Dropsafe

how much would you pay, in order to extend your life by one hour? It’s an odd thought, but it went through my brain whilst doing a little present-shopping this morning. It’s quite a hard question to answer straightforwardly, because (a) the question implies that you know when your life would end in the first…

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[blogs.motorbiker.org] Many of you don’t use a GPS and to plan your trips you use websites that map out your itinerary. One consistently great site for route planning is viaMichelin (by the producers of the Michelin Red Book and Green Book – Red is for food & hotels, green for tourist information). Well, viaMichelin just…

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[www.leapsecond.com] Ten years ago I wanted to build a LED digital analog clock that would be accurate to better than one second per year — so I would have the fun of adjusting it when a leap second occurred. This simple goal resulted in a most interesting journey into electronics, horology, astronomy, test equipment, quartz…

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[nightskylive.net] – link from Chris Samuel. 😎

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Well, that was an entertaining four hours. I re-orged my e-mail filestore – I use the NMH mail handler as a backend to EXMH – and at a conservative estimate linked, renamed and unlinked some 30,000 files making a total of 90,000 file operations. On Solaris – or on MacOS’s BSD filesystem (apparently deprecated, and…

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With the above headline the BBC host a fine article on the truths and fallacies about Democracy as practiced by George Bush: Do democracies fight each other? When outlining his vision for peace in the Middle East, President George Bush said “democracies don’t go to war with each other”. Is it true? The president’s comments…

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I first posted this in 2002 and feel it’s time for review: Just a little reference list as we approach the gift-giving season; the intent is not to be churlish – although no doubt it probably seems that way. I would just rather have something thoughtful that cost 50p, rather than a 8-quid bottle of…

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Hi all, As you can see from the changes to the sidebar, I have installed a basic, no-frills RSS feed for accessing dropsafe comments at http://www.crypticide.com/cgi-bin/crss.cgi At the moment it is nothing more than a link to the updated article comments page, saving me the hassle of polling the website to check for comments. More…

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Apparently passwords are dead: [it.slashdot.org] Bill Gates has just proclaimed the end of passwords. There’s only one drawback – you have to use .Net (well, what else would you expect?). However, the smart card that is at the centre of it – made by Axalto – is still a great bit of technology. Alas that…

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One day it’s the world’s funniest joke and the next day it’s news. Go listen to the soundtrack, if you can stomach it.

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The new bike has arrived and it’s wonderful. I got a phonecall last wednesday saying that it would be delivered a week early, viz: the day following; some hasty insurance phonecalls ensued (300-odd quid, not bad at all) and Bullen gave me a lift to SPC to pick it up. An extended handover ensued –…

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My new job is forcing me to actually write things down. (gasp!) On real paper. (eek!) Legibly. (“the horror… the horror…”) No, really. Time was when I was a great… nah, let’s be honest here, I’ve always had the bonkers handwriting of a true geek, I never have written in joined-up script except when doing…

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