Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Numbers
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
James Lovelock
Is his Gaia theory right or wrong? Has our planet's bio-system been altered beyond repair by human activity?
He is very gloomy about the future for the human race, but is right about one thing, which has been left out of the clip, our planet is a wondrous place to live!
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Back to Normal
The school playground has always been small, so the builders needed to used part of the recycling centre during, making it difficult for contractors to empty the containers.
Not that I'm moaning-- there was no other way. I'm just hoping that it hasn't made too much difference to the weight credits that we receive from Babergh District Council. The last cheque for July to September was £729.38!
Thursday, March 25, 2010
ANGLO-SAXON FIND
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
CORALIE BICKFORD SMITH
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Just a minute
Have a break? from Greenpeace UK on Vimeo.
I guess you're thinking "what's this got to do with recycling?"
Well, when I was teaching, I found that it was very easy to link recycling to land use, caring for our environment and sustainability. Most children seem to have a natural interest and affinity with animals and the pupils at Elmsett School have helped to create Buckles Wood and know that trees and bio-diversity are important.
If you want some information about other products that use palm oil in their production click here.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Monday, March 15, 2010
GET OUT!
My nephew Charlie Swan Pullin (aged 18) has created this great animation by using bits around the house. The clothes Old Man Fergus is wearing are made out of old socks, the room he is in is Charlie's old computer box. I think it is a fantastic animation!
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Maximizing profits from recycling electronic junk
I have been doing some research about all the components on a mother board to figure out why someone would pay $2.50 a pound for them. I found that these boards go to companies that remove all the components and refine them individually. In my research I found the the IC chips, gold plated connector pins and other items are worth a lot more than $2.50/lb if sold in individual lots. For example, I found a buyer for the IC chips alone that was willing to pay between $5 and $10 per pound just for them!
Now my wheels started turning. Why sell the boards whole when I could make a lot more money by taking all the components off them and selling them individually? The first thing that comes to mind is how does a person take these items off the board? I watched a really awful video of some folks in China who heated the boards over an open fire to melt the solder so the parts will fall off. This method is clearly unsafe due to the noxious fumes and gasses that are produced by heating/burning the boards over an open flame.
After some more research, I found that a preferred method is to scrape the components off the boards. A bonafide board scraping machine is quite expensive, so I began thinking of other ways to load a pc board into a machine, hit a button and a large blade would move across it thus scraping the components off. After much looking, I found that an electric log splitter could be modified to do this quite nicely and it would not require a lot of modifications to do it.
This type of log splitter can be purchased for around $300 and provides 4 tons of working pressure, which is more than enough to scrape the components off of a circuit board. Excuse my photoshop skills (below), but hopefully you can get an idea of how to modify the log splitter for scraping. Simply put, a stop is mounted on the far end of the splitter to keep the board in place; the moving part that was used to push logs is modified with a blade. The blade is set at the edge of the board, level with the top of the board. As the blade moves across, the components are simply scraped off. I found several different types of plow blades that are low cost at a local farm supply store. In choosing a blade you need to use something that is easy to modify and readily available.
Somewhat crude, but very effective in my opinion. Now that the components have been removed from the boards, it all needs to be sorted into a few categories such as IC chips, connectors with gold plated pins (which most all motherboard connectors contain gold), aluminum (heat sinks), etc. To find buyers or just get an idea of what computer scrap is worth, go HERE and search. The web site is a little hard to navigate but you will get some very good information. Happy recycling!
In an upcoming segment, we will discuss in detail how to find more buyers for all types of your recycled electronic components. Stay tuned!
Thursday, March 11, 2010
JD Recycle 6: Komakino
[Link removed 20 November 2012] (24 MB)
Joy Division
Komakino
Factory Records Fac 28
Produced by Martin Hannett
April 1980
Tracklisting:
01 Komakino
02 Incubation
03 As You Said
1, 2 sourced from Nippon Columbia Japan CD Substance COCY-9332
3 sourced from London Records CD box set Heart And Soul 828 968-2
Thanks again to Craigie for scanning assistance.
Here are the notes from Mr. A.L., who is doing the mastering:
A record you could simply get free by walking into a record shop and asking for it. Granted it was a shoddy flexidisc, but free? In those pre-filesharing days, legally this was something.
