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My first hands-on experience with Soviet-era engineering was in 1978. The company I was working for had a large contract for the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, connecting all the sites with video from all the other sites (23, if I remember correctly), so a commentator at one site could watch all the events taking place. As I have observed before, we got paid before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan when the Games, under American pressure (and the then love of Osama Bin Laden), ended up being a rather heavily Eastern Block affair.

The Soviets had already been to our plant in West London for acceptance tests – three engineers plus a communist minder – and we had gotten very friendly with one another. We had shocked them with the contents of Western supermarkets; taken them to spectacular box seats to watch a Tchaikovsky ballet; wined and dined them on luxurious, ethnic food from the rest of Europe; left them speechless when I didn’t take the windshield wipers off m...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

There was a time when if you used the word Tempest in public you would have had the FBI knocking on your door – in my case it would have been MI-5. Now, it seems everybody knows that Tempest (should be all capitalized, but I’m only going to do that just once) was/is the code word for both the emanations from an electronic device and the protection of such a device.

People have been trying to listen in on others since the telephone was invented. In the early days (and in many developing countries to this day) crosstalk between telephone circuits was a major – and misunderstood – phenomenon. In WW-I, crosstalk from field telephones was deliberately exploited by the Germans and the British invented a low signal level phone system to prevent it.

In WW-II the Germans again showed inventiveness by tracking shipping and aircraft from submarines by the radiation from the enemy’s local oscillators. From the LO frequency they were also able to ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

When you buy any piece of technology you have to expect that you will be using something that suddenly becomes obsolete. Not because the electronics don’t work any more; simply that the next stage of development has taken place as we progress – although that’s arguable, I suppose. At my daughter’s age (13), the peer pressure to upgrade is quite incredible and I occasionally have stopped to think how grateful I am that we are not in an iPhone service area…

I am less likely to take such things so seriously, and when we bought the MacBook Pro I am using right now, in November 2007, I was aware that there were rumors of a replacement in the works. But, probably like the early iPhone adopters, I would be a little irked if Jobs had done a memory-doubling, price-halving thing on me. Maybe a little more than irked, actually.

Well, MacWorld 2008Click Here to Read More >>

There’s a brand new laser printer/fax/copier/scanner sitting just next to my work space. Carefully chosen from the specifications of different manufacturers’ machines, the Brother MFC-9440CN was a standout in its performance, capabilities, price, and Mac compatibility.

Office Depot delivered the box free of charge (I don’t do 85 lb lifting) and all that remained after setting up the machine itself was to make the computers talk to it. Faxing and copying are independent of the computer, and there’s a nifty walk-up USB printing port (mounted upside down for some bizarre reason). We have a Wi-Fi network but it is never going to be activated for anything but Internet access; even with security I still don’t trust the ruggedness. I had already been directed to a clever 2:1 USB switch from Click Here to Read More >>

One of my brothers was a Reader (in Mechanical and Production Engineering) at the University of Nottingham -- in the UK -- and it is good to see one of the other departments there (Electrical Engineering) at the hub of one of those projects that should make us all proud to be engineers.

Four universities have come together in a project with the acronym SCORE (Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity supply). The researchers are from the University of Manchester, the University of Nottingham, Imperial College (London), Queen Mary College (University of London) and they have stretched their arms across the Atlantic to gain help from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and GP Acoustics (a division of GP Industries and manufacturers of KEF and Celestion audio products). Th...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

I have often wondered whether some of the things I am told during my visits to semiconductor vendors are misleading by accident, or whether there isn't sometimes a more deliberate attempt to keep a sensitive part of the story quiet. As a journalist, I expect to hear news and forecasts of progress in technology, techniques, and results, but I don't expect to hear about a quantum (most apropos, as you will see) leap until very close to the unveiling of that special new thing.

When I read in these pages Lee Goldberg's report of his visit to Solar Power 2007, in Long Beach, I was struck by some of the stuff he didn't write about, central to the production of electricity from the sun's energy. Lee, rightly, recognizes the incredible commercial business that lies ahead for the industry, but it seems companies are trying to keep quiet about a few things that, presumably, they think th...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Not many people seem to realize that the implantable RFID chip that your vet put in Rover last year is also approved for humans. The FDA issued such approval in 2002 and then, in 2004, expanded the approval to medical applications, after their self-declared very careful consideration of patient privacy issues.

The ICs are the 11-mm long product of VeriChip and the conventional location for the implant is under the arm. A life of twenty years is claimed although I personally don't understand what would eventually kill what is essentially a passive device (for 99.9999% of the time).

