Electro-ramblings

Certain things are sent to wide me up, and wireless access is one of them. The job of being a web manager means I need to use a laptop, some of the time on a wireless network.

At home this is OK. My £50 DLink router always connects first time, never drops out and I can work from any room in the house.

Why is it then, that at work with millions of pounds of IT systems, it always takes several minutes to find the network, which frequently drops out and is patchy around the building?

It seems the second two problems might have a cure from researchers at a couple of UK universities and one from New Zealand.

This blog from New Scientist suggests that using specific materials when building walls can help route wireless signals around a building. Hooray.

The world might be going high tech, but try telling that to Indian student Sainul Abideen, who has apparently demonstrated how to encode 256Gbyte of data on an A4 sheet of paper.

The article at TechWorld says that Abideen prints multi-coloured geometric patterns onto the paper, which can be read back by a suitable scanner.

Files such as text, images, sounds and video clips are encoded in "rainbow format" as coloured circles, triangles, squares and so on, and printed as dense graphics on paper at a density of 2.7GB per square inch.

Abideen, who has just finished his Masters degree in Kerala at the MES College of Engineering, Kuttipuram, has named the process “Rainbow Technology”. He imagines using small pieces of card to store data which can be read by a scanner included in a laptop or desktop PC.

It's like data cards and punched paper tape all over again.

In his blog at Silicon.com, Peter Cochrane notes that Wi-fi is beginning to be supplied for free in many European countries.

For the folks in North America this will all seem so very quaint but believe me, this is quite a revolution over on this side of the pond. People here are still paranoid about new technologies and what to do with them. They have been protecting wi-fi and restricting access like it was all a very scarce and expensive resource.

Anyone working via laptop in London and other European cities will know the frustration of finding Wi-fi at a reasonable rate. £10 an hour is not unusual in the big hotels, but a few chains are breaking the mould:

All over London there are posters advertising that the Radisson hotels provide free broadband globally.

Meanwhile CNet, which owns Silicon.com, has set up a nice website to help find those free Wi-fi networks at airports.

The Inquirer reports that a British car audio firm is planning an amplifier system with a valve front end.

The story "Genesis to cram a few more valves into your car" says the amp will use a Russian built triode valve, the Sovtek 6H30Pi (pictured right).

According to the blurb it utilises a Russian built 6H30Pi tube. This incredibly linear triode was developed for use in missile guidance systems and can withstand up to 500G-force while working quite happily at loads of 100G. We're hoping this means we can fire the cars off great distances with explosive effects, safe in the knowledge the amplifier will probably survive.

Actually, that tube is well known within audio circles, so Genesis ICE isn't doing anything too radical (apart from putting it in a car). Sales literature says the tube has "low plate resistance and high transconductance".

There's a nice article on why people should use this tube "The 6H30 Tube - One Designer's Perspective" at Balanced Audio Technology.

One of the joys of the run up to Christmas is spending time enjoying the fuits of other peoples' labour. The best from this year is an advent calendar populated with games like space invaders and tetris.

I can recommend day 3 (Christmas Invaders), day 5 has a YouTube video of a great trick with three pool tables and some dominos, Golf is quite tricky on day 7, while day 17 is Tetris.

If you want to release some anger, may I suggest day 14, which allows you, a Yeti, to thrash falling penguins with a big stick. My best distance was just over 250m.

Meanwhile day 18 has some wise words from Peter Kay (for our US and overseas readers, Kay is a comedian and actor in the UK), including:

"One of the most awkward things that can happen in a pub is when your pint-to-toilet cycle gets synchronised with a complete stranger."

Michael at the Black Sheep Blog has suggested I do the Five Things meme that is floating around the blog world at the moment. So here goes with five things people would (probably) not know about me:

1 Richard isn't exactly my real name, as I was born Mungo-Jump Twister the Second.

2 I can eat a (whole) Mars bar sideways.

3 My first job was singing in a church choir, where we got paid 10p per service.

4 In a previous life I was incarnated as the child of an Inuit woman and Sir John Franklin, the famous arctic explorer. To this day my favourite food is shoe leather - grilled, not fried, obviously.

5 I am currently reading EMC for Product Designers by Tim Williams, published by Elsevier, ISBN10: 0-750-68170-5.

Amazingly I didn't know these facts myself until I wrote this piece. I think I shall offer a random prize to someone who guesses which of the five so-called facts is true (click on comments to post your answer).

Now then - who should I challenge to carry on the meme/theme? I think David Manners, Tom Foremski, Ed Sperling, Mike Santarini and Nick Flaherty. Although if they read this posting they'll probably think I've lost the plot completely.

Prove if it were needed that hobbyists are resourceful fellows comes from Dutch hardware geek Mark Hoekstra, who has gone to extremes to repair an Apple iBook.

His blog post at DIY obsolete iBook logic repair shows in exquisite detail how he fixed the (in)famous graphics problem on an iBook.

Here's the YouTube vid:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u68G-gCkswk

Amazingly the board is powered up as he heats the ATI graphics chip! And he posted to the blog using the repaired iBook. Superb.

I once did some accidental BGA rework on a military avionics graphics board by forgetting to reconnect the airflow cooling system. Unlike Mark's, the board did not survive!

Rapid prototyping is fantastically cool. Design an object, then watch as a machine constructs it in front of your eyes. The prioblem is the machines cost anything up to a million quid or more.

However, a kit that allows people to build their own rapid prototyping machine has been developed by researchers at Cornell University, according to the linked article at New Scientist.

