Ben Shephard

This weekend the clocks went forward so now it’s warmer and the days are longer. I also got paid the other day after a month trying to scrape by on the bare minimum. I barely had a few quid left. I’m spending about £50 a month on petrol most of which is commuting. It’s only 2-3 miles to work depending on the route. I decided it’s time I dusted off the bike and saved some cash and got fit and saved the planet into the bargain. My bike is it’s safe to say a bit shit. My dad found it at the dump where he used to work and brought it home. It’s a Claud Butler so a decent make but old and knackered. The seat is the worst part. The old one was stuck in the frame. My dad had tried to free it with little success so the hight is now fixed. it also has a tilt adjustment that is all worn out so if you shift your weight the seat suddenly flops back or forward and throws you off. The gears an brakes are reasonably OK. The wheels aren’t perfect but I’ve ridden worse. I patched it up as best I could then set to work making a few modifications. The first of which was a mud guard. Since I’m broke I didn’t want to go out and buy one so I found an old piece of UPVC window trim and cut it to size and cable tied it the the bottom of the rear reflector bracket.

It’s nothing fancy but it should keep me from getting mud flicked up my back.

The seat problem was solved by setting it in a comfortable position and strapping it to the frame with tie wraps both at the front and back so it can’t move.

I did have a bottle holder until it fell off one day and I lost most of the bits. I like to keep a drink of water with me when I’m out on the bike so I wanted to fix it some how. Luckily I had a length of bungee cord left over from Glastonbury a few years ago. I decided to snip a bit off and make two loops to go around my bottle. It works pretty well but I’d have to stop to put the bottle back in it as it takes 2 hands.

It just wouldn’t be my bike without a few geek toys strapped to the handle bars. I don’t have a cycle computer but I do have a Garmin Etrex GPS receiver which does similar things like tell you your speed but does loads more too and I can plug it into my laptop and download my track data and do all kinds of things with that data. I had to find a way to mount it and at first i went for tie wraps but this is a bit inconvenient as I want to ba able to take it off easily when I get to work. It takes 2x AA batteries and the ones in there now have a steel casing and I’ve got loads of old hard drives knocking about so I ripped the magnets out of them and strapped them to my handle bars with tie wraps to make a strong magnetic mount for my GPS

This turned out to be pretty stable so I decided to try a few more items. Both my phone and MP3 player would be nice to have on the handle bars but both have internal Lithium batteries and contained very little steel for the magnets to grip to. I got around this by gaffer taping a square of steel cut from the lid of an old altoids tin to the back of my MP3 player and another inside the battery cover of my G1. I decided to cover the magnets with gaffer tape so as to avoid scratching the back of my phone. This seemed to work a treat and both were held down so well i could bump my bike around and press the buttons pretty hard and they never budged once. I doubt I’d dare actually ride around with my G1 on the handle bars unless I needed it for a specific reason such as my co-pilot sat nav but then it would only be there for the minimum amount of time possible because I’d be scared of coming off the bike and breaking it.

I know some lights and a helmet would come in handy but most of my riding will be on quiet roads or off road and it’s harder to get my headphones on under a helmet. So in the morning, weather permitting I’ll be trying it out for real. The only down side is it’ll take longer to get to my mums at lunch time but if it saves me a few quid I can live with it.

Ben

= 5.5

It seems even after my split with janine the new experiences just don’t seem to stop coming this year. I posted last about things changing at work and it’s a strange experience for me so far. I’ve been waiting to get where I am now for a long time and I’d resigned myself to the idea it would never happen but suddenly everything changed. I’ve been at it for a week now and I’ve felt a bit like a fish out of water now the expectations have changed. It’s a bit like I’ve been leaning on the door for ages trying to get in and suddenly it opened and I fell into the room and landed on my face. I think I’ll settle in pretty soon but it’s all a bit new to me and the people I work closest with now although I’ve worked with them for a number of years I’ve not really worked so closely with them much before. They are a fantastic bunch of people and it’s nice to get to know them better and to learn from them.

Outside of work I’ve barely been away from a computer at all for the last month or so. I’ve been doing lots of jobs for friends and family and currently I’m working on a few web site changes for a friend of mine. I’m looking at developing this into an on-line store using something like Drupal or Joomla as I’m pretty sure they can do that but I’ve never used either before so I need to familiarise myself with them and with the basics of e-commerce using things like PayPal for payment processing. I’ve signed up for PayPal this week and I’ve been experimenting with adding a donate button to my blog tonight but that seemed to stop my page validating properly. I need to look at the code and the errors it causes and see if I can fix it or failing that how I can go about adding such buttons in other ways. WordPress has a bunch of plug-ins available that I need to look at.

