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Boycotting Google

July 9, 2024December 18, 2012 by Neil Turner

Last week, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt said he was ‘very proud’ that Google was able to avoid paying taxes in overseas markets like the UK. This is at a time when multi-national companies like Google are under fire in the UK for not paying their fare share of taxes, and when public services are being cut because there’s not enough money left from government funds – funds which are raised through taxes. Ergo, if these companies did pay fair taxes, we wouldn’t be so screwed.

Starbucks recently volunteered to pay more tax in the UK after a consumer backlash saw sales at main rival Costa increase by 7%. Similarly, a number of people are avoiding purchasing from Amazon this Christmas because it only paid £1.8 million in corporation tax, despite sales of £3.35 billion.

Frankly, Schmidt’s comments are insulting. The only people who will be pleased by his statement will be Google shareholders and investors; to everyone else, especially in the UK, it’s demeaning. And, unsurprisingly, people are looking to boycott Google as well.

This means things like:

Using Mozilla Firefox instead of Google Chrome
Switching to Yahoo! Mail or Outlook.com instead of Gmail
Uploading videos to Vimeo and photos to Flickr, instead of YouTube and Picasa Web Albums
Searching using Bing
Sharing on Facebook or Twitter instead of Google+
Using an ad-blocker to hide Google’s advertising
Storing files in Dropbox or SkyDrive, rather than Google Drive
Using maps from Apple or Microsoft

Personally, I’m not going down the route of a boycott, even though I think Schmidt’s attitude is unacceptable. And, in any case, Apple are also guilty of tax avoidance in the UK, as is Facebook, and I’m sure Microsoft probably is as well. Unfortunately Google products are so ingrained in how I use the internet that I’d find it difficult to not use them.

And I think the best way of tackling the problem is to close the loopholes that these companies exploit. Avoiding tax increases profits; for some companies, this would be a no-brainer and has, until recently, not really attracted attention. Of course, times have changed and now these companies have the negative image that tax avoidance brings to counter; Starbucks have found that this was to their detriment and I hope that Google will follow.

Disclaimer: This site carries advertising via Google and Amazon.

How to use Google Sync without using Exchange

December 23, 2024December 16, 2012 by Neil Turner

In a blog post on its official blog called ‘Winter cleaning‘, Google announced that it was shutting down some of its services. They are all features which have either been replaced with something (supposedly) better, or are only used by a small number of people and are therefore not worth keeping. This includes Google Sync, which allows the use of Microsoft Exchange protocols for synchronising Gmail, Google Contacts and Google Calendar.

Unfortunately, Exchange is what myself and a number of others use on the iPhone, as it’s the easiest way to synchronise mail, contacts and calendars at the same time. Now Google isn’t dropping Exchange support completely – users of Gmail and free Google Apps accounts (which recently closed to new sign-ups) can continue using it but won’t be able to set it up on new devices; paid Google Apps users will be able to carry on with no problems.

But it’s clear that Exchange support is not a priority for non-paying users like me and so it’s probably best to look at alternatives. Google is, refreshingly, pushing open standards instead – IMAP for email, CalDAV for calendars and CardDAV for contacts. Luckily for iPhone users like me, Apple supports all three, although Windows Phone users aren’t so lucky.

So, here’s how to replace your Exchange-based Google settings with IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV:

Step 1: Remove the Exchange account

Open Settings, choose Mail, Contacts and Calendars, select your Google Account which is using Exchange, and then select Delete Account. This will remove all contacts, calendars and emails that have been synchronised so I would ensure you have backed your phone up first, just in case there are any problems.

Step 2: Set up a new Gmail account

You should now add your Gmail account in the standard way, by choosing ‘Add Account’ in Mail, Contacts and Calendars and then tapping the Gmail logo. This will set up email and calendar sync, using IMAP and CalDAV respectively, but not contacts.

Step 3: Set up a CardDAV account to synchronise contacts

Going back to the ‘Add Account’ screen, tap ‘Other’ and then ‘Add CardDAV Account’. In server, enter ‘google.com’, your Google Account username and password, and a description – I called mine ‘Google Contacts’.

