Posts by OllyL

Death to clunky, creaky rip-off cable boxes – here's how it will happen

I thought they'd already done this way back in the 90's by mandating the cablecard format?

Even 'modern' boxes have to have one or more inside, and the cableco must provide you with one if you ask for it.

It's a fun ride for sure (took three calls and two trips to my nearest Comcast office), but they did indeed supply me with two without too much of a song and a dance.

I hear the newer TiVO's can do all the VOD stuff that the X1 service does too.

They still charge you $7.50/month for the card, but that's better than the outrageous rental fees they charge otherwise...

Amazon Echo: We put Jeff Bezos' always-on microphone-speaker in a Reg family home

Love mine

As a brit abroad, I've really become quite enamored (yes, yes I know, US spellchecker) with the Echo. I loved that it was able to play all the CD's I'd bought off Amazon that came with autorip (about 90% of them) and with the amazon uploader thing, it let me upload the remaining 10% (mostly small release UK EDM). With the amazon prime membership, it's rare that it won't play a full song whenever it's asked. It took the echo about a week to understand my eldest son (~4.5 years old), and the adults it got pretty much on the first try. I picked up a couple of the Belkin WeMo switches and an Emerson thermostat which was compatible with it and it's worked nearly flawlessly with them. The iHeartRadio plugin is great, as it'll stream BBC Radio 4 quite happily without having the faff of VPNs to hit iPlayer.

When I first got one, I did do the tinfoil hat thing and watched the traffic it generated through the firewall, and (at least in this firmware release), it does seem only to broadcast back to the mothership when woken (and the data volume is small enough that it's only the content of the question, not the last 10 hours since the prior question - unless Amazon have *really* sophisticated compression).

Has anyone tried using one of these in the UK as yet? I've been debating getting my parents one for Christmas

What Ashley Madison did and did NOT delete if you paid $19 – and why it may cost it $5m+

Tax records?

surely for audit/tax purposes they must have to retain who paid them how much and when? I saw an earlier post which suggested that paid removals should be stored offline, which makes sense, but surely for their end of year books etc...they must have to keep these records in the main 'online' database?

Obsolescence of food is complete: Soylent now comes in bottles

Re: It's not that bad...

Absolutely; my life is optimized around getting up and out of the house as fast as possible, then doing whatever I can to cut down the amount of time spent at work; so that I can get back and spend time with the kids/walk the dog/see the wife, so fifteen minutes in the morning and forty five minutes at lunch get me back an extra hour at the end of the working day. For me, soylent has been great. I'm happy that you have oodles of free time to spend on things like making cheap, tasty and textured lunch; but for my life, it works well and I'm very pleased with the trade off.

It's not that bad...

I've been on the soylent (1.5 I guess) for about 4 months now, using it just for lunch. I've found it most palatable when you use about 25% less water than they recommend, add a sachet of hot chocolate powder to it, make it about 2 hours before you intend to consume it and add a handful of ice to the mixture before shaking it. It's still largely unappealing; but I like that I can stay in bed for an extra 15 mins (not having to prepare a lunch), and it's considerably cheaper (both in a time sense and $$$) than going down to the food court at the office complex/leaving the building to go find food. I still go out with the team on Fridays, but for Monday to Thursday, soylent worms out at about $2.50 a day and certainly satisfies my appetite.

OnePlus phone fanbois flock for a shiny phondle

Re: specify parts like on laptops

Isn't Google doing something similar to that in Puerto Rico right now (or very soon if not?) where you buy a phone shell and can then add/remove individual portions to suit your need?

Your security is just dandy, Apple Pay, but here comes Android

Opinions of a user

So as someone who has actually used Apple Pay (on both sides of the pond), I actually quite like it.

It didn't magically solve a problem in my life, however I do rate it as an improvement.

I have four US cards registered against the iPay thing (only one of which is natively NFC - an amex, and three visas from two different banks) and two from the UK (Nationwide in case anyone cares). I like that it gives me the option, and it seems to remember which card I used where last as the one it pops up first seems to be tied to whatever I used at the location last (one of my cards gives me better cash back on fuel, the other has a better rate for pretty much everything else).

I am still required to use a PIN however if I use it against a debit account (confusingly, one can present a US debit card as a credit card at POS terminals), so I'm not sure how that works.

The one thing I find particularly curious about the UK implementation is the 20 pound cap. Does anyone know why that is? Here in the states I can spend as much as the bank will let me (as far as I'm aware...I think the largest transaction I've put through Apple pay was about $800)

The one thing I'd love for them to add to the phone would be some form of ID verification, such that if I forget my wallet and I meet with a particularly officious checkout operator that really won't accept that I'm legally old enough to buy whatever booze happens to be in my cart

Microsoft: This Windows 10 build has 'NO significant known issues'

Will it be (finally?) possible to stop an application stealing window focus?

I know it's really trivial, but I miss that on XP (I think it was XP...it was a looong time ago) where whatever I was working on would stay the active window until *I* decided that I wanted to type into another window.

