GraniteGeek

THIS BLOG HAS MOVED!

If your bookmark brings you here, please go to www.granitegeek.org and bookmark that baby instead. Ganite Geek is now being hosted by the Nashua Telegraph instead of NH.com for a variety of exciting-only-to-Web-folks reasons. Personally, I hope it will help with ads and search-engine linkes. (Hey, it works for the Freakonomics blog on the N.Y. Times site!)

See you there!

Small wind turbines often not worth it

(Note: The transition to a new blog platform continues, hence the weak posting. Sorry!)

This won't surprise GraniteGeek contributor Earle Rich, who has real experience working with wind turbines and is quick to introduce real-world caution, but this NY Times article notes that small, building-mounted wind turbines aren't so great - notably, the funky-looking ones at Logan Airport have been a disappointment.

Good quote from the story: �In an urban environment, more times than not you�re better off with a solar panel,� said Mr. Stimmel, of the wind industry association.

Biodiesel Cog Railway ready to be unveiled

The Concord Monitor has the story - and the contest to name it (mentioned in a post last week) is still ongoing. The engine will burn a diese/biodiesel combination.

For those who haven't been around Mount Washington when the Cog goes up, it throws out a ton of smoke. In 2005 and 2006 they established skiing next to it - ride up the train and ski down beside the tracks. I never got around to trying it, but I heard it was fun until the train went by and showered you with smoke.

Wind farm work in Maine

NOTE: We're switching blog platforms, so posting may be light.

As components are assembled north of Keene and I await word on a chance to visit contruction at Lempster Mountain Wind, work has begun on another wind farm in Maine: What will eventually be a 44-turbine operation near the New Hampshire border. (Lempster will have 12 turbines).

I have made a second version of the regional alternative-energy map in the left-hand rail - this one shows just plants that most people consider true "alternative power" - wind/solar/geo/tidal.
View Larger Map

Download speeds in N.H.

I have to write my Telegraph column soon - part of it is going to be on this survey from speedmatters.org, a site run by the Communication Workers of America (which is my union) that asked members to test their upload/download speed.

New Hampshire's state average was 1.877 kpbs down and 445 kpbs up, putting us a bit above the average for states. Since that covers everything from fiber-optic folks in Nashua to dial-up in the North Country, it's not terribly significant, but it's fun. The site includes a browser-based test for your speed - anybody care to report what they get?.

Power storage - necessary but hard

It's good - although slightly depressing - to see mainstream media discussion of alternative energy move from "cool technologies will save us" to details about the difficult reality of making it work. The NY Times article on the need to rebuild the (discussed here last week) is part of that, as is today's Globe article about the need to store electricity to make the grid work - a topic also discussed here before.

Robot spinoffs take root in Mass.

The dream of any state is to have a self-generating industry, a la Silicon Valley - an industry that spontaneously grows it own companies, better than any other location does. Minicomputers are the obvious Boston-area example; biotech hasn't quite gotten there yet. This Globe article raises the hope that robotics might do it. From the story:

"People are moving to Massachusetts from elsewhere because of the robotics companies. This is seen as a place where robotics is happening," says Rodney Brooks, the dean of robotics research at MIT and a cofounder of iRobot Corp., the Bedford maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaner.

Shareware Report: Photo tagger

Picture this: You've just taken pictures at your neighborhood's annual block party. Now it's time to post them the neighborhood Web site for those who purposely missed the gala celebration. "Who's that with the ape mask on? Must be Andy, he's always a jerk at these parties," you think. As you move the cursor over his disguised visage, a tool tip reveals the truth: "Ah! It's John. I should have known."

Annotating pictures to make them more informative is just one of many photo features packed into FotoTagger, developed by Cogitum LC. FotoTagger lets you easily add movable notes to individual elements visualized on images. The notes can be hidden in a click of a button so the original view remains intact. Moreover, the notes always stay with the image wherever it is shared. You can identify people, places, and events on digital photos. Mark notable details and comment specific objects. To add comic relief to this boring block party, why not display your tags in a form of balloons?

Once you're done creating exciting annotated pictures, you can publish the images to Blogger and LiveJournal, or how about uploading annotated pictures to Flickr and download them back to FotoTagger with Flickr notes preserved? You can easily create build photo slide shows of annotated images to create albums, presentations, tutorials, and galleries of annotated artworks. They can be published then on your site or burned on a CD. You'll have picture-perfect memories to perhaps an otherwise forgettable occasion.

Where to get it: http://www.fototagger.com Price: Free System Requirements:PC with 300MHz Pentium processor; 128MB RAM; about 3MB of free hard disk space; 800x600 pixels, 16 bit color monitor; Windows 2000/XP.

Bill Dubie and Dave Sciuto are industry columnists. They recommend strongly that you read the end-user license agreement on any software you download, as the program could contain spyware or other utilities you don't want on your computer.

"Green" politicial convention - not so much

On another political note ... the Democratic National Convention was big on "green" hype, but as this report from CNet notes, had some trouble following through:

"Bikes aren't permitted inside the convention's security perimeter, so golf carts and other vehicles are used. The wooden card keys proved buggy, and some were replied with more reliable plastic. Fried mini-donuts were prominently on sale inside the Pepsi Center. Party VIPs and celebrities told their decidedly non-green town cars and GMC Yukon XL mega-SUVs ... to idle, with engines and air conditioning on, in the nearby pickup area."

This would be a ground-breaking presidential candidate

It's ground-breaking that an African-American has gotten a major party nomination for president, as it will be one day when a woman gets a nomination, or a Latino, or a Jew.

But here's a historic change in presidential nominees I'd like to see: Somebody with scientific training. As far as I can tell, no president has ever had a college degree in anything but law or business. (Woodrow Wilson had a Ph.D. in political science, and a half-dozen, most recently Harry Truman, didn't graduate from college at all.) (UPDATE: Thanks to comments below, I realize that I overlooked nuclear sub officer Jimmy Carter, and Herbert Hoover, who claimed to have been the first student at Stanford (sez wikipedia, at least) where he got a geology degree.)

New Hampshire has shown the way here with John Sununu pere et fils - the elder got his doctorate in mechanical engineering from MIT, the younger his BS in mechanical engineering from that school before slipping with a mere MBA from Harvard. Regardless of your opinion on their politics, their education stands out.