Author: jamesclay

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Will there be fibre?

Weston Village

So I recently contacted BT Openreach about Cabinet 25 in Weston Village and asked for an explanation of why it hadn’t being upgraded to fibre and why the original date of March 2017 was now delayed? I specifically asked them for an explanation.

Their reply was

In response to your query regarding delay in providing fibre we would like to inform you that the cabinet is not fibre enabled yet, however, a project is ongoing to provide fibre to the cabinet.

The project is expected to be completed by the End of June, 2017, however, this date is subject to change as per the amount of work left.

Please keep an eye on our website from the End of June, 2017 for an update. It’s where we publish the very latest fibre coverage information and we update it daily. This is when we would estimate that you should be able to place your order, all being well.  

They are saying the end of June 2017…

Really…

Somehow, and for some obscure practical reason I think, it will be delayed a they say themselves

this date is subject to change as per the amount of work left.

As you can also see there was no explanation as requested.

Hopefully not too long now….

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Mobile phones, will they catch on?

I do wonder if the concept of a mobile phone would ever catch on….

From 13th September 1979…

Michael Rodd makes a call with an experimental cordless mobile phone.
It’s 1979 and time for the telephone to go mobile. In this report from a longer programme, Michael Rodd examines a British prototype for a cordless telephone that allows the user to make calls from anywhere. Also included at the end of this item is a rather nice out-take as Rodd also experiences the first mobile wrong number.

I do recall watching this when it was broadcast.

Of course we don’t really use our phones as phones these days, the mini computer we have in our pockets is now used for way more than just making calls.

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Time to replace the ink

Back in July I posted about my new(ish) printer, in which I wrote:

…by posting this post I hope to have some kind of record of how long the cartridges last.

Well I now need to replace one of the replacement cartridges.

The first setup cartridge to run out was the double sized black cartridge which is used for black and white output. This lasted from the end of March to the beginning of July, just over three months.

The replacement XL version lasted from July to January and is still going, so lasted over six months.

I have replaced all the cartridges over the last six months and it looks like the XL cartridges are on target to last as long as the XL black cartridge.

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We will have fibre in “12 months”!

Though to be honest I will believe it when I see it!

Those who have been following my FTTC fibre journey will know that I was one of the first people in my area to get fibre back in October 2010.  I was impressed with the 40Mb download speeds.

Really fast…

I was less impressed when I moved house in 2012 and having moved (literally) just down the street I was back on really slow ADSL. So for nearly the last five years I have had an ADSL connection that struggles to get to 1.5Mb download speed!

The story of the fibre journey of cabinet 25 connected to the Worle Exchange has been one of mis-information and downright confusion.

Back in 2015 I outlined the story so far…

Still no fibre

I have written previously about my woes with fibre before, when we first moved house and lost fibre and then my initial investigations into why I couldn’t get FTTC and back in 2012 writing about the confirmation of no plans to upgrading cabinet 25.

It would appear that BT Openreach decided initially that cabinet 25 wasn’t commercially viable, as a result passed it over to Connecting Devon and Somerset. Then at some point BT Openreach changed their mind about the commercial viability, so when Connecting Devon and Somerset came to plan to upgrade the cabinet, they found it was part of a commercial plan, and under the rules they adhere to, they weren’t able to upgrade it. Now we are in a situation where BT Openreach are saying that it is under review with no indication of when or even if it will be ever upgraded.

In May 2016 there was an article on the local paper.

Well, that’s a surprise…

According to the report in the local Weston Mercury, BT Openreach had changed their mind and would be upgrading cabinet 25 to fibre so that we can get FTTC.

In theory we were supposed to be getting fibre by March 2017… then it all fell apart and BT Openreach backtracked on the date!

So last week when I checked the BT Openreach linechcker I was surprised to see that the fibre journey which had been stuck on “We are exploring solutions” for years had moved along to “Design”.

According to the BT Openreach website this means

You’re in a fibre plan and we’re looking at the existing network in your area to see how we will design the upgrade. You can’t order a fibre service today but typically it’ll be available to your premises within the next 12 months.

So we could be connected to fibre in less than 12 months!

