sade027

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...

Finally, after months of waiting, Samsung has released the Android Marshmallow update onto their soon to be ex-flagship phone Galaxy S6 - four months after Android 6.0 was released on the Nexus series. The update, which is rolling out at snail's pace and on the whim of carriers who rather you buy a new phone than update your current phone, is currently available on only a handful of Galaxy S6 variants. Namely, it is only available for the G920F global variant running in certain regions. Fed up with waiting for Samsung to update my variant, I downloaded the bloatware-free  French firmware ( via XDA ), and applied the update using Odin 3.10.7 for Windows. The process was simple enough, though it does expose a huge flaw with Android and Samsung's terrible update policy (like why do we need to wait months for firmware updates for certain variants to arrive or be forced to flash our firmware manually). Here's a very quick guide (insert disclaimer claiming no responsibilities fo...

Continuing with our recent January travels (I promise this will be the last travel-logs for a month or so), we recently spent four nights in Budapest. We flew Ryanair again via London Stansted Airport. We stayed at the City Ring Hotel, short walk from Budapest-Nyugati Railway Terminal and the Hungarian Parliament building. The hotel itself was fairly comfortable and based on what we paid for, I can't find any fault with it. There's free (but flaky) WiFi connection accessible from our room and a mini-fridge in the room. There is however no kettle (we brought our own kettle), something which we have learned never to expect in most European hotels. Fisherman's Bastion As there aren't any direct railway service from the airport to the city centre, we took the frequent 200E bus from outside the airport terminal to the closest metro station (Kőbánya-Kispest) before taking the M3 line into the city. It was rather straightforward if a little tiring process (the bus isn't on...

Our January trip continues with a quick 24 hour trip to Stockholm. Well the entire trip was closer to two days if you factor in the flight time and the bus to and from both airports. This was our first time to a Scandinavian country, so it was worth the stress. We stayed at the Anedin hostel on-board the M/S Birger Jarl, one of many boat hotels around Stockholm. It was moored near Slussen, Södermalm (where other cruise ships were moored as well) only 15 minutes walk from tourist island Gamla Stan, and also a short walk to the trendy district 'SoFo' in Södermalm. The cabin itself was small, though it does have its own en-suite bathroom and toilet. As we were only in Stockholm for 24 hours, we knew that this was more or less an exploratory trip - one designed for us to get our bearings and to see if we like Stockholm enough to warrant a proper holiday there another time. We limited ourselves to the two islands, Gamla Stan and Södermalm, while also getting a metro pass to explore ...

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

Petrin Hill Early this January we spent six days and five nights visiting four cities in three countries in Central Europe. The budget for the entire trip was roughly £500, including tickets, hotels, attractions, transports, souvenirs, food and coffee. We flew easyjet, and because it was a post-Christmas/New Year period, tickets were as cheap as you can imagine (the entire return flights for both of us were cheaper than lunch for two at Hawksmoor, or a train trip to the North of England). The itinerary were two nights in Berlin, followed by taking the train to Prague, but with a six hours stop in Dresden, a night in Prague, then the coach the following evening to Vienna (the coach trip takes the same time to get to Vienna as the train, but is significantly cheaper). Then it was two night in Vienna before we flew back to London. Reichstag dome Despite our modest budget, we still managed to snag a private room with en-suite shower room at the Generator Hostel in the so-called trendy Mitt...

It is almost mid January and still no Marshmallow update for my Galaxy S6 - supposedly the current flagship Android device from Samsung. Come on Samsung! Oh, happy new year!