Now, open the Mail, Contacts and Calender apps on your iPhone in turn to download the data again, which may take a couple of minutes. And then that’s it – you should be back to where you started.

If you find that some of your calendars are missing, open Mobile Safari and browse to https://www.google.com/calendar/syncselect – this will allow to select which calendars are synchronised over CalDAV. The changes will take effect the next time you open the Calendars app, after a few seconds.

These instructions are a bit long-winded and it would be nice if the iPhone’s Gmail support included Contacts as well (which would make step 3 unnecessary). However, considering Apple’s uneasy relationship with Google of late I can’t see this being a priority for them, especially as these features duplicate Apple’s iCloud.

Bicester Village

December 23, 2024December 2, 2012 by Neil Turner

Today we went to Bicester Village, an outlet shopping centre in Bicester, Oxfordshire, whilst visiting relatives. It’s one of a number of outlet shopping centres, where shops sell off old, excess or seconds stock at discount prices. However, Bicester Village is somewhat posher than others.

By this, I mean it has shops from the likes of Gucci, Alexander McQueen, D&G, various Saville Row tailors, and other luxury brands that are normally the preserve of the ’1%’ who can actually afford these. If you’re happy with buying something that isn’t quite perfect, or from last season, then you can bag a significant discount.

Of course, despite these discounts, pretty much everything was still well out of our price range. Hooded jumpers for over £300 for example – and that’s a reduced price. In the end, we just bought some cheese and pasta from Carluccio’s and retreated to Starbucks for a coffee to warm up.

Visiting on a Sunday in the run up to Christmas meant it was very, very busy, although we got there before 11am so there were still a few parking spaces (top tip – use the car park next to Bicester Town railway station as it’s quieter). Sunday trading laws meant that some of the larger shops couldn’t open until 12pm, and when we went past just before then there was a queue of at least 100 people waiting to get into the Polo Ralph Lauren shop. This is despite it being one of three shops in the centre, and not the only brand to have multiple outlets – there were a couple of Calvin Klein shops as well, amongst others.

Also notable was that many of the signs were both in English and Chinese, and that UnionPay, a major card system in China akin to Visa and MasterCard, was accepted by many of the shops there. Hence there were many Chinese tourists shopping when we visited, although we heard a number of other foreign languages being spoken, and there was a wide variety of left hand drive luxury cars in the car park.

As a Northerner who doesn’t have a huge disposable income, coming to a place like this was profoundly weird, and from a social anthropology perspective it shows just how wide the gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ is in this country. Many shops did not have anything for sale under £100 per item, and yet neither me nor most people I know would pay those sorts of prices, even though they’re already discounted. Whilst this sort of place isn’t quite for the ’1%’, it’s certainly aimed at those in the 99th percentile. I’ll stick with my Marks & Spencers clothes.

Britain’s best high streets

September 28, 2024November 30, 2012 by Neil Turner

It’s not a paper that I would choose to read, but in the Daily Express last week was an article entitled ‘Britain’s best high streets‘, and, pleasingly, it mentioned Wharf Street in my adopted home town of Sowerby Bridge – pictured above during the Rushbearing festival.

Now, since it only features three towns, it’s not exactly an authoritative article and I’m sure there are many better high streets out there. But Wharf Street is pretty good as high streets go – we have an independent bakery, grocer, butchers, a post office, two banks and a wide range of specialist and boutique shops. There’s also a number of restaurants, including two good curry houses, and a bistro which is listed in the Good Food Guide. And there’s a market which is open most days of the week.

Sowerby Bridge’s high street has held up against two supermarkets. Lidl is just up the hill, and there’s a reasonably-sized Tesco at the western end of the town. It’s probably because the independent shops here tend to offer services that are better than, or different to, what the supermarkets can provide.

