Thy Kingdom Come 2019: will you join with us to us light up the world in prayer?

Thy Kingdom Come is a global prayer movement that invites Christians around the world to pray for more people to come to know Jesus. What started in 2016 as an invitation from the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to the Church of England has grown into an international and ecumenical call to prayer.

During the 11 days of Thy Kingdom Come, it is hoped that everyone who takes part will:

Deepen their relationship with Jesus Christ

Pray for God’s spirit to work in the lives of those they know

Come to realise that every aspect of their life is the stuff of prayer  

After the very first Ascension Day the disciples gathered with Mary, constantly devoting themselves to prayer while they waited for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Like them, our reliance on the gift of the Holy Spirit is total – on our own we can do nothing.

Through the centuries Christians have gathered at that time to pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit. ‘Thy Kingdom Come’ picks up this tradition. Over the past three years more and more worshipping communities have dedicated the days between Ascension and Pentecost to pray ‘Come Holy Spirit’.

We are praying that the Spirit would inspire and equip us to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with our friends and families, our communities and networks. It has been amazing how many varied ways there have been in which people from every tradition have taken up this challenge. The effects have been remarkable.

It is our prayer that those who have not yet heard the Good News of Jesus Christ and his love for the world will hear it for themselves, and respond and follow Him. Specifically, we again invite each and every Christian across the country to pray that God’s Spirit might work in the lives of 5 friends who have not responded with their ‘Yes’ to God’s call.

https://www.thykingdomcome.global/

Microsoft says expiring passwords are no longer secure

Microsoft will scrap its archaic password expiration policies in the upcoming Windows 10 May 2019 update to encourage organisations to implement more contemporary and effective security measures.

The update will apply to Windows 10 version 1903 and Windows Server version 1903 and to replace the time-based periodic password expirations, organisations should set up.

The company explained that if customers are required to change their password regularly, they are more likely to write down the passwords so they don't forget them and this could mean that others can quite easily get their hands on them, increasing the likelihood of them being stolen.

Microsoft also noted that if people are asked to change their passwords often, they probably will only make very small changes and thus they won't be particularly secure. They are also more likely to forget their passwords and will have to reset them, affecting user experience and loyalty.

www.itpro.co.uk

Fitness trackers 'add miles to your marathon'

Some fitness trackers are inaccurately measuring running distance, according to research from the consumer watchdog Which? 

It tested 118 trackers using a treadmill to complete the distance of a marathon - 26.2 miles (42km). It found that the least reliable unit tested underestimated the distance by 10.8 miles – meaning the researcher actually ran 37 miles!

“Our tests have found a number of models from big-name brands that can’t be trusted when it comes to measuring distance, so before you buy, make sure you do your research to find a model that you can rely on,” said Natalie Hitchins, head of home product and services at Which?

www.bbc.co.uk

Calli has been for her sprucing session with Pam!

Not only does Calli look & smell lovely - she even looks happier too! 

Thanks Pam!

www.k9-4pawsandthegroomingroom.co.uk

Apple Three-Prong AC Wall Plug Adapter Recall Program

Apple has determined that, in very rare cases, the Apple three-prong AC wall plug adapters designed primarily for use in the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Hong Kong may break and create a risk of electrical shock if exposed metal parts are touched. This wall plug adaptor shipped from 2003 to 2010 with Mac and certain iOS devices, and was also included in the Apple World Travel Adaptor Kit.

Customer safety is always Apple's top priority, and we have voluntarily decided to exchange affected wall plug adapters with a new adapter, free of charge. We encourage customers to exchange their wall plug adaptor using the process below.

Identifying your wall plug adaptor: Compare your adaptor to the images ABOVE. Affected three-prong wall plug adaptors are white, with no letters in the inside slot where it attaches to an Apple power adaptor. New adaptors are white with grey on the inside portion that attaches to the power adaptor. If you have one of the affected adaptors, please click HERE to find out how to participate with the exchange process.

www.apple.com

The Trussell Trust: Record number of food parcels provided to people in crisis

Between 1 April 2018 and 31 March 2019, the Trussell Trust’s food bank network distributed 1.6 million three-day emergency food supplies to people in crisis, a 19% increase on the previous year. More than half a million of these went to children. 

“What we are seeing year-upon-year is more and more people struggling to eat because they simply cannot afford food. This is not right.

