The box that is installed on the compressor, has a pager network radio receiver, and when it receives a signal from PG&E, it will throttle the AC back. It looks like it does it’s throttling by cycling the compressor on in 15 minute intervals, when the thermostat tries to turn the AC on. During this time, since the thermostat thinks that the compressor is on, the fan will still be running to help with the cooling of the house. Users also have the ability to opt out of the throttling in 24 hour periods.

In our case, I don’t think that we will be affected, as we hardly have the AC on. But, I figure that we can do our part, and if turning off our AC in 15 minute intervals, can prevent a black out, we can join the program.

This blog post describes the steps needed to upgrade from ext3, without formatting the hard drive.

Unfortunately, I didn’t unmount it before running through the steps, and I didn’t pay attention to the fsck warning. My partition did get corrupt, and I decided to reformat and do a clean install. (At least I am able to create an ext4 partition, and it is nice to do a clean install every once in a while.)

Luckily, I was able to restore all of my data, since I have been backing up my files on Linux with JungleDisk. Also, I am able to restore my Windows VMWare image, since it is backed up to my Windows Home Server.

I was able to use the instructions on this page to get video working. You need to launch skype with the following command line:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv41/vl1compat.so skype

As one last ditch effort, I wanted to upgrade to Windows 7 to see if would fix Netflix streaming. If it didn’t, I would go get a cheap Comcast DVR, and a Roku HD box for each TV.

The upgrade to Windows 7 went smoothly, and I am now able to stream Netflix content. Also Windows 7 Media Center adds other Internet TV sources. In addition to those things, the redone UI is very nice.

I RDP’d into the server and then took a look for where the disk space was going. I found that the log files from the DynDNS client were taking 8GB of space. Once I deleted the log files, everything started working well again. I will try to see if I can disable the logging the client.

Windows Live Mesh has a similar feature, but it doesn’t have the requirement that the windows installations has its RDP server enabled. Live Mesh’s implementation requires that the Live Mesh client is installed on the computers that you want to access, and the computers that you want to do use to access them. Once you have the software installed, you need to log into Microsoft’s live server on each computer. Then from any computer signed into a Live Mesh account, you can connect to any other computer also signed into that account.

The problem is that this doesn’t really work well with multiple accounts. For example, I have a Live Mesh account, and normally am logged into it when I log into my Windows account. When I want to help out family, I need to log out of my account and then log into their account. Ideally, Microsoft would add the ability for a Live account holder to be able to grant access to another Live account for a particular computer.

I would like to see a few things added to this:

• Better support for multiple notifications. Currently only the last notification is shown. There are a few things that could be done
  1. Create a view that aggregates all of the new notifications since the user last looked at the phone
  2. Create a prioritization scheme that would make sure that the most important notifications are visible first
  3. Allow developers to expire previous notifications for their applications
• Support to send information back to developers. Since using Apple’s Push Notification requires developers to have a server that keeps a persistent connection with Apple’s servers. This connection could be used to send information from about the iPhone back to developers
  • For example, this could be used to send location data back to developers. This would allow Loopt or Google Latitude to update a users location without running an application in the foreground.
  • Having this implemented in this manner, it would allow the users to have control over this data
    • Users should be able to go to settings application and disable this feature for all applications, or for particular applications
    • Apple could control the frequency that the GPS would be turned on, so they could conserve power appropriately.

So I went looking for a USB hub that would have the same footprint as the Mac mine. I found the Iomega MiniMax Hard Drive. This external hard drive has both USB and FireWire hubs. It fits perfectly under my Mac mini, and has allowed me to to everything that I have wanted.

Google made it available to use Google Voice with existing cell phones. With this you can now have your voicemail sent to Google voice, and you can listen to it from your phone or your computer. Also Google Voice will create a transcript of your message, and you can received that via email or sms.

I have been using Google Voice for a little bit, but this functionality allows me to receive messages from callers that don’t know my Google Voice number in my Google Voice inbox.

[via Engadget]

The benefit if using push over tradition SMS messages is that it is cheaper, if you only want to talk to people who also have iPhones or iPods. This is also especially true if you have a limited number of text messages per month on your plan. Also for iPod users, since they don’t have access to SMS, this may be a viable solution.

I don’ think that I will be using this application that often. Since I already uses SMS with people who are not using iPhones, I don’t know if it would be worth it to use a separate application for the subset of my contacts that have iPhones and also have Ping! installed.