Posts Tagged ‘News’

An email went round work last week announcing that we were going to be having a minute’s silence for the victims of the Tunisian beach attack. As it happens everyone forgot when the time came but it brought up an interesting point.

I didn’t really know about it.

People were shocked, but it just had not entered my radar. I hadn’t seen the news and while there were probably some references to it, perhaps in conversation or on Facebook, I had just filtered them out.

I have gone through periods of my life where I thought it was really important to read the news. I would diligently check BBC News every day to find out what was going on in the world.

I have also gone through periods, such as now, where I just do not read the news. Why? Because it is generally full of unfortunate things happening to people. In fact, it is almost exclusively full of that.

It is extremely sad that those people died in Tunisia. In some ways it is an odd story to focus on. 50,000 people died of a preventable cause yesterday. That is 30 just during the minute’s silence. That isn’t in the news.

Similarly a story such as this might put people off from travelling to Tunisia. However, statistically the most likely way for me to die if I was to go there for a holiday, would be as it always is – in a car crash travelling to or from the airport.

It feels an odd thing to admit to being not just ignorant of something, but wilfully ignorant of it. However, my life does not seem to be much affected by my screening out of the non-stop string of mongering and negative news reporting that the media engages in, so it is hard to see how I am not better off without it.

Hello everyone! I just wanted to post a quick update on what the status of the site was now.

We first acquired Hardware Tutorials back in 2005, but since then there hasn’t been much content added to it – and indeed the content that was posted back then wasn’t exactly amazing quality. But for prosperity sake, we have kept it.

Never the less, it has always been an ambition to develop the site further and one thing I constantly find myself doing at work is googling for solutions to problems, usually when I’m trying to install something, usually on CentOS. Though that isn’t to say I don’t have my fair share of problems dealing with OS X, Windows 7 and Fedora too.

Rather than just leaving the solutions I eventually find for these problems, Hardware Tutorials seems a reasonably appropriate place to post such solutions – a lot of it isn’t strictly hardware, but as I said in my opening post six years ago, we would almost certainly be straying from that criteria anyway.

So please enjoy the new and updated Hardware Tutorials. Hopefully, you will be seeing a lot more regularly updated content from now on.

At around 4pm this afternoon, dozens of people, some wearing St George’s Crosses came running past my window, followed by a few dozen police officers and half a dozen police vans. There are still seven police vans a police car parked outside my house.

What was going on?

Well, my first guess was that there was some kind of EDL protest happening.

Unfortunately, traditional news outlets can’t keep up. There is nothing on the BBC Leeds website, nor the Yorkshire Post website. There never is.

The one place you could find out what was going on however, was Twitter. A quick search for the words “EDL” showed my a long series of posts about the group having a demo in Dewsbury today, next to the train station, they had then moved to Leeds and were now running around the city centre.

I could even confirm most of these details on West Yorkshire Police‘s official Twitter account.

That’s the great thing about Twitter. You’re right – nobody does give a fuck when Lily Allen puts the kettle on and tweets about it, but when it comes to breaking news, Twitter really is bringing something special to the game.

Oh, we’re still alive btw. You win again, science!

Welcome to Hardware Tutorials! Over the next however long it takes me to get it sorted, various tutorials and such will be posted on the site to help people get to grips with everything from installing a printer to installing Windows (not strictly hardware but there you go).