David Pitkin :

The Energy Detective

david@davidpitkin.com (David Pitkin) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 09:38:42 -0600

I love my energy detective. It is a display that shows our household electricity usage converted to $/kWH all the time. My favorite usage so far is checking when I leave the house to ensure that the usage is below 0.10$/Hour, if its higher we forgot something left on. I wanted to share the Groton Electric settings for it… if you pay your bill early (10% discount included)

Tiered Rates T1 (0-500 kWh) = 0.0612 + 0.0088 + 0.03157 + 0.01842 – 0.0126 = 0.10739 T2 (>500kWh) = 0.0717 + 0.0088 + 0.03157 + 0.01842 -0.0126 = 0.11789 Annual Charge = 0 Fixed Monthly = 0 Min. Monthy = 5.62 Tax Rate = 0%

My meter is read on the 23rd of each month, all this information was easily available from Groton Electric

A few pictures of installing mine, don’t forget that the red dots on the clamps need to be on in the same direction.

Did I leave my blog on?

david@davidpitkin.com (David Pitkin) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 09:33:46 -0600

I wonder where this blog now belongs… I could upgrade Typo to the latest version, which would fix some interactions. I could turn it into the new trendy thing which is a lifestream like Jaiku. When I started the blog if you had something you wanted to publish online it was not easy. Now with Twitter/Facebook/FriendFeed/Google Reader I can pretty quickly share an idea and get lots of feedback without the overhead of a blog post.

Ralph Lauren Mobile – RL-QR
Originally uploaded by atmasphere
I just like QR codes for bridging print to the interwebs

facebook now putting wall entry text in email notifications

david@davidpitkin.com (David Pitkin) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 20:23:00 -0700

It has begun, the special sauce that was facebook is fading. Things like not sending the content of a message or a wall post to your email box and just sending a link to the information on the site has now changed, due to user feedback.

via: Publishing 2.0

i like 2d barcodes in the physical world to link you to the internet

david@davidpitkin.com (David Pitkin) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:28:00 -0700

11292007249
Originally uploaded by atmasphere

This allows me to interact with the real world and the internet in a great way, even better is if at that link I can leave a comment, or imagine the GPS coordinates where I found the link.

could web 2.0 be just many separate address books on a bunch of websites

david@davidpitkin.com (David Pitkin) — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 13:26:00 -0700

IMG_1369
Originally uploaded by tantek

The address book/activity stream/presence will be a foundation of a great application, in this category plaxo has some strenght but being able to resolve/sync find conflicts between your IM, facebook, linkedin, mobile and email contact list will really start to make the mainstream user enabled by this technology instead of being overwhelmed.

my bag for the plane

david@davidpitkin.com (David Pitkin) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 04:10:26 -0600

I thought I would throw this up after seeing it on Thoughtfix. This is my bag for the Web 2.0 summit, I try to pack super light which is why I also like my N95 so much. I think the DS might get left in the car at the airport but we will see. I hate running out of juice hence the inflightpower gizmo and the CA-100 chargers. I also debated taking my MacBook but the NINE hours of battery in my work laptop wins out for a cross country journey. I would need four batteries to get that out of this notebook computer. Wish me luck and you can follow on jaiku. I wish I had an invite to the Nokia breakfast, anyone know anyone who will be there?

Nokia LD-4W unboxing

david@davidpitkin.com (David Pitkin) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 20:33:00 -0600

I lost the LD-3W that came with my N800 Navigation kit on one of my trips, I just forgot it on the dash of a rental car. So here is the unboxing of the fancy new LD-4W from mobileplanet.com.

The box front and back and then the contents of inside . And here is all the stuff the karabiner that it comes with is a joke, brittle crappy plastic the device itself is awesome it is a perfect size and the addition of the hole allows you to actually use it with a suction cup and not have it awkwardly around like the old style. . It has soft rubber on the back so it does not slide around and uses the standard 2.5mm charging cable that most Nseries devices now use.

Great customer care, Native Eyewear

david@davidpitkin.com (David Pitkin) — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 07:40:10 -0600

Native Eyewear has great customer care, I lost and broke a pair of sunglasses and they have done everything right to keep me as a customer after a few accidental mistakes on their part their attention to detail has been great.

If you are looking for some active sunglasses with replaceable lenses look no further, lifetime warranty for 30$ no matter what you do to break your glasses and fantastic optics.

They might want to update their Event schedule.

A new ZoneTag version, sorry Shozu

david@davidpitkin.com (David Pitkin) — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 07:35:25 -0600

ZoneTag was the first mobile phone upload tool I used to send pictures to flickr, created at the Yahoo! Research Berkley lab. On the Nokia 6682 it was great, even without a GPS it would upload the cell tower information and they started to build a database so you could put it on a map. This was before flickr had geotagging. The other thing they did was suggest tags based on your location, so when I took a picture at Fenway it could suggest that tag on flickr, this was in 2006.

Fast forward and ZoneTag lacked in support for my newer phones and so I turned to Shozu for a while, the thing I missed the most was when I went to upload I could not tag or set the privacy of the photo being uploaded. This was a major disadvantage for me but I lived with it, I actually uploaded all my pictures as private and then selectively turned them public, but often forgot and never went back to tag.

Now with the new N95 and new version of ZoneTag prototype there is a ton of stuff, including the ability to tag a photo with a verb/Acton Tag like !scanr:wb will tell ZoneTag that I am uploading a picture of a whiteboard to send to scanR and have it perform OCR on that picture. Fantastic.

Now if only ZoneTag used the GPS coordinates as well as Cell Tower info…