Friday, January 29, 2010

Power Saver: How it works?

Can you really save 40% on your electricity bills by plugging a small box into your AC socket?

In the past six month a number of products have been advertised on TV and online which seem too good to be true. I’d like to explain the reality of these exciting claims and give you a layman’s understanding of how Power Savers work.

A Power Saver is a device which you plug in to your power socket. Apparently just by keeping the device connected it will immediately reduce your power consumption. Typical claims are savings between 25% and 40%.

The technology behind Power Saver units comes from German research coupled with Asian manufacturing and it is based on sound scientific principles.

Electricity is not stable. When electricity flows the voltage can rise and fall all the time. The rises in voltage are known as ‘spikes’ and they cannot be used by your appliances at all. All these spikes do is waste your electricity. These power spikes also convert electrical energy into heat energy which leaks power from your circuit. Not only that but the heat will also do long-term danage to your wiring and to your appliances.

There are a few Power Saver models on the market but they all work along the same principle. They store the electricity inside of it using a system of capacitors and they release it in a smoother way to normal without the spikes. The systems also automatically remove carbon from the circuit which also encourages a smoother electrical flow. This means that you will have less power spikes. More of the electricity flowing around your circuit can be used to power your appliances than before.

There are many factors which do affect the efficiency of your Power Saver. The device works immediately after plugging it in although it can take as long as 8 days before it has adjusted itself for peak performance. The rate of savings will depend on what kind of appliances you have connected. All appliances are different but expect savings of up to 25% on lights, 30% on air-conditioning units and up to 35% on other appliances.

The highest savings will be in areas where voltage supply is less stable. Locations close to shops, restaurants and light industries tend to gain additional savings from Power Saver devices.

So how can you be sure that your Power Saver is working correctly?

Most often Power Savers come fitted with a light to indicate that it is working. If you have access to an electricity meter then you should see it immediately slowing down. Assuming that the light is on and that you leave the device unattended you can expect savings immediately. Be aware that often electricity companies will not take meter readings each month. Often bills are calculated on monthly averages which self-correct over time so please be aware of that in using your bill as a guide.

Finally, it is highly recommended to order your Power Savers from companies offering 100% guarantees for longer than 30 days. Remember that 30 days may not be sufficient time to truly know if the device is working as effectively as you expect. Try to work with companies that extend their guarantee dates to at least 60 day which gives you a much longer period to assess the benefits.

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Thursday, January 21, 2010

Niche Swanky House of Wilkinson Residence in Portland



Evoking the feeling of being in a tree house is exactly what the beautiful Wilkinson Residence in Portland does. Located on a flag lot, the extraordinary house is brilliantly designed to perfectly blend with the natural landscape. A steep sloping grade provided the opportunity to bring the main level of the house into the tree canopy.




Catering to the desire of the client, Wilkinson Residence designed a dwelling that not only became part of the natural landscape but also addressed the flow of music. It has a natural wood ceiling that wonderfully floats on curved laminated wood beams, passing through a generous glass wall, which wraps around the main living room. The interior space of this amazing house flows seamlessly through to the exterior. Taking a walk through the house will help you see its complexities and its connection to the exterior.








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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Squid Proxy: How To Make a Transparent Squid Proxy Server on Ubuntu

Squid is a fully-featured HTTP/1.0 proxy which is almost HTTP/1.1 compliant. Squid offers a rich access control, authorization and logging environment to develop web proxy and content serving applications.

This is a short guide on how to set up a transparent squid proxy server on an Ubuntu Distro. Squid is a caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator.

So Let's Install Squid!

The first step is to install squid 3
apt-get install squid3

Edit the squid 3 configuration file in your favorite editor
sudo vi /etc/squid3/squid.conf

And set the transparency and the allowed hosts



http_port 3128 transparent
acl our_networks src 192.168.0.0/24
acl localnet src 127.0.0.1/255.255.255.255
http_access allow our_networks
http_access allow localnet

where 192.168.0.0/24 is the IP range of local network. Probably you need adjust the swap size
cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid3 7000 16 256

where the first number denotes the size of cache in megabytes. Save you changes and restart the squid proxy by
sudo /etc/init.d/squid3 restart

For more detailed configuration read the manual of Squid or check the configuration examples on Squid wiki page.
Remember, the memory and processor usage of squid is a function of swap size.
Last but not the least we need to redirect the HTTP traffic to your new shiny proxy
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.0.1:3128
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 3128

where eth1, eth0 are the LAN, WAN devices and 192.168.0.1 is the IP address of your LAN device.

After all, probably you feel the need to monitor the performance of your proxy. Unfortunately, most of the squid log parsers in the Ubuntu repository are configured for Squid 2.x. Nevertheless, squid 3 uses the same log format, so you can change the log file path in your parser config file (sarg, calamaris, etd.) or simply link the log directory of squid 3 to the correct path
ln -s /var/log/squid3 /var/log/squid



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