Some years ago, I was with a company called UKHosts. I ran several websites for myself and other people from their servers. They were not particularly good on the customer service front in the first place, but the final straw came when I found out that they’d been hacked and not told anyone – it was one of my clients who reported that their site was down, and when I checked that’s when I found out they all were. UKHosts didn’t have any backups – or if they did, they were not very quick reinstating their servers from those backups. Oh, and they also reckoned they’d tried to contact people!
I switched hosts immediately, and I’ve been with 1&1 ever since. But the UKHosts hacking affair (there were apparently several more after I left them) appears to have nailed their coffin shut and they were taken over by Media Marmot shortly after.
Times have changed in the ten years or so since then, and many companies run their websites on the servers of these smaller hosting outfits like 123-reg. As one of them is quoted in the BBC article:
This will wreck my business and plenty of others…
It makes you wonder if 123-reg can survive something like this (edit: their parent was bought out by GoDaddy in 2017 – this article dates from 2016). Having something go wrong is one thing, but not being able to recover from it properly is a different matter entirely.
Any decent business should have its own backup – many of them use WordPress as their content management system like this blog, and I have an automatic backup made every night. However, the hosting company really should also have complete backups of all their servers. If not nightly ones, weekly ones at least.
I saw this story on the BBC website. Apparently, a BA Airbus A320 flying to London from Geneva collided with what was believed to be a drone as it was coming in to land.
Apparently, it is the first such collision, though there have been numerous close calls.
…pilots have also called for the DoT to fund tests into what would happen if a drone got sucked into an engine or crashed into a plane’s windscreen.
I’m not quite sure what they think this will prove. All I do know is that if I was on a plane, I would much rather it landed without incident instead of having one of these things get sucked into the turbines. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist – or an aviation expert – to realise that the risk of a catastrophic incident goes up, not down, if something gets pulled into an engine, and quite frankly I wouldn’t give a damn about the results of such tests.
One thing that is clear is that people who operate drones are predominately twats. It’s already illegal to fly them near airports, with up to five years in jail being up for grabs, and yet between September and November 2015 there were six reported near misses in the UK near London airports alone. Leeds and Bradford airports have also had near misses, though this is less of a surprise when you consider the general mentality of people who live near those. There were another six incidents recorded in the 12 months up to July 2015. It’s anyone’s guess how many go unreported.
Drones have the potential to be great fun to play with – I have been tempted to get one myself – but the rules surrounding them are understandably restrictive. Apart from what they could do to a jet engine, there are also the documented effects of what they do to people if they hit them. Consequently, if your desire for fun knows no bounds then you have to break the Law. And that’s when you start to understand why Leeds, Bradford, and London have such a problem.
It’s ironic that for something which hasn’t yet been banned, you can’t fly them far away from you (where they might hit planes), you can’t fly them near large groups of people (where they might injure them), and obviously flying them close to you puts you and anyone near you in danger. So, pretty much anywhere – which significantly detracts from their “fun” value.
Drones are not toys. Unfortunately, apart from professional operators, the people who use them use them EXACTLY as toys. It’s what I’d do if I had one – I have no actual need for one – which is the precise reason why I haven’t bothered to get one.
Be aware that there is a very convincing phishing scam doing the rounds at the moment. It takes the form of an email, which looks like this:
It has the Virgin logo and everything, and if you click on the link at the bottom it takes you to an exact copy of the usual Virgin Media log in page.
What made me suspicious was that my monthly bill was paid just last week. I checked my bank account.
I very nearly fell for it, but I became more suspicious when I realised that my log in details – which I secure using Last Pass – were not automatically filled in because the site’s security certificate is all wrong. And the alarm went off completely when Windows 10’s Smart Screen Filter popped up and warned me to be careful.
If you get anything like this, do what I did and log into your Virgin Media through the VM website – not from any links in emails you have received.
I’ve reported the site as a phishing site to Microsoft and various other parties. Couldn’t report it to VM, because they have made as sure as possible that customers cannot contact them directly.
When I think of the Apple versus the FBI fiasco, I sometimes wonder what the world is coming to.
In December 2015, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, carried out a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. They shot and killed 14 people, and seriously wounded 22 more. Three bombs they also planted failed to go off, but if they had then there could have been many more fatalities and injuries. Farook and Malik were killed in a shootout with police. Apparently, Malik had pledged allegiance to Islamic State on social media on the day of the attack.
In February 2016, the FBI asked Apple to help unlock an iPhone owned by Farook. The FBI had realised that if they failed to enter the correct password after several attempts then they would lose any information held on the phone. The FBI wanted a modified version of iOS that would bypass this security feature.
