ZZZ Online | Other Issues

PhoneSecure

On 12 January, 2005, by se99jmk

I'm not generally an insecure person. I'm perfectly happy with carrying in excess of ?1000 in electronics on my person... well, maybe I should get some protection after all, and I've found it, in the form of PhoneSecure.

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Phraselator

On 12 January, 2005, by se99jmk

One step closer to the babelfish from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

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Epson fabricates 20-layer PCB using InkJet tec

On 05 November, 2004, by Dreadnought

Epson has fabricated a 200micron thick 20 layer using their own InkJet technology with a conductive ink containing silver micro-particles measuring from several nanometers to several tens of nanometers in diameter, and a newly developed insulator ink.

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PetaPixel displays, 100TB storage and more...

On 05 November, 2004, by Dreadnought

Colossal Storage is developing 14M dpi or 200Tpixels per square inch of near-non-volatile display. It is based on a ferroelectric material which gives each pixel a state retension of up to 12 hours. Display resolutions of up to 4Petapixel will be possible with this technology.
Colossal Storage is also developing a holographic media which can store 10TB on a single 3?" disc. The theory behind it can go up to 1.5Exabytes (1.5x10^1.
They are currently looking for companies who are interresting in licensing the products.

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Zeppelin NT

I found an old two-gallon ice cream bucket, some copper wire from other "experiments" I'd pulled off over the years and found a couple of empty soft drink bottles sitting around that I could figure out how to invert and partially submerge into my "reservoir". It was easy enough to construct ... I set up the apparatus in a makeshift manner similar to what I'd done in class and found a 9-Volt lantern battery from a local store, and charged it up.

Honestly, it was better than before. Off of the electrodes gasses were streaming elemental hydrogen and oxygen into their respective water-filled containers. I can't really say what happened next other than there was large bang that surely scared the neighbors and deafened me for a bit. Alas, the hallmark of a young geek is to put one's own life into jeopardy, I suppose, all for the sake of science.

Zeppelin History, ZZZ-Style

It wouldn't be relevant to ZZZ unless it flew, was unique in some way, or it blew stuff up. Fortunately for us Zeppelins, such as the LZ-38, fulfull all of these requirements. This dirigible could fly at about 60 mph/ 96 kmh, which was pretty zippy for an airborne vehicle.

Interesting tidbits of history ...

"During the war, the Germans used zeppelins as bombers. On May 31, 1915, the LZ-38 was the first zeppelin to bomb London, and other bombing raids on London and Paris followed. The airships could approach their targets silently and fly at altitudes above the range of British and French fighters. However, they never became effective offensive weapons. New planes with more powerful engines that could climb higher were built, and the British and French planes also began to carry ammunition that contained phosphorus, which would set the hydrogen-filled zeppelins afire." - Centennialofflight.com

Despite these pesky phosphorous fires, the wartime track record of the Zeppelin was pretty decent. Altogether Zeppelins dropped close to 200 tons of explosives in England (5,806 bombs), killing 557 people and injuring 1,358. Offensively, it wasn't particularly useful because of its burgeoning size and rather slow speed ... somewhere around 88 of them were built during WWI, of which around 60 were destroyed. This, however, didn't really end its life. It would take fabulous disasters such as the Hindenburg incident to quickly dispel the popularity of Zeppelins and for nearly 60 years after the Hindenburg and the Graf Zeppelin, no such airship was built.

Zeppelin NT

Windows NT (Nice Try? Next Time?) was a bust, but let's hope that the "NT" slogan carries better for the Zeppelin. Airships have been around for a good many years ... a vast improvement over the standard hot air balloon, able to carry passengers and limited cargo over rugged terrain. Although in their classic hydrogen-filled tradition, Zeppelins have waned quickly from the pages of our history books. Any physical science student with a penchant for fire (and a little knowledge of the electrolysis of water) knows that hydrogen can be a literal bitch-goddess. Now, with a fresh new perspective and an eye for safety, they are beginning to make a comeback.

