Nikon D90

Last thursday i bought a new camera body, the Nikon D90. Compared to my previous camera body (D50), the D90 is a huge leap forward. A large LCD screen, great viewfinder, camera instantly available after power on, in-camera image processing, HD video, more customization; the list is to long

Together with my AF-S DX VR 18-200mm 3.5-5.6 G lens and SB600 Speedlight i’ve got a great tool to make the best pictures i can. I’m also planning on buying the GP-1 GPS unit to Geotag all the images.

Plugwise houdt zich bezig met ontwerpen, ontwikkelen en produceren van energie management systemen.

Plugwise heeft een plug ontwikkeld die tussen het stopcontact en de stekker van een elektrisch apparaat kan worden gezet. Die plug kan daardoor het energieverbruik van dat apparaat meten en stuurt deze meetgegevens draadloos door naar een PC. Software op die PC geeft de gebruiker inzicht in het energieverbruik en kosten van individuele apparaten of geaggregeerd. Prachtig!

Tot zover het mooie verhaal. Maar er zijn dingen gaande met dit energie management systeem van de eeuw, die maar weinig mensen kennen maar waarvan zij zich wel bewust moeten zijn alvorens men overgaat tot aankoop.

Onderzoek heeft uitgewezen dat alle verbruiksgegevens die door de Plugwise software wordt vergaard, ook over het Internet naar een centrale server wordt gestuurd. Tot op het meest gedetailleerde niveau! Deze server heet portal.plugwise.com… Op deze server wordt een database gevuld met gegevens over wanneer en hoe lang de verlichting brandt, wanneer de wasmachine in gebruik is en hoe vaak de vaatwasser wordt gebruikt en wat dit voor energie verbruik tot gevolg heeft.

Dat u als consument hieraan niet wilt meewerken omdat dit nooit duidelijk aan u kenbaar is gemaakt, is voor Plugwise geen onderwerp van discussie. En bent u in staat om bijvoorbeeld met een firewall dit ongewenst lekken van naar uw mening privacy-gevoelige informatie te voorkomen? Jammer, daarmee verspeelt u bepaalde rechten die plotseling alleen zijn voorbehouden aan consumenten die er geen bezwaar tegen hebben dat hun hele energie-huishouding daarmee al praktisch op straat ligt.

Is het normaal dat er zo wordt omgegaan met privacy van de consument? Zijn wij als consument dan nergens meer veilig voor? Moeten wij het maar accepteren dat onder onze neus heel ons hebben en houwen wordt weggesluisd naar wie-weet-waar? Is dit de nieuwe moraal van het bedrijfsleven, waarbij er handig wordt ingespeeld op het gegeven dat als gevolg van technologische ontwikkelingen tegenwoordig alles aan elkaar verbonden is?

Laat de consument goed geïnformeerd besluiten over aanschaf van het Plugwise systeem. Daarbij mag kennis over het wegsluizen van verbruiksgegevens niet ontbreken!

Next wednesday i have a Remeha representative coming over to my house to see what’s the best heating system for our house. Remeha has got a new model since recently, the Remeha Calenta. Probably with a much higher price than the Avanta, my choice so far. Another very important issue is that the Calenta needs to have the ability to be operated with the Remeha Gateway just like the Avanta. The recommended thermostat for the Calenta does like very nice, BTW. And maybe i’ll add a solar water heater to the system, who knows. Alot of questions, hopefully to be answered next Wednesday.

Remeha iSense

Remeha solar water heater

Remeha Avanta

Remeha Calenta

I was never really satisfied with my former Blog engine dasBlog, so i decided to switch to WordPress. Main concern was ofcourse how to get all my posts from dasBlog to WordPress. With some links and some tools i managed to get the most important posts over to WordPress without having to type them all over

http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/08/23/breaking-up-moving-blog-engines/

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/DasBlogML

Today i found this ad in a magazine:

175 Euro discount on the Remeha central heating of your choice. It’s time for the next project

Yesterday our old and broken freezer was replaced by a new A++ class freezer, a Liebherr GP1466-22.

While hunting down the large power consumers in our house, i found out that our old freezer had a defective thermostat. It was constantly freezing, 24 hours a day! Something had to be done about that, since constantly cosuming 65-70W is way to much! Now that the new freezer has been working for 30 hours or so, i can see it has an average power usage of 16.5W. That’s 145 kWh per year, where the old freezer used 587 kWh. That’s another 440 kWh saved on a yearly basis…

Now i wonder how the manufacturer has come to the advertised 135 kWh…

Every year we (2 friends i know since the HTS Arnhem and me) go for a ride on
our motorbikes.
Today was a beautiful day; not to hot, not to cold; just
perfect. Normally we go for 3-4 days to Belgium or Germany, but this
year we stayed in Holland and only went for 1 day.
The tour took us
over the winter dikes of the rivers de Rijn and de Waal. We started in Westervoort and from there we went to Huissen, Nijmegen along the north side of the Waal
all the way to Neerijnen.

There we went north, through Geldermalsen
towards de Rijn, where we took the south side of de Rijn back to
Arnhem. When we got back to Arnhem, we had driven about 200 km, mostly
dikes. Riding the dikes is very much fun; very low traffic and very
much nice curves. Plans for next year have already been made: in 2009
we’ll go to the region of Koblenz, Germany.

Some moments ago i updated the NIC driver. Current driver version is 6.203.214.2008, made for Vista, but i was able to install it on my Windows 2008 Server. At reboot Hyper-V service got stuck, it didn’t want to shutdown, so i had to push the reset-button. However, everything booted ok afterwards. At the same time i re-installed the 4GB RAM i recently removed. So now i’m back to 8GB, with a more recent driver. Now all i can do is wait to see if this driver-update has helped…

Since i virtualized a bunch of my PC’s, i’m having some trouble lately with my Windows 2008 Server running Hyper-V RC1. I get BSOD’s way to much, somewhere around 1 every 2 days. I was lucky that i witnessed the BSOD on 2 occasions and i could see vmswitch.sys being mentioned on the screen as the possible culprit. This lead me to the following Microsoft TechNet Forum post. 

Well, that can’t be a coincidence that this thread mentions the same NIC as i have on my Gigabyte EP35-DS4 motherboard. It seems to be a problem in the driver for this NIC (an on-board Realtek RTL8168/8111 Family PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC). So probably updating the driver should help, although i don’t know yet how to handle this if the driver is not digitally signed..we’ll see. The replacement RAM was already purchased, cause the problems started around the same time that i added an additional 4GB so i blamed that at first… well, nevermind, a bit of spare RAM is always handy

Yesterday we got a letter from the company that does the maintenance of our central heating. It said our current central heating was to vulnerable to failures and we were offered an upgrade to a newer central heating at a reduced price. Well, it is true that our central heating has caused us a lot of trouble through the 10 years that we live here. So i understand the reason why they want us to upgrade to a newer model from a different brand. But i’ve got my own wishes…
Our new central heating should be controlled by means of the Opentherm protocol for instance, so that i can ‘tap’ the communication between central heating and the thermostat and incorporate the data that i can get out of that, into my Domotica System. And i’ve made my choice: our new central heating will be a Remeha Avanta, controlled by a Remeha Celsia 20, including a so-called gateway for attaching a RS-232 cable to it and tap the communication.