Phone power price

The electricity used my my phone has a price so I thought I would try to work out how much that is. 

I charge my phone phone for 2 hours every day. The charger on my phone uses 15 watts so every day I am using one 33rd of a killowatt hour. One killowatt hour of electricity in my home costs 10p. So 10p divided by 33 is  0.3 pence per day. My phone costs about one third of a penny per day. There are 365 days in one year so my phone's electricity costs 109.5 pence. Less than £1.10. 

The cost of electricity used by my phone is 

0.3 pence per day

2.1 pence per week

109.5 pence per year

I don't always charge my phone all the way so I would say the electricity used by my phone costs about £1 per year and I have a very bad deal, most people in the UK pay less than 10p per killowatt hour. The cost of electricity of most Brit's phones is less than £1 per year, perhaps 80p. 

At the time I wrote this, £1 is roughly the same as $1. About the price of a branded loaf of bread or two budget loafs. 

 

Things to Try

I would like to try putting Roller coaster Tycoon on my TV box, it has support for bluetooth keyboards with touch pads. There is two 'Roller Coaster tycoon' games that I want to put on it. Classic Roller coaster Tycoon and the mobile edition. 

I am also trying to get Nintendo to make their android Mario cart game work with bluetooth controllers. That would be awsome. That way I can play it on the TV and through the Internet. 

Brisk Day

Jacob, my son. Earlier in the day you entered a new phase of your development, you can walk briskly and confidently. You have mastered walking and can walk very fast and run in short spurts. You don't feel worried about falling down. 

There is a phrase, "what a difference a day makes". Within the space of one day you went from woddling and toddling to walking with confidence. You have a very pleased look on your face because you walk just like us, you have mastered walking. 

You spent the 2020 lockdown spring learning to walk, you spent the summer woddling and toddling and in the first few days of autumn at the end of September you walk briskly with confidence and full control. You don't even reach out your hands to grab things as you pass, you just walk like it is natural to you. 

A new first

A few days ago I managed to make a video on a smart TV box. I downloaded "power director" app on my android box and made a quick video to see if it was possible to do so. It was just a quick fame change of two still images. It was an experiment to see if my TV box could make and deliver a video to my YouTube channel, it worked. 

The last two YouTube videos I made were on my phone but this test video was on a TV box(a TV) I used the same power director software on the TV box that I use for my phone. 

When you get very little free time, convenient  little things make a big difference. To me being able to make a video on your TV without a desktop computer is amazing, perhaps it is only me that thinks this way. Without moving from the sofa I can create videos, making videos is my third hobby. 

A happy place

It is true autumn and we are heading towards shorter darker days. A new episode for the the Pandemic is opening and it is darker than the winter. All I can do now is pray and imagine me and my family are in a happy place. 

I imagine taking Jacob to Chessington world of adventures in the summer. I imagine the happy excitement and all the happy memories he may have. There are so many places for us to go to and visit. 

Just walking around and going on different rides, the Pandemic is gone or mutated into a less dangerous nuisance. I imagine the sound of all the people and the queueing and the sound of the rides. I imagine the smell of onions frying in the open air and candy floss. I imagine looking at a map with happy faces on it and discussions about where we are going. 

I imagine the 3 of us going out to a Chinese buffet and eating too much and woddling home. 

Mind blowing PI

Today I went to the raspberrypi.org website to see how much the little £5 micro computer has changed, I was in for a shock. They still make a £5 desktop computer called "Raspberry pi zero" they also have a slightly better computer called the "Raspberry pi zero w" and you get change from £10. What blew my mind was the "Raspberry Pi 4", a credit card sized computer that has more computing power than the desktop computer I put together 6 years ago. 

what I am saying is a little £35 credit card sized computer does everything my old desktop computer does. It has a standard x86 system so it will run any operating system that can boot from an SD card. Someone even managed to get windows 10 to run on it. 

They make their own Operating system for it, they renamed it Rasberry pi os, a type of Linux. It is a single board fanless mini computer that is cheap and powerful, my mind is blown. Everything is on the circuit board, the ram, processor, grachics controller, sound card, network card. All stiched together and ready to run. 

