of 2007 at the start of
business I will begin the process of disputing the charge with my
credit card company and I will lodge a complaint against iWeb with the
Better Business Bureau of Montreal http://www.bbb-bec.com/ and with
the bank that provides iWeb's merchant account.

Gardner

They encouraged me to dispute the charges if I refused to send in a photocopy of my credit card. A claims officer from my bank will be contacting me shortly to gather details about the dispute.

Long story short: I'm with Aplus. iWeb pissed me off. Site5 kicks ass!