utilities

Our utilities update report is a column on updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there were updates for a couple of popular maintenance utilities, some file recovery and management tools, and a package manager and system monitor.

Maintenance Two maintenance utilities were updated this week: the popular MacCleanse and OnyX tools for running … Read more

Illinois utilty ComEd today released a study that found smart meters yielded larger-than-expected financial benefits on operating efficiency alone.

The report, prepared by energy engineering and consulting company Black & Veatch, said smart meters eliminated the need for manual meter reading. The two-way communications of smart meters also cut down on energy theft and unpaid bills, costs which are now passed on to customers.

Projecting from the utility pilot's program, the report estimates that a full-scale smart-meter program would save between $2.8 billion and $3 billion over the 20-year life of the meters.

The meters can alert the … Read more

Our utilities update report is a column on updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there were updates for a few system monitoring utilities, maintenance programs for Lion, and a few search and file management utilities.

System monitoring If you need to monitor the CPU, drive, and memory usage of your system then Activity … Read more

Utilities stand to save money in operational costs after an initial large investment in smart-grid infrastructure, but the rest of the savings will depend on consumers.

That's according to a 38-page white paper (PDF) released this month by the Institute for Electric Efficiency.

The IEE group did a cost-benefit analysis using real-world numbers for things like equipment costs, energy prices, and usage statistics to estimate the costs and benefits to four different types of prototypical utilities managing a service territory of one million residential electricity consumers.

Implementing smart grids, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), and associated energy management technologies would … Read more

A simple display connected to a smart meter has effectively helped consumers trim energy use, a smart-grid pilot showed.

Electric utility CenterPoint Energy and the Department of Energy yesterday announced the results of a pilot program with 500 residential electricity customers in the Houston area. Overall, it found that the regular feedback on energy use prompted people to lower consumption.

The in-home display is a battery-powered device which can be placed on a table top or attached to the refrigerator. Getting information from a smart meter, it displays real-time power use, a forecast of the monthly bill, and changes to … Read more

Apple's Disk Utility program is a useful tool for managing hard drives and volumes; however, in Snow Leopard, Leopard, and other past versions of OS X, when you would run a drive verification routine it would only access the format structures of the volumes on a drive and check them. For instance, if you have a drive that is partitioned into two volumes, then if you select one of those volumes in Disk Utility and run a Verify Disk routine the program will check the volume's formatting in a routine similar to the following:

If on the other … Read more

OS X comes with a variety of tools and utilities for managing your system (available in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder), including those for observing OS activity, network and disk activity, and also those for managing some aspects of the hardware in your system. One of the most commonly used utilities is Disk Utility, which allows you to create disk images, burn DVDs and CDs, as well as manage the partitions and formatting of your hard drives. Disk Utility comes both in the form of the Disk Utility application, but also as the "diskutil" terminal command.

The Disk Utility … Read more

EnergyHub is going to see if it can pique consumer interest in the smart grid without utilities.

The Brooklyn-based company plans to start selling a relatively high-end home energy management system next month from its Web site, its first effort to bypass utility or cable company channels. For the residential energy business as a whole, the program could help signal the level of interest for energy efficiency and control technology.

EnergyHub's initial consumer product package is focused on a smartphone-size touch-screen console, or Home Base, which shows power usage of the whole house when connected to a meter. People … Read more

Our utilities update report is a column on updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there were four updates, for a display manager and customizing tool, a file renamer, a file recovery tool, and a popular maintenance tool.

The first utility update this week was for SwitchResX, which is a tool that can help … Read more