Everyone has to be a techie these days

I am still celebrating photos from the lost archive. This one is a scan from a 35mm photo. A river god for a grotto, made years ago. Water now cascades from its mouth.

I made another technical breakthrough today. Remember me moaning about how they had scrapped BBC iPlayer in favour of the much more brash 'Sounds'? Well I was toying with H.I.'s iPhone last night and discovered that her iPlayer app still worked.

If she can get it on an identical phone, then so should I. This morning I deleted the old app then reinstalled it. Bingo. I now have my beloved old iPlayer Radio back. The bastards lied to me when they said it was unavailable.

Talking of lying bastards, on that phone yesterday I received a disturbing email. If it were not for the fact that several friends have had the same one, I would have panicked, but I stayed calm and simply deleted it as per instructions gleaned from others on the net.

The very long and well written email said that it was from a hacker who had installed malware on my computer which used the built in camera to video me watching hard core pornography, and they would send this video to all my friends, colleagues and family if I did not send them £600 in Bitcoin via the Dark Web.

Well for a start, I knew it was a lie because I do not watch porn on the computer. I looked up this scam, and learned that it is very widespread. People all over the world are getting the same message.

The scammer goes to the Dark Web and buys lists of passwords and email address for a few dollars, then pretend that they have hacked your computer. The most worrying thing about it is that someone has stolen these details, probably by hacking an innocent website which you have visited sometime in the past.

So now I will have to change quite a few passwords in case someone else tries a break-in. It's so boring. Criminals make our lives so needlessly difficult.