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Having a baby is a pretty major change in your life, and things tend to get a bit hectic. I’ve found having a device in my pocket that can help smooth the way a bit really helps.

Just Noise

This app is like having a magic button on your phone that soothes grumpy babies. For some reason babies find white noise really relaxing. I’ve used this one to get my daughter off to sleep many, many times.

Remember the Milk

All of a sudden your life has just got a lot more complicated. Unfortunately this also coincides with a new adventure in sleep deprivation. Having an app that can organise you life and remind you to do things is invaluable. You can set recurring tasks, organise them by lists, tags, and a heap of other features. Requires a Remember the Milk Pro account, but the US$25 a year is well spent.

Aldiko

If you’re going to spend countless hours sitting up awake at night settling babies, you might as well do something useful with your time. Aldiko is a great ebook reader that actually makes reading on a small screen quite enjoyable. Plus it has a huge supply of free books ready to download. Mostly that means old book that are out of copyright, but if you can handle reading the Sherlock Holmes novels, War of the Worlds or some Sun Tzu then you’ll be fine.

One handed reading is a very useful thing to be able to do when you’ve got a bundle in the other arm. Another good option if you’ve got a Kindle is their Android app. It will even remember what page you were on when you switch back to the Kindle

Quick Alarm

Simple app, but does the job. Set yourself an alarm for a 20min catnap when you get the chance, and fight back against the sleep deprivation.

Baby ESP

Plotting and recording when your child eats, sleeps and poops may sound a bit anal, but it can also make your life a lot easier. Sometimes you don’t realise your baby has fallen into a routine until you track it, and then knowing when they’re going to do what ahead of time is a huge win. This is a paid app, but you get a fully functional seven day trial. And it’s only US$3 anyway.

At least that’s the result of a Nielsen survey in the US when they asked smartphone users how likely they were to stick with their current smartphone OS when they next upgraded.

Another interesting stat was the OS which people said they would choose if they switched:

From this, we can take a bit of a potshot at estimating what the battlefield in the smart phone wars will look like in a year’s time. Assuming that everybody is able to defect to the system they’d most like to then to figures below show the Iphone snatching the top spot from the Blackberry. The problem with that assumption is that an awful lot of Blackberry users (and 40% of Iphone users, incidentally) are given their phones by their employer, so actually aren’t free to switch.

Personally, I don’t think the Blackberry number will drop as much, for the reason mentioned above. WinMo has been dying a slow death for a while, so a 4% drop doesn’t sound too unreasonable, despite also being popular with enterprise users. Recent polls have also shown Iphone uptake to be stagnating, while Android is surging. So my prediction is that my numbers for Android and WinMo will be accurate, but that the swing from Blackberry to Iphone may not be as severe as the numbers suggest.

Can Blackberry hold onto that top spot? Only time will tell…

The Fonera is a compact green and black box. The multiple antennae betray the presence of high-speed wifi-n under the hood.

I’ve blogged about FON recently, but didn’t go into too much technical detail. The magic box behind it all is the Fonera router.

The latest iteration is the Fonera 2.0n, which unsurprisingly uses the new 802.11n standard for higher speeds and better range wifi. That alone is probably worth the £79 pricetag, but this beastie actually has a lot more tricks up it’s sleeve. Features include:

• A seperate public wifi signal, giving the owner access to all FON hotspots worldwide.
• USB port for adding storage, printers, soundcards, etc. With storage added the router functions like a NAS. With a printer added it works as a print server. Or you can plug in a USB hub and do both.
• Transmission bit torrent client.
• Download tool for file sharing sites (eg: Rapidshare).
• Facebook, Picasa, Youtube and Flickr uploaders.
• Plug in a 3G dongle and it’ll create a wifi hotspot from it. So you don’t even need a landline or ADSL connection to use it.
• An open application framework for extending it’s capabilities.
• As a “self-tweeting router” it has it’s own Twitter account, and will tweet you when your up/downloads are done.

On top of this it has all the usual router functionality such as DDNS, QoS, static and dynamic IP addresses, etc.

