Believe it or not…
…these two are soon getting married.
***
Showing posts with label Gear. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gear. Show all posts
20091127
20090602
Nowhere near the uncanny valley
…but still: this gives me a warm and nostalgic feeling coming straight from the early eighties.
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Maybe we'll get our flying cars, too, at some point ?
20090531
A Better Place than Google Earth.
Looking for a poster child for the western world and whole earth future, if there's any to have ? Look no further, we have a friggin' winner right there.
Shai Agassi, founder of Better Place, is well on his way to put internal combustion engines and coal power plants where they belong: in museums.
All that within the next two decades, mind you.
Best part of it is, it could actually work.
With a single eureka and a deployment plan that shows uncanny smarts for context analysis, the same man / company could be both the inventor, the initiator and the main agent of the most significant milestone to date on the way to green power and CO2 emission reduction.
The idea is simple: gas-powered cars are responsible for about 25% of the human-related CO2 emissions, but electric cars are plagued by their limited autonomy and the recharge time of today's batteries , not to mention their unfavorable cost of ownership.
Eureka.
Agassi's solution is to remove the battery from the end-user's side of the equation, and not for trolley wheels.
In the Better Place model, the killer app is gas stations equivalents that can swap the main electric battery of a car in the same time (or less) it takes to fill a tank of gas today, with less hassle for the user. Better even, by taking advantage of a car's downtime on the parking lot to recharge the batteries, these pit stops would be only occasional, and in any case less frequent than with a gasoline car.
Swapping the actual battery instead of recharging it is genuinely brilliant, largely because it's practical, provided the infrastructure allows the process to be fully automated, a plan that doesn't have to worry about backward compatibility or established providers slowing down the penetration of Better Place-compatible battery swap stations, because there is no competition yet.
Electric car owners don't have to front the cost of the batteries anymore, and re-pay it over time through the e-miles they're billed on battery swap (much like today's cell phones are sold below cost by telcos and repaid by the customer through her phone bills/minutes recharges).
Not only does this solution reduce the cost of acquisition and total cost of ownership for the customer while solving the autonomy issues, but it also enables all electric cars to seamlessly upgrade to the latest in batteries technology as those become available in power stations, further reducing the per-mile cost and environmental footprint of cars over time.
The required infrastructure may seem like a huge barrier to entry, until you realize building charge spots at home, on the workplace parking lot isn't such a big deal, since they're basically smart power outlets.
As for the much more innovative Battery Switch Stations, it definitely takes more heavy duty work, what with the cars on conveyor belts and the automated underside extraction/replacement of batteries in under 5', but I'd guess in these times of economic collapse, the extra jobs are welcome, and the real estate for that can be found at affordable prices, where simply converting existing gas stations is not an option.
Double-plus smart.
You would expect such a perfect plan to be instantly torpedo'ed by BigOil™ with all the weight they can put to milk the last of the gasoline profit until the world ends, right ?
That's where Agassi's business acumen really shines: after solving the practical issues on the wares front, he figured how to reach critical mass to force his way in by going for the most eager early adopter for anything that gets them out of OPEC and Iranian grip: Israel.
Then he moved on to the euro tree-huggers with their 100+ % taxes on gasoline and gas-powered cars, and to the third-worldish/developping countries that aren't too happy about spending their limited monies on Saudi oil when they could use homegrown electricity instead.
Australia, Canada, Japan are hopping on the bandwagon already, with many others to follow …well, pretty much any place gasoline is expensive and not locally produced in sufficient quantities to feed domestic needs can see the incentive in the model.
The US of A lag behind still, as usual when it comes to not entirely burning down the planet, yet the combo of Obama's green bent with a totally wrecked economy should steer Uncle Sam toward the clean electrons light sometime before people start shooting each other for jerrycans, Mad Max style.
Although there obviously are some bumps to iron out before the Better Place EV go global as intended, such as the big issue of actually feeding all those batteries with clean juice — lest eco-friendly EVs have to run on on dirty electrons from coal/diesel power plants — there is a good chance this model might work out: context has never been better for radical changes in the human transportation industry, and green is the new pink.
