Attacked
Posted: Sat 22 April, 2023 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky 2 Comments »Over the last week or so, D4D’s been getting attacked from Sources Unknown, which has made things into a real Pain In The Chuff.
More worryingly, it turned out that my hosting company haven’t been keeping decent backups, and managed to not notice a bundle of key files being changed (repeatedly) on the sites I have with them.
Now OK, I’d been slack, and had a lot of those domains all under one username/file-owner , which was lazy of me, and shouldn’t have been done. (On the other hand, having to remember a different username/password for each site/domain is… complicated, and leads to people writing down far more stuff than they should. Swings and roundabouts)
So there’ve been a number of remedies and updates I’ve been going through, but there were still facets that weren’t working – mainly because of those key files that got over-written, and that either weren’t backed up, or weren’t backed up regularly enough. (Needless to say, that’s now changed – I’ve got backups in various places, so it shouldn’t happen again)
It’s ended up with a scorched-earth strategy, where I’ve effectively changed everything that’s possible – new username/password, new file-owner name and password, new folder location, and then reinstalled everything in a completely fresh clean copy of WordPress, and only then updating the config file to use the same database as before. And even the database tables have had their references changed.
It’s now all back and operational, and there’s been a fair amount of learning/remembering along the way. But honestly, I’ll be very happy to not have to do that again for another decade or so!
Mileage Averages
Posted: Sun 1 November, 2020 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Geeky Leave a comment »Having had the car MoT’d this month, it means I’ve had the poxy thing for four years now. And, with the online MOT record, I decided to have a look at the recorded mileages, just because I’m interested in useless information like that.
As it turns out, I’ve been pretty consistent…
| Year | Start Mileage | End Mileage | Total Mileage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 – 2017 | 76,252 | 95,557 | 19,305 |
| 2017 – 2018 | 95,557 | 117,947 | 22,390 |
| 2018 – 2019 | 117,947 | 140,086 | 22,139 |
| 2019 – 2020 | 140,086 | 157,831 | 17,745 |
| Total for 4 years | 81,579 | ||
So even with my mileages being much reduced (because of more local contract etc. etc.) I still usually do around 22,000 miles a year. This year’s an (obvious and understandable) anomaly, but still comes in as being more than the “average” person does in a year.
I know it’s not really interesting to anyone except me, but still, such is life.
Sequential
Posted: Fri 1 November, 2019 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Geeky Leave a comment »Over the last week, I’ve had two significant (to me) numbers come up on the car’s odometer. I missed one, and managed to capture the other.
So the one I got was this
And the one I missed was (the even better) 141414 . That’s annoying, because obviously it’ll be another 10,000-ish miles before I even get a chance on that one.
I know these things are silly, but they amuse me along the way.
Zapper
Posted: Fri 20 September, 2019 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Getting Organised Leave a comment »Back at the start of July, I finally caved and bought one of the big bug-zappers, to see how it worked out in comparison to the other devices I’d purchased in previous years that proved to be far less successful.
And I have to say, I’ve been really pleased with it – it’s not 100% perfect, but that’s mainly because flies and bugs are stupid, and don’t just dive straight into the zapper. However, it’s been a lot more successful in its body-count than any of the other devices.
Even better, it’s been pretty good (surprisingly so, in fact) on power – considering how much it’s been in use, I think it’s added a pound or two to the summer’s bill, but that’s it.
Really, the only downside for it is that it’s somewhat… explosive. The fly/moth bits can pop outside the case/grille of the zapper, so I’ve had to use the hoover a couple of times to just clean up the bits. And sometimes the zapping itself is noisy – occasionially, the bugs get caught on the wires, and sit buzzing away for a surprisingly long period of time. Even the usual zaps can sometimes be loud and sudden, if it’s been quiet for a while beforehand.
Regardless though, it’s been a good buy. I hope I won’t need it as much between now and next Spring, but we’ll see.
The Joy of Tech
Posted: Fri 22 March, 2019 Filed under: Bankruptcy, Domestic, Finances, Geeky, Getting Organised, Rebuilding, Technology, Thoughts 3 Comments »Yesterday, while doing a quick shop on the way to work, I suddenly realised I’d left my wallet at home. Bugger.
I was just about prepared to take everything back to its shelves/locations, when it occurred to me that actually I was still OK – I had my phone with me still. That meant I’d got the ability to make a contactless payment – and because I’d also added the details of my Monzo card/account to the phone, it meant I had everything I needed.
It’s pretty amazing, the way these things have now become so much more mainstream than they were ten years ago, or even five. Since I got the Monzo card eighteen months ago (it’s the only one I have that also connects into my ApplePay account on the phone) I’ve stopped carrying cash except for specific occasions – for example, the car wash I use still only takes cash.
I still prefer to carry physical cards (hence usually having a wallet) but it was still interesting to realise that forgetting it is no longer the “Oh shit!” moment it used to be. (So long as I remember my phone, and that I can use it, anyway)
Ain’t progress grand?
Weirdly Consistent
Posted: Fri 14 December, 2018 Filed under: Cinema, Customer Services, Domestic, Films, Geeky, Single Life, Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »When I moved here six-and-a-half years ago (and yes, that does still freak me out) I got a Cineworld Unlimited card, so I could see as many films as I wanted to. It’s a decent deal, less than £20 a month, so as long as you see more than one film per month, it’s paid for itself.
Because I’m a geek, I also started listing what I’d seen, with a separate sheet per year.
And it seems like I’m really quite consistent in how many films I see each year – not through any plan or schedule, it’s just the way it’s worked out.
The totals are
- 2012 – 26 films (although that’s in under six months, as I didn’t get the card ’til July/August)
- 2013 – 61 films
- 2014 – 64 films
- 2015 – 64 films
- 2016 – 54 films
- 2017 – 66 films
And so far this year I’m on… 62, with a couple of weeks to go.
Each year I think I’ll up my quality control a bit and see fewer films (when you’re not paying anything to see them, it’s remarkably easy to just say “Yeah, fuck it, I’ll give that a go”) And yet it all ends up being much of a muchness.
It’s odd, but I’m not going to complain. At least I know I’m getting value for money out of my Unlimited card. (It’s an outlay per year of £215 all told – so each film is costing me an average of £3.30, which is one fuck of a lot cheaper than the £10-ish for a single ticket!)
Dickhead
Posted: Fri 7 December, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Music, Stupidity, Thoughts, Toronto, Travel, Weirdness 1 Comment »There are times where (as many people already know) I’m an absolute dickhead. This is the (fairly short) tale of one of those times.
One of the reasons I wanted to visit Toronto (which I finally did earlier this year) was because I’ve been a fan of a band called the Cowboy Junkies (who I’ve written about several times, and saw twice in November) for a very long time – since the first time I heard their “Trinity Sessions” album, in fact. The Trinity Sessions was an album that was all recorded at the Holy Trinity church in Toronto, with only one ambisonic microphone to pick up all the voices and instruments. It’s one of my all-time favourite albums. However, I’d never seen a picture of the church. (This is relevant)
Then, on the anniversary of the recording of Trinity Sessions, they put a photo on their Facebook page of the church
And I thought “I recognise that church“. It turns out we’d gone in and visited it while we were in Toronto, and I hadn’t even realised it was the same place. Indeed, we only went in because it looked interesting (and was hidden away down a little side-street, so we’d only glimpsed the place and its architecture) and it turned out to be a great little find, because it’s beautiful inside, as well as having an absolutely massive organ. (Fnarr) And I knew it was called the Holy Trinity church. I just hadn’t connected the two.
So it took me another six months to realise that I’d actually been in the place, despite all the clues that were there.
And that, in this case, is why I’m a dickhead.
Upgraded
Posted: Mon 3 December, 2018 Filed under: Advertising, BT, Customer Services, Domestic, Geeky, Milton Keynes, Technology, Utilities 4 Comments »Last week, I upgraded my internet connection to an “Ultrafast” one – known by BT / Openreach as G.Fast. Apparently they’re slowing down the roll-out of this in favour of full FTTP (Fibre To The Premises) roll-out, but for now it’s the best speed I can get.
G.Fast offers a guaranteed 100Mbps download – and I’ll get compensation if it dips below that – which is amusingly ridiculous. When I moved here six-and-a-bit years ago, I was only just able to get ADSL and a 2Mbps connection. It was painfully slow, although it did enough for the necessary at the time. When FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet) came here, I got it, and went from 2Mbps to 75 overnight. At that point I could do streaming TV and so on with no problem at all. And now I’ve doubled even that. Truly insane.
I wasn’t actually aware that this tech had been installed in my area, but BT sent me a promotional mail about it at the start of November, and I’d dragged my feet on it a bit. But then I got a “Black Friday” promotional letter about it as well, where I could also get it installed for free, for an extra £1 a month on what I pay already. Well OK then.
(As an aside, it’s the only “Black Friday” deal I bothered with at all – and only because it saved me money on a product I was actually interested in)
The engineer came round on Friday to do the installation – it needs some changes at the cabinet, and as it’s still new stuff, they’re doing it with engineers rather than self-install. This had a happy side-effect, in that he also appears to have finally fixed the line problem that’s been plaguing me for more years than I care to mention. (And has cost me the price of an engineer visit on one visit out of the five, because they worded the ‘fix’ badly, but that’s a dead issue now)
Ever since I moved in, the line has been dodgy on occasion, and it’s just got worse over time. The broadband connection has been fine in general – unless I have to make or receive a phone call. At that point the crackles on the line were enough to knock out the broadband connection. BT insisted this wasn’t possible, and that all the options I suggested were Just Wrong. (Because obviously I don’t work for them, so what could I possibly know?) In that time, I’ve had five master sockets, and swapped from ADSL to FTTC for broadband, so I knew it was nothing in the house. It was always either going to be a fault in the line (“Oh no, sir, that’s not possible, more people would be complaining if that were the case”) or in the cabinet itself (also apparently “impossible”)
Anyway, this time the engineer could hear the problem, and tested to find where the problem was. Surprise surprise, it was in the cabinet. So while he was redoing connections for my new broadband, he had a look round the cab, and the terminators on my line (I dunno) in the cab were “worryingly loose, I could just pull them off, didn’t even need pliers“. When he came back to the house, oooh look, what a surprise, no crackle on the line.
So, I’m now working with a 150Mbps download connection, and a lovely crackle-free phone line. All told, bit of a win.
Typos
Posted: Thu 27 September, 2018 Filed under: Advertising, Geeky, Marketing, Sweary, Thoughts Leave a comment »Note 1 : Owing to Muphry’s Law , there will likely be at least one typo in this post.
Note 2 : It may also induce eye-crossing rage/despair in some.
Anyway – this week I’ve had two emails containing images that include typos (or just piss off my pedantry) The first came from Cotton Traders.
Seriously, how the hell does that make it through umpteen proof-readers, editors, and marketing twerds? #rage
The second was a promo for a novel, and I’ve trimmed it down to just the bit that grated on me.
This one is a bit more pedantic – but it grinds my gears anyway. “A prickly woman” is fine. But crossing out the “Prickly” makes it “A Independent Woman” – which isn’t right. Find another word for “prickly” (which they’ve chosen because the title of the book is “The Cactus”) that starts with a vowel, or a synonym for independent that starts with a consonant. Then it works. And wouldn’t annoy pedants.
Anyway, now I’ve shared my irritation. You’re welcome.
Current Scams
Posted: Wed 25 July, 2018 Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, Geeky, People, Security, Thoughts 1 Comment »At the moment, there are a couple of interesting (and fairly well-crafted) scams going around. I’ve seen/received all of these in the last week or so.
First – the ‘we know what you’ve been up to‘ scam email.
It says something along the lines of “I know what you’ve been up to – when you were on that porn site (it’s noticeably non-specific on details) I loaded a screen-grabber to your machine, so we could record your ‘activities’“. Some of them also have something like “We know your password for the site was [whatever]” – the password is usually an old one that they’ve taken from a record including your email address, and gambles on people using the same password across multiple sites. (In fairness, most people do exactly this) And then it asks for a ransom “or your shame will be available for all to see” It’s pretty basic, but is apparently enough to scare a certain sub-set of people (AKA gullible idiots) who so far have forked out around $250,000 to the scammers.
Second – and there are two types of this currently bonging around – are the HMRC scams.
These basically draw on the whole paranoia about HMRC losing payments, or trying to take the business owner to court.
I’ve had umpteen emails about “Your payment hasn’t gone through” along with attached links or forms to fill in – always a pretty damn good clue that it’s a scam. And again, they’re all ridiculously non-specific, don’t mention a company name/details, or what the payment is supposedly for – another warning sign
The second type, which is a bit nastier, is the phone message – I’ve had a couple now, with a message saying “We’re issuing a warrant in order to discuss this matter with you“, and sounding a lot more official. Still no details though, or anything about what they’re wanting to discuss. (I know, in theory GDPR would also stop them from discussing, but that’s a side point for now) However, they show the phone number – in my experience, calls from HMRC and the like come through a switchboard, and usually show as “Unknown Number” – and a quick search on that number provides more than enough evidence that it’s a scam.
Of course, there are plenty of other scam emails out there – it’s just that these are the ones I’ve noticed specifically this week, and particularly after having received a couple of the “HMRC” calls yesterday and today, so I thought I’d write a bit about them.
Lead Developer 2018
Posted: Fri 29 June, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Food, Geeky, Getting Organised, Getting Out More, Lead Developer 2018, London, People, Solo Dining, Thoughts, Travel, Walking Leave a comment »This week I was in London during the week, attending the 2018 Lead Developer conference. I’ve been before, both in 2016 and 2017 (so I’ve only missed the first one, back in 2015) and this year was as good as the previous ones. It’s gone from size to size, and this year had 1,100 delegates – which also meant that it’s outgrown the QEII centre, so this time we were at the theatre in the Barbican centre instead.
I had decided this year that I couldn’t be arsed with frantic travelling, so instead went down to London on Tuesday afternoon, checked into a hotel in Islington (so I had plenty of opportunity to keep up with walking and so on as well) and stayed for two nights. On the Tuesday I also darkened the doors of Mac and Wild, where I had a truly ridiculous (and rather excellent) off-menu burger. Following the first day of the conference I also walked to Mere (again – and I hadn’t remembered I’d done much the same thing last year until I re-read the post from then) and back.
On the Thursday, once the conference was done, I walked up to where I’d parked the car, and had dinner in Wahaca up there before driving home. This had been planned, as it meant I left London just at the time that England started their kickyball match in the World Cup, which meant that the roads were comparatively much quieter than usual, and that the drive home was pretty easy.
Along the way, I’ve also been able to complete a full working week, allbeit crammed into three days rather than five. It’s been pretty tough, but at least it’s all done now.
After this weekend, things calm down a lot – and I honestly can’t wait.
Ignition
Posted: Fri 1 June, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Kindle, Reading, Reviews(ish) Leave a comment »A long, long time ago, someone on Twitter repeatedly introduced me to the chemically geeky “Things I Won’t Work With” blog, which basically did what it said on the tin. Chemical compounds and experiments that were… on the energetic side, shall we say? The way it was written made me laugh, and I loved seeing the sporadic updates.
Then it disappeared, and I pretty much forgot about it.
Only it turns out to have been (still sporadically) updated, but on a different site – something I found out this week. I’d been on The Twitter to mention to that original someone about a newly reprinted copy of “Ignition!” (which , from memory, had been one of the inspirations for “Things I Won’t Work With”) and then other Twitterers reminded me of the name of the blog.
“Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants” is fascinating. Originally written in the early 70s, it hadn’t been reprinted in decades – (but there’s obviously been some demand for it, as the publishers weren’t going to go to the effort if there weren’t) but it was on my ‘want to read’ list if I ever found a copy. When I saw earlier this year that it was being re-printed, and available as an eBook as well, I pre-ordered immediately, and it arrived this week.
The book itself has an irreverent style to it, which is fine – and even understandable, considering that the author was part of a very select group involved in all this stuff. I’m not a full-on chemistry geek, so some of it is a bit mind-boggling, but it’s been a great read. I’m really glad I managed to get it in the end.
Gone Phishing
Posted: Wed 2 May, 2018 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Geeky, Security, Thoughts Leave a comment »One of the things about being a techie is that I own a fair number of web domains. Some I’ve got for things like ongoing projects, business names I like, and a bundle of other stupid shit. A lot are in the “when I get a chance” state of being – the ideas remain, and haven’t been done by anyone else, but for now they’re kind of drifting.
However, one of the other things I do is have a couple of domains that are purely for use when buying stuff. They’re set to forward everything to my home email account, so it means I can set up anything @ the domain and it’ll do what I want. While it sounds a little bit mental, there’s a very good reason for all this.
For the purposes of explanation, let’s say I own a stupid domain, like myemail.com
So – when I buy something from a new company, I register with them using [company_name]@myemail.com . Any mail there will come to me – it’s a legitimate email address, just not one I’ll ever send an email from. (I can if I need to, but that’s a different point) Everyone’s happy.
The key, though, is that if [company] starts spamming me, I can block that specific address, rather than having to do any kind of weird and fragile message rules etc. It’s easy – I just add [company_name]@myemail.com to the ‘bin everything’ list, and there we go, it’s gone.
What I’ve found recently though is another interesting one – I can easily tell when [company] has been hacked, or lost its mailing list somewhere.
