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[decryption]

Cheapest iPhone 7 & Plan Combo Tactics

It's that time of the year again, where I try work out the cheapest way to get an iPhone and a plan to use for the next 12 months until the next iPhone comes out. I think I've done this every year for the past 9 years. Damn.

Some assumptions:

- You want a new iPhone every year. If you're a 2 year upgrader, just get a plan with enough data from a telco you like and see the contract through.

- My aim here is to find the purchase method and mobile plan that has the lowest total cost of ownership over the 12 months.

- I've only done the math here for an iPhone 7 Plus 32GB, because that's the iPhone I want. The pricing for different models is pretty linear, but do your own math if you're after a different sized iPhone.

- I also assume that in 12 months time, I'll be able to sell my old iPhone for 50% of what I paid for it, as that seems to be about what a previous generation iPhone with a few scuffs and scratches on it (fuck cases) sells for lately.

The first option is to BYO iPhone and go on a pre-paid or 12 month SIM only contract.

What plan ya go on probably won't be the same as mine, but if I was in the market for a new SIM only service, I'd probably go with one of these:

Aldi XL (Telstra) - 6GB/m, unlimited calls & SMS, pre-paid - $35/m TPG (Vodafone) - 7GB/m, unlimited calls & SMS, no lock-in contract - $34.99/m OVO (Optus) - 8GB/m, unlimited calls & SMS, no lock-in contract - $34.95/m Optus - 8GB/m, unlimited calls & SMS, 12m contract - $20/m (it's $40, but I get a $20 broadband bundle discount)

Over 12 months, I'd have spent $420 on the plan (12 x $35) and $1269 on the phone. Then I sell the phone for about $650. This means my out of pocket expenses when the next iPhone drops is $1039 ($420 + $1269 - $650). A monthly cost of $86.58.

Ok, cool, not bad. But what about if I went on a phone contract with a telco, then just renewed the contract in 12 months time when the new iPhone comes out? Let's see how that works out.

Optus have the 32GB iPhone 7 Plus on a plan with 7GB of data for $87/month ($2/m for the phone, $85 for the plan - which would actually be $65/m for me with the broadband discount, but I'll ignore that for now). After 12 months, I'd have spent $1044. Then when the new iPhone comes out, I re-contract to whatever new plan Optus has that costs the same or more as the plan I'm on ($85/m). This will mean some fees for breaking the contract.

Optus say on their iPhone plan webpage that "If you need to leave your plan early you can. Simply pay out the full remaining cost of your phone including any amount Optus was going to cover." - I take this to mean that any plan cancellation fees are waived, but you still gotta pay Optus back for the unsubsidised amount for the phone. The phone is $1269 and you're cancelling it halfway, so I assume that you'll owe Optus $634.50. Assuming I sell the old iPhone for $650 (very likely), that means I'll just about break even.

The total cost of ownership with an Optus 24-month contract, then renewing it for the new iPhone is just $1044 (which is less if you manage to sell the iPhone for more than $635). Monthly that's $87, which is pretty much identical with going outright and on a no-lock in contract.

What about Telstra though? That'd cost more, right? Surprisingly, no. Getting a Telstra contract then cancelling it works out to be even cheaper than Optus. They have a 10GB/m plan for $116/month ($95/m plan + $21 for phone). When the new iPhone comes, I re-contract for another 24 months and all the fees are waived, all I need to pay are the remaining handset repayments ($21 * 12), just $252. All up over the 12 months I'd have spent $1644. Sell the old iPhone for $650 and I'm only $994 out of pocket. That works out to $82.83/m.

Vodafone are even cheaper! I was able to talk to a live chat person and had someone answer me on Whirlpool to confirm that the same thing Telstra does, applies to Vodafone too. If you re-contract on another 24 month plan, they'll waive the remaining plan repayments and all you gotta do is pay out the handset costs.

Vodafone have a plan with 11GB of data for $107/m (Plan $90 + Phone $17). 12 months of this works out to $1284. When I re-contract, I'll be asked to pay $204 in remaining handset fees ($17 x 12). I sell the old iPhone for $650, leaving a total 12 month cost of $838. That's only $69.83 a month. A goddamn bargain and way cheaper than getting a $35 plan from TPG with only 7GB of data, plus you don't need to pay upfront and you can pool your data with other plans on the same account (e.g: an iPad, or mobile broadband or your kids or partner's phones). If you're a student, you get a further 10% off too, making the bargain even sweeter.

Telstra, Optus and Vodafone offer the ability to pay $149 or $99 and upgrade to the new phone after 12 months (aka New Phone Feeling). Don't do this as it's shit value as you don't get to keep the iPhone. The total costs are awful value - Telstra: ($116 x 12) + $149 = $1541 vs. $994. Optus: ($87 x 12) + $99 = $1143 vs. $1044. Vodafone: ($107 x 12) + $149 = $1433 vs. $838.

Unlike previous years, it looks like the best value for a yearly iPhone upgrade is to go on a 24 month contract and re-contract every 12 months. No upfront cost, but you are kinda locked to that telco indefinitely (hence why they love it so much, hah). Personally, I'll likely go with Telstra because Vodafone has me on their shitlist for credit and refuses to give me a contract of any kind (even SIM only) and won't tell me why. Happy iPhoning!

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Crowdfunding the rights to broadcast the 2024 Olympics in Australia

Because I am a nerd with too much time on his hands, I think about buying the rights to broadcast the Olympics in Australia and what that entails. Here's some back of the envelope type hypothesising on the costs, expenses and possible profit if anyone wanted to buy the rights to the 2024 Olympics.

The 7 Network purchased broadcast rights off the IOC for between $150m-$170m, according to this SMH story. The real figures are not made public, so all we can go on is this story and other stories at say it was definitely lower than $200m. So let's be generous and assume 7 paid $180m to be the sole broadcaster of the 2016, 2018 and 2020 Olympics in Australia.

To split this out into actual numbers for each Olympics, we can assume the winter Olympics in 2018 is the least valuable to 7, as Australian's don't give too much of a rats arse about snow sports. The two summer Olympics are differentiated by the time zone and what can be shown during prime time. Tokyo's (2020 Olympics host city) time zone is much more conducive to prime time viewing than Rio, so I assume 7 values that a bit higher than the 2016 Olympics. With that in mind - 2016 Olympics: $65m, 2018 Olympics: $35m, 2020 Olympics: $80m.

This puts the value of the 2020 Olympics - an Olympics in our time zone, at around $80m.

We obviously can't buy the rights to the 2020 Olympics - they're already sold, but the 2024 Olympic rights are up for grabs. The current bid cities for 2024 are Rome, Paris, Budapest and Los Angeles. All of which are in relatively poor time zones for Australian viewers compared to an Asian Olympics, decreasing the value a little. I'm going to assume it'll be in Los Angeles - as they've got the best chance. It was in Europe not long ago (2012) but it's been a very long time since it was in the USA (1996, in Atlanta) and a USA Olympics is a huge money spinner for the IOC.

I would imagine that the cost of the 2024 Olympics rights would be at least $85m-$90m. Considering it's not in our time zone, there's a small hit that'll mean the other bidders (Foxtel and 7 mostly - I don't think Nine will take a punt on another Olympics) won't want to pay too much. For the purposes of this hypothesis, let's assume a $90m wire transfer to Lausanne gets the job done.

Buying the rights is only one portion of the expenses - you have to do all sorts of shit to actually broadcast it. That's the next set of sums.

===

Putting on a broadcast on the scale of the Olympics isn't gonna be cheap. The OBS handles all the front line work at the venue, so for our purposes, it's all about getting every single second of every single event from every single camera at the Los Angeles 2024 Olympics to Australian eyeballs. The Olympics themselves actually does this already, via what they call the OVP - Olympic Video Player. It's pretty much an app in a box that shows all the events. Taking the OVP footage and app adn re-skinning it is pretty much what they've done for 2016.

What I would want to do is take the OVP a step further and build our own platform, because the OVP sucks. The OBS produces the footage onsite, the OVP is the online distribution.

Streaming platform development - there's various apps to make (Apple TV, iPad, iPhone, Android phone, Android tablet) a website and maybe even a couple of smart TV apps and PS4/Xbox One apps. Being the nerd I am, I reckon I could get a couple of mates together and make a better system than the drivel I've seen so far. Maybe a dozen or so developers and designers to work on it. Let's say $2.5m in wages to get the platform made in 24 months, which I really don't think would take 24 months to make.

Streaming platform operation - Someone has to orchestrate and maintain all the infrastructure. I reckon 3 people would cover it, so let's over estimate and say 5. Probably $1m in wages here.

Bandwidth costs, very loosely estimated: 2 million people watch 40 hours of coverage in 5mbit/sec video (1080p H.265 - this is 2024 we're talking about), that's about 2PB of data transfer. On Amazon Cloudfront, on the Australian region, that's $208,000. Again, very very rough estimate - other CDNs vary from about $50k up to $300k.

The streaming and product/promo website has to live somewhere, that's just some basic AWS shit. $20k I reckon, way too much money, but I'm just guessing here.

There'd also be servers to transcode from the source feed, running something like Wowza on AWS infrastructure. Couple of EC2 instances shouldn't cost more than $50k (the public hits the HLS/HDS streams via CDN) I reckon. There'd be heaps of instances though, as each sport/session would have it's own stream and hence, it's own EC2 instance pushing to the CDN. I think - I haven't sat down and planned the actual streaming infrastructure.

On-site production - even though we're just grabbing the OBS feeds, there's still a lot of work required on-site to get the feeds from the venues to the broadcast centre, then to Australia, particularly with commentary. I don't know how exactly (the OBS doesn't publish this stuff online unforunately), but I guess there'd have to be a group of people sent over there, then some sort of method of getting the streams from the IBC to Australia. That could be satellite (I don't think you'd be able to send every single venue's output via satellite - not enough bandwdith), that could be a dedicated IP link (if it's a 4K 60fps source for even venue, goddamn). I'm going to hazard a guess that all the ingestion and transcoding is done onsite, then sent to a CDN directly from the IBC. Would be cheaper and more reliable to do that, than send raw footage across the ocean to Australia and do it all here. This could be expensive - $4m sounds like what I think it would cost.

Commentary - the OBS doesn't provide commentary, so you need to get experts in their field who can educate the viewers and tell the stories of the athletes. So you've got to send people there to watch it live, pay them to do it and pay them properly so they'll do the background work required to be informed before they go.

Someone like 7 has heaps of production expertise for interviews, crosses, highlights packages etc. I don't really care about any of that stuff. I literally just want the OBS feed, with commentary. There's even the ability to have multiple audio streams with the video, so it'd be cool to licence say, ABC radio for the stuff they're commentating. $1.5m here sounds like a good number, I really don't know.

Marketing - you gotta tell people that the app exists! $5m in marketing staff, materials and placements, who knows what it really costs. Maybe the Olympics thing sells itself, I dunno.

Misc - you gotta have a few lawyers, accountants and a HR person or two involved as well I assume. Plus an office for them to work in as well as equipment and shit like that. Chuck $2m at this as a rough estimate.

Streaming platform development - $2.5m Streaming platform operation - $1.5m On-site production - $4m Commentary - $1.5m Marketing - $5m Misc - $2m

All up there's $16.5m in costs just to produce the content. I don't know if this is even remotely accurate, but it's a start. In total, including the rights ($90m), you'd be spending at least $106.5m to do this.

Now you need to make that money back, how many people have to watch this thing in order to at least break even?

===

An easy way to reduce costs is sell 7 the rights to FTA broadcast. Let them do whatever they want with it, we don't care. If they'd pay $90m for full exclusive rights, including online, surely they'd pay $45m for TV only.

Plus I don't think it would be too annoying if the app was sponsored. Like, say, McDonalds or Woolworths or Toyota or something. Some tasteful ads or whatever might get an extra $7m in our pockets. I totally reckon ads can be done right, without fucking up the stream and without ruining important events. There's plenty of dwell time in all these streams, so that's perfect for some ads. Maybe we also partner up with a telco to give away free unmetered access, like Optus, Vodafone or Telstra. Vodafone for example has ~5m customers, let's say they'll pay $1 per customer, that's an extra $5m again.

So onselling the rights will get $45m, some branding/ads will get $7m and getting a telco onboard to give away to their customers, $5m. There's $57m shaved off the $106.5m, leaving $49.5m left to make up via direct subscribers.

If we stick with the $20 rate as what 7 is charging now, that's means we need 2,475,000 people to buy an account.

By 2024, Australia's population will have grown. According to the ABS, Australia grows at around 1 person every 90 seconds. Australia's current population is 24,151,757 - by August 2024, eight years away, that's an extra 2,803,333 people (there's 2.523e+8 seconds in 8 years, 2.523e+8 divded by 90 is 2,803,333), making Australia's population around 27 million people.

If you reckon 10% of Australian will cough up cash to watch a fucking perfect implementation of a full suite of Olympics online streaming apps and website (if I made it, you bet your fucking arse it'll be perfect and you'll cry tears of joy at how beautiful it would be), that's 2.7m accounts. That would bring in $54m in revenue, generating a modest $4m profit (you wouldn't actually get $20 for each subscription, as there's credit card/App store fees, but let's ignore that for now), on which you'll still have to pay tax anyways.

We don't know the full stats of 7's Olympics streaming, but I'd be surprised if 2.4m-2.7m take up premium access - that sounds like way too many people. According to Roy Morgan, in April 2015, there's 1.89m Netflix accounts and 2.2m Foxtel accounts. You'd practically need every person who has Foxtel and/or Netflix to also want to pay for the Olympics.

If you up the price to $30 (totally worth it for the fucking awesome service your eyes will feast upon), that's 1.65m accounts required. A bit more reasonable I reckon, but still, really really high.

If we tweak the other inputs a bit more - say Optus cough up $8m for premium access for their customers, sponsors kick in $10m and 7 reckon it's worth $50m for them - for a total of $68m, leaving $38.5m to recoup. At $30 a subscription, that's 1.29m subscribers required.

==

Well there you go, buy the rights for $90m, spend $16.5m to develop a platform and broadcast and market it, then resell the FTA rights to 7 for $50m, get $18m of sponsorship and manage to get about 1.5m Australians to pay $30 each. Easy!

