Current Tranformer
At home or at work, you probably have spotlights which indicate only 20W or 35W of power consumption, but sadly these spotlights are powered by a lower voltage and so they require a transformer (hidden in the ceiling, a cupboard or a hood) which in turn consumes around 40W.
I've recently designed an application (with libmodbus, glib and Django) to measure the power consumption from various sensors built by LEM. By doing some tests at home, I've confirmed my suspicions about a transformer permanently plugged into the mains (0.18 * 224 = 40.3W for total of 80W when both spotlights are turned on).
So, I've replaced the shunt plug with a switch between the main and the transformer and once again I have a perfect 0W when off!
Do you know how many electricity transformers do you have around you?
Not utf-8 by default
On Ubuntu 10.04 (tested on server and desktop editions), the PostgreSQL database created by default, uses the SQL_ASCII encoding!
It's not possible to create new utf-8 databases so check the encoding with psql -l as PostgreSQL user and you can use the following radical way (drop everything) to fix this:
rm -rf /var/lib/postgresql/8.4/main /usr/lib/postgresql/8.4/bin/initdb -E UTF8 /var/lib/postgresql/8.4/main/