The last time we had a power failure was about four years ago, and this one lasted about 15-minutes. That gives us a reliability of about 99.99998%. Pretty good, as far as systems go, but not what Americans expect. They think of electricity like gravity; always there 100% of the time.

In reality, this level of reliability is amazing when you consider the fact that your house sits at the end of a long chain electrical components, some of them redundant (like the power plants at Hetch Hetchy and Diablo Canyon) some of them not (like the transformer on the pole outside your house) which stretches over thousands of miles. Although power outages in this part of the world are infrequent, they are a regular fact of life on many parts of the planet. And they are about to get more frequent here as well.

As we switch over to smart grid technologies in the attempt to improve grid efficiency and integrate green technologies like solar, wind, wave and small cogeneration facilities, we are going to have a lot more of these little inconveniences and perhaps a disaster or two.

Smart technologies, while more efficient than traditional approaches, are also less robust. They lead to the kinds of problems we are now seeing on the Toyota Prius, where in the quest for the power efficiencies of regenerative braking, some owners are experiencing brake failures. These systems fail suddenly and in unusual ways, like digital television which gives you a perfect picture until it suddenly goes away completely rather than degrading slowly into a snowstorm of static. (By the way, the current generation of kids, raised exclusively on digital media, doesn’t even know what static is.)

As we move into this brave new green world, consumers are going to have to take more responsibility for their infrastructure if they don’t want to be inconvenienced. We are ever more reliant on electricity and communications to make our day-to-day lives possible, which means that in addition to stockpiling supplies of water and food, you are going to need to start thinking about emergency supplies of electricity.

Fortunately, the same technologies that threaten our piece of mind are there to save it. New innovations like home hydrogen fuel cells, whole-house battery backup systems (developed for solar applications) and even small but mighty traditional generators with automatic transfer panels can, for the first time in history, put the reliability of your electric systems in your own hands and can actually make you look forward to the next power outage.

Links:

ClearEdge Power

Related posts:

1. Using Power to Brag about Saving Power
2. The Hydrogen Economy

How the Clock Works — from the Outside.

Our clock has only three interface elements; a big blue display (the time), a smaller yellow display (the alarm time) and a knob. Pressing the knob turns the alarm (and the yellow display) on and off. No yellow numbers, no alarm. Yellow numbers? That’s what time the alarm will go off. It’s that simple.

You change the alarm time by turning the knob. It moves in 15-minute increments, so in a couple of spins (forwards or backwards) you can move through a whole day. I’ve always thought that the little AM/PM light was hard to notice, so we’ve done away with it here. You set the alarm in 24-hour time. which makes it really hard to get it wrong; 7:00 AM reads as “7:00″ while 7:00 PM reads as “19:00.”

That just leaves the noisemaker. Rather than leave it up to the a radio station, which has too many parameters to set (volume and tuning) or may have unreliable programming, I decided to include my own noisemaker. Sure, we could have interfaced to an iPod, but adding another device undermines our assurance that the alarm will go off as planned. Instead, I’ve chosen to play sound files off a micro-SD card. This gives us lots of other capabilities as well, like making the clock chime on the hour, speak the time, or play different alarm tones at different times. Since the reader accommodates a 2Gb card, you can design your own audio “skin” if you like.

Last, but not least, we solved the power problem. With the old mechanical clocks, you lost exactly as much time as the power was out. With digital clocks, even a brief power interruption restarts the clock at 12:00.  Some clocks have a back-up battery in case the power fails, but most do not. The ones that do, require you to replace the battery periodically (which no one ever seems to do).

This clock keeps the correct time even when you pull the plug. For how long? At least a few days and maybe a couple of weeks (there are a lot of factors involved). The displays turn off and the alarm can’t sound when the power is off, but when power is restored, the time is still accurate.

How the Clock Works — from the Inside.

The guts of this machine contains a hard-working and very inexpensive 8-bit PIC microcontroller. (It’s the long rectangular black thing in the picture.) There is also some audio circuitry to play sound files off a micro-SD, an amplifier to drive a speaker, some LED displays, and a power supply to make it all work.

