Category: Technology

On the Waterfront

On Thursday we walked via Times Square to Pier 83 on the Hudson for a 1 1/2 hour boat trip down the bay, past the Statue of Liberty and up the East River to the Williamsburg Bridge.

Ways and Means

If you have nothing better to do, reflect on the pace of change on our planet.

Polar Power

I started writing here eleven years ago. I thought I might be bored not having to get up and go to work. Strange, because I always had a range of interests beyond my job.

Tech and Trivia

I should go to an overworked NHS doctor for a check-up occasionally but, as with the car and gas boiler, I wait for something to go wrong. This website does gets a check-up; it comes with the rations as us old soldiers say.

This and That

When a country has an elite school it is always described as the Eton of (insert country). In the FTWeekend today Aitchison College is “Pakistan’s answer to Eton”. Is there a Harrow of Pakistan, or anywhere else? But I digress.

Flying Boats

When Barnes Wallis and Nevil Norway (aka Nevil Shute) were tinkering with designs for passenger airships at Vickers, Short Brothers had another vision for inter-continental travel.

Starship Enterprise

Two names you have never heard of: Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis. They founded Skype and sold it to Microsoft for $8.5 billion.

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Categorised as Technology

Lamplighters

I have recently re-read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (John le Carré, 1974) in which lamplighters are the dogsbodies of British intelligence doing surveillance and courier work.

Project Gutenberg

The oldest library in the world is thought to be the Library of Ashurbanipal in modern day Iraq. When it was founded in the 7th century BC it was in Assyria, a city-state in Mesopotamia. The oldest continuously working library may be the Al-Qarawiyyin library in Fez, Morocco, dating from 859 AD (a suspiciously precise… Continue reading Project Gutenberg