It’s not perfect though. Three of the pubs on Wharf Street are currently shut – two have closed recently and one has been shut for some time. And with it being the main road between Halifax and Rochdale it is very busy with traffic, making it a rather noisy place to be with rather narrow pavements. However, the variety and quality of shops is one of the things that drew us to the town and, two years after moving here, we’re still generally in love with the place.

Printer sharing with VirtualBox on a Mac

December 29, 2024November 20, 2012 by Neil Turner

This blog post will probably be only be useful to a small niche. If you have a Mac, with a printer, and run Windows in VirtualBox, here’s what you need to do to get it to work.

Step 1: Make sure your printer is shared on the network

On your Mac, open System Preferences, choose Print & Scan, and then select your device on the list on the left. Tick ‘Share this printer on the network’.

Step 2: Check network settings for your virtual machine

In the VirtualBox manager, open your Windows virtual machine’s settings, and under Network, ensure you’re using ‘Bridged Adaptor’ rather than ‘NAT’. This will make your life much, much easier later on.

Step 3: Install and set up your printer using Bonjour

Bonjour ships on all Macs, but not on Windows, which is a shame because it makes setting up network connections much easier. Thankfully, Apple offers a cut-down version for Windows computers, so download Bonjour Print Services for Windows, and install it. This will add a ‘Bonjour Printer Wizard’ icon to your desktop.

Run the Bonjour Printer Wizard. If you’ve done the first two steps correctly, your printer should be listed. Click Next, and, if you’re lucky, Bonjour will install the correct driver and add the printer to Windows for you. Sorted. If not, then…

Step 4: Install the printer driver in Windows

Sometimes Bonjour won’t be able to identify which printer driver you need and will ask you to select it. Again, if you’re lucky, your printer will be one of those that Windows ships with, but if not, you may reach an impasse here. Some people have had luck with using a driver that is similar to their printer, but this doesn’t always work.

Instead, we’ll connect the printer directly to Windows to convince it to install the driver that way. VirtualBox lets you bridge any USB device which is plugged into your Mac, so that the virtual machine can see it. Turn your printer on, and then whilst Windows is running, click on the Devices menu in VirtualBox, select USB devices, and then choose your printer. Windows should detect that the printer is now ‘plugged in’, and so it will install the necessary drivers. Complete the installation, disconnect your printer using VirtualBox and then shut down both your virtual machine, and your Mac, to ensure that your printer is correctly picked up by your Mac on the next boot.

Start your Mac again, and then open Windows in VirtualBox, and try to run the Bonjour Printer Wizard again. Hopefully, this time you’ll be able to select your printer driver from the lists when presented (annoyingly it’s not searchable).

This still didn’t work for my printer, so I had to do one final trick. I clicked ‘Have Disk’, and then browsed to the c:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository folder, then sorted the sub-folders by date. My printer is by HP, and one of the newly-created gobbledegook folders had ‘HP’ in the title which turned out to be my printer. I selected this, and was finally able to get the printer working, with the above test page as proof.

Why not just connect the printer directly?

In step 4, I mentioned you can simply connect your printer directly to the virtual machine, thus avoiding the dilly-dallying around with Bonjour. This works, but it’s flaky; once you’ve connected your printer to Windows, you may need to reboot your Mac before any Mac applications can print to it. Whilst setting up Bonjour is more effort initially, once it’s done, you should find it easier to work with.

If anyone’s interested, I went through all of this because I wanted to print out a coupon for a free one litre carton of grape juice and couldn’t get the Coupon Printer to work correctly on my Mac.

Blood donation

December 23, 2024November 15, 2012 by Neil Turner

I donated blood for the first time today.

On Tuesday, I donated a pint of blood, for the first time.

It’s been something that I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time. I’m already an organ donor (I carry a card around which shows that I give consent for my organs to be used in transplants after my death), but until now I’ve never given blood.

I couldn’t donate throughout much of 2007 and 2008, as I had been on high-strength steroid tablets due to flare-ups with my asthma and my overnight stay in hospital in November 2007. But although I’ve been okay since then, I admit that I’ve simply never got around to it, even when there have been donation sessions at work.

