For two weeks workers at the plant have been battling to regain control of the systems that were supposed to be perfectly safe. Risking their lives in their valiant attempts to manage many difficult problems they face to get things back to some sort of safe and stable situation.

How can this have happened when we have been told for years that nuclear power was perfectly safe and there was no chance of anything going wrong?

Yes, the plant suffered a 9.0 earthquake which is more than it had been designed for. Yes it suffered from a very high tsunami that was higher and more powerful than the plant had been designed to cope with but surely that is the whole point. It was not designed to cope with what nature threw at it. It was not safe.

Now we are being told that Japan is a special case. The situation there is very different to the UK. We do not suffer frequent powerful earthquakes and we do not suffer from devastating tsunamis.

That may be true today. There was a devastating tsunami in 1396. Who knows what tomorrow might bring. When the nuclear lobby claims something is safe they seem to use a different standard to the rest of us. Their idea of safety is that things will probably be ok. They think that if something is unlikely to happen that means it is safe.

Most of us humans consider something is safe when it can never do you any harm. Cars can be dangerous and many people die on our roads every year but just having a car sitting outside your house will not kill you. Having a nuclear power station next door could.

We are told we must have nuclear if we are to avoid catastrophic shortages of power in the future. Really? Well, why not start by ensuring we don’t waste what we already have?

We have all seen pictures of the city of London light up like a beacon in the evenings when there is hardly anybody working. Lights are left on, computers are left on. Huge amounts of energy are going to waste. We have shops with their front doors wide open in winter and you can feel the blast of hot air leaving the premises as you walk into the store.

We waste energy at an appalling rate and the way energy suppliers work and bill us means that it gets cheaper the more you use. Surely that is back to front if we are supposed to becoming a greener society?

Instead of going more nuclear we should be looking to put solar panels on the roof of every home in the country. The installation of solar panels on the roof of a house offers the possibility of collecting energy from the sun throughout daylight hours. A town with every roof covered by solar panels would generate considerable amounts of clean renewable power with complete safety and wit no problems of disposal of nuclear waste by having to store it and arrange security for a thousand years.

It is astonishing that we have not been furiously developing tidal power. We live on an island surrounded by powerful seas yet we have done very little to collect any of the massive amounts of energy available within those waves and tides.

It is very likely there will be a huge backlash in Japan against Nuclear power. Since they have few energy resources it would seem likely that Japan will go into the development and installation of Solar power and wave and tidal energy in a big way. They will probably take the place we could have had of being a world leader in tidal power technology.

We must learn lessons from the problems faced by the nuclear plant in Japan. We may not suffer the same type of devastating problems but what would happen if the whole of the North of England and Scotland were affected by some sort of nuclear accident? The consequences are too scary to contemplate but the possibility, no matter how small, must be considered.

The lesson should surely be that we should fully develop other, much safer technologies before we go using Nuclear Power. Encouragement of better and more efficient use of energy would be a good start. Insulating our homes and cutting down on wasteful business practices would make much more sense.

If there were no money to be made from building nuclear power stations and their use didn’t provide the raw material for nuclear bombs you can be sure there would be nobody wanting to build nuclear power stations.

We claim to be concerned for the planet we leave behind for our children so we cannot leave them piles of nuclear waste that they will still be having to manage in a thousand years, just so we can have neon lights flashing their advertising at us. We need sensible use of the power we already have available and much greater use of solar power and wind and tidal energy collection systems.

Japan is said to be the most prepared nation in the world for coping with the effects of earthquakes and they have survived very well it seems, with buildings relatively undamaged by an enormously powerful earthquake.

The word Tsunami is Japanese. They have been aware of the possibility and preparing for such an event for many years. The result of the tsunami on towns and villages on the North Eastern coast of Japan is staggering. To see the ground stripped bare where a town once stood is to see how powerless we humans are when compared to the forces of nature.

Thousands of lives have been lost and for many, perhaps most of the survivors life will never, ever, feel the same again. How can anyone ever hope to overcome such a devastating shock and come to terms with the fact that everything you ever knew and recognized has disappeared. Friends, family, local landmarks and poplar places you visited, all gone, leaving barely a trace of their previous existence.

The consequences of the tsunami on the nuclear power plants on the coast appear to have been extremely serious. The cooling plant which is essential to the safe maintenance of the reactor core has been damaged and made ineffective. The management of the power plants have resorted to using seawater in an attempt to keep the nuclear rods cooled to a safe level. As I write this they are still struggling to achieve this basic requirement.

Throughout all the chaos as every risky rumour has appeared the people in charge have talked it down and argued that everything was under control and public safety was not at risk.

Shortly after each of these comforting announcements we have heard that actually things are worse than had been admitted but everything is under control. It would seem to be the case that what they think ‘under control’ means and what we think, are two entirely different things.

Perhaps all businesses are like this and it is standard business spin but when you are talking about an industry that has the potential to cause enormous loss of life and cause serious illness in many thousands of people you have to ask if the use of business speak and spin is appropriate.

