Neil Turner, Author at Neil Turner's Blog

Some 2029 election predictions

July 7, 2024 by Neil Turner

An AI-generated image of a fortune teller looking into a crystal ball which says 2029

Okay, so I appreciate that we’ve only just got the 2024 general election out of the way. It’s likely that the next general election will be in 2029, and so I’m going to make some predictions. Mainly because it’ll be interesting to look back on them in five years time, to see if I was right. So, here’s what I predict:

The Tories won’t win a majority

I suspect that the Conservative party will be out of power for at least the next two parliamentary terms, and so will lose the next election in 2029. We know that Rishi Sunak will step aside as leader, once a successor is found, and so there will be a leadership election soon. We also know that, to be eligible to stand, you have to be an elected MP – and there aren’t many left now. Penny Mordaunt, for example, was seen as a potential candidate, but she lost her seat. Jeremy Hunt has also ruled himself out, despite having narrowly retained his seat in the House of Commons. He has stood twice before for leader and lost both times.

The names that are being discussed are:

Suella Braverman
Priti Patel
Kemi Badenoch
James Cleverly
Robert Jenrick
Victoria Atkins

As we saw last time, the Conservative party membership, when faced with a choice between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, went for Truss and triggered the Truss-Kwarteng Budget Crisis. Rishi was then brought in as leader after the economy crashed and Truss was forced out. I mention this, because Rishi was arguably the better choice (though not much better) and yet the mostly white, mostly older party membership voted for Truss. This wouldn’t be good news for Patel, Braverman and Badenoch.

The 1922 Committee

There’s also the issue of the rules of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs. I don’t have a better source other than this thread on Bluesky, but to be a candidate in a Conservative Party leadership contest, you need the support of 100 MPs. This is regardless of how many Conservatives MPs there are – which is currently 121. Therefore, any potential candidates are going to have to get the support of more than 80% of sitting MPs, and MPs will be asked to back multiple candidates – assuming that’s even allowed. Oh, and once a leader is elected, if 15% of sitting MPs send a letter to the chair of the 1922 Committee, a vote of no confidence can be instigated. That’s only 19 MPs in the current Parliament, as opposed to over 60 before.

Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if the 1922 Committee and/or the Conservative Party itself changes its constitution, to adapt to having a historically low number of MPs.

After the 2029 election, there will potentially be a new crop of MPs who have better leadership qualities, and who can’t as easily be blamed for the mess that the Tories have made until now.

Labour will win again in 2029, but with a smaller majority

Labour have a lot of work to do. Even though yesterday was a Saturday, the first cabinet meeting took place, as a sign that the new government wants to hit the ground running. Of course, it could have been mostly performative, but most government roles have already been filled.

Interestingly, there’s a couple of appointments to ministerial roles outside of the House of Commons:

James Timpson, boss of the Timpsons business, is Minister for Prisons, Parole and Probation. Timpsons employs many ex-prisoners to help their rehabilitation and reduce re-offending
Sir Patrick Vallance is the new Science Minister – you may remember him as Britain’s chief medical officer during the Covid pandemic and his regular appearances alongside Prof Sir Chris Whitty.

I’m guessing both will need to be appointed as members of the House of Lords, but it’s refreshing to see people with relevant knowledge and experience being appointed to suitable roles. It gives me hope that this will be a government that actually gets things done, and I hope that, by 2029, they’ll have done enough to warrant re-election.

Not all of Reform’s MPs will last

I suspect that Nigel Farage is the dog that caught the car. He’s succeeded at being elected as an MP on his eighth attempt, but when faced with the day-to-day reality of being an MP of a small party, I suspect he’ll get bored soon enough and quit, triggering a by-election. Depending on who wins the Tory leadership contest, they may end up joining the Conservative party, although that will prove controversial and may see others quit in protest.

The same may happen with the handful of independents who were elected; either they’ll quit, or join one of the major parties.

