you bought bread???

I know it's more difficult in Spain, because my experience is that the UK has much better supermarkets, but buying a loaf of bread for a euro when you are on a restricted budget, madness.

ASDA will sell you 1.5kg of bread flour for 80p, you can make a sour dough starter and have three loaves for the price of one shop bought one. You just need to add a pinch or two of salt, some water and find somewhere to bake it. Again, in Spain, you should be able to build a clay oven and use spare wood lying around :)

All the savings will be spent on....

... benefits for the meter readers who have been made redundant.

Actually, probably not, as the metering will become so complex, we'll need 24/7 support and double the number of people in vans to come out to reboot them.

Windows Vista smart meter anyone?

Expect the unexpected

I'm not going to mention names, I don' t want them to come and get me. I worked for a large utility that had gone to the effort of having two centres, six miles apart, away from known aircraft routes, fault lines, rivers, volcanos, lay lines and crop circles. They then built their billing machines over in the sites, 100% redundancy of everything, right down to power from different grid supply points (we're talking 400,000V network tracing). As a utility, they billed millions a day at sod all margin, so they needed the cash flow to pay suppliers quickly, we used to talk about 10 days without billing means even the banks would stop lending money.

I was a grad given a project to check the business continuity, what was expected to be another pointless exercise they ran every year to keep the useless grads busy for a month. They were in for a shock, a factory that was halfway between our sites and used to process nothing in particular had changed hands, so I wrote to them asking what they did for business contiuity and if we could learn anything, seemed like something to do in my month to write this report.

The start of paragraph two said it all "As a processor of chemicals who have a statutory 10 mile exclusion zone should there be a confirmed leak......"

Dumbkoff

Try getting rid of cheques before cash.

Die non-engineering scum

The whole reason I did solid state optoelectronics engineering degree is to I could make Laser Glasses to kill off all non engineers. b*stard Google have now ruined my fun.

Paperwork...

I'm not overly worried about hackers going after my stored personal files, they aren't of any use to the average person. I'm more worried that in the good old US of A, any local sheriff seems to be able to get a court order (or whatever they call them over there) and get all your data on a whim.

My files are hosted in Germany, at least the courts make the security forces turn up before they hand all my files over. The best security of course is the fact my documents are crap, and anyone reading them will implode with boredom.

Hurry up already...

I'm hoping a "cheap" iPad mini will drive the 32G Nexus 7 3g to market, reduce it's price and enable it right into my sweaty hands.

I'm a genius....

... reading these comments brought something to mind. Keeping uninsured, unlicenced and untaxed drivers off the road, all that information should be on a smart chip, if you don't have one, the car won't start. If you lend yours to someone, you get prosecuted for their crimes. If it was actually encrypted properly, it may even reduce car theft too.

Copyright me, if it does turn out to be genius, or you can have it for free if this post gets ripped to bits by people who have thought it through more than I have in the last 30 seconds.

MK

El Reg....

Did you even check your story on this? I had two texts about the cloud too, and it appears most of your commenters did. This isn't meant to be news of the world, check your facts just a little.

Maybe the next story will be "El Reg quietly removes readers comments". Not that you can prove its me, as you gave my fucking log in details away last year.

I wonder if the fact I'm typing this and the whole page is sponsored by Orange is a coincidence?

Disappointed

usual publicity seeking rubbish

He only says these things to get free advertising, we should all ignore him, then maybe he will go away

I'm a Mac User (I confess)

I don't care if it has digital handcuffs, it does all I want it to do, and I don't have time to piss around with it to make it do other things anyway.

It is pretty, had to be, so the Wife Acceptance Factor was high enough for me to be able to leave it around the house without getting shouted at.

My fridge is just a fridge, I bought it knowing it just keeps things cold, I'm not going to get annoyed or outraged that I have been prevented turning it into an effing toaster.

Some people just want to use things the way they come out of the box. If that makes me stupid in your eyes, great, I'll live.

Flame away :-)

Did I post this, or was it someone using my details you gave away...

TWATS, that was my favourite alias....

I wondered....

.... where my stolen garden furniture was going to end up

Never Mind Mobile Me....

The Apple TV servers have been broken for about 8 days, for most people this means they can't upgrade, for many it means they can't restore their bricked units.

I'm surprised el reg hasn't picked up on this, hundreds of pee'd off people here!

https://discussions.apple.com/message/15510333#15510333

MM

Focus is still a "big car"

I know we need the space for the batteries, but the modern focus is still a fairly big car.

When my first generation focus was ready for the scrap heap, I looked at the new focus, and it had grown in every direction and weight.

In the end, I went for the new Fiesta, which had also grown, and in fact was the same width and height as the old focus, and only 13cm less in length.

Some real efficiencies could be made by cars stopping this growing cycle, so I wonder what the range would be in a Fiesta with the same batteries as the focus.

As someone who tries to keep cars 6 or 7 years, I'm hoping my next car will be electric, juiced up by my local Nuclear Power Station