A Little Ludwig Goes a Long Way

A smattering of opinions on technology, books, business, and culture. Now in its 4th technology iteration.

Amazon Unbox rental -- never again

23 June 2008

Rented a flick on Amazon Unbox last night – it downloaded fine to my Tivo and it looked fine, but the 24 hour exploding limitation is beyond stupid. We regularly watch a movie on two nights running, half each night, but this is impossible with Unbox rentals thanks to the fact that the movie explodes in 24 hours. I can pay the same price and buy a movie off Tivo PPV and keep it forever. This unbox thing will be a failure until Amazon can get DRM straightened out.

Replacing my DVD player with a PS3

21 June 2008

Spent the morning hooking up my birthday present – a PS3. Replacing my DVD player.

One major bummer is the PS3’s use of bluetooth for remote. While I appreciate an RF solution versus an IR solution, as the PS3 boards note, no universal remote will currently work with the PS3. So sigh, I have to keep yet another remote around. Bummer.

Also my AV receiver is a few years old and doesn’t support HDMI and so I have to use RGB + Digital Audio connectors. My AV receiver is in a tight cabinet and so I have to work largely blind plugging cables in, this was painful. HDMI would be nice for reduction of cables.

Solar cost competitive by 2015

20 June 2008

Electricity Rates from Solar Cost Competitive by 2015 « Cooler Planet

Clean Edge, a research and publishing company focused on renewable technologies and the non-profit organization Co-op America released a report that states the cost of electricity derived from solar power will be on par with electricity derived from fossil fuels by 2015.

Awesome, this is certainly my bet. The amount of investment that has poured into solar technologies is going to pay off somehow. I don’t know which approach will win, but one of them will.

Energy links -- IT leaders, Tesla, Nuclear, Duke Energy, Construction

18 June 2008

* HP working on solar PV, IBM putting a billion dollars into green datacenters, Intel spinning out a PV firm – nice to see the IT leaders getting behind alternate energy * DOE funds electric vehicle projects – not sure why GM, GE, Ford need DOE money – give it to startups! More interesting is the note about Tesla’s deal with Daimler, very smart. * Nuclear option gets more public support – thank goodness. The public is more rational than the politicians about energy strategy * Duke Energy jumping into residential and commercial solar installs – the wave of the future? * Green construction materials – I wonder about the 50 year life of these. I think I will let others be the beta testers.

World Cement Usage

17 June 2008

[The Oil Drum World Cement Usage: An Indicator of Energy Consumption–and China and India Are Certainly Using It](http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4162) – OK we better start worrying about peak cement.

LELA from Linksys review

16 June 2008

up at PC Mag

But Linksys needs to do some work before getting LELA 3.0 for free beats spending $49 for Network Magic .