... I Cancelled My Amazon Prime Membership

Simple put - Irish customers aren't getting nearly as much as their UK counterparts, but are charged the same (£7.99 a month or £79 a year). I won't go into the new import tax and VAT that we now need to pay on most purchases shipped from the UK post-brexit.

Here's a comparison of available benefits that I would have been interested in. The others either don't interest me or are available in both jurisdictions.

The argument is that Ireland are too small to be catered for, but much like Amazon's attitude to Irish customers - I don't care.

Delivery

	Ireland	UK
Unlimited Premium Delivery	No	Yes
Unlimited Same Day Delivery	No	Yes
Delivery Upgrades	Yes	Yes
Unlimited Priority Delivery	Yes	Yes
Amazon Day	Yes	Yes
Amazon Fresh	No	Yes
Morrisons On Amazon	No	Yes

Videos & Photos

	Ireland	UK
Prime Video	Limited	Yes
Prime Video Channels	Yes	Yes
Prime Photos	Yes	Yes

Music

	Ireland	UK
Prime Music	No	Yes
Prime Music Unlimited	No	Yes

Prime Wardrobe

	Ireland	UK
Prime Wardrobe	No	Yes

 

... I Set Up A Spotify Alternative for Irish Punk

https://playitfaster.com is my Funkwhale instance.

There you'll find a load of music by Irish punk bands.

To connect to it from an Android device, you can use Otter Funwhale for Android.

It's available to install from Google Play.

No login details are needed, so you can connect to my instance with the following setup:

• Check `Anonymous authentication`
  
• Set Host name to playitfaster.com

And here's what the UI looks like once you've logged in. I like it!

...I fixed an Issue Where IFTTT Couldn't See the Name of The WiFI Network My Phone was Connecting to

I've entered the IoT world and bought my first smart bulb. Nothing fancy, just cheap. Something to play with. I'd the bright idea (pun absolutely intended) of turning on a light to the rear of the house as soon as my wife's (android) phone connected to our home's WiFi network.

IFTTT is usually a good option for this and I'd tested its "Android Device" services trigger - "Connects to a specific WiFi network" with good results. An integration with the "Smart Life" service allowed me to turn the light on once the trigger had been activated.

This was all well and good on my own phone, but when it came to my wife's, the simple applet refused to do what it said on the tin.

I debugged by creating a simple Applet which used the same trigger, but instead of turning the light on it sent a system notification from the IFTTT with a simple message "Connected to $SSID_NAME". In the case of my own phone, $SSID_NAME resolved to the name of our network, however on my wife's it displayed "unknown ssid". Because of this, the "specific WiFi network" name was never matched.

Strange.

The applets were identical. I'd not done anything differently when installing IFTTT and the Smart Life apps on our phones. No extra permissions, nothing.

A spate of googling later, brought me to the realisation that my wife's IFTTT app needed the "Location" permission in order to see the WiFi network's name. I'd been messing around with random IFTTT services on my own phone. These included location service, which had of course prompted me to grant the Location permission.

Once I'd manually granted IFTTT the location permission through the system app settings, my wife's phone was able to turn on the light as soon as she'd arrived home.

... I Realised Why My OnePlus 5 Couldn't See my 5GHz Wifi Network

I'm running dd-wrt on my Linksys 1900ACS V2.

My shiny new OnePlus 5 couldn't see the 5GHz network. This has been an issue on work's wifi too.

I discovered under each of the 2.4 and 5GHz network advanced settings that my "Regulatory Domain" was set to the United States. I flipped this to Ireland and Voila! my phone now happily sees and uses the 5GHz frequency.

... I had Jenkins Build Steps Fail Just Because Grep Returned Nothing

All I wanted to do was check if a docker container was running and if it was, stop it.

Simples.

Apparently not :(

Every time the Shell Execution Step with the following code ran, it marked the job as failed, if the docker container wasn't running.

docker ps|grep appserver || true
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then #appserver container is running - stop it
 docker stop appserver
fi

What isn't immediately obvious with Jenkins' Execute Shell build step is that it is run with -xe arguments.

The -e causes the step to fail for any part of the script that has a return status that isn't 0.

To override the the default behavior, one must add a shebang to the step's code as follows:

#!/bin/sh
docker ps|grep appserver || true
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then #appserver container is running - stop it
 docker stop appserver
fi

Very annoying, but easily fixed.

... I hit a wall when trying to use right click to paste with putty into a tmux window

Not an issue I'd ever thought I'd come up against, but not being able to paste from my browser into a tmux window is quite the show stopper.

Googled for a while and found all sorts of scripts to aid me in my quest to get a line of text from the browser into a file I'd opened in vim running inside tmux.

Along came this post and the damn SHIFT key.

Hold shift while right clicking to paste into a tmux window.

The joy!

I fixed the Netflix 15001 Error on Android 4.3 JSS15R

Myself and my girlfriend bought Nexus 7 (2013) devices.

Last week, I bought a chromecast from the US so we were all excited to get Netflix up and running.

Both devices displayed the following error when we launched Netflix:

Sorry, we could not reach the Netflix service. Please check Network Settings to connect to an available network and use Netflix (15001)

We could get no further than the above. Not even as far as the login screen.

I tried the following to resolve the issue - all without success:

• Uninstalled/Re-Installed the Netflix Application
• Ensured I was on the latest version of Android 4.3 (JSS15R)
• Cleared Google Service Framework cache and data.
• Did a full factory reset.

I basically did everything short of flashing the device.

I'd pretty much given up on Netflix completely until a trip to France this week.

For the craic, I tried Netflix from my Hotel. I was VERY surprised to find that I could get to the login screen! Of course, since Netflix isn't available in France, I couldn't get beyond that point.

I was delighted to get back to Ireland last night to find that my Netflix app now worked :)

Anyway, my girlfriend's Nexus was still showing the error above.
Here's what I did to resolve the issue for her.

1. Set a French DNS IP in Android's network settings
1. I found the French DNS IP here (80.67.169.12 worked for me)
2. To set a DNS IP manually, you must go to your network's advanced settings and choose "Static" for IP Settings.
2. Once I'd done this, I launched the Netflix app, which got as far as the login screen.
3. I then went back and set the Network option to DHCP again.
4. Launching the Netflix app again, I was brought to the login screen without issue and could finally log in to use Netflix with the chromecast.

It's an absolute farce that I had to trick a service that I've paid money for into thinking I was in a different country just to use it!

Netflix really need to sort their android development out!