Sony - another useless bunch!

Firstly, just to note that I don't own a Sony product - I stopped using their stuff on the back of the rootkits they installed into their stuff years ago.

Anyway, for Christmas, my eldest daughter received a Shine health/fitness monitoring thingy from a company called Misfit.
My wife and other daughter already own a Shine each, so they knew the eldest would enjoy it.
One of the cool things is that the Shine syncs to the mobile phone app. In my wifes case, to her Moto G, and the youngest to her iPhone 5.

The eldest has a Sony Xperia M which, we assumed, would work just as well.

Wrong!!

Apparently these devices use something called BLE - Bluetooth Low Emission or something.
So, we went to the Play Store on the Xperia to download the app for the Shine - only to receive a message telling us that the phone didn't support the app. What!!!

No problem - maybe it needs updating? A slow tedious (see my previous rants about BT and my broadband speeds!) download later and we can now see the app in the Play store! Download app - only to find it still reckons the phone isn't supported.

Some google research later, and I find that Sony were going to update the software on the phone, but, just before it was due, they pulled support and didn't bother.

Total ba****ds!

More google suggests a few things which may work - the most obvious to me is to install Cyanogen Mod. Sony apparently kindly allow you to unlock the bootloader on their phones - so over to their website to check if the Xperia M is in their list of phones which can obtain the unlock key.

Hurray!

The Xperia M shows up - so I get the code and begin setting up my laptop to unlock. Using an Ubuntu derivative, I can get the fastboot software straight from Synaptic - this is all looking great and simple!

Hold down the volume up button and  connect phone to laptop - we get a successful connection with the blue light showing me we are in fastboot mode!

Enter the first lot of commands to check  - and get a positive result. Now all I have to do is issue the unlock command!

Bugger!!

Failure!! 

Failed:

What? Seems that not all Xperia M phones can be unlocked. The daughters has a flag set to prevent the unlocking which can be seen by issuing a load of hashes and stars to get into hidden bits of the stupid thing (I got the actual command from a website)

OK - we can try another route to solve the issue.
This one was much more fun - lets root the thing!
The easiest option seemed to be using a rooting tool called Towelroot by Geohot - a name which will be familiar to those who use a jailbroken iPhone I expect.

Anyway, downloaded this tool, ran it, clicked the button marked Let it Ra1n - and away we go.
Now to sort out the BLE issue.
Sony's support forum has a pretty lengthy discussion on the BLE problem with the M, and, on page 8, post number 72 has a pretty good answer!

https://talk.sonymobile.com/t5/Xperia-M-M-dual/Does-Xperia-M-support-Bluetooth-BLE/td-p/673259/page/8

It is a simple case of installing a xml file which "allows" the BLE to be enabled.
Yes - the hardware is all there - just that Sony can't be arsed to write a couple of lines of code which could be rolled out really easily.

It comes down to a kind soul to give the code needed and a clue how to install it.

As it happens, in my case it was much easier to install than the poster makes out.
I simply downloaded the code and then, using ES File Explorer with the Edit as Root option enabled, simply copied and pasted to the Permissions folder. Rebooted the phone and ....

Success!!

So Sony,  why the hell couldn't you have just enabled this BLE in the first place?
Or at least had the decency to let folks know how to fix it (assuming the user has root and a basic knowledge of commands).

I will NEVER buy a Sony product as long as I live - and will advise all my contacts not to do so if they can avoid it.

You useless bunch of maggots, BT!

So, today I get a script kiddie attack looking for vulnerable phpMyAdmin installs on servers.
I collect the details and discover that it is a BT customer. As BT are likely to do something (as opposed to the many, many attacks from certain other countries), I drop an email to the abuse contact address on the whois lookup with all the details.

A couple of minutes later, I get a response from an automated system explaining that due to high numbers of emails, I need to complete a "webform" to give the relevant details. A bit frustrating, but yep, OK.
So I go to the link provided - only to be sent to a page explaining what phishing is. Really?  I bloody know what that is you morons.

