Blog posting via posterous.com

Thanks to Mark Cohen @markc I am now playing with posterous (http://bit.ly/B2vKM), a simple and easy to use posting tool that allows you to update your mutiple social networking pages simultaneously via email.  I guess it also means I can quickly post using iPhone mail, although I have yet to try this.

 

Seems pretty cool so far with tools allowing you to embed images, videos and mp3s.

 

The big plus for me is the ability to update both twitter and facebook status simultaneously, although my twitter account is quite dead.

Posted via email from Sanson Lowe

DIY Solar Battery (2)

Since moving to the new place made a few adjustments to the solar battery box

1. The panels are now mounted on the roof (north facing of course)
2. I asked the nice TV antenna installer to run the solar cable through the walls into our study. The battery now sits in our study. No more lugging the box around
3. Mike Greenaway was nice enough to give me an old 12v 40ahr battery. This is wired in parallel with my existing 12ahr battery.

All these improvements mean I not only do I charge my phones and batteries with the box, my laptop now runs of solar power. For now I have to be disciplined to turn off my laptop after use.

DIY Solar Battery Project

I always had a interest in batteries, particularly rechargeable batteries. I think it stems from my younger days of chewing through batteries playing the old Nintendo Game&Watch games. I had Oil Panic and Fire. The games ran off these button type batteries that were not rechargeable. I had to beg and plead for my parents to buy new batteries. They were expensive in Australia in the early 80's so my parents could only get them once a while flying back to Hong Kong. I knew it was expensive but I was too young to care.

Nowadays batteries are cheap. You can buy slabs of them at your nearest hardware store. This “abundance” kills me when I think about the environmental waste. As a household we run lots of little gadgets, notebooks and mobile phones, all off rechargeable batteries. These however have to be recharged by plugging an adaptor into the mains power supply. I had an old solar panel lying about (trickle charger for a car battery) so I thought "what if I can recharge all our gadgets with solar power?"

First attempt

• Solar controller
• 4.8W solar panel (charge rate 300mA @ 12v)
• 12v 12amp hour Sealed lead acid battery
• Cigarette lighter socket
• Enough wooden panels to make a box.
• Cigarette to USB adapter
• 150w inverter with USB outlet

The MorningStar SunSaver 10amp controller

A solar controller (shown above) is the hub of the system, controlling the flow of electricity between the panels, the battery and output (load). More importantly it prevents the battery discharging into the solar panel. Solar panels without controllers (nor backfeed blocking diodes) will drain power from the battery to keep the circuit powered. If a panel is operating in cloudy conditions or partial shade, it will actually drain power from a battery.

Controller, Battery and 150w inverter

The 12v 12amp-hr battery stores the electricity generated during the day. A 12 amp hour battery is more than enough to charge our mobile devices and Chris' toys. It can also power my laptop for around 2-3 hours. The cigaratte lighter socket is where power is drawn from the system. This socket provides the most flexibility. You can put in a cigarette to USB adapter, run DC to AC inverters or just plain "car power adaptors" for your mobile device.

4.8W panel hung on downpipe

Once you've gathered everything, it is just a case of wiring and soldering everything together. I just hung the panel outside the house off a downpipe. The most difficult part was actually building a box to house it all. I am hopeless with craft or woodwork, so instead of taking minutes it took.....2 hours! Heidi was laughing all afternoon. As Heidi puts it "This box is Sanson's equivalent of Rome! You know Rome wasn't built in a day, nor is this box!" I wasn't impressed.

The initial system worked, but a problem surfaced during mid-late August when we had long weeks of cloudy days and rain. The little solar panel just couldn't keep up with charging our phones and Chris' toys. The panel faces roughly 035 degrees NNE direction. For a month or two, the 12amp-hr battery never reached full charge. This is bad for battery life. At one stage the battery level dropped to the solar controller's cut off point at 11.5volts. The cut point exists so that the battery is never fully drained, which is also bad news. 11.5v is roughly 20% capacity. I crunched the numbers and worked out, at best, that little panel would take 40 hours to fully charge that battery. Given there is really 5-6 hours of useable sunlight in a day, it would take over 1 week to fully charge the battery assuming no power was used during that time.

Second attempt

• 30w solar panel (charge rate 1.75A @ 12v)
• More wood to make a rack/stand
• More wiring

30W panel on the roof facing north

With Tim Taylor's (Home Improvement) catch cry in mind, I bought a 30W solar panel off eBay and built a mini frame to mount this on our roof. The panels are wired in parallel to provide a total of 34.8W of power (charge rate 2A). There is now enough grunt to charge the battery in one single day. W00t!

iPhone charging with the Multimeter reading 13.26 Volts (battery is charging and full)

All the smaller gadgets are now recharging everyday with enough power to spare. With the arrival of spring and summer, there will be actually spare capacity. On weekends, with a fully charged solar battery as a backup, I can use my laptop all day running off the panels and an inverter. How's that for green computing!

