Plans2Reality

Computer Glasses

OK, not very dramatic. But with monitors getting bigger and bigger, the top edge of a monitor is higher than it used to be. So 'specially for us older folks, computer glasses help with neck strain and posture.

They are basically progressive-lens bifocal, but they are "biased" - there is a big sweet spot in the middle, just right for the distance of a computer screen. At the very top, they let you see distance.

Try some!

The third industrial revolution begins: The gentleman manufacturer | The Economist

3D printing is not that new, but it appears we are at, or even past, the stage where laser printers were int he late 1980s - leaving the corporate world and becoming personal

 

via www.economist.com

Electric cars: We're not there yet.

WE're not quite there yet on 'lectric cars. It looks like battery prices need to drop a lot - 5X or so. But that could happen, tho not overnight. Read on, courtesy of the Economist.

GETTING the equivalent of 106 mpg (2.2 litres/100km), the Nissan Leaf electric car would seem a motoring skinflint’s dream come true. Even an advanced plug-in hybrid like the Chevrolet Volt (Opel/Vauxhall Ampera in Europe), with an energy consumption equivalent to 61mpg, sounds pretty miserly, too. Yet, for all their frugality, neither has been selling particularly well, despite the present sky-high price of petrol (see “Priced off the road”, July 15th 2011).

via www.economist.com

A Note on Digital Photography

This is from a recent issue of the Economist. It's as clear an explanation of digital camera sensor tradeoffs as I've read, and it contains some new information as well.

 

ON RARE and very special occasions, your correspondent digs out his ancient 120-format camera and loads a roll of colour-reversal film from a precious supply of Fujichrome Astia Professional he keeps stored in the fridge. He shoots off a dozen scenes painstakingly composed on the camera’s large ground-glass screen, carefully extracts the film-carrier and removes the exposed spool, wraps it in kitchen foil, and takes it to a lab across town that still knows how to process roll-film properly. Despite the palaver, the silver halide communion is hugely satisfying. Even after all the years of use, viewing the 120's big square transparencies under a loupe on a lightbox can still take the breath away.

In so far as it is possible to compare two entirely different ways of capturing photons, the Hasselblad's 6cm square frame is equivalent to a 70 megapixel digital sensor. The attraction of such a format is that it provides a large enough transparency for art editors to select the crop they like best, while still offering more than enough resolution (when the cropped area is enlarged) to cover losses incurred during plate-making and printing.

Creating a full-page bleed for a colour magazine using even 35mm film is far more challenging. Trying to do so with a compact digital camera or smartphone is out of the question. But, then, the vast majority of digital cameras have light-gathering sensors the size of tiny toe-nails—and are used largely for uploading images to Flickr or Facebook, or for making 3.5 inch by 5 inch (8.9cm by 12.7cm) prints for family albums.

That is not to say film beats digital any day. Not having to pay for and reload a fresh film every couple of dozen shots encourages digital photographers to experiment more. And there is the convenience of being able to see the result immediately, which allows users to delete inferior images and, if necessary, shoot additional ones. Meanwhile, the past decade has seen the light-processing power of silicon sensors become truly awesome.

Depending on the lens and the film speed, a frame of 35mm film has the digital equivalent of between 15 and 20 megapixels. The “full-frame” sensors (with the same 36mm by 24mm format of 35mm film) in digital single-lens reflex (D-SLR) cameras used by professionals can more than match that today. The Canon EOS 5D Mark II, for instance, uses a 21 megapixel sensor. 

With a decent lens, even the cheaper D-SLRs produced for the “prosumer” market can come close. Thanks mainly to their smaller sensors (typically 22mm by 15mm), these popular devices tend to be lighter, more compact and less than a third the price of full-frame models. Their sensors are based on the old APS film format, which promised to revolutionise photography but failed miserably. The cameras were barely any smaller than 35mm ones, yet had only 40% the frame size.

