Observations on the world and its inhabitants
If you are looking at a twenty-two-year-old science fiction television series, you will find the visual effects are undeniably dated. The pacing belongs to a different era of broadcasting. It features people in leather jackets flying spaceships. But I am asking you to look past the early-2000s aesthetic, because beneath the surface of Battlestar Galactica ...
You need to thank one man for your current existence – a Russian. On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer at Serpukhov-15, the Soviet command bunker for early warning satellites. Just weeks after serious NATO actions, his Oko satellite system reported that the United States had launched five intercontinental ballistic missiles from ...
The Objective This was to create a secure, dual-user environment on a single BigLinux machine where the primary user (CW) and a secondary user (User2) maintain complete session isolation. The secondary user requires access to their mobile hotspot (UX1) without viewing the primary user’s files or possessing administrative (root) privileges. The Core Bottlenecks & Hardware ...
It is tempting to talk about COVID as if it were a chapter we have closed. A horrible few years, then a return to “normal”. But that framing feels increasingly wrong to me. The pandemic was not only an acute crisis; it was a forcing function that pushed institutions, companies, and individuals into rapid adaptation. ...
We have all been there. You are halfway through typing “I hope this email finds you well” for the fourteenth time since breakfast, and for a split second, you actually forget how to spell “well.” Like wut! It happens to people. Or perhaps you are staring at a blinking cursor, trying to remember if your ...
Most of us spend our lives fighting with our keyboards. We have these thoughts—medical observations, legal arguments, complex lines of code—but the physical act of typing it out over and over feels like a tax on our time. When I first looked at Espanso, I almost closed the window. It looked like a wall of ...
Date: 8 February 2026. System: Scan 3XS Laptop (Clevo X56xWNx Architecture), Processor: Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX (Arrow Lake), RAM: 64GB DDR5 RAM, DRIVES: 3TB NVME, Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU (Blackwell). In simple terms, this just means no-nonsense very high end. Luddites will be deterred by all the ‘jargon’ in here. ...
If you’ve spent the last decade or two using Windows, your brain has been subtly “programmed”. You don’t just use a computer; you use it the Microsoft way. You know where the “Start” button is, you know that a .exe file is something you double-click, and you know that when things go wrong, you probably ...
The transition to a Linux-based dual-boot system is often marketed as a streamlined experience. However, when high-performance hardware meets specialised networking requirements, the path quickly shifts from a standard installation to a deep-dive into kernel modules and system architecture. This is a technical post-mortem of a transition involving an RTX 3080, an Archer TXE70UH Wi-Fi ...
For the better part of three decades, “personal computing” was synonymous with Windows. It wasn’t just an operating system; it was the foundation of digital life. Blue Screens of Death and endless updates were tolerated because, frankly, there were few alternatives. Apple was expensive and maintained by a cult. Linux was perceived as an obscure ...
This one follows from: Man vs. Machine (Spoiler: The Machine Lost). But on this occasion it was Man and Machine [AI] working together in harmony. The primary motivation for this migration was to reclaim the performance of a 2018 Dell Inspiron 7786. While the hardware remains capable, running Windows 11 felt increasingly sluggish and heavy. ...
Humanity has always lived in the shadow of its own ingenuity. Every leap in technological power has widened the gap between what we can do and what we can wisely control. Today, that ancient asymmetry has become the defining tension of our age. We are accelerating into a future shaped by artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, ...
For the independent author, the “final pass” of proofreading is often the most daunting phase of production. Traditional advice suggests separating the creative act of writing from the analytical act of editing. However, with the advent of sophisticated AI and custom automation, a new “proactive” strategy has emerged: the Integrated Workflow. By managing proofreading iteratively ...
1. Introduction The motivation for this workflow exploration was the necessity of converting existing Microsoft Word documents (.docx) into well-structured Markdown (.md) files automatically. While Markdown is an ideal format for documentation, version control, and lightweight text editing (such as in Typora), manual conversion or reliance on simple tools often results in corrupted formatting, particularly ...
