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Inexpensive, highly efficient solar cells may be on the way

"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/

Filed under: environment technology

Get a Mac version of Google's Superbowl ad

(via tuaw.com)

Filed under: mac technology

Upstate NY Time Warner customers: reboot your cable modem

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.

You can test your speed here.
Filed under: news technology

Clever and artistic Google Chrome video

(source: dvice.com)

Filed under: art technology

Google launches a new programming language

Mashable has the details on "Go" here, including an embedded Google Tech Talk video.  Looks very interesting.
Filed under: development technology

Securing local Evernote data on the Mac

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.

Filed under: technology

Going paperless

My Fujitsu S300M scanner arrived today & I am thoroughly impressed.  Not only is it compact and fast, but it does a great job of managing various workflows (save to file, send via email, save to Evernote).  It also impressively handles straightening crooked scans, which inevitably happens when you're sticking different-sized documents into the thing at maximum speed.

I spent the evening scanning in family recipes and putting them into Evernote -- an idea I got from this Evernote blog post.

Next step will be to scan every single receipt and important document that I receive and then shred the paper version when possible.
Filed under: personal technology

PhotoSketch: Drawing composited images

Thanks to Neatorama.com for this find!

Filed under: art technology

OS X slowdown and speedup

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.

Filed under: mac technology

Perforce plugin for NetBeans 6.x

Last night I installed NetBeans to explore its potential use as a PHP IDE.  So far I'm impressed.  The only major struggle came when I tried to get NetBeans working with Perforce this evening.

Gregg Wonderly was kind enough to develop the Perforce plugin I'm using.  The plugin provides basic add/edit/submit/diff functionality, which is really all I need at the moment.  It's tremendously easy to install via NetBeans' plugin architecture.

The gist of the problem is that, at least on OS X Snow Leopard, NetBeans (or the Java runtime) doesn't appear to have knowledge of environment variables.  Nothing from /etc/profile or ~/.profile is visible to the Runtime.getRuntime().exec() call that the Perforce plugin performs.  NetBeans also doesn't appear to have any place to specify environment variables.

The workaround that I'm currently using is to launch NetBeans from a bash prompt with:

/Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans\ 6.7.1.app/Contents/MacOS/netbeans 

The plugin now works, since my path and Perforce environment variables are visible to the exec() call.

If anyone with more familiarity with Java or NetBeans has any other ideas, please share them!  Barring any other solutions, I'll just use Platypus to create an app stub that automatically launches the shell and then NetBeans.

2009-09-17 UPDATE: NetBeans is a very impressive PHP IDE.  Its command completion, PHPDoc and PHPUnit support, along with excellent debugging once xdebug is installed, is top notch.  I highly recommend checking it out if you're in the market for a PHP development environment.
Filed under: development php technology
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