Mobile data: PAYG in Canada

Having found precious little on the web before my recent trip, I thought I'd do the right thing and publish my discoveries for the benefit of others.  This new-found knowledge is almost entirely down to an ex-local who just happened to be in Montreal when I was visiting and who found this for me - thanks Alex!

The first thing to note is that most providers in Canada require you to have a Canadian street address and a credit card. The staff in the cellphone shops are trained (or simply don't know any better?) that monthly contracts are the only option. Do not be dissuaded.

For only minimal (unverified) details of name and (any) date of birth, Fido offer a prepaid SIM (both full size and micro for iPhone/iPad) for free with top-ups from CA$10. This comes with a pretty ordinary tariff of domestic calls at 30c per minute and domestic texts at 10c each.

However, what I was after was data and this proved to be the real bargain. CA$2 buys 20MB or 24 hours, whichever comes first, and CA$7 buys 125MB or 7 days on the same terms. As soon as you attempt to use data or exceed your purchase allowance, you'll receive a text from 3330 offering you a link where you can buy the data add-ons. The fee is taken from your airtime balance.

Top-ups are readily available from tabacs where you'll be provided with a till receipt showing a fourteen digit number; dial *868 and follow the (tortuously slow) prompts and then wait for the confirmation - you'll get a confirmation text from 9000. You can check you available balance by dialling *225.

Fido's website says there's also a CA$25 500MB "month" option, although I didn't see this. Generally, the 3G service on my iPhone4 was very good, with some coverage even available on the underground Metro. To give them their full name, Fido Solutions are part of Rogers Communications and share some tower infrastructure in some locations as well as their own gear so I suspect coverage is just about the best that's available. That said, I didn't venture beyond the city so beware before you choose to rely on data for navigation, safety etc.

Our first port of call

And so, here as requested, and for a few more posts, is a mini-journal of our Great Tour to attend our friend's wedding in Fiji. Hopefully this will also provide a decent aide-mémoire so we'll be better able to reminisce about our travels long after we've returned to the grind of normal life.

Saturday saw us install the holiday custodians who would be looking after things in our absence and then it was off to Heathrow in our (upgraded to a Volvo XC70, Tom was very pleased to see) hire car. By the time we'd returned that, checked-in, got through security and had taken the trek across T1 to our gate it was almost time for us to board. The flight across the pond and beyond was very comfortable, Air NZ doing a great job as we've come to expect.

Despite worrying noises from the crew when we landed at LAX, US Immigration wasn't too bad at all and we were quickly sorted and in our hire car, this time a (ridiculously large) Chevy Tahoe. With him and her pretty much asleep I faithfully followed the sat-nav to our hotel. It wasn't until after a good hour's driving with no sign of a freeway that I realised the sat-nav had been left calculating the shortest route. This would have been great in the day as I was following the old coast-hugging Pacific Highway but as it was pitch dark I replanned to the fastest route and we arrived to our hotel shortly after.

Sunday: Up for breakfast reasonably early and then out. With the coastal weather being a little overcast we decided to have a look inland and headed for Julian and the Cleveland forest beyond. We managed to find a very quiet parking area in the woods and Tom had his first taste of taking control of an all American V8 monster; needless to say, he seemed to quite enjoy the experience. From there we headed down at a leisurely pace to San Diego and headed further south to San Ysidro, just on the Mexican border facing Tijuana. By now the sun was out in all it's force and I for one could not stand too much time in the open. As we set off north the lack of decent signage almost caused us to head towards the border - scary! We stopped in San Diego old town for a while, saw the immense Midway at the harbourside and gently headed north, eventually finding some more retail and then tea in Carlsbad.

Monday: An early breakfast again and it was off to Sea World in San Deigo. The day was overcast and almost damp. Thankfully this kept the number of visitors and therefore the queues down to very reasonable levels - I can't imagine what the place must be like when the carparks are full. The sea lions, Shamu and everything else lived up to expectations and it was easy to stay there for the bulk of the day. We called at the hotel (to dry off from the water rides) and then returned to Carlsbad to explore more of the retail we'd clocked the night before. To finish the day we ate in Ruby's all-American diner, the Fifties must have been a fun time.