This week, I’ve been getting some *very* clever phishing emails (the ones about ‘just log in, give us your details, and we’ll sort this out’) to one particular address. They’re good enough that if they had come direct to my home email, I might’ve clicked on one by mistake. (I haven’t, but I could have) They’re *that* good. But I can see that they’ve come to [company]@myemail.com , so a) I know they’re shit mails, and b) I know that [company]’s mailing list is being used.
I’ve let [company] know, although there’s not much they can do about it now. But at least maybe they can notify their customers that their details have been leaked/stolen.
All told though, it’s another interesting reason to have that particular domain, and to use it in this way to keep my own information as safe as possible.
Writing Tools
Posted: Mon 12 February, 2018 Filed under: Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Geeky, Getting Organised, Thoughts, Write More, Writing Leave a comment »At the moment, I’m waiting for some new tech stuff to arrive, that will (hopefully) enable me to do more writing while I’m out and about.
All my current easily-portable tech is either too big (laptop-sized) or has a shitty on-screen keyboard, which is OK for small amounts of typing (email etc.) but bloody hateful when it comes to writing larger amounts of text.
Weirdly, two are keyboard/typing alternatives, and the other is a new device that I’m pretty excited about, and hopeful for.
The first of the keyboards is the WayBlade – what looks like a really nice keyboard, and I’d like to finally get my hands on it. However, as I ordered it three fucking years ago, I’m not holding my breath for it to finally arrive.
The second one is a typing device, rather than a keyboard. It’s the Tap, a wearable device that appears to use chording as a typing method. It’ll take a bit of learning, but I had a device back in the 80s (the Microwriter AgendA) that also used a chording keyboard, so it shouldn’t be too unfamiliar.
Both of those will be useful to have (assuming they actually arrive) regardless – well, it’d be nice to have one or the other, but knowing my luck, both will turn up within a couple of days of each other. But whichever one works best will stay, and be useful with the phone at least.
The final device though is a bit different. Way back when I wrote about writing tools before, I waxed lyrical about the old Psion devices, the 3a/mx, the Revo and the Siena, that were tiny devices with brilliant keyboards – and how it was surprising that there weren’t any similar things around currently.
And now, there’s a new device coming, the Gemini. They’ve obviously worked from the same kind of viewpoint I had, including partnering with the people who designed the Psion devices. They look really promising, and I hope it’ll be as good as it appears to be.
So hopefully, going on the evidence of preview reviews and so on, the Gemini might just turn out to be a decent replacement for most of the stuff I currently use the phone for. It’ll be interesting to find out, anyway.
Technical Dipshittery
Posted: Fri 20 October, 2017 Filed under: Business, Customer Services, Domestic, Geeky, Stupidity, Technology, Weirdness Leave a comment »Yesterday, I got a text message from O2, telling me that they were going to be closing their TuGo app (an app that allows phone calls to be made/received through my wifi connection, when the mobile phone signal is bobbins) at the end of November. It gave some options for enabling better alternatives, including their ‘4G & WiFi Calling’ through a range of phones, so it will no longer need a separate app.
That’s all well and good – and TuGo has always been a bag of shite anyway. So I started to go through the process, as ‘detailed’ by O2 of how to get it all set up on my phone.
Except that once I’d enabled it on my phone (or tried to) it told me I needed to do it via the O2 website, to activate it on my account. Bit of a pain in the arse, but OK, let’s get it done.
Oh.
The page detailed in the message doesn’t actually contain the information necessary. I can see a link explaining how great the 4G and Wifi Calling is, but nothing to activate it.
So, I start up a LiveChat with one of their Tech Gurus, who tell me that it’s still showing I’ve got Tu connected to my account, and that needs to be removed before I can do anything. No worries though, they’ll sort it out. Give it about half an hour, reboot the phone, it’ll be done.
Except it wasn’t.
So I got back in touch with O2, this time by phone instead of LiveChat. Oh dear, oh dear.
I (eventually) got through to another of their Tech Gurus, who again says that Tu is still connected to my account, and that I have to uninstall the TuGo app on my phone in order to get rid of the connection. No idea why the previous tech person said they could do it, that’s not possible, it can only be done from your phone, sir.
So I uninstall the app, in the usual way. Oh no, sir, you haven’t uninstalled it. You’ll need to go back to the app store, reinstall the app so you can uninstall it. (Eh? What?) Yes, you’ll need to reinstall the app – you didn’t uninstall it, “you just deleted the little picture on your phone”. That’s a direct quote. From a Tech “Guru”. Who doesn’t appear to even know the word “icon”.
So. Let’s see how this goes. Phone call goes to speakerphone, so I can go through the process while the “Guru” is still on the call, and telling me what I need to do. I reinstall the app – and in order to get in to it, I have to rebuild the connection and association with my number – because uninstalling the app has got rid of all that information . Which is exactly as it should be.
I rebuild the connection, then go into the app’s Settings and Delete the Account. The Guru says “Oh there we go, I can see you’ve now uninstalled the app”. No, I haven’t, I’ve deleted the account. The app is still installed, I can see it. “No, it’s uninstalled”
All the way through the call, that “Guru” couldn’t tell the difference between “Delete the Account/Connection” and “Uninstall the App”.
It’s resulted in two further interactions with layers of O2 management, telling them the problems, fixing the issues, and generally getting it more sorted.
And all the way through this, all it would have taken was for that “My Device” webpage saying “You’ve still got an active connection to TuGo – you need to remove that before we can progress. Here’s how.” That would’ve fixed everything, and I wouldn’t have needed to speak to O2 at all, let alone a total of four times.
Sometimes I just despair of people, and companies.
Paying for Parking
Posted: Fri 28 July, 2017 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Geeky, Milton Keynes, Parking, Technology, Thoughts Leave a comment »During the working week, I regularly park in an area controlled by parking meters – not one per slot, but in big blocks, so you pay for your ticket/parking at a machine, and return the ticket to the car.
It’s an area/business that in many ways doesn’t seem to have kept up with progress at all, but in others is quite a way ahead of most other places. It’s very odd – and it seems like a lot of people are caught in that middle space between the two extremes.
You see, the meters themselves take cash, and only cash. There’s no facility to take card payments, let alone contactless. I assume that some of this is down to maintenance costs – the more things it can do, the more things there are that can fuck up.
Then at the other end of the scale, we can use online/mobile payment setups like RingGo to pay for parking, which is super-easy to do, and works really nicely. (There are other parking payment providers, most of which are worse than RingGo, but they’re still getting used by various councils etc. around the country) There’s no need for cash, it’s all smooth and simple to do, with the parking wardens having smartphone equivalents where they can check each vehicle’s registration and see if it’s paid for parking online.
Both solutions seem to work, either with the super-basic “put coins in the machine” or the semi-techie (but still really pretty simple once it’s set up) paying via mobile/online. There’s also the ability to pay by phone using RingGo, but that appears to be overly complex.
However, both options seem destined to confuse the majority of people. I regularly see people dredging pockets for change – which is becoming less common, with the prevalence of debit cards and contactless payments, so they’re surprised and unprepared for needing coins to park – or completely stumped by smartphone apps, or having problems with the paying by phone.
In some ways that harks back to people not being prepared, but at the same time I do understand that these meters are a bit of a surprise. They’re so low-tech in many ways, and people just don’t seem to expect that. But they’re also unprepared for using their smartphones – despite this whole pay online/app thing becoming more and more common for parking – and don’t have the relevant app, or have it set up. And even with 4G coverage etc., it seems that a lot of them are utterly unable (or just unwilling) to sort out installing the app and just doing things the easy way.
I don’t know what the answer is. I think we’re in this weird hinterland at the moment, where we’ve still got simultaneous low-tech and hi-tech solutions, and people are just caught in the middle, too advanced to be happy with the low-tech, but a large number also still unhappy or uncomfortable with the hi-tech alternative, so they’re stuck in some kind of mid-tech wilderness.
It’s very odd, but interesting to watch and see how things go.
Updates
Posted: Mon 19 June, 2017 Filed under: 1BEM, Domestic, Geeky, Stupidity, Weirdness Leave a comment »Yesterday, I was a bit stumped about what to write for today – but luckily, AVG came to my rescue.
It put up a notice yesterday on my screen telling me that six of my installed programs were out of date – which is kind of a surprise, as I’m normally pretty good at that kind of thing.
Then I read the message properly…
You’ll need to click on it to embiggenify and make it properly readable – but basically, all six programs it was telling me were out of date were actually *more* up to date than the ones it wanted me to install.
So no, I don’t think I will ‘update’ them to keep my machine safe. For fuck’s sake.
#1 Dad
Posted: Wed 14 June, 2017 Filed under: 1BEM, Advertising, Creativity, Cynicism, Design, Domestic, Geeky, Marketing, People, Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »Sometimes, you see something, and your brain just goes “What?!?” (or words to that effect, but with more swearing) Currently, there seems to be a theme connecting that with both Father’s Day and Star Wars.
Last year, we had the card with Kylo Ren…
[Spoiler from two years ago – Kylo Ren kills his father]
This year, I’ve seen this in Sainsbury’s…
I’m pretty damn sure they haven’t seen the same Star Wars films I have…
88888
Posted: Wed 24 May, 2017 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Geeky Leave a comment »Sometimes, things come together fortuitously.
Over the weekend, it was this – I got in the car one morning, and saw that the odometer was on 88,888 miles. So I took a picture of it.
I know it’s properly geeky, but still, it made me happy to have caught it – and with no risk to anyone else.
X-23
Posted: Tue 28 February, 2017 Filed under: Domestic, Films, Geeky, Seeing Films Leave a comment »Tonight, I’m off out seeing a preview of the new X-men film, “Logan“, which is apparently the last of the X-Men films to have Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.
It’ll be interesting, as pretty much all the films starring Wolverine have been rotten, but I’m still willing to give this one the benefit of the doubt- it’s being sold as more of an independent film, looking at how these heroes have aged, how they’ve been treated by time, and the like. So yeah, I’ll be interested to see how it works out.
On a geekier note, the preview starts at 22:23, which is amusing. Why? Because it works out as 10:23(pm) , which works out as X:23 (we’re being geeky, so one roman numeral will have to do) because the X23 programme is the programme/code for one of the successors to Wolverine
I’ll probably write more about it in the next couple of days.
Open University IoP Lecture Series
Posted: Fri 16 December, 2016 Filed under: Domestic, Education, Geeky Leave a comment »I didn’t really explain much about the IoP Lecture Series at the Open University in the last post.
I’m lucky enough to live quite close to the Open University‘s main campus in Milton Keynes, although up ’til this week I hadn’t actually ventured on/in to it.
I was made aware of the Lecture series a few weeks ago, by a friend who’d been to one of the earlier events. Basically, it’s a collaboration with the Institute of Physics, and consists of free lectures (open to the public) on a range of subjects. I’m sure there’ll be ones I’m less interested in, but being a bit of a geek – OK, a lot of a geek – I’m always open to learning about new stuff, so I’ll take something out of all the ones I’ll get to go to.
I’m hoping that in 2017 I’ll do some more learning, both random stuff and more organised/official, and this Lecture Series will definitely be part of that…
Open University IoP Lecture – Human Colour Vision
Posted: Thu 15 December, 2016 Filed under: Domestic, Education, Geeky, Milton Keynes Leave a comment »This week, I was lucky enough – or at least organised enough – to go and see a lecture at the Open University campus as part of their IoP Lecture Series, about Human Colour Vision, presented by Professor Andrew Stockman.
It was interesting, and covered the basics of both the biology and physics of human vision, as well as how easy it is to fool and confuse vision.
Being a bit of a vision geek, I understood most of the information coming in – although it seemed to boggle the minds of a fair few of the audience – but I still learned stuff about how light and colour are initially processed by the eye (“univariance” being particularly interesting) and the cell structures etc. that aid this process.
As always, the ways to mess with the brain about colour fascinate me – and although we didn’t see my two favourite images (below) on colour perception, there were others that were just as fun.
I’m hugely lucky, in that I live near the OU campus, so it makes it an easy evening of geekery – I didn’t know about this IoP series of lectures until recently, but you can be sure I’ll be going to more of them…
ReKindled (Again)
Posted: Wed 19 October, 2016 Filed under: Amazon, Bankruptcy, Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Geeky, Kindle, Reading, Rebuilding, Technology Leave a comment »Just to top off a pretty expensive fortnight, while I was away over the weekend the Kindle broke. As with previous ones, the screen film cracked, so half of it is working and the other half isn’t. In short, fucked.
As it turns out though, I can’t be too annoyed (annoyed, sure, but not too annoyed) as it turns out I’ve had this one just short of three years. Considering that before that I had a spate of broken screens in less than a year, it could’ve lasted a lot less time.
Yes, I’d rather these things were more resilient, were designed to last longer than 18 months.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how things have progressed with Kindles, and whether they’ve improved the ways to reload content onto a new device. It was horrific three years ago, so I’m hoping for improvements, it’s fair to say. (And if that doesn’t happen, I’ve got a backup from the old device – so maybe I’ll just be able to roll that onto the new one.)
We’ll see.
EE’s broken payments
Posted: Sun 16 October, 2016 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Finances, Geeky, Technology, Thoughts Leave a comment »As I wrote yesterday, I ended up having some major issues with the cottage’s already-installed 3G Dongle through EE.
Basically, it’s either not been used for a while, or the previous people ran the account into the ground – there’s absolutely no credit or data available on it. That’s OK, you can connect to EE still and add a credit. Or at least you should be able to.
Basically, the device is set up so that it can still connect to ee.co.uk , and that doesn’t come out of the data allowance. All’s well and good. But. Ah, but.
The thing is, when it comes to processing payments, the processing isn’t all done on ee.co.uk. It also goes off to get the 3D secure (also known as “Verified by Visa” or “Mastercard [something]“) from the relevant bank. Only that’s from a different (and thus not-allowed) domain outside of EE, and because there’s no data allowance, the connection is refused, and the credit transaction fails.
All you get to see on screen is “An error occurred” with “Try again”. Which is… unhelpful.
What’s more unhelpful is that EE’s transaction system has pre-authorised the amount you’ve topped up by. So the funds are then locked by your bank. They’ll be released when the transaction doesn’t complete – but it can take two to three working weeks for that to happen, because banks are paranoid and slow and shit. And EE are just shit, because their failed transaction doesn’t release those funds.
Even better, you can’t then offer feedback or contact EE. Because – yes! – all the online feedback is done through a third party, and goes off to a different domain.
So you’re basically left with no data, no top-up, locked funds, and no way to contact EE to tell them so.
Even worse, I suspect it’s only because I’m a techie that I understand it this much – for Joe Public it’d just be “it’s broken, and EE are shit”. (Which isn’t something I could argue with either, but at least I can understand why it’s broken!) It’s a simple scenario, but one I’m willing to bet they’ve never tested, going on the assumption that people would top up before they ran out completely, etc. etc.
I’ve written to them to explain the same situation, so it’ll be interesting to see what they come back with (if anything)
Lockdown (Experimental)
Posted: Fri 20 May, 2016 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, Security Leave a comment »In the interests of – well, really just geekery – I’ve turned on HTTPS encryption on D4D™. It should be an invisible process to users of the site, but I want to know if it actually is or not.
I firmly believe in making all internet connections more secure, for a bundle of reasons I’m not going to go into right now. So I figure I might as well do some testing of it here (as well as on some other projects I’ve been running, or that are coming up and haven’t been mentioned here) to see how it goes.
In other news, it’s been a busy old week again, but I’ll write more about that in a different post.
Ridiculously Organised
Posted: Fri 19 February, 2016 Filed under: Cinema, Day Trips, Domestic, Films, Geeky, Getting Organised, London, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »So far, this year has been pretty non-stop with travel, visits, concerts and idiot day-trips (mainly to see concerts) and I’ve kept on saying that I must calm things down a bit, build in some time for myself and so on.
And I’m trying to, I really am.
But then cool stuff comes up that I want to go to – which means I now have plans all the way through this year. Not every weekend, or anything similar – but there’s already stuff planned right the way through to December.
The latest one, last night, was finding out that the Royal Albert Hall is doing a showing of Aliens – with the soundtrack performed by a full orchestra, as a celebration of the 30th anniversary of its release. Even more fortuitously, it’s on the weekend of my birthday. Oh, I am so there.
And so yes, tickets are booked for it. I’d already got stuff booked in for December as well, so as it turns out, November was the only month this year without something already booked in.
Now my main challenge will be to not book up the rest of the year, and suddenly realise I’ve had ridiculously few ‘downtime’ weekends. Again.
Stars
Posted: Fri 12 February, 2016 Filed under: Day Trips, Domestic, Driving, Food, Geeky, Getting Organised, Single Life, Solo Dining, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Last year, I started a project to get used to going out for restaurant meals on my own – something that had always been a bit of a “thing” in my mind. Some people don’t like going to the cinema alone, or to pubs.
Part of it became a plan to do more “high-end” eating – if I’m going to eat solo, I might as well make it decent stuff – as well as the usual things, and as a result I ended up eating in a few Michelin-starred places which I really enjoyed. (Far more than I did my previous experience with Michelin-starred places)
I’m keeping up that aim this year, with a vague plan of trying a wide range over the year, and aiming to ‘collect’ a star a month. (Not necessarily at a place each month, but at least averaging it out to one star per month)
So far this year I’ve eaten in a one-star place and a three – with a two lined up for the coming month. From there, I’ve got a couple of others booked up already, and we’ll see how things go from there.
