I started having signal issues a few weeks ago where my Optimus 2X would randomly lose signal in a seemingly good signal area. It wouldn’t get it back until I either rebooted the phone or I set airplane mode on and then off again. Obviously this is a real pain and shouldn’t need to be done.

After a little bit of investigation work I determined it wasn’t likely to be the phone itself. It’s either a SIM card issue or a software issue (more likely since I run a custom ROM on it). The easiest thing would be to order a new SIM card to I went ahead and did this through O2′s live chat. That went smooth as you could ever imagine so no complaints there. And kudos to O2 for offering such a service, it saves time and money.

Anyway the rep I spoke to assured me everything was automatic for the switch over, which I was happy about. I was told it would arrive in a few days.

On Sunday I got a message saying I’d get it on Monday. Great! Fast service! Come Sunday evening I was browsing Facebook just before I went to bed and suddenly I noticed the phone had no signal again. Great, so I rebooted but the signal didn’t come back. I tried a second time with the same result. Thinking nothing of it I put it into my old Sony Ericsson which reported “SIM INACTIVE”. What the hell?

So here I am wondering why this has happened, it turns out that O2 have turned off my current SIM in anticipation of the new arrival the next day. Well done O2, you’ve now cut me off for the next 18 hours. How? Let me explain. I work a 9-5 job like most others, and as everyone knows post doesn’t magically arrive at 7am in the morning so there was no chance I was going to have my new SIM until the evening of the next day. This makes no sense because it means I’m without a phone for 18 hours.

Now what they should have done is activated the new SIM the next evening and told me to put it in on Tuesday morning. That would have made more sense and would have prevented daytime disconnection. I have sent O2 an e-mail regarding their replacement SIM activation process but I’ve not heard back from them yet (not surprising, they’ll probably take a few days). I’ve suggested the above to them for their activation process for replacement SIM’s, so I hope they take it.

Had I been a business customer I could have potentially lost a full days business. Even being a regular consumer I could have missed important phone calls. What if I needed to get in contact with someone or them contact me? I was completely out of reach for the whole time. Had O2 told me this would be the case I would have been OK with it, but the fact I was not told and it happened out of the blue is what annoyed me most.

Anyway what’s done is done, and I’ve made the complaint to O2. Lets hope they follow it. And let this be a lesson to anyone who is thinking of a replacement SIM following similar issues, make sure you confirm with them what the procedure it. It will probably vary between providers.

If you do, check out this pepperoni pizza website. It has facts and history of pizza, and makes an interesting read.

I’m going to make a pepperoni pizza from scratch one day as it seems like a nice idea. I wonder if it will be any cheaper than buying one? Initial thoughts say not but from the results I’ve seen the look far more appetising!

OK so you’ve probably heard of MB and GB (MegaBytes and GigaBytes), they’re used on all sorts of devices from phones to computers. But what are they? Better still, what are MiB and GiB (MibiBytes and GibiBytes)? Well both are units for measuring memory size but they have differences. The difference is that one is calculated using base 2 and one is calculated using base 10.

For these examples we’ll stick to GigaBytes and GibiBytes for our sizes.

A GigaByte that we’re all so used to is base 10 (1,000,000,000 bytes to 1 Gigabyte).
A GibiByte that you may have heard of is in base 2 (1,073,741,824 bytes to 1 GibiByte).

Table taken from http://www.pcguide.com/intro/fun/bindec.htm

So why does it cause confusion? Several reasons. Most sizes are referred to in Mega or Giga bytes so many people have been accustomed to this. For example in magazines or advertisements selling electronic equipment (tablet’s, digital cameras, etc.) and computers running Windows they’re referred to as this, but that’s where the confusion comes in, and a bit of a rant because of it.

The difference between 1GiB and 1GB is marginal, but when you increase this to several tens or thousands, it throws the scale way off. Not only that, Windows runs in base 2, but actually displays it using the prefix for base 10. So when you think it’s 1 GigaByte it’s actually showing 1 GibiByte instead but with the wrong unit! I have no idea why Microsoft decided to do this but it’s confusing as hell when you’re trying to work out the differences in file size on a program that really does show it properly. Gah!