For the Zeppelin, history began with its inventor, Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin. Per encyclopedia.com, this guy was well-traveled:

"(zĕp?elĬn, Ger. fĕr?dēn?nt gr?f fen tsĕp elēn?) , 1838-1917, German army officer and airship inventor and builder. He entered the Prussian army in 1858 and served in the Seven Weeks War and in the Franco-Prussian War. He was an observer with the Union army during the American Civil War. In 1891 he retired from the Prussian army to devote himself to the building of motor-driven airships. He invented the first rigid airship in 1900, and in 1906 built one that had a speed of 30 mi (48 km) per hr. In 1908 he established at Friederichshafen the Zeppelin Foundation for the development of aerial navigation and the manufacture of airships. - Encyclopedia.com"

Zeppelins, also called dirigibles, are steerable lighter than air crafts. This is much improved over earlier airships (blimps) because of of their rigid frame composition. The primary advantage of a Zeppelin over a standard blimp is that it wouldn't "sag" under a heavy load. Generally, these ships were comprised of a duraluminum latticework inside containing individual balloons containing hydrogen, so these craft were like an array of small hot-air balloons working together. Conventional engines would drive the craft forward.


Lessons Learned

For most of us, thoughts of the Hindenburg immediately come to mind when thinking about Zeppelins.

Gee, let's think. Big bags of hydrogen and a little St. Elmo's fire. Electrostatic buildup from driving through clouds? Hmmmm .... Honestly, hydrogen in and of itself wasn't really to blame for the Hindenburg fire. In the later part of the 20th Century, researchers like Addison Bain pointed out that the main culprit was the "skin" of the Hindenburg itself ... cotton, aluminum power, butryate acetate-based paint. In a word, a chemical recipe for disaster.

The Hindenburg was a monsterous airship, much larger than conventional aircraft and seeing how it could make an intercontinental trip in about 2 1/2 days, one would imagine that it'd be almost relaxing (except for all that catching on fire stuff).

Ahh, like the Titanic ... lessons learned.


The Return of the Zeppelin

Every so often, I sit in a bustling airport wondering ... where did the elegance go? We have sacrificed beauty for speed (questionably however, with up to 3-hour waits to get through security). Imagine something like Tom Hanks' new movie "The Terminal".

Not that I want to take a two-week trip across the ocean on a cruise ship if it weren't for pleasure, but it'd be nice to relax for a day or so. So reviving the nearly lost spirit of the Zeppelin, comes the Zeppelin NT.

These days, such airships are considerably safer:

"Nonflammable helium contained in an envelope of highly resistant laminates provides the lift required. The envelope is slightly superpressurized (5 mbar). Interior air chambers (ballonets) maintain constant inner pressure for any flight situation and therefore guarantee optimum safety."

According to Robbreport.com, the Zeppelin NT has a top speed of about 77 mph/123 kph and a range of about 559 miles/899 kilometers.


Why Zeppelins?

I suppose my biggest question after all this is, "Why build Zeppelins again?" Why return to Zeppelins while there are empty seats on more conventional airplanes? Why fly around in an airship when we'll soon be seeing (hopefully) a winner to the X-Prize with contenders like SpaceshipOne and can fly into space?

"The zeppelin as communication module convinces by the surprise effect - one actually expects no advertisement in the air - on the other hand the gigantic advertising formats of the Zeppelins go beyond the framework of the known. As a direct comparison to other media the Zeppelin can undoubtedly offer something special: EMOTION"

Well this can perhaps be answered from personal experience as well by the old "Goodyear Blimp" concept. You look up into a wide open sky and see a lumbering object with "GOODYEAR" painted all over the side. You can't miss it and it looks cool. The image stays with you for a while.

Personally, I like the Budwieser Blimp, but I suppose we can say the same thing of the X-Prize's ultimate goal of getting civilians into space ... A zeppelin is cool.


Zeppelin ET and the Future of Airships

There's been talk of creating a new craft called the Zeppelin ET, for "Euro Tour" (no, Led Zeppelin's not back on tour), perhaps as an alternative to modern cruise ships. I can only imagine slowly rolling over foreign lands, looking down on them from above and having time to enjoy the scenery, rather than craning my neck around to get a glimpse of the ground from an airplane. It'd have to be pretty amazing.

Beyond this, companies such as Lockheed-Martin are working towards what they hope to be a High Altitude Airship:

"an unmanned lighter-than-air vehicle that would operate above the jet stream and above severe weather in a geostationary position to serve as a telecommunications relay, a weather observer, or a peacekeeper from its over-the-horizon perch" - Globalsecurity.org

The only thing that I can forsee in the distant future would be something like in the anime program "The Last Exile" ... large fleets of destroyer airships battling in the skies.

