Reducing power consumption of electronics

One of our network switches stopped working.  While looking for replacements, I decided to look for a switch that would be more energy-efficient than the existing one.  I was very interested in D-Link's Green line of products. I bought the DSG-1024D 24-port network switch.  I figured that I would be able to replace several switches with a single energy-efficient switch.

The D-Link Green series has several ways that it saves power:

• It powers down port where it detects an idle link status.


• The switch can detect the cable length of Gigabit Ethernet run, and will use less power for shorter runs.

Before I replaced the switch, I measured the combined energy usages of the switches and did the same after replacing the old ones with the new switch.  By just replacing the two older switches, with the single new switch I saw some power savings.  Since I have other switches that are always on, I decided to replace those as well.

Once I replaced these switches, I saw a savings of 8 watts.
[googleapps domain="docs" dir="spreadsheet/pub" query="hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0AnUYscckGbyadDdmaGZPYmJuQmZEdkFJdVZROHRfM0E&single=true&gid=0&range=A1%3AC15&output=html&widget=true" width="320" height="350" /]

Travel accessories

My wife and I traveled to Chicago this past weekend.  There were two accessories that made the trip easier.

AmazonBasics Universal Travel Case

The AmazonBasics Travel Case allowed us to keep our assorted cables and accessories in a compact form.  For this trip, we used it to store:

• 2 cell phone chargers


• USB cable & power adapter for our kindles


• USB cable for phone


• ethernet cable


• charger for Motorola Xoom


• USB thumb drive


• extra sdcard


• Charger for Samsung Series 5 Chromebook

All of these items fit in a 10" x 6" case.  One good thing about this is that having these items contained in one case made it easy to find each of these items.  Also, my backback wasn't loaded with a rats nest of wires.

I did put this case inside my checked bag, as I was sure that such a densely packed container of wires might have looked suspicious to the TSA agent watching the X-ray images.

ZuniConnect Travel IV

The ZuniConnect is a great travel router.  It lets you connect to a wired or wireless network, and share that with multiple computers.  It will share the network connection either via Ethernet or a 802.11g/n network. One our trip, my wife and I used  the ZuniConnect to share the the hotel wired network connection with our two phones, our laptop, and our tablet.

There are some other nice features of the ZuniConnect:

• Two USB ports to charge portable devices


• The ZuniConnect can be used for a wireless network bridge to connect devices that only have an Ethernet port to connect to a wireless network.

Summify

I have been using my6sense for a while to find content that I am interested in.  my6sense does a very good job ranking content, and it is easily accessible when using the application on my phone or when viewing the Twitter site, with the my6sense extension. One downside is that I need to actively perform steps to view this content.

Summify is a service that will periodically send you an email with a summary of some stories that you are interested in.  When you create an account, you associate your Twitter, Google Reader, and/or your Facebook account.  Summify uses the data from those accounts to determine your interests.

Then periodically Summify sends you an email with articles that you may be interested in.  You have the ability to further refine your interests when you receive the emails.

What is Summify? from Summify on Vimeo.

What is Summify? from Team Summify on Vimeo.

Backupify

Backupify is a service that allows you to backup the data in many online services.  A couple of months ago, I tried the 30 day free trial for the service, but I decided not to continue after the free trial.  I figured that I didn't need to backup my data, as the various services back up the data.

About a month later, my wife mentioned that she was missing some contacts from her address book.  This is the perfect situation that Backupify solves.  If I had set up Backupify for our domain, we would have been able to restore the contacts from the backup.

Once I upgraded my account, I was easily able to add my wife's account, and have it backed up. I had more trouble with my account through.  Since there was a period between when I used the free trial, and when I upgraded the account, the authorizatiokn tokens had expired or had been revoked.  Unfortunately, there isn't a way to manually reauthorize access for Backupify.  Working with Backupify's support, I was able to get things working.

There are several things that I would like to see added to Backupify's service:

1. Ability to backup WordPress blogs


2. For the Backupify Pro plans, it would be good to have the option to allow the other Google Apps users to backup their Social Media services


3. When restoring data, it would be nice to be able to search through the archives to find he particular entry that you are looking to restore.

