Ten years after Don sold her, at 0200 on July 26, 2019 - Don's 89th birthday, Iolaire was underway in heavy weather. She was sailing dead downwind in the Spanish Balearic islands along the northeast coast of Ibiza. Reports state that an inadvertent jibe caused her to head inshore, pile up on the rocks, and sink ending her 114 year old career. In this video podcast from Don's two volume how-to set: Streetwise Tips, Don demonstrates three different ways to rig a preventer that will stop an accidental jibe of the boom when running well off or straight down wind. CLICK TO PLAY. DON STREET VIDEOS Over the years Don has been involved in the production of five major sailing videos in which he passes on his decades of seamanship knowledge. Iolaire is featured in two of these: "Antigua Race Week 1985" and "Transatlantic with Street". Three others contain dozens of how-to sailing tips: "Streetwise 1 & 2, and Sailors' Knots & Line Handling. You can stream Don's videos, and purchase Downloads and DVDs with a SailFlix subscription. You can buy or rent individual Don Street videos through Vimeo On Demand. MAIN BOOM FOREGUY/PREVENTER Over a half century ago, when Don purchased Iolaire in St Thomas, he realized that the large, heavy main boom (leftover from her gaff rigged days) could be a real widow maker in an inadvertent jibe. Don insisted that whenever sailing broad off, the crew rig a main boom foreguy/preventer. This was often a difficult and dangerous job. After testing various methods, Don developed a foreguy/preventer that the crew could easily rig with no one going FORWARD of the mast. WATCH THE VIDEO then read Don's detailed instructions. ALWAYS rigged when sailing broad off or dead down wind, Don's foreguy/preventer kept crew and Iolaire safe throughout Don's ownership. IOLAIRE HISTORY "Iolaire" is a Gaelic term that translates in English as “white-tailed sea eagle”. She was designed, built and launched by Harris Bros, UK in 1905. Iolaire was the only 100 year old plus yacht that had been in continuous commission since she was launched; cruising and racing during both wars, as she was Irish owned and based. In her early years, Iolair was raced and cruised by several prominent skippers of the R.O.R.C (the UK's Royal Ocean Racing Club). For full specifications and history of Iolaire, visit the Classicsailboats.org Iolaire registry page.. IOLAIRE AND DON STREET Beginning in 1957, Don Street owned and sailed the 46 foot yawl for 52 years cruising, chartering, racing, and exploring the eastern Caribbean with family, friends and his Grenadian crew. Don skippered Iolaire across the Atlantic seven times between the United Kingdom and the Caribbean, and eight times up and down the Thames River - all without an engine. The knowledge he gain from these voyages resulted in hundreds of articles, three books, and his all inclusive Guides to the Eastern Caribbean and the Atlantic's Cape Verdes islands. Don also created the highly popular Imray Iolaire Charts to the Eastern Caribbean, which opened these waters to regular cruising sailors for the first time. Learn more about Don Street and Iolaire. Brought to you by TheSailingChannel.TV

On Friday Paramount dropped the trailer for the second most anticipated EON Production of 2020, The Rhythm Section! The Rhythm Section has been delayed several times (first when star Blake Lively suffered an on-set injury), but here's proof that it's finally really coming... and it looks great! While an adaptation of Mark Burnell's 1999 spy novel would be something for spy fans to be seriously excited about anyway, it's even more exciting because it hails from Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson's EON Productions, the producers behind the James Bond movies. While EON has been venturing outside the realm of 007 lately, this marks their first new foray into the genre that defined them—and that they defined, under the auspices of first-generation Bond producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. And it's not only a new EON spy movie; it's potentially the start of a new, female-fronted EON spy series! (Burnell wrote four Stephanie Patrick thrillers.) Will Lively end up being the Sean Connery of a long lasting Stephanie Patrick film series?