Never mind, I decide to use their main website to report the attack AND their shitty pointless link.
Find the Contact Us bit on site, then follow the Report a scam/phishing/abuse linky - which gives an "email us" link.  At last!

Buuuuuuut.............. clicking on that link takes you to the stupid page about bloody phishing again!

If they can't get their own bloody website to work, its no wonder my internet connection and phone line are piss poor.

You really are total crap BT. 

Dear Google - Noooo!

Google have apparently been trying out a method to avoid ads by paying ..

Sorry, but I avoid ads by using AdBlock or by other techie methods such as modified hosts files.

Do I object to advertising? Yes I bloody well do. I pay for internet access each month via my shite ISP - so I don't expect to pay any more.

Simple, no flashy, non scrolly ads I don't mind too much, but the current situation if I remove my AdBlock is pretty awful!

I shall not pay to remove ads - and will continue to block flash and other animated advertising.

Just like on the telly (which I no longer have), I am not influenced by adverts, so don't waste millions trying to get me to buy whatever crap you are promoting.

K thx bye

Same old...same old....

Isn't it funny how the same old topics crop up in my (and many other peoples) blog?

This one is about .... Gmail again.

In the last few days, every time I open Gmail, I get a yellow banner across the top telling me that my browser is out of date and that I should use a newer one. It gives me two options - to get a new version or to dismiss the banner. I dismiss it - but every bloody time I open Gmail in a browser, I get the stupid banner again.

Now, Mr Gmail, I *know* my browser is "out of date" - it is specifically that way. I hate the new look firefox and when it came out, I made the mistake of allowing Xubuntu to download and install it for me. It was dire - so I reinstalled the older version whilst I had a chance and then pinned it in my package manager (if you don't understand, it just means that I locked the version so a new one can't replace it).

So, I don't want the new Firefox. Please stop this sort of dictatorship, Google!  Every time the Gmail folks have too much LSD and come up with another wacky change to the UI, we all have to install it - they give us no choice. And now this crap....

Think I might just go to using Gmail via my mail program - see how Google like that!  Losing their ad revenue (although I don't actually allow ads - but still!)

Thunderbolt and lightning.....

Well, more thunderstorm with quite a lot of lightning.

After the storm, all my computers and gadgets were fine - except the EeePC I use as my weather station data collecting/ftp to server box.  That, I spotted after a while, was down. No obvious reason, so went through the checks and it appeared that the power supply had been knocked out. As I have several of these machines around, I grabbed another power supply and plugged the EeePC into that. Success!
Of course, I then had to wait whilst Debian ran through all the fsck checks as the machine hadn't been shut down correctly. Tedious, but at least nothing gets lost (usually!). Then I had to restart all the various things which run on it, plus change permissions on the USB port where my serial to USB adapter plugs in to interface with the weather station console.....

Odd that only that one power supply went bang. It was a cheapo replacement for the original EeePC supply which was chewed by our old cat. Guess there is the problem - lower spec parts?

Anyway, almost a year of uptime ruined by the lightning. But at least it shows the stability of Debian in this kind of environment.

Virtual machine time!

Back in my Yoper days, I spent hours using virtual machines to run test installs and fiddle with buggy stuff etc.
I ran all the available VMs on and off but the most useful was generally the VirtualBox. Yes, its not "free" as in open source, but it is easier to use than the others and the features which it has by default make it so much easier than the hours of tweaking which some VMs need.

Anyway, I have just installed VirtualBox on my laptop to play around with some distros - and today I am installing Crunchbang Waldorf.

I was well impressed with this minimalistic distro when I installed it on the wifes EeePC a week or so ago, so a VM seems the perfect opportunity for me to have some time with it!

Installation of CB seems to be straight forward enough - I went with the defaults for the VM with regards to memory and virtual hard drive space. I didn't touch any of the other settings at all.

