Ben Smith

LGW ✈️ ALC

South Western Railway can’t operate the additional services promised because there’s not enough power to run them. An interesting long-read.

Train companies to release data to help tech firms build passenger apps →

The Information reports only 2% of Amazon Alexa users make a voice purchase. We’ve never used voice purchasing but all our grocery needs go on the Alexa shopping list first before an online / in-person purchase.

Bought a MiFi and instinctively switched the WiFi to 5Ghz to discover it requires a 1min ‘DFS check’. So now I know what DFS is…

Connected our Tile account to Alexa. Should be brilliant… “Ask Tile to find my keys” but Alexa’s hit rate on the names we use (“Ben’s Car Key” – we have several Tiles) is poor 😞

Pentagon bans use of geolocators on smartphones →

Given news that Android (and iOS?) still track with this off I wonder if this is enough…

Alexa can crank the bass on your Echo →

The equaliser function is showing-up in the UK now too.

Royal Mail:

30 parcel postboxes [are being tested] until November – the biggest change for the humble postbox in over 160 years. The postboxes have a larger opening and secure design, making it easy to post parcels.

Gizmodo:

thanks to the byzantine structure of the NHS, developers nearly made an utterly insane decision about how [its new app] should work – before user-research intervened and stopped … something nightmarish.

Hooray for doing it properly!