I’ve used Mazuma Mobile several times now. They never fail to impress – and this time is no exception.
I have upgraded my HTC One to the latest HTC One M8 model, and once I was running on the new phone I hopped on over to Mazuma and ordered a return pack last Wednesday night. It arrived Friday morning, and I packed up the phone and sent it by Special Delivery on Saturday morning.
Today (Monday), I got an email from Mazuma timed at 08.30 telling me they’d received it and it was going to be checked and processed. Another email timed at 17.40 told me the phone had been accepted and payment would be made shortly. A third email at 18.20 told me payment had been made and that it would appear in my account before midnight. It was actually in there as soon as I read the email (at about 21.30 when I got in)!
If you have a phone to sell, you’d be mad not to use Mazuma. They pay the full price every time (in my experience – and the HTC One is quite high-value), unlike some other companies who’ve come in for some stick over that, with their reneging on original offers over minor (and debatable) cosmetic issues. Mazuma doesn’t do that.
I’m playing with Visual Studio at the moment because I need to do something that there is no proprietary software for, so I decided to write it myself. I chose Visual Basic (VB) for this.
I sat down and started working through a few tutorials to remind myself how it works – it’s ages since I used VB – and after getting bored with lesson 2 I jumped straight to lesson 20-something because that’s where the browser control was. As it happens, you can create a complete browser with VB using a single line of code, and it worked first time. Well, when I loaded Google or my own site, it did. But when I tried to open the site that had prompted me to write the application I am working on in the first place I was confronted by a message informing me that I needed a later browser than IE7!
Bugger. It turns out that even in Visual Studio 2013 the default browser behaviour of the WebBrowser tool is to behave like IE7. And it further turns out that there is no simple setting to change it.
I’m no VB expert, but some of the information I found on the topic was very confusing. Some people say that VB adopts the installed browser settings by default, and others provided poorly explained solutions which didn’t work. However, after a bit of tinkering using several of these references I managed to get VB to open the page I needed.
For anyone who is having the same problem, here’s what you do – and it involves editing the Registry, so take the usual precautions – and remember that unless you are extraordinarily cack-handed you cannot destroy civilisation as we know it by editing the Registry. Just don’t delete anything and you should be fine.
When you create a project in Visual Studio and run it, as I understand it there are basically two .exe files created. Let’s suppose our project is called MyWebThing. If you run the project from within Studio it is compiled into a file called MyWebThing.vshost.exe and this is what is executed during the debug within Studio. A standalone file called MyWebThing.exe is also compiled, and this is what you could run outside of Studio (it’s your finished product, so to speak).
Now, you have to edit the Registry so that named files take on different default behaviours – in this case, the default browser behaviour (there is no global setting or easy way of doing it that I can find). In our case, for our project MyWebThing we need to make sure that both MyWebThing.vshost.exe and MyWebThing.exe are catered for in any Registry changes we make. If you change the name of the project, or create a new one, you’ll have to do this all over again. We need to put new entries – one for each .exe file – in three separate places.
This applies to Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. I don’t know if it will work on other versions.
Open RegEdit and navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER >> Software >> Microsoft >> Internet Explorer >> Main >> FeatureControl >> FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION
Create two new DWORD entries, and name them MyWebThing.vshost.exe and MyWebThing.exe (or whatever name you are using instead of MyWebThing). Modify them both to have the hex value 2711.
Now navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE >> Software >> Microsoft >> Internet Explorer >> MAIN >> FeatureControl >> FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION
Create two more DWORD entries with the same names as above, but give them both hex values of 270f.
Finally, navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE >> Wow6432Node >> Microsoft >> Internet Explorer >> MAIN > FeatureControl >> FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION
Create a further two DWORD entries named as before and give them hex values of 2711.
Close RegEdit and run your project again. You should now be able to access all websites.
In-car cameras are in the news at the moment. Personally, I have been experimenting with them since 2009. My favoured device at the time was not designed as an in-car camera, but it worked perfectly for what I wanted to do back then. My biggest gripe with the purpose-designed cameras in the intervening period has been that the field of vision is too wide and everything is distorted. I wanted HD-quality, but that’s no good if everything looks like it’s wrapped around a fishbowl.
