Author Archives: hmallett

Better broadband for north Powys – part 2

Following my previous post about better broadband for north Powys, I tried to do some initial investigation on Facebook to see if this was something that would have enough interest to investigate further. I posted on local pages, mainly for … Continue reading

Posted in B4RM, Computing | 2 Comments

Ruby and Ruby on Rails version compatibility

I have recently been planning upgrades for an application which runs on both an old version of Ruby on Rails and an old version of Ruby. The recommended upgrade path for rails is to upgrade through each version, rather than … Continue reading

Posted in Rails | 1 Comment

Better broadband for North Powys

I’ve lived in Powys for 10 years, and I’ve always had good broadband, as I live only 200 metres from the telephone exchange. This means that I’ve got used to being able to watch Netflix, stream music, backup devices to … Continue reading

Posted in B4RM, Computing | 1 Comment

VAT registration and the flat rate

Disclaimer: I’m not an accountant, this is not tax advice, this contains assumptions and simplifications. Also, apologies to the accountants I know for mangling accounting theories and terms. When the time comes to register for VAT, there are two schemes … Continue reading

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Starting out alone in Information Security and IT consultancy

After 10 years with my previous employer I was made redundant at the end of January. Rather than rush straight to the job boards in a state of panic, I’m looking at this as an opportunity. For several years I … Continue reading

Posted in Business, Computing, Information Security | Leave a comment

BitTorrent Magnet links for FreeBSD

Since the FreeBSD torrent tracker has been taken offline, and it appears that it won’t be coming back, you may be able to use a magnet link, so here they are. Each magnet link announces to three public trackers, to … Continue reading

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Installing sqlite3 ruby gem on FreeBSD

If you try to install (or update) the sqlite3 ruby gem on FreeBSD, you might get the following error: sudo gem update sqlite3 Updating installed gems Updating sqlite3 Fetching: sqlite3-1.3.5.gem (100%) Building native extensions. This could take a while… ERROR: … Continue reading

Posted in FreeBSD | 4 Comments

Netgear DGN1000 review

After an intermittent failure of my previous ADSL router, I thought long and hard about whether I could justify spending many hundreds of pounds on a nice Cisco 1800, I decided to go cheap and buy a bottom-of-the-range Netgear. After … Continue reading

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Daily Mail corrects incorrect facts, but not the biggest ones

The BEA released a briefing about the loss of Air France flight 447 today. The flight involved a descent of 3 minutes 30 seconds, during which the aircraft was stalled. All 228 on board lost their lives. The briefing specifically … Continue reading

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To the Daily Mail – people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones

The Daily Mail try to have a laugh at the expense of The Independent in this article. The article points out that on The Independent’s site you can alter the URL as long as you retain the article number. Of … Continue reading

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