Comment on some guy’s little hack to fix the knob on his car stereo:

PR22 says: wow. this is pretty ghetto
kqrpnb says: Thanks!

I have plug-in hybrids on the brain. Traditional hybrid cars couple electric and gas-powered motors to generate propulsion for a car. They can recapture momentum during braking as electricity to charge a small set of batteries. Plug-ins, unlike current hybrids, have bigger batteries and can be charged off the electrical grid.

Ian Wright (founder of electric car-maker Wrightspeed and maker of the X1 prototype) was recently at Squid Labs doing a talk, discussing the potential for upcoming hybrid tech. Plug-ins with sufficient battery capacity could allow drivers to drive 100 miles or so on a charge, but also have a small gas-powered generator for longer drives. Typical commuters would basically be using an electric car, but with longer range for the occasional road trips.

Using electricity is certainly cheaper (half that of gas, even including the amortized cost of batteries), but aren’t we just shifting the pollution elsewhere? Mostly likely, not. Yesterday, the Terrapass blog wrote up a new report that estimates that plug-ins would significantly reduce carbon emissions, even if the U.S. continues to generate electricity using the dirty technologies (e.g. coal) that it currently uses.

The report mapped out nine different scenarios by varying both the market penetration of plug-ins and the carbon intensity of the U.S. electrical grid. In even the most pessimistic scenario, plug-ins result in significant emissions reductions. In the median (and presumably most likely) scenario, plug-ins shave about half a gigaton of carbon from annual U.S. emissions. To put this in perspective, this is about 10% of the reductions we need to stabilize the climate. Not bad.

The switch would also net reductions in pollutants across the board.

Where are the plug-in hybrids? I want one now.

So, I’m happy with my Helio Ocean (though, of course, this is often the case with sunk costs.) But there are a lot of nits. And, aside from the location-awareness of the Ocean, it doesn’t hold a candle to the iPhone.

In any case, I’m sure there are still people out there not willing to shell out the extra $200-$300 for an iPhone, so here are some notes from an old email thread between Ben and me. Perhaps it will end up being useful to someone.

Read the rest of this entry »

A couple news stories, today, about the Congo. I blog them because they have a little bit more context than the usual dispatches that I get from the area (e.g. “Boat Sinks on Lake Kivu, Killing 20″):

• “A Life with Hope” has a brief description of roots of Congo’s troubles, and some anecdotes about people who are working to stabilize the country.
• “Faction Uproots Thousands in Congo” is more of a regular news item (and thus less optimistic), but has some good information of the current political climate.

By the way, it may seem from these articles that I will be working in an incredibly dangerous area. North Kivu overall is indeed a really dangerous place to be, but Goma proper will not be. As the Sacbee reporter noted, “Somehow the horrors of this conflict seem to be elusive and happen all too often out of sight.” Part of the problem of this conflict is that so many of the atrocious acts occur out in the vast countryside, where there are few cameras.

So, for better or for worse, I will be fairly safe.

I will be stoked if I bump into someone like William Kankwamba during my September trip to the Congo. Snip from his blog:

I took the minibus home from Madisi Secondary School to my home in Wimbe, Kasungu District, and began a project to upgrade the main source of power generation from a bicycle dynamo to a treadmill motor, a much more powerful generator of electricity.

I was given the motor by Mike and Peter of Baobab Health, where I will have an after-school job beginning in August. They bought the motor as part of a kit to build a windmill from a story they saw in the American Do-It-Yourself magazine, MAKE. They were intending to build a windmill from a kit to power one of their remote health care computer systems but gave me the motor and a Volt meter as a gift when I first met them. I had already been to the TEDGlobal Conference with their colleague Soyapi. I was very happy to receive this motor and have been wanting to install it on the windmill for some time.

via Inhabitat.com.