The Gadgets Page

We pay for a lot of power at the highest billing rate in Southern California because we have eight people living in a 5000 square foot home. When we moved in, our average summer time power bill exceeded $700 per month. Cooling the house with A/C was ridiculously expensive, and it put me on a quest to reduce power usage dramatically. I wish I could say I wanted to save the environment, but it was the money that motivated me.

So I looked at my options and came up with two potential solutions to the massive power bills: Solar, and on-site natural gas cogeneration. Either would be big, expensive projects, so in the mean time, we just ran around the house and opened the windows whenever it got hot, leaving the A/C off.

With my roof and location, I can get up to 3.5Kw of solar power generation installed for about $20K. Going through the numbers, it looks like I’ll reduce my power bill by about $220/mo. on average.

As we tired of the daily window opening and closing, I setup a simple home automation system to automate the problem. I put motors on the crank-style casement windows and used a $300 home automation controller to setup simple rules, such as “Open the windows if it’s cool outside and hot inside.” The whole setup cost less than $2000 and took me about three days to get running, most of which consisted of fishing wires through the walls to the window motors.

Then I looked into on-site natural gas cogeneration. Natural gas energy is much cheaper than electricity in California, but unfortunately cogeneration wasn’t feasible with a generator. While possible technically, the generators wear out every year. They’re noisy, and it’s not clear that they’re legal. On cost grounds, by my analysis, it would be twice as expensive as paying for power due to the short generator lifetime. I looked at fuel cells as well: Highly efficient, silent, and long-lived, but also very expensive. The payout would be fifty or so years, longer than the unit’s lifetime.

When I revisited the power bill after automating the windows, I discovered that this simple, interim solution had reduced our power bill by over $300 per month! The house was comfortable all the time, and the A/C hadn’t come on since I got the system running. A $2000 investment in home automation equipment would be paid back in just seven months, and was reducing more utility bill costs than a $20,000 solar system would.

The system automatically opens and closes the windows based on the home’s interior temperature compared to the weather outside. I have a simple program that runs on a $300 embedded controller computer (a Universal Devices ISY-99) that monitors the inside temperature, an RSS feed of the weather station where I live, time-of-day, and likelihood of rain, and makes decisions about whether and when to open or close the windows.

This setup saves me, on average, $320/mo. compared to the months when we first moved in and left the windows shut and the A/C and heat on a 68/74 degree thermostatic setting. Those months we were averaging over $740/mo. for power, and now we’re averaging $360.

Before you spend a lot of money on generating electricity, do everything you can to reduce your electrical use. Big wins for us included eliminating AC with natural ventilation and ceiling fans, replacing CRT and plasma televisions with LCD, replacing old appliances with new more efficient models, cold-water laundry, and line-drying clothes. We now have our power consumption down by two-thirds over-all, and have reached a point where adding solar may take us down to zero.

I used Truth casement window operators and controllers from wintrol.com, and INSTEON I/O Linc modules, and an ISY-99 home automation controller from smarthome.com to implement this project.

• Dear Apple, Thank you for the update to Pages. It didn't fix everything, but at least I have my toolbar in landscape mode. #

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When Mike and I lived in an 800 square foot house, we got quite inventive with our storage and multi-use rooms, but nothing like the ingenious work done by architect, Gary Chang, in Hong Kong. His sliding walls can create many rooms in a 344 square foot apartment. Check out the video from the Wall Street Journal below.

The idea of creating one room with sliding walls that create a different room is a stroke of genius. The media storage wall of the living room slides away to reveal a dressing area.

The guest bed folds down over the bathtub.

The master bed folds up into the wall just like an old Murphy Bed.

The wall holding his television slides away to reveal a kitchen including a bar.

Gary’s entire apartment is a gadget lovers dream! The walls slide so easily, despite being loaded down with books or a heavy television. I wonder what mechanism he used to make the panels move. The next time you’re feeling cramped in your home, remember Gary and his inventively creative use of space.

I bought a netbook a little over a year ago. I thought it would be perfect for conferences because it was so small, but the battery life was so unbearable short that I was always searching for an electrical plug. At the last conference, I ended up going back to my trusty Macbook because at least the battery would last six hours. I endured the bulkiness in exchange for the convenience of not having to find electricity in every room.

With the iPad, however, there is a perfect marriage of long battery life and portability. It’s smaller than my netbook and the battery lasts easily ten hours. I haven’t fully acclimated to the onscreen keyboard and I prefer to have a real keyboard. The Apple Bluetooth keyboard works perfectly and even when I have to carry both around, they are still about the size of my netbook.

