I wondered why there weren't any cheap Ubuntu laptops for sale, so my business partner Nicky and I have posted the following advert on Gumtree:

Brand new laptop for sale, running the latest Ubuntu operating system.

Model: Novatech W12
Screen: 12.1 inch LED
Processor: AMD Neo MV40
RAM: 2GB …

Patrice pointed out that the HTTP HEAD method in Imprimatur doesn't work, so I've fixed it in Imprimatur-019. Let me know if you have any problems with it.

My colleagues and me in 007 attire:

I got a bulk email from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall advertising his Fish Fight campaign.

The campaign is asking people to sign the following letter:

To Commissioner Damanaki, Members of the European Parliament and all member state governments,

I have seen images of dead and dying fish discarded in European waters.

I …

Sitting alone in the Rondo theatre on a cold and misty Monday evening in November, a few weeks before my 39th birthday, preparing to watch a documentary on nuclear waste disposal in Finland, I wondered what my life had come to.

The waste in the film has to be stored …

Thanks to Patrice for pointing out that the URL of the Imprimatur DTD http://imprimatur.sourceforge.net/imprimatur-008.dtd is returning the wrong content type. IIRC it used to be text/plain, but then it must have somehow changed to text/html, I've now changed it to application/xml-dtd which …

Julia writing her name on Bonfire Night.

The UK energy minister Charles Hendry has called for (among other undesirable things) a capacity payment for low carbon electricity. Capacity payments are a market distortion that increases the cost of electricity. The way it works is that you're paid for being available to generate electricity, even if it's not …

I disagree with the government's decision to remove child benefit from higher rate tax payers. They should have taxed child benefit instead. As Stephanie Flanders writes:

Mr Osborne could have [...] raised a similar amount, £1.1bn - by simply taxing child benefit.

This would have meant that:

• The benefit would still …