rant

Phone rates can really ruin the fun

When you look around at phone tariffs, you can indeed get minor to major fits of rage. The telephony components are now somewhat okay, the SMS rates are still ridiculous to absurd - there are no more expensive ways to send your data in 140-character packages. But okay, that's nothing new. But when you look at the data rates, you really start screaming.

The reason why I subjected myself to this madness: SMS from T-Mobile that I had used up my full-speed volume and now for the rest of the month I have to live with 64kbit downstream and 16kbit upstream. Checked in my iPhone under data usage: 1.1G downstream and 430 MB upstream. Unfortunately, but in a period of almost one year. How I suddenly should have used 200 MB in the first 8 days of this month was a mystery to me until I remembered that the providers conveniently bill started 100kbit chunks. So that the full-speed volume is used up as quickly as possible. Thanks, push notifications.

Looking at the three big ones (T-Mobile, Vodafone, and O2), you first see nice overviews with prices. And of course flat. Today everything is flat. But flat was probably only the mind of the marketing guy who came up with this nonsense. Although the volume is actually unlimited, but of course only in the fine print it says from which volume you are reduced to ridiculous 64kbit - and that is only the download, the upload is then reduced to 16kbit, almost unusable.

To O2's credit: if you click on the right paths, you get a relatively clear view of the throttling stage there. So not under the mobile tariffs with the smartphone specification, but via the internet and then surfing with a mobile phone. Why one is clear and the other is not, only the web designers know. Or the price hiders. Possibly, the other providers also have an emergency page where you get a reasonable overview, but at some point, I didn't feel like looking anymore.

The fine print is incidentally only with the Telekom referenced with numbers in the tariff - and already displayed unfolded at the bottom. With O2 and Vodafone, you first have to think that something could be hidden under "further legal notices" or "further notes," without being pointed out. Why bother, it's insignificant, it's all flat. Oh, and of course pale-gray font and only 10 points high, it shouldn't be too easy to read. For me, this borders on fraud.

Apart from the hidden placement: the normally affordable tariffs (sorry, but tariffs over 50 euros a month are simply an audacity but not an offer) have ridiculous 300 MB volume until the shutdown. Oh, sorry, Vodafone only has 200 MB ...

Then there are the funny ideas about contract bindings. Yes, I can understand the 2-year binding if you take a contract with a device - after all, the device has to be financed over it and I don't expect gifts. But the then casual extension by one year if you don't cancel at least 3 months before the end of the forced period, that is really cheeky.

Especially when you look at the budget brands of the big providers: Base, Fonic, Congstar. Strangely enough, you can see directly on the tariff overview which variants of throttling there are. In addition, there are several variants. And there are significantly clearer prices. Only strange - they run over the networks of the mothers. I don't have to mention that the budget brands have more moderate contract bindings, do I? Of course, the budget brands are not good either - there is not even the claim anymore that you would get service (which the big ones don't really deliver either - those are rather acts of desperation than service).

It's strange that the same service can be offered at drastically different prices, and the budget brand still makes a profit. Could this have something to do with the fact that the mother brand simply sells things at moon prices? Oh, and it is of course pure coincidence that they all have almost the same prices in their respective segments. I mean, this is a well-regulated market, there are certainly no agreements or anything like that. How can one even think of that ...

The enemy of mobile internet, the stumbling block of the development of this sector? The absurd ideas of mobile phone providers. It's time for alternative radio technologies that can be provided by providers outside this inbred bunch of purse snatchers. But hoping for that is probably also absurd, the telecommunications lobby will take care that the market is not accidentally opened.

PS: yes, I know that Base is not Vodafone's budget brand but E+'s. Or uses the E+ network. Does Vodafone even have something like a budget brand?