Where Google claims Do no evil as its motto (which is unrealistic, sounds a bit holier-than-thou and is largely disproved by the facts), Agassi takes a more radical and uplifting approach of not just dreaming the world was a Better Place.
My 2KW.
The enabler value of this project is not to be overlooked either: not only does it have the potential to single-handedly grow the market for clean electricity to critical mass, but it should make green juice available anywhere you have cars, which is also where consumer of electricity (for other purposes) hang out.
Once the infrastructure is there, and you can buy clean electrons right at home or at the corner shop for cheaper than the no-name current of your local utility company, both on tab and canned, the realm of possibles for creative/derivative applications (and lawsuits) is rather shweet.
Despite appeasing cookies thrown in the general direction of electric utility companies such as "Better Place’s services will also create an opportunity for utilities to utilize electricity produced from intermittent renewable energy sources more effectively (e.g., wind power generated at night).", it's pretty obvious where this is headed: the electrons route is about to become a two-way street as consumers awareness of electricity as a product (as in good/commodity) rises.
It's a recurring theme in Better Place's discourse that not all electrons are equal, depending on how they are produced, harvested, distributed and used.
With the green fad nowhere near ending, organic junkies will jump at the opportunity to switch to clean electrons for much more than powering their cars, as soon as convenience meets quality.
It won't be long after Better Place goes gold before homegrown and farmer-market styled electrons offers begin to flourish.
Will the utility companies cling on their crumbling monopolies, or embrace the change to get in business with local producers by offering to store and distribute their green juice ?
My guess is: both, and the former will go down lobbying and suing till they're blue in the face and get washed off.
The remaining ones will have to fight for their lives, by competing on retail price and/or perceived value (green is better, hence worth more) driving up the demand for affordable clean electrons.
I suspect Shai Agassi knows this already, but I can see clean electrons becoming an everyday alternative currency before 2030 if Better Place works out halfway as good as announced.
Meanwhile, I'd put my money in flywheels and efficient small scale water turbines if I had any (I'll leave as an exercise for the reader to work out what just crossed my mind, here).
Shai Agassi, founder of Better Place, is well on his way to put internal combustion engines and coal power plants where they belong: in museums.
All that within the next two decades, mind you.
Best part of it is, it could actually work.
With a single eureka and a deployment plan that shows uncanny smarts for context analysis, the same man / company could be both the inventor, the initiator and the main agent of the most significant milestone to date on the way to green power and CO2 emission reduction.
The idea is simple: gas-powered cars are responsible for about 25% of the human-related CO2 emissions, but electric cars are plagued by their limited autonomy and the recharge time of today's batteries , not to mention their unfavorable cost of ownership.
Eureka.
Agassi's solution is to remove the battery from the end-user's side of the equation, and not for trolley wheels.
In the Better Place model, the killer app is gas stations equivalents that can swap the main electric battery of a car in the same time (or less) it takes to fill a tank of gas today, with less hassle for the user. Better even, by taking advantage of a car's downtime on the parking lot to recharge the batteries, these pit stops would be only occasional, and in any case less frequent than with a gasoline car.
Swapping the actual battery instead of recharging it is genuinely brilliant, largely because it's practical, provided the infrastructure allows the process to be fully automated, a plan that doesn't have to worry about backward compatibility or established providers slowing down the penetration of Better Place-compatible battery swap stations, because there is no competition yet.
Electric car owners don't have to front the cost of the batteries anymore, and re-pay it over time through the e-miles they're billed on battery swap (much like today's cell phones are sold below cost by telcos and repaid by the customer through her phone bills/minutes recharges).
Not only does this solution reduce the cost of acquisition and total cost of ownership for the customer while solving the autonomy issues, but it also enables all electric cars to seamlessly upgrade to the latest in batteries technology as those become available in power stations, further reducing the per-mile cost and environmental footprint of cars over time.
The required infrastructure may seem like a huge barrier to entry, until you realize building charge spots at home, on the workplace parking lot isn't such a big deal, since they're basically smart power outlets.
As for the much more innovative Battery Switch Stations, it definitely takes more heavy duty work, what with the cars on conveyor belts and the automated underside extraction/replacement of batteries in under 5', but I'd guess in these times of economic collapse, the extra jobs are welcome, and the real estate for that can be found at affordable prices, where simply converting existing gas stations is not an option.