Tuesday: One more early breakfast and we set off for Mojave. The drive up through LA was interesting, seeing lots of names that we recognised. Climbing up from the coast was spectacular, as was arriving at the edge of the first desert at Palmdale. I was quite excited to get some photos of an airplane graveyard at Mojave itself and it took us a while to figure out what the massive tubes were resting on the railroad carriages. Looking north-west provided the answer - they were all tower sections for windmills and I suspect I'll never see a larger farm of the things. We continued along the route of one of the settler's trails to Tehachapi and then followed the descent to Arvin. Again, the change in landscapes was nothing short of amazing and I think I understand why arriving settler's felt the need to turn to religion.

When stopped for Starbucks I'd spotted Hungry Valley on our route back to LA so we decided to investigate. This SVRA (State Vehicular Recreational Area) is a huge valley dedicated to burning around in 4x4s, quads and bikes. It was deserted and we had a fantastic couple of hours scaring ourselves silly driving around goat-tracks and tackling far too severe slopes. As it was so very empty, Tom took his next driving lesson and even my good lady had a go. Top, top fun for $5. The last stop was the Holywood hills (nice) followed by Hollywood proper (not nice) and then back to LAX to prepare for our flight to Fiji.

Silence is golden

Many moons ago I posted a happy tale of LAN renovation and my delight in then owning a "cool and quiet" switching infrastructure. Alas, 30 months of dust and uptime had resulted in one of the devices becoming a bit of a problem, not least to my wife who had to endure it constantly whining (I hope those words are in the right order!).

The SRW2008MP 8-port PoE switch has a fan in its (huge) power-brick and also a fan within its case. Both of these now sound very unhappy with varying degrees of vibration and volume. Whilst I was searching t'Web for replacement fans I stumbled across what seemed to be a much better solution. Cisco now offer a fourth tier of product, fitting neatly after their SOHO and "Business Series" but before the fully-featured Catalyst range. An ESW-540-8P-K9 is the smallest (8-port) gigabit model of the new "Small Business Pro" ESW 500 range. Apart from increased performance and many other supported features, crucially this device is listed as "fanless" - hopefully that would be true of the PSU as well.

Setting the thing up was a breeze using the web-based interface. Rather than simply transposing the settings from the old device I took the opportunity to do some proper tidying up. Following a little re-patching (the new model has a separate combo-fibre/copper uplink and so is effectively a nine port device) everything sprang back into life. Of course, there was one major difference. Apart from a smaller device and power-brick than its predecessor, there were no fans - in fact, no noise at all. Happy days!

Or so it seemed.  When I looked to confirm syslog messages from the new switch were reaching my Splunk server I discovered that this (virtual) machine was apparently AWOL. I'd configured three switch uplinks and two VMware ESXi hosts as trunks and had allowed the necessary VLANs for my environment. Therein lies the gotcha. Looking in the logs on the switch I saw...

%2SWPORT-W-LOCKPORTACTIVE: A packet with source MAC 00:0c:29:81:21:a7 tried to access through port g6 which is locked

...and sure enough, looking deeper down in the configuration, I discovered all eight ports were configured by default with port security, allowing only three active MACs at a time. Some sort of warning when configuring a port as a trunk would have been a nice touch. Fixing the problem was easy but I bet this setting will be the cause of many a support call.

I suppose, bearing my mind my day job, I should be happy that Cisco thought some on-by-default security would be a good thing. I can't help but feel my experience is a typical example of why most people will simply turn off all that good stuff and enjoy their life just as they've always done.

Ensuring mice don't disturb a sleeping Windows 7 machine

Having recently made the leap to running Windows 7 on my main laptop, things have, in general, been pretty good. There have been a couple of niggles (eg. Explorer crashing and restarting (something that it now does very well), most commonly caused by IZArc's shell integration) but all-in-all I'm happy to have a cleaner and quicker machine for everyday use.

I was particularly looking forward to benefiting from the updated power management and sleep/hibernate functions that at last seem to be reliable on a Windows machine. I had persisted with "sleeping" my XP build but it was always a game of chance as to whether the thing would wake up successfully - I always had to make sure I closed down anything valuable before beginning the hypnosis. Windows 7 rapidly loses conciousness when commanded to do so and has yet to fail to return (touch wood!).

