You are brilliant! There are probably many issues we face daily that have simple solutions, if only we knew them.

My laptop failed to boot, saying Checking NVRAM... I took the back off the laptop and removed the battery that maintains the settings when the computer is switched of. After a few seconds I replaced the battery. That reset things to the factory default and the laptop now boots!

Yesterday I was walking back from the train station to my house, it was raining and gloomy. I noticed a man sitting at the bottom of the steps leading from the front of a house to the pavement. At first I assumed he'd just a had a bit too much …

I've just watched Spooks.

First my standard plea that the BBC should make all of its shows OpenSource. The license payer has paid for them, so they should be available to view, download, copy, show publicly, adapt, whatever. Also, they should be published using an open format such as Theora …

I've been asked to sign the Raise The Roof petition to raise the tax free allowance under the Rent A Room Scheme. I won't be signing it because I think that the Rent A Room scheme should be abolished. All income should be taxed at the same rate, otherwise government …

The first thing you need to know is that the 'Ayn' in Ayn Rand is pronounced to rhyme with 'fine'. Atlas is noteworthy as one of the few books where the heroes have Asperger's. I say hero rather than protagonist because the characters are heroic. Rand believes that humans can …

After reading The Prefect, I was looking forward to Revelation Space. I finished it in France, but have only just got round to writing about it.

The first thing that comes to mind is that Reynolds uses the word 'caul' too much.
Revelation Space is a space opera of vast …

Here in the UK the postcode data set (the mapping between postcode and physical location) isn't freely available. Thankfully the Free The Postcode project are creating a free postcode database. It's easy to help, you just tell them a postcode and its GPS coordinates via the web form.

You can …

I enjoyed reading about the lock, how interesting! When I was a kid, we vacationed in Northern Michigan and we always made a point to visit the Soo Locks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soo_locks)in the St. Mary's River. It amazed me the way Mother Nature was circumvented and …

My dad and I went to see Fussell's Balance Lock:

Okay, it's hard to make out from the photo, but the two deep bits on each side are where the canal boats would have gone up and down in the caissons.

Looking at this artefact of industrial archaeology prompted me …