Tech
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Fair trade energy
Check out this article on Popular Mechanics about using excess CO2 and algae to create biofuels. It’s an elegant solution, using one problem (excess CO2) to solve the other (the need for energy).
If I were Bill Gates, or at least in some position of power in his charity, I would subsidize the creation of these things in the third world. Doing that would create industry in the (mostly) quite hot third world countries where it has never been. Unlike the traditional oil regimes though, this industry would not be easily stolen as capital and expertise could be moved fairly easily.
I’ll have more ruminations on the “Curse of oil” and capital flight eventually.
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Friday night round up
- Hansellman on graphing – the data “wants” to be presented in a certain way
- Hansellman on a family backup strategy – for all of those of us who give out free tech support to family and friends
- Perceptions of America and Iran in der Spiegel
- Der Spiegel again – Muslim integration into Europe
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Needed technological advances
In keeping with Instapundit’s list of needed technological advances, here are four of mine
- Cheaper Carbon Fiber materials – Much lighter and much stronger than metal, but at the moment, much more expensive. If this cost could be brought down many other technologies become economical, electric cars, prefabbed buildings, small scale wind generation, etc.
- Smart traffic lights – while these do exist at the moment, they are not in wide use. I live in a traffic-light heavy part of the city. I also do most of my car travel at non-peak hours. I still stop at most of the lights for no reason whatsoever. Smart lights (these exist already) would sense if there is a car that needs to get by and turn green (assuming there was no competing traffic) and then snap back to it’s existing cycle.
- Decentralized electric power – To my knowledge, the main power grid has not been modernized, ever.
- Cheap wholesale medical testing – imagine just having a machine in your home that could analyze your blood or urine every day or week and test it for the top 50 detectable problems. If all of these problems are caught at the first opportunity, how many lives could be saved?
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Quick Wednesday link splash
- Backyard wind-power – not cheap, but not horribly pricey either. I imagine this would work much better in the country.
- The Aral Sea – on Wikipedia
- An interview with Michael Crichton
- Hand Cranked Cell phone charger – sadly available only in Japan. One would think it would be more popular here. Oh well.
- More hydrogen economy
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Quick Thursday round up
- Interesting solar thermal plant in Nevada.
- George Eastman – founder of Kodak, and the originator of two of my favorite quotes. He named his company Kodak because he thought the letter K was “a strong, incisive sort of letter”. His suicide note was “My work is done. Why wait?”.
- Tech Recipes – Vista Tips
- A good bio of Albert Jay Nock.
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Quck roundup
- An interesting look at the military aspects of social networking.
- Underwater windmills
- How we would fight China
- The metaweb/FreeBase
- Evidently February was cold
- Blurb has dropped their prices.
- Strangest suicide attempt, ever
Two Georgia men survived a gruesome suicide attempt Friday after cutting their own arms off with a saw, reported Atlanta’s Journal Constitution.
The 40 and 41-year-old men managed to remove three of their four arms, cutting them about six inches above their wrists, Atlanta Police Major Lane Hagin told the Journal.
- Baby steps to a better editorial, it’s easier to see why this one is so wrong.
- The 20 best comic book weapons.
- It’s odd seeing this already existing – I stumbled across this C.S. Lewis quote yesterday “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ which is the general gist my future novel The Comedian.
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The ever amazing Vista
For some reason Outlook quit working on my new Vista install. Basically it would gray out and then present with me an offer to go to Microsoft to fix the problem. I actually do that and lo and behold, it gives me a registry fix that actually works. Amazing. I think that’s the first time that has happened.
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Freaking Vista
For some reason after the upgrade my local box would not respond to localhost. After several hours of searching, I finally see this article. Who knew write permissions on a log file could be so important?
And now of course, it doesn’t work anymore. Sigh.
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New favorite deal site
The new one is UberBargain. They found a one Terabyte hard drive array for less than five hundred dollars.
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Growl
I’ve been stuck trying to upgrade Office 2007 for the past 10 hours now. For some reason the Groove files are un-deletable. The Microsoft general knowledge base article on uninstalling Office is here.