July 03, 2008
Personal independence
By Rick DeMeis

It's perhaps fitting that at the time Americans celebrate the birth of the nation's liberty and freedom, this year is also the 100^th anniversary of the Ford Model T—a vehicle that can be considered the enabler of the freedom of movement and travel we enjoy today (granted, maybe not at rush hour).

Ford is commemorating the event with a Top 10 List of the Ways the Model T Changed the World. While it may at first sound like boasting, the advent of the vehicle not only changed the way we get about, but the way we make things and how we work.

Take, for instance, the assembly line and standardized parts, for efficient manufacture and thus a price many could afford. Ford workers got a minimum wage and an eight-hour workday.

By 1921, Ford says the car accounted for 57% of the world's auto production. When production ended after 19 years in 1927, more than 15 million had been sold. In 1999, a panel of experts name it the most influential car of the 20^th century.

But as an omen of the changing automotive world, the Model T's production record was broken by the diminutive WV Beetle in 1972.
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June 29, 2008
Has auto electronics gone too far?
By Rick DeMeis

You may think this screed will roil against how complex some automotive electronic systems have become. But this Website has long maintained that without modern microelectronics, processing, and sensors, the cleaner, safer, and increasingly efficient vehicles on the road today would not be possible.

But there are features that have been poorly thought out, particularly in regard to user interfaces. But the folk at Hagerty, the insurance company that protects overpriced collector cars that are worth more as investments than transportation (hey, sounds like the Dutch Bulb Bubble of a few hundred years ago), have come up with a list of the 10 most Outrageous Options ever put in a car—some of which are electrical or electronic in nature.

No. 1 (and this reflects the social acceptances of the time) is the steering-wheel mounted cigarette lighter. Today, some cars come without ashtrays to discourage the habit.

My personal favorite is No. 2, the record player that slide out from the dash in the 1956 Plymouth from where the glove compartment was normally found. (OK, I'm old enough to have had a friend who once installed a record changer in his car.)

Farther down the list are an electric razor (frightfully not all that uncommon now, but it shook me up in the '70s when a guy passed me on the Long Island Expressway buzzing his face), talking cars (you could get chips with French Canadian accents), and solenoid turn signal semaphores.

Are there any options you would add to this list?
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June 16, 2008
Moving beyond Wi-Fi
By Rick DeMeis

It was an interesting email from our editorial director, linking to a video about

But I couldn't help thinking, that, in a way, I just transcended the need for Wi-Fi at all.

Let me explain. Several weeks ago, the wireless connection between the cable modem and Wi-Fi router on the first floor at the opposite side of the house from my third floor computer was losing its lock more and more frequently. I also noticed many more networks popping up in the neighborhood when I would scan for the presence of signals, which I figured was causing interference with my system. Changing the router channel did not help the problem.

A back-to-basics discussion with Planet Analog Editor/guru Bill Schweber had me trying reflectors at a quarter-wavelength behind the antennas and repositioning them for higher signal strength. What I found was the signal strength in my office was not only highly variable in space but also over time, and there was no noticeable improvement in maintaining signal lock.

Next I tried a "range extender" or booster—the only problem was that when trying to synch the booster with my encrypted router, I would be bounced off the system.

But wait! Someone must make a commercial reflector or replacement antenna to effectively boost my signal—and I was right. Radio Shack has what it says are 7dB antennas to replace the shorter ones on my router. These nearly doubled my signal strength, but did nothing to cure losing lock at the distance I was from the router.

A call to router tech support was now in order. But because my unit was old enough, I had to be sent to a special technician—a very nice lady in the Philippines. We rebooted the router and cable modem in a proper time sequence (which I should have known), which cured the problem—at least for few days. But as the two-week warranty on the "repair" was about to expire, I called back again since the problem was occurring as frequently as before.

Another nice Philippine lady realized I didn't have the latest firmware update, which we proceeded to install. Again, the problem was only temporarily solved.

Finally, a skull-session with Bill Schweber gave me the cure that worked. Bill had a PVC plastic pipe installed in the wall during a home improvement that allowed passing wires, etc. up to his top floor. I realized that during work on our house many years ago, the back wall of a closet on the second floor with access to plumbing was never permanently closed off. I removed the temporary panel and was able to have access down through the first floor to the basement as well as upwards to the third story.

The bottom line to all this rambling is that for only $25 dollars (100 feet) of Ethernet cable (less than the cost of a router) and a couple of hours of project labor, I was able to get an interference proof connection from my office computer to the Internet world outside.

Plus I'm blazing along at 100 Mbit per second, not 11 Mb as before with the best wireless or even 60 Mb at hot spots!
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June 02, 2008
HAL on wheels
By Rick DeMeis

We've covered

Now comes word from researchers at MIT that vehicles might even have the intelligence to "evaluate" driver behavior and compensate for it. While running in a testbed vehicle for now, such systems in an operational car would learn driver habits and react to changes in them. The MIT test car will also help determine ways to evaluate aging driver performance.

While these developments may, in general, be good for sustaining mobility, with systems monitoring driver actions, I can see a soft error or programming glitch producing results much like with HAL, the rogue computer in 2001 a space odyssey, "Sorry, Dave, I can't open the garage door."
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