General: About my 2009 prediction

In 2009 I predicted a change to 240 Volt power in the US to facilitate the large power demand for vehicle recharging.
At the 2011 CES in Las Vegas, General Electric had a stand showing their 'WattStation' charging a Chevrolet Volt.
The nice thing is that it is apparently a 240 Volt system :-)

AP writes "An attendee looks GE's new Residential WattStation plugged into a Chevrolet Volt electric car at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show January 8, 2011 in Las Vegas. The 240 volt Residential WattStation is intended to be installed at home and can charge a car in only 4-8 hours. The Residential WattStation will ship in the fall and is expected to retail for between UAD $1,000 to $1,500."

I have no idea what UAD are, but if they meant AUD then US is about the same.


Update: 20110119 -

The Register has an interesting story on the current (no pun intended) state of UK electric vehicle recharge infrastructure which has this interesting bit of information -

"... This is because e-car batteries can't be charged up at all quickly. Using a specialist 240V, 32-amp supply - representative of the sort of charging point that could be widespread very quickly, and the rating that its users' home charge points have - a Mini-E can recharge in 4½ hours. The maximum amperage it can take, according to the makers, is 48: thus the fastest it can possibly, theoretically be juiced up without damage is 3 hours. If the luckless Mini E driver is compelled to use a normal UK wall socket, it will take well in excess of 10 hours. ..."

The next paragraph dealing with the recharging of a Tesla Roadster is a bit of a horror story! It is well worth reading the whole article.

That's a lot of power to generate and distribute over a country to run a significant percentage of transport on electricity. I think that even the local distribution for that power will be at a lot more than 240V, probably with a small substation/transformer per cluster of recharge points.

General: My Obesity Solution

Here is a passing thought I will share with you.
The media and doctors are all brow-beating us about how the population is becoming obese.
Well surely, if so many people are becoming obese, then it should be time to redraw the height/weight scales that are used to determine 'normal'.
If you think that would be cheating consider this - the scales currently in use were derived post-war after years of rationing where people barely saw sugar or butter or any sizable piece of meat, is that fair? Is it pure coincidence or artistic incompetence that paintings and books from previous centuries depict a great many portly people? (Think 'Pickwick Papers').
I think that losing weight might be a good plan, but I am not convinced that we are being judged fairly.

Others doubt the BMI too!

Update: A nice kicking for BMI on The Register -'Being fat is no worse for you than being a woman'

General: The passing of a friend

Peter Hemsley was a good friend of mine who lived in the UK.
I had known him for about thirty-eight years when we both became 'Telecoms Technician Apprentices' in British Telecom (then known as the Post Office as the same company was the national mail carrier)

During this time we both enrolled in an early computing night-class at South-East Derbyshire College of Further Education and rapidly gained skills in BASIC and PDP-8 assembler, both memory-constrained so we learnt to code lean and mean!

Later we both worked at S.E Labs in Sandiacre, Nottingham (which became a branch of Thorn EMI Datatech) in the field of instrument repair specialising in microprocessor-based instruments and analogue and digital multi-channel tape decks.

During this time and subsequently, we formed a business partnership, 'Amber Microsystems' specialising in the development of custom hardware and software. Much of our development work was carried out on Apple ][ machines which were our first (and much loved!) personal computers. I left my half of the company to Pete' when I emigrated to Australia in late 1987.

I didn't normally get a lot of email from this friend although I included him on all the techo' newsletters and occasionally sent him an update on happenings in my life.
For a couple of weeks I had email delivery failure notices from his mailbox provider and on further investigation, his domain seemed to be gone from the internet.
On last Monday (the 23rd Feb') my unease and foreboding prompted me to seek more information on his curent status.

Knowing that he was keen on Amateur Radio, I 'Googled' his name with 'RSGB', that being the body (Radio Society of Great Britain) that 'Ham' clubs are affiliated with in the UK.
Sadly, I found an obituary notice on the site of SNADARC, a club in South Normanton, a village close by his home and one of our old haunts. -

Peter Hemsley
It is with sadness we report that Peter Hemsley has passed away recently after his brave five month battle with cancer.
A floral tribute was sent on behalf of the club and members were also in attendance at the funeral service at Mansfield Crematorium.

Searching the site for confirmation that this was the same person I found some pictures that indeed seemed to be of my friend and I sent off an email with a picture I took of Peter in April for them to confirm my conclusion.

Sadly, it was indeed my friend Peter that had passed away just before Christmas after a five month battle with cancer.
When I saw him in April he was pretty ill and said that he had Emphysema (bad enough in itself) but perhaps he got re-diagnosed afterwards.
I suppose that his preference for hand-rolled filterless cigarettes may well have caught up with him finally.

He was an elegant coder with a preference for assembly language and had a particular skill with numerical methods and an intuitive grasp of manipulating numbers in binary representation.
There are still several places on the internet archiving his fast and compact PIC microcontroller routines for Square roots and Decimal Input/Output that he originally presented in Everyday and Practical Electronics magazine.
A bit of competitive fun that we both enjoyed was each taking turns trying to improve the speed or reduce the size of a piece of code until no further improvements could be made. I think the score was about even (well, that's my story and I'm sticking with it!).
He was similarly economical when it came to hardware design and contrived some very nifty microprocessor-based designs and single-sided PCB layouts with minimal interconnects.

