Aquila Online

Desktop utility monitors Eskom load shedding

// April 6th, 2008 // 6 Comments » // News, Tech

Those of you active on Facebook and other ‘media‘ may have seen this, but I thought I’d also share this with the regulars (hi mom!) still reading this blog.

By now we are all painfully aware of Eskom’s scheduled power cuts or load shedding and as frustrating as it is, it’s just something we’ll have to deal with for the foreseeable future. Until we all do our bit to reduce at least 10% of our power consumption, rolling power cuts will be part of South African life.

That being said, it also helps to be prepared for the scheduled load shedding and since Eskom‘s website is as helpful as the vehicle licensing call-centre, we have to rely on one of many websites to keep us informed.

One such website is MyEnergy, that provides a nifty (and very small) desktop monitoring utility that allows you to keep track of Eskom’s schedules for multiple locations.

This is great, as you can track the schedules for say Northriding (home) and Sandton (work) and many others from the same utility.

In addition to allowing users to monitor schedules of relevant locations, MyEnergy Monitor allows users to specify custom actions to take upon the detection of a scheduled power outage. These include a simple desktop notification, automatic computer shutdown and, for system administrators and developers, windows event log writing.

Once downloaded and installed, the MyEnergy monitor is quite simple to use and as stated above, gives you access to a couple of nice features. Thus far it’s been quite a novel and I’m interested to see what the week brings.

Keep track of updates via the MyEnergy blog or the MyEnergy Facebook group.

Happy camping…

Resolve any phone number to its location

// March 24th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // Interesting, Tech

Found this nifty neat handy little tool that resolves any phone number to its geographical location.

TP2Location is currently still in Beta and the blog is barely 3 days old, but it seems like there’s promise.

Just enter the telephone number in question and voilà – you’re presented with the country code, number type, region, telecom network, related links and country map (from Googlemaps of course).

At present they do support South African phone numbers, but it would be great once the maps show regional/area detail instead of just the country map.

Speaking of Google Maps – did you see the one with some “deal” going down on Google Street View?

Moth on Fire

// March 24th, 2008 // 3 Comments » // Photos, Tech

After reading what Dror said about f/8 at 1/250 I was intent on looking a lot closer at my camera settings before I fire away.

This one was taken at f/2.8 – which I think looks pretty cool – but is it better than the f/8 one below? Admittedly though – we’re not comparing apples with apples if you consider the composition is different and the above picture was taken at 1/3 versus the one below at 1 sec.

Which one looks better?

Home-made USB lamp

// March 2nd, 2008 // 4 Comments » // Tech

Load shedding is on its way again and what better way to get some light at your desk, than to create your very own USB-powered desk lamp.

This video shows you step-by-step how to make a USB-powered lamp.

Apparently if you do try this at home, it may actually fry your PC. A suggestion is to rather use a LED than a normal lamp, but then I’m no electrical expert. Build at your own risk.

PS: Eskom now supplies load shedding updates via an RSS feed so best you subscribe now.

HTC Touch Dual – Double the excitement

// January 25th, 2008 // 13 Comments » // General, News, Tech

Regular readers may recall that I got a bit Touchy Feely with the HTC Touch last year. Since then I’ve seen quite a number of people walking around with this device, which brings testimony to its style and appeal.

In my review I mentioned that a few niggles surface relating to the overall functionality of the phone as the lack of a slide-out keyboard or even an alpha-numeric keypad made ordinary tasks a tad tricky.

It turns out that HTC was listening. HTC took the market’s feedback into consideration and developed the Touch Dual, which now features either a full 20-key slide-out QWERTY keyboard or 16-key slide-out keypad for added convenience. Now you can type messages or e-mails without the need of a stylus.

According to Leaf International Communications, HTC’s official distributor in South Africa, the Touch-FLO menu has also been updated, which now allows you to flip through emails and SMS messages, as well as being able to rotate and zoom in and out of photos. The overall structure of the TouchFLO menu, allows you to browse through the phone options by rotating it like a cube with your thumb. You can also scroll through web pages plus access your music and video with just a flick of a finger.

After reviewing the HTC Touch last year, I’ve sorely missed the home screen (obviously included in the HTC Touch Dual and dubbed the Live HTC Home) which features quick shortcuts to things like a weather widget, contacts and text messages. Now if only they could build in a traffic report widget or Eskom Load shedding schedules, I’d be extremely happy.

Now for all the technical acronyms…3G, HSDPA and GPRS/Edge/GSM is included in this small body, making it a winner in the connectivity department. Wifi sadly got the boot, but then, how many free/good hotspots are around in any case? The Touch Dual sports a Qualcomm MSM 7200, 400MHz processor, making it a heck of a lot faster than the original 200MHz Texas Instruments CPU found in the Touch. Memory has been bumped up to 256MB ROM and 128MB of SDRAM respectively and additional storage is available in the form of a microSDâ„¢ memory card.

With all the enhancements, this phone could surely provide double the fun, double the excitement and double the functionality.

Oh and if you’re drooling for the HTC Touch Dual yet, reports have it that it’ll be available in South Africa from the beginning of February 2008.