Things have come a long way in five years, though. At the moment I have my eyes on the Hero Go Pro. It is a professional-quality HD camera. Here’s a sample of the kind of footage it captures:The only drawback is the lack of GPS logging. Maybe that will come on a future model.
Anyway, this isn’t a run-of-the-mill dashcam. It’s intended for people who get out and about – much like the Contour unit I was using previously. It isn’t cheap, and one of the accessories – which is also not cheap – is a suction cup mount which allows you to mount the camera on boats, cars, and so on. Most of the reviews for the mount are positive, but one of them isn’t. Look at this:
A first trial of my brand new GoPro hero 3 cam ended in a huge disappointment. I used the suction cup as specified in the description. During a flight it was mounted on the wingtip of a single engined aircraft which is a flat and smooth surface. I cleaned and dried the spot where I mounted the suction cup carefully before placing it, just to make sure that the suction cup was fastened correctly as recommended. After a 20 minutes flight with a speed of 110 Mph I looked on my IPhone to set the camera in the photo mode instead of the video mode. I was very enthusiast of what I saw at the display of my IPhone. Suddenly the contact with the camera was lost and I looked at the wing and saw that I lost my camera………unfortunately above the water. 🙁 I wonder if GoPro has a solution for this as the suction cup does not meet the specification as mentioned and I was not able to see one single picture or video of my new cam.
I couldn’t stop laughing when I read it. This character had spent several hundred quid on a professional quality video camera and suction mount, and then gone and stuck it on the end of the wing of an aeroplane! Over water!
It’s a bit like buying a Ferrari and then driving it on a stock car track. Or a white silk shirt, then creosoting the fence while you’re wearing it.
I use eBay a lot – mainly to buy, very occasionally to sell. I like it because items listed there are usually cheaper than identical items from normal online retailers. In addition, postage is often free – I’ve lost count of the times I’ve got to the checkout stages with an online retailer who is advertising something at a low price only to discover on the final page that postage costs are close to (and sometimes more than) the advertised price of the thing I’m trying to buy. Amazon is bad for this where third-party vendors are involved.
Of course, this is an underhand way of dragging people in – a bit like driving instructors advertising low prices, then trying to keep hold of people for more lessons to make up some of the shortfall they’ve created for themselves. For example, over on eBay something might be advertised at £15 with free postage, whereas an online store will be blatantly advertising the same product for £10 – but with postage costs (hidden right until the end) set at something like £8.99 (and then it arrives seven days later by first/second class Royal Mail – not Special Delivery – in a Jiffy bag).
Anyway, back to eBay. Some years ago I picked up a newly-published book while I was at Heathrow waiting for a flight to Vienna. It was called The Perfect Store: Inside Ebay, written by Adam Cohen. It’s worth getting hold of a copy if only to marvel at how the dotcom bubble of the 90s so easily made silk purses out of sows’ ears, and then for seeing how writers like Cohen managed to hype it up still further a decade later. In truth, eBay existed for years with a sociopath in charge of the hardware and software on which it depended. Every step forward the company made was opposed by the sandal and poncho-wearing employees who had been there from the start. Flotation on the stock market was seen as a sell-out by these people, and as an insult to what “eBay stood for”. In fact, the main reasons eBay was so successful very early on was because of a) the chat room it operated, and b) those who used it, and who didn’t have lives of their own. Some of the original employees were drawn from this pool of misfits, and they fitted the TV sit-com stereotype of that era like a hand in a glove. Once eBay moved to real offices, staff really did play office ball games at set times every day, and they really did consider desks, suits, and ties as “terminally un-cool” (apparently, no one who turned up to an interview in such attired was ever recruited, and that was on the say-so of the recently promoted chat room people). As an aside, the book is also notable for the number of times Cohen uses the word “iconoclastic” to describe founder, Pierre Omidyar.
The buying and selling part of eBay eventually reached critical mass, and it became successful IN SPITE of the chat room and the weirdoes in it. However, it never got rid of the underlying “hippiness” and radical attitudes – particularly those which dogged its technical division – and those attitudes persist to this day.
