Artificial Intelligence

Some members of the US National Academy of Engineering have predicted that Artificial Intelligence will reach the level of humans in around 20 years. So on 2028 computers can reach our level of development - a level incapable of understanding the horrors that we are doing to our planet? If we see it like this, it probably doesn't seam much. Hopefully computers will take over and save us - probably the film movie AI deserved another end...

Reusing the gifts paper

Every year we throw lots of gift paper to the garbage can. This Christmas my father decided to reuse some of card paper to make this cool house.

The house design is cool and simple - my father just did it while we were opening the presents, from a single piece of paper card, on a very elegant and simple design. I'll try and reverse-engineer the schematics and post it here. Hopefully next year we'll waste less paper while creating new toys :)

If someone knows of a site with schematics with this kind of models please post me a comment. Thanks in advance.

Merry Christmas

Monitoring Power

Here's a nice post about monitoring power at home - in Portuguese. It makes a reference to RFXCOM - I'll have to follow this through.

One thing bothers me on this post: keeping 2 computers up 24h/day wasting 300Wh doesn't seem like a great way to save power. I'd probably try:

• for the home automation controller, I'd try a low-power device over Linux; an if you can't find Linux support, an old laptop, from the time they didn't heat as much;
• for the VPN, I'd try to wake-up on LAN - probably from the first device;
  

localcooling.com

http://www.localcooling.com/

PC Power Consumption, does it really matter?

More than 30 billion kilowatt-hours of energy is wasted because many of us simply forget to shut down our computers when we’re not using them. If we could just improve the efficiency of how we use our PCs, the savings in energy costs would be over $3 billion dollars! The CO2 emissions from just 15 computers are equivalent in energy terms to the gas consumption used by one car. Learn More About PC Power Consumption...

LocalCooling is a 100% Free power management tool from Uniblue Labs that allows users to optimize their energy savings in minutes and as a result reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions.

What does the local cooling application do?

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Local Cooling will:

• Cut your energy bills.
• Reduce the amount of Greenhouse Gas CO2 emissions as a result of your reduced PC power consumption.
• Give you full control over your power mode settings.
• Improve your overall computing experience and efficiency.
• Show you in detail how much you have saved since installing the software.

Learn more about the LocalCooling Application and how it will help you save energy!

read it in: Hugo Ribeiro

Saving money!

Look, mom, I'm not the only lunatic that wants to save money! Here's Hanselman's contribution.

Yes I know, I'm really obsessed with logging data - I keep log my car logs since 1993! Sick!

Energy saving is my last data acquisition obsession. On 2005, I was spending 11,76 KW/h per day, and managed to lower my daily consumption to 5,48 KW/h!

Here's how I've managed to get such savings:

• changed all lighting to power-saving lamps
• turned off equipment I used to stand-by
• moved my servers away from home into an ASP
• only powered on my net appliances (router, WiFi AP) when needed
  
• plugged out of the power socket equipment that still sucked up power turned off
• changed the refrigerator for a more power effective unit - ok, the old refrigerator broke down, I (kind of) got lucky
  

To support some of these, I bought a watt meter and some remote operated power sockets.

Hope you too can save some money with this hits. And the planet we all live in...

A simple concept

We are just loosing control on our computers - people just ask for more power, but not all people need such computers.

Here's a nice simple computer, sold at Wal-Mart. Not as inexpensive as you would expect, but yet a nice simple concept. Would probably suffice for my parents computer.

One thing is for sure: it should suck less power then most other desktops.

Saving power

I've finally found the right remote power controller for the right price which really doesn't wastes power.

I've found it at LIDL. It is a Mandolyn 9952, a set of:

• remote controller
• 3 remotely controlled sockets
• 1 remotely controlled dimmer

I've got my self two of these set, for 25€ each, and started setting them up. Here's my topology:

• Channel1: electronics at the living room; for now my old 32' CRT TV (16W standby) and my old XBox (9W just for being linked into the socked))
• Channel2: portable power adapters and networking; power adapter at the living room (9W), power adapter at the bed room (9W), ADSL modem + Wireless AP (26W)
  
• Channel 3: electronics at the bedroom; 20' CRT TV (16W)

I didn't make reference to my bedroom DVD and living room Home Cinema because they don't waste power on standby.

A word of advise to the range: all my (small) apartment is in range! That pretty cool, but comes with a price: hope my neighbor doesn't get nothing on these frequencies...

And here's the economical analysis, assuming I'm only using all of these 4 hours a day: (20/24) x (16 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 26 + 16) x 24 x 30 / 1000 x 0,12 = 6,12€ / month savings! I'll have my ROI back in 8 months. Try and find businesses with better ROI while helping to save the planet and let's still allows you to turn of your TV from your bed :)

I'm trying, I'm really trying...

Here's my last try to save energy: I've bought a remote controller for my stand-by devices. It's an inexpensive set of controller + 3 sockets for 16.95€ at AKI. It's from a brand unknown to me - Avidsen.

The set is easy to setup and works just fine, except for this little big detail: each of the remote controlled sockets sucks up 11W !!!

I'm returning it tomorrow. The question I have to pop is: shouldn't consumers know this before the buy?

Internet Uses 9.4% of Electricity In the US

According to slashdot, Internet Uses 9.4% of Electricity In the US and 5.3% of global demand.

Hope these heavy investment will be well used building knowledge to help our planet...

Can I (economically) justify swapping my CRT to an LCD?

As much as I wanted, I'm afraid I can't. My wattmeter reads 93W/h for our 17'CRTs and 36W/h for the corresponding LCDs. (93 - 36) * 10 (hours a day) n* 22 (working days) / 1000 * €0,12 / KW/h = €1.5. Let's assume we would spend the same in air conditioning to lower the temperature my CRT raises (hope we spend a lot less...). This would give us something like €144 savings on 4 years, and I cannot buy an LCD with that budget. Nope, I cannot definitely justify it economically.

