So. Plastic, right. I’ve never been terribly fond of plastic packaging. Particularly because it’s often not sporting the appropriate recycle logo, which means that it ends up in the bin if we can’t find another use for it. And eventually you end up with hundreds of the buggers, and have to start chucking them away. But anyway, ignoring that, we’ve known for a very long time that plastic leaches chemicals into the food it surrounds. It’s a problem that’s worse when the food is hot. I’ve been vaguely aware of this for more than 10 years, but it’s slowly beginning to bother me. In that way that, well, we try to eat healthily. In years when our garden produces more than a bumper crop of slugs, we try to eat organically produced, home-grown food. This year is not turning out so well, what with it having rained pretty much continuously since March – we’ve had some soft fruit (those few strawbs that we saved from the slugbeasts) but not much else is growing.
Anyhow, so. And then that niggling thing about plastic leaching into foods sits there, and whenever I open a packet I now think about eating plastic. I have a packet of chewing gum at work… for when I eat something very strong on my break… apparently, chewing gum is made of plastic too. Feh. And then you think about tins, I never thought of tins as being plastic, but they are – apparently – coated in plastic internally. And tetrapac cartons – I knew they had plastic in, but I think about the quantity of fruit-juice I drink… and oh dear.
Now I know there are arguments about what’s better – the shipping cost of a lightweight plastic packet vs the shipping + recycling energy from a glass or ‘other’ container. Which obviously makes my brain hurt trying to decide which is the least-bad option. It all ends up being horribly, horribly complex, like most trying-to-work-out-what’s-eco-friendly things. It does make me feel like I’m going to turn into one of those tin-foil hat people. Otoh, as my beloved pointed out, I don’t think it’s all one vast conspiracy. So yay for that :)
In other news, my mum now has a new linux box which is, apparently, working well for her. Yay for Ubuntu. Also, Yay for Ubuntu which is now on the last of the hackintoshes. My other 8 year old PC (I can’t quite remember why I ended up with two. Something to do with a dud power-supply, I vaguely recall) is now running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. It’s surprisingly responsive, if not actually very good when you get to doing real work. Unfortunately, during the installation process, I dropped the nice trackball that Alex sent me. Not far, you understand. Less than a foot, I think, onto a rug. And it stopped working…instantly.
I took it apart, and couldn’t see anything obviously wrong…
But thankfully, John applied his superior fixing skills to it – one of the pins on the sensor had corroded through to the point that dropping it was sufficient to break the pin. Replacing the pin with wire (using his nice temperature controlled iron) brought it back to life. Which has made me very happy :)
He also gave me an old keyboard and mouse, so that the garage security camera / music player can go live. Only slight problem is getting Motion to work. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu installed version doesn’t seem to have installed the default config file, and also the camera I’m using at the moment – one of those old Logitech golfball quickcams, that’s a bit finnicky about working in Linux. The night-vision camera which claimed to be supported by linux is, but the night vision bit of it, not so much. Having got both cameras working…trying to get Motion to use them is proving to not be as ‘off-you-go’ as I’d hoped. While I’ve alloted the 5 minutes ‘while the bath is running’ period for having a quick dink, I don’t hold out a great deal of hope for it working this morning.
John also gave me a wifi bridge, so hopefully I can get the network extended down to the garage without having to have the router in the larder. Which will be good :)
All I need to do is find by 100BaseT hub, which is kicking around….somewhere. Because there’s only the one network point in the larder. Of course, the 10baseT hub has now hidden itself, along with the amp which I was *also* going to take down to John’s yesterday. Bah.
Right, so Bath. 2000 words. Fun.
