Posts by Andrew Jones 2

But..... I'm pretty sure when you upload a video to YouTube - you can specifically choose not to allow it to be embedded.....

So a privacy storm is going on - and they think the best way to handle that (knowing it is being very publicly reported too) is to stick their fingers in their ears and go "LA LA LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU, LA LA LA LA LA"

Even Apple realises it has to make an attempt to quell people's fears - eventually.

I'm not sure how this articles went from being about Apple to being about Google, especially since I've never seen Google advocating a software SIM for anything - nor can I understand why they would want to. Google's mission is simple - Google services everywhere, for everyone - being able to reject certain networks from the device makes absolutely no sense, from a user standpoint nor from a data collection standpoint on the Google end.

It's also on O2 in the UK.

But clearly it's what we have all been crying out for -

first it's tablets with a data contract

now it's watches with a full blown phone contract.

Yup - just what I need 3 mobile contracts to pay for every month.

No thanks. WiFi Tablet, Android Wear will do me fine. Happy with just one mobile contract thanks all the same.

This may very well be the best page on the entire internet today!!!!

Well, I mean clearly if my shares were only worth 5.3 billion, I'd be quite upset too - I mean what can you buy for 5.3 billion these days?

Sorry what -

2G?

Rural broadband?

EDGE is slower than even 256k broadband. I thought there was supposed to a minimum of 2mbps?

Moffat strikes again.....

Personally we were frustrated by 2 things - which made the rest of the episode nonsensical anyway.

1) The absolutely terrible CGI when they first stepped onto the moon was jarring and immediately took us out of the fantasy.

2) As soon as the power came back on in the mining colony, despite the fact they had not entered through any sort of airlock chamber, they were immediately able to take their helmets off and breathe oxygen - because apparently (although never explained) in the future we seem to of discovered a way to immediately fill a space with breathable air. Further, although the moon has gravity and that must be exactly the same level of gravity as on the earth, because there was no floating on the moon, nor being crushed - when there is a breach at the mining colony - suddenly things start flying towards the breach - despite the fact the pressure inside the colony must be the same as the pressure outside the colony - because there was never a need to pressurise or de-pressurise anything.......

How Moffat can destroy something the way he is with Doctor Who - while at same time create something as entertaining and full of real logic as Sherlock - is baffling.....

Surely this will just come under the "if you don't hand over the necessary data to decrypt your mobile phone, you will be considered to be a terrorist and thrown in jail" law that we already know and love?

Home Automation is easier and cheaper than people think.

Why on earth would anyone choose to use XMPP?

MQTT exists for a very good reason - XMPP has so much overhead!

It's not rocket science people, I have an Ubuntu Server running Domoticz which is free open source and constantly upgraded. I have those DIY remote sockets you speak of -and I discovered RFXCOM who make a lovely USB transmitter/receiver specifically for talking to home automation kit on the 433MHz band - which Domoticz supports wonderfully. OpenZWave is also supported by Domoticz and I currently have 2 devices which are ZWave. Domoticz will run happily on a Raspberry Pi so you don't need a full blown computer running.

I have a second machine (a laptop) running in a different building (but attached to the same physical LAN) which is using th Teldus Tellstick which again speaks 433MHz - unfortunately Domoticz doesn't support the Tellstick hardware, but it has a lovely commandline utility called tdtool. So I use MQTT to send commands across the network to the laptop which a python script intercepts and sends commands to tdtool.

Home Automation is cheap these days to get started, the kit is not terribly expensive and you can start at the low tech end of the scale and upgrade to the higher end stuff as you feel comfortable / time allows.

As a bonus - Domoticz supports my OWL Electricity monitor so I get lovely graphs and comparisons to previous months / years. For the Theatre (the other building) I'm using a 3 phase Current Cost Envi-128 that I poll every 30 seconds using a Python script and then update the values in Domoticz using a JSON web request.

If anyone is at all interested - take a look at www.domoticz.com

The self service machines have enough trouble scanning barcodes in the clubcard app - or responding in a timely fashion to an item being scanned. The "Activity" light which I assume to the be HDD light is flashing away like a disco light at a rave, and often when it speaks the sound is choppy.

The Tesco self service machines also behave like tech support on the phone - they don't like you jumping ahead when you already know what it is you want to do. For instance, my Tesco won't let me enter my PIN number in until it has told me to, but it's still spieling out the ways I can pay - while I have already selected to pay by card, and been told to put my card into the machine (on screen) and the little light on the card reader has turned on, I have already said I don't want cashback - but the voice hasn't even reached the part where it says "sssselecccct ccccaasshhhbaaack amounnnnnnt"

ASDA used to be the same but they upgraded their machines recently - and the voice actually gets stopped if it is still speaking at each step. So my checkout process goes something like "beep, beep, beep, unexpect.... beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, blah blah blah notes are dispensed below the scanner, please insert you..... select cashback am..... please enter y..... Thank you, please take your shopping.....<10 seconds later> Please take your shopping"

There is a Russian video which looks pretty real - if it really is a fake - it's an incredibly detailed and very time consuming one.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=657UeODW178

oooo look iShiny.....

