Intro to Hardware – Arduinos and ESP – talk slides
Presented in-person on day 2 of GDG DevFest Brunei 2023
http://blog.thewheatfield.org
Intro to Hardware – Arduinos and ESP – talk slides
Presented in-person on day 2 of GDG DevFest Brunei 2023
Tales from a Remote Worker – talk slides
This was presented on day 1 of GDG DevFest Brunei 2023 which was held remotely (day 2 and 3 will be in fashion hybrid)
September 1st brought a UNN upgrade and now our telcos DST, Imagine and Progresif have updated their home broadband plans. Below is a summary of the changes for each telco and the latest plans
Pick My Provider https://bruneigeekmeet.com/pmp updated to help pick which provider could suit your needs (view old plans here)
Ever since we got the revamp internet plans from DST, Imagine and Progresif (which I call the #BruneiTelcoWars) thanks to the work of UNN there have been several comparisons around and now is my turn with Pick My Provider https://bruneigeekmeet.com/pmp
Features
Most things are there and one current known issue is that Mobile Pay-As-You-Go search does not currently look at the number of days the data is valid: so a search for 1GB can show an addon that is only valid for 1 day. Hope to fix this one day down the road
If you need to book a slot with the Immigration and National Registration Department Headquarters in Jalan Menteri Besar in relation to IC matters there are the following options
The QueUP app only has limited slots when there are actually more slots available that are not listed. So if you end up doing a walk-in they will just book you into a slot
TLDR: Be wary of Baiduri’s new online b.digital banking platform: if you lose access to the mobile app (e.g. phone died / broke / app has issues) you’ll be locked out of your account and the only option is for them to delete your account causing you to lose saved details such as payment accounts and beneficiaries and who knows how long it will take them to get your account in order for you to start being able to make online payments again.
Also it would probably be best to email ebanking@baiduri.com if you want to be alerted of any replies becuase their “email” in the mobile app does not allow attachments and will not send you any notifications
So as of the time of this writing I’ve not be able to make any online payments via Baiduri Bank’s b.digital online banking system for over 2 weeks
Failure #1
It started on 19th June when I opened up the mobile app to see that I was logged out. No bother: tried logging in again and it asked me to go through some extra security checks but on the final step it gives me an error saying that they are currently unable to service my request
Failure #2
Let me try logging in via a web browser and it asked me to enter a soft token from the mobile app which I can’t access because I’ve been logged out of the mobile app which generates the soft token
Failure #3
Called their help line and was told that I was still logged in on my device despite me tell them that I have been logged out and that it asked me to go through some extra checks but still failed to process my request. I believe I asked if there was any other fallback for verification like SMS and seems like there isn’t. They said they could remove my account and I would have to re-register and that would take 2 days. Not having any options, I asked them to proceed with the removal.
Failure #4
The next day I decided to try login again and it seemed that my account was no longer recognized so thought they managed to remove my account early. Managed to re-register and login and have access to my account. Found that my previous payment account details were no longer there. Guess it was tied to the account which they removed and deleted. Tried to make a payment and get an error of having no checking account.
Failure #5
Called into the helpline again and they told me to send an email via the app. The “email” interface is shown below with no ability to send screenshots of the errors or other details. I sent an “email” via the app and waited.
Failure #6
On 28th June after about a week of not hearing anything I tried again and still got errors. This is when I saw that they did actually reply to me 4 days after I wrote in but the only way for me to know about the message is to log into the mobile app to manually check for any new message. I got no emails sent to my email address registered with them: no notifications that they replied. So seems their concept of “email” is a message in the mobile app that you have to manually check every so often in order to see if they actually responded.