The books are quite good, and remind me of a female Callan. Like Callan, Stephanie ends up working as an assassin for a particularly unpleasant boss in an ultra-secret branch of British Intelligence. And like Callan, she doesn't do this work by choice. Instead she's forced into it by that unpleasant boss. But she's also got very personal motivations (motivations he ruthlessly manipulates) for her initial mission: an opportunity to get revenge on the terrorists responsible for the death of her parents and siblings. Burnell's book is very dark and very serious, and judging from this trailer the movie will be true to that tone. In fact, the movie (directed by Reed Morano and scripted by Burnell himself) looks quite faithful to the book overall, though it's obvious that the ending has been changed, which was pretty much a given. (The villains' plot in the '99 book had eerie similarities to 9/11, which simply wouldn't play in today's world.) And it looks great!

The first of two major EON spy movies coming out next year, The Rhythm Section opens on January 31, 2020. It stars Blake Lively (The Age of Adaline), Jude Law (Spy), Raza Jaffrey (Spooks/MI-5), and Sterling K. Brown (Black Panther).

I've never quite understood the concept of "James Bond Day" (or "Global James Bond Day?"). But maybe that's because since I was 11, I don't think there's been any day I haven't thought about James Bond! Maybe there are people out there who need reminding? Anyway, to mark this year's James Bond Day, MGM and EON have released the first poster for Daniel Craig's final outing as Bond, No Time To Die. No Time To Die, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga and starring Craig, Rami Malek, Léa Seydoux, Lashana Lynch, Ana de Armas, Jeffrey Wright, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Ben Whishaw, Billy Magnussen, David Dencik, and Rory Kinnear, opens in the U.S. on April 8, 2020.

In a great profile in Saturday's New York Times promoting his new novel Agent Running in the Field, author John le Carré  reveals that his sons' production company, The Ink Factory, are plotting an epic new TV series about his most famous character, spymaster George Smiley. "According to le Carré," asserts the article's author, Tobias Grey, "The Ink Factory now plans to do new television adaptations of all the novels featuring Cold War spy George Smiley - this time in chronological order. 'That means that if you actually go back to the first big conspiracies in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, you've got to consider how Smiley ages and how young he was at that time,' le Carré says. That would mean finding an actor who can play younger than the Smiley incarnated by Gary Oldman in the film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Le Carré says that his sons are interested in casting the British actor Jared Harris, whose performance they all admired in the recent TV mini-series Chernobyl." Harris (The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Allied), interestingly, was originally cast in Tomas Alfredson's 2011 le Carré  adaptation Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as Circus (MI6) chief Percy Alleline, but had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts with Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, in which he played Professor Moriarty. Toby Jones took on the Alleline role, and embodied the character perfectly. Besides Oldman, Smiley has been played in the past by Denholm Elliott, James Mason, Rupert Davies, and, most memorably, Alec Guinness in two famous BBC miniseries.

A new miniseries version of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold was first announced back in 2016 as a follow-up to the hugely successful le Carré miniseries The Night Manager. Le Carré worked with the producers and writer to crack their take on the material, and that work led him to write a whole new sequel to the book, A Legacy of Spies, but did not yield a series. Instead, The Little Drummer Girl (2018) proved to be the next le Carré miniseries, but work continued on The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Now, apparently, that project has grown in scope and morphed into this one. I've long craved a long-form TV series about le Carré's Circus, devoting a season to each book and dropping in the short stories from The Secret Pilgrim at the appropriate historical moments and, most crucially, finally giving us a television version of the (to date unfilmed) middle book in the Karla trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy. This sounds like it could turn out to be exactly that! (Though hopefully they'll begin at the real beginning with Call For the Dead, and not The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.) It's a most tantalizing prospect!

Read my George Smiley Primer here.

Black Widow will be the first of Marvel's superspies to get her own movie (preceding Shang Chi by a year), and today Marvel released the first trailer. And it looks pretty cool! I'm honestly surprised about how many images come directly from the various Black Widow comics over the years. Clearly, the character's first standalone film will contain some flashbacks to Natasha Romanoff's early days as a child raised to be a KGB assassin in Moscow's infamous Red Room. Scarlett Johansson has played the role in seven Marvel movies (most recently the all-time box office champ Avengers: Endgame), but this will be her first solo feature.


