Articles - Nearly Done

10000 all electric miles

Posted 22nd January 2015 by Nearly Done

7 months after taking ownership of our Tesla Model S, we have just crossed the 10000 mile threshold and thought it would be a good point to reflect on what impact if any, this decision has had.

Financial

Firstly I will compare how the Model S stacks up against my previous car, a VW Passat and a car of equivalent value to the Model S.

10000 miles @ 47mpg = 212.77 gallons = 967.25 litres of diesel.

The price of diesel has dropped dramatically over the last 7 months so to be completely unfair to the Tesla I’m going to pretend all of the diesel was bought at todays price of 114.9p/litre making a total cost of £1111.47 to do that 10000 miles.

Next let’s see how this stacks up if I had charged 100% at home, again to put the Tesla in the worst possible light. This time the calculation is a little easier.

3576kWh * 10.687ppkWh = £382.16

Making a straight saving of £729.31 per 10000 miles. Now in the real world I do a lot of charging whilst out and about. I have a supercharger on route to the current client I am servicing and they also have 3 charge points at the office itself! (albeit very slow ones) There are also the Ecotricity points at the vast majority of motorway service stations. There are also charge points dotted around Coventry city centre that I make use of whilst out shopping.

Upon taking delivery of the Model S, Chargemaster took quite a while before installing my home charge point, by which time I’d already clocked up 3000 miles all at zero cost. Since that point well over half of my milage has been using externally acquired juice. For simplicity, lets say it’s exactly half making 65% of the 10000 miles costing nothing at all. This means that the real world cost of my first 10000 miles in the Model S is about £250.34 or 2.5p/mile.

Environmental

I can hear the ‘Yes but that electricity all comes from coal’ arguments already.

To which I say:

At home I pay extra for a 100% renewable energy tariff.
Tesla are dedicated to using renewable energy wherever possible.
Ecotricity are known for their wind power initiatives.

I cannot vouch for the energy mix from the office charge points so cannot say if the co2 levels are good, bad or ugly.

The Passat on the other hand is rated at 158g/km or in old money, 254.2g/mile making a total co2 (not) output of 254.2KG. Lets call it a quarter of a ton per 10000 miles between friends. I have no idea if that is a lot or an insignificant amount as I have no scale to measure this amount against.

Printing DataTables with scroller

Posted 1st December 2014 by Nearly Done

So you work with DataTables (datatables.net)? Nice to meet the few 100 of you.

Had to implement table virtualisation with the Scroller plug-in? Whoa! Down to 20.

Now hands up if you’ve had to deal with printing the table in Internet Explorer. 3. Wha?! Only 3!?

Well welcome to our collective world of pain. Alas there is a solution to the printing problem.

The problem

When you have a long table and you’ve scrolled half way down and found the data you want to print out and go to print, what do you expect? What you see on screen right? Nope, you get the top of the table.

This is the point some funky maths gets employed (whoever is telling you maths is a waste of time is lying to you kids!) to pull the table back up to where is was on screen. And of course, restoring the table to it’s original state once the printing has finished.

window.onbeforeprint = function() {
	'use strict';
	$('.dataTables_scrollBody').each(function(idx) {
		var table = $(this);
		var cache = {};

		table.dataTableSettings[idx].sDom = table.dataTableSettings[idx].sDom.replace(/S/, '');
		table.dataTableSettings[idx].oScroller.s.dt.bProcessing = false;
		table.dataTableSettings[idx].oScroller.s.skip = true;

		cache.oldTableTop = parseInt(table.find('table').css('top'), 10);
		cache.oldScrollTop = this.scrollTop;

		table.data('oldcss', cache);
		table.find('table').css({
			top: cache.oldTableTop - cache.oldScrollTop
		});
	});
};

window.onafterprint = function() {
	'use strict';
	$('.dataTables_scrollBody').each(function(idx) {
		var table = $(this);
		var cache = table.data('oldcss');

		table.dataTableSettings[idx].sDom = table.dataTableSettings[idx].sDom.replace(/S/, '') + 'S';
		table.dataTableSettings[idx].oScroller.s.dt.bProcessing = true;
		table.dataTableSettings[idx].oScroller.s.skip = false;

		table.scrollTop(cache.oldTableTop);
		table.find('table')
			.css({
				top: cache.oldTableTop + 'px'
			})
			.dataTable().api().draw(false);
	});
};

I couldn’t get this working with wide tables that force a horizontal scroll mind.

Initial setup of Vtiger and connecting a form to WordPress for leads generation and capture

Posted 27th November 2014 by Nearly Done

If you are developing for a client that requires webforms or CRM software then the Vtiger plugin would be most suitable.

Vtiger

View Article

Typography on the web

Posted 7th November 2014 by Nearly Done

Everything you need to know about how to get proper typography onto your sites today.

WordPress Plugins

Posted 6th November 2014 by Nearly Done

Here at Nearlydone, we use and recommend a variety of different plugins to help improve website functionality. By visiting WordPress.org, or your website admin plugin area, you will come across downloads, documentation and reviews to help you decide which plugins, out of a wide selection, is most suitable for you.