What a con

I felt compelled to post this, very annoying indeed.

I use Quidco, it's great, have earnt about £150 in cashback from just buying stuff I would normally over the past 4-5 months!

So one of the things I got cashback on was a free trial to CreditExpert.  Checked out the reviews and found that they are easy to cancel with (if you go over the trial you get charger of course).  So I went ahead and signed up.

A few weeks later, I rang up to cancel, no hassle.  The only bother was that they did not send out the confirmation emaiul to say that your trial has been cancelled, which is reassuring to have!  I even rang up a second time to confirm.

So the trial ran out yesterday, no charges or anything so all is good.  Untill today, when I get an email titled:

"CreditExpert Alert"

Great....

The email then goes on:


"We’ve detected a change to your credit report that you should check. If you weren’t responsible for this change, it could be a possible indicator of identity fraud."

Like hell, the day after my trial ran out?????  To obvious I'm afraid CreditExpert.

So I clicked on to login, just to see what happened, sure enough, I was linked straight through to my saved debit card details, just one click away from paying £7.99 to see the "alert", ha!

I will of course be ignoring the message, very irritating that they would try something on like that though.  Would love to know what fake alert they concoct if you were to pay etc

Steam can be cunts

I was going awat for a few days last week, so was just milling around the house, last minute packing etc.  Had my computer logged on, but wasn't really using it.

Came back to turn it off before I left and found a Steam message on my screen saying my account had been disabled!!!  Nothing to do with VAC as that would have banned me from servers and not disabled my entire account, AFAIK.

Anyway, logged a support call with Steam and left for my holiday.

Luckily, I had my laptop with me so was able to check Steam while I was away, I tried logging in and it worked just fine, I then remoted my home PC, checked it there (on my static IP) and it also worked fine, very odd indeed.

I left the support call open with Steam, as I was curious to know what had happened and why it was disabled in the first place.

I got home this week and Steam still had not replied to my question, so I logged on to check my support account, I found my question hadn't been closed, but just removed completely!  So I logged another one last night, asking the same question.

Checked again this morning and found that one had been deleted also, WTF?

Are Steam trying to cover something up?  Did they have some mass system error?  Not that I have heard of any other folks getting their accounts disabled!

Tempted to log another support call with them, doubt it will get me very far though.

I GOT RICK ROLLED BY RICK ASTLEY!!!!

Yes I did!!!  By the man himself!!

This was of course not a Rick Astley only show I went to see, he was supporting Peter Kay (WTF right??) at the MEN during his "Tour The Doesn't Tour Tour".

I also nearly got thrown out for taking photos of Rick Astley, they only did the "don't take photos" announcement after Rick Astley had finished.

Seriously though, why can't you take photos during gigs and things?  I wasn't using flash, like most of the tards in the arena, so I wasn't distracting the act.  I'm not going to sell them, that same I guess applies to most people there taking photos.  Even if I put them online, it's free publicity right?  No ones going to look at my photos and then decide they have seen enough so won't bother buying tickets!!

The other annoyance from the night was the MEN sound system, which broke during the second half.

It was still outputting sound, but along with it came a high pitched whining noise, it was horrible, really got inside my head.  It was just the right pitch to give you a headache.

I could see the technicians running round at the bottom trying to fix it, but they failed, so the noise remained for the whole second half.  It was obvious that Peter was distracted by it, he stumbled on his words a bit at first, obviously not expecting the noise to stay.  When it did, he just stared talking faster to fill the silence, which certainly helped, so thanks for that Mr Kay!  Boo to the MEN and their crappy technicians.

Anyway, at the Apollo next week for Flight Of The Conchords, can't wait!

Android, First Impressions

Well, at last, I have my shiny HTC Desire running Google Android.  Have had it for a week or so now, this is just a collection of points and stuff from my experience.

My contract with Vodafone ended in November, so been waiting until they had some decent Android phones.  March delivered the goods, with HTC Legend, Desire, Nexus One and SE X10 all coming to Vodafone.  I went for the Desire.

So, I'm reasonably tech savvy, so thought I would get along OK with Android.  As with all new phones, they recommend charging them up before using it, priming the battery and all that.  So as per quick user manual (the only bit of instructions that came with the phone), I stuck my SIM in and then plugged the battery in.

This caused the phone to auto power up!!!  Not ideal at all, wanting to charge the battery fully before using, anyway, turned the phone off and gave it a full charge, only took a couple of hours.

So, getting it all set up was a breeze, opted to setup Gmail and Facebook accounts, won't go into details here, all this stuff has been written about.

