Status-Q

Status-Q as it appeared about a decade ago, thanks to the Internet Archive.

The very pretty Nest thermostat has justifiably attracted a certain amount of attention recently. But it has a few failings, too:

• It's expensive - someone quipped that the Apple-inspired design comes with Apple-inspired prices
• It's a single point of temperature measurement, and what most houses need is multiple thermostats, or at least sensors
• It isn't available in the UK and wouldn't work with most UK heating systems anyway,

So, it's not for me. But I am keen to upgrade my heating controls: we have pretty substantial fuel bills even for our small and fairly well-insulated house.

So I'm after recommendations. Here's my ideal system:

• You could set the temperature you want in each room, and control the times of day at which you want it. Or, even better, it would learn the pattern for each room. (And not get too confused by daylight savings time changes)
• We have radiators in each room, so it would need to manage the radiator valves. (i.e. replace the TRVs)
• The temperature sensors would not necessarily be on the radiator valves, but could be elsewhere in the room.
• The timing of the boiler ignition would be based on the combined needs of the house, and not on the temperature of a particular thermostat in the hall, or of the time programmed into a separate heating controller.
• Ideally, it could be programmed through a wife-friendly app or web interface.

Anyone know of anything that satisfies a significant number of these?  I don't expect to get them all. But I also don't want to spend a lot of money and time on a system which does some of them, only to discover that another would have been a better choice.

  Oh, and I'd rather not have to do any major plumbing...

Any suggestions welcome!

I’m not quite sure if I’m allowed to have this. But we could have a fun chasing game if you wanted to take it away from me….

A rainy night at Gog Magog Hills farm shop – one of my favourite local haunts.

In a box in the loft I found my old Olympus OM30, which I purchased a little over a quarter of a century ago: an OK, but never great, camera. With it, however, were a couple of Olympus OM-series Zuiko lenses, which were pretty good for the price. And I was delighted to find that you can get adapters to connect them to a micro-4/3 body like my Panasonic Lumix GH2. You can buy the adapter from Olympus for £143 or from Fotodiox for £29. I chose the latter.

My first few experiments with the combination are here.

Rose and crime writer Jim Kelly ended up doing an impromptu discussion of their writing habits at Cambridge Library today.

I like Clayton Christensen. He oughtn't to be an interesting speaker, by many of the standard metrics: he speaks slowly and haltingly, he stumbles over words, and he uses unexciting slides with little aesthetic appeal. And yet I think he's brilliant.

This is partly because what he has to say is very important, and partly because he has a wonderfully dry, understated sense of humour which seeps out throughout the talk and can be exceedingly funny.

His talk last month at the Gartner Symposium is particularly good, and you can watch it here. If you're in business, I recommend curling up on the sofa with your iPad for an hour.

This is a crash course for those who know the term 'disruptive technology' but have never heard its originator explain it. It asks questions about how we measure profits. It suggests we are often mistaken in the way we understand customers, and that our competitors may not be who we think they are. It explains milkshakes.

This could have been three or four very boring business talks, and somehow turns out to be one very compelling one. Recommended.

Had a delightful if decidedly foggy walk on and around the Torpel Way near Peterborough at the weekend.

Very pretty villages round here. Thought this was a rather impressive house, in Ufford:

More pictures on Flickr. Pleasing 8-mile route on Everytrail.

We love the Cawston Press drinks; Our local Waitrose sells several, but our favourite tipple is the Apple & Rhubarb juice. Actually, 'tipple' is probably the wrong word: we consume gallons of this stuff! Recommended.

However, the real reason for this photo is simply that I'm playing with a nice Voigtlander 35mm/f1.4 lens lent to me by John, which gives my Lumix a pleasingly quirky ancient-and-modern appearance.

It's a nice challenge to go back to a fully-manual lens for a bit; rather more so, though, without the aid of a focus prism, and using an LCD viewfinder...

I've recently switched to using GnuCash to manage my accounts, and have been quite impressed with it. A friend recently asked about software for simple bookkeeping, and I wondered whether GnuCash might be appropriate, but I didn't find an introduction that took someone unfamiliar with accounting software through the absolute basics. So here's my attempt to do so. It's 26 minutes long.

Direct link.

A view from the top of BBC Television Centre yesterday, cobbled together from a couple of quick iPhone snaps.

The Television Centre building itself, one of the earliest and still one of the largest purpose-built TV production buildings in the world, is being sold off as part of funding cuts, and its residents gradually dispersed to other parts of London, Salford and elsewhere over the next 18 months, so there won’t be many more opportunities for pictures like this, at least not with the BBC logo visible!

Seldom has such an ugly building inspired such fond memories. This is the home of the Blue Peter garden, for example. Much of Fawlty Towers and Monty Python was filmed here. And under that canopy on the bottom left you can find a Doctor Who telephone box…