A prototype flying car has completed a 35-minute flight between international airports in Nitra and Bratislava, Slovakiareports the BBC.
The flying car has been a vision of the future for decades, along with the jetpack. Could this be the turning point and we start to see flying cars on our roads (and in the air) in the same way that we are now seeing electric vehicles?
Dr Stephen Wright, senior research fellow in avionics and aircraft, at the University of the West of England, described the AirCar as “the lovechild of a Bugatti Veyron and a Cesna 172”. Dr Wright said.
“Anyone can make an aeroplane but the trick is making one that flies and flies and flies for the thick end of a million hours, with a person on board, without having an incident.
Having spent virtually all of the last eighteen months working from home, I have had the luxury of my FTTP connection, with 1Gb/s download speed and an upload speed of 100Mb/s.
However for a few weeks now I have been venturing to the office in Bristol. The connection in the office is usually fine, however I had forgotten what the experience was like using internet and 4G in a coffee shop was like. Having ventured to Coffee #1 near Queen’s Square in Bristol I was struggling with my 4G personal hotspot, so much so I had to switch to The Cloud free wifi.
I had forgotten how bad and unreliable 4G can be in an urban environment. I had been spoilt with my home broadband reliability and speed.
Having said that, the coffee was great and it was really nice to have a change of scenery and routine.
Long time followers of this blog may recall the long and winding story of my journey to a full fibre connection here in Weston Village in Weston-super-Mare.
Having moved from dial-up to an ADSL connection I was well pleased in 2010 when our local exchange was upgraded to FTTC and we could get a fibre connection.
Having moved house in 2012, literally just down the road, we lost FTTC and had to return to ADSL as the (different) cabinet we had been connected to wasn’t enabled for FTTC.
Jump forward three years and following further work by BT Openreach I was able to upgrade to FTTP or as it was called Full Fibre resulting in a download speed of 1Gb/s, which was faster than the 30Mb/s I had with FTTC and significantly faster than the 1.3Mb/s ADSL connection we had when we first moved in.
I did think that was the end of the saga, well it was the end of the saga for me, the reality for Weston Village is that there is now a bundle of companies putting in fibre and cable connection. As a result there is a huge amount of roadworks and cable laying across the village.
This is as you might imagine making a mess of the roads and pavements.
So I am now also getting bombarded with pamphlets and advertising new fibre and television services.
Well six months ago I subscribed to Britbox. I had BT Broadband for just under a month and got an e-mail from BT saying I could have six months free of Britbox.
Well it was bit of a no brainer, six months free for a service I quite liked the look of, so I clicked yes.
I did say in my post.
Will I renew in six months time? I think that depends on what content we’ve watched and whether they refresh the content over the next few months.
Well, here we are six months later and the answer is, will I renew, the answer is sorry no.
The main reason I am saying no is that I am not watching enough of the content to justify the subscription. It’s not that the content isn’t any good, on the contrary there is a bundle of great stuff in the service. The reality was that though I was interested in watching some of the old series, no one else in the household was interested. I don’t really have a lot of time to watch television on my own, so never got round to watching very much of the series or films on the service. In the end when it came down to it, I decided that I would not renew my subscription.
I don’t think the fact that we subscribed to Disney+ back in December has helped, as there are only so many subscription services you can afford. We also have Netflix, so in the end a service had to go, and as the only person watching anything on Britbox, that was the one that needed to go.
I might renew at some later time, but for the moment it’s goodbye Britbox, so long and thanks for all the fish.
So I really miss Google Reader and I also miss Flipboard which worked really well with Google Reader. I’ve not really found an alternative that works for me in the same way that combination did.
I do use Apple News, but really don’t see the point of paying £10 a month for access to what appears to me to be The Times and Newsweek!
My main issues with Apple News are:
Over positioning and pushing of Apple News+ stories in an attempt to get you to subscribe to Apple News. So much so that much of the feed appears to be Apple News+ stories that it almost becomes a pointless exercise scrolling through the app.
Another issue is that local news is ignored to the point that news from Weston-super-Mare for example can be weeks or even months old and no new stories. Part of the problem is that Apple News uses mainstream sources for news, which means local news often is sidelined.
My final complaint about Apple News and hence the title of the blog, is that there are buttons you can use to like and unlike stories, and you can block certain news sources as well. However blocking to me, means that you don’t see the news stories at all! Well for Apple News, blocking means still having the news in the feed, but just then placing right there in front of you.
I blocked the source because I didn’t want to see it, so don’t put it in front of me, ever!
I really should be looking at alternatives for Apple News, so what are you using for curating and collating the news?
Last September I blogged about how the Great North Air Ambulance Service as testing out a jet pack from Gravity Industries.
Now the Royal Marines are doing the same. The Royal Marines are testing out a jet suit, made by Gravity Industries, to assist in Maritime Boarding Operations.
Despite the easing of restrictions, think many of us will still be attending Zoom or Teams meetings over the next few months. So to get you in a summer mood here are ten amazing summer Zoom and Teams backgrounds to brighten your meetings.
So last week the hard drive on my iMac stopped working. I had to migrate the data off the defunct drive, fix it, format it and migrate the data back again.
Well having now used it for a few days it appears to be working fine, I think it might be working even better than it was before.
However as with any drive, I will be making a regular backup of the data.
Having left my iMac overnight I came down the following morning, slightly apprehensive I looked in on the iMac, pressed the space bar, and I was rather downhearted to see the prohibitory symbol.
So I went to make coffee, but when I came back it had gone and I saw the Migration Assistant back in full flow finalising the migration. Maybe it had worked.
Once the migration process had finished I rebooted the iMac using the external drive and everything was working now.
Well not quite, though all my data was on the external hard drive, the settings needed to be updated and various applications needed passwords and all manner of things.
So my plan for the day was to work from the external hard drive and then later reformat the iMac hard drive and migrate the data back.
To be honest I got so fed up with the spinning beachball that I started the Migration Assistant just before lunch. I took the decision not to migrate some of the user accounts, as yes I wanted to retain the data, but didn’t need it on the main machine.
So I formatted the internal iMac fusion drive, checked the health of the drive and installed a fresh copy of OS X on there. I then started the Migration Assistant, taking the data and settings from the external drive and putting it back on the internal drive.
What was interesting was how much faster this process was from external hard drive to the internal drive compared to the other way round.
It was also interesting to note that once I had completed the migration, that unlike working from the external drive, as well as no spinning beachballs, most things were working just as they were before the crash.
