Topic Tuesday #50 2013/07/02 - "CHARGE!!!"

Topic Tuesday #50 2013/07/02 - "CHARGE!!!"

CHARGing you batteries is not the easiest thing to do some days. It gets especially difficult when you do something unusual. For instance you may have seen the MIT/Wilson Solar Grill.

This implementation is unique in the way is stores energy, which is certainly different from the way a cell phone or laptop stores power. This configuration (which has not actually been constructed to my knowledge) uses a fresnel lens to magnify and focus the rays of the sun to melt a lithium nitrate substrate. The melted lithium nitrate, due to its phase change reaction, is able to release its thermal energy for longer periods of time and at higher temperatures than other methods up to now. Heat is then redistributed through convection, which allows for outdoor cooking and heating homes. This method is referred to as "latent heat storage".

Obviously this is a unique application that requires a specific set of criteria. This could also be used to provide electric power or boil water for steam applications. 

Peltier element

Remember any time you have a change of temperature you can utilize that to create power as the heat is exchanged and returns to a neutral state. Peltier coolers use power to create heat, which in turn creates a cold side. With an application such as this, derivatives of that technology can turn a heat source, into power. If done creatively, a refrigerator too. 

Batteries, and power sources in general, are complicated things. The design may be simplistic, but usually a power supply is designed to fit an application.  Some things to consider:

Capacity (Amp Hours)

Weight 

Size (Physical Dimensions)

Discharge Rate (Time to Empty at designed load)

Charge Rate (Time to Charge, when under load and not under load)

Charge Cycles (number of charge/discharge cycles before needing to replace)

Operating temperature range (Affects charge and discharge rates. Batteries can catch fire and explode under the "right" circumstances, like being embedded in a cooking appliance like the solar grill)

Architecture of storage media: Lead-acid? NiCd? NiMH? NiZn? AgZN? NaS? Lithium ion? - and so forth.

Longevity and recyclability:

Obviously what the battery is made of has far reaching implications for the ability to recycle them. Lithium is rare, expensive, and in high demand. Lead Acid (car, marine, UPS batteries) are low cost, high weight, and readily recycled into new batteries given the proper facilities.

So, thank your local engineers for building all this stuff we take for granted all the time, and keep the innovation alive by encouraging our youngsters to... play with electricity, fire, water, light... and anything that interests them. Who knows what problem they might solve.

Topic Tuesday #47 2013/06/11 - "Big Brother / Big Data"

Topic Tuesday #47 2013/06/11 - "Big Brother / Big Data"

Orwell would be pointing a malnourished finger at all of us and chanting, "I told you so".
I don't go into the dystopian conspiracy theories, but as they are part of our culture, they still must be examined. Today the magnifying glass is on "Big Data". You may have heard the term, and if you haven't, you will.
Wikipedia summarized it thusly:
Big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis, and visualization. The trend to larger data sets is due to the additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data, as compared to separate smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be found to "spot business trends, determine the quality of research, prevent diseases, link legal citations, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway traffic conditions.

Big Data is just that, BIG. Veritable truckloads of data available on demand and manipulatable to yield a variety of correlations. It's enough to give you the heebie-jeebies, but honestly, it is unavoidable.
Big Data is a side effect of our increasingly technological society. We have devices that generate information that can be captured and logged. Most of it is innocuous. Like temperatures, wind speed, and rainfall.  
We take weather measurements every few seconds (this would be a data set, like a spreadsheet) in thousands of weather stations all over the world (a larger data group, a collection of spreadsheets). Now imagine that you have all this information collected from all the weather stations all over, and now you can see patterns. With patterns you can make predictions. Voila, you have a rudimentary weather model and can start to predict storm patterns.
Now extrapolate that out further. Do you have a credit card? Congratulations you have your own data set of purchasing patterns! This information is stored and used to determine fraud patterns. If suddenly you are outside your normal spending patterns or regions, you may be flagged with a fraud alert, keeping you safe. The dark side of the credit card industry is they have a tendency to sell/share that information with marketers and even law enforcement. In this way your habits become a recognizable pattern. Patterns can be identified, and some are as unique as a finger print.
It is safe to assume that if your have a device that generates a loggable data set, you can be sure someone somewhere is collecting it, and someone else wants it for some reason. Some will want to make life easier for you, others for themselves. Some will profit from it, and others will suffer. And I haven't even got into facial recognition! 

