Sassor wants to let users know just how much electricity their gadgets are wasting (hands-on)

Sassor wants to let users know just how much electricity they're wasting handson

Everyone knows that their game consoles, appliances and HDTVs are energy vampires, and while Energy Star-certified products tell us which gadgets are more green-friendly than others, we still don't know just how much juice they're actually sucking down in a given day. Enter Sassor, a start-up from Japan that's created a system to monitor the electrical consumption of anything plugged into a wall outlet -- from PCs to refrigerators. It tracks power consumption using current sensors clamped onto power cords, which communicate wirelessly via ZigBee with an module (based on an Arduino design) that uploads the info to the cloud.

Through the web portal, users can track energy consumption on a per-device basis in real-time, letting them figure out which gadgets are most responsible for their sky-high utility bill -- and take appropriate steps to correct the problem. Currently, it's aimed solely at businesses, but once Sassor's on its feet, funding-wise, the plan is to also put them in people's homes. The company told us it'll ditch ZigBee in favor of a WiFi solution in such future iterations, and it'll make an SDK and the system APIs available to all so that people can program for the platform and improve it in ways currently not contemplated. Alas, there's neither a timetable nor a price for the consumer version just yet, but you can see some pictures of the hardware's innards below.

Sassor wants to let users know just how much electricity their gadgets are wasting (hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jun 2012 21:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Coca-Cola not to blame for US obesity: CEO

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Phones gain ability to learn by touching

NEW YORK (AP) ? There's a form of extra-sensory perception called psychometry, whose practitioners claim to learn things about objects by touching them. Smartphones set to be released this month by Samsung and Sony will have some of that ability: they'll learn things when you touch them to pre-programmed "tags."

For example, you can program a tag with your phone number, and stick it on your business card. When someone taps the phone to the card, the phone would call you. Or you can put a tag on your night stand. Place the phone there, and it goes into "alarm clock" mode, holding your calls until the morning.

Samsung Electronics Co. announced this week that it will be selling these tags in the form of stickers it calls "TecTiles" ? $15 for 5 of them. They'll work with its new flagship Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone, set to launch in a few weeks, and several others already in the market, including the HTC EVO 4G LTE sold by Sprint Nextel.

Sony Corp.'s Xperia Ion, to be released June 24, will come with the ability to read different coin-like plastic tags that read "Home," ''Office" and so forth. The tags cost $20 for four, and the phone can be programmed to react differently to each tag. The "Car" tag can launch a navigation application, for instance. Tapping "Home" can send a text message to the rest of the family that you're home, and set the ringer volume to maximum.

The big push behind the technology, which is known as Near-Field Communications, comes from companies that see the phone as the wallet of the future. When touched to payment terminals, NFC-equipped phones can act as credit or debit cards.

But turning phones into credit cards is a tall order. Mobile payments already work with a few phones, but broad adoption is being held up while cellphone companies, banks, payment processors and retailers work out who pays for what and who benefits.

This ability to sense things close by is made possible by a new type of communications hardware in phones, complementing long-range cellular radios, medium-range Wi-Fi and short-range Bluetooth.

The latest version of Google Inc.'s Android software, known as Ice Cream Sandwich, comes with the ability to use NFC to communicate from phone to phone. When the backs are tapped together, the owners can trade information like contacts.

Samsung takes this one step further with the Galaxy S III. Tap two phones together, and they set up a connection via Wi-Fi. That means the owners can walk away from each other, and as long as they're in the same room or so, they can transfer photos and even hefty video files between their phones.

There are issues to work out. The Samsung tags can be read by most Android phones that have NFC capability, but not the Sony phone. Samsung and HTC phones won't recognize the Sony tags.

Apple Inc., whose iPhones are trendsetters in many ways, hasn't built NFC into them ? yet. Its patent filings hint at an interest in NFC, but they've given no clue when the technology might show up in iPhones.

Nick Holland, an analyst with Yankee Group, believes NFC will shine first in non-payment applications, because they're easier to sort out, and the technology has many uses. There have been NFC trials in Sweden, using phones as hotel room keys, he points out. Another compelling use case would be Wi-Fi hotspots. A cafe that wants to limit access to the local hotspot might let patrons tap their phones against a tag instead of having them laboriously enter a password.

"There's been an over-focus on the wallets," Holland said. "It's a technology that's not designed purely for payments."

For advertisers, NFC tags could replace the so-called "QR" codes ? two-dimensional bar codes that need to be photographed with specially downloaded software to be deciphered, so they can send a consumer to the advertiser's website or earn them a coupon for a discount. QR codes work at a distance, unlike NFC tags, but have significant drawbacks.

"Someone described them as 'digital vomit' recently. You can't make them look pretty," Holland said.

Each NFC tag includes a tiny chip, which explains the relatively high prices Samsung and Sony are charging. Those prices will come down, Holland said, as adoption rises. QR codes, of course, have the advantage of being very cheap, since they can be created on a simple printer.