Conclusions
Knowing that all of Chris' toys, my iPhone, Heidi's phone have been running for over 4 months on pure green energy gives me the warm and fuzzies. Heidi's phone runs off green power now and I am pleased to say my iPhone has never touched a wall socket. When I sync my iPhone with the notebook, I run it off the notebook battery then I recharge the notebook with the solar battery. I am also happy that we're safer from power outages. A year ago our whole neighbourhood lost power for a day or so and we had to charge our phones at with family and friends.

This green power does come at a cost. The hip pocket took a hit of around $600 purchasing all the equipment. I could have used cheaper components but I wanted something to last over 20-30 years. I am not sure if over this lifetime we'll ever recoup the costs through savings in our power bill. Given that the cost of power will only ever increase and over such a long time span I'd like to think we'd get close. The greatest satisfaction is knowing that in our little way we’re helping to save the planet.



By the way this post was written with notebook plugged into the solar battery :D

Fring is now available on iPhone

I read about Fring many moons ago on Mark Cohen's blog. I have been waiting for it to be released on iPhone. Finally, it is now available through the iTunes App store. For those who don't know, Fring is an all-in-one communications portal. It combines MSN Messenger, Google Talk, SIP (or VoIP), Skype and many more services all in one.

Currently I have MSN Messenger, Google Talk and my iinet VoIP account all set up on Fring on my iPhone.

SIP settings for iiNet are as follows

Proxy Server: sip.YOURSTATE.iinet.net.au (ie sip.nsw.iinet.net.au)
username: your phone number including area code eg 02XXXXXXXX
password: password to access VoIP. If you have a iiNET supplied Belkin ATA you can export the settings to a file and find your password in that file.

Only downside is that a non-jailbroken iPhone will not run applications in the background. Grrrrrr

....now just wondering if I should migrate this blog to WordPress so I can blog easily on the phone

China & Tibet & the 2008 games

Recent events in China and Tibet in the build up of the olympic games has been of interest for me. I do agree generally that China's human rights record is abysmal however the blanket 100% blame on China is completely unjustified. The physical attacks from both sides are uncompletely unjustified in this day and age. I also feel sorry for the athletes who have trained so hard for this event just to have their efforts and achievements drowned out in this historical and political mess.

Anyone who has a studied Chinese history will know that it is not a black and white issue. The whole mess is no where near entirely Chinese fault.

I came across this video where my thoughts on this issue are expressed far better than what I can write in the blog. Let us hope there will be a peaceful 2008 Olympics where the efforts of the athletes and organisers shine brightly.

JumpBoxing

First post for 2008 and it's a nerd post. I haven't had sufficient time off lately to gather all my thoughts and experiences as a dad. Suffice to say that Heidi and I are proud as punch of Christopher (Chumba). We're both having an absolute ball but like I said, fatherhood is important enough to have its own post.

That being said, I am sure most readers of my blog would be interested in this new tech I recently discovered. Incidentally this is my first blog post using Flock :D

I gave myself (hehe one of the few perks of my role) the fun task belting through our infrastructure to find new ways of improving workflows, information sharing, bug tracking and the like. Naturally I dived first into open source software to see what was around. I started to cringe that the thought of setting up WAMP or LAMP machines to get this all to work.

Thankfully I was upgrading my VMWare Fusion on my MBPro and did some goofing around on Virtual Appliances where I discovered JumpBox. This is absolutely brilliant. Pre-configured open source software running in a virtualised environment. As an ex-colleague put it "a liveCD for software". There's quite a number of software available.

A 140Mb download of Mantis (open source bug tracking software), 30 minutes of setting up users and configuration and voila an instant web based bug tracking tool. My team is currently evaluating Mantis but I am absolutely sold on the JumpBox. If you're keen to muck around with opensource software but don't want the hassel of setting up WAMP or LAMP, I'd suggest you give it a go.

For the budget conscious, or those that have to manage a budget, JumpBox offers free trials. For USD$30, the virtual machine is registered allowing you access to the jumpbox interface to backup important data and upgrades.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Aria Restaurant - une revue

La Prefazione (Foreword)
I often find it amusing that a fine dining restaurant in an English speaking country, feels that a plain English language menu appears somewhat inadequate. I am not sure if this is a reflection of insecurity in Australia's English culinary heritage or that we, as a young country, are actually embracing all the world has to offer. Aria's menu does not stray from this notion and thus is quite liberal in its use of Franitaliglais. Accordingly, this review will be punctuated with random French phrases. My Italian is non existent and I don't quite trust Google Translate. You'll never see Chinese expressions on the menu either!

l'introduction
Heidi and I celebrate our 4th year wedding anniversary, which incidentally, is also our last child-free anniversary. We wanted to choose something special and Heidi's choice of Aria est très magnifique! Aria Restaurant is situated right at the end of Circular Quay which is owned and operated by the highly regarded chef l'Australiene, Monsieur Matthew Moran.