Far too many times I've been doing a delete/copy/move/other operation and typing into (say) a Word Doc, only to momentarily have the focus stolen while I was typing and then being in the position of not being sure which option it had chosen on the dialog box.

Free markets aren't rubbish – in fact, they solve our rubbish woes

They have a $0.10 deposit on any carbonated drink bottle/can here in Michigan (still drinks don't incur this...I guess so that Milk and such don't get hit?), and in the local Meijer (supermarket) they have a hole in the wall with a conveyor belt that you can put the empties on, it scans the barcode and if it's recognized, adds the $0.10 to a running total and prints you a chit at the end you can redeem in store against your shopping etc...

Vis the rag & bone men, here in Detroit every second Thursday they have 'bulk pickup day'; you always know when it is as the (neighbor)hood is full of people in pickup trucks trolling the pavements looking for anything of value they can sell to a scrapyard (the 70's era metal filing cabinet I put out a couple of weeks back barely had time to make an indentation on the grass before it was half-inched)...saves the city money (i presume) on not having to collect it and puts some cash in some of the locals pockets!

Bulk interception is NOT mass surveillance, says parliamentary committee

Not read, but not forgotten either?

I note they highlighted that not everything is seen by human eyes. I do wonder if it's ever deleted though (such that if in future someone becomes 'politically interesting' their past can be dredged through to see if there is any 'leverage' to be had)

Hated smart meters likely to be 'a costly failure' – MPs

Capita cost increases

as a lay person and thus not entirely up to speed on contract law, would it not be possible to hold Capita's feet to the fire and force them to abide by the contract that they presumably signed to win the business in the first place? I'm fairly sure that most organizations I sign contract with would take me to court if I failed to live up to my side of the deal (paying the bill in this instance)

Apple Pay a haven for 'rampant' credit card fraud, say experts

Re: ApplePay is very secure

I disagree somewhat with your conclusion there...

I'd be interested in a quick straw-poll of the commentators on here to see how many have actually used Apple Pay.

I'd be willing to wager I'm one of the few. I use Wells Fargo for my main credit/debit cards. When I got an iPhone 6 (in the UK incidentally), part of the setup noticed that the cards were iPay compatible, and would I like to use them. Once I'd done that I got an email from Wells Fargo telling me that someone had asked to add them to an Apple ID for use with iPay (I forget if it included the account details/phone #, but I'm due a new credit card soon, so I'll report back if I remember). I had to sign into the online banking, and run through additional security procedures before Wells Fargo would authorize the cards to be used with my iPhone (more than just the username/password to get into the online banking). Because the wife hadn't used her online banking in a long time, the bank actually insisted that she called up

Another thought too, they'd have to be a fairly well heeled criminal to do this, as I'm sure if the transactions were flagged as suspect, then you'd lose the apple account and (one would assume) the iPhone attached to it...

The finest weird people in the world live here, and we're proud of it

Working spouse

Great article (again),

As a Brit living stateside, the working spouse thing actually isn't an issue if you're on an L1 (a/b) visa, as your partner can get an EAD (Employment Authorization Document) on his/her L2 spouse visa.

If you're brought over on an H1 visa, your partner probably will not be able to work (although there are signs this may change in the future). Have your partner look on internations/facebook/craigslist for a local expat group (European/Aussie/SA, not just Brits), we were spectacularly lucky in finding such a group that took us under the wing for a few months while we got our feet on the ground!

Keep up the good work :)

Hey, network giants: Facebook swigs from an 'open' 6-PACK of tech

For those of us unable to convince a white-box vendor to build one for us, will these be available to the unwashed masses at any point to buy, or will it just be something for us to marvel at from afar?

Bankruptcy could see RadioShack close doors for good – report

Re: died in the Uk years ago

Thank you for the reminder. I used to live in Willesden some time ago and have many fond memories of wandering up to Cricklewood electronics. I can't actually remember a time when they didn't have exactly what I was looking for (and a host of things that until that point I didn't know I couldn't live without).

Not-spot-busting for the home: Eero thinks tiny mesh router's a winner

Hasn't this been done (better) before?

An apartment building that a friend lives in was wired up with OpenMesh units...I picked up a couple on ebay as I was curious and was quietly impressed (the online management portal was pretty tidy too).

Also, why would people not use the homeplug wifi extenders? I put one from TP-Link I think into the inlaws place and it cloned their existing wifi network using the WPS button and was running (without the customary halving of bandwidth) in minutes...not bad for 40quid or so from Maplin (had to buy the kit which had one wifi plug and one regular one in it)...also better than this 'new' product.

These two solutions also appear not to have the current habit of wanting to know everything about you and broadcasting all the data they can collect back to some social outfit on the West coast either

EE data network goes TITSUP* after mystery firewall problem

Re: Oh, dear...

Such an app already exists. I don't know if one is allowed to post links to app stores, so I won't, but if you search (certainly the Apple App Store) for 'CoverageMap' and select the one by RootMetrics, it already exists. Also lets you view the results, filter by network/technology etc...

