@simon_brooke @thecommongreen In England the problem is sometimes that nobody *wants* to admit ownership of a piece of land, because they then might be liable for various costs.

We ( #Cambridge City Council) wanted to resurface a footpath but we couldn't find out who owned it to ask them for permission.

After some research it appeared plausible that it *might* be owned by the Diocese of Ely, but they refused to admit that they owned it, because then *they* might be responsible for paying for the maintenance of the footpath.

They were however, in due course, persuaded to write a letter saying "we do not admit that we own this land, but if we did own it we would have no objection to the council resurfacing the footpath". As there were no other candidate owners identified this seemed good enough (ie it passed our own lawyers' risk assessment) and we went ahead.

Researching ownership of odd bits of land is the sort of task that might be given to a law student doing a summer vacation job.

I'm still getting spam - not enough Yandex data centres have been hit yet.

The "High Street" again. I wasn't really expecting the little local shop to still exist, despite the vestigial web presence, but I cycled into town anyway (the exercise is good for me) to find that indeed it did not exist any more.

So I will be ordering online from a national organisation.

As usual.

A win for Iran. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cmwyve191dlko

UK to join in Trump's war - what could possibly go wrong?? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqlykpe4dk0yo

@CountBinface is not challenging @ZackPolanski https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MjnnQpQFoY

I have only just learned that Arthur C Clarke invented (as well as communications satellites and his many other inventions) modern LLM text generators.

The story is The Steam-powered Word Processor, 1986, and includes:

A vicar bored with writing sermons, which he realised consisted of subsets of the same text rearranged in slightly different ways each week "... conceived a machine which would automatically reassemble massed of text in any desired order ...".

And to train it?

"Before the machine could be used, [he] was faced with the laborious task of punching not only the Bible but the whole of Cruden's Concordance on to Jaquard cards ..."

Oh look, a new prime minister who promised devolution is actually delivering centralisation.

As expected.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy8m0gxexl4o

OK, so it's taken me a while to work out the motivation for the American anti-vaxxer movement - the American health "care" industry makes far more money from treating a person with a disease than from just selling them a dose of vaccine.

Which has let me to wonder: are there other areas of preventative medicine which the American health "care" industry fights against, because cure (or, indeed, failed attempt to cure) makes more money than prevention? Is it for example the health "care" industry which is behind the drive to reduce food safety?

There must be something I'm missing here.

If you've got a stocks and shares ISA and you keep a few pounds, or even tens of pounds, in cash, perhaps from recent dividends, perhaps so that fees can be paid without selling anything, then you'll get a few pence interest each month.

And the ISA provider will have to write new systems to pay a penny or two of that to HMRC. And HMRC has to write new systems to accept these odd pennies.

The whole costing, surely to goodness, several times what it will raise in this "charge" (which isn't a "tax").

What am I missing? Or is it really as bonkers as it sounds?

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fiscal-events-2026-factsheets/isa-reform-2027-anti-circumvention-rules-factsheet

Hey, anyone know why squirrels dig up potatoes?

(We assume it's the squirrels. We haven't actually seen them do it. We've also got frogs and foxes which are really the only other possible suspects.)

#squirrel

Has somebody got at the BBC?

Yesterday that headline read "savings" - today it reads "cut".

So I've got a legal document as a PDF, and I like having printed copies of legal documents in a filing cabinet.

Sure, I could just print it.

But.

It consists mostly of white text on a dark blue background, and would presumably take several cartridges of at least the blue ink to print.

What would be a sane way to convert it to black text on a white background so as to be able to print it in a sensible fashion?