I don’t only eat in Michelin places, by any stretch of the imagination. My tastes are varied – I’m still amused by the Scotland trip I did last year, where I ate in a Michelin-starred place on the Saturday, and a daggy little hole-in-the-wall Mexican place on the Sunday – and I never want to end up the kind of up-myself twerd who’ll only eat at high-end places. This is just a silly side-project that’s also a lot of fun, and is eminently doable. I get to experience a lot of new stuff, seeing what’s good and what isn’t.
I can’t deny, I’m fascinated by the whole thing – the levels of food, the differences (or lack thereof) between places with one, two and three stars, the differences between places with stars and those that haven’t, and the whole experience of the thing. But mainly, it’s fun – and if I’m going to have a ‘sin’, a money-drain or whatever, it’s going to be this one.
D4D Performance
Posted: Fri 25 December, 2015 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, Getting Organised, Technology 1 Comment »This year, D4D’s performance as a site hasn’t been that great. I’d noticed a lot of times when pages timed out, or seemed to get lost along the way, but couldn’t find what was causing it, despite looking hard on several occasions.
Last week, I finally found what the problem was – and it wasn’t in something I’d done, which was nice. More importantly, it also wasn’t something that was showing up in code or settings – because it was a plugin that wasn’t doing what it had been told to, for whatever reason.
I’ve got a security plugin on D4D that’s supposed to take automatic backups, to add some safety and recovery to the site. That was set to take a backup every week, and to only store three backups, then overwriting the oldest.
Except that wasn’t what was happening. Somewhere along the line, something had gone wrong, and it turned out that it was taking a full database backup (with a different filename each time, so no over-writing etc.) every fifteen minutes. Then storing them in a folder that was hidden away in a non-obvious location, with a non-helpful filename.
Even on a server that says it’s got unlimited space, that was taking the piss. It was making the server work extra-hard for no good reason, and causing a whole load of problems.
I finally found it all, and ended up both deleting the old files, as well as killing off the backup task completely. (I’ve written my own automated job now which is working fine, and not causing any problems. The moral of the story? Don’t trust other people’s code.)
Since doing that, I haven’t seen the site crash. I’m hoping that the problems are now fixed, the stability will improve, and that 2016 will be a much better year for D4D™
Fingers crossed.
Privacy Breach
Posted: Wed 2 September, 2015 Filed under: 1BEM, Agency Idiocy, Business, Corbett, Customer Services, Geeky, Laziness, Marketing, People, Stupidity, Thoughts Leave a comment »Yet again, today there’s a story about another place revealing a confidential list of customers in emails – and as usual, in what’s known as a Corbett round here (courtesy of a certain Irish marketing person) it’s looking like the leaker sent the email using CC instead of BCC.
In this case, the information is even more sensitive than usual, as it’s people who’ve used a particular STI clinic in London, and may have also revealed their HIV status. Oh, bloody whoops.
It amazes me how often this seems to happen – and how easy it should be to fix.
The first answer is, obviously, train people.
But after that, it’s about defending against laziness and stupidity. But even that’s pretty easy.
All it really needs is a block on recipients in CC. If you’re sending an email and it’s got more than (say) 10 addresses in the CC field, it simply asks if you’re sure you want to send it with those people in CC rather than BCC. That’s an email-client thing – but is easy to do.
It can’t be that difficult – my own email clients all already ask if I want to send an email with no attachments if the message contains keywords like ‘attached’ or ‘CV’, after all.
A similar thing could be done on the mail-server as well – put in a rule that if there’s more than [defined limit] of addresses in the CC, it doesn’t send without an authorisation, an acknowledgement that this is OK.
There will still be the odd blithering fucktrumpet who manages to send out a whole mailing-list in CC (or even To) – but at least make it harder for them to do so.
Surely that’s not asking too much?
6666
Posted: Tue 10 February, 2015 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky Leave a comment »When I logged in today, I spotted this…
Nothing special to it, but I did like that nice balanced figure for the comments…
Somewhat Calmer
Posted: Sun 18 January, 2015 Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, Geeky Leave a comment »Over the weekend, I’ve been working on reducing the impact of whatever/whoever was attacking D4D™ (and many others, I’m sure)
Looking at log files, it became apparent that a number of the issues were related to a particular site primary user-name that’d become known. Not massively surprising- it wasn’t the strongest in the first place, although the password was- and while it hadn’t been cracked/opened, it was getting hit so many times that it kept on getting locked out. And because it was the primary user-name (which I used all the time) it meant I was getting locked out as well.
As a result, that user has now been massively demoted, and I’ve created a couple of others with more-secure usernames and similarly secure passwords.
It’s not been the easiest of processes, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it over the next few weeks – but at least things now seem to be calmer and less slogged-down with hassles and shit.
Writing Tools
Posted: Mon 22 December, 2014 Filed under: 2014/15, Cynicism, Geeky, Technology, Thoughts, Write More, Writing 3 Comments »Many many years back – before D4D even started – I used to have a couple of palmtop computers. I started off with the Atari Portfolio, then ended up with Psion devices, a 3a and then a Revo. I used to love these things – they made things easy, and gave me a lot of time/ability for writing. Of them all, the Revo was the best for also having a decent keyboard.
These things were tiny – far smaller than today’s tablet devices – but had enough power to do general organisational stuff, and plenty of writing along the way.
In 2015, I want to do more in the way of writing, and I’ve been looking for something similar to the Psions of old – the main requirements being small size, and a decent keyboard. One thing I hate on tablets is the “on-screen keyboard”, which is nigh-on impossible to touch-type on. There’s no real feedback, and it’s hard to type clearly/cleanly/correctly on the poxy things. When one is wanting a device primarily for writing/typing, that’s hardly ideal.
There’s a couple of smaller tablets that also have decent keyboards – but then, if I’m looking at that I might as well get just a small/compact laptop. Mind you, a laptop (even a small one) is still larger than I was looking for.
Ideally I’d like something the size of the old Revo(ish) with a decent keyboard, and better connectivity. Doesn’t seem like much to ask for, does it? Particularly when you consider that such a device was in existence more than a decade ago. But it just doesn’t seem to available. The best alternative seems to be something like the Typo2 keyboard for my phone – except that then negates the case/battery-pack I’ve already got, and also buggers up some of the other phone functionality. Which makes it a bit more pointless.
I feel the same about “smartwatches” like Apple’s iWatch and so on. Sure, there’s a lot of things that are cool on them, but when I think of what Casio used to do with digital watches back in the 90s – watches with calculators, databanks, thermometers, barometers, heart-rate monitors and so on – then the smartwatches are actually pretty dumb.
It’s just annoying – it seems that for all our technological advances, in some ways the devices we have now are less useful than those from a decade ago.
Spam Tendencies
Posted: Mon 15 December, 2014 Filed under: Advertising, Cynicism, Geeky, People Leave a comment »One of my geekier interests (and there’s a long list, I know) is that I find it interesting what sort of subjects are used by spammers in their efforts to get people to click on their ropy emails/links.
I’ve got one email account that gets spammed rotten, and I look through it on occasion when I’ve nothing better to do.
In this case, I had a look on Saturday evening, while my brain was somewhat comatose, and found that the following seem to be currently popular…
- “You’ve been accepted onto this year’s ‘Who’s Who’ listings – click here to verify your details’ (appealing to the vanity of the vacuous who’ve done fuck-all)
- Working from home (no surprise there)
- ‘Super-low’ mortgage rates (again, no real surprise)
- And some weird shit about ‘this 57 year-old man cured Diabetes/Alzheimers/Cancer’ which I don’t quite get.
Of course there’s plenty of others, but I’d guesstimate that those four account for about 60% of the shit I receive on any given day…
Two Hours
Posted: Mon 8 December, 2014 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Geeky, Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Over the last couple of weekends, I’ve looked (again) at just where I can get to in a two hour drive from home. As has been said before, I live between Milton Keynes and Bedford, so I’m sat right between two decent North/South access roads (The M1 and A1) as well as vaguely decent cross-country connections with the A428 towards the West, and the A14 to the East.
What this means is that a two-hour drive covers one heck of a lot of the country, and I decided to have a look at just how far (via use of Google Maps, and their route predictions) I could get in each direction.
Two hours North takes me up to Sheffield, and South gets me to Brighton. That’s a total distance of 225 miles top to bottom.
Two hours West gets me to Bristol, and East gets me right across to Felixstowe and Aldeburgh – roughly 234 miles in total.
The area within that circle comes out as roughly 43,000 square miles (if my maths about area in circles is correct) or 111,000km², which in terms of the UK is just under half the area of the UK as a whole (going by CIA’s Worldbook figure of 243,610km²)
Not bad, all things considered…
Backed Up
Posted: Mon 1 December, 2014 Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, Geeky, Getting Organised, Media, Photography, Technology Leave a comment »One thing that’s changed over the last four years is the way that I back up data. I used to have a big-ass (for the time) hard-drive that held all my backup files, but I haven’t (hadn’t) fired it up in years.
Now I use DropBox for most things – at least the things that aren’t commercially sensitive or need extra security, etc. I don’t necessarily trust/rely on them, but it tends to be where most of the stuff sits (as well as on through another paid-for service for my work stuff and so on) and it suits me to use them for the moment. That may change a bit over 2015, there’s a more secure and privately-held service that might do better, but for now, DropBox suits me.
However, I recently realised that all my photos and music files were still sat on that old hard-drive. Which has sat untouched for four years, through four or five moves. Oops.
I fired it up over the weekend, thought I might as well bite the bullet and see if all’s well or if it’s dead and I’m screwed.
Thankfully, everything worked first time. I’ve pulled all the music data off, and that’s now sitting in multiple locations again. Next will be the photos – although I’ve also spent some time looking at old images and seeing what’s what (and just looking back at events of the last eleven years, which is what the drive holds) It’s been quite the journey…
Miscalculation
Posted: Mon 18 August, 2014 Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, Geeky Leave a comment »People always say that if there’s one thing computers can do, it’s count.
That really doesn’t explain this particular status message…
Which is a bit of a worry
Breaking Things
Posted: Sun 13 April, 2014 Filed under: Creativity, Cynicism, Geeky, News, Security, Stupidity, Technology, Thoughts Leave a comment »Last Friday there was a big(ish) story in the BBC and Media about the convicted paedophile who is requesting his laptop – complete with ‘non-obscene’ images of one of his victims. Dorset Police were quoted in the story as saying it would be ‘unlawful’ to delete/remove those images from the laptop, because they’re not technically obscene or showing nudity.
Now, aside from the fact that there’s something so blatantly wrong with this entire process (and why wasn’t the laptop just removed/destroyed as part of the evidence and ‘proceeds of crime’ bollocks?) then surely this is a perfect opportunity for a tragic IT-related ‘accident’?
Make sure it’s believable, could happen, and is feasible, and it’d be the devil’s own job to prove anything.
For example, a liquid spillage. Or leaving the machine next to – I don’t know – some kind of large magnet. Maybe the metal scanner in a doorway. Or just mis-filed in such a way that a) it can’t be found or b) it got destroyed. Lost property, IT security, avoidance of possibility for divulging person information.
There are many, many ways in which this could’ve never been an issue. The mis-filing and “sorry, can’t find it” would be easiest (and probably hardest to be disproved) but any of them would work nicely. It’s more of a problem now, because they’ve admitted that a) it exists and b) it’s currently in an OK state. Ooops.
Notebooks
Posted: Tue 8 April, 2014 Filed under: Customer Services, Design, Domestic, Geeky, Reviews(ish), Stationery, Thoughts, Work-related 2 Comments »
One of my loves is – as sad as it sounds – stationery. Pens, Inks, and particularly note-pads of various types. I use them a lot in my work, taking notes, keeping track of ideas and projects. Well, that’s how I justify things, anyway.
Recently I’ve been getting savage temptations from a company called Bureau Direct, who have a huge range of everything I love using. I’ve been impressed by their service, their range, and the speed and efficiency of their service. Sadly, their weekly promotional email is like temptation itself.
The most recent addition to my collection arrived over the weekend – a pack of three limited-edition “Field Notes” notebooks called “Shelterwood“.
They’ve managed to get a fine layer of American Cherry wood as the cover – I have *no* idea how they’ve managed it, but they have. The covers are still flexible, but they’re a razor-thin laminate of ‘proper wood’. Naturally, all the covers are different (as you’d expect from wood) and they’re ace. The books aren’t as big as I’d thought they might be – about A6, I’d guess – but that’s fine, and makes them different from my normal notepad-size too.
It turns out that Field Notes do these limited editions on a regular basis – I suspect I may end up with more…
Tweetastic
Posted: Mon 24 March, 2014 Filed under: Business, Geeky, Twitter Leave a comment »Apparently, over the weekend Twitter had its eighth birthday. (On March 21st, to be exact)
It also turns out that I joined Twitter seven years ago yesterday. (And another friend joined a year after that, as we discussed over the weekend)
I hadn’t appreciated that Twitter gained over 2 million users in its first year (It must’ve done, because my user ID is just under 2,000,500)
However, in that next year, it gained another 26 million users – my friend’s user ID is just under 28,100,000.
And now the new user IDs are coming close to 2 and a half billion – a recent one I created (for another project) was just under 2,400,000,000!
That really is quite huge.
Convergence
Posted: Sun 12 January, 2014 Filed under: Change, Design, Geeky, Health, Technology, Thoughts 1 Comment »Since getting the FitBit Flex, I’ve been thinking a lot about technology, innovation, and devices.
Why?
Because actually, despite being useful, the Flex feels something like a backwards step. Despite it still doing a number of things, it’s nowhere near as advanced as it could (and should) be.
Yes, this one device – worn on a strap on the wrist – can detect/monitor motion, whether that be steps, or motion during sleep. It can communicate via Bluetooth with my phone. But really that’s about it. It’s not got GPS to show where I’ve been, it’s not got a display for showing time, heart-rate, or anything else. In essence, it’s a pretty dumb device.
How has this happened? I remember back in the late 80s and early 90s when Casio were bringing out watches galore, and they could do so much more than the Flex. Casio’s corporate history is amazing for the number of innovations and firsts. Their first databank watch was made in January 1984, their first watch with GPS was released in June 1999. Within that time they certainly made watches with thermometers, weather predictions, heartrates, and many others.
So why are we now in some ways less advanced than these watches of 20-odd years ago? Why can’t my Flex also display the time, or be able to monitor my heartrate? Casio did it 20 years ago – it just seems bizarre that we can’t get one device to do all that now.
Remember The Name
Posted: Tue 7 January, 2014 Filed under: Advertising, Cynicism, Geeky, Marketing, Media, Television, Thoughts Leave a comment »Over the Christmas Break, I watched more ‘live TV’ (i.e. not stuff recorded on my PVR, and not ‘delayed’ so I could skip adverts) than I usually do, and thus saw more adverts than normal. Advertising is something that interests me for a lot of reasons, mostly having worked for/with a number of agencies over the years, and also being interested in the psychology and manipulation behind them.
As always, “Brand Recognition” is one of my bug-bears, because for a lot of the time it seems that advertisers don’t care about much else, so long as you remember the brand-name. However, in my experience a lot of the time I remember the brands just so I can be sure to never, ever give them any money. This happens particularly when an advert (or set thereof) are
- insanely annoying (Insurance Comparison sites, EE, and the like) or
- paying money to people I can’t abide, and/or hypocrites (an example covering both those is when Knorr were using Marco Pierre White to advertise their stock-cubes – a product he wouldn’t touch in a month of Sundays)
I’ve written before about how adverts for certain industries are changing – usually for the better – but it’s interested me to see how GoCompare in particular have continued that change.
When they started, GoCompare had one of the most insanely irritating advertising “characters” (that bloody opera singer) known to man. I won’t link to anything, because it’ll just cause brain-damage and broken monitors. (Apparently it was also voted “most irritating advert” for 2009 and 2010 – quite the achievement) GoCompare then had ads of various celebrities killing the character in a variety of ways, and over the last year or so it’s been about the same character trying to get back into the adverts, and various ‘wacky’ schemes to advertise the company.
Now, though, they’ve changed again, and the same character appears to have become a driver or guide on coach tours. (Although I did like the reference to Blakey from ‘On the Buses‘, but that’s probably just a sign that I’m old) I have no idea where they plan to go with this set of adverts – although at least now they’re just weird and self-referential, rather than being actively violence-inducing.
I still wouldn’t ever hand over money to GoCompare – that memory of the dire branding will last a long time – but it’s been interesting to see how their stuff has altered over the last couple of years, in some sort of recognition that people hated the original concept.
[Updated and reposted on 7/1/14] – The Drum posted up this article about the ads, saying…
“We know that people will be keen to see what happens to Gio next. The new campaign will firmly position him as the legend that we all know him to be, but will also see the introduction of new characters enabling us to convey aspects of the Gocompare.com service that differentiate the brand still further.”
Although my favourite line (and I’m sure it means something other than what I’m choosing to read it as meaning) comes at the end of the article…
A series of executions are set to appear throughout the year.