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How to watch the Rio 2016 Olympics Live in Australia

I love the Olympics, but viewing it live is a pain in the arse. If you want to watch your chosen sport live, you have to go through a mess of steps thanks to the convoluted IOC transmission rights and the sub-par skills of TV networks when it comes to Internet TV. This guide will help Aussies who want to make sure they can watch all the sports live up on their TV. Channel 7 have decided to create an online platform for watching the Olympics, with all three of their free to air channels (7, Mate & 7Two) streaming for free inside it. It's on Android, iOS and on the web. They're also selling a $20 premium pack that will enable streams of all the other sports that aren't on their free to air channels. They're free for Telstra customers (more info here). Unfortunately, there's no Apple TV app and the iOS version doesn't support Chromecast (I don't have an Android device to test Chromecast there) so if you wanna watch this stuff on your TV, you need to AirPlay with an Apple TV or plug your iOS device into the TV via a Lightning-HDMI cable. If you take the Lightning-HDMI cable route, the image is a bit shithouse as It doesn't fill the screen properly. It's fine as a last ditch effort, but I can't tolerate it. If you've got an Apple TV, AirPlay works fine - but if you close the app or switch away from it, AirPlay stops working (e.g: you go to Tweet about that amazing gold medal win and the video stops because ya changed apps!). When it actually is streaming though, the quality is pretty good. The frame rate seems a little low sometimes (looks like 24fps instead of 50fps like FTA TV - please correct me if I am wrong) but the resolution is good and the bitrate decent enough so the image doesn't turn into a shitshow during high motion periods. You can plug a computer in to the TV as well, and watch it via the web. I found that the video player's chrome (e.g: the banners at the top and bottom) wouldn't go away (using Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome) and the quality wasn't anywhere near as good as on the mobile devices. If the Channel 7 app doesn't do it for you, there are other options that involve using a VPN. I'm not gonna explain how to use a VPN or a DNS re-direct, it's common knowledge by now, surely. Other English speaking countries have the following apps (there are no dedicated Apple TV apps unfortunately). USA - shit is fucked there. They're broadcasting stuff all over NBC's various channels. Basically, if you haven't got pay TV, you can't watch anything except a single NBC live stream. So don't even bother. South Africa & New Zealand - pay TV only, FTA broadcaster not streaming online or they're just streaming their FTA channels, not blanket coverage Ireland - The RTE app looks like an exact clone of the 7 app, but with the latency and constrained bandwidth of your video coming from the other side of the world, so there's not much point when you can just use the 7 app. There's the RTE Player app, which says it will have some Olympics stuff, but I think it's just a live stream of the main RTE channel, not blanket coverage of each sport. When live coverage starts I'll check it out and update. Singapore - Toggle looks like it's set up 4 dedicated Olympics channels in their app. I'll update this info when the events start in a few hours and I can actually stream something live. UK - the BBC has saved us all once again and via the BBC Sports app, will have every minute of competition streamed live. You just need to make a UK app store account, grab the BBC Sports app, set up a VPN on your iOS device and you'll be able to AirPlay from the app to your Apple TV. Not 100% ideal, but better than nothing. The BBC iPlayer app is also supposed to have live streaming of Olympic events - but I'm unsure if that's just live streaming the BBC free to air channels, or there will be dedicated channels for each sport. We'll find out later tonight. Canada - the CBC has released a dedictaed Rio 2016 app and it will also have every sport streaming live. The app supports AirPlay and the quality looks half decent from the on demand stuff I've watched so far. Again, once live events start, I'll report back. So to summarise: * There's no dedicated Apple TV apps for the Olympics (fuckkkken). * The 7 app isn't that bad if you have a dedicated iOS device you can AirPlay from to an Apple TV and are a Telstra customer to get the free Premium pack so you can watch all the sports. * If the 7 coverage doesn't interest you or isn't showing what you want, get yourself a Canadian/UK iTunes account, download the CBC Rio 2016 or BBC Sport apps, then connect to a VPN/DNS in either Canada or the UK. Once you've got all that shit sorted, AirPlay what you wanna watch to an Apple TV. * I don't know about Chromecast/Android stuff because I don't have an Android device to test on. None of the iOS apps I tried supported Chromecast. * If you don't have an Apple TV, grabbing a Lightning to HDMI adapter (get the official Apple one) and plugging it directly into your TV will do the job too. But with the 7 app, the video looks a bit shit vs. AirPlay

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Who the hell are all these people on the Victorian Senate ballot paper?

I was browsing through the list of parties on the Victorian Senate ballot for the 2016 Federal election and saw a few names I’ve never seen before. I couldn’t gather from their party names what they’re on about, so I thought I’d write this post with brief explanations of the different parties on the ballot for Victorians. It’s not very comprehensive - you should do your own investigation into each party if you have more than a passing interest.

DERRYN HINCH’S JUSTICE PARTY Most of us know who Mr. Hinch is - TV dude who did TV stuff, got shoved in jail twice and is the lucky recipient of the first spot on the ballot. What’s his reason for bothering with this politics bullshit? Most of his policies surround the legal system and how he perceives it to be warped. Derryn thinks judges hand out far too lenient sentences and too many crims getting away with stuff on technicalities. People getting out on bail then bashing and raping women, domestic violence sufferers not getting the justice they deserve and building a public sex offender database.

COLLYER David & MITCHELL-COOK Wanda These two don’t have their party affiliation labeled (apparently due to “stupid new electoral laws”, but they’re both on the Australian Democrats website as candidates representing their party. David Collyer is the campaign manager for Prosper Australia - a think tank that thinks about property investing as it stands today is a drain on Australian society and property developers don’t pull their weight. Wanda is a nurse educator at the Menzies Institute of Technology, as well as running a pain management clinic, program, something or called Kikqua Therapy that she seems to have invented, as there’s fuck all info about it anywhere else on the internet and nothing in any medical journals.

The Australian Democrats themselves are pretty central and don’t have anything particularly interesting to offer - kinda like a grab bag of popular ideas.

ANIMAL JUSTICE PARTY First impressions: Senator Poon, lol. Besides that, they do what their name says - looking after the animals. A quick flick through their policies doesn’t highlight anything morally corrupt (to me). The most “out there” idea they have is that they want to educate people not to eat meat. Which actually isn’t that weird and good common sense, even though I love meat.

AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY You know who these people are, I assume. Not gonna bother explaining what their deal is.

SCIENCE PARTY / CYCLISTS PARTY The nerds and the lycra crew are combining their forces in Victoria! As a certified nerd, I can dig pretty much 100% of what they’re standing for. Interesting that they propose the creation of an Australian Charter City. WTF is a charter city? Basically a place that’s set up to be a center of science and technology excellence in Australia. They wanna call it Turing (I wonder why) and place it between Sydney and Canberra, hooked up with a fast train. Subterranean roads and its own immigration laws. Basically a nerd utopia. They also want a space agency, which is probably more realistic than their charter town.

Basically the Science Party wanna spend more cash on science and tech researching. They want a republic. Simplifying the tax system. Decriminalisation of drug use and a focus on mental health. A full fibre NBN. No nukes, but they’re cool with GMOs.

The cyclists part of the ticket is again, what they say in their name - more bikes and better bike related policy! Nicholas Dow is a “hardcore cyclist” (obivously) and someone made a small doco about him: https://vimeo.com/27393987. He really likes his dog (and his bike).

PALMER UNITED PARTY Clive Palmer’s politcal party still exists but Clive isn’t going up for re-election and they’re just contesting the senate this time around. They’re all about a federal ICAC, removing politican entitlements, changing the way companies pay tax (so they pay less, in the hope this would “turbocharge” the economy). Also they have a very bad website with a very bad URL and a Tasmanian dude called Quentin von Stieglitz.

JACQUI LAMBIE NETWORK Jacqui cracked the shits with Clive Palmer after piggybacking his name to get elected as a Tasmanian senator, so she made her own party. Her schitck is mainly about veterans. Making sure the people in the ADF are treated much better than they currently are. She’s also a member of the Halal is a conspiracy to fund terrorism brigade, so yeah.

AUSTRALIAN CHRISTIANS Christians. That are Australian. Their central tenets are that Australia is a Judeo Christian country goddamn it and it should remain that way (aka: watch out for those sneaky Muslims and their Sharia law). Also they love “families” but their definition of family is a man, woman and some kids. No gay families and no gay marriages. A consistent theme through their messaging is that Christianity and Australian Values are under attack - but don’t say who from or where, but if you read between the lines, it’s clearly anyone who isn’t Christian.

SUSTAINABLE AUSTRALIA Sustainable Australia. Sounds good hey? Sustainable is good, everyone likes things that are sustainable. They basically want Australia to stop growing - lowering birth rates, wayyyyy lower immigration levels and promoting the concept of a sustainable Australia. Dick Smith is a big proponent of this and made a documentary called Population Puzzle.

PIRATE PARTY The nerds reading this are probably familiar with the Pirate Party - an Australian version of the Swedish and now global (but still pretty fringe) movement. In Iceland they’re actually one of the main political parties. Their main reason for being is copyright and patent reform and free sharing of knowledge. The heavy tech involvement also means they have a much stronger grasp on tech issues than most other parties. They don’t like data retention and really hate censorship. They love to arc up when these topics are talked about.

SOCIALIST EQUALITY PARTY This is the Australian branch of the *clears throat* International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the World Party of Socialist Revolution. If Trotsky and Lenin mean something to you and you like that, well these people represent you. In a nut-shell: death to capitalism.

HEALTH AUSTRALIA PARTY They’re a bunch of anti-vaxxer quacks. They say they want to “remove the influence of multinational pharmaceutical companies”, which we all know is code for “vaccines are poison”. Their full policy document is littered with key phrases from the anti-vaccine movement and they believe that natural medicine should be “placed on an equal footing with pharmaceutical medicine”. The Health Australia Party also don’t like fluoride in our water. The guy that leads the party runs an alternative medicine clinic in Coffs Harbour.

RENEWABLE ENERGY PARTY It’s what you expect - they want renewable energy rolled out across the entire country by 2030 and by 2035, 40% of our transport derived from renewable energy. By 2050 all of Australia emits net zero greenhouse gases. Also a strong stance on climate change.

VOTEFLUX.ORG | UPGRADE DEMOCRACY! Another “direct democracy will solve all our problems” platform startup. Using the software package these people have developed, Australians/members of Flux would be able to vote on issues over the internet, then the elected senator would act based on those results. Because of this they actually don’t have any policies for you to judge on. Read up on direct democracy over representative democracy (what we have now) and think about if you think this is a good thing. Switzerland does this sort of thing, for example.

FAMILY FIRST PARTY Senator Bob Day is the leader of this party, so it’s easy to see what they stand for based on his moral compass by checking out his Twitter feed. Against safe schools, against gay marriage, doesn’t think taxing ciggies does anything except revenue raise and of course, wants to reinstate “family values” (code for taking us back to the good old days when you can beat your wife and kids and there weren’t any funny smelling brown people).

CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY (FRED NILE GROUP) Fred Nile is a shitstain on Australian society and represents everything hateful in our otherwise excellent country. A party of bigots in the same vein as Family First.

THE ARTS PARTY People who think the arts are very important. Improve access to books and music and museums and galleries and movies. Improve funding for all the creative industries, including video games. Also the usual lefty stuff like legalising weed, stop treating refugees like shit and letting the gays do their thing.

DLP DEMOCRATIC LABOUR I really can’t get a read on the DLP. I think they’re like an evil ALP. Their main beef is abortion and how they don’t like it. They somehow get elected in Victoria at the state level and consistently stir shit trying to ban abortions.

CITIZENS ELECTORAL COUNCIL When I was 18 and living in St. Albans, they had a table outside the local library and because I was an 18 year old dork who still went to the local library for fun, I talked to these crackpots and their ideas that global warming is fake and that we are on the brink of permanent financial disaster unless we nationalise everything. Lyndon LaRouche is their hero.

SECULAR PARTY OF AUSTRALIA Removing the influence of religion in our society. No religious education in schools, removing the national school chaplaincy program, allowing gay marriage, legal euthanasia, pro-abortion and generally pro anything held back by religion.

AUSTRALIAN LIBERTY ALLIANCE Racists.

NICK XENOPHON TEAM Main reason to exist is anti-gambling. Massive restrictions on gambling advertisements, online gambling and reigning in pokies. Also wants the government to buy exclusively Australian things and wants labeling laws beefed up to accurately portray where the stuff inside a box comes from. Anti GMO though.

AUSTRALIAN MOTORING ENTHUSIAST PARTY Based on Ricky Muir’s performance in the senate so far, surprisingly normal and not racist like we all thought they might be. Their core values are common sense. The AMEP’s focus is cars and making more roads.

MARRIAGE EQUALITY LGBT equality and letting them get married.

PAULINE HANSON’S ONE NATION Huge racists.

SOCIALIST ALLIANCE If you think the Greens aren’t left wing enough.

AUSTRALIAN COUNTRY PARTY Let farmers do their thing, let people shoot stuff and make things better for people living in country towns. They also want to remove local councils from the legal system - something about inefficiency.

MFP John Madigan’s Manufacturing and Farming Party. John Madigan used to be part of the DLP, but quit. He’s anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage. Offering a Thermomix as a prize if you enter his raffle to raise funds to help him get re-elected. Cut from the same cloth as Tony Abbott via his affinity with Bob Santamaria. His other claim to fame is wanting an enquiry into the Essendon bombers doping issue. He reckons there’s some funny business going on and the Bombers are innocent (or less naughty than they’ve been accused of being)

DRUG LAW REFORM De-criminalise drugs and move to a harm reduction/public health approach instead of punishment.

VOLUNTARY EUTHANASIA PARTY Allow people to decide when to end their own life.

MATURE AUSTRALIA Seniors concerned about their superannuation and pension. Have a bizarre policy to utilise all our coal and natural gas to generate electricity, as well as renewables. How can you advocate for burning all our fossil fuels when you say you realise renewables have a place? Surely if you realise renewables are the good shit, you’d leave the fossil fuels in the ground?

LIBERAL/THE NATIONALS The incumbents.

SHOOTERS, FISHERS AND FARMERS They wanna go camping wherever they want, shoot whatever they like, while fishing anywhere there’s some water - chuck in a bit of 4WD action too. Absolutely hate inner city latte sipping hipsters deciding what happens in rural areas. More defence funding and stronger border protection.

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS Libertarians. The crucible of current senator, David Leyonhjelm. Want to bring back guns and remove foreign aid. Are upset that Australia is a “nanny state” and that government causes more problems than it solves. One of the profiles of a WA senate candidate caught my eye: “Connor is a Draftsman who lives in Bunbury, Western Australia. He is passionate about Bitcoin, the blockchain, firearms and other disruptive technologies.”

RISE UP AUSTRALIA PARTY Ultra racists.

AUSTRALIAN PROGRESSIVES Progressive, left-leaning policies, based on evidence. Some key policies: a federal ICAC, integrating dental care into Medicare, pro-gay marriage, increasing refugee intake, making our education system more like Finland’s and moving to 100% renewable energy by 2036.

THE GREENS They’re large enough now that it’s pretty clear what they stand for.

AUSTRALIAN SEX PARTY Less religion influencing our lives, drug decriminalisation/harm reduction, rights for sex workers, very friendly to LGBTIQ people and care about animal welfare.

UNGROUPED Randos who couldn’t get a party to back them or find one they agree with.

JUHASZ Stephen - fuck all about this guy on the internet, no idea who he is. Only thing remotely connected to him, I think, is this ranting submission to a Financial System Inquiry about how banks should be allowed to fail, which doesn’t actually have his name in it, but the filename is Juhasz_Stephen.pdf - might not even be him. Not on Facebook or anything like that either. Weird. The AEC says he is a student at Deakin Uni and lives in Geelong.

UPDATE: a cool dude called Silas emailed me some relevant info he found out whilst doing his own research - here’s a press release Stephen Juhasz has sent some people, and here’s a flyer/poster (front, back) he’s made up.

ARASU Karthik - Karthik made himself a nice video. Wants a public holiday for Diwali and Eid, no tax for new “moms” in the first 3 years of being a mom. Multi-level car parks at train stations (err, dude, this is a Federal election), lower tax in regional AU, no plastic bags and a random grab bag of ideas.

HALL Dennis - just has a Facebook page. Opposes same sex marriage and the safe schools initiative. Posts a lot of christian-esque stuff on his facebook page. Looks like your crazy uncle who talks a lot of shit.

SPASOJEVIC Dana - a truck driver with basically no policies outlined anywhere. No website and a basic Facebook page. What the hell?

KARAGIANNIDIS John - tried to crowdfund some campaign money and nobody gave him any. Another basic Facebook page and some very loose, ranting policies such as “Reducing unemployment by fostering innovation and job creation opportunities.” and “Transparency and accountability in government: “Keep the bastards honest”.

LUTZ Geoff - this guy is an internet ghost as well. No website, no Facebook, nothing outlining why he’s bothering to run for the Senate in Victoria. On the AEC website, he’s listed as a "Semi-retired Orchardist” UPDATE: I received some more info about Geoff, who used tobe a chestnut farmer. He’s spent many years on the Moreland city council, who started out as a Liberal, went independent, tried to join the ALP (who wouldn’t have him) and ended up as a Democrat. Now just runs for the senate for the fun of it, I guess?

MULL Allan - a man who loves wearing red shirts and hats with pom poms on them. A farmer from Tawonga with another grab-bag of policies. Predominately focused on farmers and land rights for farmers. Also wants to kill reduce foreign aid to food only (no cash, no engineers, no technical support, no help running elections, etc.) and look after Australia’s veterans a bit better.

