This Valentine’s Day let’s share the love with a little green.

Electric cars seem to have a few issues when it comes to traveling distances. Batteries just take too long to charge, and don’t hold as much juice as we’d like. Not even the great and mighty Tesla (the car company, not Nikola) has managed to solve that problem just yet.

However, chances are, sometime in your life you’ve seen (in real life, or on TV) an electric train, subway, trolley, bus, or other wheeled vehicle of some type that runs on electricity provided by a grid that it’s connected to. You know, that really tall hook thingy that grips those overhead wires? Or the dreaded train/subway rail that you’re not supposed to touch? It’s a common enough concept and makes sense in limited areas. In fact, it’s more energy efficient for a vehicle to grab its power as it travels than it is to lug around a big gas tank.

So why don’t electric cars use the same approach?

Well, all of those wires overhead everywhere could get awfully difficult to maintain for one. And if you used something lower to the ground, chances are some numbskull would electrocute him/her-self crossing a road.

Well, that is, unless you asked Tesla (Nikola, not the car company) to come up with a solution.  (Wardenclyffe Tower anyone?) Sadly, being dead, no one thought to ask Nikola Tesla how to power an electric car without plugging it into the road. So it took us an awfully long time for we mere mortals to think of this: We could always charge an electric car wirelessly as it drives.

Thanks to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science soon two electric busses will be able to travel along the road from Gumi station by recharging their batteries wirelessly from induction loops embedded in the road along the route. No zappy-zappy to humans. It’s effectively the same technology that lets some cellphones and even toothbrushes recharge wirelessly, only applied to moving vehicles.

And if you eat the cost to put this same kind of technology into urban areas, you could easily design a gridwork of roads where electric cars, busses, trolleys, etc. can recharge themselves as they drive. All without wires.

It could become a green-city utopia.

Even major highways, tollways, turnpikes, etc. where longer distance driving is done could be augmented with sections of induction charging to allow electric cars, that drive on the right roads, to eat up the miles indefinitely without ever needing to stop for a charge, which would make electric cars infinitely greener and more convenient than their gas-guzzling compatriots at that point. Imagine driving thousands of miles without ever having to stop for fuel even once.

In theory, it’s possible. And Korea is the one showing us how.

In case you’re new to InsanIT.net, let me be very clear that I never recommend a product unless I’ve actually used it myself. And while I may rag on some things just for the fun of it, I don’t actually tell you that a product is awful unless it really really was when I used it.

I mean it.

That said, this OrGreenic frying pan is absolutely positively the best pan I’ve ever owned.  It is the real deal.

Unlike Teflon-coated non-stick pans that mostly don’t stick, OrGreenic truly takes non-stick to a whole new standard of, well, non-stickiness. You literally almost can’t even use oil or grease in these pans because even the grease won’t stick to the pan. It just dots up and pools instead of coating the pan.  It’s like herding ducks. That’s your first indication that here is something better than Teflon.

And where every other nonstick pan that I’ve used over the years scratches and becomes less and less non-stick, sometimes sticky to the point of being worse than just simple cast iron, the OrGreenic pans really don’t seem to scratch. At all. Partly because they’re so non-stick that you really don’t have to scrub at them. Ever. They’re ridiculously easy to wash.  But also because the non-stick coating is darned hard compared to Teflon.

So they’re easy to cook in. They’re easy to clean. And because you need little (or even no) oil to cook with, they’re healthier too.

But wait, it’s also been scientifically proven that Teflon, when heated sufficiently, also offgasses some toxic fumes that in some people results in flu-like symptoms. But not OrGreenic!

And the build quality is pretty darn good too. The handle is attached solidly. The pan is dense enough to actually use. Nothing bends, wobbles, or dents. I would even so much as dare to call it commercial-grade quality. For the price that’s amazing. Also showing absolutely brilliant thinking is that the handle is all aluminum, so you can put the pan straight into an oven with confidence.

Frankly, the only bad thing about OrGreenic pans is that near as I can find, it’s just the one pan size. There’s no set of many pieces. There are no glass lids. It’s just the one frying pan, and that’s it for choices.

