Laptops for schools. Some facts!

Why did Computercentre get given £480 per laptop when a suitable price would have been half that?  Because they’re Tory donors and they’re just resellers so all they would need to apply is their profit margin.  100% profit?  In these circumstances?  Hmmmm!

There’s been an awful lot of hyperbole spouted about how children at home are being disadvantaged in their education. They don’t have enough laptops comes the cry and whilst computacentre has been profiting at their expense there are plenty of ways kids can, right now, get access to educatino remotely.

For starters don’t forget that google classroom and in fact any browser based provision of education is also accessible across smart TVs and games consoles.

• UK households with access to a games console increased to nearly 8.7 million in Q3 2020 – an annual increase of almost 900k, or 11%.
• at least 45% of households also had access to a smart TV. An increasing number of UK residents use Smart TVs to go online, with as much as 26 percent of total time online being spent on Smart TVs.
• 95% of households have access to a mobile phone and all the major mobile operators are offering a range of assistance including extra data. 
• 88% of households had at least one laptop in 2018.

So with a combination of these various channels to access content getting pre-planned education to kids should be simple, right?  I mean, we’ve known this for ages so what is the fucking problem???

OK it’s a lot of hard work for teachers to generate the original content (thanks BBC for your help here) but being able to access it should not be an issue. It won’t necessarily be interactive but hey, why not get the kids to write their responses down and mail them in, snail mail or otherwise?

I hear that Gav the fireplace salesman wants schools to provide 3-5 hours of “direct” teaching a day.  And if it’s not deemed up to standard he’ll set Ofsted on them! FFS!

“It is therefore nothing short of disgraceful that the government should choose today to start threatening schools about the quality of their remote learning offer,” Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT.

Is that the same for all age groups?  Surely for the very young, whose ability to sit still or concentrate for anytime who will be supervising them?  Their parents?  Or will those parents be getting on with their own work?  Unlikely.

Once again Gav has just exhibited another knee jerk reaction probably because one of his friends who has kids is pissed off that the schools aren’t babysitting them for them! I’m getting increasingly tired (and I’m not a teacher, I’m retired!) by the volume of u-turns, pompous pronouncements and general vomiting of garbage coming out of the mouths of ministers. Clearly each morning they sit around and have a brainstorming session and whoever shouts the most stupid idea wins – it becomes government policy the same day!!

FFS can we get a plan in place?  This is just a complete shitshow, it’s embarrassing.

Trillion dollar tricks

Wow the UK’s world beating Covid-19 testing system is really….how can I put this….pretty amateurish. Allegedly someone did the following…

Pretending I live in Scotland I got a test at “a testing location” for today, got a qr code, took a screenshot of the part showing my name, date of birth and code but not The location! Went along to “a testing location in London” with it where despite saying constantly online that there are no tests I got one and went straight through no questions asked!

And this isn’t an isolated example…

So clearly the system isn’t joined up, locations are not in communication, information on testing centre websites is wrong and people at these centres aren’t checking the QR codes. Or perhaps the QR code system is in another “silo”.

And Cummings wants a trillion dollar tech company here in the UK? Blimey he’ll be lucky if this is what he’s spent our money on so far!!

So given the need for people to get tests and the news that one centre in Wales (Rhondda) was allegedly forced to limit the number it was offering, despite extra capacity existing, I wonder what other wheezes people have come up with to get round the system…in a “specific and limited way”.

Sly digs and Covid-19 data cockups

Just been reading Sky’s pretty good analysis of the coronavirus data cockup…

“Coronavirus: The inside story of how UK’s ‘chaotic’ testing regime ‘broke all the rules'”

Pretty good, as it highlights the incompetence of the people managing the system – including the management consultants and the decision makers (politicians!). But not perfect as there are several sly digs at the private sector – the people who have really been behind the massive growth in testing capacity!

“The picture that emerges is of government departments, agencies and their consultants struggling to navigate a maze of different computer systems, and a Byzantine pathology sector, of flawed decision-making based on targets rather than sustainable systems.”

Well that’s what you get when you get Ministers competing for power and wanting to control their own departmental data for fear if they share they’ll lose out in the power stakes!

“When news first broke of the virus in China at the turn of the year, the working plan at DHSC was to rely on PHE and its existing network of testing facilities.”

Typical centralised control response. If they’d asked the Home Office they would have got a totally different response – give it to the private sector – now!

“We bet on red. And it came up black. The Germans were lucky. They had lots of machines lying around and a system in place. We had next to nothing.”

The Germans have at least 90 DNA (PCR) labs, so they immediately had a much greater capacity, plus they made the correct decisions – to listen to the experts and to test, test, test as recommended by the WHO.

“But in March, the government decided to reject those advances and set up an entirely separate network of testing sites and facilities, run in large part by commercial partners.”

But instead of talking direct to them they called in Deloittes! Big mistake….

“It was a bold, disruptive move in the face of what was seen as foot-dragging by PHE and NHS labs, but multiple sources from inside government, from labs and from the technology sector told Sky News it was this move more than any other that set in motion the problems with testing results and data that have plagued the system ever since.”

The one thing that private PCR labs are set up to do is to manage and report data – accurately and rapidly. So this is a sly dig at the private sector which is totally unfounded. Slag off Deloittes and the government officials who set up the contracts but each of the private sector labs will have had robust systems in place to test, analyse and report – it’s their forte! I know – I worked in one for 15 years.