Overall it’s an impressive and flexible device, and FON seem committed to keeping it an open platform and encouraging people to play about with it. Personally I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to someone looking for a simple cheap NAS and torrenting solution. It does have one major drawback though. Bizarrely, it doesn’t include a modem. You will need an ethernet ADSL modem or a modem/router as well. However, I was surprised to find how well it played with my old BT Voyager modem/router. It’s just a pain to have a second box plugged in just to get the Fonera online. For such a feature-packed device it’d be nice if it could handle the ADSL connection as well.

Despite this weird shortcoming, I think it’s a cool device. Access to thousands of wifi hotspots for a one-off payment is a good deal. Chuck in wifi-n and the bucketload of useful features and I can forgive it for not having a modem.

Incidentally, if it’s access to the FON network you want, they also do a stripped-back 2-port wifi-g device that’ll start you FONing for only £29.95, which is a great deal.

Why watch those downloads on your PC, when you can watch them from the comfort of the sofa?

The plan:

Watch video and photos and listen to mp3 music stored on our home network through the normal TV and stereo in the living room.

Issues:

1. Must have low power consumption
2. Must be quiet
3. Must boot fast
4. Must be stable and low-maintenance
5. Cheap is good!

What:

Mini-ITX based PC with a decent processor and onboard graphics, squeezed into a tiny wee case.

Why:

For a while now most of us have had two cool things in our homes: a home entertainment system and a network. But how can we get all our great digital content onto that nice big TV and hifi in the living room? The answer is a media centre PC.

How:

Hardware:

• Jetway JNC-62K Motherboard with onboard Nvidia 8200 graphics card
• AMD Athlon X2 e4850 high efficiency CPU
• Silverstone NT07-AM2 low-profile heatsink/fan.
• 1GB RAM
• 80GB SATA hard drive
• Terratec Aureon PCI sound card with S/PDIF
• Jou Jye NU-528i-B case with internal 73W power supply.
• Wireless keyboard with built-in trackpad
• TOSlink optical cable to get shiny digital sound to the hifi

Software:

• XBMC media centre software
• Ubuntu 64-bit, stripped down custom version. See Ubuntu Minimal: Build an ultra-lightweight custom OS

How much?

Grand total was £269 (+P&P), sourced from mini-ITX.com, Advance Technologies, and dabs.com.

>>> Enough talk, show me how it’s done! >>>

Mmm, donut...

I received the latest Android update over the air a couple of nights ago. Codenamed Donut, Android 1.6 isn’t a huge change, but i’m pretty impressed. On my HTC Magic, the main highlights are:

• It’s noticeably faster. No more lag in animations like when switching between  browser windows. I’d been led to believe Donut would be a little clunky, but my experience has been the total opposite.
• Search is now awesome. It now searches all the phone’s contents (contacts, notes, etc) as well as the web. This is a Google phone though, so search should be this good.
• The revamped Android Market is nice.

But that’s about it as far as I can tell. A couple of apps are slightly broken for now (including Google’s own Voice Search, wtf?) but i’m assuming they’ll be fixed in updates shortly. (All fixed now!)

Your computers are probably sucking a lot more power than you realise.

Take my audit results (PDF). My desktop PC can quite happily sit there sucking 100W, more than i’d be using to light the whole house some nights. Coupled with the fact that PCs are routinely left on for hours (or even continuously) and it adds up to a moderately shocking amount of wasteage.

Use a laptop

Laptops use a fraction of the power of desktops, and often have similar performance. From my audit results you can see that my laptop uses about 80% less power than my desktop.

Use a netbook or nettop

Don’t believe the hype from computer manufacturers. If (like most people) you spend most of your time on the computer using the internet, you don’t need a powerful desktop machine.

Netbooks are small super-efficient laptops designed for low-power use and long battery life. They’ll happily run a browser, office apps and internet goodies like Skype. As a bonus, most come preinstalled with Linux, so you won’t need to worry about viruses and malware.

The Asus Eeebox is so small you can mount it on the back of your monitor

A nettop is a similar animal, but for desktop use. Most desktop machines are hugely overpowered for browsing, but a nettop with a fast connection will give you 100% of the online experience without the overkill.

They’re built from laptop components and special efficient chipsets. You won’t be able to play the latest games on them, but if that doesn’t bother you, then they’re a really good option. As well as being more efficient than regular desktops they’re also quieter, cheaper and a lot smaller.

Examples include the Mac Mini, Asus EeeBox and the Linutop ( aka Viglen MPC-L)

Never torrent with your desktop

Torrents are great. The trouble is you need to leave the machine running for ages.