You need to go to Rasberrypi.org website to see what I am talking about. 

Bluetooth Irony

I have a bluetooth joystick, it didn't cost much money when I bought it. It also has two modes, it can be a joystick or a mouse controller. It works with all phones and Android computers that have Bluetooth. There is also a spring loaded cradle to hold your phone in place which is useful. 

The thing that amazes me is what games support bluetooth joysticks and what what ones don't. I played commander keen on Android, a side scrolling adventure game from the 90s. The developer put the original ROM for the game in a DOS emulator, the emulator works with bluetooth joysticks so I was able to play commander keen on my smart TV box and phone with my bluetooth joystick. But "call of Duty mobile edition" doesn't seem to support bluetooth controllers so I guess they just expect everyone to poke their screen the whole time. It would seem to be the other way around, you would expect "Call of Duty" to be the game that supports Bluetooth controllers but it isn't it is the ported commander keen games that works with it. 

I talk to machines every day

One thing I do every day is talk to machines. I talk to my phone and to my smart speaker. 

My smart speaker understands my speech and answers me. My smart speaker is hooked up to an encyclopedia and a dictionary and it is very good a maths and logic. If there is anything I don't know I find out straight away. Someone told me they have fibromyalgia so I said "Alexa, what is fibromyalgia"? The smart speaker then told me what Fibromyalgia is. I was advised to wait 50 days to do something by a doctor  so I asked Alexa what date it will be in 50 days and the smart speaker told me what date it would be straight away. I asked my smart speaker what is 250 divided by 7 is and it told me. Very often when I get home from work I feel frustrated because things always go wrong one way or another so I ask my smart speaker to play Dion Warwick, she was before my time but her voice is very smooth and soothing. Other times I just ask for the news. My smart speaker knows the difference between me and my wife and responds with our names. It says ok Alan here is the news or ok cinthya, here is the news. 

I don't think it would ever understand someone from Birmingham in England, no machine or humans can understand them. They need subtitles when they appear on the news. 

The other day the sun was shining very brightly and I couldn't see my phone screen so I asked Google to turn the screen brightness up 100%, my phone responded by turning the brightness up 100%. When the power went off I asked my phone to turn on the flashlight and it did it, it turned on the flashlight. I also ask my phone things I don't know just like my smart speaker and it answers me. 

Water War

One thing I think is being overlooked right now in the world is what I call a water war in the Pacific. 

China is sending military vehicles into and over territorial waters of other countries and claiming that it is either open ocean or belongs to them. This is happening in Taiwan quite often and some of the small Philippine Islands. Some island nations in the Pacific Ocean seem to have a problem with China. It would be an equivalent to America claiming that the waters just 250 meters off the coast of Venezuela belong to the United States and sending aircraft carriers to patrol it. 

Right now there is a lot of tension in the Pacific Ocean. I just wonder how long this will go on for until a true Pacific war kicks off. Perhaps this would be the starting place of world war 3. 

Alexander the Scum

If I told you there was a man that hacked thousands of people to death with a sword so he could be exalted as a ruler and that he killed his friend because he refused to call him a God, would you call him Great? What if I told you that all he actually did was kill thousands of people because of him and his ambition, would you not compare him to hitler and call him a scum? 

Well, Alexander the Great was that man. Why do we call him Great? 

Did he create a medicine that saved thousands of lives? no! 

Did he invent a machine that made everyone's lives easier? No! 

Did he sacrifice himself to help mankind? No! 

Did he help starving people to eat? No

What did he do? Killed loads of people and ruled over their communities. That's it!!!! 

Please correct me if I'm wrong. I get things wrong quite often. 

Amazing to me

I recently learned that some of my favourite old computer games had been reinvented in very creative ways, let me Explain. 

When I was a kid there was a game called Myst. The game is a point and click adventure puzzle game. In the game you click on still pictures to navigate around an island with hidden door ways to other dimensions. I learned that when you play puzzle adventure games it is useful to have a pen & paper with you to write down clues. I recently learned that Myst had been recreated as a first person 3D puzzle game, I believe it is called realMyst on Android. To me that is amazing. Look up Myst and realMyst on a YouTube to see what I am writing about. 