“When the vial reaches the test centres another crucial chain of events begins: the vial needs to be assigned to a specific plac2e in the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machine, where the test itself takes place.

Sometimes mistakes happen at this stage: the vials are dropped or contaminants are introduced.

Sometimes tests have to be reprocessed.

Sometimes mistakes happen? Cheap shot! Mistakes at reputable laboratories are rare – very, very rare. This needs correcting. Mistakes at reputable labs are so rare that each tends to be discussed at company meetings!

There are a number of comments about NHS labs thinking they were better placed to do the work, and that was probably true at small volumes but once the virus took hold there was no way they could cope.

Equally their sarky comments about it taking extra time to get the samples to private labs don’t stack up as valid criticism when they say themselves they have to send some samples to other NHS labs!!

“But the real problem was: there were too few people at the very top who understood the nature of the tests they were dealing with.”

Now we’re getting to it! Management consultants v the experts? A call to the Association of Forensic Science Providers might have been a better bet. In one fell shot you can hit the 3 biggest forensic laboratory providers who between them handle millions of samples each year and whose robotic systems could have been switched over to run Covid-19 samples.

Instead time was wasted and added layers of bureaucracy and, cost and complexity were added in – that what management consultants are especially good at!

These companies already test, analyse and report to government departments, it is pretty simple to set up a dashboard of agreed data and then regularly upload data to it. It really isn’t rocket science. But get the likes of Deloittes involved and they like to control stuff….to the detriment of any outcomes.

Here’s another dig at the private sector…

“Gaps remain. Test and Trace is not able to say how fast many tests in care homes are done, for instance, as these are conducted by pharmaceutical company Randox, which uses a different system to manage its records.”

A different system? Their test data will be held in a relational database and it will be child’s play to write a data extract that would run overnight and export, analyse and report to the Minister, or Deloitte or whoever had the “other system” and import it. If there was a problem here it was with Deloitte – trust me I know about these things.

Another point about why you need to trust the laboratory experts is from a standing start they have now matched the total testing volumes undertaken by the NHS labs…

“These new data shows that the cumulative number of people tested between the end of January and late May was just under 2 million, split evenly between pillars one and two.”

And remember is was only during March when the private labs were contacted…and they’ve managed a million samples tested in 2 and a bit months..but then for them that’s just the nature of their business, they know how to get things done.

So, as I said, a pretty good analysis, but of the people the journalists talked to, I wonder how many were in senior positions in laboratory management – I think I know the answer to that and anyway, even if the system is half arsed, surely there are more important things to analyse than dodgy data.  How about the death toll?  For more discussion on the reasons that the Covid-19 death total is so high here in the UK read this article on theconversation.com – no mention of laboratory systems here.

 

Windows 10 update history – FAIL!

Is it just me or does my desktop pc has a love hate relationship with Windows 10 – specifically the updating of the software?

I’ve lost count of the hours I’ve waited expectantly for the machine to spring back into life like a phoenix from the ashes of each system update – but no, I’m sadly disappointed and deflated each and every time.

• Feature update to Windows 10, version 1903 – Failed to install on ‎18/‎06/‎2020 – 0x800701b1, and Failed to install on ‎20/‎12/‎2019 – 0x800701b1
• Feature update to Windows 10, version 1909 – Failed to install on ‎06/‎05/‎2020 – 0x80240034, and Failed to install on ‎19/‎11/‎2019 – 0x800701b1
• Feature update to Windows 10, version 1903 (3) – Last failed install attempt on ‎06/‎05/‎2020 – 0x80240034 and Last failed install attempt on ‎03/‎04/‎2020 – 0x800701b1
• Feature update to Windows 10, version 1903 (2) – Last failed install attempt on ‎22/‎01/‎2020 – 0x800701b1
• Feature update to Windows 10, version 1903 (4) – Last failed install attempt on ‎03/‎10/‎2019 – 0x800701b1

Here’s the complete list of Feature Fails!  I’ve tried loads of things and even going through MS online help, who were very helpful – except that they didn’t solve the basic problem…

So I’m still on version 1803!  Which means I’ve missed out on the following feature updates:-

• Windows 10, version 2004 and Windows Server, version 2004 update history
• Windows 10, version 1909 and Windows Server, version 1909 update history
• Windows 10, version 1903 and Windows Server, version 1903 update history
• Windows 10, version 1809, Windows Server, version 1809, and Windows Server 2019 update history

Not impressed but not surprised.  Luckily the machine is still working but every time it tells me it needs to update my heart sinks – there goes another couple of hours of my life (that I’ll never get back) while the machine goes through all the steps to download and install gigabytes of updates (does Microsoft have shares in broadband companies?) – only for it fail close to the end and then have to spend more time uninstalling all the updates – what a waste of time!

KickStopper and IndieNoNo

What a fantastic idea it was – to crowdfund the development of cool new tech, new gadgets and stuff that the mainstream manufacturers thought too risky.  And what a shame that it has developed into a den of iniquity, of unfulfilled promises and downright lies from those running the campaigns.

