Walking in a technology wonderland

  I have played around with Linux for about 20 years, and I am constantly amazed by its ability to make simple things hard Why? Well, I tell myself it's money, but in truth it is more about the achievement of making things. Maybe it is a holdover from the days men went to kill woolly mammoths, but that feeling of overcoming obstacles feels great, even if the end product is not as slick as a bought product. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), installing anything with Linux will have issues. Some things procedures have been smoothed out over the years, but the more you dive into it, the more issues you will hit. It's not as if, however, there is no advice. In fact, it is the opposite. There is far too much, but many of them are badly written assuming some critical knowledge or out of date dealing with legacy software etc. However, as Mission Impossible says, "Your mission, should you choose to accept it..". Start the theme music now The challenge For example, a few y...

  The Life and Death of Colonel Bridgen For the last 14 years, I have been represented in Parliament by Mr Andrew Bridgen MP. For the vast majority of my life I, like so many, have been largely apolitical. You cast your vote in the various elections (The next general one is only a few weeks away), and after that, apart from general grumbles, you ignore the result. As the late Douglas Adams put it, you vote for the lizard, because if you don't, the wrong lizard gets elected. However, being part of Andrew's constituency has changed the way I look at politics. Let me explain.. In the beginning... We moved into NW Leicestershire in about 1990 which at the time was were represented by David Taylor MP.  David was a typical back bench MP. A local guy, working hard to represent the area, and his only ambition was to do the best job he could. We would quite often bump into him in the village, either hand-delivering leaflets, or just having a coffee in a church café. Whatever his ...

  I recently came across this article on the BBC website commemorating the end of Fusion experiments at JET fusion laboratory This hit me hard, since it was only a mere 40 years ago, that I, a fresh-faced Physics student, entered the gatehouse at Culham, Oxfordshire to undertake my one and only contribution to British science as I started a 6-month placement at Culham Fusion laboratories. In truth, it was an exciting time. When I was in the last year of A-levels, me and a few others on the Physics course at Sutton Coldfield College of Further Education had arranged a tour of the site. To be honest, I remember little of it now, but something must have stuck, and while fellow students at Sheffield Polytechnic were going to placements at such dry board manufacturers (where really they were used as cheap labour) I felt I was doing what I really wanted. Real cutting edge physics that would shape the future. My first step to the Nobel Prize would start here....  The truth was a lit...

 It may have escaped some people's notice that twitter is now under new ownership. The world's allegedly richest man is now $44 billion less wealthy and is now the proud owner of the world's biggest cat image sharing site For even to a man of such wealth such as Elon, $44 billion is not to be found down the back of the sofa, so as well as personal investment, he has also taken out a large loan and brought in some trusted partners, such as that great protector of free speech, the Saudi government (Slogan - free to say anything as long as you can do it decapitated). It is often said in the church of Musk (which sounds like a dodgy perfume name), that we are just not capable of understanding his genius.  That he moves in mysterious way, and mere mortals just don't great get his great plan. For example, mortals when trying to decide whether to send 44 big ones would take months of careful negotiation. Not the anointed one. He toyed with the company, deviously forcing the pr...