Category Archives: Top Tips

Advice, sometimes frivolous

My 5 top tips to get and stay in shape


Every year in High Wycombe, they weigh me. In this video, I explain why and give my 5 top tips for those of us who are overweight to get and stay in shape. As I say, we don’t want to be chasing implausible body images. Here’s my video, Body image – it’s time to Be REAL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CK0q6smLCY. And everyone should eat the right calories: only eat less if you are overweight. MyFitnessPal is here (other calorie counters are available): Website: https://www.myfitnesspal.com iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/calorie-counter-diet-tracker-by-myfitnesspal/id341232718?mt=8 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.myfitnesspal.android&hl=en_GB […]

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Sprucing up old plastic headlights


At ten years old, our cars’ plastic headlights were badly crazed. as I tweeted: A PoliCraft alloy, brass and copper polishing kit from @Halfords_uk worked a treat on tired plastic headlights pic.twitter.com/PEWOeUvvPQ — Steve Baker MP (@SteveBakerMP) February 1, 2015 Available here. I strongly suggest you keep the polishing head moving: if you let it dwell in one place, expect damage.

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Why iPhone and iPad work with Exchange but not OS X


Update: An update in the course of 2014 rendered this obsolete. Exchange email, calendars and tasks work well enough with iOS devices (iPad and iPhone) but not OS X. Google revealed the usual spread of despairing cries for help followed by suggestions of varying usefulness. A couple of top tips include the news that, when there is no field to enter your domain, you can specify your username as <domain>\<username>. This is apparently well-known to Windows system administrators (although why […]

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Bucks County Council advice: Staying safe in a heatwave


A level 3 heatwave has been announced across the South East of England. A new County Council flyer sets out the “top tips” for staying safe in the heat: Stay out of the heat – especially during the hottest part of the day. If you’re out, keep to the shade, wear a hat and light, loose clothes; Cool yourself down – have plenty of cold drinks, eat cold food such as fruit or salad, and sprinkle yourself with water if the […]

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You too can lose weight fast with The Sherlock Diet!


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Apparently the UK faces an obesity crisis. Helpfully, as reported in the national news [1,2], I am annually weighed in public in High Wycombe. This year, I had lost weight thanks to The Sherlock Diet. Today, I have lost 10kg since Christmas, 8 of them in the last 10 weeks. I was significantly overweight with a Body Mass Index of 29, just 3 kg off obese. My wife, a GP, hinted fairly heavily that the trajectory of my health was […]

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Free, zooming presentations with Prezi – How Government created the crisis by debasing money


I have many times presented the argument that for forty years politicians’ promises in excess of what they could take in tax were paid for by debasing the currency to avoid an explosion of debt. Here’s a typical PDF generated from Keynote, Apple’s (superior) competitor to PowerPoint. Then I was introduced to Prezi. Instead of a series of animated slides, Prezi uses a zooming user interface over a canvas. Here’s my first attempt to convey the big economic story of the […]

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Via TED, Yves Rossy: Fly with the Jetman


Via TED talks (“Ideas worth spreading”), Yves Rossy talks about flying as only he can: TED is well-worth keeping an eye on for “Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world”. TED began as a conference bringing together people from Technology, Entertainment and Design. Occasionally, a politician speaks at their events: here’s Rory Stewart calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan.

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Five videos for a better-understood new year


Some of these videos are in a US context, but the concepts apply to the UK and Europe. (We’ll just have to raise the funds to have such things done in the UK…) On levels of debt: On the madness of QE and the current economic consensus: On the battle of economic ideas: What worked for the republic of Georgia: My presentation on honest money and the future of banking (follow the link for the slides):

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The Future and its Enemies


I just finished Virginia Postrel’s challenging The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress. It is an appeal to embrace the dynamism of life and overcome our fears for the future. It is about real progress, not state-driven, top-down control. Consider for example this, from page 42: Conserving only the underlying stable rules, while letting individual decision making drive change, is a concept that a century of technocracy has made foreign to most people. It […]

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Top tips and the clear choice in British politics


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Today, I rode to church on my KTM 950 Supermoto, which revealed a couple of top tips I would like to share. On the ride home, I assembled these into an illustration of the clear choice in British politics. Here we go. Top tips for motorists and motorcyclists When in the rightmost of three lanes at a roundabout, indicating right, you should turn right.  If, at the last moment, you decide to turn left into the services, go around the […]

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