Today, Microsoft Hohm and Blue Line Innovations, the maker of the well-known PowerCost Monitor home electricity meter, announced the launch of their partnership that uploads electricity usage data from a Power Cost Monitor to Microsoft Hohm‘s online portal.

The idea is, once you become aware and understand your energy use, you can reduce your energy use and in turn reduce your electricity bill. Studies have shown that you can save up to 20% on your electric bill through awareness – The Power Cost Monitor is designed to do just that.

Microsoft Hohm is a free online application that provides real-time electricity usage data that you can use to monitor over time; in 30 minute intervals to over a period of one year (see screenshot below).

Buy the Power Cost Monitor WiFi Edition

The PowerCost Monitor WiFi Edition includes both PowerCost Monitor and the WiFi Gateway upgrade accessory.

Microsoft Hohm works with the Power Cost Monitor through the addition of the new WiFi Gateway that connects to your Power Cost Monitor’s utility sensor via the 433MHz frequency that transmits that data over your WiFi 802.11b wireless home network which then uploads the data to your Microsoft Hohm account.

Setting up a Microsoft Hohm account is free and easy to do. All you need is a MSN login, so if you already have an MSN Chat or hotmail login, you’re good to go.

Easy Installation

Installation took me about 20 minutes. Despite the fact that you do have to go in and out of your house a couple of times to reset and sync the sensor, following the instructions in the manual was really easy and straight forward.

Issues I had

I installed the entire kit at our test bench at work with no problems. We have encryption enabled at work and didn’t find this to be a problem. However, I did have an issue over the weekend installing it at home and discovered that you need to pay close attention to the type of encryption protocol set in your router’s admin (ie. 192.168.1.1 for Linksys routers).

I live in Canada and at the moment, although you can use the entire kit in Canada, because Microsoft Hohm is not configured to Canadian homes yet, I had to enter, “90210″ in my zip code because I didnt have one. In hindsight, I should have picked a zip code as close the Colorado/Montana border as possible. Basically what that means is Im not able to compare my electricity use to the area average. So, I hope Microsoft Hohm supports Canada in the near future.

Does it work?

Yes, after I was able to get the green light to appear on the WiFi gateway and 3 lines of “completed” green text appeared in the installation wizard, I logged in to Microsoft Hohm and after about 10 minutes saw my electricity data appear.

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Not even 5 minutes ago, I was logged into GMail when I got this application error. I retyped gmail.com in the address bar and even pressed the refresh button because hitting “F5″ multiple times didn’t work. The first thing I do when I think my internet connection has gone down is check to see if Google.com works; because if that simple homepage doesn’t load, then Im sure nothing else will.

After loading Google.com, I noticed something really different. The words, “SSL” & “beta”; I haven’t seen the word beta on Google since 2000. I heard about secure search from one of the Search Engine marketing blogs I subscribe to; probably techcrunch either a week or two ago, so when I saw the logo, it hit me! “ahhh yes!” That explains why I got SSLapped out of GMail

If you haven’t heard about Google’s new SSL (which stands for Secure Socket Layer) or Secure Search, you can read about it here from Google’s support.

Here’s basically what it does:

“With Google search over SSL, you can have an end-to-end encrypted search solution between your computer and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party. This provides you with a more secure and private search experience.”

In the support page, it states that if you want to search using this new beta feature, use: https://encrypted.google.com, but using https://www.google.com does the same thing!

So next time you type Google in your address bar, add a bit of encryption and see what hits you! or at least won’t hit you because they can’t see you, you’re encrypted!

Thanks Google!

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“Thelonious” WordPress 3.0 is now officially released. I’ve been waiting for the stable version to come out since its initial buzz. I just finished upgrading my WordPress a few moments ago. I noticed a problem already… watch the video or scroll down to see a bug i found.

So the bug I discovered was when you click the add photo button beside “Upload/Insert” it doesn’t pop up in a new tiny window, it opens it in the parent window. What does that mean? well for starters, you have to click back twice to go back to the edit post screen and 2 you cant insert image into post; it just doesn’t work.

Download your version of WordPress 3.0

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I’ve been working away on implementing our current web design theme on one of our websites at work this past week. Magento is definitely not easy and the resources online are just as difficult if not harder to come by.

Here’s a great and easy to follow tutorial from TutsPlus.com – This is part 4 of their Magento for Designers series and it has really helped me wrap my brain around how themes work from a document level.

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/magento-for-designers-part-4/

Thanks TutsPlus.com!

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The Google AdSense blog published an article on Monday finally revealing how much publishers made from AdSense ads. Until Monday, I’ve only been able to speculate how much money was made from AdSense and how Google determined how to split the revenue from clicks from the ads. Some of the ideas I’ve read about explained that your commission percentage depended on several factors that included how they arrived to the publisher’s site (via Google, direct, or referred) and the quality of the content on the website; plus more.

So the cat is out, here’s how much money you can make by placing AdSense ads on your website:

68% – Publishers who place AdSense on the websites, which is referred to as the content network, make 68% of the cost advertisers pay Google for advertising.

51% – Google’s Search Partners, which include sites like Amazon, Ebay, etc are paid 51% of the cost advertisers pay Google for advertising.

Google AdSense: How Much Money Do You Make From 1 Click?

Your click earnings is determined by percentage, yes. But, it is also determined by the content on your website/blog because the way Google AdSense ads work is that it displays ads that are relevant to the page content your ad appears on. There have been times when I only make $0.01/click but other times when I make $6.75/click. How much money you make in a month from Google AdSense will depend on your content’s reach and your niche.

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