Recently in Technology Category

Back in December, I wrote this entry about the terribly engineered part that the General Motors corporation put into Saturn Ion vehicles, that sometimes causes them not to start, in cold weather.

I picked up the part at my local Kia dealership. Why Kia? Because they used to own the Saturn dealership which was right next door, and when the Saturn dealership closed, they moved the parts department next door to their Kia dealership so people like me could still get GM parts for their cars. When I asked the parts manager about the part, he knew the part number by heart (10392423), and told me that he had several in stock. I think this speaks to just how prevalent this problem  actually is.

Installing the part went very smoothly, mostly because I had read several forum posts by people who had already tackled the job, and this minimized the learning curve. Any handy person who has done any sort of mechanical work should be able to handle it, but beware, you must have a set of Torx sockets, to do this.

After the switch is replaced, all you need to do is reset the Passlock system, by going through that ten minute cycle three times. Once I had done that, the car started right up, and all was well.

As I had mentioned in my previous post, this is not a re-engineered switch that solved the problem inherent in the old switch. It will probably fail in three years, just like the original part did, but by then I will probably have a new car. I will just have to remember to sell this one in the summer, so that the problem won't resurface.   :-)

This post is about electric cars. Real electric cars, not fake electric cars like the Toyota Prius, and the Honda Insight, which are two among many other Hybrids (half gas and half electric), currently on the market.

I really can't talk about electric cars in the modern age without first talking about the General Motors EV1, which was manufactured between 1996, and 1999, and leased under the now defunct Saturn nameplate. The story of that vehicle was chronicled in great detail, in the film Who Killed The Electric Car. I highly recommend the film, and won't go into great detail about that vehicle, but after producing eight hundred vehicles, and leasing them to happy customers, nearly all of the cars were destroyed at the end of their lease term. A few vehicles survived, were hobbled, and exist in various automotive museums.

After seeing the film, I was left with many questions, not actually about who killed the electric car, but about things like why General Motors even tooled up to manufacture the car, if they were only going to stop manufacturing them, claiming the expenses were too high, and various other excuses. Don't costs go down when you pay for the tooling over time? Something was up. Suffice it to say that none of GM's excuses added up to me.

It has always seemed to me that the automotive industry, and the oil industry were in bed together. Makes sense, right? They have a kind-of symbiotic relationship... or do they? The oil industry needs cars with internal combustion engines to sell lots of gasoline, but does the auto industry really need the oil industry? I don't think so. They get to make and sell cars no matter what powers them. It seems to me that Detroit needs to get out of bed with big oil, since they simply do not need them.

For decades, there have been many small companies doing electric car conversions, to normal automobiles. Simple. Rip out the engine, and gas tank, and replace them with an electric motor, and some batteries. But these companies are very small boutique-style companies, with little to no market penetration, and little to no funding for research and development.

In 2003, a company with real financial backing, called Tesla Motors, incorporated, with the goal of producing an electric sports car, as well as more run-of-the-mill sedans, and as of today, are producing about twenty five vehicles per week. I have seen their offerings, and they are impressive.

But where are the big boys? It's been eleven years since the EV1 project was scrapped; why have none of the other big car companies come forward with an all-electric vehicle? Well, I recently started seeing commercials for a new, all-electric vehicle, called the Nissan Leaf (oh please). After visiting their web site, it is unclear to me when we will actually see these cars for sale at the dealerships, but it does seem clear that Nissan is making a real commitment to production of both the new-technology battery, and the vehicle, itself. I am encouraged by this, and think that this is a huge step. Hopefully it will pressure the other manufacturers to start designing and releasing their own electric cars.

Nissan reports that the Leaf will initially have a range of one hundred miles. To many people that doesn't sound like much, when we are used to our cars being able to travel many hundreds of miles on one tank of gas, but studies show that most people only drive about thirty five miles per day. I think that people just need to re-adjust their thinking. I also know that the technology exists today to give electric cars a three hundred mile range on one charge. Don't worry, that technology will reach these cars in a very short time.

I was having a conversation about electric cars with a friend, just the other day. We both agreed that each of us could live quite nicely with a one hundred mile electric car, and are thrilled that one of the major manufacturers is finally getting on board, and will be offering a mass-production vehicle, in a more affordable price range.

I can't wait to see them on the dealership lots. Make mine silver, please.

Remember those days? When everything was good, everyone was happy, and everything worked? Well right now I am longing for them.

I am certain that everyone that you ask about the Good Old Days, will give you a different answer on what exactly they were, but for me, right now, they are about the days when products were not manufactured with built-in obsolescence. Or at the very least, were built with better quality.

