Posts

Phone Switchover from Analogue to Digital: How will I be affected….. and when ?

  A lot of concern has been expressed about this topic recently, particularly by vulnerable older customers who don’t have mobiles or a broadband connection, and still depend on traditional landlines exclusively for their contacts with the outside world. Not surprisingly, much of this has been driven by announcements in the press and online to the effect that ‘BT will be shutting down the copper cable phone network in your area by the end of 2025’. What does this actually mean ? Before we look at this question, first of all a bit of background knowledge about how our phone system, and more recently our broadband internet communications, work. The old traditional phone network originally installed in the early 20 th century was (and still is in some areas) based on copper cabling between telephone exchanges, and from the nearest exchange to the consumer’s premises. You can still see the familiar telephone poles and wires strung out between them in some areas. As technology ...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Is Bins ? - A Light-Hearted Look at our Domestic Refuse Collection System

  Editor's note: See update at the end of the main article for news on the new UK.GOV plans for recycling collections.... ---------------------------- As one of the more incisive questions of our age, "When is Bins ?" definitely deserves some attention…and hopefully a reliable and effective solution for those afflicted by recent changes (i.e. most of us!). In days of old, life was much simpler when it came to getting our rubbish collected…. The majority of households had just one dustbin. We put it out for the dustmen (as we affectionately referred to them in those balmy 'pre-pc' days) on the same day each week, and with a bit of luck it got emptied sometime on that day.  Life is much more complicated nowadays when it comes to dealing with our domestic waste. The advent of recycling and climate change awareness, which admittedly was necessary, given our profligacy with the earth’s non-renewable resources over the last 100 years, came in the late 1990s, and n...
Post a Comment
Read more

No Standing Charge Electricity and Gas Tariffs: OFGEM says they’re coming, but will they save us money ?

Image
 Why are No-SC tariffs important, and when are we likely to see them ? Our Electricity prices in UK are acknowledged to be the highest in Europe.  Despite this rather serious indictment of our pricing structure, as discussed in a previous blog , our Electricity and Gas suppliers have continued to penalise low users by first re-introducing, then continually hiking up their standing charges (SCs) to hitherto unprecedented levels. This has not so far been challenged by the regulator, but has caused much resentment and complaints amongst consumers, who object to 'paying through the nose for not using any energy' as they see it.  Figure 1 shows the true injustice of the policy by comparing the effective  per unit price paid by consumers at different levels of annual consumption. A very low user (e.g. someone living on their own and only using electricity for lighting and low wattage appliances) with an annual consumption of only 200 KwH would pay a whopping £1.31 per Kw...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ramadan Fasting Times - How are they defined ?

  The start of Fajr (the islamic dawn prayer) is defined as '...the point at which the sun reaches 18 degrees below the horizon..". This corresponds to the beginning  of astronomical twilight. Fajr finishes at the point of sunrise. During the holy month of Ramadan, fasting is normally practised by muslims during daylight hours between the start of Fajr and astronomical sunset.  Although there are specialised tables available online for Ramadan fasting times each year, these tend to be aimed at the larger centres of population.  The exact start and finish times for fasting each day will of course vary between different locations, and precise values may not always be provided by mosques for our smaller towns and villages.  Even in a relatively small island such as the UK, variations in both latitude and longitude can lead to significant differences between locations, particularly if Ramadan falls close to either solstice, when the range of latitude we experie...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sharing Files over the Net - How Painless Can We Make it ?

  Many of us who still use a pc will, sooner or later, find they need to share larger files  with others. If these are  more than ca 10MB in size, this can present problems. The traditional, and probably still the most widely used, method of transferring smaller files to someone else is via an email attachment. This has two associated problems…the first (and perhaps best known because of the trouble it can cause) is that all mail systems prohibit attachments above a certain size, and this limit can be as little as 5 MB or even less. Even a medium-sized Word document with illustrations or images within it can easily exceed this, and audio and video files will almost always be above the limit, unless they are very short.   This results in 'offending' mail messages being rejected and not reaching their destination, something which is not always apparent to the sender. The other, and less widely appreciated, issue is that emails are eminently ‘hackable’ (see recent...
Post a Comment
Read more

Windows 7 to Windows 10/11: To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade ?

  Microsoft (MS) withdrew support for Windows 7 way back in 2014 in line with their general policy of planned version obsolescence. By all accounts, there are still a considerable number of older pcs running Win 7; their owners have either simply not been able to afford the cost of an upgrade, or have heard of the obstacles to upgrading, and are quite reasonably reluctant to risk trying to upgrade an older pc with a new OS that it may not be able to cope with. For anyone actually brave enough to try upgrading a Win 7 pc,   MS have thrown an additional spanner in the works by no longer offering   downloads for Win 10 or Win 11 installation on pcs they detect are still running Windows 7 or XP. Users are therefore effectively   prevented by MS from using either of the more recent OS versions......the very versions that MS were originally prepared to let you upgrade to for free. This is an obvious ploy to force users to upgrade their old (but still serviceable) pcs to...
Post a Comment
Read more

Our Daily Lives are Inextricably Linked to the Internet – But How Does it all Actually Work ?

Image
  Introduction We all interact with the ‘net’ daily in one way or another, whether it’s via our smartphone, on a laptop or desktop pc, or just at 'arms length' when using a service that involves internet data transmission of some kind. We are now arguably totally dependent on the internet's continued function to enable our increasingly complex everyday lives - our society just wouldn't work properly without it. This makes us vulnerable to cyber-attacks, or indeed any  natural event which interferes with its infrastructure, as discussed in a recent blog on modern warfare How many of us really understand how it all works, though ? And do we really need to ? It is, of course, as with many modern inventions, perfectly possible to use the internet without having a clue about its internal workings. And I suspect the vast majority of people do so. Over the last 30 years or so the increasing complexity of life in general and our technology in particular has turned us into...
Post a Comment
Read more