So, how come digital cameras that use so-called APS-C sensors, with less than half the sensor area of full-frame cameras, perform as well as they do? Even the so-called “micro four-thirds” D-SLRs, with sensors less than a third the size of a full-frame’s chip, seem more than passable. The answer is that while professional photographers using full-frame D-SLRs may blow up their images to poster size, the majority of camera users rarely make prints larger than 8 inches by 10 inches. Under normal lighting conditions, practically any 12 megapixel D-SLR will suffice.

In fact, 12 megapixels has become a kind of sweet spot in the digital-camera business. With smartphones incorporating eight-megapixel cameras these days, the number of basic digital cameras sold fell 17% during the first 11 months of 2011, according to NPD Group, a market research company based in Port Washington, New York. Meanwhile, unit sales of pricier point-and-shoot models with bigger sensors and zoom lenses grew by 16%, and prosumer D-SLRs were up 12%.

In theory, the more pixels a sensor chip has crammed onto it, the greater is the amount of detail that can be captured in a scene. That was certainly the case a decade or so ago, when Japanese camera-makers were engaged in a megapixel race. But there comes a point at which the pixels are too small and are packed too close together for further advantage to accrue.

At that point, the “shot noise”—caused when individual pixels are so tiny that too few photons strike them—replaces the steady shower of light falling on the sensor with a sporadic, hail-like drumming effect. Meanwhile, the close proximity of the pixels induces thermal and electrical noise. The result is an image that begins to fragment and develop artifacts, especially under conditions of low light.

One answer, of course, is to increase the size of the sensor chip, while making the pixels larger and spreading them out more. The point of using full-frame (and even larger) sensors in professional cameras is not just to increase the pixel count, but also to reduce their density—and thus the background noise. It is the low noise level that allows professionals to produce such detailed images in poor lighting conditions, and to enlarge them to such an extent.

The first rule in choosing a digital camera, then, is to place sensor size over pixel count. A second is to put sensor density and layout ahead of both of the above. Your correspondent has become intrigued of late by Fujifilm’s EXR sensor technology, which uses octagonal pixels instead of the usual square ones. Practically all digital cameras employ a square-grid arrangement of photosensors called a Bayer mosaic, which comprises rows of red and green filters alternating with rows of green and blue filters. This colour-filter array, patented by Bryce Bayer at Eastman Kodak in 1976, has proved extremely successful in capturing both the colour and the detail in a scene.

The use of twice as many green elements as red and blue ones mimics the physiology of the human eye. Because the eye can perceive finer detail in the green part of the spectrum, the abundance of green pixels produces an image that appears to be less noisy and to have greater resolution than would be the case if all three colours were treated equally.

Fujifilm’s EXR technology (originally called Super CCD when first introduced in 1999) produces a higher resolution than is possible with a conventional sensor of similar pixel count. It does this by allowing alternate rows of pixel sites to be read separately, rather like the scanning arrangement on an old-fashioned television set, making a 12 megapixel chip appear as though it were two interleaved six megapixel sensors.

Because the octagonal pixels are aligned diagonally along 45º axes, instead of being arranged in horizontal and vertical rows and columns, pairs of pixels of the same colour can be next to one another, which is impossible in a Bayer rectangular array. In low light, the sensor combines data from pairs of similarly coloured pixels next to one another, averaging out the noise between the two, to reduce the overall noise within the image.

To improve the camera’s dynamic range, the sensor reads alternate lines in the matrix and switches them off part way through the exposure process. This reduces their chance of causing overexposure while still retaining information about highlights in the picture. The underexposed highlight detail is then combined with information from the fully exposed other set of alternate lines, to produce a final image that reveals detail which might otherwise be lost in the shadows.

