Recently I was featured in two prominent online newspapers. The Times published a short story I wrote for The Times Cheltenham Twitter Competition. Extract from The Times The Guardian wrote about my experiences with energy monitors. Extract from The Guardian What struck me was the very different ways that these "Old Media" approached the "New Media" of the web. I'll state my biases up front. I'm a tofu knitting, bleeding heart liberal who - if I were one of the dwindling number of…
Continue reading →
I've decided to add a preview of YouTube videos into Dabr, the mobile Twitter service. The code is fairly simple - although I still suck at regular expressions. if (preg_match_all('#youtube.com/watch?v=([_-dw]+)#', $tmp, $matches, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER) > 0) { foreach ($matches[1] as $match) { $images[] = theme('external_link', "http://m.youtube.com/watch?v={$match}", "
"); } } Here's how it looks. A user writes a …
Continue reading →
As part of my ongoing quest to save energy and save money, I decided to look into changing energy suppliers. Eon were doing a special offer in their Energy Shop for a free PowerDown Plug worth about £15. Here's the unboxing. …
Continue reading →
I'll go through all the features of the Humm Duet Energy Monitor as I figure them out, but there's one that I'd like to highlight because it's a perfect example of usability and how a little improvement can go a long way. The left half of the Duet is concerned with electricity. I want to focus on the "Speed Dial" on the top and the "Daily Counter" in the middle. The units can be £, kWh or Kg of CO2 - a click on the fascia buttons switches between the three modes. Cold Hard Cash As you will …
Continue reading →
My Humm Energy monitor is now fully set up. It's been churning away gently admonishing me for going over my kWh allowance for the day. As I mentioned in the unboxing - there's an integrated 2GB SD card for the Duet to record the energy usage. As the trial progresses, I should be able to upload the data to the website for them to analyse. They faithfully promise to send me a spreadsheet of the data if I want it. Well, what kind of geek would I be if I didn't have a tinker with it my self :-…
Continue reading →
(Disclaimer, I work for Vodafone Group who do a lot of work with Opera. These are my personal views.) The regular BlackBerry browser is... how can I put this politely... sub-optimal. For reading mobile-friendly sites it's perfectly adequate - but for anything more complex it tends to choke. Don't get me wrong, it's "good enough" for most basic browsing needs, but a lack of tabs, half-arsed JavaScript implementation and idiosyncratic rendering choices make for a somewhat frustrating browsing…
Continue reading →
After setting up the HummEnergy Duet electricity monitor yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised at how easy the gas monitor was to set up. Pairing the device was easy and the manual was very clear as to which pipes need to be monitored. A velcro strap makes it really easy to attach the wires to the pipes. Once it's all plugged in, this is what it looks like Clips and Cupboards The monitor now shows whether your hot water and radiators are on. It will show whether the water is cool, heating …
Continue reading →
After seeing a talk at BarCampBrighton on home energy monitoring, I was determined to try it out for myself. I got the Duet from HummEnergy. At £50 it's very competitive to other units in the marketplace - although that is the trial price. It's important to note, this isn't a "SmartMeter". It doesn't replace your normal meter and report your usage back to the energy company - instead, it monitors roughly how much energy and gas you use based on the readings from its sensors. This is a great …
Continue reading →
Green Energy Options have sent me the Duet home energy monitor. The Duet offers a secondary display that is attached to the Solo display and provides the monitoring of up to 6 appliances and central heating. It also provides the ability to compare the energy usage of the appliances and heating over time. In addition to the Solo, the Duet displays: Current energy usage (load) Overall consumption today Environmental impact: CO2 emissions and cost of energy used today …
Continue reading →
Another weekend, another BarCamp. This time the Fourth Annual BarCampBrighton. The BarCamp was excellent. A great bunch of people. The venue was beautiful, but the lack of walls (and floorboards!) meant that sound bleed was a problem. The problem I have with BarCamps is there are invariably two or three talks which I really want to see which have clashing timeslots. So, I decided to record the sessions I went to so that others could see them later. I really hope that future BarCamps ma…
Continue reading →
Dear Sir, This is my response to your consultation "Consultation on Legislation to Address Illicit P2P File-Sharing". I believe that the paper "GOVERNMENT STATEMENT ON THE PROPOSED P2P FILE-SHARING LEGISLATION" is dangerously flawed. In this response, I shall outline four general areas of concern. Practical, Philosophical, Technical and Cultural. I also will provide a series of solutions which I believe will have a positive impact for the creative industries of the UK. Practical There…
Continue reading →
I hate shortened URLs with a passion. It makes it hard to see what a link is and whether I've visited it before. If they fail - like tr.im threatened to do - you lose your links with no way to see where they once went. So, hurrah for LongURLPlease - a service which takes those horrid little links and turns them in to full sized URLs. Here's the basic code in PHP to use the service. function long_url($shortURL) { //Use the LongURLPlease API $url = "…
Continue reading →
· #TCTC guardian news times web · 750 words