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I have fond memories of my grade school library. It's been said the sense of smell keenly triggers nostalgia, and I agree. I recall a fragrant blend of ink and wood and paper in that library room. That unique smell lingers in my mind to this day.What a joy when I discovered that I could roam the school library and borrow any book that tickled my fancy. From that day to this, I still enjoy visiting libraries. I support my local library with an annual personal donation, and I always find time in my busy schedule for recreational reading.Yes, I will admit I'm a couch potato. My wife often finds me on there with my nose buried in a book. But this lethargy came in handy once when I clinched a job when the personnel manager asked me during an interview what books I had read in the past six months.Fewer People ReadUnfortunately, studies reveal that, in general, fewer people are reading books these days, although the recession has breathed some new life into libraries. A National Endowment for the Arts study shows th...

Yesterday's news included a report that a key member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the supplier of more than 40% of the world's oil, is going to cut oil production. "If demand is down," said the Iraqi Oil Minister at a recent OPEC confab, "then we need to cut production."That's a good thing, as far as I can tell, as that kind of talk is just what's needed to get carmakers off the dime, so they can start producing electric vehicles for real. It may also spur some new thinking in other quarters. You really don’t think $2 per gallon gasoline is here to stay, do you?%IMG_left_full_739%A mildly promising development, unveiled at last month’s Washington Auto Show, is Chrysler's 200C Concept car. Unlike the rather prosaic looking Toyota Prius, the 200C Concept is drop-dead gorgeous and should appeal to hot-rod minded Americans. Powered by lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries and a gasoline-driven generator, Chrysler says the vehicle could deliver a 40-mile range on b...

OK, I just realized I’ve become an official old geezer because more than half the music that my 12-year-old daughter listens to sounds like ungodly noise to me. Any lingering misconceptions I might have had about simply being a mature, but socially hip kind of guy evaporated when I realized that I just don’t understand the earth-shattering significance of Twitter. It seems to me that trying to compress anything meaningful into 140 characters is sort of like trying to convey the majesty of a Shakespeare play in a handful of PowerPoint slides – oops, that’s already been done…  In fact, I’ve had so much pressure from some of my associates to become a Twitter-er that I’ve been trying to figure out how I’d find the time to post a half-dozen witty digital haikus a day – and just what I’d use them for.At first, it was hard to see how a technology that breaks everyone’s allotted 15 minutes of fame down into 140-character snippets could be an...

The concept of uncontrolled air space has been incredibly important for non-commercial use of the skies, around the world, for over sixty years. Obviously, controlling the air space around terminals is even more important to the safe operation of commercial traffic – especially with the quaint mixture of non-commercial light aircraft and commercial jets that occurs at so many airports in North America.During my flying life I only ever once landed, and departed, in a light aircraft at an “International” airport – Stockholm-Arlanda – when I was given a special clearance to pick up a friend from an arriving commercial flight. It was a scary experience because the tower opted to speak Swedish with much of the traffic, so I was totally unaware of where anyone was. At take-off I was also instructed to move as fast as I could down the runway in the Cessna 172 I had rented, and then take off as close to the end as possible, so that the commercial SAS DC-9 my friend had arrived on could l...

When I was a kid, I loved the folk tale called “Stone Soup.” In the story, a hungry soldier returning from a war wanders into a poor village where nobody has enough to eat. The clever soldier announces that he’ll make a soup from a favorite recipe his mother taught him whose main ingredient is smooth river stones. He agrees to share the soup with the battle-weary inhabitants if they’ll help him collect the rocks and loan him a pot to cook it in. Of course the soup is helped along by a few bits of cabbage, potato, and whatever else the villagers can scrape from their nearly-bare cupboards and, in the end, everyone is much better fed than if they’d hoarded the scraps for themselves. It was nice to hear a similar sentiment expressed by publisher, tech guru and part-time social entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly in his keynote at the Emerging Technologies conference, where he advised the tech sector to put their creativity to work on extracting the global economy from the ditch we&rsquo...