The phone is nice though, the screen is crystal, everything is snappy and smooth.  I am in a position where I have no previous Android to compare this with, but would be nice to see just how much more responsive it is with the faster CPU and more RAM etc.  The multitasking is great though.

Here is my gripes though:

Closing Programs

Now this is a bit hard to get used to, but basically, you can't close apps on Android.  You just go back to the menu and stuff stays running.  The manual says nothing about this, or what you should do.  I had previously seen a task killer app for Android rated as a "must have".  I did install it and found that everything it left running in the background, which must be bad right?

Wrong!  The task killer apps are a ball ache to use, opening them, kill the apss, lock the phone.  Horrible habit to have to get into!  To make it worse, the task killer app itself sits running in the background as well, although it can kill itself!

I found a few helpful discussions, (here and here) about why you should not use tak killer apps.  Basically, Android manages its memory just fine and killing apps makes no difference to performance and battery life.  Very good read if you get chance, I haven't used the task killer since and have noticed no difference.

Web Presence

Try searching for "Android" on Google and look at the results that are actually written by Google.  All you get is developer stuff, nothing user based, how to use Android, tips and tricks.  So you are left at the will of the phone manufacturer and how well they describe the phone.  HTCs manual was OK, but stuff was left out!

Alarms (Task Killing Related)

So for the first 2 days of having the phone, my alarm did not go off.  Now it seems obvious now, but this was because of using the task killer app and closing the "clock" application.  Coming from Sony Ericsson, where the clock is just part of the phone OS and you cannot "kill" it, this did not strike me immediately.  All the more reason why it should be described specifically.

HTC Facebook Sync (Friend Stream)

What a dodgey load of crap, does not detail what it is going to do before it does it.  Supposedly, it brings contacts from Facebook and Google to your phone, but instead of having 2 entries for everyone, you link them together on the phone, sounds clever eh?

Actually, it is very crude, it does work quite well, but leaves a big mess behind if you ever want to remove it.

It uses the Notes field in Google Contacts to store a bit of XML which links to the Facebook page, looks like this:

id:123456789/friendof:123456789

My first thought when I noticed this was that it would wipe out any notes currently stored by Google, luckily, it appends this data to the end of any notes already stored.

When I removed this sync, it left all this crap behind in Google, so now I have to go through and remove manually.

The other thing it does badly is the merging of contacts.  If you have a number for someone in Google and that person has also (stupidly) added that number on Facebook, Friend Stream does not merge the numbers, or just hide one of them.  It shows both, so you end up with contacts that have 4 or 5 numbers, some of which are just duplicates.

This information is also synced up to Google Contacts (I think, not 100%) and left behind after using it.

I stopped the sync with Facebook in the end, it is great having all that info and pictures for contacts, but it seems to hammer the battery.  I haven't got around to figuring out sync frequecy and things, so maybe turn it back on in the future.

Desire User Manual

Well basically, finding this is guess work.  It does not come with a printed manual, which is fair enough, it also does not come with a CD with the manual on, which is more common these days.  The manual is actually on the SD card in the phone, but this isn't mentioned anywhere in the info that comes in the box.  I had to rely on Google to tell me where the manual is.

If I missed some bit of paper that said that, then I stand corrected, but it sure ain't obvious!!


Google Map Rotation With Compass

How the hell do you get this working??  I have seen it on the iPhone, is this their special feature??

Random Contacts Showing Up As SMS Senders

This seems to have been solved now, as it hasn't happened for a while.  But messages from Google Calendars and Vodafone showed up as being from a random contact on the phone.  It is possible this is tied to the Facebook that I turned off, so can't confirm this happens to everyone.

Calendar Ownership

The built in calendar is great and syncs perfectly with Google, shows the different colours for the different calnedars and allows you to create appointments in any calendar, not just your personal one, wow!!

The only problem is that if you create an appointment on your phone, when synced to Google, you are not the owner of the appointment, but a guest to it.  I noticed this as it had the whole "are you attending" thing when you click on the detail.  Bit annoying really, not sure if this is a technical limitation with Google or just the way the software works.

Marketplace Issues

This has been widely complained about here and still ignored by Google,  Basically, when a new phone comes out, Google have to add the ROM signature to its database, so that it can download certain apps from the marketplace.  If Google do not sign the ROM, you only get certain apps, still a lot, but not some of the better ones.  Google have only just signed this ROM off as I finish the post, about 1 month after the phone being released and there are still apps missing, such as Google Earth!

Very bad attitude from Google and rubbish desicion to even release the phone before this is sorted.  I am certain a lot of people sent their phones back and went with Apple over is, crappy experience of the "next big thing", really not doing much good for the Android platform.

