(To the tune of the popular Mary Poppins song.) How much does it really cost to drive an electric car? Well, I've had my BMW i3 for a few months, so I thought I'd crunch the numbers. As part of the UK Government's OLEV scheme, there's a subsidy for installing car charging points at home.…
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There's one of those "I've come up with a perfect analogy for life" blog posts going around. It's sort of like those stock photos with an "inspirational" quote on it - but in long form. Apparently, Your Life Is Tetris. Stop Playing It Like Chess. It's all vaguely plausible, life-lessony, woo - which tries to…
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The UK's official web infrastructure is in a shockingly poor state. I've been doing some light digging into the security of UK Schools' websites. As I've written about ad nauseum, the Government takes almost no interest in the way some of its official websites are managed. The Department for Education is particularly inept when it…
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I spent my Saturday crewing the reception desk at the amazing UK GovCamp Unconference. Part of our task was to check people in, hand them their name badges, schwag, and offer them a free conference T-Shirt. If you're anything like me, you've got hundreds of conference Ts stuffed in a drawer somewhere. They're all the…
Continue reading →I few days ago, I was somewhat surprised to find that one of my Tweets had been used as a citation in Wikipedia! I began to wonder - how often are Tweets used in citations? It's possible to search for your own Tweets using this (somewhat obscure) link: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALinkSearch&target=twitter.com%2Fedent Just edit the end of it…
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This isn't a review of the new Star Wars film, it's a diary entry about my experiences at the première. No spoilers, sweetie! I love Star War. Probably more than is healthy. When tickets for the new movie were released, I snaffled up a pair... for the next morning! Look, I'm getting old, and I…
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Regular readers will remember that I run Ubuntu on a MacBook pro. Why? I'm a contrarian sod. It's the machine work gave me. I can do everything I need to do with Linux without having to deal with OSX or Windows. What can I say, it works for me! The only problem is that the…
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The British State's desire for its citizens' private data is becoming unquenchable. As part of a minor act of disobedience, I decided to send two Freedom of Information requests. The first to the Home Secretary asking for her email metadata. The second to the Police and Crime Commissioner for Surrey asking for her web browsing…
Continue reading →If you've ever reported a bug, you'll have seen the dreaded response "works on my machine." So, I was using a small open source project (I'll leave it anonymous for now) when I noticed a bug. Not a show-stopper, but one which would affect and annoy lots of users. I wrote as detailed a bug…
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Last year, the battery on my Motorola Nexus 6 died. It got hot enough to melt the glue holding the phone together and started bulging - so I replaced it. Now, sadly, the new battery has failed. The phone will suddenly switch off as though the battery were yanked out. After a few minutes it…
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