Category: End User

End User

I blog about nail polish – what’s wrong with your filters?

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 28 January, 2015
No Comments on I blog about nail polish – what’s wrong with your filters?

Web filters block list includes fashion blog

https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559720386112552960

https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559720218155835394

https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559722059660795904

https://twitter.com/SmashleighJayne/status/559722582921207808

The point about this is that the only reason Ashleigh-Jayne found about about this is because she is a TalkTalk customer. TalkTalk’s own web filters block list had her site down as being adult only.

Now maybe parents wouldn’t want little girls (or boys) checking out nail polish and fashionable shoes. The little darlings grow up too quickly these days. However we hope this is just a mistake. Ashleigh-Jayne will almost certainly be able to contact TalkTalk and get her site taken off the black list.

However if she hadn’t been a TalkTalk broadband customer she might never have found out whether her site was on the list. Millions of people might be wrongly denied access to her site. This is a problem with the system. The blacklists are automatically produced by machines that tbh are inherently untrustworthy because they get it wrong too often.

The following link takes you to an Open Rights Group website that can test your own website to see if it is blocked

http://linkis.com/www.blocked.org.uk/TJZCq

I took a look at trefor.net and the results are in the featured image. The BT and TalkTalk results that are inconclusive don’t necessarily mean they are blocking me buy it is certainly raises an eyebrow or two.

Haven’t actually looked at Ashleigh-Jayne’s blog but I’m taking her word for it that it’s not pornographic. As far as I’m aware she is a fine upstanding member if the blogging fraternity (sorority?).

As I write I realise that I will soon need a new pair of shoes. I doubt I’ll find them on her site mind you but I should be OK. I don’t think that ja.net has the same filtering policy. I’ll leave you with a little story about dubious websites that perhaps should be blocked from viewing by children (once the parents have opted in to the filter of course).

A year or two ago I gave a talk on VoIP security at a ja.net conference. An engineer came up to me afterwards for a chat and the conversation got round to how ja.net would have coped had they had to implement the Digital Economy Act and monitored its hundreds of thousands of users for their downloading habits.

The guy told me a story of how they had one been alerted to a really high bandwidth usage coming out of one room in a hall of residence. They went on an investigative visit and found that the female occupant of the room had moved in with a pal. The room had been painted purple and now had a pole in the middle of it surrounded by 4 webcams. Four enterprising female undergraduates had been paying for their university education by doing some professional internet pole dancing.

Now will that get me on a web filters block list?

broadband End User

ISP report places Sky at top of rankings for Q4 2014

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 26 January, 2015
No Comments on ISP report places Sky at top of rankings for Q4 2014

broadbandrating.com ISP report

Couldn’t help noticing that broadbandrating.com have published their quarterly ISP report.

Highlights include:

Sky was rated top provider for Q4 2014

Plusnet recovered from a number of service outages in Q3 to rise to second place in the overall ratings

BT showed a big improvement in customer support levels with average call waiting times over Q4 dropping from 15 mins to just over 6.

The report also shows a sustained social media campaign in the run up to Christmas took TalkTalk to the top of the Sentiment rankings with EE showing how a piece of good news (launch of TV service) influences the way people feel in a positive way.

Check it out yur. Some interesting graphs to look at in the isp report, one of which is the featured image for this post.

For those who didn’t already know broadbandrating.com is a brand recently introduced by trefor.net as part of our foray into the world of affiliate marketing. There is much dosh to be made in this game although you do have to be quite high in the search engine rankings to get your hands on it.

I first thought of adding such functionality to trefor.net but decided not to sully this site (too much) with the notionally crass commercialism that is the affiliate market.

broadbandrating.com does have some differentiators. We use Sentiment Analysis to rank ISPs – those getting it in the neck most on Twitter get lower rankings. We also use what is known as Customer Support ratings whereby we call up the ISPs every day to see how long it takes them to answer the phone. These result are quite revealing. You can have a play with the different charts for sentiment analysts here and customer support here.

When we first started, BT were often taking an eyewatering 15 minutes to answer the phone. Since then this has improved dramatically (see featured image) and chatting to a senior BT exec last week I’m told it reflects a conscious effort on their part to improve things. Fair play.

The next ISP report will be for Q1 2015 and is due in April.

More anon…

End User security surveillance & privacy

Pretty graphic reaction to ISP porn blocking

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 26 January, 2015
No Comments on Pretty graphic reaction to ISP porn blocking

encryption adult content filter snoopers charter revisited TalkTalk Router Security Flaw ashley madison

Thought I’d slip this one in – adult content filter eh 😉

I don’t know John Harvey but he seems a fairly forthright kind of guy. From Yorkshire maybe.

It’s not so much that you are telling your ISP anything when you opt out of the adult filter, or whatever it’s called. We doubt that any human intervention is involved in the process. It’s the likelihood that the information that you don’t wish adult sites to be blocked is leaked or hacked. That’s the issue.

If the information isn’t there is can’t be hacked. If this was an opt in that would sort it, aside from the fact that these filters aren’t renowned for their accuracy.

As an aside I assume that this site will henceforth be blocked by these filters. Probably already is. Parents don’t want their kids to know that they go to parties like trefbash or the pissup in a brewery. The blog was once blocked by the Timico firewall as “social media” sites were frowned upon by whoever set the policy in place (not me – I used to spend all my time on social media – I had a different set of permissions:).

The question is would Twitter be blocked. There’s a lot of graphic language on Twitter. I once unfollowed someone because of his non stop use of swear words. Not my kind of thing. Would be interesting to hear from anyone who has adult content filtering in place to see whether Twitter was visible or not.

Looking on the positive side, if you have opted out of the adult content filter, and are therefore “down on the list” you can always say it’s because you wanted to read posts on trefor.net;)

Effin read it first on trefor.net. wtf!

Read this highly popular and relevant post on the consequences of allowing government to monitor our online habits here.

End User online safety

Sky asking customers to tell them if they want to access adult content

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 21 January, 2015
No Comments on Sky asking customers to tell them if they want to access adult content

Sky adult content filtering to be left on as standard unless asked otherwise

It was in the news yesterday. Sky is phasing in the inclusion of an enabled Sky adult content filtering as standard unless specifically requested not to. I was told by Lyssa Mcgowan herself. Well on her blog.

This is going to be an interesting one to watch. I’m not going to rabbit on about how it should be the other way around – that families should opt in. I’m just going to see how long it takes for someone to hack in to the Sky database and publish the list of clients that have opted out. Just to show they can. Someone will take on the challenge.

It’s the same issue as why we shouldn’t be thinking about saving internet browsing data. Someone will leave it on a bus or it will get hacked and published on a server somewhere around the world.

Name and shame I say. Who wants to look at filthy pornography anyway. Bring back the high necked collar and floor length dresses. They had it right in Queen Victoria’s day. They also used to hide kids away in the nursery with their nannies. It’s no different today except now Sky provide the parental services by proxy.

The knock on effects of this type of decision will reverberate around the world. At least around the world’s browser manufacturers (does one manufacture a browser?). Sky customers that have opted out and who for reasons of privacy want to use incognito windows will now see a new message:

“Going incognito doesn’t hide your browsing from your employer, your internet service provider or the websites that you visit. ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE A SKY BROADBAND CUSTOMER WINK WINK”

Interestingly Sky come out very well in our BROADBANDRating rankings. Getting the product mix right continues to be a difficult exercise but I’m not so sure they have it right with this one. There hasn’t been much adverse customer reaction on Twitter, as yet. Just people noting that filters are automatically on. Time will tell.

Fnar fnar.

Later – found a fair few negative tweets on this subject after all. Sample below:

https://twitter.com/kentindell/status/557654044232409088

https://twitter.com/misterjorgensen/status/557843887004606465

https://twitter.com/calh15/status/557656535485411328

https://twitter.com/Chagr1n/status/557590528188235777

https://twitter.com/AlisonW/status/557602200500047873

Wonder how many bloggers will end up blocked by the Sky filter. Don't think it won't happen. http://t.co/XoZPKWNURJ

— Jax Blunt (@liveotherwise) January 21, 2015

Just imagine the lists you'll be on if you choose to 'opt-out' of Sky's filter. One more ISP not to use! http://t.co/JRYX7mthra

— Paul Bernal (@PaulbernalUK) January 20, 2015

broadband End User

Are ISP incentives to new customers going to be counter-productive and drive broadband churn?

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 19 January, 2015
No Comments on Are ISP incentives to new customers going to be counter-productive and drive broadband churn?

broadband churn Broadband Technology Pipe

Offers to new customers could drive broadband churn

The broadband market is massively competitive. This is a good thing. As in many markets ISPs offer incentives for new customers to sign up. In the B2B world these incentives are frequently given to resellers rather than the end customer. However in the consumer marketplace where everything is automated and done online new customers often get a bung to join.

These highly visible offers often rub up existing customers the wrong way. They feel unloved, regardless of whether they received such an offer themselves way back when. It is also very noticeable that customers will complain about the slightest additional cost and when they have a service interruption look for compensation. I some cases, where their monthly broadband bill is already miniscule, for example TalkTalk’s standard monthly cost for their LLU ADSL product is £3.50 plus line rental, any compensation received is likely to be very token indeed.

@SkyHelpTeam to upgrade to tv package would be £42 a month I can get virgin or talktalk for less new custs get better offers than existing

— Shaun Hamilton (@Shaunhamilton87) January 18, 2015

So when a customer, such as Shaun Hamilton in our example tweet above wants to upgrade his existing service but finds that he can’t get a particularly good deal because such deals are only available to new subscribers it is easy to see how he may be tempted to up sticks and leave.

Regardless of the fact that all ISPs sting leaving customers with an admin fee , typically around £30, it is possible to make big savings in the first year of a new service. As well as attractive (free even) monthly rates in the first year up front incentives can often be over £100 in terms of cashback or a shopping voucher.

If you are going for a high end TV package the savings can occasionally exceed £300 in the first year, if you catch the offer at the right time.

