Paul Shadwell RTFM

Energy Saving for Geeks

Today has been interesting in that I woke up and went straight to my Mac Pro, that is usually running through the night along with all my other computers, and checked Twitter. I noticed Bill Thompson mention Dr Who, don't know why that caught my eye, I'm not a big fan or anything like that but all the same, there was a link that took me to a recording or a radio interview with Andy Stamford-Clark and engineer at IBM who has wired his Isle of Wight house up to send Tweets when certain things happen.

Then after delving further I found more information about what Andy does and that his setup also monitors and tweets the electricity power consumption of the house as well as individual appliances. It was only the other day when we were faced with paying what equated to be a large electricity bill, almost double what I usually pay and I was wondering what could be drawing so much energy.

The web pages led me to find that what Andy was actually using, was a device that uses a sensor around the main power cable going into the house, that detects the flow of electrical current in the wire and that in turn is displayed wirelessly to a device with an LCD screen. The device also has a serial port allowing it to be connected to a computer. More details here.

For more detail go and take a look at his video presentation and read the interview found here. I have now ordered the monitoring hardware via eBay and I shall blog about it's installation and setup when it arrives.

I have also ordered a Viglen MPC-L for just £104.75 with £11 postage, which will run the setup described by Andy.

IBM is offering the MQTT service for free to those interested in participating in the social side of this project. I can see this becoming an ongoing project for my house in Switzerland. Stay tuned.

Not only does this look like a fun and reasonably cheap project but it can also potentially save you money spent on your energy bills. How cool is that?

I'm Back

Well actually I didn't go anywhere, at least no where exciting, it's just that every time I do something of interest and I think "I must blog about this" by the time I get round to it the moment has gone. Plus, and this is probably more of an excuse than a valid reason for not keeping my blog updated, I find it a pain to go to the website and update my blog there.

I use TypePad and although it's a great site I just find the whole process tedious and time consuming.

Now, when I did the last few blog posts, I have been using a couple of tools to do this which has proved to be much easier. On the PC I was even using the free blogging tool which is part of the Windows Live suite of free apps. The tool I use is called Windows Live Writer and for a free application it is very nice and easy to use.

But I'm trying to move away from PC apps and spend more time doing everything on my Mac. I was using Blogo but it just seemed too basic. Watching a recent SCO from Don McAllister he mentioned that he uses MarsEdit to update his blog. Although I had heard of MarsEdit, I had not tried it. So here I am telling you about it via my blog and doing so using MarsEdit! I just have the 30 day trial version and like most Mac apps, it is a fully functional trial.

Tell me about your blogging experiences and what tools do you use.

ps: It would be really nice to have a WYSIWYG interface in these blogging tools that really show you what's going on. I have nicely presented paragraphs here in MarsEdit but when I post all the text appears as one block.

pps: just discovered the paragraph item under the Markup menu.

A comment about IE6Update

I listened to Paul Boag's AudioBoo this morning regarding IE6Update and had to comment. Here’s what I said:

I completely agree Paul, this is really bad.
I think it's pretty safe to say that the majority of people still using IE6 do not have any choice in the matter, i.e. they're sitting in enterprises consisting of hundreds if not thousands of users where the process of upgrades are very strictly managed.
The biggest reason used by management for not upgrading is cost. If it doesn't effect the day today running of the business it is right at the bottom of the list of priorities. Sad but true.
Believe me when I say that most IT departments fight tooth and nail to get basic upgrades like these done but it's an uphill battle to justify the cost, especially during financial crisis times.
Of course, there are also IT departments that are ignorant to the issues if browser versions.

In addition to this comment I do have an example of IT department ignorance. A well known insurance company I used to work for has a very good and forward thinking web site that does not function well if viewed using IE6. However, 60,000 installed users within the company are still using IE6 because upgrading the web browser is the lowest priority. The people who need it, i.e. the web developers have special installations.

Unfortunately this is the sort of reality that internal IT departments are faced with and right now, IT departments are being thinned down and projects are mostly on hold unless they’re business critical.

I also dislike IE6 but as I said, most of the people who still have it, have absolutely no choice in the matter and using something like IE6Update does not help the matter, in fact it’s more likely to get you site blocked by IT if you do use it. So please don’t encourage it.

My Podcast Debuts

Some people have been asking me about my guest appearances on podcasts so here are the episodes of the International Mac Podcast I have appeared on so far and the Mac 20 Questions.

IMP Live 025 Swiss Paul
IMP Live 029 Terms & Conditions Apply
IMP Live 033 The Clone Wars

Mac20Q PodCast 11

Enjoy and let me know what you think.

If you'd like me to appear on your podcast just drop me an email or contact me via Twitter.

Todays Challenge

Today has been a long day and I don't feel as though I achieved much.

Issues today included, an ActiveX control not working for one user
A .eml file giving strange behaviour when opening. in fact it never opens but alternates between Downloading and Done very quickly.
SharePoint apparently running slowly.
The last one I have tracked down to an issue with the clients viewing the SharePoint pages. Not all the PCs had the same issue.
I now have to dig deeper to find out what the issues are that's causing these failures.

Just a short and sweet blog this evening as I am cream crackered.

Good night and speak to you again tomorrow.

What should I do now?