Double-plus smart.
You would expect such a perfect plan to be instantly torpedo'ed by BigOil™ with all the weight they can put to milk the last of the gasoline profit until the world ends, right ?
That's where Agassi's business acumen really shines: after solving the practical issues on the wares front, he figured how to reach critical mass to force his way in by going for the most eager early adopter for anything that gets them out of OPEC and Iranian grip: Israel.
Then he moved on to the euro tree-huggers with their 100+ % taxes on gasoline and gas-powered cars, and to the third-worldish/developping countries that aren't too happy about spending their limited monies on Saudi oil when they could use homegrown electricity instead.
Australia, Canada, Japan are hopping on the bandwagon already, with many others to follow …well, pretty much any place gasoline is expensive and not locally produced in sufficient quantities to feed domestic needs can see the incentive in the model.
The US of A lag behind still, as usual when it comes to not entirely burning down the planet, yet the combo of Obama's green bent with a totally wrecked economy should steer Uncle Sam toward the clean electrons light sometime before people start shooting each other for jerrycans, Mad Max style.
Full spiel @ TED '09.
Although there obviously are some bumps to iron out before the Better Place EV go global as intended, such as the big issue of actually feeding all those batteries with clean juice — lest eco-friendly EVs have to run on on dirty electrons from coal/diesel power plants — there is a good chance this model might work out: context has never been better for radical changes in the human transportation industry, and green is the new pink.
Where Google claims Do no evil as its motto (which is unrealistic, sounds a bit holier-than-thou and is largely disproved by the facts), Agassi takes a more radical and uplifting approach of not just dreaming the world was a Better Place.
My 2KW.
The enabler value of this project is not to be overlooked either: not only does it have the potential to single-handedly grow the market for clean electricity to critical mass, but it should make green juice available anywhere you have cars, which is also where consumer of electricity (for other purposes) hang out.
Once the infrastructure is there, and you can buy clean electrons right at home or at the corner shop for cheaper than the no-name current of your local utility company, both on tab and canned, the realm of possibles for creative/derivative applications (and lawsuits) is rather shweet.
Despite appeasing cookies thrown in the general direction of electric utility companies such as "Better Place’s services will also create an opportunity for utilities to utilize electricity produced from intermittent renewable energy sources more effectively (e.g., wind power generated at night).", it's pretty obvious where this is headed: the electrons route is about to become a two-way street as consumers awareness of electricity as a product (as in good/commodity) rises.
It's a recurring theme in Better Place's discourse that not all electrons are equal, depending on how they are produced, harvested, distributed and used.
With the green fad nowhere near ending, organic junkies will jump at the opportunity to switch to clean electrons for much more than powering their cars, as soon as convenience meets quality.
It won't be long after Better Place goes gold before homegrown and farmer-market styled electrons offers begin to flourish.
Will the utility companies cling on their crumbling monopolies, or embrace the change to get in business with local producers by offering to store and distribute their green juice ?
My guess is: both, and the former will go down lobbying and suing till they're blue in the face and get washed off.
The remaining ones will have to fight for their lives, by competing on retail price and/or perceived value (green is better, hence worth more) driving up the demand for affordable clean electrons.
I suspect Shai Agassi knows this already, but I can see clean electrons becoming an everyday alternative currency before 2030 if Better Place works out halfway as good as announced.
Meanwhile, I'd put my money in flywheels and efficient small scale water turbines if I had any (I'll leave as an exercise for the reader to work out what just crossed my mind, here).
20090422
Steampunking the MacBook Pro…
Right about to get one of the 'new' unibody 17" MacBook Pro, I'm told these tend to run *hot*.
Looking at Apple's specs, the operating ambient temperature range for these machines is 10°C to 35°C.
Needless to say, I routinely run my laptops on the high end of these temps, if not higher, which is a good enough reason to be concerned that those figures may not just be a matter of CYA on Apple's part.
Add to that the double issue of battery life and dust buildup inside the machine, both of which are tied to how often and how hard the two fans at the rear of the MacBook have to blow on the CPU/GPU heatpipes' heat exchangers, and it becomes obvious that anything which can be done to improve the cooling of this laptop by other means is a GoodThing™.
