I bought some proper cycling shoes and cleats the other day and have been practicing with them. Turns out they’re harder than they look and it’s a pain to unclip from the pedal. Managed to do this just before work this morning:

I’ve also set up a private timed segment on Strava to time myself from home to work. Every time I do the run, it automatically updates:

After a bit of searching, I found a nice road bike on eBay – a Felt F80. I managed to get a great deal: brand new, this bike and its components would have probably cost around £1000 and I got it for around £300!

I took it for a quick 15 mile spin and it’s fantastic! Super lightweight, speedy and looks great! You can follow my rides on Strava – a great website linked to an app on my phone.

Due to an error on Amazon.co.uk, they were selling packs of 24 Irn Bru for £4 with free shipping. Of course me and Chris bought a couple each and they’ve arrived today. Let the sugar binge begin!

Woke up this morning to find the results from the modules I’ve taken this year were put online and I’m pretty happy with them! Strategies in Forensic Computing and Computer Network Principles both scored over 70%, making them both firsts. Forensic Management managed to get me a 2:1, which I was expecting after doing the exam in early January.

Overall, these marks average at 69.66%, just a third of a percent away from getting a first overall. As long as I stay on track, I should finish this year with a first.

Last week, Megaupload was shut down by American law enforcement agencies, charging the owners with…

Conspiracy to commit racketeering.
Conspiracy to commit copyright infringement.
Conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Criminal copyright infringement.

The people running Megaupload and its sister websites have had all their possessions confiscated, including more than 20 luxury cars and face jail sentences of up to 20 years. This comes around a month after Megaupload’s last controversy, their advert starring well known artists such as Kanye West and Lil Jon, which was pulled from YouTube due to a bogus copyright claim by Universal. The video has since been reuploaded numerous times by users and Megaupload has retaliated by launching a law suit against Universal.

This sudden move by American authorities to shut down a file hosting website (especially considering the state of the web concerning legislation such as PIPA and SOPA), has caused other well known file hosts to change their policies. Here is a summarised list of the changes carried out by file hosting websites since Megaupload was taken offline:

Turned off file sharing. You can only download what you have uploaded:
Filesonic
Fileserve
Filejungle
UploadStation
UploadBox
x7.to

Shut down:
Megaupload

Blocked US traffic:
Uploaded.to

As I’ve said before, it really is a tough time for the Internet. We need to fight against censorship of the web, otherwise we will be left with an Internet resembling nothing of today’s.

SOPA’s been in the news recently due to the 24 hour blackout of high profile websites such as Wikipedia, Reddit, BoingBoing and more. I even took my site down (as my 2 readers may have noticed) and replaced it with this:

If you can manage to survive reading a wall of unformatted text, Jeff sums SOPA up pretty well:


Now it looks like the bill will be rejected when it comes time to vote. Members of Congress’ websites suffered from downtime from the sheer amount of people trying to contact their local representative. The owner of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch has been slated for his involvement with SOPA, more so now after he claimed Google was a piracy leader.

It isn’t over. SOPA needs to be stopped for good. Keep informed. Save the Internet.