Do you sometimes think about where you are and what you're doing? I'm there right now. For the past few weeks I've been busy working on various projects but all for other people and not making any progress on my own projects one of which is branding myself.
I have a lot of experience in a number of different and wide ranging fields, from building virtual infrastructure environments to customising real Harley Davidsons, all of which I find a lot of fun to work on. So I'm thinking, should I focus on one or maybe two of these area or all of them together, should I have one blog that focuses on one or several blogs, one for each?
I also have some possible business opportunities and I am getting my own company off the ground, these include offering my services as a Virtual Environment Engineer and as a web designer/developer.
My daughter has just graduated as a graphic designer so I can see an opportunity also for her, she has already done some design work for me which will result in new websites soon.
So as you can see, I'm having trouble knowing where to start.
I often think about blogging my thoughts but generally that's as far as it gets and I know that's not good.
Anyway, enough of my ramblings :-)
There are a couple of things I need to complete, not least of which is the review of online accounting software. I intend to do this soon, especially as there have been significant changes to some of the software I intend to look at, plus, my tax year is coming up at the end of March, so would be handy to have something for myself by then.
If you have any input, suggestions etc, I would love to hear them.

Online Accounting Software Review

Starting a new business is a challenge in itself, especially when the economy is as unstable as it is at the moment but that's where I am and I'm pretty excited about being able to work in areas of tech that I love.
What I don't love is having to keep record of my income and outgoings better known as accounting.
In the past I have used Microsoft Money and Quickbooks which are client based applications, by client I mean that they are software applications that you have to install on your PC to use it.

These days internet bandwidth availability is making it much easier to have applications siting on a central server in an ISPs datacenter. Making these applications web based and non-reliant on client installed software.

I put a tweet out on Twitter a couple of days ago asking for online accounting solutions and I was very pleased to get some responses and I will list them here and I will be doing a review on each of them. The review will be focused on my requirements for my business which is based in Switzerland but as I am not an accountant some details may be left out. My girlfriend who IS an accountant will also be looking at these applications with me.

The online accounting applications I will be looking at will be:

Xero
Clarity Accounting
Freshbooks
Liquid Accounts
Kashflow
LessAccounting
Free Agent Central

Another reason for looking at online solutions is that I need an cross platform solution as I will be using both Macs and PCs to access the systems. Saying that, I have also been told that there are some installed applications for the Mac such as Cha-Ching and iBank thanks to Victor Cajiao for suggesting these and thanks to Don McAllister, Dobes Vandermeer and Ralph Bassfeld for their suggestions too.

I'll be posting reviews of each of the products over the coming days.

Update: LessAccounting has been added to the review list, thanks to Steven Bristol for bringing it to my attention.
Update 2: I have added Free Agent Central to the list. Thanks to Paul Stone for the pointer.

New Swiss Apple Store opening Friday

The new Apple store in Glattzentrum is opening this Friday, the 26th of September at 10am.

The first 1500 customers will get a free Apple t-shirt.
Unfortunatley I won't be there as I have a prior engagement with a few thousand other Harley owners in Italy.
If you go to the Apple store opening, tell me how it went and post some pictures.

New Geneva Apple Store and already a possible lawsuit

I have a colleague who runs his business out of an office that is situated behind the new Apple store on the Rue de Rive in Geneva. The store is due to open before the end of this month and today they powered up the air conditioning systems.

The block that my friend is working in backs onto an open area between the buildings where there are fire escapes and the roof of the ground floor establishments.

Apple's new store runs into the middle of this area and during reconstruction a lot of noise has been generated by the workmen there, so far the neighbours have tolerated this but today seems to be the final straw.

When the air conditioning units were powered up the noise was so great that it would drown out any noise that the workmen had previously generated. Even with all his office windows closed the noise is unbearable he tells me. Prior to the Apple stores refurbishment works it was possible to have the windows open as it was a relatively quiet location compared to the usual noise and bustle of the Geneva high street just the other side of the building.

Residents and other businesses living in the block have already complained so watch out for any new law suits coming Apple's way. Not a great start for the 1st of 3 new stores due to open before the end of the year.
The other two stores are in Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich's exclusive shopping street and until recently said to be the most expensive street in the world. The other store will be in GlattZentrum which outside of Zurich in a large shopping center (mall) near the town of Dubbendorf.

The new Geneva store has already caused some controversy as it is situated only a few doors away from the well known Apple reseller FNAC which sells Apple products alongside other consumer goods.

Fusion 2.0 Released

Today saw the release of VMware's Fusion 2.0.
I have been using the beta release of 2.0 for some months now and have been enjoying a lot of the new features as mentioned in previous posts.
Now that the full release is out I can highly recommend upgrading to this new version. It's performance has been significantly improved and some of the nice usability features include recognising the operating system CD or image that you wish to install and pre-setting all the features you'll need before you start. Installing Windows, XP, Vista and Ubuntu are a breeze.
Other new features include snapshots. Snapshots are a common feature for those of us used to working with the Virtual Server technologies that VMware provides to businesses and it is now available to Fusion users.
A snapshot, as it's name suggests, takes a snapshot in time of your virtual machine. This snapshot is then available for you to revert to if you wish.
For example, say you want to test an application on a Vista VM, before installing the application, you take a snapshot of the VM, you then install the application. You can the test the application. Should you then decide to remove the app, rather than uninstalling and running the risk of residue settings being left behind you can just say, revert to snapshot and your virtual machine is exactly as it was before you started the installation.
Vmware Fusion 2.0 also allows you to create scheduled snapshots, effectively backing up the configuration at each point.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as 2.0 features are concerned, so go ahead and download the upgrade or, if you don't already have Fusion you can download the 30 day trial.

Let me know what you think about the new version and share your favorite features.