One wonders what effect this has on churn. Apart from the occasional sporting package most of the ISPs offer similar TV packages, at least those that do TV, so it’s not as if the big consumer players have that much in the way of exclusive content. Sport seems to be the one exception here and although Sky Sports is available via most ISPs BT have been building up some exclusivity with their rugby coverage.

It’s a difficult equation to manage. All ISPs assume a certain level of customer churn. One wonders whether churn generated by over-gilding the lilly for new customers might get out of hand. At least they can control this as they can just reduce their attractiveness to newbies.

It’s a difficult marketplace. You can check out the latest deals over at BROADBANDRating.

End User gadgets

Of mice and, well mice

The wireless mouse conundrum

I haven’t bought a mouse for donkeys years. In fact I’m not sure I’ve ever bought a mouse. There has always been one around to use. This weekend I found it convenient to buy a mouse. I’ve been borrowing one of the kids’ and he has understandably periodically been nicking it back.

In order to purchase a mouse I went to MiceRUs otherwise known as Maplin in Lincoln. Maplin is a shop you can happily browse in for hours before buying what you originally went in for. Niche cable fittings sit comfortably next to remote controlled helicopters, disco sound gear, electric heaters and a plethora of other useful and essential gadgets and paraphernalia of modern living.

Eventually I found my way to the mice section of the shop. I wasn’t expecting there to be a mice section. I thought it would be a couple of plastic boxes on a shel next to other PC accessories. Nope. Mice had their own section. There were roughly twenty different products on shale at prices ranging from a tenner to fifty quid.

This is a problem. How on earth do you chose from such a range of devices all of which essentially do the same thing. Moreover they were all wireless mice. I’d thought that the choice would be wired versus wireless and maybe a couple of colour options. Nope. It was all wireless. Yes colour options but no wired. I didn’t really mind the absence of a wired mouse. Hey we all have to move on. My problem was how on earth do you choose.

I flagged down a passing expert member of staff who was able to offer advice. They major on staff training at Maplin. “You have to choose one that feel right in your hand” he said. Only problem is they are all contained in the rigid plastic wrapping that requires a combination of uber sharp chisel and a pneumatic drill to open.

Staring at the display for another minute or so I ended up buying a red one. Not the cheapest one, at £15 but I figured I didn’t want to be seen as a cheapskate. Anyway I got home, dug out my set of chisels and am now the proud possessor of a new cordless mouse. It works.

The photo below is of the wireless mouse in situ next to the Chromebook. Enjoy:)

Business ecommerce End User mobile apps

Online life – more trust being placed in mobile devices & airbnb

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 8 January, 2015
No Comments on Online life – more trust being placed in mobile devices & airbnb

In which I book a flat in Paris using airbnb

Had a really good online experience last night. The Davies’ are off to Paris for Easter to celebrate our daughter’s 21st birthday (I know I know I don’t look old enough). She will already be there so transport and accommodation for the remaining five of us ain’t cheap and takes a bit of shopping around. I booked Eurostar and then looked for accommodation for 5 people

The daughter will have a flat in Paris by then and the small army of mates she has invited over will be laying claim to that space. A hotel can get expensive. An apartment was the answer.

I ended up on www.airbnb.co.uk for the first time. I’m not into renting a room in someone’s house whilst they are there but airbnb also do whole house rentals. I booked 2 flats. One for the week that we go over at the beginning of Feb to do some flat hunting, open a bank account and get an NI number. The second for the family for Easter weekend (bear with me).

I found a nice 3 bedroom place in Montmartre but needed clarification as to what constituted a “bedroom”. You see some places where a curtain down the middle of the room turns that room into a 2 bedroom flat and one of the beds is an airbed. I’m after quality.

I sent a question to the owner and retired upstairs. In bed an sms came in with the answer. 3 proper bedrooms with proper beds. Sorted. I was going to leave the booking until the morning but noticed a red button on my phone inviting me to confirm and pay for the reservation there and then.

Clicking on the button took me to the Play Store, downloaded the airbnb app and let me finish off the transaction. Totally seamless. A serious joy to use.

This ranks with Uber as one of my recent “discoveries” of highly useful and functional mobile applications. I also now manage my bank account from my mobile.

The point is that up until fairly recently I wouldn’t have touched financial transactions with a bargepole when using my mobile. I didn’t consider it a secure enough device. Now I’m spending thousands of pounds at the click of a button.

What’s changed. First of all the bank made a point of stressing that it would cover any losses incurred as a result of use of the phone app. That was good enough for me. That also removed the barriers for me to use the phone for other financial transactions.In fact these days I am far less reticent about storing my credit card details with online retailers than I used to be.

My phone really is becoming my global personal management device. I do everything through it. I also use 2 Chromebooks. One in the office and one at home. I used to think that the phone would one day replace a PC. All it would take would be a screen and a dock next to the keyboard – see my CES 2012 non report which mentions this.

Reality is that is what I already have. The Chromebook, which is a considerably cheaper device than my phone, is effectively that keyboard and docking device in one. That’s because nothing of real value is stored locally on either my phone or my Chromebook. It’s all in the cloud.

If push came to shove I could do without my Chromebook, as long as I had my phone. This actually sits quite nicely with my CES 2015 post earlier this week. In that post I discussed the fact that we never see revolutionary new products at such trade shows. However mature products can eventually look revolutionary when you look back and compare them with their functionality at launch. I used the iPhone as an example.

Now I look at the whole concept of the mobile device and see that it really has become the stand out revolutionary gadget that makes a huge difference. I’m not sure that the current “wearable” revolution/fad is going to have the same legs. Unless wearable devices are just the evolution of the mobile phone form factor and we have a cheap and perhaps disposable User Interface device to replace what we now call a handset.

I can envisage walking in to a room and using a display in that room in order to see the emails/IM/video coming in on my by now tiny handset that sits in my watch or on my keyring. We already have the prototype of such displays with the TV and the Chromecast.

I have regular hangouts with my daughter who currently lives in Toledo (she gets around). I see no reason why these hangouts shouldn’t happen on the TV, voice-controlled. We are almost there. Slap low cost displays around the house and you could do the same thing in any room. The only thing missing is the camera on top of the display. Mere detail.

This all came about from finding that airbnb was a joy to use. Life really is now all about the mobile device and the cloud¹.

I’m digressing a bit but the one surprising change in the market is the reduced dominance of the mobile service providers. Telecoms services are rapidly homogenising into a single service set with fixed line broadband perhaps being the leading play. Mobile/cellular connectivity is just something you use when nowhere near a wifi connection (that’s the way it’s going even if it isn’t quite there yet. It’s certainly true where home use is concerned).

It’s a tough old game, telecoms. For years telcos have been fighting against the race to the bottom. Who can provide he cheapest services. To counter this they have tried to introduce added value services. TV is the only successful such service that people are willing to pay for.

The telcos problem is that for a service to be a winner, such as airbnb and Uber it has to be independent of the telco. These revenue streams are denied to them.

Back to the science fiction of now almost the only thing that is really stopping me reducing my reliance on the old fashioned keyboard UI is the fact that an open office isn’t the right place to hold a conversation with your display. I also don’t want to spend my whole day talking to a computer. Furthermore voice recognition tech will really need to do something about ending sentences. On my droid I have to say “period”. Who on earth calls a full stop a period???

Mere detail…

¹ yes yes ok I know life is really all about happiness and wellbeing etc with a dose of number 42 thrown in for good measure:)

End User piracy

List of websites blocked by Virgin Media due to court orders

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Friday, 12 December, 2014
No Comments on List of websites blocked by Virgin Media due to court orders

Taken from the Virgin Media website.

Found this and thought you might be interested. List of websites blocked by Virgin Media due to court orders. No comment really. I don’t support copyright infringement. Easy to circumvent the blocks though. I wonder how effective they are. Potentially a lot of work for the ISP for little or no return.

Date of Sealed Court Order	Identity of parties who obtained the Order	Blocked Websites
27/04/2012	Members of BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited and of Phonographic Performance Limited	The Pirate Bay
05/07/2012	Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)	Newzbin2
28/02/2013	Members of BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited and of Phonographic Performance Limited	KAT or Kickass Torrents websites
28/02/2013	Members of BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited and of Phonographic Performance Limited	H33t
28/02/2013	Members of BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited and of Phonographic Performance Limited	Fenopy
26/04/2013 and 19/07/2013	Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)	Movie2K Download4All
01/07/2013	Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)	EZTV
16/07/2013	The Football Association Premier League Limited	First Row Sports
08/10/2013	Members of BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited and of Phonographic Performance Limited	Abmp3 BeeMp3 Bomb-Mp3 eMp3World Filecrop FilesTube Mp3Juices Mp3lemon Mp3Riad Mp3skull NewAlbumReleases Rapidlibrary
08/10/2013	Members of BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited and of Phonographic Performance Limited	1337x BitSnoop ExtraTorrent Monova TorrentCrazy TorrentDownloads TorrentHound Torrentreactor Torrentz
30/10/2013	Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)	Primewire Vodly Watchfreemovies
30/10/2013	Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)	YIFY-Torrents
30/10/2013	Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)	Project-Free TV (PFTV)
13/11/2013	Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)	SolarMovie Tube+
18/02/2014	Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)	Viooz website Megashare website zMovie website Watch32 website
4/11/2014	Members of BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) Limited and of Phonographic Performance Limited	Bittorrent.am BTDigg Btloft Bit Torrent Scene Limetorrents NowTorrents Picktorrent Seedpeer Torlock Torrentbit Torrentdb Torrentdownload Torrentexpress TorrentFunk Torrentproject TorrentRoom Torrents TorrentUs Torrentz Torrentzap Vitorrent
19/11/2014	Members of the MPA (Motion Picture Association of America Inc)	Watchseries.It Stream TV Watchseries-online Cucirca Movie25 Watchseries.to Iwannawatch Warez BB Ice Films Tehparadox Heroturko Scene Source Rapid Moviez Iwatchonline Los Movies Isohunt Torrentz.pro Torrentbutler IP Torrents Sumotorrent Torrent Day Torrenting BitSoup Torrent Bytes Seventorrents Torrents.fm YourBittirrent Tor Movies Demonoid Torrent.cd Vertor Rar BG

List of websites blocked by Virgin Media due to court orders. By introducing filtering functionality do you run the risk of accidentally blocking innocent websites? Quite possibly.

