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dale lane

fan of all things mobile, father of small girls, IBM code monkey, youth charity trustee...

Another CurrentCost app updateJanuary 4

The tabbed interface in my CurrentCost app continues to serve me well. It means I can keep adding new pages to try out new things to display and compare, without spending any time rethinking the interface to make room for another graph.

I added another this morning. When you sync the app with the web, it downloads (anonymised) daily power usage values for every registered user, and plots them on a single scatter graph.

I wanted to do this for every stored daily power usage value, but it was unwieldy. I’ve settled for having the web service calculate average daily power usage for each user, and plotting them instead.

Each cross on the graph for a day represents a different user, which is neat - a nice way of seeing trends. By

Vtech KidizoomJanuary 1

Top of Grace’s Christmas list for Father Christmas was a camera.

In the end, Santa went with the Vtech Kidizoom.

It was tough to find many reviews for it, so I thought I’d share a few of Grace’s snaps with it so far, for anyone interested to see what the image quality is like - all of the photos in this post were taken by Grace (our 4 year old) with the Kidizoom.

The camera cost £40, and produces JPEGs with a resolution of 640×480. There is about 12 MB of storage in the camera, which has enough space for at least a couple of hundred pics, and an SD card slot if you need more space.

The pictures are a little fuzzy, but G

CurrentCost - the CC128December 29 2008

The nice people at CurrentCost were kind enough to let me have a pre-production version of their next home electricity monitor to play with: the CC128.

I’ve been meaning to post some thoughts about it for a few weeks now, but the run up to Christmas meant it got forgotten.

But I finally had a bit of time to give it a try today.

If you already know about CurrentCost meters, nothing here will surprise you - this is more of a refinement to the current design, rather than something new and different. (If you don’t, I’ve written about CurrentCost meters before - this new one is just the same, except with a new display unit).

There are some improvements here that I like.

Longer history - The most obvious improvement is that this meter maintains a longer record of historical power usage than the current model. To summarise:

‘first gen’ ’second gen’ CC128 2-hourly history none 1 day 31 days daily history none 31 days 90 days monthly history none 1 year 7 years

Crisis ChristmasDecember 29 2008

I’m not normally one for habits or routine, but Christmas is an exception - it’s one time when I’m happy, if not actually quite comforted, to do the same stuff I do every year. Traditions are part of the festive magic.

One of my traditions, which started for me when I was at Uni, is to go up to London for Crisis Christmas - the annual homeless shelters event organised by Crisis.

Crisis Christmas provides over a thousand people with a warm, dry place to spend the festive period, and somewhere to share a meal and watch some Christmas telly - the stuff that we all take for granted.

But it’s more than that. People from various specialties and professions volunteer their services, making the Crisis shelters also an opportunity to see a doctor, get a healthcheck - even an X-ray (useful for detecting TB), see a vet (important to the many homeless people who have dogs), see a dentist, a hairdresser, a chiropodist (vital to a group of people whose feet are so often cold and damp, where even getting trench foot is not uncommon), an optician, a pharmacist, get help writing a letter or filling in forms, talk with advisors such as benefits

Drawing pretty graphs with Open Flash ChartDecember 19 2008

I’m keen for young people that Solent Youth Action works with to have access to information about how the charity runs. I’d like for us to be as transparent as possible, and as a geek, one of the ways that I am working on this is by putting more stuff on our website.

We put our Financial Statements online so that people could see where we get our money from, and how we spend it. But it’s a dry document - a twenty-two page PDF of numbers and accounting blurb.

While it is important for this information to be available, it’s not easily accessible to many like this. Tonight I had a play with presenting it as animated online graphs using the awesome Open Flash Chart.

The Open Flash Chart site has very clear tutorials and a ton of examples, so I wont waste time here by going into detail explaining how to use it.

But it’s worth highlighting just how simple it is - drop the swf file into a directory on your webserver, then point it at a JSON file with your data (either by URL, or by reference in your HTML). That’s pretty much it.

The most complicated bit was copying figures out of the Financial Statements document and pasting it into