Monday, July 28, 2008

mirrorsheeting.com

mirrorsheeting.com:

Tensioners for Making Mirrors

These make it possible to achieve a mirror by pulling the four corners tight. It includes an eyelet screw

that goes into the wall and a clip that bites into the mirror sheeting and an adjuster with a wing nut

to apply tension, you need one on each corner to pull the sheeting tight. Includes: 1 each, eyelet screw, adjuster with wing nut, and clip.

You can put this in a stud in the wall, or for a portable mirror screw it into a pvc piping frame

"Tensioners for Making Mirrors

These make it possible to achieve a mirror by pulling the four corners tight. It includes an eyelet screw

that goes into the wall and a clip that bites into the mirror sheeting and an adjuster with a wing nut

to apply tension, you need one on each corner to pull the sheeting tight. Includes: 1 each, eyelet screw, adjuster with wing nut, and clip.

You can put this in a stud in the wall, or for a portable mirror screw it into a pvc piping frame"

MIT team plays with fire to create cheap energy | csmonitor.com

MIT team plays with fire to create cheap energy | csmonitor.com

Inventor responds. Not a blogger, but have a few minutes of free time.

One square meter of solar dish aperture is worth one barrel of oil per year (burned at 85% efficiency) in Colorado climate. Each m^2 should cost about $100… simple one year payback against oil and two years against natural gas, all without solar subsidies — very important for global warming mitigation.

China and India have told me they have raw materials and massive causal labor. They want rapid scale up with no new tooling nor capital bottlenecks.


Nothing new about solar dishes. The news is construction simplicity (without special tooling) and low dish materials cost.

Smaller dish size is cheaper due to the ground, rather than steel, supporting mirrors.

The frame was made from all identical parts. Only a paraboloid has that potential.

The mirrors are flexed into near perfect parabolic curves with force rather than with conforming substrates.

Two flexed dishes have survived record breaking hurricanes with zero damage.

Our first dish is 30 years old and the exposed mirrors (glass/silver/copper/paint) are in good shape with only minor degradation. The MIT mirrors are off-the-shelf low-iron glass/silver/palladium/paint and are even more durable ~ $1.65/square foot (Guardian Industries).

Amory Lovins recommended I put this into the public domain. NASA engineers advised a patent to pay for engineering improvements. A sole US patent was a compromise.

The question in search of an answer is: How cheap can solar get?

Background: http://www.harbornet.com/sunflower/pvdish.html

Thursday, July 17, 2008

ShapeWriter iPhone App Product Profile

ShapeWriter iPhone App Product Profile

Shapewriter looks like a winner to me. (And I've looked at a LOT of alternative writing schemes!)

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Sea-Water Air Conditioning Plan for Honolulu, Hawaii Finishes Funding : TreeHugger

Sea-Water Air Conditioning Plan for Honolulu, Hawaii Finishes Funding : TreeHugger

Toronto, Canada is working on this type of downtown-core building cooling system as well.

http://www.toronto.ca/environment/initiatives/cooling.htm

I say cached snow and ice is Rochester's next cash crop.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Vara Software : ScreenFlow - Professional Screencasting Studio

Vara Software : ScreenFlow - Professional Screencasting Studio
ScreenFlow

Record Everything

You don't need to pick an area of the screen for capture, ScreenFlow has advanced algorithms that only encode areas of change on your screen. The application is powerful enough to simultaneously record from your iSight or DV camera at the same time as your screen (and your microphone and computer's audio!).

The Best Capture

ScreenFlow has the best screen capture available. Using a custom multithreaded SSE & Altivec accelerated, 64-bit enabled compression system, ScreenFlow can handle everything from capturing DVD video & audio to fast moving Keynote presentations.