End User food and drink fun stuff

Happy birthday me

As most of you know I’m normally a quiet, softly spoken kind of guy. I don’t shout out about things like it being my birthday. I’m 53 today.

Not entirely sure what to think or say. It’s either borderline mid fifties or early fifties, or both. I quite like it being my birthday. Fifties feels respectable although you and I both know that is hardly the case, innit.

I’m spending the night of my birthday having a quiet steak and chips in with Mrs Davies and our two youngest. The other two are away. There are enough parties going on to merit not bothering with one for my actual birthday which in any case a school night.

We began the party season last Thursday in Town with the ITSPA Xmas lunch. That was followed by our by now traditional (since at least 25 years ago) Xmas Market Party on the Saturday night of the Lincoln Christmas Market. We sing carols, drink lots and have a jammin’ session afterwards. I’m lucky enough to have musical kids and together with friends we mustered trumpet, piano, sax, geetar and drums.

Sunday night was a similar party at some friends. This week it’s the big one – the #trefbash2014 which in effect lasts two days. Saturday is a 50th birthday party black tie job.

The last week of term I already have local after work party invites on Monday (OpenPlan) and Tuesday (Wright Vigar) . Thursday is my annual carol singing night at The Morning Star in Lincoln followed by Jazz. We also have the LONAP board coming over that night. On the Friday night I have the launch party of The Lincoln A2Z Project. This is something I have been involved with for the last two years, writing 52 creative pieces for radio. Google it.

On the Saturday night we have a party at the Brittains around the corner on Curle Avenue and on Sunday we leave to visit parents and do the Christmas thing. Unfortunately that involves non stop partying until 30th December at which point we return home and immediately go out to a Pylons Gig at the West End Tap.

We don’t do New Year’s Eve so that is pretty much our quiet night in of the whole holiday season. I think Anne would like to do New Year’s Eve but tbh I’m a miserable bugger. Good thing probably.

So that’s it. It’s my birthday and a quiet night in with the kids beckons. I will need to build up my energy in time for #trefbash2014. The featured image gives you a taste of what’s in store!

Early doors anyone?

ecommerce End User

Black Friday stuff

Black’s Black Friday – 15% off full priced items

I was lying in bed this morning when Black Friday was all over the news. If this blog is the only media you ever take notice of you need to know that Black Friday is an Americun import designed to try and make people rush to spend money by thinking they are getting fantastic deals on stuff.

So I picked up my trusty phone and looked up Tesco online. Not with a view to buying anything you realise. What do I need? Just to see what kind of bargains were available. Oo, Tesco’s website was busy and I couldn’t get on it. At 7.30 in the morning. People need to get a life!

In the interest of research I went on Amazon. I could access Amazon.co.uk. That’s what happens when you own a massively scalable cloud resource. Nothing on there to buy that jumped out of the page though so I visited PC World. The “bargains” on PC World appeared to all have 10% off. Oh.

Now don’t get me wrong. 10% off is a good thing but it doesn’t really seem to be the level of discount that should justify the hype around “Black Friday”. Maybe I’m just an ungrateful sod. Maybe these products are already sold at such competitive prices that it’s difficult to knock the price down any further. No so sure about that when you consider the manufacturing costs of electronics these days must be rock bottom – just look at the components of my dissected Chromebook in yesterday’s post. PC World seems a bloated inefficient organisation to me (allegedly, own opinion etc). Never make the mistake of telling them you are buying something for your business. It takes about 15 minutes to process a credit card when 5 seconds is the norm.

I’m sure that if you shopped around online you would probably find that product you were considering clicking “buy” for available elsewhere at that Black Friday reduced price. Time spent doing due diligence for product purchases online has replaced time spent wandering around the shops. At least in my world it has. Especially when it comes to buying train tickets. Let’s not go there.

Just to round off this somewhat negative post I’d like to share with you the fact that my walk to work takes me by Blacks, the outdoors shop. Their window dressing was using “Cyber weekend” as their promo as opposed to Black Friday. Obvs trying to avoid confusion. I think they missed a trick. They could have called it “Blacks Friday” and demonstrated leadership.

Blacks’ Cyber weekend promo is a perfect example of what I’ve been talking about in this post. They are offering 15% off “full priced” items. Who buys full priced items these days? Maybe I’m just tight…

broadband End User

Calling the fibre broadband rollout team

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 17 November, 2014
No Comments on Calling the fibre broadband rollout team

B4RN broadband BT rural broadband reinvestment B4RN business model broadband vision

Fibre broadband rollout not reaching “parts that other rollouts cannot reach”

My heart goes out Jazz – see tweet below. We hear that metropolitan areas get new tech rollouts because of their population densities make the return on investment faster and more attractive than say rural areas.

@SkyHelpTeam hence why I would like to speak direct to the rollout team. What is stopping a borough of London moving to the 21st century?

— Jazz (@jazzjuttlay) November 15, 2014

Reality is not all city slickers get the fast stuff early. There are many possible explanations for this. For example Jazz could be unfortunate enough to live near an industrial estate.

BT tend not to upgrade cabs next to industrial estates because compared to residential there will be fewer subscribers in a given area. The cynics amongst you will no doubt say the real reason is that BT want to keep selling businesses their more expensive Ethernet services. Come now. Surely not.

Another reason could be purely logistical. There could be a problem with the existing cab., planning permission issues maybe, a blocked duct or insufficient power. It could be that the cost to BT of sorting out the problem was such that they prefer to spend their money elsewhere

Unfortunately for Jazz it isn’t just a question of having a word with the fibre broadband rollout team. BT would have so many people wanting to talk with that fibre broadband rollout team that they would never get any work done.

We can only hope that BT hasn’t actually finished in Jazz’s area and moved on leaving him as one of an unfortunate few left on the legacy “normal” broadband.

In all fairness to BT they are cracking on with their fibre broadband rollout generally (I know @Cyberdoyle will have a go at me for calling to fibre broadband but hey…).

The purists amongst us will not settle for less than Fibre to the Premises but that is another story..

Ciao amigos. Skinny latte in the trendy coffee show around the corner anyone?

End User security

Potential TalkTalk Router Security Flaw?

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 13 November, 2014
No Comments on Potential TalkTalk Router Security Flaw?

Interesting tweet describing a potential TalkTalk router security flaw

Picked this one up on Twitter. It describes a potential TalkTalk router security flaw. I can’t for the life of me think how this scenario happens unless somehow TalkTalk are using the same IP address for more than one router – I guess with Dynamic IP addresses it will happen.

If that was the case then he certainly shouldn’t be able to access the router. Suggests there is a default username and password in play. Maybe the routers are only locked down from people outside the TalkTalk network. Seems strange to me.

@TalkTalkCare so when I type in the router IP, should I be able to see the details and password of my neighbour’s talktalk router?

— King ♔ Dominic (@CyningDom) November 12, 2014

Should really be locked down for everything. Bit of a worry really especially when you consider that most people will have no idea what is going on. Someone could be browsing your unsecured laptop or phone. Most will be unsecured. Laptops at least. People tend to have a pin number on their phone to stop Fraping.

Anyway though this one was worth sharing. If anyone from TalkTalk engineering would care to comment that would be great. Suspect they will keep stum though and get on sorting it out.

The whole subject of personal security where the internet is concerned is a difficult one. It’s hard for most people to get their brains past anything other than just installing anti virus software and even then it is rarely maintained. ISPs need to take responsibility as far as they can for their customers safety.

It’s in their interest really. The last thing they want is for a customer’s PC to be compromised and to be spamming the world. Gets the ISP blacklisted.

As far as the TalkTalk router security flaw goes I’m sure there must be a simple and innocent explanation. Hope so anyway.

That’s all folks. Ciao bella.

End User fun stuff

Hitler, he only had one ball…

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 11 November, 2014
No Comments on Hitler, he only had one ball…

The Pylons at the Royal Albert Hall

Having spent all last week in Hammersmith at RIPE69 the start of this week saw another two days in London. This time the visit was to see T he Pylons at the Royal Albert Hall at the Music For Youth Festival – the Schools Proms.

I’m very proud to tell you all that my son Joe is a member of The Pylons. Keyboards, trumpet and vocals. The Schools proms are billed as three days of music from the best youth talent in the uk. Ordinarily I wouldn’t blow trumpets like this but last night was a seriously top class evening of musical entertainment and with a totally vested interest I’m doing it anyway.

There were groups there who you could consider to be world class. If we consider The Pylons, each band member is a multi-instrumentalist to a high level. They have all already played the Albert Hall on a number of occasions as members of different youth orchestras and big bands. This showed in the composure and professionalism with which they appeared on stage.

I have no photos of the actual set. I was too busy watching and enjoying the show. The Pylons were accompanied by a cameraman for the whole trip so we will have a professionally done video to show as a souvenir of the day.

Safe to say the show was fantastic. I’m still emotionally exhausted from the evening. I’m sure The Pylons will go on to great things. The lads are still only aged between 16 and 18 and they should see the Albert Hall as just a stepping stone.

Although most of the family headed back to Lincoln and the mundanity of school the next day although Joe was playing the Last Post in the local village remembrance ceremony. I fortunately was able to stay in town to celebrate. We ended up with a 1am finish at The Phoenix Artist Club, venue of the forthcoming trefor.net Xmas Bash. No doubt this has contributed to my exhaustion.

zzz…

End User security

Virgin Media net nanny parental controls make internet unusable

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 10 November, 2014
No Comments on Virgin Media net nanny parental controls make internet unusable

Virgin Media net nanny parental controls cockup

On Saturday Twitter was awash with complaints from Virgin Media customers unable to surf their weekend entertainments. Apparently the Virgin Media net nanny parental control system had gone tits up. Presumably during some maintenance.

