I was going through some CD’s in order to create a western style soundtrack for a potential camping trip over the weekend, local monsoon permitting; anyway I came across the theme tune for The Virginian. The start of it is the start of the James Bond Theme!

There you go.

Just thought I’d follow up my previous post on installing energy saving bulbs.

I picked up an energy saving GE R50 Spotlight to try out in the house it cost me about £4 from Tesco. I currently need 5 of these for Rebekah’s room and under the stairs. The good news is that unlike the GE R63 that I tried in the hall way, this one worked. The bad news is that it was too long! Too long? I really wasn’t aware that there is a length issue on bulbs. This is part of what makes the transition to Energy Savers far from straight forward.

Anyway, looking online I found that Megaman are doing a good line in bulbs that are almost a perfect replacement… the downside is that they are almost twice the price of the GE equivilents! They also have some good dimmable options too!

I also thought I’d hilight something that Ken said in the comments of the previous post… Basically that there is a ‘Warm Front’ grant that covers energy saving costs for Bulbs, Boilers, and Insulation for those recieving “Working Family Tax credits”.

I went to the Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge last night. I was up there for 9pm ready to see the sunset. I’ve not see the sunset at the stones before and to be honest they are not in the right position for it!
There was a small amount of cloud which cleared relatively quickly and the rest of the night was pretty clear and dry. It only rained for about 10 seconds at around 9:30pm.
The stones were busy, mainly I think because Glastonbury is upon us and many people will be en-route. I have to say that security seemed a bit edgy. I’m not sure if they were expecting trouble or that they were concerned about the numbers but there did seem to be something in the air. There seemed to be a lot more nobs than usual and there was an awful lot more rubbish left lying around. All in all I didn’t think it was the best solstice celebrations.
The sky was clear right through to 4am and the the dark storm clouds rolled in. By 4:30 the sky was pretty covered and the chance of seeing a decent sunrise looked very very remote. Also, the chance of getting soaked look very very high. So we cut our loses and head for home.

I finally got round to replacing my lightbulbs with energy savers. I’m not particularly subscribed to the whole climate change thing however, I do believe everyone has a responsibility to use less energy, create less waste, and recycle more where they can. Basically, if we can we should. I also thing industry should do more to relieve the burden from individuals. If nothing else, the panic of climate change is starting to make industry do that. For example, my frozen peas now come in packaging that only takes 3 years to breakdown in a landfill as opposed to the 100 years that the previous packaging takes ( I only know this because it says so on the packaging! ) Now, although placing it in landfill is still not ideal, the massive reduction in time is a good start and involves no change from consumers.
So back to the bulbs… I was thinking that I really should change all my lightbulbs and started looking into it. On the whole it’s a relatively painless task; you can replace most normal bulbs pretty easily, and there are a number of different looking bulbs depending on whether they are to be on show or not.

The first problem I had was size… many of the energy savers a bigger and I have a few light fittings where the bulbs wouldn’t fit. However, I also found that many of the bulbs had a removable cover that makes it look less like a fluorescent light and more like a normal bulb. Removing the cover makes the bulb fit.

Second problem is spotlights… energy saving spotlights are hard to come by depending on the size. I need R50’s and R63’s - R80’s were easy to find! I tried an R63 and it didn’t work. Also, many of these spots don’t work in a downlighting situation

Third problem is dimmers, the majority of energy savers do not work with dimmer switches. You can get them, but only as standard shape. So not only do you need to change the bulbs, but you also need to consider how you use the light. For example, all the lights in Rebekah’s room are downlighting spots which are on a dimmer. We use the dimmer to allow us to control the light during the night. So ultimately we need to remove the dimmer and replace it with a bedside lamp that is either much lower wattage or a special dimmer bulb.

Halogens… there is a solution but again not for dimmable and not where size is an issue.

I know it’s been a while since I posted or did anything on this project, but I finally got round to doing something again today.

Firstly, I wrote a lot of code for DDR back in October 2006, I had a good few programming sessions on it, and then as usual faded away. I coded most of the NPC’s AI; Follow Liege, Follow Foe, Go after Object, Go home, Do Nothing, Approach a Lord, Pickup Objects on their travels, and Move. I coded the moving mist and wild thing regeneration. I also coded most of the battle code… and then I got distracted by shiny objects.

Since then I’ve changed computers and compiler; so loading up the project yesterday I found that it didn’t compile in a big way. So tonight I have mainly spent all the time fixing compiler issues… and there are an awful lot of them.

One of the other problems I have had with the project is that the graphics are getting so complicated that while running in debug mode, the project runs a little slow. I’ve been putting up with it because it isn’t so bad in Release mode but slowly it has been getting me down and distracting me from the issues. It’s hard to test logic if the frontend isn’t working properly.

I’ve wanted to move the graphics subsytem to make use of the hardware. By moving the 2d logic to use 3d cards I would be able to massively speed everything up. However, I’m not a 3d programmer and again the task just keeps distracting me away from things.

I had a word with Jon Alma today who has been working on the Legends Engine and hopefully he is going to knock up a quick wrapper for some OpenGL stuff that will allow me to move the graphics forward and solve the speed issues.

So today I felt that I made a little progress…