But for my money, I can’t think of a single more worthwhile kitchen purchase than an OrGreenic pan!

Seriously!

I’ve been using it for months now and still smile every time.

I give it six and a half perfect omelets out of five. I give it twelve dancing chefs out of ten. OrGreenic is the bee’s knees. It’s the pan-pan that can-can and to use it will have you high-stepping too! It’s the best technology a kitchen could ever have.

So you want to make a moon base.

But you don’t know how in the universe you’re ever going to ship enough materials to the moon to make a base.

And it’s kind of hard to build a moon mine, refinery, and smithy to build the materials that you need to make a moon base completely sourced from the moon.

… Or is it?

That’s what the European Space Agency is actually suggesting … sort of. They want to ship a 3D printer to the moon to print buildings from moon rocks. Basically.

Architecture firm Foster + Partners has been working on a proof of concept for just such a plan, turning a 1.5 ton block into a simulated moon base using a 3D printer from Monolite, a UK company. The Monolite mobile printing array of nozzles successfully sprayed their simulated lunar rock print material onto a six meter frame.

The trick, claims Enrico Dini, Monolite’s founder, is to mix the moon rock with magnesium oxide to create a “’paper’ we can print with.” The second step involves salt, according to Enrico, who says, “Then for our structural ‘ink’ we apply a binding salt which converts material to a stone-like solid.”

Of course printing something on Earth is not the same as printing something on the moon. With minimal to no gravity or working with no atmosphere, you’d hardly be impressed if your “ink” were to sputter out into space instead of onto what you’d hoped to print. But Monolite reckons that they have that covered too, thanks to capillary forces holding droplets of 2mm size in place in the soil.

They hope.

After all, they didn’t use real moon rock, as that’s kind of hard to come by. They just grabbed some basalt from a volcano in Italy, which should be similar enough … in theory. Likewise the process hasn’t actually been tested in space, in Earth orbit, on the moon, or otherwise. It’s all still just a lot of practical theory.

Still, if it worked it’d be a sure sight better than spitting loads and loads of expanding capsules up to the moon for astronauts to live in. Stage 1 would obviously be gaining a presence on the moon. Stage 2 would then be printing off the real buildings to use for a permanent moon base.

Sounds good. Let’s get crackin’!

It also kind of makes me wonder … just why exactly aren’t we doing this on good old Earth too? Why can’t I just 3D print myself a McMansion?

Are you tired of slow networks? Well Fujitsu thinks that they have the answer!

Many network protocols run over Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), basically a set of rules for network communication. TCP is an essential part of the greater Internet Protocol (IP), which is more of the same. Thus you’ll often see them referred together as TCP/IP, as they’re almost always joined at the hip. This is basically the heart of what makes Ye Olde Internet work, and what allows programs running on computers (and other gadgets and gizmos) to communicate with one another and the world at large.

What TCP/IP does is break down what you want to communicate (be it an email, the contents of a file, or what have you) into tiny chunks called packets. It then sends these packets through the many varied paths through a network from point A (you) to point B (the recipient). If you were to send the whole shebang in one chunk, chances are that big piece would get damaged or stuck along the way, and then you’d have to resend it. Quite possibly again and again and again. Which would be slow and unwieldy. Because in today’s world networks are thousands upon thousands of computers shaking hands, routing information down this way or that depending on which looks to be less utilized, et cetera ad nauseam. Back in the good old days when the internet was shiny and new, this wasn’t such a challenge. Today though it’s like tightrope walking across a congested superhighway of tightropes over a minefield while carrying a cup of water and hoping to not spill a single drop along the way. By breaking your message into lots of tiny packets carried by multiple tightrope walkers and reassembling them at the end it allows to send packets down multiple paths and to request only to resend the damaged or lost ones, making communication from one end of the Earth to the other possible amidst the chaos.

The thing is, you see, TCP/IP is basically as old as the internet itself, more or less. And while it works, there’s always room for improvement.