[Speaking of which, I'm not entirely sure how much of the air intake is done from the rear grille and how much is dependent on semi-improvised various holes such as around the keyboard, etc.]
Since I want to keep the drilling through the MacBook Pro chassis to a minimum of roughly zero (and it's not like there's much room to spare inside the box anyway), the back of the display casing seems like the best place to hook up some external cooling apparatus.
Yet before I even begin to worry about where the heck 'plate' type heatpipes can be procured, or how to build a small thermosyphon, I'll have to figure out the first and so very weak link in my thermal chain, ie: how to extract the heat from the 'cold end' of the factory heatpipes, and bring it to the 'hot end' of a back-of-the-display thermal circuit ?
The wiggle room between the internal heat pipe and the unibody shell is about 3 millimeters at best, and right next to the rear grille, so I figure a sheet of copper attached with clips and connected with thermal paste to the 'cold end' of the factory heatpipes can get me out of the chassis without sigificant adverse effects on the factory cooling system.
…yet from there I still need to work my way around the bottom of the display (which rests inconveniently below the topside plane of the main chassis) to reach the 'hot end' of the external heat dissipation circuit.
And no, hard plumbing is not an option, the display must still be able to open, adjust and close with the external cooling system mounted on, so the thermal bridge better be flexible.
Ideas ?
[See here for an in-depth look at the innards of the 17" MacBook Pro Unibody.]
Looking at Apple's specs, the operating ambient temperature range for these machines is 10°C to 35°C.
Needless to say, I routinely run my laptops on the high end of these temps, if not higher, which is a good enough reason to be concerned that those figures may not just be a matter of CYA on Apple's part.
Add to that the double issue of battery life and dust buildup inside the machine, both of which are tied to how often and how hard the two fans at the rear of the MacBook have to blow on the CPU/GPU heatpipes' heat exchangers, and it becomes obvious that anything which can be done to improve the cooling of this laptop by other means is a GoodThing™.
[Speaking of which, I'm not entirely sure how much of the air intake is done from the rear grille and how much is dependent on semi-improvised various holes such as around the keyboard, etc.]
Since I want to keep the drilling through the MacBook Pro chassis to a minimum of roughly zero (and it's not like there's much room to spare inside the box anyway), the back of the display casing seems like the best place to hook up some external cooling apparatus.
Yet before I even begin to worry about where the heck 'plate' type heatpipes can be procured, or how to build a small thermosyphon, I'll have to figure out the first and so very weak link in my thermal chain, ie: how to extract the heat from the 'cold end' of the factory heatpipes, and bring it to the 'hot end' of a back-of-the-display thermal circuit ?
The wiggle room between the internal heat pipe and the unibody shell is about 3 millimeters at best, and right next to the rear grille, so I figure a sheet of copper attached with clips and connected with thermal paste to the 'cold end' of the factory heatpipes can get me out of the chassis without sigificant adverse effects on the factory cooling system.
…yet from there I still need to work my way around the bottom of the display (which rests inconveniently below the topside plane of the main chassis) to reach the 'hot end' of the external heat dissipation circuit.
And no, hard plumbing is not an option, the display must still be able to open, adjust and close with the external cooling system mounted on, so the thermal bridge better be flexible.
Ideas ?
[See here for an in-depth look at the innards of the 17" MacBook Pro Unibody.]
Glaswegian Computing.
I'm currently looking into options for an unpowered and silent yet efficient cooling system for a mid-to-high end gaming rig.
At first, I looked into heatpipes and/or thermosyphon based designs, but I recently stumbled on an old experiment, and it got me thinking.
Yes, at the uncanny crossroads of Scottish cuisine and Xtr3m3 nerdiness, people figured deep-fried computing was an operating concept, provided the tub is see-through.
Seriously, follow the link, I'll wait…
The quick and dirty cooking-oil-in-a-tub proven surprisingly solid, especially on the noise reduction end of things, which is kind of a big deal for me.
I also like the elegant simplicity of a pure convection liquid cooling system with zero pumps or extra power requirements.
