radioAe6rt

Let the engines of user-financed networks roar.

No government has the right to give the rights of way to the Phone Company or the Cable Company. Demand of your local elected officials a network that you own in your community, taking advantage of the municipal rights of way that belong to you as citizen.

You don’t have to take what the Phone Company or Cable Company give you, rendering bits of their choosing. Contact your local city officials and tell them about the third way: a network owned by you and your neighbor that just delivers bits and values not one bit over another. We call this user financed networks.

Let the Phone Company and Cable Company find another way to make a living, because we don’t need them.

Update: Look at where your country is in terms of broadband penetration. Then tell me you are satisfied with this, even if your Congress is. Being 19th is giving up. In a “design” economy such as ours, with the Indians and Chinese coming on, we cannot afford to give up. 19th is giving up.

[tags]net neutrality,user financed networks, cringely,canarie[/tags]

One third of my life as a human is spent sleeping. Of the remaining two thirds, half is spent configuring printers for Linux on my home LAN.

Having continuously run Linux since 1991, I can say this: printing under Linux or any Unix is harder than it should be. After 35 years of Unix, and 15 of Linux, you’d think this would be easier than it is. You’d be wrong.

Take CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System. And take Ubuntu, Linux for Human Beings (I love Linux as much as Ubuntu does, but get real). Why does CUPS on Ubuntu, or any consumer Linux, come with authentication enabled? Linux is hard enough for humans to install and run without messing with authentication for setting up a printer. Aren’t I already authorized to run sudo to admin my Ubuntu box? Is that implied trust not good enough for me to configure printing? Guess not. CUPS authentication notwithstanding, you’ll be doing good to get that test page to print.

Backup your original cups configuration in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf now. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Replace it with this one, allowing for network numbering differences, for cups 1.2, and restart cupsys

BrowseAddress @LOCAL
BrowseAllow from 192.168.0.0/24
ConfigFilePerm 0600
DefaultCharset notused
Listen 127.0.0.1:631
LogLevel info
Printcap /etc/printcap
ServerAdmin yeremailaddress
DefaultPolicy p
<Policy p>
   <Limit all>
      AuthType None
      Allow From 127.0.0.1
   </Limit>
</Policy>

This allows you to add and modify printers without all that authentication nonnsense for home networks. And no, I’m not going to add myself to some magic cups group for alternative auth purposes.

Lessee, where was I before I blew two hours on this problem?

Update: In a comment, Marc pointed out esr’s note on cups config. Like Mr. Raymond, I should point out that I appreciate all the hard work that’s gone into cups and linux in general. You always hurt the ones you love.

[tags]cups,ubuntu[/tags]

Taking my electricity and water bill and doing a bit of arithmetic, In recent billing periods, I found that our home on average consumes about 1kW (1000 J/s) of electrical power, and about 182 gallons of water per day. Family of 3, sometimes 4, adults depending on the time of year.

I’m curious how this compares to others’s homes?

Energy calculation goes like: (kwH/da) * (3.6e6 J/(s kwH)) * (da/24hr) * (hr/3600s) = joules/s = watts
Water calculation goes like: (hundreds of cubic foot of water) * (7.48 gal/ cubic foot) = gallons

[tags]energy,conservation,itron,c1sr[/tags]

Jon Udell had an interesting article last week on energy consumption in the home and elsewhere. He raises an interesting point, or implies one, wherein all through the month, homeowners have no realtime idea of how much energy they use. This, in the Information Age, no less. Only after they receive their utility bill do they know how much they used, past tense.

We need networked homes to monitor energy usage: all sources of energy have small networked sensors to report back in realtime the source consumption. Factor in some sort of realtime cost display, thereby giving users an idea of what they’re spending on energy on an hourly basis.

I switched my local phone service over to measured service recently. And I can tell you without hesitation: when I make a local call now, I am highly aware of the pennies flowing out of my pocket into Verizon’s pocket. Acutely aware. Give users the same sense of loss when they turn a light on, or leave the water running while they shave or brush their teeth.

[tags]energy,networked home[/tags]

Vanessa Williams of Oponia Networks describes how to configure JXTA using Spring beans. The technique grows out of the new JXTA NetworkConfigurator work. NetworkConfigurator is one of two ways to configure JXTA programmatically, before the platform starts. It’s an essential tool in any JXTA programmer’s toolbox.

Great stuff.

[tags]jxta,oponia[/tags]

Knowing that my PhoneGnome keeps track of every call I make and its duration, I set about analyzing my phone bill to see if a measured-service plan could save me money on “local” calls.

I currently pay $17.25/mo for flat rate local calling.

Verizon, my local phone company, has a measured-service plan which costs $10/mo + $0.04 + $0.01*(D-1), where D is the duration of a local call in minutes. This is a peak hours rate.

According to data available to me on my.phonegnome.com, my last 275 PSTN, non-800 number local calls are of average duration 2.97 minutes. Round that up to 3 minutes. For purposes of this analysis, we’ll assume all these calls occur during what the Verizon rated plan considers peak hours 8:00am to 4:59pm. In fact, my.phonegnome.com tells me that some calls occur off-hours, when rates would be cheaper on this meausured-service plan. But let’s take worst-case, and assume peak hours calling time.

Each of those calls would therefore add $0.06 to my bill if I had the measured-service plan.

So I have $7.25/mo to play with ($17.25 - $10.00). With that $7.25 I can buy about 120 3 minute phone calls.

But my.phonegnome.com tells me that during the last three months, I place on average 69 local calls per month. So those calls would have cost me $4.14/mo, not the full $7.25/mo budget.

But wait, there’s more! The measured plan also includes a $3/mo allowance before per-minute charges are applied. So those 69 calls on average cost me $1.14.

So I save on average about $6.00/month if I switch to the rated plan — without modifying my local calling behavior.

Remember this is worst-case: I treated all calls as occurring during peak hours, which in fact is not the case. I make a number of evening phone calls, too, which are cheaper under the Verizon plan. It was already more trouble than it was worth to treat those calls as off-hours.

Verizon in Los Angeles also uses a premium “Zone Usage Measurement” (ZUM) charge for calls between 13 and 16 miles from my home phone. I’ve not treated that here, as most calls I make are pretty much to the same handful of numbers within a few miles of home.

So not only does PhoneGnome save me a ton on domestic long distance, it also allows me dwell upon my actual call data and analyze it.

Disclaimer: I do consulting to PhoneGnome.com. I have also been a Phone Company customer since I reached the age of reason.

Update: Here is a simple perl script to help analyze your local calling assuming you are a PhoneGnome user.

[tags]phonegnome,verizon, ben franklin[/tags]