Highwayman

Laksi Plaza is definitely the place the taxi driver would have meant.

The site has been under redevelopment for the past year, should reopen some time in the next six months as a brand new IT Mall.

KATHMANDU: Notorious French serial killer Charles Sobhraj, jailed in Nepal for the murder of an American woman, yesterday lost his appeal against the conviction.

The Kathmandu District Court last August sentenced the 60-year-old French national, who preyed on Western tourists in Asia in the 1970s, to 20 years in jail after convicting him of the 1975 murder of the backpacker.

The Appellate Court upheld the verdict of the Kathmandu District Court after a five hour hearing, Sobhraj's lawyer Sanjiv Ghimire said.

Sobhraj, dubbed "The Serpent" for his audacious escapes from the law, described the ruling as "shocking." "I am going to move the apex (Supreme) court against the verdict after discussing the matter with my lawyer," Sobhraj, sporting a cream-coloured polo cap, a white shirt and a blue coat, told reporters in court.

Police had said a key factor in the conviction was an analysis of signatures under the name of Henricus Bintanja, whose Dutch passport Sobhraj allegedly used to enter and leave Nepal in 1975.

Bintanja and his fiancee Cornelia Hemker were strangled that year and their burned bodies were found in a ditch outside Bangkok.

"The airport disembarkation card and hotel registration from 1975, both made under the Dutch name, were kept as part of the investigation. The signature matched the handwriting of Sobhraj's French passport," a police investigator said after the conviction.

Sobhraj, reputed to be a compulsive gambler, was arrested in the all-night casino of Kathmandu's five-star Yak and Yeti Hotel in September 2003. Sobhraj has already spent 20 years in jail in India.

Gulf Daily News

The Nation article.

Pioneer DV-585K-s

Pioneer DV-380-S

Just looking at the manual and it has DivX 5, DivX 4, DivX 3 and DivX VOD listed.

Things may have changed but when looking for Pioneerl l didn't see any Pioneer DVD players in my local Tesco and only the cheapest superceded model in Carrefour. BigC now have it but l got mine from Homepro Rangsit. I was actually looking to buy the earlier model but wandered in to Homepro just as they put the first shipment on display, so new that it wouldn't scan at the register. A quick look told me that it was what l was after.

It's a few kms. going away from Bangkok on the same road that runs out front of the airport. Bus #539 from Victory Monument passes by there.

If you do a search for Asia Airport Hotel you will see exactly where it is. It's opposite a Carrefour store and is the biggest IT centre l've seen in Bangkok. It doesn't have all the dodgy guys trying to sell you pirated dvd's which may or may not be a good thing.

Not many westerners go there so you won't find as many sales staff that speak English as you would at Pantip but worth a look if you want something a bit different to Pantip. If you go there with a Thai lady then they will probably like the market and clothing mall out the front called Bobae (single storey white building), some great bargains in there according to my wife and her friends.

If you go to Zeer Rangsit then go to NPE.

Go to level 2 (ground floor for Aussies or Brits) and walk on the left side to the far end you will see a sign for NPE, just pass famous Computer. It's a large electronic supermarket which seems to have just about everything electrical you could possibly want.

The other place worth a look that has some really good bargains is in the basement, opposite the food court at the rear of the building. Look for a blue Daewoo sign at the shop entrance, beside the escalator. It can get a bit crowded but they're doing the place up so as it's not as chaotic as it used to be.

Not many VHS recorders on sale in Bangkok but l have seen a couple of models at Central, Sony and LG l think.

You could also try www.sinsiamelectronics.com

Yeti, l have the Pioneer DV-585K-s model DVD player, bought it a month or so ago, the day it came out virtually.

I can't tell you for sure if it will play what you get from p2p networks but l suspect it will. So far l have played original Australian, Thai and American dvd's as well as pirated Thai dvd's, all played perfectly including a couple that l had never been able to get working on other machines and computers before, no adjusting regional settings required. It also displays photo cd's made on my computer very clearly.

It's a good value unit, made in Thailand so it sells for half the price that an nearly identical spec. model sells for in the west. If you don't need the Karaoke option then l think there is a slightly cheaper (less 500baht?) model available that does everything the 585K-s does.

There was a review in The Nation recently that said it was a pretty good player. If you have a look on the internet you will find that Pioneer DVD players have a very high customer satisfaction rating which was one reason l decided to buy one. I'd maybe compare Pioneer with Pentax as a brand, maybe not the absolute best but always good value for money.

I get the same message as lomatopo using True. Maybe it's just a slow site to load but it's rare that l get that message..

Chanchao, you must be a person of influence in Chiang-Mai.

I have sitting on my desk a "Notification to Collect International Postal Items"

It's for 10 Ubuntu cd's, sent to me from the Netherlands. Declared value is nil, however customs have assessed the value for duty at 2,000 baht. That means import duty of 60 baht and VAT of 145 baht.

I trust the employees at my local Post Office will make good use of the cd's.

I'd go with APC also. There are many brands available in Thailand but APC is the best known brand.