Overall, pretty happy with my phone and am pretty sure I have only just scratched the surface, still getting used to it all, and have plenty of apps to discover.  But, I have 24 months for that!

Guess what game Steam updated today?

The one I thought would never get an update!!  GTA IV!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Coming up to the release of "Episodes From Liberty City", Rockstar have finally updated GTA IV, bye bye cheating shits!!

GTA multiplayer was terrible, when it should have been so awesome, cheating was rife, no one got banned, it crashed, froze, people got kicked etc etc etc

Hopefully, this will all be solved, not had chance to check it out yet.



http://store.steampowered.com/news/3695/

April Fools Roundup

Just catching up on my RSS feeds this morning, some good April Fools going on!

GamerSushi - Natal Delayed Indefinitely: “Just Not Working”, Says Lead Developer

Money Saving Expert - Have you got a ‘Downturn 50p’ said to be worth £1,000?

Android Guys / Google - Holy Cow! Google Translate for Animals Hits Android Market

Firebox - DIY Carbon Freezing Kit

IWOOT - Ground-Breaking New Exclusives at IWOOT

Google - Our newest Mobile Search feature: Where am I?

The Register - Google to digitize world+dog with People View

The Register - DIMENSIONAL PORTAL INCURSION AT THE LHC!

Team17 - Crawl Of Duty 1, 2, 3, 4

The Register - New Reg comments system ready to launch

Google - Today's vowel outage 

Will update this throughout the day if possible.  It is going to be a bad day, I got rickrolled before 08:30 this morning!  Sigh

Printer drivers, how complicated do they need to be?

Now I have had a lot of issues with printer drivers before, huge bulky packages of shit, just to run a printer.  Most driver downloads from HP for example are in excess of 100MB, combine that with their terrible download speeds and your in for a stressful install.

I have just been installing a HP Officejet 6000, nice cheap network inkjet.  Now, I don't want it running of DHCP, so setting a static IP address should be pretty easy right?

Wrong!!

No printers come with LCD screens these days, so that's the first problem.  Easy configuration out of the window (even on some business level lasers).  They now just have a few lights on the front to show when the ink is ran out, not even the level of ink!!  A little LCD can do that FFS...................

OK, my PC just rebooted itself, you know why?  The HP printer shit that was installing in the background decided it wanted window focus to show a message asking if I wanted to reboot my PC please.  Well, I assume that's what it said, I didn't see it, but that's what it did.  It obviously took any keyboard press as "yes" and went right ahead with it.

Anyway, secondly to now having LCD screens, I would expect that they may have a simple web interface?

Wrong!!

I can sort of understand saving money on hardware, like screens, but web interfaces?  That's easy enough right?  They must spend a hell of a lot of time on bulky driver software and they could do away with most of that if they just had a web interface.

So, no screen, no web interface, the only option is to install the software, just to change the dam IP address.  The network printers here get installed on servers, so this software will never be used again.

I installed the software, eventually managed to get the printer detected in the network discover app, carried on with the install.  It then wanted to apply network changes to my machine???  What the hell does it need to change, it's just a printer for frig sake, non of the Konica lasers need this kind of dicking about, so they just have got it right.  So it applied network settings, then wanted to reboot, the reboot above was the SECOND one.  That's right, two reboots for a printer driver install.

Even after the two reboots, it still doesn't work, the driver software helpfully sent of an error report and in response downloaded some generic Vista troubleshooting document.

I have a feeling that when this is all configured, it still won't work on the server.

Gmail Notifier - https access

Google have announced today that they will be turning https access to Gmail accounts on by default.

While this is great news, I can forsee problems with people who use Gmail Notifier. This is a small taskbar app that shows when you have unread emails in your Gmail account, very handy. It also acts on "mailto" links on the web, opening Gmail in your browser to compose a new email.

Now, this app does not work by default with accounts accessed over https, the app hasn't been updated since 21st March 2006. I am amazed that Google hasn't made a small tweak to it on announcing that they will be switching over to https!! Basically, it will not be able to check for new emails if using https

However, there is an easy registry change to fix the problem, which is provided by Google in their help pages.

1. Download this .zip file.

2. Unzip the contents.

3. Close Gmail Notifier if you have it running.

4. Run the "notifier_https.reg" from the unzipped folder.

5. Allow user account control popup in you are running Vista or Windows 7.

6. Click "Yes" on the Registry Editor window to make the change

If you ever want to turn of https, then you would have to make this change in your Gmail account and then run the other file, "notifier_https_undo.reg". But, I don't recommend you turn this off at all.

I haven't experience any problems with speed or compatibility with other apps while having https turned on, I think I had it turned on from the start.