Topic Tuesday #37 2013/04/02 - "To the Cloud! Part 2-Storage"

Topic Tuesday #37 2013/04/02 - "To the Cloud! Part 2-Storage"

Continuing from To the Cloud Part 1 #35, today we will delve lightly into cloud storage, specifically those that sync to multiple computers and devices.
Again, if I get too far in the jargon weeds and I lose you, let me know in the comments.

A number of cloud based storage providers have dove headfirst into the business of storage. Some are "better" than others. Some are more private than others. Some are just a better deal with many free-to an extent. Thus far, personally, I have not found a single solution more to my liking than any other.

Top Contenders I have become familiar with:

Google Drive (Collaborative Apps, Storage, Mail, Chrome browser sync).
Microsoft Skydrive (MS Office Apps, Storage, Mail).
Apple iCloud 
Dropbox
Box
Tonido (not the Tonido Plug)
PogoPlug (not the physical device, but the computer based software)
Jungle Disk
Carbonite
CrashPlan

If you have an iOS device or a MAC you are already in the iCloud. You have most likely enabled syncing of your devices, and that has made you pretty happy, if you were in that ecosystem already.
If you have a Gmail account, then you already have Google Drive and may be familiar with some of the features available.
If you have a Hotmail or Live.com account, similar to the iCloud and Google Drive, you are familiar with some cloud storage options and document editing features and perhaps still more.
Dropbox and Box have become the kleenex of cloud storage, Dropbox much more so. It's largely free to play up to a few GB and more if you publicise it for them. You can purchase, for a monthly fee, large quantities of storage.
Tonido and PogoPlug are special in they allow you to be your own cloud by attaching a drive or installing their software on your own, and accessing it from the internet or via their mobile apps. These also have drive mapping utilities so you can access the files as a drive letter on you computer. They also have pay to play versions where you can get online storage for a fee, but it is not necessary. The biggest benefit from these two is the option to not trust them. You hold your information on your own device. Your data can be secure in that it does not go through the companies hands, unless you bought storage from them. Great for the paranoids and the mistrustful, or the criminal.
Jungle Disk, Carbonite, and Crashplan are all essentially backup providers. They have a selling point of also having apps and the ability to access your files from anywhere and turning your backup in to cloud storage. This is the same as say Dropbox or Box, but the other side of the coin, and focused on the backup portion. This ability is only available if you "trust" the company with the key.  Let me explain very simply what that means.

If a storage provider can provide your saved data to you in an app or on the web, it is safe to say, they can access it at any time and not require your password to do so. Keep that in mind. If you don't want something to fall in to the wrong hands (melodrama intended) don't put it where people can read it.
Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, Box, Apple and any of the providers that can display your files in their interface, can and will comply with law enforcement and relinquish access to your files to them, with a court order. Crashplan, Carbonite, and Jungle Disk, if you setup the options to have a private key, all they store is the random bits and they don't know what they have. They can't access it, and are then free to tell law enforcement that they cannot comply. This makes them TNO, or Trust No One, compliant.

But there is a convenience that we enjoy with these cloud applications that is undeniable.