Parental Controls in Windows 7 Media Center

Our kids are getting old enough to be able to use our Media Center, so I have enabled parental controls to prevent them from seeing content that is inappropriate for them.  When we had used a TiVo DVR, we had used the parental control and were pretty pleased.  The Windows Media Center implementation of parental controls has several peculiarities:

• With parental controls enabled, every time you start playing content, that has a rating higher than the specified threshold, you will get prompted for the PIN.  This happens even if you press stop, and then play on the same show.  (I like TiVo's implementation, where once you enter the PIN, parental controls will be disabled for a time, or until the DVR is turned off.)


• While in the PIN entry screen, content is playing in the background.  So if you take a while to enter the PIN, you will have to rewind to not miss any of the content.


• The parental controls setting is not applied to playing Netflix streaming content, even though Windows Media Center has had support for Netflix content for a while.  So it is possible that inappropriate content could be view through Windows Media Center's Netflix interface.  (One interesting thing is that the Xbox 360's Netflix streaming implementation respects the Xbox's parental controls setting.)

Roku XD|S

I have been interested in streaming content for a while. I have installed PlayOn and the tubeCore Windows Media Center plugin to view TV content. This is not an ideal experience.

With tubeCore, the user interface to browse the list of shows and episodes is pretty simple. For example, the meta data about the episodes is not shown. Also, I was never able to get reliable streaming though PlayOn and tubeCore.  Often, I would need to try to play a stream twice in order for it to play successfully.

The Roku XD|S looked like it would be a perfect way to watch content that is available on-line.  With the Roku, you have easy access to Netflix streaming, Amazon Video On Demand, Hulu and other content.  I like the hardware, as it is very quiet, and is small enough for me to use on any of our TVs.

The setup was pretty painless, and I was up and running with several of the content providers within 30 minutes of starting the setup process.  Where the content partners provided HD content, the picture quality was good.

Glympse

A while ago, I wrote about On My Way.  This application allowed you to share your location, and that person could see this location updated in real-time.  That application is not available anymore.

Glympse is a new free application that allows you to do the same thing, but it has some interesting features:

• Ability to set a time limit, where sharing of your location is automatically stopped.


• Ability to mark recipients as "favorites", to make it easier to initiate sharing


• Ability to set a destination, where sharing will automatically be stopped when you reach that location.

 

Multiple Chrome profiles on Mac OS X

Sometimes I want to use two different Google Chrome instances, with different sets of Chrome extensions.

This page has instructions for setting this up on Mac OS X

Rumor: Microsoft TV

There are rumors that Microsoft will introduce a video streamer box at CES this year:

http://twitter.com/#!/slashgear/status/22224742257790977

I think that this could be a pretty good product that I would like. I think that this could be something that would help simplify my setup.

Announcement hopes:

Here is what I hope the announcement will be:

• The box will be about the size of a Roku or Apple TV


• It would run a version of Windows that has been stripped to only allow Windows Media Center to run.
  
  
  
  • Windows Media Center already supports Netflix streaming
  
  
  • Windows Media Center plugins would still be allowed to run
  
  
  • This would help prevent software conflicts
  
  
  • The box would automatically update itself from Microsoft's servers
  
  
  
  


• These devices would also be Media Center Extenders
  
  
  
  • This would allow you to buy a few of them for a house, and be able to watch the same content in all rooms.
  
  
  
  


• There would be two SKUs.  One with a hard drive for content, and one that would only stream content from other sources.
  
  
  
  • The SKU with the hard drive would allow the user to store content, and playback from the local hard drive.
  
  
  
  


• These would also support Zune Marketplace to get access to video and audio content (as the Xbox 360 does).


• These devices would also be UPnP AV client.


• These would support USB or UPnP TV tuners, to allow viewing or recording (for the SKU that has the hard drive) of TV content.

Since Microsoft already has the Xbox, this device would need to be cheaper than the existing versions of the Xbox.  I would think that the version without the hard drive would be $100, and the version with the hard drive would be $200.

