Israeli police detained protesters against the war in Haifa: 'To Stop the War' is something that is not legal to put on a shirt.’”

#Haaretz is reporting that a police officer was recorded telling the protesters in Haifa that the shirts they were wearing, with the slogan “To Stop the War,” were illegal. “These shirts are illegal. You are are now leaving the area,” she said, “'To Stop the War' is something that is not legal to put on a shirt.”

The demonstration where the officer was recorded took place in the Hadar neighborhood, calling for an end to the war between #Israel and #Iran, as well as the war in the #Gaza Strip. Only a few protesters participated.

xcancel.com/haaretznewsvid/sta…

@palestine
@israel
#GazaGenocide

Salesforce study finds LLM agents flunk CRM and confidentiality tests

Link: theregister.com/2025/06/16/sal…
Discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

Salesforce study finds LLM agents flunk CRM and confidentiality tests

: 6-in-10 success rate for single-step tasks

^{Lindsay Clark (The Register)}

Chinese retail Sales rose 6.4%, Manufacturing output rose 5.8% in May year-on-year.

Bloomberg saltily admits: 'Overall, economists said the world’s second largest economy had weathered the threat of hikes in tariffs relatively well'.

bnnbloomberg.ca/business/econo…

#china #economy

China gets boost in retail sales as export goods stay home, while tariffs hit factory output

China’s economy managed a mixed economic performance in May, as retail sales jumped while factory output slowed in the face of higher U.S. tariffs.

^{The Associated Press (BNN Bloomberg)}

Sensitive content Reveal/hide

🔞 adult content View on Loforo »

Things you can play with your pussy - Loforo

Loforo - Free Blog Hosting

^Loforo

got a bit of welding done already today now i need to cut some stock on the bandsaw and drill and tap some holes.

kind of craving more cofe desu

I spent time over the weekend with my #Tangara, and have written up my first impressions. Did I love it? Hate it? You'll have to read for the details - but the TL;DR is that it's a cool device that falls short and isn't quite ready for prime time.

Wanna know why? Read my blog post all about it: wrewtopia.com/read/2025-06-15-…

🌍 ■ Médicos Sin Fronteras urge a la UE a actuar por el patrón de genocidio y de limpieza étnica que detecta en Gaza ■ "La hipocresía de los Gobiernos de Europa alimenta el sufrimiento" en la franja palestina, afirma la ONG en una durísima comparecencia en Bruselas. Reclama una "presión real" sobre Israel para acabar con la ofensiva.
huffingtonpost.es/global/medic…

#global

I’m all-in on the Fediverse as the best way to own my own data and network. It’s based on an open standard (ActivityPub), loosely-coupled and open source services, and everyday people (and, it isn’t subject to the whims of lying, narcissistic billionaires). You can think of it as the next iteration of the open web, with social features baked in.

I’ve got a number of accounts that correspond with content that the different networks are good at – posts on Mastodon, photos on Pixelfed, reading habits on Bookwyrm. If I post something on one that I think my followers on a different network may like, I can boost it directly for them to see; or, folks can follow me on whatever platform they choose. My WordPress blog has federation switched on, too, so you can if you like follow @andypiper, and read my blog posts directly in your Fediverse platform of choice. (of course, RSS remains another excellent way to follow my blog).

By the way, if you’re curious what the buzz about the Fediverse is all about, I recommend Elena Rossini’s newsletter The Future is Federated – in the edition that was published today, she did a great job of explaining some of the interoperability between federated networks, from the perspective of, you know, just actually, using them, rather than from a deep technical angle. Worth following!

One of the other services I’ve been using is PeerTube, a federated alternative to YouTube. Up until now I’ve been on Diode Zone. However, that instance recently started to run into some storage issues, and also switched off the live broadcast feature that I’d occasionally used to stream some 3D printing and pen plotter content (this is straightforward to configure in OBS, by the way). I really appreciated my time on Diode Zone, but I’ve chosen to move across to MakerTube, a relatively newer instance dedicated to “makers, musicians, artists and DIY content creators”.

One of the core elements of the Fediverse is data ownership, and some form of portability. When I first joined Mastodon I started out at mastodon.social/@andypiper – if you visit that profile page now, you’ll find my posts starting in November 2016 and ending in November 2022, when I moved over to my current home, macaw.social – there’s a large message that points you at my current location if you look at my original profile. When I switched instances, my whole follower network went with me, seamlessly – unlike, for example, Twitter, where I lost everything when I deleted all my accounts; or Facebook, which heavily relies on its lock-in – read Cory Doctorow‘s excellent book The Internet Con to understand what’s happening there.

