The Yorkshire Ranter

Firedump has gone a little cold over Christmas, so it’s clearly time to bump it. Just before Christmas, I invited the public to get in touch with the Romanian government regarding the BAC-111 said to be used by San Air General Trading, 3C-QRF, serial no. 61, which is currently in storage at Bucharest-Baneasa airfield. I’ve…

Via the good people at RepRap, this paper from Cornell University on how to print out zinc-air batteries. Amusingly, despite the more polished presentation, the Cornell team’s gizmo shares the pleasantly homemade look of the RepRap down at Bath University…and there was I thinking it was British eccentricity.

David Neal of IT Week is concerned by those huge AOL adverts about all the terrible things that are out there On The Internet. So am I. Is this the beat-up for some sort of return to a walled-garden canned-web product? AOL, famously, sucked when they ran something like that.

One of the main factors delaying defeat in Iraq is the support of SCIRI and its alliance with the Kurds. It seems the SCIRI is now under pressure to come out against the US and its allies. This story is interesting, but mostly on a point buried right at the end of the article: dissension…

The moment of decision in the Government’s atrocious ID cards scheme is fast approaching. On the 16th and 23rd of January, the Bill goes into its report stage in the Lords (where the House of Lords will debate and vote on the outcome of the committee hearings on it). Every amendment that passes here will…

Der Schockwellenreiter can tell you how to integrate GMaps into other web applications using the Google API. (If you speak German, that is.)

Christ. So Ariel Sharon just had a stroke through eating the world’s supply of falafels and Jack Straw says “it’s showtime for Syria”? Please. Can I go to bed?

Over at Airminded, Brett Holman’s PhD blog, we were discussing Rudyard Kipling’s rare excursions into science fiction, With the Night Mail and As Easy as ABC. Both of them deal with a future dated to round about now, aviation, and the integration of the world’s political economies into one seamless technocratic whole. They are cracking.…

Today, my railway season ticket went up by 7.5%. And, as if to thank me, tonight I returned home in a seat next to this charming pool of unidentified dark liquid! Mind you, at least I’m not yet as stupid as Conservative transport spokesman Chris Grayling, who found his plaice in history yesterday by announcing…

Well, the Great Gas War of 2006 seems to be over before it started. The Russians and Ukrainians composed their differences and now, it’s back to sleep at the back. What on earth was up? The first thing to remember was that, whatever the Russians said after they announced the crisis, almost all the gas…