Author: David Landon Cole

Thoughts on the Jolla phone

Posted on by David Landon Cole

This post originally appeared on my Tumblr.

I’ve been using a Jolla mobile phone since early 2014, not long after it came out. I’m going to be replacing that phone shortly. These are some slightly random thoughts on Jolla and phones in general.

Every phone has its quirks; however, the ones that have developed on my phone have become very annoying. I will end a call, and the network will drop, and I’ll have to restart the phone. The browser frequently closes itself. I will turn on wi-fi tethering, and it will turn on for a moment and then turn itself off. I don’t know whether those are software problems or hardware problems, but they are substantial problems.

The best phone I’ve ever had, for the time it was in, would probably be one of the Nokia Communicators I had. Through most of my undergraduate degree, I had a 9210i. In this, I was (despite having a solid, business-orientated phone) ahead of my peers. People are actually quite happy to carry around large phones, and it’s much more convenient to type lecture and class notes than handwrite them. I did get more than a few odd looks when I opened the phone to reveal a qwerty keyboard and started typing. It was also very solidly built. I then moved to a Nokia E90, the updated version, which was a similarly very useful phone. After several years, I needed to replace it, and went with a very disappointing HTC. I bought it for its qwerty keyboard, but it was too small and too flimsy for me. When the Jolla was being developed, The Other Half was a big selling point; it had the potential for a proper, qwerty keyboard and Jolla was made up of ex-Nokia types. The Other Half wasn’t available yet, but I needed a new phone, and took the plunge.

I also wanted to support people coming from Nokia (as I mention below, a company I had huge fondness for), and to have an alternative to Android and iOS.

What is now known as TOHKBD is sort of available; I considered it, but I didn’t want to buy it through Kickstarter. The person behind the Kickstarter did, it seems, a very good job, but I’d have preferred something OEM and they are, in any case, no longer producing TOHKBD. Relying on your users to develop an ecosystem for The Other Half wasn’t a bad idea, but the pump needed priming. Individuals in their bedrooms were never going to cut it. As it turned out, the only The Other Half options Jolla offered were coloured backs that also gave you a new background. A nice gimmick, but ultimately nothing more than that.

I do really like the gesture-based interface; it is very intuitive, to the extent that I often find myself trying to use Jolla gestures on my Android tablet†. The Jolla team have done a really good job on that. The visual style for the interface is also very appealing. There is a certain cleanness to the whole package that makes Android and iOS feel clumsy even now; when I moved from the Android device I had – a Motorola Razr Maxx, iirc – it felt vastly better.

The battery is a real problem. One of the selling points of the Jolla was that it had a replaceable battery. Apart from one very brief period, there have been no replaceable batteries available. That is really very frustrating indeed. A big reason I’m changing from the Jolla is that the battery life has become very poor; I can unplug it at eight in the morning and, half an hour of internet usage later when I reach university, it will only have sixty per cent of its charge remaining. The last ten per cent runs out in a matter of perhaps half an hour, significantly less than the rest of the battery. I don’t know if it’s a manufacturing problem, something to do with the OS (various updates have improved and worsened battery life), wear and tear, or something else (I was under the impression that the memory effect wasn’t really an issue for for lithium ion batteries). I don’t think that Jolla were acting in bad faith, but it seems that they’re no longer manufacturing the phone, and have set up a separate entity to make handsets. Some acknowledgement that this was a promise left unfulfilled would have been welcome. I mentioned it on the Jolla forums, and received some helpful comments from the community and a ‘this is ridiculous’ from a moderator, which I thought was a bit of a poor show. Apparently, someone had asked the same question some weeks previously.

The design of the handset itself, with the minimal branding and two-layer effect with The Other Half, is still very attractive. I have the Poppy Red cover (as much as anything, so I can find it in my bag!). When it came out, the hardware specification was for a midrange phone; it’s absolutely fine (with the possible exception of the camera). I wonder, though, if it is as robustly built as it might be and whether that has caused some of the problems I mention above.