I continue to be fascinated by the advance of technology and the the direction of prices. With TVs this is totally amazing. See also How Samsung TV Prices Dropped Over a Decade! £35,000 to £2400 (at Feb 2025) So at 31/08/2025, one could splash out on a good quality 85-inch Samsung TV that would have ...
WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system. It provides the core software for a website, handling everything from publishing content to managing users. However, by default, its design and customisation options are limited. Building a WordPress site with GeneratePress (GP) and GenerateBlocks (GB) is a highly effective way to create a fast, stable, ...
Ah, artificial intelligence – the technology that’s supposed to revolutionise our lives, save us time, and maybe even write our grocery lists. But let’s be real here, not everyone is rushing to embrace our new robot overlords. After all one of them called DeepSeek caused a $1 trillion wipe out on the stock markets in ...
If you were well off and bought an 85-inch Samsung TV in 2014 – the price would have been around £35,000!! Wot! I knew that was a ridiculous price but it was the sort of price for that size of TV back then – 10+ years ago. So I took a photo in 2014. All ...
Wow!! It’s such an amazing tool – beating back ChatGPT hands down – that I had to try it out on some conundrums I faced in the past. Note that on opening this post, a video starts playing automatically at 11:11 min and stops automatically about 6 mins later. To not have the video start ...
Not everybody needs this! I often have text copied from PDF when I’m working on something. This leads to loads of unnecessary paragraph marks. At other times I have rows of plain text copied from somewhere. It’s a pain to get rid of paragraph marks at the end of each line, yet preserving the correct ...
This is one part of a strategy to clean up a MS Word document (ver 2019 and later). Too often I receive documents that have loads of double paragraphs, double-spaces between text, or a leading space at the beginning of a paragraph. Those are annoying. Today I deal with leading white spaces. This is only ...
Don’t ask – “How do these situations happen to you only?”. Right let me get into it straight away. It’s today 29/05/2024, I’ve left my room on the third floor of a hotel, on the way out to get to a domiciliary visit. I see a man who appeared be about 70 y.o, just outside ...
I just received learned opinion from a group of high IQ doctors that using AI to summarise articles and present findings is “low effort”. This means that anybody who cannot or does use AI for such purposes, is a “high effort” person! Some people may to believe that low effort is simply laziness. However, low ...
Most people want to know what’s the best mobile (cell) phone to buy. I often hear questions (not necessarily to me) like, “What’s the best brand?” or “What works best?” Those sorts of questions are like asking “What’s the best restaurant or food?” Again – how would I know. These questions are about attitude leading ...
Not me – from one of my ‘associates’, as I have no friends. My take Well, I hate self-service as it often sends up my blood pressure. Something ‘always’ goes wrong. It could be some nonsense with age verification, it may not like my bag, something can’t scan, then when the red light flashes, they ...
WordPress that runs this site – has recently updated to version 6.4.2. This version changes lots of things for bloggers. In case some do not know, blogs happen on ‘websites’. In previous years had been running a certain ‘theme’ that avoided the confusion caused by all the WordPress development that happened in version 5. [Themes ...
The net has gone wild since around November 2022, when AI took off. The rate of advances is staggering in the last 6 months. As usual, when something powerful arrives that disrupts the usual run of the mill, people react in fear or freeze up. If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT by now, then your ...
Well, loads of people have been biting their nails about ChatGPT. Yuh know anything that is new and apparently intelligent is to be feared. Like “OMG!! OMG!! AI is taking over the world, let’s have a panic attack!” The sort of responses are similar to when aeroplanes were made to fly people around, the telephone ...
I’m a longstanding customer of Anker. I don’t buy cheap poor-quality stuff. Anker is middle of the range and produces technology that is great and reliable. No delay – the Anker Q45 is currently on sale for a genuine price drop of £42. So it is now £97.99 which means I had paid the full ...
All of this post is my notes. It is not designed for ‘you’. I use advanced features of find and replace in MS Word. I write my notes like self-talk because I’ve noticed that in a few months’ time I may not remember every aspect of this. Challenge Recently I wanted to find an easy ...
Captain Walker
Captain Walker
