Last year in the run up to Christmas, I found the best gingerbread I had ever tasted, being sold by bakery chain Cooks. I liked it so much that I bought a batch for everyone at work to enjoy. Unfortunately there wasn’t any of the same this year, so I decided to give it a go myself.

The key to trying to match those sold by Cooks was going to be the mix of spices – their dough didn’t contain just ginger – and baked consistency, as they were nice and soft.

Fortunately, pretty much the top result in Google was a great recipe that allows for soft or crispy results and involves lots of winter-associated spices. The only issue was liquid molasses is hard to come by on this side of the Atlantic, but granulated molasses – basically a very soft dark brown unrefined sugar – seemed to do almost as good a job.

The result was delicious, and now my sister wants me to teach her how to make it!

Some people don’t stop at making delicious biscuits, as gingerbread can serve a purpose as building material too. Ever seen a gingerbread house? Bet you’ve not seen one like this (as seen on Instructibles):

If you’re not familiar with the concept, cashback sites like this act as affiliates – directly or indirectly through affiliate networks – for online retailers and service providers. When you use the site to browse to these online merchants, any purchases you make are tagged as having come from the cashback site. The companies then pay a percentage or fixed amount to the referring site. Instead of pocketing the money for themselves, they give it back to you.

So far I’ve raised a few pence shy of £150 over a period of maybe a year. The things I’ve purchased are things I would have bought anyway, so I’ve only gained – just have to remember to go to the cashback site first. The larger cashbacks tend to be with insurance and utilities, so when it comes time for me to renew I’ll be looking out for the best combination of cashback and price. I’m hoping I’ll pass £200 before the end of the year.

It takes time for the money to become payable to you, but you can track the progress of your transactions and raise queries manually if something doesn’t track. The time to payment depends entirely on the retailer you’re purchasing from.

This site in particular is a good place to find offers and discount codes, and there is a very active forum community (although I don’t use that feature much).

It’s entirely free to use – no fees at all, and at the moment you get 101% of the cashback you earn (normally 100%). You can also invite friends and family, and receive a fixed bonus for each person who signs up. You can help me out by signing up through my referral URL of http://www.topcashback.co.uk/ref/killswtch and in turn I will have helped you by pointing you to this valuable resource

• 56k v.90 Serial Dialup Modem
• 4 port Lindy PCI serial card
• Zalman High Perf. Ultra Quiet VGA Cooler VF700-CU
• Linksys ADSL2+ Modem/Router w/ 4 port switch AG241
• Lindy 2-port USB/DVI/VGA KVM switch with audio
• iVogue DVB20 DVB-T USB Receiver
• Microsoft Sidewinder USB Joystick
• Gigabit Ethernet Converter 1000Base-T to 1000Base-X
• XP-Pen USB Graphics Tablet

I normally only have the one machine on constantly, my server boron. It’s a fairly old self-built P4 with an old Radeon 9600 AGP graphics card, which puts out more heat than most of my newer machines. When idling, there’s enough heat to keep the cabinet at a mild temperature on these cold nights, but the room is not so easily heated. In summer, there is the opposite problem of too much warmth which on really hot days can only be solved with air conditioning.

With a temperature sensor or two, I could set up boron to run a CPU-intensive task (such as a BOINC project like Folding@Home or Seti@Home) when it’s cold to produce heat while at the same time doing something useful. While it’s not an efficient way of heating a room, you gain both heat AND processed data, rather than just producing heat and nothing else like an electric heater would.

If I had more (quiet) computers in my room, I could keep them off most of the time, then turn them on automatically (using Wake-on-LAN, for example) when heat is needed to do some number crunching.

This idea could be applied to an entire house, like my future self-built house (still in the dream stage, and probably will be for at least 15 years). The heat produced by computation could be put to use heating a house in winter, directly using the warm air, or just helping to heat hot water in the summer by using a heat exchanger to pre-heat the water going into the boiler.

In fact the same could be, and probably is, applied on a commercial scale in newly designed efficient corporate buildings, where the heat from server rooms and networking closets is used to improve the efficiency of heating and hot water provision. Many new well-designed buildings take into account natural air flow, attempting to minimise the amount of energy required for environmental control. Such a use of the inefficiency of necessary electronic systems would add to this eco-design.

Back in the present, in my current location, using the machines I have, this could be accomplished quite easily by setting up a computer-connected thermistor measuring the ambient room temperature and some simple software to monitor the temperature and start/stop intensive tasks as necessary. Not difficult or expensive at all. It could also be applied to the MythTV box, sodium, downstairs in one of the coldest rooms of the house.

If you know of anyone or any buildings that use something like this, I’d be interested to hear about them. Please add a comment below if you are aware of any instances of this idea in use.