Bank with Monzo

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I'm not sure if Monzo is the "bank of the future". But I am sure that it provides a bunch of features that people are going to want in their future banks. Once you've used it for a while you start to think "Why can all banks be like this?".

Banks and their mobile phone apps have been getting steadily better over the years. We can now send money instantly and check our balances. But the balances always tend to lag between "real life" as payments and credits take their time to meander through the banking system. Monzo isn't like that. Within seconds of paying for something with my Monzo card my watch goes buzz and tells me how much I've spent.

The app keeps track of how much I've spent each day, and it knows the retailers I use, their location and the kinds of things they sell. So I can see how much I spend on coffee, petrol and groceries and do (or at least attempt to do) sensible budget type things. 

The customer support is excellent and registering for an account was a snap (quite literally - as you have to record a 5 second video of yourself asking for an account as part of the process).

To add a bit of icing to the already nice cake, it turns out that you can use your Monzo card abroad without paying any of those nasty commissions that other card companies like add on top. It's actually based on Master Card technology, which means that it should work most everywhere.

At the moment you could't really call Monzo a "proper bank account". It's missing a few features that make it a bit hard to use as the only place you put your money. I'm using it by transferring lumps of cash from my main account into Monzo, and then using the Monzo card to spend it. This works very well though, the transactions go through very quickly, so tracking how much cash you left is very easy. 

Monzo have big ambitions to challenge the high street banks, and they are adding features on a regular basis. What they're offering is a big step forward on what is currently offered by everyone else, I just hope they can find a business model that allows them to fund what they are delivering on a long term basis. Speaking personally, I'd be happy to pay a subscription to them just for the improved budgeting tools. I'm sure that all the other banks are looking very carefully at what Monzo are doing, and taking notes.  Banking just got interesting.

You can sign up for a Monzo card here, although there is a bit of a waiting list. Existing account holders are occasionally sent "Golden Tickets" which they can pass on to their chums to get them on the system, so if you fancy having a go, just find someone with a bright pink card, and ask them for an invite. 

Hull Pixelbot and Meltdown and Spectre

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There's been a lot of talk in the press about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities inherent in modern computer systems. For anyone out there who is concerned, I can confirm that there is no danger of any Hull Pixelbots being compromised by either of these issues.  

Actually, to be serious for a moment, the important thing about these two clever pieces of nastiness is that they let a naughty program read another part of your computer memory. They don't directly allow a program to attack your system.

If you happen to be running a missile control password management database at the same time as browsing the murkier corners of the internet and running a cracked copy of Photoshop then you might have cause to worry, but most people don't do this. At least, I really hope they don't.

One of "Robert's Rules" is "A system complicated to be useful will have bugs in it". A corollary (posh word) is  "A system complicated enough to be useful will be vulnerable to attack". 

That's why we wash our hands before eating, have locks on our houses and make sure that our computer has the most up to date security patches. 

Closing rings - a New Year Resolution

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In the great spirit of "Fail early, fail often" I actually managed to break my New Year's Resolution on January the first. This was almost intentional, having crashed and burned so early in the process kind of takes the pressure off any future attempts. 

Anyhoo, the resolution was to at least complete my "activity ring" on the Apple fitness app each day. Like you can see I did last year at the end of December.

Closing this particular ring (there are three as you can see on the left) calls for a mere 30 minutes of moving about a bit. Spending an entire day on the sofa watching telly doesn't seem to fit well with this, hence the failure. 

But since then I've been a lot more busy. The latest version of the Apple watch software has a "fitness coach" mode which passes comment on your efforts and tries to exhort you to achieve more. I know that actually what is happening is something along the lines of:

if (exerciseTime < 30)
{
    print("Get off the sofa and do something you lazy person");
}

..but it does seem to be working. I've become quite fastidious about filling in the fitness ring and even hopping onto the rowing machine to top up any missing minutes towards the end of the day. Maybe I'll manage to fill in the others (energy consumption and standing up during the day) over time. 

I'm not sure that this will enable me to live longer, but I do find that with a bit of exercise my razor sharp mind is just a bit razor sharper. 

Hornsea in the New Year

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Way back when we used to go to Hornsea on New Year's Day. We didn't manage it this year, the weather wasn't good enough to tempt us out of the house, but we did go today. Of course I took a few pictures. I took the one above on Hornsea Mere. I love the way that the pier creates a calm region of water on the right of the picture. This might be a nice metaphor for people in these fractious times.

Idiot ebay buyers

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Here's a model for a business. Search ebay for things which appear to be going cheap. Make a stupidly high bid for the cheap item to try and win it at a knock down price. If you win at a low price, pay it. If you win at a high price, delete your username and walk away.

I've had this happen to me before. Up until now the buyers had the "decency" to come up with an excuse for their stupidly high bid before retracting it. This time they just deleted the user. 

It occurs to me that eBay should probably keep track of the postcodes used by buyers and check for large numbers of accounts being registered/deleted at a particular location. This would seem to be a good use of all this "artificial intelligence" that we are always hearing about

Start a Diary

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We had a lovely Hardware Meetup at c4di today. We were a bit worried about having one so close to Christmas, but in the end enough folks turned up (hi Rob!) to make it more than worth the effort. 

One person that turned up has been making great progress working with his Hull Pixelbot. Each time we get together we solve a few problems, discover a few more and more forwards. Today we were talking about potential dividers. Great run.

As we left I made a strong recommendation to him. Start a diary. He's having lots of great ideas and building things, but having the standard "mad inventor" problem of remembering what he's done, what happened and where he's put the program files. A diary would solve all that.

I suggested that a great Christmas present would be a nice "page a day" diary, which can be used to record ideas and experiments. I keep a diary. If I do something interesting I write down what I did and what happened, along with links to any resources that I used.  Mine is electronic, an ever growing Word document, but I sometimes think a paper one would be nice too. There's something much more "real" about a physical artefact that you update. It's also much easier to work on and add diagrams and other stuff as you go along.  Proper engineers take pride in their log books that they use to record what they did. These are a fantastically useful resource if someone ever asks "Why did you do it that way?" because you can go back to the day that the design decisions were made and explain exactly what drove the decision. 

Writing a diary is also a great way to practice your writing skills, and you might even find that some of your diary entries become blog posts (I've done this before too).