There is an incredible lack of transparency and, it would seem, honesty in the nuclear industry. Throughout it’s history it has been secretive and less than honest about problems it has faced. Things do not appear to have changed over time and we are still assured that nuclear power is a safe and very green technology.

There is no doubt that events in Japan are exceptional. Things like this do not happen every day but there is no way of knowing that some sort of natural disaster will not happen tomorrow in the UK, the USA or anywhere else. The problem with exceptional events is that they are exceptions to the rule and as such are difficult to plan for.

Perhaps the biggest lessons are not that there are risks to using nuclear energy but actually that we are using too much energy. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves if we really need this much energy. Is it that important that we have brightly lit stores selling us electrical goods that use even more energy?

Nature has demonstrated just how insignificant we are and what a fragile species we are. Technology doesn’t keep us safe and it could even make us weaker. In a society dependent on centralised water supplies, food supplies, energy supplies and needing access to mobile phones and the internet, we are not well prepared for coping with a disaster where all those resources have disappeared.

No doubt Japan will recover from this disaster and we wish them well in their recovery but lessons need to be learned about being prepared for unlikely but catastrophic events and whether control, support services and supply lines should be more localised so that one area being devastated does not mean that larger areas are severely affected by the consequences of that devastation but we must have more transparency and honesty from the nuclear power industry if we are to make sensible choices about energy supplies in the future.

There are a lot of bad guys out there who want to take advantage of you and your internet connected equipment to steal your personal information and to spread their spam and phishing emails all over the web.

So, it should come as no surprise that there are warnings of the possibility that internet tvs could get hacked and enable the bad guys, and girls since we mustn’t be sexist about this, to do these things.

When it comes to TVs there is not much we can do to prevent these types of action so we must hope that the security of internet connected TVs is absolutly 100% secure when they become commonplace in the not too distant future.

Hacker warning over internet-connected HDTVs • The Register.

It’s a general news and information site that publishes a lot of stories and people are able to leave comments much like many other sites and blogs.

BBC News – Gawker hack triggers password resets at major sites.

The fact that such a big website has been hacked and passwords stolen is worrying but what it has shown is how hopeless we humans are when it comes to using and remembering secure and difficult to guess passwords.

It is not hard to come up with a complicated password that cannot easily be guessed. Here’s an example ‘so&qi+;txb%’. That is a pretty strong password but how would you ever remeber that?

We all have multiple passwords these days. We have pin numbers for credit cards, passwords for websites and it becomes increasingly difficult to remember them all.

It is important to use strong passwords and if you are using ‘qwerty’ or ’123456′ then frankly, you are asking for trouble.

There are both free and paid for password control programs available and they make life a heck of a lot easier and they keep your passwords safe and secure and reduce the need for you to remember them.

Personally I use a program called Roboform and have done for some years. It manages thousands of passwords for me and also enables me to easily log into sites on my different computers. It’s a great package and I heartily recommend it. The cost is tiny when you think of the financial risk and the inconvenience of either losing your passwords of having them guessed and missused.

It is a free download with full use for 30 days but after that you can still have gull use for I think it’s ten passwords which is free forever but the upgrade price is a one time payment and it is not expensive for what it does.

Give it a try or find out more here.. Free Roboform Download

So I have been sickened and embarrassed to hear how sport is using technology to try to beat the competition. Hi-tech materials and design are said to have had a hufe impact on the China Olympics particularly in cycling but also in every other sport.

If Britain wins gold thanks to our use of a high tech design I see that as cheating and I think any medal winner should feel they cheated. If the competition is not equal then the medals count for nothing.

All athletes work hard and train for years for the opportunity to compete on equal terms with all the other competitors. Taking drugs has been considered cheating for years and great efforts are taken to catch anyone who uses performance enhancing drugs. What is so different about using performance enhancing equipment?

The athletes  deserve  sports bodies who ensure that they all compete on an equal footing. Hi tech equipment in sport is cheating and the rules should ensure nobody is allowed to win thanks to using performance enhancing equipment.

If Britain wins any medals at the 2012 Olympics I will wonder if they were really the best competitor or if they just had the benefit of performance enhancing equipment that allowed them to cheat the true deserving winner out of their medal.

Most people don’t buy top of the range expensive tvs. Most people buy a cheap TV with as big a screen as they can afford. You only have to look at a demonstation of different TVs in a store to see the wide variation in the quality of the images produced. If you can’t even get a top quality picture on every TV produced why do these same cheaper TVs need to be worrying about HD images? Marketing.

There are some people who really do want HD TV. Those enthusiasts for particular sports and interests who want to see the details down to the tiniest degree but most of us don’t care.

HDTV has cost the TV production industry a fortune to change all their cameras and equipment and I remain unconvinced of any great benefit. The quality of the images produced for adverts promoting HDTV, which have been made to be view on normal TVs, shows that the quality of images on normal TV can be very impressive. I wonder if the efforts should not have been placed into better cameras, lighting and camerawork but HDTV is with us whether we like it or not.