Google Drive, has very inexpensive storage. They have the Google Apps, as an office product replacement that has the single greatest feature to hit the web in a very long time; you can simultaneously edit documents with collaborators. You can see exactly what they do! It's quite the experience. There is also a desktop sync app, that allows for a folder on your computer to be replicated to the cloud and any other machines you install it on. We will label this feature as "Desktop Sync". Also, their cloud allow for backing up of your Android phone, which is indispensable. The Drive application is a little resource heavy and can bring system performance down.
SkyDrive has storage, backs up your Windows Phone, has a light version of MS Office (no simultaneous collaboration, yet), email, "Desktop Sync" once you have installed their Sky Drive "Desktop Sync" you can access all the files on your computer from the web. Convenient, and a little creepy when you think about what they CAN access. It's all about trust.
iCloud, honestly... Pretty useless except for those items that are Apple centric. It's not a catch all and there is no way to edit your documents in a browser. It is handy for recovering your cloud backed up phone or ipod.
Dropbox has become the ubiquitous cloud service. All the apps for your phone will be able to sync to it, if anything. It syncs well across all your devices, and you can earn free storage. The price tiers are a bit steep, It's usefulness is without question.
Box is very similar to Dropbox. Their software is very well executed and handles syncing with less resources than Dropbox. They have occasional promotions where you can get free storage. I ended up getting 50GB for free by simply signing up for service with the iPhone app. That is hard to beat, and hard to come by. They do have a fault in there is a file upload size limit of 250mb. This is raised on paid plans, but not removed as a restriction. Dropbox has a significantly higher restriction.

Tonido is a mashup of different things. There is a sync application and a drive mapping application. Inside he web interface there are options for calendars, Thots (a wiki of sorts), media streaming and you can send links to share your files directly with people (and even see when they downloaded it). Overall, since the desktop installation is free (with limitations of file syncing and such) it is well worth the look. If you want to shell out some cash, and have an extra laptop hard drive around, the Tonido Plug is a very handy home file server with all the features I highlighted above. The Sync and Drive applications can be flakey, but that may depend more on your own internet connection speed, so your mileage may vary.
PogoPlug is similar to Tonido, but their desktop application I found to be very resource hungry using lots of ram. A colleague of mine has the stand alone PogoPlug device, and he has been very pleased with its performance. Some things are better when they are dedicated, and somethings to do not scale well. I have several TB of data, and that may have been the limitation of my PogoPlug experience.
Carbontie and Crashplan I will lump together as they provide the same service. Crashplan was more economical for multiple computers for unlimited storage. Carbontie has a more friendly interface.  Bothe have applications and you can access files an stream media with them, unless you have the setup a private key. Having done this for security, my overall experience with using them as a cloud storage option is limited but mentioned as it has tremendous value for low risk material.
Jungledisk and many of its type that I have left unmentioned are very highly configurable and somewhat daunting to setup. Additionally you pay for the storage separately, and you would choose your own provider. This is a very finest of geeky solutions, but may not be your cup of tea. It is mentioned more to show the opposite extreme.

There is more to say about these, and each could warrant its own place of honor as a post here and in your life. Give them a try and let us know what you think.

Topic Tuesday #34 2013/03/12 - "Going Paperless"

Topic Tuesday #34 2013/03/12 - "Going Paperless"

The modern information age has presented a few problems our forebearers did not consider.
In a day (24 hour period):
If you read the newspapers you see around 30 headlines, with the attributing article.
If you then use the internet for news, you are likely to pass by over 300 news articles, with various links to other articles and source material and pictures and media and blah blah blah. 

Carry on to email and search and other various tasks; on average somewhere around 200 web pages will be encountered.
With all this, daily we encounter roughly 500,000 words. To put that in context; Leo Tulstoys's 'War & Peace' was only 460,000 words.
So we have a plethora of information at our fingertips and clouding our minds, our inboxes, and our desks.

What do we do with all this? How can we manage all this information?
The simplest way is filters. A way to index and search for what you want out of all your sources. The problem with this is that we can't index paper by much more than some basic keywords, like author, subject, date, etc. The full text remains hidden to us. Solution: Going paperless.

