Alex Mace’s Blog

Royal Mail Online Postage

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Royal Mail’s Online Postage used be a great service. In a nutshell, it allowed you to pay for posting something online. Once you had paid, you could then print out an envelope or label and pop it in the post without having to get a book of stamps or visit the Post Office. No mess, no fuss.
For Mac users, that was the happy situation up until fairly recently, when Royal Mail “upgraded” their offering and completely broke it.

You see, when you download your label, it comes as a PDF with “SAMPLE” in large, unfriendly letters across the front of it and a small box explaining that this wouldn’t print out on the final label. Which was true, whether you were using Adobe’s official PDF viewer, Adobe Reader or Apple’s Preview, which ships with Mac OS X and doesn’t come with a load of crapware attached (Adobe Air? Acrobat.com? Fuck off Adobe). However since Royal Mail “upgraded” the service, if you print the label in Preview it also prints the unfriendly “SAMPLE” and the notice that it won’t print the word “SAMPLE”.

So you have to use Adobe Reader instead. However this doesn’t work either, as I found out. Not only does it force you to install other services that I didn’t want (Still here Adobe? FUCK OFF), but when I first launched it, it halted to install updates. That’s right, updates on software I just downloaded and installed. Then, say for example you told Royal Mail you wanted to print out a DL envelope. Well Adobe Reader can’t manage to print that out for you. Instead, it assumes that the envelope itself is A4 and scales it down to fit on the envelope. Which it then fails to print on, only managing to fit the top 25% of the label on the bottom of the envelope, rendering it useless.

So congratulations Royal Mail. You’ve taken a useful, if little known, service and rendered it useless for me. I guess I should be thankful you haven’t closed the Post Office at the end of my street.

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The iPad Buying Decision

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

While the iPad is now available for pre-order over in the US, the date when you can do the same in the UK has not yet been announced. There are some questions to be answered: What will the UK pricing be, should you buy one and if yes, what model should you get?

Up until fairly recently, Apple were displaying the US prices on their UK site, with a note that international prices had not yet been announced. This, to me, seemed a strange move for Apple considering their UK prices have usually been substantially more than the (US price * exchange rate) + VAT. Perhaps for once they were going to actually do that, but since the initial announcement of the iPad sterling has slipped considerably against the dollar, which I think was what prompted the removal of the US pricing. They are, however, still trailing it as being available at a “unbelievable price”. Unfortunately for those of us in the UK, this is more likely to be unbelievably high than unbelievably low.

These are the current US prices:

Current US prices in sterling at current exchange rate (£1=$1.517):

What I expect sterling prices to be for the iPad:

It is very much possible that they may be higher, they may be lower. I have no insider information, but on past evidence I would expect prices to be at least those I have listed. There is precedent for worse; Apple TV is available in the US at $229 (£151 at the above exchange rate) but its UK price is £223.

Anyway, regardless of that, which iPad should you buy? Let’s start by thinking about which model to go for – Wi-fi or Wi-fi + 3G (which I’ll refer to just as the 3G model after this point to prevent confusion). I personally think it is unlikely that the iPad’s main use is going to be going on the Internet while on the move, that’s what the iPhone is for. So you could make the case that you don’t need to buy the 3G model. However, the 3G version also has GPS, which to me is justification to spend the extra money on that model. The 3G chippery itself is a mere bonus. The possible applications of GPS in location-aware apps is very exciting and I wouldn’t want to be excluded from that. So get the 3G model.

Next question is how much storage should you go for? When buying a hard drive, my advice is usually to think about how much you need and double it. My 16Gb iPhone is full and only has one movie on it. The iPad is going to be a million times better for looking at photos and watching movies, which will require much more storage. Better to be able to take as much as possible with you rather than wishing you’d put movie x on rather than the selection you brought with you. So I’d go for at least 32Gb, preferably 64Gb.

