andyking

If you really wanted to keep your politics secret, you wouldn't put a political sticker on your car.

All anyone sees on my car is what radio station I listen to.

I get your point - if you live in North London, then getting directions from "London" is probably not the way to go. Postcodes seem to be the quickest way, for me.

  *#1345# - gives you your credit balance if you're on a prepaid account
  *#100# - your phone number
  *#101# - the current network date and time
  *#[102-105]# - various network engineering information that I can't understand.

The only concession to technology in my bedroom is a DAB clock radio. I'm not interested in checking Twitter or email or whatever from bed, but if it's there, I'll do it instead of sleeping. So just keeping all that stuff in a different room works!

This article is nonsense. It's just a sales pitch for some software. Going on the computer and writing your notes in that software just before bed is likely to harm your sleep, as is going on a computer to do anything right before bed...

My area in northern England is like this - you can't move for constant advertisements for "start-up events," in the local newspapers, on the local radio and so on. It just feels like a way of spending EU money. I don't think they actually hand out many start-up grants or credits, they just run these endless "events."

I live in a small town of 8,000, and they even have them every month there, plugged ceaselessly on the local radio station. It's quite a good way of propping up the local media with advertising revenue, but I'd be interested to know how many people actually get anything out of this.

But a quick apt-get -f install after I get those errors sorts it out.

These expensive spats between huge companies just aren't interesting, or in any way relevant, to my life or business. They're just billion-dollar corporations flexing their muscles and making lawyers a bit richer every day.

Every other day now, it seems like we get a story about some shiny flashing trinket or other being 'banned' by some judge in $country, or one massive corporation suing another over three lines of code, or something.

It just feels like irrelevant corporate politicking between super-rich corporations, and doesn't have any grounding in the real world.

I rent at present, it's not ideal, but it means that I'm not tied to a certain geographic region - if I need to move, it's a hassle, but I don't have a house on a 25-year mortgage that I'm stuck trying to sell in a terrible market, I can just say to the landlord - right, I'm offski, here's the keys, bye.

So here I am, with a car - but it's not a fancy brand-new £10,000 model with crippling monthly payments. It's a slightly beaten-up 2002 Micra, I bought it from a guy down the road for £600 cash, it doesn't use much gas. I don't care how I look in it, whether it's 'cool,' I don't see it as a status symbol, I see it as a tool for life.

Maybe that's the difference - younger generations don't see a house or a car as a symbol of status or wealth, merely as something to be used, as a necessity - just like you wouldn't choose your electricity supplier based on how "cool" it is, we don't choose our cars on that basis either now.

Eventually, after having a go with Xfce and finding it reasonably good, I tried the latest Kubuntu (12.04, KDE 4.8) and really love it. Every time I come across an annoyance[1], there's a checkbox somewhere to turn it off, or change it to work how I want.

[1] Annoyances for me include things like doing something just because I move the mouse somewhere - like showing an Exposé just because I put my mouse in the top-left corner.

There has been extensive coverage of this scandal - and widespread vilification of Barclays and their leadership - in the British mainstream media. It eventually led to the resignation of various senior people within the bank, including the media bête noire Bob Diamond.

Having said that, I much prefer going on the BBC Travel News website (which is the same INRIX data) and looking at it in tabular form. I don't find the red/yellow/green lines on roads particularly useful.

It's a beautiful little village, not bad for commuting into the nearby city of Sheffield, but last time I looked, there were several houses to rent, that had been up for rent for over three months each, in a rental market that's generally red-hot. The lack of broadband is surely an issue. I'd move there if broadband was available, and I'm sure a lot of other people are in the same boat.

The issue here is that the rest of South Yorkshire has now been wired into a publicly-funded FTTC operation called Digital Region (http://www.digitalregion.co.uk/) which I'm using right now. The connection quality is good, I get a full 40Mbps with the option of raising it to around 110Mbps for more money - but the network is failing financially, because they've wired up places that are already connected to BT "Infinity" FTTC, instead of those areas which don't get broadband/fast broadband. My small town is one of the few places which has Digital Region and not Infinity, and I don't know anyone else with a DR connection.

In the North West, for instance, Winter Hill used to run around 1,000kW for each of the analogue TV channels. Post-DSO, this is down to 100kW per multiplex, as the DTT signal is far more robust.

Her actual tweets read:

CPS owe my constituent @pauljchambers and the country a huge apology for a shameful prosecution that should never have been brought

Two years of a man's life, stress and massive public costs wasted over an obvious joke. It is for Parliament to investigate actions here.

Whether it is the Justice or Home Affairs Select Cttee, the CPS and this decision should be investigated on Parlt return #twitterjoketrial

I think she's asking that parliament look into why the CPS ever brought this to trial in the first place.

It was laid out like a simple street map, in a grid formation, and companies could "rent" a "shop," or more accurately, place their logo in one of the spaces in the grid.

I did it, then left the station, and it still sits there online, the "streets" filled with For Rent signs. It's like a failed SimCity, or a 2D version of Second Life...

There are even several Twitter accounts dedicated to documenting the agony of daily commuting on this awful service: http://twitter.com/#!/ntfail

My pay now seems to have appeared, and my second account doesn't have £0.00 in it any more, so I've got my fingers crossed that I'll be able to go to Tesco tonight. I might go to the branch and get cash though, just in case I get the dreaded 'card declined'.

Perhaps a little less seriously than the effect on my health from a lack of fresh food, I was paid my monthly salary yesterday, and that hasn't appeared in my account. I'm assuming that it'll appear in the next few days, but if it doesn't, I can't purchase the car I'd arranged to buy on Friday. It's all a massive balls-up and affecting my life in so many random ways.

Can any British readers recommend any alternative banks? I'm based in the centre of Sheffield, so I have the choice of pretty much all of them.