If you want to play catch-up on the comics and see where some of those images in the trailer come from, there are some collections out there that make that possible. (And even more are due next year in the lead up to the movie!) Three beautifully prodcued Marvel Premiere hardcovers collect this secret agent's most essential adventures in matching volumes. Black Widow: The Sting of the Widow presents the character's first appearance (in a silly costume in an issue of Iron Man) and earliest solo adventures from the early Seventies, after she'd gotten an Emma Peel makeover, ending up in the black catsuit with which she's still most closely associated. These early Black Widow comics will surely be of interest to collectors and hardcore fans, but casual fans looking for a great introduction to the character are better off picking up the second volume in the series, Black Widow: Web of Intrigue first.

Black Widow: Web of Intrigue offers an excellent primer on the character containing some of her classic appearances from the early Eighties, including an excellent comic drawn by my second-favorite spy artist (after Steranko), Paul Gulacy.  (Look for a cameo appearance by Michael Caine!) Black Widow: Web of Intrigue contains this and several other seminal tales of the red-haired Russian superspy. A third volume, Black Widow: The Itsy Bitsy Spider collects a pair of Marvel Knights stories from the late Nineties (including one by Queen & Country scribe Greg Rucka).

My two favorite modern-day Widow storylines have yet to receive the hardcover treatment, sadly, but are available in a pair of out-of-print trade paperbacks. (They'll also, happily, be collected in a new single volume next year!) Richard K. Morgan's Black Widow: Homecoming and Black Widow: The Things They Say About Her put the focus on espionage above superheroics and are among the very best Marvel spy stories of this century. Other recent Widow stories include Black Widow: Deadly Origin, Black Widow and the Marvel Girls, Black Widow: The Name of the Rose and Black Widow: Kiss or Kill. Most of the character's adventures with Daredevil from the 1970s are included in Essential Daredevil: Volume 3. as well as the color Daredevil Epic Collection: A Woman Called Widow.

Wow! We're so close to the release of a new Bond movie now that a new James Bond theme song has been released into the world! Listen for yourself to Billie Eilsish's title track to the twenty-fifth EON 007 movie, No Time to Die. Eilish recently won all the Grammies, pretty much, and performed at the Oscars. It seems pre-ordained that this track will shoot to the top of the charts. Eilish reportedly wrote the song with her brother, Finneas. Hans Zimmer composed the film's score.

Theodore J. Flicker's 1967 James Coburn satire The President's Analyst is one of my very favorite spy movies. (It's also Coburn's best spy movie... Sorry, Derek Flint.) When describing it to people, I always say that the comedy holds up surprisingly well today... sadly. America is still facing many of the same social  issues Flicker sent up over fifty years ago (from institutional racism to monolithic Big Tech), and it's easy to imagine a remake. Now, Paramount is imagining one... with The Daily Show host Trevor Noah on board to produce and potentially star. According to The Hollywood Reporter, former Obama White House staffer Pat Cunnane will write the script. The premise, about a psychotherapist burdened with all of the President's top secret stresses, will obviously be familiar ground for him! According to his publisher, Cunnane served as "President Barack Obama’s senior writer and deputy director of messaging at the White House, where he worked for six years in many roles."

A few weeks ago, Paramount announced a remake of The President's Analyst was in the works. Now comes even better news.... The 1967 original, starring James Coburn, Godfrey Cambridge, and Severn Darden, is at long last coming to Blu-ray! Australian label Via Vision will release the title via its Imprint imprint (yes, you read that right: two "via's" and two "imprint's") on May 26. It' can be imported from the Via Vision site, and is available to pre-order from American outlets like Amazon (from which this site receives a kickback) and DeepDiscount. Imprint Blu-rays are region-free. The 1080p HD presentation of the film with LPCM 2.0 mono audio comes with brand new special features including an audio commentary by the great Tim Lucas (who recently provided the company with an updated audio commentary for their release of Danger: Diabolik to supplement his classic original DVD commentary with John Philip Law) and an appreciation of the film from Kim Newman, as well as the original theatrical trailer and optional English subtitles. The first 1500 copies will come in a limited edition slipcase. The President's Analyst is one of the all-time great spy comedies, and remains as timely as ever. If you love it as much as I do, you'll already have pre-ordered. If you've never seen it... now's your chance!

