Battery Saving

Well, I've sussed it now - just refrain from continually looking at your mobile screen, and then on low illumination, and you'll vastly improve your battery life. It's the screen that's the killer, not apps.

Note in the image below how massive drops in battery power sync with screen activity.

The irony is that the vast majority of the screen activity in the image above is checking the GSam Battery Monitor to see how I'm progressing...

Solar PV With Emin's Unmade Bed

Well, I've added up my last four electricity bills (£1,446.26) and added up my last four cheques for the solar feed-in tariff (£1519.55) and I'm £73.29 in credit.

Allowing for the fact we have also used the best part of a 47kg bottle of Calor gas at £65 for the separate gas hob (and that was for more than a year), I'd say we're just above breaking even. That means the house costs nothing to heat or power, despite us having under-floor heating - which is not the most economic means of house heating by any means, but certainly the most comfortable.

Well, that's so long as we keep getting the £0.43 per KWh feed in tariff, which should be till I'm 84, if I live that long. I suppose we could always increase the input value in future years as solar PV arrays become more efficient and cheaper.

I hear Tracey Emin hopes her unmade bed will end up in a museum. I hope it ends up in a municipal dump. To quote Brian Sewell (with whom I am in total agreement): "Contemporary art has largely abandoned intellectual enquiry; it is subject to no formal discipline, nor has it a formal language; it is not concerned with aesthetic or empathic consequences for the viewer and, having no rules, has become unjudgeable self-indulgent by largely self-declared, but wretchedly ignorant and ill-educated practitioners. Art, in most manifestations supported by the public purse, is now neither the learned profession of the High Renaissance and the Age of Reason, nor the skill-based trade of the earlier 20th century - it has become the business of the circus freak managed by the circus barker."

That was from the coda to Sewell's Naked Emperors, an illuminating expose of the contemporary art scene - how it's run, who controls it and how the tax payer funds it. Marcel Duchamp didn't realise that his urinal heralded the collapse of art - it's art, Jim, but not as we know it.

Apparently UK fertility clinics are facing a shortage of sperm, which may force them to accept poorer quality sperm. They could try using Tracey Emin's unmade bed as a source...

Serving Suggestion

Was in the mood for a packet or crisps while watching the World Cup the other night. Pulled these out of the cupboard and noticed the "Serving Suggestion" text at the bottom left (tiny vertical text).

I immediately dashed out to the shops to get a sack of potatoes, some cheese, onions and chives. I guess you have to eat the spuds raw...

Avast Me Hearties

The latest acquisition to be fitted to the oak doors to the 'engine room' and No.1 Son's vestibule. Thank God they arrived while Hay is away.

17 inches (43cm) across and damned heavy, despite being aluminium. The glass is toughened and fairly heavy on its own.

Was considering brass portholes, but the theme of the house is chrome and stainless steel, so aluminium is more in keeping with the look and feel (as well as being less of a bugger to keep shiny). They will require some judicious grinding of the flange at the back to make them fit the door panels as well as the fabrication of a back-plate, but I can get Stuart (our tame fabricator) to do that - perhaps with some light buffing too.

Also got this last week for a song on eBay:

It's a double sheaved block from around the 1950s made of steel, brass and oak - I'm intending to use it to convert the gun tackle hanging over the main minstrel gallery into a luff tackle, but until I get a decent ladder to reach the upper block hanging from the ridge beam, it's being used as an ornament.

The previous owner was going to use it in his house, but it had seized and he didn't know how to free it. It's pretty easy, you just unscrew the brass plaque and hammer out the pin from the other side (with great difficulty if it has become seized), but if you don't know how these things are constructed then it's a bit of a mystery. Some sanding to get rid of a thick layer or orange paint and some beeswax and it now looks like new, or at least a little less stressed.

Hannibal Suarez

If nothing else, the internet is fast!

I'll bet some Liverpool fans are a tad disappointed. 

Overheard in Tehran

Overheard during the Argentina vs Iran World Cup Match:

Presenter: "Reza is his Christian name."

I think I'm going to have to start running an Android Tech Spot on here - been playing some more with the Samsung Note 2:

1. Installed a new launcher - Nova - to replace TouchWiz, the standard Samsung user interface.
2. Installed a few gizmos to help me better understand extending battery life.

Nova gives you so much more control over your user-experience, allowing you to change the way folders are handled, adding gesture features, speeding up transitions, etc.