I will miss him a lot for his sense of humour and steady friendship.

This is the last photograph I took of him as we wandered around Anchor Surplus in Nottingham in April 2008 chatting about how we used to actually work on half the old stuff there in our younger days!

General: It's Prediction-Time!

It occurred to me today that now I don't do an email newsletter, I haven't made my New Year prediction this year.

Since we are already in February, I think it is appropriate to make a somewhat further-looking prediction than usual.

As you may know Copper is in seriously short supply world-wide. This has led to a lot of thefts of copper cable recently, sometimes attempted thefts of live cables worthy of Darwin Awards.

Simultaneously, our oil reserves are now on the downward side of 'peak-oil' and in any case we can't afford to burn carbon compounds and exacerbate Global Warming.

This inevitably means an ever more serious attempt to replace Internal Combustion Engines in vehicles with Electric Motors and some kind of electrical power storage.

Since putting new batteries in your vehicle every day is right out, a rechargeable power storage system is necessary and recharge-time is clearly a limiting factor if it can't be recharged in a reasonable time.

Eight hours is, in my opinion, the longest duration acceptable for recharging where a vehicle is used to it's maximum range/performance.
A vehicle that can be recharged in eight hours, adopted throughout a country clearly represents a massive load that cannot be easily distributed throughout the working day barring differences in time-zones.
The best that might be achieved is partial recharging whilst at work, but this is during the part of the day that industry makes it's heaviest demands of the power generating and distribution grid already.

With the current generation of electric vehicles, eight hours does indeed seem to be the best achievable recharge time BUT, this is on 110 Volt distribution outlets due to the limitations on maximum current. On 240 Volt outlets, this can be reduced strikingly to two and a half hours!

Once you can achieve a recharge in two and a half hours, you can also have a managed, phased recharge period in three or more 'shifts' to lighten the load on the power grid which saves building extra generating capacity just to recharge Electric Vehicles.

Given that copper house wiring may soon be impractical due to scarcity of copper, we can expect to see other materials used in this role. To achieve the same deliverable currents will require a moderate increase in wire size but to achieve a high enough current delivery for an electric vehicle revolution at 110 Volts would require a much larger diameter of wire and also present additional difficulties over those already present in working with conductors such as Aluminium.

An alternative would be to make ALL domestic 110 Volt mains three-phase, but this would have it's own complications of expensive re-work and materials as well as overcoming perceived safety issues with the higher phase to phase voltages.

For these reasons (Here comes the actual prediction!), I think it is extremely likely that within five years we will be hearing about the necessity of the USA adopting the 240 Volt standard to enable the Electric Vehicle solution to Oil shortages and Greenhouse Gases.

It is possible that in order to handle the recharging loads an even higher voltage could be chosen to reduce the cost of thicker conductors or to try and carry on with Copper conductors but of a lighter gauge. This would cost more in higher performance insulation and there would undoubtedly be a big panic about the safety aspects of voltages that are higher than any currently used. For these reasons I don't think a voltage greater than 240 Volts would be adopted.

Given the irresolute prevarication about switching to Digital TV (as if they will be any more ready in 4 months time), I can only guess what a mess the changeover to 240 Volts will be.

A sample Electric Vehicle (and a rather tasty one at that) with the recharging times documented.

General: My Australia Day

First a bit of sillyness and a dance at Eloquence - http://www.flickr.com/photos/27843830@N07/3226591313/


Then off to the local club to listen to the band and watch others dance - http://www.flickr.com/photos/27843830@N07/sets/72157612983770139/

General: My 2009 so far...

So far, 2009 has been a very busy year from day 1 for my wife and I.

We have been busy (but unpaid) getting to grips with multiple roles and functions at a local venue in order to re-allocate them in a more flexible distributed manner to facilitate easier management by the elected officials in the future.

I have also spent my weekends thus far assisting in the replacement of a commercial kitchen floor, which entailed dismantling and removing a lot of built-in steelwork and heavy-duty appliances, floor preparation for professionals to lay a sealed vinyl floor on a new level base, re-tiling walls, electrical and plumbing work and restoring/rebuilding all appliances and shelving.

In my 'free' time I have been seeking full-time employment as my wife is now unemployed after 33 years and I must put a steady income at the top of my priority list. Hopefully a decent income for me will allow my wife to find local low-stress employment, I know she has more than earned that lately.

I hope that your 2009 has been less hectic so far and that you prosper, despite the state of the world-wide economy.

Here's to us, Cheers!

General: Songbird is now at version 1.0.0

Songbird is an open-source, customisable music player.
An excerpt from today's announcement -

...
We set out to build an open, customizable music player. Today, we're launching with dozens of integrated services, hundreds of add-ons, and a growing developer community. We'll be the first to admit that there's plenty left to do. And, while we're not ready for everyone, 160k users a month are expressing their vote for an alternative music player.

We now use GStreamer as our main media playback system, across all platforms - giving us higher performance, better reliability, and a platform for much more media-related functionality in the future.
...