Nuclear meltdown in Japan increasingly likely

BBC News - Japan earthquake: Explosion at Fukushima nuclear plant. That was it with the hopes that maybe it would still turn out alright. And people are still running around claiming that something like this could never happen to us, because here everything is much safer. Funny enough, I do remember incidents in cooling systems that were only admitted long after they occurred - and the failure of the cooling system is the problem in Japan, the tsunami and the earthquake were just the triggers.

What I wonder, though, is how will the catastrophe in Japan change our perception of nuclear energy? With Chernobyl and before that Harrisburg, secrecy was relatively easy - but Japan is a country where all inhabitants are highly technologized. The joke about at least 5 cameras per Japanese might be exaggerated, but the number should be high enough to make secrecy more or less absurd. And the high integration into the internet leads to publication channels that were unthinkable in Harrisburg and only conceivable for utopians in Chernobyl.

Surely, energy companies and the government will now show solidarity and talk about how earthquakes and tsunamis in Europe are not a problem. And thus completely miss the actual problem, because as mentioned above, cooling systems can fail not only because of earthquakes and tsunamis. Therefore, such a problem is quite conceivable here as well, if the cooling system fails for other reasons. And why should we believe our energy companies (and the government), who are regularly caught lying, more than the Japanese energy company, which is also known for lying?

It will be difficult for politicians to lie convincingly about such things. And maybe, just maybe, people in Europe will wake up from their wishful thinking that nuclear energy is so safe.

Strange Phenomena in iPhoto

I only use it as an image storage for creating books and syncing to my iPhone and iPad, so my iPhoto is rather unimportant for photo management. But at the moment, I have a phenomenon that is driving me crazy: I imported a CD of normal Jpegs. Then I created an album and put the pictures in it. And now iTunes always claims that this album is empty during sync. The import is also listed as a separate event in iPhoto. iTunes also claims in the sync panel that this event is empty (0 pictures). Accordingly, when syncing "All Pictures," all pictures are transferred - including these pictures. Only the albums and events that consist only of these pictures are not there. Because iTunes thinks they are empty.

What's the point of this? Does anyone out there have an idea? Googling hasn't brought up anything useful, and I've already tried various things (deleting and recreating albums, different ways of creating albums, etc.). The whole thing is quite strange. iLife is quite nice as long as it works, but when problems arise, the whole thing is nearly completely undiagnosable. Which wouldn't matter much to me if I didn't stupidly need it for syncing with my iPhone and iPad...

One reason why I prefer to stick with Lightroom, because I know where the pictures are and the databases are normal sqlite, so I can get my hands on them if necessary. And if they are in the trash, I can reconstruct everything from the pictures and sidecar files. I'll also cross Aperture off the list, its picture management sounds too much like that of iPhoto...

It's quite embarrassing when a tool from Adobe is more reliable and trustworthy than what Apple delivers. Especially since iLife is supposed to be foolproof - when problems arise and necessary troubleshooting is required, it's more of a case of "no user-serviceable parts inside".

Whoever the asshole at Apple is responsible for the appallingly bad app sorting in iTunes (seriously, how can someone be so completely braindead to replicate the already quite clunky sorting interface for the home screen in iTunes with the mouse in nearly the same stupid way?), that "designer" deserves to be slapped, kicked, and fired. If I spend 20 minutes sorting my apps, I expect that when I click "Apply," it will actually be applied. I certainly do not expect all the icons to revert to their original positions before my 20 minutes of work. And no, this is not the first time I have cursed this pathetic app sorting interface. Bah.

Apple just can't do encryption

I fell for it again and thought, I'll just enable the encryption of iPad backups. Pretty stupid. I should have been warned by the debacles with the encrypted home directory. But of course, I did it again. Everything worked fine until today when the backup mess happened - it got stuck in the first step and just wouldn't proceed. Possibly corrupt backup files on the Mac. Ok, the standard procedure is to simply delete the backup in the settings under devices and create a new one. But that doesn't work if you have encryption enabled - it complains, naturally only after all the steps have been completed, that it can't make backups because no session with the iPad can be started. Huh?

