I started having signal issues a few weeks ago where my Optimus 2X would randomly lose signal in a seemingly good signal area. It wouldn’t get it back until I either rebooted the phone or I set airplane mode on and then off again. Obviously this is a real pain and shouldn’t need to be done.

After a little bit of investigation work I determined it wasn’t likely to be the phone itself. It’s either a SIM card issue or a software issue (more likely since I run a custom ROM on it). The easiest thing would be to order a new SIM card to I went ahead and did this through O2’s live chat. That went smooth as you could ever imagine so no complaints there. And kudos to O2 for offering such a service, it saves time and money.

Anyway the rep I spoke to assured me everything was automatic for the switch over, which I was happy about. I was told it would arrive in a few days.

On Sunday I got a message saying I’d get it on Monday. Great! Fast service! Come Sunday evening I was browsing Facebook just before I went to bed and suddenly I noticed the phone had no signal again. Great, so I rebooted but the signal didn’t come back. I tried a second time with the same result. Thinking nothing of it I put it into my old Sony Ericsson which reported “SIM INACTIVE”. What the hell?

So here I am wondering why this has happened, it turns out that O2 have turned off my current SIM in anticipation of the new arrival the next day. Well done O2, you’ve now cut me off for the next 18 hours. How? Let me explain. I work a 9-5 job like most others, and as everyone knows post doesn’t magically arrive at 7am in the morning so there was no chance I was going to have my new SIM until the evening of the next day. This makes no sense because it means I’m without a phone for 18 hours.

Now what they should have done is activated the new SIM the next evening and told me to put it in on Tuesday morning. That would have made more sense and would have prevented daytime disconnection. I have sent O2 an e-mail regarding their replacement SIM activation process but I’ve not heard back from them yet (not surprising, they’ll probably take a few days). I’ve suggested the above to them for their activation process for replacement SIM’s, so I hope they take it.

Had I been a business customer I could have potentially lost a full days business. Even being a regular consumer I could have missed important phone calls. What if I needed to get in contact with someone or them contact me? I was completely out of reach for the whole time. Had O2 told me this would be the case I would have been OK with it, but the fact I was not told and it happened out of the blue is what annoyed me most.

Anyway what’s done is done, and I’ve made the complaint to O2. Lets hope they follow it. And let this be a lesson to anyone who is thinking of a replacement SIM following similar issues, make sure you confirm with them what the procedure it. It will probably vary between providers.

If you do, check out this pepperoni pizza website. It has facts and history of pizza, and makes an interesting read.

I’m going to make a pepperoni pizza from scratch one day as it seems like a nice idea. I wonder if it will be any cheaper than buying one? Initial thoughts say not but from the results I’ve seen the look far more appetising!

OK so you’ve probably heard of MB and GB (MegaBytes and GigaBytes), they’re used on all sorts of devices from phones to computers. But what are they? Better still, what are MiB and GiB (MibiBytes and GibiBytes)? Well both are units for measuring memory size but they have differences. The difference is that one is calculated using base 2 and one is calculated using base 10.

For these examples we’ll stick to GigaBytes and GibiBytes for our sizes.

A GigaByte that we’re all so used to is base 10 (1,000,000,000 bytes to 1 Gigabyte).
A GibiByte that you may have heard of is in base 2 (1,073,741,824 bytes to 1 GibiByte).

Table taken from http://www.pcguide.com/intro/fun/bindec.htm

So why does it cause confusion? Several reasons. Most sizes are referred to in Mega or Giga bytes so many people have been accustomed to this. For example in magazines or advertisements selling electronic equipment (tablet’s, digital cameras, etc.) and computers running Windows they’re referred to as this, but that’s where the confusion comes in, and a bit of a rant because of it.

The difference between 1GiB and 1GB is marginal, but when you increase this to several tens or thousands, it throws the scale way off. Not only that, Windows runs in base 2, but actually displays it using the prefix for base 10. So when you think it’s 1 GigaByte it’s actually showing 1 GibiByte instead but with the wrong unit! I have no idea why Microsoft decided to do this but it’s confusing as hell when you’re trying to work out the differences in file size on a program that really does show it properly. Gah!

The problem I had recently was on one of my sites, BetaArchive. I was trying to find discrepancies in the total archive size counter. It wasn’t showing the right size but we were adamant we had it right. In the end it turned out to be in the units.

Now I believe Mac and Linux use GigaBytes correctly and are also switchable from what I have read, you just have to find the option for it so Windows should have no excuse getting it right. Many people have complained to Microsoft but they’ve never done anything about it for some reason, so this problem continues to plague developers and people like myself trying to work out these discrepancies.

Suffice to say I wasted 2 hours trying to figure out where the missing data was. As a result of this cock-up I’ve even had to put a message next on the display on BetaArchive so people know it’s actually showing the right unit on the site but Windows shows the wrong unit!

I don’t doubt this will plague people for years to come as I doubt it will be fixed in Windows 8 either. I just find it hard to believe Microsoft have got away with it for this long.