Re: hahahahaha

And how do you know "the quality is cool" until you've got it?

"Plus, surely the point of any of these home weather stations is to provide a forecast?"

No. That's the point missed.

Accuracy

@Steve 39: "a five degree or more increase when the sun comes out and shines on it gets extremely annoying, particularly when publishing to a website. The cheap ones aren't at all accurate, I've been there."

They're not bad if you take the trouble to separate the sensors, extending their cables. Mine has wind speed/direction on a gable-mounted pole as high as possible (though still only just above the flat roof of neigbouring flats), temperature sensor somewhere permanently in shade and rain sensor on a flat roof (not on the pole where it's subject to vibration).

Re: Useful

As far as I know, CO2 levels within reason don't cause headaches. Air contains about 20% oxygen which is what you need; 1 or 2% of non-poisonous CO2 isn't going to make a noticeable difference.

Re: Toytown

You always get these condescending comments regarding amateur weather stations, which always miss the point - they are not designed to be part of a network that can forecast the weather a week ahead, but to provide an interesting indication of what is going on exactly where you live - yes, not where the nearest professional monitoring station happens to be. The sensors might not be precisely calibrated or perfectly positioned but are reasonably linear and are great at showing how conditions change. My £50 weather station told me yesterday that I got 6.5mm of rain when that intense April shower went over, together with a sudden temperature drop of 5 degrees. Fascinating stuff, as the author of this article has found out by studying the graphs such devices produce. And you can't stick your head out of the window to find out what the weather was like an hour ago.

Re: Stop the press

I guess Linux doesn't run all the world's stock exchanges after all, then.

Re: Stop the press

You have concerns about impartiality and yet you read The Register?

Re: Concordance....

Concordance works fine for me, at least with my Harmony 515 (bought for less than £20). The Ubuntu package creates a file association in the web browser so that's even set up for you. Unfortunately, though, the otherwise-impressive web wizard cannot be programmed to cope with modifications to make everything power up and down from the mains switch on the TV.

Re: Happy Harmony One owner here

You're splurging on Sky+ AND V+ and are complaining about things being overpriced?

Re: Power lead...

Interesting thought, but isn't that a UK plug as opposed to bare wires?

Re: Spamhous must really be hurting those parasites

If they weren't parasites they would use legal means to get themselves off Spamhaus' block lists, would they not, "my friend"?

Re: MS is continually trying ot make "Trusted Computing" a reality

"You missed canonical and Red Hat off that list. If only they were vendors of an OS relevant to the discussion..."

Ah, I guess that's why last week I installed Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit from a USB stick onto a Windows 8 computer without having to go into the BIOS even so much as to change the boot order, let alone switch off "secure boot".

(It didn't understand what the Windows partitions were, but I wanted to wipe them anyway.)

Re: Solar monitor

@YetAnotherLocksmith: The solar inverter will only produce an output if it is connected to the grid. It will not do anything if you connect it to an isolated load such as an immersion heater.

Re: Solar moitor

@TeeCee: I agree sod the solenoids, but the trouble with an old-skool dishwasher (like I have) is that it has a ~3kW element, which is likely to exceed your panels' output most of the time. I gather the modern ones use much lower powered elements. I have a 900W "hotel kettle" which I use when I'm exporting power. Not only does it use a higher proportion of solar energy than a 2kW/3kW traditional kettle, but its smaller size means it is much more likely to be filled with the amount of water needed, rather than too much. It will probably never pay for itself, but it's satisfying to use!

I don't understand your comment about timers - "play and pause" is to start and stop as the sunlight and house loads vary, not to delay starting and then running a normal program.

Re: Solar moitor

@Nigel 11: Yes you have missed quite a few things.

- Strings of series-connected solar panels as used in domestic PV installations produce up to a few hundred volts

- If you want to get the maximum power out of themuse them efficiently you don't just slap on a constant resistance load, you have to track their maximum power point with a varying impedance, which is one of the functions of the inverter

- It is very problematic to switch high voltage high current DC because you draw arcs which are not extinguished every half cycle. There are dire warnings on inverters to isolate them by switching off their AC outputs before the isolators on the inputs. You'd have to stop the inverter before removing its input - and what about when you come to switch out the immersion heater?

- The inverter takes a considerable time to start feeding into the grid when its input goes above threshold. This is because of the self-diagnostics it runs for safety (anti-islanding, i.e. not allowing power out if the grid is disconnected; earth fault detection as some models do not isolate panels from the mains for efficiency)

- The generation meter is on the output of the inverter; if you intercept the panels you don't get paid for what is generated

- There is a source of varying power (the panels) and a load of varying power (the property) - to use the difference optimally requires proportional control of the heater, not a crude switch

Despite all the electron mangling it has to do, my inverter claims an efficiency of around 95%, and with its fanless heatsink it doesn't melt in full sun, so I can believe it.

I came to the conclusion that the amount of money you save is quite modest, for a lot of effort. It's a great hobby project but not a cash cow.