I went with the Debian choice from the VirtualBox menu - CB is a Debian system with a few tweaks.

The dvd with my CB installed was spotted and I selected to Install.
No problems - all went as expected, chose to install Grub to the virtual hard drive and everything went fine.
Rebooted the VM, removing the dvd and I am now looking at my Crunchbang virtual machine!

Awesome - and really really easy. Off to play now!

Three and tethering

Three, who provide my mobile connection, allow new customers to use their phones as "hotspots" - i.e tethering - up to a gig or two per month.
Customers on their older (i.e around a year or so ago) contracts have to
purchase an "add-on" for a fiver to get a gig of tethering.

Back at Christmas, I was in Nottingham for a couple of days and could have done with this ability - but I am no way paying extra!
There is a - technically not allowed option I have available to me using an app on my jailbroken iPhone - but I decided to be fair and ask Three about it.
The reasonable response I got basically said that tethering wasn't allowed on my contract but Three listen and may change this soon.

Fair enough - it is now 9 months later, so I head over to the Three website to check if things are different.

Still the same - my contract requires me to pay if I want to use a pathetic gig or so of my unlimited download ability as a hotspot.
I fired off another email to Three.....

Today they have offered me the option to move to one of the new contracts - with unlimited data, unlimited texts and an extra 100 minutes talk time per month - plus free 0800 numbers (which mobiles usually charge for) and of course 2Gb of tethering - all for an extra £2 per month - and my contract period isn't affected.

Sounds quite tempting, but the tethering would only be a very very rare thing and is it worth paying out more for what I don't actually use now?

Never got even within half of my talk time - I usually manage to use 30 minutes if lucky!
Likewise the texts - probably half a dozen, thanks to WhatsApp etc.

Shall I go for it? Maybe... may be not....

Will decide soon!

Bee Tee yet again!

I seem to bang on about the crap service from BT on a regular basis looking back through my blog!

Anyway, this week they have dropped me a letter to ask me to consider taking a 12 month contract out with them. Normally, I would have thrown it straight into the bin, but they are offering UNLIMITED downloads (although our speed limits us anyway!), plus the usual free calls evenings and weekends etc for half what I pay now....

Interested, but BT have screwed me over so much that I really don't feel I can take any more of them.

Got a while to decide anyway - and, bearing in mind their price increases looming, I am pretty reluctant.

Interesting distro!

Whilst looking for a suitable distro to install on my wife's EeePC 701, I came across Crunchbang. Not a distro I have looked at before but I was very impressed. Minimalistic, yet really useable. Some minimal distros are simply too cut down and make your life a misery, yet CB contains most of the stuff you need to run a modern compter system, but with a lean mean Openbox front.

Had trouble getting it to run from a USB key (and even from a DVD) on my laptop (ended up fiddling for hours!) but on the EeePC - once I realised it would just install once I corrected a Debian bug with the installer - it installed beautifully onto an SD card, leaving the original Xandros OS installed on the SSD (the wife likes the speed of that).

Will doubtless be reporting more on this distro later

F--- BT

Seriously?  I was away from home for a couple of days - so the internet goes down and I can't check things are all OK at home?

Then, after a rather stressful day, having a tumour removed, I spend an evening trying to get the shitty HomeHub to reconnect....

Sorry but I pay a load of cash each month for this crap - and you intend to increase the price?
Just spent a couple of days aways - as mentioned - at my daughters' flat - with 50 meg internet - no way am I getting a decent service here. BT - you will be dumped come December (or earlier if I have my way!)

Totally unacceptable

My friends at BT again!

So, my dear chums at BT have announced a price hike for later in the year.

How can they have the cheek?

My sub one Meg internet isn't fit for purpose, the phone line is crackly and often unusable and they make me pay a fortune per month for this supposed service and a line rental charge which is really high.

