About this time last year, I finally got round to buying some yarn and a pattern to try re-learning to crochet. Last time I crocheted, I was about 12 and my efforts were limited to creating hair bun nets (as in the kind of things little girls wear – and indeed I wore – to ballet lessons). I think the last one was bright red for wearing to school on No Uniform Day for Red Nose Day. After that, I got bored of it and lost interest.

So after completing a smaller practice project last Spring, I decided to tackle something I’d actually wear. And as it was July, I figured it would be timely to make a jumper for the Winter (or even the Autumn, in my more optimistic moments). So I chose the Unseamly Sweater from a book I have called Stitch ‘n’ Bitch: The Happy Hooker. This weekend (8 months later, and on the verge of Spring),  I finished it.

Here’s a photo of me modelling it, catalogue-style (photo courtesy of Tony Whitmore):

I’m really pleased with how it came out. There was a moment last weekend when it seemed I wouldn’t be able to complete the second sleeve because I’d run out of yarn, and my original supplier was permanently out of stock. The combined wonders of Google and Ebay saved the day.

So, being a good little IBMer, I now turn to Lessons Learned:

• Hold the crochet hook; don’t grip it. I struggled for the first two-thirds of the body (crocheted as a tube – front and back at the same time) to get my ‘guage’ right. Guage is the number of stitches to the inch, and is determined by a combination of weight of yarn, size of hook, and how tightly you hold the hook and yarn.
• Use the right size of hook. Related to the point above, I started the jumper about 5 times before it was neither fit for a child nor fit for two of me at once. I actually used the right-sized hook for the arms (a size bigger than the pattern suggests) but, for the body, I used a size smaller and I ended up having to increase the wrong number of stitches to make it the right size of jumper. This also meant that I ended up buying more yarn than I should’ve needed.
• Buy enough yarn first time. Every book tells you that this is the only way to ensure a consistent shade throughout – something only guaranteed by all the balls of yarn being dyed in the same batch. Because of the previous two points, I ran out of yarn not once but twice. Consequently, the body and the first quarter of one of the arms is a teeny bit darker shade than the rest of the arms.
• I enjoy the decorative bit more than the…um…mundane bit. This is the same as for the sunflower pots I made two years ago. Being crochet, it was actually quite quick to get through the mundane bits and I enjoyed it more than I expected. I do, however, much prefer making the fun frilly bits and changing stitches. So while I really like the finished effect of this particular pattern, it did get rather repetitive along the way.

Incidentally, the yarn I used (for both this jumper and my previous project) is Anchor Bamboolo, which is actually made from bamboo mixed with some cotton making a lovely soft, light, shiny yarn – similar I think to mercerized cotton, which is what I’d looked for originally. Bamboo is probably better for the environment than cotton, which is usually really bad for the environment because of the phenomenal amounts of pesticides that have to be used to grow it (though this article and its comments ponder the pros and cons of bamboo as a material from a furniture design perspective).

So, bearing those lessons in mind, I’m now keen to find my next crochet project. I seem to have acquired a few patterns already and they might make more sense now that I’ve done a relatively easy one!

I was inspired to blog about my new car by a post on the BBC Ethical Man blog that @monkchips just tweeted. The slight irony is that the post is about how the author had his lovely Saab taken away to see if he could make it in the world without a car. And I’m about to tell you about my lovely new Citroen C1, which I bought so that I don’t have to catch the bus any more.

Typing that hurts slightly because I used to be so smug that we were a one-car household.

We (Tony and I) live in a village, and I work in another village. Public transport from villages in Hampshire to the cities isn’t that great; public transport between villages is worse. For a while, one of us would take the other to work but after trying both permutations of that arrangement, the fact that the two workplaces were pretty much opposite directions made the effort fairly pointless (in some ways was probably even a bit less green than if we’d each driven in separate cars because whoever was driving would end up in the morning rushhour traffic after dropping the other at work). For a while it worked with Tony catching the bus and me driving the car to my work – though this probably wasn’t ideal in terms of greenness because I was the only one in the car.

So, next, I was fortunate in that a couple of friends (who are also colleagues) car-shared their way past the end of my road every day and offered to include me in the arrangement too. That worked for a few months until a house-move by the driver meant that he would now be driving in the opposite direction from work to pick me up. So I finally tried the bus that ran through our village.