If ever you’ve ever had contact eBay you will know that you’re like a drop of water falling on to a bone-dry sponge the size of several football fields. You’ll get saccharin-sweet emails which don’t help one bit or, if you phone (or online chat) them, you’ll be connected with someone with a restricted grasp of English who will try to persuade you that your problem fits into one the the neat pigeon holes he (or she) has on the desk in front of him. When it doesn’t. he will try to persuade you that it does, and before long you’ll be wishing you’d never bothered.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, to discover this same attitude permeating eBay’s responses (or lack thereof) to the recent massive hack, which has seen the personal details of every single eBay user stolen.
To start with, it has taken eBay as much as THREE MONTHS to reveal that the hack took place. That’s THREE MONTHS during which the thieves have had plenty of time to steal identities. Secondly, even two days after the announcement – which broke in the media, not from eBay – eBay has still not implemented any form of communication forcing users to change passwords (I changed mine 10 minutes after I saw the story). Thirdly, it would appear that most of the stolen data were not encrypted in any way – which means that someone out there now knows my name, address, date of birth, phone number, and email address. Passwords appear to have had only minimal encryption, meaning a skilled criminal could probably crack them inside a couple of days.
eBay’s attitude and responses to questions from the outside world (or maybe that should be the REAL world) have been typically “eBaysian” (that’s another word the group-hug brigade in the early eBay coined for itself). There are many searching and very relevant questions that eBay has simply not answered. All eBay cares about is eBay.
If I ever find out my identity has been stolen as a result of this, eBay is going to have a lawsuit on its hands. My personal details have basically be handed out to God knows who by eBay.
Come to think of it, eBay made almost $13 billion last year, and the details of 145 million users have been stolen. It would be a relatively simple gesture to pay each of these users $1 million in compensation. Now there’s a thought… because back in the days covered by Cohen’s book, eBay dished out massive bonuses to the weirdoes it originally employed for much less.
It’s funny how some things won’t die. Magnetic tape has been old hat for many years now, yet many organisations still rely on the medium for data backup and restore.
The data density involved marks a huge leap in capacity for the medium. It makes you wonder what effect it will have on other forms of storage – just imagine having 200TB hard disk drives (HDDs) as standard.
My old computer has done a sterling job over the last four years or so. It had a Q6600 quad-core processor in it, and at the time I built it that was pretty nippy. However, although it was still perfectly serviceable I felt it was time for an upgrade.
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve always been interested in electronics. I started off with radios and other gadgets when I was a teenager, and progressed to computer tinkering in the early 80s when I bought my first home computer (an Atari 800XL, later followed by an Atari 520ST). Back then there was no internet as such, and bulletin boards were the way to “get online” (a bulletin board was another computer you dialled into using the phone line, and was usually operated by an enthusiast like yourself). Back then phone calls in the UK were on price bands based on distance, and I remember running up a £200 bill one quarter – which would be around £600 today – calling long-distance to one that was based in Aberdeen (it was called “The Twilight Zone” if memory serves). The modem I was using was one I built myself, and it ran at the majestic speed of 300 baud – nearly half a million times slower than my connection today!
I bought my first PC (running Windows 3.1) around 1992. In those early days of the PC computer retailers like Escom and Tiny were where you went to wanted one and didn’t want to splash out on an IBM. I started with an Escom PC, followed by a Tiny a few years later (then another Tiny a few years later). One of the drawbacks with Tiny computers was that they used miniature power supplies (especially built in Korea, I think), and these were notorious for burning out and for being difficult to replace for the simple reason that they weren’t easily available. On the second Tiny, mine did burn out, and it was then I got into repairing them – first, using direct replacement PSUs (a suppler appeared in the magazine classifieds who could get hold of them), and then using full-sized ATX PSUs when I discovered they would fit in the cases. Tiny used the miniature PSUs because they were cheaper, and their PCs were otherwise completely standard (well, more or less – the ATX units were a bit of a tight fit, but the crucial footprint was the same for fitting them). I replaced PSUs for a few people whose computers had simply stopped working, several of them being Tiny machines.
