While I have no experience of healthcare, I know that office politics and culture can be a nightmare in any workplace. What I also know is that we are or own ‘brands’ and if we want to be good at anything we need to develop ourselves as we see fit. This is part of being professional. You choose to do it in work break hours where you have the time and maybe are less tied. Maybe it gives you access to people who can help when you need it. All this is good, but I think it’s worth noting that you will miss out on some of the office culture (for better or worse). Professionalism is as much about what you know as well as your network, and people make snap judgements about others. You seem to have come off badly this time, these things happen, but are fixable one way of another. What if you (force yourself to) spend one break ‘socialising’ every now and again? You may be able to turn the conversion into something more worthwhile. You may find someone who will become a real asset.

I’m waaaaay along the spectrum and I too would rather learn than idly chat. The above is very hard for me to do, but I have reluctantly found that there are benefits. It’s a bigger picture thing.

Be you and do your thing, but do it strategically. I suspect that your ‘brand’ is very saleable, so if it’s not working where you are, you can always try elsewhere.

Bedtime doesn’t equal sleep time, but is a good discipline to start making ready for bed and putting devices away. Getting ready for bed at 10, asleep by 11 doesn’t sound bad to me.

Battery replacement is an issue, but is easily solved with good design. I don’t need the thinnest phone that’s difficult to hold, a few extra mm won’t affect my life negatively. I’d rather have something usable and maintainable.

My biggest gripe however is the built in obsolesce of software support life. Perfectly good electronics are rendered useless by the system not receiving software / security updates after a couple of years.

Exactly. Thanks. This is a ‘non-domestic’ application shall we say. Measuring something with any buffer capacity at all should negate the water’s pH, so shouldn’t be a problem, but the manufacturers advice still doesn’t sit comfortably with me. But they should know!

Has a psion5, brilliant tech. Loved it. The calendar was way ahead of its time, 2AA batteries gave weeks of life and you could just about touch type on the keyboard. If I could get it to synch with office I’d be tempted to dig it out again, it really was the future.

When I was a child we lived in a house in the countryside, so nights were very dark and very quiet. I’d wander around the house in the dark quite often and noticed that as well as peripheral vision, the acoustic of the room gave me information, I could sort of hear the sound of my footsteps change if I was walking towards a closed door rather than an open one. Similarly the air moved differently going from one room to another. None of these senses had enough information to navigate alone, but all added to the model of where I was and what was around me. Of course this was in a place I knew well. When walking outside, I could ‘hear’ the echo of the hedges and walls beside me which kept me in the middle of the path. At the time this didn’t seem unusual. It goes to show that we use all our senses all the time, one helps the other to fill in the gaps.

I’m much older now, the eyesight and hearing are both failing, but it was fun while it lasted.

Allows you to remove power from the plugged in device without unplugging it. This provides convenience to easily and quickly turn things on and off and prevents arcing when unplugging. 240V 13A can arc a bit, particularly if unplugged under load, or on older sockets where the contacts have worn. While a little arcing doesn’t do much damage immediately, over time it will cause pitting and make a high resistance joint that will generate heat.

The switch only disconnects the live terminal, but the neutral terminal should be similar potential to earth (depending on how the building is wired).

Truly the king of plugs and sockets. The plugs are individually fused according to the device needs, ergonomic to use and exciting to stand on.

If it happened frequently enough, the government would find a way to tax it.

I have a couple of setups, one has poe ip cams writing to a surveillance nvr which looks after motion detect etc. The other system relies on the camera software detecting motion and writing to a Nas.

Both systems are on their own subnet and are firewalled from everything else. I VPN as and when required.

I’ve found motion detect with alerts to be difficult to tune to get good detection without false alarms.

Why wasn’t there security on the device? My works devices are password protected and it’s a disciplinary offence if I share passwords or give unauthorized access.

If he gave them the login creds, then he should be penalised .

If he logged in and gave the device to non parliamentary staff, he should also be penalised.

He got caught because it cost money, which is the lesser offence. Cyber security should be more robust for ministers than it is for most companies, but seemingly not.

The PI is always a good place to start, but they’re not cheap anymore. You can still do some useful things at the command line (not sure how fun, but a great education), python is there and very accessible. - get a camera and you could do some great things with open CV. Not sure what packages are out there though. Think you’d just have to follow some web tutorials.

As an alternative, have you considered an Arduino kit? Lots of great projects, all very well documented. Playing with LEDs, sensors, motors etc may keep their attention longer than a bash prompt.