Last week there were a couple of interesting ships visiting the Mersey and Liverpool - the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal was here for the weekend, and the world's biggest supertanker stopped off at one of the oil terminals.

You can't quite see the river from my front window - someone built a huge cathedral in the way - but it got me thinking about how nice it would be to have a feel for what was happening on the river. Obviously, given my interest in the "Internet of Things", I wondered how I could connect the river to the Internet...

The last couple of weekends has been a veritable conference roadshow for the Mazzini project. First it was off down to London to find out what everyone else is up to with energy monitoring and home automation (all sorts of interesting things as it turns out) at Homecamp, and then last weekend we kept it local and made the five minute walk to Barcamp Liverpool.

Bubblino is a Twitter-monitoring, bubble-blowing Arduino-bot.

A what?

This past week the Mazzini project, my controllable electricity monitor, has taken a great step forwards. The initial hardware prototype I talked about earlier has undergone a few tweaks and is now soldered up rather than push-fitted together on breadboard. It's also boxed up in a not-too-pretty but suitably environmentally-sound reused ice-cream tub, which means I can leave it running without fear of anyone accidentally coming into contact with 240V AC.

I've just realised that although I wrote up my notes from Be2Camp, I only posted them to my personal blog and didn't mention them here. Let's rectify that now.

A quick update on the problems with updating the ranks of books. Amazon seem to have mostly fixed the problem. For the past week I've still seen the occasional update that didn't run through completely, but it's effectively back to normal.

I'll be keeping an eye on things to check that it doesn't recur.

From this year's ETech (Emerging Technology) conference, this is an illuminating presentation which looks into our energy usage and how we might resolve our energy needs with the problem of climate change.

It's been a while since I announced my latest research project, the controllable electricity meter, and although I haven't written any more about it (apart from the occasional comment on my twitter feed) behind the scenes it has been steadily progressing.

For the past day or so, we've been seeing an intermittent and annoying problem with Amazon.

When updating the ranks for all the books being tracked by Booklert, the Amazon service to find out the rank is sometimes reporting an error - meaning that each hour a few of the books don't have their rank updated.

It isn't always the same books, and sometimes more fail than at other times. So far we haven't been able to work out a solution to the problem.

The ranks reported for any book will still be correct, but at times they could be a little out of date.