How do we do that?
It's a good question and one that is still very much in debate. I have seen in my daily work that most "paperless offices" actually generate MORE paper than they did before they were paperless. Doesn't make much sense, until you add the human quality of mistrust of new technology into the mix. In a few more years, the hard copies will start to become less and less. Until such time, they do have the advantage, at the end of the day, of being able to search all those papers virtually.

What does it take?
The Source Material, An imaging unit to make the source digital, A place to store the files it creates, A way to recognize the text and make it searchable and editable, Time, Effort, and An organizational plan.

You have the stuff you want to scan, that's easy to identify. Now what?
What will you use to make an image?
I have taken pictures with my phone, used a flatbed scanner, a digital copier, and sadly, hand transcription back into a document. Once you have the image then you need a program to turn the print into editable and searchable text. This is called OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Most scanners will come with one that will perform this task, like Abby Finereader. Some are better than others; you have been warned. Many also come with document management software, like PaperPort. Others will have complete package solutions that you will either love or hate, like NeatDesk. You need to be cognisant that you will be living with the imaging solutions for years to come. Many scanners outlive their computer counterparts by a decade. I recommend you select a manufacturer that has a good track record for updating drivers quickly and not abandoning products. Read the reviews. Think ahead. Think of what you would like to have the ability to do.

That said, I have some more genealogy documents to get scanned, and I'm going to buy one of these solutions and cross my fingers that the pile of papers I have, soon becomes a mass of easily indexed 1s and 0s.

What solution have you tried?

Fujitsu ScanSnap iX50

Epson WorkForce GTS50

Brother ADS2000

Xerox XDM1525-WU DocuMate 152

NeatDesk

Topic Tuesday #26 2013/01/15 - "Keeping Your Sanity & Your Files"

Topic Tuesday #26 2013/01/15 - "Keeping Your Sanity & Your Files"

About two years ago I suffered a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) failure. This was a particularly large array, at 14TB, and I was grief stricken for quite some time. What really ate at me was that I wasn't even sure what I had lost. One might think that a blessing, but I am cursed with the unknown loss. I have grieved and moved on. I rebuilt my RAID and subsequently swore never to have such a catastrophe again. It was about this time that I was listening to one of the TWiT Podcasts, Macbreak Weekly and Alex Lindsey over at Pixel Corps was singing the praises of a Drobo disk array. That was nice and all, as Alex is known for buying the nicest and most expensive of toys, but there was a reason he was talking about backup. Photographers, in particular digital media artists, have a great deal of unique intellectual property that needs to be kept safe. Leo Laporte (of TWiT network, and of Screen Savers and Call for Help fame) mentioned the 3-2-1 backup strategy. Peter Krogh in his book The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers, came upon the notion and it goes like this:
3 – Your important files should exist in three different places. This could be your computer, your spouses computer, an external drive, a burned DVD, a remote backup, a friend’s house, whatever. Just three distinct copies of the files.
2 – Those files should be on at least two different types of media. Media can be hard drive, DVD, memory card or stick, or even original paper or film.
1 – At least one of those copies should be maintained off-site. That is away from the site of the original. Preferably in a different city or state. Think about common natural disasters. Off-site should be out of reach of those natural disasters.

Another way to look at it is, one copy of anything, might as well not exist.

FYI-Hard drive platters are made of glass.

