Posts by David Thorn

Airbn-bye: Barcelona bans short-term apartment rentals for tourists

GSMA will be unhappy

Given Mobile World Congress alone attracts 100k people and there are only 76k hotel beds in Barcelona…

Crack team of boffins hash out how e-scooters should sound – but they need your help*

Silence please!

Imagine a not-too-distant future where every goddam vehicle has to make some form of noise as it moves, and that noise is designed to be distracting enough to make sure you look at it.

Now imagine a city full of them, and millions of people who live (and sleep) near roads...

Wine 2.0 lands: It's not Soylent for booze but more Windows apps on Linux and Mac OS

Re: "get a guernsey"?

Because it's close to a Jersey?

Sorry - that will come across a bit Sarky, I will look for an Aldernytive way to put it.

Vale Matti Makkonen, SMS dreamer

Re: 160 chars

Yes - it always was 140 bytes, which when using 3GPP 03.38 7 bit encoding allowed you to fit in 160 characters. The reason for the limit was the max size of an SCCP packet being 255 bytes, which once removing all the header, routing and transactional data should leave you with at least 140 bytes.

Unfortunately the standards then introduced application contexts which added more data meaning that long text messages no longer fit in a single packet, but hey ho, that's life.

Cor blimey: Virgin Media pipes 152Mb fibre to 100,000 East Londoners

Ironically I live on Cable Street, E1 and aren't covered by Virgin Media yet nor seem to be in the expansion.

Catch cack-handed baggage handlers in the act with Ericsson's SPY SUITCASE

I always find lots of wiring and (presumably) lithium batteries ensures my suitcase has a smooth passage through various security checks at airports.

London officials declare cabbie-bothering Uber is legal – for now

Has anyone actually used them?

There seems to be all sorts of speculation here about how it is charged for but surely the easiest way is to just use one and see what happens.

Like this:

Fare Breakdown

CHARGES

Base Fare £3.00

Distance £1.92

Time £1.30

Charge subtotal £6.22

DISCOUNTS

Rounding Down -£0.22

Discount subtotal -£0.22

TOTALS

Total Fare £6.00

Amount Charged -£6.00

Outstanding Balance £0.00

Trip Statistics

DISTANCE

1.30 miles

DURATION

7 minutes, 15 seconds

AVERAGE SPEED

10.76 mph

Slip your SIM into a plastic sheath, WIPE international call charges

Not really a SIM

It's not a "Subscriber Identity Module" as all it's doing is using the SIM Application Toolkit commands to intercept the dial request and presumably dial an indirection service first.

If you note their tariffs are all plus your normal calling plan and require your number not to be witheld so you're using your normal SIM identity.

Their international piece is slightly more interesting in that it seems to be an automated callback but again that can be done using the call control features (ie auto answer when the callback occurs) of the STK.

Zeppelin-borne boffins in Bay Area alien 'extremophile' hunt

Looks like...

.... A View To A Kill

Is there a James Bond icon?

Acer DX900 dual-SIM Windows smartphone

What about receiving calls?

Are both radios active simultaneously? What happens when a call is received - do you see which MSISDN was called to know if it was for your work or personal number? Ditto for SMS....

Nokia 'Curse of Silence' SMS exploit uncovered

Recently added to 3GPP specs?

The article imples that being able to instruct the handset to treat an SMS as Internet Electronic Mail is a relatively recent addition to the 3GPP specifications. It's certainly been in the specs since 03.40-540 (late 1996?), but that's the earliest one I have to hand...

BT bundles MS Office with Linux laptop

Dabs offer:

A Pinnacle Systems PCTV DVB-T USB thingamy as part of a bundle (yes - I know they're owned by BT these days)

Requires: WinXP, 1.0Ghz processor, 20GB free disk capacity recommended and a CD-ROM