I also learned that someone had recreated 16 bit sonic the hedgehog and Super Mario in virtual reality. This means you could look through the eyes of Mario and Sonic and be in their world. To me that is Amazing. The trouble with virtual reality is it makes me puke. After about 1 hour I get very dizzy so I won't bother trying these games out. At least until they make a virtual reality walking machines so it feels more real. 

Unsolvable whack a mole

I see the Earth as a whack a mole game from hell. One Issue is fixed and then it is replaced by 2 more problems. The world we live in is a never ending cycle of unsolvable puzzles. 

One puzzle that is evident now is Brexit. The island of Ireland is two states. The Republic of Ireland and  the "United Kingdom of Britain" Northern Ireland. The British part of Ireland is being dragged away from the EU with the Rest of Britain but the Peace agreement that stopped the conflicts in Ireland involved having a soft border between the two states. But if we are separate from the EU, we need a hard border because we will change our own import tariffs and the member states don't want untaxed goods from countries with low inflation competing with their own products. The EU common market is very important to many EU states. 

So how do you solve a problem like NI Brexit? We want to have some kind of trade deal with the EU but the Northern Ireland border has to remain soft. Low friction and free movement between the two states. 

Amazing to me

When I look at most TV remote controls, they have mostly the same layout. The remote itself is made of black injection moulded plastic and resembles a black brick that has been cut in the middle length ways. It is covered in about 50 little bubber buttons. The top of the remote is the "on and off" button and in the corner of the remote is the "source select" button. Lower down on the remote is number buttons, volume and channel up & down. Then there is a D-Pad for the settings I think. Then you have multi coloured red, green, blue and yellow buttons. Below that you have a load of buttons that don't do anything. Play, Pause rewind, select. 

I recently learned that the so called useless buttons are not useless, they are there to take control of devices that are connected to the TV, devices that support CEC. The HDMI port doesn't just send video one way, it allows the TV to send Remote signals back to the device, so if the TV and attached device both support CEC and the feature is turned on in the settings for both devices then the remote from the TV can control other things that are connected to it. 

You could have a TV with a Blueray player attached and have one control for both of them. Plus, the attached device doesn't need to be in sight of the remote, it could be duct taped to the back of the TV because it is the HDMI cable that is controlling it. 

To you this may not be amazing, but to me it is. 

R going up

The Covid19 virus is still around and infecting many people. Here in the UK we measure the transmission rate as "R". If the R rate is above 1 then the epidemic is growing in size because each person infected is infecting more than one person on average. 

Right now the "R" rate is above one, I think it is 1.3. This means that some people are infecting more than one person on average. If the "R" was at 2 then we would be in trouble because the epidemic would grow twice as big every 2 weeks. 

I wonder what will happen in winter when there is less sunlight to destroy the virus particles. The ultraviolet light in the sun destroys viruses, but the days are getting shorter all the time and eventually we will be in winter, this means we will have more active virus particles everywhere. 

New world Disorder

For the last 15 months there has been widespread fires in the wildernesses of 3 "new world" continents. 

The first episode of fires started in Brazil in the summer 2019, large parts of the Amazon Burned up and billions of beasts were killed. The second episode of fires was in Eastern Australia last December, large parts of the Australian bushlands burned up and the wildlife was devastated. Now there is a Third Episode of fires, this time it is in Western North America, mainly in California near cities like San Francisco, it effects urban areas as well as woodlands. 

What I think is happening is the atmosphere is getting drier and windier so when careless people start fires and loose control, the effects are much worse. I can't say why it is happening this way. All I know is that the events are regular and we'll spaced out. The continents are small so perhaps smaller continents respond to climate change faster than  the big ones. 

Cold night

Jacob, my son. Earlier in the week I made you a fruit salad. I cut some Banana coins with Watermelon and Mango. You didn't like it. You touched the fruit and showed a repulsed face, then put the fruit in your mouth and Immediately threw the fruit pieces one by one on the floor and started crying inconsolably. It is very clear that you don't like Watermelon and Mango at this stage of your life. 

