JON HONEYBALL
Jon reveals an ingenious British solution to the problem of GPS navigation on motorbikes and explains the mysterious reappearance of Windows RT
Jon reveals an ingenious British solution to the problem of GPS navigation on motorbikes and explains the mysterious reappearance of Windows RT.
We’ve come to rely on GPS. It’s one of those technologies that’s been utterly transformative during my lifetime. My late father’s desk, which sits behind me in the lab, has a drawer stuffed full of old Ordnance Survey maps. Today, they’re merely a curiosity. Google Maps does a better job in every way. And that’s before we start talking about the sheer usefulness of Street View.
Whilst we can discuss the advantages of Waze running on a connected smartphone versus the overpriced and underperforming GPS that’s so often built into cars, and the somewhat rapacious price of map updates, the reality is that the built-in thing is still workable.
Things get rather more exciting on a motorbike. A few vendors have implemented satnav directly into the digital dash of their most modern bikes; for example, BMW has created an app that runs on your phone that provides GPS capabilities to the screen on the bike. That’s fine if you have a new bike, but isn’t any good for the older items. For that, you must turn to vendors such as Garmin.
I have two BMW motorbikes: a 2009 K1300S (which is akin to Concorde or a private jet) and a 2013 R1200R (which is the last of that particular line of flat twin engines). BMW sells a full satnav product called the Navigator VI, which is custommade by Garmin. This is a proper waterproof GPS that’s designed to be mounted on its own custom bracket. The advantage is that the bracket has push buttons for commonly used functions such as zooming in and mode change.
I have the official brackets on both bikes, and I move the Navigator VI between them as needed.
Making a GPS for a motorbike is a lot more difficult than something you can suction onto the screen in your car. First is the obvious point about it being waterproof. Then it must be able to handle much higher light levels than you would normally find in a car. It has to cope with a lot of vibration. And, finally, it must work with a gloved hand. So a lot of assumptions that apply to a car GPS don’t apply to a motorbike item. Which probably goes some way to justifying a price north of £500.
I could handle the cost because it works well and ticks all the necessary boxes… right up until the point when the screen fails. I’ve now had five (or is it six?) replacement units under warranty. One had a microscopic hairline fracture across the screen, underneath the touch layer. But the others have had screens that simply went mad, with random clicks and screen touches occurring with no input from me.
It seems that the design isn’t as good is ought to be, and it might be susceptible to vibration. Which is fine, but not when mounted on the BMW cradle on a BMW motorbike.
Out of frustration, I’ve been looking for alternatives. The obvious route was to move the whole discussion forward and use my iPhone 12 Pro Max in a mount on the handlebars. There’s an excellent case and mounting system from Quad
Lock ( pcpro.link/323quad) that works very well, but I’ve always been somewhat reticent about putting a phone costing a four-figure sum onto a motorbike.
For a start, iPhones aren’t waterproof to the extreme levels I’m looking for. Then there are the numerous reports of the camera elements failing due to vibration. A modern smartphone has an incredibly intricate camera lens arrangement, often multiples of them because of the numerous camera units fitted, and these are very delicate. They’re designed to cope with normal day-today operation, but not the more intense vibration of a motorbike or even a pushbike.
Hence why Quad Lock produces an anti-vibration mounting option
( pcpro.link/323vibes) to sort this out. However, I’m again dubious, and my reluctance isn’t helped by the fact that non-rugged phones aren’t easy to operate with a gloved finger. Getting USB power to the handlebars isn’t a problem, but the day-to-day operation of a smartphone there is something I really cannot get enthusiastic about.
I tried using Waze on the phone with it held safely in my jacket. Or in a pannier attached to an additional battery pack – GPS causes phone batteries to wilt at an alarming rate. With the Sena Bluetooth communications module fitted to my Shoei Neotec 2 helmet, I can listen to voice instructions. But this never really worked for me: the noise levels
“I’ve always been reticent about putting a phone costing a four-figure sum on a motorbike”
within a helmet means that serious earplugs are necessary. Even then the speech can get lost in the noise.
I needed to think sideways and approach this from another angle. And then I discovered Beeline ( beeline.co), which has a product for pushbikes and motorbikes.
