GBJab.com

via the Observer blog

Technorati tag: Election, Satire

The Independent assesses the cases for and against various organic foods. Organic milk, pork and chicken are definitely better, whereas with fruit and veg the important thing is to eat, or freeze, them as soon after harvesting as possible.

Technorati tag: Food

Apologies for the disappearance, but Casa Spinneyhead was temporarily without broadband. I was all listless and confused. But, on the plus side, I did finish one book and am halfway through Going Postal already. Reviews to follow.

The dance mat arrived on Wednesday and, despite initial problems because the game was on a blue disk, is now being used. But not by me. Before I’d willingly play a dancing game I’d have to be so drunk as to be a danger to myself and anyone else in the room.

So I’ve been pondering an old idea. It’s impossible to use the dance mat to control GT4 (trust me, I tried) but I reckon it could be used to control movement in a first person shooter. Add a hand held device to control aiming and firing and you’re a little closer to immersive gaming.

How would you do it? I can’t give you wiring diagrams or anything, but I do have a basic idea of how to go about it. First, you’ll need a cheapo PS2 controller to donate its right analogue stick and R1 button, and the circuit board and lead to go with it. You’ll need to fit these into something with a pistol grip. The simplest version would involve a mushroom head over the analogue stick that can be moved around with your thumb to shift POV- whilst the buttons on the dance mat control movement- and the R1 button wired up to the trigger.

The trickiest part is going to be wiring up the shooting and aiming control to the movement control. Even in this thought experiment I have more sense than to damage someone else’s controller, so no wiring into the dance mat lead. What is needed is a dongle. Dance mat leads go into the back of the dongle, which then combines them with the feeds from the hand control and passes the message to the Playstation. There are nine pins on a PS2 controller, far fewer than the possible combinations of controls, so this is also the point when you’d have to sit down with some sort of voltage meter to check what output corresponded to which actions and work out how to combine the signals from two sources so they’d make sense to the console. This is one of the reasons I’m suggesting the right analogue stick and R1 buttons for the pistol, the mat does have an R1 equivalent but no analogue controls, making confusion less likely.

Given a workshop I’d be half tempted to give this a go. As I don’t have one, I’m going to post this half formed idea and see if anyone can understand what I’m trying to say well enough to give it a go.

Technorati tag: Playstation, Hack

One complaint I heard a couple of times yesterday was that the inclusion of energy saving features in houses, whether they be new builds or refurbishments, doesn’t enhance their value. It has to be time to do something about this. Other, sometimes ludicrous, “improvements” can do wonders for a house’s price, so why not ones that save money?

I was looking at gas boilers and found a Powergen stand touting the WhisperGen micro Combined Heat and Power system which I’ve mentioned before. Take up the company’s offer and you can have the CHP installed for around £3000, with a special deal whereby you sell excess electricity back to them. They estimate the system will write off the greater expense of its installation, in saved electric bills and power sold back, within 4 years. But what if you want to move out in 2 years time? You haven’t fully recouped the costs and the new owner will inherit £150 a year (PowerGen’s figures) in electricity savings. Surely that has to be worth something on top of all the other factors that affect a building’s cost? Even after you’ve passed into profit the presence of such money saving tech should add to the value of your house.

Surely anything that makes a house cheaper to run, from insulation through to full energy independence, should make it more valuable. A green home that’s off the grid for most of the year has to be worth more to a buyer than an equivalent sized muggle house whose occupants are being charged to damage the environment. I don’t know where we go to increase the value of green choices, but I say we start here.

Technorati tag: Housing, Combined Heat and Power

A local guide to how you should vote, based upon comparison of your opinion across a (limited) range of issues to those of your MP and the three main parties. This one told me I should vote Lib Dem as well.

via NTK

Technorati tag: Election

The BBC takes a look at Zipcar car rentals, short term, mostly urban and very high tech ways to get a car.

Technorati tag: Transport, Zipcar

The BBC has a collection of photo guides to the Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem front benches.

Technorati tag: Election

Free CSS and HTML templates.

Technorati tag: HTML, CSS

Organic insect control methods.

Technorati tag: Gardening

Three students created a fake scientific paper to test the selection criteria of a conference, and promptly had it accepted.

“we kind of suspected they had low standards […] They ask for submissions, but once you get in you have to pay a $400 (�220) fee to have your paper published.”

Technorati tag: Science

Light emitting diodes could eventually pass the compact flourescent bulb as the energy saver’s lighting of choice. Bulbs are made up of arrays of red, blue and green bulbs which can produce white light up to six times brighter than equivalent power incandescent bulbs. The levels can also be varied to produce mood lighting. At the moment unit costs are far too high for domestic use, but that used to be the main drawback of compact flourescent as well. Development and a growing market should bring them into sensible price bands soon enough.

via Slashdot

Technorati tag: Lighting

The freesound project, ready to sample free sound files.

via Lifehacker

Technorati tag: Creative Commons

The Register takes a look at the spin applied to the Bourgass case and finds, unsurprisingly, that the Government is bullshitting us.

via Honourable Fiend

Technorati tag: Terrorism, Politics