Re: My project...

Motorised TRV's definately exist - we got them put in at work initially from Honeywell (not my project) - £80 per valve and £150 for the control panel to set the target temperature (on a schedule).

When I did my heating at home recently I looked for something a little more sensible in price - Pegler make a TRV that is motorised/scheduled target temperature changes all in one for around £25. Each room is now turned up and down to a schedule as necessary (i.e. kids rooms off while they're at school, dining room turns right down in the evening & our bedroom doesn't start warming up until 9 or 10). They can be adjusted manually at any point, and revert to programmed temp at the next scheduled change.

There's a USB programming stick and remote available (600MHz). The programming only has s/w for windows at the moment, but it's just a USB/Serial interface from what I can tell so that's a project for later on.

Doing similar

Have a spare wireless thermostat/receiver that I'm cannibalising for actual switching. The transmitter is simple 3v pulse signal to an on or off pin (the actualy upload codez are all on the little daughter board thankfully).

USB thermometer currently in the post (£8 / ebay) and than it's all software - I'm hoping to persuade it to look up the outside temp & wind chill from the met office then reference a schedule of when the church hall is in use and calculate when to turn the heating on so it's suitably warm when needed. In winter, that can be 3am some weeks, despite having a boiler the size and power of the flying scotsman (probably about as efficient, too).

Thermonuclear boiler might be a suitable replacement, hence icon.

Re: Red Shift

Redshift only applies as a means of judging distance on large cosmological scales, that is extra-galactic at least, where the overall expansion of the universe applies. Not that you can't measure the shift, but it doesn't tell you how far away the object is (because the galaxy isn't expanding, at least not in the way the universe is)

Within the galaxy, you need to rely on other factors - parallax measurement as the earth goes round the sun is good, if you can measure accurately enough.

Re: How far?

Time was I could have made that calculation without an envelope, but no more, alas.

Science aside, there's also something strangely satisfying about seeing it on the sky, even if it's a virtual sky (easier to zoom in on the right place as well then, plus you can draw pretty pictures over the constellations)

Re: Note that "industry average" bar and also that there are about 450 ISP's in the UK.

From the Ofcom report:

"The ‘industry average’ refers to the average of providers included in the Ofcom research. Complaints about other smaller providers are not included in this average."

Statistically speaking of course, if only the worst three had more than average complaints out of 450 then they would have to be truly appalling.

Re: Dark fibre?

Ah yes, Sewernet. A great idea and I was one of the first to sign up for 'when it became available'. 3 years later and it's still not here ( Bournemouth, first FibreCity in Europe!). Got fed up of waiting for inifnity as well (April 2012, still no sign of anything happening at my exchange).

Came to the conclusion that all ISPs will promise anything as long as you don't expect them to deliver. Might as well ignore the promises and go with whoever gives you the closest to what you want when you want it. I went back to Virgin who do actually provide the 30Mb/s I asked for, and don't force me to take a phone line to go with it. Fortunately, I haven't had to deal with their tech support yet....

Re: USB Question

Just been looking this up - the (rather pathetic) user guide says you can connect USB keyboard/mouse/joystick etc 'with an adapter' (and recommends powered hub for multiple peripherals) so I guess host mode is available.

I'm unsure whether host mode and OTG adapter = USB storage support, but I'm one step closer to an impulse buy.

For 3g, I'd stick to wireless tether via my phone, 'cos it's simple and I already pay for bandwidth.

That's assuming patent lawyers are free. I'd think it's fairly safe to assume they're not.

@Jeff11

I think you may have missed the point a little. I don't think Matt's talking about the software, rather the large donations to worthy causes that selling bucketloads of the software has enabled him to make.

I don't think giving a copy of windows to someone (even if he'd done that) counts as 'doing more for the worlds poor'. Putting millions/billions into funds to cure nasty diseases does though (even if the funds are named after himself, a practice I rather dislike)

Re: At last! - Absolutely

I've been wondering for years why remote controls are still IR.

Anyone who thinks otherwise has obviously never had a child sit directly in front of the DVD player and demand to know why Little Red Tractor isn't playing yet.

@AC 08:58

That's exactly how it works, didn't you know? http://xkcd.com/827/

rewrite/improve it?

(no, I've never done that before you ask)

Download it legally for free.

Run it on a clapped out old PC.

Give it to my kids without worrying they might break it.

Those are the obvious things, I'm sure there are others, but you only asked for 1.

Conversely, there's nothing I can't do on Linux that I care about, so why pay for windows?

speaking of stupidity...

'a machine for which there are no viruses'?

There's a prime example right there.

molehill maybe

but I don't want molehills one my lawn (though a mountain in my back garden would be cool).

They may give you the choice, but if you don't want your data sent out, you have no location functionality. Which is not much of a choice in my book.

GPS requires no data to be sent anywhere, cell tower and wifi based location tracking (and associated AGPS features) require a little data to be swapped ("I can see this base station" - "OK, that lives here...").

None of this requires anyone to know who's asking. Leave my phone ID out of it please. If I want you to know where I am, I'll log in and tell you.