“Enough is enough. We know this situation can be fixed – that’s why we’re campaigning to create a future where no one needs a food bank. Our benefits system is supposed to protect us all from being swept into poverty. Universal Credit should be part of the solution but currently the five week wait is leaving many without enough money to cover the basics. As a priority, we’re urging the government to end the wait for Universal Credit to ease the pressure on thousands of households.  

“Ultimately, it’s unacceptable that anyone should have to use a food bank in the first place. No charity can replace the dignity of having financial security. That’s why in the long-term, we’re urging the Government to ensure benefit payments reflect the true cost of living and work is secure, paying the real Living Wage, to help ensure we are all anchored from poverty.”

www.trusselltrust.org

Fullers: Shakespeare in the Garden - returneth!

SHAKESPEARE RETURNETH! Summer 2019, we're transforming 32 of our pub gardens into the perfect setting for open-air Shakespeare with a mammoth 47 performances from July until September, our biggest year yet!

For 2019, Open Bar brings you The Merry Wives of Windsor and Romeo & Juliet for shows full of fun, laughter and sword-swinging action.

Early bird tickets are now on sale for a limited time only so booketh today!

So, what's it like? In a word: BRILLIANT! Last year we went to see A Midsummer Night's Dream at The King's Head, Wickham - such a fantastic show! Here is a mini video of the show, enjoy!

www.fullers.co.uk

Using Microsoft Office 2010? 18 months till it goes End Of Life!

Office 2010 will reach its end of support on 13th October 2020. If you haven't already begun to upgrade your Office 2010 environment, we recommend you start now.

What does end of support mean?

Office 2010, like almost all Microsoft products, has a support lifecycle during which we provide bug fixes and security fixes. This lifecycle lasts for a certain number of years from the date of the product's initial release. For Office 2010, the support lifecycle is 10 years. The end of this lifecycle is known as the product's end of support. When Office 2010 reaches its end of support on 13th October 2020, Microsoft will no longer provide the following:

Technical support for issues

Bug fixes for issues that are discovered

Security fixes for vulnerabilities that are discovered

Because of the changes listed above, we strongly recommend that you upgrade as soon as possible.

Also read this article on Windows 7 going EOL in Jan 2020.

What to do next? Contact Donline for advice in planning upgrades and migration to an up to date operating system & productivity suite.

www.microsoft.com

The Marvel Cinematic Universe explained: the chronological order that the movies run in

SPOILER ALERT! This article contains details of the plots of some Marvel films, including recent releases.

Marvel sequel Avengers: Endgame hits UK cinemas on 25 April and is widely expected to be the biggest release of 2019. The film will be the 22nd entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which began with 2008's Iron Man.

If you want to watch Endgame, but feel daunted by the sheer size of the MCU, never fear! Here's everything you need to know.

www.bbc.co.uk

Millions of people STILL using 123456 as password, security study finds!

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has today published analysis of the 100,000 most commonly re-occurring passwords that have been accessed by third parties in global cyber breaches. The results show a huge number of regularly used passwords breached to access sensitive information.

The NCSC hope to reduce the risk of further breaches by building awareness of how attackers use easy to guess passwords, or those obtained from breaches and help guide developers and System Administrators to protect their users.

The compromised passwords were obtained from global breaches that are already in the public domain having been sold or shared by hackers.

The list was created after breached usernames and passwords were collected and published on Have I Been Pwned by international web security expert Troy Hunt. The website allows people to check if they have an account that has been compromised in a data breach.

www.ncsc.gov.uk

Reading for Good Friday: Isaiah speaks of Jesus' amazing sacrifice - to bring us forgiveness and Salvation

But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Read all of Isaiah 53 at Bible Gateway

Samsung's folding-screen phones, loaned to tech reporters, break within days!

Samsung’s space-age Galaxy Fold smartphones, which you can fold in half to pop in your pocket, are cracking up after just a few days of use.

Good thing these devices aren't on sale yet, and only in the hands of, oh no, journalists to review, who went literally round the bend late on Tuesday in revealing how their on-loan handhelds were failing.

The problem lies with the Fold's foldable screen: the handset's unique, or dare us Brits say, courageous selling point. At first glance, the $1,980 phone has a tall and narrow rectangular display, though when opened out, it sports a 7.3-inch touchscreen.

