A Brand New Year is Upon Us

Happy New Year everyone – I’m sure most of us have high hopes for a better year this year.

2022 has been a mixed year here at tech.scargill.net, my old favourite Banggood have not been having a good time and have been very quiet, meanwhile I’ve made all sorts of new industry contacts around the world. In the UK it’s easy to think that Covid is behind us yet large numbers of people are still being infected with the now somewhat muted disease.

Back in my base in rural southern Spain, things have been relatively normal aside from the inevitable price hikes partly thanks to the Russian-Ukraine conflict but over in China, industry is still in trouble thanks to the effects of the Zero-Covid policy and its quick reversal – one of the side benefits of running a tech blog is that I get to chat to people all over the world – widening my perspective on all that’s going on.

Back to my own (relatively trivial) issues, during my Christmas stopover in the UK I’ve been keeping the blog up to date despite being in a new base with no traditional broadband and struggling with everything including my own incompetence in picking, earlier in 2022 a not-very-sensitive 4G router (details of the Kuwi device elsewhere in the blog).

In the summer of 2022 on a brief visit to the UK I had the router mounted on the roof of our new UK base (2 storeys) which seemed like a great idea at the time but now, in the depths of Northeastern England winter, I’m trying so far unsuccessfully to get someone out to retrieve the SIM from the roof so I can fit it into my latest GL-iNet 4G router (Spitz V2, covered elsewhere in here) and meanwhile suffering at the hands of LycaMobile who appeared to offer a great deal in mobile data in the run-up to Christmas but who in reality failed to provide ANY meaningful support over the Christmas period when I had massive issues getting data out of them.

As you might imagine, the blog includes not only text but images and video and I’ve been severely hampered over christmas by the need to grab mobile data from various sources including roaming data on our phones. Early this month I’ll be back in full swing but I’d like to put in a word for Spanish mobile operators DigiMobile and Xenet who’s roaming support has kept me in operation and someone who shall not be named who’s sharing his BT Hotspot data with me. Outside of the UK you may not recall but back around 2007 while living in the UK I was enjoying the early FON network which turned ordinary folks’ broadband into hotspots assuming both the home user and mobile user were part of the FON network. That then somehow transformed for the UK into BT Hotspots. At the time I had no use for these but over the christmas I’ve become re-acquanted with the latter. Consumers with a BT account can use this facility when away from home to share a portion of the WiFi of other participating BT broadband users (within range).

Between BT Hotspots, my Spanish roaming and the pretty awful O2 signal thanks to the KuWFI router, I’ve managed to keep writing while family do the inevitable TV/movie Christmas bingeing, you may note I’ve had lots of new stuff in the mail and in the next few days I’ll have even more to talk about here in the blog. I hope my subscribers have had a nice break and I look forward to 2023 at it develops as I’m sure do many of us.

Update: Broadband sorted – the BT-Broadband hotspot is making a good backup and I’ve thrown the rubbish Lycamobile SIM in the bin. STILL no response from them despite having a go at their social media.

Total aside – the free WLED software (I just LOVE his URL – https://kno.wled.ge/ ) has just been updated to handle addressable LED arrays – I’ve just ordered an 8*32 job from AliExpress delivery mid-Jan – should be good for some scrolling message fun which I’ll no doubt write about. Meanwhile – keep warm – this might help 🙂