Category: Uncategorized

With the publication last Friday of a secret report, the Australian Government seems bent on using the introduction of health care record systems as a back door ID Card system.

Individual Healthcare Identifiers (IHI’s) is seen as the way to get a National ID for every Australian citizen. With only the old Tax number references and passports currently in existence and previous failed attempts at ID Card introduction, this could be the way that Australia finally gets an ID grip on its own citizens.

Could it happen here? Yes and probably already is! As the UK government continues to received such negative press about the UK National ID Card system – too expensive, too intrusive  and not free. Electronic Medical Health ID numbers seem an ideal solution for the UK government to finally get a UK ID card in place without any additional cost and resultant bad press.

Perhaps the original ID scheme has been just red herring, albeit a very expensive one.

Paranoid? Perhaps this may be what was planned to happen all along!

In a clear breach of European Law, out so called representatives are telling UK Police Chiefs to ignore European legislation to remove People from the UK DNA database where requested to.

The Guardian has the full story here. The sooner we get rid of this Orwellian government the better off we will be.

Here’s a great ‘advert’ from Liberty about the Database Society that we are fast sinking into. makes you think.

I seem to have gotten behind in some posts, here are my speeds graphs for June & July.

Clearly a hiccup in June due to a bad firmware upgrade to my router, there’s always some thing!

However, all seems to be building back up again.

In a previous post about Broadband speed, one of my points was about being persistent when reporting faults.

A friend of mine has had their ISP connection ‘repaired’ after two months of constant phoning, not his own equipment, fault at the exchange. Was 1.5 MB, not 3.5MB!

This incident brings a whole new meaning to ‘Pop-Music’!

What’s more worrying though is Apples attempt to gag the owners of the exploding iPod, so that it was going to suffer and bad publicity.

Not an isolated case it seems and a bit of a black mark against Apple I think.

Seems that we can’t get enough reports telling us that we don’t have the Broadband speed that we are paying for – what’s new! – or that we don’t have the Broadband speed that we deserve – how long will we have to wait?

With the latest OFCOM survey and report telling us again what we all already know; that we all pay too much for lower speeds than we thought we would get!

The full OFCOM report is here. At this stage, I don’t see that it gives much confidence in us achieving the Digital Britain landscape that the government has been recently talking about.

How can you ensure that you can have a good broadband connection. This is not intended to be a tutorial, but here are some pointers (in no particular order) for making sure you have the best chance of good broadband speeds.

• First check out the various speed tests available here. When the test is running don’t be doing any internet work, it will affect any results.

• Check the physical connections inside your house. make sure that you don’t have extension lead plugged into extension lead etc. to connect your router to the telephone line, it could have some effect. You really want the router plugged directly into the first socket on the line (via the filter).

• Make sure that your filter is in the right place.

• Make sure that your telephone line does not have any noise, clicks, hums on the line, it will have a very bad effect on your speed. If you find you have noise on the line, report it and keep pestering your supplier until it is fixed.

• Never switch off your router, even when you go on holiday. A router left on will gradually build up its speed capability – it works in conjunction with an equivalent box in the exchange that looks at how many routers (it can be in some cases up to 50) it has to deliver its share of broadband services to. If you keep switching off your router; believe me, you’ll be at the bottom of its (the box in the exchange) list of potentially bad connections!

• Check that your router is working correctly, make sure that it is using the latest firmware. A word of warning! Be very careful when updating firmware, my last update of a Netgear router completely stopped the router working! Thank goodness I have a spare router (old but working) while it took me a two days to get the Netgear router working again.

• Take time to understand the technology of what broadband is and why it may not be working properly. Your phone line can be working perfectly for voice calls, but the ADSL service may have dropped off at the exchange. Understand what you need to tell the support agent when you report it. In a lots of cases, you will know more than they do. Don’t accept suggestions that your equipment is at fault when you know it is not! That said, if it’s all working okay, don’t fiddle!

• After all that, check out the various speed tests again here. When the test is running don’t be doing any internet work, it will affect any results.

Hope these pointers help.

I’m a bit confused!

1 – Vestas Wind Systems is shutting the Isle of Wight site because it says…

the UK wind turbine market is not big enough to sustain UK manufacturing site.

2 – Residents of Welshpool are up in arms about about five years of potential disruption as up to 150 Wind Turbine are moved through their small town as one of Europe biggest wind farms is built on various hills in Powys – to supply electricity for Liverpool and Manchester!

3 – Local sources tell me that the Turbines and blades  will be imported from Germany!

4 – The UK government has announced a grant of over £6 million to a wind turbine firm’s research centre on the Isle of Wight, despite its plans to cut 625 jobs and shut its factory.

Some where along the line I think there is a bit of government departmental non-communication going on here and a fine example of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing.

Why are we paying money to company for a UK research centre when they are shutting their UK manufacturing site. Nudge, Nudge; Wink, Wink; I smell a rat here!

I either did not know this or I had forgotten as it was nearly eight years ago, but the Photo Card part of our UK Driving Licenses runs out after 10 years!

A friend of mine found this out last week when he was stopped by police for a failed stop light and when he produced his license, they told him that it was out of date!

Apparently the DVLC used to send out reminders, but that seems to have stopped, he is being charged with a number of offenses and has been told that he could be in for a hefty fine!!!

He emailed me and sure enough when I checked, my photo bit runs out in 2011 and the paper bit in 2019 (yes I am that old!) so I’d better have a reminder in my calendar to make sure I don’t get trapped in the same way.

It seems the difference in the dates is to ensure that the photo is no older than 10 years out of date. Only in the UK do we need to have two parts to a driving license!

So the message here is get your license Photo Card out and check those dates and make sure you renew before the photo cards expires.

I don’t use the service much, but have been following one or two Twitterers recently (Tour de France for example ) and it seems that it may be running out of capacity!

Not very good for something that is said to be the biggest thing since….

Today is the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, it was a great achievement considering the technology in use at the time and when you think that the average PDA/iPhone today probably has more computing power than they had on Apollo 11.

It’s one of those events you don’t forget it or where you were at the time, for me that was sitting on board HMS Devonshire in a dry dock in Portsmouth naval dockyard under going a small refit. What a bore.

At least the TV’s were working, if nothing else and if I remember correctly, quite a few of us stayed up to watch it live.

What a fantastic event, it’s just a pity that they did not them plan to go further afield, Mars? But I suppose that will come in time.