There are lots of useful hints and tips around – often relating to fiddling around with your MTU, for instance – few of which I’ve found give any benefit. However, here’s one that even gets the backing of BT.

It would appear that in many people’s master BT socket (the one that all your other extension cables and phones are plugged into) there is a wire still in use that, well, isn’t really needed – the bell wire. And it can often cause interference resulting in slower internet connections.

The DIY answer is to open up this socket and remove the wire. The safer option for those who are terrified of pulling on a limp cable that’s barely held in place by anything, is to buy the iPlate from BT. Yes, BT have created a replacement front for your master box that essentially does this for you. And for less than £6 (inc P&P). Seriously, try the DIY option¹.

Zen Internet, my ISP, have been quotes as saying…

In a small scale trial we performed… the results [were] varied from no increase up to 1Mb/sec

You may not see immediate improvements because BT automatically limits the speed of your line to match your sync speed to improve connection stability. This is known as your BRAS profile² and it can take up to three days for BTs automated equipment to adjust this profile.

Personally, I was disappointed – not by the results but the fact that the wire was already missing from mine when I checked, so I have nothing to try. Drat.

1. instructions kindly supplied by Draytek, a manufacturer of broadband modems [↩]
2. Zen Internet have an excellent support site for customers where you can check your current BRAS profile [↩]

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a great game. And its title music is superb too – especially the choral singing.

Anyway, it turns out that the singing is Japanese translated into Latin. However, translating roughly back to English it is…

Hear of this rumour!
(He) Alone rushed against enemies.
And saved the fatherland.
Hear of this rumour!
Hear of this rumour!
Hope to all, also to me,
Terror to all, also to me,
That one (is) near to me,
That one (is) near to me,
Who at that time were strong men
And rivals.
Ferociously, struggling and fighting
Splendour growing.

Doesn’t really go with the cuddly Nintendo image

It’s almost daily at the moment that something goes wrong.

Today, after my wife accidentely left the Wii on all night, I realised that a lot of the online facilites aren’t working. The two events are unrelated, just simply that after being left on I decided to test it. And I didn’t test all the Wii online functionality when I changed the router recently.

The web appears to work. And that’s about it. If I do a connection check, it says it’s working but then can’t do a system upgrade check. The news won’t work, and I can’t get on the Nintendo Channel (I assume the Shop Channel is the same).

On top of that my SoundBridge¹ refuses to communicate with the router too. Again, something I didn’t test when I changed the router.

In the case of the SoundBridge, it may be a port change that needs to happen.

My laptop can connect to the internet fine too – it seems to me that internet traffic (port 80?) works fine. But then again, my PC² has no issues at all. It’s all very confusing I have to admit.

If anyone out there has any ideas, I’m open to them. Once I register my router with Netgear I’ll submit a query to them about this. I also have active posts on Wii, SoundBridge and Netgear forums (but so far the responses haven’t been too useful).

1. this streams music from a NAS hard drive that I have [↩]
2. which isn’t connected wirelessly, but if the issue is the firewall on the router, it shouldn’t make a difference [↩]