Smart AC
A while ago, I received a letter from PG&E mentioning their Smart AC program.  This program lets customers voluntarily let their air conditioning get throttled when there is a significant energy demand. 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 stil

Upgrade ext3 to ext4
I was interested in upgrading my laptop’s hard drive to ext4 from ext3.  Ext4 offers some features over ext3, and I figured that since I upraded to Kubuntu 9.10, I might as well upgrade the file system. 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 dec

Skype video with Ubuntu 9.10
I had to reinstall Kubuntu, for a reason that I will write about later, so I needed to reinstall skype.  When I downloaded and tried  the 2.1 beta, I wasn’t able to get video to work. 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

Netflix and Windows Media Center
For some reason, within the past couple of days Netflix streaming in our Vista Media Center stopped working.  The interesting thing is that playback worked from the browser and from PlayOn, both from that computer.  Nothing that I did solved the problem.  I was getting so frustrated that I wanted to just get a Roku HD, so I wouldn’t have to deal with software configuration anymore. 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

Disk Space on WHS System disk
I have been having some problems with my Windows Home Server.  The 20GB system disk has been filling up.  When this happens various programs get unstable (Can’t connect to the console, Squeezebox Server crashes, …) 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.