Category: Annoyances

My on-going Baiduri bank b.digital online banking problems

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

The Details

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

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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.

Summary

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

iOS 8 Shows Android How it’s Done

So iOS 8 has been released and it shows Android how to do things properly in terms of advanced notifications as well as the sharing menu

Advanced Notifications

iOS 8 advanced notifications allow you to respond right in the notification itselfiOS 8 advanced notifications

On Android you may some extra actions (there was none in the messaging app a.k.a Hangouts), but taking a reply action on an email bumps you into the Gmail app itself to reply
Android advanced notification
Android advanced notification reply

Sharing

Android has had sharing capabilities for ages (possibly since the first public Android release) however it is not consistent and seems to exists in at least 4 different variations.

1) Sharing in the Android Photos app (1st party application from Google): grid of large icons
Android sharing Photos

2) Android sharing in Skitch (3rd party application): a quick touch to share with the last application and going to the “See all” option expands the list and adds extra items to the bottom of an existing list

Android sharing Skitch

3) Android sharing in QuickPic (3rd party app). Selecting “More…” shows a whole new menu that has no correlation with the initial shortcut share menu
Android sharing QuickPic

4) Android sharing in Chrome (1st party app from Google): another 1 touch quick share with last app but otherwise a full alphabetical list of share intents.

Android sharing Chrome

iOS 8 sharing: consistent look and ability to order sharing activities (order seems different based on app, i.e. Safari vs Photos, but at least the order is configurable)
iOS 8 advanced sharing

iOS 8 advanced sharing ordering

As an Android fan, it really bugs me that Android has had a lot of functionality but never seem to fully polish things up and strengthens the argument where Apple doesn’t necessarily innovate with new features but implement features in more usable forms.

Google Support: Successfully Shipped! Finally…

After the last post, I gave Google yet another call and found out that there have been similar issues: getting a confirmation on the website but no emails nor courier. They set things up yet again and thankfully the courier finally came to pick up the goods on Tuesday (they came on Monday but we were out for a company lunch, and didn’t even ring my number).

So after 3 weeks, 2 emails and about 5 calls, I have finally managed to get a replacement Nexus 4 and returned my old one. That totally felt much harder than it sounds (more reason to buy from physical brick and mortar stores?)

P.S. Recorded the hold music and found out that it is “The Lighthouse and The Whaler-Untitled (This Is an Adventure)” – listen on YouTube thanks to Shazam (at first I though it couldn’t find it due to the name having “Untitled” in the name…

 

 

Google Support: Progress but still not at home base yet

Nexus4replacement

So after the last post, I followed up with an email to Google Support and this time there was a response within 30 minutes, with the RMA details as below (full email). Hurrah!

Nexus4SupportEmail3

2 days later I got my replacement device. Double hurrah! Backed up and restored data to the new device and on to returning the old device

Nexus4SupportEmail3ReturnDetails

Nexus4Collection

Packing the device on Friday 29th and re-reading these directions, I realised that I didn’t get any confirmation email nor shipping labels. Cue a another call to Google support and Google Support lady (first one I’ve spoke to, previous 2/3 calls have all been guys) says that they don’t email shipping labels to Australia and that the courier man should have it.

Courier man never came yesterday, so retried requesting another return request today and got a “Collection for given RMA Number has already been requested”. So yet another Google Support call….

Nexus4SupportCollectionRequest

Searching for “Google Support”… still returning 0 results

Nexus4SupportEmail2After my last post on Google’s Support, I gave Google another call and thankfully William managed to further process my support ticket: he said that it was lodged and escalated but there wasn’t any updates on it.

He asked me to check my Google wallet billing and shipping address and after some verification with him, that it would be processed accordingly. He was saying something along the lines that it takes 2 days for the system to get updated after changing my billing/shipping address and it would then be processed. But alas still nothing.

Is this what customer support is meant to be? The customer having to manually follow up on things only to get things done?

Google Support. Where are you?

So my Nexus 4 started acting up 2 weeks ago: the left section of the screen doesn’t respond to touch: essentially anything between the vertical red and blue lines is non-responsive to touch. Watch the video to see it in action.

Screentouches

So I called Google and they advised to do a factory reset, which I did 8 days ago, and proceeded to reply the email I got for my case (which I still have no reply as of today).

Google Case Email

So I gave them a call the following day, which they told me that my device is still under warranty and that their “Termination Team” would get back to me. It’s been a full week since I called them and they have yet to get back to me. 