The main limitations of the oil-immersion model (besides the yuck factor when adding extra RAM) seem to be the potentially harmful capacitance and corrosive characteristics of cooking oil, but provided a similar fluid without those drawbacks can be substituted, this approach has real potential.
Oil-like liquids, despite being less thermally efficient, are especially attractive as they don't evaporate as easily, which fits the general less is more angle I'm going for.
It would seem practical enough to build a kit based on a ready-made durable container, where the motherboard and PSU would be placed near the bottom, while everything that needs to remain easily user accessible such as drives and I/O connectors could be installed above 'sea level'.
Some passive funnels could also be mounted inside the cooling pool to boost the convection cycle.
Provided the side walls of the containers were made of acceptably transparent material, plexiglass style, and that two or more (non-soluble with each other) fluids of different densities could be found (that fit the conductive/capacitance/corrosion bill), a 3GHz lava-lamp becomes a distinct possibility.
Obviously the one big technical bump is finding the right fluid(s).
Any ideas ?
At first, I looked into heatpipes and/or thermosyphon based designs, but I recently stumbled on an old experiment, and it got me thinking.
Yes, at the uncanny crossroads of Scottish cuisine and Xtr3m3 nerdiness, people figured deep-fried computing was an operating concept, provided the tub is see-through.
Seriously, follow the link, I'll wait…
The quick and dirty cooking-oil-in-a-tub proven surprisingly solid, especially on the noise reduction end of things, which is kind of a big deal for me.
I also like the elegant simplicity of a pure convection liquid cooling system with zero pumps or extra power requirements.
The main limitations of the oil-immersion model (besides the yuck factor when adding extra RAM) seem to be the potentially harmful capacitance and corrosive characteristics of cooking oil, but provided a similar fluid without those drawbacks can be substituted, this approach has real potential.
Oil-like liquids, despite being less thermally efficient, are especially attractive as they don't evaporate as easily, which fits the general less is more angle I'm going for.
It would seem practical enough to build a kit based on a ready-made durable container, where the motherboard and PSU would be placed near the bottom, while everything that needs to remain easily user accessible such as drives and I/O connectors could be installed above 'sea level'.
Some passive funnels could also be mounted inside the cooling pool to boost the convection cycle.
Provided the side walls of the containers were made of acceptably transparent material, plexiglass style, and that two or more (non-soluble with each other) fluids of different densities could be found (that fit the conductive/capacitance/corrosion bill), a 3GHz lava-lamp becomes a distinct possibility.
Obviously the one big technical bump is finding the right fluid(s).
Any ideas ?
20081028
X-over 4 free 111
[Full disclosure: I am a CrossOver Advocate, for EVE Online, Teamspeak and Ventrilo apps, albeit an unpaid one, so you may want to take my opinion with a grain of salt over potential fanboism — but not corporate whore-ing].
CodeWeavers' CEO seemingly blew a fuse a while back (around july '08) with the Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge, and then another a few days ago when some hiccup in the US of A high-velocity circling of the history drain sent the gas price at St Paul's pumps back down to $2.79.
End result: Crossover if offered for free (today) at CodeWeavers' website.
Does it look like a shameless plug to you ? It is, certainly, but in no way a shameful one in my view, as CrossOver is one of the best standalone WinXX emulators on the MacOS X platform (at least).
I'm a daily user of Parallel's Desktop for Mac, TransGaming's Cider (as it's the official platform for EVE Online's Mac 'client'), and CodeWeavers' Crossover (which, did I mention it, you can get for free today).
Objectively, Crossover smokes Cider on everything but audio, of which there is none at this writing: it doesn't crash nor pukes as much in the RAM, and most importantly for laptop users, doesn't attempt to melt your GPU the instant you launch a second client — and who plays EVE with less than two sessions, I ask you ?
There are obviously things you can't do with a WINE-styled WinXX emulator, compared to a machine-level emulation a-la Parallels Desktop, but when it comes to gaming, you can't beat the performance of Crossover, short of rebooting in native Windows mode — which is usually something I personally try to avoid.
So if you have a MacOS X machine, give it a spin, it's free as beer for one year if you jump at it today…
CodeWeavers' CEO seemingly blew a fuse a while back (around july '08) with the Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge, and then another a few days ago when some hiccup in the US of A high-velocity circling of the history drain sent the gas price at St Paul's pumps back down to $2.79.
