Tomi Engdahl’s ePanorama blog

What would happen if they’ve turned off the Internet. After the riots have settled down and the withdrawal symptoms have faded, how would you cope? Cracked.com asked you to Photoshop what life would be like in an Internet-addicted society learning to cope without it. The World of Tomorrow (If The Internet Disappeared Today) picture collection shows you the best 20 pictures.

Twice a year, tech companies descend on CableLabs’ Innovation Showcase to demo their wares for a group of cable operators. PrimeSense’s 3D sensing chip won the ops’ vote in an informal poll for best new product idea. This product lets digital devices see a 3-D view of the world. The device includes a sensor, which sees a user (including their complete surroundings), and a digital component, or “brain” which learns and understands user movement within those surroundings.
This system provides something similar to thermal images, showing how many people are in front of the TV. Do we really need cable and/or video service operators knowing this? This system can also track and react to user movements outside the computer.

Turku (a city in Finland) will be the European Capital of Culture for year 2011. For this reason Turku has initiated the world’s largest media art and new media competition Live2011 Grand Prix. They were making co-operation with the Assembly Summer 2009 festival where I saw their booth. A digital capital of culture, Live2011.com will be opened in 2010.

Assembly Summer 2009 is Finland’s largest computer festival. It takes place in Helsinki 6th to 9th of August 2009. ASSEMBLY is a four day computer festival, in which thousands of people and their computers spend the long weekend by meeting friends, playing games, surfing on the net, talking on IRC and enjoying the great productions from the demoscene. It is a great atmosphere of being with likeminded people. I have participated many times this festival when I was younger. ASSEMBLY events are organized by ASSEMBLY Organizing, a group of over 200 volunteers backed by a not-for-profit Finnish company. I have been part of ASSEMBLY Organizing many years working for AssemblyTV TV production done at the festival. Designing and building all the technology needed to run a long live TV broadcast and the audio/video systems for the event itself has been a very good experience. I have learned a lot how big shows are built. It takes a lot of audio, video and computer technology to make this kind of event. The audio/video noise problems I have faced at Assembly and other events have been working with inspired to write my Ground loop problems and how to get rid of them document.

A floating measurement reads the voltage between two points, neither of which is at ground potential. A most typical floating measurement done quite often is when doing voltage measurements with a battery powered multimeter. The floating insulated multimeter allows doing floating measurements of slowly changing signals easily.

The advent of switching power supplies and motor controllers brought a need to characterize waveshapes, timing, distortion, and other dynamics. Today’s power measurements call for an oscilloscope. Floating measurements of fast AC signals are a challenge for conventional instruments. The traditional line-powered benchtop oscilloscope models typically lack the possibility of making floating measurements. There are many compact battery-powered scopes around, but many of them have inadequate bandwidth and sample rate for accurate high-frequency waveform capture. Floating measurements have unique requirements over and above the usual considerations of bandwidth and resolution. Foremost among these issues is operator safety.

The Three Facets of “Floating” Measurement Solutions document at Tektronix web site examines the available alternatives for measuring AC signals in an ungrounded environment. It will show how the balance between three characteristics ­ safety, packaging, and performance ­ determine an instrument’s effectiveness for making floating measurements.

Solid-state disk (SSD) drives are all the rage among techies. The drives use non-volatile NAND flash memory, meaning that there are no moving parts and they are faster in reading and, in most cases, writing data. Computerworld magazine has published a worth to read article Review: Hard disk vs. solid-state drive — is an SSD worth the money?

The conclusion in the article is: For most users, this a good time to consider buying a higher-end HDD that should deliver more-than-enough performance while you wait for SSD prices to drop further. That could be a long wait.

Typical notebook or desktop users probably won’t notice a big difference between an SSD drive and a traditional hard disk drive other than a faster boot-up and quicker application-launch times. For laptops and desktops, where consumers will continue to seek as much capacity as money can buy, SSD adoption will likely suffer for years to come.

SSDs make sense for small handheld devices and special applications. SSD will continue to dominate in small handheld devices because the cost to produce flash memory-based drives is significantly cheaper than hard disk drives when drive capacity does not need to be very big.

Ban on incandescent lamps is coming to Finland and other EU countries. Decision makers think that consumers and the environment alike would benefit from replacing the familiar incandescent lamps with energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs or LEDs.

At present, some 80% of the electricity used for lighting by Finnish households is consumed by incandescent bulbs, the standard filament lamps. Replacing them with energy-saving lamps is expected to save around 900 gigawatthours of electricity, which equals the annual electricity consumption of 50,000 households. Article Ban on incandescent lamps discussed by Finnish Parliament discusses on banning old light bulbs in Finland and in EU. Should There be a Ban on Incandescent Lamps? gives a view to what is happening in Australia.

Using more efficient lighting would reduce the carbon dioxide emissions, but not for the full amount of the saved electricity. During winter time (and spring and autumn) most of the electricity wasted as heat in light bulb heats up the space it is operated. When you replace the lamp with energy saving lamp, you need to turn up to heating to keep the temperature same.

The compact fluorescent light bulbs contain mercury, which in turn adds to the problem-waste problem. According to Should There be a Ban on Incandescent Lamps? article many compact fluorescent light bulbs are not very good in construction, which will cause shortened life span and possible danger of fires.

LEDs are advertised to be super efficient light sources. They are much better than normal light bulbs, but they are far form ideal. Today’s high power white light LEDs are only about 18% efficient. This means 82% of the energy put into an LED dissipates as heat. LED inefficiencies EDN blog posting will list out where this 82% of energy is lost. There’s a lot of room for improvement in each of these areas of loss – especially the white light conversion process.

Acording to LED lighting: panel debates quality versus cost posting LEDs won’t make a replacement for screw-in light bulbs any time soon. A typical 5mm LED produces about 6 lumens. So a big commercial fixture built out of them would require thousands of LEDs to be as bright as the original bulb. This will create all kinds of challenges to the designer. And in the end the result is that the created bulb will consumie about the same power as a florescent fixture of the same output. The typical 5mm LEDs are not very good for lighting applications anyways. When you drive or overdrive that small LED in hot environment, it will degrade the epoxy encapsulant. The epoxy turns yellow, and then it starts to crack. Once you get a crack, the LED will fail. So this is not a good use of these LEDs.The products built carelessly in this way will not live up to the promises of the LED technology and the advertisements of those products.

The big advantage for LEDs in lighting applications will not be replacing the existing light bulbs or fluorescent lamps. Best LED lighting results are obtained when the lighting instrument that used for the purpose is specifically designed for LEDs in mind. Then you can achieve output efficiency, directability of the beam, and reliability that you can’t get any other way.

Regular light bulbs are also getting better. Halogen light bulbs are better efficiency than normal light bulbs. There are also light bulbs nowadays energy efficient that look like normal light bulbs, but they actually small halogen light bulbs packet to package that makes them to fit to the place of normal light bulb. There is also energy saving halogen light bulbs, for example new energy efficient halogen light bulbs promise to give same light as “normal” 300W light bulb with only around 200W of power. There are some research results that a Laser Blast Makes Regular Light Bulbs Super-Efficient: Laser Process Doubles Brightness for the Same Amount of Energy. I expect that it will take some time until this new innovation will come to use, if ever.