The Logic Board

The PIC microcontroller does all of the heavy lifting, keeping track of the time, managing the two displays, controlling the audio chip, and handling user interaction.

One more component worth mentioning is the carbon aerogel supercapacitor. (It’s the big round thing on the logic board.) This little guy stores up electricity when we’re plugged in. When we’re not, the microcontroller senses the power failure, shuts down everything non-essential and hunkers down for a long winter. It draws just enough power from the ultracapacitor to stay alive and keep track of the time. Supercapacitors are cool because, unlike batteries, they don’t get tired of charging/discharging so they don’t need to be replaced periodically.

Mechanically

I decided to build this clock into a CD storage container. It was about the right size, inexpensive, and I liked the color. In order to give myself a little more flexibility, I put all of the electronics on two boards instead of just one. There is a display board, which holds the digital displays and the knob, and a logic board which holds the microcontroller, audio electronics, and power supply. A 16-pin connector mates the two boards together.

The Display Board

The size of the display board, which is the larger of the two, is primarily determined by the size and placement of the LED displays. By putting the rest of the electronics on another board that mates behind it, I gave myself the option of fitting the whole thing into a smaller box than I could have if it were all on one board (in case I change my mind later).

In our next installment, we’ll talk more about the details of the design and how engineers design something like this.

Related posts:

1. Building the Perfect Alarm Clock in (1200 Easy Steps)

You would think that a device so critical to modern life would be designed better, but in spite of the fact that there are thousands of models to choose from, they pretty much all suck. How often have you gone to bed the night before a critical meeting and been unable to fall asleep because you had no confidence that the alarm was set correctly? My own alarm clock requires at least a dozen cognitive steps to set the alarm with any confidence.

How it should work

You should be able to set your alarm clock in a few seconds. You should be able to tell from across the room if the alarm is set, and for what time. You should be able to set it in the dark, without your glasses. You should never be lying in bed wondering if you accidentally forgot to push some button or bumped the volume control and are going to get up late and look stupid.

So, forty years after the digital watch was rolled out at CES, I decided to design and built the perfect digital alarm clock. Even with all of the advances we’ve made since the 1960s, this has turned out to be a really interesting challenge. It involves assembly language programming, custom fabrication, parts suppliers from all across Asia, and an enterprising low-volume circuit board manufacturer based in Bulgaria. Why all the complexity? Because of the simplicity.

Simple = Complex

Let’s assume you want to fly to Los Angeles. (Don’t take it personally, it’s just an example.) Think about the steps you have to go through to make that happen.

• Determine when you want to go and when you want to return
• Go on various websites to find the right combination of itinerary, cost and airline
• Identify and use the correct payment method
• Manage your seat assignments
• Create appropriate reminders to ensure you arrive at the correct airport at the correct time
• Arrange for transportation to and from the airport

And this doesn’t even include packing luggage and all the personal aspects. This is just getting there and back. Now imagine you wanted to make this completely simple for yourself. What would you do? You’d hire an assistant and say “Steve, book me a flight to Los Angeles.” Very simple for you, but it requires that you interface with a highly complex and sophisticated machine — Steve.

The easier it is for the user, the harder it is for the designer. This is something I’d always more or less understood, but this project made that completely clear.

In the next posting, I’ll describe the clock itself: how the user experiences it, and the insane complexity behind that apparent simplicity.

(Read Part 2 of this article here.)

Related posts:

1. Building the Perfect Alarm Clock (Part 2)

This little cafe makes perfect cafe lattes, but just as importantly, they have a wonderful assortment of baked goods to go with them.

I’ve done a hundred transactions with them, every one perfect. How is that possible? They never screw up the order, never botch the coffee, they even remember my name.

Do they realize that they save my life a little bit each morning? I love them.

There are apparently a dozen of these little cafes, although I have only been to the one on Market Street.

