OK, time for a quick rant in today's “big companies being assholes” news: Our new house came with Hive smart heating preinstalled – it was even listed as one of the features in the sales brochure. It turns out that Hive doesn't want to re-assign the network hub to a different user, and forces you into buying a whole new hub. If you buy it from them it's £80, but it seems like you can get it cheaper on Amazon through a reseller.
Tech support even had the audacity to tell me that the previous owners “forgot” to take the hub with, as a hub “can only be assigned to one account during its lifetime”. This is both bad for the environment, as I now have to throw the existing hub away, but also bad in terms of customer service. When will these companies learn?
At Tidepool we develop open-source software, but we also use a lot of open-source software to make everything work. It makes sense to give back, and we have done so in the past. For example, we gave a donation to electron-builder, as we use it to manage our build and auto-update process for the Tidepool Uploader.
One recent option to make it easier to support open-source efforts is Tidelift, which pays open-source contributors to maintain their software, notify users of vulnerabilities and assist with licensing issues. To be honest, I think NPM v6 already does a good job handling security vulnerabilities using the npm audit tool . GitHub now also notifies you of critical vulnerabilities. Licensing is complex and time will tell how Tidelift does there. That leaves paying contributors to maintain their software.
Another option that I tried in the past is npx thanks. It scans your package.json and tells you if there is a donations page, Patreon or something similar available for the maintainer of any packages you use. I think it's a great idea, but it does mean that you'll have to contribute to each maintainer individually, which is more time-consuming than just paying for a Tidelift subscription.
My parents are visiting at the moment, and I wanted to print them some useful things that they could use. My dad needed a shoe horn, so I found this one that fits the bill, and it printed very nicely. The weight feels good and it's just the right width.
My mom wanted a picture frame that could go on the fridge using magnets. I found this OpenSCAD design that is easily customisable, so I was able to create exactly the size and frame width that I wanted. Printing large flat things can be tricky on a 3D printer, but the i3 MK3 handled it quite well – I just had to use the optimal settings instead of the fast settings.
Why is it that airlines always have these weird pricing scheme that make no sense? For example, the last time I checked a single ticket (instead of a return) costs the same price as a business ticket, while you can get a single ticket using air miles at a reasonable price.
Today I bought a ticket and noticed the following:
To be able to cancel the flight, you have to pay almost twice the price! A ticket you can cancel costs £1107, and you still pay £150 to cancel it. A regular ticket costs £687, so you still pay £570 if you cancel your flight on the £1107 ticket.
I'm also a bit annoyed that you now pay extra for check-in baggage on international flights, but since the last time my baggage was delayed/missing, I usually travel with hand baggage only when possible.
I previously wrote about how I'm always running out of space on my 16GB iPhone 6S. I decided to reset my phone to factory settings and then install everything manually, instead of restoring from a backup. Surprisingly, iTunes and iCloud makes this very easy. If you click “Restore iPhone..” in iTunes, it erases everything from the phone and automatically installs the latest release of iOS.
If you then sign in using iCloud, it automatically restores most of your settings from iCloud. You still have to install every app manually, but if you go to “Purchases” in the iTunes store it's easy to see what you had installed before. The most tedious part was signing into each app again.
The only issue I had is that I turned off Whatsapp iCloud backups in June, so my chat history from June to September is missing. Apart from that all photos, messages, contacts and so on restored from iCloud without any problems. It seems iCloud finally matured into a usable technology.
The best part is that I have 5GB of free space on the phone after installing all my apps again. This means there was probably some cruft that accumulated over the past eight or so years since I got my first iPhone, where I always just restored from a backup when upgrading to a new phone.
Tl,DR: It's good to start with a fresh install of iOS every now and again, and iCloud makes it easy nowadays.
It has a user interface dating from two decades ago, but Freecycle remains one of the best ways to get to the reuse part of reduce-reuse-recycle. We had an extra bookcase that we wanted to get rid of, and it was reasonably easy to list it on the site. Within a day I had two takers, one who dismissed it after hearing the dimensions. The other picked it up in a van this morning.
There have been various attempts at building better alternatives to Freecycle, but it's hard to recreate the same network that FreeCycle has been building since 2003, with more than 9 million members. That said, this feels like the kind of thing that would work really well as a decentralised app.
We would like to plant some fruit trees along one of the walls in our garden, that over time will create a natural screen from the neighbour's backyard. We had a look at some fruit trees at the garden centre this afternoon, and I suddenly realized how little I know about trees in general.
How do we make sure that they will be pollinated and can bear fruit? Do we need multiple trees of the same type or do they cross-pollinate? How large do they get? What type of fruit would we like to grow? And so on. I guess I have some research to do before we start buying trees.
I'm back from the Lake District and starting up my daily posts again. Even though it was pretty rainy this past week, with Storm Ali sweeping across the UK, we had a good time and even managed to fit in a long walk along Lake Ullswater.
The photo above was taken at Lake Windermere, which is the largest natural lake in England and the Lake District.
I'm spending some time with my family in the Lake District this week, so for the first time in more than a hundred days there may be some days without any posts. See you on the flipside!
Now that we're living a bit closer to the beach again, it was great to go for a quick run today. The weather almost looked like it wasn't going to play along, pouring down earlier in the morning. I had a quick look on Windy and noticed that there would be a short break in the rain, and luckily I timed it exactly right.
There was a little bit of sun that came out during the run, and it was great running on the beach itself at high tide. And then running back along a small stream in the park. It does make you ask the question: Why would you not want to live in Swansea?
