How Not To Backup a Hard Drive

A story of age-related mental degeneration. My daughter's computer CPU fan failed, and I had to lend her a spare PC. She was feeling a bit down in the dumps because of exams, but mostly because her mobile phone screen had also failed. So I decided to copy all her iTunes music to her temporary PC to cheer her up. I took her HD out, and connected it up to another spare PC with the idea of first backing everything up to an external HD, and then copying the music from the backup. Obviously, being an experienced PC whiz, I didn't go so far as to fasten the HD into the drive cage; I just left it sitting on top of the cage. But like a complete idiot, instead of placing it upside down so that the only thing in contact with the cage was the HD casing, I left it right way up so that the cage was in contact with the unprotected control board. By the time I had put the flames out the control board was toast, and tests confirmed that it no longer functioned.

I came up with the idea that the data might well be intact. So I looked on eBay for an identical HD, and got very lucky: someone was selling individual items from a whole batch of probably faulty kit, saying that it was all untested and not guaranteed in any way. I reasoned that HDs almost always fail mechanically, and that even if it was faulty, then the control board may well be perfectly OK. And this turned out to be exactly the case. So for £11 inc postage I got a replacement control board, a happy daughter, and some very powerful magnets.

Please don't make the same mistake.

Covering Your Router In Aluminium Foil

A friend was given a suggestion by someone from IT to alleviate network connection issues. The suggestion is to wrap their router in "tin foil". When they'd finished laughing, they called me for an opinion. Assuming they meant ordinary aluminium kitchen foil, the suggestion is ludicrous. The best you might hope for is that it doesn't make any difference. If it has any affect it would surely be to act as a Faraday cage, keeping external radiation out and internal radiation in. I decided to test it. I performed six throughput runs alternating between uncovered and loosely covered with a folded sheet of kitchen foil. Each run consisted of three one-minute trials, where TCP upstream and downstream speeds were averaged using TamoSoft Throughput. The server was my development PC upstairs; the client a downstairs laptop two metres from the router. Both were connected on the 5GHz WiFi band. Here are the results. The best you can say for the foil is tha...

Reducing Regional Funding, and Calling It Levelling-Up

The most important part of addressing regional inequality in the UK is funding. The new UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) is due to launch in April 2022. But what the government seem keen to hide is that this is just a replacement for EU structural funding that will soon end. The EU's European Regional Development Fund and European Social Fund are allocated by looking at per capita GDP by region, and then member state governments have discretionary powers to reallocate some funds between regions. The UK used these powers to reassign some funds from England to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We also had an agreement for funds to be administered by our devolved governments. These two funds together support innovation and research, information technology, small- and medium-sized enterprises, employment-related projects and vocational skills training, including youth employment, as well as the promotion of a low-carbon economy. For the seven-year tranche of funding 2014-2020, t...

Ridiculous Snooker Competition Format

This year the format for the Championship League Snooker competition is very inequitable. It works like this. There are twenty-five entrants, of which seven are placed in Group 1. They play a round-robin tournament and the top four then play a knockout to decide the winner of the group. The winner qualifies for the Winners Group, and the remaining other four of the top five progress to Group 2, joining three other players from the original twenty-five. The bottom two are eliminated from the competition. This whole process is repeated until Group 7, when only the winner qualifies for the Winners Group, the other six players getting eliminated. The Winners Group then contains the seven players who won a group. Again, they play a round-robin and the top four play a knockout for tournament winner. Players win money by winning frames, getting through to the play-offs, winning a group or being runner-up, and by making the highest break in a group. The rates for these are differen...

Aniseed Balls

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