Posts by Frederic Bloggs

The problem is that the User Services (or to be more specific: the Home Office) seem to think that they need a "one thing does everything" approach (on Android), whilst ignoring the fact that most high bandwidth data doesn't use one's handheld TETRA radio. The little that does could be accommodated through one's smartphone over IP and, if you really must, through your own MVNO. You don't need to spend 100s of extra pounds on smart phone that do "press to talk" (badly, especially compared to Tetra).

But then TETRA (in the shape of Airwave) has always been looked down on by Government who have regarded it as too expensive. It was them that sold it off into the private sector in the first place. As a monopoly. Several times - just look at the list of previous "owners". Needless to say the Free Market has worked its magic and costs have risen well above inflation ever since. When ESN finally beds down into something useful, they will repeat the same mistakes all over again.

The Android thing they have is interesting, because they *still* appear to be under the delusion that they can buy an "off the shelf" app to do anything they want - like call and dispatch - which requires a whole raft of specialist, low volume, back end and operational programming to achieve. Just where are you going to get, for example, a police, fire or ambulance dispatch system from? The App Store?

Chicken or Egg?

Is it just me or are there striking similarities between the behaviour of ICANN and Nominet? Is this some disease that tends to afflict all registrars over time, probably caused by the lorry loads of money they receive for doing nothing very much? The US Government got a lot of (political) stick for "running the Internet" before ICANN, but at least they were somewhat competent. Or are ICANN and Nominet locked in some titanic battle competing for the highest egregiousness score that they can achieve?

Hypocrisy?

We've heard, no wait... Someone mentioned that word a while back on some PP presentation, I wanted to ask what it meant, but we ran out of time for questions. Is it about anything important?

No-one seems to have mentioned the smell and then that noise...

In the 70s (and into the 80s before PCs and "winchester disks" become a thing that got stuffed into toy computers called PCs) I spent many happy hours looking after ICL and CDC disk packs. Maybe I was erm "lucky" but invariably a head crash would be preceded by a funny (but very distinctive) smell which, if caught early, would save the heads from actual destruction. There would be a small amount of oxide on the (usually) one head which could be cleaned with the special spatula and early form of wet wipes (they came dry and you wet them with isopropanol). But if you missed the smell, then the next stage emitted a characteristic "ping, ping ..." noise. There was still a 50/50 chance of saving the heads, although by this stage more than one would be affected. If all these clues were missed then that loud humming noise would tell you that the head assembly needed replacement after a tedious cleanup of the drive bay and filters and another trophy (or two) could be added to the "groovy disk" platter collection on the wall.

Not doing an adequate cleanup and then crashing the expensive drive alignment test disk was also erm... a strong learning experience!

It isn't just Fitbit

I only sync manually but my Alta HR became very reluctant to sync - and then screen cover came off (Oh and the strap started to irritate after two years).

So I cast around for a (hopefully cheaper) replacement and I bought an Honor 4 HR (as recommended by Which). It looks stunning, colour amoled screen and only £30. Well firstly the app requires one to sell give away your soul by having to load Huawei's "play services" as well as the app. Fortunately I have an old phone with nothing else on it and, as said earlier, I only sync twice a day manually. Then one discovers that on the 19th August there was an app update that disabled permanent HR recording. Also it doesn't auto recognise anything. You have to tell it to start recording whatever sort of exercise you are doing and then it starts the HR, So of course the obvious thing is to start an exercise and never stop it (actually you have to do it daily). Then the real reason for disabling HR becomes apparent - the battery is flat after about three days. The watch is recording HR data during exercise and you can see your HR on the watch, but you can't then see it on the app. The daily HR graph stays resolutely blank.

I needed something under £100 that did at least what the Alta did - I bought another Fitbit, an Inspire HR. Which seems to be working just fine and, apart from the app displaying "searching for device" when it obviously means "syncing", it syncs much quicker than the Alta HR. It still sends the HR data to HQ to be <cough> processed, so it still needs two syncs in the morning (with a decent gap between them) to see whether one is still alive. Yes, the screen is nothing like as good as the Huawei but it tells the time and still auto recognises most of what I do in the way of exercise. And I can now wear it in the shower. Bonus.

For my limited use case as a historical exercise and sleep monitor it works just fine. And the battery lasts at least a week.