August 9th, 2006
After reading today that the Australian Government is considering subsidising the cost of converting cars to run on LPG, I got curious about how environmentally friendly such an option is.
Turns out, its pretty good!
As background for those who haven’t heard about LPG conversions, it is possible to convert cars to run on Liquid Petroleum Gas, rather than petrol. LPG is available in most large petrol stations, and is substantially cheaper than petrol. On the downside, you do use more than standard petrol, and the conversion process typically costs between $2000 and $2500. Because of the relatively high cost of conversion, the more your drive, the more cost-effective the conversion is – Taxis, for instance, are often converted to run on LPG. Subsidising the cost of conversion, as the Government is considering, would make this attractive for people who drive shorter distances too.
The Australian National University seems to have done a feasibility study on converting their fleet to LPG. They found that using LPG resulted in between 12 to 24% less CO2 emissions over unleaded petrol. Or, to look at it another way, its like taking the car off the road 1 to 2 days a fortnight.
Thats not bad. Its worth pointing out though (as a card-carrying Prius fan!) that driving a Prius gives a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions! And cycling….well, thats better again! 
Posted in Cycling, Environment, Green, cars, hybrid | 1 Comment »
July 24th, 2006
After playing around with writing Sudoku Solvers in the past, I was interested to see this page which details a number of tiny sudoku solvers in a variety of languages such as Perl, Ruby, etc.
They have a few basic rules – no line over 80 bytes, etc, etc. And the examples take their input as a string of 81 digits, which represents the 9 rows of 9 digits, with “0″ being a blank square.
As I apparently have way too much time on my hands , I got up the motivation to convert one of these examples into Java. The results?
- The end program is around twice as many lines as the Perl original, and
- Yup – you can make Java programs as unreadable as anything else out there!
There may well be shorter possibilities out there – I didn’t put in a great deal of effort past converting the Perl original. But, for the record:
import java.util.*;public class S{static char[] A;static void R(){int i,j;for(i=
0;i<81;i++){if(A[i]!='0')continue;HashMap h=new HashMap();for(j=0;j<81;j++){h.
put(j/9==i/9||j%9==i%9||(j/27==i/27)&&((j%9/3)==(i%9/3))?""+A[j]:"0","1");}for(j
=1;j<=9;j++){if(h.get(""+j)==null){A[i]=(char)('0'+j);R();}}A[i]='0';return;}for
(i=0;i<81;i++){System.out.print(A[i]);}System.out.println();System.exit(0);}
public static void main(String[] a){A=a[0].toCharArray();R();}}
Assuming you have an appropriate classpath, you can run it with a line like:
java S 006070800000000000078601520030405010400000002090302060052103690000000000003020100
This code was converted from the excellent Perl example at:
http://www.ecclestoad.co.uk/blog/2005/06/02/sudoku_solver_in_three_lines_explained.html
Posted in IT Stuff, computing, java | 7 Comments »
July 14th, 2006
Came across this link on CNN about a guy going into business selling a kit to “hack” or modify your Prius.
The kit apparently replaces the NiMh battery with a (greater capacity) Lithium Ion one, and also allows the car to be plugged in to a power point to charge it up. (For the Prius newbie’s, this is not the way they normally work – Priuses (or Priii? ) charge themselves up when breaking and coasting, or by diverting power from the petrol engine).
Great idea! Some of my car-mad friends with hotted up cars have long delighted in buying modified engine management chips that squeeze more power out of the engines. This guy is modding a car to be more fuel efficient!
Obviously, some of the “green points” are lost if your house gets its electricity from a coal-powered generator plant – whenever you plug the car in to charge it up, you’re still polluting…indirectly. But if you subscribe to one of the green programs on offer, where your electricity provider sources your power from renewable sources like wind, its all good.
Interestingly, the story has Toyota being quite supportive of this kind of thing. Makes sense – as the manufacturer you want to encourage your customers to build a community around your vehicle and take it further.
