Beasley's Place

The country is at last to recognise the important work that the Bletchley Park coder breakers did during WW II and their successful cracking of the secret Nazi Enigma codes.

Although kept secret for over 30 years after the end of the war, it’s good that some of the original staff will still be on hand to see a special Memorial unveiled by the Queen.

What a great shame that so much expertise and technology remained hidden for so long as I am sure if we had had just a little more imagination and planning perhaps the early computing technology used by Bletchley Park may have provided the UK with a better post war recovery path.

I’m working through some Blogger Template changes at the moment, as have just realised that Google have updated the Template GUI and some other stuff, so there will be some style/format ‘funnies’ appearing on the blog for a short while.

To coin a phrase, “Bear with, bear with!”

Read a great piece in last Saturdays Telegraph weekend travel section by Andrew Gilligan about using the UK’s bus network for some very inexpensive touring trips of the South West of England.

There is something so English about this.

So says another in-depth scathing commentary article by the Telegraphs Peter Oborne.

David Cameron has truly dug a very deep hole through his connections to Murdoch’s New International cobweb  that will take him and many others in the Conservative party a long time to get out of.

It now appears, according to this latest article that it was George Osborne who first suggested to Cameron that he should take on Coulson as his press communications head, thereby entrenching a Murdoch insider deep into the then Government opposition and subsequently the current UK government.

It also appears that Tony Blair seems to have also had a very very close relationship with News International over his years in power. Ed Miliband albeit for this recent phone hacking saga,  may well have ended up treading the same path, I bet he will now be counting his lucky stars.

Someone as least seems to have have seen the light and is now prepared to stand up to Murdoch’s grip on our political system. I hope the debate that Ed Miliband has called for happens and we can get control of the situation.

Will Cameron really see the issues in front of his own eyes? Only time will tell.

As the newly released OFCOM UK interactive research map shows, there is still a massive disparagey between the Broadband Speed have’s and have not’s in the UK.

Ofcom hopes that the map will help the UK government see where investment is needed to being the UK up to speed of other countries and hopefully put the UK out in front of many others.

The map in fully interactive and provides a wide variety of information based on the various regions in the UK. It’s worth a look and a play with to see what the speeds & Broadband take up is in your own area.

From my own point of view, I continue to receive good broadband speeds through my BT Infinity line, although I can see a slight tail off in the download speed, but at an average of 30MB, I cannot complain at all. It may just be that that more users are being added to my fibre spur and the bandwidth is being taken up with TV/Movie viewing, gaming etc.

In the end, is this not what high-speed broadband is about and the fact that I can still receive these types of speed over a twisted copper pair of wires is amazing!

The Daily Telegraph published this story yesterday, again stirring up the controversy about FM Radio frequencies being turned off in favour of DAB Radio.

I’ve posted a number of times about this and I am still convinced that this would be a serious backwards step in the delivery of quality of broadcast radio in the UK.

It shows again how a supposed industry regulator (OFCOM) is completely out of touch with the ordinary public and seems to be indulging in an over enthusiastic pandering exercise with big business.

If this change is goes ahead, every radio in the UK will have to be replaced, including car radios, at the same time opening the floodgates to massive imports of non-UK produced DAB radios!

Why does officialdom want to interfere with our lives some much? OFCOM has yet to officially divulge a date for the switch off, which may be a late as 2020.

However, unless there is a concerted protest effort by the public it looks like we will end up with a rubbish quality radio broadcast system at sometime in the near future. Write to your MP about it here.

Read a great article in the Thursday Telegraph by Peter Oborne about the fallibility of David Cameron and his obviously bad judgements in hiring Andy Coulson & his cosying up too close the Murdoch ‘clan’!

Oborne also points out that these issues have also happened to past political leaders, which makes Cameron’s errors of judgment even more surprising; clearly he did not major in political history during his education!

If he is not careful, the effects of the NOTW debacle will engulf him (and probably Clegg) and we’ll end up with see yet another hamstrung UK government, just when the country needs more decisive actions to rectify the current economic situation.

It appears that Beko fridge-freezer fires began four years ago!

As I mentioned in my previous post on this issue, it seems incredible to me that we are only now learning about this issue.

What happened to Consumer Protection? What happened to Trading Standards? What happened to the government looking after it’s population?

It seems to me that so many organisations appear to be completely disconnected from the real world that we have live in. Somewhere, someone knew about this & I expect that they either could not be bothered to tell the public or perhaps they were prevented from doing so by business rules!

After publishing the previous post I decided to create another listing all of the MySociety websites in a clearer format.

• Write To Them – Enter a postcode and it’ll tell you who all your local representatives are, and a bit about who you should contact for which reasons.

• They Work For You – tells you everything you could want to know about what your Member of Parliament gets up to in Westminster. Uncover their voting record, read or watch their speeches on video, subscribe to email alerts when they speak.

• What Do They Know –  This definitive Freedom of Information site will help you make Freedom of Information requests and read all about what other people have been asking, and what replies they’ve been getting.

• Fix My Street – Enter your postcode, stick a pin in the map, type in your problem and zoom!… off it goes to the council. It’s so simple that over 100,000 problems have been reported through it so far.

• Petition Your Council – helps you find out whether your local council has an online petitions site.

There are plenty more useful website to visit, check out there Project Pages and have a good look around. You’ll find it very informative.

I’ve been displaying one of their website access ‘widgets’ on this blog for some time which allows you to find out  who are and write to your local MP/Councillors.

MySociety.org, the creator of this ‘widget’ has produced some more websites that allow people to find out if there are any ‘Local Petitions’ being run by their local council or to create one.

MySociety.org have also made some updates to ‘Fix My Street’ and a created new site for ‘Fix My Transport’ – soon to launched.

These are really useful tools if you are interested in making your points of view known, I have used some of them a number of times and they really do work.

You can see all of the work that MySociety.org does at their main web site here.