Most people can simply ring their nearest cable or fibre provider and move, or perhaps contact another ISP who supply a service on copper lines. Here, the choice is much more restricted.
No cable, no fibre and even many of the alternative ISPs such as Primus don't operate here.
So the choice is basically BT or their subsidiary PlusNet, or some other equally terrible and overpriced outfit such as Talk Talk.

I use my mobile phone when I need to download anything - at least that gets a decent 3G speed here, but it isn't really practical on a day to day basis, plus my provider won't allow me to tether it unless I pay extra and even then there is a really low limit of a couple of gigs per month which would be pretty useless as my main connection (imagine the data used by my daughter watching TV programmes online as we don't have a TV)

I will need to do some serious thinking about whether to ditch the broadband altogether. Expensive and poor quality service which I am not happy about.

All roads....

Originally, this was going to be a post about the fun I have been having with my two Raspberry Pis, but now I have another ramble on my mind!

Linux distros.....

So, I was looking today at Distrowatch (a website which claims to show the popularity of various distros - but I know it can be manipulated (legally) by a distro asking its users to do certain things!)

Anyway, this is tied in to the (what seems to be certain) demise of my old distro, Yoper (and my later distro PCLinuxOS).

If you look at the top distros based on page rankings, Yoper has vanished (as indeed it is now dead, then I expected this). However, other distros seem to be limping along, dispite no updates for a long time (check out Mandriva for example, whose last (official, stable) release was August 2011 - yet they are still there at number 69!)

A look at the top few suggests that Mint is the most popular distro - and has been for some time.
Presumably this is because the Ubuntu family split their vote with the various variants they have? I personally use Xubuntu for many of my machines (although I am a PCLinuxOS XFCE fan myself).

Some of the choices are really odd - several of the Linux distros in the top 100 are either dead or pretty much so! Others are old, specialist distros which are ancient too!

I have never been a fan of Distrowatch - it is very easy to manipulate the results and doesn't reflect what I see on users machines in general..

From my own experience, the top distros are all Debian based. So the -buntu family, Mint and indeed the original Debian itself.

Amusing to see dear old Puppy still hovering around the top 10 - and Knoppix still in the top 60 (and Knoppix is quite aged now!)

I am downloading the latest live version of my favourite current distro - PCLinuxOS at the moment. Sadly their XFCE version is currently sleeping, but the KDE variant is updated and this is what I am grabbing for various testings. I prefer the XFCE desktop for my machines, but still prefer their KDE version to Ubuntu for example! (I use Xubuntu currently on most of my machines, but not all!)

More broadband speed ramblings!

So on Tuesday, I had to go to the local village doctors surgery. It is held in our village hall, which is next door to the house of some well known local people.
Whilst I was there, I noticed that I was connected to a BT wifi hotspot through my phone. Interesting I thought - I wonder how fast the local people internet must be.
Now BT encourage their members to opt in to their wifi hotspot deal - also was known as Fon - where you share a small percentage of your broadband to those who might be in your general area, in exchange for obviously being able to use other peoples shared wifi.

Bear in mind that only a small percentage of the bandwidth is shared - with less shared if you - as the main account holder are using the connection to its max - so I was interested to see what sort of shared speed I would get from their wifi

A swift Speedtest later and I find that the "shared" speed is 4.5Mb/s (later I got over 5) - so goodness knows what they get themselves!

I get 800kb/s to 1Mb/s as my main connection - not as a small shared wifi hotspot!

Then BT wonder why I hate the fact that they dumped all the 4G trialists to remain on this crap whilst using 4G to make little or no difference to city dwelling yuppies.

BT where are you

Soooo..... where was the call from the BT minion I was promised? Seems they don't want to talk to those people who ask awkward questions which deviate from their basic crib sheet.


Shame on you BT.  The main UK provider of telecoms, but absolutely shit useless at dealing with questions.

The only reason I still pay you useless feckers  - and indeed the only reason I have an internet connection at all  - is that my wife and daughter won't let me cancel as yet. I will cancel as soon as I can though - believe me!

