Roger Waters 2008

Good to see the Rogmeister back on the road again this year for a small "World Tour" of the US and Europe finishing with 3 dates in the UK (Liverpool and O2 Arena London).

I'll not be seeing him this year but hopefully he'll have a new Rock album soon... please Roger for the love of gawd release it. I never thought when I first saw Roger in Toronto 1999 he'd still be on the road 9 years later selling out show after show. Quite simply he enjoys it and long may it continue. More recently I saw him in Manchester 2002 and Birmingham 2007.

While fat d*ve sometimes hauls his lazy arse out of bed to do a show or record a few string bends nothing quite matches up to the sheer excitement of seeing Roger performing HIS (Pink Floyd) songs as nature intended. Having said that I much prefer his solo songs when seeing him live. Its one of life's greatest disappointments that he never toured with his solo masterpiece, Amused to Death.

Anyway, if you get the chance get yourself off to see the man.

Category:

• Music
• Roger+Waters

Rangers 1 : Deviants 0

Immense victory for Rangers against the deviant hordes. Six points clear and a game in hand it's ours to lose. How many games is that they've played this season so far? How many games left? Two more old firm games due (at parasite) nothing is certain in this mighty season.

Carlos Cuellar to be cast in bronze and placed at the entrance to the stadium?

"It's behind you, Artur."

Category:

• Sport
• Football

Electricity - How Much Does It Cost? III

Just a quick post about the power energy monitor I mentioned in this post. I know a couple of you have bought one so I thought I'd give a couple of tips on how best to use the device.

Read more...


The monitor will display all manner of useful information such as RMS Voltage, RMS Current, Active Power, Apparent Power, Line Frequency, Power Factor, Energy Quantity and Time. Now, unless you're an Electronic Engineer most of that is of little interest. What we want to concentrate on is Active Power (measured in watts) and Energy Quantity (measured in Kwh).

Active Power: We would use this reading when connected to a device which has a constant power consumption (i.e it's power consumption does not vary over time). To use the table lamp example I've mentioned before we know that a 40w bulb will consume 40w for the duration the lamp is turned on. It's power consumption will not change over time. To convert watts into Kwh (remember, that is what your electricity supplier will bill you in 1 unit = 1Kwh) you just divide by 1000. Therefore the 40w lamp will use 0.04Kwh (0.04 Kw per hour). This reading also applies to devices on standby etc.

Energy Quantity: We would use this reading when connected to a device whose power consumption will vary over time or will last for a finite time. Take for example a sandwich toaster. When you first switch it on it will consume power in an effort to heat the plates up to the desired temperature. Once it has reached that temperature it will switch the heating element off (usually indicated by the wee light on the front of the toaster switching off). If during the toasting of the sandwich the plates cool down enough the toaster will switch the heating elements back on to top up the temperature to the desired level. This can happen numerous times during the cooking process. As the toaster is already hot it will use less power to top up the temperature thus making it unsuitable to read the active power value on the meter as it will be constantly changing over time. For this we use the "Energy Quantity" value displayed on the meter. Helpfully this is already converted into Kwh for us so no further calculatuion is required.

So to get a reading on how much power was consumed to make that cheese and ham toastie you plug the toaster into the meter, switch it on and activate the button on the meter to display Kwh. Toast your sandwich and when it's all done read the value displayed on the meter. This is the total amount of Kwh the toaster consumed while making the sandwich. To find out how much it actually cost you to cook simply multiply this value by the value of 1Kwh of electricity you calculated using your electricity bill (as described in this post). Remember these aren't wild approximations or industry overhyped values this is the real, personal cost to you.

You'd use the same method for calculating the cost of a load of washing, or a dishwasher or to boil a kettle etc. Not very difficult when you actually get down to it.

I've now got a spreadsheet listing every electrical device I have plugged in on a room by room basis and am slowly taking readings of everything. Saving my cash (and the planet) one plug at a time.

Category:

• Electricity
• Home

Twitter

Just added a twitter feed to the sidebar for some realtime, round the clock... err... moans and rants (what I do best).

Category:

• Twitter

Rangers win CIS Cup

First trophy of the season in the bag. Mixed emotions, I wouldn't have minded Dundee Utd winning in any other circumstances but it's our first trophy in 3 seasons so it had to be done.

Honestly, it was our best chance of a trophy this season. The fixture pile up particularly in the league, a round behind everybody else in the Scottish Cup and in the waffa cup last 8 I really fear for the SPL crown. The team looked knackered, 'cause they are, completely spent.

Category:

• Sport
• Football

Electricity - How Much Does It Cost? II

This is a follow up to my original post about how much electricity costs us (in the UK) and how that applies to real world usage. Since I wrote the original post my electricity supplier announced increases of 15% to their prices, ouch. Using the previous calculated figure of 9.75 pence per KWh (1 unit) my electricity will now cost me on average 11.21 pence per KWh... double ouch. Has my income increased by 15%? hell no, will prices go up again and again? hell yes. What am I going to do about it? Use less energy of course (and switch suppliers again in May).

