I;ve had a few speed issues with my MacNook after I changed/upgraded the internal hard disk, but not done anything about it until now, as it was getting ridiculous.

Xbench to the rescue :

As you can see it's appallingly slow …..(scores should ideally be around 100)

As my wife can attest - I sleep well, and this possibly confirms it.

This describes the situation in a nutshell

As you can see they report electricity consumption around with approximately 15% difference. One is a Wattson - the other one a costco Envir sensor.

Next - what is the real usage?

The stair lights are coming along nicely - as a test I now have LED strips glued under the nose of 2 set of steps, and a Jeenode with a PIR movement sensor hanging over the flight of stairs.

The LED strips are controlled by a LED node (from Jeelabs) to give a quick ramp up to the desired light level, and then slowly down over a minute or so. This is one of the nice features of the LEDnode - it has configureable "ramps" or "profiles" with the ability to pre-program these and store them in the LEDnode - ready to be triggered by a short command string from another node.

The software has now been written - and works reasonably well, but will need quite a bit of tweaking.

More to come.