Category: Thai Society/Culture

RIP Koh Samet

We have several guests arriving next week, including my brother and sister from the states. We were going to pick them up in Bangkok and head to the beach, possibly Koh Samet, but that seems impossible now that they’ve effectively destroyed all the beaches and marine life with the oil spill.

I guess we’ll have to go somewhere else so we don’t have to smell the seafood for oil before we eat it as recommended by government officials. You can’t make this shit up.

Even if you could smell crude oil on a deep-fried delicacy, does anyone even know what the chemical dispersants smell like? Because they probably aren’t very good for you either, seeing how they can kill coral and that “laboratory experiments showed that dispersants increased toxic hydrocarbon levels in fish by a factor of up to 100…”

Thailand’s True Move H APN settings for internet

Truemove-apn-android

So basically create a new APN with the following settings:

Name: TRUE-H INTERNET

APN: internet

User name: true

Password: true

MMC: 520

MNC: 00

APN type: internet

Personally, I think anyone using MMS in this day and age should just give up and go back to using a typewriter, so I won’t cover that.

You can find device-specific info on the True page from which I borrowed the above graphic: http://www.truemove-h.com/helpsupport_apnsettings.aspx

True seems dedicated to the curious corporate tactic of changing the location of any helpful information on their website every few months, to the point where I can no longer find it. Anyway, the settings described above are still valid as of February 27, 2014.

All hail Nexus 7

I have started down a new path on the way to tech happiness by (almost) throwing away my smartphone and replacing it with dedicated tools: a dumb phone, a tablet computer, and a camera (when I need one). I am tired of carrying around a device that is a compromise in every area it was designed to cover – a smartphone is the Swiss Army knife of handheld devices, and while it can be used for many things, it does none of them as well as tools designed for those jobs. A smartphone, in general:

  • Is too big, complicated, and laggy to be considered a good replacement for a simple mobile phone
  • Has too small a screen to view many webpages, documents, etc., especially for an extended period
  • Usually takes crappy photos compared to a dedicated camera
  • In its latest and greatest form, costs more than a dedicated camera, tablet, and dumb phone combined

For these reasons, I have decided to go back to carrying more devices, perhaps until smartphones can be had with better features at a reasonable cost. This is an experiment.

I have cameras, so that is covered.

I went to buy a dumb phone, but the color I wanted (a small black Samsung flip phone) was out of stock at Tesco, where it was on sale. They had one in Ruby Red with sequins, but I’m not ready for that quite yet.

As for a tablet, I got a great deal on a Google (ASUS) Nexus 7 3G 32Gb at the Tesco Lotus five minutes from my house. This model can use wifi and a 3G sim card, so I signed up for an unlimited True H promotional deal for 499 baht/month (discounted iSmart 699 plan). I don’t plan on using the sim that often at home or work, but it will prove useful when my wife and I go on trips. The 400 voice minuted bundled with the plan will go to waste, since the tablet does not have phone functionality. Oh, well.

My next few posts will be dedicated to the rooting, modding, and set up for the Nexus 7.