I don’t want to drive, given the choice - it’s much better to be able to read a book, nap or get some stuff done on my laptop on the train. But when you add the cost of the train to the problems with strikes, staff shortages, etc. it starts to feel like the more expensive and higher stress option.
Full disclosure - my last journey was first class. I believe my point about it being cheaper to drive would stand even if I’d gone standard. And what did I get for the extra? Well, on a Thursday night for the outbound journey, I did get a few cups of tea and some snacks.
However, as per flippin’ usual, the journey back on a Sunday night had no service in first, meaning all I got was a few inches of extra space. Oh, and shortages meant I had to change trains in Birmingham and spend half an hour hanging around. There’s nothing quite like New Street Station on a Sunday night.
Several friends are visiting me in the next month, and sadly, they’re all planning to come by car for exactly the reasons given above. Let’s hope whoever wins the next election has a plan, eh?
]]>Catch me at Oxford Geek Nights in April, doing 15 minutes on the very timely and very difficult topic of the Horizon scandal and what we in the IT industry should be learning from it.
]]>Things have now shifted to the point where many of the cafes, pubs and restaurants in southern England simply don’t take cash since the pandemic. I haven’t routinely carried any (well, maybe an emergency tenner) since the end of the lockdowns.
I have however recently started using cash for one thing: paying my cleaners.
I’ve had a few different people on the job since relocating in 2021, and it’s been a patchy experience. Unfortunately the previous firm I used had some staffing problems, and kept rescheduling visits or failing to turn up for them. And therein lies a downside of paying for such services by standing order: once they’ve got your money, there’s less you can do about it if the scheduled visit doesn’t take place.
Anyway, fingers crossed I have now found a good pair of cleaners. Initially I was annoyed that they insist on being paid cash (there’s no rule against it, and what they do with the money is between them and the chancellor…).
However, I’ve realized that it’s a good thing: if the only way they get paid is to turn up, that makes it much harder for rearrangements or last minute faffing to take place without the downside being equally split.
Here’s hoping the new team keep doing a good and timely job.
]]>I’m reasonably pleased with how well prepared I was for India (except for the checked baggage curve ball) so here’s the scoop from my second visit (shout out to any readers who remember reading about the first, 13.5 years ago!).
Lebara are a good choice at the moment for pay as you go in the UK anyway, and they include India as a full roaming destination at no extra charge! The 4G network is pervasive in cities and seemingly pretty good on the outskirts too, although rereliability does drop with distance from town and vary throughout the day. Having the ability to keep in touch on WhatsApp without extra costs is a game changer, though, and a major difference from 2010. If you’re not on Lebara, the usual eSIM suspects work if your phone supports it.
I don’t remember anything from my first visit, probably because all I brought with me that time was a Nokia 3310 which lasted 10 days per charge. Simpler times…
India uses a three pin plug, but not the one we know and love in the UK and ROI. It has round pins!
A standard Euro travel adapter will fit into many of these sockets, although be aware you won’t have pin 3 connected so anything made of metal or otherwise needing an earth will be dangerous to use. Then again, in a country where double insulation probably means a second duvet, who’s to say the third pin of the socket was connected to earth anyway? If you lack a basic understanding of electrical safety you’ll have a happier trip.
I’m thinking I need an extension lead with inbuilt RCD in my travel kit.
Outside of airports and westernized enclaves, India is still a cash economy, so get some rupees and make sure to have the small notes. RS100 = £1 is the rule of thumb. Even having curry in a swish hotel, the card machine wouldn’t take my Chase card, I’m guessing because it needs online authorization and the machine wasn’t reliably networked. As always, carry multiple cards.
Indian airports generally want to see a ticket or boarding pass, plus matching photo ID, before allowing you to enter the terminal building. Unfortunately, terminal 3 at Delhi insists on paper boarding passes, (I’m guessing) because they stamp them at various points to indicate you’ve got through immigration and security. BA’s app is tricky to use as a “ticket” becuse many screens, as the border force official noted, don’t mention the passenger name! I poked until I found one and was let off this time, but for the future: bring hard copies of booking confirmations to be safe.