Re: Solar moitor

I've looked at driving an immersion heater from solar panels too. The awkward thing is doing it legally. If you use phase angle control you need major filtering, and if you use burst firing (which works because of "elasticity" in the electricity meter) then you are likely to break "flicker regulations". If you don't bother, you can at least feel better that your panels are offsetting electricity rather than (presumably) gas use.

As for charging laptop batteries, the extra strain on them would probably cost more in replacements than the reduction in your electricity bill. It's annoying!

By the way

There is a good excuse for no ethernet port on things like this and the Lenovo Yoga - they are too thin to accommodate a standard RJ45 socket.

More

The copters also have two markers on them to allow their positions and orientations to be calculated in the same way. The cameras have LEDS round the lens to produce very bright reflections from the markers, and image processing occurs inside the cameras so there's no video to be analysed at all - just a stream of co-ordinates. This keeps the delay to a minimum, which is needed to allow reaction to be quick enough.

Re: Really cool demo but...

You're right - definitely not autonomous. Not only the white sheets but there are two reflective markers on the pole, making its position and orientation easy to calculate without intensive image processing. There will be cameras placed at different viewpoints to enable this to be done in three dimensions.

Re: Acceptable

That may be a font issue - if the font is not embedded in the PDF and not known to the browser, the browser will have to make do with something else, which probably won't kern in exactly the same way.

Or I might be talking rubbish. :)

"Well almost"

Those "relatively minor" issues are what make all the difference, and is why this has yet to be replicated by some smart-arse with a glue gun.

Re: the new bane of my life

But pressing 9 proves that a human answered the phone, so is much more valuable to them.

Re: I am not a lumberjack but.....

It won't matter if they're left on the forest floor - the point is that they call home when they can, and so the logging can be detected, even if the culprits aren't caught red-handed.

What's unfortunate is that the radio range would be much better before the tree was chopped down!

Re: Recognition

Worse than that - with these moustache games, will it be able to get video of you too?

Re: Am I the only one...

Only if it sprouts legs.

@LarsG

Well you have to admit, the biogrphy of Adolph Hitler is a lot more interesting.

Re: "The executive's convictions included (...) unlawfully wounding her boyfriend with a gunshot"

Self Defence? Seems to be in the constitution or summat.

Re: I still find it amazing...

And the whole point of using a higher voltage is to reduce the copper losses: doubling the voltage results in the losses for a given power being transmitted through a given thickness of cable being quartered. Using 12V rather than 230VRMS would need cables of 300 times the cross-sectional area! They don't make 400kV transmission lines for fun.

(Solar feed is even trickier than LED load. You have to have a maximum power point tracker to present the optimum load resistance to the cells, with the result that the input voltage goes all over the place. A DC system would remove the additional complication of having to synchronise the output to the mains waveform, but it would still require an inverter to match the voltage.)

@Dave 126

"I think the article author was referring to the hifi that used DIN for speakers."

No, the author specifically referred to 5-pin DIN plugs, as used for MIDI. These are not used for speaker connections.

Re: Screen is worse?

I agree (and did say the screen was good) - I was just responding to the poster who said that everything about this was better than an iPad.

FAT support

A convincing reason - could this be it? Still a bit of a shame, as an SD card can still be used to provide extra storage and backup without needing to be FAT-formatted, but it makes it less convenient or impractical for other uses.

USB cable

A USB cable with a computer dangling off the other end is another possible means of transferring the data, but it doesn't really answer my question.

downvote so I guess I'm wrong then...

Is there another reason why there's no highly useful (micro-)SD card slot? They cost pennies so it's not cost. Other manufacturers have no problem putting them into tablets so it's not technical. Is it so they can overcharge you for the model with extra storage? If not, why doesn't Google put SD card slots in their products?

Honestly, I have no axe to grind on this one - I'd really like to know the answer.

Screen is worse?

I read on here the argument behind the screen resolution and it persuades me. But saying that the screen is better because it has more pixels is as lazy as comparing digital cameras by the same metric. I read a review that said that the Nexus screen, while good, is not as good as the iPad's, in terms of colour saturation, black levels and backlight bleed. I'd like to do my own side-by-side comparison. And in terms of pixel count, unlike for digital cameras, once you reach a "retina" level of pixel density, increasing it further is a complete waste of time and CPU/GPU resources, because you won't be able to see the difference.

I'm no iPad fan, by the way.

And the reason they have no SD card slot is...

...that Google's business model is to know as much about you as it can in order to flog you stuff, and by omitting the SD card slot you have to send all your data through the cloud, preferably via their servers. It's no surprise that this has no SD card slot and others are right - with a Google device it ain't going to happen.

Oh dear

"magnetic power connectors ... can't be subject to patents can they?"

Good enough to not get caught?

So good that they didn't manage to do any damage either?

That's not called censoring

Don't be ridiculous. Censoring would be the prevention of the publication of these articles in the first place. This is simply a filter which the reader can choose to switch on and off. It is no more censoring than not clicking through to the article in the first place if the author was shown. A Greasemonkey script to do that could also possibly be written, but would be a lot less useful for me.