A NAS like the Qnap TS-209 will save power and money while protecting your data

In my case, leaving my desktop running 24/7 at 85W is not an attractive option. I’ve shifted all my torrent work over to a small efficient home file server from Qnap. Their range of home NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices will store all your movies and music on your home network, and download torrents at a measely 12W. Electricity costs for 24/7 use come to about £10.51 per year, compared to £70 for an 80W desktop machine. So the NAS totally pays for itself in electricity savings alone after about three years. Since I use one of the two-disk versions in a RAID1 setup, i’m also protected against data loss from hard drive failure, and the box is capable of a lot more. I’d recommend a similar device to anyone.

Use sleep/suspend

Modern PCs have more options than on and off. They can seamlessly move into low-powered standby states when they’re not being used.

Called sleep on Win/Mac and suspend on Linux, the machine shuts down all the hungry componants like processors, fans and hard drives, leaving your open apps in memory. At a moments notice they can be restarted. While in suspend my desktop only uses 1W more than it does when “off”!

I’d recommend setting your OS to suspend the machine whenever it’s idle for a few minutes. Most desktop keyboards and all laptops also have a hot key to suspend manually if you have to step away from the machine momentarily.

Use power-efficient components

If you build or modify your own machines then take a moment to look into efficient components.

Power supplies are a good place to start. Look for a model rated as “80Plus”, meaning it converts greater than 80% of the input power into usable power.

There are also some highly efficient CPUs on the market. For example the Athlon 4850e is a respectable 2.5GHz dual-core chip that’s rated at an amazing 45W, meaning it uses about half the power of similarly powerful CPUs.

Also, make sure your motherboard and CPU are compatible with the power-saving features built into modern chips. In a correctly matched motherboard a modern chip will reduce it’s voltage or even shut down whole cores depending on the demands on it. This can lead to large power savings.

Graphics cards are also a huge power consumer. In general, for machines that don’t do a lot of gaming, rendering or video work i’d suggest using the lowest-spec GPU that you can. For many people onboard graphics is perfectly usable.

Summary

It’s easy to be wasteful when it comes to powering your IT gear. But there’s also a ton of things you can do to give you a powerful, flexible setup that won’t eat the planet or your wallet.

Conducting an audit will show you where the problems are, and where a change in behaviour or hardware could bring about savings.

We all have a lot of these little guys in our life

In the first post of this home power audit series I described a way of measuring your power usage with a plug-in power meter. But what about electrical devices that don’t plug in?

We can get a good idea of home much power our battery devices use from rechargeable batteries. Using my plug-in meter I checked how much power it takes to recharge some flat AA batteries.

The bottom line:

Recharging 4xAA batteries took 0.13kWh of juice.

This usage would naturally include any overhead power loss from running the charger.

Should I use rechargeable or disposable batteries?

Rechargeables, always.

A rechargeable battery should be good for about 250 charges. At 0.13kWh for four batteries and 12.8p/kWh you’re looking at about 0.41p per battery per charge. Over the lifetime of the battery it’ll cost you a little over a £1 to recharge your £2 battery.

The equivalent 250 disposable batteries will cost you about £125. So it’s £3 vs £125. Per battery. Chargers cost about £10-20.

So apart from saving yourself a truckload of money you’ll keep a huge amount of highly toxic heavy metals out of the environment and you’ll save the hassle of continuously having to buy new batteries.

This is an absolute no-brainer, folks. If you haven’t already, buy a charger and start phasing your disposable batteries out when they run flat.

This might be going a little overboard...

By now, we’ve probably all heard that we should unplug or switch off any devices on standby around the house. The reward for doing so is that we get to continue having a planet to live on. Seems fair, but how true is it?

What’s the problem?

A lot of devices these days do actually consume power after they’ve been switched “off”. This can be seen from the results of my home power audit. Here’s some examples:

So in fact it does look like we’re wasting some power. On all these devices “off” is taken as being switched off with the button on the front panel. Idle in the case of the tellys is standby mode, waiting for the remote to turn the screen on, and for the hifi is switched on but not playing anything.

How much is this costing me?