It’s a small circular unit that you can clamp onto handlebars with a variety of clamp designs. It relies on an app that you run on your phone for control, and this means the phone can be safely stored away somewhere dry and vibration-free. The display, however, is the most interesting part. It’s super-simple: distance to next junction or event; the direction in which you’re going; an indication of which exit to take at a roundabout; percentage of the trip completed.
It’s a triumph of design and careful thinking, and turns the whole GPS question on its head. You don’t actually need to see where the next café is on a side road, and riding a motorbike is difficult enough without the distraction of a full scrolling map. I’ve ridden a few hundred miles since buying this, with mounts on all four of my bikes. And it’s a true joy. The display unit has backlighting when needed, and a 20-hour battery life – meaning wired-in power isn’t necessary. It’s sufficiently small that you can quickly remove it at your destination and drop it in a pocket. Or just leave it on the bike on the grounds that is certainly doesn’t look worth stealing to the uninitiated.
The best part? It’s a British company that has had the clarity of thinking to take a problem and totally reconsider the solution. A solution that only costs £149, too. I haven’t looked at the pushbike version, but I only ride around my village for fun.
It’s such a refreshing change to find an IT solution to a real problem – one that isn’t afraid to be bold. We need more of this.
Sense of isolation
Mozilla, in the shape of Firefox (my preferred daily browser these days), is making architectural changes to the way it handles websites. See the posting at pcpro.link/323fire.
In essence, up until now, unrelated sites have been loaded into the same process space. That means malware in one can access the memory space in another, unrelated site. As the post explains: “Firefox’s parent process launches a fixed number of processes: eight web content processes, up to two additional semi-privileged web content processes, and four utility processes for web extensions, GPU operations, networking, and media decoding.”
In the future, as Site Isolation is rolled out in Firefox, each site will get its own process, and hence be isolated. This brings with it a number of issues. Firefox will have to work out whether a site is sufficiently “different” to another one to ensure it’s loaded into its own processor space. Clearly “ibank.barclays.co.uk” and “www.barclays.co.uk” are close enough that they can be trusted to be in the same processor space.
But “ibank.barclays.co.uk” and “www.mymalware.com” should not. Hence why Mozilla is building up lists of sites that are known to be safe.
It isn’t clear whether other browsers are doing this already; there’s a hint that
Google Chrome might be doing something similar, but I couldn’t find a definitive answer. Still, it’s a welcome move to help keep sites in their own protected spaces.
Hard pass on Google passwords
There is an ongoing problem with password handling on websites. I know we should be good and use a password manager, but sometimes it’s just too much hassle, and an old favourite gets reused. Tools such as Dashlane try to automate this procedure by logging in on your behalf and working out how to do the password change process. This works, some of the time, and it’s better than nothing. But we need a proper process for handling this.
Google has announced that it’s enabling such a solution with its built-in password manager. In a blog ( pcpro.link/323chrome), it says:
“The good news is that Chrome comes with a strong password manager built-in. It’s been checking the safety of your passwords for a while now. And starting today, whenever Chrome detects a breach, it can also fix any compromised passwords quickly, and safely.
“Going forward, Chrome will help you change your passwords with a single tap. On supported sites, whenever you check your passwords and Chrome finds a password that may have been compromised, you will see a ‘Change password’ button from Assistant. When you tap the button, Chrome will not only navigate to the site, but also go through the entire process of changing your password.”
Clearly, this requires you to be using the Chrome password manager. This might be a good idea, but I would rather keep my passwords away from a specific browser. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting step and one that’s to be applauded.
Talking of passwords, I’ve just completed my move from Dashlane to Bitwarden. I’ve used Dashlane for a while and built up a long list of unique
“Once you’re done, you have Windows 10 on the RT box. And it works… no, it really does!”
auto-created passwords in there for the hundreds of sites I appear to use. So why switch? Well, Dashlane has become somewhat annoying – it likes to provide dropdowns on fields it thinks it can autofill, and whilst this is good in theory, it can become very annoying on some sites.
Bitwarden keeps well away from the structure of the page itself. When you want to log into a site, just click on the Bitwarden icon and it will show you a list of username/password combinations that are relevant to that page – click on that, and it injects the items into the correct fields. It seems cleaner and less annoying to me.
In addition, I’m not particularly happy about Dashlane moving away from having a desktop app and doing everything through the web tools. I can’t pin down why I’m uneasy about this, but it just doesn’t really feel right. Bitwarden has apps for all the platforms, and the migration from Dashlane to Bitwarden was simplicity itself. I hope I won’t regret the change, but I can always go back if I find a significant stumbling block.
