Author | Lightnews

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · 4d

The Tado? Quite happy with it. It's different to the Nest so just adapting to those differences. The Nest is dead in a crate now.

1

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · 6d

Always nice to hear Chloe Slater in 6Music. Keep an ear on her, I think she's going to be (relatively) big. (Bit annoyed that I couldn't get to her gig at the Fleece a couple of weeks ago).

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · 6d

I feel there's a lot to like about Jimmy Wales' approach to life.

(Coming from someone also running a successful non-profit tech org, and who has also had the 'communist' criticism levelled at them).

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

‘People thought I was a communist doing this as a non-profit’: is Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales the last decent tech baron?

In an online landscape characterised by doom and division, the people’s encyclopedia stands out – a huge collective endeavour giving everyone free access to the sum of human knowledge. But with Elon M...

www.theguardian.com

2

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · 18d

A Google Maps feature suggestion - 'drop off/pick up radius'.

= The distance a friend can drive you to connect to/from public transport.

Prompted by me accidentally finding a *very* useful bus route that was 10 minutes drive away.

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · 19d

I'm on the kind of flight that gives easyJet's CFO nightmares - a ~50% LF A320neo, which I paid (booking 5 days ago), £50 for.

And the operating aircraft was sat idle for 1½ hours before we boarded. 😬

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · 20d

Look, I'm not saying that getting involved with chaos that is Three is a direct cause of Vodafone's problems but... 🤔

1

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · 20d

BBC News had some on-air yesterday, from Eurostar passengers at St. Pancras.

1 1

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · 21d

The vox pops of Eurostar passengers saying they knew nothing about EES is really indicative of just how loud and long you have to repeat stuff to people to make it actually land.

1 2

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · 22d

I know we all know this, but it's worth just airing it around now and then

I've a short trip to 🇨🇭 Switzerland on Tuesday. easyJet cost £99 return
An equivalent train to 💂 London would cost £101.85

Booked at the same time, advanced, non-flexible off peak fares, all that. Yet somehow more expensive.

1 1

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · 27d

Honestly, the UK does not make it easy. A Liverpool station in London, and a Piccadilly station in Manchester.

1

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · 27d

(Liverpool Street, before both the Londoners and the Liverpudlians come at you...)

1 5

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · 28d

It seems like there's a fair number who don't even know "IP". Every support interaction is excruciating.

By comparison, their network engineers have been great - proper hands on, get it solved, kind of people. Just so badly let down by their IP colleagues.

1

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · 28d

Sunday morning dealing with Virgin Media having yet another IP network meltdown. 🤦‍♂️
So here's your periodic reminder to actively avoid Virgin Media for your connectivity needs. #virginmedia

1 2

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · Sep 27

Less than 14 days notice, you bet they do...

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · Sep 24

I don't have a conclusive answer, but as I understand it, DDG is a kind of anonymity proxy to Bing. So it's possible MS is supporting DDG in growing Bing's share of search. Maybe similar to how Google pays Moz to make Google the default search in Firefox?

1

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · Sep 20

Another early adopter penalty. Off to the #googlegraveyard for my perfectly functional 1st gen Nest thermostat, bricked because Google don't want to support the backend any more.

New #Tado system fitted today - #matter open standards should dramatically reduce the obsolescence risk. 💪

A picture of a first generation Nest thermostat and it's base station

1 3

Reposted by Nick Piggott

kopper @w.on-t.work · Sep 18

oh HELL NO

java installer except the "3 billion devices run java" screen is replaced with an advertisement for a "oracle tiktok enterprise edition"

6 77 360

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · Sep 19

See also the manically obsessive but apparently not so smart Musk.

rubot @rubot.ie · Sep 18

Zuckerberg did one thing clever in his life, making a perving site he then pivoted into a site for your auntie to be racist on. Everything else has failed or he bought. He's not even proper evil, just an absolute dork with too much power.

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · Sep 13

Yes, that's right. The graph is the output of the monitoring that tells you the effective transit time of the packets over the IP network. It's handy on networks with packet loss because the TCP just fixes that up (given enough time/buffering).

1

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · Sep 13

It's to a transmitter site, annoyingly. I switched it to my own Voda PAYG 4G, and that's doing just fine. The VM backup is on O2 4G, and it's clearly deprioritised and flaky as hell. (See graph).

EE 5G has been exceptional on a number of sites, and it's cheaper than DSL or fibre.

A graph showing poor performance of an O2 4G connection and good performance of a Voda 4G connection

1 1

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · Sep 13

Performing my public service again to warn you off using #virginmedia unless you have no other choice.

A 2am 'firmware update' bricked the router. A manual reboot got the 4G 'backup' up, but it's uselessly slow (<2Mbs) and jittery. No engineer until Thursday.

So, just don't unless you have to.

1 2

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · Sep 12

BBC launches three new DAB+ 'spin off' services today, 23 years after the last new DAB services they launched.

The speed of change, eh? Blazing.

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · Sep 7

I mean, who would be daft enough to put all their eggs in a single technical basket?

Oh... yes, I see the problem now. IP-madness.

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · Sep 5

Outsourced CS really isn't much fun for anyone except the financial people.

4

Nick Piggott @nickpiggott.bsky.social · Sep 5

Oh good grief, how many times have I had this exact conversation. I suspect my customer record somewhat reflects my varied experiences with CS agents - either 'nice customer' or 'became frustrated'.

1