Categories
Business fun stuff

I met the girl from Ipanema

You know what it’s like. You are in the lift heading down to check out from your hotel and a gorgeous blonde gets in on the third floor. You don’t want to stare too much at her so you focus on looking somewhere else. Nothing is said. She gets out at the ground floor, you get out at the ground floor. You go your separate ways and the “incident” disappears into memory. Mine not hers.

On this occasion I went to the checkout desk and she greeted someone who was meeting her for breakfast. Blow me down if it wasn’t my old mate Phil Smith. I called to him. They came over. He said he was now working for a new company called Ipanema and the girl was one of his colleagues over on a business trip from the Americas.

I was thrilled. I had just met “the girl from Ipanema”.  Now I can’t stop humming the tune…

That is all!

da da daa de da dada de daa

Categories
End User fun stuff

Alex Murphy is dead – long live Alex Murphy

The view from the Royal Box at Twickenham

Alex Murphy - dead man walking

A year ago last Saturday Alex Murphy died. Tref in the Royal Box at TwickenhamThis was no staged death of the line fluffed comedian, booed off by an unforgiving crowd or the fate of the failed gladiatorial actor staring up at the inverted thumbs of angry Roman citizenry in a modern Coliseum.

Alex was playing rugby for the Commons and Lords at Twickenham. He died that day. Kaput. His heart stopped, it beat no more, the blood of his life had run its course. This was the ultimate act of finality.

Had Alex been playing anywhere else thatengland and fiji teams line up would normally have been it, his memory consigned to legend, an anecdote on the rugby tour of life. Fortunately this was Twickenham, HQ, and home not only of English rugby but of the equipment that could restart Alex’s heart.  Restart his life. The fact that there were two doctors at the pitch-side watching the match was an added bonus.

So on Saturday we celebrated Alex’s first birthday, the second time around. Alex is a council member at the RFU and very generously invited some of his mates down from Lincoln to watch the England v Fiji Autumn international. We got the works, greatCraig Miller gives England team coach Stuart Lancaster a few tips seats, access to the very exclusive members bar and the post-match players dinner.

Because I know that some of you will want to see what it’s like at Twickenham I have selected a few photos plus a video that I had forgotten I took.

The video has 5 people in it. There is a prize if you can guess all of their names. I‘ll help out by telling you that three of them are Paul Clarke, Craig Miller and Huw Edwards.

There is also a vid of the song sung by the Fiji rugby team to entertain us after the dinner. The quality ain’t great but it is worth putting up because of its historic nature.

Dead men naked they shall be one with the man in the wind and the west moon. Alex Murphy is dead. Long live Alex Murphy.

Categories
Engineer mobile connectivity

Train WiFi – the unexpurgated truth (as far as I can see it)

test data for WiFi versus O2 cellular on Eastcoast trains - click for full size imageThe only sensible way to travel to central London is by train. Whilst it isn’t cheap it is fast and has the benefit of allowing you to usefully use the time doing work and of course tweeting and writing blog posts.

I was tweeting away during one such trip and one of my pals, @HmmmUK, suggested I write a post on the connectivity on board the train. This is that post (said in a dramatic booming sort of voice).

Finding out all about the service was easy. Icomera, the company that provides it, proudly boasts about it on their website. I had thought it was satellite based but surprisingly it is based on a combination of satellite and 3G.

The connectivity is based on the good old “Moovbox M800” which you may not have known “provides a central network connection moovbox m800 - it's a cool name - thanks to Icomera for the picfor all the real-time communication needs of urban and suburban rail systems…

…combining up to eight cellular WAN radios with an aggregated downlink speed up to 28Mbps (in our dreams). The Moovbox will automatically change between network types including HSPA, 3G UMTS, EDGE and GPRS to deliver the best connection possible depending on network availability. The M800 can also be configured with a DVB-S satellite module for connectivity in areas where terrestrial networks and unavailable. Each cellular radio supports two SIMs allowing it to switch between different cellular providers and thus the best available network. Where a track-side or depot Wi-Fi network is present the Moovbox will use this as a preferred backhaul alternative at speeds up to 54Mbps.”

Icomera is a Swedish company which explains why I’ve occasionally had Swedish language adverts pushed to me when using the service. The ground station is in Sweden with a Swedish IP address.

To make this post a little more interesting I decided to test the on board WiFi against the O2 sim in my phone. I did this on a 2 hour 20 minute journey between Lincoln and London Kings Cross (the train was late – it shouldn’t take more than 2 hours 5 mins 🙂 ). After Newark I did continuous testing using speedtest.net on both laptop WiFi and phone sim.