It is very interesting to give you new foods to try. I never know what food you will like and what food you will hate. 

scooters and computers

I often see people riding electric scooters on the pavement, I think that is very cool. It would be the cheapest powered transport possible. A small battery gets you around and the cost of charging it would be almost nothing. It would be even better if they put a small seat on it. If it is legal to ride small electric scooters on the pavement then perhaps I should get one, I think you can fold them up and take them on the bus. 

I am old enough to find smart TVs amazing. I saw a man connecting a blue tooth keyboard and touchpad to an Android TV on youTube, the TV started behaving like a desktop computer, a cursor appeared on the screen and the keyboard would operate the apps. I think they get everything that made a computer in the 90s and put it on a chip, a desktop computer on a chip. Everything is there, the graphics controller, the sound controller, processor, network adapter and bios system, it is all printed on a small chip that doesn't need a cooling system. It is so small that it is concealed by the TV case, it still works as a TV. 

I need to know more. 

Drawing my thoughts

My mind is full of thought creations, machines that don't quite work, dreams, paradox thoughts, ideas, questions, stories.

My second hobby after blogging is drawing. Like blogging, it costs me almost nothing and takes very little space. I drew the 90s flashback bar that is nested inside my man-cave inside my head. 

By looking at this drawing, you are looking at one of my thoughts, you have been given temporary telepathy. I simplified the drawing a bit because I used a black ball point pen to draw it. There are TV screens attached to Flashback retro games consoles and small cooler fridges with cold drinks in them. There is five stools and bottles of whiskey on the lower shelves, on the upper sheves is novelty lighting that gives the effect of a bar and merchandise related to 90's gaming. 

The strange thing about this dream is I don't drink alcohol very much. The bar is mostly for coffee but I keep beer and whiskey for visitors. In the dream I sit on the stool and drink coffee and play old 16 and 32 bit computer games and imagine that I am back in the 90s when I was a kid. 

My writing is far from the quality of Charles Dickens and my drawings are not brilliant by my own standards but I try to improve quite often. One day my writing will be excellent and my drawings will resemble the thoughts that they reflect precisely. 

What can I say

America will have a general election at the end of Autumn to decide who will be the leader for the next 4 years. 

Well, I will watch the election debate. It is a lot like a bulimia convention, they will bring up everything, things said in the previous decade, outcomes to pandemics, things like that. I think the most important thing to listen to is the biggest issues facing America, high government dept, cost of living, those sort of things. 

The question is will they show they have a plan for the problem? We will see. 

Normal Day

Jacob, my son. It is nearly your second Autumn in this world. Some people just call the whole of September Autumn. 

I sat with you on the sofa yesterday and we were watching a toddler video on YouTube, the video was about the alphabet and colours. There was one scene where they were painting some eggs and then the eggs would hatch and the chick would be the colour of the egg shell. You were very excited when you saw the chicks jump out of their shell. one chick was red, the other was blue and green. You would shake your hands quickly cheer with a squeaking sound. 

When you eat toast, you prefer real butter to margarine. You also seem to like peanut butter on your toast. I wonder if you like watermelon now? 

You have a restless mind that wants to explore everything. I learn something new about you every day. 

Pasta Paradox

When I eat pasta, I can eat a lot of it but I have noticed that if I eat a small amount of it and wait for about 30 minutes, I feel as full as if I had a large portion. So what I am saying is 400 grams of cooked pasta will fill me up the same as 600 grams. The same is true of beans. 

What I think happens is the pasta absorbs the fluids in my stomach and expands to fill up all the space, so it turns into a mass of pulp. I think that it actually grows in volume after I have eaten it. So all the tea I drink after the meal gets absorbed into the pasta while it is in my stomach. 

The thing is I don't know if this is true. It is just a guess based on my observations of what pasta does. It could be possible that any food causes me to feel full if I just wait 30 minutes. Perhaps something else is happening, I don't know. I may never know. 

I am grateful I have food to eat, many people in the world today are starving. 