BT - strange lot!

Well, my BT provided router (a HomeHub3 - revision A) is known for not being particularly good when it comes to setting up port forwarding. I have seen this before when setting up port forwarding, but not enough of a problem to bother me.

This week I had cause to set up port forwarding for VNC so I could carry out an experiment. The BT HomeHub has a number of preset port forwarding rules built in - and one of those opens the ports needed for VNC. So I went into the hub and set the VNC preset up - applied the rules etc and the hub tells me all is good.
But, when I try to VNC into the relevant machine, no luck. So I check the open ports with a couple of websites - and the relevant ports (specifically port 5900) are not open! BT hub says they are - but they are not.

So, I fire off an email to BT, complaining about the useless hub.
After lunch today (well, yesterday now!), I get a phone call from them. A nice lady tries to explain all about things to me, but when I explain the actual issue, she goes off to get her crib sheet on port forwarding! After various dead end suggestions, she tells me that BT don't support port forwarding on residential lines and that I need a business line! I remark that the HomeHub3 is a residential router and has port forwarding built in - although it doesn't work!
She just repeats that port forwarding needs a business line. Truly bullpoop!
Eventually, I give up, accept her fairy tale and decide to escalate the issue with someone who perhaps doesn't need to read from a crib sheet to answer basic questions.

Anyway, shortly after this call had ended, I get another call from BT. This time it is a bloke. Same basic start - what is my problem etc. I explain the issue, tell this one that I am familiar with using a computer and port forwarding etc before he goes for the crappy crib sheet. Eventually, he accepts there may be an issue with the port forwarding. This chap decided he needed to speak with some tech people at BT before answering my questions - so he will ring me on Monday!

Lets see what happen then!

Mid July ramble

OK, Microsoft backed down and the domains seem to have been returned to the control of No-IP. However, I ended up changing to a new dynamic domain from the guys there - who were pretty quick to offer domains which had not fallen foul of MS to their members.

Seems to be the way of the future though - our Government here in the UK are now rushing through - with cross party support! - a law to allow the UK to spy on our communications. Whilst I am not some radical terrorist or maniacal right wing (or left wing or whatever wing) bad guy, my emails, phone calls and even web browsing can be collected and spied on by the various branches of the UK (and USA of course) secret services.
Pretty scary isn't it? The Apologists will always say that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. But my view is that I object to my (non bad guy) interweb use being collated by these secret organisations.

Well, I am getting to the point where I shall pull the plug on the web here - I don't need it and my connection is so slow that any interference will bring it to a stop.

Dear Mr Cameron - Piss Off trying to spy on law abiding citizens. K Thx Bye

No-Ip and Microsoft

SO Microsoft flexed their muscle (i.e cash and power) to get 22 No-IP domains removed from the web - including the one I was using (no-ip.biz).

MS claim that bad people were using these no-IP domains in connection with malware.

Well Microsoft, in case you haven't noticed, these malwares, naughty though they may well be, presumably only run on Microsoft OS enabled computers. So it could be argued that you yourselves are permitting malware and perhaps the flaws in Windows are what should be addressed rather than removing legitimate websites (mine is simply a database of a specific surname) from the internet.

I do not use MS operating systems, so I don't have any problem with malware. Perhaps, if you are using their operating system, you may wish to consider something better, such as the Apple systems, Linux or a BSD?

Long time, no post!

Blimey! Just popped over to my blog to find out what I had written about my experiments with the Raspberry Pi and my old webcams - seems I didn't even note that I had the Pi!

I might get around to updating you all about the Pi soon (and I have two of the things now).

Meanwhile, a quick update. I have removed the Three box thing - it was OK, but the internet here is so slow that it just loses any sort of sync on a call after a few seconds. Easier to just turn it off and hang in a window to get signal.

Anyhow, I am off to play with the Pi and webcam!