The problem I had recently was on one of my sites, BetaArchive. I was trying to find discrepancies in the total archive size counter. It wasn’t showing the right size but we were adamant we had it right. In the end it turned out to be in the units.

Now I believe Mac and Linux use GigaBytes correctly and are also switchable from what I have read, you just have to find the option for it so Windows should have no excuse getting it right. Many people have complained to Microsoft but they’ve never done anything about it for some reason, so this problem continues to plague developers and people like myself trying to work out these discrepancies.

Suffice to say I wasted 2 hours trying to figure out where the missing data was. As a result of this cock-up I’ve even had to put a message next on the display on BetaArchive so people know it’s actually showing the right unit on the site but Windows shows the wrong unit!

I don’t doubt this will plague people for years to come as I doubt it will be fixed in Windows 8 either. I just find it hard to believe Microsoft have got away with it for this long.

Image Source:
bcbrownbooks.blogspot.com/
2011/02/book-thief.html

Last night I came home from work as usual and as I walked down the driveway I noticed something wasn’t right. Something was missing. It took me a second to realise what it was but it was my bloody trailer! It had gone! Half inched! I didn’t even put a second more thought into it, as soon as I was in I called the police to report the theft. I used the new non-emergency line on “101″, since this wasn’t an emergency really. It’s only the 2nd time I’ve ever had to call the emergency services in any shape or form, and the last was 7 years ago when my friend Tom jumped off a short cliff edge (2 meters high) onto some rocks, landed badly and broke some bones.

I should probably mention at this point that the trailer wasn’t empty.

It contained the poles for a tent which are probably irreplaceable now due to the age of it, but it’s such a great tent it would be a shame to lose it. That’s what I was more concerned with, not the trailer. They’re easy enough to come by and for fairly cheap as well.

Anyway I called up the police station and was through to someone within 20 seconds. They took some details down and gave me a reference number. This took about 5 minutes and then it was done. I was told by the woman on the other end I’d receive a phone call in the next 24 hours for a proper statement. By this point I was happy it was getting looked into.

As a typical Facebook user I thought it might be a good idea to post there to my friends who live in the area, just asking for them to keep an eye out for it. I even posted a picture (which didn’t work for some reason, so I went back to text only). This sparked up suggestions to check eBay, gumtree and I thought of trying freecycle as well. Stolen items often seem to make their way onto those types of sites fairly quickly. I did some checking but it wasn’t there.

After a few hours my friend James suggested I contact the landlord in case it was them who had moved the trailer. I dismissed the idea as even plausible but instead thought of asking them about the recent contractors that had been renovating some of the building, just in case they had seen anything. I fired off a quick e-mail and that’s pretty much all I heard about it the rest of the night.

The next morning one of my workmates who carpools with me turned up. I told him the full story that I’m telling you now. We head to work and all sorts of scenarios are spoken about and before we know it we’re at work. As soon as I got in I told all the guys there – some knew already because of Facebook, others didn’t and were fairly shocked. “Who would want to steal a trailer?!”, I asked. “Someone who wanted to tow something I guess!”, was the response. We all laughed, it was a stupid question I suppose!

5 minutes after I sat down my e-mails came through and there was one from the landlord. It went to the tune of “We’ve received your e-mail and we’ll ask around the contractors”. Great, it’s a start at least. Nothing more was said.

About 10.30am comes around and I get another e-mail from the landlord.

“We moved your trailer”

What?! I kept reading. “We believed it belonged to a previous tenant who was evicted in the summer, so we removed it believing it to be abandoned.” OK, fair comment, but it has my number plate on it! It’s hard not to know it’s mine! Then it was pointed out that I was at work and they had nothing to compare it with. Doh!

Anyhow, the e-mail continued; “It’s still with our contractor so we will arrange to have it returned to you”. Great news! I was relieved so much. I e-mailed back saying thanks, and asking if the contents was still intact as well to which the reply was “yes”. That’s all that mattered. The poles are the bits that I want back the most otherwise our camping holiday would have been completely ruined in a sense. We rely on the large tent as our common tent for everyone to cook, eat and chat in. Without that we can’t all be in the same place socialising etc, outside gets too cold in the evenings.

