Posted By RichC on January 9, 2009
Here’s a biodiesel hybrid vehicle for those who would like to reminisce; one can be had for $129,000 or if you can fore go the solar setup, go ahead and order one for pocketchange: $69,000 USD.
It is a unique vehicle and isn’t just a “woody” — check out Verdier.ca.
Posted By RichC on January 8, 2009
It was a nice day to be a Palm user when on Thursday afternoon the company announced their long awaited smartphone with a new operating system (followed on Twitter). 
The sleek new phone with a sliding QWERTY physical keyboard “looked” to be precisely what many Palm advocates have been waiting for — I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one. For now, I’ll just envy the photos and read the Palm blog posts.
Posted By RichC on January 8, 2009
If you are a Palm device user who appreciates Palm products, Thursday January 8th 2009 might be the day that determines the company’s future. 
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) advocates expect the announcement of Palm’s long awaited new Nova operating system and new smartphone. The rumored new device is expected to compete with the latest and greatest from Apple, RIMM and others. Currently their smartphone choices and carriers have been slimming down (above), and many of users are carrying phones well past their prime (at least “prime” defined by gadget lovers).
While I’m not particularly in a hurry to replace my Treo 700p, the bulky size and inability to multitask, along with its poor bluetooth performance, makes few improvements desirable. I could have side-graded to the much smaller and bestselling Centro that both my wife and daugher use, but the improvements are relatively minimal. For me, the ‘smaller screen and keyboard’ is even more challenging for my fat thumbs and aging eyes, so I’ll wait to see what shows up at CES.
Along with other smartphone users, I have put together my Palm phone wish list that continues to grow over time. One of my concerns is program compatiblity and availablity for whatever new device and OS is developed. It’s not that I require all that much more than a basic communication device, but I do enjoy some of the software gadgets like Slingplayer, Kinoma, My Bible and PDANet and pTunes.
Posted By RichC on January 7, 2009
For those of us concerned with protecting the worlds’ oceans, President George W. Bush signing documents with Benigno R. Fitial, governor of the U.S. Commonwealth Northern Mariana Islands establishing the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument on Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009 is a positive step. The signing creates three new “national monuments” in the Pacific Ocean in order to protect this marine environment and its pristine coral reefs. The includes the seven mile deep Mariana Trench as well as the Palmyra Atoll.
Here’s an article from the the San Jose Mercury News below:
Bush protects unique areas across the Pacific
San Jose Mercury News — By Paul Rogers
Posted: 01/06/2009 06:09:57 PM PSTPresident Bush on Tuesday established three new national monuments in the Pacific Ocean, setting aside for permanent protection pristine coral reefs, the world’s deepest underwater canyon and marine environments teeming with tropical fish, sea turtles, manta rays and giant clams.
Ranging from the seven-mile-deep Mariana Trench near Guam to the tiny Palmyra Atoll 1,000 miles south of Hawaii, the new monuments are spread out across the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from the California coast.
But despite their remoteness, they have close links with Bay Area marine scientists, who cheered the news.
“These places are like time machines. They provide us a window as to how oceans looked prior to many of the negative impacts of human activities,” said Healy Hamilton, an evolutionary biologist with the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.
“It’s one of the most important moves in marine conservation in recent decades.”
The move follows a similar action by Bush in 2006 to establish a new monument in the northern Hawaiian islands. Combined with the latest announcement, Bush has now protected more ocean area than any president in history.
Tuesday’s monuments total 195,000 square miles, an area 36 times the size of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and more than 20 percent larger than California.
Hamilton has worked at Palmyra Atoll studying the DNA of coral reef species, particularly octopuses. Getting there, she said, involves chartering a 14-seat plane in Hawaii, at a cost of $25,000, for a four-hour flight from Honolulu.A chain of 50 small islets, Palmyra is so isolated it has never been permanently inhabited by humans, or commercially fished, so it offers one of the world’s rare opportunities to study ocean life in a truly untouched environment.
The California Academy and Stanford University both have researchers working at Palmyra Atoll, as part of a partnership started over the past decade.
The island’s laboratory — complete with kayaks and high-speed satellite Internet access — was built with a $1.5 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, funded by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore of Woodside.
Privately owned until 2001, the island was purchased for $37 million by the Nature Conservancy with funding from several foundations including Moore and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in Los Altos.
