There is a worrying thing happening at the moment. People are giving money to Pirate Bay so that they can buy Sealand. If you don’t know what Sealand or Pirate Bay is, then have a look here: http://buysealand.com/

The theory is that if Pirate Bay buys Sealand then a whole pile of operations varying from the mere dodgy to the sheer criminal can be run from there and nobody can touch them. So far they have raised $15,327 from donations. They state that if they can’t afford Sealand (I believe Sealand are looking at something in the region of half a billion dollars) they will buy another small island and declare independence.

Now I am a fan of Pirate Bay. If they want to give me a means of downloading episodes of Battlestar Galactica and Veronica Mars when I miss them on telly then I am all for this. If at the same time they are pissing off big companies that makes the whole thing even more fun. My problem isn’t with Pirate Bay, it is with the utter legal naivety and idioacy of these people. They seem to inhabit a world where they can own a nation state and commit illegal acts from it with no consequence. At the same time, there are wars going in in both Afganistan and Iraq against reghimes that supposedly committed illegal acts thinking they could do whatever they wanted.

Simply put; if they buy Sealand and start pissing off Sony or Murdoch, there is nothing stopping either of them getting a gunboat and blowing the thing out of the water for ever. They flaunt French Law? It’s not that hard a target for a single Exocet and those things sting! Why don’t they see this simple fact? They want to break the law and yet they want the law to protect them. Nobody out there is going to help them if someone decides they don’t like them; they are a large open target with “ABUSE ME BIG BOY” painted in neon on the side.

As I said, I rather like Pirate Bay and I’d prefer not to see it sunk for ever letting another pile of people with guns and money win. The legality of Sealand as an independent state is also very dodgy and even more so if it is sold. Nobody has ever taken that much time disputing it because previously it was just some random nutter waving a flag; as soon as they start to actually piss people off, methinks they will need a lot more than $15,327 to pay those legal fees. I have spent a good deal of my life and my money in court on issues like this over the years, it’s neither fun nor fruitful and the bastards nearly always win.

The other thing I find mildly amusing is the idiots who are giving them money. Fifteen years ago I wrote an article about the rot that sets in when things like this start asking for money - You can find it at http://lorry.org/Docs/life.cycle if you are curious. What is going to happen with all this money? Will it just end up being wasted on buying a pile of rock somewhere? It’s all very odd. Still they are Pirates, maybe it is all an elaborate scheme to relieve naive tossers of their money. If so then I wish them the best of luck!

The Technophobe News, the flagship magazine of The Technophobe Press is now open for business.

That is, it would be if the Editor, Printer, Binder, Distributor and only Author of this rather short lived journal wasn’t quite so terrified of his printer.

It happened yesterday. Previously the offices of The Technophobe Press were inhabited mostly by a comfortable old HP Laser Printer that had formerly been the property of BT and had been thrown away because it was obsolete. Obsolete is a word that the The Technophobe Press like. In our dictionary the entry for Obsolete reads:

ob-so-lete (adj): See Comfortable, Familiar and Useful.

The Technophobe Press were tempted yesterday by the offer of a supposedly obsolete colour laser printer. This offer sounded too good to be true, pretty colours would boost our readership no end and since this printer came with toners, it would save some load on the ageing HP. We were informed that it was large, we didn’t contemplate how large.

The first issue is that the offices of The Technophobe Press only have mortally sized doors. This is not a printer for mortals. The only place it would fit was in the porch so we had to clear away a whole pile of mouse eaten junk to create it a new home. At this point we were already in mild fear of it and wanted it to feel comfortable. A couple of hernias, some broken fingers and a lot of bruises later, The Printer was now settled and had power. Getting a network connection to the porch was a slightly more complicated matter involving moving a hub into there. When you have a hub in the porch, you know things are starting to get ridiculous. To make The Printer feel more at home, we introduced him to some locals, and tried to make him look as in place as possible.

It was time for a test print. After pressing buttons randomlyfor a while, a noise like a small jet engine started to issue from the innards of this beast; it rattled somewhat in the way the Tardis used to rattle back in the days when Dr Who had more comfortable special effects and after a little whine, it started to shoot out sheets of paper faster than should be possible. They weren’t blank sheets of paper, they were all full of tecnical stuff that looked important. At this point, we started to get suspicious that we may have allowed a Trojan Printer into our midst.

After downloading new drivers, setting the IP address and things that are not too complicated, and permissable to us here, we sent a few colour photos to The Printer. The house shook, the Tardis spoke and the colour pictures appeared as if from nowhere. Somewhat curled up but none the less excellent quality. Something that would have taken about 5 minutes on a mere mortal printer.

