Let’s Play Spot the Difference

September 7, 2017 | Comment

Can you tell the difference between these two seemingly identical bills I received by email from Virgin Media?

I have to admit that initially I couldn’t. It was only when I saw the bill total of £498.52 and did a double take that I took a closer look. When you do that it becomes clear that:

my account details are missing
the email address, while valid, isn’t correct
when hovering over the View Bill button it wouldn’t have taken me to the Virgin Media website.

I consider myself to be pretty internet savvy but I was shocked at how well … Read the rest

Going Secure via Cloudflare (and a Warning)

August 15, 2017 | Comment

Forced to be Secure by Google

The more observant amongst you may have noticed that the site is now “secure”. Quite why a blog needs to be so I am not sure but Google is starting to insist on such things so I am in the process of converting all my sites to load via https.

To be honest it has been a bit of a trial, partly because this site runs on a WordPress multi-site installation and that has thrown up a few peculiarities. Anyway, the change from Google has forced me to look at all my sites and … Read the rest

Pebble Time vs Apple Watch

July 7, 2017 | Comment

As regular readers of this blog will know I am a huge fan of the Pebble smart watch. So it was a great disappointment when the the company collapsed and the assets were bought by Fitbit. Pebble did at least return the money that had been pledged on Kickstarter for the next generation and, due to currency fluctuations, I actually received marginally more back than I put in. However, that’s not much consolation for not getting what was looking like a great watch.

For a few months I persisted with the Pebble Time but as time went on it … Read the rest

Siri Idiot

July 5, 2016 | Comment

I was persuaded by a mate to take a look again at Apple’s Siri, the personal assistant on iOS. I have to say that I have some deep seated psychological dislike of shouting into my phone in order to get it to do stuff but I promised to take a look at it again as he felt I was missing out.

The first thing I struggled with once turning Siri back on again was just what would I say to here. I could ask the weather forecast but I have apps for that and I find looking out of the … Read the rest

A Bit of a Curve Ball

June 28, 2016 | 4 comments

Much of the banking system is still based on procedures and practices from the 20th century and so, like many other areas of life, is ripe for modernisation through technology. One company trying to bring some innovation in this space is Curve.

Curve is billed as the one card to replace all your cards and feels a little bit like Apple Pay in that you scan your existing cards into their (iOS only) app and then swap between them when making payments.

The Curve is currently in “beta” and only available to those working for small businesses. There is an … Read the rest

Google Cardboard. VR – the Future or Passing Novelty?

June 7, 2016 | Comment

A friend of mine turned up recently with a Google Cardboard a, well, cardboard phone holder that allows you to watch virtual reality content. I was interested to have a go but skeptical as to the longer term possibilities of the technology.

As you can see from the picture above the box has a place to put your phone which is held a few inches in front of a couple of lenses. You need specific apps in order to see the content which create a sort of stereoscopic effect. Although this is made of cardboard it is pretty robust although … Read the rest

How did they manage to get that?

May 3, 2016 | Comment

So I received the above message to my phone last week. There were several things that were interesting about it:

it was supposedly from Apple (it isn’t)
whoever sent it had my full name
they also had my mobile number.

This was obviously a scam as Apple a) wouldn’t send notifications like this and b) definitely wouldn’t send you to a site called “applewarning.co.uk”.

I’m pretty careful about who has my mobile number although getting my name is pretty easy so I’m left wondering just who or what has been compromised to allow this information to become available to spammers. … Read the rest

Accessing an AWS EC2 Instance via Macfusion

April 19, 2016 | 2 comments

As part of a drive to improve security we are moving more of our AWS EC2 development instances behind a VPN. This is fine for most things but the code editor we use, ShiftEdit, won’t see the servers behind the VPN as they are not publicly assessable over SSH. This means I was looking for a different solution. Ideally I wanted a code editor that had native SSH support using private keys or agent forwarding and had a tabbed interface. Unfortunately none of major players seemed to have what I was looking for.

There are a number of free editors … Read the rest

Raspberry Pi GPS tracker – Connecting Without a Network

February 24, 2016 | Comment

All articles to date have been about getting the GPS working with the Raspberry Pi and converting the original Python code to PHP. All of this works well (for me) but what if you want to make changes to the settings or download the log file while you are out and about and away from your home network?

Normally what happens is that you configure your device to connect to a known network but as you are going to be using the GPS/Pi combination away from known networks you need a way to access anywhere without having to connect a … Read the rest

Raspberry Pi GPS tracker – Converting Code to PHP – Part 2

February 16, 2016 | Comment

In the last post I looked at converting the original Python code to PHP. This all ran without issue but I quickly found that because the Pi wasn’t connected to the internet the date and time of the device never got updated. This meant that the log files always had the wrong timestamp when they were created making it difficult to find the one I needed.

Turns out that there is a simple answer to this problem. As the GPS satellites include the current date and time as part of the detail that is sent along with the location we … Read the rest