We’re drawing up our network plans and assessing the best way to bring fibre to your area. We currently deliver fibre to you in two ways. Sometimes we use a combination of fibre and your existing copper line to deliver our Superfast network (Fibre to the Cabinet). At other times we connect fibre directly to your property (Fibre to the Premises). We often need permission from the local authority while also considering the wishes of your community in terms of look and practicality. At the end of this design process, we’ll have a blueprint in place for delivering fibre to your community.

Possibly we might even get FTTP (fibre to the premises) but I think I am just blue sky thinking there!

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I keep getting Calendar spam notifications…

If you use Apple’s Calendar app you may have been getting iCal invitations which are obviously spam, I have and so have many others including BBC’s Rory Cellan Jones.

The result is that your calendar starts to fill with invitations that are obviously spam, trying to sell you stuff!

The problem arises twofold:

Firstly you are unable to actually block these notifications, so can’t stop them coming in.

Secondly you are unable to delete the notifications, if you decline the notification then the spammer will get a receipt that your calendar is authentic, so you get a lot more spam notifications.

This all means that very soon the calendar becomes unmanageable and unusable.

The first thing to do is to set up your Calendar app to ensure all notifications of events come as e-mails and not as notifications in your calendar inbox. This is not as simple as it sounds as you can’t do this in the Mac or the iOS application, you need to do this on the web.

So go to iCloud.com in a web browser, this needs to be on a computer and not on your iPhone or iPad.

icalscreen01

Select Calendar and then click the cog in the bottom left hand corner and select Preferences…

set Calendar invites to go to your email instead.

In the Preferences window select Advanced.

set Calendar invites to go to your email instead.

Under Invitations change Receive event invitations as:  from the default In-app notifications to Email youremail@icloud.com. Though the dialogue says Use this option if your primary calendar is not iCloud you can also do this even if your primary calendar is iCloud!

There are two options for getting rid of the spam notifications.

You can create a special spam calendar that you can then add the spam notifications to, and then delete the calendar.

Create the new calendar and the tap on the spam invitation and tap calendar and select your new spam calendar. You can after doing this delete the new spam calendar along with all the spam notifications.

The method I used (which was before I knew about the previous method) was to decline the spam invitation (I was lucky that I only had two or three) and then delete that calendar merging the events with an existing (or you could create a new) calendar.

Hopefully Apple will release a fix for this in the near future.

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So how do I do that then…

One of the issues when using a new laptop or a new operating system, is remembering how to turn on everything you use regularly or sometimes turning them off.

I download images from my Flickr collection quite a bit, probably more so than using Photos or iPhoto. With a new Mac laptop I was getting very slightly annoyed that after downloading the images, they would open in Preview. I knew on my iMac I had turned this off, but could I remember how, no I couldn’t. I had done it a fair few years ago now, as I had migrated my settings to the new iMac (and I think I even did it before that one too).

I did do a quick Google search and saw that it wasn’t a Preview setting, but was a preferences setting in Safari. I was using search terms such as stop Preview opening downloaded images but I suspect a better search term would have been  stop Safari from opening downloads.

So from the menu, Safari -> Preferences.

Click the General tab if isn’t showing already.

Preferences

At the bottom is a check box, which says: Open “safe” files after downloading. “Safe” files include movies, pictures, sounds, PDF and text documents and archives.

I do like how Apple puts safe as “safe” which means they should be safe, but should be treated as “safe”.

Uncheck the box and Safari will no longer open files automatically.

Preferences

What I usually do is if I do want to open them, say a PDF, is I drag the file from the Downloads folder onto Preview in the Dock.

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Wifi on the tube

On the tube

Finally managed to sort out getting wifi access on the London Underground through my Three account on my phone. You need to set it up above ground, which I did, but didn’t quite get my password right, so when I was down on the tube, it didn’t work the first time. After resetting my password I was able to connect to the underground wifi.

It only really works at the stations on the tube, not in the tunnels. However with the short time between stations you can still do stuff like read web sites, do the Twitter and send e-mail.

What I find it most useful for is tracking train times as I return to Paddington after working in London.

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Going through the ink…

Though modern printers are cheap as chips, the ink costs are usually astronomical. My new printer is no exception, though one reason I did purchase it was because it had separate ink cartridges rather than the usual one black and one colour that lower end printers have.