One of the things I love – really love – about Jolla phone and company is that my handset had almost nothing installed on it when I turned it on for the first time. Phone, browser, messages, tutorial, store, and very little if anything else. There was none of the pernicious, useless bloatware that everyone else seems to go for.* You just installed what you wanted, and didn’t have anything else. That is exactly how it should be done. Jolla also had a range of useful apps on its store, and that number grew. It was never, though, going to match the range available on Google and Apple’s respective stores. Running on Linux, though, meant that Android apps could run on the Jolla. That was a big factor for me; my comment above about wanting an alternative notwithstanding, there’s a lot of great stuff available through Google and Apple. It was very easy, if you wanted, to install the Aptoide app store; it was like installing another programme. It should have been just as easy to install Google Play. I very much doubt that anyone at all will read this, but there seem to be a lot of people in the Jolla community who celebrate the fact that they don’t have to use Google anything. That’s fine; I think it’s great to have that option. There should also be the option to use it if you wanted. It is possible to install Google Play through the command line and I have done so. However, I had to factory reset my phone a while back and, knowing I probably wouldn’t be keeping it, I just couldn’t be bothered, especially as I usually have an Android tablet with me. In theory, you can install things like Google Play Music through Aptoide, but while I can get the programme running, I can’t actually get it to log in.

I do wish Jolla, Sailfish, and Mer well. I might even install the Jolla launcher on a future phone or tablet. For the time being, though, I’m disembarking the little boat‡.

* I very much like my ASUS transformer, but I can’t get rid of some of the preinstalled crap and it bugs me; it is the worst thing about the device.

† While the Jolla tablet looks interesting, I don’t need a new tablet at the moment, would need one with the very good battery life offered by my transformer, and would want one with a keyboard dock. Beyond that, I’d want to wait to see other people’s experiences with it, given my comments above about durability and hardware.

‡ ‘Jolla’ apparently means ‘little boat’ in Finnish.

Katholiko Monastery, Crete

Posted on by David Landon Cole

This post originally appeared on my Tumblr.

Last week, I finished a walk I started two years ago. The story of that walk is on my YouTube channel. I’d had to turn back, because I ran out of water, just above this:

Katholiko panorama
Katholiko monastery dates back as a place of worship to the eleventh century. It was abandoned because of pirate raids.

This photo is taken from opposite where I walked down. I came in through the arch towards the right of the picture. To the right of that is an entrance to a cave that contains a chapel. Moving leftwards, there are a couple of ruined buildings – the one further back has grass, sadly rather brown when I was there, growing on its roof. Then, at the left edge, is a bridge to nowhere, of which more later.

Katholiko panorama

Alice and I were on holiday in Crete again recently and I was able to walk from Gouverneto monastery to the ruined (but not entirely abandoned) Katholiko monastery. This time I wore stouter shoes and took rather more water.

This photo is a reverse shot of the first, taken from before you walk through the arches.

Katholiko panorama

Here is a shot from a different angle; the grass-covered building is in the centre of the image and just to the right are the entrance arches. A little further to the right is the entrance to the cave chapel. The whole place has a Indiana Jones feel to it.

Katholiko panorama

From more or less the same spot, this shows the bridge I mentioned. I don’t really understand why the bridge is as it is; it has rooms of some sort, but it doesn’t go anywhere other than a cliff face on the other side. The construction is pretty solid and must have taken a lot of work to get all the stone down there. There is a riverbed under the bridge, dry when I was there, but the size of the bridge is disproportionate to what water might flow down there. My only guess is that it was built as a platform to allow outdoor services or gatherings, but I may be way, way off.

I hope that it and the next photo give some idea of its geographic location, on the side of quite a steep valley.

Katholiko panorama

These are the stairs down from the path from Gouverneto. I presume that building materials would have had to have been carried down here from there; it took me about half an hour, as I recall. I walked down and then back up; I would not have liked to have carried a building’s worth of stone down.

Katholiko panorama

A shot of the complex from a bit further back.