According to their own stats Kickstarter claims over 150,000 successful campaigns raising over $4bn – that’s non too shabby.  But hold on just a cotton pickin’ minute – just because the campaign is successfully funded doesn’t mean it will ever deliver on its promise. A CNNMoney examination of the top 50 most-funded projects on Kickstarter found, way back in 2012, that 84% missed their target delivery dates -and that’s just the top 50.

How many of those 150k+ “successful” campaigns ever delivered anything?  Hmm, difficult finding any statistics – I wonder why?  Thankfully there are enough examples of campaigns that have been investigated to highlight the level of criminality that is going on – I particularly like this exposé from March 2018!

Indiegogo has raised over $1.3Bn from 800,000 campaigns.

Indiegogo is a less stringent alternative to the more successful Kickstarter and as such, its failure rate was always doomed to be high. Founded in 2008, the crowdfunding site has had its ups and downs. Guttulus, the Marketing Internet cat lists the top 17 failures and boy oh boy some of them are really big!!  I’ve got a 50% success rate with them:

Cynaps: Bluetooth Bone Conduction Headset in a Hat  by Mike Freeman

Just put it on to take a call or hear music on your phone or PC. No earphones required!  I’ve backed them as the product is really innovative.  It certainly delivered what it promised – except that my head doesn’t seem top generate any bass, so the sounds comes across as tinny.  However if you copy their video of a guy pressing the cap against his car then yep, that works – some serious weight of sound!

Jolla Tablet – world’s first crowdsourced tablet by Jolla 

Experience the world’s first people powered tablet, running Sailfish OS 2.0.  As an early adopter i got the Jolla phone, still have it, and yes it’s been kept up to date – but the screen’s too small so it just sits there, doing sod all.  I backed the tablet  but that never came to fruition.  Well a few lucky souls got one but I didn’t – I have however got 50% of my initial stake back so I don’t feel too disappointed in Jolla.

With Kickstarter I’ve backed 5 projects – with varying success:

Ring – Shortcut everything from Logbar inc.

Wearable Input Device that lets you control anything. Gesture control, text transmission, payment, and more! Well in reality it was too flaky to actually be usable – but from memory it did turn up when expected – so that’s a positive!!

Exploding kittens by Elan Lee

This is a card game for people who are into kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats.  Truly surreal, arrived as promised and does what it says on the tin (box!) – brilliant!

Sowatch by Farasha LLC

The world’s first autonomous smartwatch that tracks cardiovascular health, blood pressure and customizes your workouts !  A mega rip off.  Still, after keeping people waiting for 3 years, I still don’t have the item.  Not really sure if it will ever arrive and not sure what it might actually deliver in terms of usefulness – as after all it’s now 3 years out of date.

Amabrush – The 10 Second Toothbrush

Amabrush is the first toothbrush, that cleans all your teeth at once in just 10 seconds!  Allegedly!  Some people have received products and the reviews are rather mixed, so I’m not holding my breath about this one either.

Cirrus Shower: Revolutionary Experience, Uses 75% Less Water

A new innovation in the way you shower; luxurious experience and superior cleansing…  Well this actually arrived – approximately a year late.  And it meets some of what it claims.  It does use a lot less water..which means that the showering experience is pretty crap, it’s turned my power shower into a trickle.  So I’ve removed it….

So looking at my experience here I’d say I’ve had a success rate of 1 in 7 – Exploding Kittens.  Everything else has either not turned up or just hasn’t met the hype.  And sadly for anyone out there who is looking for backing to fund their innovative project these people have screwed it for you I’m afraid.  I know that there’s a higher rate of failure in technology start ups but judging by what I’ve seen on these 2 crowdfunding platforms there’s a higher level of fraudsters and get rich quick merchants – that’s a shame as it will make many more people than me look at what they’re investing in more carefully and at the same time tarnish the reputation of these crowdfunding platforms to the point where they no longer provide a viable route to market for some of the brightest thinkers of our time.  Sad but true!

My phone, it’s just like banging on rocks!

Tell me, dear reader, what’s your opinion on the following?

• Have smartphones killed the art of conversation?
• Watching television will give you square eyes
• A room without books is like a body without a soul.

…are you sitting there, harrumphing away, muttering things along the lines of..” the kids today, pah!”  Or are you like me typing away at your keyboard thinking – these are about as accurate as Bill Gates (allegedly) saying that “640K ought to be enough [memory] for anybody” or William Orton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company saying in 1876 “What use could this company make of an electrical toy?” when offered the patent for the telephone.

I’ve written before about my love for technology – when it works – and equally I’m not a creationist!  The world is a constantly changing place – climate (yes Donald, it is!), culture, technology, language – as they say the only constant is change!  I love that.  Everyday there’s something new to discover, something new to experience, to learn and to enjoy.  To me these 3 sentences are all about sticking your head in the sand, like and Emu, and living in the past, a rosy coloured past where everything was wonderful and live was just…better.

Bollocks, it wasn’t better – it was different.

The first sentence is one of the most popular statements you see/hear from older people about how the children of today spent their lives in a digital world, not communicating with each other.

Wrong!!  Today’s youth communicate far more and with far more people that has previously been possible.

OK, I know that not all of it is good but to say they aren’t communicating is just silly – they’re just communicating in different ways than their parents did, and their grandparents before them!

The second sentence, or fallacy, to give it a more useful name has been around for years – well since the television (for my younger readers that’s the big screen in the living room that you stream Netflix on) became popular and widely available in the 1960’s.

