Unilorin Partners U.S. Firm To Build N600bn Solar Power Plant

The University of Ilorin (UNILORIN) has signed a memorandum of agreements with a United States of America based firm for the production and installation of 500 megawatts solar powered plant.

The solar powered plant to be located inside the campus is part of effort to curb the incessant power outages in some parts of the country especially Lagos and Kano states.

Addressing journalists after the signing of the agreements, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ilorin, Professor Abdulganiyy Ambali, explained that the public private partnership with the firm will cost the company 600 billion naira.

The General Manager of Arrow Capital, Brian Travis, noted that the project when completed by October 2016 would serve both Lagos and Kano states as the megawatts would be sold to them in accordance with the permission of the federal government. - ChannelsTV

Microsoft's amazing new app helps the blind see.

At the 2016 Microsoft Build event, Microsoft announced a lot of  cool technologies, but one particular announcement, really stood out and inspired me.

Saqib Shaikh, a visually impaired Software Developer at Microsoft, developed an app that identifies objects in the user's environment and it describes it back into the user's ear. The app uses a smartphone camera or a camera equipped glasses to see it's environment.

"I think it's a man jumping through the air doing a trick on a skateboard," the app says.

"I see two faces: 40-year-old man with a beard looking surprised; 20-year-old woman looking happy."

The "Seeing AI App", is still in development, but looks really promising. Can't wait to see the finished product and to see how it will positively improve people's lives.

Enjoy the video below.

How I get 24-Hours of power in Nigeria without a gen or "NEPA"

First of all, this is not a marketing post. I am just excited to share my experience with anyone who is willing to benefit from the joys of uninterrupted clean energy.

Power outages in Nigeria have been the norm for several decades but Nigerians have never gotten used to it and I don't think we will. From ECN (Electricity Corporation of Nigeria) to NEPA (Nigerian Electric Power Authority) to PHCN (Power Holding Company of Nigeria) to the present day privatization, sadly, the power situation hasn't changed. We have given the government fifty-odd years to prove themselves and I think it's high-time we take matters into our own hands.

Fortunately, Nigeria is blessed with  a lot of sunlight all year round due to it's geographical location and since December 2015, when I decided to tap into mother natures blessings, I have had uninterrupted power supply.

In this blog post, I am going to show you how to run on 24-hour of power by leveraging solar panels and energy efficient appliances. I am a big advocate of renewable energy(as you'll see from my blog posts) and I just had to put my money where my mouth was... as they say.

Okay, let's get right into it.

2 Cool Augmented Reality Windows 8 Apps

The two apps I'll show you today are from Corinth

1. Corinth Micro Engines Augmented (Download Here): 

Have you ever been interested in types of engines and how do they work? This ground-breaking 3D interactive educational app offers all the facts you are looking for - in a visually outstanding, easy-to-understand and fun package. 

Watch a video of how it works below:

Making of John Lewis The Bear & The Hare Advert

Just amazing!

List of the tools & services used to build GOV.UK

I've always thought the GOV.UK site was well built aesthetically and even in it's robustness. After visiting a couple of other government sites I decided to find out what was used to build the site and what makes GOV.UK so amazing compared to the others.

I was well pleased to find out that there was a blog post on their website dedicated to the tools and services used to develop the site.

I've listed some of them here:

Frontend:

• HTML/CSS/JS - using HTML5 where appropriate, with a heavy focus on accessibility, and validating where we can
•  Jquery
• SCSS
• A2-Type for font production 

The core of the servers:

• Infrastructure As A Service (basically, they don't host in-house servers. This will ease scaling and mitigate maintenance costs) from Skyscape
• Akamai as the Content Delivery Network 
• Servers run on Ubuntu GNU/Linux 10.04

Redirection:

• nginx used for redirection
• perl used to manage redirections  
• node.js was used to build a side-by-side browser for reviewing redirections

Yahoo! mail's new alternative to multiple tabs (Recent)

Like most people, I always thought Yahoo! mail's 'multi tab' feature was really cool and helpful. But since it's recent update, that feature seemed to have disappeared.

I stumbled on a new feautre that pretty much does the same thing.

Watch the 16seconds video below to see how:

Your recent activity in Yahoo Mail is there when you want it, but not in the way when you don't. Quickly get to your recent emails, search results, and drafts with a single click.

Simple Opencart tutorial - shipping rate based on percentage of order

I was looking all over the internet for a free module to allow me set the shipping cost by a percentage if the order total was within a certain range; but to no avail :(
So I decided to do it myself.

Here's what I needed...

So for example:

• If we set the shipping cost to be 10% of the order total, for an order total of £158.00, the shipping cost will be £15.80.