Hopefully I’ll learn a lot over the next month or so but hopefully not the hard way. Today I have been working on some uninterrupted power supplies that keep the companies servers going during a power cut. After I left work it seemed one of the ones I’d worked on had failed for some reason taking down some pretty critical services. It had been showing a warning light so I’d had the batteries out to spec for replacements when I found there was a fault with a certain batch of that model of UPS which caused the fault I was seeing. There is a firmware patch available to fix it so I put the batteries back so that can be investigated later but after I left it seemed to have died and killed the power to a whole rack of servers. I got a phone call so I went back even though I didn’t have to. I was interested to see what had happened and how I could fix it and how it could be prevented in the future.

It’s all good stuff even if I get a roasting tomorrow for messing with it at least I’ve learned something. Perhaps I can be a bit too bold and pull the plug out knowing things should keep running but that’s not always the way it works and I notice some of the other chaps I work with are a little more hesitant when it comes to messing with mission critical kit. If it ain’t broke don’t try and fix it but if things go pear shaped during routine maintenance and we can fix it and learn from the experience I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

The next few weeks may be a bit of a bumpy ride for me but I’ve got a week off coming up so I’ll get chance to chill out a bit.

Ben

= 6.4

It’s been a very interesting week as far as work is concerned. Yesterday there was a team meeting with our line and department manager in the board room. It was all pretty formal with a powerpoint slide show and there was lots of interesting discussion. One of the changes that came out of it is that I am to be taken off the help desk starting next week. I’m really happy about this because It’s what I’ve been wanting to do for ages. It’s not officially a promotion and my job title and salary remain the same it’s just a slight change to my duties in that I’ll be spending more time working on more advanced jobs and working with the 3rd line technicians. It also means a change of scenery as I’ll be moving to work closer to the 3rd line technicians. I figured a laptop would be very handy but I know the company wont supply me with a decent one so I’ve offered to use my Lenovo which has been lay dormant for ages now. My managers were all OK with that so in preparation for Monday I’ve spent today installing a fresh copy of Fedora 12 on it. I’ve always been an Ubuntu / Debian fan but lately I’ve been finding more and more to like about Fedora recently. I’ve been setting my Lenovo up all day and I’ve been extremely impressed by it so much so I’ve decided to give it a go on my netbook. If some of the bugs that are present in Ubuntu are fixed in Fedora I think I’ll make the switch and go fedora all the way. Anyway i’ve just downloaded the live ISO and stuck it on my USB stick with unetbootin so I’m off to reboot and see what happens

Ben

– 7.5

Since I’ve switched my energy supplier to First Utility the other week I’ve been wondering where and how I can cut back my energy usage. One of the things I’ve always wondered about is how much energy I use hosting my own website. I have a spare room that I have as a study and I keep my computers in there quietly humming away 24/7. A few years ago I bought a plug in energy meter from Maplin. It was in the sale and I thought it might open my eyes as to how much power I use and where.

I’ve Left it plugged in the the computer room for ages but I tend to forget it’s there and not look at it before I pull the plug out to move something or there’s a power cut and all my recorded data is lost.

I decided today to see what it had recorded since I last moved the room around about a month ago. It told me it had been running for 836 hours and in that time my kit had used 113 kWh of electricity. This works out at an annual average of 1184 kWh. My total electricity consumption for 2009 was 3627 kWh so hosting my own web site accounts for just under a third of my total electricity consumption. That does seem like rather a lot but what I want to know is would it be worth turning it off and investing in other ways of hosting my stuff such as a VPS. I worked out the cost based on First Utility’s prices which they emailed to me earlier in the week which at the moment is 8.064 pence per kWh so the cost of running my kit for the year works out at £95.48. This pails in to insignificance compared to the cost of my internet connection which is £22.43 a month plus £11 line rental for a PSTN phone line I don’t want. I wish they would just provide the broadband over the line on it’s own but it seems that isn’t possible. This means I spend £401.16 a year on my broadband connection so in total I spend £496.64 a year so now I need to work out what’s cheaper. I worked out my CO2 foot print using the on-line calculator on the National Energy Foundation’s website (click here) which tells me that my kit produces 640 Kg of CO2 every year. Using this I was also able to work out my CO2 footprint for the whole of 2009 which was about 9.25 tonnes over the whole year. This doesn’t include any CO2 produced at work and is just my own personal domestic output. This consists of Electricty 1950 Kg, Gas 3340 Kg and Petrol 1612 Kg but one of the biggest and easiest to solve was the  CO2 produced by my trip to the USA last year which came in at 2393 Kg. I had a miserable time there and it cost me and the environment a small fortune so to save my sanity and the planet I’ll not be going back there again unless I find a really good reason to do so.

