Standard light connector

Anyone who does DIY and installs new lights will know as soon as you unscrew the old light fitting you'll see a mass of wires and a connection block. Often due to the way UK ring-main works (6 wires) and then if you have a spur then there are 9 in total. Quite a mess to then try and connect in 3 wires for the new light fitting.

Therefore, what I would like to see is a standard, compact in-line connector, as is common in car lighting. The design needs to be safe, and have different shaped plastic (curve on one side etc) so it can only be inserted with the Earth, Live, Neutral connected correctly.

Clear Product Origin Labeling

Just bought from Tesco, Daily Care Toothpaste. What I didn't realise until I got home and read the small print was that it had come all the way from China!

My usual Colgate is made in the EU (Poland). I would rather buy UK materials+production, but there don't seem to be any left (we used to have a toothpaste and even Brillo pad down the road).

Therefore, I put out a call for legislation to have compulsory labeling of:

• Product origin in country name in large letting, equal size to product name/description.
• The origin must not be disguised ("Scottish" Salmon produced in Russia, packaged in Scotland etc)
• Km from the top destinations (as a product made in Beijing is 3,700 Km from Tibet).

Supporting UK car production

UK Car production:

For someone who would like to support local industry, for both locality and co2 environmental issues (not importing their car from Japan) a website showing car production in the UK and Europe of popular models would be very useful. A wiki with this information would be most useful, allowing everyone to keep it up2date.

The UK production I know about:
* Honda Jazz, production just moved to Swindon
* Nissan - Sunderland
* Ford - Dagenam

Modern timezone for the UK? British Standard Time / Central European Time

The BBC had an interesting article the other week: Tundra time call in clocks debate. It is great the BBC gave some coverage to this safety and productivity issue (also sanity, daylight helps well-being!)

"Sir Alistair Horne said it was "absolutely crazy" for the UK to have a different time zone from the rest of central Europe."

He is absolutely right, we all deal with Europeans, travel there on holidays, and then because the UK is still -1 behind Central European time we miss meetings (13:00 telecon with German customer? oops, I'm on lunch break then). Wikipedia has a page on GMT showing Western European Time on the map so you can get a better idea.

There is a fantastic independent write up of the 1968-71 UK British Standard Time trial, it was a great sucess. With 2,700 less KSI (Killed or Seriously Injured) over the period the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents reports (section 2.1 in report below), it's not possible to argue with that figure.

"This Note provides an overview of the pros and cons of British Summer Time, as well as details of the latest attempts to change it in the UK.": British Standard Time 68-71

Workaround is start work @ 8:00, and come home at 16:00, the only problem is children aren't allowed to arrive at school before 9:00. Interestingly, 1.3 indicates Norway and Sweden are doing exactly as I suggest already (people work earlier hours in winter months to make the most of the light).

The people who would moan about this reform are likely the same bunch that did last time, the rural crowd saying that this means they have to milk cows in the dark.. (why not just milk them 1 hour later?), and the parents who don't like waking their children up when there isn't a complete sun visible outside (they would rather they walk home in the dark and get run over).

Another post on this matter: RoSPA Calls For Switch To Ligher Nights to Save Lives

BBC article from 2003: Safety call as clocks go back

BBC article from 2006: Clock change 'would save lives'

Daily Telegraph 2006: Majority in favour of double summertime

The Guardian 2006: Whatever happened to Double Summer Time?

For those that argue we are placed to deal with both the US and Asia from our time-zone, just compare the US West coast with Asia/Australia east coast, (both sides of pacific) why not nudge our time-zone to fit best?

Los Angeles is GMT -8
Sydney is GMT +10

See the timezone map.

You can see where I am going with this. The blue column at GMT+1 is perfectly aligned to take advantage of this working day :)

It's also a small co2 issue, there is one hour longer every day now that everyone has to have lights on.

It is inevitable that as is always some are hostile to change, but standardisation and safety improvements really seal this one for me. I say bring it on ;)

p.s. I won't get on to this point this time around, but standardising on driving on the same side as the rest of the Europe is also a good thing (like Sweden did, switching in the 60s). Metric is also one worth moving too (no more Miles and Yards signs, yay!)

Even the EU shores up Adobe Flash now

In a bizarre twist of fate, Viviane Reding one of the non-democratically elected EU Commissioners put up her weekly video entitled "Protecting privacy in the digital age", in the privacy invading Adobe Flash format. This gives a privacy problem like the following screenshot (example I'd saved, she's not using youtube from what I could tell):



I've written about the security and privacy flaws in Flash before. Due to Flash being a proprietary binary that the user has no control over, it can happily just ignore all the cookie and privacy settings in the browser. Happily sending and receiving cookies, as well as maintaining a large set of cached files and data locally that the user is unaware of.

All we need now is for the information commissioner to advocate Adobe Flash, seeing as he's already using unique google tracking cookies to monitor the populace for two years.