There may be another coalition government

If Labour doesn’t do so well next time and we end up with a hung parliament, then I can see Labour potentially going into coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The SNP and/or Green Party may join too, depending on how many MPs they have and how many are needed to get a majority. Turnout was low this time and Labour managed to get elected with a thumping majority despite winning fewer votes overall than in 2019. So, Labour will need to get more people out to vote for them next time, rather than rely on a combination of apathy and split votes among the opposition.

Before the election, Labour talked about automatic voter registration, which would ensure many more people are registered to vote. Whilst they haven’t committed themselves to completely abolishing voter ID (which stopped 14,000 people from voting in 2023’s local council elections), there are likely to be changes to what ID will be accepted. I’m against voter ID personally – it tries to fix a practically non-existent problem – but accepting a wider variety of ID would be an improvement. The Electoral Reform Society shows an example of two almost identical Oyster cards, one issued to a young person and one to someone over 60, but only the latter is accepted under the current rules.

I think that’ll do for predictions. They say that a week is a long time in politics, so five years is almost an epoch.

A General Election debrief

July 5, 2024 by Neil Turner

An AI-generated illustration of an elephant dressed as a politician standing in front of a podium, surrounded by supporters.

So, it’s been around 13 hours since the polls closed last night, and we have a new Prime Minister in Sir Keir Starmer. Obviously, as a Labour Party member, I’m delighted that Labour have won the election, and with a sizeable majority too.

This is a quick, stream-of-consciousness blog post reacting to the results, and what I think it means for each party. I’ll be referring to these statistics from the BBC throughout.

Labour

Obviously this is, for the most part, a fantastic result for Labour. Having had a dire outcome in the last General Election in 2019, to come back and win a sizeable majority of seats is an impressive turnaround.

It’s not a perfect result; some polls in the run-up to the election suggested an even bigger win, and Labour has only gained 1.6% of the total votes compared to last time. And some seats have been lost, notably two in Leicester and one in the new Batley and Dewsbury constituency (which covers part of the old constituency of Batley and Spen where Jo Cox was assassinated in 2016). These both have large Muslim populations who have not approved of Labour’s stance in relation to the war in Gaza.

The limited swing in the popular vote suggests that people have not voted enthusiastically for Labour, but are voting against the Conservatives. Whilst it could be 2029 before we have another election, Labour may need to do more to convince people to stick with them next time. I believe Labour’s strategy has deliberately been vague and uncontroversial to get elected, and marks a break from the Jeremy Corbyn era (who incidentally retained his seat as an independent candidate). Now that they’re in power, with a healthy majority, I hope that they will pursue a more progressive agenda. Labour could definitely do more to reward those on the left who have backed them, especially around LGBTQ+ issues. Kier Starmer wrote an op-ed piece for Attitude magazine, to which its editor has had to add clarification based on Starmer’s comments about Trans* people in recent weeks.

Conservatives

The Tories have taken a deserved battering. After winning a majority last time, we’ve had two changes of Prime Minister, and a government that has looked increasingly out of ideas. Big issues like the state of the NHS, failing school buildings, universities approaching bankruptcy, and thousands of refugees fleeing conflict risking their lives on small boats in the English Channel, have not been tackled. Instead, we’ve had ‘culture wars’ and inaction.

No wonder this became the worst defeat in the party’s history for what it calls itself ‘the natural party of government‘. It wasn’t as bad as some polls suggested – one had the Tories in third place behind the Liberal Democrats. But they have less than 1/5th of the seats in the Commons now, with a net loss of 250 – more than two-thirds of the seats they were defending. And whilst Rishi Sunak retained his seat, many of his government colleagues did not – nor did previous Prime Minister Liz Truss. It’s also notable that Wales now has no Tory MPs anymore.

Liberal Democrats

As mentioned, some pre-election polls predicted that the LibDems would win more seats than the Tories, making them the official opposition. It would be very funny if that had happened, with both the government and main opposition formed of centre-left parties. This didn’t come to pass – the Tories didn’t quite as terribly – but with 71 seats, the LibDems have more than they did in 2010 when they entered a coalition with the Tories.