RYAN Chris - another no website, no Facebook dude. Is a lawyer from Point Lonsdale. His email address is nicklennie7@hotmail.com tho - dunno why it isn’t chrisryan7@hotmail.com or something. Who’s Nick Lennie? Or Lennie Nick? UPDATE: Silas, again, contacted Chris Ryan, asked what his policies are and received this as a response.

VADARLIS Eric - quite an accomplished lawyer and also a dairy farmer. I think this is the same Eric Vadarlis who was part of a legal case against the immigration minister at the time, about the infamous MV Tampa. There’s a decent wikipedia entry about the case. Eric’s senate election platform is strong on refugee rights.

DICKENSON Mark Francis - here’s his gofundme page, where he’s raised $120. A very odd blog URL “http://000000000k.blogspot.com.au” where he writes about how disillusioned he is with the ALP/LIB duopoly and that nobody represents the average person. Dislikes corporate welfare, wants a federal ICAC - general loathing of the status quo.

SHMUEL Immanuel - has a website for his financial services and travel agency business, but not for his senate election campaign. Only thing on his Facebook page about his run for the senate is this photo, outlining a totally nonsensical ideology. “Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution.”

FLOYD Glenn - classic unhinged bloke. Absolutely hates government corruption and wants way more transparency. He reckons all the current politicians are bribed. Wants 9000 child care centers. Thinks psychiatrists kill more people than cancer. Like I said, textbook unhinged. Website is fun read.

URIE Meredith - doesn’t really have any policies and is more focused on “inclusiveness” than actually saying what she thinks backed up with evidence. Recorded a couple of audio interviews with random people about topics she thinks are important (how jobs and the environment are connected). A few YouTube vids nobody as watched.

NYE Trevor William - another all caps ranter on Facebook, haha. Mainly concerned about the sale of Australian land to the Chinese, has a motorbike as his profile pic on Facebook.

HAWKS Peter John - a “silent majority” nutbag that is afraid of social engineering from the lefties.

BESLIS Christopher - top 3 policies: abolish politician perks, reduce politician salaries, then remove ATM and bank fees. Clearly the three most important issues facing Australian society today. UPDATE: Chris actually sent me an email! Here’s what he said. Seems like a normal enough person with goals that aren’t crazy. Everyone wants a federal ICAC (except the guilty).

After reading all this, you’re probably wondering how you can number all those boxes on the giant form? Kenneth Tsang has created a handy website that’ll make a neat printout for you to take to the booth on Saturday, so you can just copy the numbers off that onto your ballot and move on to the sausage phase of the voting process.

[decryption]

11 years of my desk

I've been documenting my computer setup quite regularly since 2005 and it just so happens I got myself a new setup over the long weekend. I thought it'd be fun to look back at all my setups over the past 10 years. This is the oldest pic I can find of my desk setup, when I was living in a one bedroom flat in Richmond, about a year after I first moved out of home in August 2005. I can't remember what spec those computers are, but I bet the cases and PSUs are MSY "Shaw" specials. That Dell 17" (or is it 19"?) CRT was awesome at the time. Check out the blank CD spindles, heh. For laughs, here's my wife (then girlfriend's) computer at the time. A G3 iMac Dalmation - when I assume Jony Ive did acid for the first time. In November 2005, I posted this. Those two computers are gone and I found a new keyboard or something. There's also a G3 PowerMac not doing much on the floor there. I think it was busted. Still with the CD spindles. That 14" Compaq CRT, I hauled on the tram all the way from the Camberwell swapmeet. Fucking pain in the arse. If you look closely, there's even a 10 pack of 3.5" floppies behind a spindle of CDs! May 2006, I scored a 17" Intel iMac and had a 30GB iPod Video (the best iPod ever). The MacBook was a loaner from work so I could write about it on AppleTalk. Note the Nokia 8210 phone near the iMac, heh. Not long after that in November, I picked up an Xbox 360 and a 19" monitor. I had a different phone, I think its a Nokia 6280. So many CD spindles. A Nintendo DS Lite too. Some beers because I was 22 and I thought beer was cool. Around April 2008, I moved house, back to St. Albans, so I had a room just for computers and shit for the first time. This is what it looked like. Dunno why I have so many mini computers there and a bunch of magazines. Not long after that I had a PS3 and an XBox 360! A 24" 1920x1200 Benq monitor that would still be great today, hooked up to a MacBook Pro. Oh, there's a PSP up there as well. Next to an empty bowl, there's a first generation iPhone in its dock (Apple gave you a dock!). I think the only thing in tat picture I still own are the headphones right on the edge of the desk. Slight update a few months later, where I got a stand for the MacBook Pro, moved the PS3 and XBox to the living room and was given a B&W Zeppelin to review that I rather liked. Check out the classic Linksys WRT54G doing noting at all. Some external HDDs on the floor as well, haha. Who remembers Cover Flow being a big deal? September 2008, better quality photo where you can see the iPhone (which I think by then would be the 3G?) I had a second setup in the MacTalk podcasting cave. I'd spend a fair bit of time there, writing for MacTalk, trying to convince people to give me money for ads on the site, podcasting and editing stuff. Here it is on the night of WWDC 2009 (June 2009), back in the days Apple didn't live stream the thing and we had to follow text blogs like animals. Here it is a little quieter, when I'm just on my own editing stuff. 20" Intel iMac was actually a loaner from CompNow if I recall correctly, who let me use it as long as I kept an ad up on the site. The MacBook Pro on the left was my main machine. I miss that fucking joint. I shared it with some electricians in South Melbourne who thought we were the biggest nerds ever. Nobody was podcasting back in 2009. Now every dickhead had a podcast. November 2009 and I purchased a house (the house that MacTalk bought!) just a block away from where I was living in St. Albans previously. The first setup I had there that I took photos of was a Mac Mini (old school design) hooked up to two 24" Benq monitors on an arm, in portrait view. Looking a little more modern there, with the same keyboard as now and a Magic Mouse. I think that's an iPhone 3GS there too. There's an AirPort Extreme up on the shelf a Kingrex amp and so much mess. I had two desks side by side at that point, so here's the other end of the desk. Just a dumping ground for whatever tech shit flows my way. The MacBook Pro has been abandoned there for some reason. I'm unsure when the next set of photos were taken - I assume some period between 2009 and 2012. This is a 17" MacBook Pro and an iMac. I really don't remember owning that iMac. The 17" MacBook Pro was a beast that I used mostly to swing between the MacTalk office and home, as I didn't have an external monitor at the time. There's a round iPhone dock behind the MacBook, so I assume this was near the tail end of the iPhone 3GS, maybe late 2009, early 2010. Here's my Mac Pro and 27" Dell LCD. Awesome machine that Mac Pro, I never should have sold it! These are two monitors connected to I don't know what. I think it's around 2011-2012 here, as there's keys for my sister's Hyundai Getz on the table, which we purchased in mid-2011. Google Reader still existed then too (RIP). Here's some pics of the 2nd MacTalk office, in Flemington. This one was taken in March 2010 (it had EXIF off Flickr) I had a second partitioned off area at the back that I'd use as an office, where as the podcast recording happened in the middle partition where I could enclose it in soft stuff to prevent reflections. Looks like I had a 13" MacBook Pro there. Must have been cold as I put the space heater right on the desk to blow over my hands! Notice the iPod Hifi, another thing I regret selling. Now we're back on the photos with dates! This is from November 2012, with a lot going on, haha. There's a HP Opteron server I snagged for like $50 off Gumtree. My main machine at the time, I think, was that Mac mini (still the best Mac Mini as you can change the RAM & SSD. There's an Acer laptop there too, which I was using as my laptop as I didn't have enough cash to get a Mac laptop. I think that black Antec case was a gaming rig I wanted to set up. Dunno how long that lasted. March 2013 comes along. The Acer laptop is still there, as is the gaming rig. Using a MacBook Pro again as my main machine, as you can see on the shelf to the right. I had two 802.11ac routers there, which were brand spanking new at the time - that I used to create a wireless bridge between my garage and the house, where I kept that 16 core Opteron HP server beat of a thing, hah. April 2013, hooked up some neat Jamo speakers. Using the box my Manfotto video tripod head come in as a monitor stand. Still got the MacBook Pro as I can see the Thunderbolt-Ethernet adaptor just on the right. August 2013 saw the creation of my Litecoin rig in some bloke's shed in Bacchus Marsh. So much fun. I've ranted about my Litecoin rig in so many places, I won't rehash it here (heh, hash). Just marvel at it's fire risk glory. In November 2013 I hooked up two monitors to the MacBook Pro - watching the cricket. Yep. Don't have either of those monitors now. March 2014 saw me experiment with using a 9" Windows tab as a laptop replacement. You can't. It sucks. In May 2014 I picked up three 20" monitors off Grays super cheap. I think it was like $150 for all three. They were 1600x1200 too, so quite nice! All three hooked up to the MBP I assume - one in each TB port and one in the HDMI port. Still have those speakers, that 5-port Anker USB charger. Featured on the monitors is the lovely Jeff Tan-Ang who now works for Apple in Cupertino! Hi Jeff. In June 2014 I started a new job as a Linux (mainly, bit of Windows too) admin and this was my desk. Not a home setup, but I spent just as much time sitting here as I did at home, so it deserves to be here. Just a boring regular cubicle, even has my name up on the partition. Had to use a Dell Latitude (I think 7000 something) which wasn't that bad. In December 2014 (maybe November, but I didn't take the pic until December), I moved back to a 15" Retina MacBook Pro, hooked up to a 27" Dell LCD. You can see my pile of stuff to sell sitting on top of that Dell R710 server. LIFX, an old Apple TV, an Edgerouter. Also a pair of socks because I'm filthy. They keyboard, mouse and speakers there, I'm still using now. In Feb 2015, as part of my job reviewing stuff for PC & Tech Authority, I had two ASUS 27" LCDs, so I hooked them up to the MacBook Pro for a while until ASUS asked for them back a few months later. Three 27" monitors, nice. By August 2015, I moved house, to a much larger study space. Here it is in its first setup, with the 15" Retina MacBook Pro. In November I chucked up a shelf on the wall to store some crap. Around the start of the 2016 I was low on cash, so sold the MacBook Pro (bad decision really) and moved to a HP Elite 8200 SFF box, with an i5-2400. It's actually a really capable machine for the $150 or so I paid for it. Runs practically everything I throw at it. But it's a Windows box. Using Windows is my punishment for spending excessively. Now we come to today. This is my setup as of late April 2016. I finally got a Philips BDM4065UC 40" 4K monitor and found a ridiculously cheap 27" Retina iMac with 16GB of RAM, 4GHz i7 CPU and Radeon M295X graphics. I really, should hang on to this setup for many years. But who knows what itch I'll have to scratch or what new laptop Apple will release?

[decryption]

Everything You Wanted To Know About Upgrading a Mac Pro But Were Afraid To Ask

I've been dicking around with the idea of using an old Mac Pro as my main computer. New Macs are too expensive and used ones are either just as expensive or can't handle a 4K display or fast PCIe SSDs. I looked into what's required to modernise a Mac Pro, the cost of doing so and then how it would compare to a modern Mac with a variety of benchmarks.

Storage Options

The Mac Pro has four drive bays where you can shove in 3.5" drives, or 2.5" drives with an adapater - but it's probably best to get an SSD in one of those PCIe slots. From slowest to fastest, here's the storage hiehrachy: 1. 3.5" HDDs. You can use one of these as a boot drive if you like, but come on, it's 2016. Use 3.5" HDDs for storing bulk amounts of junk like videos or photos. Even though the Mac Pro has a SATA-2 bus and most HDDs are SATA-3 these days, there's very little real world difference when it comes to HDDs (unlike SSDs), so it's not that big of a deal. 2. 2.5" SATA-3 SSD installed in a 3.5" SATA bay with an adapter. Macfixit sell the adaptor you need to make a 2.5" drive fit on one of the Mac Pro's sleds. The cheap adaptors (like this one, and this one, or even this one) won't attach to the Pro's sled properly, so the expensive adaptor is pretty much the only option. Whilst an SSD plugged in to the Mac Pro's SATA-2 port will work fine and perform so much better than a HDD, it's really bottlenecked compared to SATA-3 or PCIe. 3. 2.5"/mSATA SATA-3 SSD connected to a SATA-3 PCIe card. There actually aren't many PCIe cards that are bootable on the Mac Pro. The ones that are, from joints like Sonnet or OCW, are expensive. So don't even bother with this route. 4. M.2 SATA SSDs. These are "blade" SSDs with a SATA interface. Technically known as M.2 B Key. These still need to be hooked up to a SATA port, which on a Mac Pro is SATA-2. Waste of time. 5. M.2 PCIe SSDs. This is the good shit. This bypasses the slow SATA-2 bus on the Mac Pro and hooks up to the PCIe bus directly. All the speed and latency bottlenecks are bypassed too. Problem is, there aren't a lot of these sorts of SSDs around. I'm going to focus on explaining more about the M.2 PCIe SSDs and what the go is with the various models around out at the moment. Unfortunately, the Mac Pro can only talk to AHCI based SSDs. The newer, faster, NVMe drives simply won't work in Mac OS X as Apple's implementation of it is slightly different to standard. It'd be nice if we could chuck in a Samsung 950 Pro, alas, maybe in Mac OS X 10.12 Apple will include NVMe support. So, what PCIe AHCI SSDs are there to choose from? Not many... The Samsung XP941, Samsung SM951, Plextor M6e and Kingston HyperX Predator are ones readily found in Australia. The Kingston SHPM2280P2H/240G is easy to find at a few PC stores around Australia and includes a PCIe to M.2 adaptor in the box for a total of ~$234 including postage. It kinda sits between the XP941 and SM951 performance wise according to this review. The Samsung SM951 comes in NVMe and AHCI variants, so make sure you get the AHCI model for use in the Mac Pro. The SM951 is significantly faster than the XP941. Check these benchmarks out. It's the most expensive, but it's the fastest. Plextor and the XP941 aren't worth it I reckon. I'd grab the Samsung SM951 over the other AHCI PCIe SSDs, considering the vast performance difference between it and the rest. Ram City are the only place in AU selling the SM951, they've got new ones and refurbished ones. They're also sold on Aliexpress, but a refurb from Ram City is cheaper. I'd suggest grabbing it from Ram City as if it fucks up, you've got somewhere easy to deal with and local to return it to for a refund or replacement. Plus Ram City will ship it to you next day, where as you'll be waiting almost a month for postage from China via Aliexpress. You need to get an adaptor for the SSD to go into a PCIe slot too. Ram City has a guide nicely explaining all the "blade" SSD form factors. For the SM951, all we want is a simple 'M' key M.2 to PCIe adaptor. If you're buying your SSD from Ram City, may as well get the Lycom DT-120 adaptor at the same time. If you want to save a few bucks, you can grab a similar adaptor off Aliexpress for ~$9 (again, will take a month to arrive). I purchased the SM951 and chucked it into my Mac Pro 3,1 and unfortunately, it only operates at 2.5GT speeds. See my AppleTalk thread about it here for all the details. While it's faster than SATA speeds, I'm not really exploiting the proper speeds on the SM951. It still takes advantage of its superior latency and random IO speeds though, so the SM951 is still worth it in the Mac Pro 3,1, just not as useful as it would be in a Mac PRo 4,1 or 5,1, where it can really shine. My personally preferred storage setup for a Mac Pro is a 256GB SSD in the PCIe slot as a boot drive, a 2TB drive in a SATA bay for bulk storage (like photos or music or video) and another 3-4TB drive in a second SATA bay for Time Machine as a quick and dirty "ooh shit I deleted that file and I need it now" backup, that works in conjunction with my other backups. Having all that inside the machine as opposed to in external cases is a nice touch I reckon.

