Intriguing early stage technology to convert waste heat to electricity

It's a long way from practical, but scientists at the University of Utah have
created technology that takes waste heat and converts it first into sound and then into electricity.

Not immediately relevant, but still an interesting thought. May eventually have applications in solar panels, electronics cooling...

Tags: computer, pc, solar power

Coffee Roaster Comments Update

Most of a year ago, I posted on a friend's Blog about Home Coffee Roasters. At the time, My flat bed roaster was in the process of going belly up, and I was experimenting with a new iRoast 2 machine from HearthWare.

It's several months later, and I can now report the the IRoast is a much better machine than then previous Hearthware coffee roasters that I have owned. The electronics are much better and much better shieled, and as a result it is much more durable.

I've replaced a couple of plastic pieces (as a result of my dropping them) but the electronic base / heater is still going strong.

Due to the volume of coffee that I roast for the office, I've now purchased a second iRoast2.

My only complaint is that it is too sophisticated for the programming interface that it has. There are only a couple of buttons, and as a result custom programming is an error prone and tedious process.

That's a pain, but it is generally a one time pain, since you don't program it again once you have the roast profiles you want stored in the bases non-volatile memory. So, Again, I give this a big thumbs up. The original Hearthware roasters worked well for a brief period of time, but the electronics were not protected from the units own heat well enough and they tended to have very short lives. Hearthware seems to have fixed this problem with the IRoast 2 version.

Tags: coffee, home roasting

Swiss Diamond Cookware

My wife and I are pretty active cooks... In fact, my two teenage boys can probably outcook most adults when they want to. Like most kitchens, ours has seen a long line of non-stick cookware. Everything from the very cheap to the very expensive. About 8 months ago, I was looking to replace the latest nonstick pan casualty, when I tripped across the Swiss Diamond brand via a general search on Amazon. The description looked to good to be true, and after years of durabilty promises, I was a bit skeptical. But, after several months of very heavy use the two frying pans that I purchased still work and look like new. I've purchased a set for my mother, and will be buying more in the future. Very highly recommended.

Tags: Cookware, nonstick, swiss diamond

Toshiba Direct -- Buying a new laptop

We recently needed to buy a new Windows laptop. The laptop was needed to: give my wife a fallback computer while the lap top she uses for her consulting gig is repaired to replace an aged family desktop.

As is my usual style, I investigated the options to death. I looked at DELL's web site (we have corporate discount), at HP and IBM's web sites, at NewEgg, TigerDirect and as well as all of the usual suspects in local outlets (CompUSA, Best Buy, Costco, MicroCenter, Circuit City...

The lap top will be used for general computing including Visual Studio development, Game Playing and normal Internet/Office activities. Decent game performance is a priority, since that is the most taxing task we will likely push at it.

The last time I bought a laptop, I ended up buying it locally at one of the usual suspects, because my wife was starting a consulting gig in a couple of days and she needed it right away. I was also naive enough to think that a local shop would make the warranty more useful / valuable.

This time around, I was less naive. The local warranty we had purchased last time around only lived up to the letter of the agreement. As the sales guy claimed: We were able to just drop the laptop off, and they would take care of any and all issues. What they didn't tell me was that for laptops, they don't fix it locally, they just mail it off to a third party repair center with a two week turnaround. So much for a local warranty, it saved me the trouble of boxing it up and going to the local UPS store. The machine has now been gone for 6 weeks. I think they fixed the original problem (the fan was making a very loud noise) but they had not properly reconnected all of the cables and the laptop would not power on. This was fixed in two weeks again, but they didn't get the power buttons aligned properly and it would not consistently turn on and off. No more paying a premium for local warranties for me, at least for laptops.

Anyway, back to the point of this post. I had pretty well settled on a Toshiba laptop, so the choice was one of the local usual suspects, a web based computer center (NewEgg, TigerDirect...) or... Topshiba Direct.

Well this turned out to be a no brainer. Toshiba Direct offered a newer, better model than I could get at the other outlets and at a better price. It had a better screen, was bundled with Vista Ultimate and best of all had an nVidia 7900GTX based video card instead of the nVidia 7600 offered at the other outlets. And it was a couple of hundred dollars cheaper, especially when you figured in the 3 year comprehensive warranty that was about 1/2 the price. Yes, if it's broken, I will have to mail it back myself. But I got a heck of a deal on a very nice laptop and it arrived via UPS in 3 days.