L'ambiance
Ideally situated at the northern end of Circular Quay, diners enjoy the fine fare taking in the glamourous views of the Opera House, The Bridge and Harbour. The dining room was large but the tables still felt a little packed for a fine dining experience. Unfortunately Heidi and I got the worst seat in the house...right next to the Waiter's stand which, incidentally, was also close to the bar. Our dinner throughout the evening was interspersed with sounds of the cash register ringing, EFTPOS machine printing receipts, waiters grabbing cutlery from drawers, bags of ice dumped into the sink and other busy sounds. This is something I would expect from my local pub or RSL, not from a premier restaurant. I would think Aria, a restaurant of such high calibre, would forgo this table so their diners would truly get a fine dining experience. Thankfully, there is no table next to the restrooms as they are located in the outside foyer.

Vino
The wine list was very comprehensive with a selection of wines from Australia, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Argentina and USA with a price tag to match. I didn't feel the need to down a bottle on my own, get hammered and have my poor pregnant wife carry me home on our wedding anniversary. I stuck to a single glass of French Burgundy and migrated to a good old fashioned beer.

Le Tucker (aka "The Grub")
Dinner started off with a pleasant amuses-bouche consisting of a cream consomme of mushroom. It was a small but intensely flavoured starter which certainly enlivened the taste buds. We were also served bread and butter (bien sur!). Heidi's bread was served upside down, which we found childishly amusing, but the butter wasn't quite at room temperature, so it was butter chunks with bread. Bread was nice and warm which helped.

L'Entrée
Heidi - Peking duck consommé with duck dumplings, shaved abalone and mushrooms
Sanson - Hiramasa Kingfish tartare, with crème fraiche, buckwheat blinis and sterling caviar

We both thought the Peking duck consommé broth was very flavoursome with all the essences of meat dancing on the palate. Heidi loved the duck dumplings saying it was a beautiful moist, melt in your mouth experience. The Kingfish tartare dish unfortunately didn't quite work for me. I found there was too much crème fraiche and the Kingfish tartare (which was seasoned in a light vinigarette) didn't have quite the tartness to cut through the cream. The caviar wasn't quite salty enough to cut through all those flavours either and was subsequently "lost". Felt a bit like having raw fish on bread with a little dash of white wine vinegar topped with a whack of good old Philly spread and a tiny pinch of salt. Good concept but the balance of flavours wasn't quite right in my unprofessional opinion. Food is all about balance.

Plat principal
Heidi - King George Whiting tempura, with jamon iberico, yabbies, peas and mint
Sanson - Poached beef fillet with braised silverside, bone marrow, condiments and beef consommé

Heidi thought her dish was pleasant but not overwhelming. The fish tempura was very very lightly battered. So light that I didn't realise that it was actually tempura. Perhaps this is a good thing. The beef was superb, the fillet was rare, moist and juicy, silverside the same. The bone marrow just glides right down the throat and the beef consommé chaser tied it all together.

Sides
Truffled Potato Mash
Steamed Broccolini Polonaise

Wow the sides were huge! We should have ordered one side but the who would have thought?
The mash was pure indulgence. Nothing beats well cooked potatoes, grated with a moulin, mixed with a little salt and double cream. I am guessing they used double cream because it was sooo creamy and rich. The generous glug of truffle oil certainly brought this humble spud side dish to great heights. I am thinking of repeating this at home but with Tetsuya's Black Truffle Salsa. Gotta get me a moulin first as the $5.00 potato masher from Coles would take forever to get such a fine result.
The steamed brococolini was very fresh and cooked just so. Lightly seasoned with a little butter, it was a good complement to our main course.

Dessert
Shared - Fromage Blanc vanilla, pear carpaccio, date and crème de marrons
Desserts are never my strong point. I enjoy them but don't review them with as much detail as other courses. Hence I picked the dessert that had more French and Italian words than English. Pourquoi? Pourquoi Non! Needless to say, the dessert was nice, well presented and concluded the dining experience beautifully. Teas and petit fours followed.

Mot final
The restaurant is what i would term a "relaxed fine dining experience". It is a place of good food, great views, excellent staff and service without that stiff pompous feeling that can exude from other establishments. I personally prefer the latter, as I like a place that challenges me as a diner where the focus is squarely on the food and service. This is purely a personal thing as some people may feel it is too overbearing. Personally, if I want a a relaxed dining experience, I would go to McDonalds.

Please don't let that last statement detract you from trying Aria. Like I said, it is a purely personal preference, not an opinion. Aria is a great restaurant with fine food, great staff and gorgeous views. It is certainly a place to celebrate special occasions. The waiter who looked after us was very nice and made our teas gratuit. If you decide to book, book early and ask for a table on the western side of the dining room, closest to the bridge and avoid the table next to the Waiters stand.

Next time, I want to book The Kitchen Table.....gotta find me 6 friends.