Everybody has to have a blog. This is ours. An assortment of practical tips, stories and findings without warranty. Updated less regularly.

Shine on you crazy sun

As cost of energy is climbing, the gravitational center of our solar system is getting more paid attention. Solar energy is simple to capture and clean to use. Up-front cost to set up a solar energy harvesting sytem is relatively high, but running the utility is almost free. The problem is that in a typical case it is not only sunny days when energy is needed. Energy has to be stored.
An interesting experiment carried by Nokia is finding out how the radiation from the sun can fuel a mobile phone. The idea is to get hard data from real use cases.
http://solarcharging.nokia.com/
Our technology plays a small humble role in this study.

Tradeshow database

If you have a plan to visit Japan and have blank days to pad out with activity (and visiting countryside to see us is not an option this time), it is a good idea to check out what trade shows are available at that time.
JETRO (Japan External Trade Organization) hosts an useful web site, listing most of the tradeshows, including Japan.
www.jetro.go.jp/en/database/j-messe.

The site offers a search engine to refine your area of interest. For minimum, select the region and country, as well as the period of interest.

Gedit tuning for programming

Gedit is a great editor for a programmer. Perhaps it does not have all the bells and whistles of commercial IDEs but the great news is that user has lots of resources available to modify the editor to suit to the target purpose.

Theme

To get the right mood for programming, the theme of the editor can be tuned to align to the hacking task. Darkmate theme by Luigi Maselli provides a stunning codeview for those who prefer dark background and plenty of Mellotron. We boldly made some changes to the theme and renamed it to Darkmod. It is available in here. Place the file in a convenient location and install it from preferences->Font&Colors->Add...
To add the final spice, change editor font to "Sazanami Gothic Regular 14pt".
Have fun!