Blessed by the Potato

I’m sure you’re all bored of my ranting and obsessive tracking of my hydro usage, so I’ll put that at the bottom.

First, I’d like to just mention that Netbug lent Snow Crash to me over the holidaze, and I quite enjoyed it. It has me thinking now, though: you know all that crazy spam that’s been avoiding the filters lately? The ones that mostly have crappy gifs with the random gibberish in the clear? I wonder sometimes if those patterns of lines and colours in those gifs aren’t there to tell you that this really is a legitimate stock tip that you must follow up on, but are attempts to fine-tune some sort of visually transmitted virus for our wetware. Or in a similar vein, try to find a combination of colours and lines and pixelated text that is absolutely hypnotic and is vastly more effective at getting the message across. Given how cheap and plentiful spam has been, it provides a brain researcher in this area an easy way to just go about experimenting by trial-and-error rather than trying to come up with any sort of governing theory… I also sometimes wonder if it’s some terrorist or otherwise secret organization attempting to send steganographic (encoded) messages to people who are unreachable other than by general broadcast…

Anyhow, on to power issues.

I flipped the main breakers today, and the wheel in the power meter did indeed stop spinning. That’s mostly good: good, because it means the meter isn’t completely, flabergastingly broken. Of course, it also means that the easiest solution to my problems is no longer a possibility. Rather than doing stuff and recording the power use in several-hour blocks (pretty much the minimum to get any kind of accuracy from a scale with 1 kWh as the smallest unit), I looked up the method of getting power use from the rate the wheel in the meter spins (thanks to Mr. Electricity). Before I shut off the main breaker, I had one computer and a 100 W light in my room running, plus some LED xmas lights on out front and a variety of leak power (TV, clocks, and the small blower fan for the hot water heater was on too). I was using 428 W, which coincidentally, is quite close to the average power use in the apartment. There’s still a bit of unknown power to account for (again, my computers and all that other stuff were in the apartment too, and except for the light, all that was generally on all the time, so my baseline should be lower so that occasional things like cooking and having the fridge cycle could bring the total up to that point), but it’s not huge. Maybe 100-200 W or so.

Then, after I switched the power off and on again, I went upstairs, turned off the light and turned on the other computer (I should have kept it constant, I know, but I was on my way out, and the difference between the two should be pretty small), then went outside to check again. The furnace clicked on (but I don’t know if the fridge did) and my power usage jumped to 1250 W! This is closer to the usage that would rack up the crazy bills we’ve been seeing, and sort of implies that the furnace fan, beyond all expectation, is somehow drawing 800 W (or possibly, the furnace and fridge together. The fridge was off when I walked out the door, but I didn’t go back inside to check that it didn’t click on before I made it to the meter). I’ll try to track this a bit better tonight when I get home.

Calculation: For the first usage, the wheel turned in 60.5 seconds. The power, in kW = ( 3.6 * 7.2 )/time in seconds. The 3.6 is a factor to go from seconds to hours and also from W to kW. The 7.2 is a factor printed on the meter. So, P = (3.6*7.2)/60.5 = 0.428 kW (or 428 W). The second time was 20.7 seconds if you want to do the calculation yourself.

Sorry for the brief outage today. Turns out I broke the little tab on the network cable that holds it in place a while ago, and when I was under the desk installing my new monitor I tugged the cord out enough that it wasn’t making a good contact. Of all the stupid ways to kill a website, eh?

Well, I called London Hydro today about where all my electricity was going, and to see if they would check that my meter was working right. They said that that usage was typical for this property (i.e., similar to what a family with two kids was using before we moved in), and said that when meters break they tend to underrecord (or slow down) so they wouldn’t check on it. Naturally, they have a disincentive to check it if it’s overrecording, but saying that wasn’t going to help me any.

She basically said that yes, we’re using more than 3 times the electricity as the old place, and our stuff is mostly the same, but that the stuff in the house may account for that: older stove or fridge (though they look to be about the same vintage), the fan in the furnace (I told her the furnace & water heater were gas). The thing is, we still used all that electricity when we were gone, which pretty much narrows it down to the furnace (though the thermostat was turned down and the fan only runs when the furnace does), the fridge (though it doesn’t sound sickly and it would have to use ten times the power it’s rated for on the energuide sticker), the security light, or the mysterious “sump pump” (there’s a switch on the circuit breaker for one, but I’ve never heard one running).

So, since they won’t check my meter (or see if there’s a grow-op leeching power nearby), pretty much the only thing I’ve got left to do is to just start throwing switches on the circuit breaker to see if I can isolate one circuit that’s drawing too much juice.