“Defy the limits of what you can do with our most expansive Infinity Display ever ... Unfold it for more immersion, more multitasking and to seamlessly transition apps from the front display,” Samsung gushed about the thing in its promotional materials.

Yeah, well, it’s more unfold it for immersion into a black screen of death. Several hacks at different publications, loaned devices to review, have experienced malfunctions after using the smartphone just for a few days.

www.theregister.co.uk

Reading for Holy Week - believe & be saved!

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 

For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.

Read all of Romans 10 at Bible Gateway

Keanu Reeves talks about his love of motorcycles

Keanu Reeves recently did an interview with GQ Magazine about his motorcycle endeavors. You can see how passionate he is about everything on two wheels. Reeves discusses his love for motorcycles and riding very candidly. He also goes into how Arch came into existence. It’s an interesting story and one worth hearing.

You get the feeling in the video that Reeves is being himself. He’s very candid with his answers. You can tell everything was off the cuff.

www.webbikeworld.com

Heartbroken by the terrible fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral? Would you like to help rebuild?

Hundreds of millions of euros have been pledged to help rebuild Notre-Dame after a devastating fire partially destroyed the French cathedral.

The fire, declared fully extinguished some 15 hours after it began, ravaged the 850-year-old building's roof and caused its spire to collapse.

But firefighters who worked through the night managed to save the Paris landmark's main stone structure, including its two towers. The cause of the fire is not yet clear.

The French charity Fondation du Patrimoine is launching an international appeal for funds for the cathedral, a Unesco World Heritage site. Click here to help support the rebuilding of this wonderful building, & historic seat of Christianity.

www.bbc.co.uk

Do you have an Outlook.com email address? You need to be aware of this...

Microsoft’s Outlook.com service has been the subject of a pretty serious hack in recent weeks. Microsoft first confirmed to Techcrunch that its email service has been compromised for months, with hackers being able to access subject lines of emails and names of people within conversations in select Outlook.com accounts.

However, following a new report from Vice’s Motherboard website revealing that hackers were actually able to read the content of emails, Microsoft has been forced to change its stance.

Microsoft confirmed to Motherboard that it sent breach notification emails to Outlook.com users who had their emails read by hackers, and the company added that this was just 6% of users affected by the hack. “We addressed this scheme, which affected a limited subset of consumer accounts, by disabling the compromised credentials and blocking the perpetrators’ access,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement.

www.onmsft.com

Psst... wanna try the shiny new version of Edge?

You might have heard that some changes are coming for Microsoft Edge, and today we’re excited to announce that the first preview builds of the next version of Microsoft Edge based on Chromium are now ready for download on Windows 10 PCs.

We’d like you to be among the first to try out what we’ve been working on. We’re proud of our progress so far, but we still have a lot of work to do. We want to hear your perspective on how to make the product even better.

Keep in mind, these early builds can be run on any 64-bit version of Windows 10 without impacting your current browsing experience—and the current Microsoft Edge browser will continue to be included in Windows 10 Insider Preview Builds.

We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the new preview builds, and we hope that you’ll continue to give us feedback on the current version of Microsoft Edge. This will help us ensure a quality experience for our current users while we work towards what’s next.

This is just the beginning. We hope you’ll join us as we work to make the future of Microsoft Edge great. Thanks for helping us build a better Microsoft Edge.

VISIT THE MICROSOFT EDGE INSIDER SITE 

AND DOWNLOAD NOW

Now is the best time to sign up to an Audible trial!

What is Audible? Audible is the publisher and distributor of the world’s largest selection of digital audiobooks and spoken word content. Audible customers can listen anytime and anywhere they like to professionally-narrated audiobooks across a wide range of genres, including best sellers, new releases, sci fi, romances, classics, and more.

From 10am 8 April, all new customers signing up to a free trial before 10am 29 April, 2019 will receive an additional audiobook in their first trial month!

www.amazon.co.uk

Have a D-Link router? Better read this then...

For the past three months, a cybercrime group has been hacking into home routers - mostly D-Link models - to change DNS server settings and hijack traffic meant for legitimate sites and redirect it to malicious clones.

The attackers operate by using well-known exploits in router firmware to hack into vulnerable devices and make silent changes to the router's DNS configuration, changes that most users won't ever notice.