That was January 2007. Nearly two um three years later, I’ve finally given in and got a car. I did mandate to myself that it had to be rated at at least 60 miles to the gallon, and be as close to 100g/km carbon emissions as possible. Aside from a momentary wavering when I met Martin’s rather lovely Lotus Elise, I am proud to say that I stuck to that requirement (partly by telling everyone I knew so that I couldn’t slide out of it!) with my new 3.5yr-old C1 (60miles to the gallon; 109g/km). And it’s great – despite being a 1.0 engine, it’s only teeny so it’s very nippy.

So why did I give up the smugness of ‘being green’? Mostly (without boring you with joys of working across timezones) because I just couldn’t attend cross-timezone meetings and still get home by bus some days any more.

So how green am I now? Well, I really don’t know. I suspect that, in hindsight, the most ‘green’ arrangement I’ve tried was when I car-shared. When I was catching the bus, I wasn’t actually catching it every day because I did also get ad hoc lifts from friends too but bus was definitely my default transport for those two years. I’m actually not convinced that I was especially green for about 50% of the buses I caught – in terms of numbers of people on the bus, as the Ethical Man suggests. I have no evidence for this but I think the lift-sharing was probably greener.

So, I should/will probably start giving lifts to people who live on the way to work as long as my travelling times fit with theirs. Maybe I could/should continue getting lifts some days (and leave my own car at home) as I did before. I’ll have to see how it goes…

On a final, positive note, travelling with other people (whether by car or bus) is actually quite good fun and useful. On the bus, there’s a small community of regulars who usually say hello and notice when you’ve not been there for a while. Which is really nice, and I’ll miss that. Sharing lifts (or catching the bus with someone from work) is also really good because it gives me chance to catch up with the other person and find out what’s going on on their projects. It’s also been really valuable for doing reading or thinking. And it makes you get up on time and leave work on time.

Last year, after getting a Nintendo Wii, I wrote a post about its energy consumption and Nintendo’s place in Greenpeace’s electronics company rankings.

Greenpeace have updated their rankings…and Nintendo still holds bottom place. Pleased to see that Samsung and Nokia are still doing well (I have a Nokia phone and Samsung laptop and TV – part of my reason for going with Samsung was their green and ethical reputation).

Greenpeace have released their latest edition of their Guide to Greener Electronics rating Nintendo at the very bottom of the list of 18 electronics companies. It turns out that they’re bottom by default because Nintendo didn’t supply any data. So until Nintendo do supply some data, it’s not possible to tell how green (or not) they are.

Having been involved in trialling the Current Cost monitor recently, I’m interested in not only the company’s green credentials (which the Guide addresses) but the actual Wii’s green credentials, specifically its power consumption (which the Guide doesn’t seem to address). I think this kind of information would be useful to consumers – even if it doesn’t influence whether or not to buy the Wii, information about standby consumption etc would help consumers know whether they’re happy to leave the Wii plugged in 24 hours a day..

I’m interested to know because (like 6 million other people in Europe) I have a Nintendo Wii. So the other night I had a look at the Wii system settings. And found the WiiConnect24 option, which I hadn’t come across before.

In there, you can set your Wii to be:

• Always connected to the internet (via the wireless connection that you’ve set up previously) regardless of whether you’re using the Wii or not (when in Standby, the orange light shows)
• Always connected to the internet while you’re using the Wii but not when the Wii switches to Standby (when in Standby, the red light shows)
• Not connected to the internet at all, even when you’re using the Wii

By default, after you have set up the wireless connection and enabled WiiConnect24 (which is required to be able to visit the online shop etc and which I must have enabled at some stage), the Wii is set to the first option–connected to the internet always, even when the Wii switches to Standby when you’re not actually using it. A benefit of being always online is that the little blue light on the front flashes to alert you that you have received a message (from a Wii friend or from Nintendo) or that there is an update available for you to download. Personally, this is of no interest to me.

So, anyway, AndySC took his Maplin power meter to his Wii and found that when being used (green light), the Wii draws about 15 Watts, which isn’t too bad really – considering that a laptop can take anything between 20 and 50 Watts, I think. And you’re actually making use of that 15 Watts.