The standard version of their Freeform fabricator – or "fabber" – is about the size of a microwave oven and can be assembled for around $2400 (£1200). It can generate 3D objects from plastic and various other materials.

The machine connects to a desktop computer running software that controls its operation. It then creates objects layer-by-layer by squeezing material from a mechanically-controlled syringe.

So far it has been tested with silicone, plaster, play-doh and even chocolate and icing. Different materials can also be used to make a single object – the control software prompts the user when to load new material into the machine.

Once you've created your silicone or plaster object, you can take a mould and then cast it in something more solid, like metal or acrylic.

I want one.

Here's a link to the Fab@Home project.

Like them or loath them, wind farms have become a part of rural life in many parts of the world.

If you're a turbine-sceptic, then you might like this video from Google:

I'm not sure how long it really takes to build an Airbus A380, but here's a beautiful time lapse video of the assembly in seven minutes.

I was doing a bit of home decorating this weekend, and thought my masking tape work was pretty cool until I saw the video.

I just read Howard Johnson's column on the EDN website, where he talks of the difference between those people who are forced to trade their time for money, and those who trade knowledge, experience and their own intellectual property.

Howard, a guru of high speed digital design, argues in Why teach science? that people who make the effort to learn something useful in life (like engineering) have the most valuable commodities to trade:

People lacking useful skills or knowledge are forced to trade their time for money. Time is all they have to offer. An hour of uneducated time pays only about $7 in the United States. Successful people cut a different deal with life. They do not trade their time for money. As Robert Kiyosaki outlines in his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, successful people directly create value and then trade that value for money.

But it's not just about that knowledge: The way in which concepts and information are transferred is just as important:

My clients pay me not for the time I spend in the classroom, but for the lifetime of experience I bring with me and for my ability to communicate that experience in a way that improves their technical capabilities and, often, changes their lives. That’s value.

I met Howard a couple of years ago at Oxford University, and he's one of the most charismatic likeable guys I've ever met. Here's a shameless plug for his very successful digital design course which you can find at Oxford's CPD centre. The next week is in June.

Sorry for the lack of posts over the past week, but I've been away in Scotland doing a bit of mountaineering.

February half-term week north of the border is a regular feature of the Wrekin Mountaineering Club, but over the past few years the weather and conditions have become more and more variable.

This year was no exception. For the whole of last week the freezing level didn't go below 800 metres, and what little snow there was disappeared through the week. The picture below shows Liathach from Beinn Eighe, and it should be absolutely plastered with snow.

It didn't rain much, so plenty of good walking was available in the Torridon hills, but precious little ice-climbing was available, and all five ski resorts in Scotland were closed by the end of last week.

So is it the fault of global warming - or just a statistical abberation? All I know is that we saw seriously unusual conditions, and something odd is happening year after year.

The free electronic gizmos that are starting to appear more often with products like breakfast cereals are actually quite complex little beasties.

Brian Dipert's blog on EDN has this post - See inside a cereal surprise: Dissecting the Xbox Mini electronic games - which breaks down some free toys from Frosties packets.

Brian goes into exquisite detail in his breakdown of these free toys, with the conclusion that they pack in a lot of engineering ingenuity. He asks:

How do you make an electronic toy inexpensive enough that it can be given away within a box of Froot Loops while still retaining enough compelling features to motivate a cereal purchase?

Read Brian's post and be amazed at how these hand-assembled toys do their stuff.

Just a quick post to say 'hello' and introduce myself - Alun Williams - as the proud new web editor of ElectronicsWeekly.com, taking over from Richard who departed for pastures new in Shropshire.

How does Firefox compare to Internet Explorer when it comes to readers of ElectronicsWeekly.com? How is the browser war faring on our particular piece of electronics turf? And what of Safari's share?

It's that time again for the periodic browser question: how fare the armies on the battlefield of cyberspace? How does Firefox compare to Internet Explorer when it comes to readers of ElectronicsWeekly.com? How is the battle faring on our particular piece of electronics turf?

The stats for the last month are:

DEVmonkey is live! If you work with development kits make sure to bookmark this new site: www.developmentmonkey.com

Aimed at design engineers it delivers dev kits, ratings, reviews, news, and a whole lot more

* Check out the new "2 Minute Review" series to read the February DEVmonkey Lab evaluation - a quick, hands-on evaluation of a kit - who needs it, what's in it, quick facts to know and what design engineers can do with it.

Liked this cartoon that was sent to me, from Non Sequitur.

Follow the link for the full picture http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2008/05/09/

The value of Wikipedia does divide people, to some extent, but I think most welcome it as "a very good thing", providing easy access to (very largely) reliable material. Maybe you feel you shouldn't rely on it as a single source of authority? In that case, you can always follow the references at the end of the entries.

Speaking of which... I was pleased to see that another Electronics Weekly article is cited as a reference. The latest involves memristor technology (resistors with storage capabilities), and cites our Technology Editor Steve Bush's article "HP nano device implements memristor"

Check out the Wikipedia entry for Memristor

The two books are:

• MIMO Wireless Communications, by Ezio Biglieri, Robert Calderbank, Anthony Constantinides, Andrea Goldsmith, Arogyaswami Paulraj, H. Vincent Poor (Cambridge, ISBN-13: 9780521873284)
• Emerging Technologies in Wireless LANs (Theory, Design, and Deployment), Ed. by Benny Bing, Georgia Institute of Technology (Cambridge, ISBN-13: 9780521895842).

If you are interested, drop me a line at webmaster@electronicsweekly.com