So what do we do? Backing up is not as easy as we would like it to be. We don't want to think about it!
I took the approach of spending large amounts of money on a big expensive infrastructure of RAID drives and that still didn't help me. Anyone that backed up their data to an external hard drive and had it fail on them will feel my pain, to some degree. So I rebuilt my RAID, with better knowledge from the school of hard knocks under my belt. That takes care of some of it, since my RAID will survive drive failure.
My RAID will not survive a flood or other act of nature of vandalism or theft... So I need to have an offsite solution. In the old days we would burn copies of the important things on to optical storage (CD/DVD) or magnetic tape (DAT) and send them off to a friend or relative, safe deposit box, or secure storage facility like Iron Mountain or Recall.
Now thanks to high speed internet and cloud storage prices coming down we have more options, and new ones are popping up all the time. I looked at several, and the easiest to use is Carbonite.com. They have the simplest interface and reasonable rates, but they do not pass the Trust No One (TNO) security model. If you are not concerned with someone at the company being able to access your data for law enforcement, they are a great bet. I have many computers and wanted a more economical model to work with them. Crashplan.com has a family plan that will let you backup 10 computers for the same fee and works on Linux, Mac and PC. If you are not concerned with TNO, you can set the standard password and access your files on the go via your phones and tablets, just like Carbonite. If you are concerned, you can set a private key and then the data is encrypted before it leaves your computer, safe and sound. You can also backup to one of your other computers or a friend for free, which is a thing a beauty.
Another subscription based backup is Mozy. Mozy is cross platform, but I am not sure about its security model as I have no experience with it.
If you don't like to pay monthly for SaaS (Software as a Service), there are two that are buy once-use forever. On the Mac side there is ARQ Backup from Haystack software. On the PC side is Cloudberry. They both support Amazon S3 & Amazon's new very affordable Glacier long term storage product and are TNO compliant. They both have lots of other bells and whistles too so go check them out.
If security really is no concern, there are many more options. Google Drive, Microsoft Sky Drive, Box.com, Dropbox.com, and many more. These offer an amazing array of free and scalable storage sync option. Anything in one of their folders will go to their servers (which they have access to your files through) and whatever machines you choose to sync to. Great if you have low security things you want to work on in multiple places. Available in these services for affordable prices are things like undelete, multiple file versioning, and in the case of Google drive; simultaneous collaborative editing. The cloud is powerful, just watch your butt on the security you give up for all the cool features.

Bottom line, all of the services I mentioned will fix you up very well for a solid backup where your files are backed up automatically, off site and since you have a copy, and they have a copy (and a service level agreement to keep your files safe and backed up) you can consider their backup solutions for your data as part of your own. Just... Don't keep all those baby pictures on that portable drive on the edge of your desk and consider them "backed up" when the cat knocks it off onto the tile floor and it skids across the floor under the foot of someone that then trips and falls into the water cooler spilling 5 gallons of refreshing spring water all over your precious 1s and 0s. I want you to be able to buy me a beer when you remember that all of your eggs are not in that one soggy basket.

Topic Tuesday #10 2012/09/25 "Water World - Part 2"

Topic Tuesday #10 2012/09/25 "Water World - Part 2"

We need quite a bit of water to survive on. It needs to be clean...
Last week I discussed the requirements of how much water we need to survive. Today, how do we make it safe?

I am going to quickly give some ways to clean up water so you don't die. 

There are 4 categories; Separation, Chemical, Filtration, Oxidation.

SEPARATION: (HEAT, LIGHT & GRAVITY)

• SEDIMENTATION gravitationally settles heavy suspended material. 
• BOILING WATER for 15 to 20 minutes kills 99.9% of all living things and vaporizes most chemicals.  Minerals, metals, solids and the contamination from the cooking container become more concentrated. 
• DISTILLATION boils and re-condenses the water, but many chemicals vaporize and recondense in concentration in the output water. It is also expensive to boil & cool water. 
• ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT is a good bactericide, but has no residual kill, and works only in clearly filtered water. Still in its infancy stage is a new technology involving super white light.

CHEMICALS

• CHLORINE is common, cheap, but extremely toxic. It does not decrease physical or chemical contamination, it does increase colesterol formations, is a carcinogen, amd causes heart disease. 
• IODINE is not practical, and is mostly used by campers. 
• HYDROGEN PEROXIDE kills bacteria with oxygen, is chemically made and is very toxic. It is used in emergencies. 
• COAGULATION-FLOCCULATION adds chemicals which lump together suspended particles for filtration or separation. 
• ION EXCHANGE exchanges sodium from salt for calcium or magnesium, using either glauconite (greensand), precipitated synthetic organic resins, or gel zeolite, thus softening the water. Minerals, metals, chemicals or odors are not affected, and the water is salty to drink. 

