Posts by Barleyman

Sort of useful

I've found the smart meters kind of useful. You get monthly bill based on the actual consumption instead of getting the hammer once a year if you don't bother regularly checking the readings manually. Other than that, they're pretty useless. Okay, I guess if you have hourly pricing (or half an hourly or whatever), you could take some benefit by charging a BEV at night or something.

WRT the meters becoming bricks, that's more ticklish problem than you guys probably think. 2G is the go-to utility tech because we don't have a replacement. There's Cat M1 (LTE-M) which piggybacks on 4G and allows cheapo low battery use devices for stuff that doesn't need that much data, like smart meters. Only UK has been reeel sloooow deploying those things, national O2 network happened pretty much this year and it's not really that national yet. So up until now, there simply was no replacement for 2G in many cases, except for 4G which is expensive and unnecessary tech for such devices.

Anyways, 2G is not going to go gentle into that good night, it's a bit ridiculous we're going to have that thoroughly obsolete tech around in 2030s, but it's hanging around exactly because of the millions of devices that depend on it.

The power of Geek to rescue

Anything stopping the journo from side-loading Google play store and the associated services? This was pretty standard operation while I was messing with mystery Chinese tablets. You have to download some APK files and run them on your phone. Easy enough if a bit of a hassle and you have to allow side-loading first. No rooting or other tricks needed.

First the Google account manager:

https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/google-account-manager/

Then the Google Services framework, just pick correct android version (10):

https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/google-services-framework/

You also need the services package. This is more problematic because there are about a million versions.

kirin SOC uses ARM64 core so you need to pick that variant for Android 10

https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/google-play-services/

And finally the play store itself:

https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/google-play-store/

Use your favourite file browser and run the apk files in order downloaded. Reboot phone and Google services should work just like the "real" thing, keeping themselves up to date etc.

Fiddly? Yes. Worth it? Definitely if you don't like avoiding Google stuff to show you're different and/or bought new Huawei phone without knowing what you signed up for. This same process works with Kindle Fire but you need to pick different versions of the files (no ARM64).

Available versus predicted

Many / Most people commenting on IoT seem to be hobbyist of some sort or perhaps working on a single fixed installation. If you're designing something that needs to go out there and work in not-predefined locations reliably, LoRa is right out. SigFox actually has decent coverage depending on region but the data amounts are simply far too small for anything doing regular monitoring.

LTE CAT-NB1 and LTE CAT-M1 are not here (in UK), period. No amount of handwaving gets around it, you design a device with either and you just made an expensive paperweight which might start working sometime in the future, or not. CAT M1 was "supposed" to work on existing basestations with just firmware updates but this didn't happen, surprise. In reality, you need hardware changes which means there's nonzero cost involved and operators don't wanna since there will not be that much business for some time. And since the network isn't there, business won't come.

So for UK, for something with real coverage and reliable service, you've got two choices really. There's LTE CAT-1 which is a slightly cheaper-to-implement low speed (around 10Mbit/s) version of common garden 4G technology. It works with zero modifications on 4G networks, which is nice. What's not so nice is that you've now got a bona-fide cellular module that will do around £20-30 worth of damage when bought in volumes. Ouch. If you're deploying in US, you may very well get a reasonable M1 coverage which slashes module prices to one half or less.

The fallback is the good old GSM GPRS. It's everywhere and it works. It's slow but the ~8kbit/s speed is a far cry above what you can achieve on SigFox and you can push data all day if you want unlike LoRaWAN. If you can get EDGE, you're in with roaring data rates.

3G is on it's way out in intermediate term, better not bet on it for something that needs to be around for 5-10 years.

So the sad truth is that if you need a serious IoT device deployed right now in UK, you've got to reach for a 20 year old cellular technology. Where's my flying car?

Homegroups

That was actually kind of useful if you have more than one PC. In my case work laptop, desktop and HTPC. At least they apparently keep printer shares ..

Ascension

After years (and years) of playing on and off, I had an epiphany. Instead of usual amulet of reflection + gray dragon scale mail, I started using amulet of life saving, cloak of magic and silver dragon scale mail.

That "extra life" just made all the difference. No more suddenly dying because you didn't realize there was a Mumak in that blob and just *how much* damage you were taking per turn.

The second boost was statuscolors patch. It's surprisingly effective when HP changes color at specified thresholds. re: Mumak situation. It's now included in Nethack 3.6.x (as status hilites) so no need to get a patched binary.