For an increasing number of Brits, BBC Radio is about the only thing the modern BBC has to offer that might justify its antiquated and much resented television licence fee. Or rather it was up until yesterday (2025-01-21), when sadly 3/4 of its AAC/HLS internet radio streams inexplicably fell silent. I’ve written to BBC Sounds…
Wishing you a very merry peaceful Christmas, followed by a happy, successful New Year. Creating this year’s card This year we wanted to do something a little different. So we decided to deploy Stable Diffusion open source artificial intelligence to generate the main image. Unfortunately AI is not good at drawing signs. So that was…
Creating the main image for this year’s Christmas card was not the straightforward “one-click deal” I hoped it would be. Seems synthetic stupidity is very much alive and kicking in the world of artificial intelligence. Fact is, AI is still not all that bright. In order to create the one successful image we finally chose,…
Seems the British Government has set up an open consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence. It aims to discuss with the public how artwork stored on cloud servers, or processed using cloud-based software should be treated with regard to being used to teach AI (artificial intelligence) machines. Essentially the Government offers three possible choices:- Do…
I had a pleasant surprise today, when I took delivery of a Lidl’s own-brand “Parkside” laser level, sent as a Christmas gift from my mother-in-law and sister-in-law in Hungary. Unfortunately the user manual is in Hungarian, Slovakian, Czech and German. Not English. “No problem,” I thought. “I’ll get onto Lidl and request an English language…
It’s quite an exciting time in the FOSS graphics world at the moment. After a long, long wait, GIMP 3.0 is finally at RC1 (first release candidate) stage. Debian 13 (Trixie aka Testing) users have just received the long-awaited KDE Plasma 6 desktop – with full Wayland support. Which I have to say that after…
I’m a big Debian fan and I’m currently running Debian 13, aka, “Trixie” on my main laptop workstation. Currently Trixie is Debian’s “testing” branch. Despite being a test version, Trixie has generally proven very stable and reliable. And we users get all the new stuff very promptly. I’m also rather keen on the KDE desktop,…
For reasons I will never understand, it seems the United States has just re-elected 34-times convicted criminal and adjudicated rapist Donald J Trump as its president. As a Brit, sadly there is nothing I can do about this. All I can offer the world is a few futile acts of defiance, whilst mercilessly ridiculing jumped-up…
One of my pet hates is the soft-touch rubberised coating some manufactures put on their kit. It invariably fails sooner or later. Indeed, I’ve had quite a lot of kit over the years where the rubberised coating has failed. Fortunately it is usually fixable – or to be more precise, removable. Depending on the coating’s…
One of the most annoying features on standard SD cards is the write protect tab. This tab often seems to get caught and pushed into the “read only” position when one inserts an SD card into a card reader or camera. Thus rendering the card “read only”. It seems a particular issue with the slots…
Seems Trump’s re-election plans suffered a bit of a ding today. Well I guess it must come as a shock when senior members of your own party publicly announce their intention to vote for the other side. But Dick Cheney – yes that Dick Cheney – Lord Sith himself has endorsed Kamala Harris rather than…
I’m often amazed by the money some Hi-Fi buffs spend on their systems. I’m something of a tightwad, and I took a rather different approach. This involves mixed tech – or as I prefer to call it, “appropriate technology“. I run one of these. It used to be an Acer Windows box, but all that…
Is AI, a serious threat to artists? Or yet more IT industry bullshit? I’ve been in the IT industry for many years. I still look back with some amusement at a teacher who told us, a class of 8-9 year olds, that computers were, “Modern labour-saving machines“. Having spent most of my working life either…
While the Clownstrike fiasco rumbles-on in the West, and people in our particular part of the planet can’t even purchase a train ticket, it seems both Russia and China are almost completely unaffected. Editor’s note 2024-08-17: Seems we’re not the only site referring to Cloudstrike as “Clownstrike”. Crowdstrike has issued several takedown notices to a…
Today our planet is suffering what appears to be Microsoft’s biggest ever outage. Seems the culprit is a piece of buggy “security” software provided by a company called Crowdstrike. Or is that Clownstrike? It sends Microsoft Windows computers into a never-ending boot loop, from which users cannot escape, without going into “safe mode” and removing…
I’m a clumsy clot and I’m always knocking my phone off my desk. OK it’s ruggedised and the floor is carpeted. Nevertheless, ruggedisation has its limits. Also my phone is a heavy old beast, weighing some 360 grams. That’s around 3/4 lb in “old money“. Which means that those flimsy plastic phone holders you see…
Tories have just been well and truly trounced in the UK. Labour has officially won the 2024 UK General Election. Results still coming in but it’s set to be an absolute landslide… https://www.theguardian.Com/politics/live/2024/jul/04/general-election-2024-uk-live-labour-tories-starmer-sunak-results-exit-poll Not so much that Labour won, than the Tories lost. Granted, this time it was more about people voting out the Tories,…
Happy July 4 to all our American friends, celebrating the fact their ancestors had the good sense to rid themselves of our awful Royal Family. Here in the UK, it’s General Election time again. For some strange reason, it was called for 2024-07-04. Hopefully the results of this election should be cause for celebration here…
By which I mean testing my Tamron 500mm Catadioptric lens. It was a nice warm reasonably clear day today, peaking 24°C. So about an hour before sunset I took my Tamron, fitted on the front of my µ4/3 Lumix DMC-GX7 up to my favourite vantage point on Portsdown Hill, Hampshire. This is a wonderful place…
I was pleased to note that our collared doves have returned after several year’s absence. Of course I have no way of knowing if they are the same collared doves. But whoever they are, I’m rather fond of them and delighted to see them back in the garden again.
Quite a lot of noise in the photography press regarding Ricoh Pentax’s new point and shoot film camera, the Pentax 17. And even more noise regarding its somewhat hefty price ticket: £550. Choices However for me it would have to be a choice between one of these (below) Pentax ME SUper, or more likely a…
About a decade ago, I decided to go “mirrorless” – basically abandoning my heavy old Pentax DSLR and going for a system camera that is smaller and lighter. At the time I considered the new Fuji mirrorless offerings and micro four thirds. Problem was that at the time Fuji raw files would not work in…
I’ve been flirting with affordable LED in the studio for over a decade. And on each experiment, I’ve had change out of fifty quid. My latest sortie involved a pair of these things They have simple removable diffuser, reducing the need for a soft-box, they’re fairly robust and in addition to being dimmable they also…
If like me, you are tired of having your screen cluttered full of stupid ads, c/w the general enshittification of the Internet by commercial interests, then you may wish to try /etc/hosts file “hostile server blocking”. It’s free and no additional software is needed. This is because your /etc/hosts file part of your computer’s TCP/IP…
I suffered my first hard disk failure way back in 1987. Fortunately I recovered 99% of my data. However, successful recovery required quite a lengthy struggle and a somewhat inelegant bodge. Since then, I’ve held something of a fascination, some might even say an obsession with backup systems. Over the years, I have tried all…