Now when you consider what happened at Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, then in Paris in November 2015, and then (albeit more recently than the FBI’s request to Apple) in Brussels in March 2016, any normal person would have expected Apple to comply immediately. But Apple isn’t a normal company, and it refused. Worse, we discover that there a lot of other people out there who aren’t normal, and who supported Apple’s stance.
Irrespective of whether or not Farook’s phone contains anything relevant to the FBI’s investigations into the San Bernardino murders, it was vital that they at least had the opportunity to examine it to make that call.
Apple managed to stall for almost two months – through the Brussels bombings – and there was every likelihood they would have continued to do so as the matter moved sloth-like from one US court to another. However, in late March 2016, it became known that an Israeli company was working with the FBI to unlock the phone without Apple’s assistance. Today, it was announced that they have succeeded.
Apple said it did not know how to gain access, and said it hoped that the government would share with them any vulnerabilities of the iPhone that might come to light.
Let’s just get this straight. Apple refused to help crack the phone (and it could have), but it wants the government to tell them how it did it.
I wonder if government officials are allowed to give one-fingered salutes to Apple?
It seems that the accident was the fault of the Google car – the bus didn’t do what the Google-bot’s program said it should – and that’s what caused the collision. Mind you, I’m sure that Google’s scientists see that as a fault of the bus driver, and not of their car. Perhaps the solution is to make autonomous vehicles more visible for we inferior humans so that we automatically sense danger when one is near?
Maybe they could stick a lot of Audi badges on them.
One of the more promising additional features in Windows 10 was the apparent ease with which you can display your computer display on to your TV set using the “cast to…” feature. If only it were as easy as that.
The web is full of half-assed articles thrown up by Google whenever you search for how to cast your Windows 10 display to a TV. None of them actually tell you how to do it on a PC – it’s inevitably some American tablet or a smartphone they’re talking about, running Android – not Windows.
Even Microsoft online support doesn’t know exactly what it is talking about. I spent some time with them over the issue and they wanted to selectively begin to disable every installed service to “check for conflicts”. I told them that it wasn’t that, because I can’t cast from my Surface Pro 2, either.
In the course of my investigations, I discovered that the casting technology in question – Miracast – needs to be supported by your graphics card (I’ve since discovered that your WiFi card needs to support it, too). When I contacted NVIDIA to see if my GeForce GTX 660 had such compatibility, I was informed that NONE of their current graphics cards does.
Then I found this link on Intel’s website. It is a small tool which checks to see if you can run WiDi (as it is called) on your system. Here’s what it told me:
If nothing else, I can now stop worrying about why I can’t get it to work. On my desktop, at least.
Because my Surface Pro 2 reports that it CAN support WiDi. Now I need to try and figure out why it won’t bloody work when I try to cast to my Amazon FireStick – with Amazon’s online support being pretty useless in not saying if Windows can cast to it or not.
In a nutshell, if you are having problems using the supposedly simple “cast to…” feature of Windows 10, unless your PC is brand new, top of the range, and doesn’t have an NVIDIA card, you are probably not going to be able to do it.
It’s been in the media the last week or so that the power cords supplied with Surface Pro 2 and some Pro 3 machines before July 2015 have been identified as having a fault which can lead to overheating or even fires. Microsoft is replacing the cords free of charge.
Note that the issue is with the power cord only – that’s the bit that goes into the wall socket. There are no issues with the power supply “brick” the cord connects to.
The story below is from 2009. A more recent one (January 2016), which has generated renewed interest in the subject, suggests that scientists have found a way to make the old-style bulb more energy efficient (better than LEDs). I should point out – since the Daily Mail skims over it – that it is only “proof of concept”. Such bulbs are not being manufactured yet, and I would suggest that they are years away – and they may not even make it to market. For one thing, they will still “burn out”, whereas LED bulbs don’t.
Traditional incandescent light bulb
The Daily Mail has outdone itself – and that’s really saying something where this middle-class rag is concerned. The humble incandescent light bulb has been around for nearly 200 years (or 130 years if you believe that Thomas Edison invented them first). It’s a long time by any standard.
The typical filament-based light bulb is extremely inefficient – most of the energy used to power it is wasted as heat, and they don’t last very long. The 40 watt bulb my desk lamp used to take typically lasts a couple of months before I hear the familiar ‘plink’ when I try to turn it on. However, the fluorescent energy-saving bulb I switched to had been in for almost a year and no problems at all. Of course, fluorescent bulbs only use around a fifth of the energy that an incandescent one needs to get the same light output.
The EU has determined that incandescent bulbs will be phased out by 2012, and the UK has targeted 2011 – by which time retailers will only be offering energy-saving versions to customers. The move would save something like $12bn (£8bn) a year throughout the EU , and cut down massively on greenhouse gas emissions.