End result: Crossover if offered for free (today) at CodeWeavers' website.
Does it look like a shameless plug to you ? It is, certainly, but in no way a shameful one in my view, as CrossOver is one of the best standalone WinXX emulators on the MacOS X platform (at least).
I'm a daily user of Parallel's Desktop for Mac, TransGaming's Cider (as it's the official platform for EVE Online's Mac 'client'), and CodeWeavers' Crossover (which, did I mention it, you can get for free today).
Objectively, Crossover smokes Cider on everything but audio, of which there is none at this writing: it doesn't crash nor pukes as much in the RAM, and most importantly for laptop users, doesn't attempt to melt your GPU the instant you launch a second client — and who plays EVE with less than two sessions, I ask you ?
There are obviously things you can't do with a WINE-styled WinXX emulator, compared to a machine-level emulation a-la Parallels Desktop, but when it comes to gaming, you can't beat the performance of Crossover, short of rebooting in native Windows mode — which is usually something I personally try to avoid.
So if you have a MacOS X machine, give it a spin, it's free as beer for one year if you jump at it today…
20080418
Cooking made easy.
This is a shameless plug for a piece of MacOS X software, but since it's freeware, you don't even have to worry about me having a vested interest in pushing this to your Dashboard.
What it does is deceptively simple: create iCal events (complete with alarms) in the future with minimal keypresses and interface fiddling.
Time units can be toggled to hours or days prior to digit input, by hitting the h or d key first. Beautiful in simplicity.
In fact, before CASE Apps became Gravity Apps, their slogan was:
Their other stuff is nice, too — I'd buy Steel in a blink if it was cross-platform, but I'm still entangled to good ole S3's PasswordWallet, for compatibility reasons.
As a final note, it's worth mentioning what a nice chap Martin Kahr is:
Back in 2006, when Reminder 1.x was still Rem!nder, published by CASE Apps, I had problems getting it to work reliably on my tuned version of Panther (notably using case-sensitive FS), and Martin whipped a custom build overnight that fixed it and got me running up to the 2.0 release (Leopard friendly).
Tip'o'the hat, that's solid freeware support.
Reminder ?
Reminder is a Dashboard Widget that took me some time to find, and which I've been depending on ever since, for everything from cooking to calling people back, to keeping the infamous *just 5 minutes* computer-time warp in check.What it does is deceptively simple: create iCal events (complete with alarms) in the future with minimal keypresses and interface fiddling.
Usage:
Summon Dashboard, and if you — like me — leave Reminder on as your last/default text input, all you need is to type the number of minutes until the event, optionally hit Tab once to edit the name of the alarm, and press Return or Enter before you resume normal activity.Time units can be toggled to hours or days prior to digit input, by hitting the h or d key first. Beautiful in simplicity.
Notes:
This is one of those *basic* tools I'm confident no MovieOS designer could overlook, yet is consistently absent from RealWorld™ vanilla OS distros.In fact, before CASE Apps became Gravity Apps, their slogan was:
Applications that should have been in the box.Spot on.
Their other stuff is nice, too — I'd buy Steel in a blink if it was cross-platform, but I'm still entangled to good ole S3's PasswordWallet, for compatibility reasons.
As a final note, it's worth mentioning what a nice chap Martin Kahr is:
Back in 2006, when Reminder 1.x was still Rem!nder, published by CASE Apps, I had problems getting it to work reliably on my tuned version of Panther (notably using case-sensitive FS), and Martin whipped a custom build overnight that fixed it and got me running up to the 2.0 release (Leopard friendly).
Tip'o'the hat, that's solid freeware support.
20080417
Ball-point ride.
Toss a couple random items in a beta-grade teleporter, and you don't quite get that flying car I was promised in the 50's...
but this thing still makes for some cute future shock.
[PS: free cookies for anyone who can tell me how to avoid borders on pictures.]
[PPS: Found it ! Free cookies for meh.]
but this thing still makes for some cute future shock.
[PS: free cookies for anyone who can tell me how to avoid borders on pictures.]
[PPS: Found it ! Free cookies for meh.]
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