Whilst Ed Davey has some skeletons in his closet from his time as a minister with responsibility for the Post Office during the Horizon scandal, he ran an entertaining and well-targeted campaign. His various stunts brightened up the pre-election period, and by focussing their campaign on a number of core target seats, they’ve pulled off a great result.

Reform UK

Urgh. If I have to say the phrase ‘The Right Honourable Nigel Farage MP’, it’ll be through gritted teeth. On his eighth attempt, he has finally become an MP, representing Clacton-on-sea in Essex. Reform’s popularity surged throughout the pre-election period, and even last night’s exit poll predicted that they would win 17 seats. Despite more than 4 million people voting for them (urgh again), they only picked up 4 seats – three of which are seaside constituencies: the aforementioned Clacton, along with Great Yarmouth and Boston & Skegness.

If we had some form of proportional representation, then Reform would have won more seats than the LibDems and become the third-largest party. As it is, by fielding a candidate in just about every constituency, arguably they spread themselves too thinly. At best, they split the right-wing vote and helped Labour into power.

Green Party/ies

The Green Party of England and Wales have held a single seat in Brighton for a few years, but never managed to capitalise on this elsewhere. Until now, having won 4 MPs this time, and almost 2 million votes. That puts them on a par with Reform, so, theoretically they should receive the same amount of airtime. This is a really good result for them.

Workers Party GB

George Galloway’s latest vehicle has run into a siding, again. Having won a by-election in Rochdale just four months ago, Galloway managed to lose his seat, and none of their other candidates did any better. Nationally, they picked up over 200,000 votes, which is more than Plaid Cymru achieved in Wales. No doubt Galloway will pop up again in another constituency by-election in time.

A new Prime Minister

So, we have our sixth Prime Minister since our eight-year-old was born in 2015. I’m hoping for a period of relative stability – for context, I was 32 when my sixth Prime Minister, Theresa May, took up the post in 2016. Keir Starmer has promised ‘change’ – let’s hope it’ll be effective change for the better.

As for the rest of the world? I hope that Britain’s ability to move on from having a right-wing populist government will give some hope to those in the USA and France, who have imminent elections.

It’s polling day!

July 4, 2024 by Neil Turner

A photo of a sign saying 'Polling Station' on the side of a building

Today’s the day when you can vote in the UK’s General Election (assuming you haven’t already voted by post). The polling stations opened at 7am, and you have until 10pm to get out there and vote.

If you’re not sure where your polling station is, use WhereDoIVote.co.uk – just pop your postcode in. Similarly, WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk will tell you who will be on your ballot paper, and (most likely) some more information about the candidates and what they stand for.

You don’t need to take your polling card with you, but you must bring some photo ID with you. The Electoral Commission has an extensive list of what forms of ID are accepted, but the main ones include your passport and driving licence.

I’ll be off to vote in person this morning. Tomorrow, I’ll try to find the time to write about the result, once we have a picture of which party (or coalition of parties) is likely to be in government. I may or may not stay up for the exit polls tonight.

Phomemo D30 Bluetooth Label Printer review

July 3, 2024 by Neil Turner

A photo of a Phomemo D30 Bluetooth Label Printer

We’ve had this little Phomemo D30 Bluetooth label printer (sponsored link) for about 3 1/2 years now, and it’s a fab little gizmo.

It lets you quickly print labels from your phone, with text or emojis, using the Print Master app. It’s quick, as it uses thermal printing in the same way that receipts are printed in shops. The label printer itself is also quite compact – about the same height and width as a smartphone, but about twice the thickness. It comes with a built-in rechargeable battery, and a micro-USB port for charging. There’s a variety of colours to choose from – we have a ‘green’ one that’s more turquoise, but they come in pink, purple, grey and a cheaper all-white model.

The Print Master app is relatively easy to use. You select the size of label to match, type what you want and add any emojis. There are also templates that you can use, and a variety of fonts. When you’re ready to print, you can select the number of copies, and it’ll pop out of your printer in a couple of seconds.

