vivweb01

  Ever wanted to get rid of those pesky AI summaries that seem to appear nowadays every time you do a Google search ?  Want to bypass AI and 'do your own thing' with a more focussed advance internet search ? Or switch the search engine you're using at the touch of a button ?  Now you can - and without needing to remember the exact query syntax to use....or even opening a new window. To find out how, just read on….. Background Internet searching has changed a lot over the last few years, due largely to the automatic insinuation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents into everything but the most basic searches by the all the major search engine providers. There is no doubt that those AI summaries which now appear uninvited in response to most queries can be very useful, particularly for those who know little about a particular subject to start with, and aren’t quite sure where to start looking. But they aren't always needed, and they can clutter up the results ...

  UK Hotels, and the european hotel industry generally, have traditionally focused on providing holiday accommodation for couples. There are a number of historical reasons for this. Hotel accommodation tends not to attract families, particularly larger ones with small children. Single travellers were in the minority when many of our current hotels were designed or retro-fitted, and couples without children were the main holiday customers, particularly during the peak holiday seasons. Thus the room offerings were primarily designed to cater for their group. Some single rooms were included in the mix, but these tended to be located in odd corners not large enough for a double room. They were often sited high up near the eaves, requiring a considerable degree of fitness to climb multiple flights of stairs and are usually quite unsuitable for those with disabilities. In recent years, the demographic changes in our population have highlighted the resulting poor provision made for ...

The short answer to this question is that, for the BBC at least, it’s both an anachronism and an essential…. The licence fee was originally introduced to fund public broadcasting way back in the 1940s after the enforced break in transmissions caused by WW2. It worked reasonably well while the number of channels was small, TV broadcasting was still analogue, and radio retained a significant audience share. While still reasonably priced, it was probably a fair way of funding public broadcasting. Since the dawn of digital TV in the early 2000s, with its plethora of new commercial channels, the BBC’s ‘market share’ of viewer attention has steadily dwindled, while the licence fee has risen nearly 20-fold, from the princely sum of £10 p.a. for a colour licence in 1968 to the current £180 in 2026. Unsurprisingly perhaps, this combination of factors has generated much argument as to why all of us should continue paying what is now a substantial amount for a service we may not actua...