Some Tweets for your info – then scroll down for some thoughts on the subject.

Watch out if on @virginmedia as their net nanny web safe is blocking all websites unless you have already disabled it. Sigh!

— Debs Cooper (@debscooper) November 8, 2014

Poor @virginmedia – blocking most of internet on a Sat night, but leaving Twitter online. Didn’t think that one through… #websafe

— Dr Edward Packard (@paxcyclist) November 8, 2014

Hey, @virginmedia why is your websafe bollocks, which I didn’t opt into, blocking half the internet?

— JamesW (@jwrw) November 8, 2014

If @virginmedia websafe is giving you grief, then change your DNS to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

— JamesW (@jwrw) November 8, 2014

The danger with this kind of technology is that it will break the internet. Normally the issue is accidental blocking of legit sites who carry on innocently with their business not knowing that a chunk of their target market has been denied access to them.

Last weekend this was taken to the extreme as most websites were blocked. I don’t really have a problem with parents being able to opt in to parental controls (ie have to switch them on as opposed to others having to switch them off) although it is worth pointing out that any kid with a soupcon of street wisdom will know how to circumvent the system.

At my kids’ school it is a daily battle between teachers and taught to limit access to proscribed sites. More on this kind of subject here and ‘ere.

Also quite a few Twitter fuelled posts that you might find an interesting read over at broadbandrating.

So long…

Apps Business Cloud End User storage backup & dr

office 365 unlimited storage

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 28 October, 2014
No Comments on office 365 unlimited storage

Microsoft message to renegade professionals I'm not a big fan of Microsoft but in fairness to the company they are working hard on making their cloud products competitive. The latest is their announcement of free office 365 unlimited storage

Microsoft announce office 365 unlimited storage

I’m not a big fan of Microsoft but in fairness to the company they are working hard on making their cloud products competitive. The latest is their announcement of free office 365 unlimited storage. Course it isn’t free. It costs. £5.99 a month for a single user or £7.99 a month for a household of up to 5 persons. This sounds like a very good deal to me considering a single copy of Microsoft Office can cost over a hundred quid (or it was when I last bought one).

Apart from being an aggressive move in a market that they absolutely have to succeed at, and which indications suggest they are not doing badly, the great thing for me is what this is likely to do for the competition. A Google account is free for personal users and it gives you most of the functionality of Microsoft Office, although I accept that the equivalent Google features may not be as mature and functional.

With Google though you only get 15GB free storage. I worked out earlier this year that the free Google account with a Terabyte of storage is around £70 a year. Whilst a Terabyte isn’t unlimited it’s not far off at the moment, to all intents and purposes.

Maybe £70 is the base market price for this kind of cloud service. Most people won’t need a Terabyte, or an unlimited amount of storage, at the moment. I use around 400MB on my NAS box and that is mostly photos. If I had unlimited storage I might start to push the boundaries on what I choose to store.

I’ve no idea what that is at the moment. It might, for example, mean I get a CCTV app that keeps all the video footage ¹ ever recorded by the camera/s. A bit of a waste but why not. It’s free. Add to that the fact that unlimited usage broadband packages have become the norm and hey presto, all barriers removed.

In one sense Microsoft might be making a rod for their own backs here but I think it is great. It can only be of benefit to us all. Where does this all go? What happens when everyone’s product looks the same and costs the same? I suspect that we will start to see differentiated cloud services, speed of access, mining tools maybe. But that is all in the future. For the moment it’s well done Microsoft. Competition is good.

They still have a lot of work to do on their mobile strategy though…

¹ use of the word footage seems somewhat anachronistic

End User phones

A week with Oneplus One CyanogenMod in the UK

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 20 October, 2014
No Comments on A week with Oneplus One CyanogenMod in the UK

After I got my Samsung Galaxy S4 back from the menders, again, the screen was fixed but the microphone seems to have been totally jiggered. At least broken enough to not be able to rely on it for phone calls. A little research and the Oneplus One CyanogenMod jumped out of the web page at me.

I was thinking Google Nexus 5 but that handset had been around a while and we were waiting for the Nexus 6 to be launched. The Oneplus One CyanogenMod had great reviews, better than the Nexus 5 due to being newer, and I could get a 64GB version for £270! Nobrainer I thought.

Oneplus One had different ideas. You can’t buy a Oneplus On CyanogenMod UK without being sent an invite by someone who already has one. Doh! I decided not to. What a terrific marketing ploy!

A week later and I gave up on my SGS4. I found that I did actually need to talk to people every now and again. Even if I used VoIP over WiFi I still needed the microphone to work. Twitter found me someone with a Oneplus One invite and I ordered.

I paid for express delivery but this still took a few days. It came from the good ole US of A. When it did arrive the packaging was great – fair play. Setup time was short though I did find that not all the apps I had previously installed on my Galaxy S4 automatically ported to the Oneplus One. With hindsight this was a good thing as I probably had too many apps I didn’t use on the old phone.

The biggest complaint about the Samsung is the bloatware. You don’t get this with the Oneplus One CyanogenMod. Whizzing through the gallery is v quick. There are a few things I think are greats and others not so.

Great is the fact that I can turn on the camera from the lock screen by just swiping the icon. You can also do this from standby mode by drawing a circle on the screen. The camera comes on. Yay. V handy for taking snaps of something you need to be able to respond quickly to and far better than having to enter a pin number.

You can also turn the torch on and off by drawing a V on the phone in standby mode. A sideways V or arrow switches on the music player. This can be a bad thing as I have occasionally found the torch on in my pocket and likewise the music.

The fact that the lock screen has options also sometimes makes it difficulet to enter a pin number – you only have to catch the edge of the screen with your palm and it thinks you are after the camera instead.

Another negative is that fact that the Oneplus One doesn’t support O2 4G bands in the UK. Seeing as I can’t get 4G in my home town Lincoln this seems to be a relatively small price to pay. It would work if I was on EE.

Doesn’t really matter though. This phone cost £270, it has the spec of a high end job and feels great in the hand. I do sometimes find I have it the wrong way round but hey. It doesn’t matter. Power consumption seems good – not a particularly scientific test but at least a whole day in my experience so far.

The Nexus 6 has now been announced. I may also buy one of those and use the Oneplus One as a backup. Having had to be without a handset (I don’t call the Samsung Galaxy Mini a handset!) for periods of up to ten days whilst getting my own fixed it is clear that I can’t function without one. This isn’t an admission of weakness. It’s life Jim.

Stay tuned…

Tags Android

End User H/W phones voip voip hardware Weekend

VoIP Hardware: Giving a British Icon a 21st Century Makeover

Post author By Mark Williams
Post date Wednesday, 8 October, 2014
No Comments on VoIP Hardware: Giving a British Icon a 21st Century Makeover

Repurposing a 20th Century British classic for the new millennium.

Trefor.net is pleased to welcome “VoIP Week” contributor Mark Williams, Director of Sales at Obihai Technology.

The GPO746 is loved by many – it’s hard to ignore the classic look and high quality construction of the original — but with most of us now using VoIP it is often left to sit there as an ornament and gather dust. But we can give it a 21st century upgrade!

The GPO poses a few challenges for VoIP hardware enthusiasts. First, it requires a ring capacitor to drive the bells when it rings. Also, the GPO is a rotary dialer, which most modern ATAs don’t support. But where there is a will there is a way, and here I will offer detail on two approaches that can be taken to ready this classic for the world of IP.

The Easy Approach

The easiest way to get your classic phone to work with VoIP is to plug all the adapters inline, external to the phone. To convert the rotary dial clicks into DTMF you can use a Dialgizmo, a device that sits inline between the ATA and the phone. It works well, though it will occasionally detect the hook flash as a “1” and send the DTMF so you need to be careful when taking the handset off hook.

Along with the Dialgizmo you’ll need to find a ring capacitor. You can either purchase an inline ring capacitor from an online store, or you can repurpose a master socket if you have one lying around.

Finally you’ll need an ATA.

mw1-GPO746 plugged into a re-used master socket — The GPO746 plugged into a re-used master socket, which in turn in plugged into the Dialgizmo, which is plugged into an Obihai OBi202 ATA.

Using this simple conversion approach you can get your classic phone working over VoIP. But you want a more elegant solution, I hear you say?

The Advanced Approach

You say you don’t fancy having a string of adapters connected to your classic phone? Well, if you are handy with a soldering iron, the Rotatone offers another method, an integrated solution, installed inside your GPO746. And if you’re not handy with a soldering iron, don’t worry – they also have a service where you can send in your classic phone to have the Rotatone and a ring capacitor installed (after making a ham-fisted attempt at soldering — It’s been many years — I chose the send-in option).

The Rotatone is the black box on the left. It is wired between the rotary dialer and the control board of the GPO746.

The Rotatone has the advantage of not suffering from hook switch triggering DTMF tones, and having the ring capacitor installed in the device also removes another item from the daisy chain between the phone and the ATA.

So how about we go a step further an install the ATA within our classic phone as well!

The OBi200 (and OBi300) ATA both fit perfectly between the hook switch of the GPO746. If we remove the line cable from our phone we can wire this plug internally straight into the back of the ATA and route the power for the OBi via the line cable’s port. Rather than drill into the case to create a hole for an Ethernet cable we can instead plug an OBiWiFi adapter into the back of the ATA to allow it to operate wirelessly.

We now have our WiFi-enabled GPO746 IP Phone, repurposed and ready for the 21st century. And you can even take it a step further by installing an OBiBT USB adapter into the USB port. To do this you’ll need to use a USB hub to allow plugging the OBiWiFi and OBiBT adaptors into the one port. If you can find a place to squeeze that in you will have a GPO746 that’s not only wireless but that can also pair with your mobile phone via Bluetooth.

So what are you waiting for? Winter is just around the corner, and there are few better excuses for spending an afternoon converting your phone in a small room filled with solder fumes. Best of luck!

broadband End User

BROADBANDRating soft launch – feedback welcomed

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 1 October, 2014

The BROADBANDRating soft launch happens today folks.