Well, my new monitor arrived from Dell today, and I wasted no time in setting it up. A first-pass review:

First, the good: the monitor is big, and it was cheap. There also aren’t any stuck pixels as far as I can tell, which is a welcome relief (Wayfare’s has one and it drives me crazy)

Unfortunately, as I came to suspect after I had put the order in (I’m not usually so quick to rush into these things!) this is not the same type of monitor I have at work; it’s a much, much cheaper monitor. First off, the stand is pretty cheap, it only rotates up/down a little bit. There’s no height adjust or the cool rotate to portrait mode function I was hoping for (nor a way to rotate left/right without dragging the base across the desk). The back only has VGA, DVI, and power connectors: no USB hub or memory card reader (though the last part is a bit excessive on the screen I have at work). The included power cord is fairly short (though the power is on the wrong side of the desk here).

The picture is also not as good as I was hoping for. It looks really washed out somehow, but I can’t quite put my finger on how, exactly. Playing with the brightness and contrast seems to help a bit, but it still doesn’t look as good as my laptop’s screen. The viewing angle isn’t great, either. By 45 degrees off centre the colours start to go wonky, giving about 90 degrees total viewing angle. IIRC (the page is gone, so I have to go by memory) the viewing angle is reported as 160 degrees. That may be the point at which you can’t see anything, but image quality is in the pits long before that (the colours fade out to brown).

Reading up on the technology some more, I found that it has “6-bit colour” (over 3 colour channels, that should be 18-bit colour if my math is right, as compared to most LCDs which have 24-bit colour, or CRTs which display 32-bit colour), a trade-off for the very fast response time (good for gaming, or so I’m told). Since people can actually notice the difference between 18- and 24-bit colour (whereas 24 to 32 bit is harder to notice), this screen uses some sort of dithering to fake its way towards true colour. Looking at text I can’t really tell, but when I fired up a movie or an image, it seemed to shimmer a bit; perhaps that effect is a result of that.

Going to the Dell website, it looks like this monitor is no longer listed/available (it was just introduced a week or two ago). I wonder if that’s telling me something…

Now I have to wonder if I should return it or keep it. It is big, and it was cheap, and returning it would hit me for a 15% restocking fee plus shipping, so there’s some motivation to get used to it… on the other hand, it’s not quite the awesome upgrade to my CRT I was hoping for. (There’s a third option, of course: try to sell it and recover the $342 incl. taxes I spent. While it would be hard to find a buyer for a “used” screen that I’m not totally happy with at a price that would make it worth the effort, it might be possible since the normal list for this monitor is $400…).

Update: Well, I set it up with Wayfare, and I’m leaning towards keeping it. I will miss not being able to put it in portrait mode (I think I might be the only person in the city who would use that, too), but the “shimmering” that it does to get colours isn’t really all that noticeable if I stay an armlength or two away. When I had first set it up, I put it on the edge of the desk, but that only put it about a foot from my face, instead of something more like 3′, and it was fairly annoying that close. I think I’ll be satisfied with it as long as I remember not to put my nose up against it.

Update 2: I’m back in London and have it set up on my desk now. First, another complaint: the DVI cable has a big, rounded plastic bit on the connector. That is to say, the plastic part of the connector, the part just behind the pins, the part where the thumbscrews and all that are, is larger than normal, and curved instead of squared off. This makes it taller when trying to go into the port, so much so that it hit the part of the case just above the video card and wouldn’t go in! This is stupid design on two fronts: first, on my computer’s case for having this metal part (where the on-board network and USB and what not are) stick out right above the video port. I’ve had this sort of problem with PCI cards before, where adjacent cards interfered. In that case, you just move them. However, an AGP video card only goes into one slot, so if there’s an obstruction there, you’re SOL if there’s a fat ass cable like this trying to squeeze in. Of course, the other half of the stupid design comes from Dell. Why the heck did they make the connector so huge? What’s wrong with making it the same size as everyone else’s connector? Geez…

Anyhow, I ran up to work and swapped cables there, and have it hooked up now. For the moment, I’m running in dual-monitor configuration, which makes it really easy to compare the two side-by-side. The LCD is definitely “washed-out” compared to my old screen, but the shimmering hasn’t bothered me with it at a proper distance.

Also, the driver CD has the drivers for it (really only needed if your system doesn’t already have an option for the native resolution of 1680×1050), but the documentation for another screen entirely.