Now the industry is pushing for us all to have 3D TVs. Why? Have you ever exxpressed the desire for a 3d tv? I know I haven’t. I suspect that one day 3d holographic images may become readily available but even then I am not sure I want a cops shoot-out appearing in the middle of my lounge.

The industry wants to sell more TVs, replacement TV cameras, studio equipment and everything else that goes along with a complete change of output like this but do we the consumers ever get consulted?

If I were asked if I want 3d TV I would say no, but nobody asks me and in a few years time I expect I will only be able to buy 3d TVs.

I guess the argument could be made that when we changed from the old 405 to 650  screen resolution nobody was asking for it but the improvement is obvious. These changes to HDTV and 3d are no less obvious but I just don’t care about them. I do care that the BBC has had to use an enormous amount of licence payers money to change to HD and the change to 3d is likely to be even more expensive.

It would be great if the TV industry could just worry about producing top quality TVs that give me a great picture at standard resolution and TVs that lasted for twenty years. Now that is something that I would welcome but HDTV and 3dTV? No, you can keep it, thank you very much.

They still cost an arm and a leg to buy even though their output was poor but they used ribbons for printing and the cost of ink was a small consideration.

These days the inkjet printer has changed everything and we can now print out top quality pictures and text that is as good as anything a print shop could do. The problem now is the cost of ink. While inkjet printer are cheap to buy the ink we use in them is very expensive and it only takes a few full page colour images to empty one or more of your inkjet cartridges.

Fortunately the size of this market of people who want cheaper inkjet supplies has led to a whole industry of compatible inkjet cartridge manufacturers appearing on the scene. I have been using these alternative suppliers for years and have been very happy with the savings in price and the quality of the printing. The printer manufacturers may not like it as it reduces the profits they make from supplying very expensive ink and they say that the quality of ink is much worse from the compatible inkjet suppliers but then they would say that wouldn’t they.

Personaly I have used compatible inkjet cartridges for years and will continue to do so while the branded manufacturers continue to charge such ridiculous prices for their official cartridges.

Only a handful of scientists would even have been aware of the potential problems a volcano in Iceland might cause to the travel plans of people throughout Europe but cause problems it did and because air travel has become so normal a thing to do it was not just intrepid adventurers who were caught out. Families, groups of schoolchildren on trips, businessmen,sports personalities and entertainers were all caught out by this unexpected chaos.

It could have been a lot worse. It could have been that the first we knew about the problem would have been planes falling out of the sky as the volcanic dust stopped their engines. It looks now as though the risk was not quite as serious as first thought but given the choice I would rather be stuck in an airport for 6 days than scattered as body parts across the burning wreckage of a crashed aircraft.

Expect the unexpected and most times you will be wrong but come the day you were right and you will be glad you planned for it. We live in a very complicated, interconnected and fragile society where everything depends on everything else to keep working as expected. The ash cloud from the volcano in Iceland caused chaos throughout Europe but it demonstrates that we cannot and should not take technology for granted. Things can go wrong and there may be lessons we need to learn.

The technology that keeps our society humming smoothly along seems to be pretty robust but then so did the system of for air travel. In a society that is so dependent on technology we cannot simply assume everything will carry on working day after day and we need to plan for the most unlikely situations.

Imagine, if you will, that something occurs somewhere on the internet. The internet was designed to be quite literaly bomb-proof but if a virus was maliciously placed there or some other problem that nobody ever thought possible occurred we would all suffer. In a society that is so dependent on the internet this would cause massive disruption to the daily lives of millions of people. It would cause major disruption and many businesses would be unable to operate without it. Imagine that small mishap were to last for several days or even weeks. Most business are dependent to some extent or another on the internet these days. Many of the airlines that suffered recently are totally dependent on the internet for bookings and their business would come to a grinding halt. Anyone who uses VOIP internet phone systems would lose their phone connections to the world and everything would just stop working.

It may never happen but we surely need some sort of backup plan and the way everything is internet based these days does make the assumption that it will always be there. The lesson of the Icelandic volcano is that perhaps we should not always assume everything will run smoothly. Even if it did take forty years for those vapour trails to stop appearing in the sky it did eventually happen and nobody really gave it much thought before it did.

Do you look at your one month old mobile phone and think it must be time to upgrade?

Do you want to really impress your neighbours?

Then you need this, the very latest in expensive hi-tech, electronic, whizz bang, gadget shit.

If you don’t like strong language, DON’T watch this video!

Of course lots of people did get excited. What else could they do? The hype had been hyped, the film crews had been booked and the flights had been flown. They could hardly admit there was nothing to get excited about could they?

The iPad is very stylish. Nobody could argue with that but as to functionality there seems to be nothing at all to get excited about unless you have poor sight in which case a large screen iPhone might be what you need. Apparently it is not even a phone though so it fails to do that too.

A pretty ebook reader it may be but if you also need a laptop to do other things then you may as well use that instead and you will be able to do a lot more besides.

I suspect the iPad was intended to be more but due to design and production difficulties this was all they could produce by the appointed launch date. I suspect there will be a much more capable version released in six months or so and that may be a game changer. We will have to wait and see.