Homecamp November 2008

Great day at Homecamp yesterday, an unconference loosly based around doing cool stuff with Current Cost and other home automation stuff. We heard about tracking llamas across the downs, linking your doorbell to twitter, sharing your electricity usage with a group and getting competative about it.

What impressed me most about the day was the awareness of the problems we face with energy and climate change and the enthusiasm for addressing them. How can we encourage the behavioral change we need? Was an ongoing question for the day. This was in marked contrast to the previous conference I attended where the general mood seemed to be denial of the problem if possible and certainty that people won't change behavior.

Back to Homecamp. Met lots of interesting people and more I never go the chance to talk to but here are a few links and buzzwords I managed to jot down:
IBM have exteneded their range of protocols down to a Really Small Message broker suitable for Pervasive Messaging (think lots of things measuring stuff and sending out messages about it). Google MQTT and RSMB and XMPP
Prices of Zigbee coming down, £4-5 per chip, but does have problems with stone walls as uses 2.4GHz - X10 still useful for some applications.
Current Cost is the cheap and cheerful device if you want to start measuring electricity use and using the results. Produces an XML feed which can be updated every ?? seconds or will save data up to a month but only in 2 hour granularity. Uses Serial port with Serial to USB cable to connect to a computer. More stuff here: http://code.google.com/p/currentcost/
If you don't want to use more electricity monitoring your electricity, consider Viglan MPC that uses about 10 watts. Cost £80ish. For details see ubunto podcast.
If you want to start tinkering go to tinker.it and buy a arduino board which can take data from all kinds of sensor and has an ethernet connection. Also check out knolleary.net, blinkum and ambiant orbs.
Predictive Failure Analysis links with Pervasive Messaging. Your washing machine sends the manufacturer ongoing measurements of it's performance so that changes in pattern can be used to predict failures before they happen. Or vans send data on their usage so that maintenance can be scheduled based on need for greater efficiency.
Ideas for visualising electricity/carbon - onzo.co.uk for another measuring device but using design to create awareness. Idea of having plant (real of electronic!) that droops or flowers depending on your behaviour.
Plugin for sketchup allows measurements from aduinos via pachube to be displayed on a sketchup model. Useful for planning location of solar panels, how buildings are behaving after people start messing with it in ways the architect didn't foresee. Can also do with into second life to turn lights on and off or see if you left the iron on.
Nokia are doing a homeautomation project using mobile technology - no details.
In terms of changing behaviour - social motivation is stronger than monetary (generally but depends on context). Nothing like a near death experience to motivate people. The power of the group can be used to provide a context - how am I doing compared to others in my group. People like challenges - challenging but achievable.
We currently waste more than half the energy we use (ie. delivers no benefit) 35-40% is down to the technology (standby mode etc) and 30-35% is behavioural (leaving things on).
We are facing a complex problem with is both socially and technologically challenging.
Joe Short from Dynamic Demand and I brought the group up to speed with the challenges and opportunities around dynamic demand and balancing the grid. It's not just using less that cuts carbon, but when you use it. A previous post on demand response.
Publish your data to http://www.pachhube.com (pronounced patch-bay) to allowing sharing and aggrigating. This project is only just getting going but already has feeds from all over the world - energy use, carbon footprint, wind speeds, London Bridge going up and down, whatever you fancy.


I've started twittering #laptopsurvey counting the types of laptops in cafes. This was initially triggered by a friend who said it was rubbish that more and more people were buying Macs instead of PCs. Also interested in counting uptake of netbooks as I think PC people are considering alternatives when buying a new laptop and I suspect many, who might have gone for a Mac last year, will go for a netbook. Feel free to add your own surveys!

Homecamp (approx figures)

Macs 11 (2 white, 5 black, 3 silver, 1 air)
PCs 7 (all but two were Thinkpads belong to IBM employees I think)
Netbooks 6

Checkout @homecamper on twitter and friendfeed room is homecamp.

Hope to see you all again in March if not before.

IT@Cork Conference 2008

A full day yesterday with talk from a wide range of perspectives from a Segway riding (standing/commanding/steering/balancing/figureheading?) economist http://tinyurl.com/6pl4y2 to the CEO of the ESB. Mixed feelings at the end of the day.

We had strong talks on the clear and present danger of both climate change and peak oil (and gas and uranium and coal and copper) but for many people this was a bit of a surprise and were inclined to think they were too down beat. I, of course, would disagree.

