My dream portable pc

The pieces are finally all here. As you've read previously, I have a new laptop which is enough of a workhorse that I use it for almost everything and leave the desktop off making my living room significantly quieter.

I'm still a little tempted by the new netbooks -- they have a high cute factor and are much more portable than my work-sized laptop, but they are also severely limited in function. So much that I don't think I'd really use one that often. I think Scott Adam's idea of the phone computer of the future is certainly possible, but we don't have the ubiquitous infrastructure to make it realistic yet. Apple's iPhone has certainly stolen a march on the competiton in this direction.

For now though, what I would really like is something the same netbook form factor, tablet interface, mini OS built into bios for quickly getting the web or reading an ebook without needed to boot up a whole os, and finally a really power efficient screen like ePaper.

Lots of companies have gotten on the netbook bandwagon, and at the prices they are selling at, who can blame the public for ditching their blackberries and PDAs for a real computer. These are small and light in a way we always wished laptops would be. The screens are usually acceptably wide, but the pixels come up short in height.

The cool thing about tablet inferface is that you can ditch the keyboard when you don't need it and easily turn the whole thing on its side to read a PDF in portrait layout. There are lots of technical books and manuals I have in pdf, but it's a pain to read them normally since I either have to read the top of the page and then the bottom, going back and forth if there are columns; or I strain to read the page compress to fit the screen.

Splashtop is widely available on ASUS motherboards with other manufacturers starting to join in, notably Lenovo. It's essentially a very thin linux installation that have specific and limited hardware awareness, but will let you surf the web, look at pictures, play music and use skype without starting a whole os which usually takes a minute or so. Splashtop starts up in about 5 seconds. Adding the ability to read ebooks from a memory card port is trivial.

And just announced is Pixel Qi's combo LCD and ePaper display. It will function normally indoors, it will function in full color but without the battery draining backlight* outdoors while remaining perfectly readable. But the coolest trick is a full ePaper mode which uses a small current to change the screen which then remains static drawing no power until the page is changed again. ePaper has a noticeable delay when drawing a new screen and is only a limited greyscale, but you can get thousands of page flips on a small rechargable battery using eReaders like the Kindle or iRex.

All the parts are here, now someone just needs to assemble and sell them. I'll buy one.

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* - To give you a concrete example, my Garmin 296 has five different brighness settings. Using full brightness has a battery life of about an hour and five minutes. Using the most dim, it lasts for almost 6 hours.

SPOT Report

Short version: convenient and incredibly accurate if it can get a gps lock.

Long version:
SPOT is a nifty little device sealed in safety orange plastic and rubber intended for hikers, off-roaders and the helpless. It does have a place in general aviation, but the "Help" button needs to be re purposed as "I'm being delayed". Soaring pilots and balloonists might use it for, "I'm here and there's no cell reception." The "911" button should be used for honest to goodness emergencies when you want to activate Emergency Services. There just aren't that many GA situations where someone on your email list can help you better than you can help yourself except in cases where you should be calling Emergency Services anyway.

SPOT has four buttons, Power, OK, Help and 911. It seems like a nice balance between having a texting keyboard (which would hard to make rugged) and just the OMG emergency button that you see on other systems. And all the buttons are independent. There was a story about a guy who was out on the mountain when they had a problem and were too far from civilization to walk out, so he hit 911 to get Search and Rescue out to get them home, but he could also signal his wife with a later "OK" so she knew he was alright without cancelling S&R.

Another nice feature of SPOT is that it has user replaceable batteries - in this case, two AA lithium cells. They should last for a year of ON and gps tracking, 19,000 Help or OK messages, 14 days of tracking or 7 days of 911 alerts every 5 minutes. The lithium cells should probably still be changed bi-annually like your ELT.

I would feel better about it if I could connect an external antenna. When they say the unit needs a clear view of the sky, they aren't kidding. My first test was while sitting on my neighbor's porch, which is covered, but narrow and only cuts off an additional few degrees of sky -- my southern and western skies were clear and it never locked a gps location. In its favor, it was still able to transmit the "Help" notification -- "OK" doesn't transmit without gps coordinates.