Fujifilm's recently launched $600 point-and-shoot camera known as the X10 encapsulates all these features and more. And while it will never replace your correspondent’s clunky old Hasselblad, it could well give his even older Leica IIIF a serious run for its money. (Cutting modern 35mm film to form a tongue that fits in the take-up spool of the old rangefinder camera is becoming too much of a chore.) While not quite as retro-looking as its X100 bigger brother, the X10 at least has a bright zoom lens, a faster auto-focus, and an old-fashioned (Leica-like) optical viewfinder. Your correspondent guiltily admits it was this last feature which finally swayed him to make the purchase. Happy New Year!

 

From PJ O'Rourke

This originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal in 2009, but it's worth a re-read. A note to PJ: yes, I am, uhh, bending copyright rules. But hey, I've bought all your books. That should count for something. And I remember your C&D Snowmobile Bob-Evans-Farm-Sausage story like it was yesterday.

The End of the Affair

The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of economics. It’s a tragic romance, whose magic was killed by bureaucrats, bad taste and busybodies. P.J. O’Rourke on why Americans fell out of love with the automobile.

The phrase “bankrupt General Motors,” which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as “Mom’s nude photos.” And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War.

Corbis

Insert another “power” after the horse and the verse was as true in the suburbs of my 1950s boyhood as it was in the Khyber Pass.

Horsepower is not a quaint leftover of linguistics or a vague metaphoric anachronism. James Watt, father of the steam engine and progenitor of the industrial revolution, lacked a measurement for the movement of weight over distance in time—what we call energy. (What we call energy wasn’t even an intellectual concept in the late 18th century—in case you think the recent collapse of global capitalism was history’s most transformative moment.) Mr. Watt did research using draft animals and found that, under optimal conditions, a dray horse could lift 33,000 pounds one foot off the ground in one minute. Mr. Watt—the eponymous watt not yet existing—called this unit of energy “1 horse-power.”

In 1970 a Pontiac GTO (may the brand name rest in peace) had horsepower to the number of 370. In the time of one minute, for the space of one foot, it could move 12,210,000 pounds. And it could move those pounds down every foot of every mile of all the roads to the ends of the earth for every minute of every hour until the driver nodded off at the wheel. Forty years ago the pimply kid down the block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan, whose hordes went forth to pillage mounted upon less oomph than is in a modern leaf blower.

iStockphoto

Horses and horsepower alike are about status and being cool. A knight in ancient Rome was bluntly called “guy on horseback,” Equesitis. Chevalier means the same, as does Cavalier. Lose the capitalization and the dictionary says, “insouciant and debonair; marked by a lofty disregard of others’ interests, rights, or feelings; high-handed and arrogant and supercilious.” How cool is that? Then there are cowboys—always cool—and the U.S. cavalry that coolly comes to their rescue plus the proverbially cool-handed “Man on Horseback” to whom we turn in troubled times.

Early witnesses to the automobile urged motorists to get a horse. But that, in effect, was what the automobile would do—get a horse for everybody. Once the Model T was introduced in 1908 we all became Sir Lancelot, gained a seat at the Round Table and were privileged to joust for the favors of fair maidens (at drive-in movies). The pride and prestige of a noble mount was vouchsafed to the common man. And woman, too. No one ever tried to persuade ladies to drive sidesaddle with both legs hanging out the car door.

For the purpose of ennobling us schlubs, the car is better than the horse in every way. Even more advantageous than cost, convenience and not getting kicked and smelly is how much easier it is to drive than to ride. I speak with feeling on this subject, having taken up riding when I was nearly 60 and having begun to drive when I was so small that my cousin Tommy had to lie on the transmission hump and operate the accelerator and the brake with his hands.

Car Culture/Corbis

A 1950 Studebaker Commander Convertible, with its famous ‘bullet-nose’ front end.

