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And then we move along again…

It wasn’t that long ago that I was complaining again about the slow progress of enabling cabinet 25 in Weston Village for fibre. When I checked this morning it was still at the Field Survey stage, however since this morning we have progressed along the fibre journey and are now at the Build stage.

We’re installing the new fibre cabinet and laying the fibre cables to serve your home or business.

You can get more detail on the fibre journey page.

At this point we’re ready to start the physical work in your community. We’ll be installing the new equipment and bringing fibre cables from your local telephone exchange to your area. You might see our teams working in the footway boxes along your street as they bring the fibre cable through the underground ducts or overhead on telephone poles. Putting our equipment in position might cause a bit of disruption with traffic diversions and closed pavements and we’ll do our best to reduce this. Throughout the build phase we continue to work closely with the power companies and local authorities to reduce delays and keep disruption to a minimum.

As you might imagine I will be taking a look round to see if they have actually started work…

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You have been using too much wifi

GWR HST in 1976 colours

I’ve noticed that GWR (who were First Great Western) have started to limit their customers’ use of wifi. Three years after free wifi was introduced on their high speed trains, they’ve realised that it’s very popular and have implemented restrictions.

I've noticed that GWR (who were First Great Western) have started to limit their customers’ use of wifi. Three years after free wifi was introduced on their high speed trains, they’ve realised that it’s very popular and have implemented restrictions.

Back in 2007 I wrote an article, This is the age of the train… talking about the refurbishment by FGW, then I said

Do you think I should point out to First Great Western that some train operators provide free wireless on their trains, or do you think that would be pushing it?”

After seven years in 2014, it looked as though they finally listened and added wifi to their carriages on their high speed services from Bristol to London. Back then when trying it out I discovered.

The speed, as you might expect travelling at 125mph is inconsistent, but having done a speed test I was hanging to get between 5-9 Mbps which is more than reasonable. I was also able to stream video using YouTube and iPlayer.

I also asked the question:

Will the travelling public use the wifi, what with 4G and 3G so much more commonplace than back in 2007?

Well it certainly looks like they have been using it, hence the restrictions that GWR have put in place.

It’s nice that they also let you know how it is being used and how much bandwidth is available.

It's nice that they also let you know how it is being used and how much bandwidth is available.

It isn’t surprising that they need to do this, as technically I can’t see them being able to increase the bandwidth easily, so it make sense to restrict usage.

Having said that 15MB is not very much, not in this day of HTML e-mail messages, attachments, Twitter, Facebook and so on…

Well at least it’s still free. Hey Cross Country are you listening?

Me, well I still using my own 4G connection, it’s faster and unlimited data is greater than 15MB.

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…and so it continues…

Well the fibre journey continues…

Back in January I wrote about how on the fibre journey, cabinet 25 in Weston Village had moved to the Design stage having spent years in the “we are exploring solutions” phase, which I actually believe means “it’s at the bottom of the pile of a large number of ‘solutions’ and we will get to it once we have had enough bad press, someone else starts laying cable or we have nothing better to do….”

Well as of the beginning of April we have moved along that fibre journey. We have entered the Field Survey.

Field Survey

We’ll now take the blueprints from the design stage to your community, and check that what looks good on paper works in the real world. Our surveyor needs to check that there’s enough space alongside all the existing utilities underground for our new cables, and whether there’s enough space to accommodate our equipment. We’ll also need to determine whether we’ll need to close any roads to install fibre and, if so, apply to the local authority for road traffic management, traffic lights etc… We’ll work closely with your local authority to make sure fibre is installed safely and with the minimum of disruption to local people.

This says we should have fibre in the next nine months which does make me wonder if BT are still hoping to have everything done by the end of June?

Nothing beats having a field survey of my own, and looking around that part of Weston Village where cabinet 25 lives, there doesn’t appear to be anything happening. No BT Openreach vans, no roadworks or cabinet installations. When other cabinets were upgraded, a new FTTC cabinet was put in place, usually just a few feet away.

So the story continues…

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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.