When it does get a gps fix, like when it's sitting on the dash of my car, it's really accurate. When I sent a "Help" test message to myself after parking, it was able to accurately locate the exact parking space in a big lot. My plan is to use the "OK" function at the start of the flight and every 30 minutes thereafater when I need to switch fuel tanks* and then finally, once again when landed.

For an extra $50/yr, you can have SPOT track you every 10 minutes (when activated) and assemble a google maps page so that friends and family can follow your progress. It just seems to me that 30 minute updates are fine. It's always something I can add later.

The additonal $8/yr upgrade for GEOS emergency response insurance covers up to $100,000 for rescue costs including helicopter extraction. This seems totally worth it. GA is very safe, but there is the possibility that you'll end up perfectly fine (or even injured) and have to climb down a mountain you never climbed up. Your sectional map is not going to help as much as you'd like.

There is a further $28/yr upgrade for road-side assistance, which seems to assume that you have no one you can call and are maybe afraid to change a tire.

Considering satellite monitoring of 121.5MHz has ended and the new 406 MHz ELT's aren't required by the FAA (and are still quite expensive) -- having this as a backup in your flight bag seems like a good idea. They keep promising inexpensive 406 MHz ELT's with GPS location transmission, but so far these are still in the $2000 to $3000 range plus installation. Maybe not much for aVLJ owner, but for someone with a 1963 Cherokee, this is huge.

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* - For you Cessna drivers, the Cherokee doesn't have a 'both' position for fuel. They also have a somewhat complicated schedule in my 1963 POH -- I just switch every half hour. There's a nifty timer function you can activate to have your Garmin hand-held pop up a reminder.

Fusion Fuel?

I know this is supposed to be about flying or computers, but I wrote a senior thesis on nuclear fusion back in 1987, and I was sure it was 'just around the corner'.

Obviously not as much progress has been made as I hoped. I think if it had, we would at least being seeing cheap electricity and less expensive gasoline since oil wouldn't be burned to power generators. There are also some reactor designs that promise to scale easily to house powerplant size or even for use as a car engine.

Some bright guys at the University of Gothenburg have figured out how to make an ultradense deuterium*. When they say ultradense, they mean more dense than the core of the Sun -- they figure a 10cm cube would weigh 130 tons. The article is pretty light on hard details, but if this stuff turns out to be relatively easy to make and safe/easy to handle**, it could make an excellent fuel for fusion reactions as well as being easy to store and move since a small volume is simpler even with an immense weight than some huge pressurized tank of a flammable gas.

If this works out, there are a lot of plans to make cars that run on electricity if only electricity were cheaper, some even use electricity to disassociate hydrogen from water in a garage -refueling unit and use fuel-cells to drive the wheels. So far, range is the problem and lack of infrastructure for refueling, but if electricity were much cheaper***, everything would change. The cost of fuel for the plant would be negligible compared to fission (28% of annual budget) or coal (53%) without even counting the cost of disposal of radioactive waste or the mountains of ash from a coal plant.

What if they can scale a fusion plant to car-size? A cube of this stuff .5cm per side weighs 32.5 lbs and might provide as much power as 40,000,000 gallons*** of gasoline. Your car would sell fully fueled and you'd only buy more if there was an accident or something caused a leak. It would produce trace amount of tritium (H3), which is hazardous, but this should be able to captured, then cleaned out annually and sold to industry. Even if some escapes, the half-life of tritium is only 12 years, making it not nearly the problem that radioactive waste from fission plants are with half-lives in the thousands of years.

Here's hoping that more progress will be made in this twenty years than the last.

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* - deuterium (H2) is a naturally occurring, stable (non-radioactive) isotope of hydrogen (H2). Fusing two deuterium atoms will give you Helium (He4) plus gobs of energy. Deuterium is rare, occurring about 1 in 6,500, but the Earth has a lot of water.