Here are some shots of the GSam Battery Monitor from yesterday:

As you can see, the battery life has improved dramatically, even when out of the house - as illustrated by the fluctuation in phone signal from about 8:30 to early afternoon, when we went to Stroud. I kept the screen brightness down to an absolute minimum and didn't keep flashing it up every few minutes - only when necessary.

From the following screenshot you can see my location on Wednesday, based on another App that tracks the GSM cells you're using, which is much more efficient way to track your location than the power-hungry GPS function (but useless for navigation).

Took this screenshot on the way back from Dartmouth a few weekends ago and am determined to visit Diggerland some day....

I'm Home Alone for most of the coming week - Hay is having a week in Fowey with her Dad and No.1 Son is off to stay with a mate in Cornwall. Peace and quiet!

Footie Wig Fabrication

Overheard in the House:

Hay: "Dad had a 12 lead ECG this morning."

Chairman: "Is that a bit like a Stratocaster?"

Is Michael Fabricant just Martin Freeman in a really bad wig?

Those who know me know I have little interest in football. I suspect interest in football to be not so much an interest in the game itself, but a willingness to engage in uncritical partizanship for a locale. I've never really lived, as an adult, in one place long enough to become emotionally attached to it, hence the lack of interest in the various football leagues. The nearest I come to having a leaning to a place in the UK is Southport, but I'm not even sure they still have a football club. I do remember they played Everton once in the 60s in the first round of that year's FA Cup, which was a massive event. Needless to say they didn't progress much.

Only when the game is played at a national level do I feel a vague stir in my loins; even then I have to admit it is only a small stir, and I put that down to being widely travelled as Merchant Navy officer. I will, however, support Holland and England - the former due to me being born there and out of a strong sense of family allegiance, the latter due to it having been my home for the last 50 odd years. If the two were to play each other, then family allegiance would take precedence, as I'm sure it does in many foreign-born Brits. I'm obviously somewhat tribalist at heart - I think most men are - but it does give me a sense of unease; it's a bit like biting the hand that feeds you.

Silent Harley Nuisance Calls from Hodgson

Must get a push-button phone, even if just temporarily.

I keep getting automated nuisance calls from some outfit that wants to sell me a new gas boiler - not that I have a boiler anyway, or even gas (except Calor). The calls are incessant. I want to get through to someone to tell them to bugger off, but in order to be put through I have to press a set of numbers. Of course my phone is an old 1950s rotary dial phone, so I'm stymied for now. So much for the Telephone Preference Service.

I honestly don't know why I answer the calls - it's not as if anyone other than BT knows the number. All my calls are on my mobile.

Got another app - GSM Battery Monitor - which tells you exactly what's burning battery power. It transpires it wasn't Tasker that was eating up the battery, but me continually flashing up the screen to check whether Tasker was working. Seems the screen is the single largest power drain. May set Tasker to read my emails and SMS messages, rather than me looking at them.

I see Roy Hodgson has ruled out resignation - I guess that's him sacked then by the time he touches down in London.

Harley Davidson have made an electric motorcycle. Just doesn't seem right somehow - it's the sound that's the integral part of the Harley experience. Could you imagine Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda siding off silently to 'Born to be Wild'?

Battery-Hungry Battery-Saving Apps

Having rooted my mobile and mucked about with KitKat, I decided to purchase an App called Tasker from Google Play. Tasker automates a lot of functions on your phone, like automatically switching Wi-Fi on when you get home by sensing your local phone mast signal and other nifty stuff like that.

I wrote several battery saving profiles, such as only switching on GPS when I open an App that requires GPS, only switching on mobile data when away from a Wi-Fi zone and opening an App that needs data on to function, switching off sound at night, etc, etc.

Yesterday I had cause to travel up to London for the day to attend a satellite communications event in the West End and was horrified at the rate at which my battery was draining. It would seem that having all these tasks running in background was killing my battery - got home with only 10% remaining, whereas I can normally spend a day out with 40% remaining.

Doppelganger Monoglots

Is it my imagination, or is Genesis' Tony Banks slowly turning into Brian Sewell?

Apparently 95% of British monoglots think it's important to speak English in order to be considered British. What about the 4% or so of Welsh who can't speak English? More importantly, what about the Scouusers, Brummies, Geordies and Glaswegians with their impenetrable accents that are based on English, but you can't actually recognise it as such when speaking with them?