- Looks quite cool for getting around town.
links for 2009-04-13
- Powering your CC128 by battery. I wonder how long it lasts, though.
- Great looking graphing app from Omni – handy for all those 'management graphs' needed in presentations.
Posted in Uncategorized Comments Off
links for 2009-04-12
- Clever – combining public data from various social networking sites to establish the identity of supposedly anonymous individuals.
Posted in Uncategorized Comments Off
links for 2009-04-10
- Great spoof site by the ORG folks, highlighting quite how much data the UK government is mining.
- Pretty cool visualisations of OECD data
- "Sid and Ajay will present a technical overview of OpenSSO (Resource Center) and then will explain how it is being used in a real-world deployment. The presentation will end with a roadmap for the features in future releases of OpenSSO."
- 'This gateway is valuable because it is a hub for connecting users and other identities to the services that it works with, so that an organization has to manage only a single identity-federation relationship to enable its identities to access any and all Microsoft and Microsoft-based services that they want to use.'
- "pv – Pipe Viewer – is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline. It can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion."
- I've seen something like this used once and it seemed pretty effective. Worth remembering for future use.
- Sounds awful.
Posted in Uncategorized Comments Off
Flights for lights
Tesco has for some time allowed people to convert Clubcard points into Airmiles, so on one hand, this story seems a bit of a non-event… Except for the fact Tesco are actively suggesting people convert the bonus miles earned when buying CFL bulbs into Airmiles.
That’s right – suggesting you get in a jet and burn a load of fuel as a reward for ‘greening’ your domestic lighting.
I’m all for encouraging people to reduce their consumption, but this needs to be by educating people on the reasons why, not by offering discounts on massive energy consumption as a reward for minor reductions.
links for 2009-04-08
Posted in Uncategorized Comments Off
links for 2009-04-07
- A great article on what you should be scared of. Hint: Being scared of terrorists makes you an idiot.
Posted in Uncategorized Comments Off
links for 2009-04-05
- 'A survey by Stonewall, the gay rights charity, published last year found that one in five gay people had been the victim of a hate crime in the last three years.'
- Decent article on Microsoft / Yahoo / Google. And Big Hairy Audacious Goals
Posted in Uncategorized Comments Off
Global Successes & British failures?
Whilst the news has been focused on the financial aspects of the G20 summit of late, there’s also been a good scattering of news on international environmental issues. There seems now to be a general acceptance that we’re rapidly approaching, if not sailing past a ‘tipping point’ that sends us towards catastrophic climate change.
Even for those who don’t believe in the cause, there are undeniably good reasons to strive for energy efficiencies, and to remove the Western dependence on Middle-East oil. On a local scale, for individual homes and businesses, there’s a clear economic gain with a very short payback period by installing insulation and low-energy lighting, or simply by planning more efficiently.
At an international level, it’s surprising to see even fairly entrenched ‘traditional fuel’ organisations announcing that they are aiming for carbon-neutrality by 2050. Given this agreement includes companies like E.On and EDF, who are heavily into coal and nuclear respectively, it’s going to be quite a stretch. If they can collectively move forward on smart grid technologies and power distribution, though, the cost savings of stable, European power prices will be much more attractive than the volatile fossil fuels markets – especially if one factors in the cost of wars for oil. I was surprised by quotation from the president of the European Wind Energy Association on the relative prices of fuel -
At current fuel prices, electricity production costs from a new wind farm, coal plant and gas station are more or less the same.
I was under the impression renewables were still a fair bit more expensive. Of course, the statement needs to be taken with a pinch of salt given the source.
Elsewhere in the world, Barack Obama has promised to sign a climate bill into US law, a significant departure from the previous administration. The bill is likely to include a US cap-and-trade system for CO2 emissions, compatible with the system already in operation in Europe. It also seems that a significant amount of Obama’s economic stimulus money is being given to green power, which is great news. Interestingly even companies such as IBM are bidding for funds, in order to invest in smart metering & distribution. We’ll just have to hope that the bill doesn’t get too watered down, and that US carbon trading is more effective than the European scheme has been so far.
Closer to home, things are a little less optimistic. It seems there’s now a chance that the third runway at Heathrow won’t get built, but this relies on the fact that BAA won’t lodge a planning application until 2012, after the next general election, and that the Conservatives are significantly ahead in the polls. They have said they will prevent the project going ahead, as compared to the encouragement from Labour. Whilst I support many of the environmental moves the Tories are making – high speed rail instead of the runway being one – there are enough skeletons in their (not so hidden) closet that I couldn’t bring myself to vote for them.
Talking of Conservative idiocy, in a supposed cost cutting measure, Boris Johnson has cut the environmental staff of the GLA from 40 to 20, reducing the climate change & energy team from 10 to 3. This seems to fly in the face of his stated goal to make London the greenest city in the world. In isolation this would be frustrating – but perhaps necessary to save money – but alongside his abandoning of the Western congestion charge and paying mere lip service to other environmental schemes, it seems we’ll have to look elsewhere for leadership on the environment.
Zombie power
In a thrilling final installment in my current (no pun intended) obsession with power consumption at home, I took some time to go around the house switching things off and on to get an idea of where power is still being used despite things being notionally ‘off’.
In a pretty unscientific experiment, I turned off everything in the house except the Current Cost meter, then went around switching things on and noting roughly how much power they use. Curiously, with nothing on except the meter, it was still showing around 60W of consumption. I’m not sure where this is coming from, but it’s constant.
Here’s the list of devices around the house that I measured:
Fridge 50W (when running) Sky 30-50W NAS 65W (on 1600-midnight weekdays, 24hrs weekend) Mac mini 20W Airport 4W Router 5W Xbox 360 10W Wii 5W (in 'red' standby, 10W in 'amber') TV 5W Xbox 5W Amp 5W Subwoofer 5W Phone 5W (two cordless chargers) Laptops 2W (two chargers) Mobiles 1W (two chargers) Boiler 2W Microwave 3W Appliances 2W (oven / dishwasher / washing machine) Pong clock 3W
So this highlights mostly that we have too many gadgets. I reckon we could save about 40W by completely switching off some of the stuff in the living room when it’s in ‘standby’. Assuming usage of 4 hours per day and the rest of the time on standby, at roughly 20p per kWh, we’d save nearly £60 a year by switching them off – definitely worth investing in a ‘standby saver’ adapter, I think… Or just getting rid of the gadgets!
Posted in Uncategorized Comments Off