This is how I did it:

First of all,

1. You have to download this free module -> Total Based Shipping (http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=4029 )
2. Follow the instructions on how to install the module (it's really easy)
3. When you are done with that, navigate to catalog\model\shipping\standard_cost.php
• NB: the standard_cost.php file will be a file from the module you just downloaded.
4. Scroll to where you see, it should be around line 38 - 50
• if ($cart_subtotal <= $data[0]) {
if (isset($data[1])) {
$cost = $data[1];}
break;
}
5. Then insert this
• elseif ($cart_subtotal <= 200.00 ){
$cost = $cart_subtotal*0.1;
break; }

Simple! You just needed to add 3 lines of code.

The Module you downloaded in step 1 allows you to set specific shipping cost based on the order total. So we just included that code to calculate shipping cost based on a set percentage (in the above example, it's 10%. To calculate for a different percentage, just change the '0.1' in the code to whatever you want).

This was a quick fix and unfortunately, it's hard-coded. I'll try and improve on it so it can be modified from Opencart's back-end and update this post.

Please feel free to make suggestions or comments below. Thanks

Exoskeleton helps paralysed walk - Ekso

After decades of development, Ekso's bionics technology has now been taken out of the lab and into the commercial market.

It's really nice to see the joy on peoples faces after taking their first steps in years and in some cases, forever.

Charge your phone while riding your bike - Siva Cycle

After the Urine Powered Generator, Solar Cooker, Solar hand-bag and the shoe charger, SolePower, this has to be my favourite gadget yet. It's very simple and practical. Might just start riding again :-D

I'm sure most of us have had our smartphones run out of battery at least once... Siva Cycle has created a gadget to stop that from happening again.

Best part is, Siva Cycle have pledged to donate one of the devices to those in need for every 10 purchases... cool!

Watch the video below to see how it works; pretty sweet.

Fascinating Nigeria

I have to say, the minister of Tourism, Culture & National Orientation, Chief Edem Duke, did a great job on launching this platform. It's an official guide to all Nigeria has to offer; It's pretty detailed and enjoyable.

Nigerian Food

Carnivals

The web developers also did a fantastic job on the mobile and desktop sites.
Have a look at the site here

Ceremonies

How do you answer 3 billion questions a day?

Ben Gomes  (Illustration: Sumit Kumar)

GOOGLE SEARCH FACTS

• Google handles more than 100 billion searches each month or more than three billion per day.
• Google has to crawl more than 20 billion pages a day to keep up with the ever-changing web.
• Google has found 60 trillion web addresses so far, up from one trillion in 2008.
• Google has indexed pages from over 230 million domains.
• A query on Google travels 750 miles each way, to and from the data centre.- BBC

What do you do if you get more than three billion queries a day?

If you are Ben Gomes, Google's Tanzania-born, India-bred, US-educated vice-president of search, you are responsible for helping to answer all of them - in the shortest time possible, on all devices: desktops, tablets, phones. And now, in the spoken word too.

Continue reading the main story

Search is Google's raison d'etre and cash cow, bringing in a bulk of its $50bn (£33bn) revenues last year. It is also, says Mr Gomes, "about having a continuous conversation with the user to find out what he wants". 

Read the rest of the interview he had with the BBC here.

Follow me on Instagram @gadgetboy_naija

instagram.com/gadgetboy_naija 

How We Lost Our Capacity to Innovate in Nigeria #TEDx #Ofili

It's amazing how we Nigerians hardly innovate. The speaker in the video below, Okechukwu Ofili, stated something quite profound and apparent about Nigeria, which is the fact that we Nigerians suffer from something he calls, "the foreign comparison issue". This is were we tend to compare our status and accomplishments with developed countries which somehow, mentally dampens our capacity; which shouldn't be. Seeing other countries constantly innovating and developing should instinctively cajole us to aim higher but unfortunately, that isn't the case.

Ofili also gave some statistics which I found embarrassing (being a Nigerian) but enlightening at the same time.
Between 2000 and 2011:

• 450,000 patents were registered in Japan (population 120 Million)
• 15,000 patents registered in Israel (population 10 million)
• 1500 patents registered in South Africa (40 Million)
• 17 patents registered in Nigeria (population 150 million) 

X_X

Ofili, is an engineer, author, artist and public speaker (he probably has more up his sleeves) who is well known for his books and well-entertaining blog.
I found this talk uplifting, inspiring and I will definitely start innovating more... hope you will too.

SolePower - Charge your smartphone by walking

Watch the video of how it works

"SolePower is another contraption that lets you charge your smartphone through a very basic action that everyone does at some point during the day: walk. Similar concepts have been proposed before, but a group is finally taking action and their proposed device is called SolePower. It’s dubbed as a “power-generating shoe” that allows the wearer to charge portable electronics like smartphones, MP3 players, and tablets as they walk.