This is something British Gas’s man clearly failed to do when fixing my grandparents’ central heating recently. I don’t know the full details of the problem, but I do know that their thermostat was broken, so he installed a new one.

Fair enough, but it turns out that the iron march of progress has changed a thermostat from a knob with some numbers on it to something ‘smart’:

And how does the new wireless thermostat make life worse for my nonagenarian grandparents? Let us count the ways:

• Because it’s wireless, it has batteries in it which need replacing every so often. This is achieved by opening a flimsy plastic door on the bottom of the unit which is fiddly to access once it’s wall mounted, then scrabbling on the carpet as the batteries fall to earth. It also means the thermostat will mysteriously stop working once every n months until someone younger sorts it out for them, since there’s no way they’ll hear a low-battery beep or spot an indicator on the screen.
• Since it’s superglued to the wall just inches away from the hot water tank it controls, the only advantage of wirelessness is to save the drilling of one hole and the running of a six-inch bit of cabling – and even these could presumably have been avoided by replacing the original thermostat instead of leaving it screwed to the wall but not doing anything.
• Instead of reading the numbers round a knob, you see them on an LCD display which is not backlit and not very big, thus making it perfect for people with poor eyesight to see in a not-very-well-lit hallway.
• Pressing the middle of it resets it to a pre-programmed ‘preset temperature’ (“ideal for the poorly sighted”, the manual claims with no sense of irony) – an unnecessary recipe for confusion if you knock the middle by mistake
• It doesn’t go ‘click’ as it passes the current room temperature like an electromechanical thermostat would, so you have to read the screen instead
• By default the display shows the current room temperature, meaning you can’t tell without adjusting the knob what temperature the thermostat is currently set at

Somewhat more subjectively, I think it’s more likely to malfunction than an electromechanical device with two moving parts, and presumably it has to fight for spectrum with all surrounding cordless phones, WiFi units and garage door openers – let’s hope the base station does something sensible in the face of losing contact with the unit.

Well done, lads. Another triumph of engineering.

Oh, and let’s check on the outcome of that 2011 geek wishlist…

• That Debian Squeeze will release in Q1 2011

Granted, and all my machines have been upgraded.

• That I’ll discover a J2EE Servlet Container which isn’t totally horrible

Tomcat 7 is a considerable improvement over its predecessors.

• That some kind of reconciliation between the JCP and Apache will occur

Nope.

• That Java 7 won’t be delayed forever

Partial victory: it’s arrived, but most of the interesting new features will only be in Java 8.

• That Python 3 will get adopted faster than PHP 5 or Java 1.5 did

Probably still to early to say.

• That we’ll finally see some major UK ISPs offering IPv6

Not a sausage, as far as I’m aware.

Merry Christmas all.

I’ve done this before, and in the past, got away with replacing the battery. This time, though. pushing a new battery in made all the segments on the screen come on, and brought forth no response to the buttons.

So I took the whole thing apart and found it covered in white crud, presumably washing powder. Spraying the innards with WD40 drove that out, and re-assembling brought it back to life and saved me spending £30 on a new one.

Logged on to RSH (one of the few operators still willing to post you the tickets for free) and bashed in my dates and times. The cheapest single from Oxford to Macclesfield on 23 December after 1700 (with Railcard)? £39. No sign of an advance single.

Hmm. Maybe RSH being weird. Try East Coast? Nope, same prices, same problem. Same deal with trying the morning of the 24th.

The National Rail Enquiries journey planner’s calendar doesn’t go up to the 23rd of December, and if you enter that date manually, it says you can only book twelve weeks in advance.

So, do we think RSH and East Coast would have told me that? Or taken my money? Being a regular reader of Private Eye’s Signal Failures, the whole thing smells like shameless profiteering to me, but I’m not about to risk £20 finding out. I’ll report back in two weeks.

Week      10/09 17/09 24/09 ...
Bathroom  Tom   David Harry ...
Kitchen   Dick  Tom   David ...
Bins      Harry Dick  Tom   ...
Hoovering David Harry Dick  ...

Careful and studious readers will have no difficulty in spotting the pattern.

Inevitably, though, instead of being grateful for the minutes I slaved over my desk putting this together, t’housemates complained. Specifically, Tom complained that ‘I always do something the week after Dick’s supposed to have done it, and he makes a mess of everything’.

Given the choice between speaking to Dick to correct the problem, or writing some code, I wrote some code which starts with the above layout, then shuffles the columns until the following constraints are satisfied:

• A given person never does the same thing two weeks running
• For any given pair of people (p1, p2), this pair never appears twice in a given row

Careful and studious readers (with Maths or CS degrees) will have no difficulty working out the number of weeks of chores rota I’ve limited myself to doing at a time, becuse the constraints become impossible for a greater number.

* No, my housemates aren’t really called Tom, Dick and Harry. After five years at an all-boys school, there’s no way I’d live in an all-male household.

There are quite a few providers who’ll do this for £3-£4 per month, but sipgate are doing their best to disprove the theory that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, offering UK numbers for free (at least for the moment).

Within a couple of minutes of signing up, I was the proud owner of a ‘real’ 01865 Oxford phone number and some SIP credentials for registering a device to make/receive calls via it (obviously outbound calls cost real money, it’s just that there’s no line rental or monthly charge to have the number which people can call at their usual geographic rate).

I managed to set up Linphone as follows:

Under Linphone > Preferences > Manage SIP Accounts, hit ‘Add’ under ‘Proxy Accounts’, set “SIP Identity” to sip:1234@sipgate.co.uk, “SIP proxy address” to sip:sipgate.co.uk. OK out and you should get a prompt for your sipgate password; put it in and the status bar should read ‘Registration on sip:sipgate.co.uk successful’.