Today is the BROADBANDRating soft launch. BROADBANDRating is a new trefor.net property that seeks to help consumers with their choice of broadband provider. Rather than being site that just compares broadband deals we want to help people decide which ISP to go for.

This is actually quite a difficult task after all there are basically only two flavours of networks in the UK: Virgin Media and BT and most products are the same. For the purposes of this activity we aren’t including the small emerging players who have a limited geographic coverage. All the big ISPs offer highly competitive packages, eg free Fibrebroadband for 12 months (!!!), and occasionally they chuck in amazing sign up deals. For example at the moment TalkTalk are offering £100 worth of Love2shop vouchers to go with an already cheap deal whether you choose regular broadband or Fibre broadband (sorry to lapse into non ADSL2+ and FTTC speak – this consumer game is affecting me :)).

The site is probably only 30% finished but it is good enough to get us started kicking a few tyres. The idea is that we have different metrics that we use to judge an ISP’s service. Initially these include “Phone Answer”, plainly speaking how long it takes a helpdesk to answer the phone, and “Social Media Rating”.

Working on “Phone Answer” has been quite interesting not all providers work the same way. Some ask for a minimal amount of information before sticking you in the call queue. On the other hand others, and Virgin Media specifically spring to mind here, take you through an IVR tree that includes some diagnostics. When emerging from the IVR queue the phone is answered immediately. This has to go down as a highly responsive service on the part of Virgin but is still involves queuing time. We just record the time it takes to get to a human because I think that is what most people will want. All ISPs are called at roughly the same time of day which may differ each day. The response times are converted into star ratings based on a formula that takes into consideration recent historical data.

The Social Media Rating is essentially Twitter Sentiment Analysis. This has been an eye opener. We use a tool to do a first pass Sentiment Analysis and then run a human check. You certainly couldn’t give the checking job to a minor. The language used can be seriously juicy. It also shows how much people have come to rely on their broadband connection and the emotions brought out when the B*&^%y thing doesn’t work. Some ISPs definitely seem to come out worse than others on Twitter. We expect that we will be able to show who gets more outages over a period of time than others because when this happens Twitter gets flooded with complaints. A week or so later and people may have calmed down. We rate a few thousand tweets a week. We must bear in mind that the ISPs listed have millions of subscribers so the complaining tweets represent only a tiny proportion of their customers. One has to consider how many people just put up with problems without complaint.

Social Media Rating currently attracts a higher weighting than Telephone Answer although we will be monitoring this and perhaps tweaking as we add more metrics. How we specifically rate for each category is listed here on the BROADBANDRating site. Some metrics will change more regularly than others based on the type of data being measured. The site should change most days.

BROADBANDRating is up and running but not yet being shouted about. We would be happy to receive feedback, positive or otherwise about any aspect of the site. The links should all work. Maybe you have some observations about the User Interface. It is still very much work in progress and as already mentioned we are only around 30% of the way through.

Please feel free to click on one and if you like what you see buy the service. There are some amazing deals, and that’s not just me saying. Affiliate Marketing commissions are the name of the game.

PS a few related posts here and here.

Bad Stuff broadband End User

Broadband sentiment analysis

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 23 September, 2014

Broadband sentiment analysis used to examine broadband providers

When you browse an ISP website looking at the packages they have on offer it is really difficult to decide how to choose. By and large they are all very similar. Some may offer different TV bundles and you occasionally see the occasional high street store voucher thrown in as an incentive to sign up. Been trawling through various ISP streams on twitter doing a bit of broadband sentiment analysis. I though this might throw up some real world feedback on specific ISPs that might help people decide on the right one for them.

What came out was quite revealing and makes me glad I no longer work for a broadband service provider. The amount of vitriol that gets heaped on ISPs when their service goes wrong is amazing. It’s no surprise. The same probably happens when there is an electrical outage. People now rely on their internet connection as an utility.

In doing the work it is worth noting that an automated sentiment analysis tool isn’t perfect because computers can’t understand the nuances of human language. Sarcasm for example is very difficult to get right. eg

So and so is a great provider

versus

So and so is a great provider !!!???

Same words but the second would go down as negative sentiment if judged by a human. Because of this some human checking has to be performed. This human checking has brought out some interesting anomalies.

For example this tweet:

@drdeakin: Most reliable network @EE ? Rubbish! 4 mobile contracts plus mobile broadband each month and was about to add a business mobi…

was retweeted 112 times (at the time of writing). I found this curious so looked up @drdeakin. He has 177k followers. No wonder he was getting so many retweets. I also wondered how he got hold of so many followers whilst only following 412 accounts. Was he a celebrity? Turns out he just got married to the mother of someone in “One Direction” – a popular music group, apparently 🙂 (@JohannahDarling with 1.15M followers). On this basis I didn’t consider it fair to apportion negative sentiment to tweets other than the first, although a few did get through early on.

Other tweets were showing positive sentiment but clearly posted by someone with a vested interest. These were discounted (eg “@Exposure4All Get 152Mb broadband, 260+ TV channels & unlimited anytime calls to UK landlines → http://t.co/vYY5LuJFUN http://t.co/Br52f3djA0″ is on the face of it just a sales pitch)

One provider in particular, Plusnet, looked like drowning in complaints. Plusnet suffered a major outage during the window in which I was looking at the tweets. This was exacerbated by the fact that Apple had just released iOS8 and all the fanbois were at it in droves. As such Plusnet came out very badly compared with other ISPs. However this is a constantly changing data set. I know from experience that ISPs occasionally have problems that seem to the huge disasters at the time but they are overcome. A historical trend chart of broadband sentiment analysis should reveal who is the most reliable ISP overall.

ISPs use Twitter as a means of engaging with dissatisfied customers. Twitter is used basically as an alternative inbound means of communication. Some seem to handle it better than others.

These two examples illustrate how:

@BTCare @someukbitch Happy to but need a better description of the problem, whats the problem and is the light on your Hub blue?
@EE @RhodriOR Hi Rhordi, Afraid we can’t help with home broadband queries, Please call on on 0844 873 8586 from your … http://t.co/OCZ4Z8vDYs

In this case BT is doing a good job compared with EE who aren’t making it as easy as they could for their customers.

The one common thread that came out of the analysis was the number of times an engineer didn’t show up. People had usually taken days off work to wait in for the visit. This is pretty unacceptable but is unfortunately a situation that has prevailed for years now. Maintaining the copper broadband network is a nightmare.

I’ll be making the output of this broadband sentiment analysis available quite soon but thought some of my findings were interesting enough to publish beforehand.

broken gear End User Mobile

Broken S4 screen and Oneplus One availability

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Wednesday, 17 September, 2014

Broken S4 screen once again in insurance claim and Oneplus One availability is somewhat of a disappointment.

Broken S4 screen once again. It’s either my second or third breakage since getting the phone. I get it repaired under the insurance that comes with my bank account. Fifty quid.

The last time it went I decided that if it happened again I’d use the opportunity to find a new phone. It’s happened again. I’ve looked around for a new phone.

I don’t need to get a new contract and so would be paying SIM free prices. This is ok except that the functionality of my Galaxy S4 is fine. I don’t feel the need to buy the latest and greatest just to have a slightly more curved screen or an optimised power button position – you know what I mean. These new phones offer very little over and above those introduced a year or so ago. If they offered unbreakable screens that might be different.

So I looked around. My instinctive port of call was the Nexus 5. A Google phone without the bloatware. To my surprise I found a newer better cheaper Android phone called the Oneplus One. Great power consumption, great processor etc and running Android CynaogenMod. Looked perfect on the face of it.

In town I popped in to Carphone Warehouse to see if I could touch and feel one. They had never heard of it. That rang a small alarm so I went home and did some more research. It’s mostly released in the US of A but can be easily imported. However the it has a limited support for 4g frequencies and will only give you the higher data rates on O2 and 3 in the UK. I’m with O2 but don’t want to restrict myself from moving in the future. An issue but not a showstopper.

The showstopper for me came when I tried to order one. I couldn’t. Take a look at their webpage. I either had to be invited to buy one by an existing owner or enter a competition. I’m sure that with my vast array of social media contacts I could find someone, or someone who knew someone with a oneplus one.

Tbh I can’t be bothered. It isn’t compelling enough to go to the effort. I’ve paid the fifty quid to repair my broken s4 screen. I’ll wait. Either they will bring out a version with more UK frequencies and launch it without the faff or Google will bring out a new Nexus 5. I hear they have stopped making the existing Nexus 5.

I’ve got loads of posts on broken phones over the years. It seems to be a common thread especially for the Samsung Galaxy range. Check out the category here.

End User net neutrality

Namecheap promotes Net Neutrality in USA

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 2 September, 2014

namecheap net neutrality video ISP traffic management

Namecheap Net Neutrality video simplifies the message to the man in the street.

Net Neutrality as a subject could provide enough posts for a stand alone blog. Probably does somewhere. There are certainly enough posts on the subject on this site including this recent one from Pete Farmer. Was chatting to Matt Russell of hosting and domain name co Namecheap (and trefor.net) this morning who mentioned that a Namecheap Net Neutrality video was going live this afternoon. The above YouTube video is the outcome.

The Net Neutrality debate has to a large extent been the demesne of industry. Network operators and content providers in the main. This Namecheap video is a very good attempt to get the message about Net Neutrality across to the man in the street who probably doesn’t understand the issue. The issue, if you are one of those men in the street, is that telcos want to charge content providers for delivering their content reliably to you. Telcos want to do this because delivering an ever greater amount of content is costing them money. There is a very recent example where OTT video provider Neteflix has had to pay telco Comcast to provide sufficient bandwidth to meet their streaming needs.

This was not a very good precedent but Netflix were caught in a difficult position. They needed to be able to guarantee a certain quality of picture to their customers. Comcast also provide their own video services so arguably this could be seen as being anti-competitive. The point of course is that the customer, in this case of both Comcast and Netflix is already paying for the bandwidth.

