Author: billthomuk

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Lazy Sunday Afternoons…

Some of us read the papers, others walk the dog. But for a true geek, Sunday is just the day for installs and configuration.

I, like many millions of others, have a Linksys WRT54G wireless router at home. Generally, it’s been fine, but recently I’ve found myself having to reset it every few days when connectivity just seems to go away. Updating the firmware from the Linksys site didn’t help.So today I took the plunge and installed one of the free alternative firmware distributions available: DD-WRT.

Status-Q » Blog Archive » Taking the plunge and flashing

And in case I should be seen to be less than sympathetic to Quentin, I must confess that I spent the morning finding an AAC player for my iPaq so that I can listen to music from my iTunes library without having to convert files…

[Later – I’ve just upgraded two WordPress installations from 2.02 to 2.04 while having coffee and cake.]

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Castro’s birthday




Venice: August 2006

Originally uploaded by BillT.

Fidel Castro was 80 last Sunday, and I was in Venice But I’d remembered to take along my last cuban cigar, bought in Havana on my trip there with Lili earlier this year… and so we toasted the great survivor in style!

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Travelling in Turmoil

This should be coming to you from Venice, where the cybercafes have started offering wireless connections and you can even log on while sitting at the Palenca vaparetto stop.
Instead I’m sitting on my living room floor trying to decide whether the seven pm Ryanair flight to Forli I booked myself on last night will actually take off, and looking at the Trenitalia website trying to decide whether I’ll be in Italy in time to catch the last train to Venice’s Santa Lucia station.
Continue reading “Travelling in Turmoil”

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No photography

I do a fair bit of freelance work for the BBC, so I’m often in Bush House and other buildings. While there I sometimes spot things of interest, such as a display case containing Alistair Cooke’s typewriter.

And, this being the digital age, I take photos of the things I see and post them to Flickr.

Well it seems the BBC, dedicated though it is to the provision of information to the world and having ‘nation speaking peace unto nation’, is rather less happy about people seeing what goes on inside its buildings. There is, I’ve been told – only eight months after the event – a general prohibition on taking photos inside or of any BBC building without written permission from facilities management or whatever they call the people who look after the buildings.

This doesn’t seem to have inhibited the BBC Pool on Flickr or stopped some important people posting cameraphone photos –  but I’ve been asked by the man who organised displays to take down my pics of the Cooke typewriter and, since he arranged the display, I have done so.

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Talkin’ about my generation

Fifteen years ago the World Wide Web started to live up to its name when its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, posted a message to the alt.hypertext discussion group about his work on ‘The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project’,  which aimed ‘to allow links to be made to any  information anywhere’.
Berners-Lee had been working on hypertext-based information services at the CERN physics lab for many years, and had written the first web server and browser late in 1990, but on August 6th 1991 he started to tell people outside CERN about it.
Continue reading “Talkin’ about my generation”

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Which terms are you on?

Billy Bragg’s music is back on MySpace, and we should all be pleased.

Even if you’re not a fan of his jangling guitar, political sensibilities and poetry of failed relationships and broken promises – and I am –  it’s great to see an artist with such a long history making good use of the network to reach a new audience. Continue reading “Which terms are you on?”

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I’m tired of spam

[Read an edited version of this on the BBC News online, as ever]
About two weeks ago I started getting a lot of bounced emails. Most of them were notifications from the ‘postmaster’ somewhere that my email could not be delivered because the recipient didn’t exist, but quite a lot were from spam filters to tell me that I’d sent messages that they weren’t willing to accept.

It seems I’ve been pushing stocks in dodgy companies, offering pharmaceuticals without prescription and even sending virus-laden images to unwitting users.

Continue reading “I’m tired of spam”