This paragraph, from “Clare” writing on the Smallpiece Trusts website, sums the situation perfectly.

This was one of the usual threats used by mother when I was a child. I never believed her, really, but I did sit a little further back from the screen every time she said it. Then when I became a mother, I decided that my daughter would never watch television. She’d only eat organic green food (while sitting nicely at the table, obvs), never ever lay eyes on a tablet and never see a mobile phone. Judging by the way my daughter chatters away into the remote control and the face she made when she first tasted broccoli (below), I can safely say I’m losing a few of these battles.

Once again we see the parent/child

 

The third sentence is a quote by Marcus Tullius Cicero, who lived 106 BC – 43 BC. A Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, and writer who vainly tried to uphold republican principles in the final civil wars that destroyed the Roman Republic. His writings include books of rhetoric, orations, philosophical and political treatises, and letters. He is remembered in modern times as the greatest Roman orator and the innovator of what became known as Ciceronian rhetoric…and in his day it was spot on.

And even then he was ahead of his times.

In Europe (I say that even though our politicians and lunatic right are trying to make us leave…) we had to wait for a millenium before Gutenberg revolutionised printing so the masses could get access to the written word…which, interestingly is now the name of a web based foundation enabling free, online, access to thousands of books!  The technology simply didn’t exist, there weren’t that many libraries around and few of the population could have actually read a book anyway.

Think about this, cuneiform writing was only developed around 3,000BC and if we take things back even further the first cave painting are thought to be only 40,000 years old or so (there are a number of places where they have been found Spain, Indonesia, and Borneo).  When people first starting to use spoken language to communicate with each would have been much earlier but we, obviously, don’t have any proof of when that started!!

Suffice it so that at some point in time, way back in history (before flares were fashionable, obviously!), banging on rocks or banging rocks on something else would have been a means of communicating with other like minded individuals. To them the idea of writing might have been a real WTF moment – “how did they do that, wow, that’s really cool”, or perhaps it would have been a “don’t do that, your fingers will drop off and your wrists go all floppy” reaction.

This is really all about attitudes to new technology and the best summation of that I can think of comes from a book – yes a book that was printed and you could, like, pick it up and it had pages which you’d be told off for folding down the corner of to remember how far you’d got! – called Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore – yes children you can still buy it on Amazon, although there is a Kindle version, oh and an Audible one as well 🙂

It was all about selling new technology and it grouped people and markets into stages of technology adoption – hey even silver surfers get social media these days!  The 5 types/stages of adoption are as follows – from fastest to slowest:

• Innovators – these are the people who think stuff up, who break new ground, adopt new ways of doing things. The love the technology pure and simple – even if it isn’t that practical yet.
• Early Adopters – these are the people who see what the innovators have come up with a go wow I want it.  Not only that they tend to evangelise of the benefits of the change, rather than technology/process itself.
• Early Majority – this lot need to know that it works, maybe some one they know already has it and says it’s really good. They like reviews – they’re the Tripadvisor generation.
• Late Majority – this lot are only prepared to adopt something when it’s been around quite a while, it’s really easy to get it and the price has probably dropped significantly.
• Laggards (also known as Luddites) – this bunch either aren’t interested in what’s new or are actually afraid of it.  A lot of the statements you read about the harm that new stuff can cause is from fear – from a lack of understanding, from ignorance.

So that’s why you get so many different attitudes to technology, and anything that’s new in fact, and phones and the way they are used is just the latest form of communication.  Much of that communication is in digital form and uses social media, and if you thought that 20 million people watching a TV programme in the UK was large, check out the user bases below – data from Statista:

Taking Facebook as an example, of that total of over 2.2 billion users more than 1 billion are using their mobile phones to communicate. and well over half of all Google search is now conducted on mobile devices.

So are young people spending too long on their phones?

No, the mobile device/phone is the portal to the world wide web, to knowledge, to entertainment – the communication channel of choice – just like those rocks were millenia ago.

..but you do have to wonder what comes next…will Virtual Reality still have a “social” means of communication or will people become more insular – we’ll just have to wait and see.

 

The folly of phone design

So, tell me, why after the development of phone design over the past 20 years that has claimed to make them so robust e.g. Gorilla Glass, ceramic backs and the like are they so bloody fragile?

My Samsung Galaxy S8+ is actually cracked in 2 places on the front and the back has several cracks running the full length.   I was quoted £250 to replace them but as it turns out to be an “International” version the company wouldn’t touch it.  I’m not even aware of how it got so damaged.  The only thing I can think of is that it came into contact with something else in my trouser pockets – possibly a key or possible a coin.  I’ll admit to having dropped it a couple of times but on both occasions it has either been fine or been protected by the case I have had to purchase to protect it since it got cracked!!

This from Tom’s Guide – Phone Drop Test results 2018:

Good news: Chances are, your phone will survive a 6-foot fall onto wood and, if it’s lucky enough to land on its edge, withstand drops onto concrete with minimal damage.

Bad news: If you don’t have a screen protector, there’s a really good chance something’s going to break.

It seems that the Motorola Moto Z2 Force was the winner – in fact, Motorola guarantees that the screen on the Moto Z2 Force won’t crack – and in Tom’s test’s – it didn’t! – but the rest suffered in varying degrees.  Sadly they aren’t planning on producing a Force version of the Moto Z3 – shame on you Lenovo!