And the first track is among the band's best ever. A very oppressive, dense, kinetic track that by all rights should have been on Closer. Bernard lets it rip a bit towards the end (feedback rather prominent in the mix), and Ian's lyric is amongst his most emotive and prophetic. "As the questions arise and the answers don't fit into my way of things", indeed. The next obvious step would be to say, well, what next? And we all know what came next.
Incubation comes off as more of a disposable guitar workout, with Ian's hyper strumming throughout - I wonder why Ian never saw fit to match a lyric to the tune, as the tune itself is kind of unique.
As You Said, a track that could be as much a Hannett composition as a Curtis/Hook/Morris/Sumner one for all the crazy effects on the track, was taken from the box set because that's the only digital version not sourced from scratchy flexi plastic. The box set compilers actually were able to source the 1/4" master tape and use it for the box, so it made sense to grab the track from there.
Minor EQ and volume adjustments only.
To me, As You Said is a clear "eff off" to the deniers who say Joy Division would never have gotten into all that synthy disco bullshit. The signs were there. I'd never heard the track until sometime in the early 90's when I managed to acquire a copy of the flexidisc, but I recognized it right away because it was beautifully sampled by Meat Beat Manifesto and used as the rhythm bed to Hello Teenage America on their 1990 album 99%. MBM is another of the bands I've followed obsessively (see also: Nitzer Ebb, The Cure, Depeche Mode).
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
JD Recycle 5: Love Will Tear Us Apart
[Link removed 20 November 2012] (49 MB)
Joy Division
Love Will Tear Us Apart
Factory Records Fac 23
Produced by Martin Hannett
April 1980
Tracklisting:
01 Love Will Tear Us Apart
02 These Days
03 Love Will Tear Us Apart (Pennine/alternate version)
04 The Sound Of Music
05 Love Will Tear Us Apart (1995 Don Gehman Radio Mix)
06 Love Will Tear Us Apart (1995 Arthur Baker Remix)
1, 2 sourced from Nippon Columbia Japan CD Substance COCY-9332
3 sourced from 1988 Factory Records CD single Atmosphere Facd213
4 sourced from Nippon Columbia Japan CD Still COCY-9331
5, 6 sourced from 1995 London/PolyGram Canada CD single Love Will Tear Us Apart 422 850 129-2
Thanks to Josef, Ken, Craigie, and Dave for sleuthing and scanning assistance.
Here are the notes from Mr. A.L., who is doing the mastering:
Ask any random stranger on the street to name a Joy Division track, and if they actually come up with an answer, it's usually this single.
Not much I need to add, though for punters who think the jaunty music is the band's signature style based on this song alone, obviously they've not done enough digging into the catalog. An utterly incongruous match between such jolly, Radio 1-esque music and one of Ian's bleaker lyrical contributions - perhaps that's why it works so well?
Track 1 was largely recorded at Strawberry Studios, Stockport in February/March 1980 with the vocals tightened up during the March 1980 Closer sessions at London's Britannia Row Studios. Ian famously modeled his vocals after Frank Sinatra, per Tony Wilson's suggestion. Tracks 2, 3 and 4 were recorded in January 1980 at Pennine Sound Studios, Oldham, and because the band never agreed on the quality of this original LWTUA interpretation, re-recorded it as per Track 1.
Track 2 was recently discovered to be not pitched correctly, so please keep an eye on The Power Of Independent Trucking for a repitched variant (giving it much more of a sonorous depth than the too-fast common version).
Tracks 5 and 6, largely disposable, came about during the first wave of JD renaissance retro fashion in 1995, upon the release of Debbie Curtis' "Touching From A Distance" and the first London-era JD compilation, the useless Permanent. Neither interpretation strengthens the song though Gehman (known for his work with John Cougar Mellencamp and R.E.M.) does bring up the acoustic elements a bit (too much?), and Baker's effort does give the track a bit of a dance feel.
Minor EQ and volume adjustments only.
I actually like Arthur Baker's remix a lot, and will occasionally close out one of my DJ sets with it. Another remix which was commissioned (but rejected) at the time is by Trouser Enthusiasts (Ian Masterson). I find it laughably inappropriate, but if you want to hear it, download this (192 kbps MP3, 10MB).