One element of behaviour, however, did seem strange. Sometimes when I suspended my machine it would immediately wake up and I would have to suspend it a second time. After a few iterations I realised it was the act of unplugging a borrowed USB mouse after the suspend process had completed that was causing the problem.

Whilst I'm happy to have the option, I think it's highly unlikely that many people will want to have an accidental mouse click or a device removal wake their system. Perhaps it would be better if this option was switched off by default? No matter.

A little Googling pointed me to "powercfg -devicequery wake_armed" and this revealed that a "HID-complaint mouse" was indeed capable of waking the system. Issuing "powercfg -devicedisablewake "HID-compliant mouse"" removed this device from the list and now all is good. (This command has the same effect as unticking the "Allow this device to wake the computer" on the "Power Management" tab of the device's properties in Device Manager.)

If this turns out to be my biggest difficulty with my new OS then, of course, I'll be a very happy bunny!

Post-trip photo sorting

I've just spent half a day sorting through photos of my recent trip, ready to bore my extended family and friends should they dare to ask me where I've been. Here's a brief rundown what took up all this time.

True to form, I'd neglected to update my camera settings properly as I moved between timezones and, for the changes I did make, even managed to change one camera and not the other, further complicating the situation. In order to have Picasa, iPhoto or whatever display the photos in the correct chronological order it was necessary to do a little rework.

My cameras save the date and time into the EXIF data of each photo as a discrete value, with no adjustment or recording of timezone or daylight saving settings. After working out the required time corrections by reviewing the photos against the cameras' current times, I created a plain text file ("dir /B IMG*.jpg > list.txt") containing one picture filename per line and then manually chopped this up so I had one file per time adjustment, e.g. "plus4.txt".

Using the excellent EXIFutils and the good old command-line "FOR", I was able to modify the EXIF data easily by adding the appropriate correction. The "exitdate.exe" tool allows you to add or subtract an amount of time to or from the existing timestamp data. A sample of my workings appears in the screenshot. (Remember, you need "%%i" in script files, "%i" if running the command interactively.)

Modifying the date/time of the AVI videos from my compact camera required a different tool. Each file contains metadata that can be edited with many downloadable tools, the best I've yet found is abcAVI. However nice it is for the metadata to be correct, this data is generally ignored and it's the file's modification time that is used by most photo libraries to determine the sort order for video clips. To correct this I used "touch" (in fact "touch.exe" from the UnxUtils toolset) to set the modification time back to the manually corrected time from the metadata. By the way, this is a bit of a pain as you need to make sure you preserve the file modification times as you move them around, sometimes a challenge if you're using FTP etc.

Now all I need to do is wade through the snaps and brutally cut out all but the ones that are worth keeping. Being a hoarder, that's something where I really struggle.

On the way home

An early start was the order of the day as Clint volunteered to dash to Starbucks to collect breakfast before we set out to Milford Sound. The brand new RealJourneys coach was very cool with its tiered, angled seats and massive expanses of glass. Tracey, our driver, kept us well entertained as we headed the two hours down to Te Anau under increasingly grey skies. Statistics about sheep, deer, stoats and other introduced species made a very good case for not interfering with Mother Nature's work. A brief stop for coffee revealed the temperature had dropped also. We were beginning to think our luck with the weather may have come to an end.

The remaining two and three quarter hours were interspersed with a number of stops as we headed up along the bottom of steep valleys towards the Homer Tunnel and then Milford itself. No-one really noticed the skies clearing but all of a sudden there wasn't a cloud to be seen. The scenery is the most specatular you could imagine. Remnants of recent avalanches were still mightily impressive, as was the engineering effort that had gone into blasting a tube 1270m thorough a mountain. More stories, of postmen and more wildlife, were retold and before we knew it we were down at the harbour waiting for our departure on a cruise of the sound (actually a fjord, as Tracey so rightly pointed out).

Two and a bit hours on the water allowed us to scour both sides of the lake, the south side on the way out into the Tasmin Sea and the north side on the way back. The weather remained flawless and stunning, with the boats crew joking that they'd had similar conditions before - sometime in 1978. Seals and penguins were the main attraction and the rolling and picthing on the open water certainly made everyone hold on. The vegetation, sounds of wildlife, fantastically high waterfalls and impossibly balanced trees were really something to behold. The entrance to the fjord from the sea is a long way from obvious, a true hidden jem.

