Amazon has been doing some really interesting things with technology in the last 5 years.  Some part of still me thinks of them as an online book store, but many of their own technology products have been consistently innovative and unique.  Until the kindle, most of those like the EC2 (virtual servers on an hourly rate) and S3 (pay by use data storage) were only things a geek could love.  I was stunned recently to find out about their cloud player which lets you upload music to the web and stream it to any device with a network connection and Adobe Air support.  While it currently only works in the US, if it survives legal challenges, it could turn out to be pretty significant.  The recently announced appstore for android might seem like that not a big of an issue since there are other options for getting Android apps.  However there is one very significant issue which as ramifications in the international context.  The Google market is tied to providers while the amazon appstore is tied to customer accounts.  If I swap SIM cards in my mobile phone, I see different applications available in the Google market.  On the other hand, the appstore seems to be tied to my credit card.  In Bangladesh, paid apps don’t show up in the mobile version of the market, but they do show up in the app store.  Net net that means I can actually buy applications here.

It’s starting to get hot and as a result power outages are getting more frequent.  Last year with more than 12hour daily power outages and only 3 or 4 during daylight hours it was hard to get any work done.  This year however, we got a solar system setup and I hope that makes things go smoother.  There are still some quirks to work out, but we seem to have a system that is giving us consistent power through the day.  We have 960W array and a 48V 400ah battery pack.  The interesting bit is the charge controller, a Su-kam PCU 2k48.  I haven’t seen anything quite like it and it seems like a fairly ideal system for our situation.  There’s no net metering policy in Bangladesh, and even if there was, the grid power is so inconsistant that you would need some sort of battery backup anyway.   This unit ties together PV, grid and a batteries.  I haven’t tested inverter efficiency yet, but the design seems like about the most sane way to do it.  The documentation is fairly confusing, but there are two paths though it. There’s the PV -> Charge controller/Battery->  Inverter path which it prefers, but in the event that it can’t supply enough from that source, it fails over to the other path which is Grid power, also there is a battery charger which can charge your pack at the same time.

Seven years ago I was playing around and I wrote my first post on a blog. I had a website even earlier, but having a blog made it easier to write posts. It’s had several homes since then, I looked in the archives and it’s a pretty good list of stories from over the years. I hope there will be many more.