Gerhard Potgieter

After doing my daily morning routine of getting coffee and reading a few forum post on mybroadband.co.za I came across a interesting post.

For those of you that know about the One Red Paperclip this is something similiar. This is about a young 21year old student wanting to make his dream come true of being a pilot.

The site www.abadge.co.za is where Itai Etzman has placed his first trade option online. What he is aiming to do it trade item for item as till het gets to say a fully paid flying coarse or something of the likes that can send him off to flying school.

Itai placed his first item, a F16 badge, up for trade. If you have anything worth while of trading please go help the guy out.

First Item up for trade is this F16 Badge.

Today I discovered a new site dedicated to listing broaband packages. Its brand new as ISP’s are still adding their packages on the site as I am writing this entry. The site www.broadbanddeals.co.za looks like it is a MyBroadband.co.za site. The goal of the site is to list all types of broadband packages available by ISPs for the 6 types of broadband services offered in South Africa. The site has a nice control panel for ISP to log into and add packages and details about them in a convenient way. So if you are a ISP feel free to register on the site for free and help make the site a success.

So lately some peeps cant seem to get the hang of connecting to a irc server, luckely i stubled across a nice thing called mibbit. Users can now connect to the CTWUG channel with the push of one button. To check it out or use it follow the CTWUG IRC link at the top of my site. Happy irc’ing noobs.

Hey dudes, hierdie sal my eerste blog wees in my eie moeder taal aangesien dit rock.

Eks trots om aan te kondig die release van Die Heuwels Fantasties se nuutste single “Vinger Alleen”.

Wie is Die Heuwels Fantasties? Wel as jy nog nie van hulle gehoor het nie wake up buddy. Hulle sound maak uit van die nuwe musiek finominaam genaamd Electronic Pop Rock wat besig is om Suid Afrika aan die ore te ruk.

Die groep bestaan uit Hunter van Fokofpolisiekar en aKING, en Pierre van Lukraaketaar. Doen julle self ‘n guns en gaan luister gerus na die dudes. Albei hulle singles is beskikbaar op hulle Facebook Page.

As julle die sound like check gerus vir Jax Panik en Zebra & Giraffe ook uit, albei local bands wat tans die 5FM High5 @ 5 dominate.

Last night Neotel showed their firt TV advert. This means the game is on in the local telecoms market and telkom will be feeling the competition soon.

The add is embeded.

Have you ever tried waching a video on YouTube and gotten the message “We’re sorry, this video is no longer available”?

If you are a South African and using Telkom then your answer probably is yes.

The problem arrise from transparent proxies SAIX pushes all traffic through. This results in your connection to the site having a different IP each time, and then this can be seen as a hacking attempt of some sort.

Some forums out there operate on the same principal, say you are logged in and your IP changes you are then automatically logged out.

Good news is there is a work arround. You can use a fixed proxy, that will result in you having the same IP address each time you load a page.

To make use of this simply edit your browser proxy setting and add cache.saix.net:8080 as the server and port.

Now you should be able to browse sites uninterupted.

Multichoice released details about their HDTV and HDTV Decoder price and launch date.

Thursday Multichoice anounced the launch of its High Definition Personal Video Recorder decoder (HD PVR).

Customers whom would like to view HD channels will need a HD PVR decoder aswell as a HD Ready television set. The HD PVR decoder will be available in major retail stores from August 2008 and will launch at a price of R2 499.00 (for a limited time period).

The HD PVR will initially be made available with pre-launch software which does not include all the features for a full suite of interactive applications.  These will be made available as soon as MNet HD channel is launched at the end of August.

Customers won’t need to worry about obtaining this new software as it will be made available via Satalite transmition just like all the other decoder models get their software upgrades.

HD PVR owners will soon be able to link their HD PVR to their current Dual View PVR to enjoy viewing 3 channels at the same time, or to a 1110 decoder to enjoy viewing 2 channels at a sime time for a extra R55pm.

The first HD broacast on the DStv network will be the Beijing Olympic Games from 8 August to 24 August on channel 170.

From 24 August DStv will have a dedicated HD channel offering a mix of series,  movies, sporting action and once-off specials. This channel will be called MNet HD and will offer some of the content in surround sound aswell.

I’m an active MyBroadband member and a few times have seen a thread called “I am the Thread Killer” in the off-topic section, what drew my attention everytime was the size of the thread.

I hardly ever post in the thread but just now I had a look inside and again the post count got my attention and I started wondering what the largest thread is in the world. Im sure “I am the Thread Killer” could surely be there with the top of them, if not the number one thread.

I did some research on google and couldn’t realy find any other thread that mached “I am the Thread Killer“. Currently it consists of 165 702 replies, 11047 pages, and a enourmous 2 881 061 views to date. The thread was started on 10-03-2005 so it quite old, yet still it is a very active thread.

A while back I read the the owner of MyBroadband wanted to close down the thread cause it seriously cripled the server where the site is hosted but the formnites didn’t like the idea very much, so they upgraded the server quite a bit.

After moving about a month back, I decided that I would need to get signal to my new place. Lucky for me it was only about 1km from my parents’ and los was great towards my new place.

So I modified the kit a bit, and now broadcast with a 14dbi panel towards Bellville Larochelle area.

This weekend 2 members had great success in connecting to the site, one is a brand new member and the other one just moved over from bot so pings and speed will be allot faster for him.

So if you are in that area feel free to scan and if found do the right thing and connect.

In a country like South Africa where Telkom dominate the local telecoms market, local communication is extrodinary expensive. That was untill a group of local citizens had enough and started their own wireless based network called a WUG (Wireless User Group).

The first WUG started out in Johannesburg, and then spark interest in other provinces where users started their own WUGS aswell. Recently JAWUG (Johannesburg Area Wireless User Group), PTAWUG (Pretoria Wireless User Group) and PWP (Pretoria Wireless Project) finally got to a point where they could link up their networks and bring their total connected nodes to just over 200 and covering +-140km of area.

If you are interested in finding out more about a WUG in your area please visit wug.za.net for a complete list of wugs in South Africa.

For a complete article about the networks check out the MyBroadband article.