Still don't understand why there is so much hype around it -

it might well be the most intuitive, easy to use, fantastical device ever released to date - hell it might have a battery life that lasts for a week. But - if I need to own an iPhone to use it. It's already completely pointless for me.

For people who bought into the Apple ecosystem, it'll probably be great, but not everyone has bought into the Apple ecosystem and that's where this hype - not just from Apple but from countless tech blogs too - that it will immediately take the world by storm - is just silly. It's the exact same reason Android Wear won't take the world by storm.

So given that the problem was with the find my iPhone web service, does this finally explain what happened several months ago when numerous Austrialians woke up to find their iDevices had been remotely wiped overnight?

Samsung TV!

TV's annoy the hell out of me when they do this -

In 2006 when I bought the 42" Samsung LCD TV for the Cafe to run our presentation on - I noticed when I got it setup and was playing with the menus that it had a demo for some mode (can't really remember the name now) which made HALF of the screen super super detailed and crystal clear which of course by comparison made the remaining half of the TV without this special tech applied look absolutely terrible - now I can't say for 100% certain that it was a software thing, but I'm pretty sure that the cost of making panels that are half new fangled and half old tech would be prohibitively expensive - that I can rule out it being a hardware thing. Now the thing that irritates me - is that if I wanted the entire screen to use the new fangled option - I would have to upgrade to the next model of TV - even though it is clearly present in the model I have just bloody bought!

I still don't understand why disks, CDs / DVDs are shipped through the post full of private information?!

Haven't these people ever heard of VPN - if the data needs to go somewhere - it should be transferred securely through a dedicated VPN setup specifically for that purpose!

I think you will find the huge number of people outside the UK who have been downloading Doctor Who using the various well known, well publisicised workarounds may have actually been more responsible for the BBC issues.....

"Raytheon informed us that the [UK Border Agency] UKBA had given them no benchmarks against which they were to perform. It is now clear that the UKBA didn’t know what they wanted from the e-Borders programme."

While I am sure Raytheon are not exactly squeaky clean here - the idea that the UKBA didn't actually know what they wanted from the e-Borders programme - does sound sadly like any technology based arm of the UK Government......

If "Verify Apps" has been updated to detect this issue - as the article suggests it has been, then essentially every Android Device that has the Google Play store from Android 4.4.4 right back to Android 2.2 has been silently updated to combat this issue - regardless of what manufacturers may or may not have done.

Dear copyright protection people - how about:

Fixing the problem?

Case in point, When I got my Chromecast I bought season 1 of Friends from Google Play. When I watched all of Season 1 - I bought Season 2 of Friends. Now - for 2 seasons of Friends I have paid £40.98 for the convenience of watching it online. For between £50 and £80 I could have all 10 series on DVD. I will not pay £200 to buy all 10 series online. If anything just like the music industry learned (eventually) - it should be cheaper for me to buy all 10 series online, than it would be to get them on physical media.

Next we come to availability -

As long as Amazon / Netflix / Sky etc are going to keep having these ridiculously long "exclusive" terms, piracy will continue. Sky for example with their "once we have it, no one else can have it for 18 months" 18 months!! Exclusivity windows need to be reduced to at the most - 6 weeks. I am NOT going to have a Netflix subscription, An Amazon Prime subscription, a Sky subscription and a TV license. I am going to use one service, and anything I can't get on that service, or buy legally online for a reasonable price - I am going to have to get elsewhere.

Never quite understood how this is supposed to work.

The Pi needs to be connected to a WiFi network with internet access, and obviously needs to be powered.

When the Chromecast deauths from the WiFi the Chromecast will enter config mode - which the Pi must take advantage of, and tell it to connect to the Pi's AP - which I get.

But then in order for the Pi to tell the Chromecast to load YouTube and then to load a YouTube video - the Pi needs to have internet access.

How does the deauth thing work - does the Pi have to be connected to the target WiFi network to issue the deauth command?

It performs a few basic functions out of the box,

When the platform opens up - you will be able to purchase add-on skill sets (this will be the next phase of the freemium model, you want it to do anything more useful - pay us more money)

It doesn't come with a battery, and if you want to buy one for it - it will last a whole 30 minutes!

Thankfully though - as artificial intelligence is nowhere near the level this thing would need to be useful, it runs via the cloud - so if it starts looking like it might want to try and kill you and take over the world, just turn the WiFi off.......

On the downside...... it runs via the cloud, do expect security breaches and people being monitored without "permission"