Posts by dotdavid 1713 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jul 2010
Honest Mobile are trialling what they call a "Smart eSIM" which provides backup roaming data access for certain applications (like WhatsApp) via other UK networks when you don't have any signal. I'm not really sure how well it works or how you would go about signing up for it.
> I just don't see the point. What do you actually use it for?
I use my MiBand 2 (which I got for a tenner) as a cheap digital watch that has the added benefit of buzzing when my phone rings or gets a message, which means the phone can stay tucked away somewhere. Being a LCD it lights up in the dark which is useful in the dark. It displays the full date. As it syncs with my phone it doesn't need the time setting/updating and remains accurate. The battery lasts for most of a month between charges and I'm generally happy with it. Personally I don't use the fitness features at all, the only thing I'd use that's missing is media controls (stop, play, next track) which is available on newer versions of the device.
Actually there are a lot of benefits of the cheap fitness bands that don't have anything to do with fitness. So much so that actually the extra things a "proper" smartwatch can do above and beyond what my £10 band can do are probably not worth me upgrading for.
Other alternatives that are worth a look are Mattermost and RocketChat, which are basically host-your-own-Slack. Even compatible with all of Slack's add-on plugins.
*Edit:* Oh there's also Google's Hangout Chat which we tried as we have GSuite anyway but found pretty poor, mainly thanks to lack of integration with other services (due to not supporting Slack plugins) and really poor or missing client apps with broken notifications. I had had higher hopes.
"Given I read articles on the register et al I am not a subscriber to the grass is always greener brigade."
Surely it's better to have x providers all claiming to have installed fibre broadband to your area rather than have to put up with just one provider claiming to have installed fibre broadband to your area?
"Well I have an Unlimited "up to 80Mbps" FTTC service from Plusnet. I get between 50 and 60Mbps depending on which way the wind's blowing, and I pay £22.49 a month."
Plus £16.99 line rental. Still not sure why the advertised prices of broadband don't include this mandatory charge, even if you never use the landline.
Yeah, interestingly the main differentiator between the phone and the tablet was the price; the Fire Phone was horrendously overpriced. Do we need any other reasons for its failure? The tablet sold well and is relatively cheap, despite a lack of Googley ecosystem.
"You need some goggles, two LCD screens, and an accelerometer? And after you've paid six hundred bucks for that, you need to pay twice that to get a computer that can drive it fast enough... amazing what people will spend money on."
Yeah I can't believe that they needed Facebook's money to develop it at all!
On a related note a car is just four wheels, a steering wheel, a few pedals and an engine, why do people spend so much on *those*?
"But remember the Pure Bug radio? It was, to my knowledge, the only one that came close to the promises with ability to record. I don't know why."
I'm guessing record company execs decided that radio taping would kill music just like home taping did.
Every new Android version I hope for a saner update mechanism, and every new Android version I'm inevitably disappointed.
I got briefly hopeful when Android-based things like Android Wear came out with updates direct from Google and I naively thought it was a sign of things to come, but nothing has materialised. Android-on-phones is probably the only Google product I can think of that *doesn't* auto-update by default and that leaves the millions of Android users that don't have Nexii vulnerable. Yes I know Google patches AOSP even on past versions, even if OEMs rarely distribute/use those patches, yes I know there are custom ROMs but both are workarounds not solutions to Android's support problem.
So no improved security. Still I'm sure cosmetic tweaks to notifications are a very important feature to have too...
"Funnily enough, there is one thing still working at least: EE was able to text people today warning them that their tariffs are going up in March."
I'm quite surprised that they're still doing that; none of the other networks have within-contract price rises inflation or not and it was one of the many reasons I left them.
> > The free market would have fixed this
> There is one, and it didn't.
Speaking as a capitalist running dog, internet of things security, like automobile safety standards, seem to be winding up as a thing that the free market cannot adequately handle mainly because the average purchaser lacks the expertise to even know that it's a problem. We don't have to be mechanics to have a safe car; we shouldn't have to be networking engineers to have a safe router. I don't see a problem having regulators impose standards in these sorts of situations.
"Personally I think there s no hope until routers go fully open and run Linux (for example, OpenWRT) so that security updates happen in a timely manner"
Not knocking OpenWRT or its controversial cousin DD-WRT (which I use myself) but AFAIK you don't get automatic security updates even with these firmwares, and the average user won't want to nor should need to install a third party firmware and more importantly keep it updated to remain safe.
"CompSci's are skilled, just not 'skilled' in the way employer's want, like or need, so there's still a skills gap"
Indeed. Until I joined the "real world" I had very little experience in key business skills like filling out a career development plan that's worth more than the time and effort put into filling it out, learning how to suck up to the right managers and setting SMART objectives that sound terribly important to the business but are nice and easy to achieve with flying colours. A module or two of those sort of things in my compsci course would have gone a long way towards giving my first employers what they appeared to want ;-)
An ex employer sent me a snotty email once when I reported one of their phishing test emails as abuse to Google and told them I had. I very much doubt that Google did anything with the report but some wannabe-bigwig emailed me telling me my action had been "escalated" as it might have effected the success of the education campaign. Of course nothing further happened to me, but it did leave a sour taste in my mouth for doing the right thing.
I think ignoring phishing emails, legit or otherwise, is the best policy.
"On my stock unlocked G3 (software version V21a-EUR-XX), I can add and remove Smart Notice just like any other widget"
The widget, sure, but I can't disable the app in Application Settings like you can some other "built-in" apps.
"My experience with Cyanogenmod (on Galaxy S2) is that it's ... bad for stability."
Samsung's fault because of their horrendous record of not releasing code for their Exynos chipsets. The G3 with its Qualcomm-based chipset should be much better.
"* Continue using your device for financial stuff and have the whole thing compromised exposing all that data to the bad guys.
* Have a secure device but lose the ability to do financial stuff with it."
While I agree with your sentiment I must point out that some custom ROMs, like CyanogenMod, actually don't execute as rooted by default. In the latter case you have to enable root using a developer option, so you can still get the benefit of the quick updates without root.
"Government + outsourcing = even slower progress, even more overspend and later delivery"
In my experience it's "Government + civil service + outsourcing". Oddly enough, adding another organisation to the plus list doesn't make things more agile.
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