sade027

A couple of years ago I was at the press launch of EE's exciting  launch of their 4G network . Things were starting to look up. Now I am posting one final blog post about this dreadful company to warn you against them. For the past 3-4 weeks, EE (also known as Everything Everywhere) has been down for a lot of people, including me and my partner. They have made no attempts at fixing the issues that has plagued this dreaded network. Whenever connected to EE's network, we could not use Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and many other apps to upload and view images. In addition to that Twitter and Foursquare apps are not working altogether. Some websites has been blocked as well. Reddit for example does not load, at all. These apps only works while on wifi. This issue can be replicated on two separate EE sim cards, both on PAYG data allowances, and on two separate factory unlocked phones (one iPhone 6S with the latest iOS update, another a Samsung Galaxy S6 with the latest OS update), ...

Sometimes you wonder if the people at Transport for London ever use the buses they provide. Living in South East London, I understand the frustration of being someone who is very dependent on public transport and yet resigned to the fact that Transport for London will never improve the infrastructure here. If you have ever taken a bus through Brockley Road between 7.30am and 8.30am, and between 5pm to 7pm, you will be aware of how much this road sucks your life. It takes about 20 minutes to cross a half mile stretch of Brockley Road before the buses reach the bottleneck that is Brockley Cross. But what about the bus lane? Shouldn't that help with moving buses along. It should in theory, and this is where Transport for London's utter incompetence and collective uselessness is highlighted for the world to see. A two year old can design a better road layout than TfL Despite having a clear bus lane, bus drivers has been unable to drive down this bus lane. Why? Because some idiot at...

Ever since my partner bought her iPhone 6S on launch day, it has received four or five software updates - I can't remember but it was at least once a month. On the other hand, the last update on my Samsung Galaxy S6 was way way back in October. Meaning, not only is Samsung's so called flagship still running on the archaic Android 5.1, the security patch for it is October! The mind boggles on why this company still loves treating their customers with utter contempt. Even my five year old Windows 7 laptop is still getting its monthly security updates (and also a free Windows 10 update that I haven't applied yet), but not a barely year old flagship. Android apologists will no doubt refer me to the Nexus series - which I did own for two years under the guise of the initially superb, but then deliberately neglected Nexus 5 phone. If there was a compelling new 5" Nexus phone running on updated hardware that isn't more expensive than the S6, then I would get it. /Rant

Android 5.1 For four months since I updated my Nexus 5 to Android 5.0 Lollipop, my phone has been suffering from severe memory leak. A memory leak happens when the system doesn't release RAM back for the user. In this case, after several hours of uptime, Android 5.0 was reserving 1GB of RAM for its use and aggressively killing off apps. Yesterday I applied the latest Android 5.1 update on my Nexus 5. I declared, prematurely, that my phone was finally usable. It was true, at first. With a fresh boot, the phone was quick off the mark. It may be placebo (or wishful thinking), but it felt like what a Nexus phone should be. Soon after (and I mean roughly 6-8 hours later) however, the dreaded memory leak bug reared its ugly head. Since 'upgrading', I have rebooted my phone twice. Like Android 5.0 and 5.0.1 before, 5.1 requires me to reboot every 8 hours in order to force the OS to release RAM. It means that the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning and before I go to the...

Dear TalkTalk, You win. I give up. I won't fight anymore. There is no point. I have a life, and my life is worth more than £50 . You can have that £50 you earned dishonestly, but you could have had so much more if you worked to make this right from the beginning. I could have given you more than just £50 but because you wanted the money the quick and dishonest way, I will be leaving you in November. We could have a long term relationship where you will eventually earn thousands of pounds from me. But you really wanted that £50, and that £50 will cost you. Have it, I shan't fight you any more. Unless you bill me of things I did not agree of again, this will be the last of it. The next time you will hear from me will be in October when I give my one month notice to be freed of your tyranny. Good luck, you will need it. Jon

Well if you thought our war against TalkTalk has ended, you are sadly mistaken. Upon checking my last bill with TalkTalk, I found that they applied an engineer charge of £50.00. This was done without my consent. If you remember, TalkTalk was supposed to connect us to the internet in November, but failed to do so under terms of the contract. After persisting for a week they finally relented and agreed to send an engineer to connect us. In my calls to TalkTalk, they never once told me they would apply a call out charge - and why should they? They fucked it up first. So I sent them a stern e-mail questioning this frankly illegal charge. Here is their condescending reply. Thank you for contacting TalkTalk about your bill.  I am very sorry to hear of your recent disappointment with our services. We assure you that customer satisfaction is our top priority, and we want our services to reflect that principle. I would like to apologise for any inconvenience this matter may have caused yo...

So Courtney Love read a plea asking for people to help find that missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 plane, and she does so, in her own best way. Cue slagging from people, as well as national newspapers, like the Guardian , who in a very Daily-Mail 'ish post, not only  mocked her for trying to help, but also her intelligence. Because she ain't no expert, innit (as if the writer was). She was just trying to help, which is more than I can say for the mass media (who aren't experts as well) who has done nothing but speculate, and more importantly, impend the investigation, whilst taking advantage of a tragic event to generate clicks and advertising revenue. If this isn't an example of gross sexism I do not know what is.