When we bought the iPad, I looked forward to reading books, playing video games and watching movies with it. I had no idea how good it was going to be for taking notes and actually working!

For the last two years, I’ve loved Zenses Rainforest for my Nintendo DS. I talked about the game here:

• The Gadgets Page- Zenses for the Nintendo DS

Now that I do most of my game playing on my iPhone, I have been looking for a soothing and relaxing game to lull me to sleep. Imagine my delight when I found my favorite game for the DS was now available on my iPhone!

I downloaded the free app, but I had been perfectly willing to pay for it. After I loaded the game, I realized that it was just a demo version of the stacker game. An in-app 99 cent purchase later, and I had the full version.

With this game, you make stacks of three items of the same shape and color. It differs from the Nintendo version slightly because you can’t make stacks of the same shape with different colors for less points. Sometimes, if I was running out of time, I would make a couple of desperate stacks out of different colors, but that’s not an option with the iPhone version.

One of my favorite aspects of the game is the music. I’m the type of person who immediately turns the music and sound effects off on most games, so the fact that I love the Zenses soundtrack is a testament to their ability to create a soothing atmosphere. When I bought the Nintendo version, they gave me a code to download MP3s of the songs in the game. I still listen to those songs at least once a week. In fact, the only reason I searched the iPhone app store for Zenses this weekend was because of a bout of insomnia in which I lulled myself back to sleep by playing Bejeweled with its sound effects turned off and the Zenses soundtrack playing in the background.

Unlike the Nintendo DS version, there is only ONE game with Zenses Rainforest. Fortunately, it was my favorite from the collection, but there were others that I enjoyed and I’m worried that they won’t be ported over to the iPhone because this game is being marketed with the same name as the multi-game version. I hope to see the other relaxing games show up on the iPhone soon and I’d willing pay extra for the multi-game version on the iPad. Here’s to hoping there is more to come from Zenses.

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Update 06-03-10:

I just got an email from Christian at Kiloo

Hi all, I tried to respond to your post about Zenses for the iPhone (written by Laura) but as it didn’t seem to work, I try here instead.

There is indeed more games in the Zenses series on their way to iPhone and iPod touch – we’re actually developing the next one as I type this, so hopefully it wont be too long.

Good to hear you enjoyed the first game in the series 🙂

Best,
Christian

www.kiloo.com

I ordered the iPad keyboard when I bought my iPad, and it arrived today. The keyboard is amazingly heavy; it’s carved from a single block of aluminum and seems to weigh about five pounds. It holds the iPad firmly, and is just barely heavy enough to stay put when you pull the iPad out. It would be awkward for carrying around. If you want a portable option, a wireless bluetooth keyboard is your best option to take a keyboard with you on the road.

The keyboard itself is basically Apple’s keyboard with a few extra buttons where the function keys would be:

• Home
• Search
• Dim
• Bright
• Photos
• Onscreen keyboard
• A blank key that does nothing (!)
• Rewind
• Play/Pause
• Forward
• Mute
• Volume Down
• Volume Up
• Lock

The iconography is quite obvious. Otherwise it’s a typical Mac keyboard, option key and all. One difference is that Alt-delete is not interpreted as backspace–this is a key I miss. Might be a good use for that blank key if the right set were shifted left so it could be placed above delete. The key feel is superb, just like a Mac keyboard, and I can type on it as fast as any keyboard I’ve ever used. I really wish there was an additional dock connector on the long bottom axis so the iPad could be used in landscape mode. I check my email in landscape mode, and I tend to do all of my “producing” work in that mode. I wrote this review in Pages with the keyboard, and I’m quite impressed that the iPad and this keyboard could actually replace a desktop for light users.

The keyboard makes the iPad far more useful when not wandering around, and will allow it to replace a laptop for many users. I consider it to be a mandatory buy for iPad owners.

The iPad came out Saturday morning as my family and I drove from San Diego to Cape Canaveral to see the Shuttle Launch. Using my trusty iPhone, I determined that we’d be in Baton Rouge at noon, so I picked one up there. The line had been about two hours long, and I arrived at the tail end of it. My wait was ten minutes.

I synced it in the car outside a Winn Dixie, got it connected to my Verizon MiFi, downloaded a few apps, and synced some kids shows to it. The first thing I noticed was the awkward size: too big to really be mobile, and too small to set down anywhere convenient. It’s the same problem I had with my Newton fifteen years ago.

The built-in apps are great–better looking and more seamless than their iPhone or OS X counterparts. iCal is looking seriously stale compared to the iPad Calendar.