Posted in Environment, Green | 1 Comment »
July 3rd, 2006
I have to admit that I never saw the original Captain Planet cartoon series – I gather it was about a superhero with a real environmental streak. Well, a friend put me onto a little video on the Net that has a whole new interpretation… 
I should warn that its probably not for little kiddies – its only claymation animation, but some of the language is rather… earthy (pardon the pun)!
Enjoy!
Posted in Environment, Green, general | 1 Comment »
June 19th, 2006
Following on from my posting on my new centameter power usage monitor, I came across this interesting article at www.dxgaming.com.
They did some testing of the power consumption of common consoles and made the discovery that the latest consoles use between 5 and 10 times more power in standby than their predecessors – so, an XBox uses 0.4W in standby, but the new XBox360 uses 2W. The Playstation and Playstation 2 is a near identical story. They have an interesting discussion about why these figures may make you switch off your Playstation 2 when not in use, but not your XBox360 – worth the read.
Posted in Environment, Green, IT Stuff, computing | 3 Comments »
June 12th, 2006
Apologies for the recent outage folks. I’ve been travelling in Europe this last month, and my ADSL modem decided to get confused 1 week into the trip. Proof that Murphy’s Law is alive and well!
On my return, a quick off/on of the ADSL modem, and everything is back online.
So, we now return you to your irregularly scheduled blog…
Posted in IT Stuff, Uncategorized, general | 1 Comment »
April 11th, 2006
I make it a habit to do a quick google around the net around once a week or so to see if there are any rumours about the next generation Prius. After all, its been 2 years since I bought mine – there has to be something in the works, right?
Well, stumbled across something at digg.com today on the first whispers about the next model. I’ve googled a little further, and this URL has a decent summary:
http://www.greenhybrid.com/discuss/2008-prius-lithium-ion-and-94-mpg-us.6729.html
To spoil the surprise, they’re talking about a lithium battery (instead of NiMH), fuel economy roughly twice as good (which is pretty mind-blowing itself), and shaving a second or so of the 0-100km/h figure. Nice……
Only downside? The net gossip is talking about 2008 as a release date – and thats for the UK/US! Past experience has Oz getting their models another year after that. Sniff…. 
Posted in Environment, Green, general | 1 Comment »
April 5th, 2006
After having my name on the waiting list for Google Analytics for a good 3 or 4 months, I got an email this morning inviting me to sign up. And 15 minutes later I was up and running!
Plenty has been written about Google Analytics, much of it in a breathless “Wow!” sort of tone. And, I’m afraid I’m yet another one! The thing that gets me is the sheer depth of information. I’ve just spent the last 15 minutes discovering that (in the first few hours of stats collection) that:
- Most of my audience has a screen resolution of 1280×1024
- About a third of my audience is using dialup
- All of my audience has Java enabled (well, this is a rather small sample at this stage )
In addition, of course, there’s the more “standard” stuff – where in the world your clicks are coming from (although this is down to the State level, which is rare for us Aussies – plenty of tools give you US state info, but not Australian), which pages are most popular, etc.
Up till this point, I’ve been using AWStats in a static configuration – stats are generated in the form of static pages once per day. A great tool that gives me a lot of good summary information, but it just can’t touch the depth of Google Analytics stuff. That said, I’ll still be keeping it. AWStats runs on my PC, so I can always access it, even if I lose Net access. And, being static pages, its blindingly fast.
(Google Analytics is no slouch, by-the-by. I think we’ve all come to expect good performance from Google, be it search, mail, whatever, so this is probably no surprise. But there are noticeable pauses from time to time – only 2-3 seconds or so – as you navigate around)
Anyway, it looks like I can say goodbye to another 30 minutes of my life each day. So many graphs, so little time!
