Crouching Badger

Kitchens of Distinction

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:16:22 +0000

We’ve finally exchanged contracts on the house and we’re having to make grown-up decisions like “what kind of kitchen extension do we want?”

I got Google Sketchup out and watched a shedload of tutorials. I still didn’t really understand it until I’d built our new house several times, each time somehow misaligning the walls by 1 pixel or filling in the entire sky when I just wanted a wall.

Eventually I got the hang of it, and these are the results, which I’m quite pleased with. I actually enjoy sketching them on the back of envelopes, a skill I inherited from my grandpa, but I have to say that changing the viewpoint on a piece of paper takes somewhat longer than on a computer model.

So when are you coming for dinner?

Some photos of our wonderful Mia. There’s a massive gap...

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:53:57 +0000

Some photos of our wonderful Mia. There’s a massive gap where she once was.

And now a witty monologue from Jonathan Ross…

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:53:13 +0000

And now a witty monologue from Jonathan Ross…

Sitting on the Sandbanks to Purbeck ferry, remembering all these...

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:33:09 +0000

Sitting on the Sandbanks to Purbeck ferry, remembering all these things from my childhood.

Bracknell

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:04:00 +0100

Bracknell Forest of toy houses,
sticky notes, sticky traffic,
hub & spoke, stop, start.
Heart of concrete, high-tech solutions for everything but pleasure,
and a gap where the weather used to come from.

Forced to bear children.

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 14:04:34 +0100

Forced to bear children.

Playmobil Security Checkpoint

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:46:19 +0100

Playmobil Security Checkpoint:

Halt! Ihre Papiere bitte.

I suggest reading the reviews also.

Cassetteboy vs The Bladdy Apprentice

Thu, 28 May 2009 18:36:01 +0100

Cassetteboy vs The Bladdy Apprentice

The Kessel Run, West Virginia

Tue, 05 May 2009 00:22:59 +0100

The Kessel Run, West Virginia:

I had no idea the Kessel Run was in West Virginia. Looks about 6 parsecs to me.

The People’s Princesses - Together Forever

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:44:45 +0100

The People’s Princesses - Together Forever

WWF Earth Hour, Sat 28th Mar 2009, 8:30pm

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:38:30 +0000

On Saturday 28th March 2009, at 8:30pm you can make a statement about the urgent need to do something about climate change.

For one hour turn off the lights. See how much of the planet we can plunge into terrifying darkness. If you’re not sure what to do with this hour of darkness, here are some suggestions:

Light some candles
Have a seance
Have a candle-lit dinner party with the neighbours
Have sex
Take light graffitti photos
Look at the stars

Last year, an estimated 50 million people took part, even Nelly Furtado so it must be good.

Saturday, 8:30PM (wherever you are)

Check out the banner above - Sign up and Switch Off.

You’ve got nothing to lose unless you work with cutting machinery.

Graffitti Rock - a pilot from 1984, later inspiring the...

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:18:18 +0000

Graffitti Rock - a pilot from 1984, later inspiring the UK’s “Dance Energy” and “The Word”.

Everyone gets a quick go, although Josephine in the pink shirt seems to be hogging the camera a bit. Also see the punk bird who can’t dance - this is all about ticking every single style box:
Hispanic vests [y]
b-boys [y]
breakdance [y]
electric boogaloo [y]
stuck inside glass box [y]
richard pryor in strappy sandals? [y]

Why I say “Hey” thou shall not say “Ho”.

Weasel Shit For Fun & Profit

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:49:00 +0000

My new Current Cost meter arrived today. The CC128 is much the same as the original Current Cost meter, but slightly better looking. Under the facelift it offers the chance to monitor several sensors around the home which has possibilities for things like water usage and smart thermostats, but today I’ve been fascinated with the developments of the Current Cost crowd and the National Grid.

It starts with Pachube.com. The idea is pretty simple - you provide a data feed of anything (number of bananas consumed, watts of electricity, temperature, socks lost, etc) to Pachube and it will sit there and graph it until kingdom come. You then share or re-use that feed to another system as XML or CSV, effectively patching a tube of data from one device to another. Hence the name ‘Pachube’.

