Time to go shopping for a new mobile phone provider. To the readers of MT.Net: what rulez about your current plan? What is big sux? Post your commentary below!

Oil prices have gone through the roof lately with no signs of slowing down. With this in mind, and having the itch to try something new, I’ve been exploring the option of buying an electric car. I figure hybrids only take you halfway there. Why not go completely electric?

I read about electric cars in the latest issue of Make magazine, though these were hobbyists’ cars. I don’t have time to build one, so it was time to look for a complete car. Some asking around brought me to the Triangle Electric Automobile Association club, a local group of electric car enthusiasts. A notice on their webpage told me an electric car owned by the late Jon Mauney was for sale. I made an appointment to see it.

The car is in the posession of Ken, one of the club’s members. He’s been sheperding it for the past two years, as the car hasn’t been exactly well. I met him at home and got a look at the car after work today.

The car is no thing of beauty, to say the least. It’s plastered bumper to bumper with graphics advertising the EV Challenge, a high school competition for building electric cars. The car was covered in dust and pollen as well. It hasn’t moved much in the past two years.

Ken popped the hood for me. I peered at a bewildering assembly of strange boxes and cables. Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore! A large silver box took the place of the engine: a control unit which powered the electric motor. Surrounding the control box were other boxes as well as familiar parts like power steering pumps, an air conditoner, and radiator. There were more parts hidden beneath the control box, including the motor itself.

As we climbed into the dusty car a smell of mold wafted out. I checked the window seals and, sure enough, they were loose. Electric or not, there’s no getting around the fact that the car is twelve years old. I sat in the passenger seat while Ken “cranked” it up.

“Purring like a kitten, Ken!” laughed a neighbor as she walked into the house. There was a purr of sorts, though not from pistons firing. A slight buzz emanated from under the hood – the power steering pump. Not much noise, otherwise. We backed smoothly down the driveway and took a spin around the neighborhood.

As we drive, Ken explained the main issue with the car. “When it works,” he said, “it works great. Only there’s this problem.”

“Oh?”

“You’ll be driving along and all of a sudden the motor will stop.”

“I see.” Houston, we have a problem.

Ken explained his theory that the battery pack was sliding around underneath the car, causing a short in the system. I listened with interest until he turned the driving over to me.

The car handled very solidly. The battery pack underneath the car kept the center of gravity lower than most cars, which I could feel in the steering. It drove smoothly and silently around the hills of Ken’s neighborhood, even packing a surprising amount of power.

I was almost willing to ignore the occasional hiccup when I rounded a corner at the top of a hill. Looking down, the dashboard flashed “ready” and “fault.” The accelerator pedal had no effect. The electric car had done the equivalent of stalling: a fault somewhere had stopped it cold.

“Don’t worry,” said Ken. “Usually all you have to do is turn the key off and on again and it will clear up.”

I tried that to no avail. I grinned at him. “Okay, what do we do now?”

Ken hopped out of the car and pushed it for a few yards until the momentum carried it to the top of the hill. He then hopped inside. The plan was to take a turn at the bottom of the hill that would shift the battery pack in the other direction.

No luck. Still stuck.

Ken’s wife came to rescue us, a role she seemed to have played before (and regretted). The car was left for AAA to deal with. On the way back I asked Ken why the Triangle EAA clubmembers didn’t buy it and fix it.

“That’s a good question,” Ken answered, trailing off.

I learned something important from the experience. Most importantly, electric cars are great when they work, but when they don’t, don’t count on calling your local mechanic. If you can’t fix it yourself, it ain’t gettin’ fixed. The particular car – a converted Geo Prizm – isn’t made anymore. The conversion company went out of business long ago. There’s only your own ingenuity and that of hundreds of electric car enthusiasts to get you going again.

In spite of the issues with this car, I am still enamored with owning an electric car. Perhaps when the right one comes along. At this point in my life, though, I’m not ready to make my car my hobby. For now, electric cars seem to be stuck in first gear.

A few days ago I blogged about the Carnegie Mellon study on cellphones in aircraft, wondering if it wasn’t total bunk. Today I found out I was right: it doesn’t prove anything. The IEEE article on the study admits it right in this paragraph (emphasis is mine):

There is no smoking gun to this story: there is no definitive instance of an air accident known to have been caused by a passenger’s use of an electronic device. Nonetheless, although it is impossible to say that such use has contributed to air accidents in the past, the data also make it impossible to rule it out completely. More important, the data support a conclusion that continued use of portable RF-emitting devices such as cellphones will, in all likelihood, someday cause an accident by interfering with critical cockpit instruments such as GPS receivers.

So the researchers didn’t actually prove anything, they just said it might be true. Let me apply their conclusion to a different scenario, equally truthful as their own:

Nonetheless, although it is impossible to say that cows may someday build rockets and colonize the moon, the data also make it impossible to rule it out completely.

