I decided to measure my personal Carbon Footprint using http://www.carbonfootprint.com today - This site seems just to be some (hopefully) well meaning con to guilt-trip people into giving money to plant trees somewhere in Africa which I am sure will end up being chopped down to make paper or something before they are of any use whatsoever in carbon sinking.

The site is a little simplistic and only provides an un-offset figure - It doesn’t ask the question “How many acres of woodland or forest do you have” which is odd considering that ultimately, their aim is to get you to fork out money so that they can plant trees to offset all the carbon that you are pumping out into the atmosphere.

Anyway, all that aside I put my data into it and my Carbon Footprint per year (before any offsets are applied) is 9,273 Kg compared to the national UK average of 5,013 Kg. Of course, it doesn’t allow me to factor in offsets so I did my own adjustments and apparently my Carbon Footprint is actually -190,700 Kg.

That is over minus 190 tonnes a year - How fucking smug should I feel now? Absolutely, enormously, stonkingly, hugely fucking smug, that’s how fucking smug I should feel now.

Right! Now! Speaking from my absolutely, enormously, stonkingly, hugely fucking smug and very righteous pedestal, I want to express my pissed offness at this new airport passenger tax which has been imposed on us by Blair’s Stasi and backed by the Green Party and Friends of the Earth. When twatty little environmental group spokespeople with their half million quid, solar-aided middle class homes and their £40,000 environmentally friendly cars say that they want to make air travel so expensive that normal people can’t afford it; claiming that this will save the planet for their privately schooled, chinless little offspring Tarquin and Lucretia, then sorry but I want to put an incendiary bullet into them and their methane recycling systems. Cheap Air Travel is a godsend to Europe and is doing a hell of a lot more social good than it is doing environmental bad.

I have never had problems with Friends of the Earth before but now I do and I can’t be the only one. A fluid European population and workforce is a good thing and cheap air travel is vital for this and of course, the people this will most effect are the poor. Go pick on someone else why don’t you?

I am holding off on publishing the design for MICHAEL’S DEATH MACHINE for a few reasons. Firstly, I am still getting the safety systems for the prototype and secondly because I am not sure I should be responsible for the death of millions of bloggers. It would be a bit pointless having a blog taking the piss out of them if they were all dead and self-parody is so very 1990’s.

Anyway, I figure I owe you something so this week I will present How to Hack a Stanley Yankee Screwdriver in glorious digital kodachrome. The Stanley Yankee is one of those screwdrivers that you push in and it twists itself in the direction that you set; they are useful for doing things without people hearing you, unlike those pesky noisy electric things and they are just generally cool things. One of the problems with the Yankee though is that the bits are expensive and as far as I know there is no interchangeable tip system so - I made one.

The standard flathead bit looked like a good start since it already had a taper in the shaft which would save a little bit of cutting. The aim was to create a tapered 1/4 inch square drive on the end so that a bit changer could be fitted.

Case hardened steel is no match for my Dremel and a sodding great vice! Anyway, it needs cutting off at the neck.

Eventually, with time and some effort, it’ll fall off. Happens to us all in the end. You need to keep this bit in case you were wondering:

You need to taper the end now - Luckily two sides are already done as part of the flathead so just match these up on the other side to make a nice square.

With luck, the 1/4 inch bit will fit onto the end nicely - A bloody big hammer makes it fit better though.

And just to prove it still looks cute - Here’s the end product.

There. Now don’t say I don’t occasionally post something useful!