Matt Saunders

Rugby

Road Test Editor at Autocar

Road Test Editor, Autocar. "God damn, this guy is the definition of the revenge of the nerds." Or indeed “like Schmee’s older, more boring brother.”

Articles

Another Lightweight Kubernetes Distro Choice as k0s Joins CNCF Sandbox

1 week ago | infoq.com | Matt Saunders

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has accepted k0s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution, into its Sandbox programme. Mirantis's zero-dependency Kubernetes platform has been gaining adoption in edge computing and resource-constrained environments, and it now joins fellow lightweight distribution k3s in the Sandbox.
Royalty-free gas for Woodside’s North West Shelf project

1 week ago | thenewdaily.com.au | Matt Saunders |Rod Campbell

A 50-year extension to the North West Shelf (NWS) project in Western Australia would see huge amounts of gas given away with no return for Australians. While the exact volume and value is hard to predict, a basic estimate is that up to $215 billion worth of gas could be given away, royalty-free. The NWS liquefied natural gas facility, specifically the Karratha Gas Plant, producers up to 18.6 mega tonnes of LNG each year.
Queensland LNG exports and tax

1 week ago | australiainstitute.org.au | Matt Saunders |Rod Campbell

Over the past 10 years $125 billion worth of liquified natural gas was exported from Gladstone in Queensland. None of the relevant entities have paid company tax in that time, with just one exception. Clearly, Australian policy settings on energy and tax are out of order. No new fossil fuel projects should be going ahead, and far more money should be being raised from the existing projects to help pay for the rising costs of climate-linked disasters.
Car makers are going back to cheeky ad campaigns

1 week ago | autocar.co.uk | Matt Saunders

The process of choosing a car, ploughing your money into it and then having to explain so many times why you’ve done it inevitably makes automotive culture a bit tribal – and, critically, adversarial. It’s puerile to laugh or sneer at someone who simply made a different choice and yet, just occasionally, we do it. We can’t help it, because it taps into something ancient in our subconscious that no effort at enlightenment can permanently suppress (that’s what scientists say, I promise).
Travel Giant Skyscanner Overhauls Observability, Cuts Engineering Costs by 90%

1 week ago | infoq.com | Matt Saunders

The COVID-19 pandemic gave the engineering teams at travel search giant Skyscanner an opportunity to introspectively examine their observability stack. Skyscanner has written about how it has overhauled its approach to technical observability with a system that improves reliability for engineers and travellers alike. According to a recent engineering blog post, the company began this transformation in 2020, when the travel industry lay dormant and faced unprecedented disruption.
The petrol Mini JCW is an outlier in dying breed - shame it doesn't come with a manual | Autocar

2 weeks ago | autocar.co.uk | Matt Saunders

Close Verdict Model tested: Rating: 8 A proper hot hatch, let down by ride and user interface Good Proper hot hatch handling Strong performance Charming interior design Bad Very stiff ride Convoluted user interface Pros That it exists at all Genuine powertrain and suspension upgrades over standard Cooper Classic Mini looks Cons Visually very similar to a Cooper with a Sport pack no manual gearbox Let’s start with a quick note on naming, because it’s easy to lose track of how the Mini range...
Grafana 12 Launches with Observability as Code and Dynamic Dashboard Features

2 weeks ago | infoq.com | Matt Saunders

Grafana Labs have launched Grafana 12, bringing significant updates to its visualisation and dashboarding platform. Several new key features are now generally available, including Git Sync, dynamic dashboards, and improvements to Drilldown which gives code-free point-and-click insights into data, and a Cloud Migration assistant. A central feature of Grafana 12 is a new collection of observability-as-code tools, designed to help teams automate observability workflows.
What is it like to drive a concept car?

2 weeks ago | autocar.co.uk | Matt Saunders

I began learning how all this works back in 2006, when a chance to drive a brand-new Mazda sports car came along. If you remember the Kabura, give yourself a goldfish. It was a cool-looking, 2+1-seater, MX-5-engined coupé with a fantastic asymmetrical layout, concocted by the company’s then design boss, American Franz von Holzhausen (who now runs the colouring-in department at Tesla). It was a fantastic idea: a kind of half-an-RX-8. I loved it.
10 fun and affordable sports cars that will rekindle your love of driving | Autocar

2 weeks ago | autocar.co.uk | Matt Saunders |Jack Warrick |Richard Lane |Matt Prior

With the ever-increasing number of SUVs on our roads, finding proper, dependable sources of driver entertainment isn't quite as easy as it once was. It's especially hard to find a sports car on a real-world budget, but our list of the best affordable sports cars will help you find a phenomenal drive without breaking the bank. They may not be as numerous as before and many don’t seem as affordable in these inflationary times, but they exist, and they’re cars that demand to be seized and cherished.
Porsche Taycan Turbo GT

3 weeks ago | msn.com | Matt Saunders

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