No, seriously, why are you holding your phone like that? I don't like to do it sideways. I won't do it at any fancy angle. Call me conventional but what can I say? I'm a straight-talking kind of guy. How hard does it have to be to get a firm grip on it… and hold it against the side of your face? Oh right. Put that yoga manual down, you might have misunderstood my meaning. I was …
I know it's incredible stupid but I had two phones give me a nanny warnings about turning the volume up to loud. One required me to go into settings and click an option for me to turn the volume up. When I first got it I had to get get head phones to hear people. I had to use goolge and found out that you had to go to settings and click on option . Then you could turn it up pas 50%
You're talking utter tosh, A/C.
I had a plain iPhone 6 — no S, no plus — for three and a half years (until just a few weeks ago) with no such positional problems. I have a relatively normal sized head, maybe a tad larger than a few (no jokes please!) and I used to put the thing to my ear in the appropriate manner and just talk to the human on the other end of the call... and it basically worked just like a phone should. Every time, every day. Except the few hours it took Apple to replace the old battery because I was too tight to buy a new phone. And the few times when the other person couldn't grok how to use a bloody phone ("Hello? Hello! Hello? Hello? I can't see you hand-waving, you have to talk words.") The design layout really isn't any different from all the other phone slabs out there for the last few years in that regard.
Maybe you just put it in a crap case, or your ear was in the wrong place?
SB.
"[...] the French won't be told what to do."
It has always seemed to me that the French are anarchists who love to have an authoritarian Establishment. Occasionally they have a popular uprising that goes a tad too far - and they then welcome another authoritarian regime.
The British used to be different - but I'm not so certain these days.
The advantage of flip/slide mobiles that increase their length when used - is that the sensitive bits are protected when not in use.
My home cordless has a pad button lock feature by holding * for few seconds. Pressing * twice will unlock it.
For convenience you can receive a call when the pad is locked. The other day the caller was a utility company wanting my meter reading - and offered me several "press button" options. I then discovered that the unlock feature doesn't work while a received call is in progress.
"Well, we wouldn't want any sensitive bits that increase their length when used to be unprotected, now, would we?"
I heartily endorse the protection of sensitive bits. I surely can't be the only person who has jabbed themselves in the testicle with the stubby antenna on a Nokia 5110 back in the day? (note that this happened if not enough care was taken with where and how the phone sat in my pocket when sitting down, and was not an odd masochistic choice)
About the smart meters, I mean. Anything with a transmitter in it that you can't turn off and transmits without your knowledge is called a bug. Can you sit there with a straight face and tell me some bugger, one day in the not too distant future, will not decide this data is so informative with a few tweaks and an "AI" to infer what's going on behind your closed curtains that it's a crime not to (here comes that bloody word again) "monetise" it and add a continuous development stamp to the consumer-fuckery section of their MBA? That's even before the sods at Snoophenge get hold of it, which will probably be in real-time.
"Some bugger" makes up a significant portion of the population, Some of them have to be working in telemetrics.
Indded.
In UK you can happily refuse the energy company pleading to install a smart meter. For added bonus amusement, you invite them round to your stone walled house, which meter is in centre of, & get them to do a signal check and they realise no chance of a smart meter (similar variants if meters down in a cellar)
If I had to have a smart meter installed against my wishes I think I would be doing something about it (do not fancy installing what is essentially a tool for tech skilled burglar to monitor usage and "at a distance" (less suspicious than walking by casing the joint) spot the uninhabited houses)
Har har, yes, very funny. Only it won't make the slightest difference with that honking great aerial sticking out of it that you're not allowed to touch. I'm talking about the incoming feed line.
It's all tinfoil hats and paranoia jokes until the data leaks, isn't it? What was that quote allegedly from Cardinal Richelieu again? I forget...
:-) indeed.
Don't forget these are almost real-time readings, i.e. "meter point x started drawing 5.1A more at hh:mm:ss for a duration of 2.3¹ minutes." AI says you boiled the kettle with even more certainty because it happened during an ad break on the channel your "smart" TV also told the cloud you were watching. You used too much water for the two people who live in your house because AI says it should only take 1.4 minutes to boil the correct amount so you're either guilty of profligacy and eco-vandalism or you have a visitor. That's a rather mundane example. I have others just as easy to detect and much more embarrassing, especially if you add the card issuers' data into the mix.
I wasn't saying that the quote applies to smart meters on their own but we're blindly giving far too much away. The above example is just two connected devices being extrapolated. Can you look me in the monitor and state in all honesty that someone, somewhere won't eventually put all this together if we continue to accept ever more leakage of data from our private lives?
¹ Numbers from nether region, natch. I'm not breaking out the formulae for boiling a sodding kettle.
No if you spent any time looking up the subject you'd know the readings are limited to half hourly summation for exactly that reason. Google DCC SMETS2 and inform yourseves on how it works, it's all public information. You all need to take off your tin foil hats, it's a technology to get relatively fine grained readings so the energy generators, and in the future storers, can predict and respond to real energy demands to provide guaranteed supply. You're meter reading a worth jack all to anyone else and trying to make out it's the next Cambridge analytica when you don't know how it works in the first place does not make you sound as cleaver as you might think.