We’ve used our label printer extensively since we bought it. It was especially useful in our new kitchen as it meant that we could label boxes of things in the cupboards. We also use it on a regular basis to label leftovers before they go in the freezer. It’s easier and neater than writing labels by hand.

Madam Misfit

July 1, 2024 by Neil Turner

I’m going to talk about one of my favourite artists of the moment: Madam Misfit. She’s been at the past three Sci-Fi Weekenders and is always popular with the crowd (although we missed her this time as she was on really late). Her first appearance saw the smaller venue (‘The Spaceport’) filled to bursting, and so she’s rightly been on the main stage for her two most recent events.

I first found out about Madam Misfit through her collaborations with Professor Elemental (who we have also seen numerous times). Her music sits between Electro Swing and Chap Hop, combining singing and rap elements in songs that are very easy to dance to. As well as Sci-Fi Weekender, you can often find her at Steampunk gatherings, and co-hosting her Carnival of Chaos, a variety show.

Most of her music is on Spotify, but there’s also a few singles that are exclusive to Bandcamp, including her latest, Power Up. Also, if you want her song ‘Crap Romance’ (a parody of the Lady Gaga song), then you’ll need to buy her first album, The Elixir of Swing, on audio CD. Some of my favourite songs of hers are her cover of the Inspector Gadget theme tune, and the theme tune to The Wombles where Misfit plays the oboe.

Like many independent artists, you can also support her on Patreon – her third album should be coming out soon.

A temperature-controlled fan using Generic Thermostat in Home Assistant

July 3, 2024June 29, 2024 by Neil Turner

A screenshot of the description of the generic thermostat integration in Home Assistant

So earlier this month, in my review of the ThermoPro Bluetooth Thermometer, I mentioned some ‘additional functionality’ in Home Assistant that I would write about. Well, later is now, and I’m going to talk about how I have a temperature-controlled fan in our bedroom, powered by Home Assistant and its Generic Thermostat integration.

Generic Thermostat is one of the older Home Assistant integrations, having been around for several years. It allows you to take any temperature sensor, and any smart switch, and automatically turn the switch on and off in response to temperature fluctuations. In essence, Home Assistant itself provides the thermostat functionality.

The switch should power something that can either heat up or cool down a space – for example, a plug-in heater, or an air-conditioning unit. In my case, I’ve hooked it up to a standard pedestal fan, and used a smart socket to turn the fan on or off at the plug.

Enabling the integration

Note: within days of publishing this blog post, Home Assistant 2024.7.1 was released, which allows you to configure the Generic Thermostat through the Lovelace UI, so you don’t need to add the YAML code anymore.

I mentioned that it’s an old integration, and sadly it’s not one that has been updated much since it was implemented. This means that you can’t add it using the Home Assistant interface (Lovelace), and instead you’ll need to add it to your configuration.yaml file.

Here’s mine:

# Generic thermostat
climate:
  - platform: generic_thermostat
    name: Bedroom thermostat
    heater: switch.bedroom_fan_socket
    target_sensor: sensor.tp357s_55ab_temperature
    min_temp: 15
    max_temp: 30
    ac_mode: true
    target_temp: 19
    cold_tolerance: 0.5
    hot_tolerance: 0.5
    min_cycle_duration:
      minutes: 20
    away_temp: 19
    precision: 0.1

Here’s what each variable refers to:

Platform specifies the integration, and the Name is the friendly name of the device.
Heater is the name of the entity that controls the smart socket that the fan is attached to.
Target_sensor is the name of the thermostat entity that provides the temperature.
Min_temp and Max_temp set the minimum and maximum temperatures that you’ll see on the Climate card in Lovelace – I’ve set these to 15°C and 30°C respectively.
AC_mode is set to ‘true’ because we’re using a device that’s supposed to cool down the room. If this were a heater, I would leave this line out.
Target_temp is the temperature that I want the thermostat to achieve, which is 19°C.
Cold_tolerance and Hot_tolerance mean that Home Assistant will only turn on the fan when the room reaches 19.5°C, and will only turn it off when it reaches 18.5°C.
Min_cycle_duration means that if Home Assistant turns the fan on, it should stay on for at least 20 minutes, and vice-versa, so it’s not constantly cycling on and off.
Precision is how much precision I want when setting the temperature; at 0.1, this means I can set it to 1/10th a degree.