Why am I longing for these days-of-yore, you ask? Because my Samsung LCD TV died, today. If I had to guess, I would say that the problem is simply a bad relay, and is probably quite readily fixable for a reasonable amount of money, but that's not the point. I paid top-dollar for a top-shelf TV, and expect top-shelf quality.

In the Good Old Days, my dad built a Heathkit console-style, color TV, and it lasted for thirty years, without so much as a hiccup. Sure, occasionally one of those fire-breathing vacuum-tubes would have to be replaced, but get this, you could test and buy those at any decent drug store, and you could replace them yourself. Now you have to pay $50, minimum, to shake a technician's hand, ultimately to find out that you have to actually pay $200 to replace the main logic-board, because electronic devices today really don't have replaceable parts, like my dad's Heathkit TV did, in the Good Old Days.

My Dad will occasionally spin yarns about The Good Old days, when manufacturers would crimp, and solder connections, making them fairly bullet-proof. Today, you're lucky if you get a second-rate crimp, from a grossly underpaid, ill-treated employee, who could not really care less about whether or not your TV dies one day out of factory warranty.

Sure, I recognize that a 1080p HD TV, is way cooler than my dad's twenty-five-inch, color console TV, but sometimes I am not so certain that these 'advances' are worth it. It will probably be one month before I see my TV again, if they can fix it at all, and it might cost a lot of money. The good news is that I did buy the extended warranty, so hopefully this will all be taken care of at no cost to me.

In any case, this would all be so much easier if I could go down to one of many local shops, buy a vacuum tube, and put it in, myself, but I can't. I'm told that they call this progress.

Ah well. Now where the heck is my record player??

I have a Palm Pilot. Well, I had a Palm Pilot, but it seems that I have one again.

I jumped on the PDA bandwagon right around the time when Palm released their first unit, and I bought one immediately. This would have been circa 1999. I loved the idea of being able to carry around a real computer, in my hand. It kept track of hundreds of contacts, managed my few appointments, and let me write myself notes, to help with my failing memory. The Palm also let you install those third-party applications that one current particular smart phone manufacturer likes to pretend they invented.

In time, I updated to a newer model, and I purchased my third Palm about five years ago, the Zire 31. This was my first color Palm, and I was psyched to get it. It served me faithfully for probably two years, and then one day, it didn't wake up, when I tried to power it on. I assumed the battery somehow went dead, so I plugged it into the charger, and it still wouldn't turn on. Somehow, the unit had managed to brick itself overnight, as it sat in its pouch, in my briefcase.

At this point I wasn't particularly happy. The unit was out of warranty, but it wasn't that old, and I had never abused it. I don't remember if I had contacted Palm, but I don't think that I did. I think I just wrote it off as a loss, and probably used Palm's name in vain many times. The good news was that I had always made regular backups of my data, and had those backups safely stored on one of my USB drives.

I never really ended up doing much with the backups of my data. Occasionally I would simply access them with a text editor to find a needed number, but on the whole, I simply learned to live without my Palm.

Fast forward about two years, to last night. I was chatting online with some musician friends in my favorite IRC channel, and we somehow got talking about Palm Pilots. I mentioned how my Zire 31 inexplicably died, a few years prior, and one of the people from Australia mentioned that her Zire 51 had done the same thing, and that all I needed to do was keep it on the charger for about 12 hours, and it should come back to life.

Well, I did, and it did.

All of my data was gone, but since I had been vigilant about making backups, it took little effort to restore it to its previous state. As of right now, I am only one application away from getting it exactly like it was, before it decided to hibernate. The missing application was an RPN Calculator that I actually purchased. Maybe I can find it online, and they would have records that I had actually paid for it, a few years ago. Since the Palm is basically a dead platform, that doesn't bode well, however.

Now that I have this thing working again, what am I actually going to do with it? Much of the contact info in it needs to be updated, and I am probably going to purchase an Android based Smart-Phone one of these days in the not-too-distant future, rendering the trusty Palm entirely obsolete and redundant.

Also, after having used my Netbook for these last eight months, I now find the Palm screen to be very low-res, and jaggy.

Ah well. Technology marches on, and I guess I will just have to be cool with the fact that the thing never actually died. Maybe I can find a good use for it. We'll have to see.

