Kompato

"Using arrays of long, thin silicon wires embedded in a polymer substrate, a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has created a new type of flexible solar cell that enhances the absorption of sunlight and efficiently converts its photons into electrons. The solar cell does all this using only a fraction of the expensive semiconductor materials required by conventional solar cells."

Read more at http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13325

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/28/caltech-gurus-whip-up-highly-efficient-low-cost-flexible-solar/

(via tuaw.com)

Time Warner has increased the upstream speed for standard Road Runner accounts from 384kbps to 1Mbps, but you may have to reboot your cable modem to notice the speed increase.

(source: dvice.com)

I'm enjoying Evernote thus far, and have upgraded to a premium membership. The only thing bothering me was that my local data was left unencrypted -- unless I were to encrypt each and every note individually.

My workaround -- create an encrypted sparsebundle, copy everything in "~/Library/Application Support/Evernote" into it, and create a symbolic link from that location to the mount point ("/Volumes/Evernote").

So long as I remember to mount the encrypted volume before I launch Evernote, everything seems to work just fine so far, and all my data is encrypted. However, if you try this yourself beware that there may be problems that I have not yet encountered.

Recently I encountered some unusual, and intermittent system slowdowns where OS X would hang for 10-20 seconds once or twice a day. Keyboard and mouse input was ignored in every application, and by OS X (10.6.1) itself.

I thought that it might be a problem with Flash since installing Click2Flash seemed to help. Also, I began noticing the problem after installing 10.6.1, which was supposed to reapply a newer version of Flash. However, I'm not so sure if Flash is the culprit.

The problem happened again this evening and since my logs only indicated Safari and 1Password entries at the time, I ended up searching on those terms. This led me to information about the /var/db/CodeEquivalenceDatabase file, which apparently is used by securityd when determining if an application has access to the Keychain. On a whim, I renamed the file, as several articles suggested, and logged out & back in.

I have no clue if this is related to the occasional system hang (it's intermittent and unpredictable), but amazingly many apps -- and in particular, Safari -- are loading significantly faster. This leads me to believe that my CodeEquivalenceDatabase file had some corruption.

The odd thing about this is that I wasn't experiencing any of the symptoms that led others to take this step. For example, there were no processes (such as securityd) hogging the CPU during the system hangs. So -- either my situation is unique or perhaps there are other reasons to rename this file and let the system rebuild it.

In any case, here are a few links that reference this file in case others find it helpful:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070608010326883

http://iparrizar.mnstate.edu/~juan/urania/2007/08/08/hint-what-to-do-when-keychain-using-apps-lock-up/

http://www.43folders.com/2007/01/22/securityd-keychain-fix

http://mactip.blogspot.com/2007/10/securityd-memory-hogging.html

http://www.mattberther.com/2008/01/

UPDATE: This did not resolve the occasional hangs, but it did indeed speed up application launches.

UPDATE #2: Looks like this thread describes the situation I experience -- and judging by its length, I am definitely not alone.

UPDATE #3: OS X 10.6.2 appears to have addressed the issue.  I no longer experience the hangs.