This link will take you to Google Maps and will hopefully give you a useful view of the lie of the land. It’s in the Google Earth 3D mode, with the path at left and snaking in to the bottom of the monastery.

I was really pleased to make it to Katholiko. I’d like to go back, and go all the way down to the sea, but it’ll have to be at a time other than high summer. I’m not very fit, it was somewhere above thirty degrees celsius, and it was humid. It took me a while to get back up to Gouverneto, and I had to stop three or four times on the way. The further up I went, the easier it became. I think that might have something to do with the humidity, as I was struggling to catch my breath when I took my first stop on the way back up. Going back out of summer would also hopefully mean more greenery around the monastery.

The pictures are all stitched together using the excellent piece of free software, Hugin. There are some more photos from this trip to Crete on this album on my Flickr (and have a look around for more photos in general!)

The new LSE students’ centre

Posted on by David Landon Cole

By chance, I’ve stumbled across this video about the new LSE students’ centre.

I’m delighted to see this going ahead, although I have a couple of caveats that I’ll come to later.

The LSE Students’ Union currently occupies a space that is, frankly, not fit for purpose. The offices for the General Secretary, Treasurer, Societies Manager, Finance Manager and media group (the Beaver newspaper, PuLSE radio and LooSE tv) are not accessible to people who use wheelchairs and, in any case, are remote from the centre of the SU in the Quad. While the bar, the Three Tuns, is a lovely venue (and I don’t care what anyone says, the refurb a few years ago was a tremendous improvement) and the Underground bar was also greatly improved at the same time, the Quad, the main space of the SU, is, frankly, a bit dingy and no amount of refurb work is going to change that. It is also too small; the LSE has grown in number and so has the pressure on the Union. Although I have a great deal of affection for the existing location in the East Building, the simple fact is that is not big enough and was not designed to be a students’ union, rather being infill in existing space. The new students’ centre offers a purpose-built facility.

The centre of gravity of the LSE is also moving steadily northwards. This started with the opening of the new library, with the plaza cafe outside, and continued with the New Academic Building on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I believe I’m right in saying that the LSE sees expanding around Lincoln’s Inn Fields as the way to go, and so that trend will continue. Moving to the new site on the existing St Phillip’s building will put it in the centre of things once again. I discussed this on more than one occasion with Narius Aga (a General Secretary so effective that he is still known as The General) who felt that moving to a new site would mean the SU was isolated; if that ever held true, I don’t think it does any more.

Getting rid of St Phillip’s is also to be welcomed. Frankly, the building was not good. It was originally designed as a hospital (I once met a taxi driver who said he’d been born there) but it didn’t work as a university building. It was inaccessible, dark, cramped and had some pretty unpleasant rooms. Some of the rooms in the basement were known as the morgue; most people thought this was because they were windowless and dingy, but they had actually been the hospital’s morgue. There was one room that required you to enter the building, leave into a courtyard and go into something that felt like a portakabin.

While the LSE is a fantastic institution, some of its buildings are a bit lacklustre. I’m delighted to see that the design for the building is attractive and – essentially – environmentally friendly. Quite apart from the moral reasoning for that, it keeps costs down in the long term.

Although I haven’t seen the detailed plans, I’m generally supportive of the idea and what I’ve seen of its execution.

Notably, this isn’t the Students’ Union building, but the students’ centre. I do understand the rationale and to a large extent agree with it. Things like the careers office and accommodation office – the student-facing parts of the School – will be colocated with the SU. That does make sense. What I would be wary of, however, is room creep. If the whole building were just for the SU, it would be hard for the School to gain a toehold in it. With bits of the School already in the building, it’s that much easier for growth in one bit of the school to be accommodated by taking up ‘slack’ space in the building at the expense of the Union. I don’t think this would be in anyway hostile or antagonistic, but it is something that needs to be remembered that the Union’s interests, while close to the School’s, are not identical.