My Films of 2013
Posted: Wed 1 January, 2014 Filed under: Cinema, Films, Geeky, Reviews(ish), Seeing Films, Thoughts, Words, Writing Leave a comment »Yesterday, Karen made a comment on a previous post, and asked for my top five films from 2013. And I thought “Well, why not?”. Although be warned, my taste in films is rotten.
5. Gravity – Probably the smartest sci-fi film (albeit with some bugs still, mainly around orbital mechanics – and the fact Sandra Bullock doesn’t bloody die) of the year, Gravity is short and powerful. Worth seeing in 3D (which is saying something – I’m no 3D fan at all) although I can well imagine it could kick off a dollop of illness in those prone to motion sickness. But that disorientation is almost key to the film, it manages to convey some of how it must feel to be weightless and with no idea what your orientation is.
It also gets a lot of the tech stuff right (although a fair amount wrong, as well) as well as keeping the story tight. I was in two minds about seeing it, if I’m honest (not being a massive fan of Sandra Bullock at the best of times) but I’d say it’s probably the best thing she’s done – in my opinion, anyway.
4. Elysium – Another smart sci-fi, with a dark ‘them and us’ premise that seems to be becoming all the more feasible. Hell, even Jodie Foster was good in it – which is a real revelation, as usual I can’t abide her in films.
The basic premise – that as the majority of the world’s population get poorer, the rich opt to take off to a space environment/station, where they carry on their lives, with the best of technology, medical care etc., effectively leaving the poor to their own devices – is pretty dark, but also (I found) very believable, even though you know the required leaps in technology would be huge. I’m a fan of the director’s previous stuff (particularly District 9, another near-ish-future scifi) and also looking forward to his next film.
3. Iron Man 3 – Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, written and directed by Shane Black? I’m *so* there. IM3 lived up to its premise, far more than 2 did. Indeed it pretty much ignores 2 for the heap of crap it was. Smart snappy dialogue, some great action scenes, a glorious twist (that again seems ever more feasible in reality) and Robert Downey Jr just being himself. You can usually tell when people had fun making the film, and that comes across in this one.
And yes, I’ve even ended up watching it again on TV over the Festering Season. And it’s still fun, even when you know all of how it works out. Besides, just how damn good an actor is Guy Pearce?
2. Pacific Rim – I never expected anything more from Pacific Rim than what was in the trailers – big robots fight big monsters. If you expected more than that, you were – at best – frighteningly optimistic. But going in with no expectations more than that, I loved this film. Yes, it has some epic bugs and plot holes – the biggest being “if they’re clones, how can one be pregnant, FFS” – which rankle more on repeated viewing. (And yes, I’ve seen it rather more than once!) But still, epic effects, an absolutely cracking soundtrack – which I also bought – and it’s just ridiculous, fun, and probably the most entertaining film (for me) of the year. So why isn’t it at number one?
1. Mud – And the answer to that is ‘because Mud is’. I don’t know why this appealed to me as much as it did, but it’s probably the film that stuck with me the most through 2013. Matthew McConaughey has really grown on me as an actor since he’s stopped doing all the rom-com shit, and he’s really pretty versatile. This one’s more ‘American Mythology’ than anything else, I suppose – matched up with a doomed love story, coming-of-age stuff, and a whole lot more. For whatever reason, I just really liked this one.
And just for fun (and I won’t even credit them with links!), my five worst films have been…
5. White House Down – I was aiming for brainless entertainment. I got brainless.
4. I Give It A Year – I have no idea why I even went to see this. Romcom tat that was about as funny as infected piles.
3. The Counselor – Great expectations from a great trailer, but the film just wasn’t what had been expected. Beautifully shot, and some great set-pieces, but all told a real disappointment of a film.
2. Ender’s Game – One of the few this year that left a really bad taste in the mouth – the whole child-soldier thing, with some very dark morality (and no, I hadn’t read the book, so didn’t know what to expect) and again that feeling that somehow it’s not a concept that America would have any great issues with in the future. All-told, really quite unpleasant.
1. Only God Forgives – In a similar vein to Counselor, a film that didn’t live up to it’s trailer, and turned out in truth to be a very different film from that portrayed. Very arty, beautiful, but utterly up itself. Probably a good film when you’re in the mood for an art-house essay about violence, vengeance and [whatever else] but I wasn’t, so I really didn’t like it.
But bear in mind, there’s a lot of others just outside that list – including Last Stand, Man of Steel, Pain and Gain, and The Paperboy…
Why I Blog
Posted: Wed 13 November, 2013 Filed under: Creativity, D4D™, Domestic, Geeky, Words, Writing Leave a comment »[Inspired by this post with the same title over at Gordon’s place]
I started writing D4D™ back on August 9th 2002. Eleven years ago – damn, that time’s flown past.
I’ve said this before (almost certainly more than once) but I started blogging primarily because I wanted a project to keep on working on. I’ve always been a lover of the written word, since I learned to read, and I wanted to see if I could write. I’d done other projects along the way, short stories, novella-length and a couple of novel-length as well.
But the main reason was that I know how bad I am at not going through with projects. I start them, and then I move on to something else. I know that about myself, and the basic reason behind D4D was to keep a project going – as well as to get into the habit of writing, and to see whether it spawned anything else.
D4D’s been part of my life ever since. It’s been there through the ups and the downs, and a lot has changed in that eleven years. I had a year or more where the writing fell off a cliff, but this year I’ve worked quite hard to get back into it, and I think that’s been quite successful. There’s still a way to go, but I’m getting back into the habit and the routine of it.
And has it spawned anything else? Well, yes and no. I got into the writing of D4D, but in some ways that supercedes the writing on anything else, and I need to rediscover – or perhaps find at all – the balance between writing here, and writing elsewhere. I’ve got more writing ideas, stories and screenplays, but I need to find the time to write them.
D4D will keep on going for the foreseeable – I’ve still got a long way to go, and I want the ability to look back on things afterwards. I’ve changed a lot in this eleven years, and so has my writing – none of which is surprising, considering that time span – and it’ll be interesting to see how things develop from here on.
And that’s why I blog. Writing, routine, a diary, a repository of ideas and thoughts. D4D is all of that, and more.
Legalised
Posted: Tue 22 October, 2013 Filed under: 1BEM, Advertising, Corbett, Cynicism, D4D™, Geeky, Legal, Marketing, Stupidity, Time Leave a comment »It’s now two years since my little spat with Ian Corbett (of Toyota Ireland) and his legal advisors was completed. I said at the time that the way they’d requested things to work out wouldn’t actually get rid of the search engine results that annoyed him so much. But he’s a marketing manager, so one assumes he knows these things, and that I would be wrong.
On a random whim, I searched the other day on Google for said person – and lo, I was right. Even when searching for just name + company (with no mention of D4D™ at all) up comes D4D™ with a nice healthy 4th place in the search results. And now there’s also Google Images, I can also see what the glaikit bawbag looks like, too.
All told, I can’t deny, I do find this very amusing. And there’s nothing at all I can do about it, it’s all in the hands of That There Google.
Legally Dead
Posted: Fri 11 October, 2013 Filed under: Geeky, Ideas, Legal, News, People, Thoughts, Writing 1 Comment »The BBC today has a fantastic story about Donald Miller, an American man who had disappeared for 8 years, was declared legally dead in 1994, then reappeared in 2005, having been drifting and moving from place to place since 1986.
Because he’d been declared legally dead, his ‘widow’ was given his Social Security death benefits, so when he reappeared – and I’m reading between the lines a little – it looks like they’ve tried to claim that back.
However, because he’s been ‘dead’ so long, that decision can’t be resolved or overturned. Apparently it can be within three years (which is pretty mind-boggling in itself) but not after 19 years – unsurprisingly.
What this means is that Donald Miller remains legally dead.
Of course, my mind went off on a tangent at that point, and thought about how cool this actually is. (in some ways) I wonder what would happen if (for example) he robbed a bank. Could a legally-dead person be charged with a crime? Could it go to court? I suspect not. Even fingerprint checks would – as I understand it – come back as being those of a dead person. And what happens when he does actually die?
It’s all a very odd story, based around odd tenets of law. And I suspect we haven’t heard the last of it.
Data Migration – Kindle
Posted: Mon 10 June, 2013 Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Domestic, Finances, Geeky, Getting Organised, Technology, Thoughts Leave a comment »By contrast to the ease of migrating data to the new laptop, resyncing a new Kindle is an absolutely shite experience.
The actual purchase/delivery of it is great – ordered on Friday, arrived today. But synchronising it is crap.
Rather than a simple “download everything” option – or even having a “download everything on this page” – you have to choose to download each eBook individually. Even on the website, it’s a list with individual controls. Not even a checkbox against each item and a ‘download all’.
Why? I’ve no idea. But it means that what should be a simple “connect this device to my Amazon account” to download everything becomes a nightmare of (in my case) roughly 1,000 mouse-clicks. That’s no exaggeration. I’ve got 260 books on my Kindle. For each one you’ve got to click on “Actions”, then “Download”, then Select the device (there’s only one device – at least fucking auto-select it!) . For each book.
It’s a truly painful and shit experience, and there’s an email going to Amazon to explain that.
More Broken
Posted: Fri 7 June, 2013 Filed under: 1BEM, Domestic, Finances, Geeky, Stupidity, Technology, Thoughts Leave a comment »It’s obviously the month for tech stuff to break.
Following on from the laptop, the iPhone battery pack, and the iPhone cable, the Kindle’s just died. (I know, I know, “That doesn’t happen with books”, blah blah) My own fault, out with friends last night, had the Kindle (in a case) in my pocket all night, and somewhere along the line it’s got squished, and the screen has cracked in the way eInk ones do, so it’s no damn use to anyone.
I *should* have left it in the car, but forgot. That’s the way of things sometimes. No idea exactly when it happened, although it was probably when five of us crammed into a taxi, which was fairly tight.
Ah well, live and learn.
Impetus
Posted: Wed 5 June, 2013 Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, Geeky, Technology, Writing Leave a comment »One interesting side-effect (currently) of the new laptop is that it seems to have caused a resurgence in writing, or at least the desire to write.
I don’t know why though – although I guess some of it is down to having a nice new clean (and reliable) keyboard that makes things a bit easier.
I’ve also installed a couple of bits of writing software – Scrivener, and my old fallback, CeltX – as well as the LibreOffice package. (an open-source version of Microsoft Office, and much better in my opinion)
We’ll see how things go with a potential writing resurgence, but at least it’s starting off pretty well.
Equipment Longevity
Posted: Mon 3 June, 2013 Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, Geeky, Technology, Thoughts Leave a comment »As part of yesterday’s post about equipment failures, I realised just how long I’d actually had the previous laptop, which was quite surprising.
Looking back, I should have realised it was quite a while, thinking back to where I was and so on at the time I got it.
I’m pretty tough on technology, so it’s actually quite impressive that the Dell laptop lasted just under four years. I do a lot of travelling (as has been written about too many times to mention) and the laptop will always just get shoved in my backpack, rather than using a ‘proper’ laptop bag. (Mainly because I’ve seen too many idiots carrying laptop bags over one shoulder, seen how easy it is for people to steal them, and how much it makes you a target, a sign of visible wealth/gadgetry)
I dread to imagine how many hours of use the Dell laptop has had, but I’m pretty sure that it’s more than paid for itself over the four years.
Equipment Failure
Posted: Sun 2 June, 2013 Filed under: Bankruptcy, Change, Domestic, Finances, Geeky, Getting Old(er), Getting Organised, iPhone, Shopping, Technology, Thoughts, Weirdness 1 Comment »Don’t worry, this isn’t another post about the joys and pitfalls of getting older…
No, instead it’s about technology, and why the bastard stuff all ends up failing at the same time.
First of all, this post is being written on a new laptop – which I really could’ve done without having to get, but needs must when the devil drives (and/or you’re a web techie and wannabe-writer). The old Dell laptop – which it turns out I bought back in September 2009, so I shouldn’t whine so much, I guess – had been getting flakier over the last six months, but I’ve been eking out the life of it since then, suffering the occasional (and then more regular) hard-drive crash, and the ropy keyboard with some keys that only worked intermittently.
This week though it’s been crashing every time it was in use, and was obviously getting to the point where I needed to a) pull all the relevant data off it like NOW, and b) replace it with something else. And with a trip up to Manchester this week where I’m *really* going to need a reliable laptop, this was the weekend for it.
So I’ve bitten the bullet somewhat, and the new one is a (dirt-cheap) Asus thing, running the already-much-disliked Windows 8. To be fair to Windows 8, the old laptop was on the much-loathed Vista, which I never really found all that annoying. Eight annoys me more so far, but I’ll get used to it.
The other two equipment failures are both iPhone related, allbeit power-related rather than device-related. (Although I did think one of them might’ve been the phone being fucked, which was a real worry) First the Mophie battery case has failed. Again. (More accurately, the cable/charger for it, which will no longer charge) I love the Mophie cases, but they do seem to be somewhat crap, and only last about a year. And then the normal iPhone charge/sync cable also went kerfut and wouldn’t charge the phone. So I’ve had to get a new cable for that as well – considerably less expensive than the laptop purchase, but still, why all at the same time?
Oh yeah, and the fridge in the house also played up this week, with one day where it didn’t appear to be working all that well. Fortunately it’s now back up and running.
But why the hell would four things, two fairly major, all decide to kiff out within the same week? Weird things, I tell thee, weird things.
Increased Security
Posted: Sat 13 April, 2013 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, Getting Organised, People, Security, WordPress 1 Comment »At the moment, there is a huge attack going on against blogs using WordPress.
It’s primarily attacking the blogs who’ve kept a lot of the default settings – particularly keeping the primary user as “admin” with weak/known passwords – but still, it’s better to make sure that things are secure.
D4D™ has always been on an altered install of WordPress – mainly because I’m really bad at leaving things alone – so I’m less concerned about it, but all the same, I’ve added in a couple of security plugins just to reinforce things. I’m also making use of Cloudflare to add another level of security.
It’s going to make things interesting for a lot of Blog Owners on the WordPress platform, though. Basically, if you’re on WP you need to :
- Make sure you’re not relying on the “admin” user
- Add a new user to WP , give it admin rights (and a strong password)
- Set “admin” to have the lowest possible permissions (contributor), or delete it completely.
- If possible, make sure your database isn’t using the wp_ prefix for all wordpress tables.
- Use Cloudflare or similar
- Install the Limit Logins plugin
- If you know what you’re doing, also install the Extend WP Security plugin
- Take backups!
There’s other stuff along the way, but those really are the key points.
Phone Security
Posted: Tue 5 March, 2013 Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, Geeky, Technology, Thoughts Leave a comment »Yesterday there was a load of stuff on radio news with police warning about people who don’t secure their phones with a PIN code.
Supposedly it makes them more valuable (to thieves) if they’re unlocked, and also means all your personal information is available – which is obviously usable for nefarious purposes.
Personally, I’ve always had a PIN-lock on my phones, and don’t really get why most people don’t – yet apparently only 20% of people use a PIN-lock at all.
I do understand the concerns of some people – that, for example, they may be in an accident and emergency services would need contact numbers – but at the same time I’ve always got that elsewhere in my wallet etc.
As it is, I’d rather keep my primary information safe.
Counterfeits, and Real Refunds
Posted: Wed 17 October, 2012 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, iPhone Leave a comment »Back in March when I got the iPhone upgrade, I ordered a new Mophie Juice Pack Plus battery pack – I’d had one for the old iPhone, and really liked it. Plus it has the nice side-effect of doubling the battery life of the phone.
I bought the pack – me being me, the purple one – via Amazon (as I usually do)
Over this weekend, it stopped charging, and is basically broke and fucked. Not impressed. It was past the 90-day period on Amazon, so I contacted Mophie direct to ask what could be done.
I got a reply the next day, asking for the normal sort of thing – receipt, serial number etc., which got supplied.
Then yesterday they sent an email, saying that the battery pack I’ve bought is actually a counterfeit product, so Mophie can’t do anything about it. Understandable, but nightmare.
Anyway, I contacted the seller via Amazon (and left a warning on the product page) last night, just letting them know, but really expecting knack-all.
And today, I got an email, telling me that I’d been completely refunded for the purchase, to not worry about returning it or anything, very sorry, and that they’d actually stopped selling those packs recently following other concerns about their quality.
I’m annoyed about the pack’s death, but very, very impressed with the resultant customer service – both from the seller, and from Mophie themselves.
Phone Insurance – You couldn’t make this shit up
Posted: Mon 9 July, 2012 Filed under: 1BEM, Customer Services, Cynicism, Insurance, iPhone 2 Comments »This morning, I got three letters from CPP, the muppets company dealing with the claim for my knackered iPhone.
All three are dated the same day – 27th June! Nearly two weeks to get sent out – and all ‘signed’ by the same person. Combined, they make for a brilliant record of how CPP handle things. Well, it’s hilarious if you’re not receiving them.
- Letter 1 – “We need more information – proof of purchase, and a more detailed description of what happened”
- Letter 2 – “We need a more detailed description of what happened” – guess this means they’ve received the proof of purchase ?
- Letter 3 – “Claim denied”. So they’ve received a more detailed description? Or did the one in the initial phone call suddenly suffice?
And bear in mind, this is all two weeks ago – it’s already been appealed, and complained about.
