For no other reason than I caught it on Classic FM this morning and now it’s stuck on a loop in my head only with me supplying my own dire vocal  counter harmonies. Enquire no further.

Granola is available for linux and Windows desktops. It can also be deployed on VMware ESXi. It is free for personal use but has a very small cost licence which makes available much more detailed energy controls and monitoring options when deployed across many computers at the same address. Power saving results can be tracked over time via an online account which records your power usage data.

Available desktop stats are displayed in a slightly generalised way with preferences available to show annual or cumulative energy savings.

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Win your height in Jaffa cakes

No, you’re alright mate.

I woke up with this decidedly old school art rock ditty stuck in my head again. It was the swift follow up to their very successful reworking of Money.

I believe that Deborah Evans-Stickland became a psychotherapist but has from time to time stepped back into the music limelight.She contributed to a Richard X album a while back and only this year she reprised her Money vocals as part of  The Steampunk Opium Wars project.

Pez was everywhere when I was very small. These days the only place I see the stylised sweet dispenser is at the checkout of our local Iceland store (yes I shop at Iceland. Judge me not).

By the way the checkout staff always seem to be having a laugh. That’s some going for a job I’ve never envied. It’s often a more post traumatic stress vibe at the larger Supermarket checkouts.

Some of the checkout staff look as if they are, given half a chance, on the verge of bludgeoning some customers with a suitably weighty block of plastic wrapped cheese to the point where identifying the body from dental records alone would not be possible. They must have to deal with some right awkward types that would test the patience of a saint on Valium.

Checkout atmosphere (if we can assign it a dull management speak pseudo buzzword type description) isn’t just down to friendly small store vs oppressive mega corporate staff flogger stores. I’ve been in small stores where checkout chuckles would probably grant you a rapid demotion to unemployee of the month.

I don’t want to get drawn into a fanciful Pez on the checkout equals subtle benign influence theory but so far Pez dispensers and happy checkout staff scores wholly unscientific points on my improbable causes tally sheet.

Original image by SunCat under this creative commons licence

One of the inevitable(?) flip sides of the growth and widespread acceptance  of digital photography is that the decline of film creates daft asking prices for that which is now both scarce but a little exclusive.

Searching for expired film on eBay shows how that draw full of forgotten and unused film that’s well passed its use by date is a highly desirable item for lo-fi lomography photographers. Even Lomo themselves offer a brand of 35mm tungsten balanced film rumoured to be sourced from existing stocks of expired or end of line 35mm film stock. And priced accordingly.

Of course if you still like to drop a batch of analogue unpredictability into your photography you could just pick up a box of that £1 film from a pound shop and just wait for it to expire. Or stress it out a bit by running it through the dishwasher cycle as suggested over on instructables.

One of the most intriguing photography stock alternatives is the re-purposing of current and out of date stock of microfilm in your analogue camera. Don’t knock microfilm by the way as it’s still being used as the safest long term storage option for archiving digital documents due to its long term storage capability being measured in the hundred of years.

Niche obsolescence throws up some interesting options.

Original image by .Castor under this creative commons licence