Video Cards

The vast majority of "PC" video cards work fine in a Mac Pro. There only catch is if you want the grey boot screen with the Apple logo when you turn the computer on, you need a "Mac" card. These are expensive, so people flash "PC" cards with the ROM from a Mac card and the boot screen works. There's a lot of poor info around on doing this and you can easily brick your card if you don't flash it properly. Flashing an AMD 7950 or GTX680 seems to be relatively straight forward, as official Mac versions of these cards were released, so it's just a matter of taking the ROM from a legit card and chucking it on another card that's the same except for its ROM. Here are some YouTube videos that explain the process: I've seen flashed cards with GPUs that never had Mac versions (e.g: GTX980, R9 280X), from joints like MacVideoCards and these two guys on eBay, but how they do it, I don't know. It's certainly not public info in a format that's easy to follow. Probably so they can sell you cards jacked up in price. Most of the cards they flash are very similar to the 7950/GTX680, but they tweak the ROM to get it to work properly and don't tell anyone how they did it. The GPU flashing "community" has some severe ego problems I reckon. If you go down the path of not worrying about the grey boot screen and want to use any old PC card cheaply, the good news is that Nvidia make a driver for Mac OS X and keep it regularly updated. Virtually every Nvidia card works fine in a Mac once these drivers are installed. As of Mac OS X 10.11, the Nvidia drivers are no longer over-written by system updates, so once Nvidia release drivers for the latest version of Mac OS X, you can install the system update, then install the Nvidia drivers to match. AMD don't release drivers like Nvidia do, but Apple support a decent range of AMD cards out of the box, as part of Mac OS X. Not all cards are supported equally though. Generally, if the AMD card is the same GPU family as GPUs shipped with a Mac, it'll work fine. Those are the cards you want to stick to. Some dude on Mac rumours has posted lots of cool info on using Nvidia GPUs in a Mac Pro. For AMD fans, a similar thing is on TonyMacOSX86. Which card to get? Personally, I wouldn't bother with a graphics card that won't support 4K@60Hz over DisplayPort. That's about it for my requirements as I don't game and I don't need a bazillion CUDA cores or OpenCL support for FCPX or Adobe's apps. The AMD 7950 and Nvidia GTX680 are great cards to get if you can find them. They can be flashed to give you a boot screen and are solid performers. You just need to buy the appropriate power cables (e.g: mini 6-pin to 6-pin). The 7950 and GTX680 pop up for sale 2nd hand every now and then and sell for under $250 most of the time. They're also faster than any GPU Apple ships in their Macs right now, except the Mac Pro. If you're happy to live without the boot screen (I am), the Nvidia Quadro K620 is great bang for buck. It's only ~$200 brand new and performs a little bit faster than the Nvidia 750M in the MacBook Pro 11,3. It uses much less power than the 7950 and GTX680 and doesn't require any additional power, so no need to buy the 6-pin cables. The K420 is also good if you can find it 2nd hand cheaply - I wouldn't bother with it new as it's not that cheap vs. the slightly faster K620. The GTX950 is the next cheapest Nvidia-based card with DisplayPort output. Costs around $230, but needs one of those mini-PCIe cables for power - the upside over the Quadro K620 is performance. It's significantly faster for not much more cash. For day to day use it might not make much difference, but anything slightly GPU intensive will appreciate the extra CUDA cores and faster memory bus on the GTX950. Gamers might want to splash out and get a new Nvidia card, like a GTX980 or something - you can use it in Windows via Boot Camp for all your gaming stuff and then pop back into Mac OS X where it'll be a monster for any GPU assisted stuff like Adobe CS or FCPX. To summarise - virtually all graphics cards work in a Mac Pro. Unless you flash a video card's ROM, you won't get the grey Apple logo boot screen. Flashing a graphics card is generally a bad idea unless it's an AMD 7950 or Nvidia GTX680. If you're not gaming, grab the Quadro K620 or GTX950 if you can't find a cheap used AMD 7950 or GTX680.

Mac Pro 3,1 (2008) Specific Upgrades

CPU Upgrades There's not much higher to go in that socket than what Apple shipped the Mac Pro with. The fastest quad core LGA771 CPU is the X5492, which came out in March 2008. It's not much faster than the CPUs that shipped with the Mac Pro 3,1. Certainly not worth spending ~$120/CPU on I reckon. Maybe if you already owned a dual CPU Mac Pro 3,1 and want to sink a little more cash into it, you could get two X5270's, which are dual core, but run at 3.5GHz and only cost $27 each. Even then, according to CPU Mark (which can be dubious at best), the X5270 is beaten by the M-5Y31 in the entry level MacBook and is severely beaten by the entry level Mac mini's i5-4260U. RAM Upgrades DDR2-800 FB-DIMM RAM is fucking expensive in Australia. Yet if you buy it from overseas on eBay, you can get 16GB of the stuff for around ~$120 from the USA. If you had 4GB in your Mac Pro 3,1 and all you saw lacking was memory usage, I'd go for a cheap upgrade and get maybe another year or so out of it until the CPU becomes unbearable.

Mac Pro 4,1 and later (2009 and later) Specific Upgrades

CPU Upgrades (EDIT: I've been told by various people who have tried, that the X5687 doesn't work in the Mac Pro, bummer) The FCLGA1366 socket had a long life, well into 2011, so there's a range of CPUs that can slide right in to a Mac Pro 4,1. The kings of the hill are the X5687 and X5690. The X5687 has 12M cache, four cores running at 3.60GHz and a 130W TDP. The X5690 is the same, but runs at 3.46GHz and has 6 cores. There's also the W3690, a single CPU version of the X5690. You can see the entire list of LGA1366 CPUs on Intel ARK. Good news is that there's loads of these CPUs really cheap out of China. When they came out, you'd be paying over $1,000 a CPU, easily. Maybe even $2,000. The X5687 for example, is only $132. For all intents and purposes, just one of these CPUs is all you need unless you're after a video encoding monster. Now comes the catch (there's always a catch) - installing these CPUs on a dual CPU Mac Pro 4,1 is a right pain in the arse. The chips off eBay have the metal lid on top, the chips Apple use in the Mac Pro, don't. This 2mm gap means that when you screw the heatsink on fully, it will crack the CPU under the pressure. If you don't screw it in tight enough, the CPU doesn't make proper contact in the socket and obviously won't work. This video explains it:

As a workaround, you can play around with tightening the heatsink very slowly and trying the Mac Pro after each twist of the screw, e.g: Install CPU, install heatsink with 7 or 8 twists of the allen key, try it out - if it doesn't work, do another twist - try again. There's serious risk here of the pins on the CPU board being damaged if you go too tight. Or it might not happen at all. It happened to Anand! The other option is to remove the lid off the CPU. An arduous task involving razor blades and irons. Just look at this video. I kinda want to avoid doing this if I don't have to. I read some stuff about using a washer on the heatsink standoffs - that seems to be the least painful way of doing this. The thickness of the heat spreader is 2mm (apparently, I haven't measured it, so a 2mm thick plastic washer placed over the heatsink standoffs could work fine). Interestingly, the single CPU version of the Mac Pro 4,1 and all the Mac Pro 5,1 models ship with with heatspreaders included, so no modding is necessary. It's just the dual CPU Mac Pro 4,1 with this heatspreader issue. On the Mac Pro 4,1 you need to upgrade the firmware to imitate a Mac Pro 5,1 so it'll support the later CPUs. On the 5,1 you don't have to do a thing to the firwmare. RAM Upgrades There's so much cheap DDR3 ECC RAM on the market. 32GB of the DDR3-1333 ECC stuff for $80! Fucken load up mates! Just search eBay for 16GB (or 32GB) DDR3 ECC and you'll find the cheap stuff from China. The single CPU versions have 4 RAM slots and the dual CPUs have 8. If you've got a dual CPU machine, you could chuck in 64GB of RAM for just $145. 64GB! Safari will still chew it all up though, hah.

Ideal Configs

Now that we know how to upgrade the Mac Pro, what's it all cost? What's the ideal config for me? If I can find a single core Mac Pro 4,1 or a Mac Pro 5,1, I'd shove the following into it:

Intel X5687 CPU - $130 (eBay)

32GB DDR3 ECC RAM - $70 (eBay)

Nvidia Quadro K620 - $212 (Skycomp)

256GB Samsung SM951 PCIe SSD & adaptor - $297 (Ram City)

$709

With this sort of config, the only gotcha is the fact you won't see the grey boot screen. If it bothers you that much, pick up a second hand GTX680 or AMD 7950 and flash it. I can't be arsed and the K620 is more than enough for me and for the odd occasion I need to boot off a different volume without changing the startup disk in Mac OS X, I'll plug in the old original Mac graphics card. Currently, single CPU Mac Pro 5,1's are coming on to the 2nd hand market in Australia due to 5-year leases wrapping up at universities and businesses. There's currently 10 up on Grays Online (damn NSW only pickup) and if you search for Mac Pro on eBay, you can find a couple. If you can score a single CPU 4,1 or 5,1 for under $1000, spend $700 or so on upgrades, you've spent ~$1700 on a very flexible Mac that hypothetically performs better than most of the current Macs on the market except the 27" iMacs, the top of the line 15" Retina MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro (duh), whilst configuring it to your needs, unlike the iMac. The other beauty of the Mac Pro is that it's a gamer's delight. Chuck in your high performance video card, boot into Windows and you've got a gaming rig and Mac OS X box in one, instead of two separate computers. I'd love to do more benchmarks, comparing an X5687 laden Mac Pro with current Macs. If anyone has a upgraded a Mac Pro with a X5687 CPU, please get in touch so I can ask you to run some tests for me and I can properly compare the performance to price ratio of an upgraded Mac Pro to a current Mac. I plan to write a separate article comparing the price and performance of the current crop of Macs to used Macs and upgraded Mac Pros. Oh, and the other thing to keep in mind here - Hackintosh. With 10.11, there's wide hardware support and computer hardware has never been cheaper. I'll explore Hackintoshing in 2016 in more detail in a separate post.

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Charting the quality of of Telstra's LTE network on free data day

Telstra turned off the data billing system on Sunday, as compo for a national network outage a few weeks ago. This is the second time Telstra's had this freelech day for its customers and I had a hunch people would be better prepared to take full advantage of Telstra's "generosity". I was up late on Saturday night and decided to try and log the quality of Telstra LTE in Bacchus Marsh (where I live) and see how hard people hit the free data, even though Bacchus Marsh is covered in NBN and the people living here really don't need free mobile data as every home here can get 100mbit fibre with no data caps, if you're that keen for fast Internet. It's a rather crude test, just a Raspberry Pi running speedtest-cli every 10 minutes (which itself adds to the congestion), but it's better than nothing. The device I used to get on to the LTE network is a Huawei 5372T, which has a Category 4 LTE modem inside, capable of 150/50 speeds. Bit old now, but it's the fastest device I had on hand besides my iPhone and I didn't want my iPhone tied up all day just doing speed test. This test isn't supposed to find out the fastest Telstra speed possible - my modem was located in a shit spot, didn't have a full signal, is in a regional town and wasn't using the latest modem. It was more to see if there's any trends, than to find the right conditions for max download speed or the best latency. Of course, this is just a small sample of a single tower (likely to be Site ID 50537, but could be 300276, I dunno for sure), so might not reflect your experiences with the Telstra LTE network on that day. For all I know, it could have held up pretty well in the inner city/CBD areas. Anyway, here's the latency chart (click/tap to see it big). You can see that pings were fine until around 8AM and they never really recovered until about 11:30PM. Bandwidth is similar story. Speeds really shit the bed around 8AM too and didn't recover until around midnight, when people stopped leeching. However the free data continued for me at least, until 4AM - I was using a pre-paid SIM with no credit on it, so when the free data ran out at 4AM, the tests stopped working. So what do these charts mean? What can we gather from this? I don't have a "normal" day to compre against, so I can't say "well bandwidth was down 20% and latency down 40%", but it's pretty clear that the Telstra network was performing well below averge. 8AM-Midnight averages Latency - 910ms Download - 5.30mbit/s Upload 2.62mbit/s 2AM-8AM & Midnight-4AM averages Latency - 90ms Download - 30mbit/s Upload 4mbit/s Entire free data period averages Latency - 602ms Download - 13.47mbit/s Upload 3.93mbit/s The time of day when people are awake and expect decent Telstra connectivity saw 910ms latency! 910ms! That's worse than the dial-up days. I understand if bandwidth is constrained, but providing such shit latency makes even the most basic of tasks like web browsing, a slow mess. It's ironic that Telstra was offering free data as an apology for their network crapping out, an event which in turn, caused the network to crap out. There won't be any sort of compensation for an entire day of rubbish latency and low bandwidth. I'm pretty Teltra did this face-saving measure instead of simply giving all its customers a day or half day of network access fees back (i.e: you pay $100/m? Here's a $3.29 credit for the day of disruption, $1.65 for half a day) because a day of free data costs Telstra way less than refunding it's ~10m customers half a day of a mobile plan. They're happy to sacrifice a day of network quality so they don't have to sacrifice a few bucks. Plus imagine if all you received as compensation for that half-day outage was like 66c (I pay $40/m - which is $1.32/day, only 66c), they'd cop more of a backlash over that ("fucken Telstra only gave me 66c!") than over a Sunday where the network was slow, but still worked. Smart. If you'd like to see the raw data for yourself, maybe do your own analysis and charts of it, here it is on Google Docs for you to copy. And if you like this sort of inane nerd bullshit, you'd love the crap out of my daily email newsletter, The Sizzle.

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Investigating How To Promote The Sizzle - Part 1