So what else is happening in the world of screens and screen protection – improving that area is absolutely key.  Well the current leader in this area has to be Corning and their “Gorilla Glass” product which has been lauded around the globe by just about every phone manufacturer.

Visually stunning, incredibly tough Corning® Gorilla® Glass enables today’s sleekest smartphone and tablet designs, while providing exceptional damage resistance to the scratches and bumps of everyday use. Gorilla Glass is sensitive enough for today’s most sophisticated touch applications, and is available with an easy-to-clean coating.

Hmm the scratches and bumps of everyday use…I’d like to see their definition of that!  As millions of phone owners will testify Gorilla Glass is about as robust as a paper bag! Samsung did announce in July 2018 that they’d developed a bendable and unbreakable screen – I’d settle for unbreakable – the folding phone is interesting but not essential – an unbreakable screen IS essential!  and why do I say that?  Well it should be obvious – just look at the sumptuous photo shots that are being used to sell us this year’s latest phone – just check out those curves – I mean phaaw, c’mon!  Manufacturers have invested billions in designing “sexy”, “cool”, phones but sadly they also appear to have built in “built in obsolescence” as well.  I shouldn’t really be surprised.  However as the price of these phones skyrockets it is inevitable that replacement cycles will grow longer – so c’mon guys make the bloody things last better!

In some products’ life-cycle the manufacturers can make as much profit from marketing the accessories as they can from the main device itself but the ludicrously high cost of today’s phones (and no I don’t buy the precious metals argument I bit!) is such that it wouldn’t be worth the issues of product inventory management – lots of low value accessories is a real pain to manage!!  And easy to get wrong!

So please, will someone get the cost of producing Micro-LED screens down so we can start using them, thus saving power (and therefore eliminating the current issue of running out of juice) and at the same time due to their power efficiency and increased brightness can we have plastic coating applied which stops them cracking so damned easily – please?

What are Micro-LEDs I hear you ask? Well this – thanks to Anroidpit.com for the words!

Micro LEDs is a new technology still in its infancy, but it has great potential to become the next big thing on the display market. Micro LED displays work similarly to OLED panels, but are even thinner. They consist of inorganic semiconductors, specifically a gallium-nitrite combination. Like OLEDs, these are light-emitting diodes, but they are much smaller.

Backlighting is not necessary with micro-LEDs, nor is a polarization filter required. The glass layer above the panel can also be slimmed even further. The brightness per watt, which simplifies the efficiency of the displays, is even better than that of OLED panels and beats LCD by far. With the same brightness, a micro-LED display requires only half as much energy as an OLED screen, in some cases even less. The extremely small diodes also allow higher resolutions on the same surface – a 4K smartwatch would be conceivable with micro LEDs. Last but not least, micro LED screens are not as susceptible to pixel burn-in as OLED displays.

And as wireless charging is the de facto standard these days let’s just make sure that the phone back will allow inductance charging, avoid unnecessary fingerprint smearing and oh yes – stop bloody cracking!!

So c’mon Lenovo, Samsung, OnePlus etc etc – let’s see all of this in the new Z4, S10, 7T etc etc- I know it’s CES time – so go for it guys!

Technology is great – when it’s smart and when it works!

I’m not sure if it’s because there’s tech all around us and we’ve had years and years of “plug and play” but I’d really like to understand the frustration I experience shortly after I get some new tech.  I mean why does so much tech take so much effort to get it working properly?  Well from research undertaken, whilst I was having my lunch, it appears that there are a range of factors/aggregation of said factors that can make human blood boil…

1. Why doesn’t everybody use the same damn standard?
2. Why is it sooooo difficult to set these things up in the first place?
3. Why does the damn device keep losing its connection?
4. Are things getting too complicated?
5. Am I stupid?

For starters why is this so important?  Well…According to the report, “2018 Global Smart Home Market Forecast”, worldwide consumer spending on smart home devices, systems and services will total nearly $96 billion in 2018 and grow at 10% CAGR over the forecast period (2018 to 2023) to $155 billion. Adoption of smart speakers from Amazon and Google is boosting the market. – yikes!!

Now whether this is driven by the desire for us humans to have an easy life and achieving this by automating many of the hugely labour intensive chores at home (like playing music of turning on/off lights – Hey Alexa/Siri/Cortana/OK Google et al) or if it’s some quasi-ethical, anti-fossil fuel, tree-hugging instinct to monitor your energy use that is emerging (possibly only really amongst “millenials”) it appears to be a fact – the smart home market is growing apace!!

But what proportion of the population considers themselves to be “techies”?  I dunno -but back in 2013 IDG helpfully offered the following “10 Signs You’re Probably a Techie” – check your selves out – be my guest.  I consider myself to be one, I’m an early adopter who loves the latest “shiny-shiny”; gadgets and “cool-tools” – but I still find it a challenge to integrate my latest fave piece of tech!

Standards:

When I worked in the hi-fi world (hold on to your horses but we’re talking in the last millenium – yikes I’m old!!) there was a term that was used – “super-compatability”.  This meant that your devices not only connected up, but they played together – beautifully.  Sonic perfection with the minimum of fuss (although a not insignificant level of expenditure was required to achieve this aural nirvana). However, today we have a plethora of disparate operating standards across multiple operating systems and each designed to maximise the profitability of each brand’s “eco-system”!   Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Xiaomi, ZigBee, Philips, the list just grows and grows. Allegedly you can get some of these to talk to each other – you note I say allegedly!!

