Technology – Page 15 – Into the Woods

Solar activity picks up

Today’s two sunspots: spaceweather.com

Much has been written in the last couple of years about how quiet the sun has been. We are just starting to emerge from the low part of the 11-year sunspot cycle. For months, there were no sunspots at all. Today there are two active sunspots. In another five years, this cycle will peak, and it’s during that peak period when, because the sun’s surface is heavily riled, the earth is particularly subject to big geomagnetic storms of the type that disrupt communications and even affect the power grid.

Just how much solar variance affects the earth’s climate is hotly disputed, but we do know that the 11-year sunspot cycles dramatically affect the amount of ionizing radiation (that is, high frequency radiation such as X-rays) that hits the earth’s ionosphere. It’s this process that causes the Northern Lights. The process also causes radio waves of certain frequencies to travel much farther.

Since we had two good sunspots today, I thought it would be a good time to fire up a ham radio and see who can hear me. I made quick and easy contact with EA1ABT in Spain (at 14.19175 Mhz) and CU2CR in the Azores Islands (at 14.198 Mhz).

All it takes is a 100-watt transmitter and a modest wire antenna hidden in the attic.

The history of nerds

From an old advertisement

It occurred to me recently that, by now, somehow had probably written a history of nerds. I Googled. Indeed, someone has: American Nerd: The Story of My People, by Benjamin Nugent.

I have not read this book, though I’m considering buying the eBook version for my Sony Reader. I am curious to know when Nugent begins his history. As I reflect on the history of nerds (they’re my people, too), it seems to me that nerds have always been with us. It’s just a matter of figuring out who they were and what they were drawn to at any particular point in history.

American nerds, it would seem to me, burst onto the scene fully liberated and empowered when amateur radio got its start around 1900. When computers became available, ham radio ceased to be cool, though there are still plenty of hams. About 650,000 people hold amateur radio licenses in the United States, though not all of them are active. Most people have no idea how cool ham radio was, once upon a time. Just the word itself, radio, used to express the cutting edge of human progress and ambition. They named those wagons Radio Flyers because radio was cool.

Times change. Now we have digital nerds. They rule. They are highly paid. No one kicks sand in their faces.

In a sense, it seems to me, ham radio might be considered the first real democratization of nerdness. Scientists have always been nerds, but most scientists had educations and equipment that was far beyond the average person. Orville and Wilbur Wright certainly must have been nerds, as were other people who worked on inventing flying machines. But working out the science of aerodynamics, and building flying machines, was way beyond the means of most people, intellectually and financially. Thomas Edison was a nerd. Nikola Tesla was a nerd. But Edison and Tesla were uber-nerds, with tremendous resources at their disposal.

Because nerds have always been a common human type, and because the equipment and knowledge for actualizing one’s nerdness have not always been available, I have to suppose that, in the past, many nerds lived and died with no means of exploring and exercising their nerdness. They could only read books, and dream.

I find that very, very sad.

Steam punk heat pumps

The compressor

It’s cold outside, so let’s talk about heating systems.

Over the years, I’ve lived in houses with all kinds of heating systems — wood stoves (including wood cookstoves), wood circulators, oil circulators, oil-fired furnaces, gas-fired furnaces, and, in San Francisco, electric baseboard heaters. The heating system that I remember most fondly (other than the wood cookstoves) was a system that used steam radiators and a gas-fired boiler, vintage 1935 or so. A friend of mine even named the old boiler Puff.

The gothic cottage has a heat pump (a Trane XR13, model number 4TWR3030A1000AA), and these past few months have been my only experience with heat pumps. I’ve been eager to see how it performs and how much electricity it uses. It’s also a complicated system with considerable nerd appeal, not least because my system is zoned. That is, though I have only one heat pump, I have thermostats upstairs and downstairs. A Honeywell zoning system electrically opens and closes ducts to direct hot or cool air where it’s needed.

So how do I like heat pumps? Great — until the outdoor temperature drops below about 17 degrees Fahrenheit, below which temperature the heat pump efficiency clearly falls off rapidly. I’ve been observing the system carefully, paying attentions to questions such as: How cold is it outside? What are the thermostats’ settings? How often and how long does the system run? How warm is the air coming out of the ducts? Surprisingly (surprising to me, at least), the system works quite well even when the outdoor temperature is in the 20s. It goes without saying that if the temperature outdoors is in the 30s or 40s, the heat pump heats effortlessly.