Google DCC SMETS2 and inform yourseves on how it works, it's all public information.
Tell me, who is under contract to run DCC? Hint: It starts with Crap and ends in ita. That's how toxic this whole thing is.
Will no one rid me of this turbulent contractor?
"it's a technology to get relatively fine grained readings so the energy generators, and in the future storers, can predict and respond to real energy demands to provide guaranteed supply."
Why would this have to be per-household rather than per-substation if that is its main purpose?
Why would this have to be per-household rather than per-substation if that is its main purpose?
I suspect at least partly because of this 'leccy car fad they're expecting people to provide their own multi-kWh storage that they can raid because they've sold off public infrastructure and haven't planned for the future. The problem with that is every charge/discharge cycle is one more step toward the grave for the most expensive part in your unicornmobile, which is a good thing for the manufacturer and The Economy™ but bloody awful for the poor sods who have to pay for it and accept the feature disparity between grandiose milk floats and proper internal combustion.
I do hope everyone caught the "mandatory smart¹ elctrojalopy charge point in every new build" proposal. When you gather all the evidence together it becomes obvious.
¹ Monitors and reports energy used to charge, storage capacity and so on. They then know where all the big capacitors are. I give it five minutes until they start collecting geodata, timing and usage stats for road pricing through the same pipe.
I suspect at least partly because of this 'leccy car fad they're expecting people to provide their own multi-kWh storage that they can raid because they've sold off public infrastructure and haven't planned for the future.
There's a lot of truth in that, but the academic evidence shows that "asset management" of vehicle batteries actually prolongs their life. I'm in the industry, I have a professional interest in these things, and I can assure you I was staggered when the research came out. But that's how it is.
Whether that's enough to make up for the failures of energy policy over a decade, well, that's another question
There's a lot of truth in that, but the academic evidence shows that "asset management" of vehicle batteries actually prolongs their life. I'm in the industry, I have a professional interest in these things, and I can assure you I was staggered when the research came out. But that's how it is.
Whether that's enough to make up for the failures of energy policy over a decade, well, that's another question
Very interesting, thanks for that insight. While I don't doubt that keeping cells active improves their lifespan, especially where they are kept from sitting at full charge for prolonged periods in the specific case of lithium ion cells¹, surely there are efficiency issues? Genuine question, not gainsaying your point.
¹ Roughly 85% charge is where they may be stored with minimal degradation. This has been known for years.
There seems to be some question regarding exactly what levels to keep lithium-ion batteries at. My understanding, and my long habit, is discharge to around 40%, then charge to around 95%, which is why I have my androids programmed to speak up at those levels. 40 to 50% charge when storing, and store them cool (I've seen recommendations of "in the 'fridge"). Motorola Moto Z series battery mods (batteries that clip on the back and charge the phones internal battery) are programmed to keep the internal battery charged at 80%. I guess they know more about their batteries than I do. I doubt if keeping them "active" helps prolong life, they do have a limited number of charge / discharge cycles.
Apparently lithium-titanium batteries have none of those limits, though I've not found a lot of info about them. On the other hand, it's always the way, new battery technologies claim to have none of the limitations of the old tech they are replacing, until everyone's been using them for a decade, then we find their limits the hard way. Lithium-ion has half the energy density of lithium-ion, but if you are keeping your lithium-ions between 40 and 95%, then you're only using about half the energy density anyway.
the readings are limited to half hourly
Just because they are now, doesn't mean they will be forever. The meter is capable of sending readings as often as it is programmed to (though whether the mobile network uplink will cope if every meter sends readings every 30 seconds is another matter). Our "smart" meters at work have been logging readings with 5-minute resolution for perhaps 10 years now. I don't think they upload each individual reading, probably buffering a bunch and sending them together, but the point is that it can be done, if someone decides it's necessary.
M.
probably buffering a bunch and sending them together
That's exactly how it will be done or, instead of a fat (relatively) pipe cellular link, they'd be using LoRa or similar for the last half hour usage reading which, unless you're running multiple flux capacitors, should fit into a float().
When I said "real-time" I probably should have said time stamped events. After all, they don't want to be snooping on everyone immediately, just a nice virtual paper trail to look back upon should the need arise and a great big database they can broker access to. With SMETS2, the central database multiple client structure is already there, ostensibly to enable competition in the energy sector.
So, regardless of the frequency of actual uploads, the data is captured in real time. Same data, less snoopmatics talking all at once.
I'm not breaking out the formulae for boiling a sodding kettle.
Nah, but it would have been a good excuse to make a cuppa and glance at the clock... hang on...
...full pot of tea made. 2.5kW kettle, half full, boiled in about 2m15s
:-)
M.
Nah, but it would have been a good excuse to make a cuppa and glance at the clock... hang on...
I'm very ashamed I missed that opportunity. Well spotted, sir. I worry that the AI won't take into account the water used to warm the pot, too :-)
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