** - The mad scientist in me is imagining a small cube catching fire -- a 1cc cube weighs 260 lbs -- too heavy for its size to be moved by hand; however, one placed in the center of a table would probably be overlooked. If it caught fire though, it would produce superheated steam as if you'd boiled over 32 gallons of water and the volumetric expansion could be an explosion similar to a stick of dynamite depending on propagation.

*** - My source of fusion figures is here and includes 10M:1 ration for energy output of fusion vs fossil fuels, and fuel cost of fusion being 1% of the cost of power generation.

Hacking the FAA and GPS

It's been recently revealed the the FAA systems have been hacked. That their webservers and the loads of personal information has been compromised repeatedly in the past is no surprise; however, they're saying that "mission support function" servers have been compromised.

The problem with reading this report is that functionality isn't well defined, and frankly I'm not an ATC insider to know exactly how all the pieces go together. Is "mission support" tracking certificates and registration? No big deal for safely, just lots of papers moving around. Does it cover ATC hand off between stations? Hassle, but still not a huge deal, just a lot more radio chatter. Does every approach center in a Class C or better airport use the same system which connects to the FAA and requires that connection to function? That's a problem!

I expect the media to hop on this and assume that hackers can crash airliners willy-nilly if they have access to the FAA computers. They've seen it happen in movies as far back as the 90's. It was a nifty plot device, but absurd then too: VOR's need to be taken down for a day or more to realign it to match the drifting magnetic isogonic lines, not to mention that VOR navigation just isn't tight enough to fly a single engine into a tower. Fiddling with ILS to crash a plane is also pretty absurd -- not only are they legally required to have a visual on the runway, but the radar altimeter would be screaming so early that the pilots would know something was up.

[not to scale]

Today is even safer with GPS. We'll assume IFR, since VFR conditions will allow the pilot(s) to see and avoid ground obstacles. With GPS, you would have to change to clocks on multiple satellites -- four is the minimum for getting posistion with altitude and five for IFR, but I usally get 9 in my car -- which are all in motion and do so in such a way that they all report time ticks for a certain position as if it were somewhere else. This isn't impossible, but to do so on the fly on seven to nine moving satellites for the time it takes to crash an aircraft is bordering on impossible. Not to mention WAAS ground based facilities which would be pointing out any errors on the order of nanoseconds. And then, since we're in IFR, your GPS will have RAIM and FDE. RAIM basically lets it looks at the satellite data and detect bad data. FDE lets it go the step further and isolated and ignore the erroneous satellite's data.

If you're an AOPA member, I strongly reccomend their asf classes for GPS in VFR and IFR. Lots of info, and some great flash animation to help you visualize how this distributed system all works together.

I've found a lot of discussion about RAIM needed for GPS under IFR, and that RAIM doesn't exist in handheld units. Why this should be in unclear. We're essentially dealing with mathematical calculations which, given the increased speed and decreased size and power requirements of processors, should be a pretty low hurdle for today's devices.

The AIM documents regarding GPS for IFR starts at 1-1-19 subsection e. There's a lot, and it goes on without being narrowed down to a simple table that I could find. I know it includes things like being a TSO unit and having TSO wiring and antenna(s).

As the final piece of my logic puzzle, we have the Garmin 696 -- expensive and big, but pretty awesome and clearly designed to be a helpmeet for IFR pilots. They even have a very professional panel dock availiable for it so there are no wires hanging loose in the cockpit.

Here's my delima, assuming you have an IA level the dock and run TSO wires and antennas, where exactly is the 696 deficient as an IFR navigation device?

Portables and handhelds are showing up with synthetic vision now. How long is it going to be before pilots start using this to negoitate IFR conditions at uncontrolled airports? What do you want to bet if the FAA gets their user fees, there will be a whopping charge for IFR? More temptation to skirt the rules and fly cheap.