It is home to green sea turtles, coconut forests and five times as many species of coral as Hawaii. Stanford researchers use the island as a priceless teaching tool, said Steve Palumbi, a professor of marine biology at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove.
“We sent a bunch of undergraduates there last year, and half the day they studied coral reef ecosystems, and the other half they studied how coconut crabs the size of a softball feed on the vegetation of these islands,” Palumbi said. “The other part of the day they jumped in the water with more small reef sharks than you have ever seen.”
Bush established the three monuments under the 1906 Antiquities Act, a law that allows presidents to set aside areas without approval from Congress. Commercial fishing, oil drilling, mining and waste dumping will now be prohibited there.
“For seabirds and marine life, they will be sanctuaries to grow and thrive,” Bush said. “For scientists, they will be places to extend the frontiers of discovery.
And for the American people, they will be places that honor our duty to be good stewards of the Almighty’s creation.”The three monuments are:
The Mariana Trench Marine National Monument, near Guam, which includes the world’s deepest point, at 36,201 feet deep, and its surrounding undersea volcanoes and thermal vents. The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, which is made up of seven areas to the south and west of Hawaii: Palmyra Atoll, Wake Island, Kingman Reef, and Howland, Baker, and Jarvis Islands, along with Johnston Atoll, a key habitat for Hawaiian monk seals, and famous for nuclear weapons tests in early 1960s. The Rose Atoll Marine National Monument, a diamond-shaped island east of American Samoa that includes rare species of nesting petrels, shearwaters and terns, along with giant clams, reef sharks and rose-colored corals.The United States has jurisdiction over fishing and other commercial rules in the areas because all the islands are U.S. territories.The new status will provide some protection for species that migrate great distances from California across the Pacific, including white sharks, yellow fin tuna, green sea turtles and albatrosses.Environmentalists said Tuesday the news, while heartening, does not offset Bush’s numerous other efforts over the years to weaken environmental laws, increase offshore oil drilling or his leaving office without passing mandatory curbs on greenhouse gases.”These actions are substantive. They absolutely have value,” said Julie Packard, executive director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “But they are also noncontroversial. There are not a lot of stakeholders who are going to be objecting to protecting a distant part of the Pacific. But we should be glad about them.”
Posted By RichC on January 7, 2009
The 2010 Ford Fusion hybrid “won the hearts of the Car and Driver folks,” according to AutoblogGreen. The best of class midsize car bettered even Toyota in the top fuel economy and still performed well when talking performance. The Ford Fusion hybrid goes on sale this spring and is being marketed as “America’s most fuel efficient mid-size car.” The EPA government mileage rating are 41 miles per gallon in the city and 36 on the highway.
If Ford can manage the “potential” battery shortage, they might just have a winner of a family car on their hands.
Car and Driver:
First Place: Long Rangers
Ford has pulled off a game changer with this 2010 model, creating a high-mpg family hauler that’s fun to drive. That achievement has two components: First, the machinery is unexpectedly refined—call it Toyota slickness expressed with car-guy soul. Second, the electronic instrument cluster involves the driver, invites you into the hybrid game, and gives you the feedback needed to keep increasing your personal-best mpg number.
Or you can say the heck with it and opt for a minimum-distraction display that shows little beyond the speedo.
No matter which you ultimately choose, you’re welcomed to the game with green grass and blue sky, a dashboard notion so corny we would groan if it weren’t so vividly executed. Hybrid enthusiasts will select the expert screen. All eyes sweep to the power grouping that shows the level of battery charge beside two columns of discharge meters, one for power consumed to propel the vehicle, the other a sum of all accessory loads (lights, fans, air conditioning, stereo, etc.).
How far can you go without the engine? That’s the game. Easy on the accessory loads, of course, but whenever you’re moving, the propulsion meter gives you an EV bracket. Keep your propulsion power within the EV bracket by modulating the “gas” and you’ll drive on the battery, up to 47 mph under ideal circumstances. Call it a video game to go.
Under normal driving, the engine starts and stops far more often than in the other hybrids. It comes and goes stealthily. Your wife won’t notice, and you probably won’t, either, unless you’re really into the hybrid game.
Nothing about the leather-lined test car, optioned up from its $27,995 base price to $32,555, seemed economy minded except for the mileage readings. On that score, the Fusion topped the others, turning in a 34-mpg score card for the overall 300-mile test run. It also finished highest in two of the three specialized tests, with a 34.3-mpg mark on the rural loop and 36.9 mpg on the city loop. The official EPA fuel-economy numbers had not been finalized at deadline time, but Ford predicts 39 mpg city, 37 mpg highway, and 700 city miles between fill-ups. For a four-door with civilized room for five, that’s a standing-O achievement.
