Since I made public my decision not to stand again for the OpenOffice.org. Community Council I’ve had a flurry of emails from people asking what the ‘real’ reason is: is it a consequence of the Oracle purchase of Sun Microsystems? and I disillusioned with the whole Council process? have I been offered a job by [...]

I’d seen a number of adverts for aerated showers. The idea’s simple – just replace your existing showerhead (a five second swap) and you can significantly reduce your water consumption every time you shower. The claim is that aerated showers give the same ‘feel’, but use much less water. For around £20, it seemed a [...]

Inspired partly by the Transition Town meeting last night – but more so by the lovely spring weather – we decided it was time to start turning the gravel bed at the back of the house into four productive raised beds for growing veggies. But what would we find under the stones? had the previous [...]

At a public meeting last night, Kendal was formally announced as the latest Transition Town (there are apparently around 270). South Lakes Action on Climate Change, a local pressure group, announced they had successfully passed the audit to achieve TT status. The town mayor and local MP were there to add their congratulations. TT’s grew [...]

The OpenOffice.org Marketing Project produces daily statistics for the number of people downloading the software from our central download site. You can always see the latest version here – and an explanation of why this is a big underestimate of the number of people adopting OpenOffice.org here. Today’s graph (saved on this blog – click [...]

We bought our new house in January with the intention of ‘greening’ it as a retirement project. We’d been reading resources such as the Green Building Magazine, the Green Building Bible, T-Zero, the Energy Saving Trust, etc. High on the list was improving the insulation of the walls. The house was built in the 1920s, [...]