I wonder how much/commission_barroso/reding/_bin/favideo/skins/ClearOverAll.swf cost us all to make, on top of the £556 price for a copy of Adobe "Flash Pro CS4" (dabs.com price). Not a good use of our EU taxpayers money!

Eco driving from 28 to 41 mpg

Having just travelled a monster 2500 mile trip around many destinations in Europe in my Audi I am pleased to say I managed to adjust my driving style and cut my petrol consumption by 32%. In the UK I was achieving around 28 mpg (10 km per litre), with my new approaches I increased that to 41 mpg (14.5 km per litre)!! So over my 2500 miles this saved me £128 pounds (1280 km saved, 10 km per litre at £1.2)

Top tips:

1. Don't leave the engine idle, turn it off if in stationary traffic.
2. Cruse in 6th gear, watch the revs and take it easy.
3. Follow lorries in the slow lane.
4. Don't overtake cars to gain 20 metres.
5. Roll down hills, take out of gear and watch the engine on revs saved ;)
6. Coast up to lights that are on red, rather than racing and then braking. If you're lucky they will change to green and you will have saved momentum.
7. Deal with motorways which are racing, then braking, then racing along again by cruising and evening out the traffic flow. Saves the brakes as well as fuel!

Driving a UK car in Europe on the right side of the road is quite easy actually, I was surprised, the hard bit is usually positioning the car between the line markings in a LHD car, but as RHD I didn't have any probs at all. Overtaking a parked bus is bit harder as view is obscured looking left through. It is a shame Germany does not have cats-eyes on any of its autobanns, especially as some are not lit!

The BBC has recently published an eco-driving article.

If the UK switched to drive on the same side as Europe it would make sense..

The benefit of foreign TV

Travelling in the Netherlands and Scandinavia it's amazing just how good everyone's second language (English) is. It's hard to find someone who doesn't speak English. One off the reasons is that for films and other TV programmes which originate in English, they are not dubbed into a local language -- so everyone gets practice daily understanding English. For countries like Germany which dub foreign programmes into their local language this is a shame as generations will grow up missing the opportunity to understand another language as well as the Scandinavians and Dutch do!

UK driving on right hand side of road

The Romans drove on the left, as does the UK and Japan, but 72% of the world drives on the right side of the road, with Sweden switching to the right in the 60s. Should the UK follow suit and allow us to import our cars from Europe? See wikipedia for the origins, but being right-handed suits having your right hand potentially free because you are driving on the left side of the road. Generally boats all drive on the right side of shipping lanes. Also planes on a collision course towards each other each turn left to avoid a collision.

Like eating with Knife and Fork, those right-handed take Knife, the more complex of the two to operate in their right hand. How does this compare for driving? Having driven on both the left and right I always find myself crusing with my right hand on the steering wheel, which shows that steering is best suited to to being right-hand drive like the UK is currently. The gears are very easy to operate on a stick or automatic in either hand I find.

Time for the UK to switch to be the same as the rest of the EU?

Time to prohibit chewing gum?

As chewing gum will always get dropped and stuck on pavements by a minority, is it time to prohibit chewing gum sales in the UK/EU? Singapore banned it back in 1992, the ban remains to this day (although medicinal gum is allowed). I wouldn't miss it, and it would not be "nanny state" ban. In fact, dog dirt is just as much a problem, if only the culture would change, and owners would tidy up after their pooches!

European travel adapters

Isn't it frustrating countries still use different sockets. The US/Japan ones are rather flimsy and have a trailing earth wire to connect sometimes. The UK ones are great, with a longer earth pin which "unlocks" the live+neutral pin holes in the socket. The Swiss ones are inconveniently slightly differently spaced round pins compared to France and Germany. The UK shaver 2-pin adapters are also slightly larger round pins which wont fit into standard French sockets!

My "European" travel adapter doesn't fit in Swiss sockets, I need to buy a separate 3 pin adapter for while I am there!

Why don't countries support a multi-compatible socket for the moment? Then in the future just standardise on the safer UK design of plug/socket.

When will Microsoft open up their OS to customisation?

One way Microsoft could improve their strategy is to offer users and PC sellers choices in the way the OS is setup, what components are installed and what browser, Wordprocesor is setup as default etc. Even more useful things like what UI is default and the ability to run a different desktop such as Gnome or KDE. It would give Microsoft another chance to compete with the flexibility that a GNU+Linux PC seller has. The EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes may even force them to open up their OS to vendor customisation when they loose the Opera case..? It would save them market in the short-term.. so let's hope they don't read this!

Things come in waves

The EU is currently continuing it's expansion east, doubling in size. I do wonder how long it will last, and if we will see an equal and opposite swing the other way just like CCCP and Yugoslavia did.

In 30-50 years time will we see a disentanglement effort and eventual peaceful breakup and separation?

I for one think the EU is something quite different from past efforts to integrate states. How things will fair after China and India change the world-trade map will be interesting to see, fingers crossed the EU lasts ;)