A Little Ludwig Goes a Long Way

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

Greentech PPA Report

23 February 2008

Good summary of this report – Clean Energy Future by Arno Harris: GreenTech’s PPA Report – Key Insight on Leased Buildings:

* In 2009, PPAs will be established as the standard way that American businesses pay for on-site green power, bringing solar to commercial rooftops of mainstream America with yearly additional growth of 30-50%. * In 2008 the clear majority of new commercial installations will be third-party managed, with 65-75% of the market. * In 2007, of the national commercial and institutional solar market, an estimated 50% was developed under PPAs, up from 10% in 2006. * The PPA segment has not only outstripped conventional commercial PV sales, it has also expanded the market — acquiring new customers that would not have purchased solar hardware. * PPA companies will continue to drive down costs with innovations across the entire value chain.

Text 30644 for sustainable fish guide

20 February 2008

[Dial F for fish Fish, Seafood, Sustainability TerraPass: Fight global warming, promote alternative energy](http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/dial-f-for-fish “Dial F for fish Fish, Seafood, Sustainability TerraPass: Fight global warming, promote alternative energy”) – this is great, I never remember to carry the printed guide with me

Stuff I Want But Do Not Need -- grab bag

20 February 2008

* Toolmonger ? Blog Archive ? Arbortech Power Chisel – who doesn’t need one? Awesome for Halloween sculpting. Of course my sculpting skills suck, and adding power to them is not likely to help. * Salubrion Enso Clock – because it looks cool * More SSD options available…tipping point coming…going to be stupid to buy rotating hard disks soon… * Temporary todo list tatoo for your hand – I don’t think I’ve written my todo list on my hand since about 9th grade, but the day may come again * Kaossilator – I’m a fool for small music devices * Gadget gas station. To charge up the cell phone, kaossilator, kindle, ds, ipod, and every other piece of crap i travel with now

Engineering Challenges for the next century

17 February 2008

Home – a pretty inspiring list. We should all be working on one of these! I am glad to see that Ignition has companies working on health informatics, personalized learning, solar energy, and internet security.

iphone to ical to entourage to exchange == yuk

14 February 2008

OK this is starting to get really annoying. 70+ sync errors today with the iphone. seems to be mostly with recurring calendar events. grr. i know have my dad’s birthday on my calendar like 8 times.

UPDATE: Oh fricking great. 1548 sync conflicts reported. What the hell am I supposed to do with that????

UPDATE: Oh double great. Now the Conflict Resolver is trying to sync an iCal event with a contact. Awesome. And trying to resolve a conflict between my mom’s birthday and a basketball game – “Select the correct Event information below”

The good news is now I can plausibly skip every meeting and say “gee it wasn’t on my calendar”

Recent software of note

11 February 2008

* Feature: Run Your Personal Wikipedia from a USB Stick – really cool, but I have to admit I can’t understand why you would jam all your valuable project and personal info onto a fragile, easily misplaceable piece of hardware. * IDE for powershell scripts – nice tho I am moving away from Windows machines * Assigning file types to programs – I’ve always found the shell interface for this to be hard to use, I can’t say yet if this is better * Back up to friend’s hard drives with Zoogmo – intriguing