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News and Comment November 2020

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8 November (Part 1) - Who’s bored?

How do you fill a slightly damp lockdown Sunday?

In my case I was testing some Beta firmware for my car charger after discovering a nasty bug in it about six weeks ago. The company managed to recreate it but it has proved difficult to fix and when the sun gave way to cloud by lunchtime today it put paid to that activity.

I am amazed at how much data can be collected about my power usage from a remote laboratory in Lincolnshire and I haven’t even got a Smart Meter.

With the sun gone it was back to restoring old blogs which probably interests no one. I am getting through 2012 now, checking everything and improving the photo quality when the source is still available to me. Late this afternoon the software reported only one broken internal link where I had forgotten something and that is now fixed.

External links are another matter, most are outdated and they will just have to be left like it.

The exception appears to be Newspapers where references to the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph are still available to view. Ditto the News Shopper which back in 2012 looked something like a proper newspaper. But there is one glaring exception.

News Shopper reportIn June 2012 a Bexley Councillor was arrested for posting a whole series of obscenities on his blog about four residents who he had taken a dislike to. The source address was traced by the police.

The News Shopper was first with the news and later first to name him while his victims were still being kept in the dark by the police whose priority was to protect the Councillor.

All but one of those reports linked from Bonkers has gone missing. All the archived copies of the relevant ‘paper’ issues are missing too but they are not the only ones to have gone AWOL.

Can it be a coincidence? Or has the News Shopper been got at by a Council which at the time was dishonest beyond most people’s imagination?

Bonkers is undergoing much more than a link check; everything is being brought up to current standards so that most pictures will expand when clicked (as more recent ones do) and old collections of pictures are presented in the format which became standard five years ago.

Some have been collected together and Indexed.

For the few readers who still occasionally submit photographs, the tiny ones which used to be 233 x 155 pixels are now 1000 x 666 (*) or 666 x 666 (*) for the square ones. This allows them to expand with much less loss of quality on big screens. The full width images are 2000 pixels across.

The height (*) is no longer a consideration except that adjacent pictures should all be the same height or the page will look messy.

I originally hoped that all the old blogs would be restored by the New Year but I no longer think that target is achievable.

 

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