installing

GroSolar to buy Borrego Solar's residential business

GroSolar announced plans Thursday to acquire Borrego Solar Systems' residential solar installation business, in a move to expand its footprint nationwide.

The acquisition will enlarge GroSolar's presence in California, bolstering its efforts to be a national player in residential solar installations. Currently, the industry is largely made up of local installation companies.

GroSolar, which operates in 12 states and Canada, will add Silicon Valley, Berkeley, Sonoma, Orange County, San Diego, and Massachusetts with the Borrego Solar acquisition.

The company's acquisition comes at a time when the industry is poised to reap the benefits of solar tax credits receiving … Read more

Major, Minor Problems After iPhone 2.2.1 Update

Dozens for iPhone Atlas readers, and dozens more on Apple's Discussion boards, are reporting a bevy of issues after applying the iPhone OS 2.2.1 update. As usual, the following two procedures will work to solve a number of problems:

Reset your iPhone by holding down the sleep and home buttons until the Apple logo appears; Restore your iPhone: Click the Restore button under the Summary tab. Restoring the phone will erase contacts, calendars, photos and other data on the phone, but will restore automatically backed-up information including text messages, notes, call history, contact favorites, sound settings, widget … Read more

iPhone OS 2.2.1: Problems and Fixes

Users are experiencing a series of issues--some minor, some significant--after the iPhone OS 2.2.1 update.

Installation fails, cannot restore Several users have reported an issue in which the installation of iPhone OS 2.2.1 fails partway through and subsequent restore attempts fail, yielding, in essence, an unusable iPhone.

If you experienced a similar issue, try the suggestions listed in this article.

Airplane mode problems Make sure that your iPhone is not in airplane mode. If the iPhone is in airplane mode when it is updated, it will not be able to properly activate after the software installation … Read more

Troubleshoot video, audio issues

With online video and audio becoming more popular every day, most have experienced the frustration of not getting a podcast or video to work because of codec issues. Fortunately, this little utility helps let you know what's installed on your machine.

InstalledCodec offers a basic functionality: It lists all the codec drivers and Direct Show filters currently installed on your system. The interface isn't flashy or ostentatiously designed, but simply a functional pane that lists items according to a variety of categories. These categories include the driver or filter's name, type, whether it's disabled, its install … Read more

Mad Mike at CES 2009

We had a chance to catch up with master car audio installer Mad Mike, from the television show Pimp My Ride, at our Car Tech booth at CES 2009 to pick his brain about the current trends in car audio and to gain some insight into the future of cabin tech.

Brooklyn's mesmerizing sound artists

At the recent Dumbo Art Under The Bridge Festival in Brooklyn, N.Y., I heard two rather amazing sound installations.

OrganicInterfaces is a collective of artists, scientists, engineers, and musicians and their installation, Mocean was a truly enveloping sound experience. Their Web Site describes it this way, Mocean is a site-specific sculptural sound environment. It consists of a large water tank and a forest of antique organ pipes...digital technology translates the (water's) ripple patterns into sounds played by the repurposed organ pipes, establishing a relationship between water and sound. For the DUMBO Art Festival, we used a 12-foot diameter swimming pool and some new technologies, expanding the range of possible interactions and sculptural interventions..."

At the DUMBO show, Mocean was located in a small warehouse garage, open to the street. Flat stones were placed in the pool to serve as a path for people to walk over. The organ pipes hanging from the ceiling were tuned to different pitches and their sounds were complex and surprisingly musical. I listened for quite a while and found the sound absolutely mesmerizing.

Actually, the best part was watching how different people reacted to the sound as they walked over the stones. Some realized their movements changed the sound, and they "played" the organ pipes by swaying their arms and moving about. Little children were the best; they were totally uninhibited about making weird sounds.

Then there was Ted Southern's sidewalk sound show. … Read more

Microsoft starts distributing open-source Drupal

The single biggest distributor of Drupal just might be Microsoft. As I discovered from Dries Buytaert's blog on Wednesday, Microsoft's Web Application Installer comes with out-of-the-box support for Drupal, OScommerce, and other popular open-source Web applications.

The Web Application Installer Beta is designed to help get you up and running with the most widely used Web applications freely available for your Windows Server. Web AI provides support for popular ASP.net and PHP Web applications, including Graffiti, DotNetNuke, WordPress, Drupal, OSCommerce, and more.

With just a few simple clicks, Web AI will check your machine for the necessary … Read more

Zip Express partnership with TigerDirect, CompUSA eases CE installation woes

While you, dear reader, are likely a tech-savvy person, you undoubtedly know people that aren't. The fast-approaching holiday season can be a particularly unsafe time for those with electronics knowledge, as you will inevitably get recruited to do everything from installing software to hooking up a Blu-ray player to transferring music to an MP3 player. That's when you should direct these people and their headache-inducing questions to Zip Express Installation.

The company offers installation services starting at $129.95 for home theater, TV, and computer setup, and includes a one-year warranty on its services. Along with scheduling next-day … Read more

Installation art uses live fish to remix MP3s

Brazilian artist Vivian Caccuri has put together a really neat piece of installation art that remixes music from an MP3 player based on the movements of live fish. The setup uses a proximity sensor to monitor what the fish are doing and changes the processing levels, adding and removing distortion and speaker fade as they go about their fishy business.

The video, which I've embedded below, was shot by Alex Tyson, who recorded straight off the installation's sound board. To appreciate it properly you should watch it with a good pair of headphones, as the music has been … Read more

Why Installer.app will never die

When Apple announced the iPhone apps store several months ago, it appeared to signal the end for the popular homebrew Installer.app by Nullriver. While the application has a few developer creations that cost money to use, most of the library is completely free, letting people load up on useful applications without spending a dime. The application became so popular it started coming with popular unlock and jailbreak utilities, including ZiPhone, which has had more than 3 million downloads of its latest version.

Apple's new system is a different story. It doesn't cost anything, but developers must go … Read more