Martyn Drake's Blog
… but my perception of time seems to have gone right out the window. Received a letter yesterday dated the 27th June and immediately thought: “bloody hell, that was a month ago.”
*facepalm*
What with everything going on at the moment, 2025 seems to have flown by without so much as a “hello”. I can’t believe we’re in July already, and it’ll be August soon enough. The older one gets, the faster time flies.
I was locked out of my account – which has all my eBooks!
As is typical of me, I get a lot of spam and phishing emails, phone calls and all sorts of rubbish. I do my best to filter, but sometimes those filters catch legitimate emails. Alas, it seems to have caught emails originating from Rakuten Kobo. They use a service called SendGrid to send bulk, automated emails. I know of this service because I used to use it during my days in e-commerce, and I used it myself for this blog. Sending automated emails has become a bit of a chore, and hosting companies go out of their way to make it so for very good reason.
Anyway, I have recently been getting a LOT of phishing emails stating my SendGrid account is being terminated or suspended. I don’t use it any more, so I don’t care. Also, all these so-called official emails use email addresses which have no bearing whatsoever on SendGrid. It is obvious that they are not legitimate and even a lobotomised pigeon could figure that out. In order to try and reduce the noise, I used Google Workspace’s Compliance filters to search for certain specific occurrences of SendGrid. Alas, I hadn’t realised how loose the match was and it banned ANYTHING that was sending through SendGrid.
I only realised this because I couldn’t log into my Rakuten Kobo account. I tried resetting my password, which sends a password reset email, but it wasn’t being delivered. So I checked Google Workspace’s email logs and traced it back to my stupidly dumb filter and just removed it. The password reset emails flowed again, and I could reset my password. Except I couldn’t. I use a password manager called 1Password (another Canadian company) and it generates and saves the passwords for me. So I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working.
So I had to go to Rakuten Kobo’s website and use their bot to “find a solution.” Now, I get why these things exist. Looking into implementing such things at work (internally) to help with tickets and such, as we tend to get lots of queries such as “my dingbat doesn’t work” and that’s it. If we can gently get people to help themselves… etc. However, for me, it drives me into an incandescent rage, especially if the logic of the bot is wrong, refuses to put you through to a human, or any combination thereof.
I was particularly angry when it couldn’t find my account by postcode.
After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, I was told there was a problem with the authentication system. When I first signed up to use Rakuten, it was only their TV service. Kobo came much later. I was on a legacy account, in other words. This was what I was told to do – use More Sign-In Options and log in with Rakuten. That’s not at all confusing – especially when it looks EXACTLY the same.
I do think Rakuten Kobo should look at bringing our legacy accounts kicking and screaming into the 21st century. My primary concern in all of this was access to my e-books – something which long-term readers of my blogging exploits remember that I brought up with my local MP with regards to purchase and ownership rights of digital goods. Lose access to your account, you can kiss goodbye to all your “purchases”.
.. strawberry and soft cheese/crème fraiche sandwiches.
Except this one’s only half a sandwich for £2.80. Do not recommend.
.. is that while they support Thunderbolt 3/4/5 and USB4 – they don’t bloody support USB 3.2 gen 2 2×2 (a bit of a mouthful) which is what the majority of external SSD drives on the market support. The result of this lack of support (which is an optional component of USB4) is that external drives are going to be far more limited than the speeds that the manufacturers advertise.
The PC market (e.g. most modern Windows PCs) don’t have this problem. It is incredibly frustrating that Apple have chosen to go down this route to the extent that you are forced to pay their over inflated prices when it comes to internal storage. There are a number of drives (Thunderbolt 3) which overcome some of the limitations, and Thunderbolt 5 drives are slowly making their way – but these are still few and far between – and EXPENSIVE.
Alongside macOS 26 Tahoe, I decided to take the risk and install iOS 26 Developer Beta 1 on my iPhone 16 Pro Max. It generally works well, and the big feature that works right out of the box that I love to bits is call screening.
When activated, call screening answers any incoming calls and prompts the caller to leave their name and the reason for calling. Assuming it’s not an autodialler and somebody actually does leave their name/reason for calling, it’ll then start ringing the iPhone whilst displaying a transcription of what the caller has just said. You can then choose to pick up the call or send it to voicemail (where it’ll also be transcribed).
I’ve bemoaned for YEARS that the iPhone’s greatest weakness was that as a phone, it just wasn’t as good as its Android counterparts when it came to handling nuisance calls. But now that Apple has implemented call screening and on-hold waiting (e.g., it listens for on-hold music so that you can put the phone down and do other things – once it detects the other end is talking, the phone will notify you), it has fulfilled its duties in the one thing it should have done all along. This is especially true in the telecoms sector, which is so far behind in combating scam, phishing, and other nuisance calls.