Vampire Power

I recently went through a bit of an electrical shock (excuse the pun) when we started getting our electrical bills, for our newly purchased home. We bought it in early spring and noticed that our electricity usage kept going up. We discovered that our local library loans out electricity power meters so we borrowed one for a few weeks. We were determined to find out what was causing our electricity usage to continue to rise.

We were concerned about the obvious appliances as all of the appliances that came with the house were all 20-30 years old, nary an Energy Star ranking among them (as far as I could determine), so I started to test them all. Bear in mind that although I tested all of these appliances (the ones I actually could, of course, not able to test 240 V ones) I have no “current”, modern ones to compare the results to. What I can do is compare all of the items tested with each other. My fridge, being greater than 20 years old, is no worse than my 8 year old water cooler. The big shocker for me was my computers. I have 2 computers, one is my desktop that is for everyday use, the other is my server that I use for streaming music from, a website to play with, etc. My desktop I discovered has power saving abilities but weren’t active (in the OS) so I activated it then tested it over a 24 hr period. A certain amount of that time was actual usage, the other was when the PC was idle. Since I was able to activate its power saving abilities, the cost of running that machine over the year amounted to approx. $280. My server unfortunately had no such power saving abilities as its a server machine. Its always on, always available. Its calculated power cost for year turned out to be $1187.14. That’s just about 5 times more than the desktop! Needless to say, I only have that machine on when I need it.

This has made me aware of all of the power that is being consumed, not necessarily when something is being used but simply because its plugged in. Everyday items that you don’t even think about like toasters, or cell phone chargers, or TV’s, stereo equipment or printers and fax machines.

The following YouTube video was taken from the site http://www.vampirepowersucks.com, it has some interesting information there with links to a blog with some interesting industry articles. Check it out:

Ubuntu 9.10 and Flash

As some of you who use Ubuntu (and have installed the latest 9.10 version) Flash (and apparently Java) doesn’t work out of the box as it were. I’ve noticed it, and was annoyed by it but not enough to actually do anything about it. I only go looking for solutions to problems in the Ubuntu forums as a last resort because frankly, they are a pain in the ass. You have to sift through replies made to questions and problem reports that have no use in coming up with what the actual problem may be and the solution to it. So the issue with Flash/Firefox/Ubuntu/AMD 64 systems never really bothered me enough to looking for a solution. Luckily for me I just happened to find one while reading the latest ingest of RSS news items.

BTW I use Liferea RSS news reader. At first I was a little put-off with the way it works but I am now getting used to it. It comes setup by default to aggregate many IT/Ubuntu news feeds so I kept those and added several local RSS feeds. My only problem with it really is that I don’t seem to be able to keep up with it regularly. So when I actually do get back to it, there are hundreds and hundreds of news items that I really have no interest in anymore as I’ve likely read about them somewhere else. Since I’ve been on vacation though I have been checking it fairly regularly and am quite enjoying it. If you use Ubuntu, download and give it a shot, its pretty good.

Ok, back to my problem here. I came across the following blog entry by a Linux user who had been experiencing the same problems and was annoyed that people were blaming the problem(s) on the software providers (Adobe, Java). He wrote up a simple set of instructions explaining how to remove the crap that may be there now, and how to replace it with something that actually works from Adobe and Java. I followed the Adobe instructions and everything with regards to Flash works fine now.

This is the kind of information I desire when I have a problem. The instructions are simple and easy to follow. No complex explanations about crap you don’t need to know about, just a simple how-to with easy instructions to follow. I don’t know who the author is, but sir/madam, I applaud your efforts.

More stuipidity

Michael Geist has released another article on the fate of Canadian TV and it just keeps getting worse as far as I can tell.

In this article he talks about CTV and Canwest (Global) asking the CRTC for the right to be able to block American broadcasts of TV shows, just so they can broadcast those same shows, in Canada, whenever they want to, thus blocking Canadians from seeing those shows when originally broadcast. They want to be able to put off allowing Canadians from watching a show by up to 7 days. WTF??!! And then these same TV stations want us to pay extra for their channels? Are these guys really that dumb? Do they really think people will put up with crap like that?

Perhaps I’m seeing a business opportunity here? Maybe I should start up a business whereby I setup a PC that allows people to download and watch TV shows from the Internet, eliminating a need for people to have to pay for what is shaping up to be a crappy cable/satellite/TV station industry here in Canada.

All of this is just a bunch of crap. I think we need to completely overhaul the entire industry from the TV stations down to the providers.

Eliminate them all and lets start fresh!