This might seem daft, but I think I have just have seen the light. I publish my electricity usage and kitchen temperature on pachube http://www.pachube.com/feeds/1202

“Why would you do that?”, you’re saying. Well, you do have a point: it’s not useful to anyone but me. But what if I wanted to compare the nation’s demand for electricity with mine, I could just take this feed: http://www.pachube.com/feeds/1228 which is a live feed of demand straight from the National Grid. One person did the work of scaping & publishing this feed but now anyone can use it. All I’d need to do is superimpose the data on my graph and immediately I can see how I compare to the national average. (I don’t watch Eastenders so you won’t see me switching the kettle on ater the ‘doof doofs’). Ok, so it’s ultimately only useful to me, but having it on a public URL in a standard format would save me many hours trying to do it myself. That’s if I’d even thought of it until today (thanks to Dale Lane who’s already started and finished it).

So far so geeky, but given this infrastructure I thought it might soon be possible to know the best times to use the National Grid. Had I been paying attention at Oxford Geek Night #10 rather than drinking beer, I’d know that Tom Dyson of Torchbox already did that: http://caniturniton.com/

Take this a step further. Imagine you’re a computer literate Dick Strawbridge, generating your own electricity using a waterwheel, biofuel made of your own poo, and a pack of wild stoats on an exercise wheel. You don’t actually buy much electricity at all, your weaselwheel providing most of your needs, instead you monitor the demand and price (on http://www.pachube.com/feeds/1245). When the high demand alarm goes off, you quickly (automatically) switch your electric over to put current back into the grid, becoming a power station yourself. At the highest demand times you could produce an income, or at the very least an offset against your bill. Faster, stoats, FASTER!

At the moment although you can sell electricity back to the grid, the buy/sell price is fixed at a flat-rate per quarter rather than on-demand second-by-second, but as the technology and access to the data develops I hope we see forward-thinking energy companies making minute-by-minute tariffs and creating an electricity market.

If enough people generated their own electricity, a generating co-op could be created. We could reduce our reliance on the big power stations and start to live more sustainably, buying our electricity from the bloke over the road. The one with the dubious-smelling house full of stoats.

Sloe Win!

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:00:37 +0000

Well, we cracked open the sloe gin and decanted it into pretentious little bottles for xmas gifts. Very pleased with the result, which is quite surprising after less than two months in the kilner jar. Went very nicely with a Badger Industries mince pie, I think you ought to know.

Next year we go into full production.

Sloe Gin for teh Win!

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:15:00 +0000

Several years ago I read a very good book by Ian Marchant called “The Longest Crawl”. One the stops in it that caught my attention was the Plymouth Gin distillery and on a visit in 2006 I got my first taste of sloe gin on their excellent tour. I was a convert on the spot. Winter warmers don’t come much better than this. Sadly, the only sloe gin generally available in UK shops is Gordon’s, which isn’t quite up to snuff. What we did have, though, was bottles of plain Plymouth Gin, and swathes of Oxfordshire countryside in which we could find a blackthorn bush or two.

This was our first year making sloe gin and checking around the internet it seems that people are keen to share their advice on how to make sloe gin, but not on where to find sloes. Everyone has their closely guarded secret spot. As it turns out, so do we now. (Not too far from Chalgrove. That’s all I’m going to say.)

The nicest thing I found about making sloe gin is the way it brings you closer to the land you’re living in. In your quest for the sloes you learn the life cycle of the plant, how to recognise it from the leaves, fruit and habitats, and you get out there and search for it, looking more closely at plants than you’ve done since being a kid. Unless you’re a horticulturist, of course. For someone who spends 80% of his waking hours looking at a computer it’s hard to describe how liberating it feels to do something that involves rummaging around in the bushes and getting away from the daft machines.

“Why don’t you… just switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead?” as they used to say in the summer holidays.

The next bit is also fun. You get to make stuff in the kitchen instead of buying it from the shops. Provenance is a popular theme at the moment and you can’t get much closer than picking them yourself and pricking each one of the buggers with a needle. Might as well make a special occasion of it and have a glass or two of wine. Or last year’s sloe gin. You’re not going to be sneakily eating the sloes, that’s for sure.