Does that mean if you can’t afford the £699 top of the range 64Gb 3G model, you shouldn’t get one? No, it doesn’t. If you want one, get the one you can afford, but I’d go for the 16Gb 3G model before looking at the 32Gb Wi-fi model because it gives you more possibilities with it’s GPS. You can always swap around your content if necessary, even if it is a bit of a faff. You can’t swap the features around.

So, am I going to buy an iPad? No. Not yet anyway. At the moment the iPad doesn’t offer me enough to justify getting a device between my iPhone and MacBook Pro. It’s close, though. I suspect the mark 2 iPad will have a forward facing camera, which will make it a great device for video conferencing and all the stuff the mark 1 can do. Roll on the 2011 model.

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My letter to my MP, Michael Foster

Monday, February 9th, 2009

We had a letter through the door from our MP, talking about Worcester City Council’s proposed (and I believe, now approved) cuts on CCTV. I’d provide a link to the contents of the letter, but it doesn’t seem to be on his website. Anyway, here is what I wrote in reply.

Mr Foster,

Thank for you for letter regarding the CCTV situation in Worcester. I will be filling in the survey and returning it to you shortly, but I thought I would take a few minutes to give you my thoughts regarding some of the points you made in your letter and related issues.

The overall impression given in the letter is that the camera will no longer be there and that we will be less safe without them. You say
that you have “seen the statistics showing arrests made thanks to CCTV evidence”. Neither of these points are particularly informative or
helpful to me. If you have seen the statistics, I think it would have been useful to put that information in your letter, so that I and
others receiving it could make a more informed decision. Without that information how am I to know whether or not manning the CCTV
monitoring room is a cost effective use of council resources?

Which brings me to the second point,  the use of CCTV as a deterrent. Before writing to you, I thought I would take the time to look at the news stories on the issue, to make sure that I was fully informed. None of them say that the CCTV cameras will be taken down, or that
they will no longer be recording. They say that they will no longer be monitored. If this is true, then the deterrent benefit is still there
because the evidence will still be stored.

It saddens me greatly that the image that you portray in your letter is one where we all need to be watched, constantly, to ensure our
safety. Technology and surveillance are not a panacea. The only long term answer to our society’s problem is education. Knowledge is a
shining beacon against ignorance. By informing the young they will grow up to be thoughtful, intelligent people. I would far rather my council spent it’s money on educating the people of Worcester than watching them.

I really do not think that it is the “professional” criminal that makes people feel unsafe in our city. Rather it is the things that CCTV cannot prevent, merely observe. Things like vandalism, drunk and disorderly people, gang violence, etc. I am not surprised that you do believe that it can stop these things with CCTV though, since you are a Labour MP. I find the Labour Government’s cavalier attitude to putting us all on databases and giving us ID cards, so you can track our every move very disturbing. I know the argument, if I’ve done nothing wrong I’ve got nothing to fear. What if the Government does something wrong and gets me confused with someone else with the same
name. How can I argue against the system? Our civil liberties have been hard won and no one deserves, as you voted to allow, to be locked
up for 42 days without charge, even if they are a “terrorist”. Who decides tomorrow who is a terrorist? Could it be someone who disagrees with you?

Which brings me onto my final point. I find it deeply distressing and abhorrent that you raised the 2005 terror attacks in London as a reason to support CCTV. In this case it neither prevented the crime, nor caught the people involved. They had blown themselves up, along with 50  other people. CCTV could not save those people. CCTV will not comfort the people who lost loved ones. The warm glow of the CCTV monitor will not put any warmth back into those people who died. You should be ashamed.

Yours sincerely,

Alex Mace

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…and we’re back

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Ok, so my site has been offline a little while. I fell out with my host when it proved to be a pain the the arse to set up a regular payment via PayPal and couldn’t be bothered to find another one in the short term. So for now, this site is being hosted on a box in my house. It’s not exactly a powerhouse, being a silent little EPIA SP based machine, running at a mighty 800Mhz, but that should do for now.

In the short term I plan to evaluate what blog software is out there at there at the moment and possibly switch from Wordpress. I also want to transistion from using this domain name (whythehell.co.uk) to alexmace.co.uk and setup proper redirects.

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