Unfortunately this weeks CATE challenges have left me scratching my head and wondering how on earth I’m going to able to achieve any of them. Add to the fact that I seem to have worked myself into a cold and not much was done at all this week other than lay on the sofa playing PlayStation.
Challenge : Got to brick a cistern or two
Put quite simply this challenge is impossible for either myself or Siân to do as our toilet cistern tanks are embedded in a wall and have no access to them what-so-ever without taking a sledge hammer to the wall. As much as I’m fond of CATE challeneges, breaking the wall down seemed one step to far. So sadly our cistern system is exactly the way it was when we moved in. But on a plus note, our toilets are eco-toilets anyway, flushing with less water than the average toilet flush.
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02.Apr.07 
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So after a long wait I have finally received my new toy, the much anticipated Sony PlayStation 3, or PS3 and it is almost everything it should be. Firstly the unit itself is surprisingly big, as big as an Xbox 360 and massive compared to my old slim-line PS2. But the “black-box” sits nicely next to the HDTV it is coupled too so I’ll let the size go for now.
All previous PlayStation’s were plug-in and play, or you got it out of the box, plugged it in and started playing. The PS3 is a slightly different matter. After un-packing the machine and plugging in the power, HDMI and optical cable (for audio), the system comes to life and then you need to tell it who you are; create an avatar; set-up networking (in my case connecting it to the AirPort 801.11g/b network); register on the PlayStationNetwork; set up an account for buying games online (including downloading free demos) and give Sony all my financial details (which I skipped) if I want to activate one-click buying; let the PS3 detect the HDTV video modes (of which it chose 1080i instinctively for my TV); and then and only then the Cross Media Bar (XMB) appears and the system is set up.
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29.Mar.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
mon•o•cul•ture
noun
the cultivation of a single crop in a given area.
Monoculture, a new short film from director Jason Cuddy for Screen East and the UK Film Council, is a story about a man (Daniel Ainsleigh) with no joy until he grows a magical plant that brings colour and happiness into his world. Polaris Digital (well me really) have provided 32 visual effects shots for this short film. Our task was to provide a computer generated plant to several key shots throughout the film, with one catch - we only had two weeks to complete the 32 shots.
Impossible? Not if you’re us. I got very busy early on in the production advising the director and producer how they needed to shoot the scenes so that our work would be easier. During January the production shot the ten-minute film in Suffolk at the same airfield where Space Cadets (Channel 4) was shot two years ago.
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20.Mar.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Last week was been an amazingly busy week (or couple of weeks really), so I haven’t been out and about as much as usual. This hasn’t meant that I have given up on CATE challenges, far from it, but I haven’t has as much time as I would have liked to write about my progress.
But now is a new week and I have completed the first weeks challenges rather well. So here is a little summary of what I have been doing to save our environment in the last week.
Firstly we have the “Elevators are best ‘lift’ alone” challenge. Well I can report that I have avoided the lift in our building 100% over the last seven days and now the challenge is over I will continue saving our £6 a week from now on. I am starting to stride up the 94 steps in a rather effortless manner, now leaping two steps for the majority of the ascent. This sudden fit of healthyness has encouraged me to consider (at least) doing much more exercise.
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20.Mar.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
One of my favourite BBC TWO programmes is returning for a second series next Thursday at 20:30 on BBC TWO (thank god they haven’t moved it to BBC ONE). Dick Strawbridge and his family spent the first series building their super green house, complete with independent natural spring water supply, solar-thermal heating for water, hydroelectric and wind power generation, composting toilet, vegetable garden, pigs (that are eaten), environmentally friendly greenhouse and finally their own bio-diesel plant in the garage.
From what I have seen, series two continues from where we left of. Dick is now teaching all he has learnt to other green minded folk out there, the ones like us who want to be green and organic but have no idea where to start. Hmm, this sounds rather familiar. Oh yeah, Crap At The Environment is also aiming to achieve the same task, maybe we should join forces on this one. Any members of CATE reading this should definitely be in on Thursday night to watch It’s Not Easy Being Green, however this programme is also great inspiration to anyone else who wants to take their personal environment into consideration.
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16.Mar.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
… not using the lift. As part of my commitment to the CATE project, set up by Mark Watson, I have become one of several ministers for CATE projects and one of this weeks many tasks is not to use the lift. But why? Firstly the lift is just plain lazy if you’re only travelling between one and four floors (accept if your unwell or disabled). That is a lot of potential energy going to waste and a lot of calories that won’t get burnt. Instead a power-station has to pump a few grammes of carbon into the atmosphere to get you to the third floor.
