How electricity is generated

Here's a PDF of my 1999 feature 'From Pipelines to Pylons' which described the story of UK electricity generation and delivery, from North Sea gas through to the 230V outlet in your home - and everything in between.

From Pipelines to Pylons (PDF)

I featured the then-new, but now demolished, Killingholme 'B' CCGT power station when I was a guest of National Power during the station's annual shutdown. This was an ideal opportunity to explore the entire station with all its inner workings laid bare. Very rare photos of gas turbine maintenance were included.

The PDF is a print dump of my web-enabled version that I originally hosted on my now defunct epemag.net website.

How to replace fluorescent cabinet lighting with LED tubes

After years of putting up with flickering fluorescent lighting under my kitchen cabinets, the time had come to replace this ancient (nearly 100 years old), creaky and troublesome technology with LEDs. Apart from saving energy, LEDs switch on almost immediately with no flashing or flickering, are mercury-free and virtually maintenance free as well. This blog explains how I swapped old fluoresecent tubes for LEDs while keeping the old 'gear'.

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Net Work (1996 - 2025) goes full circle

After almost 29 years of uninterrupted publication, I'm now ready to stand back and take time off from Net Work, so the April 2025 column is sadly the final one in the regular series. The next occasional Net Work article appears in the September 2025 issue.

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This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions on this computer.

One day, and without warning, my version of Microsoft OneNote 2007 popped up with an error message:
"This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions on this computer. Please contact your system administrator."
This happened whenever I clicked on a hyperlink. Normally my Firefox web browser would launch, but I started getting this error instead. It also happened with Microsoft Word documents, but not with certain other programs. After a huge amount of research, trial and error, and not wanting to re-install any software, the error was soon solved as I'll explain.

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Sanyo VPC-G210 digicam - PC connection

This article's about sorting out the Sanyo VPC-G210 Digicam PC Serial lead pinouts. Trying to download camera images direct to a PC, I found that a generic PC serial lead (DB9 to 2.5mm 'stereo' plug) I'd sourced online didn't work - the camera wouldn't communicate with my PC's COM1 serial port. I also run through the MGI PhotoSuite SE/ Sanyo PC software.

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Remembering the S-Dec Solderless Breadboard

This is a celebration of the S-Dec and T-Dec solderless breadboards from the 1970s, the first of their kind in Britain. My hobbyist years will forever be indebted to them, so I trace some history and present some contemporary ads. and photos of them.

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What are those diamond marks on steel tape measures

ave you ever wondered what the strange diamond markings are that appear on steel flexible tape measures? They seem to be placed in an odd position, without explanation, somewhere near the 19” mark. Some tape measures have extra symbols placed at the 16” mark for some reason. All is revealed in this blog article!

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Exploring Sanyo Digicam Multi Shot ‘movie clips’

I unearthed my early Sanyo VPC-G210 photos and discovered a few ‘multi shot’ photos taken at the time (1997-98), so I decided to see what I could make of them today. Each Sanyo multi shot image contains 16 sequential pictures, tiled 4x4 into a single 640 x 480 pixel JPEG. So each ‘frame’ is a mere 160 x 120 pixels and movie clips last 1.6 or 3.2 seconds. I've also been experimenting with manipulating them and making a serial lead to download onto a compatible Windows 98 PC.

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Sanyo VPC-G210 digicam – the start of something big

The Sanyo VPC-G210: it’s 1997 and the evolution of digital cameras continues unabated, as manufacturers try to cram more pixels into pictures to produce better quality images. Since the earliest LCD consumer camera first appeared, the 1995 ¼VGA Casio QV-10 that I describe elsewhere, digicams were jostling for position with film cameras and there’d be an insatiable demand for higher resolution, more memory, faster operation, improved battery life and more camera-like features and controls.

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Celebrating the Casio QV-10 – the world’s first consumer digital camera with built-in LCD

‘What to do today?’ was one of my dad’s daily musings, and while pondering the same thing myself, I remembered that I’ve got a vintage digicam that I wanted to re-visit and explore. So this item is dedicated to the Casio QV-10, which nearly 30 years ago heralded a radical change in the way consumers would enjoy photography in the future.

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