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So I bought myself a power meter with the intention of identifying how my power usage is distributed and where it can be cut. I bought, from amazon.co.uk, a Plug-In Power and Energy Monitor
This is a great little device which will give you lots of information about what your electronics are sucking up. The two main settings the layman will be interested in are how much power the device is using in watts and what that equates to in KWh (Kilowatt Hours is what your electricity supplier will quote you on your bill, see original post).

In theory if you were to plug a table lamp fitted with a 60watt bulb the meter would read 60 watts and also give you how many KW it would consume in 1 hour (0.06, see original post for calculation). I've tested it on a couple of 40watt lamps and the device is very accurate (allowing for inefficiency within the lamp and tolerance of the bulb).

Over the coming days and weeks I'm going to measure as many of my electronic devices around the house as I can. As a taster I've just done a couple of tests on my main workstation, the beast).

Firstly, with the plug in but the computer powered off it consumes 6watts (you'll notice that the network port LEDs will remain lit as long as the plug is in the wall). Even if I was to never switch the thing on again it would still sit there burning electricity. 6watts = 0.006KWh = .067p per hour = 1.61p per day or £5.89 a year. Remember this is not some theoretical calculation this is fact using up to date pricing. Just shy of 6 quid a year is not going to bankrupt me but I'd rather have £6 in my pocket than some huge company.

Next I powered the computer on and waited until it had fully booted and Windows had finished all it's housekeeping tasks (indicated by task manager the CPU was 99% idle). The power usage settled at 130 watts (not bad actually). Still, how often do you walk away from your computer leaving it on and idle only to return to it hours later? I know I'm guilty of that. So 130 watts = 0.13KWh = 1.46 pence per hour = 34.98p per day or £127.66 a year. Obviously you'll not leave a computer on for a year doing nothing but it's indicative of a small server sitting in the office doing nothing for most of the day. Also, I'd hope you had the Power Saving measures and profiles configured on the machine to power down the hard drives, go into sleep mode etc after a period of inactivity.

I then ran a Blender 3D render to fully load the CPU at 100% to see the effect on power demand. The watts used jumped to 195, again not bad for a 4 year old machine in my opinion with a very inefficient PIV 3Ghz CPU. I'll rip a DVD to see the effect of powering the drive and HDD along with 100%CPU usage in the future.

Look out for an ever increasing list of devices I've ran through my power meter in future posts. How much does that kettle cost to boil a cuppa? Anything with a little, red LED indicating standby will be of particular interest, stay tuned.

Update: The next post in this series can be found here.

Category:

• Electricity
• Home

Werder Bremen 1(1) : Rangers 0(2)

Get in there! Rangers in the QF of the waffa cup, nice. Terrible, terrible performance but who cares?.. onwards.

Category:

• Sport
• Football

Sony 26" KDL26S3000U

I finally cracked a few weeks ago and ordered a TV for our bedroom. We've been without a telly in the bedroom for a couple of years now (probably since I installed the home cinema). To be honest I just couldn't get my head round what TV to go for as I've been pretty underwhelmed every time I've seen an LCD or Plasma TV in the flesh when playing from a standard definition source (as this will be purely for freeview only).

After much deliberation I settled on a requirement of 26" screen size as the best compromise between available space and cost. Trawling through avforums for some inspiration and I settled on the Sony KDL26S3000U. The best price with stock available I could find was from play.com at £399.99. The deal was done and fitted in perfectly with Lesley's holiday so someone would be in for delivery. The TV arrived on schedule as promised, so far so good.

That night I unpacked the unit, assembled it to the stand, plugged in the aerial and switched it on. It went straight away into an automatic set-up routine, all as expected. It prompted for a few button presses to set the required information and that's where it all went wrong. I automatically grabbed the remote to enter the info but it wouldn't respond to the remote. There were buttons on the top of the unit which replicated some of the remote functionality so I used them. I thought once the set-up was complete it would respond to the remote. The TV scanned the available channels and picked all the Freeview offerings pretty quickly. But it still wouldn't respond to the remote. I changed the batteries but still no joy, I even pressed the buttons really hard (as you do when angry and frustrated) but it still failed to respond. I then discovered if I held the remote right up to the IR eye the telly would change channels etc. It appeared that the receiver had become dislodged within the case. Bummer.

I'm sure I could have opened the case and fixed the receiver location but I wasn't about to poke inside a brand new (but faulty) telly and run the risk of running into guarantee issues later. So off I went to phone play.com and get it sorted. I was annoyed at the waste of time and the fact that someone would have to stay in to wait for the return pick up and then wait again for a new one to be delivered so I said straight away I wanted to return it for a full refund. Play.com were very apologetic, arranged a pick up for the following day (I warned them it must be in the morning but they couldn't promise anything).

