When Keir Starmer came to power he promised a politics that would 'tread more lightly on our lives', but this suggestion of an outright ban on smoking in public places is a direct contradiction of that. And given that pubs are places where anyone can go to get a few hours of peace and enjoyment and to indulge their bad habits, all this does is to reinforce his image as something of a too-serious kill-joy!

So the days are getting RAPIDLY darker as we hit mid September here in the UK. At this time of year at around latitude 51-52 (that's between London and Birmingham where I spend most of my time!) we are loosing 4 minutes of daylight a day....

Today the average data centre contains 2000 to 5000 servers. This requires a massive infrastructure to serve them: an uninterruptible power supply as back up, ventilation and cooling, along with fire suppression and all those connections to external networks.

So I've been dabbling with playing a little Splinterlands again over the last few days, and I've been enjoying myself. My rentals from SPS and cards have been going down and so it's got to that point where I thought 'may as well play'...

I've noticed something different in the way my search returns on Google are displayed recently....Nowadays, instead of getting a list of links I'm used to I get a paragraph of human-like prose giving me an answer. As it says at the bottom of such returns (see below), that this is 'generative AI', and it's 'experimental'.

So I've managed to land a nice little temporary six week role as a caseworker for a local MP! The constituency immediately north of my own changed from Conservative to Green and it's the new Green MP I'll be working for. And if yer gonna work for an MP, well a Green MP is about as local and genuinely democratic as you're going to get.