10:10 Campaign

I signed up to the 10:10 Campaign, which is a commitment to reduce your carbon emissions by 10% for 2010. So I decided to use some carbon calculators to work out our carbon emissions. I tried the Guardian's Carbon Calculator and the Government's Act on CO2 calculator.

I was surprised to find a very big difference in the results. According to the Guardian Calculator we produce 10.51 tonnes of CO2 per year, but the Government's calculator gives us a figure of 5.47 tonnes per year. The national average according to the Guardian's site is 15.4, the target for 2010 is 14, and for 2050 is 3.

I'd like to think that our actual figure is 5.47, but I think for the purposes of this attempt I'm going to pick the higher figure (I suspect that they are both inaccurate) because this means I have to save 1 tonne as opposed to 0.5 tonnes.

Punctures :-(

Last Monday I got two punctures in 500 yds. It seems that my front tyre had a slit in it, so when the tyre compressed on the road the slit would open up and the inner tube would squeeze into the gap, then when the tyre rolled onwards the slit closed up chomping bits out of the inner tube.

I effected a temporary fix by putting a puncture repair patch on the inside of the tyre.

I have now replaced tge tyre with a new Schwalbe Marathon which are meant to be puncture proof, I hope.

The puncture proof Specialized Armadillo on my racer 700x23 has done well so far (about 600 miles of puncture free cycling) although a small nail did find it's way through the protection to give me one puncture.


-- Posted from my iPhone

Trigger's Bike

Just replaced the frame on my old mountain bike (used for commuting), with a new Dawes Watoga frame, and as a consequence also needed to replace: -

• The brakes - the old Canter Lever brakes wouldn't work on the rear, as there was no centre-pull for the system, so I've had to replace those with Vee Brakes.
• The front dérailleur - the old one was bottom pull only, and the routing on the new frame required a top-pull system.
• Bottom bracket - I couldn't extract the old one from the previous frame.
• The seat-post - the old seat post was way too narrow for the new frame, which accepts a big 31.2mm diameter seat post.

Incidentally, I had some difficulty measuring the seat post hole until I worked out that by rolling up a sheet of paper, inserting that into the hole and letting it unfurl; I could then draw a line all the way around the top of the hole. Measuring the length of the line with the paper flat gave me a length of 98mm, dividing this by pi gave me my 31.2. I checked that 31.4 should be 98.6mm and 31.0 should be 97.3mm and then rechecked the lengths.

Previously replaced on the bicycle are the following: -

• Headset bearings - after the steering ground to a halt (lots of leaning around corners for a while there).
• Front forks - after the headset was replaced I had too much rise for the previous forks.
• Both wheels - after discovering splits in the rims.
• Chain set - can't remember why I did this.
• Pedals - upgraded from plastic things to SPD pedals.
• Chain and Cassette - I got through three chains & two cassettes last year.
• Tyres - On my second set of tyres this year.
• Rear Dérailleur - The old one had worn very badly.

So all that remains from the original now is: -

• The handlebars & grips
• The saddle
• The bell

I'm thinking about changing the saddle next :-)

Cycling

I returned to cycling (last year) after about a 14 year absence, and now cycle commute to work every day, and have brought a mountain bike for the weekends.

Well this weekend's plan was to go on the Cambridge Carbon Footprint picnic, but plans were thwarted by some misinformation as to the start time :-(. We ended up cycling into Cambridge and a bit further to try and find them, this wasn't helped by a puncture on the way.

We arrived at 10:30 (the time we were told), but unfortunately the group left at 10:00.

Luckily we had another cycle ride planned for Sunday, and ha a very enjoyable ride to Grantchester and a pub meal in the Red Lion with some ex work colleagues (the company went into liquidation last year). It was nice to catch up with them all and some of us enjoyed a walk alongside the Cam afterwards.

On the route home we took a detour along the new guided bus-way, and saw a "little owl" on a fence post near the Oakington section.

All in all I think we racked up 52 miles over the weekend, which when added to my normal weekly commute came to 152 miles this week.

Next weekend is more likely not to involve much cycling

Dragon Game 239817

This is an attempt to use Drago to put the game into my blog

Back to Blogging

Been absent from updating my lbog for a long time. In the meantime I've been up to quite a few things, including passing my karate grading - I'm now 3 dan in Shotokan karate.

My go activities have been reduced in the past two years, as I've been preparing for my karate grading and had quite a lot to do at work. In addittion I have been trying to learn japanese - so I've been quite busy.

I'm keeping my go playing abilities active by using http://www.dragongoserver.net/ and http://www.littlegolem.net/. I was inspired to resurrect my blog by the very well written http://the-shodan.blogspot.com/, and hopefully I will keep going this time.

Fingers crossed.

Just finished an interesting 13x13 game on dragon (Dragon Game 239817)

Star-Encoding in C++

Star Encoding is a way of making your data more compressable by standard compressors

Read more at www.dogma.net/markn/art...

Rzip - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Interesting algorithm to take into account long distance duplications in source data - very memory hungry though

Read more at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Compression Tools Compared | Linux Journal

Interesting site about compression tools - comparing memory usage, time taken to compress/decompress and resultant size

Read more at www.linuxjournal.com/ar...

Fractal Desktops

Just found some rather nice fractal images at Fractal Desktops