I assume it's in the UK app store (as my installation was from the US one)

MI5 boss: We NEED to break securo-tech, get 'assistance' from data-slurp firms

Am I the only one that read the DG's comments on the first page and thought 'So being able to see through their crypto wouldn't actually have helped in these instances' as they only found the information through forensic processes *after* the Police had impounded their computers.

UK banks prepare for Apple Pay 'invasion', look to slap on bonking protection

Re: Additional steps...

Works very well.

I'm back in blighty for a while having lived the last few years stateside and when I picked up an iPhone 6 here it noticed that the card on file with iTunes was a Wells Fargo one and would I like to add it. I then had to log into the Wells Fargo online banking and confirm that I did indeed want to grant iTunes the ability to use this card for iPay and it was all done in about 10 mins.

Works very well over here (Greggs, Boots, Sainsburys...anywhere that the contactless payments thing is shown it would seem). The killer for it will be the 20quid limit they arbitrarily set. Stateside I can wander into BestBuy and spend as much money as I have with the phone, I find the limit somewhat curious and pointless (although I assume it's rooted in the banks not wanting to let anyone in on those juicy high value transactions (or a percentage thereof)).

I would assume this is old hat to those with a 'droid mobile, given there have been NFC chips in those phones forever...

Do Apple have any plans to allow one to add other NFC cards to the passbook thing? would be nice to get my oyster card/Reading bus ticket in there so all I need for my day to day stuff is the telephone...

18 million iPHONE USERS HAVE NEVER BONKED to ApplePay

And I thought it was pretty good...

back in the UK for a few months and picked up an iPhone 6 to use whilst here...it noticed when I was setting it up that my Wells Fargo cards were supported and promptly added them to the iPay thing. Worked flawlessly at Boots, Sainsburys and Greggs (all in Reading). The interface was neat, and it let me choose between my debit and credit cards. I must admit the various till staff thought I was a bit odd until it flashed up on their screens that I had pid. I think my only complaint at this point is the £20 maximum.

Apple patents facial recognition tech for mobile log-in

Re: Right, time to sue the Android phone manufacturers.

I never thought I'd be coming to Apples defense on something, but did anyone actually follow the uspo link in the article? The paten was filed in 2008...just like their immigration system, it would appear the patent office is also backlogged...

Hunt's 'paperless', data-pimping NHS plan gets another £240m

Where's all this cash going...

So like Jim O'Reilly by the sounds of it, I'm a Brit living in the states. Having just moved from one major metropolitan city to another, I simply went to my existing doctor & dentist, requested a copy of my records; moved, found a new doctor & dentist & handed them over. All my prescriptions transferred automagically via CVS (like Boots) and are transferable to Walmart/Walgreens/the ghetto pharmacy round the corner with a simple click of a mouse. I can even get at my medical records online with minimal fuss & get 'suggestions' on medications etc...from the portal based on my last few health checkups. I can't for the life of me see where 250million is going when my local doctors pharmacy (in a not so wonderful area of metropolitan Detroit) can manage to electronically send my prescriptions etc...to any number of pharmacies in/around the city and approve refills online when their revenue is likely well under a couple of million dollars annually

New tool lets single server map entire internet in 45 minutes

Re: Yes but

I think (before they got borged by plusnet or whoever it was) Metronet used to do this or something very similar...blackholed your connection so you could get to AV vendors & a few other sites and stopped you communicating with anything else...I think they also had network level content filtering (that you had to opt in to fwiw)...I guess their admins were just a few years ahead of their time.

UK gov's smart meter dream unplugged: A 'colossal waste of cash'

What's all the fuss about?

We had one of these smart meters from Southern California Edison (SCE) when I lived in Long Beach...it's was superb. Their website gave me 15min breakdowns of energy usage in the house and gave me a good heads up of when the ass clenchingly high bill was going to come through the door. (Also helped me isolate a bug in my cooling controller that turned he AC on for 3 hours at 3am every day).

I find now that I've moved away from LB that my current supplier doesn't do this and just gives me a lump bill at the end of the month with no further information on when peak usage hours etc...were.

My supplier already knows who I am, where I live and what my ssn is, it doesn't overly bother me that they get an itemized breakdown of my usage. They even offer me a discounted tariff (that I'm not forced to subscribe to) if i give them the option to turn my AC off when demand outstrips their ability to supply.

I'm yet to meet an American that has this feature from their power company and 'longs for the days of the anonymous usage and the chimp that comes and reads the meter.

Gigabyte's BRIX fall into place

Re: HTPC?

Or get yourself a USB CEC adaptor and use the TV to pass the signals down the HDMI cable...works a treat on XBMC

AT&T adds 61¢ 'Mobility Administrative Fee' for users

Unless they're slow updating their website, I note that they've not added this tax to their pre-pay service (GoPhone)...One would have thought the Administrative fee would be higher for non-contract users (which also doesn't seem to fall victim to the hoardes of other fees lumped onto contract users)