Now that I know it’s safe it’s a big relief. It’s not been returned yet, they’re going to let me know when the contractor has time to return it. That way I can make sure it’s been secured and I can remove the contents. I’m not letting that happen again!

You might be asking why I’ve even bothered telling you all of this? It’s simple. Don’t take ANYTHING for granted. If a trailer is not secure, it WILL be stolen (or in my case, removed). And DON’T leave anything of value in it! That’s the mistake I made, and I almost paid for it. I’m just glad my luck was for the best here and it was someone I knew who removed it in the first place and would return it.

Now, all that said, keep safe everyone, and keep your belongings locked up.

Happy new year to everyone, I hope you welcomed the year in style and with a stomach full of booze. I know I did!

This month has been an interesting one, not just with Christmas and New Year but also with hardware as well. A few weeks ago my server randomly reset during the night. I thought nothing of it and let is continue doing what it does, I never checked any logs. A few days later the same happened again so I started keeping an eye on it. Again another few days passed and it reset again, this then started to concern me so I did some chkdsk scans and everything came back clean. As I had other things on my mind I left it for a few days.

One day several days later I started to get backup failure e-mails so I went investigating. Hold on, the backup drive is missing, it’s just gone. I reset the server but it didn’t come back, so I tried a hard reset instead (full power off and on again). It came back. I decided it would be a nice idea to check the SMART stats and to my dismay it had “Raw Read Errors”. The drive was dying.

Several things can cause raw read errors but the most common are either controller failure or physical media failure. No matter which it was, the drive needed replacing. Luckily for me I had a spare 1TB drive which I hadn’t used and was just sat there waiting. While making the change I decided that perhaps now would be a good time to switch to my new home server hardware which has been gathering dust for the better part of 6 months.

The one part I hate about switching hardware is the OS re-installation and reconfiguration, but this time I decided to just switch the boot drive and see what happens. To my delight the OS started and worked just as it did on the old hardware with just a small wait for the new drivers to install. After that I put in the other drives and the server was fully operational without any reconfiguration! All I had to do was initialise the new backup drive, set up the new directory structure and off it went.

Needless to say I was very happy that I didn’t have to spend hours reconfiguring it all. So what are the new specs you might be asking? Nothing special.

AMD Phenom II 550 Dual Core CPU @ 3.10GHz
10GB DDR3 Corsair 1333MHz (2x4GB and 1x2GB)
ASUS M4A77T (6xSATA)
3×1.0TB Samsung
1×1.5TB Samsung
2×2.0TB Samsung

It does allow me to use hardware virtualisation if I need to though which is what the extra memory was for originally.

Now, I better not get another disk failure as I have no more spares and they’re still not cheap enough to buy new ones!

A friend of mine recently bought an Arduino Uno after I mentioned it in a conversation. It’s much the same as a PICAXE but it is designed to be much easier to program (even though the PIXAXE was programmed in BASIC which wasn’t really so basic). I decided it would be fun to try it as well because it has something called an Ethernet Shield (a shield is just an expansion or add-on board).

The Ethernet Shield allows you to connect it to the Internet. This allows you to do so much more with it, and that’s where I got the idea for basic home automation. My first idea was to control a light to begin with and work my way up from there. I’d like to make a remote reset system for my home server set up. I’d like to make it so I can reset the server remotely should it be required.

This got me thinking of other ideas as well such as a weather display (I’ve seen a few of these around) or a server monitor for my server in France and at home. I’ll probably think of even more ideas along the way as well as there are so many “shields” you can get for the Arduino, including GPS, GSM (mobile phone), LCD screens and more.

Source: Arduino.cc

I’ll be updating the blog with my progress once I receive my Arduino and Ethernet Shield, and I will probably post code that I use as well. Hopefully it won’t take too long to get used to as it looks much like PHP code that I’m familiar with.