Although I tried to start each test at the same time in reality one normally took longer than the other so the finishing times do not coincide. I managed 88 cellular tests but only 55 using the WiFi which suggests that the WiFi tests took longer to perform.

This is borne out from the average results which were better for O2 than for the WiFi.

Average Download Speed bps Average Upload Speed bps Average Latencys ms
O2 mobile data 2002 872 203
On train WiFi 985 618 231

The recording process was not perfect. We have to remember that I was hurtling through the English autumnal countryside at 125mph for much of the time (must have been less than that seeing the train was late) and there were times when the speed test stalled due to no connectivity and continued when it picked up a signal once again.

It felt like it did this more often for the O2 sim which you could understand losing connectivity in parts of the countryside whereas the satellite should have had a continuous connection. That said the fact that I was able to perform more speed tests with the former is telling. Of course it may have been down to more people on the train using the WiFi than their cellular connection but I can only report my own experiences. The numbers speak for themselves.

Cellular WiFi
Fastest Download (bps) 6176 3930
Fastest Upload (bps) 3233 1580

Although I do use the on train WiFi I have on occasion resorted to the cellular connection in my laptop (O2 in phone, Vodafone in laptop) and whilst this test used O2 not Voda I suspect what it is telling me is that it makes more sense not to bother with the onboard WiFi and just stick to the mobile networks.

It also makes me wonder what sort of cellular connectivity they have on the Moovbox M800. I guess must have a lot of people hooked to it on that train!?  They must use some sims because the latency seems low for a satellite only connection. In fact thinking about it I wonder if they used a satellite at all on my trip?

Icomera looks like it has established a nice little niche in transport based connectivity but I suspect that passenger expectations in the UK have overtaken what Eastcoast is providing.

That’s all for now – click on the header image for a full size graphical representation of the test results. You will see that there are many more “good” results for the cellular connection than the WiFi. Also it’s no surprise that the best cellular readings come when the train is in or near a station.

Categories
Engineer voip

What’s in a bowl of fruit – IPCortex RaspberryPi

bowl of fruit - click to see IPCortex RaspberryPiIt never ceases to amaze me what we can do with technology. The most generous Rob Pickering of IPCortex sent me a RaspberryPi microcomputer loaded with a cut down version of his PBX.

It was the work of minutes to set up a couple of Lincoln area code (01522) SIP trunks and then define some client devices with which to make phone calls. I then downloaded the 3CX SIP client for Android, free from the Google Play Store, stuck in some simple credentials (user name tref etc) and I was away.

The IPCortex bearing RaspberryPi is ipcortex on raspberrypi screenshot currently plugged in to an Ethernet port in our kitchen. Click on the photo to zoom in. I don’t think my wife has noticed yet but no doubt she will. At that point I will move it to the switch in the attic and leave it there for a general play.

The IPCortex lets me configure any SIPipcortex on raspberrypi - click to enlarge client for the RaspberryPi. In this case a softphone was used and we needed to generate some dummy mac addresses – shown in the photo as 0000001 etc. Ordinarily you would input the MAC address of your deskphone.

In one of the images you can see that there are three users set up – Tref, Joe and John. You might need to click on each image to enlarge for a better view.  I took these screenshots lying in bed this morning. It’s just great what you can do from your phone. You can see the internal IP address of the IPCortex/server plus a glimpse at some of the features.

The 3CX is great for a play but I haven’t3CX SIP softclient running on Samsung Galxy S3 and hanging off the IPCortex on RaspberryPi figured out its ideal set up yet. It currently assumes it is the main phone you want to use when dialing out but I have a number of clients I play with on my handset and I don’t want it to be the main one. I have to switch the 3CX off for normal operation of other phones. It might just be a question of me needing to play with the Galaxy S3 more.

The call quality was great. I made WiFi to PSTN, PSTN to WiFi and WiFi to 3G.

I can see possibilities for home workers and consumers with this technology. You could envisage giving the kids an extension hanging off a local number – press 1 to talk to John etc or they could have their own DDI.

The time is not far off where people manage their own call routing – for example forwarding to their own mobile when not at home. If their package includes free calls to mobiles, or just to family mobiles then this would be a no brainer. This functionality could easily be embedded in a set top box along with a media server, which coincidentally (not) is what me next RaspberryPi project is going to be.

That’s all for now. I’ll report back as I get more to say on this subject.

Ciao…

PS no comments about the untidy cable. I couldn’t find a shorter one and my wife will have enough to say anyway when I get home.

PPS Thanks to Rik Wheeler for helping with the setup and being at the other end for the 3G demo calls.

Categories
competitions End User

Jordan Watson man of action

Jordan Watson - click to see full frontal photoTimico is a great place to work and although we work hard here we also like to have a bit of fun. Last night Jordan Watson was out with the boys and the conversation somehow came to dress down Fridays.

