PrimeTel’s PrimeHome Triple Play

Today I became a happy owner of PrimeTel PrimeHome installation, also known as Triple Play. Triple Play is this new way of bundling together loads of television channels, ADSL Internet connection, and really cheap telephony. It’s said to cost only 25 CYP month, but I got lucky and received a promotion offer of free installation and 3 month of service free of charge as well.

I didn’t have any time to play with it just yet, but it looks quite good. Here are the things that I’ve noticed during my short experience:

  • Television has an electronic TV guide with a time schedule for all programs for all channels. This is very handy.
  • Internet connection was way to easy to install. Just plugged the Ethernet cable straight into my laptop and I was done.
  • Sound quality in the telephone is a bit less than CYTA’s. There is some minor background noise all the time. But it’s not as bad as it can sound.
  • Switching channels on TV is a lot slower than before. This will need some getting used to. But it’s a fair trade for not having to configure any of the channels, crispy clear quality of image and sound, TV guide, and the selection of channels.

I’ll probably post more about it later, when I’d played more with it, but don’t hold your breath on that one.

P.S.: I might be somewhat biased being an employee of PrimeTel Ltd., and having received the package free of charge (installation + 3 month). Take my words with a grain of salt. And pepper.

Driving in Cyprus

Here is your chance to smile – Sue has a post about Cyprus highway code. Nicely done.

There is one thing I can add to what has already been written. When my wife (well, technically girlfriend back then) was going through the process of getting a driving license, I noticed that the “highway code” book she used to study was called “How to pass a driving license exam”. It wasn’t “Traffic rules”, or “Driving safe”, or “What and how of the road”. It was a tutorial on how to pass a driving license exam. Nothing more, nothing less.

SMS support in Google Calendar

These are the greatest news I’ve heard for a while – Google Calendar expanded their SMS support for providers outside of USA. Particularly, Cyprus Telecommunication Authority (CYTA) is now in the list of supported providers.

I have configured and verified my mobile phone, and it seems that notifications and reminders work just fine. The only problem so far is creating events via SMS messages, and requesting schedule information, like next event and daily agenda. This is most probably due to the shortcut number that Googles uses. Hopefully this will be fixed soon too. But even if it won’t – free SMS notifications for Google Calendar is something I’ve been waiting for.

As usual, you can have more infomration about SMS interface to Google Calendar check.

Assinging network settings

Yet another strange problem that I was banging my head at recently was the magical swapping of network interfaces after reboot. It’s not such a big issue, as reboots are rare, but when they happen, it annoys the hell out of me. The problem is that I’ll get my eth0 device would become eth1 and my eth1 would change to eth0. And back again after the next reboot.

Today I got really bored with this swapping, as I had to change my firewall settings once again, and decided to solve it once and for all.

The solution turned out to be trivial. There is a simple way of specifying which network settings should apply to which network device. All I had to do was edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file and add HWADDR=my:mac:address:here line. Then I did the same for the eth1 device.

I’ve tried a few reboots just to test the solution and so far it looks great.