Here is the final circuit I used as a basis. Some of the components have been subsituted:-
- 220uH substiuted for 200uH (best I could find for 1A output)
- 100uF substiuted for 330uH (what I had to hand)
- 0.1uF left out

Here are the 4 separated circuits on a single board:

The heatsink at 85% load (850mA) gets hot but not hot enough to burn you when you touch it. This is much more efficient than the LM7805 which got too hot to touch (it actually melted my breadboard).

All that remains is to add some output connector blocks and the board is complete. I can then move onto the smaller board which will house the voltage divider. This will be mounded behind the switch for each of the USB ports.

More to come.

So, the Blackberry was a bad idea, I admit. It was a nice phone but the software was lacking in too many areas (mainly the Java side of it). If RIM bring the Blackberry to Android standards then I’d happily go back.

So anyway I thought it was about time I got myself a new phone. I was definitely after another Android because they’re just so powerful and the apps you want actually exist (and for free too) unlike on Blackberry. I began shopping around quite a while ago but I could never quite find what I wanted for the right price. I didn’t want to spend any more than £300 because I just don’t feel the likes of the iPhone 4S is worth £500 (more if you get more memory). £300 was my set limit, no matter how tempting the iPhone was.

I set myself the challenge of price, it had to be Android and it had to be capable of running Cyanogen Mod (stock ROM’s are awful on most phones). So after much browsing and research, the LG Optimus 2X was my final choice. I wanted the Samsung Galaxy S2 but it’s price tag of £480 put it straight off the list. The LG Optimus 2X however has similar specifications but only cost £269 from Amazon (the cheapest I could find it). What’s more it runs Cyanogen too.

Source: TechRadar

Specs

This phone has some impressive specs packed into such a small area. Lets have a look:

Dual Core 1 GHz Cortex-A9
Nvidia Tegra 2 AP20H Chipset
ULP GeForce GPU
512MB RAM
8GB Internal Storage, up to 32GB more can be added with a micro SD card
480×800 IPS LCD Capacitive Touch Screen
Soft Touch Capacitive Buttons
8MP Main Camera (1080p Video Capable @ 24fps, 720p @ 30fps)
1.3MP Front Camera
LED Flash
GPS
1500mAh Battery

See more specs here >
See TechRadar’s Review >

As you can see, it’s a very powerful device. The 2X was the first dual core phone ever produced, and along with the Nvidia Tegra chipset it makes for a very powerful combination.

512MB RAM is pretty standard for a high end Android smart phone, so nothing special about that. The internal 8GB of memory is double that of most other smart phones, but this can be upgraded with 32GB more with the micro SD card slot. And again with the screen this is a standard size for high end smart phones. I was disappointed to see no OLED screen with this but for the price I’m not going to complain much.

The camera is an 8MP 1080p video capable sensor which I have to say performs pretty well. The focus speed is immense at under 1 second, often quicker. 1080p video doesn’t appear to stutter during my tests but the quality is a little short of that I would expect from a camera designed to do 1080p. It’s a little grainy and lacks definition but certainly does well enough for your average amateur video recording. I’d imagine 720p would look a little sharper but I’ve not tested this as of yet. The LED flash is a little dull, my Blackberry was at least twice the brightness but the quality of the photo makes up for this when lighting is sufficient.

The 1.3MP front camera is very poor. If you’ve ever seen a poor webcam in low light you’ll understand what I mean, that’s how bad it is. There is no lighting on the front either so for low lit video calls it would be useless. Since I won’t be using it for video calls though I’m not fussed, it’s just an “extra”.

I’ve not tried the GPS yet but as a standard function of most modern smart phones I imagine it would perform just as it would in any other device. The only measure you can use for this is its ability to get a GPS lock quickly, but as I say, it’s not been tested yet. Perhaps I’ll write another post once I’ve used it for the first time.