Through his beer tinted specs Jordan accepted a bet that he wouldn’t turn up to work this Friday in a romper suit, or his “onzer” as he calls it. Jordan, who works on the Timico tech support desk boldly took up the challenge and appeared this morning in a very nice (and very cozy by the looks of it) blue and white onzer.

Note the one piece fashion item, purchased for a tenner from Primark (a value for money high street department store I’m told) comes complete with penguin faces on his feet. A fun thing to wear for both work and play.

Jordan Watson, man of action.

I’ll finish off this Friday, fin de semaine, post with a couple of parting comments. One is that I recently upgraded my SG3 to Jelly Bean with no problems but without yet seeing what it can do for me. This morning I found out that I can take photos by just saying “smile” or “cheese” or “capture” or “shoot”. V cool. The header photo, which you can click to see the whole of Jordan, resplendent in his attire was taken by saying cheese. Note I found it has to be exactly “cheese”. “Say cheese” didn’t work. Impressive.

Secondly, because we haven’t had a competition for a while I’m offering a magnificent Timico mug as a prize for the best caption for the photo of Jordan. Timico staff may enter.

Categories
broadband Business

Superfast broadband video case study by Timico and Openreach

Superfast broadband video case study

Never before seen footage of the inside of the Davies household now viewable on tinterweb.”

This is it, the video you’ve all been waiting for. Well I have anyway. A few weeks ago we shot some footage around and about Lincoln and chez Davies for a video case study of a Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) aka superfast fibre broadband installation.

Get your popcorn and fizzy drinks ready and settle in to your favourite armchair to watch this much anticipated movie. I don’t have an agent yet but if any major studios are interested in talking then you know how to get hold of me.

That’s all folks 🙂

Link to what BT has on their website http://www.btplc.com/ngb/News/Timico.htm

Categories
End User phones

Most popular blog posts

Samsung Galaxy S3 seen next to a Samsung Galaxy S2The most popular blog posts at the moment are those talking about problems with the Samsung Galaxy S3. In the last month I’ve had just under 7,000 page views of the “Galaxy S3 not charging” posts here and here (in order of popularity) and over 4,600 views of the “problem with headset socket on Galaxy S3” post. That last post has had over 14,000 views since it was written (as an aside it’s surpassed only by the “how to bypass Pirate Bay filters” post which has had over 18,000 views).

That’s a lot of problem phones out there.

Categories
Engineer internet

miscellany submarine cables and submarines – dive dive dive

submarine cable map courtesy of http://www.submarinecablemap.com/Visiting my old alma mater today, Bangor University. It’s nice to get invited. We are opening a new Laboratory and then the Annual Engineering Lecture. This year it is entitled “Submarine Engineering across the years”  and is to be given by Rear Admiral (retd) Paul Thomas CB, FREng, FCGI, FIMechE, Hon FNucI, Hon FSaRS. That’s more badges than most of us could possibly dream of!

The subject is quite convenient because some time ago I bookmarked a website http://www.submarinecablemap.com/ thinking it was cool and would come in handy some day. Well now it has and whilst absolutely  nothing to do with today’s lecture it is fascinating to see where all the undersea cables are. The whole internet is underpinned by relatively few connections really.

If you click on an individual cable line it tells you who owns the cable, how long it is, when it was laid and where it lands. This is big business. Some of these cables are very long. SeaMeWe3 for example is 39,000km, stretches from Germany all the way to Australia and South Korea and is owned by a cooperative of 16 organisations.

Keeping it topical, some governments, ours included want to monitor the traffic running though these cables. When you look at the map it makes you realise how absurd this is.

I have visions of Rear Admiral (retd) Paul Thomas in his sub pootling along following the cables to find his way home – a bit like the pilots in their Sopwith Camels during WW1 following the roads and railway lines. Fiendishly clever. Splice the mainbrace, Klingons on the starboard bow, land ho, take her down number one, dive dive dive, etc etc etc.

I’ll let you know how the lecture goes 🙂

Categories
Cloud Engineer virtualisation

Think global act local – vmware survey

vmware surveyI’m not an angry person but some things can certainly irritate the heck out of me. Today it is survey forms. It’s not concept of filling in a survey – I don’t mind doing that sometimes, especially if I have a particularly good or bad experience.

I should explain:

I just downloaded VMware  player for my laptop. I got the usual message “this may take several minutes” and for once it did take several minutes – usually the installation is quite quick regardless of the message. Coincidentally a survey from VMware popped up on the screen as I was wondering whether o believe the message and go off and do something else in the meantime.