After writing 100 issues of The Sizzle, I think it's time for me to reflect on what I've done, assess how it's going and plan for the future. I love writing The Sizzle every weekday. Since wrapping up One More Thing back in 2013, The Sizzle is the first thing I've gotten stuck into that I really enjoy. I get paid, to read and write about a topic I'm deeply interested in and fascinated by - how can I not love it? Best of all, other people really like The Sizzle too. Just check out the awesome feedback I've received. Totally unsolicited comments. People enjoy it that much that they went out of their way to let their friends know about The Sizzle. Most of them are practically strangers and the vast majority, I've never even met. From a personal fulfilment point of view, The Sizzle is a winner - but enjoying the smell of one's owns farts doesn't pay the bills. I'm not that independently wealthy that I can sustain sinking hours a day (currently takes me around 3-4 hours of reading and writing to compose an issue of The Sizzle) into it for what is currently working out to approx $8.50/hr. I need to grow The Sizzle's audience to make what would be considered minimum wage here in Australia: $657/week. The good news is, I think that's totally possible. It's possible for me to make minimum wage, doing what I love, sitting at home in my underwear. The purpose of this post is to explore how to grow The Sizzle to reach an income of $2850/month after expenses and before tax - the minimum wage in Australia and enough for me to say to people "yes, I make a living doing this". === Let's look at The Sizzle's (very simple) finances, starting with expenses: Mailchimp (for sending the newsletter out) - $14/m Moonclerk (for handing the recurring subscriptions) - US$9/month (AU$13) Vultur (hosting for The Sizzle forum & website) - US$20/m (AU$27) Domain name (thesizzle.com.au) - $1/m ($24 for 2 years) Total: $55/month If I grow the list to the rate I need to make the minimum wage, Mailchimp costs $21/m and Moonclerk will be US$30 ($41). Even then, my monthly expenses won't exceed $100. Now, my income: 157 subscibers @ $4.61/month (after credit card fees with Stripe) Total: $723.77/month Total profit is $668/month. $2,182 away from the target. As you can see, income is $4.61 per subscriber, per month and the target is $2950/month ($2850 minimum wage + $100 expenses). This means I need at least 640 subscribers. I already have 156 people paying me, so that works out to 484 new subscribers in order to meet the minimum wage target. Now this is the hard bit - how do I get 484 new, paying subscribers? That's what I need to work on - strategies to get 484 people give me money for The Sizzle, every month. === The Sizzle's customer acquisition strategy (aka how to reel in the punters) is simple: - Get people to visit The Sizzle website - Once at the website, sign up for a free trial - When the trial is over, get them to pay The challenge in getting more paid subscribers is converting them from interested people at a website, to signing up for the free trial, then converting them to paid users when their free trial is over. Here's some stats on current conversions: 1704 unique users visited The Sizzle website in 2016 so far. In 2016, 59 people signed up for the free trial. So going by this, I can roughly estimate my website to free trial conversion rate is 3.46%. No idea if that's good or bad. The next conversion is getting those people on the free trial, to pay me for a subscription. This conversion rate is much healthier. Again, since the start of 2016 to now, of the 59 people that signed up for a free trial, 23 of them are now paid subscribers. That's a 39% conversion rate. This shows me that once people know what The Sizzle is after having experienced it for a week, they're pretty likely to give me money. My marketing should focus on explaining what The Sizzle is and showing it to people so they can get into the trial and let the product (the newsletter) speak for itself. === I could focus on improving the free trial to paid conversion rate (particularly with following up with those who don't subscribe), but I feel that if they've seen the Sizzle for a week and don't decide to pay, they're relatively a lost cause. I don't wanna be that guy that harasses you after you say no in the off chance you simply forgot or ran out of time to subscribe, when really the most likely reason you didn't subscribe is ya just don't want it. I hate those follow up calls from banks and insurance companies, I don't want to do it to others. So - how to get those sweet sweet leads? What the fuck is a lead? A lead is someone who signs up to the free trial. I pay money/buy something, then you/someone/something directs users to my website and a user signs up for free trial. That, is a lead. All my market efforts should focus on how much a lead costs. Before I even look in to what marketing and advertising options are available to me, I should work out what a lead is worth to me. Is it smart to spend say, $100 for a lead when they might not even convert into a paid subscriber? I can work this out using the conversion stats from earlier and what my revenue is. If I assume that my current 39% of leads turn into paid customers stays true, that means that for 2.564 leads, I'll get one paid customer. If a lead is $1, I'll need to spend $2.564 to get a paying customer. If a lead is $5, I'll need to spend $13.20 to get a paid customer. To put it another way, how many months do I need the paid subscriber to stick around in order to get a return on that investment? If I'm happy to wait say, 3 months until I get my money back for what I spent to get that customer, a lead is worth $5.39 to me. But if I decide that 6 months is a worthwhile time to wait, that same lead is worth $10.79. General theory is that the more you spend on getting leads, the more likely you are to get them. This is key to any money I spend on promoting the Sizzle. If I'm spending more than what a lead is worth to me on a campaign, then I am wasting money and will have to wait too long for the cost of that campaign to be recouped. Making the best use of the limited money I have is smart. Of course, this assumes the conversion rate from trial to paid stays the same. The current 39% could be a fluke - it could be because the people finding out about The Sizzle tend to already know me and kinda know what they're in for. If I had 1000 total strangers with just a passing interest in technology on my free trial list, I don't know if 39% of them would start paying. If my conversion rate halved to 20%, I suddenly need 5 leads to generate 1 paid subscriber. Instead of a lead having a worth of $5.39, it's $2.77. With those lead valuations in mind, I'll write up another post with some actual things I might spend money and time on as to get more subscribers to The Sizzle. By the way, if you want to subscribe to The Sizzle, do it! Just pop your email address down below and sign up.

Email Address

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Earning 280,000 Qantas Points For Only $1048

I've noticed a few large points bonus offers on some credit cards lately and thought it'd be an excellent way to reach the 280,000 points required for the oneworld Classic Flight Award - the best bang for buck points use around I reckon. A few months ago I explained how the award worked and how to find flights, but this post is how to get 280,000 points cheaply and easily. We do this by signing up for credit cards we don't need! There's some big points bonuses on offer at the moment, so it's a great time to take advantage of them. The onyl catch is that you need to be earning over $75,000/yr. This can be a mix of wages or investment income (like rent, dividends, bank interest, etc.) - just gotta make sure it's something you can prove to the card issuer if they want proof. The process is pretty simple. Apply for these cards and get the points on offer a few months after applying: Qantas American Express Ultimate Card

$450 annual fee, 80,000 bonus points

free return QF domestic flight included with the $249 fee

spend $500 within 3 months to get 77,500

spend anything with Qantas to get an extra 2,500 points

use my affiliate link to sign up so I get a bonus 20,000 points!

ANZ Frequent Flyer Black

no annual fee for the first year

75,000 bonus points

spend $2,500 within 3 months to get the bonus points

includes two qantas club lounge passes

annual income $75,000/yr

apply here, Points Hack affiliate link, I get nothin, but they get $50 I think

NAB Qantas Rewards Premium

70,000 bonus points

spend $1,500 within 90 days to get the points

$250 annual fee

unsure of annual income requirement, probably $50k+

apply here, no affiliate link

Citi Qantas Signiature Credit Card

50,000 bonus points

just need to make one purchase on the card witin 3 months

$348 annual fee

annual income of $75,000 required

apply here - Points Hacks gets a $250 kickback if you sign up

These four cards will get you 275,000 points all up, leaving you 5,000 points short. You need to spend $500 on the AMEX, $2,500 with ANZ and $1,500 with NAB to get the bonus points and these spends also earn you regular points as well as the bonus points. Using the QF AMEX, you'll get 1pt/$1 on regular stuff so that's 500 points. On the ANZ and NAB AMEX, you'll get 1.5pt/$1 so a $2,500 spend is 6,000 points. There's your 280,000 points. For total out of pocket expense of $1048 (for card annual fees - the minimum spends for the bonus points don't count - you'd have used that money anyways to buy stuff), you'll get 280,000 points. An extra $1500 in taxes brings the total spend to around $2500. $2500 for 6 business class flights worth over $25,000. That's a bargain I reckon. Make sure to read my posts about the OWRTW award so that you can use your hard earned (hehe) points properly and understand the awesome deal on offer. You're probably thinking, "will this fuck up my credit history? I'm scared to apply for a credit card because credit cards are scary and I'm a little baby who's scared of fine print and terms and conditions" Applying for cards and using them normally totally won't damage your credit history. Having credit isn't a bad thing. It's when you abuse that credit people care. Let's say you apply for the cards and get them. You then proceed to get a loan for a car or a house and the bank sees you have four cards there - that doesn't look good as to the bank as you already have a heap of credit and they won't offer you a loan. This is why you cancel them before you go applying for loans, so the bank sees that you had the cards, used them properly and cancelled them. If you go using the cards, maxing them out and you're unable to pay them back, resulting in a default - you're fucked then. But that's your fault for spending money you don't have. Don't do that. Get the cards, pay them back on time before you incur interest and cancel them once your QF points come into your account. If you get knocked back for a card, don't go applying for more cards either. If there's a lot of failed credit applications on your credit report, that looks bad and they don't go away for a few years. It's not the end of the world like a default, but more a question mark on your file for any potential lender - "hmm, why were they rejected? we dunno, but it looks suss". For more info on how your credit report works, check out this Choice article. If you do end up taking a round the world trip using this method, shoot me an email, I'd love to know how you went!

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Buying a non-Tesla to drive around the USA

@jamescroft on Twitter wanted to know what the cost would be to buy an ICE (internal combustion engine) car instead of a Tesla and instead of renting one. He reckons it'd be cheaper, I didn't think it would (hence why I didn't bother initally), so let's do some investigation! If I was buying a sensible ICE that's reliable, easy to drive and suited for a road trip, I'd probably go a Toyota RAV4 simply because it's a Toyota and I like Toyotas. It's practically the Corolla I have now, just jacked up a little. I'd assume it would be reliable and there's Toyota dealers all over America I can pop in to for servicing. I could get a Corvette or a Mustang, but they'll get pretty uncomfortable after a few weeks I reckon. Sports cars aren't known for comfort. A new RAV4 is around $27,000, or a used one pretty much identical except for the miles, for $20,995. I'd bargain them down to $20,500 very easily I reckon. I'd rather get a used one than a new one and save taking a $4-5k depreciation hit. As it's purchased in New York, there is no requirement for me to pay sales tax (check out the last dot point on the NYS DMV website), so $20,500 + $108 for rego. Let's assume all up $21,000 is the drive away price. Insurance on the RAV4 is much cheaper than the Tesla - Progressive will insure it for $1344. It's an ICE car, so it'll need maintenance. The service book says to get it serviced every 5,000 miles, which I will in order to ensure a good resale value. Each service looks pretty basic (35k, 40k, 45k, 50k, 55k) - let's assume $60 per service on average. Gotta keep it clean, so $100 on washes and $150 for a detail before selling it. RAV4 obviously needs fuel, which I went over in the original post (20,000mi @ 26MPG - $1.80/gallon), will be US$1400 for fuel on the trip.

Car: 2014 Toyota RAV4 AWD LE - US$21,000 (drive-away price)

Taxes: waived for non NYS resident

Insurance: $1344

AAA membership: $108

Maintenance: $300

Cleaning: $250

Fuel: $1400

AUD$29,952 for the car + USD$3402 (AUD$4833) for misc stuff = AU$34,785 all up. According to Kelley's Blue Book, the low-end estimate for a 2014 RAV4 LE AWD is around $16,000. Let's assume I listed it for sale on Craigslist or took it to a dealer and got $15,000 (AUD$21,084) cash for it. AUD$34,785 (what I spent on the car all up) - AUD$21,000 (amount I'd get for selling the car) = AUD$13,785 to own and operate the RAV4. Each option's costs rounded up: Buy Tesla - $21,000 (though could be more - the resale value is pretty unknown for such a high end car) Buy RAV4 - $14,000 Rent RAV4 - $12,500 I'd still go for the Tesla tho, because it is cool and the RAV4, is not.

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Thinking Out Loud: Buying a Tesla Model S for a USA Road Trip

I've been overseas and visited many countries, but have come to love the USA the most. Before the land of the free and home of the brave descends into a giant flaming garbage bin where you can't walk down the street without the fear of a bullet hitting you, I want to spend six months, with a car, seeing the things that without the luxury of time and self transportation, would otherwise go unseen. In years gone by I might have done this road trip in a classic American muscle car, some nice Detroit metal like a Corvette or a Mustang (which would still be awesome) - but this is 2016, so why not do it in a Tesla Model S? That's what this meandering blog post is about. What would it cost and what are some of the practicalities of going to the USA and driving a Tesla Model S for six months? I know from the outset it'll be expensive, but this is a bucket list sort of thing. It may never happen, but if the opportunity to do so comes about, I've done the planning. //Getting a visa First step is getting permission to stay in the US for six months as the normal visa waiver is only 90 days. Luckily getting a longer tourist visa is relatively painless. Go online, apply for a B2 visa, attend the interview and enjoy six months stateside. My wife and I have no criminal record, would be able to show sufficient means to support ourselves and have significant reasons to return back to Australia (our family is here, our house is here, our jobs are here). //How do I buy a car in the USA when I don't live there? The Tesla I want would be a Model S 85 or 90. A late model 2014 (made after Sep 2014) will have the cool auto-pilot stuff and an 85 or 90kWh battery is a must to achieve as much range as possible (which I'll get to later). Tesla sell certified pre-owned cars and are the best bet to get one from versus some dude on Craigslist. There's also some dealers selling them on eBay. Someone made a little website called EV-CPO Consolidator, which scrapes the Tesla certified pre-owned database and is way faster than using the Tesla website. It even shows you which models have Auto Pilot and which don't - handy! Each state's DMV (i.e: their equivalent of VicRoads) has wildly different rules around registering a car. For example, in Massachusetts, even when buying a car off a dealer, you gotta get a form from the dealer, take it to an insurance agent, then to the DMV, then get the car inspected, ugh. Most places however, the dealer does all the work, like a goddamn sane person would want them to. Tesla has excellent customer service and I have no doubt they'd go the extra mile to help me once they see I'm serious. It should just be a case of asking them for the total price including taxes and giving Tesla the money - they'll do the rest. Like Victoria's motor vehicle duty, US states require you to pay sales tax on a used car. This is paid when you register the car - so if buying from a dealer, you'd pay the dealer and the dealer passes it on. Some states however (Alaska, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon) don't have sales tax, or the tax is minimal (lots of the southern states), or it's wavied for electric cars (Washington, Washington DC, New Jersey). Trying to minimise sales tax is worth a lot of money for me. If I have to pay, for example, $85,000 for the car, then another $7,000 on top in taxes, when I go to sell the car before I leave for say, $78,500, I would have lost $13,500, not $6,500. The final part of the puzzle is getting insurance as a foreigner. Luckily most US insurance companies will happily insure you - it'll cost more as they have no data on you and they might not give you a quote online, but if you get on the phone, the large insurers like AllState or Geico will assist. Progressive will even give a quote online. I called Geico and they were keen as fuck to get me to pay for the insurance right there and then. So insurance really isn't a problem. Just to round out all my research, I figured it won't hurt to call a Tesla showroom and ask a few questions. These guys live to make sales so spending 10 min on the phone for a potential sale is literally what they're there to do. Guy at the Fremont showroom told me they've had a few people come in who don't have a US drivers licence and are on 1-2 year visas for work buy a Model S. In California at least, there's nothing stopping me from owning and registering a car. Tesla said they'll handle all the paperwork - all I need to do is get insurance and pay them. Paying them via wire transfer isn't a problem either. By all counts, as long as I have the cash, buying a car in the USA isn't a problem. Here's the process summarised:

Buy a certified pre-owned Model S 85/90 with Auto Pilot from Tesla, taking advantage of their excellent customer service and let them do all the paperwork.

Provide dealer with an address in that state (preferably a friends place), some ID (passport & AU licence should be fine).

Wire money from AU bank to their bank (use something like Transferwise or OFX - way cheaper than a bank).

While payment clears, get insurance (can be done same day as payment initiated).

Give insurance to dealer, let them do their thing.

When payment clears, wait for dealer to call that all is good and pick up the car.

Drive off in a nice 2014-2015 Tesla Model S 85/90 with auto-pilot.