In fact it is far more complex than just that.  The Internet of Things organisation in the UK has helpfully provided a wealth of information for those of you who are the true connected home nerds:

Powered by Digital Catapult and Future Cities Catapult, IoTUK was a programme of activities that sought to advance the UK’s global leadership in the Internet of Things (IoT) and increase the adoption of high quality IoT technologies and services throughout businesses and the public sector.

IoTUK was a national programme designed to accelerate the UK’s Internet of Things (IoT) capability, launched as part of the Government’s £32m investment in IoT.

Just check out their “IoT Standards and Protocols” – an overview of protocols involved in Internet of Things devices and applications. Help clarify with IoT layer technology stack and head-to-head comparisons. Yep, that’s what I thought too!  No wonder it’s difficult.

Difficult to set up

Remember Plug n Play?

Plug and Play (PnP) is a capability developed by Microsoft for its Windows 95 and later operating systems that gives users the ability to plug a device into a computer and have the computer recognize that the device is there. The user doesn’t have to tell the computer.

Yeah right, that sounds cool.  Sounds perfect for the non-coder early adopter such as myself!!  And maybe, just maybe, you can connect your new device to your home wifi network without too much problem – although if like me you’ve wasted money on TP-link smart plugs you’ll know that’s not a given – just check out those reviews – ouch!  Even if you’re fortunate to achieve that there’s no guarantee that, just for the hell of it, the device won’t suddenly decide it can’t be arsed to work and whatever you try it will just sullenly refuse to re-connect.  Shocking waste of money team – don’t do it.

Even Amazon – the accepted leader in the home automation world – still doesn’t make it easy on you.  Have you read my earlier post on the subject – or this one – they don’t like being criticised, do they?    I’ve got plenty of Echo devices, fire Sticks etc etc but if I wanted them to control the turning on and off of my TV/satellite box I need something else – a Harmony Hub. so I’ve got one but it was so damn difficult to get it to stay connected I switched it off.  Plus you had to say stuff like “Alexa, tell Harmony to turn on the TV”!

Here are the instructions for setting up your Harmony Hub…

#update!!!  I have just discovered that as of November 10th (no idea which year!)…

 On Friday November 10th, Logitech Harmony introduced a deeper and more natural integration with your Amazon Alexa voice experience. Play, pause, stop, fast forward, adjust the volume and tune to channel numbers, all without having to say, “ask Harmony to”. Update to the “Harmony” Alexa skill to make use of these new features.

Well I’ll just have to try switching it back on and see 🙂 apparently all you have to say now is….

“Alexa, turn on sports” to power on your TV, set your stereo to surround sound, lower your window shades and even set your table lamps to your team colors.

Stable connections

I’ve already highlighted the propensity of the TP-Link “smart” plug to lose the plot but that’s not all – my broadband router, as supplied GigaClear offers the poorest of home wifi capability, although it does offer guidance on how to improve things via its website.

1. Powerline ethernet:  I tried that and as soon as I switched it on the router just dropped ALL internet connectivity – thanks for that one!
2. Direct ethernet connection: Er, isn’t wifi supposed to be much easier, and no messy cables around the house…
3. Wireless access points.  They actually suggested I purchased and intalled a slave router.  I did. Trouble was every time we had a power cut (I live in a rural area…with no good BT broadband…hence using fibre from GigaClear…) the slave router was quicker faster and betteer than the GigaClear one so..all the wifi devices connected ti ti – but of course it was a slave so it didn’t have it’s own internet connection – doh!
4. They said avoid wifi extenders – I haven’t and thank god I didn’t although I still get the odd drop out
5. Their final option was using a different router – see 3!

So it’s clear that much of the issues are a mix of crap tech (the product) or crap service (broadband/electricity).  If you thought that broadband over fibre was stable – think again.  Here’s how Virgin Media and BT have been doing over the past 24 hours (live data so it will change) – so there’s still a way to go to provide the kind of stability that is required to cope with the flaky technology that we’re being sold!!

Too complex

At the beginning of this year (2018) Nilay Patel wrote a piece on the Verge called “Everything is too complicated” and in it he said:

Think of the tech industry as being built on an ever-increasing number of assumptions: that you know what a computer is, that saying “enter your Wi-Fi password” means something to you, that you understand what an app is, that you have the desire to manage your Bluetooth device list, that you’ll figure out what USB-C dongles you need, and on and on.

And you know what?  He isn’t the only one!

• 52 Insights.com
• Electronic Component News
• Quora
• Aeon Essays
• Wired

I could go on…and on, and on, and on!

Too stupid?

Am I really the reverse of Marvin the Paranoid android?  Do I have a brain the size of a pea?  I think NOT!

“Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? ‘Cos I don’t.”

Don’t get me wrong-  I’m no genius – but I’ve got an above average IQ (c.140 – whatever that means!) and I can grasp quite complex concepts like “Cognitive Dissonance“, “Bounded Rationality” and “Black Holes” and answer equally difficult questions such as “Why am I here?”, “Who is Linda Clayton?” and “What is The Infinite Improbability Drive” so I’m not a total idiot – I just have problems getting my tech to talk to each other and the outside world!