Permit me, dear reader, a brief moment of self-indulgence. I was involved in making some changes to the SU and some of them have persisted. Most notably, the Media Group is still there. I’m also glad that one of the changes I made – a communications sabbatical – has gone. At 10’46” in the video, in an interview with the then General Secretary, Aled Dilwyn Fisher, you can see the wall decoration is silhouettes of famous LSErs. I’m just visible on the left of the picture. The following picture is the same, but taken in the Three Tuns rather than the Quad.

The text says ’42 real heads of government, 17 Nobel laureates, 2 fictional heads of government and at least 2 terrorists have been to LSE. Countless others have changed the world. Before you finish, just ask yourself – do we really need another accountant?’.

I may well find out a bit more about what’s happening at my alma mater.

xD.

The Face Coverings (Regulation) Bill

Posted on by David Landon Cole

The Face Coverings (Regulation) Bill, introduced by Philip Hollobone MP (Conservative – Kettering), has had its first reading.

Given Mr Hollobone’s previous statements that the burka is ‘against the British way of life’ and ‘offensive’, it is fairly clear to me what its intent is.

Three points.

Firstly, this is deeply illiberal. I shouldn’t need to say much more, but I will. I understand that there are times – airport security, for instance – where we do need to make sure that the person matches the passport and we seem to be managing just fine with providing an area where people who wear the burka can be identified and so on. However, if people are just going about their daily business, I think they should be able to wear more or less what they want. Short of that, this must rank as an extraordinary expansion of the writ of the state and I don’t want the introduction of some sort of sumptuary law.

Secondly, this isn’t the way to go about it. If we assume that the burka is indicative of oppression and isolation, I don’t see how a ban will remediate the situation. If the premise is that women are oppressed and forced to wear the burka, they can be compelled to remain at home or only leave it occasionally. If the premise is that they are an isolated community, ditto, with the additional bonus of feeding into the extremists’ (al-Mujahiroun, the Daily Express…) narrative that it is impossible to reconcile being British with being a Muslim. Mr Hollobone and his fellow-travellers in UKIP haven’t talked about education or reaching out, just about bans.

Thidly, unintended consequences. It is far too easy for me to see how a badly-worded bill could lead to situations like welders’ masks having to be removed if you’re not welding for more than half a minute and not being able to dress up as a ghost for Hallowe’en. The alternative is to specify that this law only applies to Muslim women.

Ultimately, I don’t think this is about covering one’s face. I think that is being used as a proxy for Islamophobia.

I find this proposal abhorrent and I’m glad to say that, as Mr Hollobone came seventeenth out of twenty in the ballot for Private Members’ Bills, I don’t think it stands any real chance of making progress. The second reading will be on December 3rd, by which point the text of the bill should be available.

xD.

Godstone Farm: in defence of health and safety

Posted on by David Landon Cole

You have to feel sorry for anyone involved with ‘elf ‘n safety.

Whenever they get it right, they are joyless jobsworths sucking all the pleasure out of life. When they get it wrong, they are criticised for putting children at risk; viz., Godstone Farm.

The short version of the story is that Godstone Farm, a petting farm, did not have adequate measures in place to prevent people, principally children, from picking up diseases from animal dung. Ninety-three people became ill as a result of infection with a nasty strain of E. coli, O157, and it seems that some of the children who were infected will require dialysis for the rest of their lives. Insufficient attention given to handwashing at the farm seems to have been the original cause, coupled with an inadequate response from the Health Protection Agency. The independent Griffin Investigation reported yesterday.

I would make a few points about what might be considered by some to be unwarranted intrusion on our ancient liberties and so on.

Firstly, it’s not obvious. Just because it’s obvious to you (and as a reader of this blog, I can only assume that you are of quite exquisite intellect and positively overflowing with common sense) doesn’t mean it’s obvious to everyone. While I was aware that rolling in cow dung was probably not a good idea, it’s easy enough to see how the meme about children needing to get exposure to pathogens to strengthen their immune systems coupled with a lack of knowledge about, say, E. coli could lead parents to think the risks are lower than they are; in this case, there was a particular criticism that the risk was considered lower than it should be as, although the probability of it happening was low, the outcomes could be very negative. Moreover,

Secondly, people are used to a certain level of safety. Although we have evolutionary predispositions to react to certain dangers (in my case, to jump out of my skin when I see, hear or suspect a dog), we live in a relatively benign world. People are used to their environments being safe; strangely enough, we don’t like our gas pipes to leak or our computers to electrocute us, so there are systems and processes in place to prevent that and countless other dangers. The result is that we blithely go about our business, perhaps without remembering that there are dangers out there.