The big makers of NFC chips are NXP Semiconductors N.V., a Dutch company, and Inside Secure, a French one. But competition is looming, Holland said, from bigger chip companies like Broadcom Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc.

"Basically, anyone who's making chips is looking at NFC as a new area they could move into," Holland said.

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UN: 800,000 forced to flee their countries in 2011

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PURITY Correctional Camp

PURITY Correctional Camp

PURITY is a facility that prides itself on relieving teens of their homosexual urges, and like it or not, you're now a part of this program. Will you resist, or try to change yourself? Either way, it's certainly not going to be a typical camp experience.

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Qiu Xiaolong's Chief Inspector Chen Cao Of Shanghai Police China's Latest Mystery

SHANGHAI -- To climb into Qiu Xiaolong's childhood home, down a narrow alley where women chop and fry lunch in shared kitchens, is to step on creaking floorboards into Shanghai's past.

But at the top of a steep, worn wooden ladder is a loft with a window revealing the silvery crown of an office tower, part of the glass-and-steel skyscape that heralds Shanghai's leap into the future.

But for a city to fully secure its place in the global culture these days, it helps to have a fictional detective taking foreign readers where the guidebooks don't go, and that's where Qiu comes in with his brainchild, Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai police.

In China, the communist authorities still impose boundaries on all things creative, and an author must be careful how much of the recent past to insert into a work of fiction. That particularly applies to Qiu, a Shanghai native transplanted to St. Louis, Missouri.

His seven mysteries published in English often are based on real-life corruption scandals, political intrigues and murders, and at 59, this mild-mannered poet and literary scholar has lived through tumultuous times himself.

In his teens came the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when aged revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, maneuvering against his rivals, unleashed ultra-leftist "Red Guards" to wage a reign of terror on teachers, artists and others of "bourgeois" backgrounds. Only Qiu's bronchitis spared him a stint, along with millions of others, at "re-education" camps in the countryside.

In 1989, when the military crushed the pro-democracy movement massed in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, he was on a fellowship in St. Louis, and decided it was best not to come home.

Qiu even has a fleeting connection to the man at the center of the latest convulsion in Chinese politics, Communist princeling Bo Xilai, who was ousted in an affair that includes a suspected murder. The two were graduate students at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in the late 1970s, though their only interaction, Qiu says, was when Bo borrowed his favorite pingpong paddle. He never returned it.

"One thing good about writing about China is that so many things are happening, you don't have to worry about writers' block," he remarked as he sat in a favorite Shanghai restaurant, "Laobanzhai," or the "Boss's Place."

Here, a dish described on the menu as "vegetable rice" sells for as little as 3 yuan (about 50 cents) a bowl, and penny-pinching seniors sometimes bring cheap cuts of meat in their pockets to slip into their noodles.

The very rich, on the other hand, can flaunt it on "knife fish," or Yangtze saury, an endangered species advertised by the restaurant for 4,400 yuan a kilogram (more than $300 a pound).

Coming back to the Bo Xilai case, Qiu is forgiving about the missing pingpong paddle, but he has qualms about Bo's style during his time as party chief in the sprawling Yangtze River metropolis of Chongqing, when he championed mass sing-alongs that harked back to the Cultural Revolution days.

It "speaks of the real danger of the Cultural Revolution staging a comeback," Qiu said.

The Shanghai that Qiu grew up had once been known as the "Paris of the Orient," but became a grimy shadow of its pre-communist glory ? a city of workers' fatigues and shoppers lining up with ration tickets.

Qiu worked at a textile factory and buried himself in books. His translations of T.S. Eliot's work into Chinese eventually led him to a Ford Foundation fellowship and St. Louis.

His Inspector Chen series began in 2000 with "Death of a Red Heroine," in which the investigation into the murder of a young woman, a model worker, leads to high places in the Communist Party.

Although his books are sold in China, the classic "whodunnit" remains an alien genre here, outgunned by zombie tales, he says.

Those are safer in a society where the police and the party are presumed to be infallible, Qiu explains.

"The focus is not on who did it. In the Chinese crime novel, you know who did it," he says. "A lot of people know who is the bad guy, but what can you do about it?"

Qiu came across the plot for his latest Chen novel, "'Don't Cry, Tai Lake," by accident. Walking in a park near the scenic but horribly polluted lake in Wuxi, outside Shanghai, he happened upon a spa for Communist Party cadres.

"I remembered that place from when I was a child because at that time it was very mysterious to me," Qiu recalled.

There were plenty of rooms, so he stayed a few days.

"Maybe because of the pollution of the lake, not too many senior officials want to stay there. It stinks," he said.

"You smell it all day, so you ask questions, and very naturally the story comes to you."

