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Useful Links – The Whyte Paper
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Yet another blog on Scottish politics. A year on and some crap about The Vow. Police Scotland and VAT. Scottish Govt Health Spending. Scotland’s share of oil revenues. Wings Over Scotland and Infrastructure Spending. GERS: Reserved and Non-Identifiable Spending. Scottish politics sites and blogs. The Live Red, White and Blue Book. Scottish Fiscal and Economic Studies. Hands Across the Pond. Notes from North Britain. Liberal Democrats sites and blogs. England is the Home of Lost Ideas. On Ways and Means.
oldblog.mcnalu.net
mcnalu's musings: January 2013
http://oldblog.mcnalu.net/2013_01_01_archive.html
Musings on topics and events that interested or amused me. Thursday, January 3, 2013. I've been trying to set up my Linutop 2. Box as a small server for a while now, but keep hitting a variety of annoying problems. The latest was that an intenso 32GB USB stick seemed to be the cause of achingly slow performance. First I plugged the drive into my laptop, then, as root:. I tested the read speed with:. Mount -o sync /dev/sdb3 /mnt/hd. Dd count=100 bs=1M if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/hd/test. Which was intriguing but...
oldblog.mcnalu.net
mcnalu's musings: September 2013
http://oldblog.mcnalu.net/2013_09_01_archive.html
Musings on topics and events that interested or amused me. Monday, September 9, 2013. Lending is good and bad. But I would have preferred to avoid these loans because if I had the money to buy the house or car outright I'd have saved tens of thousands of pounds over the years. The common element that exists in both the household loan (mortgage) example and business example is that the loan is only worthwhile when the interest that you need to pay on it is less than the return from investing it. I go by t...
oldblog.mcnalu.net
mcnalu's musings: August 2013
http://oldblog.mcnalu.net/2013_08_01_archive.html
Musings on topics and events that interested or amused me. Monday, August 26, 2013. Firefox OS ZTE phone. About the time I received my phone, I noticed a message from a well-respected-techy-geeky-sort-of-a-chap, called Jezra, who had also recently acquired the same phone, referring to it as "shitty". To start my adventure, I read this article. And the Boiler-plate app. SUBSYSTEM= "usb", ATTR{idVendor}= "19d2", MODE="0666", GROUP="plugdev". Immediately after plugging the phone in. A restart of udev is...
oldblog.mcnalu.net
mcnalu's musings: August 2012
http://oldblog.mcnalu.net/2012_08_01_archive.html
Musings on topics and events that interested or amused me. Monday, August 6, 2012. Go into the "cloud", use the "cloud", harness the power of the "cloud", "cloud" computing, "cloud" this, "cloud" that. blah blah blah. Of course, the word has some meaning, but it has been so abused, misused and used to confuse that I now find it irksome. But there are more tangible problems with the ideas behind it. (I'll stop using "scare" quotes now.). So when I first came across ownCloud. I was immediately attracted to...
oldblog.mcnalu.net
mcnalu's musings: November 2012
http://oldblog.mcnalu.net/2012_11_01_archive.html
Musings on topics and events that interested or amused me. Sunday, November 18, 2012. Fesenjun - pestle and mortar and saffron to the left. When I was a wee boy, probably about the age my son is now (7), I remember being confronted by a dish that my aunt had made at her home in London. "That's mud, isn't it? Fesenjan is really made distinctive by the combination of walnuts and pomegranate. It is most commonly served with chicken, but duck, beef or vegetables can all be substituted. I don't recall...1 In ...
oldblog.mcnalu.net
mcnalu's musings: October 2012
http://oldblog.mcnalu.net/2012_10_01_archive.html
Musings on topics and events that interested or amused me. Tuesday, October 16, 2012. Reading Keynes part 1. First off, I'm not an economist by training, but the problems with economies around the world in recent years have kindled my interest, especially when I began to appreciate that so-called "Keynesian" solutions, as described by the likes of Paul Krugman. Links to this post. Thursday, October 4, 2012. Lucentis - a poke in the eye. I can't say I relished the prospect of someone sticking a needle in ...
oldblog.mcnalu.net
mcnalu's musings: June 2013
http://oldblog.mcnalu.net/2013_06_01_archive.html
Musings on topics and events that interested or amused me. Thursday, June 13, 2013. It was gruelling at times. I remember being sat in one editor's office as she patiently explained when I should use 'which' rather than 'that', e.g. "This is the train which takes you to Newcastle." versus "This is the train that takes you to Newcastle." Which one is correct, dear reader? I remember sitting in my car outside a supermarket listening to BBC Radio 4. The author Frederick Forsyth was being questioned abou...
oldblog.mcnalu.net
mcnalu's musings: November 2013
http://oldblog.mcnalu.net/2013_11_01_archive.html
Musings on topics and events that interested or amused me. Friday, November 15, 2013. This blog is no longer updated - please go to http:/ blog.mcnalu.net. I've decided to move this blog from Google's Blogger platform to one that runs on my own server and that is generated by a marvellous piece of software called Pelican. Direct links to old posts probably won't work, but the old blog will remain as it is, residing on blogger.com, unchanging, preserved in aspic at http:/ oldblog.mcnalu.net.
oldblog.mcnalu.net
mcnalu's musings: Faster USB sticks
http://oldblog.mcnalu.net/2013/01/faster-usb-sticks.html
Musings on topics and events that interested or amused me. Thursday, January 3, 2013. I've been trying to set up my Linutop 2. Box as a small server for a while now, but keep hitting a variety of annoying problems. The latest was that an intenso 32GB USB stick seemed to be the cause of achingly slow performance. First I plugged the drive into my laptop, then, as root:. I tested the read speed with:. Mount -o sync /dev/sdb3 /mnt/hd. Dd count=100 bs=1M if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/hd/test. Which was intriguing but...
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