To cut a long story short the unit was picked up the following morning as arranged. Play.com have a policy where opened, faulty returns are checked before a refund can be given and this takes 2 weeks. So after waiting 2 weeks and no sign of a refund on my credit card I phoned them up all prepared to give them a hard time. They confirmed that the unit had arrived and said a refund should have been issued (but hadn't). They promised to sort that immediately, which they did.

So, reasonably well done to play.com for handling the return nearly faultlessly and boos all round to Sony for producing crap.

I still haven't decided what to get for the bedroom (26" with built-in Freeview) but it won't be a Sony.

Category:

• Sony
• LCD
• TV

BBC iPlayer

Gotta say I'm loving the BBC iPlayer service for catching up with programmes I've missed during the week. Most notably, That Mitchell and Webb Look, The Armstrong and Miller Show and The Last Enemy.

I generally just watch them on my laptop while lying on the sofa. Playback is pretty smooth (I wish Youtube was as smooth) and picture quality is good, all in all a useful service. Hopefully in the future they'll up the time programmes are available for viewing direct from the web (currently 7 days).

I haven't tried the download service yet where you can view for up to 30 days on your machine as the file sizes are too large for casual one off viewing in my opinion (damn UK crappy broadband). Probably of use for people running a media center PC or such but I'm happy with watching in the browser at the moment. I also haven't tried Channel 4's telly on demand as they've nothing I really want to watch apart from Grand Designs which I never miss anyway.

Category:

• BBC
• TV
• iPlayer

Sennheiser PX200 Headphones

Bought myself a set of relatively decent headphones primarily for use at work where we've a huge open plan office. Much of the CAD support is by way of video training help files so headphones are really the only way to listen to them.

Harking back to my younger audiophile days Sennheiser was the name that instantly sprang to mind when searching for a set of headphones. They were the mark 20 years ago and they're still the leaders today. I remember fondly my set of Sennheiser HD414 headphones from my youth, I probably have them in a box somewhere though they'd need the cable and foam pads replaced.

Obviously for office use they needed to be closed type so as not to leak sound and annoy the other folk close by. I debated with myself if I wanted a full size set, more for use in the home on a hi-fi, but went for a portable model with shorter, practical cable length and less looking like a Cyberman. I personally hate in the ear-bud type things for reasons of comfort, noise leakage and volume. Anyhoo, I finally plumped for a pair of Sennheiser PX200 Closed Mini Headphones and very nice they are too for the ridiculous price of £19.99 delivered.

The two most important points are sound quality and comfort. Sound quality is excellent, a revelation in fact, they're Sennheiser's after all. Very comfortable to wear due to the diminutive size and weight. After running them in for a few hours (you must run in all Hi-Fi equipment for at least a few hours, it's the law, don't even consider commenting on sound quality until you have, the more expensive the kit the longer the run in required) the mid range opened up, excellent voice reproduction and decent bass. A quick point about Bass. I used to work for the UK's premier Loudspeaker company so I know what proper Hi-Fi bass is supposed to be. You'll never get anything like it from headphones. Bass is felt (in the guts and chest), not heard. It is achieved by shifting vast amounts of air and headphones, no matter what they claim, will ever be able to shift air. So forget about comments and reviews about disappointing bass etc. They're talking bollocks. The bass is more than acceptable from these tiny devices (tested it with some glorious Bob Marley on the iPod).

They come with a travel case which is slightly larger than a hard spectacle case and fold neatly up to fit snugly in the box, very important as I'll be carting them back and forward in my laptop bag. Bit disappointed (purely for pose value) that the Sennheiser name is only printed along the top of the head band with no mention of the maker on the actual drivers. Another nice touch is the "Left" designator is in Braille (three raised dots) along the leg to aid correct left/right orientation in the dark.

Tested them with my laptop (Dell's headphone socket is very noisy :-() and my iPod Mini. The latter has gained a new lease of life with the addition of the Sennheisers. Honestly, if you're still using Apple's ear buds chuck them away and get these instead, they're fantastic. They're not noise cancelling but do a fair job of blocking out exterior noise. I hate noise cancelling as it feels like the pressure build up is about to explode my head.

I'm a bit worried how I'll get on with them in the office though. A bit of a confession... I'm a hummer, a finger desk drummer, air guitar, head nodder, whistler, sing-alonger, face screwed up in spoo like high note stylee, string bender and all in "perfect" pitch, tune and time of course. I fear for my job. I remember a colleague who suffered the same affliction on a flight back from San Francisco. Standing at the bag reclaim telling me about how the stewardess definitely fancied him as every time she walked past his seat he got an extra big smile. I hated to do it, but had to tell him as I was sitting 3 rows back the stewardess wasn't smiling but laughing at his excruciating out of tune warblings to the in flight radio channels. Crushed he was.... crushed I tell you ;-)

Category:

• Gadget
• Sennheiser
• Headphones