Call to Google

A twisted idea that came to mind, is that the longer they make me wait, the more chances I have for accidentally dropping my phone and getting it cracked or something that puts it out of warranty, and thus my wanting to document my perfectly fine looking phone (i.e. not physically damaged) just in case they were to try pull this stunt if I do accidentally drop it (I am being too paranoid aren’t I?).

But anyway, Google support, where art thou? Can you please terminate me/my Nexus 4 in a good way?

 

P.S. If Google support is having manpower issues, I wouldn’t mind helping them out to ensure customers aren’t getting left waiting for a week without a response.

Sublime Text: “ImportError: No module named sublimeplugin” i.e. bad plugin documentation

TLDR: Sublime Text’s plugin Examples page is out of date as of 30th May 2014. Look at “How to Create a Sublime Text 2 Plugin” for proper guidance.

For the popularity that Sublime Text gets, it seems that their plugin documentation has been left by the wayside

Their Plugin Examples page is out of date showing an example for SublimeText 1. I found that out when creating the plugin only to see the following error message in the Sublime Text console (Ctrl+~ in Windows)

ImportError: No module named sublimeplugin

Searching for this error I landed on this forum post which the link to “How to Create a Sublime Text 2 Plugin” from Tuts+ which seems to work.

There seems to be a change from camelCase to snake_case for functions thus all the instructions on the plugin page are incorrect.

Links API References: choose appropriate link for Sublime Text version

Android Still has Low Phone Storage Space Problem

A couple years back I though that Android had a big problem with Low Available Phone Storage Space for apps and after reading Ausdroid’s recent review of the Medion 4, it seems that this is still an on-going issue.

The device in question is the Medion 4 which is advertised with “4GB Memory” on Aldi’s site, but according to AusDroid, there is only 500MB allocated for apps (the rest of the space can still be used to store photos/files but not apps without some rooting and hacking).

Filesystem             Size   Used   Free   Blksize
/data                  503M   151M   351M   4096

My 16GB Nexus 4 has 12.9GB allocated to the /data partition which is a bit less than 13.6GB of a 16GB iPhone 4 (can’t seem to find a definitive answer for the iPhone 5) but is still a majority of its storage unlike the Medion 4. The Samsung Galaxy S4 has a separate issue which is not exactly the same but gives the same results to the end user: a false sense of storage space (only 8.8GB free from the 16GB model due to Samsung’s customization of Android with its own skin & apps). While it’s not as bad as the Microsoft’s Surface RT storage debacle (15GB free in a 32GB Surface RT, 28GB free in a 64GB Surface Pro. Source: Microsoft’s Surface Disk Page FAQ), both of these situations don’t give me much confidence when recommending non-Nexus Android devices with X GB of storage.

At least if it is just Android customization (ala Samsung), flashing a custom ROM should be able to solve the problem. I’m not sure if the partitioning (ala the Medion 4) can be solved using a custom ROM, but even if it does, you will need to find a ROM that supports your device: so you hope that your devices isn’t a weird obscure one.

So when you buy an Android device, you can’t say for certain that you have a majority of the advertised storage available for apps. I can only assume that Nexus devices would give you the best experience in terms of not being ‘cheated’ for storage space, but I guess this gives more credence to the fact that Google has lost control of Android and that some manufacturers are still giving Android a bad name.

What happened to the WordPress I used to know?

So it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged and this is the first time I’m using the new snazzy WordPress posting process on the website which seems to have been Tumblr-ised

Tumblr’s posting pageImage

WordPress.com’s posting pageImage

But aside from that I started composing a new post and did a preview which didn’t look right at all

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I first thought the preview was broken due to some weird HTML, so I looked for the “View source/HTML” option and I couldn’t find it!

Clicked the help and it stated that I could turn it off in my “Your Profile” submenu.

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Guess what? I couldn’t find this “Your Profile” submenu

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Thought the logical place it would be is in “Personal Settings” or editing my profile but still not there. Clicking the edit link on the preview window brought me back to the new posting page with my full post, and clicking preview still did nothing. It was still loading an old version of the post.

Luckily I tried editing the post via the admin interface and was greeted with the editor I was familiar with and provided the functionality that I love.

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This hits another annoyance that I have with so called “upgrades” that remove features. This things will hopefully get logged on #upgradeIsADowngrade