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Case in point: I traveled across Chicago tonight to Best Buy looking for two simple items that they should logically carry. One was a desktop tripod for a cell phone making it easier to take pictures with the built-in camera. The other was a pocket battery booster to give your cellphone extra life in case the battery runs down. Both are simple items, easily found on the Internet. But why not pick them up right now, while I’m thinking about it?

After a 20 minute trip to the store, I spent another 20 minutes with sales people explaining what I was looking for, then following them around while they looked for things and attempted to find other, presumably more senior, personnel. Complete failure. “We could order it for you and have it shipped to the store,” offered one young sales associate. Now if THAT isn’t the worst of both world’s, I don’t know what is.

In all fairness though, the 20 minute trip back from the store wasn’t wasted. While I sat on the train, I ordered the items I needed from two different Internet retailers at prices which, including the shipping, would have produced head-spinning margins for Best Buy.

And don’t think it’s just the folks at Best Buy who are dropping the ball. The week before, I read about a new best-seller book I thought I’d enjoy. I would have just ordered it from Amazon, but in a moment of enlightened self-interest, I thought “why not head down to my local Barnes and Noble and give them the business?”  Here’s why:

Not wanting to wait in line for an assistant, I scoured the shelves and end-caps. Not finding it, I waited in line. “That’s funny,” he told me “I see that we have them on order but they don’t seem to be here.” No estimated due date, no nothing.

I need to update my model of the world. I always thought that if you wanted it NOW or you needed some help with your product selection, you went to your local retailer. If you just wanted the lowest price and the greatest assortment, you ordered from the web.

Every day the web becomes a fiercer and fiercer competitor; the selection is better, the pricing is better, the information about the product is better, and it’s easier to find things.

The only advantages to retail are that you can physically touch the product and you can create an experience around shopping for it. But for the most part, retailers have just stayed the same. They are just standing in the trash compactor as it closes around them.

So today, it would seem, you are better off ordering the things you need off the web. Retailers are just for…uh… See? That’s where I get stuck. Why do we need retailers?

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This week, Sprint is hosting its ninth annual developer conference in Santa Clara, CA and the theme is definitely smartphones. Android, Palm webOS and Windows Mobile are all featured heavily as Sprint attempts to catch up to T-Mobile and ATT in the smartphone market.

I really only care about the Android. I was anxious to see Sprint’s version of Android and try it out on their network. Would they muck up the interface with a lot of Sprint-only apps designed to make money for them and stand in the way of my using the features in my phone? Charging me to change ring tones, share pictures, and use the navigation software is simply not going to fly anymore.

Sprint was giving out a new HTC Hero plus a month of service to the first 400 developers who proved they could build a “Hello World” application before 6:30 PM. I got a late start at 3:00 PM (this isn’t my real job, you know) and barely made it, delivering my app at 6:10 PM. Most of that time I was waiting for 750 MB of developer tools to download over the crowded WiFi and EVDO infrastructure. The actual app writing took only 20 minutes. But, all’s well that ends well; after too many lattes I got my phone (and a bad case of the jitters).

The Hero is a really nice phone; lightweight, attractive, with a stunning OLED screen that automatically adjusts to room brightness. Its performance is very snappy, especially in the browser. The software is pretty standard Android stuff, with a few little twists. For example, your contacts are now integrated with their Facebook profiles (more useful and less annoying than I thought it would be), there is an included PDF reader, and Microsoft Outlook and Exchange is supported via HTC’s Sync application.

I was glad to see that Sprint had largely left the Android operating system intact. A layer of big phone carrier goo would have been a deal killer for me.

Unfortunately, the phones are running Android version 1.5 while the rest of the world is on 1.6. This means that a lot of newer applications (including the new version of the Android Market) won’t run. With everyone else talking about releasing 2.0 next month, Sprint is saying “2010″ for version 1.6. That’s bad.

Worse is the fact that Sprint’s network doesn’t support OTA (over the air) upgrades for the Android. This means that, while other carrier’s customers get their phones upgraded automatically, Sprint users will have to visit the Sprint store or go through some complicated software installation procedure using their PC and a USB cable, a gymnastics exercise which is beyond most users.

