The latest National Geographic magazine ran a single page feature on Ecofont – a new font design that is supposed to require 20% less ink when printing, developed by a Dutch agency called SPRANQ. This obviously would provide a financial saving for printers, but also help reduce the environmental damage incurred in manufacturing and disposing of ink and toner cartridges.

The font is not intended as a final print font for design or reports, rather the designers intend it to be used for draft-type printing and for general everyday printing (emails, memos, etc).

But this is rather limited as an effective means of saving resources. For one thing, the document being printed must be written using this font, and since a lot of documentation is typically written outside of an organisation (emails, etc), then this is outside the control of the person printing unless they edit the document to use the new font, which incurs a time cost. There are also many times when changing the font from the original to ecofont just aren’t appropriate – for example, it wouldn’t make sense to replace a specific font in a draft design.

A much better option is to set your printer defaults to draft printing, and only ever use full printing for final print jobs. That way, you get much greater reductions in ink usage regardless of what font you are using, and even when you are printing graphics and images.

After posting a couple of comparison images of the River Murray back in January, one of my friends pointed out that the two sets of images were from different times of the year – so there could have been some seasonal effect on the river levels.

I was not so sure – January and February promised exactly 0 mm of rain, and indeed, we have had a total of 8mm since the new year (and all of it in March).

March 2002

March 2009

I tried to find some other comparison images on the internet – there have been a lot of them printed in the local press. Unfortunately, I couldn’t readily find the dramatic images that are printed.

On the other hand, I found some more interesting reading on the Murray River, its river levels over time, and also the problems in maintaining those levels.

For one week now, South Australia and Victoria have been hit by a record-breaking heatwave. Almost everyday has had a high of over 40°C. However, this is only part of it – almost every night we have suffered with minimum temperatures of at least 30°C, with one night breaking the previous minimum recorded for January of over 35°C.

While my friends in the UK have expressed jealousy over these temperatures, especially as they are facing more snow and ice this last week, I would have to say, reluctantly, that they don’t really know what they’re on about.

I’ve been cold – I’ve been so cold my toes have gone black. But cold is easy to deal with – your body is a heat generator, and all you have to do is insulate yourself from the cold, and you are quite happy.

There’s not much you can do when it is hot – there are only so many layers you can take off.

Perhaps the worse thing about it all isn’t the fact that it is hot – it is the night-time minimums. There is no chance for anything to cool down again overnight – the brick walls of houses can’t radiate the heat that they have stored through the day, there’s no cooling breeze to drift through open windows as you sleep, and when you grab your shirt for work and it is still baking warm from the previous day, you know something isn’t quite right.

Buckled Rails near Adelaide - Taken from Adelaide Now (click for larger image)

All this is making for some incredible difficult times for transport and utilities providers – tracks are buckling as the steel expands, and transformers, which are already overloaded by the fact that everyone is running air-conditioning and fans, are struggling to dissipate the heat that is an unfortunate by-product of dropping voltages.

It looks like we’ve got about another week of this, according to the weather agency, but we’re starting to get more breezes through, which are helping.

Hopefully, I can stick it out a bit longer – the portable air-conditioner I bought the other night is helping a lot.

One thing that might be a plus – I should be sweating the fat out of myself in this weather.

I recently rediscovered a viewpoint along the River Murray that I had visited when I first came to Australia in 2002.

The Rivers Murray and Darling are the major sources of water for most of the population west of the Great Dividing Range in New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia – even southern Queensland. In fact, for South Australia, the River Murray is pretty much it – there are other minor rivers, but without the Murray, there is no way that we could support our current population or, more importantly, our agriculture.

Unfortunately, for South Australia, management of the Murray-Darling system has been fragmented between the states that rely on it – which has meant that New South Wales and Victoria have been able to take as much water as they wanted before the Murray crosses over into South Australia and then empties into the sea. Thankfully, the Federal government has finally stepped in, and is starting to ensure supply into South Australia.

The country has also been in a severe drought for many years now – one which could go on for a long while more.

All this means that the river is starting to dry up – I’ve been hearing stories on the radio, and seen pictures on the TV and in the paper – but I hadn’t really been able to see it for myself (it’s about 100 km out to the river from Adelaide). It also took me a while to find the same place that I had taken the images above so that I would get a good comparison of the situation.

The Murray, and its surrounding wetlands, are really suffering from this drought, and local wildlife is starting to really struggle.

And yet, we still have a whole bunch of people in Adelaide who insist on growing an “English country garden” with water-thirsty plants all over the place, and maintaining a luscious green lawn. And in order to do this, they quite happily and blatantly break water regulations by heading out with their hosepipes at any time of the week (restrictions are down to a few hours on either a Saturday or Sunday, as well as another few hours in the mid-week, depending on the side of the road).

And then there are the “bore-hole” waterers – who are tapping into the underground aquifers and sucking them dry. Most worrying here is the distribution of bore-hole permits – almost all of the private permits are in the most well-off parts of the city.

Water is a vital resource – it is needed by everyone for everyday life, and also by agriculture to provide food and export income, and also to support our wildlife. And, thanks in part to the selfish actions of a great many gardeners, water is becoming scarcer by the day.