Oslo Column Now Available...

My latest SD Times column is the first of a short series on Oslo.

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Idea: Solar Energy Test Kit

I wish that I could put something the size of, say, a briefcase on my roof, leave it there for a month, bring it down, plug in a USB cord, and read "A solar water heater would have generated X% of your hotwater needs. A PV installation of X panels …

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Ultrafast Battery Recharging Breakthrough

The Ars Technica article lithium breakthrough could charge batteries in 10 seconds reports on a Nature article describing a very fast way to charge or discharge batteries. The upshot is that an electric-car battery could be charged in five minutes ("which would make electric vehicles incredibly practical") but would …

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Kindle for iPhone: Nice But Not Comparable

Amazon has released a Kindle application for the iPhone. It nicely synchronizes with your Kindle library (which is all stored "in the cloud") but, strangely, it seems to only pick up books and not periodicals or blogs.

The display is okay (I mean, it's the iPhone display. Duh.), nothing compared …

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Kindle-d But Not Available

The New Yorker is now available in Kindle form. I subscribe to The New Yorker and have access to it in a browser, but the Kindle subscription is not linked to my physical subscription and their customer service says "Nope, can't link 'em." (Heck, I'd probably _trade_ my physical subscription …

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Dow 7000: What's the P:E?

Does anyone know what the combined earnings of the DJIA 30 is? I still have a couple decades before retirement; if the P:E ratio is getting back to normal, I might start buying because (a) it'll either come back or (b) it won't, in which case "investment strategies" aren't …

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From Theory to iPhone, Part 2: Separation of Concerns

Part 1

Model-Editor / Domain-View : On This We Can Agree

For 20 years now, it’s been widely agreed that one of the best ideas for writing a maintainable system is to separate the domain stuff from the interface stuff. This makes especially good sense in a world where you want …

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Google '#{first_name} Needs'

The new game is to search Google for '#{your_first_name} Needs' and post the top two things:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Larry+Needs : Larry needs to make a budget. Liberal Larry needs a fisking.

Spooky.

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From Theory to iPhone, Part 1: Everyone’s Got An Opinion

This is not a tutorial. This is me talking to myself. Much of what I say about iPhone development will be wrong.

It has become a truism that the platform library, not the programming language, has become the large barrier to learning. As a guy with a background in “everything …

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StimulusWatch.org: Wow

StimulusWatch.org is a fantastic resource, which lists the specific projects in the economic stimulus, broken down to the county and city level, and sortable by price, number of jobs estimated, or votes (from the public) as to whether or not it's truly critical.

This is just fantastic; I hope …

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