If you go to www.apc.com there is a checklist to enable you to see what is best for you. As for running a PC for several hours l think you would need something very expensive to do that. I have the APC CS-500 (about 2000baht) which will run my PC for maybe 15 minutes tops. The idea is more to enable the PC to shut down without losing what you were working on or to just get over a break in power of less than a minute.

I just had a read of the user comments for this extension. Certainly a love hate one judging by the reviews. Either it works fine or it destroys your IE bookmarks.

RDN, if you wanted to give it one more try you could try this little experiment. Back up your IE Favorites and then delete them from their default location so the IE Favorites folder is now empty. Do the same for your Firefox bookmarks. In your now empty Bookmarks create a dozen new bookmarks, editing the names so you don't have any lengthy titles. Then try exporting them again to IE and see what happens.

Your current bandwidth reading is: 237.20kbps

which means you can download at 29.65 KB/sec. from our servers.

Test Time: July 23, 2005, 11:18 am

* * * *

Download 141,216 bps

Upload 50,824 bps

QOS 36%

RTT 5 ms

MaxPause 1492 ms

* * * *

True 256/128

Listening to AFL on the internet, don't know if that affects the figures at all.

Reading this thread over the past few days and running My Speed Tests l wonder just how much value you can put in these tests. The other night at 2am l ran that test ten times in ten minutes. I won't bother posting all the results here but the downloads reported were all over the place, 20, 48, 102, 31, 123,000bps etc. The QOS ranged from 2% to 73%. This was using True 256/128 on the outskirts of Bangkok.

It sounds like l have a pretty poor connection but during the day l downloaded 300mb of podcasts. They were being downloaded at 40-50mb an hour in real life, which seems reasonable to me, considering l was also surfing and listening to crystal clear streaming internet radio. I was recently using dial-up on different computers in Australia and my True unlimited adsl for AUD20 a month looks good by comparison, both speed and price wise.

FWIW after seeing the discussions here and talking to others, unless you need to run a business or have to game online l can't see why most even people bother with the ultra hi-speed packages as for years people have complained about Thai ISP's not living up to expectations. Nobody l know on a premium package is happy, a good reason not to waste your money on such packages that rarely deliver on what they promise.

My vote for worst internet in Thailand btw still goes to the free TOT using my sister-in-laws PC in Chonburi, 5-10 mins. per page to load a site like Thai Visa.

I use www.linkagogo.com for keeping my bookmarks online. No problems in using it for two years now. I looked at a few other alternatives recently and decided to stick with Linkagogo. Some of the other free options out there were just dumb, wanted to know too much information or had too much adware for my liking.

Several of the company’s broadband-Internet subscribers have complained about access-traffic jams and a slower download speed.

--The Nation 2005-07-21

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I think maybe that should read several thousand or maybe several hundred thousand.

RDN, easiest way to edit the names is to get into the habit of doing it when you bookmark them in the first place. I've got 435kb in one profile, a lot less in my other profiles. I wonder if 1mb of bookmarks is going to have some effect on the speed of Firefox so I usually prune mine every couple of months. If l don't use a bookmark for a couple of months l usually delete it unless l think it's one that l will have trouble finding again with Google.

I usually have two profiles of Firefox open at the same time. Each looks very different as l use different themes. One has everyday bookmarks for news, forums, general web surfing etc. another has finance etc. with easily switchable proxies if l need them. I don't use proxies on the first profile as it slows things down too much at times. For internet radio l now use Maxthon as my favorite station (not any other) for some reason crashes Firefox about once a week, no idea why.

I haven't used drag and dropping for extensions for a long time but if you want to have so many extensions on tap then it sounds reasonable. I'm running 25 extensions on this profile, 18 on another. I used to run up to 50 but like bookmarks, if l don't use them often l ask myself if l really need them and the answer is usually no. I gave up on AdBlock and any tabbrowser extensions a long time ago, not worth the problems for me. These days l try to keep everything as streamlined as possible. Still running 1.0.4 which is set up perfectly for my needs so l'm going to leave as is for now on this PC.

Interesting. I used it with 1.0.4.

I don't have any bookmarks with long names as l always edit mine so l can read the title without having to stretch the side panel to read them. I don't have any with Thai characters just now.

I have all my bookmarks in just ten folders which are kept in the bookmarks toolbar. One bookmark has 20 folders and about ten subfolders, altogether about 200 bookmarks in the folder, maybe 500 bookmarks in all, so l doubt if that's the reason.

If you want to try it with 1.0.6 then l'd wait at least a month with a problem extension before giving it another try. What you could do is have a spare profile using just a basic Firefox setup that you can use to test new extensions. If it breaks that profile of Firefox you should still be able to use your others.

I think you use Listzilla, do you know there is a version where you can upload all your extensions to a website if you have one and then reload them to a newer version of Firefox from there? Much easier so l've been told. When 1.1 comes out they expect to have the updating of extensions improved so you don't have to keep on downloading them again everytime you have a major problem. I think it's meant to update like Windows Update or an anti-virus program update.

