I spotted this in York on Sunday. I did consider getting a copy of the paper to see what it was about, but decided I preferred the mystery. Or to put it another way, it’s one of those “too good to check” stories[1].
[1] The classic, and quite possibly apocryphal one being the tale of the enthusiastic BBC researcher who thought that it would be a really good idea to adapt The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for radio…
Mutter, back up today. I suppose an upward fluctuation was due sooner or later…
I walked to work again today, with the usual Garmin evidence available. If you take the time to click through, you’ll notice there was a bit of a GPSFAIL. It took longer than usual to find my approximate location, but seemed OK after that, but when I got to work and had a look, I found that it had stopped tracking my location almost immediately. But the footpod sensor did its bit, so distance and speed were recorded.
I took another walk at lunchtime. It seems the Garmin Fit app was a bit upset, as it decided to stop logging altogether when I stopped to take a photograph. I thought the phone was taking a while to respond at the time, but didn’t realise it had gone into sulk mode. The Garmin report is a bit pointless, but it’s there for your amusement, if you’re easily amused. As it was quite a long walk, I plotted it on Gmap Pedometer, and here it is:
Walk
If you’d like the zoomy interactive version, it’s right here.
And finally for today, here’s a picture of the Theatre Royal with its nice new exterior lighting. Not spectacular quality, but more than acceptable for a phone, I’d say. This has had some noise reduction done in Lightroom
For a long time now, a large proportion of the DVDs and CDs people buy online in the UK have come via the Channel Islands. This used to be the domain of smaller companies setting up there so they could take advantage of the facts that:
The islands are considered outside the EU for VAT purposes
Personal imports to the UK were given a VAT exemption up to £18 (recently reduced to £15)
Having seen other people undercut them, bigger suppliers also set up shop in the Channel Islands – either openly or slightly sneakily (Amazon tell you that some items will be supplied by their “Preferred Merchant”, a Channel Islands based company that appears to be no more than an extension of Amazon).
This has resulted in lower prices for buyers, more profits for the suppliers, and a moderate amount of tax revenue being lost.
So, the government have decided to stop it, and from next year this tax “loophole”[1] will be closed. Looks like a fairly major loss to the economies of the islands, and higher prices for us.
How much impact this will have on actual retail prices remains to be seen – but even Amazon and Tesco will be reluctant to absorb the 20% UK VAT they’ll be obliged to collect on these items in future.
This looks good – it’s a new feature on wordpress.com that makes presentation of photo galleries look seriously fancy.
They’re intending to add it to the Jetpack plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites, and I hope that happens soon – it’s a much more elegant and useful solution than the method I currently use.
Click the link and enjoy the demo. Then nag me about why my site doesn’t do that, probably.