I wonder what excuse they’ll use for these letters, and the fact it’s taken two weeks to receive them…
Restoring
Posted: Fri 29 June, 2012 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Geeky, Technology 3 Comments »So, while the insurance bullshit rumbles on, I went to the local Apple store tonight and sorted a replacement phone. Apple sell replacement phones for ‘out of warranty’ replacements. (a much nicer terminology than “water-fucked phones”, to be fair) Apparently they’re made from some reconditioned parts, but that means they cost £140 to replace, not £500.
The entire process has actually been really simple. I know I’m no Apple advocate, but sometimes they’re worthy of praise all the same – just not brainless adoration.
In this case, the actual transfer process took about fifteen minutes, start to finish. Restoring all the data is taking a long time, but it looks like I’ll have a complete restore, that I won’t have lost a single thing. And that is impressive, however you look at it.
All my contacts, all my email, even all my photos. (which were the thing I really expected to lose) This is A Good Thing, for sure.
Smartphone, Stupid App
Posted: Wed 21 March, 2012 Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, iPhone Leave a comment »Ah, RBS, I do so love the way you make life really complicated when it doesn’t need to be – and indeed shouldn’t be.
As I wrote before, I recently upgraded my phone to the iPhone 4S, which was a remarkably painless process. (I know, Apple stuff “just works”, but that’s not always been my experience, it’s safe to say – and there’s still a few niggles to sort out) All the Apps I’d purchased on the 3GS came over smoothly, all the contacts, blah blah, all worked fine – except for one.
Yep, the RBS “Mobile Banking” app wouldn’t work at all. Fair enough, security for banking, I can live with that. And there’s a button for requesting a new passkey. Clicky. Oh. It’s going to come in the post, and might take seven working days. Sheesh.
Seven working days on, nothing has appeared. So I call RBS Mobile Banking.
“Oh yes, we don’t send those any more.”
“…”
“Yes, what you need to do is text STOP (and yes, it has to be all in capitals) to 87727, then uninstall the existing app, reinstall it from the App Store, and go through the setup process.”
“You’re kidding, right? This is how RBS ‘make things easier’?”
“Yes, this is the quickest process for getting things done.”
Fuck sake. Anyway, it’s been done – but what a total bag of bollocks.
iDevice Upgrade
Posted: Mon 5 March, 2012 Filed under: 1BEM, Change, Domestic, Geeky, iPhone 2 Comments »Just under two years ago, I succumbed and got an iPhone. No-one was more surprised than me, as I wasn’t (and I’m still not) a fan of the Apple hype and fanboy obsessions with iDevices
As it turns out, I’ve been quite pleased with the iPhone, and it’s done everything it’s supposed to without annoying me too much. There’s niggles, but I think there’s niggles with any smartphone or similar device.
However, over the last couple of weeks, it’s been getting a bit flaky. The display had taken on a weird tendency to get a purple filter on it, which is visually interesting (and I must have some photo fun with a similar kind of effect, if I can manage it) but it was beginning to annoy.
Being well past the 18month contract, I went in to the local O2 shop over the weekend, and changed phone – to an iPhone 4S. (I’d previously had the 3GS) So far, I’m pretty pleased with it – and the backup/restore process to bring everything over from old phone to new was, I’m pleased to say, a really simple process.
I did look at other phones, Android OS and the like, but in the end the updated iPhone suited my requirements/use better than the other options. Again.
(Oh, and a quick thing – yes, 2 year device life is bobbins. Anyway, once I’ve cleared/reset it, I’m submitting the 3GS for recycling, which is better than nowt)
Google Web History
Posted: Thu 23 February, 2012 Filed under: 1BEM, Geeky, Legal, Privacy, Security, Technology 3 Comments »On March 1st, Google’s privacy policy is changing.
If you don’t want your web history (among other things) stored past that date, you need to delete it in the next week. If you leave it ’til 1st March, it will be too late – you need to have done it by the end of 29th Feb.
The EFF has a useful page here about how to delete your Google web history.
CEOP
Posted: Tue 7 February, 2012 Filed under: 1BEM, Advertising, Cynicism, Geeky, People, Stupidity, Technology Leave a comment »And on the subject of CEOP, which is (apparently) part of the UK Police, wouldn’t you have thought they could’ve made the acronym into eCOP instead?
As an example, they probably could have called it ‘Exploited Children’s Online Protection’. Or something.
Mind you, it just goes to show how little thought went into CEOP in the first place, doesn’t it?
Internet Safety
Posted: Tue 7 February, 2012 Filed under: 1BEM, Advertising, Cynicism, Geeky, Technology, Thoughts Leave a comment »Today is, allegedly, “Safer Internet Day“.
Surprisingly, it’s not being mentioned or promoted by CEOP, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection bunch of muppets Centre. Not a thing.
Wouldn’t you think that – if CEOP were actually any fucking use at all – they’d support and cross-promote this Safer Internet Day? Or even have created the concept themselves.
Happy 30th, ZX81
Posted: Sat 5 March, 2011 Filed under: Geeky 1 Comment »Today in 1981, the ZX81 was released.
There’s an article about it on the Register.
The ZX81 was my first computer – seeing this stuff really brings back those memories.
£70 for a ZX81. Amazing
3.1
Posted: Thu 24 February, 2011 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, WordPress Leave a comment »Yesterday, I updated to WordPress 3.1 here on D4D™. No idea what the real differences are, or whether there’s anything that’ll rise up and bite me on the backside.
Still, it’s good to be on top of these things. Allegedly.
Yes / No
Posted: Mon 7 February, 2011 Filed under: 1BEM, Agency Idiocy, Business, Cynicism, Design, Geeky, People, Stupidity, Work-related Leave a comment »Via the linguistic/literacy genius known as Sevitz (or Svetzi) comes this gem…
Oh. My. God.
I’ve worked with some spectacular options for Yes/No, but this one is way up there.
Word Lens
Posted: Sun 19 December, 2010 Filed under: Geeky, iPhone, Travel 2 Comments »It’s not often that I see a piece of technology that makes me go simply “Wow”. However, Word Lens brings forth exactly that response.
It’s basically a translation application for the iPhone, but what makes it different is that it works through the camera lens – hold the phone up to a sign in Spanish, and it’ll translate it – immediately – into English.
The demo app is free – which either removes words, or reverses them – and English-Spanish or Spanish-English cost £2.99 each. I assume that there’ll be other languages before long, and I certainly hope so. This kind of application is exceptional, and something that could/should change the way some translation is done.
Zombie Stormtrooper
Posted: Thu 4 November, 2010 Filed under: Art, Geeky, People Leave a comment »via Back to Dreams comes this excellent image…
Nothing disturbing at all, honest.
Yep, Zombie Stormtroopers. How cool is that? What a fantastic idea.
Synapse Phones
Posted: Tue 26 October, 2010 Filed under: Advertising, Business, Geeky, iPhone, Technology Leave a comment »If you’re tired of run-of-the-mill “standard” smartphones, it looks like this may be something that’s of interest.
Synapse Phones will take your order for a customised smartphone (running Android 2.2) and ship it in Q1 of 2011
Think about for what you use your smartphone and what you will do with it. For example if you are someone who loves to take thousands of pictures, you can choose the 12MP camera and a xenon flash for taking pictures at night or under bad lighting conditions or if you want to store your whole music collection on your smartphone just choose a high amount of memory.
Seems like a good idea – and the prices aren’t epically unreasonable either. I hope it works out as a good business.
Missed Dates
Posted: Mon 11 October, 2010 Filed under: D4D™, Domestic, Geeky Leave a comment »In having lots of other stuff on my mind last week and over the weekend, I missed out on some date fun.
I missed yesterday’s 10:10:10 on 10/10/10 .
I meant to do a post, but other stuff came up instead.
Bum.
Xmarks is closing
Posted: Tue 28 September, 2010 Filed under: Business, Customer Services, Geeky, Technology, Thoughts 1 Comment »Over the last three years, I’ve been using the xMarks service (formerly FoxMarks) to synchronise all my bookmarks between Home PC, Laptop, Work PC, and iPhone. It’s always been a free service – allbeit one I’d have happily paid for – that made life *so* easy when it comes to keeping bookmarks in sync.
So it’s really sad news today that xMarks has 90 days to live. I don’t know of a better service for synchronising bookmarks (and passwords) in the way that xMarks does, and it’s been awesomely useful for a very long time.
For me- and it’s a point they raise in that blog post – I would’ve happily paid for the service. Not loads – but £10 – £25 a year, certainly.
A very sad day.
Loss of Sync
Posted: Wed 15 September, 2010 Filed under: Geeky, iPhone, Technology, Thoughts 4 Comments »When I got the iPhone (and on previous phones before that) one of the best things I used was a service called Zyb.com, which allowed you to synchronise contacts to their online database from your old phone, and then pull them down to the new phone. It made life *so* much easier, allowing you to do in ten minutes what otherwise turned into a dragged out and nightmarish process of copying contacts across one by one.
When Herself’s mother got an iPhone recently, I planned to do the same thing using Zyb, but I couldn’t. Because Zyb.com is no more.
A couple of years back now, Vodafone bought out Zyb, because it was such a good service. At the time they said it would carry on being available, and they’d got no plans to shut it down. Now though, they’ve closed down Zyb, and relaunched it (kind of) as part of Vodafone 360°. It’s nowhere near as good, fast or useful as it was as Zyb.
I’m really annoyed by this – despite having been a subscribed/signed-up user to Zyb, I didn’t get any notifications about the service closing down. It’s only having done other research about it that I find Zyb closed on 31st July.
As yet I haven’t found a decent replacement for Zyb that was as smooth and painless (and fast) as Zyb. Vodafone 360 took nearly three hours to sync things, and even then it’s not as good. Any suggestions?
Scrabble
Posted: Sun 5 September, 2010 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, iPhone, Literacy, Sweary 6 Comments »One of the addictions I do have with the iPhone at the moment is the Scrabble® App. It’s not perfect – it cheats, and uses some really dodgy Americanised (sorry, Americanized) words which drive me barmy. But it’s fun, and I’m playing it way too much.
Today though I had a small dollop of success – allbeit in a silly and sweary way.
Yep, I got to swear properly in Scrabble. Aces.
Yes, the word ‘cunt’ in scrabble. And it was allowed! (Scored OK too…)
The full board here…
Can you tell what it is yet?
User Unfriendly
Posted: Thu 2 September, 2010 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Thoughts 2 Comments »Last night I was setting up Mother-In-Law with her new iPhone. This necessitated (among other things) installing iTunes on her laptop, and setting up an iTunes account. Which caused me a noticeable amount of hassle, all things considered.
Setting up the account should be easy. Except it’s not – bearing in mind that it’s not something that just techies do. Maybe as a techie I read too much into the entire thing. I don’t know. The main issue was with setting up a password, believe it or not. I tried the first one – say bumbag99 – , and got this error…
The full error message - click to embiggenify
The first part, by the password itself, looks like this…
Information about the format of the iTunes password
Fine. I’ve got letters and numbers, maybe I can’t type. So here we go again, ‘bumbag99’.
And lo, the error returns.
Then you finally see the bit at the top – completely separate to the main password error…
An extra error - nice to know about it
Nice of them to let you know everything at once, and in one message, isn’t it?
Bumbag99, and all done. Only took three goes.
Batman vs Penguin
Posted: Wed 1 September, 2010 Filed under: Art, Geeky, Media Leave a comment »Nabbed via @Mattverso on Twitter (and hosted originally on imgur), I think this is seriously cool…
Batman vs. Penguin
I love images like this, where you can turn them round and see something else. I can’t remember the precise name for them – but they’re cool as hell.
In a similar vein, the 20th Anniversary collector’s edition DVD of Princess Bride was equally cool.
The lettering is the same both ways
Zero Fatality?
Posted: Sat 7 August, 2010 Filed under: Driving, Geeky, Thoughts 1 Comment »Via a couple of other sites, I saw a thing today about Volvo’s “Vision 2020” project, which says (among other things)
By 2020, nobody shall be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo”. This statement from 2008 clearly formulates a long-term vision to create cars that will not crash. Volvo Cars’ strategy to achieve Vision 2020 includes cooperating with social partners, integrating preventative and protective safety systems into the car and, in particular, to better understands people in traffic situations. Driver behaviour is a contributing factor in over 90 percent of all accidents.
That’s pretty ambitious.
There’s a lot of technology out there making cars safer – ComputerWorld has an interactive view of car safety features in this ‘zero-fatality’ concept as well as a feature about how ‘zero-fatality’ cars are being designed and built.
But zero fatalities? That’s a leap. It might not be the driver (or even the inhabitants of the car at all) that die- but what about pedestrians hit by the car, for example? Sure, there’s stuff there to warn you of their presence, but if you ignore it, will the car slam to a halt anyway? And would that be potentially even more dangerous for other road users?
I still find the concept of driverless cars to be fascinating, the machine-logic necessary and so on, but I think it’s close to an impossible dream. After all, to do it properly would be one hell of an implementation, as (I think) all cars would need to have the auto-driving implemented at the same time. It would be far too complex otherwise, with the potential for auto-driven vehicles in direct conflict with human-driven vehicles.
Maybe that particular change will be driven by the HGV and road-train market – being able to reduce costs and improve efficiency would be paramount.
New Scam/Phishing Email
Posted: Thu 22 July, 2010 Filed under: 1BEM, Advertising, Geeky, People, Security, Stupidity Leave a comment »Yesterday I noticed a new spam / scam / phishing email that seems to have appeared.
It purports to come from Amazon, and tells you that your order has been despatched, along with some links that are clickable. The links actually go off to a russian site, but I’ve no idea what that does, and have no intention of finding out.
The biggest clue that it’s a spam/scam are
- the prices are all in dollars (which is a bit of a giveaway for us in the UK)
- you haven’t ordered anything from Amazon
- it’s got a link to “see the ordered items”, rather than just listing them in the mail
- the email address it’s been sent to isn’t the one you’ve got listed with Amazon
But all told it’s one of the better spam/scam/phishing-type emails of the moment. Best to publicise it and be aware of it.
iPhone v4
Posted: Fri 11 June, 2010 Filed under: 1BEM, Geeky, iPhone, Thoughts 3 Comments »As regular readers know, I’ve now had my iPhone 3GS for a couple of months. I’ve been surprised by how well I do get on with it in a lot of ways (although it does have some epic frustrations as well, mainly based around the keyboard) and how much more I use it than I expected to.
But I’m still not an evangelist on the thing. I’m not addicted to it or obsessed with it, and if something better came along, I’d have no problem with moving away from the iPhone.
So – as someone asked yesterday – would I want the newly announced iPhone 4 ? Am I envious of the people who will have one? Do I feel the need to upgrade as soon as possible?
In short, no. There’s nothing really on the new iPhone that is a deal-breaker for me. In fact the only thing that I’d like from it is the more advanced/powerful battery. I don’t need/want any of the other little doohickeys. I don’t make video calls anyway – never have – and the rest of it was all a bit underwhelming, really.
So if this one breaks, I wouldn’t have an issue with replacing it with a v4 iPhone. But I’m not going to go out and upgrade for the hell of it, or to have the latest/greatest. It’ll be updated again in 6-12 months anyway.
Driving and Parking
Posted: Thu 10 June, 2010 Filed under: @Media 2010, Driving, Parking, Travel 2 Comments »I got up to London last night, driving direct from work. It took me an hour to get from Bury St Edmunds to the junction of the North Circular Road with the A12. It then took 80 minutes to get from there into the city (near Southwark station). Utterly ridiculous.
[UPDATE : I actually did the maths/mileage on this last night : It was 70 miles from work to the A12, which took an hour. 70mph on the dot. It was 10 miles from the A12 to the Travelodge, and that took 80 minutes. 7.7mph.]
I’d planned to park in a close-ish NCP car park for the two days I’m here, which would’ve cost £18 per day. Better than lots of places, but not great. However, I couldn’t find that NCP carpark – and I tried twice, once in the car, once by foot. Fortunately, I knew I had options – I’d done my research.
As it was, I found a place right next to the hotel that cost me sod-all for overnight parking, so long as I was gone by 8am. By that time I’d gone down to the first of my two alternative options, found it was available, and done the deed. £20 for two days – yes, £10 per day – in a locked secure place. Bizarrely, it’s making use of some of the car-parking spaces in the building where I was working last year before I got the current job.
So I’ve managed to get 2½ days parking in central London (right by Blackfriars and the OXO Tower, for those who know/care) for £20. Pretty good by anyone’s standards.
iPhone + D4D
Posted: Wed 9 June, 2010 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, iPhone, Photography, Thoughts 2 Comments »Since getting the iPhone a couple of months back, one development has surprised me more than any other. And that’s been the difference in how I use the phone and how D4D™ has changed since I got it.
Despite it’s comparatively crappy camera (bearing in mind that the previous phone had an 8Mp camera compared to this one’s 3Mp-ish) I’m using the camera part of the phone far more than on any other mobile I’ve had, and that has really surprised me. Some of it is, I suppose, the ease of taking photos off it – I primarily just email them to myself, and it’s a painless process, as opposed to that on the previous Sony-Ericsson phones. I don’t really know what the rest of the reasoning is, but whatever it is, it looks like D4D™ is becoming more photographic in nature.
That’s no bad thing of course. It’s just surprising (to me, anyway) that I’ve gone from pretty much all-written to having a noticeable portion of the posts having photos in them. Strange the way things work out, isn’t it? I don’t plan for D4D to turn into a full-on photoblog – I’ve got other plans on that score, thanks – but it’s just another change in the evolution of D4D™, I think.