Once you’ve added or amended the settings for your thermostat, you’ll need restart Home Assistant.

How it works in practice

So, once set up, if the temperature in our bedroom reaches 19.5°C, the fan will come on. It’ll then stay on until the room reaches 18.5°C, or 20 minutes, whichever happens first.

You can also control the thermostat like you would with, say, a Nest thermostat through Home Assistant. It will create an entity which you can add a card for on your dashboard. So, although you may have set a target temperature in the initial configuration, you can change this without editing your configuration file. However, if you re-start Home Assistant, it may forget this.

If you also use Google Assistant or Alexa, then you can also make them see and interact with your generic thermostat, if you have integrated these with Home Assistant.

Whilst I use a fan and a smart switch, if you have an air conditioning unit with an RF control, you could use an RF bridge to allow General Thermostat to control it.

Fans vs air conditioning

If you do use a fan with Generic Thermostat, you’ll notice that your fan may stay on for a long time. That’s because fans don’t actually cool the air; they move air around which helps sweat evaporate more quickly. That makes you cooler, but not the air around you. It’s a bit like a hot day at the seaside, where the breeze takes the edge off the heat.

Air conditioning systems actually cool the air down, but are much more expensive and need an outlet for the hot air to be pumped out. Most British homes don’t have air conditioning, including ours – most of the year, it’s too cold, and our houses are designed to retain heat.

Playlist of the month: Appalling Cheese

June 27, 2024 by Neil Turner

A screenshot of my appalling cheese playlist on Spotify

Last month’s playlist was a Eurovision cheese fest, and this month I’m looking at the worst kind of cheese. The horribly sweet, overpowering kind, in a playlist I’ve called ‘Appalling Cheese’. It’s actually one I’ve been developing over time, although thankfully I’m limiting it to just 8 songs this month. Here’s a link to it on Spotify.

‘Macahula Dance’ – Dr Macdoo. This is supposed to be Scottish-inspired Europop, except that the man behind Dr Macdoo is actually Danish. I’ve included this rather than his other guise, Dr Bombay, where he puts on a stereotypical Indian accent. Because as he’s a white person, it’s textbook cultural appropriation and I don’t want to encourage that.
‘Chacarron’ – El Chombo. Allegedly the nonsensical vocals on this track were a placeholder to be used during production, but it was released anyway, probably as a joke.
‘No Way No Way’ – Vanilla. This is another song with an urban legend attached, in that its producers deliberately set out to release the worse song possible as a bet.
‘Cheeky Song’ – Cheeky Girls. Ah, the Cheeky Girls. They found fame on the show Popstars: The Rivals and were picked up by a record label keen to capitalise on their viral notoriety. Said record label went bust a couple of years later, but they’re still going.
‘Them Girls Them Girls’ – Zig and Zag. Zig and Zag are still a thing, apparently, despite this song having been released around 30 years ago when they were on The Big Breakfast. Its similarity to ‘I Like To Move It’ by Reel 2 Real (made famous in the film Madagascar) is no accident as both were produced by Erick Morillo, although this is significantly more excruciating to listen to. 10 year old me bought this on cassette; 40 year old me knows better.
‘Fast Food Song’ – Fast Food Rockers. Take a typical campfire song (McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hat), give it a kiddy pop beat, and then add some sexually suggestive lyrics for the dads, and you have this hot mess.
‘Ding Dong Song’ – Günther. Speaking of sexually suggestive, this is another painful piece of Europop by Swedish act Günther.
‘Mickey’ – Lolly. Toni Basil’s song was just fine as it was. This cover didn’t need to exist. I wish it didn’t

That’ll do for this month. And also, I’m sorry.