After the grown-ups had gone to bed, Tommy and I shifted the Buick into neutral, pushed it down the driveway and out of earshot, started the engine and toured the neighborhood. The sheer difficulty of horsemanship can be illustrated by what happened to Tommy and me next. Nothing. We maneuvered the car home, turned it off and rolled it back up the driveway. (We were raised in the blessedly flat Midwest.) During our foray the Buick’s speedometer reached 30. But 30 miles per hour is a full gallop on a horse. Delete what you’ve seen of horse riding in movies. Possibly a kid who’d never been on a horse could ride at a gallop without killing himself. Possibly one of the Jonas Brothers could land an F-14 on a carrier deck.

Thus cars usurped the place of horses in our hearts. Once we’d caught a glimpse of a well-turned Goodyear, checked out the curves of the bodywork and gaped at that swell pair of headlights, well, the old gray mare was not what she used to be. We embarked upon life in the fast lane with our new paramour. It was a great love story of man and machine. The road to the future was paved with bliss.

Then we got married and moved to the suburbs. Being away from central cities meant Americans had to spend more of their time driving. Over the years away got farther away. Eventually this meant that Americans had to spend all of their time driving. The play date was 40 miles from the Chuck E. Cheese. The swim meet was 40 miles from the cello lesson. The Montessori was 40 miles from the math coach. Mom’s job was 40 miles from Dad’s job and the three-car garage was 40 miles from both.

The car ceased to be object of desire and equipment for adventure and turned into office, rec room, communications hub, breakfast nook and recycling bin—a motorized cup holder. Americans, the richest people on Earth, were stuck in the confines of their crossover SUVs, squeezed into less space than tech-support call-center employees in a Mumbai cubicle farm. Never mind the six-bedroom, eight-bath, pseudo-Tudor with cathedral-ceilinged great room and 1,000-bottle controlled-climate wine cellar. That was a day’s walk away.

Getty Images

Henry Ford and his Model T.

We became sick and tired of our cars and even angry at them. Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically unimpactful way,

But cars didn’t shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We’re way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy’s lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren’t forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

But our poor cars paid the price. They were flashing swords beaten into dull plowshares. Cars became appliances. Or worse. Nobody’s ticked off at the dryer or the dishwasher, much less the fridge. We recognize these as labor-saving devices. The car, on the other hand, seems to create labor. We hold the car responsible for all the dreary errands to which it needs to be steered. Hell, a golf cart’s more fun. You can ride around in a golf cart with a six-pack, safe from breathalyzers, chasing Canada geese on the fairways and taking swings at gophers with a mashie.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Louis Chevrolet sits behind the wheel of his prototype car in 1911.

We’ve lost our love for cars and forgotten our debt to them and meanwhile the pointy-headed busybodies have been exacting their revenge. We escaped the poke of their noses once, when we lived downtown, but we won’t be able to peel out so fast the next time. In the name of safety, emissions control and fuel economy, the simple mechanical elegance of the automobile has been rendered ponderous, cumbersome and incomprehensible. One might as well pry the back off an iPod as pop the hood on a contemporary motor vehicle. An aging shade-tree mechanic like myself stares aghast and sits back down in the shade. Or would if the car weren’t squawking at me like a rehearsal for divorce. You left the key in. You left the door open. You left the lights on. You left your dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor.

I don’t believe the pointy-heads give a damn about climate change or gas mileage, much less about whether I survive a head-on with one of their tax-sucking mass-transit projects. All they want to is to make me hate my car. How proud and handsome would Bucephalas look, or Traveler or Rachel Alexandra, with seat and shoulder belts, air bags, 5-mph bumpers and a maze of pollution-control equipment under the tail?

And there’s the end of the American automobile industry. When it comes to dull, practical, ugly things that bore and annoy me, Japanese things cost less and the cup holders are more conveniently located.

