Archive for the ‘Breaktime’ Category

Look Ma, no files! Portable object persistence

Friday, August 19th, 2011

Originally posted at JavaProgrammingForums.com Where can I store my application data? I see a lot of people starting threads because they're struggling to persist (often) a little bit of data from one run of their Java application to the next. The offered solutions are often some kind of jiggery-pokery involving java.io.File. Not ...

LEGO Mindstorms RCX cable rot / decay

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

Some of the LEGO I have in the house must be 30 years old. It's as good as the day it was first unwrapped. I have to admit to being disappointed when one of my two RCXes stopped responding to the IR tower. I was pleased the other one was ...

BrickOS on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

BrickOS was an integral part of some work I did many years ago and I've been trying to dig the code up recently. It seems as though it fell out of the Ubuntu repositories some time ago (in as legos before the name change), so I'm currently installing the source ...

Power from the sun (and gun): Bandar Dataran Solar

Friday, March 18th, 2011

A couple of days ago when I wrote about how I thought Malaysia should generate electricity from the sun, I realised that the picture that I carry in my head might not be the same as a reader might form in their own. Worse, I dashed off an image of ...

Solar power in Malaysia – the residential area solar roof

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

[caption id="attachment_1200" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Malaysian house, blue sky (on a rainy day)"][/caption] 'Part two' has some better images that should make things a bit clearer! I keep suggesting this as a 'real' solar power alternative whenever someone says (as they invariably do) that solar power cannot produce enough energy to compete with ...