The biggest issue is that this could be just the tip of the iceberg. We could end up with a multilayer internet where some people who can afford it get a better service that others. This is certain to stifle innovation in internet services where start-ups might be unable to pay to guarantee the delivery of their product.

End User internet Legal net neutrality

Consumer Rights and Net Neutrality

Post author By Peter Farmer
Post date Monday, 1 September, 2014

Consumer Rights is a far less toxic term than Net Neutrality.

I’ve previously written for Trefor.Net on the subject of Net Neutrality and what it means to members of the VoIP community. And I think it’s high time for an update, but this time considering consumer rights.

After a promising start the European Union went off the rails, passing a first reading of a text that essentially outlawed 4G services. VoLTE requires prioritisation. Hard line elements on the subject of “net neutrality” managed to convince a strange coalition that it was a good idea to promote their ideological definition just before an election. It was spun as a vote winner, this despite that fact that 999 calls would no longer be treated differently. Consumer rights being protected, were they?

Unforeseen consequences at their worse, which is why I believe that net neutrality is now a toxic term and should be avoided. In fact, I’ve worked on briefing documents that are four pages long that completely avoid the term. I also try to avoid “Open Internet” for similar reasons, as both — as I’ve written before — mean different things to different people.

That’s where consumer rights come into play.

What we want is a level playing field. We want a distribution system for content that doesn’t discriminate against certain types of lawful content for vested reasons. Most of all, we don’t want people misled, and we want consumer rights upheld.

If you ask the average consumer on the street whether Skype and YouTube are part of the internet, anyone other than a recent immigrant from Outer Mongolia that would no doubt answer “no”. By extension, I defy you to find anyone, other than hardcore employees of EE and Vodafone, who would suggest that internet access does not include access to Skype, YouTube, or similar services.

Remember the outrage when people were buying 15 burgers for 99p and it transpired that those burgers were made from horses? It’s the same thing. It’s a basic principle of consumer law that you don’t mislead at the point of sale; be it overtly or through trickery in the small print. Consumer rights need to be protected.

This is why I was so heartened to see Philip Davies MP (Conservative member of Parliament for Shipley) build upon his great performance sticking it to Ed Richards (Ofcom CEO – 40 minutes into the video on the link) on the subject by tabling an amendment to the latest consumer rights bill. This amendment basically just said that you can’t call something “internet” unless it complies with the spirit of everything I’ve said before. For those who are interested, the amended stated;

A term which has the object or effect of permitting a trader to block, restrict or otherwise hinder the access of a consumer to any lawful Electronic Communications Network or Electronic Communications Service on the basis of an unreasonable or unusual definition of “internet access”, “data”, “web access” or similar word or phrase. Nothing in this prohibition shall affect filters for the purpose of child protection.

Electronic Communications Network or Electronic Communications Service shall have the same meaning as in the Communications Act 2003.

Philip Davies MP is a libertarian Conservative and as a result is one of my favourite MPs. This means he’s often at polar opposites to Her Majesty’s Opposition and an uncomfortable bed fellow with their coalition partners. That makes it even more incredible that the amendment was gladly supported by both the Shadow Minister, Helen Goodman MP and Julian Huppert MP (Liberal Democrat Member for. Cambridge and a good advocate for the technological community). A rare moment of cross party backbench support that, alas, was defeated without Government support, which is still backing the self regulation horse.

All the amendment sought to do was to ensure that the likes of Vodafone and historically EE would be unable to call a spade anything other than a spade and that consumer rights would be upheld. As such, defeat was a great disappointment.

In any event, word on the street is that there may soon be new signatories to the Broadband Stakeholder Group’s Open Internet Code of Conduct. The amendment may get re-tabled in the House of Lords. And The Council of Europe may well get its ducks back in a row.

The battle is one that is very much being fought on three fronts, however the momentum is now behind those of us who just want a level playing field to compete on. Who knows, it might even be over by Christmas.

Tags consumer, EU, European Union, net neutrality, Skype, voip, YouTube

End User google mobile connectivity phones

Mobile Phone in Spain – Holiday Tech

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 1 September, 2014

Mobile phone in Spain is very useful whilst on holiday – this post was written mostly in the shade by the pool.

Some of you will have noted on my Facebook timeline that I have been on holiday for most of August. At the moment I’m in Cala D’Or in Mallorca. Sat in the shade on the hotel terrace looking down on a moored yacht. Abba in the background:) The use of my mobile phone in Spain proved indispensable.

When we got here the first thing I did was to establish the comms position. Hotel WiFi was cheap at only 10 Euros per device for the 12 days of our stay. However I didn’t want to encourage to the kids to spend all their time on their laptops so I opted for the 1 free hour a day per person.

Next thing I did was source a Spanish sim. Mobistar 1GB for 20 Euros. I needed it to work the sat nav. We had a private transfer from the airport when we landed and had a hire car delivered to the hotel the following day. I needed the Sat Nav to make sure I could find my way back to the hotel the following day after picking up the heir who was arriving a day afer us.

As it turned out the Mobistar sim came in handy for other purposes. Kid3’s specs broke and the nearest optician was in the next town. I found the optician using google and then maps to get there. I took a pic of the street sign in case I couldn’t find my way back to the car.

I also did this in the huge underground car park in the centre of Palma. At least I took a pic of the parking bay number so that I couldn’t forget where I parked – easily done when you are using a hire car. Interesting to see car parks with red and green lights above each bay to indicate whether there was space.

The optician couldn’t fix the specs so we hunted down a supermarket using google maps to buy some superglue. We then used google translate to find out the spanish word for glue and showed it to an assistant.

We used TripAdvisor to determine where to eat each evening. By and large this was highly successful. We mostly ended up with great family run restaurants. Cala D’Or is very touristy and there were a lot of places I’d say were transplanted from Benidorm (though I haven’t been to Benidorm) and geared at the Fosters drinker. TV screens all over the place.

Restaurante Selani was #2 on TripAdvisor behind an Ice Cream kiosk at #1. The food was good enough to engender a very positive response from Kid4, the gastronome of the family. TripAdvisor did however make us 20 minutes late for the table as it took us to a spot only 60 metres away but across the marina. The 60 metres took 20 minutes to walk!

Every pub and restaurant in Cala D’Or, everywhere we went in Mallorca in fact, had free wifi. Whilst I had my 1GB sim the benefit of the wifi was the automatic backing up of my holiday snaps to Google+ which only happens in WiFi range. Upload was consistently slow though.

With three days of our holiday left I had 120MB left of the 1Gig. MIght just last. Ran out with two days to go. Usage has been pretty linear and has consisted of mostly twitter, facebook, reading the papers and keeping up with email. We also streamed the Halifax v Lincoln City game (3-2 unfortunately) using iPlayer. After the first couple of days we didn’t need to use the sat nav other than to find the occasional restaurant.

Whilst I had some of my bundle left I preferred to use mobile data that any free wifi that might have been on offer. It was clearly based on ADSL with generally poor upload and download. I also noted that the Facebook mobile experience was not very good. It often timed out saying there was no network connection whilst I could access other sites such as the BBC with no trouble.

We left Mallorca with a healthy tan and some great memories. It was noticeable though that our home FTTC based Wifi was so much better. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief when they got their gadgets out at home.

It might be argued that we shouldn’t have needed any connectivity whilst on holiday. However you can see from my experiences above that having a mobile phone in Spain was very useful. This technology is becoming part and parcel of our everyday lives and why shouldn’t you have it. My experience of being without a phone whilst it was being fixed also brought me to the same conclusion. Why shouldn’t we use the tech. It is useful.

That’s it for now. Summer is over, holidays are over (for now) and it’s time to get back to work. There is a fairly packed programme on the blog in the run up to Christmas. Check out the schedule here.

Hasta la vista baby.

broadband End User food and drink fun stuff internet media travel

What I Did On My Summer Holiday (Digital Issue)

Post author By Kory Kessel
Post date Friday, 29 August, 2014

Recounting a (digital) summer holiday, well spent.

I didn’t intend to take a break from writing during this year’s La Famille Kessel summer holiday in Normandy. No, I had plans to regale stalwart trefor.net readers with missives on the nature of my vacation from the digital perspective, intending to carry the content flag for anyone out there hungering for fresh pixelated meat during these dog days of August. Of course, I also planned to put sugar in the Latte Cannelle that just arrived to the left of KoryChrome here at Paris’s RROLL. Not salt.

Offering up the Yiddish proverb my departed mother used to wield easily and quite often, “Man plans and God laughs.”

Failures aside (gee, that was easy), in an attempt to backwards-engineer satisfaction of the aforementioned hunger I will recount five (5) areas of computer-based fun I indulged in around the edges of my mostly unearned R&R over the past four weeks.