So of all the things I can do to help save the planet the best one is to not go on long distance holidays but what else can I do?

If I did move my server to a VPS or some other hosted solution the carbon footprint wouldn’t go away it would just be shifted elsewhere and hidden from me. It may be reduced considerably depending on which option I went for but the trade off is that it would be less exciting for me as a hobby because I like looking after the hardware as well as the software that runs on it as I learn a hell of a lot from it also I don’t think the costs would be significantly less for it to be worthwhile from the adverts I’ve seen. I may be able to make things better by using a less powerful or more economical machine to host things on. Perhaps moving things on to my old laptop would help me save a fairly significant amount.

So my hobby accounts for a third of my electricity usage but what’s the other two thirds made up of I’m wondering. One I can have a pretty good guess at. My shower is a 9 Kw electric shower so for every 20 mins in the shower I’ve used another 3 kWh of electric so that must account for about another 3rd. It’s hard to work out if it’s cheaper to have a bath because gas is harder to measure in the same was I can electric. I suppose solar water heating might help cut down on my water heating costs but the outlay to have something like that installed would be prohibitively expensive. I suppose an interest free loan from the government might help uptake of technology like this but I still don’t think it would give me a nice hot shower first thing tomorrow morning when I get up for work. I’ve cleaned the windows today and I just realised I left the step ladder out with the sponge on the top rung and it had froze to the ladders. Solar is all good if you get lots of sunlight which of course anywhere in the world at night you don’t get any at all so without some really well insulated tanks you wouldn’t be having a hot shower before work. In the day if you get lots of sun then solar is all good but I live in the UK and the only sun that comes out every day without fail in this country is a tabloid newspaper. I suppose the other third would be just general stuff like the kitchen appliances and lighting. Lighting is an area where there is always room for improvement. I use low energy fluorescent lamps all through the house but I think this can be reduced further by using more LED lighting. I bought a set of 120 LED fairy lights for Christmas but I decided to keep them up all year round in my bedroom. They are a nice low level light and only use 3 watts of power. I’d like to get some more LED’s so that I could better light some of the gloomier parts of my house with a minimal impact on my electric bill and perhaps replace some of the fluorescent lamps with LED alternatives if I can.

Other areas I could cut down on are heating by installing more insulation. I don’t know if my walls can be insulated as this house is pretty old but it would be nice if someone who knew about those things told me what was possible with this house. I’ve insulated the loft but perhaps more could be done up there. I’ve got new modern energy efficient windows already so I’m struggling to find other things I can do to the house to keep the heat in.

I could drive a more economical car but the one I have isn’t exactly a gas guzzler and it suits my needs pretty well. I’m quiet a big chap and tend to carry tools and my netbook with me everywhere so a smart car might not be so good for me.

One of the biggest energy using items in my house is the washing machine. I know it’s no turned on all the time but changing habits in how I clean my clothes may make a difference. I just bought a new washer dryer but I try not to use the dryer if I can avoid it. I’ve just measured the energy used by washing my bedding and a few towels. The wash cycle used 0.85 kWh and drying the bedding on it’s own for an hour used 0.93 kWh so drying my laundry on the washing line on a nice day or on the clothes horse in the house could make a tiny dent in my energy consumption but I put the dryer on so I can get it straight back on the bed before I go to sleep tonight.

I think looking at my life style the biggest savings could be made with better switching of my heating. It’s on a timer and thermostat with a manual switch at the top of the stairs. This is all good if your home and want to turn things on or off but the timer puts it on at 5:30pm every day regardless but sometimes I don’t finish work untill late or I go to my parents for dinner so the heating being on then when I’m not home is just wasted because I’m not home to feel the benefit. I really want to come up with a way of remotely controling this stuff from my smart phone that way I can turn the heating on just before I head home so the house is warming up as I drive back and things are only on for the bare minimum.

Anyway for now I’ll be off to bed to dream up how I’m going to achieve this and hopefully some kind of micro generation project too

later

Ben

= 5.5