Nice map and summary stats on California solar power installs — California Solar Power History | Cooler Planet — thanks for the pointer dave
Archive for January 20, 2008
Smart electrical outlets
Recently had some new GFCI outlets installed in my house like these — The Phantom GFCI - Popular Mechanics — the addition of an LED letting me know if the outlet is live is brilliant! And then I saw this prototype — a light switch that responds to smoke alarms. I love the idea of embedding cheap electronics into our electrical system — I’d really love it if somehow my switches and outlets could all report current energy use; that would help me start to change behaviour re conservation.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Energy
Nanoantenna alternative to silicon pv cells
Harvesting the Sun’s Energy with Antennas — it sure seems like at some point we may see a “moore’s law” type effect in solar cells — dramatic increases in efficiency with dramatic cost drops. Will never be as longlived as the Moore’s Law phenomenom since efficiency is capped but still seems like we will see great improvements.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Energy
Wireless-enchanced DS?
Just ordered Amazon.com: Advance Wars: Days of Ruin: Video Games based on the NYTimes review today. Have to wonder — when will we see a DS with wireless integration like the Kindle? I don’t buy games that often, cartridges and manuals are a pain, why can’t I just download the games wirelessly?
Cable Storage
Like many people I have a mess of extra cables — displays, ethernet, usb, sound/speaker of many flavors, firewire, etc etc etc. I used to just keep them in a tangled mess in a drawer.
But I had an unused shoe rack like this one — Chrome Over-the-Door Shoe Rack — it is pretty great for storing cables. Lots of ways to hook them over the shoe holders, easy to keep them organized by type, etc.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Home
The Best Extinct Animals
The Best: Extinct Animals, From an Elephant Bird to a 10-Foot-Long, Four-Eyed Spider — a 7 foot long centipede. a 4 eyed spider-like thing. eek.
Sports are interesting
Professional Sports Is Very Interesting | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source — “Each and every victory of a team full of people I’ll never meet over another team full of people I’ll never meet is a complex web of nuance and metaphor to contemplate at great length.”
Essential Windows Utilities
- Completely Uninstalling Windows Applications — sadly necessary
- svchost processes — this is very helpful.
- Google Docs Uploader — I am shifting all my doc storage up to google docs, this is helpful
Translucent concrete
LiTraConâ„¢ via toolmonger. Pretty awesome.
Outdoors stuff
- Welcome to NALGENE Outdoor! — all things nalgene
- Brett on water treatment
- Brett also on how to pack ultralight
And just in case I need motivation to get outdoors — daily exercise dramatically lowers men’s death rates
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Outdoors
Latest books
- The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. Trying to understand Russian culture but this book didn’t do it for me, gave up after 15% or so. Mindless trudging thru minutiae just wore me out.
- The Greatest Battle by Andrew Nagorski. Recounting of the WWII battle for Moscow, with a lot of emphasis on the leadership and missteps of Stalin and Hitler. Millions of troops involved, casualties heading towards 2 million, 25 miles outside of Moscow. The scale and import of this battle are hard to comprehend. The tragedy of Russian life and yet endurance of the Russian people comes out strongly.
Both read on the Kindle by the way. Still very happy with this device.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Books
Open source architecture
Open Architecture Network | Improving living standards through collaborative design — seems cool. Why shouldn’t architecture have an open source element?
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Design
Got Drobo working
A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way: Not too happy with my Drobo — I did finally get a support call with Drobo and they got it working. I had to go twiddle a BIOS setting having to do with legacy USB support. The Drobo folks claim this is the BIOS manufacturer’s fault and assert that other mass storage USB devices will fail as well. However I have had no problems with a variety of generic USB housings and with a LaCie box so I don’t think the Drobo folks have this really figured out yet. Additionally the Drobo software decided to grab drive M for their use which was bad as I already had a network drive mapped to M. So that was chunky and painful.
The box seems to work fine now tho.
Grabbag of software links
- Switch Between Your Gmail Accounts — hmm this has been an impediment to spawning more accounts
- Paypal toolbar gens one-off credit card numbers — always liked the one-off credit card idea; at one point some ecommerce sites didn’t deal well with
- Generate blogrolls from google reader — need to reinstate my blogroll someday
- See if your windows box has stealth connections to the net — i’m clean
- Use Colr.org to plan out a color scheme — love color scheme tools
- AnyTV player – tried this one, actually seems to kind of work
- Visual exploration of medical terms — didn’t learn anything new but maybe useful
- Photomatix for HDR photography
Nanoscale engineering and electron mobility
Graphene breaks speed record – nanotechweb.org and Scientists make ‘Perfect” nanowires. Intriguing. Wonder what could be done with nanoengineering materials and electricity transmission.
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Materials
How do you recession-proof your career?
Ask The Readers: How Do You Recession-Proof Your Career? — some ideas from others.
In my first real job, a wise mentor who had lived through recessions and layoffs gave me this advice:
- Make sure you are working on a product that your company cares about. ”Cares about” is generally equivalent to “important to the company’s overall profitability”. If the company doesn’t care that much what happens to your product/business, well, that is not good.
- You can either make things or sell things. These are the two functions that are relatively impervious to layoffs. If you are not directly involved in the making or the selling of your company’s product/service, well, also not good.
MIDI drumpads and other stuff
Midi Madness — some wildly cool devices here that I would never use.
Why can't the US be leading this charge?
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Energy
Power strips
Why do all power strips have to be so ugly? I saw one in a downtown window that appeared to be a tower of cast stained concrete and it looked great. Why can’t you buy these anywhere? I am sick of the crappy plastic choices available. There is innovation to permit more transformers to plug in, and innovation to be more “green”, but why can’t these things look better? Is molded plastic really the only choice?
Category: Uncategorized /
Tags: Devices