Pie-in-the-sky hopes:

Jumpscan

Jumpscan is a service that lets you share your contact information with others.  With Jumpscan, you enter your contact information, and some of the usernames for various social networks, and they create an online profile for you.  Then they will generate a QR code for this profile page.

I don't understand the usefulness of this service. If my purpose was to create a QR code to share my contact information, I would just create QR code that has my information in vcard format.  This would allow the QR code to be useful, even when there is no data connection. Or, if I wanted to include a url, I would just encode that in the QR code.  If I wanted to share my social network information, I could include a link to my about.me page.

Here is the QR code generated by Jumpscan, which only links to my profile page on Jumpscan.



Here is a QR code with the same information encoded within it:



[via Lifehacker]

Memolane

Over the past few years, I have used several online services.  I use flickr and Picasa to store photos.  I also use Twitter and TripIt. With all of these sites, it is hard to get a consolidated view of these disparate sets of data.

Memolane is an interesting site that lets you view your online "lifestream" chronologically, in a single unified view.  I like that you can go back in time and see what you were doing on certain dates.



It looks like Memolane is having a problem importing my Twitter feed, but once that problem is fixed, I could see using this as a visualization tool.

Instapaper

I find interesting content while using my phone, either from my6sense or by finding links on Twitter.  Often, I don't want to read the content on my phone, either because I don't have time, or the form factor of my phone doesn't make it easy to read long content, so I would save it for later reading.

I had used Gmail to save these urls.  I setup a filter to automatically archive and add a "Bookmark" label if the message came from one of my accounts, and it had the "bookmark" keyword in the subject.  This works well, though it the experience going through the bookmarks is not ideal.

The type of experience that I ideally would like would be similar to the New York Times Chrome App, and the Flipboard experience.  These present content in a clean, visually pleasing way.  The closest experience that I have seen to this, for bookmarks, is with Instapaper.

Instapaper is a service that lets you save pages for you to view later.  They have a bookmarklet that you can use to save any page that you are viewing in a browser.  When viewing the list of saved sites, the presentation is a simple list.  There are some interesting features, that I like:

• When viewing content, you have the option to view a Text-only version, which strips all extraneous formatting.


• You can have content downloaded in Kindle or ePub format

Auto-import for TripIt

I have used TripIt for a while, as it is pretty convenient way to track travel itineraries.  But, since I haven't had to travel for work in a while, I missed their announcement that they have added the ability to automatically import travel itineraries from Gmail accounts.

This removes the need to forward itineraries to TripIt, but I wonder how it will handle an email being archived before it has been imported into Tripit.



[via Lifehacker]

DoggCatcher

DoggCatcher is a very good podcast application for Android.  DoggCatcher supports audio and video feeds, as well as limited support for rss items that don't have enclosures. There are some features that make DoggCatcher a pretty good podcast application:

1. You can browse several directories of podcasts, from with the application.


2. Search for feeds


3. Configure fetch and deletion settings globally, or for each feed.


4. Configure download options to conserve battery usage.

The one feature that I would like to see added is to have queue of file that is manually managed.  I would like to be able to manually add content to a list, and be able to manage the playback order.

Godaddy Hosting

When I transitioned from the web server running in my house, I moved to a Virtual Private Server.  When that server had problems with connectivity, I moved to a Virtual Private Server with Godaddy.  This server worked very well for several years, but it started to need more maintenance that I want to do now.

Since I was really just using the VPS for a few WordPress installations and small web site, I decided to move it to a Godaddy Deluxe WordPress hosting plan.  The transfer of the sites went smoothly, but recently the server started returning 500 errors, when accessing simple web pages.  Since the hosting plan doesn't give you as much visibility into the processes that are running or access to the logs, as the VPS did, it hard to track down the problem.

I decided to move to more managed hosting.  I moved the blogs to WordPress.com.  Since the static sites are pretty simple, I decided to move them to Google Sites.

Amahi Home Server

Amahi is a project that looks like it could be a good home server solution for me. Amahi is a set of packages that installs on Red Hat Linux, and a service that allows cloud configuration of your server.