]]>There’s nothing quite like flying half way across the world and standing next to the carousel like a spanner for an hour as lots of other people retrieve their bag … and you don’t.
I will admit to thinking some very black thoughts about Indian efficiency, many of which were unjustified prejudice as it would appear my bag never left Heathrow - despite us sitting on the stand for an hour past our scheduled take off. Oh, and I dropped off the bag a full 3 hours before departure too.
Apparently this happened to about twenty of us on the flight - there are whispers of a software fault at terminal 5 that day. What wasn’t very efficient, though, was BA’s information desk, where one member of staff was handling 20 pissed off passengers.
Having filled out a customs declaration for my bag’s eventual appearance, I was told to do it again without the values of the items, as any non trivial total could cause a delay. Not that I was importing lots, but a couple of suits and a travel monitor, plus a decent Samsonite suitcase, soon add up.
The bag was eventually delivered to my hotel (150 miles from Delhi) about 51 hours later, having taken the same flight as me but a day later. BA’s delayed baggage tracking site is at best painfully behind reality, and the hugely delayed responses to Twitter direct messages (the only sensible choice when phone and internet are constricted) are pathetic - “these things take time” is just what you need as you enter hour 48 in the same underwear and wonder how much to buy (and whether you’ll ever get reimbursed).
It’s pretty clear BA’s own staff have no more information than you can see on the stupid website, but on the morning of day 3 on the ground, I got a WhatsApp call from their local fixer who was in the right city with my bag and asked where I wanted it. Handy since I’d lacked the final address when completing the original report. They refused to hand it over to reception without a photo of my ID, which thankfully I had on me and was able to WhatsApp to the receptionist as I wasn’t there to take delivery.
While you can of course have things tailored in India for prices far cheaper than the UK, time was of the essence and I didn’t want to monopolize the available Hindi speakers in our group, so I fired up Google maps and located … Marks and Spencer! Yes, in probably the same year they closed in Macclesfield, they opened in Jaipur. The prices were about par with the UK, and in addition to the basics I bagged a cheap suit for the wedding I was attending.
Compensation for this sort of thing is apparently very limited (thank goodness they didn’t lose the bag completely as that’s generally risible too), but between BA and my travel insurance I expect to recover most of the £200 I spent, if I can be bothered to keep chasing for it. I’ll update this post when I know.
Update I filed my claim and uploaded the receipts to BA’s portal on the Friday night I arrived back, and was astonished to receive an e-mail on the Saturday afternoon accepting my claim in full and promising to pay it within 14 days. If only the customer service had been that good throughout!
Talking to other better travelled members of the group, this sort of thing is apparently unpleasantly common, so in future I’ll be packing a few basics in hand luggage, and indeed trying harder to subsist on hand luggage alone.
I’m also looking into sensible options for adding a tracker to bags, as having a live location would have saved tons of time guessing and asking BA.
Final tip, keep the receipt when you check a bag, and photograph it just in case someone on the desk fails to give it back.
]]>With the possible exception of doing Edinburgh and back from London, I can barely think of a single train journey in 2023 which was unaffected by:
Despite all of which, the price of a ticket keeps climbing. So with apologies to Greta, I suspect I’ll be using the car much more next year. Especially since the M6 toll are finally rolling out ANPR.
It’s not all been bad news - the £2 bus fares are nice on the rare occasions I want to use the bus - but for most of us in Oxford, it’s cycle or walk. The cars clog up the roads so badly that busses at peak times pretty much don’t work.
Here’s hoping for a better 2024, but for a lot of journeys, the trains have pretty much shot their last bolt with me.
]]>We use Kubernetes, quite a lot. And one of its disappointments to me is the way it has yet to stablize. To take a concrete example … do we really need multiple different ways to do container networking?
