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When the deadlines, travel disasters and relentless spew of e-mail become too much to take, I often comfort myself with the business plan I cooked up for my retirement some years ago: an old-fashioned Italian water ice vending stand on a popular beach. The idea would be to work 12+ hour days for a few months of the year while the sun and sand provides an endless supply of customers and then settle back in a small cottage to write, visit friends and tinker with airplanes for the rest of the time. Given the reliable nature of hot summer days and thirsty beach-goers, it seemed like the ultimate business plan. Much to my dismay, several conversations I’ve had recently indicate that at least one high-tech company may have come up with an even more clever way to ensure a steady stream of customers.I do my best to avoid spreading unsubstantiated rumors, but one of my most reliable informants has told me that a major anti-virus software vendor has a history of allowing viruses and other malware it’s creat...

The brouhaha in the mainstream media about exploding batteries in cellphones and notebook PCs is real. Consumers are worried. Check out the recent Good Morning America show.Pundits also point to large lithium-ion batteries in electric and hybrid vehicles. What would happen if one of these batteries short-circuited, got punctured, or caught fire in a collision? According to Toyota’s Prius Emergency Response Guidebook 154, the cells in a Prius contain potassium hydroxide that can react with zinc, aluminum, tin, and organic compounds, releasing potentially explosive hydrogen gas. Potassium hydroxide is also a hazardous material. In fact, Toyota technicians are required to wear alkali-resistant safety goggles, face masks, rubber gloves, boots, and aprons when handling vehicular battery packs. Toyota and Honda also recommend that crash rescuers use the same equipment while working on wrecked vehicles.Reliable And SafeAccidents aside, it's probably next to impossible for a nomadic device's battery to explode....

In the middle of editing and formatting Dennis Feucht’s July 2008 must-read Dear Dennis column I was struck by some recent events in my household.We live in an area where our line power supply (Hydro, as it is called here) seems to have been less than reliable in the three years we have lived here. Our full section includes a set of traffic lights on a very busy highway, and the sub-section we are on has a road with a flashing amber light – in place to try and stop people trying for a head-on crash with traffic leaving that same highway. Apart from the winter of 2006 – 2007 (when very heavy damp snow took down numerous poles), those lights have meant that our outages have been of a tolerable length, the lights being a high-priority repair item. But we still determined last year to invest in a standby generator: we hope that it will be a guarantee that we never lose power again…That installation has been a long and tedious journey. During my transmitter station building days I would ha...

Although I was later to live near Manchester, England for some years, I have not spent any time in the city since working on Top of the Pops, broadcasting live from the converted church facilities of the BBC Dickinson Road Studios in the 1960s.I was there last week on family business, and the city has changed, much of it for the better – except for the traffic.Landing at Manchester Airport – Ringway to those in the know – in heavily overcast conditions on July 12, 2008, I was in a BA Airbus A321. Unbeknownst to me, right behind our flight was an Airbus A380 paying a visit to the airport. This behemoth had her gear down but the nearest she got to the tarmac was about 50 feet and she then went around for a full circuit. Clearly visible on her side was a décal proclaiming it Recyclable by Design. Bizarre…The airport has an Aviation Viewing Park which was absolutely packed for the occasion. In the park there is the second Concorde, built (Nr 102) registered as G-BOAC (British Overs...

With my daughter Anwyn turning 12, I wasn’t sure she’d want me to bake another weird birthday cake for her as I’ve done for the past decade or so. I was pleasantly surprised a few months ago when she began asking me about what kind of cake I was thinking of making and took that as a sign to start planning for this year’s culinary engineering project. This year’s cake came together at the last minute thanks to a busy spring travel schedule, and the usual set of last-minute surprises that crop up, so it’s not the most elaborate creation I’ve come up with but everyone seemed happy with it. Even I was pleased because it did allow me to accomplish one of the goals I’ve had for my cakes: incorporating some electronics in the mix. Since Anwyn’s birthday party included an outing to see the new Get Smart spy comedy/thriller movie, I’d originally intended to bake up a cake in the shape of a “shoe phone” in homage of the original TV series. Unfortun...