All up it should take about a fortnight at most - maybe a week for funds to clear and let's estimate a few days for paperwork. It can seem scary for someone who hates paperwork and fiddling around and dealing with authorities. But I don't mind that at all. Some people do crosswords, some do puzzles - I decipher bureaucracy. //How much will it all cost? Car: There's a 90D from Denver, which would be perfect because I'd love the extra range on the 90D, but it's floor stock - which means it's still eligible for the federal tax credit, which I can't get as I don't pay tax in the USA. This means I'd be paying $7,500 more than I should, so when I go to resell it, I'd be taking even more of a hit (I pay $95,300, but it's really worth $87,800 to a local, which means I can only resell it for $80k or so. I'd be losing $15,300 before taxes!). I need to stick to certified pre owned (CPO) and the best one, at first glance is a P85D San Francisco for $96,000. But there's also a P90D in New York for US$104,700. Taxes: If I was to get the P85D in San Francisco, or Florida or Chicago, I'd have to pay sales tax of 8.250% in IL, 9% in CA or 6% in FL. This is dead money I won't get back. Let's say I get the P85D in SF for $96,000 and pay the 9% sales tax - that's $104,640. When I go to resell it, I'd probably not be able to ask for more than $90,000. I'd be out of pocket $14,640. The P90D in New York however, I think I'm able to get tax waived as I don't live in New York. The P90D is $104,700, but I'd be able to sell it pretty easily for $95,000, a loss of only $9,700 - almost $5,000 difference and I get a better car. Where the car is located means a lot more than the price. Rego: Using the P90D in New York as an example, and the NYS DMV's registration calculator, I'd be up for US$107.50. Insurance: Geico want $3005. Progressive want $2420. Could probably shop around a little more, but let's assume insurance will set me back at least US$2400. Charging adaptors: I'll explain this on its own later, but there's all sorts of different plugs in use across America for charging electric cars. The Tesla comes with various adaptors so the only one I think I'll buy is the CHAdeMO adapter, which is US$450. Roadside assist: Sign up for AAA (the US equivalent of the RACV/NRMA, etc.)- costs US$108. I dunno what you'd actually use AAA for with an electric car (flat tyre? towing?), but it'd give me peace of mind that I have it. Maintenance: no need for oil changes or fluids and shit like that, so for the time I'll be driving it, I shouldn't have to spend a cent on maintenance/ Tyre wear is about all I need to concern myself with - apparently due to the negative camber in the rear wheels, the inside of them wears down very quickly, like after 10,000mi. This could be an issue only with the 21" wheels, so I'd go the 19" and keep an eye on the tread. Getting 4 new tyres will set me back around US$1000, at least. There's also car washing & cleaning, as well as a good detail before I sell it. Let's budget US$300 for all that. Resale value: I'd be selling the car only 6 months after buying it and will add on at least 20,000 miles. A 30,000 mile P90D for US$95,000 would tempt a lot of potential buyers. I've already had offers from people on Reddit (where I briefly discussed my plan to get some advice on buying) who are keen to save a bit of cash. Summary of costs: Car: Tesla Model S P90D - US$104,700 (~AUD$149,155.72 at Transferwise's rates & fees) Taxes: waived in NYS for a non-resident Registration: $107.50 Insurance: $2400 CHAdeMO adapter: $450 AAA membership: $108 Maintenance: $300 Resale: US$95,000 (~AUD$133,667 via Transferwise) TOTAL: USD$3365.50 (~AUD$4765.65 at MasterCard's FX) + AUD$149,200 = approx AUD$154,000 (considering currency changes) A$154,000 (total Model S expenses) - A$133,500 (estimated resale value) = AU$20,500 just to own a Tesla Model S for 6 months. //Renting a normal car - petrol vs. electricity So I'd be looking at 20 grand just to drive the model S around - which sounds expensive, but, maybe isn't? Let's say I hired a decent sedan or SUV for 6 months and got the full insurance on it, how much would that cost? After about 20 min of searching, the cheapest seems to be Hertz, who will rent me a RAV4 out of San Diego (so I can start from the bottom of the USA and work my way up the west coast) with a loss damage waiver (but not 100% full insurance cover), for US$6759 (AUD$9600). Fuel for the RAV4 isn't free, so, if I drive an approximate 20,000 miles, and assuming it's a 2015 RAV4 2WD, it uses a combined 26MPG - 770 gallons of fuel would be consumed in order to travel the 20,000mi. Current gas prices are cheap as fuck right now, with a US average price of US$1.80/gallon - ~USD$1400 for fuel. Also need to do oil changes - assume a change every 5,000mi to be on the safe side (Toyota recommends 10,000mi - which is a really long time I reckon) at a rough cost of around US$80 for a filter & oil change. That's 3x changes during the 6 months - US$240. Still need to clean the rental car just so it looks ok and doesn't get our hands and clothes filthy when we touch the car - US$150 should cover it. Rental: $6759 Fuel: $1400 Oil: $240 Cleaning: $150 Total: US$8549 (~AUD$12,100) $12,100 to hire a conventional car and keep it fuelled vs. $20,500 for a way cooler (and arguably safer) car and electricity is pretty much free for it. I could buy a used RAV4 but I'd imagine the depreciation + insurance + tax on the thing will outstrip what it costs just to hire one. I could also probably find a cheaper way to hire a similar or nicer car if I put more time into it. But it puts the cost of buying the Model S into perspective. It works out to about $110/day for the Model S and $67/day to rent a RAV4. I'd rather spend the extra $8,000 and get a Tesla :)

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How to find Oneworld awards flights with KVS Tool

Previously I explained the oneworld Classic Flight Reward and how you can get a business class flight around the world, worth $25,000, for only ~$1500 and 280,000 points. Now comes the part where you actually try and book the damn thing. Business class awards seats are not as common as economy ones purely because there's way less seats in the first place and the airlines really prefer to sell them rather than give them away. That doesn't mean it's impossible though. With this guide I'll help you find availability on the route you want or how to find an alternative route. Let's so over the itenerary rules for the OWCFR. 6 flights in a single itinerary - e.g: MEL-SYD-NRT, NRT-YVR, SEA-DFW, DFW-LHR, LHR-DXB, DXB-MEL is six flights, even though MEL-SYD-NRT is actually two flights. Has to be on Qantas plus two other airlines - e.g: MEL-SYD-NRT on QF, NRT-YVR on JAL and SEA-DFW on AA would meet that requirement as there's 3 different airlines and one is Qantas. Maximum distance of 35,000 miles - e.g: using great circle mapper, you can get a total distance. MEL-SYD-NRT-YVR-SEA-DFW-DFW-LHR-DXB-MEL is 27,019 miles. Well under the 35,000 mile max. Can't re-visit a continent twice - e.g: MEL-SYD-NRT, NRT-YVR, SEA-DFW, DFW-LHR, LHR-HKG, HKG-MEL is no good as you're going back to Asia twice (NRT at the start, HKG at the end). You can visit a continent coninuously, e.g: MEL-SYD-NRT, NRT-HKG, HKG-LHR, but you can't go back to it once you've left. Flights don't need to be continuous - e.g: MEL-SYD-NRT, NRT-YVR, SEA-DFW. You can make your own way between Vancouver and Seattle. Popular on European trips where you can get around very nicely by train, or domestically in the USA where you can get a cheap 1-2hr flight. No point wasting a segment on a short 1-2hr flight if you don't have to. With that info, you can make a rough itinerary based on where you'd like to go. The next step is where you'll spend weeks furiously searching for the flights you want. Say hello to KVS Tool. It's a horrible looking 90s app designed for Windows 3.1, but it is the easiest way to go searching the oneworld flight engine. It only runs on Windows and costs USD$75/yr (or $45/6m, $20/2m). KVS Tool also isn't very intuitive, but it beats repetitively searching the QF and BA websites. I've recorded a screencast of me using it as describing it in text is pretty and tedious. I demonstrate how to set KVS up and go through some of its features:

If you want more info on using KVS Tool, the documentation is pretty thorough. Basically you just search for the flights you want until you find them. Often you'll find there's no availability and you have to search again, altering your route or your dates. You might find that you need to stay 5 days in a place instead of 3 or only stay 4 days instead of 6. Alternatively,you might end up going somewhere for a day or two you didn't plan to - e.g: LAX-JFK, nothing when you want, but there is LAX-DFW two before before and DFW-JFK on the day you want to go, so you could stay in DFW for a little bit and see what's around. It can take a little creativity and good geographical knowledge to get a working route. Some handy tips from my experience searching for flights: - QR business doesn't show up very often, if at all, in a QFF search. Same with MH and JL flights. Need to use BA search for that. - Make a BA account by signing up here. Unfortunately it's a total prick to search - BA has a CAPTCHA on every session (to stop KVS Tool scraping their site pretty much), so you need to log in, run a search manually, pass the CAPTCHA and hope the cookie sticks for a little while. - Flights between the OW hubs are generally quite easy to get. SYD for QF, HKG for CX, LHR for BA, JFK/DFW/LAX for AA. If you want a nice easy flight, go SYD-HKG-LHR-JFK-LAX-DXB-SYD, I'd be shocked if you - American Airlines doesn't have domestic business class on most flights. Flights considered transcontinental (i.e: JFK-LAX) have business, but JFK-ORD or - Continental Europe is probably better by train than by plane. For example, London to Paris - catch the train. London to Berlin, maybe fly. There's trains all over Europe that are quite nice and relaxing, as well as fast. Check out Seat61 and Loco2 for more info and booking. Keep it in consideration instead of using up a flight in your itinerary that can be used for a long haul trip instead. - Three seats in business is pretty much impossible to get. Two is difficult enough as is. If you want 3 people to travel, you'll have much better luck getting tickets in economy class instead of business. You've spent a while making an itinerary and you've found all the flights you want that meet the criteria, awesome! Now how do you actually book it? Log in to the Qantas Frequent Flyer website and click "Multi-City", just near the One Way radio button. You'll be taken to a page which looks like this: Enter the itinerary, with airports and dates in order, then the amount of passengers and select "must travel on these dates" and ensure "search classic rewards" is ticked. It'll take a little while to load and one by one you can select your flights from the ones available on the dates and route you selected. After the last flight, the total points required should add up to 280,000 if you selected them all in business class. Proceed with the booking, pay the taxes and you're booked! If you want to redeem a flight on QR/JL/MH, etc. that you found via the BA search that doesn't show up on the QF website, you need to call Qantas and book on the phone (13 11 31). They may try and charge a 5,000 point booking fee - tell em to get stuffed as these flights aren't on the website. If booking by phone, make sure you have your itinerary nice and clear and be sure to go over it with the QF staff member before booking it in. Get them to read it back to you so everything's sorted. That's it! Bon voyage! If you get stuck or frustrated trying to find flights, let me know (aagius@gmail.com) I love figuring out itineraries :) If you need help earning points to get this reward, hang out for a third post by me on a few tips and tricks I've learned over the years of collecting QFF points.

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A oneworld Classic Flight Reward Guide

The oneworld Classic Flight Reward is the reason I collect Qantas Frequent Flyer points. It's why a fat kid from St. Albans was was able to fly MEL-DXB-TXL-LHR-BOS-ORD-HKG-MEL and will soon be travelling MEL-NRT-FRA-ARN-LHR-ORD-DFW-MEL, all in business class, spending just ~$1800 (taxes) per trip on airfares. To explain just how good value this ticket is, let's compare what else you can get for 280,000 points. You can throw your points in the bin by redeeming 315,000 (fuck that's more than I thought) points for a MacBook worth $1799 at the Qantas Store. Or even stupider, get 280,000 points worth of Woolworths gift cards, which will result in a measley $1600 to spend on groceries. Seriously, the Qantas Store is where points go to be pissed away. There's a plain ol' awards redemption: MEL-LAX-MEL in economy, for 1 adult is 96,000 points plus $610.92 in taxes. You can buy a flight from MEL-LAX return for only $1030 and earn points and status credits - redeeming your points for this trip is a total waste of time. As is MEL-LHR-MEL: $1228 straight up on Royal Brunei or 128,000 points + $846.12 on Qantas. Business and first class redemptions make more sense. Business class MEL-LAX-MEL is 192,000 points, $881.67 in taxes. The same flight with cash is $5600. Wayyyyy better use of your points. You're geting ~$4500 of value here vs. just $420 of value in economy. But as you'll see, there's better ways to spend those points you worked hard to get. What about upgrades I hear you ask? Upgrades can be good, but they're still not worth it in the scheme of things. If you purchased a "Sale" ticket you won't get an upgrade. You need to purchase a "Saver" or "Flex" economy ticket in order to qualify for an upgrade, *if* some are available. An example: MEL-LAX-MEL upgrade from economy to business. $1798 for an economy Saver ticket, which allows upgrades. You'll need 144,000 points to upgrade that entire flight to business. You could have just redeemed the flight for 48,000 points more and saved $917 and you'll have a guaranteed seat, as upgrades are not always possible. To summarise:

Qantas Store - don't waste your time.

Economy one way/return flights - rip off versus paying cash

Business or first one way/return flights - good, but you're not maximising the points

Upgrades - business to first, yes. Economy to business, no.

Now we get to the oneworld Classic Flight Reward. This used to be called an around the world ticket as its maximum value is achieved when you take multiple flights on the same ticket. Earlier this year it was renamed to a oneworld Classic Flight Reward, which is confusing as Qantas has its own Classic flight awards. From now on I'll refer to it as OWCFR. First I'll explain why this is such bitchin' value, then I'll get into the fine print of the conditions surrounding this fare. If you want to read the fine print yourself, here's the terms and conditions for the ticket (starts at section 14.5). I've read it so you don't have to, so unless you're a fan of fine print, don't worry, I got your back. A business class OWCFR ticket is 280,000 points + taxes. For that, you get to go on pretty much as many flights as you like, in a forward direction, as long as your travel distance doesn't exceed 35,000 miles. It's a bit more nuanced than that (airlines love fine print), but I'll get to that later. As an example, let's go SYD-DXB-LHR-JFK-LAX-HKG-SYD. To do this flight with cash, in business class, would set you back around $28,665. If you assume ~$1500 in taxes, that's $27,165 in value. Compare that to spending the same amount of points, to get an $1800 laptop. Why would you get an $1800 laptop when you can get a flight worth $28,000 for the same points spend? Ditto taking three MEL-LAX-MEL flights in economy - why take what amounts to ~$3000 worth of flight when for the same amount of points & taxes, you can go in business class to Dubai, London, New York, Los Angeles and Hong Kong? Of course, there are other costs - you have to be able to afford the taxes which range from $1500-$2000 depending where you go. Gotta earn 280,000 points, which might not be easy depending on your circumstances. You'll probably need to take a few weeks off work to fit in all the cities versus a simple 1 week or 2 week holiday in a single city. Accomodation in all those places isn't free either - 6 weeks of hotels versus 2 weeks makes a big difference. If you want to go on a big trip to a few different cities, then the OWCFR is an awesome way to do it. Got a load of points sitting in your account? Want to book the flights? Let's go through the criteria for the award so you can plan your route properly. First is a little glossary of airline terms so we're all on the same page. Take this route example: MEL-KUL-CDG, LHR-DFW, DFW-DXB-DOH, DOH-MEL Itinerary - an itinerary is the whole thing: MEL-KUL-CDG, LHR-DFW, DFW-DXB-DOH, DOH-MEL. Segment - in the overall flight, MEL-KUL-CDG is a sector. LHR-DFW is a sector. DFW-DXB-DOH is a sector. DOH-MEL is a sector. Sector - each individual flight is a segment, e.g: the MEL-KUL-CDG sector has two segments: MEL-KUL and KUL-CDG. You'll need 140,000 points for economy, 280,000 for business and 420,000 points for first. There's premium economy for 210,000 points, but not enough airlines have that class on their flights, so you'll end up in economy most of the time. If you've booked a business class trip and one of the segments or sectors doesn't have business available, you'll get bumped to economy. You can travel a maximum of 35,000 miles. The distance travelled includes "surface segments" where you might take another form of transport between two places. For example, you might book MEL-HKG, HKG-LHR, FCO-DFW, LAX-MEL. As you can see, you didn't book a flight from DFW to LAX or from LHR to FCO. These are called surface segments. Good for when you want to make your own way somewhere. The distance between the two points counts towards your miles however. Lets say you go from London to Rome by train, via Paris, Munich and Milan. You will incur the milage for just what it would be to fly from London to Rome - 892 miles. I wouldn't worry about it too much, 35,000 miles is heaps. You can take up to 5 stop overs in a single itineary. A stop over for the purposes of the OWCFR is when you get off the plane and stay somewhere for 24 hours or more. E.g: MEL-DXB (stop 1) DXB-DOH-TXL (stop 2), LHR-BOS (stop 3), BOS-ORD (stop 4), ORD-HKG, (stop 5), HKG-MEL (last flight isn't a stop over, it's the end). This means you can get 6 sectors in the one ticket. Need to fly on at least two different oneworld airlines and one Qantas flight (i.e: Qantas, Cathay Pacific and British Airways or Qantas, American Airlines and Qatar Airways). Emirates and Jetstar flights don't count, even though they show up in Qantas flight searches as they're not part of oneworld. This is a list of oneworld airlines. To re-cap:

280,000 points for business class

Max travel of 35,000 miles, which includes surface segments

5 stop overs / 6 flights

Must be at least one Qantas flight and two other non-Qantas oneworld airlines

Now that you know the rules, you have to find the flights where you wanna go and see if there's any seats available on that route. That's when the real fun begins! I'll write up a second post soon explaining how to use KVS Tool and tips for finding availability on the flights you want.

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Pre-paid, BYO SIM plan, 24 month contract? What should a yearly iPhone upgrader do?