But the low here last night was 13, and the night before, 11. At those temperatures the heat pump really labors and runs most of the night. Both mornings, the thermostats have indicated that the heat pump’s “auxiliary heat” system had kicked in. To compensate for the poor efficiency at low temperatures (which heat pump manufacturers certainly understand), heat pump systems have electrical coils in their air handlers which kick in when the heat pump alone is unable to maintain the temperature requested by the thermostat. The auxiliary heating coils use three to four times more electricity per unit of heating that the heat pump, so they’re switched on only when necessary.

Just what is a heat pump? It’s like an air conditioner, with a compressor and refrigerant. But unlike an air conditioner, it can switch into reverse and can either heat or cool. The system consists of two units — the compressor, which is always outdoors; and the air handler, which is inside the house somewhere, often in a basement or attic. The air handler contains blowers, a heat exchanger for the refrigerant coming from the compressor, and the backup heating coils.

As an air conditioning system, heat pumps are great, and they have no greater problem with efficiency than any other air conditioner. But when you use a heat pump for heat, you want to be aware of how its efficiency falls off at extremely low outdoor temperatures.

With a heat pump, you almost certainly want a secondary source of heat. I have a propane fireplace. The fireplace works even during power failures, so it serves as an emergency heat source. But on those cold mornings when it’s 14 degrees outdoors is a great time to turn on the propane fireplace to give the heat pump some help.

If you’re bored some cold morning, why not watch your heat pump do its steam punk defrosting trick? The coils on the outdoor compressor get very cold when the system is pumping heat into the house. Frost forms. This frost must be periodically melted off. I am not yet sure how my heat pump decides when to go into defrost mode. I need to call my installer and find out. But I understand that there are two ways this is done. Some heat pumps defrost every so many minutes, and others have ice detectors on the coils. In any case, when this mode begins, you’ll see heavy white frost on the outdoor coils. The fan shuts off, and the compressor runs in reverse, so that the coils are producing heat rather than cold. Meanwhile, back in the house, the thermostats say “Waiting…”, and the air handler will continue to send “auxiliary heat” into the house if needed. Outside, as the coils heat up, water drips, and the ice melts away. After a few minutes, a cloud of steam begins to pour out of the compressor. When the defrost cycle is done, there is a steam-punk pneumatic hiss, like a steam train, as valves open to reverse the compressor back into service. The fan turns back on, and the compressor goes back to work pumping heat into the house. Very entertaining!

I’ve written previously about the steam punk movement.

The air handler, Trane model number 4TEC3F30B1000AA

I upload data on my electricity use to Microsoft Hohm. My electric bill for December was on $94. This month has been very cold, so I’m sure I won’t get off so easy with my next bill. June was the month the system first came on line, so the June bill was for only part of a month. For a mild month like September, my electrical bill was $53. That includes, of course, lighting, cooking, hot water, appliances, and computers.

Make your TV smart

MIT course on electricity and magnetism, iTunes

I got rid of my television when I left San Francisco, and I didn’t buy a new one until two months ago. As a movie-watching machine, I missed having a television. But I had almost forgotten how appallingly, incomprehensibly stupid broadcast television is. I don’t have cable or satellite. I just can’t justify the cost of it.

But here’s a cheap way to smarten up your television. Apple’s iTunes is available for both Macintosh and PC. The iTunes application is free to use, unless you buy a song, or a movie, or a television show through iTunes. It comes installed on Macintoshes, of course, but you can download it for your PC. In addition to songs and videos for sale, iTunes also has a lot of free content in the form of audio and video podcasts. There is also “iTunes U” — podcast courses from ivy league schools like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. I’ve been downloading the courses on physics and electrical engineering, but there’s also history, literature, language, health and medicine, etc.

You can watch these podcasts on your Macintosh or PC, of course. But I prefer to watch them on a larger television screen in a more comfortable room. There are two ways to get iTunes video to your television. You can use your computer to burn a DVD, and then play the DVD in your television’s DVD player. Or you can buy Apple TV, a $229 box that attaches to your television and wirelessly copies all your video and audio from iTunes to your television set. I aspire to having an Apple TV, but that has not yet come up in my miserable budget.

Downloading video over the Internet may take some time, but it gives your computer something to do when you’re not otherwise using it.

A milestone for eBooks

What the Apple tablet is rumored to look like

Clearly lots of people got Kindles for Christmas. Amazon reported that on Christmas day, for the first time ever, they sold more eBooks than printed books.

So we see which way the money is going, and it’s clear why Apple needs to be in this market.

