Blog List

Recently I reached my 2 year anniversary of having my 6 KWh solar system installed at home so I thought it’d be nice to work out how much we’ve saved.

In 24 months we generated 18518, and in the last 12 months 9474 which is pretty good considering we’ve had 2 really wet and overcast years. We use about 12 KWh per day so it’s great that we’re generating about twice the power we need and it means the electricity company gets to send me a cheque at the end of each quarter. The good thing in the last few months is AGL now does Direct Deposit into bank accounts rather than cheques which means you get the money back so much faster but you still have to call up and ask for it.

Based on the Small Business Carbon Footprint Calculator – which only allows you to enter the number of KWh says 18518KWh is 20.68 tons of emissions and equivalent to having 124.1 trees.

So we’ve had 2 consistent years of output so I’ll keep monitoring it to see how we fair over coming years.

Yesterday I showed you how to display a bing map in an IPhone Application. The next thing I wanted to do was show, and keep showing the users GPS location on the map.

To do this, we use the watchPosition call to get and keep getting the user’s gps positing using the following script:

document.addEventListener("deviceready", onDeviceReady, false);

function onDeviceReady() {     var options = { timeout: 30000 };     watchID = navigator.geolocation.watchPosition(onSuccess, onError, options); }

function onSuccess(position) {     alert(position.coords.latitude + ',' + position.coords.longitude); }

// onError Callback receives a PositionError object // function onError(error) {     alert('code: '    + error.code    + '\n' +           'message: ' + error.message + '\n'); }

Now we want to display the position on the map, but we only want to show the current position. We can use the bing maps control to do this as follows:

var pushpin= null;

function onSuccess(position) {     updatePushpinLocation(position.coords.latitude, position.coords.longitude); }

function updatePushpinLocation(latitude, longitude) {     if (pushpin == null)     {         pushpin= new Microsoft.Maps.Pushpin(map.getCenter(), null);...

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We’ve done a bunch of Bing Maps development before and we’ve done some work with Windows Phone, but we have a client who wants and IPhone application to show some spatial data as most of their internal users have either got an IPhone or IPad, closely followed by Android devices. They’re happy with Bing Maps that we’ve used with them before so are fine with sticking to what’s familiar to them. Only problem is I’m not an IPhone developer…

I did a bit of research and have had recommendations from a number of people that Phone Gap is quite good. So I’m going to try and build a good app for them using it and hopefully learn a few things along the way.

To start, I needed a Mac (which I’m borrowing to start with), with OSX Lion, XCode 4 and the other pre-requites that are set out in the really useful Getting Started with iOS guide for Phone Gap. So I’ve got all these and worked out how to install them on a Mac – you know, things like where’s the file explorer and how do i right click with the trackpad. Yes, all those things you want to do but don’t yet know how to do on this device.

I follow the instructions and helpful videos and get a hello world...

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Last week we helped out at the first Kinect Bizspark Start-Up camp at the Microsoft Brisbane Office as part of the Queensland Microsoft Innovation Centre. The goal of the 3 days was for teams to build out an idea with Kinect and pitch it as a business opportunity.

We wanted to give the teams an option to have a bit of fun or use some different ideas in their projects so we built a Kinect sandpit using the depth camera , laser projector and 40 kg of sand.



The idea being the sand closer to the kinect we represented as the colour white, medium from the kinect green and far away blue which turns into icy peaks, green moutains/grass and blue water.



...

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