Try Scotland - the Galloway Forest Park is known for it's dark skies. On the other hand, getting a cloudless night in Scotland might be more of a challenge...

The gmail app now supports Exchange accounts, and I'm assuming that's via ActiveSync?

In any case, this news is confusing because there's been an Outlook app for Android for a long time. It's awful, but it does exist for outlook.com accounts - I assume the new one is different, but the name is confusing.

Wordpress has a lot going for it, but you do need more than just css and html to get the most out of it. You're going to have a hard time getting themes right without some php knowledge. Newer third party themes do a good job of presenting lots of options for customisation, and that might be enough for many sites. If you're developing for a customer, though, eventually they'll want a tweak to a theme that can only be done by changing the PHP (ideally do this in a child theme).

It is possible to get unofficial hacked versions of OS X to run in a VM, but there's no legal way which is a real shame. For my needs, OS X is the best combination of unix and the ability to run commercial software.

That said, whenever I really think about it I realise Windows would be pretty much as good - especially with Cygwin or something on top. If my Mac died tomorrow I'm really not sure whether I'd get a replacement or go back to Windows.

This.

Rather than running other systems on Mac hardware, I want to run OS X on other hardware. But I can't, not officially.

I'd rather have a mini tower with room for at least two, preferably three, drives (an SSD for the OS + apps and a big data drive or two), built in card reader and maybe built in optical drive. Oh, and a decent number of USB ports.

Instead, to run OS X I have to have a bunch of cables hanging out of the back to peripherals, some of which need their own power supply. It's almost enough to push me back to Windows (not Linux, I mostly use Photoshop and no, the Gimp is not a substitute).

I have a very weird combination. I went partially deaf in one hear, losing all the high frequency range, when I was 30. Can hear low notes, but not much in the higher range and have constant high pitched tinnitus in that ear... BUT, with my good ear, I can still hear the tones from the thing in my garden that's designed to scare off cats and that people aren't supposed to be able to hear at all.

It's been fine on my 5. I don't think I've had a crash in Chrome yet and it seems just as quick as Kitkat was. Do you have any background apps that might not be totally compatible? All of my apps seem to work, but I have heard that some are flaky Lollipop (probably down to the switch from Dalvik to Art).

I was hoping to like the new lock screen notifications, but there's not enough flexibility in how they work. I'd like to see per app settings that hide them from the lock screen but not the notification bar. The options seem to be all or nothing, so I went back to the lock screen notification app I was using under Kitkat anyway.

Does anyone know if it aims to encrypt all your files quickly or over a time period to increase the chance of poisoning backups?

If the former, one mitigation might be to check file types on the backup? Assuming you do a backup to a different architecture, such as Linux, check file types - is a jpeg really a jpeg? Can it read plain text files? As soon as it finds one it can't, flag it up for investigation. Perhaps have a number of canary files, pull those first each time and compare them to known good copies stored in a non-shared filesystem on the backup machine, halting the backup if the file has changed in any way. It'd be a pain to set up, but once scripted it would all be automatic.

Question for cryptography gurus - does having a known good file or files increase the feasibility of decrpyting? I.e A file is encrypted. You have an unencrypted copy of it on read only media. Does that increase the chance of finding the keys used to encrypt A, and thus enable you decrypt other files for which you don't have good copies? Probably not, but thought I'd ask. Apologies if it's a stupid question before I get the piss ripped out of me ;)

Exactly, it's the norm in the UK. I started out just over 20 years ago, and only senior managers had offices then. Now even they're out in the open plan office in many places.

Classrooms are also open plan, so it was no different to what I was used to from education. Every environment in which I've been expected to work has been like that, from my first day of school right up until now.

I see the plus side, which is that even though I'm working on my thing I can pick up on conversations around me - and often make a contribution that would not happen if we were all hidden away in cubicles or offices.

That makes sense to me. The warning is saying "this site claims to be secure but the certificate doesn't check out in some way, be careful", whereas http makes no claims to be secure and hence no warning is given.

There is no need for SSL everywhere and punishing sites without it by ranking them lower is just plain wrong. Why on earth would a brochure style site for a business need SSL? Why does Wikipedia need SSL (for readers, not for editing)? Why do blogs need SSL for readers? Why does the BBC News website need SSL?

There are a vast number of sites that have no need for SSL and it's simply unnecessary overhead.

No, it really isn't. Labels do not play well with IMAP and I find it keeps downloading the same mail dozens of times.

Plus the inbox categories (social and promotions) save me from setting up filters for stuff. Trouble is, that's not reflected in IMAP so that stuff still ends up in my inbox.

Does it? I've found the label system is a bit funky with IMAP, and Thunderbird seems to like downloading the same mail multiple times. I only use it to sync a backup copy, as I tend to use the web client, but I've found it's not that smooth an experience.

Other than that gmail just works for me. The tabs were a handy addition - it saves me setting up filters to keep less important stuff out of my inbox - and the spam filter is pretty much perfect. It doesn't need to change, and is a large part of me sticking with google for other services (and even using Android). If it changed too much, I'd have an incentive to look at alternatives.

And the danger of dropping anything from schools is that these skills are much, much easier to pick up as a child. I think I'd find it almost impossible to learn how to play an instrument now because I never did as a child. Same with sports. Most of my motor skills were picked up as a child or teenager - so I can type (even though I started on a ZX Spectrum!) and play pool to a reasonable standard. And, er, that's about it.

I'm not too proud to admit I got the reference :)