I started to fill in the survey, it was a simple one, and fortunately for VMware the installation  finished just as I came to the bit about rating the experience. I didn’t really have anything bad to say. They warned me it might take some time and it did.

What annoyed me though was the fact that when it came to selecting my country of residence the name at the top of the list was the good ole United States of Americay. Now hear this VMware. It doesn’t do anything for me having the USA as the first name on the list. It just it just makes me irritated to think that you, an American company think it is more important for your countrymen to have life made easier for them but not anyone else.

Either they need to have every country in alphabetical order or, more cleverly, their survey system could recognize the country in which the survey was being completed and push that one to the top. It isn’t difficult.

If you want to be a global company you need to change your culture accordingly. Simples.

Categories
broadband End User mobile connectivity

When did you last phone “home”?

Landline use in decline

Landline use seems to be in decline. When I got into the office this morning I called home. I’d lost a tie and thought I might have dropped it on our drive.

When I want to call someone my usual way is to go to the logs on my phone and click on the relevant number/name. As often as not the person I want to talk to is high up on the list of recent calls – wife, kids, stockbroker, shrink (etc).

I called my wife’s mobile. She didn’t answer. So I called “Home”. I had to scroll a very long way down the list of logs to find Home. In fact I last called Home at 20.08 on the 1st November. 70 calls or text messages down the list. Anne answered the Home phone and you will be happy to know that she found the tie, a very smart blue bow tie, and has it safe in the house.My point is that we are using our landline less and less. Typically for calls to grandparents. I’ve even taken to answering the home phone by saying “Newport Arch Chinese Restaurant” as quite often its a scammer on the other end of the line.

Everyone in our house has a mobile phone. All the adults are on all you can eat plans and it makes no different whether we use the fixed or mobile phone. Nobody rings me on the Home phone. The kids rarely use their phone for voice calls. They either text their friends or they use it to access the internet for Facebook Messaging. The youngest often goes online on the XBox if he needs to chat to a friend!

I’d like to bet that for a large proportion of the population the landline number is hardly used at all and is effectively only there because you need a landline to get Broadband.

There have occasionally been calls for BT (Openreach) to provide data only lines, known as “naked DSL” without the costs and overhead of the voice service. BT has always pushed back on this, saying there is no demand and that the costs would not be greatly reduced.

It would be interesting to see how many households don’t use their landline at all. My bet is that millions of us would put our hands up and voluntarily relinquish possession of our old fashioned phone. It might be worth having the debate…

Categories
End User engineering

Introducing the Nook Simple Touch Glow Light – billstickers will be prosecuted

This post isn’t really about the Nook Simple Touch Glow Light, worthy subject though it may be. This is a very simple post about a man putting up a poster on Platform 4 of Lincoln Central railway station. That is it!

Sometimes you have to keep things simple:)

The video is 3’44” long. It’s longer than I’d normally post, knowing the attention span of the modern internet user. On that basis it is almost a book in blog post terms, or a full length feature film in YouTube parlance.

I have taken this ambitious step because this video is a work of art. It takes a second or two for the Galaxy S3 to properly focus so you need to bear with me there. It’s a bit shaky too, partly because it was windy (that’s my excuse anyway) and I didn’t wait until the job in hand was totally finished because my arm was getting tired and it was taking too long.  About two thirds of the way through I zoom in so you do eventually get a closer look.

Just like the ride on the Number 205 bus you could call this video an historic representation of a moment in time, on this occasion in Lincoln. It is also a study in poster technology and the craftsmanship by which the said advertising medium is skilfully erected. I say erected for this is no mere “slap on a bit of glue and shove it up” job.

There is very little dialogue in this video and whilst the main actor has his back to us most of the time1we do get a glimpse of his character when he smiles briefly at the camera just after the three minute mark.

Let me delay no further. I present to you “how to put up a poster” Act one, Scene one:

Stick no bills, billstickers will be prosecuted etc etc etc.

Oh and finally if anyone wants to send me a Nook ereader I will happily do a review. Up the revolution!

1 the cognoscenti will understand that this is unavoidable in the poster erecting trade

Categories
End User food and drink fun stuff

amusing anecdote – the Ivy restaurant beckoned briefly

The Ivy Restaurant - you know it makes sense :)Received an email out of the blue yesterday. It was one of those legitimate spam emails selling something but from a “respectable” company.

For some reason I read it and found it was an offer to go to lunch at the Ivy restaurant in London.  What’s more it was for a lunchtime meeting on BYOD which is a subject I am interested in and it had a good speaker.

I took a look and it was from someone who was notionally a competitor though I’d never heard of them. I accepted the invitation – within a fairly short time of it arriving.  They must have known I was a competitor – they had my contact details – they sent me the email. I was quite looking forward to lunch at the Ivy.