The American automobile is—that is, was—never a product of Japanese-style industrialism. America’s steel, coal, beer, beaver pelts and PCs may have come from our business plutocracy, but American cars have been manufactured mostly by romantic fools. David Buick, Ransom E. Olds, Louis Chevrolet, Robert and Louis Hupp of the Hupmobile, the Dodge brothers, the Studebaker brothers, the Packard brothers, the Duesenberg brothers, Charles W. Nash, E. L. Cord, John North Willys, Preston Tucker and William H. Murphy, whose Cadillac cars were designed by the young Henry Ford, all went broke making cars. The man who founded General Motors in 1908, William Crapo (really) Durant, went broke twice. Henry Ford, of course, did not go broke, nor was he a romantic, but judging by his opinions he certainly was a fool.

Bettmann/CORBIS

Preston Tucker, in one of the few Tucker cars produced, celebrates being acquitted of charges of fraud over the failure of his automobile business in 1950.

America’s romantic foolishness with cars is finished, however, or nearly so. In the far boondocks a few good old boys haven’t got the memo and still tear up the back roads. Doubtless the Obama administration’s Department of Transportation is even now calculating a way to tap federal stimulus funds for mandatory OnStar installations to locate and subdue these reprobates.

Among certain youths—often first-generation Americans—there remains a vestigial fondness for Chevelle low-riders or Honda “tuners.” The pointy-headed busybodies have yet to enfold these youngsters in the iron-clad conformity of cultural diversity’s embrace. Soon the kids will be expressing their creative energy in a more constructive way, planting bok choy in community gardens and decorating homeless shelters with murals of Che.

I myself have something old-school under a tarp in the basement garage. I bet when my will has been probated, some child of mine will yank the dust cover and use the proceeds of the eBay sale to buy a mountain bike. Four things greater than all things are, and I’m pretty sure one of them isn’t bicycles. There are those of us who have had the good fortune to meet with strength and beauty, with majestic force in which we were willing to trust our lives. Then a day comes, that strength and beauty fails, and a man does what a man has to do. I’m going downstairs to put a bullet in a V-8.

P.J. O’Rourke is the author of 13 books, including “Driving Like Crazy.”

Corrections & Amplifications:

Horsepower is a unit of power. This article incorrectly says that horsepower is a unit of energy.

 

Too Stupid to Live, Part Five

Speaking on the House floor, Rep. Jesse Jackson (D-Ill.) said Apple's popular tablet computer "is now probably responsible for eliminating thousands of American jobs. Borders is closing stores because, why do you need to go to Borders anymore? Why do you need to go to Barnes & Noble?" the congressman asked. "Just buy an iPad and download your book, download your newspaper, download your magazine."

Jackson, the son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, went on to cite a recent initiative at Chicago State University, which is in Jackson's congressional district, to give all incoming freshmen iPads for their studies.

"Well, what becomes of publishing companies then and publishing company jobs?" Jackson said. "What becomes of bookstores and librarians and all of the jobs associated with paper? Well, in the not too distant future, such jobs will simply not exist."

 

Works for me. It should reduce de-forestation, as we stop killing tons of trees for paper....

How Apple beat IBM in Steve Jobs' first retail war • The Register

You really want to read this article, and not just because it is pro-Apple. There are two excellent marketing points in it, and an example of why the even biggest company needs to be flexible enough to get something out the door in 48 hours - over a weekend.

The Golden Age of Computer Sales surely must have been Christmas 1984. The Macintosh had just been released, Compaq and IBM offered powerful new CPUs, but the real action was a massive Christmas sales battle between the Apple//c and the IBM PCjr. I remember it well, I was working at ComputerLand in Los Angeles, and I was at the very center of the battle.

via www.theregister.co.uk

Kindle's New Fire

The Economist has an interesting review of Kindle's new Fire:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/tablet-computers

I suspect we will be adding one to the stable here at Plans2Reality. Stay tuned.

Twin Pulsejet Motorcycle

Twin Pulsejet motorcycle built by Robert Maddox

via thekneeslider.com

Sold already. Wonder if Leno bought it?

 

Another Cool Tool

Makita makes an LED flashlight that works with their 18V batteries. I recommend it strongly; it gives oyu another good reason to get the Makita 18V Lithium Ion tool set.