Libre Draw: A Good Alternative to Microsoft Visio for Most People Many years ago I read that for any product or service, you can have any two of Cheap, Fast and Good. This sits nicely alongside another saying “buy cheap, buy twice”, something I learned the hard way when racing powerful superbikes round my local […]
Water: How Should we value it?
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. Writes Bob Windmill So, what is this device, and what makes it worth the […]
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. Writes Bob Windmill 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. writes Bob Windmill Subscribe or buy? The context was a discussion with a group of friends on millennials increasingly buying rather than possessions, and […]
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 […]