Paul Smith's Blog

I had the misfortune of stumbling upon a BBC news piece regarding Lithuanian’s illegal blockade of Kaliningrad. It went on for about five minutes, had plenty of footage of right-wing Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte blabbering on about how they’re just implementing EU sanctions, repeatedly, without the point being challenged. It also briefly mentioned how “Russia annexed Kaliningrad during World War 2”, I’ll ignore such a laughable simplification of history. Simonyte was quoted saying:...

Update May 2022 This has been successfully recovered, albeit with almost £4000 of work needing to be done to it. Original post My wife’s motorcycle was recently stolen while parked in Brighton on Saturday the 19th of March 2022 between 11:00 and 12:00. This was while parked outside the Hanover Arms along Queen’s Park Road. It’s a super-unique 2016 Yamaha MT-07 in yellow, with handguards, Yamaha heated grips, extended screen and rack and topbox....

I was doing a bit of work today on a couple of websites, including this one and noticed a drop in traffic from Bing. Initially I thought this might be related to the website re-design which was rolled out February 6th. However it looks like the problem goes back to November, when traffic suddenly dropped off. De-indexing looks like it started January 16th and was complete 4th of February with now no pages from dasmirnov....

Someone I know recently got scammed by an alleged crypto trading platform, after seeing a fake advert/article claiming Elon Musk had invested $12 million into this new trading platform. They knew I was into crypto, so probably thought they’d be willing to yolo £50 into Bitcoin and see what happens, of course the sensible thing would have been to talk to me about it and use my referral links for actual crypto exchanges....

As the Western media goes into full war propaganda mode, any notion that we had any hand in the Russo-Ukraine conflict must be dismissed out of hand. However various foreign policy experts and strategic experts warned for years that NATO enlargement would result in war. Many have also warned specifically about our policy towards Ukraine since 2013 and how it will lead to conflict, below are some examples. Henry Kissinger US Secretary of State....

A lot of the mainstream media caught up in some sort of wave of Russophobia are claiming that Russia is out to either destroy Ukraine or at least occupy it indefinitely. That’s frankly absurd. Prior to the war starting, it was estimated that Russia had amassed approx. 120,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders. That might sound a lot to the general public, but Ukraine’s forces are, according to Wikipedia, made up of 245,000 active personal and a further 220,000 reservists....

To be better understand the current conflict happening between Russia and Ukraine, it’s probably advisable to try and see things from the Russian perspective - too often the narrative in western media lacks any historical context and without that context it’s impossible to understand what’s going on in the world. 1949 NATO founded, original members include Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal the United Kingdom and the United States of America all agree that an attack on one is an attack on all, essentially a defensive alliance excluding any attacks on colonies....

Back in January, the UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss requested a photo-op meeting with Russian Foreign Secretary Sergey Lavrov to discuss the current situation around the Russian Federation asking for security guarantees from NATO - which in the west is portrayed as Russian aggression against Ukraine. As you can expect from any member of current the British government, Liz Truss was completely out of her depth, hadn’t read her brief (or at least understood it) and had the usual total lack of understanding regarding the Russian position....

I know I haven’t been blogging as much for the last few months - but I’ve been working on a complete overhaul of the website and didn’t want to work on anything and then have to tidy it up post migration. So what happened? B2evolution went out of support which I’ve used for the past eighteen years to run my blog, so I’ve ended up using the static website builder Hugo to handle it, which is what I’ve used for a number of other projects over the last couple of years with pretty good success....

Quick blog post of my experiences of using Coinbase this year. Signed up in early January as I needed somewhere to exchange some cryptocurrency, submitted my required ID and waited, and waited. A month later I submit a support ticket, get a generic stock answer, explain how they’re busy and it’ll be reviewed when they can. Ticket closed, despite issue not resolved. Fair enough, I wait another two months and submit another support ticket asking how long this will take and if there is anyway they can expedite this....