I won’t go into lots of detail here about how to make it, there’s plenty of places you can find on the interwebs about that, but this is the stuff you’ll need:

Chuck it in the Kilner Jar (or cheapo equivalent where the lid won’t seal properly and you have to double up with the seal from the teabag tin, making the teabags slightly less fresh than they should be) and pour loads of sugar over it:

At this point I’m meant to have a photo of the jar filled up with gin, but you get the idea. We’re turning it daily and watching it develop into tasty sloe gin, maybe even in time for Christmas. It’s making something yourself. AND it’s booze. And it’s not the sort that might cause blindness. Win!

How I Beat the Credit Crunch with SaveMyPrinter.co.uk

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:12:12 +0000

In another edition of what appears to be a series of money saving tips from Badger Towers, I decided to give some love to SaveMyPrinter.co.uk for saving me money.

I have an HP Laserjet 1100 which sits on my desk doing very little to justify its existence, occasionally printing a boarding pass or a coupon because it can’t cope with a big job any more. I used to have an HP Laserjet 5L which did much the same thing. After about a year of service both of them started to sulk, picking up five sheets of paper at the same and jamming inside the works.

After months of wondering if I shouldn’t just chuck it and move on to another printer which inevitably starts to over-eat after a year, I found a kit on ebay for about £6 from a company called SaveMyPrinter.co.uk. It included a new Pickup Roller and corresponding rubbery bit for the back (Separation Pad). Couldn’t hurt to try this.

It had two basic parts. One was the Pickup Roller, the easiest part to replace on the whole printer, and the other was the Separation Pad and sub-assembly, about the hardest thing possible to get at.

SaveMyPrinter.co.uk sent a CD-ROM with the HP Service Manual in PDF. I thought this was going to be a waste of time, just a replacement for the original manual with troubleshooting tips like “Q: Nothing prints A: Ensure it’s plugged in”, but bugger me, it tells you how the whole thing was built and how all the subsystems work and which bits to replace, and photo guides on how to take it apart without breaking those plastic lugs off. Brilliant.

In about half an hour and 4 major pieces removed I had the top of the thing off and replaced the pad:

I thought it’d never work. It bloody did. So far it picks up the one piece of paper it ought to. And I didn’t manage to leave any bits out. OK, I know it took over an hour in the end, and time is money, and I could have bought a new one for under £100 and all that, but you can’t buy the smug feeling of having repaired something yourself and having that £80 to buy beer with.

Yeah, take that, consumer throwaway society. Credit crunch? Is that a type of cereal?

How to make a BristleBot - Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (via...

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:51:46 +0100

How to make a BristleBot - Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories (via oskay)

Want!

Badgerpower

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:39:56 +0100

Not long ago I bought a Current Cost smart electricity meter from Southern Electric’s eco gadget shop. It works by induction, clipping around the mains cable by your real meter and then wirelessly transmitting the reading every few seconds to an LCD display.

When I first plugged it in I got the urge to turn things on and off to watch how much electricity they were using. The house in ‘standby’ mode was about 300 watts, which was a bit more than I expected. Halogen kitchen lights add another 200 watts, which is pretty poor efficiency if you ask me. Then I put the kettle on. Great Scott! 1.6 jigawatts. Well, okay 1.6 kilowatts really. That’s a shedload.

I spent the rest of the week going around turning off everything at the wall unless it was

too hard to reach
too hard to re-program
the electric meter

Then I ordered the USB cable. I plugged it in and mucked about with some perl USB input scripts I found until I made one work (Paul Mutton’s Current Cost USB script seemed to be ideal) and glued it together with rrdtool.

You can visit live stats as they happen at: Live Badgerpower!

via www.posterclassics.com I couldn’t understand the...

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:00:56 +0100

via www.posterclassics.com

I couldn’t understand the words, but I got the message. I love these simple railway posters.

Mellotron Demo Take it away, Eric.

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:31:33 +0100

Mellotron Demo

Take it away, Eric.