Though Qiu's version includes plenty of fictional elements, including an attractive young lady, it is based on fact: excessive pollution did leave the lake's water undrinkable for a time, and an activist who disclosed the problem was jailed.

Woven through the narrative is "Don't Cry, Jade River," a poem he wrote 25 years ago, lamenting the despoliation of his country:

"the dead fish afloat, shining

"with the mercury bellies trembling,

"their glassy eyes still flashing,

"with the last horror and fascination..."

Qiu says he expects the Chongqing intrigue also will eventually find its way into his storytelling ? "Maybe change the background a bit. Change the details. I still want to come back to China."

He often returns to Shanghai and always tries to visit the family home, downtown near Shanghai's riverfront, along a leafy street of shoe shops and hole-in-the wall diners.

Old calendars on the walls and an antique dresser with inlaid art deco white and blue glass recall an era when such modest possessions were cherished, before H&M, Ikea, Best Buy and cross-town expressways arrived. Even now, there are no modern amenities ? no bath, toilet or TV.

Walking to a neighboring alley, its narrow walls draped with electrical wires and washing, Qiu is greeted with shouts by old friends. They banter in the Shanghainese dialect. A one-time Red Guard leader turns up, complaining. Others chime in. The old neighborhood needs to be torn down, they say, and better housing built. "The people still living there are the ones who cannot afford to buy new apartments," Qiu explains.

It's a crowded way of living, and after many years away, Qiu can see both good and bad in it.

"It's dark. This neighbor puts a stove here. That neighbor puts a box there. It's common property, so you often have fights about this kind of thing," he says.

"People can fight, but at the same time, it's much closer," Qiu said. "Maybe sometimes we have no choice; we have to help each other."

Qiu is well settled in St. Louis, living off the proceeds of book sales. His wife is a part-time accountant and his daughter recently graduated from college. Living with them is his mother-in-law, for whom he catches catfish, bass and other fish for her to cook.

He considers his outsider status to be an advantage, and worries that if he moved back to Shanghai, he'd be sucked into the property-buying, stock-investing culture. But he does like to visit that loft and gaze out the window.

"If you get lonely," he says, "you can see the cats come to visit."

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Jonathan Saunders' Thin White Duke Chic

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Jimmy Kimmel Shows Octomom Porn Pics to L.A. Residents, Films Mortified Reactions


Just to recap, a mentally unbalanced woman with six children somehow got a doctor to impregnate her with octuplets, and is now filming porn to provide for them.

Jimmy Kimmel helpfully reminded us of this last night before showing unsuspecting L.A. residents a side of Nadya "Octomom" Suleman they'd never seen.

Nor would they ever, ever wish to.

Kimmel couldn’t show the Octomom porn photos on TV, but he could show passersby the images and film their reactions, which were less than glowing.

The shots from the upcoming film, titled Octomom: Home Alone, led to some strong responses. “I’m about to throw up in my mouth,” one woman said.

“Maybe Rick Santorum was on to something with that banning porn idea,” Kimmel added, later lamenting that “I think porn has jumped the shark.”

Nadya Suleman has that effect on things. Namely porn and IVF.

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Joe Cornish Heading for a Snow Crash

Film News

by Andrew Mack, June 14, 2012 11:38 PM


Cornish-Snow-Crash.jpg

The writer and director of Attack the Block, Joe Cornish, is going to tackle one of the most beloved titles in the cyberpunk sub genre. Neil Stephenson's novel?Snow Crash.?

The book is set in the near future, when the U.S. exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and private enterprise and the mafia control everything. The plot involves a computer virus that is manifested as a drug called Snow Crash that is transmitted visually from computer screens to unsuspecting users, frying their brains. Hiro Protagonist - that's the character's name - a computer hacker/samurai swordsman/pizza delivery driver who investigates and tries to stop the takeover of postmodern civilization.

God help you Cornish if you get this wrong. I. Love. This. Book. I read it at least once a year and I cannot fathom how you are going to do it. There is so much to cover. Rat Things. The Metaverse. The gatling gun called Reason. Y.T's skateboard and harpoon. Oh. I want to see all of this and more. This is one of those projects that I will scrutinize the most because of how much I love this book.?

At least they haven't asked you to adapt Stephenson's?The Diamond Age where information was transmitted during acts of sexual intercourse. I think that is one for a different kind of film industry.?

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Deal of the Day: Ballistic Shell Gel (SG) Series Case for HTC One X

Deal of the DayThe June 15 ShopAndroid.com Deal of the Day is the Ballistic Shell Gel (SG) Series Case for HTC One X. Built with three layers of solid protection, the SG Case features a soft TPU skin, an impact resistant polycarbonate, and a soft silicone skin all in one case. The Ballistic Shell Gel offers complete protection against drops while allowing access to the screen, charging port, and buttons.

The Ballistic Shell Gel (SG) Series Case is available for $19.95, 43% off the standard price today only. Supplies are limited to get yours today!

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