The answers are, btw, a. Because I damn well am, b. a figment of someone’s imagination and c. an example of Douglas Adams’ genius.

 

 

 

 

 

Lights at nights and prats on the pavement!

As the evenings are drawing in, earlier and earlier and the dawn rising later and later, the growth in cycling on our roads (mostly!) grows ever more dangerous.  There’s a combination of bad behaviour from both cyclists and motorists part that can lead to accidents and when this is compounded by the advances in lighting technology, the lack of practical legislation and the result of government budget cuts – well just look out that’s what I say!  Allow me to expand on this…

From a UK health perspective the growth in cycling is a bonus – especially for those older people who are trying to exercise without adding undue stresses and strains on their ageing joints.  Not everyone can afford to join a gym, or wants to have their own static bike when the draw of the open air, the the feel of lycra on your skin and the “crack” of riding en masse exists.  Good on you I say.  If the roads had been kept in better condition and not left to rot away until they offer nothing less than an assault course for the rider I’d be with you – at least in summer when it’s warm, and light!

First off bad behaviour – on both sides!

I’m a driver not a rider.  I appreciate that my 2 tonne vehicle is perfectly capable of turning a cyclist in a bloody pulp.  So I do NOT drive up their arses, jump (or even totally ignore) red traffic signals, I indicate clearly what my next move is going to be and I give them as much space as I give a horse when I’m overtaking them – safely.  So I get extremely p*ssed off when I come across a pack of lycra clad morons who are either, totally oblivious to the queue of traffic that is building up behind them as the saunter down a country lane – 2 abreast (and when there are lot of them even more abreast!!), or just being ****ing arrogant!

I drive patiently, whilst I may be seething inside my comfy cabin, I understand the argument about “safety in numbers” but still, c’mon these are roads we are talking about not the bleeding Serengeti!  Drive responsible – everyone!

Jumping red lights – According to the Institute of Advanced Motorists, 57% of cyclists admit to running red lights. A 2013 YouGov poll found that 35% of cyclists admit to ignoring red lights at least “occasionally.” If caught jumping a red light, cyclists can be issued a Fixed Penalty Notice of £30. OK these are kids – bloody stupid kids – but they’ll grow up into bloody stupid adults – if they’re lucky!

Let’s now focus on technology, specifically lighting technology.  When a car approaches with its headlights poorly adjusted there’s every chance that the driver is going to get a taste of his or her own medicine as the recipient of the dazzling elects to give the other driver the benefits of his or her own full beams!  Modern lighting is getting too bright, so when it is badly adjusted it’s actually dangerous – if you have to close your eyes, even for an instant, to avoid being dazzled (and having your night vision destroyed) you can’t see where you’re going… Now this isn’t as some writers have shown, down to my age – I’m not talking about the deterioration of my eyes – I’m talking about lights that if the individual was driving behind you would be dazzling you in your rear view mirror – i.e. too high or those lights which seem to be permanently readjusting themselves by flicking up and down or aligned incorrectly – too far to the right!

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders maintains there is no evidence that factory fitted high-power lights distract drivers and that lamp-levelling technology ensures they are safe.

Yeah, right….bollocks!

In fact there is clear guidance as to how they should be set up – this from Wiki-How :

There are mounting screws and adjustment screws above, below and to the side of the headlight. Park your vehicle 25 feet from a wall, and place a piece of tape horizontally 4 feet high across the wall in front of your vehicle. Turn on the low beams. Adjust the headlights until they shine on the tape.

Your car would fail its MOT test if your lights are poorly set up.  So you’d expect the same for those “xenon” style LED lights that bicycles are now using – wouldn’t you…and you’d be WRONG!

According to the Road Vehicles Lighting Regulations (RVLR), it’s illegal to cycle on a public road after dark without lights and reflectors and rule 60 of the Highway code says:

“At night your cycle MUST have white front and red rear lights lit. It MUST also be fitted with a red rear reflector (and amber pedal reflectors, if manufactured after 1/10/85). White front reflectors and spoke reflectors will also help you to be seen. Flashing lights are permitted but it is recommended that cyclists who are riding in areas without street lighting use a steady front lamp.”

Bike Radar offers guidance on bikes and lights –

Is there a maximum brightness for bike lights?  No there isn’t, but you don’t want to dazzle oncoming drivers, for obvious reasons!

“If your lights cause undue dazzle or discomfort to other road users, then you’re breaking the law and the police are within their rights to fine you,” says Cycling UK. In practice, though, as long as your bike has a front white and red rear light it’s rare to be stopped and fined by the police, but please be considerate to other road users.

One more word of advice — don’t mount your most powerful front light on your helmet. It completely dazzles oncoming road users, and is very inconsiderate.

So it’s mostly you MUST have lights at night and only an aside about don’t dazzle other road users…well let’s go back to that image at the top of this post.  Have another look at it – here it is again…

Have a look at the right hand hedge.  It must be at least 6 foot high.  And it’s being illuminated brightly by the light on the front of the bike…  Now take a look at the left hand hedge…it’s almost in the dark.  Now if that was me driving towards this numpty I’b be less than impressed.  In fact I’d have to say that at least 50% of the bikes I meet at night have overly bright, even dazzling lights, whereas for cars the figure is closer to 5%.