Thirdly, it’s about providing information so people can make decisions; in this case, providing better signage and information about handwashing.

Fourthly, if we’re going to draw a line, we have to err on the side of caution.

Fifthly, there have to be systems in place to deal with, for instance, outbreaks like this. The Griffin Investigation talks about greater awareness and co-operation between organisations involved with healthcare near Godstone Farm in particular and open farms in general. It would be very easy for that to be criticised as ‘excessive bureaucracy’ or somesuch. It’s too easy to criticise something where a successful outcome is ‘nothing happening’.

Sixthly, a lot is blamed on health and safety as it is a convenient and believable excuse. I happen to think, for instance, that people should have healthy and safe workplaces and so there are some rules and regulations (turns out asbestos is a bad idea). More frequent than this, I would warrant, are people using ‘elf and safety because they want to avoid litigation or just don’t understand why something has been done.

Yes, there are mistakes; I suspect, though, that the media take those few examples of poor decision-making and represent them as symptomatic of the entire health and safety culture, leading people to think that there are armies of clipboard-equipped bureaucrats just waiting, after a risk assessment, to jump out and ban whatever it is you enjoy doing.

xD.

PS Before anyone says anything, I know this came under the remit of the HPA rather than the HSE, but the points stand.

Blog Nation: what would I like to see discussed

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Sunny ‘Liberal Conspiracy’ Hundal is organising a follow-up to 2008’s successful ‘Blog Nation’ event. Details over at Liberal Conspiracy, but Sunny asks what we’d like to discuss; below the fold, then, are some thoughts.

In terms of logistics, I would make three suggestions. Given the layout, it’s important that each table isn’t talking amongst itself thereby making so much noise that you can’t hear the speaker. Secondly, there are two breakout rooms. I would like to see the two used for an hour each for anyone to stand up a present an idea for five minutes. Thirdly, I’d like to see it recorded and ideally live streamed. Certainly, the plenary sessions could be on uStream or BlogTV.

Continue reading “Blog Nation: what would I like to see discussed” →

I miss Tony Banks…

Posted on by David Landon Cole

EDM1255 (2004)

That this House is appalled, but barely surprised, at the revelations in M15 files regarding the bizarre and inhumane proposals to use pigeons as flying bombs; recognises the important and live-saving role of carrier pigeons in two world wars and wonders at the lack of gratitude towards these gentle creatures; and believes that humans represent the most obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised and lethal species ever to inhabit the planet and looks forward to the day when the inevitable asteroid slams into the earth and wipes them out thus giving nature the opportunity to start again.

xD.

Against recall elections

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Recall elections are a bad idea. They would lead to homogenised, bland, UHT-milk MPs who are unwilling or unable to take on controversial or unpopular issues.

So far as I could tell, the three party leaders have come out in favour of recall elections to remove ‘corrupt’ MPs. The mechanism, as I understand it, would involve collecting a given number of signatures of electors requesting a recall vote. I welcome the sentiment, but I can’t help but feel that this is what Jay and Lynn called the Politician’s Syllogism:

  1. We must do something
  2. This is something
  3. Therefore we must do it

The idea is simple enough; if an MP has had their hand in the till, so to speak, their constituents should have the opportunity to remove them sooner than the next election. Implicit in this is the idea that something like the Standards Board for England (which for some reason has been renamed Standards for England) or the Committee on Standards in Public life or similar should not be able to remove an MP from office. I presume the assumption here is that only electors should have the right to cashier their elected representative. Following on from the suspension of Ken Livingstone, against which he successfully appealed, there was a general sentiment that it was undemocratic for the Standards Board to be able to suspend him for four weeks, let alone remove him from office.