This afternoon I got an email from the company telling me:

“Hi Trefor, Thanks but unfortunately the event is full now. Kind Regards, xxxxxx”

I found it amazing that the gig sold out that quickly1 – within an hour or two of the announcement. I mentioned this and wished them good luck with the event.

There isn’t really a moral to this tale other than to get your mailing list right. I might never know what it is like to have lunch at the Ivy, unless someone wants to invite me…

1 it took the trefor.net xmas bash 6 days to sell out though admittedly this is for over 200 people.

Categories
End User scams

Obnoxious PPI pests move into sms

I’ve had a few calls from pests lying to me that could recover mis-sold Payment Protection Insurance (PPI). I know they are lying because I have never taken this sort of insurance out.

Today I received a text message from 07879989478 saying:

“Records passed to us show you’re entitled to a refund approximately £2130 in compensation from mis-selling of PPI on your credit card or loan. Reply INFO or stop”

I wouldn’t dare risk replying and am going to see if I can find out who owns the number. It is almost certainly an anonymous PAYG job but I quite like the idea of an expose.

Lets see how I get on.

tata

Categories
Business Regs surveillance & privacy

Draft Comms Data Bill Select Committee appearance for oral evidence #ccdp

portcullisYesterday I gave oral evidence to the Draft Communications Data Bill Joint Select Committee1. It’s the first time I have been asked to give evidence like this and something one has to take very seriously.

I was with three others: Caspar Bowden who is a colleague on the ICO Technology Reference Panel, Dr Gus Hosein of Privacy International and David Walker, a security consultant. The committee has been seeing groups according to their rough views on the draft Bill and readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear2 that this cohort was one that had concerns.

The afternoon’s evidence sessions were reported by the Beeb.

I’m sure that I will already have mentioned that the potential consequences of this Bill becoming Law are so great that it merits the most comprehensive discussion before hand. Today is the last day of evidence sessions with the Home secretary Theresa May being up before the committee.

I don’t have access to the inner thoughts of the committee but I did get a sense of the following:

  1. the fact that many communications use encrypted traffic and that this is likely to cause problems is recognised
  2. the issue of dealing with overseas providers is not likely to be an easy one
  3. the process of oversight of the RIPA system notices needs overhauling, especially if the Bill proceeds
I’m also hoping that the message got  through that nothing can ever be totally secure and that any data gathered under this Bill/Act would eventually make its way into the public domain with disastrous consequences.
I don’t have a handle of the timetable for the rest of this process (enlightenment anyone?) but it wouldn’t surprise me to see the Bill move forward in some reduced form. In the meantime we have to keep up the pressure. More in the fullness of time, a week is a long time in politics etc etc etc.

1 bit of a mouthful/oral evidence/geddit?

2 some previous posts include this one

Categories
4g Business mobile connectivity

4G cost an issue?

4G EE LTEI note the Beeb is reporting today that people are saying the cost of signing up to an EE 4G plan is too high.

There are always going to be whingers. Either people will like the pricing or they won’t. It’s a straight business decision on the part of EE. Network operators are under constant margin pressure because they have chopped their pricing too much in the past. 4G represents an opportunity to build value into their businesses.

My biggest concern is how successful they will be in adding additional margin generating services to their portfolios. If you look at the EE pricing then everyone gets unlimited voice and texts and they are just offering variable charging based on data consumption. On its own this isn’t enough but I’m not sure I see networks successfully adding other services that people are willing to pay for.

Agree?

Categories
Business fun stuff

Alex and Andy Smile for the camera

I’ve just come up for air after having my head down in my PC all day. It’s getting dark out. It’s just started raining – I can hear it on the roof of the office – one of the downsides of having the penthouse suite.

Welcome to winter. I hope you have your warm, waterproof coat ready and plenty of fuel ordered to keep you going through to spring. A car drives by with its headlights on. It is around 4pm.

All of a sudden the only sounds I hear are the rain, the air conditioning (climate control) and my laptop’s hard drive.

All sounds a bit melodramatic doesn’t it?…

PS at this point I usually get up and go and make a cup of tea. The office is vibrant and buzzing and brightly lit. The phones are humming and Alex and Andy, two of the best sales guys in the industry, smile for the camera.

That’s all. My tea has brewed. C ya.

 

Categories
Apps broadband End User social networking

Home broadband data usage growth

home broadband data usage trends for Trefor Davies

Broadband data usage growth driven by photo uploads

I’m installing a RaspberryPi computer at home carrying an IPCortex PBX with SIP trunks. I just needed to find a free IP address and found myself checking out available addresses so that I could provide a static one to the IPCortex.

I just happened to find myself looking at my home broadband data usage and came up with some interesting stats.

