OK, first off, you have to read this amazing judgement about whether Walker's Sensations Poppadoms count as a potato-based snack for VAT purposes. Like most judgements, it is written in fairly plain and accessible language. The arguments are easy to follow and it even manages to throw in a little humour. But if you read closely, you'll see there are a few instances where an errant question-mark …
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I've recently set up my own consultancy company and decided to sponsor my local UKGovCamp conference. That entitled me to a logo on the site, a shout-out during the conference, and place to put any promotional stickers. Everyone loves stickers! But I decided to bring along something different - promotional sweeties! I found a small business to print my logo with edible ink onto sweets and…
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Four years ago, I got the Iiyama ProLite 24" Vertical Screen. But as my eyes grow dimmer and my hind-brain desires upgrades, I splurged on the (stupidly named) Iiyama ProLite XUB2893UHSU-B5. It is well lush! Thin bezel around 3 sides. Excellent viewing angle when vertical. A decent array of video ports and USB. And fairly wallet friendly £280. There's a lot of screen for your money. (Yes, I …
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The lovely people at Mokin keep sending me their USB-C hubs to review, and I'm happy to do so. They work splendidly with my Linux and Windows machines, and they provide more ports than I ever thought necessary. This one is positively festooned with extra ports. Let's take a look. USB-C Plug your power adapter into the hub, and then the hub into your laptop. With most hubs, that's it; you've…
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Another day, another debunking! I've seen this quote flying around social media for some time. Everyone loves finding out that a famous quote has a twist and that the author isn't anonymous. It's the perfect piece of clickbait! But the thing is… this quote is bunkum. The easiest way to tell is to stick it into a search engine. You'll find lots of people confidently claiming it is by Wilde - …
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You can never have too many USB-C ports, right? It's rubbish having a cheap laptop with only a single USB-C port. So, the good folks at Mokin have sent me a gadget which turns your single and lonely USB-C port into FIVE USB-C ports. Along the side you get 4 USB-C 3.1 ports which are theoretically capable of 10Gbps in aggregate. At the bottom is a USB-C 3.0 Power Delivery port which can take…
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What a treat! Alan Cumming has the amazing gift of making a 2,000 seat venue feel like an intimate little club. The Crown-Prince of Scotland spent two hours regaling us with tales from Hollywood and singing his heart out. The name-dropping is outrageous! The stories scandalous! The singing fabulous! It feels like the whole performance is in italics with extra exclamation marks. It feels…
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Supertoys last all summer long! But batteries do not. The last set of rechargeable batteries I had leaked everywhere, and I could never find the right charging lead for the gizmo which pumped power into them. So let's cut out the middle-man and plug a USB-C cable straight into our batteries! What? These were the cheapest AA batteries I could find which took USB-C. £16 including delivery, for …
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I love my solar panels. But the solar panels don't love the British midwinter. Most of the year, my panels produce more electricity than I can use. But in winter we're lucky if they produce 3kWh per day - and most of the time it is considerably less. So our winter electricity bills must be massive, right? Nope. The normal cost per kWh is 28.5p (including VAT). We're paying less than half that …
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(This is, I think, a silly idea. But sometimes the silliest things lead to unexpected results.) The text of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is about 146,000 characters long. Thanks to the English language, each character can be represented by a single byte. So a plain Unicode text file of the play is about 142KB. In Adventures With Compression, JamesG discusses a competition to compress text…
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About a million years ago, I took a cute girl on a date to see the cult movie Lola Rennt. I felt pretty cool for knowing all about hip German cinema. I eventually married the girl, so she must also have thought I was pretty cool. Well, a few days ago, I found out that Netflix remade the film last year. In Hindi! Looop Lapeta (লুপ লাপেটা - literally "Crazy Situation Looping") is a hyper-modern up…
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Look, here's the deal. Sometimes companies send me products to review. I usually try and make sure they're interesting, useful, or delightfully weird. Mostly they're electronic gadgets or cool books. But someone offered to send me a shower head to review. And our old shower head had got a bit gunked up. So I said yes. I have sold the soul of this blog for a £13 bit of plastic full of magic …
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