Earthshod Blog

I managed to obtain a suitable donor lamp for my inverter project: £3 from Wilkinsons, plus another £1.99 for the bulb (9W, 14mm. screw base). The hollow china base of the lamp will contain the inverter circuit. When all is finished, you won’t be able to tell that it isn’t an ordinary mains lamp — except for the fact that the power lead will have a 6.3mm. jack plug on the end (this being the connector on which I am standardising for my 12 volt distribution boxes).

Nice hollow base: Plenty of room for circuit.

This is the LED cluster light I was thinking of building before I went ahead with the inverter lamp, and have now completed:

24-LED cluster with 14mm. screw fit base

I have a working fluorescent lamp inverter!
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Whilst searching for power MOSFETs to build a H-bridge, I noticed this 12V microwave oven for in-car use. And whilst the thought of solar-powered cooking did cross my mind briefly, I had to reject it as being ultimately rather impractical. It needs 20 amps even on its low power setting, which is enough to cane one of my 8Ah batteries in 24 minutes.

If I wanted hot food while out and about, I’d be more inclined to consider a Coleman stove. This one is powered by unleaded petrol. It’s well worth the initial investment; petrol works out cheaper in the long run than butane canisters (not to mention there being several different, incompatible types), and is more widely available.

Or if I just wanted to heat up a Cornish pasty, I’d probably wrap it in foil and stick it in the engine compartment!

Behind every great inventor, goes the saying, is a pile of failed experiments. Here I’m going to document some of my cases of finding out the hard way what doesn’t work.
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Well, the lamps in the kit are fine in their own way (once equipped with inline switches; £1.19 from Wilko, and extension leads) but I need something more.

I’m thinking of modifying a readily-available table lamp. This will look nice! There are three ways I could proceed with this.
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BBC reporter Chris Jeavans is embarking on an ambitious project: to see if she can spend a month without buying any disposable plastic items, including packaging — that’s right, she isn’t even going to buy anything with a plastic over-wrap. Re-usable plastic (e.g. food containers) is O.K. though.

Most of the negative response has been from smart-arses trying to point out that computer keyboards &c. are made of plastic — yes, but you don’t throw a keyboard away after typing one document, do you? (I bet I am going to hear from somebody who does exactly that now.)

I say good luck to her. She’s linked on my Blogroll. You can read the initial story here and the blog here.

I purchased this item on promo at my local Maplin store Electronics for £49.99 (reduced from £79.99). The kit contains a 13 watt solar panel, a charging regulator, a 12V sealed lead-acid battery and two LED lamps.
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Stop the presses! For once in my life, I actually agree with something Gordon Brown has said: we need to reduce the amount of food that goes to waste.

Unfortunately, I can predict exactly the way that his message is going to go down with the public: people are going to talk as though they had some sort of “right” to waste food.
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Software piracy does harm businesses, but not the way we are led to believe.

Piracy hurts the big established players much less than it hurts their smaller competitors.

If your business is selling an inexpensive photo editing suite, or an inexpensive office suite, then you are going to lose out to people installing pirate copies of Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word. Nobody ever has to make a single pirate copy of your program. They’re not going to, either — why would a pirate rip off £50 of software when they could rip off £500? And why would any punter pay £50 for a legitimate copy of an office suite which is “compatible” with what businesses use, when they could obtain a pirated copy of the exact same software businesses use for much less than that?

All the big software vendors put up with this because they would still rather you were using a pirate version of their product (and therefore maybe acting as an advertisement to anyone else who might just be honest enough to pay for it) than a legitimate version of a competitor’s product. By turning a blind eye to piracy, the likes of Microsoft, Adobe and Autodesk are effectively ensuring that there is no profit in trying to compete with them on price.

It’s hardly a lost sale for Autodesk if Fred in the Shed is using a knocked-off copy of AutoCad — he’d never have bought it anyway. (But it is a lost sale of some inexpensive CAD tool — which, without the option of piracy, he’d probably have caved in and bought.) But if Fred is using Cheap and Easy Designer 2008, gets a job with an engineering firm, and successfully persuades them that C+ED2008 is good enough, that is a lost sale for Autodesk.

I’m no fan of Caged software — I’d gladly watch the whole industry wither and die. But I want that to be for all the right reasons, and not from cheap below-the-belt shots like this.

If you don’t want to pay £200 for an Operating System, then you don’t have to. If you don’t want to pay £500 for an office suite, then you don’t have to. If you don’t want to pay £500 for a graphics editor, then you don’t have to. But there is no reason to use pirated software.