Though the Fusion gets out-hustled by the Altima and the Camry—at 3805 pounds, the Ford is the heaviest of the four—we think 8.5 seconds to 60 mph is just fine considering the fuel economy. All of these players were too tightly grouped in braking and roadholding to draw significant distinctions, but for the record, the Fusion did tie with the Altima at 0.80 g for top marks on the skidpad. The suspension feels nicely taut, well planted. The tires communicate more than the Camry’s and speak in tones more refined than the Altima’s.
As in the Altima and the Camry, the power delivery of the Fusion’s CVT is hard to hold steady in cruising conditions. The test logs include many comments about “surging.” Engaging the cruise control deals with it every time.
Ford really hit all the marks with this hybrid Fusion, combining excellent fuel economy with slick manners and an engrossing personality. Fun and fuel economy have finally gotten married in a mid-size sedan.
Posted By RichC on January 6, 2009
Trying to “half” listen to the Macworld Expo through Chirs Pirillo’s live ustream.tv feed. Noticed MacRumorLive.com was hacked.
🙂
Posted By RichC on January 6, 2009
It was an enjoyable night of football as we watch the Ohio State Buckeyes tangle with the Texas Longhorns in the Fiesta Bowl. The game was more exciting that most expected as the OSU defense held Colt McCoy and the Longhorn offense to 3 points in the first half and after falling behind early in the second half, came back to take the lead with less than 2 minutes to go.
The Texas offense then returned to their high powered passing and in a superb drive scored with only 16 seconds on the clock (photo left). Final score in an exciting game was 24-21. Congratulations Texas Longhorn fans … and the Buckeyes have every reason to look forward to next year.
Posted By RichC on January 5, 2009
I saw a photo of these Buckeye fans on TwitPic (thanks for the link @1datarecovery) and had to repost in my blog as we “Buckeyes” look forward to the Fiesta Bowl tonight. Since the Jesus statue is a few miles up the road from our house at Solid Rock Church in Monroe Ohio, its always fun to see the “statue” photos make it around the web.
Hopefully with fans like these looking for a little extra help in tonight’s game, the Ohio State Buckeyes will bring home a win against the Texas Longhorns. Go Bucks!
Posted By RichC on January 4, 2009
One of the interesting Christmas gifts this year was a new SD memory card to use in my Canon EOS Rebel XSi — a 4GB Anniversary edition Eye-Fi card. 
What makes this SD card unique is that it has built in WiFi. The card operates just like a 4GB memory card but utilized the camera’s battery power to upload photos to your home WiFi connection or with an optional subscription service a hotspot WiFi signal operated by Wayport. Even with the large JPG files (will not upload RAW images) produced by the 12+ megapixel Canon DSLR camera the upload to my computer is reasonable for a few photos and definitely easier than removing the card and putting it in a reader or cabling the camera. About the only weak point is that the camera needs to be within about 40 feet of your wireless access point (WAP) to begin uploading photos to your computer.
Another interesting feature is that once you’ve registered with Eye-Fi, the “manager” offers a few options as to what you want to do with the photos uploaded to your computers. One can choose to have them uploaded to a processing service or to a photo sharing service. Unfortunately if you tend to take a lot of photos, you’re computer will upload them all if you’re using this option (I suppose you can always delete them?). Nevertheless, if you are looking for a new memory card for your camera, I would highly recommend the Eye-Fi SD card (Compact Flash/SD card adapters are available and work as well).
Just another test photo — leftover bolt from VW TDI GTG on WSJ chart.
Posted By RichC on January 3, 2009
A few of us from the CinciTDI group enjoyed Saturday afternoon working on our Volkswagen TDI diesel cars and filming a new Fuel Injection Pump How To video. Bruce Bowling was once again in front of the camera and demonstrated the procedure to replace leaking gaskets and in making injection quantity (IQ) adjustments — both using the Hammer Mod and final adjustments with the VAGcom software.
We hope to have it ready and uploaded to the site soon. (check back here or over at CinciTDI.com.)
My friend Eric, who had just purchased a ‘new to him’ VW Jetta TDI, was also here for an intake manifold cleaning (photos below) and a timing belt change (Bruce and Eric above). We all had an enjoyable time.