Windows RT 10 (for real)
Maybe you’re one of those unfortunate souls who, like me, has a Windows RT tablet gathering dust on the shelves. Almost a decade ago, this was the first real push by Microsoft to get Windows 8 onto the ARM platform. Although the tablets did what they claimed, the platform never went anywhere. So all those Windows RT devices are mostly unloved and forgotten.
If you work on the principle that they’re basically a doorstop, there’s no harm in trying something out on it. Before we go any further, let me be crystal clear – this isn’t supported. It isn’t even unofficially supported. There’s a fair chance you will brick the RT box.
But who cares? Let’s throw caution to the wind. Go to pcpro.link/323rt and follow the instructions. My mate Phil did this on his RT box, and will be doing it to mine. Once you’re done, you have Windows 10 on the RT box. And it works… no, it really does!
What version of Windows 10 is this? It reports itself as being Windows 1703 Build 15035 and calls itself Windows RT 10. It also mentions it will expire on 01/05/2017. Essentially, it’s a build of Windows 10 for ARM that, shall we politely say, “leaked” from Microsoft a year or so back. It isn’t Windows 10 on ARM. This is something that probably predates it.
Is it of any use? Of course not. There are no updates. It isn’t licensed. It doesn’t give you the right to use it.
It’s a hacked bodge of an internal release of an ARM version of Windows 10. Nothing more.
Of course, this means that Microsoft could do a Windows 10 for those RT boxes out there. But it has absolutely no intention of doing so. And why should it? The hardware is archaic, there are almost no such surviving devices still out in the field, and it’s so far out of support timescale that it’s not even funny.
Nevertheless, it’s fun to see what could have been.
Windows service for Linux goes graphical
Microsoft has just hit a significant milestone with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which allows a Windows 10 computer to run native Linux code. Until now, this has been limited to command line tools and utilities. But now there’s GUI support, meaning it’s possible to run graphical Linux apps within the WSL subsystem.
This is very clever. And I’m sure someone has a use for it. However, in discussions with various mates, we drew a blank as to why and when it would be appropriate. If you were wanting to do dev work for Linux, wouldn’t it be more sensible to run a full virtual machine environment, complete with the Linux of your choice? Not according to the blog post by Microsoft: “Visual Studio Code has an amazing experience using VS Code Remote to create a way for you to have a full-fledged Linux IDE directly on your Windows machine, keep extensions and settings across both Windows and different WSL distros… WSLg will let you run other IDEs such as gedit, JetBrains-based editors, gvim, etc, to test, build, and debug your Linux applications in a performant manner.”
This is all very clever, but I’m not sure who it’s aimed at. Is it really the
developer community? Aren’t sysadmins well enough catered for with PowerShell?
I’m left scratching my head.
Surely it can’t just be an almost religious cleansing process by the Microsoft developers, trying as hard as they possibly can to distance themselves from the anti-Linux positioning of Microsoft in the Ballmer era? To almost plaintively say, “we do everything you lovely Linux people need right over here”? So I pass the question over to you, dear reader. If you’re using WSL and are genuinely excited by the arrival of the GUI capabilities, I would love to hear from you to tell me why. I’m always happy to learn more and will cheerfully cover this again in a few months when the blinkers have been removed from my eyes.
Liberating LibreOffice
For some reason or other, probably based on some deep psychological failure in my head, I like to keep running the Beta Channel versions of the macOS Microsoft Office apps on my desktop. Perhaps I do it in the plaintive hope that bugs, issues and simply missing features will magically appear, and my world will be a better place.
The problem with running the
Beta Channel is that sometimes things can go badly wrong. This happened last week: there was an update to Excel and suddenly it was unable to save files. It didn’t matter if this was to network storage or to the local file system – Excel simply barfed on file save.
In fairness to Microsoft, beta means beta. I only have myself to blame. But, for several days, I resorted to using LibreOffice’s equivalent to get work done. And guess what? It was an entirely happy experience.
Salesforce outage
My final thought for this month is about Salesforce, which suffered a significant global outage a few weeks ago. It wasn’t down for long, but when you are the size of Salesforce, people notice very quickly. There is an interesting write-up of what happened, and what the underlying root causes were. It’s worth a read: pcpro.link/323salesforce.