OK, so far today we have had two power cuts. The first woke me up, as the UPS (uninterruptible power supply) sounds an internal alarm when the electricity is cut. However, when I’m not around, or deeper in a sleep, the PC is automatically shutdown to prevent data loss or damage to sensitive electrical equipment that could result from the supply being simply cut off.
However, what I would prefer is for the computer to hibernate. This means the PC is shut down to the point that it does not require any further electricity, but all the contents of the RAM is stored on the hard drive. Theoretically, this should mean that when the power is restored, I can turn on the PC, and have the same programs, webpages etc. all opened up as they were prior to the power cut. Anyway, there is no -h switch for the command line shutdown command, so I had to do a little searching. If I enter %windir%\system32\rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Hibernate into the program to be run after sixty seconds of no power, in the UPS configuration utility, the theory is that no data will be lost, and all should be fine. There are problems with some programs not being compatible with hibernation mode, but I’ll deal with those as they arise.
If you need more info, or specific guidance, leave me a message…

How are people? For those readers not in the UK, the south of the country is currently being hit by quite a bad serious of storms. Click on over here for a BBC report on it so far.

So, if you have a moment (and electricity and a working phone line ), leave a comment, let us know if your area was affected by the 80mph+ winds or the rain and resulting flood waters.

As you can see from that last photo Cheltenham’s famous race course was hit by the winds, with some of the temporary structures in place for the National Hunt damaged. Swansea was also effected, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and phone around friends and family…

I was speaking to a friend recently, and discovered one of their relatives had just reached the official pensioner age. The relative has chosen to continue working in their current job. Not that most people have a lot of choice… The MONTHLY pension here is just 11,000 tenge! That equates to around $85, or if you prefer £40, to live on. Although some essentials are cheaper in this country, a lot of prices are catching up, without a matching rise in wages or pensions. For those pensioners living solely on a their state pension, I simply can not imagine how they manage to pay the electricity and other utility bills, buy enough food to survive 4 weeks. That is completely ignoring such ‘luxuries’ as clothing or fuel for their transport, if they have any.
When it comes to most matters with this country, I stay fairly neutral - it is difficult to criticize any system without having lived through the multitude of changes etc., however this pension level just seems immoral.
Anyway, I’ll hop off my soap box for now, at least until someone gets me fired up about the equally scandalous level of pay doctors get paid here.

Having spoken to Alex, I decided to catch up on news that featured Australia this morning, and came across a BBC article entitled ‘Australians named worst emitters’. Rather than a study into the effect too many barbecues has on the gastric tract, it details just how bad Australia’s pollution is compared to other countries, when you factor in the size of each nation’s population. More specifically the CO2 emissions created by each state’s power stations. Although Americans and Chinese people obviously have the highest pollution levels, when you divide the output by the population, Australia turns out to be the most polluting nation on earth, when it comes to the production of electricity!

It is not just me… I found the term wall sconce recently, and had to look it up - when I checked with Irina, she did not know either, so I now feel a little less stupid than before Apparently they are a type of light fixture that you find on walls, often in long hallways. If you imagine a flaming torch on the wall of a castle, but obviously they are now mainly powered by electricity, not naked flames.

British Gas have released the following Press Release, and would like it to be published in as many places as possible. As they compensate those who do so, please read the following text for information regarding BG’s two new tariffs, apparently created for an ecological purpose. The following PR is published as requested, without any amendments.

9 August 2007: British Gas has announced it is launching two new green energy tariffs, Zero Carbon, which will be the greenest tariff available on the domestic market and Future Energy. British Gas has launched the tariffs, in response to the increasing demand for green energy products.

Householders signing up to the Zero Carbon tariff will:
• reduce their household energy carbon emissions to zero through Kyoto compliant offset schemes which will meet the new Defra requirements
• help fund a direct increase in investment in renewable energy generated in the UK
• contribute to the new British Gas green fund which will:
• invest in developing new renewable technologies such as wave power
• oversee a programme to help schools in the UK reduce their CO2 emissions

Gearóid Lane, Managing Director British Gas New Energy said,”Our new tariff responds to consumer demand for truly green energy solutions. It is essential that customers have confidence in green energy tariffs and that their credibility is not damaged by tariffs that claim to be green but in reality do not deliver any incremental environmental benefits. Green tariffs are moving from niche to mainstream products and we’re leading the industry by offering a tariff that will do more for the environment than any other product currently available.”