<OK. Everybody take a breath. Here we go.>

As an R.E.M. fan(atic) dating back to the 1983’s “Murmur” I was thrilled to learn in May that the band was finally making good on their long-held promise/threat to issue a rarities collection. And in typical R.E.M. style the boys over-delivered, kicking out not one collection but two — Complete Rarities: I.R.S. 1982-1987 (50 tracks) and Complete Rarities: Warner Bros. 1988-2011 (131 tracks). 181 tracks, the equivalent of 18 albums of “new” material. Of course, the fact that I already had 98% of the tracks didn’t make this treasure trove any less interesting, oh no! These two digital “boxsets” represented an UPGRADE opportunity supreme, as well as hours and hours of artwork foraging and data tagging and reconciliation amusement. Just my kind of BIG data.
It seems that every summer for going on who-knows-how-many years I have on some late night or other sat down at my computer determined to finally get a definitive handle on media information delivery. Or, in other words, figuring out how to configure RSS feeds in a way that not only brought links across from my favorite resources in a great many areas, but that did so in a way that allowed me to spend more time benefitting from the deluge than managing it. I hesitate to whether I succeeded this time, but with RSS Notifier in place and tweaked pretty darn well I can say that my hopes are high. If next summer I find myself NOT re-attacking this project, at that time I will know that “Paid” has finally been put to this bill.
The new trefor.net site that you hold in your hands, dear reader, has been praised far and wide, end to end, and in between the cracks (yes, I am the reason the store is out of clichés until next Tuesday). And on the surface it rocks far and wide, end to end…well, etc. Behind the scenes, though, quite a bit of work remains to be done to really get the thing humming. One major effort taking place is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) enhancement/reconciliation for legacy trefor.net posts going back six-plus years, an ongoing task that represented pretty much all of the work I did on the site during August, between opening my throat for copious food and drink intake, forming a marvelous first-impression of Guernsey (the result of a brilliant 4-day holiday-within-a-holiday excursion), and doing whatever-the-heck-else constituted a holiday well taken. Regular visitors to the site will likely not notice any changes to their trefor.net experience, save perhaps for greater crowds milling about the more popular attractions therein.
38+ rolls of film. In the four weeks stretching from 27-July to 24-August I shot over 38 rolls of film. “Holy Shutterbug, Batman!”, you are no doubt thinking, because presented like that the feat sure sounds impressive. And expensive. Leyna the Leica is quite the digital camera, though, so please temper your awe accordingly. Still, I do shoot in RAW and that necessitates that I “develop” the photos into .jpg files, adjusting various photo attributes as necessary (exposure, contrast, shadows, highlights, white and black clipping, saturation, sharpening, noise reduction, and perspective correction, to name far too many), so if you want to let your awe (awe for RAW?) run rampant then by all means please do.
The “La Famille Kessel” cookbook project continued during summer holiday 2014, with 10 recipes added, the appendage of notes and photos to existing content, and even some scant thought paid to eventual production. The collection, an ongoing concern, is an amorphous beast of a thing that will bring together pass-down family and friend recipes and a wealth of those found in key cookbook/magazine/whatever over the years. Promises to be quite the tasty thing when version 1.0 is finally completed…sometime in 2022 or thereabouts, coinciding with the kicking of The Boy out of his broadband-enabled nest.

So in summing up my digital meanderings for summer 2014, it is apparent that it was all about data and databases (about as surprising as water flowing out of the spigot when the tap is turned on). And naturally, we at trefor.net are curious to know what you did to wile away the long days and short nights of summer — nobody will laugh — and thus invite your prolific Comments input. C’mon…have at it!

broadband End User internet Net

Openreach Profit Incentive in Action

Post author By Peter Farmer
Post date Friday, 29 August, 2014

BTOpenreach engineering visit Install ofcom strategic review

Openreach’s sub-contractors may not all be so bad after all.

I finally had BT Infinity installed a few weeks ago. Having watched the installation of Huawei DSLAM at the end of the road some time before that with much anticipation, I pondered how badly BT Openreach and its subcontractors would botch the job and ruin the frontage to our community, while also yearning to finally break beyond the 14 Mbps glass ceiling I have endured for 3 years.

With regular broadband I have been fortunate, being on brand new copper and only 100 yards from the primary connection point with a short run thereafter to the exchange; thus I’ve always had the top end of the advertised broadband speed. My problem was with up, though, not down. Regular readers will know I am a home-based professional nomad, and as such uploading documents to file servers etc. in a timely manner is rather important. 1 or 2 Mbps just doesn’t cut it.

I had done my research and knew that an Openreach engineer would have to visit to install Infinity II. Forums and blogs were full of details about cable models and data extension kits and Openreach engineers having to run new cables through peoples’ houses. In this industry, we would hardly trust them to dress themselves in the morning half the time let alone undertake works in our nicely decorated hallways. I was scared.

Turns out though that the BT Homehub 5 has an integrated cable modem, so that problem went away (and I note it has better in-house coverage for WiFi than its predecessors — I have been fortunate enough to have had a Homehub 2, 3 and 4 and a Businesshub 3 to play with — and it didn’t nerd up VoIP with SIP ALG either). Also, as the cabling in the house is only 3 years old and to modern standards, the engineer felt no need to run a new line or change face plates — useful as it is a large integrated one that includes TV aerial, satellite, etc. — and just plugged it in. The entire installation took about 20 minutes, including the jumpering in the PCP and DSLAM.

What struck me most about my Openreach install was that my neighbour was also having it done in the same installation slot. The engineer visited both premises and did what he had to do onsite, and then visited the PCP/DSLAM to do jumpering just once (i.e., he simultaneously did both jobs). Furthermore, he called me on my mobile from the PCP/DSLAM to check if it was working, thus negating the potential need for going back and forth. Turns out the sync speed is virtually the advertised 76Mbps up down and 19 Mbps ~~down~~ up, with the reality not far off (up is almost dead on, down hovers around 50/60 so far).

The engineer was a sub-contractor to BT Openreach, working for Kelly Communications. These sub-contractors are often derided for cherry picking easy jobs, making out that the customer wasn’t present when they were, so they can complete as many of the low-hanging fruit as possible to boost their profit margins.

I am not sure whether Openreach Direct Labour would’ve had the initiative to simultaneously perform two installations, thus, ultimately, reducing lead times and increasing customer satisfaction. I do know that Openreach Direct Labour, upon realising that there was insufficient copper in the ground between a PCP and the exchange to install a new line in a colleague’s home, had to get another engineer to pull it through and then that engineer couldn’t just provision the line, they had to get another one to do it (no doubt you can imagine how long that sorry saga took). If that job had been sub-contracted, I wonder whether it would’ve been done more efficiently and ultimately to a better level of customer satisfaction?

The incidents we have all endured at the hands of Openreach are many and would shock anyone. Anne Robinson and Watchdog even did a piece on it. Many of these incidents involve sub-contractors, however I think we are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater here as clearly the profit incentive is doing some good in certain circumstances….. it may even work to overcome the inherent moral hazard in the way Openreach’s prices are calculated (i.e., the industry often pays for inefficiency, directly through the charge controls and indirectly through non-Openreach brand damage). Surely, the real challenge is how to we promote the positives and negate the negatives.

Lots of posts on t his site re BT engineering visits – check out this one on BT engineering visit lottery

Tags BT, BT Infinity, Openreach

End User phones

iPhone 6 photo leak points to rounded edges – oh!

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Tuesday, 12 August, 2014

leaked iPhone 6 photo points to rounded edges – analysis

Am on the Isle of Man ferry and have a bit of time to kill. Now that I’ve managed to book tickets for Wales v AllBlacks. This was an achievement that involved an hour’s wait in a queue, most of which was whilst I was also waiting to get on the boat that was 2 hours late leaving Liverpool. Ah well. Being last on and in the Premium Lounge all the papers have already been taken. It doesn’t matter. I have tinternet and most of the other occupants of the lounge look as if they were born pre WW2 and will need the papers to fall asleep to. Having tinternet I’ve landed on the telegraph website and found a headline about a leaked iPhone 6 photo.

The most startling thing about this is that the telegraph considers this to be a front page news. It’s quite sad really. Why should anyone give a toss what the new iPhone 6 photos look like. I think we must surely have reached saturation in the smartphone marketing stakes. There isn’t enough difference between models to make it interesting any more.

It’s a bit like an advert for a car. It just isn’t possible to make a car look interesting or exciting. You will always have dyed in the wool fans who get hyped up bout a particular model but hey. Get life…

In the last 10 years I have only had two cars. One was my N reg Peugeot 406 diesel (250k miles on the clock) and the other is my current job, the Jeep Commander. It came as total bemusement to me to find that a neighbour of ours, who was in a company car scheme, spent weeks studying his options before deciding on a Mondeo. Apparently Mondeos were cool – totally dispels the Mondeo man as boring Mr Average myth.

Someone somewhere has probably been able to retire on the success of the Mondeo advert, I’d imagine. Maybe.

Apple have clearly got the marketing clout to keep their fanbois excited about different iterations of their telephone. At the mo. I’d like to ask you, yes you, does anyone really care. If you do care I suggest you look around for something that will make your life more fulfilling. Like doing a 5,000 piece jigsaw or counting the number of sheets on a toilet roll to make sure that they aren’t short changing you.

You get to see it all on trefor.net. It wasn’t so long ago we released exclusive images of the new Samsung Galaxy S5 logo. If you want to see the leaked iPhone photo check it out here.

End User fun stuff google phones

OK Google – we interrupt this holiday…

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Thursday, 7 August, 2014

OK Google ad on TV made me try it out and it worked brilliantly

An ad for OK Google came on the TV. It was all about where to find the nearest cake shop. I immediately tried it. It worked perfectly. Just liked it did on the telly.

It was astonishingly accurate. I’ve since tried it for other things. The weather forecast for example. I said “OK Google , what’s the weather forecast tomorrow?” it not only came up with the forecast for my postcode but a voice spoke it.

Voice recognition technology has seriously come of age. I remember years ago buying a Dragon voice rec software package. I used to be the Press Officer for Lincoln Rugby Club. I had a theory that I could dictate details of matches onto my Sony voice recorder and then use the voice rec software to turn it into text.

It never worked. In those days the software had to be trained, PCs weren’t powerful enough and in any case there was too much wind noise for it to have a chance.

Given a suitable mobile data connection I think it would work now with me dictating straight into the phone.

Getting back to the weather forecast one has to be glad that it is looking good for the first day of my holiday:) Plenty of time for it to go wrong yet but I’m sure that OK Google will keep me posted.

OK Google isn’t perfect. I just asked it “what should I wear tomorrow?” It came up with clothing advice sites. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted it to to tell me which combination of shorts and tshirt I should get out of the drawer. It’ll get there.

After that it will need to pre-empt my needs by ordering my clothes for me from the shop. Life will be full of surprises.

Ok Google. Time for bed. No answer required. Just letting you know.

End User Regs spam

Electoral register online makes opt in to open register default

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 4 August, 2014

Electoral register online makes opt in to open register default – they are trying to make money out of spammers

I have just finished filling in my details for the electoral register online. I don’t know why I have had to do this. Kid3 has also had to but Wife1 and Kid2 have not. Wossthatallabout? The bumpf they sent says “For all sorts of reasons, some people will not match against existing records (!?) and therefore cannot automatically be transferred automatically to the new register. For example, they may have moved home since the record was last updated, or there may have been a difference in the spelling of the two records“.