I figured out that if Siân and I stopped using the lift in our building for a year, we would save a lot of energy. To figure out how much energy saved, I had to predict (educated guess) some values and the margin of error would make most physicist’s cry, but it does give an good idea of exactly how much power can be saved. So get a cup of tea, and prepare to be amazed.
To work all this out I am using a typical person living in a flat on our floor (fifth floor) in our building because that provides a good average for City population, plus I know the values for most of the variables. Before we start, we need to ascertain all the variables and constants.
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13.Mar.07 Uncategorized Comments (6)
Today Polaris Digital began broadcasting our studio playlist to the world using a Digital Internet Broadcast (DIB). We’re currently broadcasting at 128kbps at 44KHz, although depending on the popularity I might have to lower the quality.
I have been playing with Internet Broadcasting for a while now, albeit on our local network. Unfortunately we only have a 8Mbp/s connection to the web, and that’s downstream. Upstream we barely get 400Kbp/s which would be just enough to carry two streams, with not much left over for anything else.
The answer to this problem is to place the live broadcasting server locally and then place a relay server on our internet server, located in Germany on a very very fast 10Gbp/s link. With that kind of bandwidth I can support well over a 100 listeners.
The way the system currently works is as follows. Locally on my desktop machine I have a local copy of iTunes running with NiceCast broadcasting to the world. This broadcast is picked up by ShoutCast on my live server, which is the one you’re all connecting too. Imagine my desktop is the the studio and the Polaris Digital web server is a satelite, my desktop machine is uplinked to the satelite that then re-broadcasts to anyone who points their dish (music player) in the right direction.
So from 9am to 9pm every day you can listen live to the music we’re playing out, and we’ll take requests too, if you leave them as a comment on this post. We will also be accepting your own content/programming to schedule in the coming months, more on that soon.
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07.Mar.07 Uncategorized Comment (1)
Over a year ago I wrote about the success of Will and Steve with their E4 sting (you can see it here). The sting Will and Steve created made it to the final shortlist and has been shown on E4 countless times between programming, usually late at night.
For the uninitiated, a sting is a short piece of video that sits between scheduled programming and advertising breaks to help puntuate the programme. The aim of a sting is to promote the brand/channel quickly, whilst informing the viewer that the main programming has ended for a break, or is returning from a break.
Most commercial channels have very dull stings, you only have to look at ABC1 or ITV1 to see how dull. E4 has always gone in another direction, letting their viewers create the stings for them in an annual E-Sting competition. The winner of the competition is commissioned to create several more stings, but the finalists stings are also shown on E4.
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06.Mar.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
From tickets and fast trains to grand cities and mountain ranges, the unofficial name for the massive project Siân and I are going to undertake this summer. If you have not been keeping up with this blog over the last few weeks, then this will all be very new.
In July 2007, we are going to investigate the ease and comfort in which people can travel around western and central Europe without the use of a personal car or planes. Why would we do such a thing? Simply because the amount of carbon a single flight to europe would generate is more than our flat generates in a whole year.
I believe that you can get abroad without flying, particularly to the popular European tourist spots, so to prove it is possible, we are going to visit most of major attractions. The journey is currently being plotted as there are a lot of unknown variables at present, but we know for sure that we will be seeing Lille, Brussels, Amsterdam, Köln, Frankfurt, Berlin, Prague, Munich, Vienna, Rome, Milan, Turin, Zurich, Nice, Bordeaux and Paris.
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02.Mar.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Mark Watson, author, actor, comedian and closet environmentalist (IMHO) has launched a new initiative on MySpace to generate social awareness about the environment and environmental issues. Obviously being very concerned about our planets health myself, added to the fact that Siân now refers to me as ‘Dave Angel, eco-warrior‘, it is probably no surprise that I was very interested in what Mark had to say on the subject.
To be honest, I didn’t know much about Mark Watson until this year when I started listening to his show ‘Mark Watson Makes the World Better‘ on BBC Radio 4, which in turn I only discovered after going to see Tim Minchin at the Salford Lowry Theatre and following him (not physically) to Mark Watson’s show on Radio 4. So… By this point I was hoping to have got an introduction about how we’re all ‘Crap At The Environment‘, but currently have only managed to re-enforce the six degrees of seperation theory and name-drop some famous people I wished I knew personally. Let me continue…
‘Crap At The Environment‘ (CATE) is a new project launched by Mark Watson on his MySpace page. Mark has realised that we are crap at environmental issues as a nation, even as a planet. This isn’t because we do not care, or believe the action of one will not change the actions of billions, but rather we have no conception of how to achieve anything to help the environment. Just as you think you have a faint idea of what to do, the whole thing is made more confusing when one group of people say one thing and then another group say the complete opposite. I mean where does one start?
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28.Feb.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
