Daniel Kendell

So, how do you run out of carbon offsets? For that matter, what kind of carbon offset will 50p buy me anyway? I mean, it can’t really cost a mere ( 50p x $number_of_rockers ) to “offset” ALL the evil anti-green-enviro-stuff entailed in putting on the festival, if it costs ( £10 x $number_of_rockers ) just for Ticketmaster to sell the damn tickets over t’intertubes.

Now, Download is put on by LiveNation, and I had a suspicion that Ticketmaster were owned by LiveNation. A quick google has told me that they weren’t bought but “merged”. So yeah, my “outrage at the evil faceless corporation queezing the blood from the innocent” nerve is running on overdrive at the moment.

Just spotted this on Google Maps. One of the boats in Fareham Creek, just down the road from where I live has reflected perfectly into the camera. Looks quite striking.

The sun shining through my bedroom window is now enough that it is starting to wake me in the morning before my alarms (yes, all five of them) go off. So I thought I’ll pull out that solar panel I so ingeniously bought during the winter!

Even at the time I took that picture, it’s not terribly sunny but I was getting 11.3 volts out of it, in direct sunlight I got 20-odd so I’m quite happy with it.

Big-ass battery, heavy-ass battery too. Charge controller on top (duct-tape again), nothing hooked up to the load at the moment, need to get me some car-stylee sockets and a MacBook Pro charger. Though I may grab an inverter and give it a go with a few things. But I’d rather not take 12vdc turn it into 240vac (or whatever it is now) just to turn it into 17.5vdc!

In the mean time it’s just been powering a breadboard, again duct-taped to it, with a 5v regulator powering my Arduino via a spare USB PCI backplate I had knocking around. The Arduino just slowly fades a green LED via the successfully constructed Power LED driver circuit. Only, I don’t have an appropriate R3 (see diagram on previous link) for my Luxeon stars (d’oh) so it’s a bit superfluous at the moment. But all that together, Rube Goldberg would be proud!