Power

An article on the Elektor magazine on home power meters caught my attention, particularly the wireless one. In the article they mention the Voltcraft Energy Control 3000, that is able to receive data (about energy consumption) from several sensor and can be connected to the pc via usb. The only problem is that the software that comes with it is in german only. The price is ok, 100€ + 35€ per sensor. But I cannot find any information on the actual format of the data that the Voltcraft Energy Control 3000 provides. I also impossible to tell whether or not special USB drivers are needed. It could be that it presents itselft as a hard drive and expose the date as a file. That would be the easiest way to interface with it and use my own tools to process the data. That would also make possible to connect to my MacBook Pro. ...

I’ve been trying to find power meters for home. My criteria is that it has to support several sensors (because I want to know how much energy my computer and home cinema is spending) and it has to be wireless (because it more convinient this way). After researching a couple of hours, it doesn’t lok good. The number of choices is very small. The Voltcraft option is in doubt because all the information I can find is in german. And the only other working option that I found is Plogg. ...

I’m moving to Sweden soon and a friend of mine sent me the following link (in Spanish, sorry) about the salaries in different countries. From here, I learnt about Purchasing Power Parity and using the data from the IMF I obtained the PPP ratios from Spain, Sweden and other countries. Using this list you can translate how much worth is your money in other country. For example, roughly we can say that goods you buy in Sweden using 10000€ can be purchased in Spain for only 8058€. Or saying it in another way, if I have 10000€ in Spain I have the same purchasing power than a suede that owns 12409€. Yet another way to say it is that living in Sweden is a 19,41% more expensive than living in Spain. ...

If you’re frustated trying to charge your K750 from USB with no luck. Try to install the drivers first, it actually makes a difference. The K750 wont recharge the battery if the drivers are not installed. At least that worked for me in Windows 2000.