lewisroberts.com

Listen, I’m sorry, no seriously I am. It was never my intention for this blog to turn in to a soap box for me to bore you all to tears with my conspiracy theories and reports of other Government led initiatives that purport to be good for the public. Again, I’m sorry, if you’d rather I just shut the hell up and got on with talking about stuff I’m actually interested in then please, feel free to comment and let me know your thoughts.

My reason for this apology is because I feel that I must respond to the latest Government bullshit to come dribbling out of the Home Office:

 Council staff, charity workers and doctors could be required by law to tip off police about anyone they believe could commit a violent crime.

I see, so that’s everyone then? All Human Beings are capable of committing a violent crime. ALL OF THEM. Let me introduce you to a word…

Fascism -  Anti-individualistic, the fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity.

Each and every day I hear more and more about the Government allowing laws through that remove our freedoms. We no longer live in a free society. We no longer are allowed to think for ourselves.
This country is marching firmly towards fascism and nobody seems to have noticed.
The “War on Terror” seems to have re-invented itself as the “War on Freedom” and we, the free are losing it because we are blissfully unaware of it. Write to your MP, your Council, anyone that will listen. Great Britain is no longer Great.

Mr. Blair, your Labour government has done more damage to the freedoms of the population of the United Kingdom than any terrorist organisation I care to mention. You and your Government’s approach to making the United Kingdom “a safer place” has resulted in a climate of fear and I hereby accuse YOU and your Government of being a terrorist organisation.

After watching a BBC programme about CCTV last night called “CCTV: You are being watched” I felt like I had been transported in to the Orwellian esque film, V for Vendetta.

Last night’s programme was nothing more than propaganda from our own government. This is the second such incident (programme) in as many months where the BBC have amazingly produced something that seemingly supports the wonderous benefits of these privacy invading “security tools” merely weeks after the government has been trying to tell us just how great these things are and how they’re saving lives etc etc.

I’m flabbergasted at the frequency of these programmes too, they’re always in such close proximity to government sponsored initiatives and seem to be an attempt to brain wash us in to acceptance by telling us how beneficial they are. The first such programme I think was something to do with GPS tracking of vehicles so that we can be taxed on the mileage we do. The No.10 website had to close an online petition because of the number of people that responded to it about this particular “idea”. Tony sent out an email after he had his cronies close the petition simply saying “we’re not in any position to do this yet.”

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“We live in interesting times gentlemen.”

Indeed, we do. But not interesting for the reasons you suggest pal.

I actually heard this pearl of wisdom before, during and after a presentation I recently attended on Microsoft’s new and upcoming technologies. The presentation was intended to demonstrate the new “Wow” factor of Windows Vista and Microsoft’s other new and upcoming technologies. After hearing the speaker say “moving forward” (the newest management buzz word) exactly forty-two times during the 1.5 hour presentation, I did actually leave with a favourable impression of Windows Vista and Microsoft’s other new (mainly server) based products. In practice however, Vista has failed to impress me and has, if anything, irritated me with its approach to security. I’m normally very acceptant of new technologies but as I mentioned in my previous blog entry, Vista is just bloody irritating. I won’t go over old ground, suffice to say I have very recently been tinkering with Ubuntu with a view to moving to it, instead of Vista, if at all possible.
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Windows…. Vista, or as I would rather refer to it, Blister. My reason for this rename quite simply is that Vista is so frustratingly irritating. As with a blister on your heel and a usual requirement for shoes, the irritation will be almost impossible to avoid too. I’ve been saying for the last few days that there’s a very fine line between usability and security and Microsoft have well and truly crossed it on the wrong side.

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I know I haven’t blogged in a while but to be honest I’ve not been motivated to and I’ve not had all that much to say, the recent developments in my life are, in a nutshell: My brother got married in South Africa in November and I made a start to improve my health by taking up exercise some time in October.

I’ve been off the fags for nigh on three years now but my waist measurements have increased steadily over time and well, to be honest I was big. I’m 6′3″ anyway so I can hide the chubb but still, I wasn’t happy so I bought a weights bench. I didn’t really get on with it and then fell back in to running… which brings me to why I’m posting. My lovely (she’s looking over my shoulder as I type this) girlfriend got me a Sony MP3 Walkman for Christmas to keep me entertained while I’m battering down the pavement. After inputting some details about my height, weight, stride and step distance it spits out all the information about how many calories I’ve burned, how many steps I’ve taken and miles I’ve travelled etc. I quite enjoy knowing how much flab I’ve burned off and remembered that I had a Cardiosport watch and heart rate monitor I’d bought the last time I’d got in to running so I fished it out of a deep drawer to have a tinkle.

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No more visiting your local Nokia Service Center to get the latest firmware for your Nokia. Simply visit: Nokia Software Update Site, check your phone is in the list, download the application, install and run it. Easy as that!

I’ve just successfully tested it on my N80 and although I had a bit of a brown trouser moment on first boot where it repeatedly said General: System error before it rebooted and tried again, it seems to be working just fine.

Thankfully Orange have declined to put their horrible home screen anywhere near the N80 so I’m happy that it hasn’t made an appearance on the updated version of their firmware too.

Cool.

If you want to apply font smoothing to your users and wish to ensure that everyone is getting the benefits of at least some level of font smoothing you can import this ADM template in to a group policy.

Check out GPAnswers.com for more ADM templates like this one, including one allowing you to disable mass storage drives via group policy.

This policy is only compatible with Windows XP! I have no idea what effect it will have on Windows 2000 systems!

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After sending a recorded delivery complaint to eBuyer some time last week they have emailed (stamps obviously cost too much) a response to me today. I still have a burning question left unanswered though; should I have had to go through this shit anyway?!
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