No sooner has Anthony Horowitz completed his trilogy of excellent, period-set James Bond novels than the next iteration of Ian Fleming Publications' literary continuations appears on the horizon via HarperCollins: Double or Nothing, by Kim Sherwood. And this one forsakes 007 (for the moment, anyway) to put the crosshairs on 003, 004, and 009... and the whole Double O Section! It should be unsurprising, given the name of this site, that I find that prospect tantalizing. Since I was a kid, I've been very curious to read about the adventures of the other 00 agents! 

Usually when we meet them in the movies, they're already dead or just about to die. The only other active agents we've ever really gotten to know well were Suzie Kew and Briony Thorne in Jim Lawrence's Daily Express James Bond comic strip, Nomi in No Time to Die... and I suppose we ought to also count Scarlett Papava in Sebastian Faulks's thoroughly disappointing Devil May Care. (Read my review here.)

Now, I know. You might ask, "What's the point of a James Bond continuation novel without 007?" To which I would point out that this has actually worked very successfully in the past! Some of my very favorite Bond continuation novels ever are Kate Westbrook's (aka Samantha Weinberg's) Moneypenny Diaries trilogy. (Read my review of the second one, Secret Servant, here, and read my in-depth interview with Weinberg about writing the series here.) Weinberg put the spotlight on Moneypenny, and created thrilling and original narratives in the familiar setting of Fleming's Secret Service. 

Kim Sherwood has already demonstrated her bona fides in her Twitter feed and on her website, and it sounds like she knows her spy stuff. (Not only is she well versed in Fleming, but she's also a Modesty Blaise fan!) I can't wait to see what she does with Fleming's supporting characters and the new 00 agents she creates in her Double O Section trilogy! The first book, Double or Nothing, is due out September 1 in Britain. A signed edition with stenciled page edges is also available exclusively from Waterstones (pictured below). No U.S. publication date has been announced so far, but Sherwood recently hinted on Twitter that such an announcement might be imminent. 

Top Gun: Maverick star Glen Powell addresses whether or not he'll replace Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in the iconic action franchise Mission: Impossible.

90 Day Fianc star Angela Deem is dealing with heartbreak on a grand scale. It's easy to feel sorry for the feisty woman who misses Michael.

Game of Thrones showrunners initially wanted to end the show with a movie trilogy, but even this wouldnt have saved its controversial ending.

Deadpool is notorious for his meta-commentary and cutting remarks, many of which are on full display in the MCUs Deadpool & Wolverine.

Todays Wordle answer will be difficult to solve unless players use hints to guide them in the right direction and help them preserve their streak.

If you feel exhausted trying to solve today's Connections puzzle, we have something better than coffee to help you finish it up in the form of clues.

Peg O'Keef, the acclaimed actor and Orlando theater mainstay for decades, is directing a modern adaptation of "Pride & Prejudice" at Rollins.

YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober is betting on his robot being able to beat anyone, every time, in Rock-Paper-Scissors. He is so confident about his robot, affectionately named Rocky, beating any competitor he has offered $10,000 to anyone who can win against the googly-eyed robot. Don't worry, it should not be able to break a

In an interesting turn of events, iPhone users may soon be able to use Google's Gemini assistant on their phones, and also initiate it directly from the lock screen, which would give Siri some proper competition. If a leak by a user in Philippines is any indicator, the Gemini Live app could soon appear in an Apple App Store near you. Or it

Nearly two months after launching its iPhone 16 lineup, which struggled for sales at launch and is still facing a measured rollout of Apple Intelligence, Apple has now added these devices to its self-repair program. It’s a continuation of the company’s efforts that began in 2022, which provides the tools and parts necessary for customers to

