The Whole is Less than the Sum of the Parts

For about a year now, I have been meaning to replace my bike lights to get a more sensible performance for night off-roading. I had a fairly good idea of what I wanted: a decent light output, equivalent to at least 20W halogen, and a sensible run time, to be able to get something like 5 hours out of them at reasonable light output (at least equivalent to 10W halogen).

In practical terms, this translates into something as efficient as an HID light running of lithium battery, and this is where my search for new lights has, until now, run into a major obstacle: the price tag. Not being able to shell out £400+, I just kept dreaming, and occasionally looking. Read the rest »

I wish the ******* in the present UK government that are determined to push ID cards upon us would read this and reflect upon it.

In unrelated news it became known that the UK government lost personal details of another 3,000,000 people, this time by exporting learner driver data to the US for processing. It’s been a while I have had to deal with the Data Protection Act, but I am pretty sure that exporting private data of UK residents to the US is prohibited under the Act because the US does not have sufficient (any?) data protection legislation (IIRC, the Act is accompanied by guidelines for data processors, in which this is explicitly spelled out), and if this is the case, then the data was lost not merely through incompetence, but because of the UK government broke the law to start with.