Taiwan Bamboo

I now associate Taiwan with Bamboo because like Bamboo, it is not clear what it is. It is not clear if Taiwan is the Original China that wasn't overrun by communism  or part of the People's Republic of China or if it is just the Island Republic of Taiwan. What is the Island of Taiwan? Is it a country or province? It seems to be both at the same time, I'm sure it is an amazing island. 

What do you call the plant fibers of the Bamboo stem? It looks like wood but it is not wood, it is in the Grass family but it is not grass. bamboo fibers can have the appearance of plastic but they are biodegradable and natural.  It makes me wonder what could be done with all the other plants that have a rigid stem that isn't quite wood. Perhaps rose bushes have stems that can be used as plastic and wood like materials? Who knows? 

Sega Mega Drive Mini

The "Sega Mega Drive" and "Sega Genesis" are the same thing. The "Sega Genesis" spits out NTSC video for old American TVs and " Sega Mega Drive" spits out PAL video for old European TVs. Other than that they are the same and use the same cartridges and play the same games. All flat screen TVs can take both PAL and NTSC and automatically detect which one it is. 

Last week I bought a Sega Mega Drive Mini. It is a Sega licensed emulator and small replica of the Sega Mega drive. It has 40 original ROMs from the Sega mega drive on it and 2 additional games that were never on the Sega mega Drive, Tetris and Darius. It is strange to play Tetris on the Sega mega drive but it is very fun. I saw Darius Arcade machines around when I was a kid, they had extra long screens and they were a very fun side scrolling shooter games. I like all the games on there and I like the fact that you could save the games. In those days most of the games didn't save your progress so if you lost the game you would start again from the beginning of the game. 

The fist part of my Man Cave is a flashback sega mega drive, I want to build a bar with 90s flash back games consoles in it. Then I want to add a pool table, football table, table tennis table, 4 recliner sofas, a large TV with modern games consoles attached, Hook a duck pond(exotic dice), whack a mole machine and glass cabinets filled with mini arcade machines. I would call it t

"The Happy Zone" because I am a big kid and I would be happy just playing with my toys. It grows like a seed of a tree, slowly it emerges from my mind to reality one thing at a time. A place will emerge that I can share with others, a place to forget about the real world for a short time and be a kid. 

Just a thought

I was wondering what they will do with all those Acrylic plexiglass panels that shield cashiers when the Covid19 virus is beaten or mutates into a mild nuisance? Perhaps they can rebuild crystal palace, or just leave them there for the next Bat eater's disease. 

There is already people super glueing themselves to the road to fight climate change. I recall in 2019 a man superglued himself to an airplane, if I was the pilot I would takeoff anyway, put the glue to the test, just kidding. I think in the same year a man climbed onto a tube train. There are lots of trains in India, he could go and protest there. 

I have become obsessed with mini arcade machines. They are very collectable. If I am able to get my man cave I will keep many of them in there on shelves inside glass cabinets. The make that stands out a lot is "My Arcade". The key words to find it on YouTube or other video platform is "my Arcade","mini arcade", "small arcade machine", "portable arcade machine". They make replicas of the original machines, the "Pac Man" one is particularly good, some of them even have backlit marques. 

What August 2020 means to me

It is the last bit of Summer now in the month when summer meets Autumn, they call it September. 

It was in August 2020 that my Grandfather on my wife's side of the family passed away. He caught Covid19 and died in hospital. I feel pity and loss quite often. I was hoping he would meet his great grandson, Jacob. While Papa José was in hospital, a dock side warehouse full of Ammonia Nitrate exploded in Beirut, Lebanon; the explosion was so powerful that it generated a small earthquake and mushroom cloud. I thought it was a nuke for a short time. 

Everything was slow this month because the previous spring we had a lockdown, there is still quarantine measures in place and the rules seem to change every week. 

August 2020 was all about Covid19 for me and all the things that come with it. Plexiglass panels, stickers on the floor, face masks, warning signs , hand sanitizers, people being spaced out inside business premises, pure alcohol. 

Now I look into autumn and remain optimistic and day dream about my man cave when I am required to be still and wait or when I am trying to sleep.