Yesterday I managed to get Talk Talk, the UK's worst ISP, to give me a callback. This was after they 'diagnose' our problem and concluded that our line is working perfectly fine, despite we trying out every available telephone connection in our house to find this untrue. Never mind that the phone number they assigned to us actually belongs to another household , possibly in breach of data protection act, they downright lied to me about doing any so called diagnosing. Well I was at home with my mobile phone glued to my head the entire time. It was 12.05pm when I finally received a call but only to get disconnected when I answered (I have full bars on my phone, so the problem is on their end). Now they have logged my issue on their service centre as 'solved', even despite not having bothered to talking to me in the first place. Oh, and the issue isn't solved. I do not have a dial tone on my landline, the internet does not work and lo and behold, the number still b...

Well I knew this would bite me in the ass when I decided to return to Talk Talk when we moved to our new home. Talk Talk promised to send a BT Openreach engineer to our house on 21 November 2013 to get the phone line activated. I have received several confirmation text and phone calls from TalkTalk confirming this very fact. I was made clear by TalkTalk that if I wasn't home to receive the engineer, I would be charged for the call out. Fair enough, I thought. On the day, I received a letter from TalkTalk confirming my new phone number and that the phone and broadband package will go live. But after waiting an entire day for the engineer, no such engineer came. The phone and broadband service that was supposed to go live did not. I went to twitter to ask their customer service representative, but they were unhelpful, using typical scripted lines. I also used the live agent chat facility on their website, but the agent was unhelpful, insisting each time that my line is okay, which I ...

So yesterday I finally got to sit down and watch Peter Jackson's first party of The Hobbit . It kinda sucked. Loosely based on Tolkein's classic short children book, the film guts whatever was fun and charming about the book and churn out a fest of mediocre CGI action epic nonsense. Curiously, Bilbo Baggins forgets that he never wanted to be part of all this dwarvish racket, but instead sets out to prove he is action hero. After all, why be the reluctant thief he was supposed to be, when you can be the warrior, John McClaine style, instead. Almost three hours long, for what is basically 1/3rd of the book. Never mind that there is just not enough content for a nine hour 'epic', even Peter Jackson recognised that, dragging the first film with so much fillers and foreshadowing, you could churn out a new TV series "Dwarves and what they do in their fucking spare time whilst waiting to go on an adventure" and have enough for twelve episodes. In comparison, the Lord...

"Hei, I got this new game. It's Real Racing 3 and it's awesome. Best of all, it is free!" "You mean the franchise racing game that plays the game for you? But because it looks nice, everyone raves about how mobile phone gaming is close to dispatching console and PC gaming, even when it isn't?" "That's the one!" "So how does it play?" "You tilt the phone to turn, and tap the screen to slow down. Most of the time the game brakes for you." "You can't even accelerate yourself? Pfft, modern gaming eh? And this is supposed to be hardcore?!" "Well, look, it is just as pretty as Gran Turismo 5 ." "Here, let me try... Ooh, that Porsche is sweet. Reminds me of the last good Need For Speed game EA ever made. You know, Porsche Unleashed . No? You are probably too young to remember... Holy crap Batman, that's a lot of jaggies!" "It looks better in motion. You saying PS3 games doesn't ha...

Windows Phone 8 has a strange storage 'bug' that keeps eating away at your storage space if you are not too careful. Now this happens all the time (it happens on my Android and iPhone as well), but on my HTC Windows Phone 8X , with its limited 16 GB of storage (12 GB after formatting and system allocations) and no ability to expand storage via microSD slot, this can lead to tons of frustration. A Windows Phone developer once told me that all Windows Phone apps are run sandboxed, meaning if you delete them, everything associated with the app goes. This also means there is no reason for a file explorer or registry so you can go an manually delete any orphan and temporary files. Unfortunately this isn't always exactly true. It appears that Windows Phone 8 uses a susbtantial amount of storage space which is labelled as 'Other'. And like the misunderstood villains of the first few series of Lost (before the series turned into an orgy for writers to make stuff up as they...

I have been using Windows Phone 8 for a solid two months now, first with the Nokia Lumia 920 and then the HTC Windows Phone 8X . And just like it was a year ago with Windows Phone 7.5 , and the year before that with the original Windows Phone 7 , I am in love with this OS. The beautiful Swiss-style Metro UI is just perfect for my mobile needs. It's so intuitive even a bloody cat can operate it. I can't go back to using an Android or iOS device without muttering, bloody Xerox grids. Go back to the 1980s where you belong. But as before, Windows Phone's great UI and UX aren't enough. There is so much to Windows Phone 8 that doesn't deserve Microsoft's inaction. I understand they had to get Windows 8 launch out of the way, but their strategy with Windows Phone is now making less sense than ever. They stumbled upon such a beautiful UI that they even made their core OS and Office products out of it, so the first product line to ever use it (Zune doesn't count) ...

So, I've just received my polling card for the Hertfordshire Police & Crime Commissioner election. As this was the first I've heard about it, I quickly read up about this reform (after all the national media has not once made us aware that there was going to be an opportunity to elect a local police commissioner). What I found disturbed me. Each candidate for the Hertfordshire police commissioner are affiliated to a political party. Worse still, every single candidates are seasoned armchair politicians with no actual experiences in policing! You know, the type of stuff police are supposed to do like catching robbers, investigating bankers, protecting the people, filling tedious paperwork etc. FFS, even the rosettes are affiliated to the three main UK parties! Policing should be impartial. The last thing we should want as a democratic country is having the police in the pockets of political party with an agenda. And because of the amount of resources needed to campaign...