More...

General: Boring stuff

Well, not to me - New Speedbor Wood Drill Bit

...
It has been designed specifically for high speed precision drilling. In addition, it has consistently outperformed rival products in independent speed tests. Speedbor Max is a drilling phenomenon achieving a drilling speed which is six times faster than basic flat bits.
...
More Here.

General: Bayer - Rat Of The Week

Something to get you infuriated and disgusted
It happened 20 years ago, I wonder how many people died from it?

General: Wassup 2008 edition

A classic internet meme revisited.

Very True, True

The original Budweiser Wassup Ad'

General: Who Knew?

The Stink in Farts Controls Blood Pressure

...
The new research found that cells lining mice’s blood vessels naturally make the gas and this action can help keep the rodents’ blood pressure low by relaxing the blood vessels to prevent hypertension (high blood pressure). This gas is “no doubt” produced in cells lining human blood vessels too, the researchers said.

“Now that we know hydrogen sulfide’s role in regulating blood pressure, it may be possible to design drug therapies that enhance its formation as an alternative to the current methods of treatment for hypertension,” said Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Solomon H. Snyder, M.D., a co-author of the study detailed in the Oct. 24th issue of the journal Science.

...

General: Squashed Philosophers

Now this is a very nifty site,
A Readers Digest version of the thoughts of the great philosophers.

As the site says -

Glyn Hughes'
SQUASHED PHILOSOPHERS

THE BOOKS WHICH DEFINED THE WAY WE THINK NOW.
Their own ideas, in their own words, neatly honed into little half-hour or so reads.
"Like reading the bible without all the begats" - Jim Curtis

General: You'll be glad you read this...

Well what do you know, it turns out that -

web-browsing is good for the brain!

All the goodness of reading and more!

General: I Used To Believe....

A great little web site - http://www.iusedtobelieve.com/

About the site, in it's own words -

I Used To Believe is a funny and bizarre collection of ideas that adults thought were true when they were children. It will remind you what it was like to be a child, fascinated and horrified by the world in equal parts. The following pages will reassure you that the things you used to believe weren't so strange after all...

You can add your own to the site. If you think your beliefs were strange, check out our most common beliefs and discover that you're not alone! We also provide RSS feeds if you like that sort of thing. There are currently 63841 beliefs on the site.

Some areas of this site contain content which is not suitable for children.

General: An Explanation about Second Life

An interesting article by Kate Amdahl to explain Second Life to those who think it is not something they would be interested in, but don't know much about it.

The Web Was Young Once, Too: Why Even Non-Residents Should Take Second Life Seriously

An extract -

For many of us Second Life residents, Second Life is an enormous and important part of our lives. But plenty of people who don't use Second Life don't understand what the attraction could possibly be, and maybe think of it as more like soap operas or Dungeons & Dragons, just a trivial hobby or entertainment or toy. Here's a piece to help someone like that understand why they might want to take Second Life at least a little seriously.

The first thing to realize is that Second Life isn't a toy: it's an environment. As David Kirkpatrick puts it (I'll mention him again in a minute), "It's not a game, it's just a place you go to do whatever you want to do."

Second Life can be much more than entertainment or a way to relax, but entertainment and relaxation are a big part of it. The thing to realize is that unlike television or video games (for instance), Second Life is an active, social way to relax. We Second Life residents spend a lot of our time talking to other resis, sometimes just shooting the breeze but sometimes having serious conversations. We explore, learn, question, create, design, teach, and grow as people.

Here are some examples of the many, many, many things in Second Life that make it meaningful and important.

...

(David Kirkpatrick is the senior editor of Fortune magazine)

General: A bit of crowing

Now we just want more reasonably-priced BD recorders for faster and easier archival backups.

General: The Demo Scene is alive and well!

It's Demo's like this that remind how much I love coding and inspire me to update my skills.


That demo is one of many entries in the Nvidia 8800 based NVScene 2008.

Whatever hardware you have, PC, Amiga, Atari-ST, Commodore 64 etc' (what? no Mac?), there will be something here to blow your socks off!

More Demo sites here, here and here, Enjoy!

General: The Google Browser arrives!

Here is the BBCs short piece on the new browser.
Here is the Comic Book Presentation from Google, and here's the explanation of it.

Things are going to get tougher for MS, just when they were planning to catch up with Firefox.

General: More Mozilla!

A Second-Life and Plurk friend Twinkles has just pointed out a new Mozilla program, Songbird to me.

Some Info' on it -

The Open Music Player

Songbird is an open-source customizable music player that's under active development.

We're working on creating a non-proprietary, cross platform, extensible tool that will help enable new ways to playback, manage, and discover music. There are lots of ways to contribute your time to the project. We'd love your help!

There are several features we're proud of, but we'll be the first to admit that others need ironing out, are experimental, or are just plain missing. There's still a lot to do.

It is a 16.2 MB download for Windows (XP and Vista), and is also available for Linux (i686 and x86_64) and Mac (OS X Intel).

General: Winners of the 'Extend Firefox' contest

Some nifty add-ons here.
I like the look of Pencil and Fire.fm.