ramblings on tech, photography and other geekery
One of the drawbacks with the furlough scheme from the outset is that it’s an ‘all or nothing‘ affair – there’s no option to reduce someone to, say, a half working week and the furlough scheme provide them with 40% of their salary. That would enable people to effectively job...
Forgive me for quoting a meme here, but this one I spotted on a friend’s timeline a few days ago sums things up fairly well. It’s from across the pond where things are (economically) a lot worse than here, without anything approaching the European furlough schemes, but the point remains...
This week, the UK Government has been advocating the opening of schools, but the Trades Union, as well as the British Medical Council have both raised objections at this stage. A few thoughts on that topic. Looking at safety in isolation for a moment – that is to say, excluding...
This is a complex question, and what’s ‘best’ will depend on the network, strength of signal, and whether it will penetrate the Faraday cage that your van effectively becomes. Generally speaking, getting the external 4G/LTE antenna outside of the giant metal box is a Good Thing (TM), so you want...
Firstly, I should probably explain a little of my background: a fair chunk of my work involves designing point to point wireless networks between buildings, and consulting on rural wireless broadband deployments for people in parts of the country which can’t get fibre broadband, and which BT have shown no...
A little bit about how the electromagnetic spectrum is allocated. There are 2 elements to this: frequency and power. Let’s talk about power first: the more power you drive a signal with, the further it travels (within reason), but the closer you are to it, the more of that signal...
In the UK, the spectrum that’s going to be used for 5G deployments is the old analogue TV space around 700Mhz. It’s been in use for well over 50 years, and TV transmitters output at *vastly* higher power levels than cellular transmitters. The data layer – 2.3Ghz (recovered from the MoD)...
Don’t rely on ‘percentage opens’ as an entirely accurate metric. To elaborate: the way most mailing lists determine whether a message was opened is by embedding a small, usually transparent, image in the HTML which is loaded from a remote web server when the message is viewed. That then indicates...
In a recent discussion the topic of dog friendly holiday accommodation arose. Dog friendly lodgings vary enormously from ‘dog tolerated’ all the way up to ‘dog treated like royalty’. The problem at the moment is that there’s no common set of criteria: anywhere can advertise themselves as dog friendly even if it’s just...
In the run up to RIAT week (anyone else going to be there this weekend and fancy meeting up?) I thought I’d do a quick test on some of the USB power packs I have kicking around here to see how close to their claimed capacity they really are. The...
A friend recently mentioned this article in The Lancet about an Australian study into cannabis use in people with chronic pain prescribed opiods. Firstly a disclaimer: I find statistical analysis interesting. I’m not a medical professional, so take everything you read from me with the appropriate pinch of salt, and...
Interested in people’s thoughts about encryption at rest in a datacentre environment. There was a request for web hosting in a certain discussion group earlier today, and I noticed one of the respondents mentioned their web server encrypted content at rest. I must admit, I’m in two minds about this....
It’s worth reading the political background to this post if you’ve not already done so: Facebook and the cookie jar As bad as the recent Facebook news stories have been, it’s fairly unlikely many of us are going to stop using it – it’s just too useful as a way...
It’s been a tough week for senior management at Facebook, as the world’s press has finally caught onto what many of us in the tech industry have warned our friends about for years: all those little quizzes you’re doing aren’t just harmless fun. It’s like the world has finally noticed...
A question came up recently: “If mining for crypto currency is so profitable why would anyone sell the tech to do it?” Mining is – at the basic mathematics level – searching for hash collisions. Hashing algorithms are an integral part of modern cryptography systems and allow you to create...
I suspect like many others in the UK, my new Google Nexus 5 smartphone arrived today. I’m not going to go into a long review about it – there are plenty of news sites out there far better at covering that than I. What I will do, though, is document...
Perhaps the most involved and frustrating thing to get right when designing an RPG is balancing the numbers. Using dice to represent opposed actions is a suspension of disbelief that only works for as long as the numbers make sense. If they’re unfair or lead to ridiculous results it will undermine...
I previously discussed skills, and I’d like to expand on that slightly. Tiers upon tiers upon tiers Skills represent your character’s ability to do something. When you attempt to take an action, your skill bonus (combining a basic ability modifer, a number of points you’ve spent training the skill, and...
In the last few years of playing roleplaying games – D&D, Pathfinder and a few others – I’ve had various thoughts about the design of such games. I’m going to start writing a column here discussing trends and possible improvements. Pathfinder is our game of choice, and I do love...
Every few months I get a pressing urge to try and throw Outlook off my Windows machine – it’s bloated, isn’t a particularly good IMAP client, and with each passing version gets gradually harder to disable HTML mail entirely. In the past, I’ve ended up trying another mail client, but...