RogerBW's Blog

The RogerBW Manifesto (2024 edition) 05 June 2024 - 2 comments

It's time again for my occasional political rant. As usual, these are the things I'd try to do if anyone were daft enough to put me in charge; they're also promises that would encourage me to vote for people who made them.

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UK Games Expo 2022 27 May 2022 - 5 comments

UK Games Expo is happening on the first weekend of June. I'd hoped to go, but having thought it over, I shan't be there.

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No Essen, Again 07 September 2021 - 3 comments

Essen SPIEL are doing a better job than UK Games Expo did, but I've very reluctantly decided that I'm not going anyway.

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An old joke, updated 27 August 2021 - 8 comments

So there was an old man who was known for his faith in God. Always ready to help out a neighbour, and just generally a nice guy.

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UK Games Expo 2021 12 July 2021 - 7 comments

UK Games Expo is happening on the first weekend of August. I'm really glad I'm not committed to going.

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An Earlier Date 31 May 2021 - 1 comment

People over 50 are getting priority for second doses of COVID-19 vaccines, so we're told.

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The ghost of care.data returns 28 May 2021 - 7 comments

This time the plan to sell all your medical records to the highest bidder isn't even being announced, presumably so that you don't find out about it in time to prevent it the way people did last time.

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Automatic Fire in Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition 18 May 2021 - 2 comments

Call of Cthulhu has a spotty history with automatic fire; it's one of the few rules that changed quite a lot between editions before the complete rewrite that was 7th. I don't think 7th has improved matters.

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Less perforation, more perfer et obdura 27 April 2021

(Guest post from Gus.)

Put down your chow mein now. I only say that because the friend to whom I chose first to vent inhaled some of hers: apparently that's rather painful.

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Exciting Choices in Gaming Typography 18 April 2021 - 10 comments

Someone sent me a link to a fan-made Traveller setting based on a USSR-derived interstellar power. And it's pretty interesting, except for the Cyrillic Thing.

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Returning to Barbecues 09 April 2021 - 9 comments

I've been thinking about what it'll take to start running barbecues again.

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Roko's Basilisk is Pascal's Wager 04 April 2021 - 1 comment

Only without the mathematical literacy.

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No More Shopping Days 30 March 2021 - 7 comments

I vaguely wish I'd known that the most recent shopping trip I'd made would be the last one for the moment.

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More pokey pokey 26 March 2021 - 20 comments

Officially last week it was still only possible to book a vaccination if you were over 55. When I'd tried it the week before (giving NHS number and birth date) I was quite properly told to come back later. But…

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I thought they wanted us to get vaccinated. 13 March 2021 - 9 comments

(Guest post from Gus.)

As of this week, I fall into a cohort eligible for the Covid-19 vaccine, one of the few things that makes me feel batter about being fifty-mumble. I like vaccines.

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The SARS-CoV-2 jab malarky 01 March 2021 - 5 comments

(Guest post from Chris.)

The Covid19 vaccine: it's a big deal, right? Right. But the actual vaccination, it turns out, isn't. Perhaps my experience will give anyone anxious about it a reason to worry rather less. If you have had a flu jab, it's very similar.

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Everything is the New Sprouts, Briefly 14 February 2021 - 4 comments

Shopping continues to be a bit strange.

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Mere Ethics 18 January 2021 - 2 comments

There is obvious a certain Schadenfreude to be had in observing the flailings of the people who got caught during and after the failed coup in the USA. But I think one should go beyond that.

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I just want to buy drugs 21 December 2020 - 10 comments

Buying drugs is more difficult than it used to be. I don't do it very often…

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Crowley wuz ere 14 December 2020 - 4 comments

(Guest post from Chris.)

Shortly before I moved into this house, I decided that my pint Pyrex measuring jug was so constantly in use that I might as well have another for when the first was in the Sisyphean washing-up pile, and went out to the nearest kitchens shop (it was called Kitchens) and bought myself a second pint jug. I assumed, in my folly, that since it had the same function and was made by the same company it would be the same.

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What, both at once? 04 December 2020

On the last day of the most recent isolation period, I went shopping. It turns out there were two separate panics on at the same time.

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Still Mostly Masks 21 November 2020 - 4 comments

I think people just don't have the attention span to cope with something that goes on for months.

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It's Not a Lockdown 04 November 2020

So it's to be a "lockdown" again. Only not.

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An Ominous Announcement 24 October 2020 - 5 comments

The local council has issued a press release. Excuse me while I run round and round in small circles.

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NHS App? 26 September 2020 - 6 comments

There is at long last an "official NHS contact-tracing app". Should one use it?