In Standby without an internet connection (red light), the Wii draws less than 1 Watt. Again, not bad. You could unplug it if you wanted to save that Watt but 1 Watt on Standby is pretty good (this is based on a meter for which 1 Watt is the minimum reading, I think).

The bit that seems silly is if you leave your Wii in Standby with the WiiConnect24 internet connection enabled to be always on, the Wii is drawing about 9 Watts of power (over half of what it draws when you’re actively playing on it). Okay, I can see that for some people being alerted with the flashing blue light when you have a message is useful. And maybe it’s useful to be alerted that there’s a new update available so that you can download it when you’re not actually wanting to play on your Wii. What I don’t agree with is having the always-on option as the default setting.

From a usability perspective, having everything enabled by default is good in that the user isn’t prevented from doing any of the things that they might want to do (like receive message or update alerts). But if that wasn’t enabled, would many people actually miss it? It’s not like they wouldn’t still receive messages and alerts – they’d just find out about them the next time they switch on the Wii to play – and, presumably that’s fairly regularly if they’re into using the messaging and updates regularly.

Okay, so 9 Watts doesn’t seem a huge amount of electricity, but even if I use my Wii for 8 hours a day, every day (which is a long long way from the reality), that’s still 16 hours a day that the Wii is sitting there doing nothing at 9 Watts. And it’s that ‘sitting there doing nothing’ that really adds up against the environment and my electricity bill.

I discovered a couple of other features that require WiiConnect24 to be always on are the News and Weather channels but I think this requirement might be a bug – afterall, why should the Wii need to check the news and weather while you’re not using the Wii? When you open the News or Weather channel, I’m sure it checks for the latest information anyway. If anyone from Nintendo reads this, can you check this out?

So, the upshot is that while WiiConnect24 might be useful to some people, it’d be a bit more environmentally friendly to set it so that the internet connection is disabled when the Wii is in Standby. Let that red light glow!

I agree with Greenpeace that it’s important to know how environmentally friendly the company itself (Wii consumption aside) is so I’ll be interested to know what they conclude when Nintendo actually do provide them with data. Will Nintendo be able to overtake the dawdling Microsoft and Phillips?

I recently booked a transatlantic return flight for Tony and me with Virgin Atlantic. When you view your booking details on the Virgin website, they include a link to their carbon offsetting scheme.

A while ago, I wrote a blog post (Carbon off-setting) in which I described my current view (or near lack of) of carbon off-setting schemes. When I booked the Virgin flights, I didn’t immediately go for the carbon off-setting option because it pointed to a company I’d not heard of and, in a world of dodgy carbon off-setting schemes, how do I know they’re any different?

So I did a bit of research. I remember last year the UK Government (specifically Defra) identified four carbon off-setting companies that were kind of recommended but kind of not. Which is a reflection of the state of confusion customers are in. While I used Climate Care last year because that’s what The Co-op uses (and, apparently, The Guardian too), Climate Care isn’t one of the companies on Defra’s list, which means that it doesn’t meet Defra’s guidelines. But are Defra’s guidelines really that good?

I came across an interesting article in The Guardian from last summer. At the end of the article, it mentions a not-for-profit Gold Standard method which accredits carbon off-setting projects (renewable energy and energy efficiency projects with sustainable development benefits). This rang a bell with what I’d seen on the Virgin website.

Virgin Atlantic have set up a scheme with myclimate, a Swiss not-for-profit foundation, that customers can use to offset their flights. myclimate have several projects, including some that have already achieved accreditation by the Gold Standard, which is supported by several groups, including Greenpeace.

You can be cynical about an air travel company providing this kind of service – obviously it’s great for their image – but it does look as if Virgin have spent a fair amount of effort on it. They even provide a page explaining how Virgin calculates the carbon emissions of their customers (we’re travelling Economy – hence my titular smugness).

So, having read around a bit about the Gold Standard method of assessing projects’ effectiveness, I decided to go with Virgin and myclimate’s service. And I’ll probably use myclimate in future too (although there are other companies and not-for-profits that have Gold Standard-accredited projects as well).