Succumbed
Posted: Fri 30 April, 2010 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, iPhone, Media 4 Comments »Of all the temptations on iPhone, my downfall has been Angry Birds. It got recommended a while back in the Guardian, so I got it on Herself’s phone – and damn it’s addictive.
I did complete all of the first release, which was the first time I’d played to completion since the eighties.
Anyway, I’d done really well and not got it on my own iPhone – after all, I’d completed it on Herself’s phone, so I didn’t need to do it again on mine.
This week though Angry Birds has had an update, new levels and all. So I’ve had to get it on my own phone.
Of course, this also means I’ve got to get through the first bits (again) in order to get to the new levels.
So that’s my Bank Holiday weekend sorted then.
Extended Life
Posted: Tue 27 April, 2010 Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, iPhone, Thoughts Leave a comment »One of the things that’s always irritated me about Herself’s iPhone is the piss-poor battery life it gets in everyday use. She has to recharge hers pretty much every day, which after a while just gets depressing. After all, it’s a step back to when I had my first digital mobile, back in 1994 (an Orbitel 902, if anyone cares) which needed charging daily. Since then my phones have gone up to being charged about twice a week at most, so going back to daily charging was always going to be a bit of an arse.
As a result, when I got my iPhone, I also ordered a Mophie Juicepack Air, which is an iPhone case with a built-in battery pack, which pretty much doubles the usable time of the iPhone. And of course me being me, it’s in a bright purple. You can get other colours, but once I saw the purple there wasn’t going to be any other colour that worked.
It’s taken nearly a week to get here, but it arrived yesterday and is in use now. And so far I’m damn impressed with it.
Battery life is definitely extended, it’s been easy to fit, set up and charge, and all told so far it’s a nice bit of kit.
A further review will follow in the next couple of weeks, I’m sure.
iPhoner
Posted: Wed 21 April, 2010 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Getting Organised, iPhone, Thoughts 5 Comments »I have to say, O2 are very impressive when it comes to delivering upgrade phones. I ordered the iPhone on Sunday afternoon, and on Monday it arrived at the office.
Of course, as I wasn’t in the office on Monday that made it a bit more awkward, but it was here on the desk when I came in on Tuesday, which meant that last night was spent setting it up, getting everything sorted and taking data etc. from old phone to new phone.
So far it’s all worked pretty well. Moving the contacts over is a piece of piss because I use Zyb, which is an online storage for contacts. Sync from old phone to Zyb, get the Zyb iPhone app and download from Zyb to new phone. That’s it. (And before any fanboys start piping up, that’s been easy because of Zyb, not because of the iPhone)
So yeah, it’s all OK so far. Set up the things I need, and I’m sure some other bits will get set up in the coming days.
But will I turn into an iPhone evangelist/obsessive? Somehow I doubt it. For a geek/techie I’m really not all that evangelical about technology in general. It’s a tool, not a belief system.
eScales
Posted: Mon 19 April, 2010 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Health, Weight Loss Leave a comment »via Twitter, I came across Withings scales – a set of scales that’s connected to t’Internet. (via wireless network)
I still can’t decide whether it’s a great idea or an incredibly bad one. I love the concept of being able to keep track of your weight, graph it out and monitor it. I hate the idea of it connecting to t’Internet rather than just recording the data on a card for uploading to your own computer. I get the idea of it, but yeah, that connection to t’Internet means I probably wouldn’t want one.
Interesting idea, though.
iPhone
Posted: Sat 17 April, 2010 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, iPhone, Technology 4 Comments »After 18 months with my Sony Ericsson C905, it’s time to update my phone again. The Sony Ericsson has been a good phone, and there’s lots of bits I like with it. It’s getting some problems with its keypad and so on now, but it’s been an OK phone all round. I haven’t used the camera on it as much as I thought/hoped I would, and really it’s been mainly used (as are most of my phones in the end) for the basics – calls, text messages and emails, and internet access.
So with camera-resolution being less of an issue, I’ve decided to take the leap and get an iPhone. Herself swears by hers, and the other people I know with one also swear by it. I’m still unconvinced by the touchscreen – I’m used to touchtyping text messages on the normal phone keypad, and it seems a bit weird to not have that possibility with the iPhone. But I’m sure I’ll get used to it.
It’s going to be an interesting experience. I’ve got reservations about it, but the iPhone is the best of the bunch at the moment, and there was absolutely nothing else that appealed at all, nor anything that’s coming out in the near future. Should be entertaining, anyway.
Hypnotised
Posted: Mon 5 April, 2010 Filed under: Animals, Domestic, Geeky Leave a comment »At home, both our laptops have the Electric Sheep screensaver running on them – it’s a fun screensaver, and we both like it.
However, it looks like Psycho Cat also likes it – or at least gets entranced by it…
Hypnotised by the laptop
Sad, but true.
NewlyWeds
Posted: Thu 25 March, 2010 Filed under: Geeky, Media, Technology, Twitter Leave a comment »One of the funniest Twitter things this year was NewlywedsOnTJob , a prank by a best-man, automatically recording every time the newly-married couple went at it – start, stop, times, “frenzy index”, “Judge’s review”, the lot. It was very funny to just get the updates saying they were at it again – sometimes in the middle of the working day – and ended up with twenty-odd thousand followers all told.
Things went quiet at the end of February, when Best Man had said he’d be telling the groom about the prank. I hadn’t heard anything, so today did a quick search and found the end of the NewlyWedsonTJob story at I Am Staggered.
It’s well worth the read – made me laugh, anyway.
01/02/2010
Posted: Mon 1 February, 2010 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky 4 Comments »Already we’re one month into 2010. Where the hell did January go? (I know for me it went mainly in a blur of broken databases, fixing inherited ropy code and just generally fire-fighting)
Still, at least February starts with a nice palindromic date. I know, geeky as fuck. Live with it – we won’t have another one like this for another 110 years…
Slimline Plug
Posted: Wed 11 November, 2009 Filed under: Creativity, Geeky, Technology Leave a comment »via bsag, I think this slimline plug is an absolutely fantastic idea.
UK 3-pin plugs are pretty sturdy, but if you’re carrying a couple of power cords around – or phone chargers, laptop power bricks etc. – then you quickly become aware of how bulky they are too.
The design of the slimline plug is aimed at getting round that, and seems to work really well. Even better are the adapters that allow three or four slimline plugs to be used in a space similar to that of a normal three-pin plug.
Scareware and AntiVirus
Posted: Mon 19 October, 2009 Filed under: 1BEM, Domestic, Geeky, Thoughts Leave a comment »Today the BBC has been carrying the story about “Millions” being taken in by scareware scams, where pop-up ads on web pages tell people they’ve got a virus and to download ‘this antivirus software’ to fix it. At best the ‘antivirus software’ is useless, and the person’s credit-card number is sold for use in credit-card fraud. At worst, the “anti-virus” actually contains viruses (virii?) and trojans that make the computer less secure, rather than more.
Now of course there are lots of idots out there who will fall for this kind of thing. But to my mind, it’s not just those people’s faults – both PC Manufacturers and ISPs need to take some of the responsibility too.
It doesn’t take a lot to get decent anti-virus software. Go to Grisoft, and get the free AVG anti-virus software (free for personal use) and job done. There’s plenty of others too – Kaspersky, Avast, so on, so forth.
But people still have to know about these, rather than using the clusterfuck shitpieces like Norton, McAfee that come with most PCs and that people never use – or just assume that it’s installed, so Everything’s OK. Not knowing that they need to subscribe, and make sure it’s updated regularly (for which read daily, rather than monthly)
So why don’t the ISPs supply a free antivirus like AVG, Avast or Kaspersky on the CD you invariably get? Why don’t PC builders install a free anti-virus with the PC rather than the paid-for POS software? (Of course, we know that PC Builders like Dell etc. must get some whacking kickback fee for providing paid-for software, which is the reason)
If computers were provided with free anti-virus that didn’t require any further financial investment or effort from Joe Everyday-User, there’d be a lot less problems of this sort.
iPhones Galore
Posted: Tue 25 August, 2009 Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, iPhone, Technology, Thoughts Leave a comment »On the journey into London yesterday, I couldn’t help but notice how ubiquitous the iPhone now is – it seems like everyone and their dog has one.
When I used to commute in to London from Bracknell, Blackberrys were the thing everyone had – or at least all the “Look at me, I’m so important” fucksticks had, anyway.
While I do agree that iPhones are a nice bit of kit, I’m still not convinced I’d actually use one if I had one. That lack of a “proper” keyboard is (for me) still a significant factor, as most of what I do on a phone involves typing – text messages, emails, SSH connections to servers for admin, that kind of thing.
But there’s also the ubiquity of it that’s (for me) detracts from any desire to own one. It may be childish, but I have a built-in reaction to doing “what everyone else does”, and while it’s not an over-arching reason for not getting one, it certainly contributes.
Migrating Contacts
Posted: Mon 3 August, 2009 Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, iPhone, Stupidity, Technology Leave a comment »As I said yesterday, one of the more interesting challenges with Herself’s new iPhone was getting the contacts to transfer across from her old Samsung G600 phone to the iPhone.
When it comes to contacts and phonebooks, Samsung are – to be polite about it – bloody awful. They don’t support useful standards like SyncML (basically a standard set of markup for addresses, contacts etc.) and instead stick to their own proprietary method. And their phones really don’t like giving up their data. In this case, it wouldn’t even send the information via BlueTooth, or save the details from the phone onto the SIM in order to transfer that across.
In short, a fucking abysmal experience when it comes to transferring away from a Samsung phone to anything else. (If memory serves, even Samsung to Samsung is a pain in the arse, let alone Samsung to anything else)
On my Sony-Ericsson phone, I can regularly sync the phonebook up to an online service called Zyb, who make the entire process pretty painless for phones that support SyncML. It also gives you a backup of the entire contacts database, which can be useful if (for example) you lose your phone, or have it stolen. They’re now owned by Vodafone, but in a fit of surprising sanity, Vodafone haven’t locked out non-Vodafone users from the service.
Through Zyb, when I upgraded my phone at the end of last year, importing the contacts etc. took ten minutes, and was one of the smoothest examples of that procedure I’ve ever done.
Anyway, on checking, it turns out the Zyb supports the iPhone – so that seemed to be the way to go.
After that, the process was fairly simple.
- Sign up Herself with an account at Zyb
- Install the iPhone app for Zyb (they even provide a link to it in the sign-up process, so it includes all the information necessary)
- Type in all the contacts from Herself’s Samsung, setting it up with correct addresses, merging mobile/contact/home/work numbers into one contact where necessary
- When done (about an hours work) sync the Zyb contacts onto the iPhone
- Job done.
Of course, if Samsung supported SyncML (or any other decent service) then it would’ve been a max of ten minutes to sort out. As it was, it took an hour. It could’ve been worse – far, far worse – if we’d been trying to do it via SIM or BlueTooth and then had to reorganise everything on the iPhone.
iPhone Replaced
Posted: Sun 2 August, 2009 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, iPhone 3 Comments »The actual exchange of the iPhone went fine in the end – went in to Norwich to the Carphone Warehouse (where Herself had got the first one) and explained the situation, and we got a replacement phone straight away.
The replacement version has worked out well so far.
It’s been updated to the 3.0.1 OS, and all is still well. I’ve got it all fixed up now with the connection details for our wireless network, Herself’s email account and so on.
The only downside at the moment is the fact that transferring the contacts and phone numbers from Herself’s phone to the iPhone may be a pig – Samsung phones are utter shit when it comes to transferring the phonebook to anything else.
iPhone Hassles
Posted: Sat 1 August, 2009 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, iPhone, Reviews(ish) 1 Comment »Yesterday, Herself went out and got an Apple iPhone from Carphone Warehouse.
Initially I was fairly impressed with it, there’s some nice interactions and stuff going on.
However, today we (OK, I) updated it to the latest version of the operating system, version 3.0.1. And since then the new iPhone has been a nightmare.
Firstly, Herself always has a lockcode set on the phone, so when you turn it on, you enter a four-digit PIN. Normally, no problem. However, as part of the upgrade to 3.0.1, the iPhone needs to connect back to iTunes, and iTunes can’t do that with a lock code set. Oh, and the iPhone wouldn’t do anything except say “connect me to iTunes”. Nothing else, no way to enter the lock code.
Cue a call to O2 to find out what needs doing, and then one to Apple. Which resulted in…
Factory Reset Number One. Yep, roll it all the way back to how we got it, loss of any settings we’d sorted. Square One. And an OS upgraded to 3.0.1.
And all was well. Um, except for not having any access to wi-fi settings (as in “Not installed” rather than “Not available”) or Bluetooth®. Totally greyed out, nothing there at all.
So a few resets, and another call to Apple.
Half an hour later, Factory Reset Number Two – and still no improvement.
So tomorrow we’re off to Carphone Warehouse, armed with an Issue Number from Apple, to get a replacement iPhone.
Let’s hope that one works better.
I’m not slagging off the iPhone per se – however, my experience with it so far has emphatically not been the most positive one. We’ll see how things go with the second one before I write up a valid review of it…
How not to do it
Posted: Sat 25 July, 2009 Filed under: Advertising, Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky, Security, Stupidity, Technology, Toyota IE | Tags: ian corbett, toyota ie Leave a comment »This post has been deleted, on the request of Ian Corbett, Marketing Manager of Toyota Ireland, and his legal advisers.
For more explanation, see here.
Yuck 2
Posted: Fri 12 June, 2009 Filed under: Charm School, Domestic, Geeky, Weirdness Leave a comment »In other news, Panasonic have released a very strange (and really quite creepy) prototype for a new remote control unit.
This conceptual gel remote from Panasonic lays limp when not in use, pulsating with a soft light. But when its sensors detect a hand coming, it stiffens, ready for action!
Thankfully, it’s a prototype and not released yet – otherwise I’d have thought twice about buying the new Panasonic DVD-Player/Speakers I’ve just got…
2.8
Posted: Thu 11 June, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, WordPress Leave a comment »The new version (release 2.8) of WordPress came out today – and it’s already been installed here at D4D™.
I have to say, since I updated D4D with the redesign and brought the WordPress install up to date as well, one of the things that has impressed me the most (despite some of its potential security issues) is the ability to update WordPress or the installed plugins directly from the site. It makes life a hell of a lot easier.
In this case, even updating the core files for WordPress was a matter of a couple of clicks, letting the file download, then a final click when everything was completed.
All told, it’s a pretty impressive way of doing things.
As for the use of 2.8? Well, there’s certainly been some changes, but I still have to explore most of them, so I’ll write more about it sometime in the next few days.
Still Dead
Posted: Tue 9 June, 2009 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Technology 1 Comment »Following on from last week’s post about the death of the DVD player and Blue Witch’s comment therein, I decided to get a DVD head-cleaning disk, (disc, whatever) just to see whether it would have any effect.
It wasn’t much of an investment, only £6.50 from Amazon, so it’s no biggie.
Anyway, we tried it out last night, to absolutely no effect whatsoever. In fact, the player won’t even acknowledge there’s a disk in the machine. It spins, but can’t identify a disk at all.
So it looks like the DVD player is now completely kaput fucked, and we’ll need to get a replacement set-up.
Bugger.
Audio-Visual
Posted: Wed 3 June, 2009 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Geeky, Thoughts 2 Comments »Not content with the bed breaking last week, it looks like our DVD player is also on the way out. For some reason the discs aren’t playing at all, and we’re getting told “No Disc” when there patently bloody well is one.
Normally, a replacement DVD player wouldn’t be an issue. Thirty quid (at most) and job done.
However, we’re in a similar situation to when my DVD player died years ago – it’s not just a stand-alone DVD player, it’s a multiple disc thing that also deals with all the surround sound, Dolby® etc., so it’s pretty much DVD plus the full stereo etc. Which means that ideally I’m looking for a DVD player with the Dolby 5.1 outputs, so I can plug the speakers into it and job done.
Only of course, they’re hard to find – if they exist at all. The players are rarely sold on their own, instead coming with all the speakers as a completely new bit of kit.
All told, it all becomes a bit of a pain. I’d rather just get the player, so we don’t have to get new speakers etc. too – but that doesn’t seem to be a possibility.
Blocking Spammers
Posted: Thu 28 May, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky 1 Comment »Yesterday, D4D came under attack from a spammer using the name “Ebay Sniper”. They hit D4D with about 200 spam comments overnight, and they kept on trickling through during the day.
For whatever reason, Akismet was stopping them from displaying, but not blocking them completely. In addition, despite adding them to the discussion blacklist in the settings, the comments were still getting through.
So anyway, eventually I’d had enough of the crap, and ended up going to the big guns – blocking it by IP at source. So the server now blocks everything from the IP address where all the spam was coming from (and it wasn’t an IP used by any of my normal readers, thankfully) and redirects it to www.fuck-off-spammer.com . I don’t know if that site exists – but if it doesn’t, it should.
Funnily enough, since I put the block in place I’ve had no spam comments at all. Go figure.
The Next 30 Years
Posted: Thu 14 May, 2009 Filed under: Creativity, Geeky, Technology, Thoughts, Writing Leave a comment »Charlie Stross is one of my favourite current sci-fi authors, and this post goes some way to explaining why.