For the last twelve months or so, I feel as though I've gone back in time twenty five years. You see, twenty five years ago, I bought a Commodore 128 computer, and it was twelve months ago that I bought my first Blu-Ray player. The Commodore 128 was the follow-up to the hugely successful Commodore 64, and Blu-Ray is the new high-definition video disc format which is replacing the DVD format

How are these two ownership experiences related? Through disappointment.

The Commodore 128 was going to be the next big thing because it had better graphics, better sound, twice the memory, and double the CPU power of the Commodore 64. It also had a Commodore 64 emulation mode that would run nearly all of the available Commodore 64 software titles. Sounds like a great thing, right? Perhaps, except for the fact that because of that, many software companies never wrote dedicated C-128 titles, since they could write a C-64 version, and it would run on the C-128, in C-64 emulation mode. While the C-128 was a successful machine for Commodore, I think it would have been more successful if more companies had written dedicated C-128 programs.

I bet you're still wondering what this has to do with the new Blu-Ray format.

Well, I'll tell you.

I am a big fan of independent films, and independent film companies often don't have huge budgets. When it comes time to do a disc-based release of a film, often, Indie film companies will only do a DVD release of the titles that I really want to buy. You see, all Blu-Ray players have a feature called Upconverting. Upconversion is a process that takes a standard DVD, and through some mathematical algorithmic magic, takes the low-resolution of the DVD, and converts it to a decent looking 1080p, high-resolution output, so that DVDs look acceptable on your fancy, high-resolution flat-panel TV. Yes, it looks acceptable, but it's fake. You're not really getting the same picture that you would get if you were looking at an actual 1080p master of the same film. It seems as if these Indie film companies believe that a DVD release is good enough, even though Blu-Ray is the new format, and there are millions of us out there, who prefer, and want the higher resolution releases.

Two recent films that did not have a U.S. Blu-Ray release, that I wanted to purchase, were Man On Wire, and Anvil! The Story Of Anvil. I would already own them, if they were available on Blu-Ray, and I will not buy them, on general principle, until they are available on Blu-Ray. I do not want to encourage this bad habit that the software companies had twenty five years ago, who believed that a backwardly-compatible version was good enough, despite the fact that the new hardware was superior, and capable of so much more.

So to all film companies, I encourage you to embrace the Blu-Ray format, else you won't see any of my dollars.

First, let me begin with a little of the back story. Almost one year ago, on New Year's Day, 2009, I was about to go to a Brunch at a friend's house. This is a traditional party that he throws every year, and I was very excited. It was a very cold morning, that day, somewhere in the vicinity of zero degrees Fahrenheit. Imagine my surprise when my car would not start! I thought in this modern age of fuel-injection and other examples of automotive technology, that the days of not starting in cold weather, were behind us. The good news that day was that after some time, the car eventually did start, and I was able to attend the Brunch.

I called my Saturn dealer the next day, and explained the problem to the Service Manager, and he was familiar with the symptoms in that particular model (2006 Saturn Ion). It required changing out the ignition switch, because that particular switch gets dirty, or something, prematurely, causing the car not to start. He said it would cost in the vicinity $150 to replace.

A dirty switch I thought? As an electronics tinkerer, I always have a can of contact cleaner around, so I sprayed the heck out of the switch, and figured that I had beaten the system, because the problem never appeared again.

Never appeared again until about ten days ago, that is.

Since Saturn is essentially gone as an automotive brand, I decided to Google around for a bit. It didn't take long to find hundreds of other examples on the web of other people experiencing the same problem, in far less severe weather. It seems as though GM simply designed a defective ignition switch, and was unwilling to do a recall, to replace all of them. Ion owners are forced to have to pay for replacing the switch, with another potentially defective switch, or perform a kludgy fix that involves cutting a wire inside the steering column.

What I learned about the problem, is pretty interesting, actually. It's not your typical cold-weather starting problem, that happens because the engine is cold, and ignition simply doesn't occur. No. This is much more complex.

It seems that the defective switch in question also has some sort of sensor in it, that sends information to the car's security system. Cold weather confuses this sensor into thinking something is wrong, and doesn't give the car's security system the OK to start the car. You see, apparently my car's security system has a few different components. The first is the alarm. If someone tries to steal the car, it sounds an alarm just like every other car, in every mall parking lot in which we've ever been. Then there is the other component, called the Passlock System, which kills the power to the starter motor, and to the fuel pump, rendering the car completely un-drivable to a would-be car thief.

Great idea, right??!

Yes. Great idea, unless you designed a defective sensor into a defective switch, which in cold weather makes the Passlock System think that something is wrong, when it is not. Thankfully this glitch only affects the Passlock System and does not cause the alarm to sound!