The problem here is the term ‘ EU ‘. You see, any time the letters ‘e’ and ‘u’ appear next to each other in that order is guaranteed to turn the Mail’s hacks apoplectic with rage. This is then quickly followed by a Zimmer frame frenzy as the Mail’s Tory-voting readers jump on the bandwagon. This light bulb situation is a prime example. I mean, how dare those damned Johnny Foreigners try and tell we True Brits what to do? This is the Mail’s approach to just about everything: oppose Europe, and blame Europe. For everything (after you’ve blamed Tony Blair (yes, even after all this time), the Labour party, and anyone or anything else you don’t like) . It’s one reason why we’re still bloody well stuck with an antiquated weights and measures fiasco, when the Metric System is sitting there just begging to be used. It’s also why we’re not in the Euro (€) like we should be.
But anyway, the Mail published the story back in 2009 and said it had bought something like 50,000 of these bulbs to give away to punters. It has changed its tune a bit the next day due to being overwhelmed by middle-class morons anxious for a freebie and has had to limit its offer.
But never one to give up on an anti-Europe crusade, the Mail then embarked on a crusade against energy-saving bulbs (a further push was made in the print version of the paper).
To be honest, fluorescent bulbs are not the future. LED is the way to go.
LED light strip
Maplin Electronics (or loads of sellers on eBay) sell a range of flexible, high-brightness LED strips . I’m using one right now to light my computer desk – they operate off 12V and have a power consumption of about 2.5W (that’s less than a quarter of what a fluorescent bulb needs). And they have a lifetime of 100,000+ hours ( over 11 years ) continuous operation.
LED light bulb
You can also buy LED bulbs with a standard screw or bayonet fitting to run from a standard light socket. When I wrote this article back in 2009 they were still quite expensive – something like £25 each – but I predicted that the price would fall. As of January 2016 you can pick them up for little more than £3 and considering that each will last for perhaps 50 years if run for 6 hours a day I don’t think that this is a bad price.
As I mentioned at the start of this updated article, scientists in America have produced incandescent bulbs in the lab which are more efficient than LED ones. It strikes me as an odd thing to do – it’s like trying to make a steam engine fly in spite of all the drawbacks associated with steam engines!
Incandescent bulbs have more issues than just being inefficient. They’re fragile, and the filament gets very hot so it inevitably burns out. From what I have read, I would expect the modified bulbs to burn out even quicker.
Note the more recent addendum at the end of this article. Also note the original publication date – 2015.
Regular readers will know that I started taking card payments for lessons a couple of years ago. I initially opted for PayPal’s system because I liked what it was offering, but although I purchased a card reader from them I never actually used it and sent it back for a refund.
PayPal Here, which was what the system was called, was brand new at the time and I don’t think the people who were dealing with it knew how it worked. I was given copious amounts of conflicting information, but the bottom line was that there was a strong likelihood that any payments I took using PayPal Here would be tied up for 30 days at a time (i.e. “held in reserve”) until I could access them. To a driving instructor this is totally unacceptable.
As a result of this confusion, I went with iZettle.
Now, I need to make it absolutely clear that in the two plus years I have been using iZettle I have had no complaints at all. I have taken close to £40,000 and probably only had to go the the bank a handful of times, whereas before I’d be going several times a week to pay in cash or cheques. But this perfect time came to an abrupt end two weeks ago.
During my time with iZettle I have used an HTC One M7, then the M8, and now the M9. All these phones have worked flawlessly, including the M9 I bought almost a year ago, both with the main iZettle app and the beta version I was trialling for them. However, on 7 October the iZettle app was one of several for which a routine update was flagged. I did my usual “update all”, and my phone reported a 505 error and the message “this app could not be installed” for the iZettle app. I uninstalled the previous version and tried again, but to no avail. Now I was relying solely on the beta app to run my business – not a good position to be in. I should point out that the app has updated without problem on the M9 several times this year.
I ran through every suggested fix for the 505 error offered by Google, checking for remnants of previous versions, and running clean-ups, but still the app would not install. The Android marketplace said it was compatible with my M9, but it just would not install on this high-end, modern device running the latest version of Android. So I turned to iZettle. Their reply was:
I was unable to find your handheld device on our compatibility list. Unfortunately given the case we cannot fully guarantee the device functionality.
A cold wind of apprehension blew over me. I wrote back and explained that it had been fine up until this last update, that the M9 is virtually identical to the M8, and that there had been no system updates. I further explained that my business depended on iZettle. They came back with:
Thank you for getting back to us and for your feedback,
Although the M9 is almost identical to the M8 is still a different android device that currently is not supported by our services. As I mentioned on my previous message unfortunately we are not able to make any promises for when or if we will be adding your handheld device to our compatibility list.
