PureGin.org

This week I gave a talk for the Vancouver Island Java User Group on integrating Apache Solr search into web applications. Since the group is, of course, Java-focused, I didn't dwell overly much on Drupal except to demo a non-trivial example of integration showing some of the more advanced capabilities of Solr search, including faceted search, search spelling correction, "find similar content", and so on - all available out of the box with Robert Douglass, pwolanin, claudiu.cristea et al.'s excellent ApacheSolr module for Drupal.

Slides are available here.

Since moving into our house in Aug 2007, we've been trying pretty hard to reduce our energy consumption, in particular our use of electricity.

Our house is a detached single-family dwelling, built in 1998, with one finished floor of 2000 square feet (186 square metres) with a full partially finished basement of 2000 square feet. Since our only energy source is electricity, the main challenge is to reduce energy wasted for space heating (using conventional electric baseboard heaters throughout) and hot water (using a conventional storage type electric water heater).

The graph at the right shows our average daily consumption per two month billing cycle for the past 2.5 years or so. We've managed to cut our electricity use by just under 20% over the first year's baseline, saving a total of approximately $620 (at an average price of 7 cents per kWh).

Part of this savings in the past year is due to a relatively mild winter on the South Coast of British Columbia in 2009/2010. On the other hand, we had an extended cold snap last winter (2008/2009).

The rest of the savings I attribute to

This has got to be one of the simplest little hardware hacks I've done, but perhaps also one of the most effective.

The problem:

I've owned four generations of Mac notebooks, and several other Apple products besides, all featuring variants of the same basic power adaptor design: the squarish, rounded white brick with flip-out wings for wrapping the low-voltage line for storage. Many of these power adaptors have not stood up well to everyday use - though to be fair, I do mean I use them pretty solidly every day. One of the early adaptors for my iBook developed a short on the 120/240v side. The magsafe adaptor on my latest laptop, a Macbook Pro, had the low-voltage line pull out of the rubber strain relief sleeve attached to the brick, exposing the internal wiring.

Something I did about a month ago really opened my eyes. I was riding the wave of complacency, just like everyone... we'd been talking (for years, literally) about getting Canada Post to stop deliving junk mail. I happened to chat with our postal delivery person as he was dropping off mail for the neighbourhood, and he said it would be sufficient to tape a little note inside our mailbox: "Please, no un-addressed bulk mail". I ran home, wrote one up, and taped it inside our mailbox - it took five minutes. Unbelievably, this has reduced the amount of paper in our blue and yellow bags to almost nothing! All of these years I've been lugging these stupid ads home, cursing, chucking them into the recycling, and hauling them out to the curb every two weeks. We had FULL blue bags and half full yellow bags almost every two weeks. This amounts to a stack of paper waste about 10 inches in height, once per two weeks, or about 4 kg. Now, almost nothing. I can't believe I've been such a chump for so many years.

Here in rural Cedar / Yellow Point, we've had weekly curbside pickup of food-waste for something over a year now. Some stats have recently been published which I found quite interesting. In case you don't know, the idea of the curbside food-waste pickup is to separate 'garbage' into multiple 'streams'. Everyone is probably practicing 're-cycling' to some extent - separating materials such as paper, aluminium, ferrous metals such as 'tin cans', and plastics, from 'garbage'.