Category: Uncategorized

For a long time I was a believer in a single, well-checked bank account. I realised now that I’d never checked most of my spending. I had a rough idea how much it was because I noticed whenever I took out £100 or so from the bank and how long it had been since I…

Here is a very rough comparison of the costs of mains and 18V power tools. The comparisons are between Einhell, Makita, deWalt, Milwaukee and Bosch. The comparisons are rough and ready, using the cheapest available items in each category in Screwfix, Toolstation and Wickes online as sources for the prices. There was no attempt to…

…and the business of transporting manufactured goods across the world. Seeing this video of the container ship Maersk Essex, I couldn’t resist trying to count how many containers she seemed to be carrying. At the rear we see the stack is 19 containers wide and probably 10 containers high (guessing on how deep they go…

Fixed holders for B22 are commonplace. Generally they are ugly fittings, used simply to provide light – cupboards (particularly under stairs), WCs (particularly in commercial premises and schools), etc. They are available as batten holders, on roses with provision for 3-plate wiring and in angled versions. Why are they used? Because they are cheap, convenient,…

Here’s something terribly old-fashioned. It’s a three-bar electric fire. When all three bars on it is rated at 3 kW (3 kilowatts) but with only one bar, the middle one at the moment, its power is 1 kW. I chose to check the power of the fire by using plug-in power meter. Here is the…

This is a condensed summary of a useful but very long YouTube video, the link to which is at the bottom. Four types of plasterboard fixing were tested. Here are the resulting weights held when a single one of each type was used to secure the top of a shelf bracket. Cast aluminium screw-in, 12p…

Geohash is a way of referring to any point on the earth with a single string of characters. It was invented in 2008 by Gustavo Niemeyer and GM Morton. Geohash first splits the equator into 8 sections, each 45° of longitude wide. Then it splits the latitude into 4 sections, again each section 45° of…

The QALocate system is a brilliantly simple way of referring to locations, buildings, routes and structures. At its heart is a way of identifying any point on the earth’s surface using a human-friendly sentence-like group of words. For instance New York is xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; London is xxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Tokyo is xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and Delhi is xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. Qalocate can…

Where do we get light from? In the beginning there was only one source of light – the light from the sun. That light is electromagnetic radiation, emitted by the sun, a very hot body. At first all artificial light sources mimicked the sun because they, too, were produced by hot bodies – by fires,…