This area is reserved for my occasional ramblings and musings.
Having all become familiar with USB C, seems the USB Group has just announced an even newer and faster connection standard, to be known as “USB D”. Of course, like all new Universal Serial Bus connectors, it will be completely incompatible with all previous USB standards. To guarantee incompatibility, the new connectors will be circular….
Is AliExpress any good is a difficult question to answer in a single word. It is ‘a pig and a poke‘ to some extent. Having spent quite a lot of time in Hong Kong, AliExpress has many of the attributes of a Hong Kong street market. I.e. quite a lot of junk, some quite good…
Bought a bundle of multifunction USB rechargeable LED lights from a supplier AliExpress. I actually a bought batch of both types shown below because I like them so much. I paid a bit over a fiver each for them. Quite amazing for their size, weight and cost. Tough, water-resistant and rechargeable via USB C, c/w…
Seems during the wee small hours of this morning, our little blue planet had a very near miss, as we narrowly avoided a collision with a speeding asteroid. At 2023-01-27 00:29 UTC, an asteroid codenamed “2023 BU” came within about 3,589 kilometres of the planet’s surface, around the southerly tip of South America. To put…
I don’t quite know how I managed it but my personal/business dataset has now grown to around 17 Terrabytes. Most of it is spread across multiple smaller disks. This is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. In fact, we are decommissioning our 4TB drives. This is partly because they are well beyond recommended end of life,…
Nurses’ noisy but good-humoured protest outside Southampton General Hospital today as first ever major NHS nurses strikes in British history take place. Something about this touched me. Perhaps it was the sadness that these hard-working decent people have to do this. Or perhaps it was the gentle considerate way they did it. Every bus and…
For my little IT business, the possibility of power cuts is very bad news indeed. So we invested in one of these things – a “UA1101l” power storage unit. On paper, it stores about 3.6 MJ (megajoules) or 1 kWh (kilowatt hour) in EV (electric vehicle) grade LiFePO4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries. My tests suggest…
Merry Christmas 2022 from Garfnet, in a cold, damp, gloomy, strike-riddled, post-Brexit Britain. Seems we really are going back to the seventies this year. This is a Winter of Discontent that rivals that of 1978-79. In fact, there are so many strikes happening here at the moment that the Guardian newspaper has published a regularly…
We’re busy replacing a customer’s ageing Sonos distributed sound system with a Linux Media Server (c/w SAMBA for remaining Sonos kit) c/w these tiny Linux-powered SBCs (single board commuters) as replacements. Granted, this is merely a prototype. This unit us based upon a Raspberry pi 4B c/w 8GiB RAM, a capacitative touchscreen and an external…
Here on the central south coast of England, it is rare for temperatures to drop much below freezing. This cold snap we recorded -4.5 °C at night and barely rising above 0°C during the day. And thanks to economies we’re making due to the ridiculously high price of natural gas, the house itself seldom rose…
I just bought a Geiger counter from a seller on AliExpress. Well it’s actually a Geiger counter and EMF (electromagnetic field) meter, all combined into a single device. I have no idea who actually makes these things. There is no branding other than a model number “BR-9C”. Though I did discover that the enclosures used…
So it seems we have yet another unelected Tory prime minister. In addition to being Britain’s first British-Asian and Hindu PM, and the youngest PM in over two centuries, Rishi Sunak also has the distinction of being our third PM in seven weeks! This time there wasn’t even ballot for Tory Party members. He just…
A lot of buzz on the interwebs about Samsung mobile phone batteries. Whilst Samsung devices do seem particularly problematic, it can be an issue with lithium polymer batteries generally – especially the super skinny type. They really don’t like getting hot. I confess I documented this repair rather badly but I did remember to capture…
As Britain reels from the effects of Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng’s 2022-09-23 budget, and the pound plummets towards an all-time low against the US Dollar, Mr pie has a sweary but succinct analysis of the shitshow in which we now find ourselves, here in Old Blighty. A less sweary and less amusing analysis…
Due to its construction, ours is quite a difficult house for “whole house Wi-Fi” due to its solid internal dividing walls, downstairs and upstairs. In fact, my first DIY job when we moved in here, back in 2012, was to run Cat 5e Ethernet cables to every room that we were likely to use a…
Today we say a final goodbye to our long reigning Queen. Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, 1926-04-21 ~ 2022-09-08) was Queen of the United Kingdom and fourteen other Commonwealth realms from 1952-02-06 until her death 2022-09-08 16:30 UTC. Her reign of 70 years and 214 days was the longest of any British monarch and the…
Just when we thought the Tories couldn’t possibly inflict anyone worse than Bore Arse upon us, along comes Dim Lizzy. Worst past the post, Liz Truss really is dim. She also changes what she likes to describe as her “mind” as often as some people change their underpants. We’ve seen some piss-poor Tory leaders over…
Like quite a few photographers, I have been flirting with AI (artificial intelligence) digital imaging. Regular readers may even have spotted my Synthetic Stupidity gallery dedicated to the fact that at the moment, publicly available AI graphics tools really aren’t particularly good – even though they are quite good fun to play with. In fact…
I’m a big fan of JuiceMedia’s “Honest Government Ad” series. It’s honest COVID ad is legendary. Granted, Aussie humour often runs a tad close to the proverbial bone at times. But this particular “Honest Ad” is almost too close to the truth to be funny… Related Images:
I have just been listening to Mr Trump and his supporters explaining the situation concerning all those crates of secret documents that the FBI found in is house at Mar-a Largo. Apparently, the documents were all planted at Mar-a-Lardo by the FBI, they were not at all important, and Mr Trump had declassified them all…
Puzzles me why Brexiteers still conflate use of International System of Units (SI) with the EU? Or why these people still think that the metric system is some how “not British” and kid themselves that they are being “patriotic” by refusing to use it? British Engineers and scientists have been pleading with various British governments…
Today we take a little trip back in time to one of the internet’s oldest and most famous memes: “All Your Base”. AKA “All your base are belong to us“, this internet meme was based on a badly translated phrase from the opening scene of a video game called “Zero Wing“. The phrase first appeared…
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) format for images has served us well for nearly three decades. But is is essentially a 1990’s format. Today we have better ways of compressing images. The most popular currently is Google’s WEBP (Web Picture) Format. Many modern websites use WebP as its default format for uploaded images that it…
Seems that as London and the midlands – not to mention much of central Europe – sizzle in 40°C temperatures, our planet is to be hit with unusual weather of a different kind: a solar storm. Activity in the upper atmosphere of the sun, known as the ‘corona’, creates huge ‘solar flares’. These generate powerful…
I have been a tad distracted by some rather serious political events that have taken place here in Old Blighty during the last few days. Basically our Prime Minister has decided to “do a Trump” and stay in power even though over fifty members of his government have now resigned in protest over his various…
