I only just learned about the UK's dissenting Freecycle moderators. It seems like the Freecycle 'brand owners' are starting to see the value in their brand, and are consolidating their Freecycle empire. What's the phrase - 'where there's muck there's money'? Well, something like that.

This entry is partly just a space for me to make notes on the SmartAlpha module from RF Solutions. If you want to contact me on any of the information contained here, please email kevin at susa dot net.

Here's a little tip for anyone with an Oil Watchman tank guage. If your batteries run out, you don't need to spend £30 or so replacing it. You can open the tube and replace the four AAA cells that are inside, it's a simple five minute job.

The power tube is the copper pipe sticking out of the unit that's on your tank. It has a copper cap on the top, and the whole tube unscrews from the transmitter. You can replace the AAA cells inside simply by twisting off the cap, replacing the batteries, and then twisting the cap back on.

I've had to brush up on a lot of maths recently, and something I've encountered more frequently than expected is history of mathematics and science. What I find so interesting is the sequence of discoveries that leads us to our current understanding, since it often leads to a deeper understanding (I think Schools would have done better to have taught me science history rather than the one-sided view of WWI and WWII that I was subjected to).

Lots of people have reported good things about the toner transfer method of making printed circuit boards. Lots of other people have said it's a waste of time. I have been trying to use this technique to produce decent quality boards, so far with a few successes.

Before I discuss pitfalls and failures, for my successes, here's a quick summary of what's worked for me so far: -

A solution to this can be found on the iplayerv2 forums (http://code.google.com/p/xbmc-iplayerv2/issues/detail?id=7#c18), but no posts contain the exact error message, so i'm posting the solution here.

G-Portal has just added its MMS Plus service which allows anyone with Internet on their phone to send photos to their friends and family via SMS. Just enter the URL 'da.gp' into your phone's browser and choose 'MMS Plus' from the top menu to get started, or read more below.

A saturday night conversation with my sister-in-law and her husband involved them complaining about the Royal Mail delivering packages incorrectly over the past couple of months. I've also had this experience, and my suspicion is that these little 'spanners in the works' are politically motivated - it only takes a small number of people to make mistakes to have a noticable effect on our opinions of Royal Mail and 'the need for improvements by the private sector'. Perhaps some pro-privatisation managers over-work their employees for a while, leading to inevitable mistakes?

Reading about the recent legal action that certain hedge funds are attempting against Porsche, I did a little reading around the history of the subject. One of interesting view was from a German politician who drew a parallel between hedge funds and a swarm of locusts, descending on their target and stripping it of all value. Those who share this view will doubtless revel in the gracefulness with which Porsche duped the hedge funds into huge losses on their VW short positions.

I'm rarely truly impressed with gadgets. I've seen so many over the years that I've become a little indifferent.

However, when my wife asked me to check out some basic contracts, mainly for SMS, the deal that caught my eye was one from the operator '3', comprising unlimited texts, unlimited Internet, unlimited '3 to 3' calls, and an 75 minutes any-network calls for 15 quid per month, and this included an INQ1 phone.