Failure #7
So their message suggested that I deregister my device and sign in again. Tried that and I tried to do another payment/transfer and this time I got a different error: “Transaction Initiated” blank screen
Failure #8
Getting really annoyed at this, I decided to write a long message detailing all these issued I’ve had and the inefficiencies of having to manually check messages and after clicking send, it tells me that my session has expired and I’ve lost the entire long message
Failure #9
Got a reply to one of my messages and they were asking me to send an email to ebanking@baiduri.com for further investigation. Why couldn’ they do this in the first place so I could provide all my screenshots in the first place? Why did I have to jump through all these hoops just to get to this email
Failure #10
Got a call from Baiduri asking me try the payment again but told them that I already paid in person due to the failure of their system. Tried to add a beneficiary to aid future fund transfers and yet again another error message
Failure #11
2 days ago I tried to log in again and couldn’t login in on the mobile app or even access the website via a browser
Failure #12
With a VPN I managed to access the website and when trying to get my Soft Token to login, I see a blank section showing me no Soft Token
Failure #13
Tried to make another payment and still getting errors and I haven’t heard back from them with their last words being “We have raised to our IT department for further investigation and we will update you once we receive feedback from them.” at 3:11pm on the 2nd of July.
So it has been 2+ weeks without being able to make an online transfer/payment. My confidence levels in this bank has dwindled and wondering if all banks have these sorts of problems. Either way guess it is time to go around bank shopping and would be curious to hear of any similar stories with other banks
Continuing on from webhooks of the last meetup we covered APIs in this December’s meetup before breaking into chatting about setting up a developer environment after trying to go through setting up GRPC on a XAMPP VM (unsuccessfully 😢)
Presentation notes
As part of the #fixBruneiWebsites movement, we took a look at the Telbru website https://www.telbru.com.bn/ which had some weird horizontal scrolling as I found out and mentioned in this tweet
.owl-wrapper {
 max-width: 100%;
}
Note: I’m using Chrome dev tools as I typically use Chrome but other browser should have similar functionality
BODY
 until the problem stops happeningtestimonial-container
 seems to be the cause of the problemowl-wrapper
 div
 has a width of 3300px
which seems suspicious max-width: 100%
seems to fix the problem max-width: 100%
on the .owl-wrapper
looks to be the solution we want!I believe that should fix the problem! 🚀
Moving on from here, perhaps we could looking a bit more into what is creating this owl-wrapper
in the first place: e.g. is it a library that just needs proper configuration or is there an actual bug in the library. But that would possibly be something for another day!
This month we held the meetup at iCentre thanks to the folks at DARe!
Topic of the month was webhooks with and some interesting links for the night
For the #fixBruneiWebsites session, I took a look at the Telbru website that I mentioned in this tweet having weird horizontal scroll behaviour
That seemed to be fixed with a max-width: 100%
definition. Full write up of investigation and ways to check and fix it to come soon!
We saw a couple of new facings and a couple old ones but it was a great time! On to next month as we finish end off the year! 🚀
Intro slides for the night which include upcoming tech related events happening in Brunei!
Did a Google search for “brunei car prices” which brought up a couple interesting results of actual approved prices for cars
It showed that the most recent one was June 2018 but curious as what is the latest version if any. As the results are coming from www.depd.gov.bn, did a search for “brunei car prices depd” and found the Motor Vehicles page
Which doesn’t seem updated since 2016
As the PDFs show that there were more recent ones they had to be somewhere, so digging we go
More digging around and found the Competition and Consumer Affairs Department page that has the latest list on the right along with other price controlled items such as Cooking Oil and Formulated Powered Milk
There is also the Price Control Goods page which has links to Clay Bricks and Others
And as it turns out it was under “Consumer Affairs” on the Department of Economic Planning and Development home page. In hind site, it makes some sense but isn’t too obvious
So from this I wondered what we could do to learn from this but instead of just complaining, what are the steps we can do to improve this. I have seen a couple websites and in Brunei that don’t seem to emphasise their web presence or just have things set up weirdly and thought it would be great to use these as learning opportunities for the local tech community in general so I’m going try a #fixBruneiWebsites journey
So I hope you come and join me on this #fixBruneiWebsites journey!