Our new house was somewhat overlit when we moved in: if all the lights had been working and turned on at once, they would have drawn nearly 1.5kW. There were twelve lights that weren't working, because of dead transformers or blown bulbs, but such was the redundancy that replacing those didn't seem urgent. It did, however, give me an opportunity to switch a huge variety of halogen bulbs to LEDs or compact fluorescents. more
When I set up a landline with British Telecom, back when we started renting Catherine St in 2010, I enabled a number of features. A few days later I received five different pieces of post, each informing me that a particular feature had been enabled, along with separate pieces of mail informing me that my account had been set up and the landline activated. more
I've always carried a small backpack with me pretty much everywhere I go. This is perhaps a hold-over from school and uni, continued because I always want to have a couple of books on me. These days, however, there's a lot of other stuff in there as well. more
My little Acer Aspire One netbook is increasingly feeling underpowered, so I'm contemplating getting an ultrabook. more
Last week we went on a tour of Didcot A. Commissioned around 1970, this is a coal-fired power station capable of generating around 2GW, with four 500MW units. The tour lasted more than two hours and we got to see at least something of most of the parts of the station. more
I've just acquired my third digital camera, a Canon Ixus 220 HS (aka Elph 300 HS in the US). Comparing this with my first digital camera, a Canon Powershot S330 bought almost exactly a decade ago, provides a nice illustration of how much camera technology has improved. more
When it comes to "green" personal (rather than public) transport solutions, the only real options seem to be bicycles and electric cars, but I think the continuum in between those deserves more attention. more
Motivated by Google taking a dislike to my book reviews, I've done some thinking about the latest change in its search algorithm. more
My web site dannyreviews.com has ranked well in Google searches for more than a decade, but in the last few months Google has taken a dislike to it. This appears to be a result of the search algorithm change called "Panda". more