I’m pleased to report that incoming calls come with the caller ID information – the incoming caller will be “01234 567 890″ <sip:01234567890@sipgate.co.uk>. As far as I can tell, it only supports one incoming call at once, but for £0/month, that’s not too shabby

Next on my list is to buy an ATA and hook up my real cordless phone to sipgate. Watch this space!

On Monday 22 August, we got an internet connection.

Fortunately, I have a shiny Android phone with WiFi hotspot capability these days, and it turns out the 500MB of data O2 give you lasts almost exactly three weeks if used carefully. They even send you a text when you hit 80% of it, and don’t automatically bill you when you reach 100%.

All very civilised, which is more than can be said for the process of getting an internet connection in central Oxford. First, we tried to get some ADSL via our BT line. There is a master socket in our lounge (carefully hidden behind a curtain, half way up the wall, natch), but the previous tennants had been on Virgin Media, and the BT socket was dead.

It took several phone calls to BT and the Post Office to establish that re-activating the line would cost us £130 for an engineer’s visit – even though the wiring and socket looked perfectly intact to me. Oh, and it would take three weeks. The process of arguing with BT Openreach about reactivation is apparently so tedious that the vast majority of ISPs offering ADSL don’t bother, insisting on your line having a phone number and a dial tone before they’ll talk to you (even if you want to pay them for the line rental too).

Having eschewed the BT monopoly’s attempt to gouge us for £130, we turned to Virgin. More promisingly, their bog-standard 10Mbps broadband (with no phone or TV) didn’t come with an up-front connection fee, but guess what – it would take three weeks to send their bloke to install it. Why they can’t offer self-installation in cases where the house is already wired is beyond me.

Our connection is currently showing a pretty respectable 9.71Mbps downstream and 0.5Mbps upstream – pretty close to the 10Mbps we’re paying for. The two annoyances so far have been that the engineer was obviously getting a bonus for conserving coax, as they gave us a 60cm length just long enough to put the modem/router on the bottom shelf underneath all our DVDs and books, rather than on the top shelf where it would give a better signal to the top two floors. Luckily some past installation of Virgin had left a lot of coax and splitters in a drawer, so I deployed some of those.

The other fly in the ointment is that our modem/router is Virgin’s superhub, much maligned by some as flaky and unreliable. I’ve not found the wifi range great on ours, but positioning it on the aforementioned top shelf has helped a lot. The main problem so far has been that, after a brief power blip on Monday, it came back on but disabled the WiFi, leaving me to plug into it with an ethernet cable in order to turn it back on.

The noddy web interface on the superhub also worried me, but it turned out there’s a well-hidden ‘advanced settings’ link back to the good old Netgear web interface with all the knobs and buttons for the advanced user.

I’ll report back if we experience any serious problems.

Meanwhile, here’s hoping that by the next time I move house, some geek will have achieved a landmark victory at the European Court of Human Rights, mandating that internet is a basic human right and must be installed within 48 hours of a person moving in to a new house. Not holding my breath, though.

Personally, I’m not too worried. In the last week I’ve seen both an older relative and someone my own age refusing to believe that websites without www in front of them can possibly exist (visiting www.sub.example.com despite being told to go to sub.example.com), so I suspect anyone silly enough to shell out $185,000+ will watch the abysmal traffic to their website and wish they’d spent their money on a leaflet campaign instead…

Consensus round the table was that my theory sounded just a bit too plausible for comfort. If I disappear suddenly, you’ll know why…

As I write, I’m coming to the end of my third week with my new HTC Desire S. And it hasn’t disappointed.

Carrying it around has proved less arduous than I imagined – although it weighs more than my clunky old Nokia 1100, it’s thinner and flatter, so it fits nicely in my shirt pocket. It gets quite warm when under heavy use (e.g. acting as a WiFi hotspot), but not unpleasantly so.

They’ve packed quite a lot into such a small case – in no particular order, we have FM radio, a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash which works quite well for basic snaps, a second front-facing camera for video calling (makes me look awful, but friends insist it’s accurate), GPS, a half-decent speaker, a headphone jack, a nice big touchscreen, and I’m told it also has a phone.

Typing on the on-screen keyboard has proven easier than I anticipated – even with my fat fingers, I can peck out a short e-mail with reasonable ease. The predictive/corrective text is actually surprisingly helpful here.

The built-in e-mail client is OK, if a little basic. It wouldn’t send outgoing mail via my Exim 4 server over TLS (a TLS packet with unexpected length was received), but I suspect that’s Debian’s fault for insisting that GNUTLS actually, er, works. I ditched the default client in favour of K9-Mail, which boasts PGP integration and is much more customizable. Apart from a few niggles with the UI, it does the job very well.

The browser works much as one would expect – even sites without a mobile option are surprisingly usable – the screen is a decent resolution for its size, and the usual gestures for zoom work well.

The music player worked straight out of the box when I copied some MP3s over, and the supplied headphones aren’t too shabby.

The ability to read bar codes and search online for the cheapest available version of the barcoded thing has proved endlessly amusing.

Irssi Connectbot deserves special mention for making IRC on the go dead easy.

One of the main reasons for opting for an Android phone were the tethering capabilities – with a couple of well-chosen taps, the phone can share its 3G internet connection by turning itself into a WiFi hotspot. This is one of the operations that makes it a bit warm, but it’s very handy if you’ve got a bigger computer with you, but no internet.

Battery life isn’t too bad given the capabilities of the device – it lasts a heavy day’s usage, and charges over USB from almost anything. They also throw in a standard wall-socket adapter too.

Android claims some IPv6 support, which I’ll report back on when my home IPv6 is raised from the dead. I’ve also got a few ideas for app development, so watch this space!