Blocking AI crawlers

June 25, 2024 by Neil Turner

An AI generated image of a robot ant and a stop sign

I’ve recently updated my robots.txt file to block crawler bots used to train AI systems. It uses a master list from here, which I found thanks to Kevin. The idea is that I am asking for my content not to be used to train large language models such as ChatGPT.

I don’t mind my content being re-used – all of my blog posts carry a Creative Commons license, after all. But it’s the Attribution, Share Alike license, and this is important to note. If an AI was to generate a derivative work based on one of my blog posts, then to comply with the license, it must:

Include an attribution or citation, stating that I wrote it.
Ensure that the derivative work is also made available under the same license.

AI models don’t do really this – at least not at present. Any text is just hoovered up and combined with all the billions of other sources. Until such a time that these AI models can respect the terms of the license that my content is published under, they’ll be told to go away in the robots.txt file.

I haven’t yet gone as far as blocking these bots entirely. After all, robots.txt is essentially asking nicely; it’s not enforcement, and many bots ignore it. I used to use a WordPress plugin called Bad Behavior to block such bots, but it seems to have been abandoned.

Incidentally, my robots.txt file isn’t a flat file – I’m using the DB robots.txt WordPress plugin to generate it dynamically. This is why it has many other lines in it, instructing other crawlers about what they can and can’t access.

Sonoff Wi-Fi RF Bridge review

June 23, 2024 by Neil Turner

I’ve been thinking about my doorbell, and knowing when someone rings it. Obviously it chimes when I’m at home, but I was hoping that with this Sonoff Wi-Fi RF Bridge, I can get notifications on my phone and a log of when people call when I’m out.

We don’t have a smart doorbell, like Ring for example. Ours is a Koopower Wireless Doorbell that I was sent to review six years ago. The Koopower doorbell doesn’t need a battery – the act of pressing the button generates sufficient power to send a RF signal to the receivers.

What I was hoping with this Sonoff RF bridge is that it could also listen out for doorbell pushes, and send me a notification. I could also integrate it into Home Assistant, which could handle logging. As you can probably tell from how I have written this blog post so far, I haven’t been able to achieve this.

Setting up

The Sonoff RF bridge is pretty small – about 2 inches (5 cm) square. In the box is the bridge, a quick start guide and, erm, well, that’s it. You need to provide your own micro-USB cable and a power source capable of 5 volts and 1 amp – so most phone chargers, or even many batteries. The bridge just has two LEDs – a blue one indicating the Wi-Fi status, and a red one the RF status. The only other thing of note on the bridge is a hole for poking a paper-clip in to reset it – there’s no other buttons.

Once you have hooked it up to a suitable power source, you can use the eWeLink app to set it up. This allows you to connect the bridge to your home Wi-Fi network, and pair RF devices.

Pairing devices

In the eWeLink app, you put the RF bridge into pairing mode, and then have 60 seconds to perform an action on your RF device. When it detects a signal, it’ll save the codes transmitted using RF, and will give you a button in the app. By pressing that button in the app, the RF bridge will mimic the action on your remote. So, you can ‘teach’ your bridge to turn an air conditioning unit on and off, rather than using its remote.

The fun comes when you link your RF bridge to a smart home ecosystem, like Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa or Home Assistant. Your bridge will appear as a device, and so you can use your voice to control appliances that are not ‘smart’ and are not on your home network.

That’s the theory anyway

As I write this, I haven’t been able to get my RF bridge to detect my doorbell, even though they both use the same 433.9 MHz frequency band. Even with the doorbell receivers switched off, and me holding the RF bridge next to the doorbell (did I mention you could run it from a battery?), it doesn’t detect a signal.

Now, to be fair, there’s no mention of compatibility with wireless doorbells in Sonoff’s marketing. Indeed, pairing RF devices can be hit-and-miss; you won’t, for example, be able to use an RF bridge to unlock your car, as the codes are changed each time you lock and unlock your car. Trust me, this is a good thing; otherwise, devices like these could be used to break into people’s cars.