Yes, cattle seem to lack skills in building rockets. Their social skills don’t extend to much more than an occasional “moo.” Yet its impossible to rule out completely that one day they could build rockets and colonize the moon.

Other snippets of their article are also dubious. For instance, researchers are shocked, shocked to learn that some people try to use their phones in flight!

Our research shows clearly that, in violation of FCC and FAA rules, calls are regularly made from commercial aircraft.

News Flash: people sometimes break rules. Especially when the rules are arbitrary. These are rules that the FCC implemented not for safety reasons, but to keep an airborne phone from lighting up several cell towers. And the one the FAA adopted it not for security but for the sake of convenience or comfort to the passengers (or if you’re of a more conspiratorial nature, to drive use of the expensive AirPhones)?

The researchers later contradict themselves, at least partially (all emphasis mine):

Furthermore, PCS is regulated separately from cellular; the FCC does not restrict airborne use of PCS wireless handsets.

That’s right, the FCC does not restrict the use of your PCS phone in flight. If you’ve got Sprint or Verizon service, you can gab with Aunt Martha until the signal fades. Your flight attendants might get annoyed, the FAA may beat you down, but the FCC won’t care.

The researchers do touch on the scariest part of interference – that occuring to the GPS system. The article states:

Our measurements also found emissions from other onboard sources—devices used by passengers—in the frequency used by GPS.

Pretty vague, huh? Emissions were found, but from where? How do they know it came from devices used by passengers? It certainly doesn’t say that this interference came from phones. The article cites a NASA technical memorandum (PDF) about a particular phone, the Samsung SPH-N300, but did not test this phone itself. It basically took the memo at face value with no testing of its own at all.

In the case of the Samsung phone, the reports to NASA were from the general aviation community. These are smaller aircraft than airliners. The Samsung phone has a GPS receiver built in, meaning it could interfere with other nearby GPS receivers – if placed right next to or on top of them! Certainly this is a different scenario from one where the phone is somewhere in the cabin, far away from the cockpit. While the NASA test seems sound, a RF-proof lab is a far different environment than an actual aircraft. The fact that a phone radiates does not in itself prove it interferes with avionics.

The most damning evidence of a fraud is this:

Ours was a conservative estimate, since a call made at the other end of the cabin from the instrumentation would be below the threshold we could observe.

Uh, come again? You had a sensitive broadband antenna and frequency analyzer in the overhead bin – a bin separated from the cabin by a flimsy plastic door – and you could not detect a call made from the other end of the cabin? You mean to tell me these phones are so powerful as to overwhelm shielded electronics located in the cockpit behind a steel-reinforced cabin door, yet you couldn’t detect them fifty feet away using an oversized antenna? Are the passengers flying pigs, by chance?

The report then goes on to cite the ASRS database, a database aircrews “and others” use to report strange behavior in the aircraft they fly. This database is flawed for many reasons. Number one, the entries are anonymous, meaning no followup can occur. Number two, if so-called emissions experts with a fancy spectrum analyzer can’t detect a cellphone in back of the cabin, how likely are the aircrews to positively identify the source of the interference? Aircrews aren’t trained in the science of radio. They are trained to either fly the plane or to hand out peanuts. If something odd occurs on the flight, guess what’s going to get blamed – those spooky electronics. Captain Bob ain’t leaving his seat to hunt down a naughty PDA. This data is anything but scientific.

One scary scenario the article cites comes from the dubious ASRS database. A 30-degree navigational error was supposedly corrected when a passenger turned off his DVD player. DVD players aren’t intentional radiators: they do not by nature transmit. There might be some interference caused by them by their intermodulating frequenies (IF) but its highly unlikely that those weak signals would be strong enough to overwhelm a VOR receiver in the cockpit. And that’s assuming the IF was anywhere near the VOR frequencies, which is unknown.

The model of the so-called offending DVD player (called “the new DVD players” in this 1999 report) is not stated. The plane was an ancient B727, apt to have other troubles due to age, and its wiring and antennas were not subsequently inspected. The radio signals coming from the ground (including the VOR transmitter the plane was supposedly near) are far more powerful than any a DVD player could produce. One incident does not constitute scientific proof. Even so, for inexplicable reasons the researchers cite this case (submitted anonymously, remember) without bothering to recreate it themselves for testing purposes.

Sorry, guys. You’ve gone round and round and you haven’t proven a thing. You can’t show that any interference occured; you can’t identify the source of any signals you did measure; you base your conclusions largely on anonymous, non-scientific, self-reported data; and you can’t even detect a cellphone in the cabin fifty feet away.

I’m gonna make a call here myself, and I call bs.

[Update] Another blogger takes a hard look at the CMU data and also has issues with the report.

I fired up my laptop to show Travis some pictures today. As we’re waiting, I nonchalantly told him “hang on now, we’ve got to wait until it warms up.”

I blinked and realized how that phrase dates me. Few kids remember when you had to wait for your television or stereo to warm up.

