Back and Forth | The Incoherent Ramblings of Designer and Musician Justin Winslow

Comments on My Inactivity

This blog has been a bit quiet for a while which is unfortunate, but it’s been for a good cause (I hope). We are debuting our Solar Array monitoring application at the Solar Power International trade show in Dallas on October 17th. I mean no self-adulation when I say our team has accomplished more in the past few months than most others in the field have accomplished in the past few years.

It is on the shoulders of some truly brilliant folks that I have been able to build the front end of this colossal application. With any luck, I will be back to music and back to the attention this site deserves in the next couple weeks.

- j

Spotify’s Truly Awful Account Deletion Method

Log in to your Spotify account profile page on the website
Under “Personal information”, edit your email address to add “.del” to the end of the address
Example: anne@example.com would become anne@example.com.del
Click “Save profile”

How do they think this is ok? Regardless, I’ll be happy to be done with their service.

Accessing //localhost from Your Virtual Machine

I’m fairly certain I run into this issue every time I set up a new virtual environment – I cannot access my local web server from the VM. Assuming your server access settings are correct for accepting guest connections, the issue is in the virtual machine’s networking settings.

All you need to do is change your network adapter to be a shared connection with the host machine. With Virtual PC in Windows 7, open your Virtual Machines folder, click on the machine you want to edit and click ‘Settings’ in the top actions bar. In the settings menu click on ‘Networking’ and change adapter 1 to ‘Shared Networking.’

Hooray! You can now access your host machine’s local host via IP address.

Logitech Wireless Solar Keyboard K750

Sometimes an idea is so obvious that it’s painful we haven’t been doing it all along. A solar powered keyboard (and hopefully a soon to come kinetic powered mouse) is such a no brainer that it should have been a standard since the onset of wireless input devices.

Think about it: we’ve had solar powered calculators for decades, how is it possible that solar energy has yet to be really effectively harnessed for our now ubiquitous wireless life? Imagine the energy savings if the billions of wireless devices we use daily didn’t need to be plugged in to charge every day.

Make no mistake, the energy “crisis” wont be solved by legislation or any large sweeping behavioral change. It will be resolved by an immeasurable amount of small efficiencies. Little things here and there will compound to create tremendous benefit.

Without further adieu, here it is in all its peripheral sexiness:

Even as attached as I am to my current keyboard and mouse set up, I will be buying one of these the day it is released. You can read the Logitech blog post announcing the new keyboard here:
http://blog.logitech.com/2010/11/01/logitechs-latest-innovation-a-wireless-keyboard-powered-by-light/