So, bottom line, if you are looking at a Toshiba laptop, do yourself a favor and compare what you can get from Toshiba Direct. I am very glad that I did.

Tags: computer, pc, laptop, toshiba

Really Cool All Electric Roadster from Tesla Motors

I read about this car in PC Magazine's digitial subscription and then went to their site. This is definitely one cool car: all electric-. 0-60 in 4 seconds. 250 Miles per charge, 1 penny per mile of operating costs...

Tags: automobile, electric

Advertising on Eggs?

When I first saw the articles about CSI being advertised on egg shells, I cringed. It sounded like another place for companies to dump big bucks for unsitely ads that would be ignored by everyone except for the people who it ticked off.

It's is still a stretch, but the twist descirbed in this article puts a new light on it. The twist is that the egg shell advertising is printed in an ink, that only shows up when the egg is boiled and is properly cooked. It still feels like a stretch to me, but it is clever and for the kitchen challenged a somewhat useful service.

Tags: Advertising, Marketing

Interesting article on current Bio Diesel cars

These cars are not available in America, but they are a far cry from the common image of the smelly, hard to start diesel cars of the 1970's.

One key piece of info in the articles is that bio-diesel production costs are based on Soybean crops, whereas rapeseed and mustard seed are 3X as efficient. Starting a real bio-diesel farming economy in the US would be a worthwhile place for the government to move some of those mis-placed farm subsidies. I for one would much rather have the bulk of my energy costs going to farmers rather than where they are going now.

Tags: biodiesel, automobile

Initial impressions of Phoenix DUET Executive Speakerphone

Two of my co-workers are moving out of a small shared office in Southern England and starting to work out of their homes. Among the many complications of this move, is the need to give them good phone access from home, without investing a fortune. Telecommunications is one of those areas that changes rapidly, so I spent a few days digging around to catch up a bit with the state of the art.

Our local IT shop in the UK has provided them with a dedicated POTS phone line, and a reasonable wired handset phone. But since these two gentlemen work heavily with those of us here at HQ, asking them to spend 4 or 5 hours a day with a phone crooked to their necks is a bit much.

Since we do a lot of internal phone calls we also would like to look at VOIP for some calls, to lower our operating expenses.

After some digging, I settled on the DUET Executive USB Speakerphone from Phoenix Audio Technologies. The primary reasons for this were:

1. Small physical size so it fits easily on the desk and can be taken on the road
   
2. USB Powered, so it can move easily from the US to the UK
3. VOIP and POTS compatible (including bridging a single call across POTS and VOIP
4. Noise filtering and canceling technologies
5. Supports RJ11, Headset jack and USB connectivity

We purchased three units from Hello Direct for $199 each. They arrived Friday, so we've started having a bit of a play with them.

My initial impressions are quite positive. They work well for a small room conference phone and also work well for Audio chatting through MSN or MS NetMeeting. We have a dedicated room for our group here at HQ, but the room has a really crappy half duplex speaker phone, so the room is not used nearly as much as it should be. The Duet plugs straight into the half duplex phone via the headset jack, and works like a champ. For this setup, I've powered the unit via the supplied standard US power brick (it can also be powered directly from a USB connection).

The audio is a bit tinny when turned up for a conference call, but the phone connection is full duplex, and is very clean. The unit only has a single microphone, so it is a bit directional, with voices trailing off to the sides of the microphone. But it works well and is a darn good value given the flexibility.

For IM audio usage, it works directly off a powered USB connection. No other cables are needed. The device was immediately recognized when connected to my Laptop and worked without a hitch in both MSN IM Audio and NetMeeting Audio chats. I was disapointed to find out that NetMeeting audio is only allowed between two participants. I missed that when reading the NetMeeting help files. That's not a DUET problem, but we had hoped to use Netmeeting for Voice chats in conjunction with presentations.

I have not had the chance to try out the bridging of a single call between VOIP and POTS, but the documentation indicates that this works just by plugging the connections together. Including the ability for the VOIP and POTS participants to talk to each other across the DUET "bridge". The DUET instructions indicate that you can gang multiple DUETS together for larger conference areas. That sounds really interesting, and we may look into it further down the road, but for now, we will only have one unit in each location.

