Solar Power

We installed a solar powered hot water system just over a year ago now. I was tracking and getting alarmed at the increase in our spending on gas and electricity. So after a year we have seen some quite dramatic change in the bills.

Yearly Gas and Electricity bills

Some of the reduction we be because of changes in the household. Jen has been working this year so there is normally nobody at home during workdays.
But we have seen dramatic increases in gas prices, though these have come down recently.

Happy Christmas

Want to wish you all seasons greetings. As usual we have created a letter.

Radio Times changeing xmltv ids

Just found the the radio times have changed the xmltv ids of 3 BBC channels, three, four, and News-24. These are now:

choice.bbc.co.uk -> bbcthree.bbc.co.uk
knowledge.bbc.co.uk -> bbcfour.bbc.co.uk
news-24.bbc.co.uk -> news.bbc.co.uk

So if you have mythtv you will need to update you channels file.

When everything is Interlectual Property

Ok so at the moment we are haveing fun a games trying to bend ancient Copyright rules to match the digital age. But what happens when 3D printers are really commonplace. Neil Stephenson touched on this in his book The Diamond Age. where the invention of molecular assemblers allowed anyone to make anything.

If this comes about then the value of things becomes almost zero, and all the value is in the design or in the instructions to your printer to make something.

What worries me is that if we don’t sort out the current legal mess with copyright on music and video we will still be fighting these battles when this sort of technology is invented. With the impact on society many time that it is now.

History and Fiction

I recently started trying to read Quicksilver by Neil Stephenson. I really enjoyed Cryptonomycon, Snow crash, Zodiac, and The Diamond Age. So expectation was high, but I found the mix of historical fact and invention of a fictional narrative confusing in terms of what was, and was not real. This is the first of 3 novels called The Baroque Cycle.

A friend had loaned me Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. And I found I was reading about many of the same events that were in Quicksilver but with at least some integrity to history.

The third book in this related series is Music of the Primes by Marcus Du Satoy. Marcus hosted a logical games slot on BBC4 called Mind Games, which I enjoyed but now seems to have been chopped. The book however is essentially a history of the Riemann Hypothesis. Now this is really another cut on the some of the same history as the other two, but with the focus of just the mathematics, though many other parallel events are considered that have a context relevance.

In my opinion the two real histories leave the fictional history far behind, but I do hope that Neil Stephenson returns to real novels soon.