If you're in an FTTC enabled area you'll be able to order fibre to the premise (FTTP) from the 29th April. You have to pay for the dig in the form of a fixed £500 fee plus a distance based construction charge. Then there'll be a £38 per month charge (all charges are plus VAT) that the ISP will then be looking to put their markup onto.

What does this mean? FTTC tops out at 80Mb down and 20Mb up if you live on top of the cabinet. FTTP will give you 330Mb down and 30Mb up and completely removes the copper segment and therefore the distance from the cabinet variable of FTTC.

BT Openreach are now taking orders for FTTC at Hook Exchange. I've got my order in and it looks like it'll take about 2 weeks as I need to move over from a non-BT phoneline before things can start progressing.

The date for the Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) rollout in Hook has been delayed again by a further three months. It's now pencilled in for the end of June.

http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/super-fastfibreaccess/down...

Shea has written a blog article on getting an X-Arcade TankStick working with PiMame:

http://blog.sheasilverman.com/2013/02/pimame-advancemame-and-advancemenu...

It leans on the Catalan article:

http://www.raspberry.cat/20130203/pimame-i-x-arcade/

Was surprised to see a link to my blog at the bottom of that page!

Broadband is about to leap forward in Hook. Additional green telephone cabinets have been appearing around the village as Openreach have been installing Fibre To The Cabinet equipment. This new technology could give you much faster download speeds of upto 80Mb and it also changes the way that the dreaded "upto" calculation is done.

First a little history.

HDMI is quickly becoming the defacto standard for connecting things to displays. When I had some re-plastering done in the back room of my house, rather than trying to run a long HDMI cable hidden in the wall I ran a pair of Cat5e cables back to the corner of the room where the Sky satellite box sits. I'm currently on version 2.0..