I made this picture from two found on flickr, the flag is by Rock Cohen CC 2008 BY, the Privat slogan is from a picture by Isengardt CC 2010 BY.
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Investigatory Powers Act 2016
The Investigatory Powers Bill became Law earlier this week. Interestingly the noise and criticism was turned up after the Royal Assent and a Government Site petition opposing the Law reached 1500,000 signatures in a week. I had reason to perform some research on what the Law actually says, and here are my notes and links.
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Emoji’s in WordPress
I have installed Super Emoji+. Here are some icons from the icon palette. 💬 🌶 🏦 🐱🗝
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NWN2, Mask of the Betrayer
I have been playing this for a while. Not seen a need to make notes until today. I am as ever using the walkthrough at Gamebanshee.
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Privacy in the UK
Some notes and links pertaining to the GDPR,
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Hitler rant from Downfall
As you know, a number of people have set alternative words to the scene in Downfall where his Generals tell him that there are no more soldiers between the Red Army and Berlin. I am particularly taken with this one which explores the funding of the UK Police and has clearly been written by someone…
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How to unpivot in Excel
The need to unpivot data is a common requirement. There are a number of reasons as to why. I and my customers are primarily using Excel on Windows and so the examples below are shown in excel and rely on excel functionality.
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Wajig
Wikipedia says, “Wajig is a simplified wrapper to Debian’s package management system dpkg/APT. Wajig provides the functionality of apt-get, dpkg, dpkg-deb, apt-cache and other tools. These tools launch as a subprocess. Wajig also provides extra functionality beyond that of the stock apt and dpkg tools.”.
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Boundary Reviews
Im wrote in 2016, “As we know the Tories are having a second go at rigging the General Elections”. It seemed they didn’t need to and have dropped the plans. For some reason I originally made this private but lifted the constraint in Nov 2020. Here are my notes and links,
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UK Immigration
I was thinking about the Brexit vote and the way that Immigration came to dominate the debate; there were a couple of factually based articles which examined the numbers, and some economic analysis which argues that like a deficit, immigration is a good thing. Anyway, despite the fact that evidence is of no use in…
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Land Rover Freelander
I am considering buying a Land Rover Freelander 1, late issue with the TD4 engine. Need to do some research; here are my notes and links
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Analysing the 2015 General Election
I am fed up hearing about the PLP’s 9m votes mandate. A large number of these 9m votes will have voted for Labour candidates that lost. So I decided to calculate the number of votes cast for the PLP. So something for both political geeks and excel nerds. Here’s how I did it.
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Site Blocking
The BBC have got themselves a change in the law to charge a licence fee if you use internet devices to watch BBC’s on-demand and catch up content. This was originally written before I restated my No TV declaration. Their web site makes it clear that mobile devices are covered by any licence paid irrespective…
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Fedora 24
This is quite different, in particular the System V init files don’t work any more and so I need to implement a systemd solution to mount the virtual box shared folders. I think these need to run after the vboxaddclient service. Some documentation suggests that LSB compliant scripts will work. I am about to stop…
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Dictatorship and Plebiscites
For people casual acquainted with political theory, we know that dictators quite like plebiscites in a way that they dislike parliaments. We can see in the UK, the way in which some of the Brexiteers, but not their leadership, are frightened of both parliament’s consideration of interpreting the referendum result and/or running a second one.
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