The battery is around the same size as your typical Android device. At 1500mAh it doesn’t pack much power but it’s enough to keep the device alive for around 12 hours of average use. With careful management you could probably get 48 hours out of it. As a light to medium user myself I’m currently trying my hand at some power saving apps that turn off data when it’s not needed, periodically turning it on for email checks etc. I’ll report back on how that gets on once I have the results. I want it to reach the blackberry battery life which was 2-3 days if barely used. If it can do that, I’ll be happy (even if it does need an app to achieve it).

I have an extended life 3500mAh battery on order. While this sounds good, it won’t fit the phone without a replacement back plate for it, as the battery is twice the thickness of the standard battery. However this may turn out to be a sound trade off for decent battery life. We’ll see once it arrives.

Photos

I scanned my device with my scanner so you can get a nice in-focus and close up view of the phone.
Click to enlarge

Cyanogen Mod

Ahh Cyanogen, what would Android phones be without you… I’ll tell you… Underused! Cyanogen unleashes the power of your device much more than a stock ROM would. It also adds more features, optimises for your device and gives an overall more pleasant experience… If you get a stable ROM that is! The only problem with Cyanogen Mod is that it’s developed by volunteers. It’s not their day job, it’s something they do for the Cyanogen community. However despite that, updates are frequent and you get a lot of help with your device on their forums.

One thing I will say about Cyanogen though is that is it incredibly difficult to install if you don’t have the capability of doing some research yourself. Although Cyanogen supply instructions, they don’t always work. In my case they didn’t work when it came to using the ADB commands on the Android SDK. However some Googling later and I found the answers I needed and I was on my way to installing it.

I began with the stable build for my phone, which worked for the most part but the nightly builds were much more up to date so I gave one of those a try. It seems a lot more stable with the latest nightly than with the supposed “stable” version. It fixed a lot of bugs in the operating system that are part of the simple operation of the phone, so I was happy about that.

Verdict… Am I happy?

Yes, definitely. I finally have a phone that can do what I want it to do, even if it’s a little buggy at times (come on, it comes with the technology, nothing is perfect!). I can almost use it like a regular PC. I can get my e-mail, browse the web, remote desktop into my server, edit documents, watch videos… you name it. Admittedly it’s much better on a PC but for a phone it’s a great feat.

I’ve only had it a week so we’ll see how it all goes, and I’ll try to post back on the battery life savings I am attempting to get.

What is “unlimited” when it comes to broadband?

This is a rant that has been going on for some time now and not just by me. You can see it all over broadband support forums, both static and mobile.

Before we begin, lets just outline the definition of “unlimited”:

Now that we know what it really means, lets outline what ISP’s think it means.

You will have found it hard to escape the small print and the all common use of “up to” in broadband advertisements. ISP’s think they can get away with selling a product as “unlimited” when really it’s just such a high limit that 99% of it’s users will probably never hit it. However as broadband becomes a more widely and higher used commodity those limits are being reached by more and more people.

Mobile Broadband

A common example would be from a mobile phone provider who offers a tariff with “unlimited data”. If you look at the small print there will commonly be something to the tune of “Fair usage policy applies” or “Fair usage of 3GB”. So on one hand they offer it as “unlimited” and the other it’s really 3GB. Now to me that’s fraudulent advertisement as they’re saying two completely different things. However it doesn’t matter as it’s “in the small print” and as long as it exists there Ofcom will do nothing about it. That’s the part of this that really annoys me. To top it off, if you go over that allowance they have the cheek to charge you £3/MB for the data when in reality the cost for that 1MB of data is not even 1 pence. It’s just a money making scam and it has to be stopped.

Regular Broadband

Another example comes from your regular broadband at home. They again sell it as “unlimited downloads” but then in the small print it says “fair usage applies” or, and this is where it’s a bit different, “we may manage your line if your download usage adversely affects others”. The difference here is that there is no given limit on how much you can use, but rather they tell you “if we feel you’re using too much we’ll slow you down”. Again that annoys me and I don’t think it should be allowed.

Traffic Management

Traffic management is the most common way of ISP’s to get out of the unlimited data problem as they are still technically offering unlimited data, albeit at a slower speed than before which artificially reduces the amount you can download in a given time. Virgin Media have been doing this for years (and so do others but I’ll pick on VM because I’m more aware of their practices).