Anybody older than forty will remember the 3-D productions that were screened in movie theaters through the 1960s, with the whole movie industry believing 3-D was the ultimate weapon to beat TV. The 3-D tradition continued at some theme parks - and presumably still does - with productions that have objects and fists apparently tearing off the stage and terrifying the audience.The 3-D effects, with the cheap and nasty red/green polarized plastic glasses that were supplied, were cheesy and, for the most part, lost on me. Since I had an eye damaged on a school field trip when I was thirteen or fourteen – when liquid naphthalene was sprayed into it at a coal gas plant at Blackwall Point (the location where the Millennium Dome was built in London to celebrate the dawn of the year 2000, supposedly on the Prime Meridian but actually a few minutes East) – the inability to see the same thing through both eyes kind of hindered the intended 3-D effects. Of the other people who could see the effects, some com...

Sometimes it's the little things that wreak havoc on an otherwise perfectly good design. This happened to me while deploying tunable RF bandpass filters ahead of a high-level receiver mixer. The filter design looked good on paper and proved O.K. on my Tonne Software simulator, so I went ahead and ordered samples of miniature shielded adjustable inductors that looked like they would fill the bill electrically and mechanically.I might add that the well-known inductor company I ordered these coils from was quite accommodating. It actually sent the samples all the way from China by way of Federal Express. Gratis. Now that's my idea of service.With the bandpass filter board etched, drilled, screened and ready for soldering, I mounted my samples, soldered down the associated capacitors, and proceeded to sweep the assembly to determine its actual passband characteristics. The results were encouraging, but it seemed a bit of tweaking here and there might be necessary to achieve best response across the band of intere...

Is this for real? In Alan Weisman's fabulous 2007 book The World Without Us (ISBN 13 978-0-312-34729-1) he describes how, on the morning of January 23rd 1998, nearly 10,000 migratory Lapland longspurs were found frozen on the ground in Kansas. Apparently they had crashed into a cluster of lighted radio towers the night before.%IMG_left_full_498%Was this an isolated case of bird kill? Some scientists contend that as many as 200 million birds fatally collide every year with lighted towers, and that's in the US alone. Is that possible?In recent years, the explosive growth of cellphones has added at least 175,000 more lighted towers to the landscape. If observers are correct, that could bring the toll of dead birds due to tower crashes to an arresting half a billion creatures annually.Moonlight MigrationsSome scientists say migrating birds that fly at night, and birds that use moonlight to navigate by, are especially susceptible to death-by-tower. The Christian Science Monitor reported that as many as 50 million ...

Whether or not the current oil crunch is due to an actual shortage, or simply manufactured by shadowy interests, its effects are certainly real as it combines with the worldwide economic downturn and the very noticeable changes in our climate, signaling the end of business as usual for the global economy. It’s now up to each of us to decide whether we’re going to continue to try to eke out a profit making the stuff that got us into this mess in the first place, or begin to create new markets for technologies that will put our economy and our ecosystem onto a sustainable path. As a hard-core tech type it’s been difficult for me to imagine how we’d even begin to make such a huge change in the way we do business, but I got a few hopeful clues during my recent press tour to Canada’s high-tech belt outside Ottawa.Although I’d originally set up the trip to visit Galazar, Tundra, Zarlink and the other chip makers who populate the QW 417 corridor, I was pleased to find out I also h...

A few weeks ago my daughter had to wear her full Number One Dress Uniform to school on a day that wasn’t an Assembly Day; wasn’t a day when visitors were expected; and wasn’t even an exam day. No, it was a day that a school bus was to take them downtown to a dramatization of Animal Farm, the novella by George Orwell. She came home that evening thoroughly depressed and asked, “Why the pigs?” That ‘why’ is a long story, but it can be summarized by a quick look at Orwell’s life. Not that he was born with that name, nor was he buried with that name. He was, in fact, Eric Arthur Blair, born in Imperial India. He didn’t know his father until he was nine years old, having been brought back to Britain when he was less than one. He managed to get scholarships to Eton but slacked in his studies – or collided with authority, whichever story you prefer – and his academic results meant there was no chance for him to go to University.Instead his family signe...