Japan: Day 1

2011/08/17 — laurent

Je suis arrivé au Japon ce matin (17 août) vers 10h30 (heure locale) ! Voyage fait sur Aeroflot avec escale à Moscou. Bref, beaucoup d’avion, pas beaucoup dormi, un peu claqué. Ceci dit, voir 2 éclairs partant du même point dans un nuage pour arriver à deux points différents dans le même nuage, c’est plutôt pas mal.

Premier constat

Au Japon, en été, comme dans les animés, même dans Tōkyō, on entends les cigales (et même on les entends fort suivant où on est (je vais essayer de vous faire une vidéo un de ces jours)).

Deuxième constat

Les gens qui vous on dit qu’au Japon en août il fait chaud vous ont menti ! Il fait grave super chaud ! Je déteste l’eau froide, j’ai pris une douche froide en arrivant, j’ai trouvé ça agréable. Dommage que je me sois mis à transpirer de nouveau avant même d’être sorti de la douche.

Troisième constat

J’ai compris pourquoi nous avion des prises électriques hermaphrodites en France, c’est pour la rétro-compatibilité. Avec une prise qui évolue normalement, et avec un adaptateur secteur qui est prévu que pour les nouvelles prise, on obtient la chose suivante, une vieille prise murale :

Et un nouvel adaptateur secteur un peu trop con :

Forcément, ça rentre pas (en forçant beaucoup ça devrait le faire tout de même).

Conclusion

Oui, sur mon premier billet sur mon voyage au Japon je vous ai collé des photos de prises électriques ;-) . Promis, je m’améliore dans les prochains billets.

Merci à Augustin et Mikiko pour le temps passé avec eux aujourd’hui.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , . 2 Comments »

D-Link DGS-1005D “Green”

2009/08/18 — laurent

Previously I was using a NetGear JGS524 switch (24 Gigabit ethernet ports) which was doing a good job for my small home network but was a bit noisy.

So I went to my local store and bought a D-Link DGS-1005D “Green” (5 gigabit ethernet ports, fanless, said to be eco-friendly).

Eco-friendly?

First, the package. At the same time I bought this switch I also bought a D-Link modem, same size, not green. Both were provided in boxes with mostly the same content but the switch’s box was smaller, with less “materials”. So yes, the packaging is a bit greener.

The switch materials: no idea. I don’t know what kind of plastic was used but it looks similar to the modem one. No more clue on the electronic parts. The power adapter is smaller than the modem one. Anyway, electronic devices in general are very energy greedy to build.

The D-Link switch is able to reduce power consumption on a port if nothing is plugged in (or if the connected device is powered off), the switch is also able to adjust the power on a port depending on cable length (plugging a 1 meter ethernet cable should consume less than a 100 meters one).

My “old” NetGear was consuming about 13 W while doing nothing (no ports connected), on constructor’s website it says to consume up to 40 W (under full load I presume).

The D-Link DGS-1005D consume 1.1 W with a bit of traffic (0 W with nothing connected to it (my watt-meter is not really done to measure power below 1 W).

So yes, it consume much less than my previous switch, but I wonder how much other small switches like this one consume.

Functional?

The question here is mostly: is it working? Well… I’m not really sure. I usually listen music streamed from my server to my MacBook, it looks like that from time to time, since I’m using this switch, iTunes stops the music and displays a “buffering” message (before resuming when data are back). At some point I was not able to backup the MacBook with TimeMachine, it failed with a network error.

To be sure about that I plugged back my NetGear switch. Same problems, but less often… (I have changed to many things in my home network recently and it looks like I have things to fix).

Conclusion

The D-Link DGS-1005D “Green” switch seems to be quite efficient (working not so bad and not using too much power).

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Getting energy from everywhere

2009/06/08 — laurent

For a long time now I have seen several “unusual” ways to produce electricity but mostly never seen them in use in real life devices.

As somebody working with a laptop, I can tell that the amount of electricity used by my computer does not allow the battery to last for a long time (maybe 4 or 5 hours if I’m doing nearly nothing with bluetooth and wifi shut down and screen backlight set to the minimum, and about 2 hours doing more CPU consuming stuff).

Computer makers are usually working a lot on:

  • making less power hungry computers,
  • making higher capacity batteries.

But I thought more stuff could be done, add electricity generators in the computer :

But then, we need to check the full energy usage here. If those generators cost more energy to produce and recycle than the “free” energy provided/saved, we should not use them.

My example was about a laptop, but those technologies can be used in lots of other devices (and several are already in use but not widely):

  • In wall clocks with thermoelectric effect (temperature gradient between the wall and the air) and solar panels.
  • In wristwatches with vibrations.
  • In cellphones with solar panels, vibrations.
  • In wireless keyboards with keystrokes.

Well, anywhere a battery is in use.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: , , , . No Comments »
«
»