The first chart plots the growth in my overallgrowth in upload data usage for home broadband - Trefor Davies usage for the last four years. It actually shows almost an order of magnitude (20GB to 160GB) growth from the lowest point in 2008 to the highest point this year.

I realise this is not scientific but you can easily see the trend. The rise in upload usage in the May/June time frame (2nd chart) this year coincides with my taking proud possession of the Samsung Galaxy S3 and the fact that all photos now get backed up to Google+. Trefor Davies photo storage requirements ytd 2012

The final chart shows the growth in photo storage needs this year and you can see a very good correlation between photo storage and the growth in bandwidth upload usage.

The numbers don’t exactly match because we use the home broadband connection for other applications and I, being both gregarious and fertile, do not live alone.

I haven’t drilled into specifics but a reasonable chunk of the photo storage space is now used for video. I do both a daily (ish) video diary for the kids and take lots of “generally interesting” videos. Check this one out from the weekend visit to the Beamish Open Air Museum in county Durham.

 

Categories
Business online safety social networking

Parliament and Internet Conference – Privacy

portcullisThe Parliament and Internet conference wound its annual way to Westminster yesterday. The conference usually comes up with a nugget or two and made the BBC news site with a comment from Andy Smith, PSTSA1 Security Manager at the Cabinet Office that he wouldn’t recommend using your real name when registering with sites like Facebook.

Lord Merlin Errol also noted that he used to give his date of birth as April 1st 1900 but that drop down boxed rarely went that far back these days. I guess there are still one or two 112 year old people around though whether they would be interested in social networking is another  issue.  Privacy  on the Internet, or lack of it, is something I’m still trying to get my brain around.

This came to the front of mind again this morning as a Facebook message appeared in my timeline asking me to confirm my mobile phone number. I did so, particularly as a mobile number is one way of recovering a lost password. Didn’t feel particularly comfortable doing it though. I don’t trust Facebook though

Categories
End User social networking

social networking participation on trefor.net – clicks wanted :)

social network sharing on the trefor.net blogIt’s interesting to see that reader engagement on this blog is increasing and that people are starting to use social networking share buttons more.

However a post that attracts a lot of Facebook “Likes” doesn’t necessarily get many LinkedIn “Shares” and so on. A quick scan over the last months or so worth of posts shows that the most shares each social network has had for any given post is as follows:

Linked In Shares 24
Tweets 18
Facebook Likes 22
G+ 3

Google Plus is still clearly low down in terms of people using it. I was surprised that LinkedIn comes out top though I don’t think I should have been – after all Timico is a supplier of business services and presumably this reflects some proportion of the readership being either customers or people from the same industry. Pinterest scores are not gathered but I’d bet the number of “pins” is low.

As a bit of an experiment can readers please click on one of the social network buttons? Just choose the network you use most. No prizes here and nothing to be gained by clicking more than once but I’ll leave this post at the top for a day or two to see what the results look like.

Ta.

Tref

Categories
4g Business

4 G E E L T E 4 ME?

4G EE LTEEE is doing a good job at building up market expectation. Today the mobile network operator launched its pricing plans, available from the end of this month.

Consumers can have unlimited calls and texts with 500MB of data for £36. Remembering that I used 60MB of data in one minute on the O2 LTE trials I suspect that not many people will stay on this plan. The options are:

500MB £36
1GB £41
3GB £46
5GB £51
8GB £56

I assume that this comes with a phone though it isn’t clear. Their site suggests you can get the Nokia Lumia 920, 820, Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE and Note 2 LTE, HTC One XL and the iPhone5 plus a few other also rans (sorry).

If you use up your data allowance you won’t be able to access the internet until you buy a data add-on (ok). It isn’t entirely clear but it looks like the cost of a data add on is £6 for 500MB or £15 for 2GB so it makes sense to get your plan right in the first place.

I note there is a roaming package for £5 a month though this doesn’t seem to apply to data which in my mind is what I am most likely to use when roaming – checking restaurants, bars, local attractions (library locations etc).

The speeds are quoted at 8 – 12Mps on average.

It also looks as if they will not be blocking VoIP

Categories
End User fun stuff

The Harrison H4 timepiece and other historical nautical memorabilia (the Cutty Sark)

Sometimes you get the opportunity to see something totally historic – like the Olympics for example. On Saturday I saw two things in the same afternoon that were in the same league. First of all the Cutty Sark was hugely impressive. Then we went to the Royal Observatory and saw the Harrison H4 timepiece. It was a lot smaller than I had imagined and a fraction of the size of its H1 – H3 predecessors. I could have stood there a lot longer than the impatience of offspring allowed.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about look em up. Here are some photos – slightly different perspective to normal:

Categories
End User fun stuff

Facebook promoted posts – uh?