Once back on dry land, we wandered the ten minutes along the foreshore to the airport for our trip back. The coach was going to take a bit over four hours to race non-stop(ish) to Queenstown but our light aircraft trip would see us back there in under 45 minutes. Phil managed to bag the seat next to the pilot while Clint and I were left to fight with the chickens on the back row. Fortunately we were all afforded amazing views as we headed up Arthur's Valley to Lake Quill before turning left to head back across to Lake Wakatipu and home. Words and pictures are inadequate to describe what we saw, a truly memorable experience.

Getting back at a reasonable time for a beer and pizza was a great decision. The evening was gorgeous and sitting outside in the mountains was glorious. Having eaten, we managed to walk off some of our excess by hunting for some secreted Tupperware in the park next to a (unexplained) monument to Captain Scott of the Antartic. I think it's fair to say Clint and Phil won't be signing up to the sport any time soon. ;-)

The following morning saw us head up the Skyline gondola and three runs down the luge. Despite Phil's cheating, I managed to win two of the three races. My extra weight (a bag and camera etc!) proved useful as we hurtled down the hill - great fun. Then it was some light shopping and back to the airport for our hops to Christchurch and ultimately Auckland. The traffic was at its peak as we headed back to the North Shore, the only facet of NZ that needs improving.

A farewell dinner at Wildfire in Takapuna with Bex and Karen was lovely and I took the opportunity to thank the girls for so generously loaning me their men for the duration of my stay. My trip has been so very busy but so very short. It was great to see Phil's boys too and I'm stilled a little shocked at how NZified they've become over such a short time.

One last VERY early start for the airport and it was time to say goodbye once again. We had breakfast before Phil and Clint followed me to make sure I went through security, they seem to have some bee in their bonnet about overstayers.

I'm now in my hotel room in Narita, Japan before my return to Heathrow in the morning (or whatever time my body will think it is by then). No doubt I'll miss the friendly Air NZ Kiwi service. I've had the most fantastic time and it was sad to leave my friends yet again. That said, I'm looking forward to getting home to my family and planning our excursion down to NZ so I can show them what a special place it is. I'll be back!

Cheap data for travellers with Telecom NZ

In order to keep mobile data costs down to a more reasonable level while I was holidaying in New Zealand, a kind and local chap recommended the Telecom NZ XT network as offering the best value. A quick trip down Queen Street allowed me to buy a NZ$30 SIM (including $15 of call credit) and a $20 top-up voucher. This, along with a $10 bonus for registering online, gave me a total of $45 calling credit. For NZ$30 you can buy a 30-day 500MB "data extras" pack, ideal for my blogging and Twittering needs.

However, the staff in the Telecom NZ shop were very pessimistic that my phone would be up to the job. Despite their compatibility checker (based on IMEI number) saying everything would be OK, they related stories of non-Telecom phones working for three days before packing up. My phone worked fine in the store with a test SIM so I felt sure all would be OK.

Everything was indeed fine until the following morning. From Browns Bay we headed north past Wellsford and I noticed my phone was apparently detecting a 3G network but I had no network name or indeed any signal strength. This remained the same all the way up to Paihia. It seemed Telecom's prediction had come true - no service for me.

My main UK mobile is a Nokia E71, specifically the E71-1 variant. Looking up the specs online reveals this version has WCDMA900/2100 capabilities, suitable for the UK market. I now know the XT network operates primarily on WCDMA850 with WCDMA2100 only "in some metro areas". Sure enough, on returning to my Auckland base the phone once again sprang into life.

All-in-all WCDMA2100 coverage seemed to be present only in a few built up areas (for me; Auckland city centre, Browns Bay, Queenstown - nothing in Whangerai for example). It seems this frequency is implemented alongside the ubiquitous XT standard WCDMA850 to provide extra calling capacity in busy locations.

To receive anything approaching the claimed coverage you really need to have a WCDMA850 capable device. The Nokia E71-2 (WCDMA850/1900) or, even better, the E71-3 (WCDMA850/2100) phones for example would be ideal.

So, there is no mystery (surprise!) and phones do not drop off the network after a few days, but it is very possible you will move out of range of a suitable network for your device. If you have the right equipment, all will be fine. Happy surfing!