Creative Deletion

I was just in Sydney, but left earlier than first planned, in part because it was hard to get internet access! Not something I expected before I got there, even though internet access was similarly expensive/absent in New Zealand.

WiFi options

One place to get online in Sydney Apple Store in Sydney on George street. It’s great, you can use their computers for web browsing etc. pretty much until you get tired of standing up. They also have unencrypted WiFi that doesn’t redirect you to a nag screen when you first try to go to a website. The only WiFi access point like that I’ve seen in New Zealand or Australia. I could get online with my iPhone via WiFi there. Some people even brought their own (Mac) laptops there to get internet access!

A bunch of cafés in Sydney (and Melbourne) offer free wifi through a network called uConnect (map of hotspots). But beware - it is only available until 19:00. At some cafés, a Starbucks I went to for instance, wifi from Telstra (the government monopoly) is available, but the prices are outrageous. $8 AUD for 30 minutes. There’s a restaurant called wagamama, that gives you a coupon when you buy something a limited time. At one point their coupon printer system broke down though, so I couldn’t use their internet. Why not just have a WPA password and give it to customers?

The current incredible situation

In Auckland there was an internet connected computer in the lobby of a hotel I was staying at, set up where you could pay NZD $10 (about $5 USD) to use the computer for 30 minutes if I recall correctly! In one hotel in Sydney you could pay $10 AUD for 1 hour of wifi access. When I ordered the hotel it said wifi included with all rooms - that is you have wifi access to a login screen. But to actually use the internet you need to buy a code, which can only be bought during the opening ours of the hotel front desk.

Compare this to when you could be online flying 10km over the Atlantic in an airplane for US $9.95 for 30 minutes! I did that once flying from Seattle to Copenhagen once on SAS just for the fun of it. There is something wrong if the internet prices in a café or hotel in a big city are not drastically lower than on a satellite based connection offered in an airplane years ago.

Alternative: 3G

Virgin Broadband seems to have a good offer for pre-paid 3G internet access.

I had hoped to buy a 3G USB modem with a SIM card with pre-paid internet access. The only problem was that no one had any USB modems from Virgin Broadband in all of Sydney. Neither did Optus - the operator whose network Virgin is using. In the Virgin Broadband store they said they had SIM cards I could use, if I had an unlocked 3G modem, but unfortunately I didn’t. The only place I could find an unlocked 3G modem was on eBay, but that was too cumbersome.

Better in “2nd/3rd world countries” with less bad regulation

You might wonder why Internet access is better in say, the Philippines and South America, than it is in Australia and New Zealand. My guess it has something to do with telecom regulation and Telstra - a government controlled telecom monopol.

The Great Chinese-style Firewall

If that wasn’t enough, Australia’s Labour government is planning to introduce filtering and surveillance similar to what is in place in China. Read more at nocleanfeed.com.

There’s a big Mexican food company called Bimbo. As far as I know, they don’t use the BIMBO brand in the USA. I took this picture in Buenos Aires.

This is a clothing shop in Montevideo called TITS.

In Danish, you abbreviate assorted like this: “ass.” Get a 10 pack of assorted cream biscuits for only 10 kroner! I took this picture years ago in Denmark.

A lot of technology today seems to ignore the complexities of world time, timezones and daylight savings. In fact, as far as I know, there doesn’t even seem to exist a good watch that makes it easy to accurately know the time around the world.

The following picture is from Montevideo, Uruguay. It is 3 hours from GMT. And so is Nuuk (aka. Godthåb), Greenland. So while I am in Montevideo in South America I am sort of in the same time zone as Denmark - how about that? This time of year, though, most of Greenland observes DST, so local time in Nuuk is now GMT-2, not -3.

If only adjusting your clock to local time around the world was a question of offsets from GMT, figuring out the local time around the would be relatively easy. What really complicates things is summertime (aka. Daylight Savings Time or DST).