And of course, I can't reset the password - it always claims it's wrong (even before I deleted the backup). My suspicion: the password is checked against the backup and if there isn't one, or it's defective, you can't perform a successful check. Resetting the password doesn't work, creating new backups doesn't work, and making iTunes forget the iPad also doesn't work. Before someone thinks they need to tell me I don't know the password: iTunes saves the password in the keychain if requested and yes, the password is the one I enter. And yes, that is definitely the correct one - the device identifier is saved as the account name with the password. And no, this exact password is of course not accepted...

Solution according to Apple? Completely reset the iPad and set it up again. Great, fantastic idea. Sure, many of the data I have are on my Mac, but over time, data have also been added that are not on the Mac. And I would like to transfer those somehow.

By the way, normal backups and restores work - and with unencrypted backups, you can also create a new one if the backups are corrupted. But not if you have encryption enabled.

Frankly, this renewed experience with Apple's inability to build reasonably stable encryption solutions makes me rather skeptical about their full-disk encryption in the upcoming 10.7...

Update: after a few experiments (tested on another computer, iPad backup reconstructed from the TimeMachine backup and tried with it) I suspect the password is also noted on the device - and this note seems to be corruptible. Because even on another device, the definitely correct password is rejected as wrong, and another device also insists on making an encrypted backup (which makes sense, otherwise you could trivially get the data via a backup on another device). The problem is not that it protects itself against manipulation - the problem is that this crap can break and without any external signs - the backups have always worked fine so far, they are just suddenly worthless now (just like the data on the device).

MobileMe sucks hamsters through straws

Twitter / Search - mobileme. It's really shitty when you have to search on Twitter to find out that MobileMe is crap again and you can't log in - because the stupid Apple status page provides no information again. The way Apple operates MobileMe is highly unprofessional. Unfortunately, sync methods other than MobileMe are pretty crap if you want to sync various Macs and iOS devices. And since I naturally searched on Twitter too late again, and had already tried to fix my problem with the support information provided by Apple, I will probably have to reconstruct my MobileMe access on my Air tomorrow or so. Because of course, checking various problems with MobileMe is only possible in a destructive way. Thanks Apple for this waste of time.

Banks and the Web

If you want to redefine miserable, you should take a look at banks and their web usage. Has any of the programmers who created this garbage pile received any minimal training? My latest "fun": the practical, low-tech TAN form is being discontinued. Now there's only Smart-TAN via code cards and such stupid devices. Okay, it should actually work - generating session passwords isn't exactly new. But of course, that doesn't work either. Why would it? That would be silly. I mean, honestly, did anyone expect anything different? And of course, my TAN usage is now blocked. Because, it's so incredibly secure when you install technology that doesn't work, and then people are forcibly locked out.

But that's not the reason that bothers me so much. The reason? The bank's notification form. A simple form with a text field in the browser. So far so good. You enter text, which goes directly to the customer advisor. Also good. I mean, that's all I want - write text and that's it. And what happens? I get the great message:

The text is too long. The text may only contain 11 lines with 36 characters each.

Excuse me? Hello? Have you ever seen a text field in a web browser? Is there a column ruler somewhere? Or have you ever heard of flowing text? Should I seriously now manually break my lines to a maximum of 36 characters (which I have to count, as the input field gives me no help) by hand? Have you all lost your minds in the data center?

Oh, and then, after I've formatted and counted (with editor support and cut-and-paste):

This text contains invalid characters. It may only contain digits, letters, umlauts, and an arbitrary and ill-considered selection of special characters.

Parentheses - which you might use when you include a note - no, they are evil and must not be used.

Sorry, but this is a total failure. And no, I don't want to hear anything about your downstream banking system only accepting 11 lines of 36 characters - I don't care as a customer. Giving that as a reason only shows how stupid you are and how little you know about the subject. Sorry, colleagues, but this is pathetic.