Facebook promoted posts screenshotI linked to that last post on why I want my Samsung Galaxy S3 back from Facebook. I wanted to make sure that none of my friends missed the post otherwise no-one might read it:).

For the first time ever I got this popup/toast/whatever they call it suggesting I might want to pay to promote my post.  I could “move my important news, links and photos higher in the news feed” and the post “will be marked as sponsored”.

payment options for Facebook Promoted postsI’ve never seen this before and certainly wouldn’t dream of giving money to Facebook for the “privilege” of them promoting my post. What’s more there is no mention of how long the promotion will last, what position it will have in the feed, basically nothing that specifies what I get for the cash.

I clicked through as if I was going to buy and found that they wanted £3.47 for this privilege. It was almost tempting to pay theFacebook promoted posts cause a bit of a stir - on Facebook money to find out what happens but I’m sure that most of my friends would think I was off my trolley if I did this.

In an attempt to find out what I would get for my money I searched Facebook for “promoted posts” but it only came up with a few user groups protesting about the fact that Facebook was now offering promoted posts.

Frankly who cares? I guess some businesses might want to sign up but Facebook haven’t exactly done a good job of selling it – at least not to me.

Ciao…

Categories
End User phones

Looking forward to getting my Samsung Galaxy S3 back

Sandown Park panorama taken with Samsung Galaxy S3Quick brain dump. I’ve been using the HTC One S for just over a week now. You may recall I’ve had to send the Samsung Galaxy S3 off for a new screen.

The keyboard keys on the One S are smaller than I’m used to and I have to be very careful when typing things in not to get it completely wrong. The User Interface seems not to be quite as slick – more button presses than required for the S3. This might be totally wrong and I don’t have a specific example, particularly as I haven’t got both phones side by side to compare, but that’s what it feels right.

The smaller form factor of the One S is good except that it means that things are smaller on screen (ref keyboard above). I also like the “ring pull” feature you use to activate the screen but this in itself is not a major reason to buy.

I guess the One S must be cheaper than the S3 which is probably how it is positioned and sold and in reality it does have a great many of the benefits of Android ICS. The One S doesn’t have an SD card slot so I haven’t swapped my music across although I suppose I could have done it via cable – it does have 32GB on-board memory. I don’t listen to music often enough for me to have bothered.

Also I don’t like the zoom function on the camera. “pinching” the screen doesn’t work. You have to use the +/- slider to zoom in and out. The One S doesn’t seem to have the panorama feature though the burst mode of the S3 is there by default – you just hold the shutter button down and it just happens. The header photo is reused from a previous post – notionally to show off the panorama feature of the S3 but in reality so that I can “pin” the blog on Pinterest – it won’t let you do it without a photo (yes I know I’m a tart).

I don’t know whether these features also apply to the HTC One X but I’m not going to find out. Bring back my Galaxy S3 – as soon as possible – I will try and be more careful with you in future (strokes an imaginary phone lovingly) 🙂

That’s all folks…

PS I realise I have to be careful here. I don’t want to appear too much like an Apple fanboi. Samsung fanboi? Nah.

PPS this post is for Jonathan – he will understand.

Categories
End User travel

…the train has stopped…

…the train has stopped and there is no cellular data coverage…

The Internet has gone to sleep. Around the world power stations idle and time stops. Life is not so efficient – things take longer to happen. Children go out to play and people sink gracefully into old age not categorised as “digitally excluded”. Families begin to talk, rediscovering relationships previously unseen in the light of day.

The clock on the mantelpiece counts its interminable seconds; tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock…

…eventually the journey continues, time speeds up and normal service is resumed…

Categories
End User security

Payment Protection Insurance – are you eligible for £7,500 compensation?

Just had a phone call from an Indian sounding gent called Harry Connor. Actually he wasn’t totally sure what his name was because when I asked him again at the end of the call he said it was Sean Connor (not sure how he spells Sean – could be Shaun or Shawn – sorry). Perhaps he flips between both names without thinking – kind of split personality.

He was calling me about my Payment Protection Insurance and said I was eligible for £7,500 compensation.  It was all above board because he said the Ministry of Justice was behind it.

I like to make sure I’m dealing with reputable folk when being asked about financial stuff so I asked for the name of his company (ukfinancial.com) and their phone number (020 881 907 01). He said they were headquartered in London but had an office in Manchester.

Unfortunately I must have mistyped both the name of the company and the phone number and now not only can I not ring him back but I can’t even track down his website.

Ah well – another opportunity to make a fast buck lost. Never mind. I dare say he or one of his colleagues will call back. They have already called about 6 times.

