Browsing all posts in Tech.
200+ MPG
Its been too long since I’ve written. I’ve had a few posts rattling around in my head for weeks, but no time. Such is the life of a working student. My mind is still consumed by fuel efficiency and energy consumption. I’ve had a handful of great conversations with other engineers, there are definitely some [...]
Ethanol
So I’ve been blogging about gas prices and the state of American automakers lately. I haven’t yet addressed one of the solutions that GM has proposed. Ethanol, or E85. Chevy and GMC are labeling their trucks, and some cars as well, as flexible-fuel vehicles, meaning that they can run on either unleaded gasoline or E85. [...]
Are High Gas Prices Good?
Two years ago I wrote a couple of essays in which I argued that high gas prices would produce some positive changes for America, as people get tired of paying at the pump and begin to look for alternative solutions to our energy needs. Two years is enough time for changes to begin to occur, [...]
Use Your Web
I just read an article that lists Firefox extensions that are supposed to save you time. Some of these are nice tips that genuinely could save time. I personally don’t like loading up Firefox with plugins because it becomes another list of things to manage. I like simplicity. Many of the things listed in the [...]
Xoopit For Gmail
One of the things that I love about Gmail is that its so packed with features that it seems I’m always learning something cool about it. Archiving emails, labels, secure connections, filters, forwarding… I’m always learning new cool stuff about my inbox. That’s pretty hip, in my humble estimation. This morning I found out about [...]
Dvorak
Have you heard of Dvorak keyboards? Its an alternative to the standard QWERTY keyboard layout, and is supposedly better for people that do a lot of typing because it minimizes the amount of finger motion required in typing. Its supposed to reduce the chances of a typing injury such as carpel tunnel syndrome. I’ve wanted [...]
Space Elevator
In one of my classes I was assigned the task of writing a feasibility study of an engineering project with a team of students. My team chose to write our document on the space elevator. It was really fun, this project is ambitious, but after reading and writing on this subject for the past six [...]
Ham Radio
I’m now in the cool part of my degree plan where we get to start doing cool stuff with the knowledge that we’ve acquired. This semester I joined a team of students that are building a CubeSat satellite, it launches sometime next fall. I’m learning a lot and its totally fun to be working with [...]
Burt Rutan Speech
In the process of doing some research for a project on campus, I came across this speech that Burt Rutan made back in Feb of 2006. Rutan has been a hero of mine for a long time. This speech is pretty encouraging, and exciting. I don’t agree with every single point that he makes, but [...]
Blog Spam
We all have to deal with spam these days. Unfortunately its part of having a digital life. This blog gets much more spam than I do on any email account though (I have filtered out more than 83,000 comment spams in the past 12 months!). Most of it gets caught by filters, and the rest [...]