Now and then I search google for an answer to a question and don’t get a  good answer, and this time I’m doing my bit for the greater good to answer these:

“Is it worth putting foam insulation lagging on hot water pipes?”

“Is it worth putting reflective foam insulation around lagged hot water pipes”

“What is the difference in insulation between no pipe-lagging, foam pipe-lagging and foam plus foil lagging?”

Yup, this isn’t about games :D

background: i have a cold old house with a  freezing cellar, and the last occupant did NO insulation. The hot water pipes for the radiators go under the floor in the cellar ceiling, exposed to the cold and damp draughty cellar. A lot of my heating costs were being wasted heating up a damp cellar we never use. So this needed fixing.

Now there is ‘reading books and believing them” and then there is “getting real data”, so I went and got one of these (an infared thermometer £20)

Then I lagged some pipes using that foam insulation stuff, tied on with cable ties. Then as an experiment I doubled up on them by also wrapping that foil stuff you get for the back of radiators around them too, and took measurements. Heres a picture showing all 3 scenarios, where I haven’t finished yet (I ran out of tape…)

With NO lagging, and the radiators on, the temperature of the exposed copper pipes was 57 degrees.

With just tied-on foam insulation, the temperature of the foam was 21 degrees. ( a reduction of 63%ish)

With tied on foam AND a layer of reflective radiator foil, the temperature of the external foil was 12 degrees. (a further reduction of 15%ish)

Obviously the lower the temperature the better, I want all that heat kept in the pipes going to my radiators, not leaking out into the cold air of the cellar.

Conclusion: it is HUGELY worth you lagging any pipes in unused unheated rooms with foam insulation. It is also very worthwhile wrapping the lagged pipes with a  layer of reflective radiator foil. I tape it up with special reflective tape and both the tape and the foil is dirt cheap. The foam tubes are about 50p each.

If you pay heating bills where you live, you would be mad not to do this :D

And if you don’t know where the heat goes, get an infared thermometer. They double up as laser pointers to entertain cats.

Spam is getting cleverer. I deleted some spam from the forums yesterday, and about 100 spam comments this morning form the blog. The thing is, they are becoming more and more cunning. They are contextual spams, that do a passable job of imitating genuine comments from people, albeit confused people with English as their second language.

For example, on my blog post about PC power consumption I got this:

“I don’t have concrete figures, but they should be using very little power with no load attached”

I suspect that the blogspam AI has scanned that post, then gone through a huge database of sentences that contain similar words to words which show up in my post (such as power, load, figures) and pasted in a sample sentence from what is obviously a different, but relevant conversation. All very clever. But two things strike me as not very clever:

1) If you are trying this super advanced AI-spam, try not posting 100 comments in 1 day from the same username on different topics. Thats kind of a big huge giveaway isn’t it?

2) This is a shit way to make money. Do you really think that if you spam a million blogs with pointless comments, enough idiots will follow links in the posters signature to convert to paying customers that make it worthwhile? Do you actually think google are stupid enough to push up your search engine rankings because you get 1,000,000 backlinks from totally irrelevant blogs?

The spammers seem to think that if they send enough spam, and get enough traffic, they will get rich. I think that’s an incredibly naive and scatter-gun approach. I earn enough money, but I don’t get a lot of traffic. The reason my traffic converts into enough sales to pay my bills is because I get relevant traffic. Traffic from people who play PC games, preferably strategy games, ideally (at the moment) sci-fi fans or political gaming fans.

If I look at traffic from ‘stumbleupon’ the site that semi-randomly sends visitors to something roughly in a category they enjoy, it converts at a rate of about $0.01 per visitor. If I get traffic from a PC strategy gaming website the return is up to sixty times higher. Quality not quantity. The 1,000 true fans, and all that. My tip for the people behind new AI spam is to go write some decent AI software for something useful such as natural language processing for customer service support enquiries. You will earn more money and feel better :D

She said I could decorate it “however I wanted“.

Oh rly?

Stage one:

You will need

• Marzipan
• Christmas cake
• Icing
• Klingon d’k tahg

Stage 2:  Imperial klingon emblem cut out into marzipan and smaller icing using klingon weapon

stage 3: Add some edible gold stars to represent the many star systems of the klingon empire! and tada: A feast fit for a warrior! Qa Plagh!

” batlh Daq joH’a’ Daq the highest, Daq tera’ roj, QaQ DichDaq toward Hoch.”

You might remember me from such festive treats as my klingon pumpkin

I’ve been reading a huge 5 or 6 volume book called ‘World War II’. A bit of an arrogant title, assuming you can cover the whole topic, but it was written shortly after the war by Winston Churchill, so he’s allowed some slack. Obviously it’s insanely long, and I’m only on volume 3, but it’s fascinating stuff, especially when you are working on a battle game :D.
Here is some of the stuff that has stood out as interesting to me so far.

1) Invasion of Poland my ass. We get taught in school that this is when WW2 started, but thats bullshit. Hitler had already frogmarched into a number of countries by then, and Mussolini had been misbehaving too. We didn’t officially declare war with Germany until then, but the idea that this was sudden or even slightly unexpected is wrong. There was tons of obvious buildup.

2) Everyone thought England was fucked. The Germans assumed they could conquer us, The Americans had strong doubts we will hold out any longer than the French. (They wouldn’t send us arms that they secretly thought would end up in the hands of conquering Germans).  The global consensus was that England would fall next, and Hitler would have the whole of Europe soon. Nobody took seriously the idea of the Brits fighting to the death.

3) The British Navy was fearsome. We kicked ass in terms of naval combat. The Germans didn’t really try to engage the royal navy, because they were just outgunned and they knew it. The story of ship v ship combat (ignoring subs) for the first part of the war, was the royal navy tracking down enemy ships and sinking them. No wonder we have this ‘brittania rules the waves’ lyric.

4) The battle of britain was vital purely because it stopped Germany having air cover for a seaborne invasion of the UK. They knew their ships wouldn’t make it over the channel without air superiority, which is why they tried to take out our air force. The whole bombing of cities was just plan B after it was obvious that an invasion was impossible

5) The Italian army was rubbish. Really hilariously bad. There were some engagements where it was literally a 100 to 1 ratio of British troops lost to Italians killed or captured. That’s just laughable. This isn’t knocking the Italians, it’s probably just that the average Italian soldier wasn’t as keen on the war as the Duce. Good for them!

6) Churchill was on the ball. This was not some upper class twit drinking port and leaving the war to the military. He was intimately aware of troop dispositions, strategy, diplomacy, economics, and always hassling everyone to get things done better, faster, and with more enthusiasm. He was determined to take the fight to the enemy, and a big believer in using new technology to win the war.

It’s especially amazing to read Churchills multi-thousand page history of the war, know all about Bletchley park, and notice he never even hints at what went on. Talk about keeping a secret…

I’m sure in 4 years time when I finally finish the books, I’ll have more to report :D If you have a million hours of free time, I recommend it as a fascinating read.

I’m working on the UI for a custom challenge editor thing…