Tinitell in Canada

Update: Tinitell is ceasing operations. I'm really sad about this because the device is great.

I just wanted to write something up to refer people to when they are thinking about a phone for their kid. I kept an eye on the market for a couple years while kid phones and phone-watches were being developed. When the Tinitell watch was made available in Canada, I bought one for my daughter. http://tinitell.com/

It is a great device. It is a bit bulkier than ideal, but it keeps things really simple to be as easy, small, and light as possible. The face of the watch consists of a single big button. Pressing this cycles through 10 LED lights around the circle (with custom audio prompts) to choose the number to call. So the first press would light up the first LED and play a sound clip of me saying "Awesome Dad!", the second would play mom's LED and play her recording, etc. These are recorded on a parent's smartphone and synced with the watch. There are volume control buttons on the side of the watch.

There is a GPS in the watch. The app on the parent's phone can request the location of the watch on demand. Inbound calls to the watch can be restricted to the same numbers (up to 10) that are programmed for outbound calls. There is no display, no keyboard, and no texting. Inbound texts go to the app on the parents phone instead which is handy to receive notifications about account balances, etc. The watch can speak the time (rounded to the nearest 5 minutes) when you hold one of the volume buttons.

In Canada, your best bet for service is a pay-as-you-go plan with Petro Canada Mobile. They use the Rogers network (the only one compatible with the 2G GSM supported by the watch) and offer pay-as-you-go data that is as cheap as it gets which is good for the small amount of data used when you request the watch location. With my daughter's minimal usage pattern of a call now and then to let me know she's going to someone's house after school, etc., $50 will last 6 months.

I pay attention to privacy and data policies (especially for my daughter) and was pleased to see that the Tinitell recently came out tops on a test of the data security of kids phones. http://tinitell.com/blog/safe-phone-for-kids/

Best of all: No apps to distract or harm and arguments for a smartphone have been defanged now that safety/calling levers don't apply.

If you have any questions, let me know!

Retropie ROMs not loading

If you have used a Mac to transfer ROMs to Retropie via Samba (SMB), note that it will create a metadata file prefixed with "._" for each file you copy. These show up first alphabetically in Retropie and trying to play them results in them failing to load.

They can be deleted by enabling SSH on the Retropie and removing them via the command line. Likewise, enabling SSH and copying them, using SFTP should keep the ._ files from appearing in the first place.

CouchDB auto-generate UUID _id attributes with POST

I was trying to PUT a new document in CouchDB and have the database assign a UUID.

It turns out that if you make a POST request instead of a PUT, and explicitly include the correct Content-Type header, CouchDB will generate the UUID for you.

For example, using cURL:

curl -X POST http://user:password@example.com:5984/exampledb/ \

     -H "Content-Type: application/json" \

     -d '{"amos": true}'

Windows with Bitlocker powers off when booting or at password prompt

A while back I installed Windows 10 Pro and set up bitlocker (without TPM hardware) so it asked for a password during boot. Things seemed fine at first but for some reason the system started spontaneously powering off during the boot at what seemed to be random intervals. Sometimes I wouldn't even make it as far as the bitlocker password prompt. Sometimes I might even get my passphrase in quickly and everything would boot up normally. But most of the time I would see the prompt and only get a few characters in before it powered off.

After hunting around, I found this solution in this thread. Open up command prompt window as administrator and type in this command:



bcdedit /set {bootmgr} bootshutdowndisabled 1

This did the trick.Then the recent Windows 10 Creator edition update was applied, things were fine for a week or two, and then it started happening again. So I had to type that command in again. Fingers crossed...

Ubuntu 16.04 upgrade broken networking

I just upgraded an Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine (running on VMWare) to 16.04 using do-release-upgrade on the command line. It isn't the first time I have done this with similar VMs running 14.04 so I was not expecting problems.

All appeared to go well until after the reboot when I could no longer SSH into the system. Thanks to this answer on Ask Ubuntu I discovered that for some reason Ubuntu now names their ethernet interfaces differently but didn't change the eth0 device configured statically in my /etc/networking/interfaces to the new device ens32 name.

I searched the Ubuntu bug tracker and found this bug that pretty much matches but claims to have fixed this back in March.

Tinitell tools

If you need to open up a Tinitell kids phone watch (http://tinitell.com) and take it apart, you will need Torx T5 and Phillips 000 or 00 screwdriver bits. Take care with the tiny speaker wires inside.