Now firmly convinced that something was wrong, it was time to search the Interwebs for details of this beastie. The results were shocking. It can print 28 sheets a minute in full colour and just under 40 a minute in black and white. It can take just about any size of paper you throw at it, it can print it on both sides and it has four drums inside it so that it can simulateneously print all the colours at once in a single pass. As if that isn’t enough, it can print its 1st print in less than 10 seconds and can hold over 3,000 sheets of paper inside it.

The staff of The Technophobe Press are now in fear. The porch has become out of bounds because we are scared to breath on it lest one of those hundred zillion parts gets a slight warp and breaks everything inside there. If this happens, it may well cause chaos not just to the porch but to the Universe as a whole. We can see it, on the network staring at us, begging us to use it but so far, we are resisting temptation whilst we ponder our fundamental position on this matter. What if we start to get attached to it and one of the zillion irreplacable parts breaks? Who will look after it? And importantly… What does it eat?

Come to think of it… If it eats mice, it can stay for ever.

The offices of The Technophobe Press will keep you informed. Watch this space.

So…

Bad news for all private boat owners in Britain, all companies that rent out boats, sell things to boat owners and rely on boats for tourism. The EU Comission rejected Britain’s application to allow private boat users to use red diesel in their engines.

There are 2 tax levels for diesel in the UK, normal car diesel has 48p a litre tax added on, and red diesel, which is dyed with a special dye so that they can easily see if car users are using it, is only taxed at about 8p a litre. Red diesel is mostly for agricultural vehicles but has also been available for private boat users and private planes that use diesel engines (not that I knew there were any).

In fairness to the British Government here, they didn’t want this change; it’s something that has been very much forced on them by Europe to flatten taxation classes on fuel across the union. The government is more than aware that this will devestate places like the Scottish Islands who rely on small boat traffic and of course, the inland waterway operators, many of whom are already saying they will have to close down now.

I am usually very pro European and tend to cringe every time I see an anti-Europe story about some silly new regulation that has been taken completely out of context but this one, well this one really is silly and. It’s funny how Europe is, piece by piece losing all of its boating tradition. A few years ago we lost the fishing industry because of EU regulation, now we’ll lose a lot of the leisure boat industry too; and it’s just an utterly pointless regulation; it doesn’t help anyone - The French and people on the South Coast of England can just pop to the Channel Islands to pick up cheap fuel anyway. Who is it actually regulating here?

To pop it into perspective a little; the tanks on Caresana are 909 litres (200 gallons). To fill them up in Guernsey costs about £365.00, in England a couple of weeks ago it would have cost £435.00. In theory, after December the 31st it will go up to to just over £870 - Double the price. That’s a lot of money.

I say in theory there, incidentally, because there are a lot of issues on how on earth the government will police this. Red Diesel is dyed so that the Government can tell if people are using it illegally but most large boat tanks have been using this for years and will be full of red dye. There are all sorts of other issues which the RYA Page babble on about a bit too.

It is an irony that will be utterly wasted on most that a bureaucratic decision taken in Belgium will probably end a British tradition that made the Dunkirk evacuations possible.

Wordpress just ate the last two postings I made because sometimes it is a pile of unadulterated shit. Unfortunately it is the best pile of unadulterated shit I have so I will have to live with it. I swear if I see that “Do you really want to edit this post?” message which I have no idea why appears when I hit Publish, too many more times… I will delete the bloody lot.

Baaaah!

I am currently trying to buy a car in Canadia. I don’t want anything special, I don’t want to pay much, I just need something solid that will work well for a few weeks. Unfortunately, it has to be a big chunky 4*4; not for cosmetic reasons but because I need to be in the middle of nowhere in places with no roads in the middle of winter in Canadia.

The European in me is getting more and more distressed. I never really saw myself as a major environmentalist - My view on Global Warming is that if I get rasberries in December and Holland becomes one big swimming pool then that is a generally good thing. The problem is that I am opposed to very literally burning money which I don’t have and wasting fuel the planet is running out of. Is it too much to ask for fuel consumption figures to be posted with car reviews? Is it possible to get fuel consumption figures without digging through tonnes and tonnes of data hidden away in the digital equivalent of a hay-barn? Ha! Is it buggery!

What I find odd is that North Americans have started complaining about the cost of petrol nowadays and with fuel in Canadia at just under a dollar a litre you’d think they’d start to want to know how much of it their 1997 Chevrolet Tahoe LTs are drinking on an average drive from the Lumberjackery to Tim Hortons and back (11 miles per gallon is the best figure I can get, though that is probably US gallons, and I think they are smaller than real ones).

If you are ever bored one day go to a US or Canadian car sales site, have a look for a few cheap cars and then set yourself the task of working out which you should buy in terms of how much fuel they waste. Remember! You can’t use the European figures most of the time because the American ones tend to come with different engine configurations with especially big fuel burning bits. It’s fun, I promise you!