If you are unfamiliar with the regular Twitter cook-offs, then check out the Summer Pudding Twitter Competition post for a bit of background. Dozens of people from around the globe in an on-line cooking competition, co-ordinated via social networking site Twitter, watched by thousands.
This month’s competition has less to do with cooking and more to do with making. Last month’s winner chose a Summer Sandwich for this month’s competition, so the only heat was in the competion, rather than the food… Well, apart from the occasional chilli in one of the sandwiches. Continue Reading…
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The aim, is to bring people together in person who know each other through Twitter, but don’t necessarily know each other well in person. Given that, of the people coming, there is the full spectrum of people who have never been to an unconference style event before, aren’t technical, and just use twitter as a social tool. There will also be hard core geeks and techies who make social platforms that use twitter, and regularly go to unconference style events. It’ll be an interesting mix of people, with one thread in common we all use twitter. Continue Reading…
I’ve been out buying gadgets to save on standby power. The exciting one mentioned in the video is this fellow:
It is a Standby Saver Energy Saving Unit – as seen on Dragon’s Den, apparently. As explained in the video, it shuts of the power to all of the sockets when the computer powers down. There is a version for for AV equipment too, which works off of the infrared remote control, and apparently one for use with games consoles in the works.
There was an alternative which I looked at, the Intellipanel – Desktop version, but it was a fair bit more expensive, and had things like a telephone line filter that I didn’t need.
It turns out that the standby saver has a little button to turn the computer back on, which turns out to be a bonus. The PC it is wired too is tucked away under the desk, so the standby saver button acts as a remote power switch, on the desk itself and right by the keyboard. That saves reaching under the desk to switch the PC on.
The RF remote powered extension seems to be doing sterling service so far too.
Drew has written a post about his hopes for TVSMC, and Neville gives a good background on Tuttle/SMC. There are a number of people out this way who regularly trek in to London Tuttle, so that gives a great start. It is wonderful to have something local to the Valley here, which will hopefully open up the opportunity for many more people to experience what happens when on-line and off-line merge.
The first gathering is at 10AM on Friday 13th of March. I’ll be there in spirit (since I’ll be in the thick of South by South West Interactive), but there is a healthy crowd going along!
It might not look like it, but that is a wondrous thing. It represents the next step in home hacking with the current cost meter. It is a lead which connects the current cost meter to the serial port on a lower power PC that runs a simple Perl script that records our power usage. The PC runs a script that captures the information from the current cost meter (current power used, in Watts, and temperature in ‘C) and build pretty graphs that are then published on a local web server.
Here are some of the useful resources I used to get it done:
The Jibble post got me started, although not being a PERL programmer or RRD user meant some of the “easy to make” changes weren’t actually that “easy to make”. Having learnt RRD a bit more, I’m impressed with it – great for performance monitoring of all sorts of thigns. It will take something more to move me to PERL as a programming language – PHP is as non-visual as I’m going to get. Some other pointers that helped (and give you an idea what it is all about):
Dale Lane has done a fair bit – it was good to meet him at HomeCamp (I like Dale’s daily electricity bill too – I’ve build something similar, but taking the Kilowatt hours figure from the Current Cost Meter).
Ben Smithurst’s posts were also very helpful – a full script that updates rrd and an sqlite database too.
A slight warning: the commonly used PERL script fails when the temperature goes bellow 10′C though (since the current cost prints a leading space then, which causes the perl string matching clause to barf) – keep your current cost warm or fix up the script .
I have been amazed at the power of measuring usage in changing behaviours. Measuring really is the first step to managing. Even more excitingly, I have noticed that my gas meter is readable (via a magnetic or optical sensor) so I should be able to track that too soon – as if I’m not driving the family crazy already. Here’s a day of our electricity use (with min, max and average power):
First, a disclaimer: Don’t do this unless you feel confident and safe to do so . This will void the warauntee on your G4, big style, but hey… It’s so old I doubt anyone would repair it anyway, right?
With that said, making an old Apple G4 quieter is a fairly simple job. There are three fans that need replacing, two 60mm fans in the power supply, and one 120mm fan that cools the CPU. Some would argue that the two smaller fans make the bulk of the noise, but my G4 is in an audio environment, so I wasn’t taking any chances. Besides, the bearing on the 120mm fan was wearing out and emitting that telling grind of death noise.
The best on-line piece on dealing with the G4 noise is on xlr8yourmac. Normally I get components for quieting machines from QuietPC, but because of the special fan sizes this time I went to FrozenCPU (an insanely large collection of PC bits and pieces, but a carbon foot print fail, since my fans went: China -> US -> UK). It turns out you can actually get a full kit here, but not so cheap.
– as seen on Dragon’s Den, apparently. As explained in the video, it shuts of the power to all of the sockets when the computer powers down. There is a version for 
too, which works off of the infrared remote control, and apparently one for use with games consoles in the works.
, but it was a fair bit more expensive, and had things like a telephone line filter that I didn’t need.
might be a better alternative.
.
. This will void the warauntee on your G4, big style, but hey… It’s so old I doubt anyone would repair it anyway, right?
