Status-Q

My commute to work is a short walk, past hedgerows like this. I'm a lucky guy.

Extremes of colour everywhere...

I detect a worrying trend here.

It started when we got the 'green bin' recycling scheme, and Rose began pressuring me into recycling everything that could possibly be recycled. I grumpily acquiesced, but am now rather proud of the small amount of stuff in our non-recyclable bin when it's collected each fortnight.

Then we made a recent decision to start buying organic food when possible, despite the premium prices at Waitrose. This is the modern equivalent of tithing to the church, I guess, but we think of it as one of the little luxuries that you're allowed when you don't have children to feed as well!

And now we even have a box of local vegetables & fruit delivered by the nice people at the Cambridge Organic Food Company.

But no, I'm not about to grow a beard, and any Birkenstock representatives considering contacting me as a result of this post should think again. Sometimes, though, this green stuff provides me with an excuse to buy gadgets. Actually, almost anything provides me with an excuse to buy gadgets. That's another thing you can do when you don't have kids.

This particular toy is a sensor which clips onto the main power lead coming into my house:

and provides a nice little wireless display telling us how many kilowatts we're currently using. Just about 1.1, at the moment:

It can also tell us in pence per hour, or tonnes of greenhouse gas per year, should we so desire. It's also a temperature and humidity display. Quite sweet. It would take a long time, I think, for me to save sufficient electricity to pay for it, but every little helps... It's an Australian invention, called an Electrisave over here, and is available in the UK from their site, or, more cheaply, from British Gas.

Somebody going by the pseudonym of 'Neorelix' has started a nice blog of Cambridge-related photos. Thanks to Heidi Tempest for the link.

We’ve had a colourful visitor in our garden over the last couple of days.

Click for more pictures

When I was playing with in-car systems at the AT&T Labs, we always wanted to do maps which were coloured according to the time it took you to get to a certain location, or distorted to show time rather than distance. We never got around to it, sadly. Fortunately, Chris Lightfoot and Tom Steinberg did.

They have all sorts of nice variations on the theme, too. The fact that much of it is based around Cambridge makes it particularly interesting for me.

Imagine a collaborative project where everybody is feeding their road speed into a central database and you can get this sort of data in real time, centred on your location, wherever you are. That would be a fun project for somebody...

And has anybody done this for the airlines, I wonder?

Thanks to John for the link.

Any readers in the Cambridge area will appreciate this useful page put together by Samuel Lipoff.

Thanks, Samuel - your efforts much appreciated!

There are some people, perhaps even amongst my readership, for whom milk is only milk if it comes straight from the cow. For some of you, the very thought of pasteurisation is an abhorrence. That, at least, was my assumption when I saw that my local supermarket had created an aisle which wholeheartedly rejected the UHT concept:

On closer inspection, I discovered that this aisle not only contained long-life milk, but that it was right next door to the 'Free from' section: "Free from gluten", "Free from sugar", "Free from artificial preservatives"...

You know that something has become a true part of British life when it gets mentioned on The Archers. The Archers, for anyone outside the UK, is a BBC Radio soap opera, set in rural England, that has been running for 55 years and has aired about 15,000 episodes. It started when Britain was still subject to rationing after the war, and part of its purpose then was to embed hints in the story to farmers about how they could raise agricultural productivity.

Anyway, yesterday, the subject of webcams came up and they mentioned the Trojan Room Coffee Pot which Paul, Dan & I set up in the early nineties when we were still subject to coffee rationing. The full programme is on the BBC web site but I'm not sure how long it will stay there, so I hope they won't mind me posting this two-minute MP3 clip.

I'll make no claims about whether or not this particular plot-line will increase British productivity...