Day 2 in which we explore Bergen, board the MS Polarlys, and depart on our voyage.
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Offline Travel Apps?!?
Ok, time for another rant.
On the plane over I wanted to set up our itinerary on my phone.
On my PalmPilot I used an application called WorldMate. Awesome little thing. Had a small database of the most common airports and whatnot included as well as a few useful utilities and pieces of info such as clothes-size conversions etc. Absolutely brilliant.
So before I left I installed that on my Android phone, as well as TripCase which seemed to be similar.
Well guess what. Both of these apps require internet access for just about everything. Most importantly, to create and edit a trip. What bollocks – just when you are least likely to have internet access (ie, while travelling abroad), apps which manage your trip require it.
While it is very nice to have these apps pre-populate input fields using online data, this should always be optional and the user should always be able to edit things offline.
So a huge thumbs-down from me for both WorldMate and TripCase on Android.
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Boarding planes
Why the bleep can’t people board in reverse order??
Here we are standing in the freezing cold waiting for a huge queue of people to board while the people in the first rows sort out their luggage.
It would easily halve the boarding time if airlines insisted on boarding properly.
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Checking in at Heathrow T3
What a refreshing change.
No queues no mess no fuss.
Checking in at SAK took all of 5 minutes with a combination of self-checkin kiosk and baggage drop.
Security didn’t take much longer either although the usual theatre of almost stripping naked and having to just about unpack my luggage due to electronics was unavoidable.Still, compared to T5 it was easy peasy. Norway here we come!
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luksClose fails, device busy
Ok, so I recently put my backup system back into my server only to find an issue with my mount/unmount scripts.
Namely: on unmount, luksClose fails with the device showing as busy. Which is funny because nothing should have been accessing it.
There’s plenty of posts/bugs/etc online of people having the same issue, but either no solutions are posted, or the solutions didn’t apply in my case. Well, I finally tracked it down: noflushd.
noflushd is a daemon which spins down idle disks. It probably wasn’t running on my old server which is why I didn’t have any problems before.
Long story short, shutting down noflushd finally let me close my encrypted backup disk and shut it down. Yayy.
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Tube troubles
So there’s a signal failure at Mile End today. More quick-setting concrete (1)? One hopes not.
However what I can’t understand is why they can’t just run up to Mile End (2) or a station or two before and turn the trains around there, instead of causing grief on the entire line.(1) In case the link breaks, on the 23rd January contractors accidentally poured quick-setting concrete into a signalling room, suspending the Victoria Line for a day.
(2) For non-Londoners, this is a station on the eastern end of the Central Line. There are 20 stations from Ealing Broadway in the west to Mile End.
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Android VOIP clients
For years I’ve used CSipSimple but lately it stopped working properly on my Note 2 after the last system update.
Looking around I found Zoiper, another free client, which seems to work.
I’ll update this post as and when I try out other clients.
For now:
CSipSimple
Integrates well with Android dialler. Many calls, usually good quality. Worked very well up to Android 4.3, since then dodgy. Tried the nightly builds but not much better. Free and no ads. Worked with DrayTel.Zoiper
No dialler integration but can read address book. 2 calls so far, one great quality the other shoddy. Free and no ads. Works with DrayTel.
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Shoes Don’t Last
So I don’t know what gives, but lately (last few years or so) shoes just haven’t lasted. Usually the sole has worn out or ended up with a hole in it after what I consider to be an extremely short period of time. Rarely do I get more than a year out of a pair of shoes, often just a season.
This is with expensive (> £100) as well as cheap shoes. From special hiking boots to trainers to Birkenstock sandals (the latter lasted my grandad for over 5 years at a time, worn all day every day).
Latest victim are my new boots bought in December: the lace just broke. *sigh*