Audiophilia on a budget

Infinity SM 152 speakers, made around 1994

Pioneer SX-3500, made in 1980

The Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network opened its radio season today with Puccini’s Il Trittico. It’s the 79th season of Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, and it’s the longest running classical program in radio history. Lucky for me, I have a new sound system on which to listen to it.

I would not say I’m a true audiophile. I’m way too poor to be an audiophile. There’s no limit to what you can spend on sound systems. But I’ve been to an awful lot of concerts in my life, and when some of the sound in recorded music is missing, or distorted, listening to music is not much fun. I stopped at a second-hand shop in Madison yesterday, and they had a giveaway price on two Infinity SX 152 speakers and a Pioneer SX-3500 tuner/amplifier. The speakers, each of which weighs almost a hundred pounds, each has a 15-inch woofer, two midrange drivers, and a tweeter. The balance controls on the front of the speakers really work. The Pioneer SX-3500 amplifier is a nice match for these speakers. I have a weakness for 1980s electronics. The 1980s was a great period in electronics manufacturing, and prices for 25-year-old electronics are low.

The Saturday broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera have an exciting, old-fashioned feel, a live performance. It’s what radio used to be, and ought to be.

Books: The end is near

My Sony Reader, displaying a free Google book

As an early adopter of computers (the early 1980s), I well remember the questions about what the computer was good for and the sometimes derisive skepticism about the future of the computer and the computer’s ability to replace things. Now you know.

I believe that electronic book publishing has now reach critical mass. The powerful economic forces behind publishing (publishers!) have realized which way this is going to go. They are already jostling with each other and working out their competitive strategies. For example, there’s a big conference in New York next month for digital publishers. Such conferences are happening all over the place these days.

So far, the big players are Amazon with its Kindle, Barnes and Noble with its Nook, and Sony with the Sony Reader. There are constant rumors that Apple will soon release a reader. There are a number of electronic readers that are not as well positioned in this market. For example, my former employer the Hearst Corporation recently announced its Skiff strategy, which is mostly an attempt to try to keep the big publishers from losing control (good luck with that).

Publishers are right to be worried. It remains to be seen who the dominant players will be. Plus, the new technology opens up publishing to the little people.

Sony has an interesting strategy. Sony seems to have realized that it can’t compete with the vast book content available from a competitor like Amazon, so Sony is the first to sell electronic readers compatible with the ePub standard for electronic books. Sony has converted all of its electronic books to the ePub standard, and Sony also is distributing free Google books through its electronic book store. What a gold mine that is!

Another free source of free ePub books is Gutenberg.org, though the ePub format is still considered an experimental format at Gutenberg.

Want to make your own electronic books in ePub format? An open source ePub editor, Sigil, is in the early stages of development, but it works. Adobe is supporting the ePub format.

There’s even a free program that will download content such as newspaper feeds and automatically load them into your electronic reader — Calibre.

Yep, I’m experimenting with these tools. My only electronic reader so far is a Sony PRS-500, which is three years old. However, when Sony announced its support for the ePub format earlier this month, they also announced that those early adopters like me who bought the PRS-500 could get the PRS-500 upgraded, free, to support ePub format. I had to send my reader to Sony to have this work done. But Sony upgraded the reader and returned it to me by next-day air the same day they received it at their repair center.

I don’t plan to buy a new electronic reader until we find out what Apple is going to do. If Apple releases a product, it probably will be more than just a book reader. It probably will be a tablet computer. It will have a fast Internet connection. It will handle music and video. That’s what the rumors say, anyway.

What does this mean to you as a reader? Sooner or later you’ll have an electronic reader. Sooner or later, instead of browsing for books at the mall, you’ll browse for books on line. As for older books, instead of haunting used book stores you’ll haunt Google books, Gutenburg.org, and the specialty on line sites offering electronic books.

Best of all, anyone can be a publisher. The niche market will explode.

Oh, and even better than that, you’ll no longer have to fill up your house with book shelves.

What are arc fault circuit breakers?

Some of the 17 arc fault breakers in my main electrical panel

Starting in 2008, the National Electrical Code included a new requirement: new homes must use arc fault circuit breakers. Like most people, I was unaware of this new requirement, nor did I know what purpose these breakers serve until my electrician explained it to me.

Many electrical fires are caused by arcs. Arcs can happen when a wire has been damaged, leaving a gap in the insulation, or when a connection has come loose. Ordinary circuit breakers don’t detect this problem. If enough current arcs for long enough, it will heat up and cause a fire. These new breakers are expensive (at least $45 each). They added more than $600 to the cost of my electrical system.