It was when my second Tiny computer finally gave up the ghost that I built my first complete PC from scratch. Since then, I’ve built a new one for myself every few years, and also for other people. My last one was housed in a beautiful limited edition mirror-finish case (Antec P180), fabricated from Japanese steel, and it’s run faultlessly under Windows 7 Ultimate during its lifetime.
I’d been tempted to build one in a new case, but I simply don’t need two PCs. So I decided to reuse the P180 case, keep the optical drives (which are perfectly OK), and use my existing hard disks (HDDs) as storage – the old machine had HDD space of 1.75TB. However, the biggest difference between it and my new build (apart from the CPU and cooling system) would be the fact that the new machine would boot from a solid-state drive (SSD).
The idea of having an SSD-based system occurred to me a couple of years ago, but the technology simply wasn’t good enough (or cheap enough) to make it worthwhile. I needed to have a boot drive of at least 500GB, and the drive would have to have decent read/write speeds. A couple of years ago you’d be looking at spending thousands to get anywhere near that. However, you can now buy a 480GB SSD for around £180 (as of April 2014), and prices are falling all the time. Incidentally, SSDs are 2.5” devices and they are tiny – easily sitting in the palm of your hand.
The specification for my new machine was as follows:
Intel Core i7 4770K @ 3.50GHz CPU
Corsair Hydro Series H60 liquid cooler
ASUS Z87-PRO motherboard
32.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 RAM
Crucial 480GB M500 2.5 6GBps SSD
Seagate ST3000DM 3TB HDD
Gigabyte GTX 660 OC 2GB GFX card
Windows 7 Ultimate
My Microsoft Surface runs Windows 8.1, and although that’s great for a touchscreen-based system, I’m not yet convinced it would be any good on a normal PC. In any case, I like Windows 7 and it is very stable, so that’s what I stuck with. I couldn’t resist buying a large capacity 3TB HDD to supplement what I already had to help me with my music and photo collections. I also opted for a liquid cooler this time instead of the normal CPU fan.
All the kit was bought from Ebuyer, and I assembled everything on Sunday. After a minor glitch where one of the RAM cards wasn’t seated properly, it booted up first time and I was away. The new machine – with all my software installed – now boots from cold in about 20-30 seconds (compared to the few minutes for my previous HDD-based system).
As you can see from the above image, the new machine boasts a Windows Experience Index score of 7.8 – just 0.1 below the maximum possible at the moment.
The liquid cooler is also quite spectacular. My system idles at a temperature of 28°C and so far has only gone up to about 40°C maximum under normal use. Running Intel’s Processor Diagnostic Tool (i.e. “stress test”) only took the temperature up to 66°C – 40°C below the maximum – and the system passed with flying colours. It should keep me going for a while yet.
I had to laugh when I read this article on the BBC website. Note the graphic which explains it all! Is that all cleared up for you now?
Let’s be honest. If that graphic really does explain something to you, you really haven’t got a clue what the story is all about, have you?
On a more serious note, though, the USA has really given itself a black eye over this. In the latest revelations, it created a spoof Facebook server which could deliver malware in order to increase its spying capabilities. This is on top of previous revelations that they had hidden access to Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple servers (amongst others). And all this was on top of the tapping of Angela Merkel’s phone.
Going back to the original link, though, you can’t help wonder if you’re missing something when the founder of a company which spies like all get out on its users comes over all sanctimonious when someone spies on him or his organisation.
A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the irresponsible advice being given to candidates (and likely to be taken up by any ADI who is a sandwich short of a picnic) to covertly record their driving tests. For anyone who has trouble with big words, in this context “covertly” means doing things in secret or without the knowledge of others.
Most Test Centres have a clearly placed notice warning that recording of driving tests is not allowed. If recording is found to be taking place, there will be an initial request to switch it off. If this is refused, or if suspicions are still aroused, then the test will be terminated and the candidate will lose their fee.
