Want One

Posted on December 14, 2006 by Paul

In case you’re stuck for a present for me, I’ll take the brown dog.

Flatpack

Posted on December 11, 2006 by Paul — 1 Comment ↓

I wonder if someone in NATO was having a little joke. Russia is developing a new fighter aircraft, known as the Mikoyan 1.44 Project. Its alternate name is the MiG-MFI, short for the Mikoyan-Gurevich (the designers) Mnogofounksionalni Frontovoi Istrebitel (Multifunctional Frontline Fighter).

NATO assigns a codename to Soviet and now Russian aircraft, so the MiG-29 is known as the ‘Fulcrum’. The codename for the 1.44 is ‘Flatpack’. In the UK MFI is a furniture retailer. Not all of its furniture comes ready-assembled. In fact, some is sold to the customer in its component parts, boxed together for assembly at home.

Wuzz

Posted on December 5, 2006 by Paul

I saw a couple of kids playing on a Nintendo Wii at the weekend. It’s USP is a motion-sensing controller that, in the case of the demo I saw, lets you play tennis by swinging the controller around like the actual tennis racket. Very cool, and I have to say I’m more tempted by this than by any other console, even though it doesn’t play Gran Tourismo. What might tip the scales for me is if there was a Star Wars game that allowed you to press a button on the controller to extend your light-saber (ok, enough with the smutty innuendo thanks) and then wave the controller around with a satisfying ‘wuzz’. I have a suspicion that you just couldn’t get cooler than that.

Reminisce

Posted on November 30, 2006 by Paul

I got myself a little upset last night, listening to this piece from The Colbert Report. It wasn’t the latest inequities of the current administration that did it, nor the reminder of times in the US. No, it was the sweet, sweet pings of a TiVo in action. *sniff*

Strong Hybrid

Posted on November 14, 2006 by Paul — 1 Comment ↓

Someone has made a ‘strong hybrid’ Mini, that is a car with an internal combustion engine that is used solely to generate electricity, and is not mechanically connected to the wheels at all. There are a number of benefits to this approach:

The engine can be run within an efficient range – having an engine that can rev from a few hundred rpm up to several thousand inevitably compromises the efficiency of the engine. Separating the engine from any direct power need means it can run within a tight rpm band. This is inherently more efficient, and also allows secondary efficiencies (you don’t need to use much energy on balancing the engine, for example).
You can size the engine for greater efficiency – if you have a reasonable amount of energy storage onboard you don’t need an engine that can create 200bhp on demand. Instead you pick one that very efficiently does 20hp (in this case) and just run it continuously.
Mechanical losses in the transmission, diffs etc. are greatly reduced. Naturally some of this is counterbalanced by the inefficiencies of the conversion to electricity, but the other benefits mentioned here come for ‘free’.
It’s inherently a modular design. If someone comes up with a better energy storage system than the battery, you plug that in. The same goes for the conventional engine, and even the in-wheel motors.
You get to run electric-only when needed. If you’re heading into a polluted city, or even just a long tunnel, you can switch the conventional engine off and run solely on the battery, reducing local pollution when it’s needed most.

All of that, and I’ve not mentioned that you can run on electricity from the grid that has huge potential for being more environmentally friendly than a oil-burning engine.

Unfortunately I suspect this might cost a little more than a Prius for now, but there’s no reason why this couldn’t be a serious option very soon, and would provide a useful platform for the developments such as fuel cells that many people are touting.