I went around to my mate's place for a bit of practice, and we were able to go through all the effects on the POD units we bought.

There's quite a few good settings on there, and when I sat and made up some custom ones, I came up with some pretty good settings.

We're able to play through 6 songs pretty well now, we're trying to get to 10 by the end of the year.

I got a call from the woman whose IT I look after for her home business. She's been away for a week, got back, and found that her internet connection was "down".

She'd tried to get support from the ISP she's with about it, but when she told them that she has a linux firewall, they refused to help her at all.

I arranged to go and look at it for her, and when I got there, I found that the modem had dialled up and connected.

A little bit of investigation, and I found that the problem was that the DNS server settings on the windows PC were wrong. Apparently the ISP had changed their DNS server, and because the windows PC uses DHCP from the linux firewall, the dhcpd.conf had the wrong DNS server IP addresses in it.

I simply updated the dhcpd.conf file, and restarted DHCP, then renewed the IP settings on the windows PC, and it was fixed.

In testing, I found that it was pathetically slow. I had a chat, and we worked out that going to ADSL is a better idea, because it will obviously be faster, and will actually work out cheaper, because there won't be the requirement of a dedicated phone line, or the phone calls to connect to the internet.

She also had bought a USB drive a little while ago, and because the windows PC runs windows 98, it needed the drivers, I found, downloaded, and installed the correct drivers, and got it workinng for her.

I suggested rebuilding the computer with windows 2000 at some point, because 98 is dragging the chain a bit.

I showed her how to back up her mail to the USB drive, just copying the files from the linux firewall (which is an SMB and IMAP server), on to the USB drive.

She asked me about wireless access for her laptop. I had a look at it, it didn't have a wireless card in it.

I told her that I'd do some research, because she wants to be able to use it on a boat, connecting to the internet access at marinas.

When I got back, I did some research, trying to work out the best way to go.

I'm not sure of whether to look for some gear including an omnidirectional antenna, to be mounted on the boat, with some low loss cable and a pigtail going into the boat, to attach to a wireless card with an external aerial connector, or to just go with a high power (200mW) wireless card with built in aerial.