Support Alan Johnston

Please show your support for the BBC's kidnapped journalist.

Read more
STEM
UFO does NOT mean flying saucer

Ok, it's another pet peeve posting. The BBC have just posted a story about strange lights seen over Bangor. The summary reads "Residents in County Down have raised the possibility of a UFO sighting above the skies of Bangor." It's not a possibility, it was a UFO sighting. That is, they were Unidentified Flying Objects. […]

Read more
hardware
SM2442

I used to have a very simple clock, synced to the atomic clock at Rugby. It took a single AA battery, warned you when the battery was low, had a snooze, and basically it worked well. Unfortunately when Aimee was very young she broke it. So I looked for a replacement and couldn't really find […]

Read more
STEM
"Anyone can teach maths"

How many times I have heard this quote. I beg to differ. I was on my way home from work yesterday, listening to BBC radio 2. A woman was on making a music request. The presenter (Stuart Maconie) asked her what she did for a living. Woman: "I'm a teacher" SM: "What do you teach?" […]

Read more
Gondolin
Bandwidth regrade

I finally got sorted out to regrade the ADSL connection for Gondolin, the download speed is now (potentially) 8096 kbps, but perhaps more importantly for the server aspect of these things, the upload speed is improved by about a factor of two to 448 kbps. I haven't done any substantive testing yet, but it's certainly […]

Read more
hardware
Balamory / Battlestar Galactica Crossover!

According to my Sky+ box, there was an exciting episode of Balamory featuring cylons. Unfortunately I must have missed them when I watched it. Go figure.  

Read more
hardware
More about the rabbit

I've had some more time to play with my Rabbit (Nabaztag/tag) now, and can say a little more about my findings. The hardware is lovely, well constructed and solid feeling. The rabbit sits around 20 cm in height. It has a slightly curved bottom so that you can see the pulsing violet glow that tells […]

Read more
hardware
Nabaztag / Tag

My new Nabaztag / Tag arrived today. This is the second generation wireless rabbit, and I hope it will be fun. So far, it's been an ambivalent experience. I had trouble connecting the beast (BTW, you will require not just a wireless network, but a wireless enabled PC or PDA (I used my Palm T|X) […]

Read more
hardware
Sky Interference

We got Sky+ just before Christmas; since my daughter gets the say over the remote control while CBeebies is broadcasting, and then my wife takes over till about 11pm, it's the easiest way for me to get to see anything. We have had sporadic signal problems however. Today I discovered it was SRSSI - Starling […]

Read more
hardware
Sony Ericsson K800i

I had a Samsung SGH-720 or some such. It's been nothing but a pain in the butt... very buggy, especially the bluetooth, which required a power cycle to work correctly 75% of the time. So I got a Sony Ericsson K800i. It seems to be a lovely phone, lovely crisp graphics, good menus and user […]

Read more