A couple of things recently got me thinking about how green I’m living and mainly how green others are living. I don’t feel like I’m polluting as much as some others do, but without any real comparison it’s fairly hard to determine, right? So I decided to start my own “tagging meme”.

The idea is to write about the ways (I currently picked 5, but you could pick less or more) you think you purposely handle things “the green way”, and then write about the things you know you should handle better. Then after than we can tag others to do the same and that way we can get a nice idea of how green we all are. In the process we might even learn some small tips and tricks on how to improve ourselves.

So here it goes. My good points:

1. I don’t have a car - I think this is probably my major green point. I used to have a student travel card in The Netherlands, so I never felt the need to get a drivers license. Now that I live in London, having a car is plain idiotic with the congestion charge and heavy traffic and all. I sometimes drive along as a passenger with others, but I don’t think that that’s a real issue as I think it might count as carpooling.
   
2. I carbon offset my flights - As I don’t have a car, the only way to get from London to The Netherlands is by plane or bus. Starting this year I’ve decided to carbon offset my flights, which I think will help the environment in it’s own special way.
3. I buy long-lasting milk - I believe London’s ex-mayor Ken Livingston had the idea to subsidize long-lasting milk because of it’s low impact on the environment. Long-lasting milk doesn’t have to be constantly cooled before it ends up in your fridge, and these days it doesn’t even taste much different than normal milk. Secretly though, I actually just buy it because the milk at the CostCutter downstairs goes bad way to quick.
4. All the lights in my home are energy saving lights - except for a few of the ones my housemates use. When we moved in here all lights were energy devouring 60Watt lights. I replaced almost all with 8 and 11Watt lights. Saved us about 6x the energy costs on lighting.
5. I bought an environmentally friendly toothbrush - This is probably the oddest thing, but a few weeks ago I was looking for a new toothbrush when I found the Recycline toothbrush. I’m not sure these days how good recycling exactly is (with recycling often also using energy) but it seems like a great initiative. The Recycline guys sell even more stuff besides toothbrushes so be sure to take a look at their site.

And now for my bad points:

1. I quite regularly leave equipment on while I’m away - And I’m not just talking about my Mac Mini which is always on (I should put it in sleep mode more often) but also the TV, TFT, and lights in general. It is such a bad habit and I hate it. I think I should get one of those car-alarm-devices that start beeping when you leave the lights on, but then for my house.
   
2. I leave chargers in the wall while they are trickle charging - Trickle charging can use shitloads of energy, but still we almost all leave our mobile phones charging at 100%. I actually don’t blame myself but think that we need to push the mobile phone companies to make better, auto-off-switching, chargers. I actually read an article a few days ago about initiatives to make the electrical wiring in a house more “intelligent” to solve these issues.
3. I sometimes watch TV while working on my workstation at the same time - As a 21st century media junkie I tend to do too much things at the same time. Mainly watching something I’ve already seen on TV while working on my Macbook. Damn you Five and your Scrubs reruns!
4. I don’t use solar panels - Although probably none of you do, I think most of us should use them. I think that for example especially my mobile phone, and my camera batteries could be well charged by solar energy. Does anyone know what the current state is in energy efficiency of mobile solar panels? It would be a waste to buy a solar panel that used more energy to produce than it will ever generate.
5. I throw batteries in the normal trash - Another bad habit. I don’t know why I do it, but every time I have a dead AAA, I realize I still don’t have a bin for chemical waste, so “this time” I allow myself to throw it with the normal trash. Obviously I still don’t have a decent chemical waste bin.

So those are my good and bad points. Now I want to see yours. I am tagging Melinda, Simon, Alper, Ian, and Martijn to do their version. Good luck.

Some of you by now might have seen this video I made with some friends by now, but I felt that there might be some need to explain how this video came about. For those who haven’t seen the video yet, here is it once more.

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About 2 weeks ago I wrote about a little script I used to backup some of my Wordpress installs automatically to Subversion. A serious problem arose with this method though, and the main reason was this line:


svn add --force *


I used this line to automatically add any new files to the repository. This was handy because often new files are created (e.g. attachments for posts in a blog), as you wouldn’t want to do this by hand every time.

This code doesn’t keep in mind deletes though. If you delete a plugin in your Wordpress, SVN will miss it and start complaining. Additionally the method above overwrites SVN:Ignore settings, which means you can’t ignore certain files (e.g. cache files that change constantly).

So instead I decided to come up with a new solution: see what files are new and what are removed, and perform “svn add” and “svn remove” actions on those files. I used a bit of code from this blog to come up with a fairly good solution.

And replace it with:


svnstatus=$(svn status)
added=$(printf "$svnstatus" | sed -n 's/^[A?] *\(.*\)/\1/p’)
removed=$(printf “$svnstatus” | sed -n ’s/^! *\(.*\)/\1/p’)


What this does is run the “svn status” command that will return a text output of all the modified files (starting with a ‘M’), added files (starting with a ‘?’) and deleted files (starting with a ‘!’). The next 2 lines do a regex to figure out the file names of the new and missing files.

Now add the following two pieces of code after the previous bit of code (and before the svn commit).


if [ "x$added" != "x" ]
then
echo adding “$added” to repository
svn add $added
fi



if [ "x$removed" != "x" ]
then
echo removing “$removed” to repository
svn remove $removed
fi


Both pieces of code use the previously regex calculated paramaters and sees if there are any files to be added or deleted. In then runs the “svn add X” and “svn add Y” commands to update the svn status. After this, a svn commit will include all new files and remove all old files from the repository. This does not remove the backup, so you always go back in time!

The “echo” commands used in these lines of code will show up on the command line, and if your cron job forwards output to an email address this can be used to check if the cron job is working correctly. If it becomes annoying, just remove them.

Since I wrote this article I added a followup article fixing a small problem with this script. Read the article below first though!

This tutorial is really most of all a reminder for me, and some of my friends who use Site5 hosting. It has a few flaws which I will get back to in the end. This site is intended for small sites, like Wordpress blogs, running on shared hosts. The main idea is this: backup all the data of your website daily, automatically, to an offsite location.

Step 1: Get Access to a Subversion Repository

The great thing about Subversion is that it offers incremental backups, allowing you to go back in time as far as you need to restore any problems you might run into. Assembla.com offers free subversion hosting (besides all the other things they offer), which is virtually unlimited. They do charge corporations, but with my current use (4 sites doing a daily backup) I haven’t had any problem with them contacting me or something.

Simply sign up and set up a “Space”. Ignore most of the settings but make sure to setup a Trac+Subversion package for your space. This will enable Trac support and subversion. Once the site is setup, go into the Trac/SVN tab and check the Subversion URL. It should be something like this:

http://svn2.assembla.com/svn/<your_site_name>
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