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Still Masks 13 August 2020

Mostly people continue to wear masks.

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Masks at last 29 July 2020 - 4 comments

People have finally started wearing masks in the shops round here.

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Milk is the new sprouts 16 July 2020 - 2 comments

Haven't you heard? Masks are last month's thing.

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Masks Latest 19 June 2020

Some personal behaviour seems to have improved since last time. (But I'm only taking one sample every two weeks…)

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More Shopping 08 June 2020 - 8 comments

Things are mostly as they were last time in the shops; a bit better, a bit worse.

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Grinding to a Halt 21 May 2020 - 2 comments

The "lockdown" has affected me relatively little: things I mail-order take longer to arrive, role-playing games have moved online, and I haven't seen my boardgame groups at all. But now it starts to feel as though people have gone into a kind of stasis.

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Sprouts are the New Flour 19 April 2020 - 4 comments

Not that I shop in person very often anyway. But it's gone a bit strange.

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Life in the Plague Weeks 05 April 2020 - 9 comments

So we finally got something like precautions being applied, though piecemeal and rather later than would have been sensible.

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Oh well 13 December 2019 - 12 comments

Well, we're fucked then.

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The RogerBW Manifesto (2019 edition) 26 November 2019 - 6 comments

It's election season again in the UK. These are the things I'd try to do if anyone were daft enough to put me in charge; they're also promises that would encourage me to vote for people who made them.

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The Suicide of Retail (and Journalism) 16 November 2019 - 4 comments

It is a truism that retail shopping is dying – and another that journalism is also dying. In both cases, the Internet is blamed. But I think it's worth looking a little deeper than that.

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Publish and be Murdered, Ruth Dudley Edwards 21 October 2019

1999 mystery, eighth in the Robert Amiss series. Amiss is brought in to help an old, money-losing, right-wing weekly newspaper lose slightly less money. Which puts him in a prime position when one of the senior staff is murdered.

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Murder in a Cathedral, Ruth Dudley Edwards 27 September 2019

1997 mystery, seventh in the Robert Amiss series. "Jack" Troutbeck enlists Amiss to help the new but unworldly Bishop of Westonbury as his chapter suffers a rift between the high church gay traditionalists and the intolerant evangelical new dean. Murder is also involved.

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No Enthusiasm for Keyforge 28 December 2018

Fantasy Flight Games has recently released Keyforge, a Unique Deck Game in which every deck one buys is different from every other. It's been getting mostly positive reviews. Why am I so comprehensively uninterested?

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Blackout/All Clear, Connie Willis 29 September 2018 - 13 comments

2010 Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning science fiction. Historians from Oxford in 2060 are visiting England in 1940, but things are going oddly wrong. Warning: this is going to be a bit of a rant.

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The demise of 3dhubs 22 September 2018 - 1 comment

Since December of 2016 I've been offering 3d printing services via 3dhubs. From the end of this month, it won't happen any more.

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Just Give Coordinates 09 August 2018 - 4 comments

People continue to give directions to their houses, places of business, etc., but not to give the coordinates. Please fix this.

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Disappointed with the RAC 13 May 2018 - 8 comments

I have decided not to renew my membership of the RAC.

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Why no electric car? 03 April 2018 - 12 comments

In principle I'd really like to have an electric car. I think burning fossil fuels is criminally irresponsible, but public transport isn't up to the sort of travel I want to do. So why don't I get one?

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What is missing from these roadworks? 05 March 2018 - 3 comments

Just before the latest Snowpocalypse, I noticed this slightly odd set of roadworks and thought there was probably a sign missing.

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Wisdom of the Crowd 09 February 2018

2017 science fiction/investigation, 13 episodes; a tech billionaire, obsessed with finding the murderer of his daughter, builds a crowd-sourced crime-solving system.

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Thoughts about drug offences 30 December 2017 - 2 comments

A recent news story, the matter of Laura Plummer arrested and imprisoned for transporting a banned opioid into Egypt, has given me to think.

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Nonsense about Legal Tender 28 October 2017 - 4 comments

Even I (not the person most exposed to news media) heard Dire Warnings recently about original pound coins ceasing to be legal tender on 15 October.

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Food pills and energy density 22 September 2017 - 3 comments

In Marty Jopson's new book The Science of Food, he demolishes the idea of food pills by looking at the energy density of fat and working out the mass of fat-pills one would need to eat. But why would one restrict oneself to the energy that an unmodified human body can get from food?

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Lies that git will tell you 14 September 2017

I do actually like git. I find it needlessly obfuscatory and deliberately confusing in its syntax and terminology, but it basically does its job reasonably well. However, there are some popular blatant untruths that I think people would do well to know about.