In Venezuala there is a certain mad man in charge that wants to create a new seperate time zone! The timezones don’t change that often, but recently there has been changes regarding DST. In USA the days when DST starts and stops was changed in 2007. DST starts and begins on different dates in different countries. Some countries within a certain timezone have DST and some don’t. A European I know asked a local person in a northern African country “Tomorrow at this time, what time is it?” The local person looked very puzzled after hearing the odd question. DST isn’t used in that particular country.

I don’t wear a watch regularly, but use my iPhone to get the time. When travelling to a different time zone, I can go to the time settings in the phone and select the city that I am in or a city that I think is in the same time zone. The iPhone will then use it’s internal clock and timezone information for the different cities to calculate the local time in the city in question.

Recently I was in Buenos Aires and, since it is a big city, of course I could find it in the settings on the iPhone. But… I came to find out that my clock was not showing the correct local time. I talked to an employee in the hotel about it and he said that Argentina in 2007 had readopted DST.

This change made by Argentina had not been reflected in my iPhone nor my MacBook Pro.

I learned that political changes can unexpectedly change timezones and DST. And current “world time” clocks don’t seem reflect these changes.

A lot of technology is developed in Europe or the US, where timezones don’t change that often. And some software developers seem to assume that it works the same way around the world. For instance there is JavaScript software that get a visitors local time from his browser and compare it to GMT to get the visitors GMT offset. That’s fine if you know that the user is in the US for instance. But in most of the Carribean DST isn’t used and in some parts of South America DST is reversed along with summer and winter.

Here’s the lesson for software developers: To accurately calculate a users time zone, knowing a GMT offset is not enough. Getting the closest (politically and geographically) city is best. Furthermore, time zones and DST policies change, so for a world clock to be up-to-date it should probably be updated with the newest time zone changes once a year or so.

About 6 months after I complained to Scandinavian telco “3″, they have called me and said that they no longer want me to pay 7000+ (~1000EUR) for something that was supposed to be free. They promised a free trial of up to 3+Mbit mobile Internet access. I took them up on the offer and used the connection while sailing in the Swedish archipelagos.

In the summer of 2007 I was about to go sailing for a few weeks in Sweden. I wanted to be able to go online during that time. If I hadn’t been able to get Internet access I probably wouldn’t go sailing for more than a week or so.

I had seen an ad for “mobile broadband”. 3 offered more than 3Mbit (today the offer up to 7.2Mbit) Internet access via a USB dongle made by Huawei. Because 3 is a Swedish company with coverage in both Sweden and Denmark, the price was supposed to be the same in Denmark and Sweden. 3 offered a free trial for 30 days. So I ordered it to use in Sweden. A box with the hardware arrived and there was a brochure in the box saying that in foreign countries you would have to pay a rate per MB in addition to the Danish subscription, but that Sweden was exempt from this. Very well. I tried it out in Denmark and it worked well.

Then we set off from Rungsted Havn and sailed south towards the Stockholm Archipelago. The first place we stopped at is a tiny island called Utklippan. There was no fresh water available for the visiting boats or in the latrine. Fresh water probably has to be sailed to the island. Visiting boats have tanks with fresh water so it’s not a big problem. While there was no running water, there were two different open wifi networks with internet access! I tried the 3 adapter too, but that couldn’t me online on Utklippan.

There were a lot of seagulls on Utklippan:

I took a picture of the toilet/latrine. In traditional Swedish style, yellow with heart shaped windows:

We then sailed on to harbors at large towns and natural harbors in the “wilderness”. The wilderness was not too far away from areas with Swedish summer houses though. Surprisingly, even in rather large towns the coverage was not good enough for a stable Internet connection through the 3 USB modem. For instance in the harbor of Kalmar I could not get online. Some places I could get a connection with decent throughput though.