If you have RF remotes, then this should work; it should also work with RF window opening detectors, alarms and curtain controls. Note, however, most remote controls use infrared, rather than RF – if your remote requires you to point it directly at the device, then it’s probably infrared, not RF.

RF bridge Home Assistant integration

I mentioned that you can get the Sonoff RF Bridge to appear in Home Assistant. There isn’t an official integration, but there are several ways you can achieve this:

Flash it with custom firmware from ESPHome or Tasmota
A custom integration available in HACS
An addon which uses Home Assistant’s API

My initial searches only led me to option 1, and I didn’t fancy taking apart my brand new device to install custom firmware on it. Thankfully, there’s a Sonoff integration in HACS which allows you to log into your eWeLink account, and seems to work well. The addon is something I only found whilst writing this blog post, and it looks like this is actually the official way of integrating eWeLink with Home Assistant as it’s in the same GitHub account. You can use a Docker image instead if you’re running Home Assistant Container.

The alternatives

It’s possible that I have a dud unit, and so I have ordered a different model from AliExpress which uses Tuya. At the time of writing, this cost less than £1, which is clearly some kind of introductory offer as it’s normally £17. This Tuya model also supports infrared, and the 315 MHz RF band. I’ll let you know how I get on with it, when it arrives in a few days.

There’s also the option of building your own. The main components inside the bridge are a standard ESP8285 chip for Wifi and Bluetooth, and a EFM8BB1 chip for RF. You can therefore buy these yourself, solder them onto a board, and use the ESPHome or Tasmota firmware to achieve the same thing. I’m not yet that far down the home automation rabbit hole to build my own devices, but you could consider it.

Cheap international roaming – Airalo eSIM

June 21, 2024 by Neil Turner

A screenshot of an iPhone 13 Mini running iOS 16 which has both a regular SIM and an eSIM installed

It used to be that, before Brexit, all of us Brits had free roaming on our mobile phones across other EU member states. Now, O2 is the only Big 4 mobile provider not to charge for roaming in the EU. I’m with Three, who re-introduced roaming charges despite being one of the first to scrap them even before they were required to.

So, in the second of my two blog posts about things we’ve done to make our holidays a little easier, I’m going to talk about eSIMs, and how you can use them to get cheaper data when travelling. The first post was on using a tag to pay for motorway tolls in Europe from Monday.

An eSIM is an ’embedded SIM’. So, unlike a SIM card that you put into your phone, an eSIM is built in. However, newer phones make this eSIM re-programmable, and so you can download a profile to change your eSIM to a different network. Normally, this is in addition to whichever physical SIM card is in your phone.

What this means is that you can have your regular SIM for making calls and sending/receiving SMS messages, and then a different eSIM for data. This can be a local eSIM, so you don’t have to pay roaming charges. And, because your regular SIM is still there, you’re still reachable on your regular phone number.

A screenshot of the Airalo web site which lets you buy an eSIM

Buying an eSIM from Airalo

Whilst in France, I bought my eSIM from Airalo. You install their app, purchase your eSIM, and then install it so that your phone can use it. It’s straightforward, and the eSIMs are not expensive. I paid $10 for a 3 GB eSIM that was valid for 30 days, which was sufficient. By contrast, I would have spent £2 per day to roam with Three, which would have added up to £20. $10 is roughly £8, so it saved a little money. Airalo also offers ‘Airmoney’ which is essentially cashback on each purchase, that can be accumulated towards buying more credit.

When you have both a regular SIM and an eSIM active, your phone should show the signal for both. In my case, I was connected to Bouygues for voice and SMS, and Orange for data.

If you use an iPhone, then you’ll need an iPhone XR, XS or XS Max or later. These were the models announced in September 2018, so unless you have a very old iPhone, you should be able to use an eSIM. Obviously support for Android phones will vary by manufacturer; my wife has a Samsung Galaxy phone of a similar age and this didn’t support an eSIM.

Whilst there are other eSIM retailers besides Airalo, this is the one I have experience with. If you want to try them yourself, then if you use the code ‘NEIL6715’ when signing up, you’ll get $3 credit.