when our central heating pump went a bit feral, I grabbed the opportunity unleash my inner geek, and build some intelligence into the central heating system,to drop its energy consumption…. …The house already has thermostatic valves (TRVs) on all the radiators, which is great from an efficiency point of view, but the water pump wasn’t joining in the game. Read more →
Category: Gadgets
8 Reasons I’m Missing the Nokia n8
likeminds – Self Portrait – Nokia n8 style!, a photo by Benjamin Ellis on Flickr. Bit of a tech tragedy at the weekend – and a bit of an embarrassing one. My trusty Nokia n8 was sitting on my desk, peacefully minding it’s own business, when a 25Kg studio monitor fell off of the wall and landed on it. To… Read more →
Monkey Power
Ok, powermonkey actually. You see it’s become a bit of a standing joke: I call back to base at the end of the day and say “hello, need to update you. Can’t talk for long, battery is flat.” Sometimes my Nokia N95 battery seems to last forever, other times it just dies – it depends on coverage, what Gravity is… Read more →
AppleTV Gestural Interface
Apple release and update to the AppleTV today, and also a new version of the Remote application for the iPod touch and the iPhone, which let’s you remotely control the AppleTV. It is a nice implementation of a gestures based interface, a very simple one, but a nice glimpse of a much better way to interact with technology: There is… Read more →
Saving on Standby Power
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 off the power to all of the sockets when the computer powers down. There is a version for for AV… Read more →
Going without a Digital SLR.
Of all the Canon Spring Collection I played with the other week (see A Camera for Extreme Photography!), the one camera people keep asking me about, and that I keep coming back to is the Canon PowerShot SX200 IS. One of the secrets to getting good at photography is to carry your camera everywhere, and that’s pretty much what I do.… Read more →