He even said "We recommend our customers not to use firewalls".

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

What version of ZoneAlarm are you using? I'm using the freeware version with True basic ADSL right now. No problems at all.

If you're using Windows have you adjusted any settings in Services or Startup recently?

Check in ZoneAlarm that you have the firewall set to High for Internet and to Medium in the Trusted Zone.

You could always just uninstall your current version and download and install the latest version, that way you'll set from the start again what ZoneAlarm allows.

RDN, l used Favorites Converter recently. My Firefox bookmarks transferred over to IE and Maxthon without a problem. There is also another extension by the same author that transfers from IE to Firefox but l haven't needed to use that. There are a few other versions l've seen, as well as some extensions that just keep all your bookmarks on the web. There are a number of options to do that that have been around for years but not many made just for Firefox.

Lopburi, you get the gold star.

The computer l'm using now is an old one from back home that l've got going again recently. WinXP was loaded for me by the computer shop when they built it and l've never had to do a reinstall. Checking the name and it is written in the same style as what l'm seeing when l do an IP lookup, which is slightly different to how l would have written it if l had set it up myself.

What really had me wondering was why this hadn't shown up before with my earlier IP address and l think l've discovered the answer. A couple of days ago l installed a small program to tweak the task bar. To enable one adjustment it required a change to two settings in the services list. I'm 99% sure that this is the reason for my computer name i.e. my own name now showing up in whois.

Lopburi, l think you're correct about the unique number/string with WinXP as that is how my other PC is named in many files.

I was starting to think that maybe True were doing something funny but they wouldn't do that now, would they?

At least l learnt a bit about proxies today. Who knows when that might come in handy.

Thanks for everyones help.

What surprised me was this:

When l checked my IP address the information provided included my name.

I have never seen that before when checking what someone else sees when they query my IP address.

Usually l see a list of data, mostly meaningless like Firefoxx says, info which includes Fortune Town, Ratchadaphisek Road, Din Daeng as my location. I'm sure that would be the same for many True customers in Bangkok. In a city of millions no-one is going to know who l am from that.

However if you have an unusual name and it's available at the top of the page to anyone in a position to see your IP is that normal? I've never seen that before, l'm just a home internet user, not someone with a website or anything like that. If everyone else sees that sort of info on display and isn't concerned about it then fine, l'll go with the flow but it's the first time l've ever come across it.

Yeti, yes l'd love to but unfortunately l don't think that's going to happen.

I use the basic True ADSL home package, 256/128.

Recently l noticed that my IP address had changed from 2## to 6# etc.

There are lots of programs that can give you information about IP addresses, l use one called Win32Whois

Anyway l ran my new IP through Win32Whois and l have to say l was surprised at some of the information l saw displayed.

I was wondering if anyone else using True has checked the information available about their own IP adress? If you haven't done so recently take a look, l'd be interested in your reaction.

Above is a car l saw in Melbourne recently. Red Bull has been in Australia for about ten years l think and l've seen it all over the world for years now.

Hopefully someone can give some advice here.

I recently had some household goods, an old non-working computer, an old but good stereo system, a bicycle etc. shipped from Australia to Bangkok. It's all in 3 boxes, with the bike on top, shrink wrapped on a pallet about a metre high.

It has now arrived in Bangkok and my wife has been speaking to the shipping agent. They have said they can handle all the paperwork and deliver to our door (less than 50 kms) for 10,000 baht, plus maybe a few minor import duties. I know from shipping goods years ago from the UK to Australia that the agents fee can be more expensive than the freight charges and it's looking the same case here.

I have no idea if this fee is reasonable as l don't know what exactly is involved in clearing goods from customs. Is it the sort of thing someone can handle themselves? It doesn't matter if it takes longer and some running around, l'd be interested in saving some money if l could. Getting it to our house should not be a problem as l was able to fit everything into a large sedan to take to the freight company in Australia. If l had to organise a pick-up it would cost 1000 baht at most.

What should l do? Pay up and save the hassle or is it possible to do it ourselves and save a substantial sum, or could it end up even more expensive and frustrating doing it ourselves?

I need to speak to the agent within the next 24 hours so any suggestions or questions l should be asking would be appreciated.

Firefox, when my phone (a pre-paid 1-2-Call) was stolen l rang the phone company to report it stolen and to see if anyone else was using it. No-one was (must have ditched the SIM) and they said they would put a block on it being used, it only had a few baht credit left fortunately.

I thought about getting the copy of the police report, which as about twenty police had come to our house to investigate the burglary should not have been to hard, but then Dtac were having some good deals so l didn't bother and just purchased a new Dtac SIM.

I do remember 1-2-Call saying l would be able to keep my number if l got the police report although how they would know the number was mine l don't know. Maybe they ask you to give them details of the calls you made or your recharge history to verify it was your number.

I think the procedure is that you have to lodge a copy of the police report about the theft with AIS and they can then issue you with a replacement SIM with your old number.