So that was it. After two years of loyal custom it was “f— you”. They have not responded to my third email informing them that their app is incorrectly listed in the Android marketplace as being compatible with my device. My previous opinions concerning iZettle were obviously wrong, and they are unprofessional and untrustworthy.
When 3rd parties talk of “compatibility” – and particularly with card readers like the iZettle – what they are referring to is the version of the Bluetooth stack used on the phone and the one used by the device in question. Indeed, iZettle alludes to this with their new Pro Contactless reader, where they say:
Please note that the Card Reader Pro Contactless should work with most Android smartphones and tablets which have Bluetooth and an Internet connection, and where the iZettle app can be downloaded.
I have the older version of this reader (two, in fact, as I needed to be covered in case one of them got damaged). But my problem has nothing to do with Bluetooth – I just can’t install the app, and that points to poorly written software. But let’s go along with this “unsupported” thing for a moment. When you look at their compatibility list, [Note: As of 2020 they say they’re compatible with all smartphones and tablets. I can assure you that in 2015 they were officially compatible with about six plus the iPhone and refused to even discus any problems outside that tiny number, even where there had been compatibility previously] it essentially distils down to all Apple iPhones and iPads, all Samsung Galaxy devices, two Nexus, two Sonys, and two HTCs (but not the M9)! And apart from the Samsungs, only up to Android 4.4.2 and 4.4.4 (latest version is 5.1.1). Can you believe that? And even if you have a phone that isn’t on the list – of which there should be many, according to that last quote – with which the iZettle system works, then iZettle’s abysmal support agent who wrote to me has effectively said that it could stop working at any time if it isn’t specifically on the list!
iZettle is an absolute joke, and I advise anyone thinking of going for a card reader not to go anywhere near them. I also apologise for not knowing this sooner – my previous reports of iZettle have been highly positive, and that just goes to show how wrong you can be.
iZettle effectively destroyed my business overnight. It is only because I don’t get caught out that easily that I quickly found an alternative solution and managed to minimise the catastrophe that not being able to take card payments has become to my business. That solution was PayPal Here – more on that in a separate article soon, and note the Q&A below.
Shortly after I wrote this article iZettle saw it and contacted me. It turns out that the 505 error being returned was down to having the beta version of the app installed. iZettle tell me that they forgot to change the package name on the beta app when the new main app was released, and that meant that there was a conflict – hence the error being produced.
After uninstalling the beta app – which iZettle wanted me to trial for them, remember – the main app installed with no trouble at all.
Fair dues to iZettle – they fully admitted to their error (eventually, and after virtually destroying my business) – and said that the reply I got from support was not correct. Unfortunately, that incorrect information was all I was given over a period of two weeks, and it was delivered several times before iZettle support refused point blank to enter into any further dialogue over it. The subsequent damage done to my business during those two weeks – and what action I had to take as a result – cannot be undone. Nor can the lack of trust created by people who would cut off a customer like that ever be repaired.
How long does it take for iZettle deposits to appear in your account?
Too long, compared to PayPal Here. If you take a card payment with iZettle, the transaction is “initiated within 1-2 business days”. Weekends and bank holidays are not business days. Then – and I don’t think iZettle uses the Faster Payment system – it can take a further “several days” for the money to show up in your bank account. It means that over Easter, for example, you could take a payment late Wednesday/early Thursday, and the transaction at iZettle’s end won’t start until the following Tuesday. Then, your own bank could take the rest of the week, and since they may not class weekends as business days, either, you might not get your money until the following Monday. Also remember that iZettle is based in Sweden, and they have bank holidays, too.
Admittedly, this is a worst case scenario, but I can promise you that it was not uncommon to wait a week for money to show up. With PayPal, you get it immediately – every day of the week.
Is iZettle reliable?
When I used them, there were several occasions where the system was playing up, resulting a delay to payments of a day or two. Not many, but several. I have also read of several problems since then. I have had zero problems in the years I have been using PayPal Here.
And then there was the serious problem that nearly destroyed my business overnight…
Quite frankly, I would not use iZettle if they were the only card reader provider on the planet.
Who owns iZettle?
When I had all these problems, iZettle was privately owned and based in Sweden. In 2018, PayPal bought them out. So they are owned by PayPal. And quite frankly, the sooner PayPal assimilates the brand completely, the better.
Update 2023: PayPal has discontinued PayPal Here and now only offers iZettle (or Zettle, as it calls it). So, it went exactly the opposite way to what I had hoped and expected. iZettle is still based in Sweden, and it still has the inferior payment system it had before. PayPal gave me less than one month’s notice – in early March 2023 – that the PayPal Here service would cease to function at all in early April. As a result, I no longer use PayPal.
I would not touch iZettle again if you paid me, as I think I have made clear.
