A clue: It’s more than just counting the money This post is based on an article I wrote for the Q3 edition of the Institute of Water magazine The ideal There is increasing awareness that clean drinking water and good sanitation has a far greater value than the simple economic returns it offers to water […]
Disinfection: Improving the odds
Abstract As operational scientists the authors know well from experience that apparently well-run treatment works can have the occasional coliform failure but all the resamples are compliant. This paper explores why, in the authors’ opinion, this is a consequence of the underpinning disinfection kinetics and two major operational factors, pH and actual retention times. In […]
Money Laundering, without getting arrested
I’m sorry if you have arrived here expecting to find ways of recycling some ill-gotten gains. You will have to look elsewhere This post is about something a little more useful to most of the population: how to keep your coins clean and COVID-free with the minimum of fuss. Yes, i know about contactless payments […]
Ransomware? No problem
A cheap and effective way of beating the ransomware bandits let’s look at this from the other end first. Imagine you run a small business , like I do. The phone rings. It one of your people telling you that they can’t access any billing or client order information because all your files have been […]
Three things I value: Part 2 – Worth paying a bit more for
In this post you will read about a device that costs low hundreds of pounds which only does he same basic job as a something costing about a third of that, but one which I still wouldn’t want to be without. So, what is this device, and what makes it worth the money?
Three things I value: Part 1 – the cheap but effective
Reading the post you will see why I value a device that cost less than thirty pounds, that at various points caused me to pull my hair out, but yet I wouldn’t want to be without. So what’s the cheap but effective example, then?
Three things I value – How it came about
I firmly subscribe to the idea that people and relationships are more important than material possessions, yet in a recent discussion I found myself defending the idea of possessions being important. Subscribe or buy? The context was a discussion with a group of friends on millennials increasingly buying rather than possessions, and opting for subscription […]
Solving the right problem
And not the one you thought it was… Have you ever wrestled with a problem, spending hours and days getting nowhere? Where what ever solution you come up with just wouldn’t work? This post is about a recent example of my own making. Happily the consequences were not serious but it was a sharp reminder […]
Passwords – One or Many
Passwords A while back I wrote a post on techniques to generate strong but memorable passwords. This clearly struck a chord with a number of you judging by the number of questions it sparked. One of the most commonly asked questions was whether it is better to have a single very strong password and use […]
Passwords – Strong or Memorable?
Passwords In our modern internet connected world we are constantly told that we need to use long complex passwords to keep out the bad people who want to steal our information and money. We are encouraged to use strong passwords, that is ones avoiding everyday words but including upper and lower case letters, numbers and punctuation […]