And I’ll be planting a tree with my daughter at her school this weekend as part of the BBC’s Tree O’Clock campaign to ‘grow a world record’.

Perhaps to coincide with National Tree Week the Forestry Commission (I’m sure they changed their name to Forest Enterprise!) issued a press release stating that if the UK could plant an extra 4% more woodland over the next 40 years we could lock up 10% of the UK’s predicted carbon emissions by the middle of this century.

The two guides are for extensions and porches. There is also an interactive house guide and an interactive terrace guide.

For those of you really into this whole ‘web 2.0′ thing the Planning Portal even have a Second Life Interactive House !

Image: cropped screenshot of Planning Portal Visual Guide

In the run up to the UN conference in Copenhagen CABE argue that Government needs to shift public spending away from “grey projects, like road building and heavy engineering projects, to green schemes, like street trees, parks, green roofs and waterways”.

The Europeans, particurlay the Dutch with their Woonerf & the Germans, have been doing this for decades. In the UK we have Home Zones but there is no supporting legislation for them. The Government has, however, given it’s support to 12 pilot Home Zone schemes in the UK. So far there’s only one completed scheme!

Actually at home (I work from home) we already do our bit – most of our lighting uses compact fluorescents. The rest are low-voltage halogen luminaires which could be replaced with LED lamps. All of a sudden it seems LED lighting for the home has made a dramatic technological leap in terms of lumen output making them comparable with compact fluorescents (could this possibly be because of the EU ban on incandescents – hmmm?). Apart from having a life time of up to 10 times that of a compact florescent, LEDs do not contain mercury.

I have yet to see LED lighting in action in an interior domestic situation where it is required for brightness and not mood lighting – my only experience of serious LEDs is with my Petzl MYO XP headtouch which I use when I’m out in the mountains and a Cateye light for cycling – the output of both is phenomenal.

There is a great deal the construction industry can do to cut carbon emissions, not just in the embodied energy of materials & the process of construction itself but in designing buildings that minimise energy use over the building’s lifetime. To use a clichéd phrase – it’s not rocket science. Dwellings that rely only on the heat output of human bodies and lighting for heating do exist.

And it’s not just energy usage – we also need to to be addressing other issues such as toxicity of materials & water usage.

I’ve also added Matt’s Random Image Script via weblogtools to insert a random background image to the ‘welcome’ post on the blog front page.

There are some fixes that I came across but they either didn’t initially work or required me to install a WordPress plugin.

The markup was failing on:

?keepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=400&width=600 

in an href attribute on the end of the URL.

The WordPress Manage Theme page in the admin panel uses ThickBox to preview themes. I validated that page and it passed. Examining the code I saw that instead of the ampersand a semi-colon was used. After making the change in my code the blog passed the markup validator.

The CSS was failing in two areas. The Thickbox CSS file contains IE6 specific CSS hacks and valid -moz rules that are CSS3 (W3C only validates CSS2.1). I put the IE6 specific CSS into a separate stylesheet and decided to leave in the -moz rules.

For the time being I’ve removed the W3C CSS validator link at the bottom of my website to avoid any possible confusion as I do like to create websites that have valid markup and CSS.

The introduction states that the thermal performance of buildings designed to Building Regulation requirements (or better?) is such that they could actually be ”consuming in excess of 40% more energy than the predicted values”, and possibly much more in some cases!

I’d recommend people to read it.

If the jewellery interests you contact me and I can put you in touch with them.

Click on the image above to preview the site

A worm is making the rounds that sets itself up as a blog administrator; it’s able to hide itself from the blog’s admin panel and it inserts spam and malware into posts.

As this site is powered by WordPress I guess it’s my duty to mention this just in case someone passing by finds it useful to know!