R. F. Stevens

Good lights, simple controller, easy fitting, 14 Jun 2013

The strip of self-adhesive LED lights has a four way socket on one end and a four pin plug on the other. There are index marks on the connectors to guide us when plugging it into the control box lead or an extension lead. Be warned, it is just as easy to plug them together the wrong way round which might damage the LEDs.

Neither the Power Supply (12Volt, 5Amp) nor the little white Control Box seem to get hot merely slightly warm, just rising a couple of degrees above ambient. The LED strip however does get quite hot, and I would not recommend running it for any length of time while still rolled up in the reel… Read more

Desktop Hard Drive, works as expected, 11 Jun 2013

I've installed this in a Dell Dimension 3100 along with a new copy of W7 and a new Radeon graphics card as an upgrade from the old 320GB drive, XP and the old MB graphics.

It is significantly faster in use than the original drive, and has about the same acceptably low level of acoustic noise. At a claimed 150MBytes/s host to/from drive (sustained) data transfer rate this WD10EZRX is the fastest of all the current WD Green drives even if not the biggest. The rotational speed is chosen using the IntelliPower algorithm to maximise transfer rate in all parts of… Read more

Kipling helped to lay the foundations for modern SF and Fantasy, 9 Jun 2013

In the 1950s I was introduced to the delights of Kipling's Jungle Books, Just So Stories, Stalky & Co, Kim, Puck of Pook's Hill, Rewards and Fairies, etc, but since then I had forgotten about the unmistakeably captivating flow of his narrative. Here once again I am reminded why Kipling won the Nobel Prize in Literature 1907 "in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author"

This collection has nine short stories first published at about the dates shown below.

. With the Night Mail (1905)
. As Easy as A,B,C (1912)
These… Read more