Category: Technology

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Day 21 – A small iOS rant

If you know me and my technology preferences, you know that I’m not a fan of iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod, iWatch, iWhateverelse). To add some more heft to my iDismay, last night I found one way that Android devices are definitely superior: The ability to spoof your physical location.

Now why the heck would you want to spoof your physical location? Why would you need to have your device think you’re in a different spot? Why would this even be possible? The long and short of it is easy: Testing apps and fooling apps. Sure, there are other more nefarious reasons, but I’m not interested in those. I’m more interested in making my new life here in China more … easier to transition into.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how I was able to sign-up for YouTube TV and caught the Golden State Warriors basketball game where they beat the Cleveland Cavaliers to win the NBA championship. Whoo hooo! Technology!! (Since then I found out that CCTV5 plays nothing but sports on the cable channels here, but it’s mostly soccer teams I’ve never heard of — or know where they’re from — or professional table tennis. Zzzzz…) Since I have a VPN connection back to the USA, there’s been no trouble accessing the https://tv.youtube.com website and viewing whatever content I wanted to see.  However, for some reason I was not able to view content on my iPad nor Android phone.

So last night I started playing around with my phone. Normally I have my phone’s data connection secured through a VPN tunnel (don’t want people tracking what I’m doing and making it harder for advertisers to target me), so I couldn’t figure out why I kept getting an error saying the YouTube TV app couldn’t load any content especially since the setup on my phone was the same as my laptop. Then it dawned on me: My laptop does not have location services so any website needing my physical location would use an IP address lookup to determine where I am; my phone *always* knows where I am and using the GPS location for that purpose. (If you haven’t guessed by now, whenever you’re on the internet, your physical location is known by the sites and services you’re using. This is yet another reason why connecting via a VPN connection that helps to obfuscate your physical location is a great idea!)

Opening the fake GPS app I have on my phone, I changed my location to somewhere in the USA and then reopened the YouTube TV app. No surprises here, but the TV content was available for streaming! Score!!

My next steps was to try and get a similar type app for my iPad as it has a much larger screen than my phone and would be much better for watching video content. It was then I found out that iOS does not support the ability to spoof your location. Sure, there are a few crappy apps out there, both free and paid, but they do not work as the APIs (application programming interface) does not exist for developers to call and spoof your location. This makes it impossible for app developers to fully test their applications across multiple geographies unless they are physically in those locations. Boo on Apple!

Summarizing this long post, what does it all boil down to? The iPad I have is over 5 years old at this point and it’s no longer receiving iOS updates from Apple, which makes it quite vulnerable to hackers. The iPad is will be sunset and an Android Tablet will likely be purchased once I get my first paycheck.

(Full disclosure: I currently own the following computer technology: 15″ MacBook Pro (roughly 3 years old), Retina iPad (bought in 2012), Nexus 6 (Android Phone), Nexus 6P (primary Android Phone). Soon I’ll have a Windows laptop for work…)
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Day 20 – Getting caught

No, no … Don’t worry, I didn’t get in trouble or anything even close to that concept, but I did get caught in the rain today. The PM team at work wanted to get together for lunch and invited me to join them. We want to a restaurant for a Hunan style lunch of soup broth, toppings, and rice noodles. Gosh it was delicious! So delicious in fact, I forgot to take a picture. 

During the middle of lunch the skies opened up and it poured for a good 30 minutes. Neither me nor my future coworkers had umbrellas so we tried waiting it out. Unfortunately a couple of people had 2pm meetings so we had to brave the rain. It did let up a bit, but it was still heavier than a drizzle. 

About four blocks from home and two blocks away from the restaurant, it started to pour again. Fortunately I was near a subway entrance and hopped inside there full well knowing I could walk underground for a couple blocks and not get completely soaked. By the time I got to the exit and up to ground level, the rain stopped and the remainder of the walk home was relatively dry.

While annoying for not having an umbrella with me in such a downpour, the rain did clear the pollutants out of the air and dropped the humidity levels a bit.

Lunch, besides delicious, introduced a new concept. I’ve seen QR codes on tables here before but did not know why they were there. It turns out if you scan the QR code it will open a web page. On that web page you place — and pay for — your order! There is either a QR code for every seat at each table or one for the entire table. 

Not only does this type of food ordering work great, it removes two potential bottlenecks and issues for restaurants: the waiter and the cashier. You don’t wait for anyone to take your food order nor do you need to flag someone down for the bill or use cash for payment! If your phone has WeChat Wallet or AliPay installed, you’re able to pay through those apps. Perfect! You just need to read enough Chinese to understand what you’re ordering 🙂
Now I need to go get a Chinese phone and number so I can utilize this new found knowledge. It’s a good thing the phones are manufactured in this country as the phones come cheap and off-contract!

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Day 6 – Technology + Golden State Warriors = Awesomesauce!

Another rainy morning which didn’t yield until late afternoon which, once again, hampered plans to explore more of Suzhou. So what’s a guy supposed to do? Figure out how to stream the Golden State Warriors game, of course!

First up, I needed to subscribe to a new VPN as the one I was previously using (TunnelBear) was just not reliable enough here in China, nor would it allow me to stream Netflix on my laptop — I could on my cell phone, sometimes — and I could not get it to work on my five year old iPad. After a bit of research I settled on trying ExpressVPN and, let me tell you, that was a great choice! Not only can I now stream Netflix on my laptop, it works on my iPad *and* you can choose from multiple servers within the United States — meaning you can set your location where you’re supposedly physically located(“spoof”); more on that later as to why you’d want to do that.

Shameless plug: If you’re looking for a VPN solution, use this link to sign up for ExpressVPN so this shameless blogged can get some bones thrown his way! And if you’re trying to understand why you might want to use a VPN when living in a non-censored country, watch this 90 second video.

Before leaving San Francisco, I knew there were a few options for streaming TV over the internet. The obvious provider is Hulu, but for some reason I just don’t like Hulu. There’s no rhyme or reason to that choice, it’s just me being me. SlingTV is the new kid on the block so I figured I’d give them a try. After connecting to my ExpressVPN account, I went through the sign-up process for SlingTV. Well, I *almost* went through the process. Step 3 (of 3) asked for a credit card number to finalize the setup. No problem! I entered my card number and it was rejected. What??? Ok, so let me try that again. Same result.  And a third time with a different card produced the same result. Not sure what the issue was, but right then and there SlingTV lost my business. Time for Plan B, and I don’t mean RU-486.

Since I wanted to stream ESPN for the Warriors game, I had to find a provider that has that channel and preferably one that has ESPN2, ESPNU, and ESPN3 as well so I can watch college football this fall. It didn’t take too long to figure out that YouTube TV has those channels plus MSNBC (Hello, Rachel Maddow!). To make things even better, YouTube TV throws in a free DVR type service (SlingTV charges extra for that) *and* they accepted my credit card. Things were up and running with only a few minutes of the game being missed.

Now why was it a good thing that ExpressVPN allows you to choose certain locations in the USA to spoof your physical location? Well, as it turns out, with YouTube TV you can watch “local” channels — ABC, CBS, NBC — provided you’re “physically” in that market. With ExpressVPN I can set my location to LA, SF, Seattle, NYC …  meaning there’s a good chance I can watch some SF Giants games or Seattle Sounders matches if they’re on one of those channels! Yee haw! SPORTS!

It should be no surprise that today’s word of the day is 技术 (Jìshù), meaning technology.