I blogged about this a while ago, and while cleaning up broken links, came across their new website, and a video.
Research shows that natural light increases productivity by 16%.
If Parans type of technology replaced 10% of electric lights in every building in Europe, US and China, we could reduce CO2 emissions by up to 220 millions tonnes every year.
Some guy named Jerry Day, has posted a bunch of youtube vidoes about Smart Meters. They have been picked up such reputable sites such End of the American Dream and others.
The profess to teach everyone about the dangers of Smart Meters.
Here is some choice excertps:
“The meters are watching you.”
No, they are only monitoring the electricity consumption.
“They see how many watts your electric toothbrush uses”
No, they have no way of knowing what is consuming the power.
“They send information about [when you use your toothbrush] over wireless networks”
No, they send a continuous feed of the current amount of electricity consumed. They do not record when appliances are turned on or off.
“They send the information to the power company, where they keep record of all your power consumption, volumes and patterns, and store it forever on computers that you have no access to”
Utility companies already store this information, and have done for many years. It is how they bill you. Data cannot be stored forever, it will be archived, just like your credit card information and your driving record.
“The data shows when you were at home, when you were sleeping, when you’re on vacation, when you have visitors, when you turned on a lamp, a power tool, some extra computers, and if you look like you are running a business out of your home.”
Usage patterns can be used to infer alot of things. The meters will not record exactly when you go to bed or turn on a lamp, but the usage over time creates a pattern that can be recognised. Power companies already have illegal usage detection to prevent grow ops in your neighborhood.
“It even senses when you ‘bootleg’ energy off the grid”.
For shame! They should turn a blind eye to that!
“This is not electrical metering. This is personal surveillence. It is a search without a warrent every day.”
“The smart meters are radio transmitters which can easily be intercepted by a hacker to gain intimate personal knowledge of your life”.
No. The information is encrypted. Just like every time you use your debit card at the store, your banking information “shoots through the air to some institution somewhere.”
“Your power company can give or sell your personal information to whoever it wants.”
Then pick a better power company with a privacy policy you agree to.
“Any abnormal use is considered just cause … for a raid … to bust you for illegal activities in the privacy of your own home that they otherwise wouldn’t have known about.”
Getting away with a crime does not make it legal. It makes it hidden. If the power company used meter data to bust a grow-op in my neighbourhood that attracted dangerous criminals, I’m ok with that.
“Smart meters are no different than wire tapping devices.”
They are very different. Wire tapping devices intercept your communications and allow the attacker to know exactly what was said. Smart meters only watch electricity consumption.
After a bit of a marathon effort, I have finally restored my Grandfather’s email system to a working state. What a mess!
First thing I battled with was a corrupted PST file. scanpst.exe is a little hidden gem that helped with that.
Then, after someone “helped” 1, and messed up the mail delivery, I had to fix his outlook profile. Trouble was, I could not find the “show profiles” tab in the mail control applet. This was maddening, because it was turning up nothing in my Googling.
Turns out that somehow, outlook had been switched into “Internet Mail Only” mode, and I suppose this somehow removes the profile editing stuff. However, the profile that was left was so broken that it had to be fixed. 10 GOTO 10.
Lukily, I found this link which informed me about IMO mode, and how to switch it back. So a lesson for everyone is that in order to use profiles in Outlook, which you need in order to have multiple PST datafiles, and to control how and where mail is delivered, your Outlook must be in Corporate Workgroup mode.
May I also add that TeamViewer is a very good remote control solution, which I used to great effect today for about 3 hours, including 2 reboots.
[1] By “helped” I mean completely screw everything up.
Excel Multiplication Weirdness
Um, what?
Update: Turns out that the cell with the value “0″ was a text string, and apparently, a text string is equivalent to 1.
So I’ve been using a European keyboard for the last 12 months or so, except because I’m stubborn, I’ve not switched to the European keyboard layout in Windows. Which means the markings on the key tops are all wrong. Luckily I’m a good enough typist that this isn’t a problem.
Except the ellipses.
On the US keyboard, the left and right ellipse is above the 9 and 0 key, respectively.
On the European keyboard, they are above the 8 and 9 key, respectively.
This causes me pauses everytime I go to use them, and eventually, I have become so confused, that I get it wrong. Every. Time.
It’s actually kinda funny how my brain works though, because it has started to slowly get used to the idea that for a left elipse I need to press the key marked with the right ellipse, and for a right ellipse I need to press the key marked with an equals sign (as far as the superscript marking on the key that is.)
This is where it gets interesting though, is when I go to use the blackberry. That one-key-to-the-right bias carries over, and when I try to type a left and right ellipse on the BB I get a right ellipse and a dash.
Stupid brain =)
Google Accounts: I’m getting a message that says ‘Sorry, your account has been disabled.’
If you’ve been redirected to this page from the sign in page, it means that access to your Google Account has been disabled.
In most cases, accounts are disabled because of a perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of Service.Google reserves the right to:
- Suspend a Google Account from using a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated.
- Terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.
Well that’s just wonderful. This all started when they thought they detected weird logins from multiple countries, and their SMS secret code method completely failed for my Spanish mobile.
And what’s up with that last clause? For any reason without notice? How do they expect to win business customers with that? I am now completely unable to use any google service, and all my data is locked away. Including YouTube, google docs, gmail, rss reader and chrome bookmarks.
Update: Got the account back, and it was pretty straight forward. But four days is too long without your main email repository. Luckily, I was able to redirect my main accounts to another service.
Gee, I dunno…..
What could be in the last byte? Half a smiley? An exclamation point?
Maybe I should choose to retrieve it just to make sure….
Painting the screen with a hung application
Haven’t done that in a while…
IE froze, and anything in front of it was painted on it. Good work SAP.
It is 2010, and yet when I browse a shared drive over the WAN, explorer slows down to a crawl reminiscent of the days when we were trying to FTP things over a 2400 SLIP connection.
Seriously, what is Explorer doing that it takes a full minute to retreive a directory listing of 16 objects? And why must it completely take over the whole computer while it’s doing it?
Worse still is if you are browsing a very large directory listing, and try to scroll. Then it hangs again, and this time, stops painting, so you get a big white square on the screen. And then the Start menu stops responding. And then you can’t Alt-Tab to other processes.
“Oh, well it’s retrieving information about all the files in the directory.”
No. Because when I click on the file, I have to wait another 30 seconds for the context menu to appear.
“It negotiating security priveledges.”
Uh-huh. We are all in the same domain, and I am several levels deep into the directory structure.
Does anyone know how I can browse file-shares over the WAN in this lifetime?
After asking around, apparently this means that the charge code I was trying to use is not valid.
This one was great. I had blocked myself out, and couldn’t continue.