The current state of portability is absolutely not perfect – in the case of Mastodon, there’s a process which enables to you to migrate from one server to another, and that automatically resubscribes you to your network, and your followers to your new account, but it’s currently not technically possible to take the past posts with you (there is a W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group taskforce that is working on a more complete set of specifications for data portability that may help to improve this in the future).

Here is how I moved from Diode Zone to MakerTube:

• Requested an account on MakerTube. They want to know who is part of the community, their content intentions, etc. I explained that I’m a maker and I also may plan to use the streaming feature.
• Requested an export of data from Diode Zone.
  
  • this was technically a little bit frustrating, as it got stuck the first time (likely because I had requested it when there were earlier storage issues), but the instance owner was really kind and helped to clear the stuck process.
  • it was also a bit annoying because of the size of my export including the videos, which was a lot of gigabytes; so I ended up having to run a script that kept running wget with a resume flag to get the data in chunks.

  
  

• Setup the basics of my new account on MakerTube.
• Imported the export from the other instance.
• Modified a few places that were pointing to Diode Zone, such as my links page, and also updated a few embeds that were loading videos from my previous account, such as some of the Fedidevs.org meeting recordings.
  
  • … while I was doing that, I thought I’d take advantage of PeerTube’s multi-channel capability, and created a specific channel for Fedidevs content, which you can now follow @fedidevs from other Fediverse platforms.

  
  

There were a couple of slightly rough edges, but nothing very significant:

• Unlike Mastodon, PeerTube does not run a process to tell your followers that you have moved, and to resubscribe them to your new account. In my case I didn’t have a huge number of followers, but I will be posting a video there to say that I moved, and I also updated my profile information to point to the new instance. It did re-follow the accounts I had followed, but didn’t do the other side of the process.
• The new instance imported my playlists, which was great – but some of them were playlists of my own videos, which I tend to create for curation and organisation, and of course, they still pointed at the videos on the previous instance. This was fairly straightforward to fix, just removed and re-added the videos on the new instance.

So there you are. You can follow my entire MakerTube account, my main channel, or the Fedidevs channel, if you like. I also have it set up to import future content that I may choose to post to YouTube, so that it has a free and open backup that Google can’t delete if I ever lose my account there.

I’m still frustrated that WordPress doesn’t seem to have a good integration for PeerTube content yet – I can paste a YouTube link here and get an embedded video, that’s less easy for PeerTube – but, I’m hopeful that will improve in the future.

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andypiper.co.uk/2024/07/25/swi…

#100DaysToOffload #activitypub #coryDoctorow #data #diodeZone #fedidevs #fediverse #makertube #migration #portability #streaming #video #YouTube

Andy Piper

2023-07-31 12:04:45

In November last year, I abandoned my Twitter account – I set it to private, did not visit, did not interact, ignored any direct messages, etc. It was simply too painful to watch friends and coworkers suddenly and systematically being fired, the company culture destroyed, and the developer communities that I supported for 9 years, finally cut off without support or API access. It has been a heartbreaking time.

Today, I took the last step in going back through my password manager vault and deleting all of my X/Twitter accounts. I’ve watched the shambolic rebranding over the past week, and frankly, I wish it had all happened far sooner – rather than seeing my beloved bird being dragged down, and the brand and memory ruined, piece by piece.

There are a few accounts that I share access to with others (for podcasts, sites or communities) that remain, but over the past hour or so I deleted 15 accounts, four of which had associated Twitter Developer Accounts.

Why so many?

• Of course, I had my main account, @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url], which was first created after hanging out with my friend Roo Reynolds in his office at IBM Hursley, and hearing about Twitter, just starting to gather buzz from events like SxSW. Created February 21, 2007. The title of the blog entry I wrote that day seems accidentally prophetic (although, in truth, I do not regret it at all).
  
  • my jobs at VMware / Cloud Foundry in 2012, and at Twitter from 2014, were both direct results of being on Twitter, sharing my knowledge, interacting with different communities, and doing my work on the platform.
  • I’ve made countless friends through being on Twitter, and I’m grateful for that. It truly changed my life to be there.