FILTRATION

• SLOW SAND of 1 cubic meter passes about 2 liters/min, and does a limited bacteria removal. 
• HIGH PRESSURE/RAPID SAND of 1 cubic meter passes about 40gpm and must be backwashed daily. 
• DIATOMACEOUS EARTH removes small suspended particles at high flow rates, must be back-washed daily and is expensive.
• PAPER or CLOTH filters are disposable and filter to one micron, but do not have much capacity. 
• CHARCOAL: 
• -COMPRESSED CHARCOAL/CARBON BLOCK is the best type of charcoal filter, can remove chemicals and lead, but is easily clogged, so should be used with a sediment prefilter. 
• -GRANULAR CHARCOAL is cheaper, but water can flow around the granules without being treated. 
• -POWDERED CHARCOAL is a very fine dust useful for spot cleaning larger bodies of water, but is messy and can pass through some filters and be consumed. 
• REVERSE OSMOSIS uses a membrane with microscopic holes that require 4 to 8 times the volume of water processed to wash it in order to remove minerals and salt, but not necessarily chemicals and bacteria.

OXIDATION - These are most often used in big water treatment facilities. These techniques attempt to mimic what mother nature does with rivers. See THE SELF-PURIFICATION OF RIVERS AND STREAMS, from 1919. You can read a great deal about it to understand how it is supposed to work.

• AERATION sprays water into the air to raise the oxygen content, to break down odors, and to balance the dissolved gases. However, it takes space, is expensive, and picks up contaminants from the air. 
• OZONE is a very good bactericide, using highly charged oxygen molecules to kill microorganisms on contact, and to flocculate iron and manganese for post filtration and backwashing. 
• ELECTRONIC PURIFICATION and DISSOLVED OXYGEN GENERATION creates super oxygenated water in a dissolved state that lowers the surface tension of the water and effectively treats all three types of contamination: physical, chemical and biological.

The easiest for you and me to go through is likely to be the separation method. An issue to remember here, and one that has caught entire villages with a bad case of the runs, is proper storage of the water once you have sterilized it. There are many methods to do that, but that will be another topic. Look for "Food Safety" later on.

Now for your consideration: 

1. What are your plans on keeping a supply of available, CLEAN, water on hand? 
2. What would be the best method for scaling up for family clusters, to villages, to towns, etc? 
3. Are you going to try any of these methods?

The Quest For Awesome - Home Server Saga-Part 1

Once upon a time, 
A couple college kids were sitting around downloading the internet over 56k modems and were thinking that the 4GB hard drive that they just scored for a couple hundred bucks was going to last them a long time. Then they got a cable modem, discovered MP3s and networked their machines with BNC cables, at a staggering 2MB a sec! (Long before YouTube was launched in Feb 2005, btw) Their world, would never be the same..
That 4GB drive did last a long time; a year or so. It was replaced/supplemented with an 8GB drive. And then a 12GB Drive... See where this is going?
Now, there are individual files that are over 6GB in my collection of data. That's a single file that I wouldn't be able to store on that paltry 4GB drive. Hell, Windows won't even install on less than 10GB these days.
I'm not here to talk about the old days but only to put into perspective the rate that we are acquiring digital assets. It's staggering. In 1995 I had a single (hardly utilized) 30MB drive that I only upgraded because of a lightning strike. I was able to upgrade to a 130MB and thought I was hot stuff. It was true for the time too, but who could really predict the gravity of the digital revolution?
So, on to the topic, "Where the hell am I going to put all this stuff?"

• A Single Drive?
• External Drives?
• DVD Backups?
• Multiple drives?
• RAID?
• Offsite? 
• Where?
• The Cloud?
• How much will this cost???

These are the questions that we will address as we go forward. So, Go forward with me and I will share the pain and the victories I have had. We will start with the "Plan".