Under the government’s Renewables Obligation (RO), electricity suppliers in the UK are already required to produce an increasing percentage of their electricity through methods such as wind farms which, unlike traditional power plants, produce zero carbon emissions. For 2007/2008 this figure is set at 7.9%.

In a recent report, the National Consumer Council (NCC) raised concerns that some energy suppliers are packaging electricity which is produced under the RO scheme as “green”, yet it delivers no additional environmental benefits. The NCC called on energy suppliers to take steps beyond their legal requirements and offer green energy tariffs that provide genuine additional environmental benefits, in particular CO2 emissions reduction.

British Gas worked with Global Action Plan and The Climate Group’s “We’re in this Together” campaign to develop Zero Carbon which goes further than any other green tariff in meeting these requirements offering consumers the only zero carbon option on the market.

The tariff carries a premium of £84 per year, reflecting the higher cost of producing energy through lower carbon emission schemes.

Virginia Graham, Chair of Global Action Plan, said, “The British Gas Zero Carbon tariff delivers on all three of the essential requirements of a green tariff which are: additionality, transparency and verifiability. As such it is a very welcome new offering in the market. Consumers signing up to the tariff can be confident that they are getting 12 per cent more renewable energy than they would otherwise have got. The carbon emissions from their electricity and gas will also be offset with emissions reductions from projects accredited by the United Nations.”

Zero Carbon is one of the first initiatives launched through the ‘We’re in this Together’ campaign, which was launched in April 07 as an alliance of some of the UK’s biggest brands who are all working to help their customers reduce their impact on the climate.

Dr Steve Howard, CEO of The Climate Group and founder of ‘We’re in this Together’ said, “We’re committed to offering people ways to make a real impact on climate change through Together.com. We’ve worked with British Gas to ensure that Zero Carbon is a genuine step forward in delivering more environmental benefits than any other tariff currently available.”

British Gas’s second green energy tariff, Future Energy, offers an alternative green electricity tariff at a premium of just £20 per year. Customers signing up to this tariff will contribute to a green fund which will provide solar panels and other renewable energy technologies to UK schools. Money from the fund will also be invested in development of future renewable technologies and sources.

To sign up customers can call British Gas on 0845 604 0055 or visit www.britishgas.co.uk

After the disastrous corruption of my hard drive last week, I resolved to go and get things sorted. The main issue was our UPS - the battery appears to have had severe issues, just outside the warranty period, and so when the electricity is cut in our area, the PC has around 10 seconds of power. Even if I am sat next to the PC at the time, it can be difficult to save all documents and shut down within that sort of time frame. Another issue that reared its ugly head again was our USB keyboard often not working outside of Windows. This made trouble shooting the non-booting PC a little difficult, to say the least. So Saturday morning, as we were out in town anyway, I picked up a new UPS (with more pretty lights on it than the old one, though only the kettle lead style mains sockets), a nice reliable PS/2 keyboard, and some DVDs to burn off all the downloads, and start making proper back ups again.

I remember watching Tomorrows World a long time ago, and seeing a piece on mains sockets that didn’t have any sockets. That is to say, you could attach a ‘plug’ to any part of the wall, and electricity would be supplied (I’m guessing through induction coils or something similar?).

Well, the next step beyond no specific sockets on a wall to supply electricity is no connection at all!

According to this article over at the BBC, the system uses resonance to transmit power through the air…

Key
1) Power from the mains supply to a copper antenna
2) Antenna resonates at a frequency of around 10MHz, producing EM(electromagnetic) waves
3) Waves of energy from antenna travel up to 2 metres (6.5ft)
4) Electricity picked up by laptop’s antenna, which must also be resonating at 10MHz. Energy used to re-charge device
5) Energy not transferred to laptop re-absorbed by source antenna. People/other objects not affected as they do not resonate at 10MHz

That means, if you were to use the power supply to its maximum output, you’d be using as much electricity as sixteen standard (60w) light bulbs.
Obviously, even with a powerful PC (quad core CPU, quad SLI grafx, fast memory, all OCed, a few hard drives and DVD burners, lights/cathodes and enough fans to keep it all cool) you’ll not actually quite need that much power… yet.
Better to have capacity to spare than to suffer your PC crashing, or in a worst case scenario, have a cheap PSU die and send a nasty spike to kill your m/board…

Anyway, for a proper review of the Tagan 1100 Watt Power Supply, check out here, also includes a little info on the upcoming 2Kw PSUs!

I’ve been updating the pages on all my article sites this evening, so whilst waiting for them to finish uploading, I had some spare time to write these last three posts, in case anyone thinks they are a little off the norm.