So you wet-behind-the-ears, solid-state generations know what I’m talking about, once upon a time electronic switching was done with vacuum tubes instead of today’s transistors. The tubes had to warm up in order to function, and when they were warm, they were really warm. They chewed up electricity and air conditioning and often wore out, inviting a visit from the TV repairman. Remember TV repairmen?

Now its rare to even see transistors. They now live with millions of their tiny friends on integrated-circuit chips, putting a handful of parts into a product that once took a suitcase-sized number of tubes (or transistors, for that matter). Imagine an iPod Nano rendered in vacuum tubes. You couldn’t fit it in your garage!

Hmm, maybe I should add a “geezer” category to my blog!

I’ve got a neighbor who is always out flying a remote control plane. He’s got a glider as well as a motorized one. The planes don’t disturb anyone and are in fact really fun to watch, especially when he’s doing acrobatic maneuvers.

Another neighbor runs an aerial photography company. He’s got over a thousand hours logged above Raleigh, taking photographs for real estate and law firms. His photo collection numbers in the tens of thousands.

One fun project I’ve been mulling over involves a remote control aircraft – perhaps with more “remote” than “control.” I’ve seen these balloons for sale from Edmund Scientifics (a fantastic company, by the way). I’ve also seen 2.4Ghz cameras for sale at The Home Despot for a hundred bucks. Wouldn’t it be fun to launch a camera to see what can be seen?

There are lots of similar, interesting projects out there already, so a lot of the way has been paved. The cost would be minimal – especially if care is taken to safely recover the payload.

I have meterologist friends who can provide information on the winds aloft. I’ve got plenty of geeky friends who can help. So, come on! Who’s with me here? Who wants to launch a camera with me? Let’s put something together for a summertime launch!

Its the first of the year, which among other things is the time I reset my weather station’s statistics. For your geek edification, here are the weather stats for 2005 at the Turner household (North Raleigh near Durant and Capital):

Coldest temperature: 12.4 F, January 11th, 7:21 AM.
Hottest temperature: 104.2 F, July 28th, 1:32 PM.
Highest humidity: 100% (any rainy day, duh)
Lowest humidity: 20%, November 1st, 2 PM.
Highest wind gust: 20.6 MPH, August 31st, 2PM (a MT.Net record)
Total measured rainfall: ~ 29.11 inches (sensor was inoperative during some storms)

Speaking of weather, tomorrow promises some rough stuff. A “vigorous” front will roar into town, possibly even spawning a tornado. Keep an eye on conditions – and stay close to your Weather Radio if you have one (and if you don’t have one, get one)!

I spent this afternoon doing something I’ve been meaning to do for years: I updated the Mighty Hallie website. Since its inception in 2002, it has run on a defunct weblog app called bplog. Needless to say, bplog didn’t cut the mustard. That, and Hallie’s brother Travis now gets equal billing.

I was glad I could import it without losing anything. It turns out the database gyrations I had to perform weren’t that difficult, all things considered. It certainly was fun manipulating things using SQL.

My search for a hack for the Odessey’s navigation system led me to an amazing site: Hack-A-Day. It’s a site which features imaginative uses for everyday tools – things people have dreamed up. It’s a dream website for geeks like me!

Look at the stories on today’s homepage: calculating bullet speed using Audacity (a sound editor app), a dj record cleaner, a mini camera flash coil launcher, a force-feedback turntable for “scratching” MP3s, and an opentracker aprs transmitter, among others.

I love websites that give me ideas for new products and new technologies. This one’s going on the blogroll this very minute.

Check it out, y’all!

We recently bought a Honda Odessey minivan (more on that in a moment) with a Honda Navigation system installed. I’ve been highly impressed with the system – the user interface, the accuracy, and the speed are all top-notch. While the system is close to perfect, the hacker in me can’t resist wondering what else could be done with it.

I did some searches and sure enough, there are tools out there that can modify the software. Tricks that can be done include putting new “skins” on the display, getting rid of the “nag screen” at startup, and changing the background image to any picture you’d like. Pretty cool in itself, but what if you want more? The system runs Windows CE on a SH-4 processor, just like the Sega Dreamcast. Linux has been ported to the Dreamcast, and I own one of them. Theoretically, I have all the tools I need to port Linux to the navigation system!

Why would I, you ask? Potential uses would be to create a navigation app more tailored to my needs – there are a few good Linux-based map tools out there. I could get a better handle on the data the GPS is sending: more detailed travel statistics than I currently have. Other, more entertaining uses would be to put an MPEG4 or MPEG2 player on the system – allowing you to watch video on the dashboard console. The only limit is the hardware itself – how many ports are available, how much memory is installed, etc. And if I decide to go back to the original software, its easy to reset things back to the default software.

I’m not ready to muck around with our newly-purchased car just yet, but I’m sure having fun thinking about it!