  
  

• Back at the start, those heady times of 2007-2009, it was not unusual to have a few accounts for fun, so certainly there were a few of those that just went away.
• There was the time when I was copying friends like Andy Stanford-Clark and Tom Coates, and putting sensors around my house online (there’s brief mention of it in this 2009 post).
• There were test accounts I created for projects as far back as my time doing Service Oriented Architecture things at IBM.
• There were a couple of accounts I’d created during education sessions, literally to show others how to get started on Twitter, growing the user base.
• There were a couple of accounts from my demo apps and projects on the @TwitterDev team, such as the IoT sensors I demonstrated on stage at the first Twitter Flight conference in 2014.
• There were the super-sekrit accounts I had for testing features, such as the original internal test for ten thousand character Tweets (yes, this nearly happened, a long time back), the customisable Tweet Tiles we would have launched at the developer conference that was cancelled at the end of last year, and so on.

Finally, it’s time to say goodbye to my main @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url] account. Twitter is not Twitter any more, it is X – and I never signed up for X.

In the near future, I’ll upload a searchable archive of my Twitter content, likely using Darius’ Twitter Archive tool. For now, it’s all done. I’m very happy elsewhere (personal sites and links here and here), and I will not be sad that X is out of my life.

… apart from the laptops that they still have not collected!

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#Life #socialMedia #Technology #Twitter

Andy Piper's links

Links to interesting things Andy Piper is doing

^andypiper.me

You’ve almost certainly seen those t-shirts and posters with the “ampersand” style of lists of names – these originated back in 2001 via Experimental Jetset’s design of the names of the members of The Beatles.

I had this idea that I’d love a shirt like that, with the names of the Fediverse platforms I use most often (referring back to my post about moving PeerTube instances, you’ll know I use quite a few). So, I designed one; Heidi typeset and kerned the design and vinyl cut it for me, using the Cricut Maker and heat press in the studio; and, eventually, I’d had enough expressions of interest that we went ahead and put a printed version up on our studio shop.

Get a t-shirt celebrating some popular #fediverse platforms, available to purchase from @forgeandcraft #fedigiftshop #maker shop.forgeandcraft.co.uk/produ…

— Andy Piper (@andypiper) 2024-06-30T10:57:52.405Z

I’m really happy with the way this came out. I’ve also designed a few other shirts (albeit, not Fediverse-related), so those may hit the shop in the future.

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andypiper.co.uk/2024/07/26/amp…

#100DaysToOffload #apparel #fediverse #forgeAndCraft #tshirt

Andy Piper

2024-07-25 14:51:54

I’m all-in on the Fediverse as the best way to own my own data and network. It’s based on an open standard (ActivityPub), loosely-coupled and open source services, and everyday people (and, it isn’t subject to the whims of lying, narcissistic billionaires). You can think of it as the next iteration of the open web, with social features baked in.

I’ve got a number of accounts that correspond with content that the different networks are good at – posts on Mastodon, photos on Pixelfed, reading habits on Bookwyrm. If I post something on one that I think my followers on a different network may like, I can boost it directly for them to see; or, folks can follow me on whatever platform they choose. My WordPress blog has federation switched on, too, so you can if you like follow @andypiper, and read my blog posts directly in your Fediverse platform of choice. (of course, RSS remains another excellent way to follow my blog).

By the way, if you’re curious what the buzz about the Fediverse is all about, I recommend Elena Rossini’s newsletter The Future is Federated – in the edition that was published today, she did a great job of explaining some of the interoperability between federated networks, from the perspective of, you know, just actually, using them, rather than from a deep technical angle. Worth following!

One of the other services I’ve been using is PeerTube, a federated alternative to YouTube. Up until now I’ve been on Diode Zone. However, that instance recently started to run into some storage issues, and also switched off the live broadcast feature that I’d occasionally used to stream some 3D printing and pen plotter content (this is straightforward to configure in OBS, by the way). I really appreciated my time on Diode Zone, but I’ve chosen to move across to MakerTube, a relatively newer instance dedicated to “makers, musicians, artists and DIY content creators”.

One of the core elements of the Fediverse is data ownership, and some form of portability. When I first joined Mastodon I started out at mastodon.social/@andypiper – if you visit that profile page now, you’ll find my posts starting in November 2016 and ending in November 2022, when I moved over to my current home, macaw.social – there’s a large message that points you at my current location if you look at my original profile. When I switched instances, my whole follower network went with me, seamlessly – unlike, for example, Twitter, where I lost everything when I deleted all my accounts; or Facebook, which heavily relies on its lock-in – read Cory Doctorow‘s excellent book The Internet Con to understand what’s happening there.