It’s the text of his keynote speech for LOGIN 2009, a conference for online games developers, and the speech is about the changes he sees coming in gaming over the next thirty years. He’s already written a novel based around some of these ideas (“Halting State“) and is currently writing the sequel to it, so I think it’s fair to say he’s done a fair amount of research and thinking about this subject already.
All told, it’s an interesting and entertaining read – and I’m sure it would’ve been even better to see him make the speech in person.
Geeky Tattoos
Posted: Wed 6 May, 2009 Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, Geeky, Weirdness 3 Comments »Really, you’ve just got to worry about some of the people shown on the Geeky Tattoos site.
I mean OK, I can understand (kind of) getting a tattoo of your favourite game characters or whatever – but the text of a 90s geeky meme that wasn’t funny at the time? Not the smartest of moves for later life, I’d suggest.
And as for a tattoo of Wolverine riding My Little Pony – let’s just leave it at “Oh. My. God.”, shall we?
Conference Conflicts
Posted: Wed 22 April, 2009 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, WHC2010, Writing 1 Comment »I’ve already written about being signed up for going to the World Horror Convention in Brighton at the end of March 2010 – which sounds like it’s going to be an interesting event.
However, there’s also the Odyssey 2010 EasterCon for SciFi stuff, which has a considerable appeal to me – except it’s only about a week after the WHC. Bugger.
At the moment I can’t decide between them – I’m more of a fan of SciFi writing than Horror (in general) although I’ve got enough of both genres to qualify on either count, I suspect.
So somewhere along the line, I’m going to have to make a decision – because somehow I can’t see Herself wearing it if I’m away for the best part of two weeks, one after the other…
MPG
Posted: Tue 7 April, 2009 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Geeky 3 Comments »I don’t see that this post will mark me as anything other than someone with a mild form of OCD, but here we go anyway.
My car has a trip-computer thing with a small number of functions on it – MPG, average speed, miles left in tank, outside temperature, and something else. I normally leave it on MPG, and over the last few months I’ve been building it up, finding what revs/speed works best for mileage, that kind of thing. Like I said, slightly OCD, geeky as hell, but well, that’s me for you.
Anyway, in the last week, I’d got it to click up to 49.0MPG on the monitor. I’ve no idea whether it’s a real figure, or just an arbitrary “kind of around that figure” thing. I don’t care either way. I was more than slightly pleased (in a quiet kind of way, because I know this entire thing is epically sad anyway) to have got the car – which is coming very close to the 100,000 mile mark – to be doing 49MPG still.
But over the weekend, the fucking thing reset. No idea why – I started the car up, and clonk, mileage down to 19.1MPG, all the other bits reset, trip meter reset. And I can’t deny, I got quite annoyed by it.
I know, it’s sad, geeky and lots of other epithets. That’s just me. And I get annoyed when things let me down.
Still, I’ll go back to building it back up again, see if I can replicate the problem…
What’s That Book?
Posted: Mon 6 April, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, Memory, Weirdness Leave a comment »Recently, my brain has been slightly locked with a question – one even the mighty AQA couldn’t come up with an answer to.
So I’m hoping that posting it on D4D™ might just find someone who knows what the hell it is I’m whittling on about.
Anyway – I read a book a while back, and I’m now trying to remember what the hell the book was. The scene I clearly recall involved one protagonist meeting the other for the first time in a school playground, where they were playing marbles. (At least, I think it was marbles – could’ve been tiddlywinks, or something)
Anyway, Person One knocks one of Person Two’s marbles out of play, and out of school grounds. As a result, Person Two throws one of Person One’s marbles out of the school grounds, and it degenerates into each one throwing the marbles out of the playground.
It’s a stupid scene, but I can’t remember where the hell it came from.
So help me, Interwebs, please…
Abbreviated
Posted: Thu 2 April, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, Thoughts 9 Comments »This post is about RSS feeds and so on. If you neither know nor care what an RSS feed is, don’t even bother clicking on the ‘more’ link below…
Summer Time
Posted: Sun 29 March, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky Leave a comment »Ah, the start of spring – the clocks went forward this morning, and that should be A Good Thing™.
The minor downside of Daylight Saving Time is that in theory I should change the way the time is displayed here on D4D™. Only I can never be arsed – so the entire site runs in GMT, regardless of whether it’s GMT or BST that we’re on.
Primarily this is because WordPress goes a bit odd when it comes to changing times – it becomes a global change, and all the time-stamps on the earlier posts get changed too. So I can’t be bothered to faff that much, and thus the decision was made to simply stick with GMT.
It’s not too much of a hassle, though – I just have to remember we’re in Summer Time when it comes to knowing when I want a future-post to go live.
Anyway, stop reading this rubbish, go out and enjoy the sun instead.
Daily Word Challenge
Posted: Mon 9 March, 2009 Filed under: Geeky, Writing Leave a comment »You may have noticed over the last week or so that on occasion, some of my posts have had a single word highlighted, and linked off somewhere.
I’ve been testing a silly idea out – the Daily Word Challenge (DWC). The “concept” (if it can be called that) is that every day a word is chosen, and anyone who wants to can use that word in a blogpost (or Twitter feed, or Facebook, or whatever) and then add a link/comment in DWC back to that post.
Yes, I know, it’s utterly ridiculous – but it seemed like a piece of fun. There’s also a Twitter feed for the site, another channel for finding out the day’s word.
Give it a go, let me know what you think.
Vehicle Checks
Posted: Tue 3 March, 2009 Filed under: Driving, Geeky Leave a comment »If you’re buying a car, you’re always recommend to do a check on the car, to ensure it’s not recorded as :
- Stolen
- Still has outstanding HP payments (which could get the car repossessed)
- Unregistered (for example, a cut/shut job)
However, getting those checks has always been either expensive, or non-simple to do.
Now, there’s “My Text Check” – for £3 (plus network charge for the text) you can text the car registration to 83600 , and you’ll get back the report, including information on police records, etc.
And about time too…
Analytics
Posted: Wed 18 February, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, Redesign Leave a comment »Damn, knew I’d forgotten something with all the redesign stuff that’s been going on here. And I’ve just discovered what that something was.
Google Analytics.
So for the last four days, according to Analytics no-one had visited D4D™ at all. Ooops.
It’s all fixed now – but all the same, a pain in the backside.
1234567890
Posted: Fri 13 February, 2009 Filed under: Geeky 1 Comment »Supergeeky, but at the time of posting this (21:30:30 on 13th Feb 2009) the Unix timestamp reads 1234567890.
Femtocells
Posted: Thu 12 February, 2009 Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, House Work, Own Business, Thoughts Leave a comment »Is it really geeky to be interested in getting one of these as and when they’re released in the UK?
Basically, it’s an extension of the cellular (mobile) network, connected through broadband, and allowing improved mobile access in phone blackspots. Like – well – our entire house/street.
Yes, geeky as all hell, but still I can see plenty of use for it just where we live…
To Upgrade, or Not
Posted: Wed 11 February, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Geeky, Redesign, Thoughts 4 Comments »One of the current questions I keep coming back to with D4D™ is whether I should bother upgrading my WordPress install to get me back up to date.
As it is, D4D™ still runs on WP 2.1 , and the current version is 2.7 . It’s so behind the times that I know I should go through the pain of a multi-version upgrade, but I honestly don’t know if I can actually be bothered.
I’m very aware that when I moved over to WP, it was a pain – although I wouldn’t go back now, believe me – and I know that the D4D™ template has been corrupted by me to within an inch of its life.
Of course, I could do the upgrade, and put D4D™ into a WP template for a while. That’d be quite a shock to the system, wouldn’t it? If I were to go that route, I’d also be putting into place at least the basics of a re-plan of how things go on D4D™ including taking out a lot of the old sections that really aren’t looked at any more, and just a bit of a tidy up.
Oh, and a move to a new/different host. After all, why make things simple and do just one thing at a time? That’s no bloody fun at all…
Poisoning the Phish
Posted: Sat 31 January, 2009 Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, Geeky, Thoughts Leave a comment »Is it just me who takes a certain amount of dark amusement from going through to these Phishing emails for bank details, and filling them in with utter rubbish?
Obviously the data I put in is nowhere even vaguely close to the true details (and I normally do it for banks/services I don’t even deal with anyway) but I firmly believe that the more you can poison the lists these spammers/Phishers work from (and thus sell on) the less valuable they are.
And that’s something that works for me. Maybe we should encourage more filling in of fake details, rather than saying “Don’t do anything”. Well, so long as you don’t install anything from those sites, of course.
XKCD = Genius
Posted: Wed 14 January, 2009 Filed under: Geeky 1 Comment »Absolute genius in a cartoon strip.
Changing Passwords
Posted: Tue 13 January, 2009 Filed under: Charm School, Geeky, Sweary 2 Comments »When faced with passwords that needs to be changed on a regular basis, one thing I always seem to forget is the relevance of timing.
After all, you don’t have to change it as soon as the stupid little dialogue box comes up to tell you to change it. At that point, you’ve still got (usually) a week or two to change it before everything goes tits-up.
So I need to remember that whatever else happens, don’t change it on a bloody Friday. Because then I bugger off for the weekend, and come Monday morning I don’t have a single bloody clue what I changed the frigging thing to. It usually takes about ten attempts to remember what the hell it was. Sometimes it also depends on what my mood was like when I changed it, which can have a knock-on effect in whether the password is sweary (which results in passwords like ‘cuntflaps’) or not.(resulting in words like ‘prestidigitate’) Both of those have been passwords in the past, by the way – but they’re not the current ones. (obviously)
I did remember it in the end (for once it was a non-sweary one) but it’s something I really need to learn to remember…
Reducing DRM
Posted: Wed 7 January, 2009 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky, Music 2 Comments »While I’m nowhere even close to being an Apple® fanboy, I do use iTunes for a significant portion of downloading. (particularly when I also use eMusic, which I believe is now owned by iTunes) As such, I’m pleased to see that they’ve announced that iTunes is going to be DRM-free, with 8 million of its 10 million tracks now available without any DRM, and the rest over the next few months.
DRM is (basically) copy protection – it’s the media industry’s way of saying “You can buy our stuff, but we’ll still tell you how you can – and can’t – use it”. It’s horrifically flawed, and something I’m fairly passionately anti at the best of times.
As a perfect example of this, we’ve both recently bought new Sony MP3 players and wanted to put music bought on iTunes onto them. Only because of DRM, you can’t. Well, you can if you burn an audio CD of the downloaded files, re-import them into [Music player of choice] as MP3s, and then put them on the player, but that’s circumvention of the DRM, and thus naughty. You’re using a file you’ve bought and paid for, but in a way that the music industry doesn’t like. They want you to buy it on iTunes and use it through that, but if you want it to go on another MP3 player, you should buy another copy of the same file that’s authorised for use on your MP3 player. Oh, and you shouldn’t be buying the album on CD and then ripping it to MP3 so you can listen to it on your player either.
It’s the same with other download services (and things like BBC iPlayer etc. too) which have historically been only available through Internet Explorer, so that they can use the Windows Media Player DRM – which is also why so many MP3 players etc. insist on using WMP 11, which has the latest/’greatest’ DRM modules on it.
So to me it’s a sign that perhaps the music studios and media producers are finally beginning to see some sense if they’ll allow iTunes to finally sell music without DRM on it.
Mobile Data Use
Posted: Wed 7 January, 2009 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky Leave a comment »It being a month (give or take) since I got the new phone and unlimited mobile data, I got the bill today from O2.
Just in that first month, I’ve used something like 8Mb of online data all told, which would’ve cost me some £3 per Mb or so. (It’s hard to tell for sure, as they’ve changed the tariff to be ‘Up to £1 per day’ instead of ‘£x per Mb’, but I remember it being about £3 per Mb last time I looked)
Either way though, the ‘unlimited’ browsing bolt-on looks like it will be a good plan all round.
The film wishlist
Posted: Tue 6 January, 2009 Filed under: Geeky Leave a comment »Currently, 2009 is looking like it’ll have a fair number of films that I want to see. At the moment, the list looks like this (in no particular order, except how I remember them) with links to the trailer sites:
- The Wrestler
- Terminator:Salvation
- Transformers 2:Revenge of the Fallen (no trailer as yet)
- Nine (or 9, if you prefer)
- Knowing
- Watchmen
- X-Men Origins : Wolverine
- The International (and wouldn’t Clive Owen make for an interesting Doctor Who at some point?)
- Let The Right One In (although I’m a bit dubious on this one, the book’s good but weird, so I’m not convinced on the film yet)
Yes, there’s some right rubbish in there (Transformers 2 and Wolverine, as examples) but well, I’m not proud, I know I’ve got ropy taste in films sometimes. Sometimes though I just want brainless entertainment rather than high-brow intellectual matter.
There are countless numbers I don’t want to see as well (Angels and Demons, I’m looking at you here), but I can’t be arsed to list those.
Mind you, it’s also interesting to compare it with the list of the films Hollywood hope you’ll be watching to make them a profit…
Badly Written
Posted: Mon 29 December, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky, News, Weirdness 1 Comment »I guess someone at the BBC is trying to see what they can get past people on a slow week.
In this story about new British stamps for 2009, there’s the following paragraph…
Later sets will feature mythical creatures such as mermaids, post boxes, eminent Britons, Royal Naval uniforms and the fire service.
Hmmm, eminent Britons are mythical creatures?
Social-Engineering Spam
Posted: Wed 17 December, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky 1 Comment »
Over the last few days, I’ve noticed a resurgence of spam email – but this time the email subjects are quite clever.
Bearing in mind the closeness of the Festering Season, it strikes me as an intelligent move to have email subjects such as “Order details” (and various mis-spellings thereof) and “Your account was blocked!”. At this time of year, it’s subject lines like this that will make people click on the emails, and then (possibly) on the links in those emails.
Of course, it’s still dead easy to spot spam mails – not least because they come from sites you’ve never ever visited – and even easier to type the address yourself into the web browser, rather than following any link from an email, but that’s something that requires awareness. (And as we all know, that lack of awareness is exactly why some people do fall victim to these emails, spams, and scams)
But all the same, I can be slightly more understanding if someone were to click on an email saying “Order details” and then click through links than if the email subject were, for example, something like “Its workss!” (another one I’ve had a lot of recently)
In The Cloud(s)
Posted: Wed 29 October, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky 2 Comments »Is it just me, or does all the guff about “Cloud Computing” just sound like all the old thin-client and server stuff, updated for t’internet?
Maybe I’m a Luddite of sorts, but I have to say, I prefer my data to be somewhere I can control – not in the hands of Google, Microsoft, Amazon et al. If I want my data available “whenever, wherever”, I’ll put it on a USB stick/drive, and use it that way, thanks.
That’s all.
GMT
Posted: Mon 27 October, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky Leave a comment »So – did you remember to put your clocks back?
As always, we’ve changed pretty much all ours now. The heating system only got changed this morning, because I forgot it last night, but other than that I think we’re pretty much sorted.
Mind you, I still think that the best thing when it comes to the time changes are the radio-controlled clocks that tune in to the Time Signal, and just change themselves. That, so far as I’m concerned, is just grand – and it makes me wonder why more things don’t do it. Even “just” the essential services (heating system, for example) would be nice, but having one’s cooker (another prime example) being auto-updated would make life a lot easier…
Camera Defaults
Posted: Wed 22 October, 2008 Filed under: Geeky, Photography, Thoughts, Weirdness 3 Comments »One of the things that has surprised me on my photography course is the number of the people on it who haven’t really played with their cameras at all.
For instance, the great majority still even have the default (and highly irritating) beeps, clicks and whistles that accompany every keypress or option change. During the course, as the tutor describes certain options, you can hear them beeping through the menus, trying to find the things he’s talking about.
Now I have to say that as well as being bloody annoying, I do find that this is quite inconsiderate – both to the tutor, and to the other people in the class. For me, those sodding beeps are really distracting – and I’m sure I’m not the only one on the course who finds them so. But while they’re going through the menus, they’re also not really listening to what the tutor is saying next, which means he’s either got to repeat it, or they’ve missed it completely.
I think sooner or later I’m going to go and silence the cameras in question – but we’ll see.
I suppose that I just find it strange that people seem to be happy to buy a new device/gadget/whatever, and not fiddle with it and try all the options. And yes, I know, I’m a techie geek, and thus fiddling with new things is always going to happen with me, but all the same – wouldn’t you want to try out most of the options on a new camera as soon as you got it? And/or figure out what these arcane settings like Av, Tv, ISO etc. actually do?
English
Posted: Fri 10 October, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky Leave a comment »Apparently, facebook is now available in “British English”.
Now, if that’s that case, does Facebook class its original version as being in “American English”?
I’d rather see the definitions “English” and “American English”, but I bet that one won’t take off.
Twats.
All Caps
Posted: Mon 6 October, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky, Thoughts 1 Comment »Why is it that, even after more than 25 years of (even vaguely) generally affordable computers/computing, there are still people who think it’s acceptable to send emails written all in capitals? And particularly to do so in a business context.
I suppose that these people have just spent the last quarter-century living in a hole in the desert (or in Antarctica) with no clue about email etiquette, manners etc.
(Oh, and for anyone who thinks it’ll be funny or clever to leave a comment written in all caps, believe me, it’s neither.)
