Rob Vaughan

Boris Johnson says Keir Starmer has made us an irrelevance on the world stage...

Today is the 90th anniversary of the first flight of the Supermarine Spitfire. 😁

There's a lot of mean-spiritedness about people who have gone to live in Dubai. We need to help, and ensure they have secure accommodation in the UK for 91 days of the next tax year.

I have been denied entry to the SIS Building, Porton Down & GCHQ by the UK government.

Okay, this is quite outstanding from Bedford Council.

You make a good point about the incorrect word "restore" - they are proposing a state which looks absolutely nothing like Britain has ever been

Matt Goodwin wants all white women to have as many babies as possible but Farage will only allow two of them to thrive, because he wants cheaper beer.

I don't think they've thought this through 🤪

This is just basic GCSE Geography stuff. UK urbanisation rate is still going up, because it's economically more efficient to live in urban areas. I recall student pub arguments over 40 years ago about whether society should subsidise inefficient lifestyles! I do realise someone has to live there😁

Donate to the RNLI and help save lives at sea Your donations really make a difference. We depend on your generosity to educate people to stay safe and prevent tragedies on and offshore. Donate here.

Since a handful of hate filled people protested outside RNLI HQ yesterday because they're angry that crews don't discriminate in their rescues and work to save all lives at sea you might want to show your support with a one off or regular donation.

rnli.org/pages/ig/new...

I'm not especially opposed to driverless cabs, but I'm fucked if I'm giving up my ancestral British right to cross the road anywhere if it's safe for me to do so. "Jaywalking" isn't a thing or a crime here, techbros, so your magic cars will have to learn to deal with that.

I can't say I've never use it, but I certainly look for the alternative every single time 👍

Vibration modes of the bridge go down to sub-1Hz seemingly, which I thought might be outside the design parameters for an IBIS system. Quick bit of web searching though shows it's probably covered (Canon website says 0.5-20Hz for example). Still, a bridge must have large amplitude movements.

Dusk view of traffic and light trails on the Portway, Bristol. Looking down from Clifton Suspension Bridge. 1.3 second exposure, shot with OM5ii.

Always impressed by OM Systems in-body image stabilisation. This shot was 1.3secs handheld, standing on the Clifton Suspension Bridge & I could strongly feel the bridge moving under me due to passing cars. Pic looks very sharp.

Oh, and I've cycled to work in all weathers every day for 35 years, so my carbon conscience is clear-ish 😁

In a previous office I had a CFD model set up just for keeping the area under my desk warm when cold. Our PCs have 1KW PSU. Now I have discovered I can max out the PSU with one line of Powershell, which is still needed in current office. HVAC is bad, not broken! Real work happens on cluster offsite

Haha - finally figured it out: pretty sure it was Draken Europe's Challenger 604 G-DRAK. Presumably some kind of training mission, and they seem to be recruiting pilots for a role in KSA?

The Viper always had an axial compressor, and can trace its axial compressor technology back to the Armstrong Siddely ASX which ran in 1943 I believe. Not really directly related to the (centrifugal) Whittle engines afaict.

Mnemonic   Thirty days hath September, April, June and November. Unless a leap year is its fate, February hath twenty-eight. All the rest hath three days more, excepting January, which hath six thousand, one hundred and eighty-four. Brian Bilston

Annual reminder of how many days there are in each month.

Pancake lenses make fantastic point-and-shoot alternatives – if you’re OK with these 3 things A mirrorless camera with a pancake lens is becoming a popular alternative to the trendy point-and-shoot

I was shooting a Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 pancake lens on an Olympus E-PM2 in 2014. I was a decade ahead of the curve! My 20mm now mostly lives on an E-PL8, and it's fantastic. Most definitely "pocketable"

www.digitalcameraworld.com/cameras/lens...

The madness in the World this morning is getting so pervasive, you can't even easily avoid it by just having a few blocked words. Time to get off social media for a while...

A robin perched in a branch in the sunshine

The news is just full-time depressing now. Here's a robin in my garden recently.

Two Men on a Bench, bronze sculpture from 1995 by Penny Giles. Sited in Cabot Square, Canary Wharf London. Woman nearby is photographing it. Sun is low in the sky in background - kind've "contre jour"

Posted a pic on Instagram recently. It's been viewed by zero accounts who don't follow me, compared to nearer 50/50 in the past. I guess due to the death of hashtags. Oh well - trying out the "foto" app instead. Meta stuff is all going downhill. Shame I can't get my contacts off of WhatsApp...

Brilliant

All the usual topics you'd expect, from a starting point that was notionally work-related 🤪

They are seemingly very few in number, but very loud.

First day back at work today. Going pretty well. But on our internal "social media" network the chess playing pigeons are really out in force. Obviously I can just ignore it and get on, but I made the mistake of commenting on a thread before Xmas so I'm getting frequent Teams notifications

A colleague in a Teams meeting on Weds said "I can't come to the meeting straight after this one because I'm out on holiday today". And I'm thinking "eh? Why are you in this meeting then...?"

Thanks - I'll give that a go

Need an Adobe pdf Reader replacement for Win11 - they keep pushing their pointless AI dross, and yet recently on my PC the text search feature is completely broken. Weird. On Mac/iPad I just use Preview.

Today I learned that the keyboard shortcuts to get to the start or end of a line on an iPad or Mac are the same as in Emacs. High spot of the week!!!