One workaround to the problem, is a way in which you can reset the Passlock System, that takes about a half an hour, each time you wake up to find that your car isn't starting. You have to attempt to start the car, and leave the key in the run position, and wait ten minutes for the Passlock indicator light to stop blinking. You then put the key into the ACC position (where the engine would be off, but the car stereo and dash electronics stay on), wait for ten seconds, and try to start the car, again.

Once you have performed this cycle three times, and have turned the ignition switch all of the way off, and waited thirty seconds, the car then should start.

As you can see, none of the fixes, or workarounds are particularly appealing, so it is terrible that GM never re-engineered the ignition switch, and replaced them all, at their cost.

Why am I writing about this you ask? Because as I sit here, hammering away on my Netbook's keyboard, I am in the middle of cycle number three, of the time-consuming workaround that I described above. This is the third time this winter that my car did not start in the morning. The good news is that two of the times, I didn't actually have to be anywhere, but one of the times, I did. Thankfully I have a friend who lives nearby, and I was able to beg a ride, until I could get my car started, later that day.

I have a new, potentially defective, ignition switch on order, that my father and I will install, when it arrives. After doing my research, apparently using any of these switches in cold weather, is like playing the lottery. Despite the fact that I just paid forty dollars for a new switch, this problem could occur at any time.

Shame on you General Motors, and thank you for making such a quality ignition switch.

As of today, Facebook will be entering your homes when you are not there, and eating all of your cookies and pies. To change this, go to Privacy Settings --> Baked Goods/Confections --> Theft, and check the DISALLOW box, and your cookies and pies will be safe. Copy and paste this into your Facebook status for all your cookie and pie loving friends ASAP!

I get several audio magazines in the mail, and one of them occasionally writes about other technologies that could affect electronic music production. Last year they wrote about more efficient solar cells that were less costly to produce, and in the latest issue they're talking about Holographic Disc Storage.

It seems the engineers over at General Electric's research and development laboratory have developed a polycarbonate material that when produced in the size of a CD/DVD/BR disc, can hold many times the amount of data of even a BR disc.

Right now, the engineers have a prototype that is capable of storing 500 gigabytes of data, and as they improve the polycarbonate material, and refine the technology in general, they expect to be able to get one terabyte of data onto a CD/DVD/BR sized disc.

Obviously a technology like this has implications for everyone who has use for storing and archiving massive amounts of data. This applies to music production because digital audio requires massive amounts of storage, particularly if you're recording at higher sample rates like 192 KHz.

First generation commercial devices are expected to be available by 2012.

I am not really a fan of these "weekly update" type posts, but I have some thoughts on a few things, that I don't think quite require their own posts.

Everyone that I know who is a Mets fan is still screaming for them to make a deal to get a bat.  At this point, I think it is too late.  I would rather that they not mortgage the future to get a bat that probably won't help them this season, anyway.  As I said in a previous post, they need three bats, not just one.

This year's Tour de France was an amazing event, because it gave us the return of Lance Armstrong.  As I write this, I am sitting in my easy chair watching the Peloton cruise into Paris, and barring anything catastrophic, Lance will come in 3rd, putting him on the podium.  This is an incredible achievement considering that he took four years off from cycling, and in his comeback this year, suffered a crash and broke his collarbone.  This took three to four weeks out of his training schedule, so his form probably wasn't quite as good as it could have been.

The big announcement at this year's Tour was that Lance Armstrong has partnered with Radio Shack to form Team Radio Shack, a new cycling team.  Lance will be racing for them, and has promised to sign a world class cadre of riders so that they can go to next year's Tour and be competitive.  Additional sponsors will include Nike and Trek Bikes which should come as no surprise to anyone.

The relationship between Radio Shack and the Livestrong Foundation will be reciprocal wherein they cross promote for one another.  Don't be surprised if when you walk into a Radio Shack in the future to buy a cell phone, you see Livestrong paraphernalia.

I was excited when I learned of this partnership because as a child, I was an electronic hobbyist who used to build little electronics projects, and kits that the various magazines published.  At that time you could go into your local radio shack and buy components to build projects such as these, and I have many fond memories of being in their stores and buying components like the 555 Timer (electronics hobbyists will be able to relate).  In addition to the bits and pieces that you could buy there, Radio Shack also had one of the early Microcomputers called the TRS-80 Model One, and I spent many an hour there playing with it.

Next year should be another exciting year in cycling, particularly for U.S. cycling since Team Radio Shack will be America's 3rd team, along with Team Garmin and Team Columbia.

Can't wait!