Instagram filter used: Lo-fi
Photo taken at: Toronto Reference Library
Author: scruss
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nerdy spreadsheet tick/cross formatting
The magic custom format string for this is:
[Red][=0]✗;[Black][<>0]
Works with LibreOffice and Excel on every platform I’ve tried.
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Flatbed Plotter Frenzy
Could the DXY-1300’s self-test page be more eighties? So I finally scored a flatbed from Kijiji. It makes all the right shapes and sounds. Here’s the self-test, all seven minutes of it —
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To be fully authentic, it would be on the sole of my foot …
If I wished to get a tattoo (which I don’t), I think it would have to be this:
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Everybody needs a Level 43 Tickle-Mimic
The display gets a bit mixed up under Linux, but Progress Quest is still delightful.It also has some of the best Release Notes ever:
 Changes for version 6.1:     * I really just don't remember.     * I also don't see how it could matter much.
Fetch me a teratoma!
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Power, at what price?
It’s the Canadian Electricity Association’s Electricity in Ontario week. Can’t you feel it in the air? A brochure, snappily titled “ELECTRICITY ARE WE GETTING VALUE FOR THE MONEY WE PAY?†[pdf] was in my dead tree media stack this morning. I think it’s trying to say our power is too cheap, as in this graph yoinked from the text:
But as ever, hand-picked statistics only tell half the story. Digging into the IEA Key World Energy Statistics handbooks for 2011 and 2012, the data look something more like this:Country
2010 Domestic Electricity Price / USD/kWh
2010 Annual Electricity Consumption per capita / kWh
Annual Cost per capita
Denmark
$0.356
6,329
$2,255
Japan
$0.232
8,399
$1,950
United Kingdom
$0.199
5,741
$1,142
France
$0.157
7,756
$1,216
United States
$0.116
13,361
$1,547
Canada
$0.095
15,145
$1,431
Mexico
$0.089
2,085
$185
So really, because Canadians use such an obscene amount of energy per capita (srsly; we should be ashamed of ourselves), the graph should look more like this:
So we’re not actually that inexpensive; solidly mid-range. Since our electricity price per kWh is so low, if we spent a little money on energy conservation, we could have really cheap power for everyone.
