Staying Online During Power Cuts (ADSL)

When there's a power cut, typically your laptop can keep running on batteries, but your internet router may well have no power, being plugged into the mains. Well, the BT Voyager 105 ADSL modem doesn't require any power other than over USB, so if you want to keep online during a power cut, keep a Voyager 105 handy. Basically, one end plugs in your ADSL socket (which probably means unplugging the inactive router), and then a USB cable goes from the 105 to the laptop. Do this, and you can send emergency tweets or whatever it is you do during a power cut.

School Punishment

I was bad at school once and got detention. We had to write out 1000 lines of something like "I wll not be bad again". I took the easy way out: I popped in the computer room and printed out the line "I will not be bad again" 1000 times on a dot matrix printer attached to a BBC Master. They didn't let me get away with it, but it was fun anyway.