This added cost has caused many people to complain. In fact the North Carolina Building Code Council (under pressure from developers, as always) recently considered dropping this requirement. But they backed down and kept the requirement after wiser heads put some pressure on them.

If you’ve ever been around a house fire, as I have, you want all the protection you can get. There are 41,000 house fires each year, causing around 360 fire deaths each year and thousands of injuries. Children and the elderly are always at higher risk in house fires (and I’m not getting any younger). I gladly shelled out the money for these breakers. My electrician was able to negotiate a good price for me because my house has much more wiring than most houses this size (I’m a nerd). My 1250-square-foot house has more than 30 circuits.

So how does an arc fault breaker differ from a ground fault breaker? An arc fault breaker is for preventing fires. A ground fault breaker is to protect humans from electrical shock. The code still requires ground fault breakers in kitchens, bathrooms, laundry rooms, basements, etc. Typically the ground fault breakers are in the outlet boxes, so these circuits have both arc fault and ground fault protection.

Toward more frugal homes

My new washer

—————————————–

One of the nice things about new construction is that, largely because of tighter and smarter regulations, new homes and new appliances are more efficient and more frugal. My windows, with a U-factor of .31, are pretty darn snug, though no window is as efficient as a well-insulated wall. Local builders complain that Stokes County’s requirement for ceiling insulation is R-38, the same as in much of Canada, even though surrounding counties require only R-30. My Trane heat pump is far more efficient than heat pumps from the 1980s. Refrigerators have gotten much more efficient. Even my big iMac consumes far less energy than the computer it replaced.

For the month of July, with my cooling system running as needed all day and all night all month with thermostats set to 77 or 78, I used 604 kilowatt hours at a cost of $71.80. For September, with no heating and cooling needed, I’m expecting an electric bill of $35 to $40. My house is not a MacMansion. It’s 1250 square feet. [My electric company, Energy United, which is a rural electric cooperative, charges .0802 cents per kilowatt hour during the summer, meaning that my per-kilowatt charges were $48.44 for July. The rest of the bill is from taxes, fees, and fixed monthly charges.]

It has been fascinating to watch my new LG front-loading washing machine, which is Energy Star compliant. It’s astonishing how little water it uses. It’s very quiet. It spins at a very high speed to reduce dryer costs. Its behavior is very complex, controlled by a computer. Older washers with mechanical controllers were much more limited in how their wash cycles were set up.

The New York Times has a piece today on the patterns of energy consumption in the home and how they are changing.

A post for the nerds: Radioteletype

The radio is tuned to 14.08128 megahertz. This is in the 20 meter ham radio band in a frequency range normally reserved for radioteletype stations. Signals on the 20 meter band, by the way, travel farthest when the sun is overhead. During the day the earth’s ionosphere is energized by solar radiation, making the ionosphere reflective to 20-meter signals. The signals go up 200 miles or so, then bounce back down to earth, far from the point of origin.

This photo was taken during a radioteletype transmission. The meter is saying that 30 watts of power is being sent to the antenna (left needle on 30). Because the antenna is tuned for this frequency, the antenna is not rejecting and thus reflecting any of the transmitter’s power (right needle on 0). In other words, there is no standing wave on the antenna feed line. The standing wave ratio (SWR) is 1:1.

Instead of mechanical teletype machines, computers are now used to encode and decode radioteletype signals. This is a program for Macintosh named CocoaModem.

A few days ago I posted an item about Teletype machines and a mode of communications called radioteletype. Radioteletype is obsolete commercially, but it remains an excellent means of communication on the high-frequency (short wave) radio bands. When I posted last week, I had not yet got around to setting up radioteletype on my apparatus at home. As of today, it’s working.

Digital (as opposed to voice) signals were booming in from Europe today during the afternoon, when the sun was over both Europe and the United States. I was still working on setting things up and adjusting things, but I did talk with two stations in Cuba — CO8LY and CO2NO. I talked with CO2NO using 20 watts of power on a new digital mode that is a relative of radioteletype — PSK31. I talked with CO8LY via radioteletype using 30 watts of transmitter power.

You might wonder how 20 or 30 watts of transmitter power could travel from North Carolina to Cuba. Two reasons, basically. For one, the power is focused into a narrow beam of bandwidth, far too narrow to carry the human voice, but enough for a relatively slow digital signal such as radioteletype. For two, the earth’s atmosphere is very transparent to radio waves. Or, to say it a little differently: It would be more difficult to talk with someone in Cuba using a microphone and voice communications. “Narrow” digital modes such as radioteletype and Morse code carry less information per second, but the power used travels much farther.

I never use more than 100 watts.