The company is pushing the technology for patient data, to protect and identify infants, and to offer a service for those that might suffer from some kind of illness that makes them wander off from their caregivers.

But the implications go well beyond the identification of a patient's name and his/her allergies, current trea...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

From time immemorial, cheating our fellow humans has been with us. From the alchemist instilling greed by persuading the punters that they had observed a base metal being changed into gold, to the trader keeping a finger on his scales while weighing produce. Some offences in Europe carried an automatic death penalty -- like clipping, where a silver coin would be cut evenly around its edge and the resulting haul of silver melted down and sold (the reason many coins were later milled aound the perimeter).

There are still scammers out there and the Internet has made it a great deal cheaper, for a lot more, Nigerian scam letters to be distributed around the world. It was nice to read, however, of the Dutch police arresting more than 100 West Africans who were, apparently, behind one of the "You have won 30 milion Euros" spams.

But despite all the continuing scams, there have always been many more ch...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

It used to be said of the race to space that it would create many inventions and techniques which would lead to technological benefits to the general population of our earth. That may nowadays be rephrased to the fact that military works are now looking to expand into civilian roles.

It goes beyond the civilian purchases of Humvees (as this editor's spouse would say, "Do you want Armageddon!?") about which my attitude is that, if you want to drive one, I'll be happy to point you in the direction of your nearest Army recruitment office. Non-jittered GPS is a very good example; and a very bad example at the same time, because we have become incredibly dependent on a system that could be taken out of service by a man-made force, or by nature in the form of solar flares.

The latest flurry of military vendors looking to expand into the civilian market is in the form of the UAV (unmanned -- uninhabited might be more apropos -- aerial vehicle).

I don't rem...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

I have never personally wanted a doctorate; it has always seemed like it was too much of a game of intense particle inspection to yield something marginally different from others' opinions. I remember as a child how my mother typed, and retyped, and retyped the dissertation for the son of family friends from Northern Ireland as he spent hundreds of pages analyzing one sentence of a Shakespeare play. His PhD from Cambridge plus further research eventually landed him, Ronnie Mulryne, the chair of English and Comparative Literature at Warwick University; a prize Professorship so close to the Bard's original -- and final -- home.

The typing did yield box tickets for my spouse and I at a performance of Romeo and Juliet by the RSC in Stratford, but there was a lot more value in the typing than that…

So, when a young friend asked -- in a very special way ...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

There is an urban legend which I can actually vouch for as actual fact. At the BBC Droitwich transmitting station in Worcestershire, England, is a 400-kW (ERP) AM transmitter with its carrier set at a very accurate 200 kHz. During WWII, the transmitter was the main source of information for embattled Europe - reaching, as it did, to the South of France and deep into Germany, and carrying coded messages for the underground. The 50+ acre site houses the two transmitter buildings (the second for a MW transmitter with separate mast), the huge multiple-conductor T-aerial, and grass -- lots of grass.

The BBC rented out the site to a local farmer.

One day this guy was talking with his mates in a local pub and a BBC employee heard him boast that he never paid for his lighting. A couple of days later he got a visit from a policeman and a senior BBC manager. It was absolutely true. With the light switches turned off, every fluorescent in his cottage glowed brightly. He was not...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

The panic over liquids being brought on airplanes after alleged chemical mixes were going to blow them up over the Atlantic -- which suddenly, probably for commercial reasons, is no longer as important as it was -- is incomprehensible compared to the dangers of products that are freely allowed on board.

All our engineering readers are very aware of the power that a battery can deliver -- at least for a short time -- given the right conditions.

Previously our fears of the battery in the millions of laptops that fly every day has been in the fake batteries that have dominated the replacement market. Many of EN-Genius Network's sponsors make products to protect battery packs against bad charging techniques and short-circuit conditions. Leave those devices out of a battery pack, as many fake cells do, and the troubles that can be created a...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

I was only reminded of my annoyance at something when I received a second reminder from Texas Instruments inviting me to sign up for one of the current DaVinci Technology Technical Seminars being held around the US.

The DaVinci™ platform (the trademark claim is TI's, not mine) is a digital video implementation using the TMS320DM64x family of DSPs.

It is a very clever mix of hardware and software that allows designers to quickly get digital video implementations for "videophones, automobile infortainment (sic), digital still cameras, streaming media, IP set-top boxes, video security" etc. It was introduced in December 2005. In an interview with David Koenig of the As...  -- Click Here to Read More >>