This is the time plus two

Image by Patrick Hoesly via Flickr

“It’s being called Greenwich Mean Time plus two: a new time zone for Britain with an extra hour of daylight in the evening. The downside? An additional hour of darkness in the morning”

The Indy discusses the fanciful notion of the UK adopting a permanent GMT+2 timezone which would see many Scottish schoolchildren see the sunrise whilst in their classrooms and experience an 11:10pm sunset in the summer months. As far as I’m concerned can we please just adopt one time over the entire year and stick with it? Maybe I can adopt GMT+2 myself and just force everyone else to adapt to my personal timezone. Perhaps even have that printed on a business card listed next to my contact details: ‘this autonomous individual operates within the GMT+2 timezone only’.

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Album Oddities: The World Of Genius Hans

A dying art form perhaps but quirky music album covers and /or titles is a fascinating one. Got any that spring to mind and was this one amongst them?

The World Of Genius Hans

by

Moving Gelatine Plates

French prog rock of the early 70′s. Now you know.

A Minty LXDE desktop at last

Linux Mint have issued a release candidate of their popular open source operating system based on the ultra lightweight LXDE desktop environment which is ideal for use on lower specification computers and netbooks. A quick test even from the live CD shows that the desktop is still fully featured though in common with the Xfce desktop it may not be fully compatible with running Adobe’s air platform. Otherwise everything else works very well.

I easily added the required Nvidia graphic card drivers and was able to add shortcuts to the desktop though found a familiar minor irritation in the shape of a missing Firefox shortcut icon which I have encountered before (some jigging about in the icons folder will fix that but it is a known bug).

The final release will be well worth downloading for extending the use of older computers (recycled or reused), together with laptops and netbooks. Linux Mint 8 ‘Helena’ LXDE is a free download.

Linux Mint 8 ‘Helena’ LXDE RC1

Making choices in the dark

Microsoft has been rolling out its browser choice update to European windows users. For those that actually have Microsoft updates enabled the result has been , perhaps a bit confusing for some.

Typically many users assumed the update was malware or spam whilst another contingent sat there asking themselves ‘what’s a browser?’.

Picture by :: Wendy :: under this  specific creative commons license

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Self harm at the BBC?

There’s really no accounting for taste. As the caller on this morning’s phone-in illustrated when she declared that there was nothing on the entire output of the BBC that suited her tastes , that the BBC were bullies and that being compelled to pay the license fee was against her human rights. Funny how that much maligned statute gets dragged up when it conveniences people.

Each to their own.

After weeks of speculation the BBC is to cut radio stations 6music (and if I hear one more ignoramus refer to it as radio 6 I swear I’ll explode. Pass the ammo) and the Asian network together with many web sites and youth  orientated initiates  whilst re-branding BBC radio 7 to Radio 4 extra (because it’d be strange to highlight the legacy of a missing number 6 station presumably) and trying to make Radio 2 ‘more distinctive’.

It was interesting to hear the culture secretary criticise the BBC for acting as if it was a dead cert that the next government would be a Conservative one (even though it’d be a bloody miracle if it wasn’t). Which of course hints at the real motivation behind these BBC cuts. They are political in motive and designed to placate any future Murdoch/ Cameron axis (of evil?) and the near certainty of a thorough butchering by the traditionally BBC-hostile Conservatives.

In this case though it seems akin to bloodying your own face in the hope of playing on the sympathy vote of any future encounter with a hostile playground bully. ‘Don’t pick on me’, the BBC seems to be saying, ‘I’ve already sawn off my own legs just to save you the trouble’.

Innovative tactic.

Photo by Joe Dunckley under this creative commons license