Heavy clouds over Västervik - the “3″ mobile broadband coverage wasn’t very good here:

After I came home I sent the 3 USB modem back to 3. Eventually I received a letter with a invoice of more than 7000 DKK (more than $1300 USD). Wow, that’s a lot more than the price of “free” I was expecting. So I called 3 customer service, and they told me I had been using the network of Telia - another Swedish telco. I said that the brochure said that usage in Sweden was supposed to be free. But the guy from 3 told me that it was my responsibility to know that I was using Telia’s network and that it wasn’t free.

I did not plan to pay for something that I was told was free. As far as I was concerned the agreement between 3 and I, was that I could try the product for free for 30 days, and it was free in Denmark as well as Sweden. At no point did I get any warning on my computer that the 3G USB modem was roaming and using another network and that this would cost me money.

So, then I wrote an official complaint and sent it to 3 with certified snail mail. I got no written response but someone from 3 called my on my phone and told me that I should pay the invoice.

I then sent an official complaint to “Teleankenævnet”. A private institution that handles complaints related to telecommunications. After a while I was called up by a “Retention Solution Consultant” from 3 who told me that I didn’t have to pay the invoice afterall. He said that I might receive a request to pay the invoice anyway. I made him send me an email stating that I did not have to pay. This request later proved to be a prudent move.

I later received a letter from a lawyer firm/collection agency stating that I owed 3 some money. Then I called them up on the telephone briefly told them about the situation and forwarded the email stating that I didn’t owe 3 anything. Finally the lawyer firm/collection agency sent me a letter stating that things were settled.

The whole thing took up a lot of my time, but I’m glad that it is settled now.

I recently got a chance to buy an iPhone. After I had made sure that doable iPhone unlocking methods existed, I went for it.

Unlocking
Engadget recently announced a software unlock. Mainstream media (MSM) has been picking up this story as well as different hardware based unlocks. The only problem with the software unlocks is that they are not available yet.

But it has been possible to use your iPhone with other operators than AT&T for quite some time now, before the ones that mainstream media is currently talking about. One hack is to use a small sim card enclosure called the “turbosim”, but they are sold out. Another one is called the “supersim”. Neither of these methods require you to modify the iPhone hardware. Basically the supersim method works like this: You create a new SIM card that works like your existing local SIM card. Then you use software to activate the iPhone in a way that makes it compatible with this new SIM card. I used the supersim method, and have been using the iPhone with my Danish mobile phone operator since wednesday last week. As far as I know there are only about 5 unlocked iPhones in Denmark right now.

Interface and exterior
The interface is awesome. It’s fun to flick between the pictures and music albums, to zoom in and out on pictures and websites etc. This is really a big step up from the interface of other phones. Like the interface from the Minority Report movie. My previous phone - a Nokia 7610 smartphone feels very 20th century in comparison.

The virtual keyboard works OK - much better than a numeric keyboard with T9. I learned that to avoid typos, you can make sure that the correct key is selected before you lift your finger from the screen - if you hit the wrong key you can slide to a different key before lifting.

The exterior is awesome too. It’s not all hard plastic like my old Nokia, but mostly glass and aluminium and a little chrome and rubber-ish plastic. Like a Mac, Apple has been careful about all aspects of the product and how it all works together. That said, it’s not perfect of course. There is plenty of room for improvement and refinement. I welcome software updates with new features. Preferably those updates should be compatible with the SIM unlock hacks

Email spam filtering
There’s an email application called “Mail” similar to the Mac “Mail.app”. It doesn’t have a spam filter like Mail.app does though. So what I did, was to run my email through a GMail account and use setup the GMail account with POP and SMTP on my iPhone. That’s an easy way to get server based spam filtering.

“Missing features”
The iPhone doesn’t do everything. You can’t use custom ring tones (without hacking it), it doesn’t send MMS etc. But I don’t care, those features aren’t important to me. On the other hand the iPhone has features that no other phones have, but it is really about the product as a whole and not a checklist of features. For what it is the iPhone is really good. Interacting with my phone is now fun instead of being a bit of a pain. If you want a nice phone with a nice interface, email, a proper web browser and an integrated portable music & video player, the iPhone does a good job.