kkleiner writes “People Power 1.0 is an open and extensible cloud-based platform that allows you to monitor up-to-the-minute household energy usage from an iPhone or Android smartphone. Part of the growing Internet of Things, People Power 1.0 brings energy monitoring to the common household. It works through your house router to connect to the Internet and send data to your smartphone. Or you can measure energy consumption from individual devices with People Power’s GreenX Powerstrips.”

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Monitor Household Energy From Your Smartphone

It would totally ruin Taco Tuesdays if you reached into your bag of delicious shredded cheese and it had all congealed into a giant yellow-orange clump. But that never happens! Ever wonder why? Food companies add wood pulp, that’s why. More

We’ve just learned that there’s strong evidence that saltwater flows on the surface of Mars. It’s another reminder that water is everywhere in our solar system, whether it’s ice, vapor, or liquid. Here’s a handy guide to where all the water can be found. More

Put your pig-tail light bulb aversions aside, because Philips has just won the DOE’s $10 million L Prize Competition for the creation of a decidedly non-curlicue 60W equivalent LED lighting solution. The company was named the first winner in the 60W replacement bulb category at a Washington DC event, yesterday. It’s taken three years to find a winner that could meet the high standards set forth by the DOE, specifically “ensuring that performance, quality, lifetime, cost, and availability meet expectations for widespread adoption and mass manufacturing.” Requirements further stipulated that the 60W incandescent killer use less than 10 watts of power, and provide energy savings of 83 percent. If Americans replaced all of their 60W incandescents with Philips’ little winner, the DOE estimates savings of $3.9 billion in a single year. The bulb is expected to hit shelves as soon as early 2012. Full PR after the break.

Philips wins DOE’s $10 million L Prize for 60W incandescent killer originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There's a war on unlimited data being fought as we speak, and Ma Bell is leading the main charge. Just days after AT&T announced it would begin throttling data speeds for the heaviest bandwidth hogs grandfathered into the carrier’s no-limit internet service, it’s also confirmed it’s ready to crack the whip on illegal tethering as well. In attempt to achieve “fairness for all of [its] customers,” the carrier has added a bit of force behind its March announcement, sending out notices to anyone using their jailbroken iPhones as a mobile hotspot. The gist? Cut it out or be scaled back to a tiered data plan. In a statement originally given to 9to5mac, an AT&T spokesperson said:

Earlier this year, we began sending letters, emails, and text messages to a small number of smartphone customers who use their devices for tethering but aren’t on our required tethering plan. Our goal here is fairness for all of our customers. (This impacts a only small percentage of our smartphone customer base.)

The letters outline three choices:

1. Stop tethering and keep their current plan (including grandfathered unlimited plan)
2. Proactively call AT&T or visit our stores and move to the required tethering plan 3. Do nothing and we'll go ahead and add the tethering plan on their behalf – after the dated noted in their customer notification

We reached out to AT&T and confirmed that this statement is indeed true. Consider this the company's last warning — your time to enjoy all-you-can-eat tethering is almost at an end. How soon the day of reckoning will come, however, likely depends on when you received the notification originally. And you thought you were being so sneaky…

AT&T: no more unlimited data for illegal tetherers originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Aug 2011 18:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It would totally ruin Taco Tuesdays if you reached into your bag of delicious shredded cheese and it had all congealed into a giant yellow-orange clump. But that never happens! Ever wonder why? Food companies add wood pulp, that’s why. More

What if the entire world’s population lived in one giant mega city? That’s probably a really bad idea, but it’s an interesting thought to give us an idea of just how many people are out there. These illustrations show how big this city of the world would be based on the population density of different real cities. If everyone in the world lived in one giant city with the population density of New York, everyone could fit in a land mass the size of Texas.

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World’s Population in One City

Mapnificient is the best idea I’ve seen in a very long time. It allows you to pick your location, set an amount of time and then find exactly where can you go using public transportation in that time. Absolute genius. More

Ever needed to test something out but didn’t want to use your own machine? JPC-2 solves that problem by giving you a virtual machine in your browser that’s capable of running Windows XP (with or without Office), Ubuntu 6, and Ubuntu 8. More

Public Knowledge’s Michael Weinberg, who wrote an outstanding paper on the law and 3D printing, has a new paper, this one on 4G networks with data-caps, and how weird it is to advertise that your network is a) very fast and suitable for video; and b) that you’d better not use it for data-intensive applications. He sez, “Wireless carriers have started to push their new 4G networks. The carriers say that these new networks are amazing, and will allow you to do more, faster, than ever before. What they do not tell you is that you will not be able to use the new 4G networks for very much. That is because the wireless carriers (with the exception of Sprint, which offers truly unlimited 4G connections) have imposed arbitrary limits on their 4G networks. For the average user, this limit is set at 2 GB per month. As a result, just about everything that you would use the 4G network for will put you over your limit. At full speed, you will hit a month’s worth of caps in under an hour. In that time, you might be able to download half an HD movie to watch for the rest of the month.”

This unfortunate fact is the result of a combination between fast 4G networks that deliver a lot of data and low limits on how much data you can use. The 4G speed means that you hit your cap even faster than you would on the existing 3G network. How much faster? Well, Verizon advertises its 4G network can deliver top speeds between 5 and 12 Mbps. AT&T claims it can deliver 6 Mbps. At those speeds, you will hit your monthly limit in less than one hour.

Of course, you may not think about your connection in terms of how long you can use it at full blast. Instead, you might think about it in terms of what you can actually do with the connection.

Under AT&T and Verizon’s 2 GB monthly limit, you could download half of an HD movie from iTunes before hitting your limit. Alternatively, you could download two 45-minute HD TV shows. If you shot some video you wanted to share with friends, you might be able to upload 2 ten-minutes videos. Keep in mind that any one of those things would essentially use up your data cap for the month, so you would not be able to do anything else with your smartphone (like get your email or get directions) without going over the limit.

Arbitrary Data Limits Make Wireless 4G A Waste of Money

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4G with data-caps: pay for a month, hit your limit in under an hour