Maybe it’s about time that bikes need to have MOTs – to get their lights tested at the very least.  Maybe it’s about time the Police stopped some of these morons who give the rest of the cycling community a bad name and did something about it – but they won’t ‘coz Theresa May has cut their budgets by 25%, and officer number are way down, and they don’t even investigate burglaries anymore – so to expect them to leave the city centres late night opening establishments to pull cyclists over for jumping red lights and having dangerous headlights is never, ever going to happen – until someone changes the priorities.

I mean, for a PR stunt, you could always knock BoJo off his bike to generate aware of bike safety, or even better stop the twat from riding around by making him MOT his bike.

Also I would like to make 2 final points about cyclists – specifically those in Oxford.  Oxford is a city that pats itself on the back (repeatedly) for being extremely bike friendly.  Loads of bus/bike lanes for them to use, masses of “parking” spaces for bikes, speed humps and other road calming measures to slow the traffic down.  They’ve even gone so far as to reduce the amount of parking for cars in the centre so you have to use the park and ride schemes they have introduced.  Great, all those measures must make it a paradise for you cyclists out there…well there are 2 things that you can do to make it safer – for us drivers who now have turned into pedestrians so we can get around your city:

1. park your cycles nicely – don’t just strew them around making it tricky to get past them..
2. don’t ride on the ****ing pavement!

That 2nd one is actually an offence – it seems to confuse many cyclists about whether or not they are allowed to cycle on the pavement. According to Laws HA 1835 section 72 & RSA 1984, section 129, cyclists must not cycle on the pavement.

“Politicians need to take their foot off the accelerator in order to protect the planet.”

Oh really? That isn’t necessarily the case – see this scientific article!

I can vouch for the fact that if I’m travelling to work, sadly using the A34 in Oxfordshire then my mpg performance drops dramatically compared to a run where the car is able to run at a speed closer to the legal limit.  And surely improving mpg is one, I’ll admit only one, measure of helping to damage the planet less. We need to get to and from work and public transport has declined to a point that unless you live in London you’re basically ****ed!

My point being that if cars were able to travel at, or even closer to, their most optimum speed the amount of petrol/diesel consumed would drop significantly.  So, taking that point to it’s logical conclusion spending £42 billion on making cars work more efficiently by providing better roads would benefit far more people than building a railway that almost no one will benefit from – except of course the shareholders of those companies who win the contracts to build HS2.  Less fuel used, less time spent driving to and from work = more time for actual working or for the family – ok I know there’s the negative that HMRC gets less income form petrol duty!

So, instead of ruining many thousands of people’s journeys on a daily basis thanks to traffic issues which are going to cost us nigh on £62 billion by 2016… (and this is just the value that people would put on their time – not the actual cost of their “wasted” time nor the cost of the extra fuel that is being used!)

In the UK, INRIX Roadway Analytics identified and ranked 20,375 traffic hotspots in 21 cities. The ranking was determined by an ‘Impact Factor’, which multiplied the average duration of a traffic jam with its average length and the number of times it occurred in September 2016. The cost to drivers due to time wasted in traffic at these hotspots, calculated using the DfT’s ‘value of time’, amounts to £61.8 billion in the UK by 2025 if congestion levels are not reduced.

…why not focus on these – the top 10 ways that Global Citizen reckons are the way to reduce climate change…

• Rooftop solar – Elon Musk is big into this
• Silvopasture – apparently this is as simple as planting trees in pasture land and letting cattle roam there!
• Solar farms – like your rooftops only on a massive scale.
• Family planning – tricky given that a vast majority of the under-developed world is Catholic and China’s just upped the children per household to 2!!
• Educating girls – we’re talking mainly (but not exclusively) in the under-developed world as educated girls/women have less kids – although educating stupid men not to treat women as an inferior species would be a good start!
• Protecting or replanting tropical forests – clearly cutting down the Amazon is just bonkers.
• Plant rich diets – this means shifting away from the western style processed food diet – clearly a good thing but pretty tricky to sell.
• Reducing food waste – absolutely essential.  The amount of perfectly edible food that we throw away is just obscene.
• Offshore wind turbines – surely there are enough places that we could site these – without destroying the beauty of them.
• Refridgeration management – we’re talking air conditioning in homes and cars as well as well fridges!!  Apparently the eradication of Ozone crunching CFCs has led to a repairing of the hole but sadly the replacement HFCs which get released at end of the fridge’s life can heat the atmosphere 900 times more than CO2!

Clearly governments have a big part to play in this, so to come back to the original headline of this post, governments need to take their collective feet off the motorist and plant them firmly on accelerators – those organisations that can stimulate innovation and future business, ‘coz that’s the only way we’re going to get things like these:

1. home battery packs to store electricity generated from our roofs,
2. wind turbines that can be fitted to homes and offices as well as out to sea,
3. greater investment in planting more vegetation – everywhere,
4. ways to convince people of certain religions that their dogmas aren’t right,
5. getting “out of date” food to people and places that need it,
6. packaging that can be recycled,
7. home automation systems designed to minimise power usage
8. I’m inclined to add in “drive less/drive smart” but only if there’s an equivalent improvement in public transportation
9. tell Trump he’s an idiot and get the US to stay in the Paris agreement
10. and finally tell planners to sort out the road network so we drivers CAN drive more efficiently!