So, bottom line, is it time to move back to Sprint? They have snappy data speeds and really broad coverage in most of the country, plus a lot fewer dropped calls than T-Mobile, and I’ve been really happy with their customer support. A lot of people should be really happy with Sprint’s new Android offerings.

But I can’t do business with them if they don’t have the products I want, and what I want is the current version of the Android operating system and all the latest software. After all, what would my friends say?

Related posts:

1. I Fell in Love with an Android
2. Portable Speakerphone for Your Car
3. Attack of the Mobile Barcode

Everyone's favorite cookie

Ask anyone to name a type of cookie and chances are they will say “Chocolate Chip.” Accidentally invented by a harried cook who didn’t have time to melt the chocolate to make her favorite chocolate cookies, these yummy morsels have been a national favorite since the recipe was first published in 1936.

I make some of the best chocolate chip cookies in the world. In fact, I almost cannot eat anyone else’s cookies. They’re often tiny, anemic, hard, dry, under-baked, burned, and greasy. They are simply no match for the big chewy sweet bites of heaven that come out of my oven.

People ask for the recipe all the time. I tell them “Back of the bag.” and it’s true. The secret to a perfect chocolate chip cookie is NOT the recipe. Like all things baked, the secret is in the process.

Here’s how it is done.

To begin, here’s the recipe from the bag:

• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs
• 2 cups (12-oz. pkg.) NESTLÉ® TOLL HOUSE® Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels
• 1 cup chopped nuts [I recommend 2 cups, not chopped]

Tools

First, let’s talk about tools. You will need a good quality kitchen mixer. It is possible to make chocolate chip cookies with a small electric hand mixer, but it is a lot of work and you won’t get idea results. As far as making them by hand, I wouldn’t attempt that unless you have a couple of strong boys around the house who really want the arm exercise.

You will also need a second mixing bowl for the dry ingredients.

Your oven can be either gas or electric, but it must be accurate. As modern timers are highly reliable, under baking and over baking is most often caused by baking at the wrong temperature. If you are unsure of your oven, you can place a small oven thermometer inside and check the temperature. You are looking for 375 F.

Good baking sheets are critical to the process. There are a number of gimmick baking sheets on the market (air-bake or whatever). Avoid them. Also avoid those thin, flimsy baking sheets they sell at the grocery store. What you want is a couple of heavy-duty baking sheets that will really spread the heat.

Preheat the oven to give the temperature time to stabilize, and place the rack in the center so that the heat will flow around the cookies evenly.

Ingredients

Let’s talk about the ingredients next. Do not attempt to substitute anything for the butter. Good quality fresh creamery butter is the backbone of this recipe. It will be easier to work with if it is closer to room temperature, but it will warm up as you mix it and you don’t want your batter to get too soft so keep it on the cool side. I use mine straight out of the refrigerator, but I have a killer mixer that is not phased by rock-hard butter.

Use a good quality of pure vanilla extract. After all, vanilla is a flavoring and you want the best flavor you can get. Stay away from vanillin or other cheap or artificial substitutes.

As for the brown sugar, I like to use the medium brown rather than the light brown sugar. It gives the cookies a more rounded taste and a better color.

Now we come to the subject of nuts. Walnuts will give your cookies a crisp nutty flavor and texture, but I don’t think they are a match for the warm richness of pecans. Also, I think the recipe is a little stingy on nuts so I always double the quantity to 2 cups. While you are at it, use halves and pieces of nuts rather than chopping them. This makes the cookies more interesting; they are lumpy and each bite is a little different, ranging from chocolaty to nutty to butterscotchy.

Also, store your nuts in the refrigerator in a tightly sealed container. Nuts contain oils which can quickly oxidize at room temperature and spoil the flavor. Plus, when we add the nuts to our batter, we will be counting on them to cool it down a bit for better dough handling and better performance of the chocolate.

Method

OK, ready? Let’s begin.

