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 mon…
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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…
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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 re…
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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…
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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 l…
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Ever seen one of these scratch cards? They often seem to fall out of magazines or inserted into junk mail. A scratchcard I usually just throw them straight into the recycling bin. But, like the fool I am, I thought "Nothing ventured, nothing gained". I could win some serious cash here... Winner Winner Chicken Dinner! If you can't read the small print, it says... Calls cost £1.50/min from a …
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One of the problems with creating a service which deals with elections, is that boundaries change. One year you might be in the Electoral Constituency of Woking, the next year it might be Guildford. Boundaries have to shift in order to keep each MP with roughly the same number of constituents. The work to determine how these boundaries should be formed is done by The Boundary Commission. They …
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Like many people, I'm upset with the direction the Government has taken with regard to "ilicit P2P file sharing". They've released a document entitled GOVERNMENT STATEMENT ON THE PROPOSED P2P FILE-SHARING LEGISLATION. It's only 5 pages long, I really suggest you read it. Being part of a democracy means you're allowed to talk to the decision makers, so I called the number at the end of the …
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Just seen 500 Days of Summer - a perfectly adequate Rom Com. On the walk back, Liz and I were discussing getting divorced. For tax reasons. Neither of us could think of any tax advantages for divorced couples, but it lead us down an interesting conversational route. A fairly standard ploy in movies (and real life) is the couple who wish to marry so one of them can stay in the country. Think…
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As you may recall from previous instalments of my thrilling blog, I'm trying to find the location of every polling station in the UK. This is proving to be rather tricky - if not impossible. The data aren't centrally held and, in any case, polling stations aren't announced until an election is called. So I went for the next best thing. Using the wonderful What Do They Know site to make a Fr…
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Where in the value chain are you? This is a question that we're constantly being asked. When a customer is doing something, who is she doing it with? Who is she doing it for? With whom does she hold the relationship. Above all - Who Owns The Customer? This sort of thinking always bothers me - I don't see anyone as owning the customer. Yesterday, on the train home, I saw a person using …
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A small disclaimer. My mother & the author's mother are great friends. I remember going round to play with Ellie when I was 7 and she was 8 and a half. Back then she towered over me with the intellectual and physical superiority that only children recognise. I was terrified of her. Ellie Levenson has written a book about moden girls and feminism. Take a look at the cover of this book. Pink,…
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