The current state of portability is absolutely not perfect – in the case of Mastodon, there’s a process which enables to you to migrate from one server to another, and that automatically resubscribes you to your network, and your followers to your new account, but it’s currently not technically possible to take the past posts with you (there is a W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group taskforce that is working on a more complete set of specifications for data portability that may help to improve this in the future).

Here is how I moved from Diode Zone to MakerTube:

• Requested an account on MakerTube. They want to know who is part of the community, their content intentions, etc. I explained that I’m a maker and I also may plan to use the streaming feature.
• Requested an export of data from Diode Zone.
  
  • this was technically a little bit frustrating, as it got stuck the first time (likely because I had requested it when there were earlier storage issues), but the instance owner was really kind and helped to clear the stuck process.
  • it was also a bit annoying because of the size of my export including the videos, which was a lot of gigabytes; so I ended up having to run a script that kept running wget with a resume flag to get the data in chunks.

  
  

• Setup the basics of my new account on MakerTube.
• Imported the export from the other instance.
• Modified a few places that were pointing to Diode Zone, such as my links page, and also updated a few embeds that were loading videos from my previous account, such as some of the Fedidevs.org meeting recordings.
  
  • … while I was doing that, I thought I’d take advantage of PeerTube’s multi-channel capability, and created a specific channel for Fedidevs content, which you can now follow @fedidevs from other Fediverse platforms.

  
  

There were a couple of slightly rough edges, but nothing very significant:

• Unlike Mastodon, PeerTube does not run a process to tell your followers that you have moved, and to resubscribe them to your new account. In my case I didn’t have a huge number of followers, but I will be posting a video there to say that I moved, and I also updated my profile information to point to the new instance. It did re-follow the accounts I had followed, but didn’t do the other side of the process.
• The new instance imported my playlists, which was great – but some of them were playlists of my own videos, which I tend to create for curation and organisation, and of course, they still pointed at the videos on the previous instance. This was fairly straightforward to fix, just removed and re-added the videos on the new instance.

So there you are. You can follow my entire MakerTube account, my main channel, or the Fedidevs channel, if you like. I also have it set up to import future content that I may choose to post to YouTube, so that it has a free and open backup that Google can’t delete if I ever lose my account there.

I’m still frustrated that WordPress doesn’t seem to have a good integration for PeerTube content yet – I can paste a YouTube link here and get an embedded video, that’s less easy for PeerTube – but, I’m hopeful that will improve in the future.

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andypiper.co.uk/2024/07/25/swi…

#100DaysToOffload #activitypub #coryDoctorow #data #diodeZone #fedidevs #fediverse #makertube #migration #portability #streaming #video #YouTube

The Future of Social is Here: a Show and Tell (part 1: Mastodon ↔️ Pixelfed)

The secret ingredient of the Fediverse is the ActivityPub protocol and how it allows networks to talk to each other. See the magic in action!

^{Elena Rossini}

I’m at Homecamp at Imperial College in London today – learning about home automation and energy monitoring. There’s an amazing group of people here. Follow the Twitter stream or watch it on uStream.

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andypiper.co.uk/2008/11/29/at-…

#currentcost #event #homecamp #London #unconference

As I previously mentioned, on Saturday I went along to HomeCamp 08 in London, organised by Chris Dalby and Dale Lane, and sponsored by Current Cost and Redmonk.

I was pretty actively commenting from the event and taking part in the live uStream channel… others have written up some of their experiences and thoughts, so I don’t propose to say much here. My main contribution was to make a (shaky!) video of Andy Stanford-Clark’s talk towards the start of the morning – a half hour overview of his home automation projects. I’ve posted it on Viddler, and if you are interested you are very welcome to comment on it, embed it in your own sites, or add annotations on the video timeline.

[viddler id=e4676600&w=400&h=267]

The nice part about Viddler over, say, YouTube is that it let me post the whole thing as a single video rather than having to chop it up into 10 minute chunks. I’ll try to post some notes on how I went about producing the video at some stage soon.

Some very general comments on the day:

• Well-organised, well-run, great venue, nice to have wireless access – thanks to everyone involved in the logistics!
• A brilliant, exciting array of skills, talents and interests. It was kind of funny to realise just how many of the folks I knew of as we were doing introductions at the start, and great to find that it wasn’t only a bunch of IBM hackers – this movement is really building momentum.
• A lot of fun… I only wish my hacking skills were greater – but I’m looking forward to contributing and generating ideas in this community.

That’s it from me. Really looking forward to HomeCamp 09!