Posted in IT Stuff, computing | 1 Comment »
April 1st, 2006
As of yesterday, I’m now the proud new owner of a centameter – a handy little display that shows you how many kilowatts of power your household is using at any instant. Here’s a picture:
As you can see by the mouse sitting next to it, it’s a reasonably small, neat unit. And, a little less obviously – its wireless! This is a great feature! It means (as well as being able to mount it semi-permanently somewhere), you can also carry it around as you check out your house’s (and its appliances) energy characteristics.
The way it works is with a neat white sensor unit installed either at your switch box, or meter. A sensor clicks on to the outside of the wire, and the sensor unit transmits this data wirelessly. The transmission is powered by a few AA (or AAA, I can’t remember) batteries which apparently last a year. The display unit picks up these signals and displays it.
You can configure the display to update every 6 seconds or 1 minute, and it can show current kilowatt consumption, current amount of CO2 production due to your energy consumption, and cents/hour. Additionally, the unit shows you the current temperature and humidity.
All up, it cost me around $200 to have installed. This included an electrician to come out and do the install – this is required simply because a licensed electrician is required whenever you’re dealing with switch boxes and metres.
And, after a day of use, I love it! Its better than TV – in fact, energy wise its a lot better; I’ve discovered that turning my TV on uses an extra 150 – 200 watts! But in all seriousness, some of the discoveries you make can be quite eye-opening:
- When my house is pretty much “off”, it uses around 250 watts – thats TV’s, etc on standby, the usual collection of digital clocks and (most significantly) 3 PCS that are on 24×7. These PCs were all selected as being low power consumption models
- When I turn on my “actual” work PC, consumption jumps by another 150 watts or so. This PC is a standard PC – not a low power model and that shows!
- The biggest impact is my (electric) hot water heater – when its running, around 3.6 kilowatts are drawn! I was quite surprised to see this, and was able to confirm it by turning the hot water off at the mains, and seeing the drop immediately on my centameter. Obviously, the hot water unit doesn’t run that often. Thankfully.
- And from the biggest to the smallest. I have a power board full of those little black plugs. You know the ones – phone chargers, camera charges, laptop. Nothing’s being used – they just sit there waiting for me to plug something in. Now, I’d heard that these things waste power when not being used – turns out they were collectively going through 30 watts. Or $26 a year. They’re all unplugged now!
End of the day, I can’t rate this highly enough. If you are even the faintest shade of green, this thing is a must have. But even if environmental issues bore you to death, being able to see how much your house is costing you in electricity bills is fantastic.
Posted in Environment, Green, general | 5 Comments »
March 23rd, 2006
Continuing what has become a tradition for me, I went in the Big Canberra Bike Ride again this week.
This is a great event they hold each year, on the Canberra Day long weekend. It consists of a 25 km ride (not a race!) around Canberra, with a stop-off halfway along for cup of tea, and a slice of carrot cake. Very civilised!
I’m not sure what the numbers were like this year, but last year I know they had around 800 riders. People are notoriously bad judgers of crowd numbers, but it looked similar to last year, so I’d guess 800 again this year.
Here’s a little piccy I snapped from my phone’s camera about 30 minutes before the start:
The weather looks a little forbidding in the photo, but it was actually a really nice 20 or so degrees (thats Celsius!). And it was a nice added element to have the Hot Air balloons float over as we prepared to start.
Being a very social ride, you get all sorts joining in – I saw at least 3 unicycles and a whole pile of recumbents. Ages seemed to range from around 10 to around 80. Really good to see so many different people getting out there.
A great day, that was finished off for me by brunch at a nearby cafe with some mates! Its a hard life… Going back for my next mountain bike ride around the 24 Hr Mont track is going to be a real shock to the system…
Anyways, highly recommended if you’ve never done it before. For the no-yet-cyclists, a nice, gentle introduction into riding around the Nation’s capital. And for the more experienced, a good ride with a great atmosphere. Whats not to like?!
Posted in Cycling, general | 1 Comment »