Did a bit of last minute "do I go on a 24m contract, or go pre-paid, or BYO SIM contract" setup for new the new iPhone and thought I'd share my specific scenario. If you're after a 64GB iPhone 6s on Telstra and like to upgrade your phone every year, then this could save you some cash. Why Telstra? I was with Optus for a few weeks but they were awful. Billing system confused me and on the train from Ballarat to Melbourne got pretty much zero data throughput. That's kind of a deal breaker for my wife and I. No big deal, it's a month to month thing with Optus so there's no cancelation fees. Vodafone is excellent but they won't let me sign up for any of their non-prepaid products. I fail a credit or ID check every time. Plus where my wife works is a giant Vodafone blackspot so it'd be useless for her. That leaves me stuck with the expensive Telstra. Oh well. At least they're chucking in free Apple Music - saves me $12/m on Spotify I'd otherwise be paying. So some long winded calculations: The $95 Go Mobile plan and a 64gb iPhone 6s is $112/month. Over 12 months the spend is $1344. When it's time to upgrade there's two options: take advantage of the New Phone Feeling or cancel old contract and sign up for new one with new phone. New Phone Feeling is $149 but you don't get to keep the phone and have to re-sign for 24 months. All up you'll be out of pocket $1493 for 12 months of use and have no iPhone to re-sell. Alternatively you can cancel your contract and just sign up for a new plan. The full terms and conditions are here in this PDF. Of course it's very dense and deliberately full of jargon to confuse people. But I've waded through it on your behalf. Telstra will waive the early termination charge if you sign up for a new contact with them leaving you just to pay the remaining handset repayments. These are $17/month ($112-$95), but only whilst you're under a contract as you get a hidden "Device Plan Credit" as part of going on a 24 month contract. When you cancel the contract, that credit no longer applies and you need to pay the "full" amount of the handset repayments. Unfortunately Telstra doesn't make the Device Plan Credit amounts publicly available before you enter the contract. I asked on Telstra's live chat and they told me that if I cancelled after 12 months the remaining handset repayments would be $612 for the 64GB iPhone 6s. In this scenario, the 12 month spend would be $1956. But you'd still have the old iPhone, which I would estimate to be worth at least $700 for a quick Gumtree sale in a year's time. You'd be out of pocket $1256 for your 12 months of usage once you sell the phone, cancel the contract and sign up for a new Telstra plan. Last year pre-paid was cheaper than all the other options for some reason, giving more data for the same price points. The telcos clearly fixed that error this year. Telstra has also moved to 28 day recharges, so there's 13 recharges a year instead of 12. For $50 you get 4GB a recharge - a year of that is $650. An outright iPhone 6s 64GB is $1229. $1879 all up and if you sell the phone later for $700 you've only spent $1179 over the 12 months. The bang for buck seems to be the SIM-only plans. $50/m gets you 5GB of data and free Apple Music. On pre-paid all you get is 4GB and Apple Music is not included for free. Though to get Apple Music, you need to enter a 12 month contract. If you leave during the 12 months, the ETC is $25 for every month left on your contract (e.g: leave with 9 months remaining and you're up for $225). This is a bit of a bummer, as you can't move around to whoever has a sweet deal on at the time. Unfortunately after trying out the 3 telcos again now that I've moved out to the country, Telstra is pretty much my only bet. Summary: 24 month contract (7GB/month) & New Phone Feeling - $1493 ($1350 after Apple Music) over 12 months 24 month contract (7GB/month), re-contract after 12 months & sell old phone - $1256 ($1113 after Apple Music) over 12 months Pre-paid (4GB/28 days) & sell old phone - $1179 over 12 months Go Mobile BYO plan (5GB/month) & sell old phone - $1179 ($1036 after Apple Music) over 12 months So for this scenario, going on a BYO phone plan and buying the iPhone outright is the cheapest option. Means I have to cough up the $1129 up front for the iPhone, but also means I don't have to stuff around with Telstra and contracts. Going on a contract instead of pre-paid also lets me pool my data with my wife, so we get 10GB/month to share and free Apple music, saving us a further $17.99/m (the cost of an Apple music family plan). The New Phone Feeling thing is a bit of a waste of money unless you really really hate selling your old iPhone on eBay or Gumtree. Now to just sit and wait patiently for the new iPhone to arrive tomorrow via the lovely, competent and terrific under stress TNT. What a nice bunch of people TNT are. So good at their jobs too. Can't wait to engage with TNT tomorrow. Mmmhmm.

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Which Camera Is Best For Recording Conference Videos?

I have a nice side-gig where I record video of tech conference talks in high quality. I love doing it because I get to share the knowledge at these events with the world and I get paid to watch these cool people present. A major part of my kit to record these things is the camera. The last camera I owned was a Nikon D800 and whilst the image quality is excellent, I sold the D800 and lenses I had a few months ago when I went overseas and replaced it with a Sony a6000. The a6000 is a sweet little travel camera because it has an APS-C sensor in a pocket camera body and has an amazingly fast AF system, the best AF I've ever used actually. As nice as the a6000 is, it's not suitable for video recording events (I'll get into why later). I'll be recording a few more conference videos in 2015 than I have in the past, it's time to look at my options for buying a camera. I recorded RubyConf 2015 back in Feb and for that I rented a Panasonic AC160 from Melbourne Camera Rental (really nice guy that runs it - loves talking about the gear when I return it). It's cheap enough ($240 for 2 days) and got the job done. I was very lucky that it was in a super well lit room. The venue is literally a glass box that let in oodles of natural light. The AC160 did a fine job. But I can tell that in the typical dark venues conferences are in, it may not be as useful.

big arse sensor and good quality at high gain/high ISO

fast face detection AF

good telephoto lens at least 300mm at 35mm equivalent

no maximum clip recording times, I can live with every 30 min, but ideally it will record until the card is full

doesn't use proprietary cards like P2 or SxS

easy on the wallet, not too expensive

bonus points if it takes good stills and I can have an all in one camera

A note about face detection AF: I really love the idea of face detect AF for video. All my video recording is of people's faces. That's all I record and their face is all I need in focus. Not their laptop, not the background, but their face. The ability to simply turn on face detect AF and have it continuously keep focus on the presenter's face is priceless. Makes it pretty much set and forget for me as the camera person and I don't have to worry about the image being soft. Unfortunately, this feature doesn't work as well as it should. On the D800 the camera would hunt to find the face often, even when the presenter hasn't moved. The video ends up useless as all you'd see is an image in focus, then out of focus and ugh. Same goes for non-face AF use, continuous video AF kinda doesn't work well, because as soon as the AF is confused the image ends up a horrible out of focus mess until the camera person intervenes. On the other hand, having to constantly adjust focus when a speaker decides to rock back and forth or pace around the stage is annoying. However... on the Sony a6000, the face detection works so damn well (and AF in general) that it hardly ever hunts, or if it does hunt, it's so quick it's not that bad. It uses a hybrid AF system with loads of focus points which combine contrast detection (the standard way AF works) and phase detection, which I don't really understand. If there was a DSLR that had such nice focussing as the a6000, that would be awesome. But I don't think such a thing exists. In the abscence of face detection AF that works, it's probably better concentrating on other aspects of the camera and just focussing the old fashioned way. Enough crapping on, let's see what's on the market!

Blackmagic

I love Blackmagic gear so much. I borrowed a Pocket Cinema Camera and it is excellent. They're Australian designed too! How can you not love that? Pocket Cinema Camera - I really like the one I have here, even more so that it records to ProRes Proxy now and doesn't need insane SD cards. Unforatunatley its sensor is just too tiny for the shit conditions I record in. I've got one here with me now and might just set it up at the next conference I record, just to see how I go. No harm done using it as a second camera. But from my tests indoors, it leaves a lot to be desired. Outdoors in the sun, man, this thing is sweeeeettt. Studio Camera - this would be spot on perfect if it had a bigger sensor. It's got the same one as the Pocket camera. Makes sense though, in a studio you'd have proper lightning. URSA - sweet baby jesus this is a good cinema camera. It is $7500 and I'd still need to get a lens. So out of the question for me to buy. They have a weird one coming out soon which is the camera, without a sensor. You plug in a HDMI source and away you go. One of these plus a Sony A7s, oooh. Cinema Camera and Cinema Camera 4K - I don't need 4K, so I'm not gonna pay extra for that. But the basic Cinema Camera is around $1800-1900 used and takes SSDs, records to ProRes, has a Super35 sensor (little bigger than APS-C) and uses the Canon EF mount so there's a fuckload of lenses for it. I can buy a used 70-200 f/4 or even try and get a Sigma 70-200 f/2.8 and it'll be up to 480mm range which is super handy. Could even get a 135mm f/2 lens, it'll end up being at 324mm and let in even more light and be super sharp! It can record 12-bit RAW images, which for what I record would need way too many SSDs, but does do 10-bit ProRes which is more reasonable. At 10-bits of colour info, there's more of dynamic range to boost the image exposure/brightness in post without too much quality loss. Can do 12-bits of colour depth if you record in RAW (and have storage to burn). This thing hits pretety much all the targets. I'd like better AF performance though (but read the side note about AF up near the start).

Panasonic

Panny have so many cameras, so so many. But a lot of them suck (small sensors, P2 memory, way too expensive) or are old (tiny old sensors). Why haven't they got any full frame or APS-C sensor stuff? I'm just going to concentrate on a few. AF-100/102 - a couple of these are on the market 2nd hand for $1000. They take MFT lenses which is nice, but there's not a lot of fast lens choice vs. the Canon or Nikon mounts, particularly 2nd hand. You need a fast lens too as the sensor on this thing is small (its MFT). GH4 - everything about this camera is perfect except that shitty MFT sensor & lens mount. Low light is worse than a cheap APS-C DSLR. So yeah. Boo. AC130/160 - the AC130 is the same as the AC160 just without SDI. I rented this before and it worked well in daylight, but I doubt it will work well in shitty conferences venues. Plus it's expensive - $3700. I like the way it handles though, with all the options easy to configure from buttons on the side. Looks "pro" too. The face detect AF on it worked surprisingly well, sometimes. I did end up turning it off because when it fails, it fails bad and won't stop hunting. AC90 - the tiny model of the AC130 with a tinier sensor. It's $2200, but yeah, that 1/4.7" sensor is microscopic. HC-X1000GC - looks like the AC130 but 4K, which is weird as it costs less than the AC130 at only $3300. 60fps 4K, very nice. Downsize that to 1080p and it should look sharp and have less noise, making up or the smaller sensors and any low light defeciencies. Of all the Panasonic cameras this is the only one I'd bother getting. I'd really need to see it "in the flesh" and see what its like in low light.

Sony

Sony also have dozens of cameras. I really haven't used them before and don't know them as well as the Panasonics or Canons but their sensor tech is the best right now. I'm only going to focus on a couple of models. Where Sony drops the ball is on all their interchangeable lens cameras. The E-mount isn't as diverse as the Canon and Nikon ranges. There's fuck all 2nd hand lenses and buying new is expensive. There's adaptors but they're shit and make AF slow (and cost money). There's no 70-200 f/2.8 for E-mount. There's an f/4, but it costs $1500. Hiring lenses is almost impossible - the only place in Melbourne is Michaels and it's not cheap. The whole point of buying a camera is so that I don't need to hire anything. So with this caveat in mind, lets see Sony's range. FS-100 - has a nice big Super35 sensor, has decent AF and records to SD cards. Not a lot of them around 2nd hand (means people like them) but when they do pop up for around $2000-$3000 without a lens. Once you get a good lens (like the 70-200 f/4 - the 18-200 kit lens is f/6.3 at 200mm, ugh) the total price is almost $5,000. Too much for me. FS-700 - replaced the FS100 and goes for around $6k used, or $7800 new, plus a lens ($1500 for the 70-200 f/4). Almost $10k, and too expensive for me. FDRAX1 - much like the Panasonic X1000GC. Does 4K, has a built in lens. 1/2.3" sensor (which is small, but probably not that bad). It is $4900 though, which is getting up there in price and records to weird XQD cards. HDR-AX2000 - old. Somone in SA is selling it for $1000 and is "open to offers" so maybe $850 delivered. But it is an old camera now and the sensor is a few generations behind. NEXEA50H - looks ok, is $3800 with the 18-200 f/6.3 lens. Which is alright, but $3800 for an alright camera when the Blackmagic is a cool camera for $2000 and EF mount and ProRes and SSD and bigger sensor... EX2/EX3/PMW-whatevers - getting a bit on the old side, but still workhorses of the event video space. Downside is that they're expensive new and hard to find 2nd hand. Oh, and they need SxS cards, so yeah, that's a $1000 to get 8-9hrs of media at max quality, or buy an Atoms Samurai. Alpha 7S - this is the best sensor on pretty much any camera, period. Excellent DSLR for stills too. $2400 without a lens. The lack of lenses let this wonderful sensor down. E-mount gear is expensive and hard to find. If this camera was Canon or Nikon mount I'd have one already. The low light ISO is awesome. I wish Sigma or Tamron would make their 70-200 f/2.8 for full frame E-mount. It does have the usual DSLR issues though - 30 min max clip length & AC power requires an external kit ($30 off eBay tho). Sometimes the external power kit doesn't work because of the size of the tripod plate - it's normally a battery with a cable hanging out, so you need to leave the battery door hanging open and depending on the width of the camera, may not be possible. Awkward. Alpha 6000 - I own this camera and love it for stills. Even records to AVCHD for video. The AF is the best I've ever used. The sensor is as good as any entry level DSLR. But shit lenses, again. A 70-200 f/2.8 on this thing with an AC adapator would be perfect, since I already own one.

Canon

Canon make excellent DSLRs and video cameras, but the pricing structure is weird and the camcorders are a bit old now. 5D MkII - seen these 2nd hand for $1000-ish. A legend of video recording. The Magic Lantern hack adds all sorts of things to it too. Full frame sensor for beautiful iamges in low light and it makes an excellent stills camera as well. It has the same issue as other DSLRs - needs an AC power kit (again, not that much off eBay about $20 - but could be an issue if it doesn't fit on my tripod) and has video clip length limitations. The 5D MkII only does 12 minutes at 1080p. That is not good. Magic Lantern doesn't even work around this, but it will auto-restart for you (losing 1-2sec of video, which I could live with, but it's not ideal). I'm not a fan of using a hacked firmware in production either, for stuff I can't reshoot. Overall though, it's a good package. I get a still camera I can use and a video camera that's very capable. Pair it up with a 70-200 f/2.8 or f/4 or the the 70-300 if I can't get close enough. For under $2500 I'll have a really nice kit. 100D - supposed to have great AF and is about $800 brand new without a lens. There's a dude on Gumtree selling it for $350 used right now. APS-C sensor, so not as beefy as the full frame one on the 5D MkII. Does clean HDMI out though, so when partnered with an Atomos Ninja, is a nice setup. The Ninja 2 costs around $800 though. 70D - The 70D is around $800 used and has "Dual Pixel CMOS AF" system kinda like the Sony a6000. When used with an STM lens, it's pretty sweet. The 55-250mm STM lens, whilst slow, can focus really really fast too. Would still prefer the 135mm f/2 or 70-200 f/2.8 or f/4 on it. APS-C sensor, so not as big as the 5D MkII but still quite nice. The AF is what makes this camera I reckon. C100 - the C100 is a very nice video camera - I used it to record RubyConf 2014 in Sydney as they are way easier to hire in Sydney than in Melbourne. There was no AF, but everything looked pretty good. Have a nice full frame sensor on the C100 too. Downside is that they're expensive. At least $4,000 for a used one. The new MkII brings phase detection AF which will be great, but only on STM lenses and they're not the best lenses (f/3.5 to f/5.6). If I had a bunch of money, the C100 MkII and some Canon glass would be the way to go. But I don't have $10,000. XF100/200/300 - the XF305 is the BBC's standard documentary camera. It is a bit old though, but still looks great. Unfortunatley, it's also expensive. There's someone on eBay selling one for $3800, but nobody bid on it. I offered $2100 but he wouldn't take it. Might offer $2500 and see how I go. Still, I could get a Blackmagic Cinema Camera and a lens for less. It's still a 1/3" sensor and it was released 5 years ago. The 100 & 200 just have small sensors and are expensive. I used to own a few XF100s and they were good for their time. I probably should never have sold them and I'd have had an excellent ROI on them.