On the plus side, great to hear all this stuff that I have been going on about for so long being talked about and built on.

Disconnect I felt, with the ITC presenters, who seemed to be talking about business as usual with lower consumption of energy, but lots more demand for computing. I don't entirely disagree with that, but I don't think they have thought through the implications of peak oil and recession for their customers and suppliers. Will blog on this in more detail in the future.

Very upbeat presentation from Padraig McManus of the ESB. Target for them to be zero carbon by 2035 and 30% reduction by 2012. Also talking demand response, smart metering (although no commitments on installation) and big growth in wind soon. Confident they would not be affected by a downturn and that demand for electricity increase significantly.

Congratulations to the organisers, well run conference, good speakers, although wifi kicking in and out so not able to keep twittering all day - probably a good thing. Met lots of interesting people so very glad to have gone.

Electric Vehicle Fans

Been getting regular feeds from Zoomi Life for the last couple of weeks - all the latest electric vehicle news. Highly recommended:

http://www.zoomilife.com/

UK Budget 2008

Three thoughts on the UK budget.

I think consumers main concern now is their mountain of debt and how they are going to pay the interest, never mind the capital. Are their jobs secure? Is the value of their house going to go back up again? Negative equity on the car and a mountain of credit card debts. I think, and may be wrong because not everyone is in debt and not everyone worries about if they are, that people are more likely to save or pay off debt with a little extra cash than go out and spend it. So I don't think cuts in taxes are going to do the business in encouraging consumer spending.

The stock markets liked the budget, today at any rate. Well that's okay then. Is part of the success criteria for the budget, that the city will like it? I suspect it is, and is this not the kind of short term thinking that got us into trouble in the first place?

What do we need new roads for? Peak Oil has not gone away and neither has climate change. In fact the problems of Peak Oil just got worse because the low price of oil has stiffled investment in both oil and renewables. I struggle to envisage any scenario that does not involve a decrease in driving in the short term, even the most positivie scenario where we replace some of our transport needs with technology. This budget was a huge opportunity to invest in the energy infrastructure of the country and show that the UK was a sound long term investment. Instead the gamble is that we are all going to start buying again and that energy prices, energy security and climate change are not going to cause a problem any time soon.

Just add a couple of wings....

As a private pilot who once dabbled in building a kit plane, the new Aptera looks remarkably like one of those kits but without wings...

Re eMail overload at big organisations

A couple of friends were telling me last night about the eMail overload they have at their company. 100-200 emails per day (not including spam) all of which have to be scanned to see if they are:
- genuine requests for action
- replies
- just thought you would like to know
- does anyone know....
- arse covering
- arse licking
etc.

We considered a number of solutions from charging people to send emails to banning email altogether, but here was the best idea of the evening.

• Email is for actions only, ie. the first two in the list above
• You can only send email to one person
• You, generally, use the old fashioned chain of responsibility when sending - ie. you send a level up or down, NOT to the whole chain. It is the responsibility of the person you send to whether to forward your email. Structures are fairly flat these days, so not as onerous as it used to be.
  
• All cc's get put on a public (to the organisation) twitter stream instead of being delivered. Can also post direct to twitter stream.
  
• It is NOT expected that everyone will see everything on the twitter stream, but it allows for some element of serandipidy - MD just happens to see cleaners observation re competitions plans leaked to girlfriends, mothers, step-brothers, aunt....

Interested to hear any ideas or experiences of what has worked as huge potential savings here for many organisations! Is it possible to process emails before delivery and remove CC'd people then post text on internal twitter? Would need to notify people their email had not been delivered to everyone, by email, thus increasing the number of emails again!

Self-help gadget for electricity cost reduction

Some time in the future our equipment will negotiate for best price energy without our having to do anything. But in 2008, if we want to reduce our electricity bills we have to do it ourselves. Studies show that installing equipment to show people their current electricity usage has a big impact on their usage. For a short time. But when the novelty wears off we tend to slide back to our old habits. Here is an idea for a gadget to keep reminding us to use electricity efficiently.

Having done your initial measurement, you can tell a gadget your target electricity usage for the day. Once you reach this amount and alarm goes off and the gadget flashes an anoying red. Only 6pm and you've busted your limit again. Of course you will start to ignore this after a while as well, but maybe by then you might have got into the habit of switching the lights off or running the washing machine at night (so you don't hear that alarm going off!).