My big worry was that it would hurt. And it did – a bit. For me the worst bit was the needle being inserted at the start; the pain was similar to when I’ve had vaccinations but lasted a little longer. However, once it was in, it was okay – a little uncomfortable, but not painful, and it was done after around 10-15 minutes. All in all, I was there for about an hour, due to me being a new donor and needing a slightly longer medical check first.

Afterwards, the site where the needle went in was a little tender for a few hours, but I didn’t receive any bruising and there was just a small red dot when I took the bandage off.

I’ve already booked another appointment, for mid-March next year, to donate my second pint. If you want to give blood, you can find details at blood.org.uk – the NHS needs a constant supply of blood and so if you are healthy and can spare the time I’d urge you to do it.

Windows 8 Installation Experience

December 23, 2024October 30, 2012 by Neil Turner

A screenshot of Windows 8 being installed on a VirtualBox virtual machine running on a Mac

On Saturday, I decided to upgrade to Windows 8. I’ve been running a virtual machine with Windows Vista Business for some time, firstly in Parallels Desktop but later converted to VirtualBox. I never bothered upgrading to Windows 7 due to the lack of differences between the two; obviously 7 is a big upgrade from XP but not from Vista.

Another major factor is that, at the moment, existing Windows XP, Vista and 7 users can upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for a mere £24.99 as a digital download, or more if you need it on DVD. It’s a very good deal, but it’s only valid until early next year. And since I’d also heard that Windows 8 should run faster on the same hardware, upgrading seemed like a really good idea.

To upgrade, you should download the Upgrade Assistant which checks your current installation for compatibility and then downloads the files. You can then either proceed with the upgrade, or save an ISO file to a USB drive or DVD-ROM. I decided to proceed, but told the installer not to keep any of my documents or settings; after all, it was a virtual machine and anything important had been saved to Dropbox and was therefore available elsewhere.

This turned out to be a mistake, frankly. It installed the files, restarted a couple of times, and then froze. No animation, no CPU activity, no disk activity. So, I hard reset the virtual machine. At which point, setup decided that the installation had failed, and set about restoring Windows Vista. So, after a few hours, I was back at square one.

This time, I told the installer to save the ISO file, which I placed in a shared folder so it was accessible by my Mac as well. I then shut down the virtual machine, and created a fresh, new VM in VirtualBox with the optimal Windows 8 settings. Bear in mind that my previous VM was originally a Parallels VM, was then converted to the VMWare format, and then used with VirtualBox 2; now I’m on VirtualBox 4.2. I mounted the ISO file mounted as the CD drive, booted up, followed the instructions, and within the hour I was up and running with Windows 8. Success!

…or so I thought. Opening the ‘classic’ desktop environment saw the little icon for the Windows Action Centre pop up, telling me I needed to activate Windows – which was odd because I had entered the product key during installation. So I re-entered it, only for Windows to pop up a 0xC004F601 error, telling me that the product key was only valid for upgrades and not a clean installation like this one.

Some expletives were issued by me at this point, but thankfully Google saved my sanity as I found this blog post which explained a workaround. I had to edit the registry to change a value, re-run the activation manager and then reboot, but after this Windows activated with no problems. Phew.

Obviously I still have the old Windows Vista VM lying around but as that license is now invalid due to the upgrade I’ll be deleting it. That, and I shouldn’t need it anyway.

I’ll write more about my actual experiences of using Windows 8 when I’ve had a longer opportunity to use it. So far, it seems okay, and the ‘classic’ desktop is almost exactly the same as Windows 7. I’ll have to play with the new desktop (formally known as ‘Metro’) a little more before passing judgement.

Parting the Mists

December 23, 2024October 16, 2012 by Neil Turner

The login screen for World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, showing a 15 minute waiting time to login

I’m writing this blog post whilst waiting to connect to play a bit of World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria. Although the game has been out for several weeks, a combination of a lack of spare time and the server being full (as shown in the screenshot) with queue times exceeding an hour, has meant that my main character is only level 86. That said, I’ve managed to get around 12 hours of playtime in the new expansion, and, generally, I like it.