Targeted routers include the following models (the number to the side of each model lists the number of internet-exposed routers, as seen by the BinaryEdge search engine):

D-Link DSL-2640B - 14,327

D-Link DSL-2740R - 379

D-Link DSL-2780B - 0

D-Link DSL-526B - 7

ARG-W4 ADSL routers - 0

DSLink 260E routers - 7

Secutech routers - 17

TOTOLINK routers - 2,265

What to do next? Contact Donline for advice & support.

www.zdnet.com

Linus Torvalds on Social Media: it's a disease

Question: If you had to fix one thing about the networked world, what would it be?

Linus Torvalds: Nothing technical. But, I absolutely detest modern "social media"—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It's a disease. It seems to encourage bad behavior.

I think part of it is something that email shares too, and that I've said before: "On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle". When you're not talking to somebody face to face, and you miss all the normal social cues, it's easy to miss humor and sarcasm, but it's also very easy to overlook the reaction of the recipient, so you get things like flame wars, etc., that might not happen as easily with face-to-face interaction.

But email still works. You still have to put in the effort to write it, and there's generally some actual content (technical or otherwise). The whole "liking" and "sharing" model is just garbage. There is no effort and no quality control. In fact, it's all geared to the reverse of quality control, with lowest common denominator targets, and click-bait, and things designed to generate an emotional response, often one of moral outrage.

Add in anonymity, and it's just disgusting. When you don't even put your real name on your garbage (or the garbage you share or like), it really doesn't help.

I'm actually one of those people who thinks that anonymity is overrated. Some people confuse privacy and anonymity and think they go hand in hand, and that protecting privacy means that you need to protect anonymity. I think that's wrong. Anonymity is important if you're a whistle-blower, but if you cannot prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn't be visible, and you shouldn't be able to share it or like it.

Oh well. Rant over. I'm not on any social media (I tried G+ for a while, because the people on it weren't the mindless usual stuff, but it obviously never went anywhere), but it still annoys me.

Spot on Linus - well said! 
At best: a huge waste of time. 
At worst: tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. 
Why don't you...

www.linuxjournal.com

NASA: India's satellite destruction could endanger ISS

NASA has called India's destruction of a satellite a "terrible thing" that could threaten the International Space Station (ISS). The space agency's chief, Jim Bridenstine, said that the risk of debris colliding with the ISS had risen by 44% over 10 days due to the test. However he said: "The international space station is still safe. If we need to manoeuvre it we will."

India is the fourth country to have carried out such a test. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the test - Mission Shakti - with great fanfare on 27 March, saying it had established India as a "space power".

In an address to employees, Mr Bridenstine sharply criticised the testing of such anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons. He said that Nasa had identified 400 pieces of orbital debris and was tracking 60 pieces larger than 10cm in diameter. Twenty-four of those pieces pose a potential risk to the ISS, he said.

www.bbc.co.uk

Visiting Europe after Brexit? Current advice from GOV.UK

There would be changes if you visit the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway or Switzerland and the UK leaves the EU without a deal.

It would mean that from 12 April 2019, the rules for passports, driving, EHIC cards, pet travel and more would change. Check if you need to act now to make sure you can travel as planned.

There would be no immediate changes to travel if the UK agrees a deal to leave the EU. The rules would be the same until at least 2020.

This page will be updated when things change. 

To get the latest information, sign up to get email alerts.

www.gov.uk

Google+ is being shut down today, and nothing of value was lost!

Google+, the search giant's failed social network, will finally be laid to rest on Tuesday morning.

Launched in 2011 and competing with Facebook and Twitter, it was Google's fourth attempt at a social network. But the platform failed to win people over, even after Google pushed it upon the thriving YouTube community.

By the end of 2011, analysts were already writing obituaries. But Google decided to close the site only after discovering a data breach, in 2018.

Click here to read about the troubled history of one of Google's less successful products.

www.bbc.co.uk

Apparently we live in a "Post-Truth" world!

Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics and post-reality politics) is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. 

Post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of facts by relegating facts and expert opinions to be of secondary importance relative to appeal to emotion. 

While this has been described as a contemporary problem, some observers have described it as a long-standing part of political life that was less notable before the advent of the Internet and related social changes.

This is really (Truly!) a thing?!? 

We wonder why this world can be such a mess at times...

Do you want to know the truth? Then read this.

www.wikipedia.org