12.15.08

Monitoring Home Electricity Usage Using Current Cost

Posted in geekery at 11:43 pm by GaZ

After reading an article over on AutomatedHome the other day, I decided to go ahead and order a Current Cost (CC) system for monitoring our own home electricity usage.

I ordered via their eBay shop, and the package arrived the next morning! Installation was a breeze: just pair the display unit with the sensor (for the wireless communication), attach the sensor ring around one of the main cables feeding electricity into your house, and away it goes! Once the basics were up and running it was time for the fun part: connecting it to a PC! This feature was the main reason I went with CC over the other units. The connection is made using a standard RJ-45 cable via a port on the display unit. Using a serial-to-USB cable I’ve connected it to my Linksys NSLU. Like most people, when I first got the NSLU (AKA the slug) I flashed it and installed an alternative Linux OS (SlugOS/BE). This allows you to then use the slug for just about anything you want from a networked PC. In my case I installed TwonkyMedia to turn it into a nice little UPnP AV server, storing files and serving photos and music to a digital photo frame and the PS3. But I digress. So with the CC connected to one of the slug’s USB ports I just had to write a little python script to parse the data, which the CC spits out in XML format every few seconds. Rich Cumbers has been kind enough to document a description of the XML format, which made it easy to identify the bits I needed.

Now on to the data consumption! When I started looking into the whole CurrentCost thing I stumbled across a new site called Pachube, “a service that enables you to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world.” There are already quite a few interesting feeds set up on the site, such as the UK’s electricity usage, an automatic weather station in the Ross sea, and a musical swing in a Swedish park, as well as several current cost feeds, as well as my own. The service also allows you to generate a dynamic image for various feeds, so here’s mine:

GW's Electricity Usage on Pachube

Now to start adding more sensors to the house. I’m sure Hanne will be pleased! ;)

12.08.08

British ISPs Blocking Wikipedia Content

Posted in geekery at 9:47 am by GaZ

From the BBC: Wikipedia child image censored

A decision by a number of UK internet providers to block a Wikipedia page showing an image of a naked girl has angered users of the popular site.

The wikipedia page in question, regarding the Scorpions album “Virgin Killer,” appears to be blocked by my ISP (Virgin Media)… all I get is a blank page, however I can access the page from work (can’t remember which ISP we use). But in the words of Kim Jong Il: Congwatulations… you have stopped nothing!

Update (10/12/2008): The IWF have now removed the wikipedia page from their list. Hooray for the Streisand effect!

11.17.08

GazBot on WeeWar

Posted in geekery at 11:51 pm by GaZ

A friend from work who has a bit of a knack for the mathematics of gambling has been playing with the Betfair API and developed a bookmaker bot to automagically take and place bets. The way it works is no different to someone logging on to betfair and taking a bet for some competitor to win / lose an event, but because he’s automated the process it’s able to process LOTS of transactions (I’m not going to give away any numbers) across multiple events. I don’t know / understand the exact details of how it works, but it seems to be doing quite well for him!

So hearing about what he’s done has inspired me to create a bot of my own. I’m steering clear of Betfair as knowing my luck all my spare money would disappear within a month, so instead I’m gonna have a go at creating a WAR BOT! Or, more specifically, a WEEWAR bot! Hmm… weewar used to have a wikipedia page, however it looks like it’s been deleted (“reason was ‘Non-notable game, no citations from multiple reliable, third-party published sources.”…. pah!). Basically, weewar is a turn-based strategy game based on maps composed of hexagons representing different terrain types. Once a player controls a base he is able to produce more units (troopers, tanks, ships, aircraft), which can be used to capture / destroy enemy units. The game is won once a single player has eliminated all enemy units. So far this sounds fairly ordinary, and it will continue to do so… unless you’re the kind of person that has an interest in WEB SERVICES, because weewar has it’s own “RESTFul” API (ok, technically it might not be RESTful in the strictest sense, but it’s the buzzword of the year so I’ll go with it)!

And so the idea for gazbot was born! So far all I’ve really done is create a crude implementation of Dijkstra’s algorithm in order for units to follow the shortest path to any given coordinate. Next I’ll need to create some form of strategy for choosing which coordinate to head for, and some way of determining how to behave according to the situation. No, this isn’t going to be easy, and yes, it will probably be next to useless against any half-decent human player, but it should still be a fun experiment and hopefully it’ll beat a couple of the other weewar bots already out there!

08.12.08

Bookmarks for June 24th through August 12th

Posted in geekery at 3:05 pm by GaZ

Here’s what I’ve been reading between June 24th and August 12th:

05.08.08

Bookmarks for May 2nd through May 8th

Posted in geekery at 9:00 am by GaZ

Here’s what I’ve been reading between May 2nd and May 8th:

05.01.08

Bookmarks for April 29th through May 1st

Posted in geekery at 12:12 pm by GaZ

Here’s what I’ve been reading between April 29th and May 1st:

04.29.08

Bookmarks for April 27th through April 29th

Posted in geekery at 9:04 am by GaZ

Here’s what I’ve been reading between April 27th and April 29th:

04.26.08

Bookmarks for April 24th through April 26th

Posted in geekery at 10:00 pm by GaZ

Here’s what I’ve been reading between April 24th and April 26th:

04.24.08

Bookmarks for April 22nd through April 24th

Posted in geekery at 6:06 pm by GaZ

Here’s what I’ve been reading between April 22nd and April 24th:

04.22.08

More Updates!

Posted in geekery, site-news at 10:34 am by GaZ

It seems I’ve been failing to deliver on my promises to pay more attention to this blog and keep it a bit more up-to-date, and all that. It just takes a bit too much of my time and effort to write down a “feature length” blog post these days. I don’t want to abandon this altogether, so I’ve added a couple of plugins to link the blog with my main accounts on Twitter and Del.icio.us.

Twitter is a sort of micro-blogging / social networking tool that allows you to post short updates via the web, various desktop applications (such as twhirl, or SMS. The ease of use and accessibility makes it so much easier to keep your status a little more “current.” My Twitter username is gareth.

Del.icio.us is a bookmarking website, allowing you to store, tag, and share interesting websites with other users. The Firefox add-on makes adding new bookmarks a snap! My del.icio.us username is gareth_western.

Now the plugins I’ve added to this blog will post daily digest messages containing my tweets and bookmarks of the day! Originally I was thinking of doing something similar to hesam and removing the blog, however I’d still like to throw out a proper blog post every now and then. I may even get around to doing my own Wordpress theme one of these days!… or maybe not ;) .

UPDATE: Ok, after a bit of thought I think I agree with this guy regarding posting tweet digests to a blog. I don’t really need to archive all that crap, and the fact that a lot of the tweets are only half the conversation is annoying. It’s like an IRC log of just yourself! So now I’ll just have my last 3 tweets in the sidebar, thereby decreasing my “new media douchebag” rating slightly.

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