As you will know, if you’re a long-term reader, I’ve been a World of Warcraft player since June 2006, although I’ve not played as much since 2009 when I quit regular raiding and decided to just become a casual player. I’ve therefore played every expansion, and also the classic pre-expansion game as well.

Prior to Mists of Pandaria, the second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, was my favourite. It built on the improvements of the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, but had a much better story, and some great quests – the Wrathgate and ensuing Battle for Undercity being especially memorable. The third expansion, Cataclysm, wasn’t quite so good; there wasn’t much to it in terms of max-level content (the release of the expansion coincided with a complete rework of the original game content, so resources would have been split), and it felt disjointed as the new zones were spread out without a strong consistent story between them.

I’m therefore glad that Blizzard has reverted to its classic expansion formula for Mists of Pandaria, where there is plenty of new content, on one new continent. And there certainly seems to be plenty of content – I’m about 39% of the way to level 90 and I’ve only managed to finish the first zone and a bit of the second; there are seven new zones in all. And the quests in that first zone, although less strictly linear than before, all led to one big plot moment at the end which was great. Like with the first two expansions, you can’t use flying mounts until late on in the new content, which also helps to provide the immersive experience that Cataclysm lacked. Although I’m a long way away from level 90, I also gather that there’s a lot more to do when I get there.

…And now I’m connected. It took 20 minutes rather than 15. The screenshot lies.

iBought a new iPhone

December 23, 2024September 25, 2012 by Neil Turner

So my new iPhone 5 has finally come. It’s not quite the model I was intending – I had ordered a black 16 GB model, but an order mix-up with 3 meant that I didn’t receive it as planned on Friday and after talking with a very nice person at customer services I ended up with a white 64 GB model, at no extra cost. I’d have preferred a black one, but I can’t argue with getting four times the space for the same price. I’ve saved in the region of £150 as a result.

Because I backed up my iPhone 4 to iCloud, when it came to setting up my iPhone 5 I just needed to connect to wi-fi, give it my iCloud login and tell it to restore from the cloud backup. This meant that all of my settings and apps would be automatically installed, just as they were on the old handset, which saved a huge amount of time getting the phone set up. It wasn’t totally smooth – stored passwords didn’t seem to copy, for example, and some apps like Pocket needed re-installing – but much better than starting from scratch. In particular, my progress on games such as Angry Birds was carried over, to my relief. Many of the apps I use regularly, like the aforementioned Tweetbot and Pocket, have been updated for the new larger display, but older apps do work okay. Apple did a good job of implementing the letterbox mode for these.

Physically the new phone is much nicer to hold – it’s noticeably lighter and thinner, and the edges don’t feel as sharp as they do on the iPhone 4. You can still use it easily with one hand too, unlike the wider screens on some Android phones which require you to change hands to reach far off corners of the display. The new Lightning connector is nice, although I’m a little less happy at the prospect of forking out £15 for an extra cable; plus, with 2 iPods and an iPhone 4 in our household we’ve no shortage of the old cables. I’ll also need to look into buying a case for the iPhone 5, as Apple haven’t released any bumpers for this model like they did for the 4 and 4S, nor do they sell any third party cases in Apple Stores, as Dave found out.

The new phone is much more responsive than my old one – apps work faster, especially Foursquare and Tweetbot. Support for HSPA+ also makes web pages download more quickly, and provides a small speed jump ahead of 3 rolling out 4G LTE services next year.

I’ve also had a play with Siri – I’m quite impressed that it understands almost everything I say (I have a northern accent) although it can’t always find data. I asked it about a local rugby league team, Bradford Bulls, and it interpreted it as the Chicago Bulls. For information about local places it uses Yelp, which is rather rubbish in the UK – searching for a nearby Nando’s found one in Leeds but not the two in Bradford which were much closer to me at the time.

All in all, I’m really impressed. Whilst it’s definitely an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary device, it’s a clear improvement over the iPhone 4.