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andypiper.co.uk/2008/12/01/the…

#andysc #conference #currentcost #energy #environment #event #green #homeAutomation #homecamp #homecamp08 #London #unconference #video #yellowpark

Andy Piper

2008-11-29 11:07:46

I’m at Homecamp at Imperial College in London today – learning about home automation and energy monitoring. There’s an amazing group of people here. Follow the Twitter stream or watch it on uStream.

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#currentcost #event #homecamp #London #unconference

homecamp / FrontPage

^{homecamp.pbwiki.com}

IBM’s Chairman and CEO, Sam Palmisano, has been speaking to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York today. He’s been discussing how the planet is getting smarter:

These collective realizations have reminded us that we are all now connected – economically, technically and socially. But we’re also learning that being connected is not sufficient. Yes, the world continues to get “flatter.” And yes, it continues to get smaller and more interconnected. But something is happening that holds even greater potential. In a word, our planet is becoming smarter.

In the speech, Sam talks about how the world has become instrumented, more interconnected, and devices more intelligent. And he talks about how the current world crises – ecological, financial, and others – represent an opportunity for change. The next step for the globally integrated economy is a globally integrated and intelligent economy and society.

Some of the problems and solutions that are being mentioned are interesting.

67 per cent of all electrical energy is lost due to inefficient power generation and grid management… utilities in the U.S., Denmark, Australia and Italy are now building digital grids to monitor the energy system in real time.

Congested roadways in the U.S. cost $78 billion annually in wasted hours and gas… Stockholm’s new smart toll system has resulted in 22 percent less traffic, a 12 to 40 percent drop in emissions and 40,000 additional daily users of the public transport system

This is exciting for me on many levels. Let me step up through them.

As regular readers will know, I’ve become increasingly interested in pervasive computing and home automation. The little “Current Cost craze” that has swept through my group of friends at work could be seen as a mark of the individual interest in applying technology in a smarter way. I’m excited that this has widened out to a group of folks who are supporting Chris Dalby’s Home Camp idea in London later this month.

Secondly, beyond this individual approach, it ties in to some of what I heard at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin… people talking about the opportunity for technology to change the way things work, from Tim O’Reilly’s keynote on the way forward for Internet technology and innovative thinking, to Tom Raftery’s brilliant GreenMonk pitch on Electricity 2.0.

Finally, and most broadly, it’s a hopeful vision which resonates when lately, things do sometimes appear bleak.

Technology can help society. Let’s go and make it happen.

New York Times article on Sam Palmisano’s speech

YouTube Smarter Planet videos

Update: a couple more links, if you want to get involved…

Smarter Planet on FriendFeed

Smarter Planet on Tumblr

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#change #economy #electricity #globallyIntegratedEconomy #IBM #ideas #SamPalmisano #SmartPlanet #smarterPlanet #smartplanet #Technology #vision

Andy Piper

2008-04-27 19:50:15

The buzz
There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.

Rich, James, Nick and Ian have all written about their Current Cost meters already, amid much twittering and the support of @andysc.

The product
The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.

Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.

Update: Roo points out that Eco Gadget Shop have them for sale to consumers, minus data cable.

The impact

One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).

It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.

The ideas

I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!

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#currentCost #currentcost #efficiency #electricity #energy #homeAutomation #hursley #MQTT

Current Cost display

Explore Roo Reynolds' 5733 photos on Flickr!

^Flickr

Israel ha bombardejat Iemen, a dos-mil kilòmetres.

Israel no para de bombardejar i matar en Líban i Síria.

Israel ha declarat la guerra a Iran, a dos-mil kilòmetres.

Israel segueix perpetrant el genocidi de Gaza en Palestina.

·

Per no perdre la perspectiva.

The buzz
There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.

Rich, James, Nick and Ian have all written about their Current Cost meters already, amid much twittering and the support of @andysc.

The product
The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.

Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.

Update: Roo points out that Eco Gadget Shop have them for sale to consumers, minus data cable.

The impact

One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).

It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.

The ideas

I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!

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#currentCost #currentcost #efficiency #electricity #energy #homeAutomation #hursley #MQTT

[viddler id=e83b64e1&w=437&h=288]

For a while now I’ve wanted to be able to check my CurrentCost meter‘s graphs on my iPhone.

Up until now I’ve been hooked up to the “Hursley mothership” and been publishing my data to a central dashboard. Unfortunately, although that draws some pretty graphs, it runs in Java and therefore isn’t supported in Mobile Safari on the phone.