The secret to good baking is to create an emulsion; a very uniform and thoroughly mixed batter. Let’s start with the dry ingredients. Put the flour, baking soda and salt in a separate bowl (not your mixing bowl). Then, mix them together thoroughly by hand with a whisk or fork until they are uniformly blended. You don’t want to come across a lump of soda or salt when you are mixing this into your thick dough later.

Now, start blending the other ingredients. Place the butter into your mixing bowl and beat it until it is soft and uniform. Add the white and brown sugar and beat some more until it is all thoroughly mixed. Next, add the eggs. More beating, this time until the mixture is soft and fluffy. Add the vanilla and mix it in well.

We are ready to add the dry ingredients from the other bowl. Pour them in, a quarter at a time, mixing well after each addition. You want to mix the dough so that it is thoroughly blended, but not so much that you beat all of the nice fluffiness out of the eggs.

When the dough is done, it is time to mix in the chocolate chips and nuts (which, as I mentioned before, I like to keep chilled) Also, I like to add two cups instead of just one. Add them all at once and just stir until blended. Don’t mix it too hard, or they will break up in the batter.

Using a tablespoon, arrange lumps of cookie dough onto the baking sheet so they have room to spread out and bake. The original recipe says “rounded tablespoons” of batter. My lumps are about 1-1/2 inches in diameter.

Bake your sheets of cookies one at a time to maintain good air circulation. Plus, this way you can work on one cookie sheet while the other is baking.

Set the timer for 13 minutes. When you take out one cookie sheet, you can put the other one in immediately (before the oven cools off). Place the hot cookie sheet somewhere it can cool (not on top of the oven).

Your cookies, when they come out, should be ALMOST completely baked, but they may still be a tiny bit translucent in the center. Because the cookie sheet is still hot, they will continue to bake as long at they are on the sheet. I generally give them a minute, then using a pancake turner, move the cookies off the sheet onto a cold plate.

After the cookie sheet has had a chance to cool, you can start putting the dough on it for the next batch of cookies.

Generally, I keep my finished cookies in the refrigerator or freezer so they stay nice and fresh. (It may sound unusual, but a frozen chocolate chip cookie is thoroughly delightful.)

If you followed these instructions to the letter, you are now the proud owner of a few dozen of the best chocolate chip cookies you have ever eaten. I hope you enjoy them as much as my friends and I do!

Related posts:

1. Blueberry Muffins
2. Popovers

I’ll just come right out and admit it: This gadget seduced me. You could set the retail package on a pedestal in the MoMA and it would blend right in. It is a work of art.

I opened up it up, stuck it in my ear and it just started working. It talked me through the process of pairing with my phone (a process which is ALWAYS a pain in the butt), and that was that; we were instant friends.

The Q1 is completely voice operated, even to turn it off. You can say stuff like “Redial”, “Call back”, “Answer call” or “Ignore call,” even “Check battery.” And, you can pair it with up to 8 devices just by saying “Pair me.” It can even monitor two phones at once and answer which ever one is ringing.

Nice, but how does it perform?

The Q1 actually has 2 microphones, one to monitor the environment and one to listen to you. The signal from the environment is fed into a DSP chip where the noise is digitally subtracted from your speech, giving whoever you are talking to a crisp clear signal devoid of road and wind noise.

One of my most demanding specifications is battery time. In spite of its light weight and small size, the Q1 has a talk time of 4 hours and a standby time of 100 hours. It charges through a standard micro USB connector. When it is time to charge it, you can use the tiny foldaway AC adapter or the USB cable to charge it off your laptop (both are included).

The USB cable has one other function. The Q1 is designed to allow the firmware to be upgraded to accommodate new phones, add features or (heaven forbid) fix bugs.

Sadly, the Q1 makes my Jawbone headset, which I was SO excited about just a couple of months ago, seem obsolete and hard to use. (Ouch!)

I’m giving the Q1 five stars.