Even with them all switched “off”, we looking at wasting 4.3W. At 12.5p per kWh you’re talking about £4.70-ish of electricity per year. So hardly a big deal. However, if they were all left on idle we’d be looking at £33.40, which is starting to look like a real waste of money for just three devices. And i’m betting anyone that doesn’t live in a cave has a lot more than that.

What can I do about it?

• Obviously, switch everything off whenever not in use.
• If practical, switch off at the wall whenever you can.
• Automate: buy timers that will switch off at the wall for you while you’re asleep or at work.

Tell me about these timers

They’re cheap. You can buy a plug-in timer for as little as £2. At that price it’ll pay for itself pretty quickly, and saves you the hassle of having to go around switching things off.

I sort my jumble of cables into things that have to be left on overnight (eg: router) and things that should be switched off (eg: TV) then put all the latter onto a timer that switches them on for a couple of hours in the morning and the evening. The timers have an override switch if you want to turn stuff on outside of these hours.

In my case I let the timer in my living room turn on for about 8 hours a day. That’s taken my standby wastage from 38.8W down to 28.5W, a saving of 27%. At that rate the timer pays for itself after 9 months, then everything after that is a saving. Best of all, I don’t have to actual do anything. Laziness + saving the world = win!

Savings will be even bigger on some of the more horrific standby power offenders. Mostly i’m thinking of PCs, more on that in a later post.

Most of us only get a rough idea of how much electricity we use from how hard the power company stings us each month. But do you have any idea exactly what machines in your house are slurping all that juice? The only way to find out is conduct a home power audit, and the results can be pretty interesting.

Why bother?

1. It’s easy. All you need is a plug-in power meter.
2. Green is good. Conducting an audit will show you how you can reduce your carbon footprint.
3. Money is good. You could be wasting a lot of cash each month.

Ok, how?

Plug-in meters are cheap and will pay for themselves in the savings you make

A plug-in meter does exactly what it sounds like. For my audit i’ve used a Brennenstuhl PM230 meter. You can pick one of these up for about £13 in the UK, and it does everything you need.  Another popular meter is the Kill-A-Watt, but they cost £10 more and do the same thing as the PM230.

These meters can do a lot of stuff, including calculating the actual cost of the power you use, but the main useful functions are showing watts being used by a device, and tracking usage over time in kWh.

Interpreting the results

First a bit of basic electrical theory. You’re probably aware that the power supply that comes out of the socket is rated in volts (either 230 or 110V AC, depending on what country you live in). But the measure of actual power consumption is the watt (W). Your power supplier bills you for the electricity you use in kilowatt-hours (kWh). Pretty simply: 1000W for one hour is 1kWh.

For most devices you’ll want to simply plug in your meter and note how many watts it sucks. For machines that run intermittently (such as fridges) you may want to take an average reading by leaving the meter plugged in for several hours. By dividing how many kWh by the number of hours you can get a rough average reading in watts to compare to other devices.

Important: Don’t forget to take readings of devices in their “off” and idle states. Many machines still suck juice when switched off, and anything that’s in a standby mode will certainly be slurping pennies out of your pocket the whole time.

Ok, let’s see some results!

Click here to download a PDF of my audit results.

Over the next few blogposts i’ll be taking a look at my results and discussing some of the issues, along with tips about how you can reduce your usage. Click on the tag home power audit on the right to see all the posts.

The Zen, showing the sexy red default theme

I recently got my mitts on one of Creative’s excellent Zen MP3 players. The short story:

• 16GB of storage. Up to 24GB if you want to bung an SD card into it.
• Clear and bright 2.5″ screen, easily good enough for watching video.
• It’s tiny. Smaller than a credit card and <1cm thick.
• FM radio, photo galleries, calendar, EQ.

Like most electronic gizmos it comes with a CD chock full of Windows software. But who wants to boot into Windows just to use their MP3? Let’s look at some Linux alternatives (all of which are in the Ubuntu repos)

Music & Video transfer

The Zen uses the MTP protocol to transfer stuff. That’s a proprietary Microsoft thing, but luckily Banshee can jive with MTP.  The other music players like Rythmbox will do the same. If you’ve got Banshee to pull down the album art that’ll get transferred as well.

Video Encoding

As I mentioned, this player has an excellent little screen, but if you want to play video on it, you’ll have to re-encode it to the right format and size. Cue Arista Transcoder.  It has presets for the Zen that make getting your encoding settings as simple as one button.  Plus it’s fast!