Welcome to engeniusBLOG

I have been known to be pretty stupid at times but what I have never attempted to do has been to predict where any particular technology was going to be in X number of years. I leave that kind of brinksmanship to others – people who have a lot more to lose…T3, a British gadget magazine, has printed, but not yet published on their web site, a top ten list of technology predictions that have gone sadly wrong. Bill Gates manages to get into two of the top ten slots, although one is probably undeserved. That one is the old classic of him predicting, in 1981, that nobody would ever need more than 640 kbyte of memory in their PC. If you research it you will find that there is not one actual reference to show that he really said it and a lot of anecdotal evidence to show that he really never did. He certainly did not understand at that time what an operating system was and did not understand why IBM wanted one, which is probably an additional reason to assume he didn’t even know what a byte was.Ga...

When Agilent Technologies asked me if I'd like to test its new FieldFox N9912A nomadic RF analyzer, I jumped at the opportunity. One of my recent amateur radio projects was the design and implementation of a directional antenna array for the 75-m ham radio band. This seemed like an opportunity to test the FieldFox in a practical application.%IMG_left_full_643%My two quarter-wave-phased 3.8 MHz radiators, spaced a quarter wavelength apart, are both excited simultaneously via a quadrature network comprised of a hybrid phase-shift network made of stacked ferrite cores and some 15-kV doorknob-type capacitors. A relay lets me remotely select the feedlines so I can determine which antenna feedpoint leads or lags by 90º, permitting me to shift the directional pattern either east or west at will.Designing an array like this is common for broadcast engineers. The problem is that the drive impedances of the antenna elements can't be measured. That information is needed to build the appropriate matching network. In...

Until a few months ago, only electronic engineers and Jeopardy contestants could tell you that Tantalum was a key ingredient of the capacitors that lurk within nearly every cell phone, computer, and many other high-tech products. But now that the potential impact of the possible shortage of coltan (columbite-tantalite, a metallic ore from which niobium and tantalum are extracted) has hit the business section of every newspaper and web site nearly everyone knows that the cost of this industry-critical metal could now soar again if the murderous war in the misnamed Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) continues to escalate. There are conflicting accounts about how much the hunt for coltan, which has to be dug for manually, has contributed to the political misery and environmental degradation of the DRC but, in many ways, it bears a striking resemblance to the so-called oil curse suffered by many developing countries who are unfortunate to be parked over large deposits of crude. And, much like the oil shortage...

If, like me, you have a child that is demanding a video game on that feared Christmas wish list, you will almost certainly report that the console most requested was the Nintendo Wii. There is an almost Apple iPod must-have ring to the requests.Sony and Microsoft continue to take the position that the Wii is not a true gaming system, and it is never mentioned in their releases. That darned 800 lb gorilla again!On Black Friday performance, Microsoft said that Xbox 360 console sales were three times that of the PlayStation 3 and 25% higher than Black Friday sales in 2007.But try, as I have, to buy a Wii console this Christmas season. Unless you are willing to line up outside a retailers like Future Shop on the morning of an expected delivery, you will not be able to secure one.I actually have a console en route to me now (don’t tell my daughter!), but I confess that I had to pay a premium to get it. The fact is that the Wii is selling better than the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 combined.Sir Howard Stringer...

In my whole career I have only been involved in one patent dispute, and that only as an interloper trying to bring the two sides together.That happened over a video timebase corrector fight involving a lawyer who bought patents, as a business, with a view to keeping an eye on the relevant industries for a possible infringement case down the road; he “won” most of his cases because the companies involved settled with him just to get the charges out of the way – and out of expensive and diverting court hearings. The other party, an American working for a Japanese company, was a previous boss, and friend.The lawyer finally lost his claim because there was a determination to go for a victory by the Japanese company. A huge amount of previous art was shown to have been made before the patent involved was granted.Although I find the morality of buying IP just to bring lawsuits rather distasteful, I would find filing for a patent in the hopes that it would be timely enough hurt a specific target to...

Back in the mid-1990s, when I was Editor-in-Chief of Portable Design magazine, we published a cover feature story about an electronics development team working on a portable medical instrument to monitor blood glucose. The battery-powered instrument required no finger pricking and blood samples. Instead it measured the interstitial fluid just below the skin, using a painless probing technique that caused no bleeding. Regrettably (for diabetics), the instrument never reached commercialization. Since then, interstitial fluid monitors have become available, but they're not considered reliable indicators of blood sugar levels.The Portable Design article created a stir, though. Readers reported related developments. It turned out that researchers were working on quite a few non-invasive glucose monitoring methods and systems. Some focused a beam of light onto the skin or through body tissues. Others measured infrared levels emitted by the body, and still others applied RF or ultrasound to the fingertips. One reade...

Hi, my name is Lee and I’m a social networking addict. As the chairperson of this week’s meeting, I’d like to welcome you all to Social Network Addicts Anonymous and ask that anybody still hanging out around the coffee urn to quickly grab a cup and take a seat. For you newcomers, please remember that this meeting is a Blackberry-free zone and that you should check any handheld messaging devices with Charlie – he’s the guy by the door – who will keep them safe for you until after the meeting. To get things started, I’ll tell you my story, and how I came to be here. Like most of you, I was a busy high-tech professional who spent 10 - 12 hours a day on the computer and the rest of my waking time with my loving family. I indulged in the occasional IM chat or text message on my cell phone but life was pretty much under control until a few of my friends got me involved with social networking.I started out with LinkedIn, just to fit in with the crowd I hung around with and ...