All in all, the DUET is an excellent value, works well, and is highly recommended.

Tags: computer, phone, speakerphone, voip

Sony shows that true political incorrectness still exists

Now this is about as politically incorrect as it gets.

GUIDEPOSTS: Character Lessons from D&D to the Real World

Warning: You will have to hang in with me for a few paragraphs of wondering about. I promise there is a valid business / team lesson buried in this narrative, but a bit of background is necessary to make the story come together.

In my high school days, I was an avid Dungeons and Dragons player. As I moved into my college and then professional years, the time available for D&D faded, but occasionally I'm struck by an instance where something that I learned or a technique that I developed in playing D&D becomes the key to a real life situation.

About a year ago, I was asked by my company to found a high energy, leading edge software development team to develop new products for new markets. Leading edge software development (or Innovation Engineering as we have come to call it) is quite different from working on a well established application. It requires team members who can take in a wide variety of information from a wide variety of sources and make pragmatic decisions that allow a product to be built from scratch and moved to market quickly. Compromises have to be made all over the place. Time to market is critical; a sales force is being built and trained; marketing is launching campaigns to generate interest, and gather information. The company is investing heavily. Information and understanding are limited but growing as individuals and teams have a series of ahah moments.

Out of all of this chaos, and by the time sales is ready to sell, the engineering team has to have something that the customers will recognize as a solution to their key problems.

Innovation engineering is different from normal Software engineering and it requires a different sort of team. I knew who my first two team members were going to be before I accepted this assignment. But, we needed a way to make the critical decisions to add or screen out additional prospective team members.

It was at this point that I fell back on a D&D inspired technique. The hardest and most important part of creating a Fantasy Role Playing Game (RPG) character is making the character real... Giving it character. The wonder of D&D is that the game changes from minute to minute. The players' actions and choices help the dungeon master (DM) to weave a wide ranging, unique story. D&D is a free choice game, with the Dungeon Master turning the players' free will actions into game world consequences. Because each player can do whatever they want at any point, it is impossible to anticipate the situations your character will be faced with. Character development is one of the most difficult and most important aspects to being a good D&D player.

My technique for developing a character was to start by choosing GUIDEPOST words or ideas that drive my characters actions in a wide variety of situations. Here is the first part of a GUIDEPOST list for one of my most memorable characters:

1. Pragmatic...
   
2. Shy at first, slow to develop friends, but open and very trustworthy once the friendship is established
3. Careful, avoids risk until the extent and nature of the risk are well known
4. Inventive...
5. Independent, Not comfortable under the rule of others...
6. Reacts strongly to children, will over react to any situation that endangers children

The point of the GUIDEPOST words is to capture some of the key aspects of my new character. GUIDEPOSTS make it possible to quickly judge how my fantasy character should react to a wide variety of situations. This results in giving the character dimension and making him/her feel real.

Innovation engineering is a new concept at our company so there are no existing models or processes to draw upon. So, we decided to fall back on the well established idea that it is the people that make every project succeed or fail. The character of the individuals in the team and the overall character of the team are the keys to success for virtually any group effort. It is much easier to help someone develop new capabilities than to correct a bad attitude or adjust an ill fitting character. So our decision making process was to center around each individual's character and the impact they would have on our overall team. Skills and knowledge are a factor, but are very much a secondary factor.

Character assessment is a notoriously difficult problem to solve. How do we go about doing that? Well, back in my D&D days, I developed my fantasy character using the concept of GUIDEPOSTS. The same concept works well here. By defining our team's character in the form of our collective GUIDEPOSTS we would have specific bench marks to use in our team member selection process. By matching the GUIDEPOSTS to our current team and our team's objectives we have an objective measure to help make what are usually very subjective decisions.

Our team is still small, but we have added team members, and have decided to not add potential team members based on their fit to our character GUIDEPOSTS. This decision is not a comment on the worth of the individual, but instead is our judgement on how they fit into our team and into our plans to achieve our objectives. Different teams, different objectives, different GUIDEPOSTS, different choices. Viva la difference.

Tags: computer, D&D, Dungeons and Dragons, Management,