Well I haven’t moved home for 17 years – since Kid3 was born and it isn’t as if Huw Trefor Davies is an uncommon name, innit?!

It didn’t take me long to fill out the electoral register online stuff but it would appear that you do have to take care when it comes to the government. They set as default that you want to join the open register. In leaving the box unticked you are giving them permission to sell your details to anyone who wants to spam you.

This is not setting a good example. No wonder the Telephone Preference Service doesn’t work when you have your own government making it easy for people to get hold of our details and to say that you opted in. I didn’t give them my phone number or email address as contact info. If they want to send me something they can do it by mail. I don’t trust them to not give these data to the spammers as well.

Loads of spam related stuff on this site – follow the spam category here. Also check out this post on Tesco spam more expensive than ham. I like the meat variety of spam.

broadband End User

Home broadband deals – how to choose?

Post author By Trefor Davies
Post date Monday, 4 August, 2014

Home broadband deals for consumers getting very competitive – help needed

I’ve been spending some time preparing for the launch of broadbandrating.com. This is a new trefor.net site we are working on to make affiliate advertising revenues from the broadband market. In doing so we’ve been signing up with ISP partners and getting an eyeful of the home broadband deals available. The offers are primarily for consumers but very eyewatering. You’re talking to someone who never looks at his own comms charges.

On Friday I walked past the EE shop in Lincoln and noticed this home broadband deal – see featured image above. £21.25 for unlimited landlines (whatever that means), unlimited broadband, 1000 mobile minutes, international calls (uhuh) and Now TV (I could look it up).

I can’t keep up with the pace of competition in this game. In fact faced with so many offers how on earth do people make their minds up?

I recently booked a family holiday in Mallorca. I spent hours online looking but gave up in the end and remembered there was a Coop travel agent in the nearby Carlton Centre. I popped down there and within ten minutes had opted for a hotel in Cala D’Or. The travel agent had been there and was able to recommend it.

Also a couple of weeks ago I was chatting to a pal of mine who had recently had an agonising six months getting his new office networked with the main one in town. He was crying out for good advice (he should have asked me 6 months previously).

The world is is crying out for good advice. Holidays, business connectivity, even insurance – ever tried to decide on how to choose an insurance policy. There’s small print everywhere!

Where comms are concerned there are so many home broadband deals with tons of stuff bundled in its bewildering. It’s no use going to a comparison website. All you get is a list of deals. These guys just work on volume. They spend a fortune getting themselves up the Search Engine rankings and then rely on a percentage success rate on a high volume of clicks. The consumer isn’t really helped. They still have the problem of staring at the page trying to decide which deal to choose.

We aren’t ready to go live with broadbandrating yet but when we do I’m hoping we will go some why towards helping people with their buying decisions on home broadband deals. It’s long overdue.

Coming back to the blackboard outside the EE shop the offer sounds good but the devil is in the detail and I ain’t going in to that detail right now because I haven’t got it.

Stay tuned…

Tags EE

Apps broadband End User fun stuff H/W internet Mobile Net phones

The Hump Day Five (23-July-2014)

Post author By Kory Kessel
Post date Wednesday, 23 July, 2014

The Hump Day Five this week goes to the pictures, gets the picture, migrates the pictures, wants a phone that takes the pictures, and offers a picture of Paris on Summer holiday.

A few days ago a filmmaker friend of mine asked if I would be interested in screening a rough cut of a documentary he has been working on for some time. I was somewhat flattered that he would ask, of course, and I have quite a strong propensity for documentaries, so I instantaneously responded with “Yes, please.”

Not long after I received the details of screening the documentary, and it was at that point that it all started to tweak my interest beyond the subject matter of the film itself, for two reasons. One, the film was presented to me as a video stream via Vimeo (password access, naturally). And two, my friend specifically requested that I promise to watch the film straight through with no breaks and without distraction.

So this is where we are today. Able to grant immediate access to video works in progress via the Internet, and as a result of that delivery method needing to beseech the viewer to take special care to not multi-task when viewing said film via the Internet. Not that I don’t get the reasoning, because I absolutely do, though it does have me thinking that in the not-too-distant future there will be technology deployed to tighten such tasks up. Insistent Streaming? You can watch vwxyz, but you have to do so in Full Screen mode and without screen deviation lest you have to start over from the beginning.

The screening request came across five days ago and I have yet to watch my friend’s film. Really, it is pretty sad that I am finding the idea of being-connected-yet-essentially-disconnected from AppleKory for 90 minutes straight to be daunting!

I’ve been hush-hush for a while now regarding my search for my next smartphone, waiting patiently for the one I had mostly settled on — the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom — to become available in France. I did manage to put my hands on a GKZ while I was in London for trefor.net’s Pissup in a Brewery last month, and this helped to both move me closer to pulling the trigger and towards establishing a sharper perspective on my decision.

In short, I realized that as much as I would love to have a Galaxy K Zoom as my next smartphone friend, I will only do so if my carrier (Bouygues) can offer it to me at a subsidized price. They do this with a good many other Samsung smartphones, including the flagship S5 (which costs €599 unlocked, without subsidy, but only €221 paid out over 24 months with a correlating commitment), so I came to expect I could put myself into a Galaxy K Zoom for under €200 (versus €499 unlocked, without subsidy).

No dice. Or, at least, no dice yet. Despite my best efforts to make such a deal happen, and the encouragement of a Bouygues drone who told me he could do so but in truth could not (seems that he was willing to say just about anything to me over the phone to get me to walk in the shop), I remain wanting. And with the Summer holidays descending quickly in France, it seems I will remain saddled with my iPhone 4 at least until the start of September. And with the iPhone 6 announcement likely to take place that month…?

A few months back I made one of those big decisions. You know, the kind that changes everything, after which nothing will ever be the same and from which there is no going back. A paradigm shift of immense magnitude.

Thick, running irony, like motor oil straight from the can.

I decided to change photo management software, from Apple’s not-bad-for-a-toy iPhoto to Adobe’s truly terrific Lightroom 5.

For a good long time iPhoto worked for me. There were some significant bumps along the way, to be sure, such as dealing with the product’s generosity when it came to gobbling up AppleKory hard drive space with it’s need to maintain two copies of any photo that was modified in any way (including simple rotation). For the most part, though, iPhoto and I got along fine, even as my photography skills outgrew the software’s cutesy function set.

I suppose I knew that at some point I would need to move from iPhoto into something more robust, however in dabbling with other photography management packages over the years — window-shopping, as it were — I became fully aware of how difficult and tedious an endeavor it would be, fully switching over. Man, that is one deep and dark path to walk down, and if it wasn’t absolutely necessary…well, I could make iPhoto continue to work for me. That is, until I couldn’t.

For reasons unknown, at right about the same time I was beginning to explore shooting in RAW (though this had nothing to do with the issue), iPhoto stopped accepting modifications made to picture files. The changes I made — upping the contrast or vibrancy of a photo, for example, or cropping an image — would stick, but only until I exited iPhoto. Thus, when I would start the application again, any modifications I had made during the previous session were gone.

Naturally, I google-binged my problem, and I discovered that I was not alone. A great number of my fellow iPhoto users had been dealing with the same problem, and as far as I was able to tell in my digging none of them had come up with a solution short of abandoning iPhoto for one of its competitors..

The writing, as they so (too?) often say, was on the wall. iPhoto, it has been nice. Enter Lightroom 5.

It has taken patience and time to do it to do it to do it to do it to do it right, child…er, move everything over, and I have hit my share of lulls, but a marvelous documentary I saw last Friday about the recently-discovered photographer Vivian Maier kicked me back into it, and finally I am finished. And nothing will ever be the same.

It has now been three weeks since I took AppleKory into the Apple Store at Opera to have one of their supposed Genius folk render opinion and possible solutions for a fan and heating problems. For reasons unknown, the poor girl’s CPU was running regularly at about 90 degrees Celsius and her fan was blowing at the maximum 6204 rpm. A friend who is also my OSX Guru has long told me that I run too many apps and processes simultaneously (foreground and background), and he was convinced that was the problem, but even when I turned just about everything off the CPU heat spiked and the fan in response ran loud enough to her in the next room (quite strange for a MacBook Pro).

The Genius who attended me ran some diagnostics and found no problem. He then, though, suggested that it could be a problem with the thermal paste in conjunction with the heat sink, and that such a repair would only cost €29…and a three separation. Wanting to have a happy and healthy AppleKory, I swallowed hard and handed her over. I then went home and told my Guru that he was wrong (Wrong! Wrong!), and that the problem was not running AppleKory too hard, but that it had to do with a hardware issue.

HAH!

Two days later the Apple technician called. He told me in broken-but-not-bad English that the thermal paste was fine, and that as far as he could tell there was no problem with my system. “Perhaps you are asking it to do too much at the same time?”, he said. “Anyway, it is ready for you to pick up anytime.”

Grr.

I retrieved AppleKory soon after, and — go figure — since then she has been purring like a kitten (so to speak…that is, without the noise). I have changed nothing with regard to the software I run or the intensity of such (over 20 Google Chrome tabs open as I type), and yet it is a rare occurrence when her temperature exceeds 80 degrees Celsius or her fan exceeds 5000 rpm (and most of the time both of those numbers are significantly lower…at this moment, 72 and 2588 rpm).

Like the child whose symptoms disappear upon realizing a visit to the doctor is in the offing? Or the sick cat who seems to get better when a visit to the vet is imminent? That Apple technician must be one scary dude, indeed!

Approaching the end of July, it is evident that the France Summer holiday has begun to take hold. Signs are appearing in the windows of shops and restaurants announcing date ranges of closure, the foot traffic on the street is significantly lighter, there are fewer people in the Metro (and fewer trains running, as well), there is a lot less ambient and incidental noise leaking into Chez Kessel. You would think, though, that with fewer people in town taxing Internet pipe capacity that my broadband service would be much improved, wouldn’t you?