What sort of madness is this? Two whole blogs in the same month? Over and above the annoying automated "shared from google reader" posts? You lucky lucky people! ;-)

First up, a quick note to myself, with a couple of things that are on the "want but don't need, and won't be buying as really need to save some money" list.

I've been playing with a Current Cost envi 128 this year, watching my electricity use sit at a reasonably low baseline (the joys of renovating and not having the electric hob, oven, or dishwasher plugged in. That still doesn't stop me from having a near heart-attack when we have a shower while the washing machine is on mind you ;-)

I do have the data cable, so if I could stop messing around with my home server for five minutes and let it just sit and run, I'd be able to log the historical info and make pretty graphs for the past N months, but me being me, I keep messing about and changing things around and forgetting to set the logging script going (and, clearly, I haven't managed to find the time to set up an auto-start script either).

Since I got the envi though, current cost have been busy, and they have released a bridge unit, which not only powers the envi, so only one socket is required, but it also hooks up to both the my.currentcost.com site, but also to google powermeter, which would not only leave the joys of logging all that historical data to someone else, but would allow me to mess with my home ubuntu server box as much as I like ;-)

Most recently (they became available at Amazon today), the once mythical IAMs (individual appliance monitors) have been released. This is a passthrough device that registers with the envi unit, and allows you to see just how much extra that 40 degree wash costs over the 30 degree, or something ;-)

So yeah, the current cost bridge device and individual appliance monitors, on my wishlist.

A quick warning as well, I may in the near future do a quick review of something that I hope I never need, but from my first quick testing am very impressed by, the prey project. The tl;dr version: it's a little bit of sneaky software that checks the website, when you tell the website that the device is missing, it helps you track down where it is. I've done a quick test on my laptop, and sure enough, when I told the website that the laptop was missing, I got a lovely report which showed me the geo-location (from the local wifi hotspots), and gave me a screenshot and an image capture from the webcam. Nice.

Well, if it hadn't been a picture of my ugly mug anyway ;-)