vivweb01

  Just a quick 'heads up' on a very useful tool I came across some years ago for downloading BBC programmes direct from iPlayer servers – and have used regularly ever since. As a committed user of BBC’s services for many years previously, I joined the online viewing revolution and started using iPlayer in the early 2010s. Not being particularly keen on ‘live’ streaming at the time, and in any case having a limited broadband download allowance as many of us did then, I took to selective downloading of anything that particularly took my interest.  As for the old VCR recordings we all remember making in the 80s and 90s, the problem then was finding time to actually watch what I'd recorded. I quickly became tired of discovering that most of what I'd painstakingly downloaded from iPlayer, and had finally got round to looking at, had already expired and was unviewable. This was because of the 30-day Digital Rights Management (DRM)-protection that everything downloaded via i...

  The world of online e-reading has become a confusing place over recent years, with a 'battle royal' raging between the publishing industry and internet users as more and more content goes online.  The industry are desperately trying to preserve their income streams in the face of increased online access to e-publications of all sorts which are outside their control, but the 'shadow' libraries are continually finding ways to outwit them..... It would seem obvious that a new publishing model is long overdue, with some alternative arrangement for internet access when a book is first published, and a better deal for struggling authors on whom we all depend for our fiction. Until the publishers accept this, and act accordingly, they will continue to lose ground; their business model will continue to struggle, and could eventually fail altogether. In an attempt to unravel some of the complexity of accessing reading material online while this battle continues, here is ...

  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 which 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 replace their old (but still serviceable) ...

An interesting news item on 'universal' vaccines appeared last week in the BBC News Health Section....  As someone with an active interest in vaccine development, the report certainly attracted my attention, and I think the methodology merits wider discussion as a possible 'game changer' in our approach to preventing human disease…. The concept of a ‘universal’ vaccine has been on the minds of those in the vaccine development field for many years, but the recent announcement is the first suggestion that such an intervention might actually be possible…and effective. I should add straight away that the Stanford research project alluded to in the above linked article is still very much in its early stages, and positive results have only been shown in lab mice to date. The methodology is nowhere near entering human trials yet, and this will be the only way to demonstrate whether a more universal approach to vaccination would be viable in the human population. Acquir...