Real World Info Virtually

I’m really cranking them out today aren’t I ;) ?

Something that struck me whenever I get into a fundamentally new type of utility / technology (Blogging, Dashboards or a new OS) is the fact that I am always interested in finding stuff for that utility or technology that will give me more information about the physical world I inhabit / physical objects I use.

Let’s take some examples shall we?

  1. My Blog – amongst the very first plugins I installed was ViperBond’s WeatherIcon. While the reasoning I gave myself “Well, now people visiting my blog know the weather where I’m at”, but that’s not the entire story
  2. My Yahoo Widgets Dashboard – amongst the Post-Its, Backpackit widgets and Day Planner I also have 2 widgets to check the weather in Singapore and Bangalore. Also, another widget to tell me my laptop’s CPU utilization and RAM Usage.
  3. My Laptop – I have SpeedFan installed which tells me how hot my CPU, Graphics Card and HDD are (right now that’s 58C, 50C and 38C respectively). Plus I have SigX running so that I can share with the world mind numbing statistics such as how busy my CPU is right now.
  4. I suppose another one is my Xplanet screensaver. But how that works is a story for another post..

I hope you see the trend here. And honestly, I have to say it’s about in some faint way satisfying the Trekkie in me (it always comes back to Star Trek doesn’t it :D ). I mean, just remembering the cool stuff Spock would reel off by looking at some sensors on those blinking screens has left some primeval urge in me to be able to look at a screen and know more about the things around me.

Yes, of course I could look at the window, but where’s the fun in that?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Comments so far

  1. on May 16, 2006 at 3:43 am JD wrote:

    Isn’t it nice to have sensors and gauges to let you know what’s going on inside the machine?

    Along those same lines, since I moved back to the farm last week, I’ve been watching our electrical usage quite closely. We live off the grid and use solar for energy. We have a digital meter that tells us the amount of solar energy coming in, the amount of electricity we are using, and the voltage of our batteries. They have serial port interfaces available for much of this equipment, which could then be formatted and posted to the web :-) It would be like a readout for our own little electrical company (plus people could see exactly how sunny it was at a particular time by how much electricity was being generated :d

    Sorry for that long rant, but I just wanted to let you know that I share your affinity for being well informed about what’s happening around me!

  2. on May 16, 2006 at 10:04 am Balaji wrote:

    Hi JD!

    Yes, knowing what’s happening inside the machine is pretty cool :)

    Are you planning to actually hookup your meter’s serial port interface to your computer? That would be awesome :D !

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