Many of the features that are available make Amahi a great solution for a home server:

• Firefly media sever for streaming to iTunes


• Built-in VPN server


• File server


• Folder replication with greyhole


• Backup, both full disk (with PBA) and incremental backups (with client software)


• Ability to install other applications.  I am interested in this for:
  
  
  
  • UPnP server, for streaming to Xbox
  
  
  • Squeezebox Server for playing audio to our Squeezeboxes
  
  
  
  

New storage solution

Our Windows Home Server machine has had some problems.  It seems that the drives in the external ESATA enclosure become inaccessible.  After a reboot everything works fine, and when I validate the drives, the results are fine.  I am thinking that the various interfaces are all potential points of failures.  We have 4 drives in the ex475 enclosure, 4 drives in the external ESATA enclosure, 2 drives in an external USB enclosure, and one more USB drive.  Each of those pieces of hardware may fail, and can cause the problems that I am having.

I was thinking about getting a server enclosure, that can support all the drives internally, when the Vail version of Windows Home Server is released.  I would take that as an opportunity to upgrade both the hardware and software, and not attempt to upgrade my existing server, and potentially have the upgrade fail.

But this week, Microsoft announced that the new version of Windows Home Server would not include Drive Extender.  There has been a large community reaction about this, and Microsoft has responded that they are looking into it, but I am not sure what their response would be.

I would install linux on a computer, and use RAID, but there are some downsides to it:

1. Maintenance is not as easy with a consumer server product.  I don't want to manage software upgrades or package dependencies.


2. RAID requires more drive management than I want to do.  With RAID, generally the drives in the pool to be the same size, and to be upgraded together.  Drive Extender allows any size drives to be used, and then added later if necessary.

If Drive Extender is not part of the next version of Windows Home Server, I want to find a different NAS solution.  Maybe a ReadyNAS or a Drobo will work for me.  I just need to find one that has enough storage space for me.

PlayOn on Roku

I have mentioned PlayOn before, as the way that we are getting a lot of our television content.  We use PlayOn to view content from Hulu and SyFy channel. Since PlayOn is a UPnP server , we are able to play this content on our Xbox or on our Media Center PC.

It looks like Roku is getting access to PlayOn content.  The addition of the content that Roku already had, the addition of  PlayOn, makes Roku a credible solution for cancelling cable or satellite service.

I am not sure if once you set the Roku up to access PlayOn content, if you need to leave the PC running to access the content.

my6sense

I subscribe to a lot of content feeds.  I have over 700 subscribed feeds in Google Reader, and follow about 500 people in Twitter (I mainly use twitter to find interesting content).  I has gotten hard for me to sift through the content feed to find things that I am interested in.  my6sense is an interesting app/web service to read content.  It's goal it to make content that is relevant for you easier to find.  So far, I am impressed with how well it presents content that I am interested in.

When you first install the application, you either log into your my6sense account.  Then you can associate your Twitter, Google Buzz, and Facebook accounts with the application.  In addition to the social network feeds, you can also your Google Reader subscriptions into the applicaiton.  At that point, you are able to view the content from those various feeds, like any feed reader.

As you start to read & interact with the content, my6sense starts to build up an idea of what interests you.  It looks like the application take several things into account when determining what you are interested in:

• Which articles you read vs which ones you skip over


• Which ones you share with others.  (Since my6sense is a Twitter, Google Buzz, and Facebook client, you can share directly from the application.


• Since the my6sense android application implements the ACTION_SEND intent, for the various social network services, I assume that sharing content though my6sense from other applications will affect my "interests".

Uninstalled SqueezeCenter from Windows Home Server

A while ago Logitech released a version of SqueezeCenter for Windows Home Server.  It was nice to install it on our server, and not have to worry about keeping another computer running, just for access to our music.  I have been having a problem with the installation though.  If the server is restarted, the SqueezeCenter is not able to successfully startup.  It appeared that the SqueezeSQL service wasn't starting fast enough so SqueezeCenter service wasn't able to connect to the database.

Since we are using Window Media Center, we have a faster computer that is always running, that can be used to run the SqueezeCenter software. The music is still on the server, so there is more network traffic when playing local content, but things are working pretty well.