Line seems to be the best option for Burma telecommunications

Like it says in the title, Line.

My wife is in Myanmar/Burma for a week. I looked up the best options for calling to/from that country before she went, but the telecom market is in a state of constant flux and it seems they the government controls the sales of SIM cards. What sad state of affairs: Third world telecom service with first world bureaucracy!

As it turns out, most of the airports and hotels she’s been to have had barely decent wifi, which has left us experimenting with voice/video chat services. Here are the results for using chat apps on Android to/from Yangon, Mandalay, and maybe other places in Burma:

1st place: (Naver) Line
Excellent voice quality even on weak connections. If there was a major disaster, this is the app I would rely on (oh yeah, that’s why it was made in the first place).

2nd Place: Google Hangouts
Fairly stable, but laggy with both voice and video calls. Consistently laggy, though (about 1/2 second), so usable if you want to speak slowly and wait for responses.

3rd place: Skype
Skype changed my world, then abandoned it. I still have most of the money I put into Skype credit 7 or 8 years ago. TOTALLY UNUSABLE FOR ANYTHING UNLESS YOU LIVE IN KANSAS CITY AND GET FORCE-FED INTARWEBS FROM GOOGLE. Seriously, I’m going to uninstall Skype from all my devices. So fucking sad.

First day of School

2013-06-03first-school-day

Today marks the first day of the regular term. Max and Mina both went to summer school, but it was more casual and the days were shorter. Today is the real deal. Nam left on a trip to Burma (what an ideal example of poor rebranding – what’s the adjective for “Myanmar,” anyways? What language do they speak there?) yesterday, so the kids are totally on their best behavior because they are with Bad Cop. No crying, no pleading, no nonsense: “Are you guys ready to go to school?”

FUCK YEAH, DADDY!

what’s going on

So I took the fam on a trip with my coworkers from the English program last week. We went to Hua Hin, which I had passed through but not enjoyed since our honeymoon. We saw the resort we had stayed at (Nern Chalet) and the massage parlor my dad got groped at, and the kids had a great time at the beach. Max learned how to stay underwater at the hotel pool, and was very proud of himself. Mina could put her face in the water, but is still scared to put her ears in, I think.

I have many photos, but alas, the start of the new term is imminent, and I have a textbook to write and several orientations to attend/help with.

Accidentally turned my Tilapia into a Grouper

It took a few hours to research and get a custom ROM installed (SmoothROM v5.1), so I was dismayed to see that it lacked 3G support. Oops. So I started over again using Nexus Root Toolkit and pushed the latest cyanogenmod nightly for Tilapia (Nexus 7 3g) and gapps via my laptop. Success!

cyanogenmod is kind of boring because it’s so stable – and that’s a good thing.

Regarding the title above,

grouper = Nexus 7 wifi
tilapia = Nexus 7 3g

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.