Imagine the scene.
You are sat at your computer, reading a fascinating article online.
You’re about halfway through reading it when something comes up and you need to leave your desk.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could finish reading the page on your mobile? (Without needing to remember how you found the webpage, or what the URL is?)
With this Firefox extension, you can. 🙂
Okay, I know I said I’d stop banging on about CurrentCost stuff… sorry. My next post will be about something different. Honest! 😉
But with talk about Home Camp 2009 starting to pick up, it seems like a good time to remember one of the interesting factoids I picked up at Home Camp last year.
As I wrote at the time:
…the frequency of the electricity you receive from the National Grid is proportional to the ratio of supply vs demand for electricity usage on a national level…
There was a lot of discussion about how this information could be used to make a difference.
This is discussed in more depth at dynamicdemand, but the sort of thing we talked about was how you could make a significant difference without reducing your total electricity usage at all, but by shifting your usage to times when national supply is greater than the demand, and so when the energy is cheaper and more efficient to produce.
As I wrote at the time, it might be interesting to see what this looks like plotted against your own personal electricity usage.
Demonstrating my lightning quick l33t development skills, only ten weeks later, I got round to trying it out. 🙂
I really need to stop blogging about CurrentCost stuff, this is starting to look like an obsession 🙂
But before I do that, I thought I’d share my experiences in writing a new CurrentCost parser.
What is this all about?
On the off-chance that anyone following me hasn’t already heard about CurrentCost a million times already, CurrentCost meters are domestic electricity monitors that tell you how much electricity your household is using. And they have a connection underneath that lets you grab the data from them.
As well as getting your current electricity usage, you can also get historical usage totals out of the serial port, which I’ve used in a variety of ways, such as in my Python CurrentCost software.
CurrentCost have now brought out a new model of their monitor – the CC128. The data format is different to the current models, so I wanted to try and write a new parser that could handle both the existing model and the new CC128 data.
Have you ever read someone’s tweet and not known what they are on about?
At IBM HackDay 5, I played around with an idea for a Twitter hack – a Twitter Glossary that would let users define terms they regularly use in tweets. The idea was that followers would see the definitions appearing as tooltips over those words when they appear in tweets.
I described the idea in more detail here. It’s now available for anyone to try.
The tabbed interface in my CurrentCost app continues to serve me well. It means I can keep adding new pages to try out new things to display and compare, without spending any time rethinking the interface to make room for another graph.
I added another this morning. When you sync the app with the web, it downloads (anonymised) daily power usage values for every registered user, and plots them on a single scatter graph.
I wanted to do this for every stored daily power usage value, but it was unwieldy. I’ve settled for having the web service calculate average daily power usage for each user, and plotting them instead.
Each cross on the graph for a day represents a different user, which is neat – a nice way of seeing trends. By plotting my own usage in a different colour, I can see where I am in the distribution.
If you’ve not tried my app yet, please do consider it. The more people I can get submitting data to the web service, the more interesting these graphs become!
Top of Grace’s Christmas list for Father Christmas was a camera.
In the end, Santa went with the Vtech Kidizoom.
It was tough to find many reviews for it, so I thought I’d share a few of Grace’s snaps with it so far, for anyone interested to see what the image quality is like – all of the photos in this post were taken by Grace (our 4 year old) with the Kidizoom.
The camera cost £40, and produces JPEGs with a resolution of 640×480. There is about 12 MB of storage in the camera, which has enough space for at least a couple of hundred pics, and an SD card slot if you need more space.
The pictures are a little fuzzy, but Grace is certainly happy enough with them.
The camera does have a flash, which means indoor pics are possible.
It can be tricky getting the distance right when using the flash – too far away and the flash is no use at all and the picture is very dark, too close and the flash is too bright creating a bright white picture. (Although this has created a couple of neat pics such as this one!)
The nice people at CurrentCost were kind enough to let me have a pre-production version of their next home electricity monitor to play with: the CC128.
I’ve been meaning to post some thoughts about it for a few weeks now, but the run up to Christmas meant it got forgotten.
But I finally had a bit of time to give it a try today.
If you already know about CurrentCost meters, nothing here will surprise you – this is more of a refinement to the current design, rather than something new and different. (If you don’t, I’ve written about CurrentCost meters before – this new one is just the same, except with a new display unit).
There are some improvements here that I like.
I’m not normally one for habits or routine, but Christmas is an exception – it’s one time when I’m happy, if not actually quite comforted, to do the same stuff I do every year. Traditions are part of the festive magic.
One of my traditions, which started for me when I was at Uni, is to go up to London for Crisis Christmas – the annual homeless shelters event organised by Crisis.
Crisis Christmas provides over a thousand people with a warm, dry place to spend the festive period, and somewhere to share a meal and watch some Christmas telly – the stuff that we all take for granted.
But it’s more than that. People from various specialties and professions volunteer their services, making the Crisis shelters also an opportunity to see a doctor, get a healthcheck – even an X-ray (useful for detecting TB), see a vet (important to the many homeless people who have dogs), see a dentist, a hairdresser, a chiropodist (vital to a group of people whose feet are so often cold and damp, where even getting trench foot is not uncommon), an optician, a pharmacist, get help writing a letter or filling in forms, talk with advisors such as benefits advisors, housing advisors, legal advisors, and loads more.