This is still a work in progress, but with a combination of Ubuntu running on a Viglen MPC-L, rrdtool for gathering and graphing the stats, and the iWebKit framework for creating the user interface, I now have a simple iPhone-optimised web application which lets me view the graphs. All that’s happening here is that the data from the serial port is being dropped into rrdtool and graphs generated; and then Apache / PHP is serving up an optimised dashboard for looking at the graphs.

I just mentioned about three different topics I really should blog about in more detail (MPC-L, rrdtool, and iWebKit) but that will all have to wait.

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IWEBKIT IS A SIMPLE FRAMEWORK TO CREATE YOUR OWN IPHONE AND IPOD TOUCH WEBAPP IN JUST A FEW MINUTES. What’s […]

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Andy Piper

2008-04-27 19:50:15

The buzz
There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.

Rich, James, Nick and Ian have all written about their Current Cost meters already, amid much twittering and the support of @andysc.

The product
The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.

Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.

Update: Roo points out that Eco Gadget Shop have them for sale to consumers, minus data cable.

The impact

One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).

It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.

The ideas

I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!

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#currentCost #currentcost #efficiency #electricity #energy #homeAutomation #hursley #MQTT

Current Cost display

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One of the first Hursley-related things I wrote about here and on the eightbar blog back in 2006 was how much I enjoy helping with our annual schools event for National Science and Engineering Week in the UK – Blue Fusion (the event website has gone AWOL at the moment but here’s a link to the press release).

This year was no exception, and referring back to my old blog entries it turns out that this is now the fifth year that I’ve been a volunteer. Unfortunately I only had room in my schedule to spend one day helping this time around, so I chose to host a school for the day rather than spending all day on a single activity (that way, I got to see all of the different things we had on offer).

So, yesterday I had the pleasure of hosting six intelligent and polite students from Malvern St James School and their teachers – they had travelled a fair distance to come to the event, but despite the early start I think they did really well.

I won’t go into too much detail and spoil the fun for people who might read this but have not yet taken part in this week’s event, but I think we had some great activities on offer. I twittered our way through a few of them. My own personal favourite was a remote surgery activity. You can’t see much in this image (it was a dark room) but the students basically had a “body” inside a box with some remote cameras to guide their hands around and had to identify organs and foreign objects.

There was also some interesting application of visual technology / tangible interfaces – a genetics exercise using LEGO bricks and a camera which identified gene strands, and an energy planning exercise which used Reactivision-style markers to identify where power stations had been placed on a map (sort of similar to what we built in SLorpedo at Hackday a couple of years ago). We also had some logic puzzles to solve, built a, err… “typhoon-proof” (ahem) tower, simulated a computer processor, and commanded a colony of ants in a battle for survival against the other school teams.

Things I learned

1. Facebook (not Bebo) is now where it’s at.
2. If a tornado is coming, get out of the way or into a safe room.
3. Girls are much better than boys at listening to multiple streams of conversation (actually I think I worked this out a long time ago!).

A now, some notes just for my team…

Here are links to a few of the other things we talked about during the day:

• my home power monitoring
• my Twittering weather station
• IBM Smarter Planet
• Andy Stanford-Clark’s automated house
• Home Camp, the home automation and green energy event (next one is at the end of April).

And most importantly, here’s the evidence that we started off in first place 🙂 and I think you were an awesome team throughout. Well done, it was brilliant spending the day with you.

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#BlueFusion #events #hursley #IBM #malvernStJames #schools #smarterPlanet

Andy Piper

2008-12-11 21:53:35

[viddler id=e83b64e1&w=437&h=288]

For a while now I’ve wanted to be able to check my CurrentCost meter‘s graphs on my iPhone.

Up until now I’ve been hooked up to the “Hursley mothership” and been publishing my data to a central dashboard. Unfortunately, although that draws some pretty graphs, it runs in Java and therefore isn’t supported in Mobile Safari on the phone.

This is still a work in progress, but with a combination of Ubuntu running on a Viglen MPC-L, rrdtool for gathering and graphing the stats, and the iWebKit framework for creating the user interface, I now have a simple iPhone-optimised web application which lets me view the graphs. All that’s happening here is that the data from the serial port is being dropped into rrdtool and graphs generated; and then Apache / PHP is serving up an optimised dashboard for looking at the graphs.

I just mentioned about three different topics I really should blog about in more detail (MPC-L, rrdtool, and iWebKit) but that will all have to wait.

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andypiper.co.uk/2008/12/11/cur…

#currentCost #iphone #iwebkit

Current Cost graph

Showing the power consumption based on the Current Cost meter. More about the Current Cost meter on my blog.

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