Google’s PowerMeter is a tool that Google has released free and made available to consumers in partnership with power utilities and government agencies. It provides probably the most useful way to monitor electricity usage. By giving access to and showing near real time stats on electricity usage it can help any body get a picture on when and how much power he or she is consuming at home and to help him or her plan and manage usage with a better understanding of what uses more and what uses less power. Google has a few partners lined up and more jurisdictions and local power producers will follow sooner or later. For this to work a local utility must install smart meters and also get on board with google.

Cisco’s EnergyWise is a set of tools that Cisco has integrated into its catalyst switches and routers with the aim of better monitoring their power usage and then managing their consumption and even turning them off when idle. This tool can manage, via set policies that include such criteria as device priority and location, other compatible devices (IP phones, PCs, etc.) on the network as well and using a new domain naming system to gather information on all those devices. All the information gathered can then create a bigger picture for analysis over time. It is an open architecture that enables other devices, built by others, to hook into it and make it more widely usable.

Google fast flip is a service from google labs that aims to make news browsing a faster experience. A selection of websites are displayed in categories such as Recent and Most Viewed. There is also further categorization by topic – such as Sports and by single source – where one can view several thumbnails from the same site.
Clicking on a news source increases the size of the chosen news and loads it on its own page. Here one can click to share the news, rate it as ‘like’ or to navigate to the actual web site it is taken from. When on the individual news page it is also possible to see more thumbnails by loading the sliding menu on the left hand side.
The disadvantage of this service is that since the pages are smaller than their actual size and are rendered in *.png format the fast flip page may not be as readable or as fast and the news is not searchable. Having said that Google fast flip along with the likes of newsmap, newseum and rayogram provide means to satisfy news junkies in a more visual set up.

Edited to add: I somehow forgot to add one of the best ways to get a visual view of all the latest news and that is newser. Similarly thephotostream and 10×10 are worth a look as well.

JetPhoto Studio is a feature-rich and easy-to-use digital photo software

With JetPhoto it is possible to organize photos into albums, and to archive and back them up as well. One can browse collections or albums in the usual thumbnail mode where not only it is also possible to add notes or tags to individual images or collections of images but it is also possible to star or favorite selected ones, view them by date either utilizing the file creation/modification information or EXIF details. Double clicking on individual photos takes the user to an (almost) full screen mode with some of the expected effects and tools included. Images can be made into a wallpaper or a screensaver, sepia effect can be added, the image can be cropped and watermark added just to mention a few.

One of the negatives of the concept of JetPhoto is that when it creates its albums it actually copies or replicates the photos. Perhaps it is possible to choose the album location (prompted when first creating it) to be in the same, originating folder that your images reside in but I did not test that possibility. Another unexpected behaviour or bug is that the magnifier did not always work in my usage, the icon did change to a magnifying glass one when the image was loaded into the full screen mode but actions -clicking and holding the mouse- had very little or no effect on the portion of the image the focus was on and even then that depended on the actual image size. A look at the program’s features pages explains

You can place your mouse pointer on an interesting part of a photo, press and hold the mouse button to reveal a magnifier which magnifies the image with actual pixels at full size of the original photo.

so perhaps this is not actually a full blown magnifier in the true sense of the word or is it?

JetPhoto makes it easy to search an album or across albums and besides the normal search criteria there are possibilities of searching photos by location if the photos have that info attached to them. To do that JetPhoto can connect to a map server to allow the geotagging of photos or to connect to google maps and generate KML or KMZ files for use with Google Earth.

JetPhoto adds a few attractive output options (see image) but some are either crippled by bearing the JetPhoto text in one frame (in the web flash gallery for example) and/or limits on the number of times they can be used to create an output. A PhotoJet server can be setup to store images online on any webspace using the program itself as a management interface. This is available as a sort of alternative to flickr, which the program itself also supports. JetPhoto runs on Windows 2000, Windows XP and Vista. A Mac OS X version is also available.

Is there a report that displays IP addresses?

Due to user privacy concerns, Google Analytics doesn’t report on personally identifiable information, including a visitor’s IP address. Instead, Google Analytics provides aggregated data to help you make informed business decisions. You can view the Map Overlay report (under the Visitors section) to look at aggregated geographical data about your visitors, or view the Network Location report (under Visitors > Network Properties) to see your visitors’ ISP locations.

It is extremely odd that a search engine which undoubtedly collects quite a bit of information from its search (and other services) users decides to withhold information in this manner in the name of privacy. There are 100s of visitor statistics scripts that allow the user to classify and view site visitors sorted by IP. It is baffling to call all those privacy invaders. It is perhaps even more puzzling to assume that if any Google Analytics user sees something like “125.12.12.12″ he or she can or will somehow use that for something other than being a good webmaster.