vivweb01blog

  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 limit, and audio and video files will almost always be above it, 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 r...

Just a brief update on live bus service monitoring online,  in case anyone else is struggling to see where their bus has got to - you're not alone. I'm located in the Midlands and have not been able to see any Arriva buses on Bustimes.org's live map local services since Sunday 18th May. All other service providers seem to be showing up normally. Looking further afield, some other regions do seem to have tracking on some of their Arriva services, so it does not appear to be a universal outage. Some further investigations yesterday and a chat with a helpful Arriva driver revealed that a) local drivers themselves use Bustimes.org in preference to Arriva's app, b) They had also noticed the dropout and, perhaps more revealing, they had enquired of their bosses what the reason was and been told 'they didn't know'. We can theferore only speculate. Arriva have been messing about with their timetables this month, and I wouldn't be surprised if they've done so...

  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.  Since the exact start and finish times for fasting each day are linked to astronomical phenomena, they will of course vary between different locations, and precise values may not always be provided by national 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 places, particularly if Ramadan falls close to...

I first published this mini-review in July 2022 - a 'lot of water has passed under the bridge' since then, with a new and highly unpopular government in place and already faltering.  The employment situation has worsened significantly since then due to the NI surchares leveled on Business in October 2024. I've recently updated it to reflect recent developments and the prospects for our economic recovery. There has been little or no progress on addressing our low productivity and high benefits dependency amongst the working age population. It's important for the sake of our economy and our children's futures that we address our poor productivity as a nation. We can only hope to do this if we make maximum use of our home-grown talent. It's important that we now include more of our older workers in our workforce, whether they have retired or not, and we can only tempt them out of their 'economic inactivity' by providing strong incentives. The following arti...

  Introduction We are living through a time of great change – and a challenge to our way of life. The fundamental reason behind this is a developing imbalance between the resources we are able to supply for our populations, and the demand they are placing on them. Our unrestrained world population growth over the past half-century has now caught up with us with a vengeance, and is rapidly outstripping our available resources. As far back as the 1970s , this imbalance was predicted to come to a head in the early to mid-2020s. At that time, the environmental movement was just a pale shadow of what it is today, and 'net zero by 2050' hadn’t even been considered. The arguments about whether climate change is actually occurring have largely subsided now in the face of the overwhelming evidence that the planet's atmoshphere is heating up, particularly in the polar regions; these have been replaced by disputes as to how much of a contribution man-made greenhouse gas emis...