Maybe some people do, but it makes me sad that we don’t have a “right answer” which is shipped by default for those of us who just want things to work out of the box.
For many years, we have mostly used Weave for our container networking needs. And I’ll admit right up front that we may not be doing things the latest and greatest way. However, it seemed to work and that’s all we needed.
However, RHEL8 really spoilt the party and gave me many more grey hairs working this all out.
In summary:
We still don’t know what the difference was, although we suspect it’s something related to this. Certainly, the way RHEL8 doesn’t include iptables-legacy feels like it might be related - Weave adds legacy rules, other things on the box add proper nftables rules, the two meet and sadness ensues. It’s possible our reference environment “got away with it” because it had nothing else adding any kind of rules, where the customer box did.
How did we solve it? Well, we switched over to Calico, installed like this:
kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/projectcalico/calico/v3.25.0/manifests/calico.yaml
The fact that I really struggled to find the above on Google again shows how many layers of compexity there are around this stuff.
Anyway, Calico, unlike Weave, appears to be reliably working on RHEL8 and also doesn’t need configuring with the pod network CIDR (I assume it interrogates the cluster for it). So it will be our choice for as long as it stays out of our way.
]]>Meaco are a Which-recommended brand, so I bought the baby unit for home.
It pulls a surprising amount of water out of the air - about 2.5 litres every 24 hours or so - but it has completely eliminated the condensation, which I suspect should translate to no more mould. It uses a unit of electricity about every eight hours, which stacks up to quite a lot of money at today’s prices - however, that’s only if it runs constantly.
My suspicion is that it probably only runs for 6-8 hours out of every 24, which is not too bad. The cost is also offset by the gas savings from not letting all the heat out during the day, although you do still want to think about changing the air now and then.
“Night mode” is too noisy to sleep in the same room as (in my opinion), so I tend to turn it off before going to sleep, and back on in the morning.
We also bought their biggest unit for work when we had a damp problem caused by a leaky roof, and that seems to suck moisture out of the air at a decent rate as you’d expect.
Too early to comment on long-term reliability, but overall, seems well built and gets the job done.
]]>I’d heard vague rumours that decent tablets can be pressed into life as a second screen, but wouldn’t it be even more convenient if there was just a tablet without the tablet part that connected directly over USB-C and came with a cute little stand?
It would. It is:
I haven’t taken it anywhere other than my lounge yet, but it’s perfectly serviceable in terms of picture quality, and even produces better sound than many a laptop I’ve known. It’s also pretty light, so it will definitely be coming along with me on the next trip I make. Heck, even on the train or at an airport I can imagine it being useful.
Well worth a punt for less than £100, and if you travel regularly for work, you should get your employer to spring for it.
I personally don’t do that much business travel (as opposed to working “from home” at awkward locations) so I did spend my own money on the thing.
]]>I’ve had my broadband (VDSL/FTTC) from Sky for 18 months, but they wanted to increase the monthly from £28 to £35 per month.
I rather think not.
Threatening to leave didn’t make a dent, probably because with no Sky TV services and no phone connected to the line, there is very little profit to be had out of me.
YouFibre (Netomnia) have run ducts and cabinets into the village, but there’s still no sign of being able to buy their service, so what to do in the meantime?
Well, Shell Energy Broadband is an inflation-beating £25 monthly, so let’s give it a go. They have a decent attitude to people using their own equipment - the website says “call us and we’ll give you the credentials” and sure enough, a nice chap on the phone did exactly that.
Their supplied router looks interesting - it includes WiFi 6 - but other than a quick speed test, I haven’t used it and don’t expect to unless my own kit lets go at an awkward moment.
Only time will tell if it’s as reliable as Sky, but the speed is pretty comparable and close to the line’s maximum. There’s no IPv6, which is a shame, but Hurricane Electric’s tunnels are easy to configure on a Mikrotik router, so that’s no big deal.
I’m hoping this is the last copper-based ISP I need before some form of actual glass fibre reaches me, but we shall see.
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