Marc Palmer

I already knew about the power wasted by household devices in “standby” mode. Upon reading Monbiot’s HEAT it has become painfully obvious that there really is huge wastage in this when you scale things up to the level of countries.

“According to the British government, around one million tonnes of carbon emissions a year are caused by equipment in homes and offices left in ’standby’ mode: plugged into the wall but not operating. This uses about 2 per cent of all our electricity.” (Monbiot, HEAT)

I’m sure the government figures don’t just mean “standby” state but also devices left idling, i.e. computers just left to be (maybe in “power saver” mode).

Well I found this at our local green shop, it’s a mains extension board with anti-surge and automatic power down for dependent devices! You plug in your main device, say a computer, into a specially marked black master socket. All the other sockets automatically power down (and up) when the “master” device is drawing operating-level power.

It mentions only computers on the packaging, but I have this working with our TV as the master, and DVD and set top box as “slaves”. It only costs £30

In truth this only saves you having to switch off your devices at the wall, but given that most of us do not remember to do this or cannot get to the sockets easily, it is a huge saving. I’m getting another one for my desktop computer shorly, to have it power down my speakers, screen and printer when not in use.

The device itself still draws current when everything is off but its very low – the die hard solution is to turn everything off at the mains, always. However this works even with standby mode (at least with the TV) i.e. you put the TV into standby with the remote and the other devices go off. Obviously in this scenario the TV is still wasting power in its inevitably inefficient standby state. Press the physical off button on it (IF there is one these days) and it goes dead and saves you more money.

Still, we have to think about the cooker, washing machine, dishwasher et al that are just sitting there waiting for a job to do, burning the electricity away for nothing.

…and of course even when you’re using your computer if you’re not listening to music or not printing stuff out etc, the devices should be turned off directly. I suppose this device is a nod to the fact that none of us are perfect and we can’t spend our lives remembering to turn everything on and off only when we need it. Roll on very efficient standby modes!

My mother died a few weeks ago. As a result I’m having to contact a lot of organisations to tell them about it. This means I have had more than my fair share of phone menu system navigation.

I’ve realised through this that almost all companies, except some insurance companies, have completely neglected to cater for this possibility in their phone user interfaces. Typically calling a financial organisation you do not get to talk to a human or get an option to select to talk to one, in the interest of saving money and filtering “timewasters”.

Typical phone menu for a bank or similar:

Step 1: Listen to a long message, often including “Please note that if you are not the account holder we will not be able to discuss the account with you”. That’s encouraging.

Step 2: Enter your account number (enter account number of dead person here)

Step 3 [on some systems]: Enter your date of birth or other security info

Step 4: A list of typical options:

• Press 1 for statements/financial stuff
• Press 2 to make a payment
• Press 3 to report a card stolen

That’s it. So if you make it past step 3 – by lying and using the deceased’s details if you have them – at step 4 you are left with no relevant option, and typically no option to “speak to a representative”.

Your only choice is to just press any button and wait for a response. “Sorry I didn’t understand that, Press 1 for ….” and there you go again. Pressing # sometimes helps… most of these systems do offer some way out after your first or second error and eventually put you through to a human, but this is after a lot of frustration and time wasting – think about doing this 6 times in succession with different phone systems and different banks. The worst are the ones where you have to speak your option. “GIVE ME A HUMAN NOW BEFORE I…”

Phone system creators take note: a loved one has died and we have a mountain of paperwork to sort out. We do not have time for such pathetic usability in the interests of stopping human customers talking to your human staff.

Given that a lot of people, at least this side of Olympia, do die and that financial instutions need to be told, you’d think that the numbskulls that put together these phone menu systems would factor in the “Press 9 to report the death of an account holder” feature.

It was very refreshing to find that at least one insurance company had this feature at the very top level of their menu. Amen!

George Monbiot is always an excellent read and very well researched. The best part is that he goes to great pains to be truthful even when the truth hurts or appears to counteract a good cause.

In his new book HEAT he believes from reviewing all the scientific evidence that we (in the UK at least) need to reduce our carbon emissions by 90% by 2030 or face dire consequences. A sample from the book here goes some way to describe what these consequences are.

My nose is thoroughly buried in this book so far, and I’m not even past the first chapter which is simply laying on the line a summary of all the science on this. You hear a snippet of “such and such has started melting” on the news and worry about it for a few minutes and then its gone. When you have many of these items catalogued and explained in relation to each other it gets very worrying indeed.

I’m looking forward to the chapters on how we can achieve the 90% cuts – unlike many environmental campaigners he is trying to set out a range of effective steps we all need to take. And quite correctly, he is making the unpopular move of saying that the only way we can achieve this is by governments forcing us to change.

The tragic part is that we as citizens have to force our government to change… unless they realise that their economic self interests will finally become irredeemably endangered by what is likely to happen.

I fear that only in the latter situation will anything happen. The general public won’t reduce their emissions significantly by their own volition, so the pessimist in me wonders if these same people will vote for politicians who openly want to force us to change our lives in order to survive – IF any politicians really have the courage to step up to the plate.

I think the biggest problem is that this is such a wide ranging subject that most people don’t have the time or inclination to grasp the facts and as such it will never seem real to them until their homes are worth nothing and the supermarkets have no more food, and the lights go out. Once the first weather report on TV shows the start of temperatures falling massively over Europe we’re all going to have a hard time selling our houses… and land in southern Spain will become priceless I imagine.

I’m really fed up with this now. There’s a lot going on for me at the moment and you don’t need stupid computer problems getting in the way! This is particularly galling considering Apple like to make out that “Macs don’t freeze” (QT .mov)
I’ve noticed ever since getting my first Mac in early 2006 that OS X doesn’t like bad volumes/mounts. Examples:

• Find a really screwed up music CD and put it in your Mac. If it is properly scratched your OS X Mac will go away for maybe 15minutes, semi-locked up in an unusable state, until finally it gives up on the disk and you get some control back.
• Harder to reproduce: mount a shared volume on the network, and have the network “go away”. Try to access the share. zzzzzzzzzzz
• Even harder to reproduce, my current problem: Have an external NAS exposing AFP shares where there is some kind of obscure problem, corrupt resource forks or something. The machine goes into a catatonic state when you try to mount this shared network volume.

Another fun side effect is that often when this happen you can try relaunching Finder but it makes no different. Typically you can no longer open applications from the Dock either.

All I can say is WHY?! For christ’s sake mounting volumes has been around since the beginning of time and losing control of a machine so that you have to power it down just because a network share has a problem with it is tantamount to a denial of service attack vector!

Trust me, I ssh’d into the mac in question, tried to kill the AFP mounting processes, no joy. I tried “shutdown -r now” and it went through the motions but nothing happened.

I’ve even tried to run mount_afp from the command line to see if it was a UI related issue but no… a mount attempt at the command line with AFP for some reason dies, from any of my Macs. The shares on the NAS can be accessed via SMB from all the macs no problem.

It’s really quite depressing. Apple please sort it out, my patience is wearing thin.