How about installing simple power meters in your breaker panel, on each circuit? That way you could monitor each room in the house and in many cases each device (such as big appliances) separately. I'm surprised no one sells such a kit.
Off the top of my head, it would involve adding a small coil of wire around the hot wire of each circuit, and reading those with some A/D's (4 kHz should be sufficient). Tap into one of the hot wires to measure voltage, again using an A/D and probably a step-down transformer. Use a small embeded controller to read all the A/D's and do the correct math (average(A(t) * V(t)) and make the data available on a LAN. I'll bet the whole thing would cost under $100. You'd have a detailed break down of your monthly power bill.
I think the clamp-on ampmeter will not give you the results you're looking for. To calculate AC power, you need to multiply instantaneous volts times amps. Most eletronic devices these days draw current that is not 100% in-phase with the voltage. This difference, called the "power factor," means that you can't accurately calculate power from the RMS current measurement you make with the clamp-on ampmeter. I expect your power numbers will be anywhere from 0 to 200% too high.
Devices like kill-a-watt (I think) make many measurement over the 60 Hz cycle and report RMS(V*A) rather than RMS(V) * RMS(A).
Once you've got your clocks sync'd up well, or you're running all processes on one machine, you can re-interleve the logs using sort (assuming your timestamp is sortable).
sort *.log > fulllog.txt
All my logs have microsecond precision, and they tend to grow at around 50 lines per second. Still, sort does fine on many 100+MB log files. This is INVALUABLE to solving strange timing bugs.
The real value in these devices is that there are no moving parts, and thus the Mean Time Between Failures is much longer. For embeded systems which live some place hard to reach (like a submarine or a satellite) a spinning hard drive can be a real liability.
Here's a good use of Google Earth to show real time weather maps with data pulled from Weather Underground's database of personal weather station. Very cool.
Try out the "export current view" link to view in 3D
Or you can change your units to get more gigabytes instantly. Just redefine a gigabyte as 10^9 bytes (rather than 2^30 bytes) and suddenly you've got 7% more gigabytes! No disk formatting required!
The placebo effect is an amazingly powerful tool that western science is just starting to open up to.
Think about it -- a sugar pill can help alleviate pain (and help heal a wide range of disease) with ZERO side effects. Isn't that the ultimate goal of any pharmacologist? This is an area of research we should all embrace, though it requires an open mind to do so. The mind has far more control over our body than medical science has been willing to admit.
Bait some SPAM to an account on the other end of your link till you're getting, say, 100000 msg/sec. Then have have your mom send you and email and show it getting delivered in under a second. That'd impress most ISPs.
I love my trackball, and it has saved my wrists, but like you said it's no good for precision work (like Photoshop). So I'd really love to have BOTH a trackball and regular mouse, simultaneously.
Has anyone tried connected two pointing devices to Windows or Linux? I don't want to dig under the desk to swap cables when changing tasks.
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How about installing simple power meters in your breaker panel, on each circuit? That way you could monitor each room in the house and in many cases each device (such as big appliances) separately. I'm surprised no one sells such a kit.
Off the top of my head, it would involve adding a small coil of wire around the hot wire of each circuit, and reading those with some A/D's (4 kHz should be sufficient). Tap into one of the hot wires to measure voltage, again using an A/D and probably a step-down transformer. Use a small embeded controller to read all the A/D's and do the correct math (average(A(t) * V(t)) and make the data available on a LAN. I'll bet the whole thing would cost under $100. You'd have a detailed break down of your monthly power bill.
I think the clamp-on ampmeter will not give you the results you're looking for. To calculate AC power, you need to multiply instantaneous volts times amps. Most eletronic devices these days draw current that is not 100% in-phase with the voltage. This difference, called the "power factor," means that you can't accurately calculate power from the RMS current measurement you make with the clamp-on ampmeter. I expect your power numbers will be anywhere from 0 to 200% too high. Devices like kill-a-watt (I think) make many measurement over the 60 Hz cycle and report RMS(V*A) rather than RMS(V) * RMS(A).
Once you've got your clocks sync'd up well, or you're running all processes on one machine, you can re-interleve the logs using sort (assuming your timestamp is sortable).
sort *.log > fulllog.txt
All my logs have microsecond precision, and they tend to grow at around 50 lines per second. Still, sort does fine on many 100+MB log files. This is INVALUABLE to solving strange timing bugs.
The real value in these devices is that there are no moving parts, and thus the Mean Time Between Failures is much longer. For embeded systems which live some place hard to reach (like a submarine or a satellite) a spinning hard drive can be a real liability.
Here's a good use of Google Earth to show real time weather maps with data pulled from Weather Underground's database of personal weather station. Very cool. Try out the "export current view" link to view in 3D
Or you can change your units to get more gigabytes instantly. Just redefine a gigabyte as 10^9 bytes (rather than 2^30 bytes) and suddenly you've got 7% more gigabytes! No disk formatting required!
Think about it -- a sugar pill can help alleviate pain (and help heal a wide range of disease) with ZERO side effects. Isn't that the ultimate goal of any pharmacologist? This is an area of research we should all embrace, though it requires an open mind to do so. The mind has far more control over our body than medical science has been willing to admit.
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Bait some SPAM to an account on the other end of your link till you're getting, say, 100000 msg/sec. Then have have your mom send you and email and show it getting delivered in under a second. That'd impress most ISPs.
Has anyone tried connected two pointing devices to Windows or Linux? I don't want to dig under the desk to swap cables when changing tasks.