If you haven’t noticed, lighting is undergoing a quiet revolution that may ring the death knell for light bulb jokes.By now, everyone is familiar with high-intensity LED flashlights, LED automotive brake lights, and solid-state emergency lamps. It’s plain there are fundamental changes happening that are as revolutionary as the cold-cathode fluorescent lamp itself.%IMG_left_full_732%In the realm of multi-color LEDs, there's a lot of activity. We recently reported on Osram’s nifty MultiLEDs. Another company making clever illumination products is Luminus Devices. Luminus’ PhlatLight solid-state light sources combine LED and laser technologies. Unlike garden variety LEDs that emit light through epoxy encapsulants, these LEDs emit light directly.Why are they called PhlatLights? The somewhat implausible moniker is actually derived from the two words photonic and lattice.Arc Lamp SubstitutesPhotonic lattice surface light emission makes for large-area LEDs that exhibit uniform brightness over ...

Microsoft Hardware should be an oxymoron, but it’s not. The Group was formed in 1982 and shipped its first mouse in 1983. It was a mice only operation through 1994 when the Group shipped that – impossible for 90% of us to use – ergonomic keyboard that required totally politically-correct typing.Since then it was optical mice, gaming mice, and keyboards until the first Microsoft webcam was introduced in 2006.Now Microsoft has announced that in July 2009 it will be shipping coolers for notebooks. The technology, if there is any beyond a blower just moving air around, has not been disclosed, but the unit – which will fit under the notebook – is just under 1.25 inches thick and is slanted so the keyboard will be tilted slightly upwards.For an expected retail cost of $29.95 it doesn’t look like the cooler is actually attached to the notebook, which strikes me as odd because the time you really want the bottom of your machine to be cool is when it is on your lap in an airport dep...

No matter what you might think about the massive bailout bill in Washington, one thing is certain. We cannot really fix our economy until we address America’s energy needs and stop our addiction to foreign oil. I won’t minimize the importance of other factors, such as the mortgage and Wall Street meltdowns, the credit crisis, and the storm of bankruptcies and layoffs – but in my view, the most important problem is energy.I would argue that our dependence on foreign oil is a huge drag on the US economy, one that is visible from the $4.50 per gallon gas prices last summer to layoffs in the auto industry. It’s also a threat to our national security, putting us in the predicament of being dependent on foreign energy resources that can be compromised overnight by turmoil in the Middle East.If they gave me a vote, I’d invest the entire bailout money in Silicon Valley companies and entrepreneurs that are innovating new energy solutions. That’s the kind of super-focused “chan...

If you judged the Consumer Electronics Association’s Greener Gadgets conference by what was going on in its small exhibit area you’d have to conclude that our planet is doomed. All but three booths on the sparse show floor were either laughable examples of greenwashing or outreach programs from various industry organizations which, for the most part, have treated any environmental issues their members encountered as simple marketing problems. One of the more priceless moments of the day came when a representative from a major Japanese battery manufacturer that was pimping their landfill safe disposable batteries tried to convince me that their products were better for the environment than rechargeable batteries. The results of Greener Gadgets' design competition were nearly as dismal. Over half of the 50 entries that made the final round were based on imaginary technologies, bad science, or came even close to heeding the contest’s instructions: to “seek ways to minimize the environment...

Last week – the week of February 22, 2009 – was one of my favorites of each year, personally getting to those winners that I can, to hand out Product of the Year Awards for 2008. This year the Awards had been chosen by January 8 – our process doesn’t depend on reader input, there are no essays to be written by the vendors. No, our Editors put their necks on the line, as we do with every week’s product reviews, and call it as we see it. And I have never been into a company where they said, “We don’t understand why you think we deserve this – why are you here?”A case in point was at the first Award meeting, on Monday morning. A large room was full of people, a long banner proclaiming the Award was hanging on the wall, and there was a huge cake with both the company and EN-Genius logos on it. Terrific! These people cared about their Award. It was, and I hope continues to be, a major morale booster for the employees.At most stops the designer(s) were also...