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Red and amber filters 09 September 2017 - 2 comments

There is a practice common to the road systems of many countries which we don't use in the UK. Why not?

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Election, Terrorism, Revolutionary Communism 08 June 2017 - 5 comments

I can't help noticing an obvious historical parallel which I haven't heard people talking about.

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Dear 3D print customers, please just use OpenSCAD 24 March 2017 - 2 comments

My customers on 3dhubs use a variety of software packages to build the models they send me; in theory, anything that produces files in obj or stl format will work. Some are definitely better than others.

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Farewell to systemd 22 May 2016 - 6 comments

I tried to give it a fair shake. Really I did. But systemd has now annoyed me to the point where I've been removing it from the systems for which I'm responsible and bringing back sysvinit.

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More Internet of Things 09 April 2016 - 3 comments

A recent news item on Revolv home hubs made me want to revisit my feelings on the Internet of Things.

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Why not a root shell? 09 February 2016 - 3 comments

Many modern Linux systems assume that you will never have a root shell. Instead, you are expected to prepend "sudo" to every root-type command.

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Internet of Things 28 December 2015 - 4 comments

This has been a year when "Internet of Things" devices became relatively mainstream. Oh dear.

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A utopian vision for electric cars 29 October 2015 - 2 comments

I have an idea for a relatively simple change which would remove some of my objections to the use of electric cars. This is less blatantly utopian than the last one.

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A utopian vision for transport 19 September 2015 - 7 comments

Driverless cars, quite apart from privacy concerns, are solving the wrong problem. Here's what I want to build to replace the majority of transport infrastructure. It is unabashedly utopian.

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The Tournament Mentality in Gaming 25 June 2015 - 4 comments

There's a certain mentality in games (particularly wargames, but others too) which seems to be associated with tournament play.

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The Wreck of the Liberal Democrats 11 June 2015 - 3 comments

The obvious story of woe of the recent General Election in the UK is that of the Liberal Democrats, who lost 66% of their vote share and 85% of their parliamentary seats compared with five years ago, leaving them about as much of a political force as the DUP. What went wrong?

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Does Free Content Drive Out Good? 28 May 2015 - 4 comments

Gresham's Law famously states that "bad money drives out good": if there are two currencies available, people will tend to hoard the one they trust and spend the one they don't. I think there's a different but allied process going on with items that are "good enough" driving out of the market ones that are good.

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Who Is David Fitton? 07 May 2015 - 5 comments

The Wycombe parliamentary constituency has been Conservative since 1951. It has often had candidates from obscure parties, but since 2001 there's been an Independent: one David Fitton.

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Ruining My Childhood 11 March 2015 - 5 comments

It has become fashionable to claim that a remake or reinvention of a favourite book, film or whatever from when one was young "ruined my childhood". And inevitably it has also become fashionable to dismiss such overblown nonsense. I think there is potential for a useful middle way.

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A Modest Proposal About Numbers 12 February 2015 - 8 comments

A small change to our numbering system would make daily use of numbers remarkably easier.

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The RogerBW Manifesto (2015 edition) 20 January 2015 - 13 comments

It's election season here in the UK – for the first time, since we've moved to fixed-term Parliaments, a protracted American-style election season rather than a few short weeks. These are the things I'd try to do if anyone were daft enough to put me in charge; they're also promises that would encourage me to vote for people who made them.

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Thanks, Google! 20 December 2014 - 1 comment

It was really useful to be able to plot arbitrary data onto a zoomable map. The only service to offer this was Google Maps; indeed, it was the last thing for which I was using any Google service.

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Why chain hotels don't need to try 19 December 2014 - 2 comments

Having recently had a truly appalling meal at a hotel that rhymes with Hark Hinn Hottingham, and heard more horror stories from people who were actually staying there, I thought about hotels' incentives to make things pleasant for their customers… and couldn't come up with any.

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How accounting rules distort real life 22 November 2014

Accounting rules have perverse effects on real life. Here's an example dear to my heart.

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Con Crud, Air Conditioning, and Legionnaire's Disease 16 October 2014 - 5 comments

Why does every large convention now seem to have an associated disease, the "con crud", generally a respiratory tract infection?

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The Origins of Homœopathy 11 July 2014

Homœopathy has some very strange ideas. But where did it actually come from?

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Why I have no smartphone 21 May 2014 - 4 comments

A reader expressed surprise that I don't use a smartphone.

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Have you opted out of care.data yet? 20 January 2014

(Readers not in England, if any, please ignore.)

Have you even heard of care.data?

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