When I think about it, I can remember more games I used to play on my Commodore 64 than I expect to.  Here’s what I’ve managed to recall.

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Vestas, the wind turbine manufacturing plant in Newport on the Isle of Wight is set to close this week despite a government pledge only hours earlier to build a green economy. There is a Friends of the Earth campaign about it here, urging the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills to save the UK’s wind power industry.

All of this comes at a time when the UK govenment has been accused of having an energy policy that’s too focused on wind power, and when companies trying to increase the UK’s supply of wind power such as Ecotricity are fighting years-long planning battles with local councils to install any. Dorset, the county where I live, has no wind turbines at all and one planning proposal was recently turned down by the council despite having been recommended by their own planning officers.

It’s a mad world.

While I was waiting in a queue at the Post Office, I was remembered something I thought while waiting in a queue on the phone to BT.  If there are fewer people serving at the desks or answering the phones and more people in the queues, and this becomes the norm, the people queueing will come to think of their time speaking with a cashier/representative as extremely valuable indeed.  No-one wants to have to re-join the queue and start again.  Having spent all that time waiting they now want to get everything off their chest and sorted out in this exchange and be done with it.

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This is a font called Spranq Eco Sans, based on Vera Sans.  The idea is that the little circular holes in the lines making up the letters can save up to 20% of the ink used for printing it out.

I think the idea is to get people to think about how much ink they use, rather than to get everyone to switch over to this font.

Found via EcoGeek.

We have some old Super-8 cine film reels and have been looking around at places that will convert it to something newer e.g. DVD.  It looks like there are two main methods:

1. Frame-by-frame conversion, where each frame is scanned separately and the frame rate adjusted by occasionally doubling frames.  This seems to be quite expensive!
2. Filming a projected image.  This sort of conversion is done at (for example) Aarchive.  This is much cheaper of course and there is a shop within walking distance that can convert it like this, so that’s most likely what we’ll do.

Anyone have positive/negative experiences about either method?