Related posts:

1. Portable Speakerphone for Your Car

(My Render of the H1N1 Influenza Virus)

When you ask someone to name the deadliest disease, they immediately rattle off “AIDS” or “cancer” or “heart disease.” A couple of these are pretty good guesses. Heart disease kills about 650,000 people a year in the US. Cancer takes another 560,000. AIDS, although scary, isn’t even in the top 15, killing only 14,500 in the US annually. (Suicide is over twice that number.)

The granddaddy of all killer diseases is actually the flu. In a typical year in the US, influenza kills from 30,000 to 60,000 people, ranking it the number 8 killer in the country. But it’s in those atypical years that influenza really shows off.  Flu pandemics have been recorded for at least 500 years, the last REALLY big one in 1918. There was a world war going on at that time which, over five years, killed 37 million people.  In a single year, influenza killed twice that many. In the US alone, 500,000 died (the equivalent of 1.9 million at today’s population).

Influenza is a tricky disease to control because, unlike polio which can be eradicated, it crosses over from species to species. Ducks and other birds are the most common virus reservoir, but pigs and several other animals can also be infected. As it crosses from host to host, it mutates, crossing with other strains of influenza, picks up little bits of RNA here and there, and emerges as a new threat. It’s the fact that humans live with and raise these animals that causes epidemics.

Like all viruses, influenza does its damage by hijacking the host cell’s genetic machinery to reproduce itself. It does this by injecting its eight coiled strands of RNA into the host cell nucleus. (You can see them in the picture, colored to represent their human, bird and swine origins.)

Because it has an RNA core instead of a DNA core, influenza has a much higher mutation rate (DNA provides a degree of  “spell checking” and error correction during replication.) This high mutation rate is one of the things that makes influenza so difficult to predict and fight.

In contrast to AIDS, which kills by disabling the body’s defenses, influenza kills with the victim’s own immune system. As the immune system starts to recognize the influenza infection, a positive feedback loop can form between the immune cells and the chemical messengers which summon them. In this “cytokine storm,” the immune response escalates out of control until fever, swelling, fluids and large numbers of immune cells themselves cause critical systems to collapse.

H1N1 gets its name from the surface proteins hemoglutinin (blue buds in the picture) and neuraminidase (red cubes). It’s the job of hemoglutinin to latch onto the host cell so the virus can infect it. Once infected, the host begins manufacturing copies of the virus. Neuraminidase enables those copies to exit the cell so they can infect their neighbors.

It is the mutation of these surface proteins that requires us to make specific flu vaccines every year, based on our prediction of the dominant strain. (The last outbreak of “bird flu” was H5N1.) If we guess wrong and the proteins don’t match, the vaccine will be ineffective.

Because of its genetic promiscuity and mutation rate, the long term defense against flu will have to be antiviral agents, not vaccines. Although we don’t have any solutions yet, there are several promising new directions under research. Until then, wash your hands, keep them away from your face, and get a vaccination if you are at particular risk.

Related:

I have uploaded a very short animation of this model to YouTube here. (Be sure to click the HQ option or it looks awful.)

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"Do you see what I see?"

Every good designer knows the rules about page layout. Your eye goes first to the headline, then to the caption of the picture, then to the picture… whatever. But if you’re really serious about page layout and GUI design, you have to use eyetracking.

The problem is, eyetracking is really expensive and time-consuming. You need special equipment and a testing environment and, probably most difficult to come by, test participants. Maybe…

Now, a group of artificial vision scientists who call themselves Feng-GUI Lab have created a piece of software that simulates the human vision process. You can upload a still image or a movie and in seconds approximate the results of a weeks worth of human testing. Their website allows you to try out a free image analysis every three hours. I tried an analysis of my home page. The result is displayed above (click on it for a larger view).

Feng-GUI also has a lot of interesting applications of AI vision analysis listed on their home page including “smart thumbnails,” the technique of only including the visually interesting part of a picture. Make your own AI eyetracking simulations here.

Links:

• Good info on consumer Web visual behavior
• 5-step formula for creating a David Ogilvy-style ad layout

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