Orange.fr tethering blocked.

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Eoin

When traveling abroad for longer than a weekend it is often cheaper to buy a local SIM card, and use that for data rather than pay roaming charges. In France Orange.fr offer an InterNet max deal which gives internet access for smart phones for €9 per month. But tethering is blocked so no laptops !!  You can circumvent this on certain phones [being a reason I bought a Nokia N900] using a Bluetooth PAN.

Orange.fr uses a simple but effective strategy to prevent tethering. it examines the first TCP connection made on a new 3G connection. If this stream is determined to be a mobile device the 3G connection will work fine; otherwise the connection will be blocked.

So circumvention is as simple as opening a webpage on your smart phone. Then setting up the Bluetooth PAN, ensuring you have opened a bluetooth connection between the phone & laptop before running the config script from the above Bluetooth PAN link.

You could alternatively use a tool such as NCat to imitate a smartphone TCP connection.

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Poulet Antiboise.

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Eoin

My interest was piqued when Elizabeth David was mentioned as the source of this Poulet Antiboise recipe. The article was by Rowley Leigh in the FT weekend magazine, and is well worth giving a go.

I followed the recipe with some exceptions:

  • I used more than the recommended 1kg of onions. [about 1.5kg before peeling].
  • I then softened the onions by frying on a low heat for about 30 mins with the olive oil, cayenne pepper & some salt before adding the chicken.

The pot was covered so the skin on the chicken did not really brown at all; contrary to the pictures in the article. You could remedy this by leaving off the lid for the last bit of the cooking period if you wanted. This would leave the chicken a little less moist so it’s a trade-off!

I did not do anything useful to do with the left over olive oil and juices which seemed a bit wasteful. There was a lot of liquids left over!

Finally the recipe called for the thyme to be added as a garnish after cooking. This looks nice but means the only impact of the thyme is it’s scent; it does not contribute to the flavour of the dish beyond this. I may in future incarnations add some of the thyme to the roasting pot or possibly to the seasoning for the chicken; we shall see.

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Mortgage Subsidies, Debt Relief & Some Math

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Eoin

Mortgage holders, at least those on tracker mortgages are already benefiting from debt relief, albeit indirectly. The interest rate on a tracker mortgage is less than the market rate and banks are losing money on every tracker mortgage and will, presumably, continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Comparing the cost of a house house bought at the height of the boom for €300,000 with the same house now costing €200,000 serves to illustrate.

A person buying a house worth €300,000 with a 10% deposit & a 35 year tracker mortgage with a rate of [ECB + 0.5%] 1.75% to is paying €858.28 per month on borrowings of €270,000.

Assuming the house is now worth €200,000  buying the same house with the same €30,000 deposit costs  €845.97 per month assuming a rate of 5% on their borrowings of €170,000.

So the subsidized interest rate is equivalent to debt relief of roughly €100,000.

As interest rates increase the effect is reduced to a degree. [€170,000 at 6% costs €951.25] [€270,000 at 2.75% costs €996.77]

Calculated using http://www.itsyourmoney.ie/index.jsp?p=118&n=298

The current rate of 5% is chosen for convenience but the logic applies not matter what the rate is.The 35 year term is chosen to emphasize the effect of differences in interest rates.

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