For the record, the DSA is not impressed that they were misrepresented in Fleet News as a direct result of Policewitness.com’s blatant attempts to sell more of its dashcams by urging people to behave dishonestly, and the suggestion that tests are completed according to some sort of agenda. The DSA has also pointed out that they do not allow recording of tests because a single (or even dual) camera cannot provide an accurate record of what was happening all around. They point out that the most common cause of test failure is poor observations, and that a single, forward-pointing camera (or even a dual, rear-pointing one) could not pick this up anymore than it could pick up what was happening either side of the vehicle. They also point out that they have no problem with cameras being fitted – they provide useful training opportunities for pupils on lessons – but they must be switched off during tests.
A normal human being would have no trouble accepting this. But of course, not all ADIs are normal people, and many believe that just because they have a spanking new cheapo camera off eBay then they should be allowed to use it on tests. I recently heard several comments about how the DSA shouldn’t be worried “unless it has something to hide”. This is precisely why cameras must not be allowed – the people saying this kind of thing already believe the DSA does have something to hide, and they’re itching to take issue and show how clever they are.
An example. Last week I had someone fail his test. On his lessons he had already shown a tendency to react to a red light above all else – even if the directional lights applying to him were on green (he had done it three times over two months of lessons). Well, he only got a couple of faults on his test, but one of them was a serious for response to traffic lights. When I questioned the examiner (ours are very helpful), it turned out he stopped at a notorious set of directional lights which were on green for the direction he was heading.
On the way home, he said “I knew you would make an issue out of that, but it definitely wasn’t what you think. I just stopped for a bit too long and she said it was too long”. However, at the risk of disagreeing with him (and annoying him – he has a short fuse in this respect) I pointed out that on the route he had taken there was no scenario where the lights for him would be on red as he rounded the corner, and therefore there would normally be no one stopped at the lights, which meant that there would be no reason for him to stop. By the time I dropped him off, he had partly confessed that he might have momentarily hit the brakes for the wrong red light.
But better still, we had a lesson recently and I took him along the same route. I knew what he had really done on that test, and stood my ground each time he tried to argue around it (it’s amazing how many different and completely unrelated excuses he can come up with for a single mistake). As we came round the corner – our lights on green arrow, but the right-turn ones on red – he slammed on his brakes to stop. I told him in no uncertain terms that that was almost certainly what he’d done on his test. And just to put the icing on the cake, we ran the same route two more times – the first of these he slammed the brakes on again, just as hard, and the second time he went for them and slowed down dramatically before realising. He has a deeply ingrained habit – the result of being self-taught – which he has almost no conscious control over. But during the after-test drive home it was the examiner’s fault…
My point is that if I was one of those dimwits who sees themselves as being at odds with the DSA over every possible aspect of driving, I could really have taken issue over the test fail based on what he told me. But DSA examiners are so reliable that I do not have to assume that every fail is some sort of scheme on their part, or that I need a camera to protect myself. I don’t.
As of September 2014 there are rumours that the DVSA has reviewed its stance on cameras (though NOT to allow tests to be recorded). I haven’t seen anything official and will hold off commenting until I do.
I have written an update as the DVSA has now amended its policy. You still cannot record tests, although insurance cameras are allowed.
The HTC One has been voted best smartphone at the Global Mobile Awards 2014. That goes with its T3 award for the same category last year. I’ve had mine for almost a year now and it there really is nothing else out there that I’d want at the moment. I called it a “super phone” back then, and I really meant it.
The device is truly amazing. Apart from its ability to browse websites normally – as though it were a laptop – it functions neatly as a portable Wi-Fi hotspot so I can use my laptop/tablet without having to have a separate contract. It’s just the right size, neither too big or too small.
It takes great photos and videos as and when I need them, and the sound from the speakers when I am watching an online video or news report is second to none. It’s amazing how much power comes out of those speakers, and this was something that all the reviews have picked up on.
When I first bought it, I had planned on disabling Blinkfeed – the home screen which updates with latest news from various feeds you can customise to suit your reading habits. But when I realised just how much you could customise it I wouldn’t be without it now.
It’s made out of aluminium, so it is reassuringly heavy, and it is sleek – putting the chunky iPhone to shame. I recently bought a handmade leather case for it which ramps up its sexiness no end.
At least one of my pupils has gone out and bought one after seeing mine.
