Roo – Page 68 – Roo's View

TED 5000 – Installation

I’ve had my eye on the TED device for quite some time. It allows you to monitor your power consumption at the whole house level. I’ve used in the past a Kill-A-Watt which is handy to monitor energy usage by a single device.

The TED 1000 had a closed software package, but showed promise. The TED 5000 provides a web based API to both view your data – and provides a manner to export it. The TED 5000 is one of the few devices supported by Google Powermeter, while I don’t plan to make use of the Google service I do hope they figure out how to collaborate with the community better.

Ontario has a Smart Meter plan on the way, but the roll out is taking a while and I really don’t trust them to get the web tools right in the near term. The TED 5000 is available now, and the data is easy to get to if I want to re-graph it in some way.

I ordered the basic package (TED 5000-G) – there are two basic parts that come with it. The MTU (Measuring Transmitting Unit) and the Gateway, each packaged in their own little box. The first (and scary part) is installing the MTU as it it attached to your electrical panel. The MTU communicates over the power lines to the Gateway (no need to run wires from one to the other). The Gateway needs to be plugged into your router/network and will aquire an IP address via DHCP. You interact with the Gateway with a web browser to view/configure the data.

The rest of this posting is about the install procedure, read on for gory details.

Continue reading “TED 5000 – Installation”

Review: Zipit Wireless Messenger 2

So I must thank my good friend Andrew C for picking one of these up for me at his local Target store and shipping it up to me in Canada. The device itself is about the size and form factor of the Gameboy Advance SP, however there is a lot more under the hood. The Zipit2 boasts a 320×240 colour display, 312MHz XScale (ARM), 32MB RAM, 8MB flash, Mini-SD expansion, backlit querty thumb keyboard, D_Pad and music controls, 802.11 B/G, and a 1000Mah LiOn battery. The retail price is $49.99, but as you can see it was marked down to under $25!

For the casual consumer, this device allows for IM with AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. It appears they also have a gateway to a wide range of US cell phone providers (and one Canadian – Fido) allowing for SMS messages to be sent / received. It will play music and display photos from the Mini-SD card. There is also support for internet radio. While you need to use your own WiFi to connect to the internet, you are reliant on the zipitwireless.com site for the IM connectivity to the device. The 1st year of service is free and after that its $29.95 a year. If you’ve got teenagers and not enough computers, this is a great solution. Another benefit is a side-effect of the limitations of the device – no malware or virus issues, constrained functionality results in a limited amount of mischief they can get into.

Oh yeah, and it runs Linux. So of course the hacking community has has its way with this device and you can now get an “open” Linux build for it. There is also a fairly dated wiki hosted by zipitwireless, however the irc logs seem to be fairly current. I was particulary excited to see that the ScummVM was able to run Full Throttle – something I plan to setup as I actually own the original game.

I’ll update with another post once I’ve got the firmware modified – you knew that was coming right?

Firestarter

My good friend Ken is in London this week, and today I get this image in my email along with:

Have no idea what this means. Some paper in the bar while I was having supper.

If this was printed locally, no doubt I’d arrive at the office to find it thoughtfully taped to the wall outside my office.

I suspect the paper was News of the World, as I found a very similar article here. It seems that Wayne Rooney is often tagged with the nickname Roo – not bad company I suppose.