The Canon MG7752 printer comes with, what are called, setup cartridges, I have no idea how different these are to the regular ones, but having got the printer at the end of March they started to run out this month, July.

Canon MG7752

As well as regular document printing, it is also used quite a lot to print photographs, the second 6×4 paper tray makes that simple and easy to do from either the Mac or from the iPhone.

The printer has two black cartridges, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and also uses a specialised Grey cartridge too.

The printer can take regular cartridges, which I am assuming contain more ink that the setup ones. There are also XL high yield cartridges which according to the marketing hype deliver twice the pages of a regular cartridge.

The first setup cartridge to run out was the double sized black cartridge which is used for black and white output. This lasted from the end of March to the beginning of July, just over three months. The colours started to run out in the third week of July starting with the Cyan, followed by the Magenta, then the Yellow and then the Grey. The other black cartridge still has ink in.

I bought XL versions of the colour cartridges so it will be interesting to see how long they last. Challenging to measure effectively as the printing usage patterns in the house vary quite some bit. However by posting this post I hope to have some kind of record of how long the cartridges last.

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Mobile WordPress Theme

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I have been using the WP-Touch plugin for a while now with my WordPress sites.

WPtouch is a mobile plugin for WordPress that automatically adds a simple and elegant mobile theme for mobile visitors to your WordPress website. Recommended by Google, it will instantly enable a mobile-friendly version of your website that passes the Google Mobile test, and ensure your SEO rankings do not drop due to not having a mobile-friendly website.

The administration panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your site to your mobile visitors, without modifying a single bit of code. Your regular desktop theme is left intact, and will continue to show for your non-mobile visitors.

What the plug-in does is provide a mobile stylesheet so that when your WordPress site is viewed on a mobile device it is rendered correctly for the small screen, making it easier for the user to read posts and navigate the site.

It means you can have one site without needing to have a different specific mobile site and your users don’t need to specifiy they are on a mobile device. There is a switch on the page if you want to move from the mobile to the full desktop version of the site.

Though the current WordPress version now is more mobile friendly than it was I still prefer and use the WP-Touch plugin as I feel it gives a better mobile experience.

The plug-in was recently updated and there was a change in the appearance of the mobile stylesheet. The old one is on the left, and the new one on the right.

Mobile WordPress Theme

Sometimes I really don’t like change, but in this instance I think it is a real improvement.

So if you run and host your own WordPress implementation and want to provide your users with a mobile experience then I suggest a look at WP-Touch.

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Melting the Wi-Fi

The canal in Birmingham

Back in the early noughties I remember attending edtech conferences and the wifi failing to cope with the number of delegates. That wasn’t surprising, they were often using a single wireless access point and when sixty plus edtech delegates hit the event with their laptops and PDAs it wasn’t much of a surprise to find the lone access point failing to deliver any wifi.

Even today I have been to events where the wifi struggles as delegates with their laptops, iPads, smartphones connect to the wifi. It is partly about the number of devices, it is also about how they are using the connection, refreshing twitter, uploading photographs, streaming video like Periscope. I also think that some people may take advantage of the fast connection (sometimes inadvertently) to download updates, podcasts and video.

The canal in Birmingham

At the recent UCISA Spotlight on the Digital Capabilities event in Birmingham, the conference centre wifi, which in theory could cope with 250 wireless clients, failed to deliver a stable consistent wifi connection. I found that if my laptop was connected to the wifi, it not only took time to get a connection, but every so often the connection would drop. I would say that when I had a connection it was fast and consistent. I felt lucky that I could still tweet and upload photographs using my phone on my Three 4G connection. I was getting over 60Mb/s on that connection in the main auditorium. I was quite pleased that the seats in the auditorium had tables and power sockets.

60Mb/s

The thing is, a conference with delegates from the edtech world are probably going to melt the wifi as most conference centres don’t plan their capacity on the extremes. For most events it probably works just fine. Personally since those early days I have come less and less to rely on the conference wifi, using a 3G dongle, 3G tethering, a 4G WiFI Hotspot to my current 4G tethering. This means that not only do I not worry so much about melting wifi, but it frees up the bandwidth for somebody else, and I think I might a pretty heavy user of bandwidth!