It's been a while since Uranus was probed up close, but old data is proving to be quite valuable in solving a few decades old oddities. The last spacecraft that flew by Uranus was NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1986. NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 are the only spacecraft ever to operate outside the heliosphere, or the protective bubble of particles and magnetic

When NVIDIA debuted its GeForce Experience app over a decade ago, the online login requirement made many PC hardware grognards (like this author) leery of the software despite its many useful functions. The green team made many updates to the GeForce Experience application over the years, but it has ever remained optional, to NVIDIA's credit. If

A one-off version of Lamborghini's flagship V12-powered Revuelto has been unveiled. Called the "Opera Unica" (meaning "unique piece of design"), the car has a unique paint job inspired by the brightest star in the Taurus Constellation with an interior to match. The car was shown off at the Esperienza Arte in Shanghai, China, to showcase the

When you think of bulk storage, you probably still think about hard drives, and that's fair enough; spinning rust still offers superior value in terms of price per gigabyte. When storage density is more important than value, though, solid-state drives win again. That's because there are SSDs like Micron's new ION 6550, which can store up to

Appendix I - Software "EMF-estimator" v8.0.32 and v8.64

Electrical safety and lightning protection of medium voltage input and up to ±400 VDC output power system in ICT data centres and telecommunication centres

Electromagnetic compatibility requirements for DC power ports of telecommunication network equipment in frequencies below 150 kHz

EMC requirements for telecommunication network equipment in the frequency range 1 GHz-40 GHz

Resistibility of telecommunication equipment installed in the access and trunk networks to overvoltages and overcurrents

Conformance of ITU-T H.810 personal health system: Services interface Part 12: Questionnaires: Health & Fitness Service receiver

Conformance of ITU-T H.810 personal health system: Services interface Part 1: Web services interoperability: Health & Fitness Service sender

Conformance of ITU-T H.810 personal health system: Services interface Part 3: SOAP/ATNA: Health & Fitness Service sender

Conformance of ITU-T H.810 personal health system: Services interface Part 7: Consent Management: Health & Fitness Service sender

Conformance of ITU-T H.810 personal health system: Services interface Part 4: SOAP/ATNA: Health & Fitness Service receiver

Conformance of ITU-T H.810 personal health system: Services interface Part 9: hData Observation Upload: Health & Fitness Service sender

Conformance of ITU-T H.810 personal health system: Services interface Part 8: Consent Management: Health & Fitness Service receiver

Conformance of ITU-T H.810 personal health system: Services interface Part 16: FHIR Observation Upload: Health & Fitness Service receiver

Conformance of ITU-T H.810 personal health system: Services interface Part 15: FHIR Observation Upload: Health & Fitness Service sender

Resolution 20 - (Rev. Geneva, 2022) - Procedures for allocation and management of international telecommunication numbering, naming, addressing and identification resources

Resolution 75 - (Rev. Geneva, 2022) - The ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector's contribution in implementing the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society, taking into account the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

Opinion 1 - Practical application of network externality premium

Designations for interconnections among operators' networks

Output - Q.ProGeoSMS "Protocol for Open GeoSMS"
Source: Rapporteur Q2/11
Study Questions: Q2/11

Implementers' guide for P.863

HSTP-NFWT - Requirements for Network Address Translator and Firewall Traversal of H.323 Multimedia Systems

FSTP-RTM - Roadmap for Telemedicine

Objective Perceptual Assessment of Video Quality: Full Reference Television

Guide on the use of ITU-T L-series Recommendations

HSTP-MMSM - Technical Paper on Service Mobility for new Multimedia Service Architecture

Applications of ITU-T G.9960, ITU-T G.9961 transceivers for Smart Grid applications: Advanced metering infrastructure, energy management in the home and electric vehicles
[Superseded]

HSTP-IPTV-PITD - Delivery and control protocols handled by IPTV terminal devices