The available apps are even better–Pages is a marvel, although how useful it turns out to be is debatable, and the various news readers are fantastic–by far the easiest way to browse traditional news content.

Dragon Dictation [iTunes Link] works well and is free. It’s a must have for text input. I look forward to a future edition that would work as a keyboard.

Omnigraffle is an interesting fail. The app works just fine, but for $50 they should have provided their full suite of stencils. The very basic shapes they provide are a flat-out rip off compared to price of competing apps, and unless they up the ante they’ll be out-competed in short order on this platform. I want to drag and drop network diagrams as I survey new customer sites. For lines and boxes I can use a $5 sketch app. Omni Group needs to either price to the casual market or provide a professional tool. Right now they’re doing neither. As it stands, I’ll be requesting a refund.

The Video player is everything you’d expect: the best mobile video player on the market in any format. Couple that with on demand rentals and the amazing Netflix app, and you can pretty much waste the rest of your life watching movies on it. The built-in mono speaker is adequate for the backseat, but you’ll want a Bluetooth audio system for home use or headphones anywhere public.

Games are awesome–driving games are much easier to control because there’s weight in that steering wheel. Strategy games now have enough map. The 2X iPhone app magnification is awkward and pixelated seeming for utilities, but in colorful games it’s just fine, and preferable to playing them on the iPhone. The mode worked well with everything I tried except Call of Duty Zombies, where the button appears incorrectly rotated and doesn’t function.

Is it useful for business? Unlikely. If you create for a living, forget it. The onscreen keyboard is okay for the occasional email but it won’t replace a laptop, ever. For email it’s fine but not substantially better than an iPhone. For niche work where the form factor allows standing data entry there’s a real niche, but this device is for entertainment through and through.

I checked the tracking. Last night, it was in Kentucky. Overnight, it boarded a plane, had a layover in Colorado and then hopped another plane to Salt Lake City. By the time I was awake, it was on a UPS truck and “In Transit.” It required a signature, so I put a sign on the door so the UPS driver wouldn’t leave before we could get to the door.

I didn’t need the sign, however. I waited at the window until the UPS truck pulled up and even met the guy at the porch when he walked up with my delivery.

“I was worried that I might miss you, so I’ve been waiting here all morning. It’s an iPad. I’m REALLY excited.”

The UPS driver nodded. I expected him to act like I was crazy instead of perfectly normal.

“Yeah, everybody’s pretty excited,” he replied nonchalantly.

I was surprised at his answer. “Have you had a lot of deliveries this morning?”

“About 28 just in this neighborhood.” I gasp with shock and curse openly. The clean cut Mormon tried to ignore my vulgarity and continued. “I delivered the stock to the Gateway store. They got over a thousand.” Then he rushed back to his truck to deliver more iPads to my neighbors.

We’ve been using our Konnet iCrado to dock and charge the iPad and it’s working great!

I’ve been in search of a kid friendly timer for a while now. I needed something that was accurate and my kids wouldn’t break on Day One. I had tried the traditional egg timers but they were inaccurate and broke easily.

While at CES in Las Vegas I walked by a booth for Datexx and did a double take. Sitting on the counter was a cube with large numbers. I stopped and discovered “The Miracle Cube Timer”. I had to try it out and purchased one that day. This has been the best timer. It is easy to use, keeps reliable time and has lasted so far (even after being dropped).

This timer is very easy to use – you turn it on pick the time you want and set it down with that time face up. The cube has four different preset time amounts: 5min, 15 min, 30 min, and 60 min. It also has a small screen which shows how much time is remaining, and a blinking red light to show that it is on. It is powered off 2 AAA batteries which have also lasted (I thought for sure we would be going through batteries but we are still on our first set).

The only problem with this timer is if you want a different amount of time then 4 choices it gives you, you might have to set it multiple times, and the alarm at the end is loud (which can be good or bad, depending on what you are doing with it).

We use the timer so my kids know when their allotted computer or Wii time is up. But it could also be used for cooking, games, naps, exercising or a number of other activities. If you need a timer that can stand up to the abuse that kids can dish out, the Datexx Cube Timer is the best I’ve found.

The email came some time in the evening.

My iPad has been shipped. I won’t be waiting in line at the Apple store for it, despite the fun that can be had from that experience. My pre-ordered iPad will arrive at my house with a flurry of fur from my dog, who is certain that every delivery is a bomb or rabid animal.

I have three days to sytematically reload the tracking number into the system over and over, watching its progress from where it is to where it should be.

My behavior is beyond my own comprehension and I wonder whether my excitement is unwarranted.