Nikon

I've had Nikon DSLRs for years and like em. They were one of the first to include 1080p video recording on their cameras too. Nice lens selection, but it still has the same DSLR issues of limited video clip length and needing AC power via a battery adaptor. Nikon's AF isn't as good as the Dual Pixel CMOS AF on Canon's stuff either. Nikon does do clean 1080p out on HDMI across the range though. D800/D600 - The D800 and D600 are pretty similar and are full frame sensors, so nice and big to pick up all that light. The D610 can be hand for around $1000 too. Add on a Sigma 70-200 f/2.8 for $600 and you've got a pretty nice kit. I know for a fact that the AF on it sucks for video, so that's a point taken away. I'd be more inclined to get the Canon 70D to be honest and enjoy the crop factor on the APS-C sensor. The fact the D610 is full frame is all it has going for it, oh and clean 1080p output if I ever wanna D3300 - $400 brand new from JB Hi-Fi without a lens. Chuck the Sigma 70-200 for $600 as well as for under $1,000 there's a camera that will do 1080p. The D3300's APS-C sensor is apparently very much like the Sony a6000 I have and I'm pretty happy with that. It's an SLR and it needs a battery hack and needs me to restart the video every 30 minutes. Price is very good though.

JVC

I have never used a JVC camera, nor have I seen anywhere that rents them out. I don't even know where would have them out on display for me to use before I drop the cash. Videocraft/Lemac, etc. have Panasonic and Sony cameras to try, but not JVC. That makes me a bit suspicious, but on paper their cameras look interesting. GY-HM200U/GY-HM170U - these are the same camera, just one has XLR input the other doesn't. I don't need XLR input, so the GY-HM170U is the cheaper one that'll suit. It does 4K and 1080p50, but only has a 1/2.3" sensor. It's $2700, so it's affordable too. Problem is that it's so new, there's bugger all info about it and there's nowhere I can demo one either. It might be a good camera, I don't know. Not sure if I want to take the risk however. GY-LS300CHU - uses a Super35 sensor (good) but MFT lenses (average). It's 4K (nice) but I can't find anywhere online that sells it in AU. To import it from B&H will cost close to $6,000 landed. Then you need a lens. Too expensive for me. GY-HM600U - an older model that looks good, but is expensive. $4500 landed in AU. Supposed to have great low light performance considering its 1/3" sensor. If somewhere hired it out for $150/day, I'd be all over it.

What will I actually buy?

I can narrow the camera choices down to a few:

Blackmagic Cinema Camera EF - $1850 2nd hand + $296 500GB SSD + $500 70-200 f/4 lens - approx $2700 all up

Panasonic HC-X1000GC - $3300, don't need to buy anything extra.

Canon 5D MkII - $900 2nd hand + $350 for 3x 32GB CF cards + $500 70-200 f/4 lens + $50 ACK-E6 AC mains adaptor - approx $1800 all up

Canon 70D - $750 used + $500 70-200 f/4 lens + $50 ACK-E6 mains adaptor - approx $1300

Nikon D3300 - $412 new + $600 70-200 f/2.8 lens + $50 for EP-5A & EH-5b AC adaptor - approx $1100

I think I'm going to buy the 70D. The demos I've seen of the AF in live view mode tip it over the edge vs the others. The Blackmagic is so cool though :(

[decryption]

Nerd Travel Kit

If you follow me on Twitter, or listened to the Reckoner podcast, you've insufferably heard me boast about my upcoming trip around the world. I leave tomorrow for Dubai, then Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Boston, Chicago and Hong Kong. All in business class thanks to the marketing department at NAB. Some fellow nerds on Twitter have asked what I'm taking with me. Besides some clothes and spare undies, my backpack is laden with gadgets, which I will elaborately describe to you in excruciating detail, of interest to nobody except the nerdiest of nerds. You can click the image to look at it bigger. 1. 2-pin IEC leads for each country I'm going to. Dubai and Hong Kong use the UK plug. Europe mostly uses the 2-pin plug and the USA uses a 2-prong plug. I had these all lying around from stuff I've imported over the years and toss into my big bucket of cables. Cheaper than buying adaptors for each country and taking a powerboard. Particularly since nothing I'm taking uses an AU plug (it's all USB). 2. Anker 40W 5-port USB charger that outputs 2.4A on every port, up to a total of 8A (so a max of 1.6A on every port simulatenously). I can plug in two iPads, two iPhones and my external battery all at once. It's 110V/240V so I can plug it in anywhere in the world and it'll work. Everything I'm taking with me charges over USB (except my goddamn beard trimmer - I got a Remington one that uses USB but it sucked, badly, so I'm taking my old Philips unit). There's now better ones out that will supply 10A over 6 ports. I'll probably grab one if I see one in HK cheap! 3. Seagate Wireless Plus 1TB HDD. It's got wi-fi bult in so I can play media off of it whilst on the plane to my iPad and Natalie's iPad at the same time. Using the Apple Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader I can copy photos off the SD card onto the wi-fi HDD. It just appears on the network as an SMB share, so there's a couple of iOS apps that'll do it. What's annoying is that I've got to copy it off the SD card onto the iPad's camera roll first, then copy the photos onto the HDD, which takes a bit of time. Also means that unless the iPad and HDD are on the same wi-fi access point which has Internet access, I can't use the Internet on my iPad whilst connected to the HDD. It also functions as a regular HDD, so if I want to just go to an Apple store (curiously, every place I'm going has an Apple store, except for Dubai) and dump the contents of a few SD cards onto it, I can do that too. 4. The board full of elastic straps and cables is a Dodocool organiser that I got off eBay - a knockoff of the Cocooon Grid-It organisers Apple sell. You just slap whatever you want in the elastic bands and shove the board into your bag. I've got a couple of micro USB and Lightning cables in there, as well as an Ethernet cable for the travel router, should the need arise. 5. I'm taking the relatively useless Chromecast with me, because I have it. I'd rather take an AppleTV (AirPlay works without a wi-fi network now in iOS 8!), but I don't have one and don't want to buy one just for this trip and lug it and a 2nd set of 2-pin power cables with me everywhere. I plan to use the Chromecast with Plex on my iPad or iPhone. I've got a Plex Media Server running on a VPS in the "cloud" which also runs sabnzbd & sickbeard. My usual shows will download and be made available on Plex, so all I need to do is connect the Chromecast to the same network as my iOS device, launch the Plex app and connect to my Media Server and pick what I want to watch. The main issue will be available bandwidth in the hotel, which I assume will be low, or they block the ports Plex runs on. Most likely I'll be hitting up an Apple Store or some other fast wi-fi, connecting to the VPS via SSH, downloading a couple of shows via Transmit to the iPad and then using the Chromecast just to stream direct off the iPad using PowerPlayer or something. 6. & 7. iPad Air and iPhone 6 Plus will make the trip with me. Pretty self explanatory. There's some useful apps on there for travelling, but my favourite so far is new My Maps Viewer (MapsEngine). Using Google's MapsEngine Pro (which is $5/m), I can create all sorts of custom maps and have them display in this app. On Android this is actually built in to the Google Maps app, but not on the iOS version. The eternal question of laptop vs. iPad might come back to haunt me, particularly since I have the iPhone 6 Plus, but I think I'll enjoy not carrying a 2nd power adaptor and cable, even if it is the relatively small 45W one. Maybe the next MacBook Air will charge over USB like the 11" HP Chromebook does. 8. TP-Link MR-3020 travel router. It's powered off micro USB (so it can just plug into the Anker 40W unit, or a TV USB port - no need for a seperate power adaptor!) and has an ethernet port, so if there's ethernet in the hotel room, I can share that out via wi-fi to all my stuff. Also handy for creating a wireless network for the Chromecast & external HDD without putting an iPhone or iPad into hotspot mode. 9. Apple Earpods. I'm no audiophile or fashionista, the headphones Apple gave me fit in my ear and were free. I'd love a pair of Bose QC25's for the plane, but they're expensive and I'd never use them except on a flight and I don't fly long haul very often. Did I mention they're expensive? Oh and in business class you're given noise cancelling headphones (which I hope work on an iPad/iPhone, not just on their entertainment system). 10. Under the cable board is a Sony a6000 camera. I own a Nikon D800 and a couple of lenses and had no intention of taking it, or even any camera. I'm cool with just using the iPhone's camera to take photos of funny signs and the interior of McDonalds around the world. Natalie wanted to take the D800 though, so I said as long as she carries it, I don't mind. Once she actually packed it in her bag and put it on her shoulders, she decided that she didn't want to lug it around either. Hence, we purchased the Sony a6000. It's got an APS-C sized sensor, which is way bigger than the 1" sensors in the Sony RX100 or Canon G7 X and bigger than the sensors in the micro four thirds cameras despite being around the same physical size. The a6000 is no D800, but it's compact (with the 16-50 lens on it), fast, relatively sharp and cheap vs. the Fuji XE-2 (approx $700 vs. $1200). The Fuji is a really nice camera tho. The Sony feels much more like, well, a Sony product. The a6000 has wi-fi and apps, which are both laughable and practically useless. I also like how it charges the battery via it's own internal charger, via micro USB. No need to bring a power brick along and I can charge it on the go with my external battery, along with an iPhone whilst we take a break and eat. That said, if the Panasonic LX-100 is in stock when I hit HK, I'll be severely tempted to bring one back. 11. Big arse battery. Limefuel L156X, 15600mAh. I have three of them left over from a project I was working on, so taking one is a nobrainer. 15600mAh lets me charge an iPhone over and over, even an iPad once or twice. It's got two 5V/2.4A output ports as well and can output a full 4.2A on both ports. There's even a 4-port model now, which is pretty cool. 12. Bunch of SD cards and a Sandisk SD card reader. Two 32GB cards, three 16GB cards and a collection of 8GB and 4GB ones I've got lying around. I figured I can take them all and not have to format any cards as we go along and keep a copy. 13. SIM cards for each country I'm visiting. I've got SIMs German Blau, Dutch T-Mobile, USA Red Pocket and China Mobile for Hong Kong. For Dubai I couldn't pre-purchase a SIM, but will get a Du SIM at the airport (they're cheaper than Etisalat, but Etisalat is like the Telstra of the UAE, so I dunno). In France, the UK and the USA, I plan to use a 3 SIM card, with their sweet global roaming deal (25GB for 15 pounds! For global roaming!). My friend Kieran has sent it, but if it doesn't arrive tomorrow, I'll have to buy a 3 SIM whilst in the UK, a Bouygues Telecom SIM in France and use my Red Pocket SIM in the USA. I picked these telcos because they all let you use LTE on pre-paid. Fucked if I'm gonna use 3G - it's 2014, LTE all the way! 14. And not pictured, a Columbus V-990 GPS logger. Got it for $100 off eBay. Records to a MicroSD card, so storage isn't a problem before I need to dump data off it. Runs for approx 20-22hrs on a single charge. Records to a CSV file that can be exported to whatever format you like. It's small and uses the MTKII 3329 chipset, not as nice as the MT3333, but one of the better ones, particularly for high density area use (hello HK). Will be used for geotagging photos, but also just to log everywhere I went.

[decryption]

A very simple way to use a Raspberry Pi as a wireless access point (not a router) with an RTL8192CU based wi-fi chipset

For what is a long winded and possibly boring reason, I wanted to make a Raspberry Pi share a connection from a Huawei E8278 LTE modem out over wi-fi. The E8278 has wi-fi built in and its range and speed is better than I expected, but I wanted *more* range and *more* speed. LTE can often be capable of speeds faster than what wi-fi can offer, which depends on the signal strength. If you've got perfect signal, 150mbit on wi-fi will be more than LTE, but if you're on the fringe and only connected to the access point at 14mbit, well you're not gonna get all the speed LTE can offer. Part of making the Internet go faster is to improve the conditions I have control of and one of those conditions is the wi-fi connection (along with the quality of the modem hardware, the antennas and antenna placement to achieve a strong signal). Wi-fi dongles are cheap and so are external antennas for them. It all worked out of the box using this guide on Instructables. The first dongle I tried was a TP-Link TL-WN722N "150Mbps High Gain Wireless USB Adapter" which uses an Atheros AR9002U chipset, which has native support for nl80211, meaning everything automatically takes care of itself on the Raspberry Pi and with hostapd (the bit of software which makes the wi-fi dongle work as an access point). I wanted to use another Raspberry Pi to share the connection out off a second LTE modem (one Optus, one Vodafone) so I went to the shop and grabbed a TP-Link TL-WN8200ND "300Mbps High Power Wireless USB Adapter". All good I thought, 300mbit and two antennas, awesome! But I didn't do any research before buying it - if I did, I would have known that the WN8200ND uses the RTL8192CU chipset, which hasn't got nl80211 support, natively at least and hostapd chucks a fit. The RTL8192CU is actually pretty common and all the other little mini wi-fi dongles I have use it too. Luckily there's a way to make RTL8192CU based devices work with hostapd. Here's the steps I took to make the Pi work as a wireless access point (which is different to a router, this guy explains the difference). I'm gonna assume you're pretty comfortable with Linux and the terms I'm throwing around. Adafruit has a nice tutorial on setting this up, but will make the Raspberry Pi a router and DHCP and NAT server, as well as an access point, which I don't want. This guide is mainly for my reference.

Install Raspbian on an SD card and plug it in via Ethernet to get Internet access so you can download the tools you need to set up the rest. Once you've got the Internet going, let's update the software and install the apps we need. hostapd, hostap-utils, iw and bridge-utils are what's responsible for making the access point. usb-modeswitch is only required if you're using a modem of some sort - it switches the USB modem to be in "modem" mode, not "cd-rom" mode (usb-modeswitch, get it?).

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get install hostapd usb-modeswitch hostap-utils iw bridge-utils

Now we are downloading a version of hostapd with support for the RTL8192CU driver. I stole this bit from the Adafruit tutorial which is way better than mine, particularly if you're new to Linux. Step by step: download a reconfigured version of hostapd for the RTL8192CU using wget, unzip it, make a backup of the one we're replacing, then move the new version where it belongs and change the permissions accordingly.

wget http://www.adafruit.com/downloads/adafruit_hostapd.zip unzip adafruit_hostapd.zip sudo mv /usr/sbin/hostapd /usr/sbin/hostapd.ORIG sudo mv hostapd /usr/sbin sudo chmod 755 /usr/sbin/hostapd

Now to edit hostapd to tell it where the config file will live

sudo nano /etc/default/hostapd

Add this line

DAEMON_CONF="/etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf"

Now edit the actual hostapd config file (or create it if it's not there)

sudo nano /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

I don't know all the settings in hostapd.conf, but you can find the documentation here. Change the ssid= field to whatever you want the network to show up as on the other computers. Change wpa_passphrase= to the password they have to enter and change channel= to an appropriate wi-fi channel for your environment (e.g: 1-7 - for me it was 4, if you don't know just enter in 3 or 4).

interface=wlan0 driver=rtl871xdrv ssid= hw_mode=g channel=4 macaddr_acl=0 auth_algs=1 ignore_broadcast_ssid=0 wpa=2 wpa_passphrase= wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK wpa_pairwise=TKIP rsn_pairwise=CCMP

Final step is to configure the network interfaces.

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

Remove everything and paste in this. You can modify the network addresses if you like and know what you're doing. Also change wwan0 to eth0 if you're using the built in ethernet port on your Raspberry Pi. You can even set up the Raspberry Pi to be a wireless bridge (take one wireless network and share it over another wireless network), if you have two wi-fi dongles. You'd set up the other wireless adapter (aka wlan1) here too. br0 is the bridge between your internet connection and the wireless network you're setting up with hostapd. Unlike a router, a bridge just passes all traffic between the two interfaces. A router will think about what's going on and decide where to send the traffic - a bridge doesn't give a shit.

auto lo iface lo inet loopback iface wwan0 inet dhcp auto br0 iface br0 inet static address 192.168.5.11 netmask 255.255.255.0 network 192.168.5.0 broadcast 192.168.5.255 gateway 192.168.5.1 bridge-ports wwan0 wlan0

Reboot your Raspberry Pi and when it reboots it should be working.

sudo reboot

Go to your client device and connect to the network! If for some reason it doesn't work, check you've installed the driver correctly. Look at the output of dmesg and if there's an error loading hostapd, that's probably why (or you put a typo in the config ya drongo).