Virgin Media employ what is called “STM” or “Subscriber Traffic Management”. This only operates between peak hours of the day (which surprisingly is 10am-9pm every day). It’s split into two so you have two limits per day. Depending on your speed you get a different allowance between these times. If you hit your STM limit, you will be traffic managed and suffer a 75% drop in download and upload speed. So instead (for example) having a 10Mbps unlimited connection, you now have a 2.5Mbps unlimited connection, which really IS unlimited now since they won’t slow you down any more.

Although Virgin Media openly give these limits out to their customers, I still feel it’s not something that should be allowed. You’re paying for a 10Mbps unlimited connection, which means you should be getting 10Mbps when you want to use it. In this day and age to watch any form of video online in HD you need more than 2.5Mbps to do it, and more when you have multiple users on the same connection (which is increasingly more common too).

The one thing I did notice with Virgin Media was with the higher speeds being introduced, more and more traffic management was being introduced – a sign that their network was simply not ready for it.

BeThere – The UK’s only truly unlimited ISP?

BeThere may well be the only
truly unlimited ISP in the UK.

Now personally I am with BeThere broadband and I have been 100% satisfied by this ISP purely for the reason that they really are unlimited. I have downloaded at 8Mbps solid for 2 weeks and not had any slow down or had a letter from them complaining about my usage. That is how an unlimited ISP should be. However with only 600,000 or so customers and little coverage compared to BT/Virgin Media, not everyone will have the privilege of going with such a great ISP.

The question is though, why do these other ISP’s limit the data allowance at all? I’ll tell you why. To save costs. Plain and simple. The only other reason to do it is if they don’t have enough bandwidth to go around and that’s what Virgin Media has been doing. They can offer 100Mbps speeds sure, but they don’t have the bandwidth to offer it to everyone ALL of the time, so they have to restrict it. It’s all about penis size with ISP’s and who has the fastest speeds. They may have the speed but they can’t deliver the actual data allowance. So there’s me with my lousy 8Mbps BeThere connection and someone else with their 10Mbps Virgin Media connection. They might have 2 more Megabits of bandwidth that me, but I can easily download more than they can because of traffic management.

Complaints to Ofcom

There have been tens of thousands of complaints to Ofcom over the years regarding this issue but all they can do is turn around with “guidelines” that the ISP’s are not even obliged to follow. It is my opinion that the word “unlimited” should not be allowed to be used in any advertising sense unless it can be proven it is unlimited.

If the ISP can’t provide the bandwidth they state on their advertisements 24/7 then they should not be allowed to sell that package as unlimited, and a GB cap should be introduced in it’s place (providing that cap can actually be reached so they don’t oversell that as well). 10Mbps is capable of 3300GB in a single month if used at full speed for 30 days so they couldn’t give a cap of 5TB if you can’t reach it. 2TB would be suitable as that would require just 6.4Mbps of bandwidth 24/7.

But anyway I think you can gather the point I’m trying to make. Hardly any ISP’s exist that are truly unlimited, and BeThere is the only one I know that stick to that policy because it’s what they’re best known for. Unlimited is a word that should be banned in the selling of broadband and phone tariffs, etc, because unlimited in these cases nearly always have a limit. The technology is becoming more popular and used more widely that these caps just don’t work any more. Jump back 5 years ago and unlimited was almost completely unheard of. Go back another 5 and nobody knew what a cap was because nobody used that much data.

Times change, and the language and meanings that come with it also needs to change to meet new expectations.

Right! Now that I have finally solved the issue on the charging here is prototype 1 of the circuit.

It uses 2 voltage dividers to give 2.0v to D- and 2.8v to D+, which allows smart(er) phones to take a high current. 1A should be allowed with this setup. If you want 500mA maximum, set D+ to 2.0v just as D- is.

Note: The smoothing capacitors have been excluded from this circuit but will be included in the final design. 470uF on the regulator input, 330uF and 100nF on the output of the regulator.

The meter is connected to the output of the regulator so it shows the current flowing to the phone.