Shortcuts
Posted: Tue 30 September, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Geeky, Thoughts Leave a comment »When Firefox 3 came out, one of the things they trumpeted about was the ‘intelligent address bar’. In short, when you typed in a web address, it also checked through your history and bookmarks in order to save time typing – if you’d been there before (in the duration of the history) then the site name would come up.
Until recently, I found this quite annoying – if I wanted a site called (for example) the admin section of one of my sites, and started typing the first two characters of admin, I didn’t want to know that I could also go to D4D’s Add a post page, or Norfolk council’s Adult education page.
But I’m slowly coming round to the function, and seeing where it can be useful – well, so long as you set up the bookmarks correctly in the first place. For example, if I want to look at the news from one of our local papers, I don’t need to remember that it’s at the (fucking stupid) http://new.edp24.co.uk URL, I type in EDP and lo, Firefox has got it there, ready and waiting.
It’s not perfect – but I’m starting to see the use of it. Now if the bookmarks have been titled properly/usefully, I can type in a shortcode that actually works. (And of course I have to remember that, for example, my internet banking is done at RBS, not just by typing in banking, or internet banking – well, until I edit the bookmark, anyway)
Loss of Network
Posted: Sun 14 September, 2008 Filed under: Animals, Domestic, Geeky 1 Comment »In the evening, we sometimes completely lose the wireless network. This is why :
If you look under the cat, you’ll just see the grey box with the word “Belkin” on it. Yes, that’s the wireless router. He’s found that it’s warm, and also that it gets our attention. So when he’s hungry, this is where he sits, ’til he gets fed.
Furry little fucker.
Yes, it could be a bug…
Posted: Fri 12 September, 2008 Filed under: Geeky, Weirdness Leave a comment »(via The Daily WTF)
4/7/2008 13:22 GMT;BENJAMIN;
Checked power connections and power to outlet. Monitor is on but not
computer. Checked power button on computer's power supply, user states
there is not one. Re-seated power connections, computer turned on for
about 3 seconds and turned off. Details:
Machine Name - DHO00MXL643843
User ID - 99321
Display Name - Burleson, Stephannie
OS Name - Microsoft Windows XP
Service Pack - Service Pack 2
Serial Number - MXL644493
Admin Access - Y OUSite - MN999-EAGAN-ETC
Assigning out per SW, setting pri3.
4/7/2008 14:09 GMT;MAURICE A;
User called for a status because her supervisor wants her to head to
the office if it will be more than an hour ; user will bring the
computer in with her if she has to go into the office
4/7/2008 15:11 GMT;ROBERT J;
contaced Stephanie and she had just finished carrying her pc downstairs
and loaded it into her car.since it is already loaded shi will go ahead
and take it into the Plano Parkway office and I will contact her when
she gets there. I am also contacting Jorge Alvarez, 2nd hat , to alert
him to expect her
4/7/2008 16:22 GMT;ROBERT J;
Jorge is picking up her pc and will connect it for testing
4/7/2008 18:21 GMT;ROBERT J;Jorge in Plano reported that this pc is
packed full of roaches so bad that they took the pc outside, did not even
want it in the building, and took the hard drive out. He will copy the users
data over to a share and i will copy the data to the hot swap pc which they
want to give the user as her new pc. They are going to bag and seal the
other pc and scrap it, as they do not want it in the building.
4/7/2008 19:14 GMT;JORGE H;
cleaned pc. Yikes! connected HD to our pointsec pc, assisted in transferring
data. Had cust test pc.
4/7/2008 20:34 GMT;JORGE H;
I would like to publicly thank Terry for helping me clean out and exterminate
all (I hope) the roaches from this computer, which has been quarantined in an
air-tied bag. NOTE: I hope never to see anything like this ever again,
however from now on I will be more careful when opening computers!
Just Yuck.
Large Hadron Collider
Posted: Wed 10 September, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky, News Leave a comment »Today is not the day the world might end, regardless of what retarded cowflop has been spread by various people in the media and science worlds.
The Register explains why here.
Basically, today is “First Beam Day“, when the first beam is sent round the 27km super-cooled track. That’s it. Yes, it’s a big achievement to actually get the thing running at all – but it’s not going to cause the world to crack, or whatever the crackheads are saying.
This “First Beam” is just that – one set of protons going round the LHC in a clockwise direction. They still have to do the Second Beam – another set of protons going round the LHC anticlockwise. And once that’s happening, they still have to get the beams to actually collide. You know, that being what the Collider is for.
And that’s not likely to happen for at least another year.
AVG Updates
Posted: Tue 19 August, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky 8 Comments »For the first time since I installed it, AVG Antivirus is beginning to annoy me.
In general, it’s a fantastic product, and the updates run quickly and easily.
However, for some reason this week every single fucking update is requiring that I restart the laptop. And it’s insisting on it in the middle of a piece of work, which makes it even more fucking annoying.
Hopefully it’ll stop this shit soon, or I’m going to be looking at replacing it.
Slashdot and Backups
Posted: Wed 13 August, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky, Thoughts Leave a comment »Sometimes Slashdot makes me laugh. More to the point, the commenters make me laugh.
In this case, the discussion about security of online data (and what happens when a company that has all your data only accessible online – think Google Docs, for instance) started off talking about backups, and rapidly went this way…
- Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy
- Redundancy, redundancy, off-site redundancy
There, fixed that for you. Backups aren’t worth a damn if the building is blown up.
- Redundancy, redundancy, off-planet redundancy
There, fixed that for you. Backups aren’t worth a damn if the planet gets blown up by space aliens.Intelligent post, more intelligent/relevant post, silly post.
Love it.
All changed
Posted: Fri 25 July, 2008 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky Leave a comment »Well, it looks like the changeover went pretty well – BT disappeared overnight, and the Tiscali connection was all up and ready.
In fact, the only hindrance has been that the modem/wireless router that I had from BT was (I suppose unsurprisingly) locked in to BT, and wouldn’t take connections for anything else. So I’ve invested in a new modem/router (Tiscali would’ve just provided a wired router, not wireless) which also means that the home network has improved security now as well. Never a bad thing.
As it is, it also meant I got to use the money-saving vouchers I’d got from Staples back in January after the farce with the desk so the entire thing cost me £20 instead of the expected £40. (Plus, it can be listed as a business expense, which is always nice too)
So all told, the savings I’ve made by swapping broadband providers has dropped to £120 over the year from just under £140 (12 months of paying £10 less a month, plus three months of half-price rental, which’ll drop it to £6.50 for three months) but all the same, that still makes it very worthwhile.
Changing Broadband – Part Two
Posted: Thu 24 July, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Geeky 1 Comment »According to an email I’ve just received, the broadband at home is now running on Tiscali rather than BT.
Of course, I’m working in Essex today, so won’t know if it’s actually worked until I get home tonight and get it all set up. All the same, fingers crossed that it’s all worked smoothly, so I don’t have to spend time tonight swearing at connections etc.
I’m vaguely optimistic – but at the same time, I’m fully expecting to get home and have no broadband at all. I’m cynical like that.
So we’ll just have to see what works, and whether everything’s set up or not. You may (or, of course, may not) hear more about this tonight, depending on ye olde connectivity.
Changing Broadband
Posted: Thu 17 July, 2008 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Getting Organised Leave a comment »I’ve just started off the (hopefully fairly painless) process of switching broadband providers. As we’ve been in the house a year now, I knew that the contract with BT was up, so the time was right for changing.
With BT, the broadband was costing me £25 per month for unlimited downloads etc.
With Tiscali, the same deal will be costing me £15 per month.
I know people have said that Tiscali’s customer services aren’t great, but I don’t expect to be using that side of the service much. So we’ll see how things go.
The changeover should happen in about ten days time – so if I fall off the face of the world at the end of the month, you can be sure that the first post on my return will be one cursing Tiscali and the twelve month contract I’ve just entered into…
English Test
Posted: Thu 3 July, 2008 Filed under: Geeky, Thoughts, Writing 6 Comments »The BBC has a 20-questions test on English (with Maths next week)
I got 20 out of 20. But then I’m
- Incredibly sad
- At least vaguely literate
How about you?
Mail Down
Posted: Wed 2 July, 2008 Filed under: Charm School, Customer Services, Geeky 2 Comments »Currently, it’s looking like the mail server for 34sp.com is totally down. [UPDATED : The service was broken on my reseller server, rather than 34sp as a whole. It’s also now fixed.]
I can’t send or receive email at all when using their services/servers, and haven’t been able to since last night.
Calling their support line, it does amuse me that the musical hold I ended up with was the Muppets theme song. Somehow you’ve just got to love a company with that kind of humour.
BT’s Wonderful Anti-Spam Measures
Posted: Tue 1 July, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Geeky 2 Comments »I got an email from BT this morning…
Urgent- BT is making some changes to its email service. Emails you send from alternate BT Yahoo! Mail addresses may be blocked. (Additional comment from me: It’s not just from alternate Yahoo! Mail addresses – it’s anything except your default BT Yahoo email name)
Dear Customer,
We’re upgrading the security of your BT Yahoo! Mail account to help prevent identity fraud and spam.
These enhancements will help protect you from ‘spoofing’ – when people use alternate addresses to disguise an email’s real sender, possibly to commit fraud.Making the improvements work
For the security improvements to work, we need you to take a few minutes now to verify each of the alternate email addresses you use in BT Yahoo! Mail. This will confirm that these email addresses are genuine. If you don’t verify your alternate BT Yahoo! Mail addresses, you may get an Error 553 message and have difficulty sending emails.Please verify addresses now to avoid blocking of your outgoing emails.
Simply follow the step-by-step instructions at www.btyahoo.com/verify. You won’t be asked for any personal information, but you’ll need to log in to your account to make the changes.
We’re committed to helping you get the most from your award-winning BT Yahoo! Mail. The changes we’ve made will help reduce spam on the network and improve your enjoyment of the service. We hope this doesn’t cause any inconvenience and appreciate your co-operation.
Kind regards,
BT Total Broadband team
Please note that this is an automatically generated email for your information only. Unfortunately we cannot respond to ‘replies’ to this address.
Of course, this would have been much more useful if they’d sent it back in March, when they actually did the work, and fucked up my email so badly I had to set up my own SMTP server instead. As it stands, we’re two-plus months down the line, and all this does is make BT look like the bunch of contemptuous customer-hostile fuckwit bastards they truly are.
Even better, I can’t even reply to that email and tell them what tossers they are.
Customer Service as it should never ever be done…
What’s Your Story?
Posted: Fri 20 June, 2008 Filed under: Geeky, Writing Leave a comment »Yesterday, following on from links by Tom and Laura, I entered into Waterstone’s “What’s Your Story?” competition.
The rules are simple – a story that’ll fit on a postcard, with a maximum of 600 characters. Due to the time-crunch in getting it done, (Yesterday was the last day for entries) I wrote the entire thing online, as I didn’t have time to print it, do it, scan it, send it, etc. However, that actually helped in a lot of ways, made it far easier to just get on with it.
When all’s said and done, 600 characters isn’t that much anyway. Although it’s an interesting (and, from the looks of it, popular) challenge to get an entire story into that number of characters.
I’ve no idea whether it’ll get any further, but for something approaching ten minute’s work, I’m not displeased with it at all.
Text after the link… Read the rest of this entry »
Home Hub Security
Posted: Wed 28 May, 2008 Filed under: Geeky, Security Leave a comment »Got a BT Home Hub? If so, you really need to read this on the Register, and then go off to BT’s site and follow their instructions for making it properly secure rather than leaving the security settings at their defaults.
Thankfully, we don’t have one of these abortive pieces of crap and instead have our own wireless router/firewall thingy.
But it’s scary to see just how insecure the BT Home Hub is by default…
Missing @Media
Posted: Wed 28 May, 2008 Filed under: @media2008, Geeky Leave a comment »Later this week, the @Media conference will be going on in London and for the first time in three years, I won’t be there. The timings would just be too tight, what with it being on Thursday/Friday, and with us supposed to be travelling to Wales (and then Ireland) on Friday.
In fairness, it’s saved me something like £500 all told – and in light of the expense of the car this week, that’s probably a good thing – but it’s still a bummer to be missing it. For me, there’s a whole bundle of things I’d be going to see if I were there – except of course that I’m not – so I know it’ll be a worthwhile investment to go next time.
All told, I’m disappointed I’m not going this time round – but I’ll definitely be there again in the future.
WordPress is 5!
Posted: Tue 27 May, 2008 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky Leave a comment »Just a very quick “Happy Birthday” post for WordPress, which turns 5 today.
Amazing to believe it’s already been going that long.
And I suppose that one day I’ll upgrade D4D™ past version 2.1 – the main reason I haven’t is because I know it’ll be a pain in the arse, because of the adaptations I’ve made to the template etc. along the way. So the upgrade will probably come along at about the same time as the redesign.
In other words, sometime.
Memory Loss
Posted: Thu 8 May, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky 2 Comments »Yesterday evening, I was working on fixing a problem by using a small bit of javascript, and I couldn’t get it to work. Annoying, but them’s the breaks.
Finally, I realised why I couldn’t get the thing to work on a browser, when I was sure I’d written it correctly – and double checked it when it didn’t work first time.
I’d turned javascript off in the browser to do something else, and hadn’t reactivated it yet.
[Edit : I forgot to add the thought in the next par when writing the post initially]
It’s the only time I’ve found so far where tabbed browsing is inferior to separate browser windows – if you turn it off in one place, you turn it off in all of them, which doesn’t happen (as easily) with multiple windows.
Grrr, twenty minutes of debugging and re-reading code – and all because sometimes I’ve got the memory span of a goldfish.
XKCD
Posted: Wed 7 May, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky Leave a comment »I’m just loving today’s XKCD comic.
Sometimes they’re a bit hit-and-miss, but this one’s worth the effort.
Meltdown
Posted: Fri 25 April, 2008 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Music Leave a comment »When it was announced that Massive Attack would be the curators of this year’s Meltdown Festival at London’s South Bank Centre, I knew it’d be interesting.
And indeed it was – if I lived closer to London, there were three or four things I’d have liked to go and see. As it is, though, the big thing was that Massive Attack themselves would be doing two shows – one at the start of the festival, and one at the end. (as well as a remixing of the Blade Runner soundtrack with live orchestra, which I would’ve loved to see)
Tickets went on sale at 9am today – at which time I was, as mentioned below, in an interview. I doubt I could’ve got away with saying “Oh, can I start it a bit late, so I can try and get tickets for a concert“, so instead I just had to hope that all would be well.
As it turned out, I’ve been lucky – a ticket to the show at the end of the Festival is now mine! The start-up show is already sold out, but the finale should be a pretty good one too, so I’m happy.
Mute
Posted: Sat 12 April, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky, Weirdness Leave a comment »Isn’t it amazing that you can still confuse some people by just turning their phones to silent when they’re out of the office, and the bloody thing keeps ringing?
Even after [cough] years with mobiles, some people just still don’t know how to silence them. Thankfully, some of us do know how to do so…
Incommunicado
Posted: Fri 28 March, 2008 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Thoughts Leave a comment »One of the things I really liked about the cottage we stayed in when we’re in the Lake District is that there’s no coverage for our mobile phones, and no internet access. It means that while we’re there, it’s very hard for us to be contacted by work- or by anyone else.
In particular, I like having no internet access. I know that if it were there, I’d be using it – I’m a sad and simple geek, and I’d make use of internet access if it were available. When on holiday, well, it’s just a lot nicer to not have the tempation there in the first place. Yes, it means that I’ll have a whole bundle of emails to deal with when I get home (and I didn’t bother this time with an out-of-office message for my email) but I think it’s a worthwhile price for a peaceful week.
As always, if anyone had really needed to get hold of either of us, they could have called and left a message. (And in fact several people did exactly that, including a couple of agencies with possibilities of work for me) It’s not an ideal system, but it does seem to work, and people seem to understand that when I/we call them back – particularly if I explain that we’ve been in “the land of no-coverage”.
And now we’re back with all the communication devices. It’s been a nice week, but in a lot of ways it’ll be good to be back with ‘normal’ communications. It’s still good to have days or weeks where those things don’t exist though – it just means it’s a proper break, with no urge to stay in touch. No bad thing at all.
Not Yet
Posted: Tue 25 March, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Geeky 1 Comment »Well, having done some major fucking about this evening (And Yes, that is the technical term) we can now send emails from home again.
In the end I’ve set up an SMTP server on one of my hosted sites, and we’re using that rather than screwing around with BT. So we can send email – in addition to the absolute fuck-up BT have made with blocking the emails themselves (and not telling anyone about it) they’ve also changed their perspective on using an external SMTP server. (Up ’til the 12th, I had to send all email via BT’s own mail server – now they’ve fucked about with everything, I can send mail with an external mail server – and of course they didn’t tell anyone that either!)
So for now I’m not going to swap suppliers just yet – probably. The contract is up in June (The anniversary of when we moved in – although they initially told me it was a three-month contract and then I could leave any time, so I detect the possibility/probability of another call to their customer ‘services’ – and of course they’ve broken the contract anyway, with their failure to sort out emails at all) so we’ll be moving supplier in June without a doubt.
At least this way I get to do some more research on which supplier is the best one to replace the smeghead shyster twatbags at BT.