Comments for Martyn Drake's Blog

Comment on Birthday treats.. by Richard Bairwell

Richard Bairwell — Thu, 09 May 2013 13:35:00 +0000

Microwave – “one off fee”.

Driving lessons – you’re going to need at least a dozen. At a minimum of £10 per lesson (probably a lot more nowadays), that’s £120 – then the theory test at £31 and practical test at £62. That £50 isn’t going to go far. Oh – and then getting access to a car (you can get hire cars of various sorts, but you may need insurance)…

So – Microwave for “immediate return on money”, but driving lessons etc will be a lot more worthwhile long term.

Comment on OS X Mountain Lion “clean” install gotcha: CoreStorage / Encrypted Disk issue by Hugo Carlos

Hugo Carlos — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:58:00 +0000

I just fixed my MBP because of this post. Thank you a lot!

Comment on In which I read Virgin Media the riot act.. by Richard Bairwell

Richard Bairwell — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 17:56:00 +0000

I’m having a similar issue with BT Business. We were tied into a 24 month contract for BT Infinity for Business, but changed address. So I asked them to move the service. Instead they’ve set us up with a brand new 24 month ADSL package.(!). Three emails to them – all with replies promising someone will get back within 2 days (no replies) – and still no movement. Tried to send complaint online: “Please call us”. No – your complaints policy state it needs to be in writing. I’ve stated now 3 times that we don’t agree to the 24 month ADSL package we never ordered, we don’t agree to them charging postage on a ADSL router we neither ordered nor need (as we have a BT Business Hub and our own) and said they don’t provide the Infinity service before the 29th (27 days after we requested it transferred – they did say it’ll be moved over on the 22nd), we’ll accept this as a breach of their contract in that they are unable to provide the service requested and therefore we will not pay any bills.

One “good thing” about their online “issues” system is it automatically responds with “Any disputed bill(s) are on hold pending your billing query being resolved.” so I’ve got it in writing from them that all bills are now on hold pending. If I see any debit from our account, I’m going to claim it back under the direct debit guarantee.

I’m really looking at AAISP or Gradwell for broadband provision now.

Comment on I love the BBC, but.. by Martyn Drake

Martyn Drake — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 08:59:00 +0000

It’s a right mess and no mistake.

Blue Bolt – indeed, made up of many good former colleagues of mine. As I have probably mentioned here many times (I like to enforce a point or two – heh heh), they had to turn down series two of GoT because of the number of shots involved (I fear if they took it on and had to employ more staff, it would have added pressure for them in the bidding process for other shows which could have subsequently resulted in job losses).

HBO went to multi-national Pixomondo which has just shut its London office (it has also shut its Detroit office, but is keeping all other offices open). I have no idea who is responsible for series three – but then again because I don’t have Sky (just Virgin and Sky wants a pretty penny to allow Virgin to carry Sky Atlantic) and can’t access Sky Atlantic I’m stuck unless I turn pirate. I’ll just have to abstain for a bit. :

Comment on I love the BBC, but.. by Richard Bairwell

Richard Bairwell — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 08:53:00 +0000

And yet Game of Thrones films in the UK (Northern Ireland) because of our tax benefits: http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Tax-breaks-for-Game-of-Thrones-movies-and-film-studios-give-major-boost-to-Northern-Ireland-175958981.html (oh, and for series 1 they used London based BlueBolt for VFX), but our own national broadcaster (BBC) gets better tax breaks in Canada. Eh? Shurley shome mistake.

Comment on Virgin Media’s Premiere Collection: The First Week Review by Martyn Drake

Martyn Drake — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:15:00 +0000

And we’re back down to anywhere between 60Mbs and 80Mbs tops. Haven’t seen 100Mbs for a week or so now.

Comment on Goodbye, Google Apps – you didn’t allow me to choose my method of composing email.. by Johndoe Smith

Johndoe Smith — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 13:27:00 +0000

It is kind of a weird feature. I was confused when they released it. It looked too social (or unofficial), and it looks like chat. There is a hard time for users to distinguish the difference between email and just chat. I believe they should provide an option to choose whether you want to use the new compose or the old compose for at least another year because we, the power users of gmail, are still kind of confused of what that whole thing’s supposed to be. I mean, it came kind of a sudden, and the time we have for preparation (when the option becomes permanent) is, what, 2 weeks? There is something weird going on there. And I think that it mostly has something to do with SOCIAL (Google+). But I am not ready for Google+. More time needs to pass before I am forced upon something new.
It’s the same thing with Google Reader. They announced it will be discontinued on July 1, this year. Even though millions of people use Google Reader over any other news reader, they, from some reason (social) decided to close the service, and give it a small deadline (force it, just like new compose). Why don’t they, at least give bigger deadlines with big changes like those, I don’t know.

I am also on Google Apps, but I enabled the new compose because I already got used to it on another account, and I like the Google Drive synchronization. I enabled it even though I am not very social on internet.

Comment on Goodbye, Google Apps – you didn’t allow me to choose my method of composing email.. by Martyn Drake

Martyn Drake — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 08:15:00 +0000

Have now completely shifted mail over to cPanel and Apple Mail. I’ve tried using the new compose for a week and it irritated me beyond belief. I believe in good UI design (hell, I did a course on it at university) and this isn’t it.

I’ve dealt with email communications since I was a nipper – probably nine or ten, starting off with telexes and writing an email system in BASIC for my GCSEs. I know email and how it should behave both technically and in terms of usability. This isn’t it, and Google doesn’t listen to anybody anymore so what’s the point of continuing to use Google Apps? See my previous article about pagination in Google Docs – Google’s attitude to SaaS is awful.

Comment on Goodbye, Google Apps – you didn’t allow me to choose my method of composing email.. by Johndoe Smith

Johndoe Smith — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 01:01:00 +0000

Just use it for ~7 days and you will not see cons of the feature anymore

Comment on Virgin Media’s Premiere Collection: The First Week Review by Martyn Drake

Martyn Drake — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:33:00 +0000

Interestingly there have been faults over the past few days which correlate to the issues I’ve been having with on-demand. They seem to have been fixed and I can also report much better consistent higher throughput (closer to 100Mbs) during peak times as well now.