Electro-ramblings

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

What an amazing advert for the security of Blackberry phone-plus-personal-organisers.

The governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are so nervous about not being able to read messages between the handhelds, that they are effectively going to ban Blackberrys.

So, well done Research in Motion, for showing that wireless does not mean insecure.

I suppose there is an outside chance of a bluff? That the two gulf states can read the messages, and are trying to trick people into using them?

'Alice'

Respond below, or to alice@electronicsweekly.
No email addresses are collected for marketing purposes from responses to this blog. I will keep it that way for as long as possible.

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

Good thing 1...
By allowing in-home energy meters to be installed, smart meters could help the population save energy - and should eventually become part of a smart grid which will be able to handle more wind and solar power. *

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

Mr Reason commented on this blog with a request.

He wrote:
There was a magazine news item entitled "Engineers Beware", some years ago...

It recounted the story of two college students who created some circuitry for an April fools prank. It was used by an employee of a company, and it led to big problems for that company..

• Photos: NI Week 2010


• Photos: LabVIEW 2010

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

Several people responded to my 'Full marks for 20mW stand-by' blog about an excellent-looking power-saving device.

One of those was Mark Muegge, v-p of marketing at CamSemi, a company that I casually mentioned in the original.

He wrote:

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

Want to build a low power x86 PC?

I am sure there are several ways to do it.

But to save yourself some thinking, take a look at Christopher Barnatt of Explaining Computers putting together a 20W PC in this video.

He uses that nice new 510 dual core Atom.

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

There was a great little free book about electromechanical relays.

It was narrow, tall and blue as I remember.

From NAIS maybe?

Anyway, I have not seen one for a while.

Intel has bought McAfee.

Heaven knows why.

For what it's worth, I am required to add my guess on Intel's motive to the melting pot.

Intel has been adding security hardware to its x86 processors, and it has predicted that hardware will be the end of malware.

To my knowledge, most recently it has been rolling out hardware to work alongside hypervisor software.

Together, the hardware and software allow programmes to be executed entirely separately on the same CPU - allowing banking type applications to safely share a processor with a web browser, for example.

An Engineer in Wonderland has a new home. You can find this particular entry here. If you wish to leave a comment, please do that on the new blog.

The plight of those unfortunate but lucky souls stuck underground but being rescued in Chile reminded me of a historic shaft boring technique I came across in California.

In the 1930s it was used to drive a vertical 1.5m diameter shaft 300m down into the Idaho-Maryland gold mine in Green Valley California.

There were several innovative features:

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