All well and good so far.

If the principle stands that only electors can cashier their MP, their cannot be a gatekeeper, either. If the vote were dependent on someone agreeing that there was a case to answer, they would effectively have a veto on the will of the people. If the did not exercise said veto, they would be making it impossible for that MP to win the recall election as they would have given a huge amount of ammunition to the opposition as well as encouraging that MP’s party to tap said MP on the shoulder and invite them to step aside for the good of the party. Either way, you set up what you are trying to avoid – an unelected body that can fire the elected.

The result, then, is not just a means of getting rid of corrupt MPs but a general ability to recall MPs. That is profoundly dangerous in the current political climate.

We have recently seen Birmingham Hall Green Labour run a leaflet against the LibDems on the basis that the latter feel prisoners should have the right to vote. Imagine if an with a marginal seat were to promote something unpopular but right in Parliament; this would be license to threaten a recall.

Add to this mix demagogues like Nadine Dorries. In the run up to the votes on restricting abortion, Ms Dorries said on her website:

Each day, I am going to highlight MPs who may need to think very seriously when voting on the issue of reducing the upper limit to 20 weeks, because if they don’t, they may see their majorities wiped out at the next election.

Dorries was saying that she felt abortion was an issue that could cost MPs their seats, that she would seek to make it cost MPs their seats if they didn’t vote with her and that she would organise to that effect. Fortunately for us, she is incompetent, but abortion remains an emotive issue. It is a conscience vote in Parliament because there’s no point whipping for most MPs, as it’s a die-in-the-ditch issue. The same is true outside Parliament, and more so when someone is whipping people into a frenzy. It is the sort of issue where someone like Dorries might try to make headway.

It is not the only emotive issue. It’s really not hard for me to see how, at the time of the fox-hunting ban, outraged country-folk, seeing the issue as tantamount to an abuse of the constitution, antient liberties and all that, would take anything available.

I’m going back to Burke’s Speech to the Electors of Bristol to sum up my feeling:

it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

The argument against this would that political culture would militate against it. The theory would go that people would not sign up for a recall election just because they didn’t like their MP or their policies and, if one was triggered inappropriately, would vote against it. I’m afraid, though, that I don’t believe it. Along with deferential voting and strong party connections, playing by the spirit rather than the letter has gone the way of the dodo.

Add to the mix the charming fourth estate in the UK, and you have a heady cocktail of populism, demagoguery and yellow journalism that can combine to ensure that we have the blandest possible MPs with no capacity for independent thought.

I’m not sure I actually agree with the above, but I think the argument may be sound and is at least worth considering. It certainly should not be put through on the nod in the early part of the next Parliament.

xD.

Requiem for Detroit, elegy for Barking?

Posted on by David Landon Cole

Last night I watched Julien Temple’s excellent Requiem for Detroit? on BBC2. It is, after a fashion, a beautiful film: a harsh beauty, but a beauty nonetheless.

The skill is in the storytelling, so I recommend watching it, but the story itself is simple. Overdependence on the motor industry set the stage for economic disaster if anything happened to the car industry; white flight to the suburbs, possible because many people could afford cars, hollowed out the city centre and the loss of a tax base turned it into a ghetto; the oil shock of the 70’s accelerated everything; racial tensions worsened as people moved from the South in search of jobs. The motor industry and the city recovered as oil prices fell, but the motor industry relied on SUVs and Detroit on the motor industry. The recent economic turmoil has dealt a hammer-blow to the city.

Barking is not a direct match for Detroit, but the closure of Dagenham Ford was a similar economic disaster. This was similarly coupled with bad social planning – specifically, right-to-buy (or, rather, the effects when the tenants who became owners moved out) – and now we have a situation in which the BNP can do well.

Perhaps some of the northern cities of England would be a better match, but Barking seems to be the focus, given that Nick Griffin is standing there and the BNP hope to take the council at the next election.

xD.