I realise that the Telephone Preference Service doesn’t work overseas but someone needs to come up with a solution for this problem.

Listen to the phone call by clicking on the image of the phone below:

Image in the video is courtesy of Wikipedia

Categories
Business online safety Regs

More Draft Comms Data Bill analysis & Gary McKinnon

blogspot broken link landing pageGary McKinnon has been in the news this week. Unless you have just surfaced for internet air you will remember that he is the guy with Aspergers who hacked into the Pentagon computer and who the marshalls Feds in US of A wanted to extradite so that they could extract revenge.

This post is not about Gary McKinnon or the rights and wrongs of his case. It is about the fact that he was able to hack into what must surely be one of the most secure computer systems in the world (wide web).

Next up is the breach of Google’s webmail service in December 2009.

Categories
broken gear End User

Apple iPhone faults

An apple - grown in my back garden at homeWe have an excellent team in our logistics1 department. Phillipa has efficiently found me a temporary HTC One S whilst my trusty Galaxy S3 is sent back for a new screen. This time it wasn’t a fault of Samsung – the last two times were faulty headset socket and a faulty connector that meant the phone wasn’t charging, or at least only intermittently.

This time the phone was accidentally dropped on a hard floor and unfortunately the display smashed. Ok s*&t happens. It’s gone off to the menders for a week or so and in the meantime I have a temporary HTC One S.  The One S is ok but smaller than the Galaxy S3 so I keep hitting the wrong keys. It’s also not quite as high a spec but hey, I only have it for a week or so.

Setting up the One S was very simple, as for all Android phones though I note that with Samsung all the apps I have previously downloaded are re-installed on a new phone whereas this hasn’t happened with HTC. This is probably a Samsung service that might well be replicated by HTC but I clearly haven’t signed up for it.

Anyway when I handed the S3 in to Phillipa in logistics1

Categories
broadband Engineer

When Things Go Wrong…

Broadband Network Operations Centre spots when a line goes down

I was in the broadband Network Operations Centre  the other day talking to the guys. We were looking at our instance of the Solar Winds network monitoring tool. Then I remembered I was on the way to see a customer later that day so I asked to see their network status.broadband

Blow me down if one of their sites wasn’t showing up as red – connectivity problem. I sauntered over to first line and to my delight one of the team was already looking at it. It was an ADSL connection. As we were watching the status reverted to green. ADSLs sometimes lose and reestablish connections on their own – that’s the vagaries of copper for you.

It’s nice when systems work like this. With ADSL we have a suite of tests we can run to see where the problem might lie. Sometimes the customer has unplugged the router for some reason. If we can’t find out the answer we spring into action depending on what we have agreed with the customer. Maybe it’s just a phone call asking him to switch the router back on. Maybe its a site visit.

Anyway I suspect that on this occasion the customer hadn’t even noticed there was a problem, but we did…

c ya

Categories
End User media

@TomAndThat presents – conservation appeal on behalf of the liberal democrats & zane lowe interview

Because I have complete editorial control over this blog I can publish anything I like. I take responsibility for the content. On this occasion I am doing the proud dad thing and offer a couple of vids published by the Davies heir. Enjoy…

Categories
Archived Business

Timico is the most innovative business yay

winners need to celebrateOn Friday night we won the award for “Excellence in Innovation” presented by the Nottinghamshire & Derbyshire Chambers of Commerce. Yay. A good night was had by all.

neil armstrong grinsThe photos tell it all. Click on the header pic to see more of what me, Kirsty, Kate and Faye are up to. The bloke behind Neil clearly didn’t win, a condition exacerbated by the fact  that he was driving and not quite in the same “joyous” state of mind.

The Most Innovative Business Award goes to TimicoThere have been times when we entered awards expecting to win but came away with nothing. I specifically remember the time when we had just reached 4th position in the Sunday Times/Microsoft Techtrack 100. That means we were the 4th fastest growing privately held tech company in the UK.

That same year we entered the local Newark Business Awards (I think it was for the fastest growing business but time fuddles the memory). We thought it must be a shoe in. In the event it went to a small local gardening business we had never heard of. I guess we must have read the brief wrongly (growing – pun – never mind!).

The lesson there is you have to take these things with good grace. Win some lose some.

Anyway this present award builds on the Best Business in Newark gong we won earlier this year and on the Best ITSP (Enterprise) cert we got at the ITSPAs. A reasonable haul for a 12 month period.

There are some who think these awards are not worth anything. I disagree. They send out a message, both to the outside world and to staff inside the company.

To our staff I say well done. You are a great bunch of people and I am proud to be working with you.

That’s enough emulsion. Ciao…

PS the award was based on our Mobile Access Management product – see here and here for more.