An muck less often used alternative to TCP is the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which was tailored specifically for streaming media, such as a movie. It’s designed for minimal delays and getting things from point A to point B a lot faster, but a lot less safely. The constant handshaking and quality checking of TCP is virtually non-existent in UDP, by design. Instead UDP just machineguns data as rapidly as possible. It makes it a lot faster, but a lot more dangerous for really important things.

That’s why most things still use TCP/IP. It’s safe. It’s reliable.

But it’s also slow.

That’s where Fujitsu comes into our picture. They reckon that they have a solution that’s the bee’s knees to TCP/IP. Because of the minimal overhead involved in UDP they built their new network protocol around that. But instead of using unprotected UDP directly, they made themselves a man in the middle. To computers it looks like a TCP/IP connection. To the networks that shuffle the data around it uses a UDP port. But thanks to their man in the middle, it’s kind of both, basically.

The advantage that Fujitsu brings is that they’re intelligently hybridizing TCP with UDP and adding in some of their own special sauce to fix flaws in both in the process. For example, UDP often sends too much data through, congesting the bandwith and clogging up attempts to communicate. Whereas Fujitsu’s approach tries to intelligently limit how much data to throw down the pipe at one time, allowing more information to pass through by not hogging all of the bandwidth. And more importantly, Fujitsu has designed a way to tell the difference between packets that have been lost, and packets that have been dropped, an important distinction that can prevent unnecessary requests for retransmitting a packet. The less duplicate and useless retransmissions of data is the less bandwidth wasted in the process of getting everything from point A to point B.

All-in-all, data transmission tests Fujitsu has run from Japan to the United States using their new technology have seen thirty times more speed and a latency just one-sixth of the time you get with TCP/IP.  That’s pretty impressive, and if everyone started using that, we’d see a whole new internet.

To that end, they hope this will make their new network protocol become a key player in today’s data-choked world now that our mini-devices do everything. Look to see Fujitsu start commercializing their product sometime this year.

Like a scene from an Austin Powers movie, Google really does seem intent on arming everyone with lasers. In a recent patent filing Google imagines a world where glasses project a virtual input device (such as a keyboard) onto your arm using frickin’ laser beams. That way you can type with one arm onto your other arm. In theory.

Ideally these lasers would be of such low intensity that they wouldn’t cut or burn the keyboard into your arm permanently, but just visually project it onto your skin or clothing or whatever.

It’s a novel approach to making Google’s Glass project, a computer wearable on your face, almost … usable. Maybe. Kind of. If not that much more dangerous.

But the idea is far from new, and questionably patentable. Laser projection keyboards have been around for years.  They’re not new by a long shot, especially in dog years of the tech world. So much so that I’m not even sure that mounting such a keyboard into Google’s funky glasses should even be something that should be allowed to be patented. That’d rather be like patenting someone velcroing a mini Bluetooth keyboard around a forearm. But far be it for me to make fun of the US PTO should Google’s patent be granted or anything.

Anywhen, clearly Google intends this whole Glass project to one day be something people might actually use. Yeah. Good luck with that Google. Maybe cops or soldiers or something, people who might actually need real-time information in situations where pulling a phone out of your pocket is somehow dangerous. But for the everyday person, I just don’t see it.

Still, lasers in your glasses… Hey, now self-absorbed idiots can accidentally blind random strangers when they bump into them because they weren’t looking where they were going, too caught up in Google Glass to notice that there’s actually a world around them still. Way to go Google, arming them with lasers. Google Glass, endangering society since… always.  Just now they seem intent on raising that bar even more so than ever before.

Besides, I think I’d much rather have some kind of bendy-screen touch-enabled watch (or larger) device worn on ye olde wrist / forearm than glasses with lasers.

Or if you’re stuck on the whole glasses shtick, how about a system that recognizes where you’re looking at and registers double-blinks as a replacement for a mouse cursor and left-click? Then no one has to worry about those frickin’ laser beams accidentally blinding people. That technology has also been around for years, helping disabled people.

But what do I know? I’m just some idiot with a blog, not some billion dollar multi-national monstrosity with teams of highly paid experts and researchers…