More wattmeter readings

My portable power adapter waists 9W of energy just for being plugged to the power socket - and unplugged from the portable itself.

By the amount of heat I had this coming... As a good geek, I had one of this plugged on my bedroom, and another on the living room. This is an ecological crime. And a economical one. 2 transformers x 9W x 24h x 30days x 0,12€ / KW/h / 1000 = 1,6€/month.

They are now only connected when needed. A huge revolution is taking place here. Start yours!

PS: by the way, my mini vacuum cleaner waists 4W charging.

Strange wattmeter reading

When I plug my old Celeron to the wattmeter, I get a reading of 28W with the system down! Can it be possible?

I finally got myself a wattmeter

I've bought it for 26€ on AKI. It measures:

• tension (V)
• current (A)
• power (W)
• work (kW/h)
• cost
  

I just tried it on the remainings of my datacenter. And here are the first results (as informal averages):

• Celeron 2400: 100 110W

• 600VA UPS: 75 30W (oops...)

• Wireless Router + ADSL Modem: 25 18W (arghh, 2 separate sets... must combine them to save power)

• 17' TFT: 15W

• Wireless Phone: 3 4W

My next readings will be over:

• my chargers room (as a good geek, I have a bunch of gadgets who love sucking up power) ;
  
• on the equipments I usually standby;
• my battery chargers;
  
• on my laptops (particularly on my laptop disconnected chargers);
• and finally on the fridge.

[update] I'm paying something like 0,12€ per kW/h , so we're talking about 15€ / month. To save energy, I will:

• continue to move servers from my silly datacenter into hosting infrastructure;
• disconnect my UPS;
• continue to disconnect standbys;
  

Paradox: are closed options the best options?

I'm currently in the process of shutting down my personal datacenter. It has served me well, but it is too costly on power and ecologically unacceptable. Oh, and it also a bit noisy.

I had a bunch of servers with a bunch of virtual machines serving a bunch of my personal sites, through an expensive domain I was paying to NetworkSolutions served by ZoneEdit dynamic DNS free service. I'm moving all of this to GoDaddy Deluxe hosting. Not as fun to administer nor flexible, but dam cheaper.

One of the decisions I had to make was for the OS. I chose Windows, and let me explain why.

I'd like to keep my old Mambo/Joomla sites, and a bunch of little projects I've done when there was no match for PHP to an old C++ programmer, but still wanted to experiment serving personal ASP.NET sites (ASP.NET sites are my way of living, but I've never did it with my personal sites for lack of licenses).

So the obvious answer was Windows, because of Microsoft's closed model. I can run PHP and mySQL on Windows, but I can't run (decent) ASP.NET on Linux.

It isn't the only example of closed option as the best one. Look at the Apple closed model: we can run Windows and OS X on Apple hardware, but cannot run OS X on non Apple machines. Again the closed model has the upper hand.

I know, this isn't fair, but that the way it is.

[update] I've just found out that the Windows account at GoDaddy doesn't support PHP - only mySQL. Due to the Metropolis low Microsoft support, and because I travel with some project baggage, I'm now trying to change my account back to Linux. The world may not be as unfair to Linux as I supposed... Only unfair to those who refuse to choose to stay only on one side of the fence...

zonbu

Let's face-it: it's just an old idea that failed us too many times, but what the hack: it can help saving our planet :)

Meet zonbu, the new generation of environmentally responsible computing.

My question is: will people pay $12.5/month for a computer that won't play games with you?...

Interesting topology

Until finally surrendered to low energy router / firewall appliances, I used to have a linux box has my first layer of protection (Mandrake SNF, MNF, Astaro, or just the ordinary linux server with Shorewall). I'm talking about my home topology, and, needless to say, I have nothing to protect back home that justifies such heavy armoury, but this is the kind of things that distinguish business man from geeks, so I couldn't help it.

It was I Pentium I, running at 100MHz, with 32 MB of memory and 1.1 GB of disk. But man, was it noisy...

So one fine day, like 2 years ago, I asked my self: "Why isn't the firewall running inside a virtual machine?".

I didn't think twice:

1. Shutdown the firewall and a virtual machine host server.
2. Move both network cards from the first to the latter.
3. Installed a router firewall (IPCop, a simple to install firewall/router was all I needed for my proof-of-concept). I kept the original firewall configuration information, so that the change would be transparent.
   
4. Hooked my WAN cable to the external interface on the router / firewall.
   
5. Hooked a cross-cable between internal interface and the host network card.
6. Did some tweaking with the VMWare Network Configuration.

And that's all! I was running on a computer who's router/firewall was donated by his own virtual machine guest! Did some performance tests, and found no performance loss.

So I kept it running for a month or so, where it was finally replaced by the low energy appliance I'm using until today. The reason of the replacement was simple: I needed to recover memory on the virtual server host to create a new virtual machine...

It was an interesting proof-of-concept. From the security point of view, it was nearly just as secure as the solution it replaced. From ecological and maintenance view, it was by far a better solution.

REF: Ditch the tie, Japan tells workers as "Cool Biz" drive begins

A friend of mine just email me this link: Ditch the tie. Japan is ditching the tie! Finally someone listens!

I'm Portuguese, and here we have the strange habit of using ties - even people that sell door to door wear ties here!

I can understand using ties in Germany, but in countries like Portugal wearing a tie in summer is absolutely nuts!

So listen to this example from Japan, and ditch your ties! If you still feel the need to have a more formal look, choose a more ecological one!