The only thing I'd worry about would be what happens when they fall?

There's a lot of interesting stuff out there about Zeppelins and airships. For really interesting pictures of the building of some Zeppelins, check out Metzfoto.de. A curious PDF about various possibilities can be found at AIAA.org.

FMD / DMD. The Next Step in Storage

Anyone one of these heartbreaker techs was the FMD (Fluorescent Multilayered Disc) tech that we covered back in issue 148 and issue 14 (see these issues for a complete and better explanation of the technology). I was following this tech like a hawk, putting all of my psychic power into willing into existence a viable demonstration of this tech into my hot little hands. Don't worry, if you don't remember what FMD tech was all about i won't hold it against you. It just kindof appeared, a few people took notice, and then it disappeared. For completely unknown reasons the website just went inactive and it was as if the technology vanished into thin air. Had it been bought out by the military? Aliens? Damnit i wanted answers.

The basic gist of it, was that FMD tech was a new form of storage technology, using a cheaply manufactured transparent medium that allowed you to fit such amazing figures as 1 TERABYTE onto something the size of a normal CD. Continuing on the CD example: Using multiple layers of clear plastic with fluorescent dye wedged in-between each layer, you had something the same size of a CD, with over 100 layers of data written into the fluorescent dye in-between layers, but the CD is completely transparent. Also the manufacture cost of the CD was about the same amount as for our current CDS, because the technology is quite similar. It would only take a little modification to a current CD player to allow it to read a FMD CD, just adding in a focusing lens so that the laser can focus through the transparent plastic onto the desired fluorescent FMD CD layer.

And it wasn't just limited to CDs. The core FMD tech was actually completely unlimited to the restricting shape of a CD. You could make cubes, spheres, credit cards, all transparent and all full of information. I guess they decided to first tackle the CD shape because it would be an easy evolution of CD (1 layer) - DVD (2 layers) - FMD tech (unlimited layers).

OK, the main point, where was i?

Oh yeah. Happily, it seems that this tech has actually recently resurfaced. You may have missed it if you were frantically searching google for "FMD", because the reincarnation of the tech is now called DMD (Digital Multilayer Disc). About 6 months ago, C-3D, the company who invented the FMD tech, was bought out by the company DDataINC. It had been rumoured in the past that C-3D was looking to do deals with the Television industry, trying to stick their foot in the door so that they could get FMD tech integrated into new Digital VCRs. This is just what DDataINC has announced that it is doing, so this must be the fruit of C-3D's previous campaigning, and people in the movie and television entertainment and HIFI industry have been taking notice. Thus DDataINC was born, injected with cash, and is now the owner of the latest in demonstrateable and mass-producible storage technology, ready to jump onto the industry stage to replace DVDs.

DDataINC has limited it's focus to JUST the television/movie entertainment industry. It's planning on using the DMD tech to make a new standard to replace DVD CD tech. DVDs just don't cut it when you want High Definition Video, because a DVD can't hold that much information. Blue laser DVDs will be coming out to the mainstream soon enough, but still it comes no-where near to the proposed 1 TERABYTE that a blue lasered DMD CD could hold.

This is good and bad news. Remember how long it took for the superior DVD tech to filter down to our personal computers? Dual Layer writable DVDs are only just becoming mainstream now, even though the technology has been around for many years. This is a business practice called a "Trickle Technology Release", it's when a company has VERY advanced technology assets, and instead of releasing the best of the best to the public, they just release increasingly better and better technology to gradually build up to the TRUE cutting edge over time. This means that the company makes the most amount of money as people continually upgrade to the latest "best thing" tech that the company has just let trickle out. We could have had cheap DVD dual layer writer tech back soon after the technology for DVDs was first released. And by the looks of it: it's going to be similar with the new DMD tech. They seem to be targeting for only 15gig and 4 layers for their first DMD red laser disc, the technology is capable of so much more, C-3D had 100gig red laser discs.

You see, FMD/DMD tech has always been completely rewritable. That's how it was invented. It's an extremely simple process to write/erase/rewrite to any DMD disc, it's one of the inherent advantages of the technology. But the movie industry doesn't see it as an advantage, it sees it as a DISadvantage. Because if the storage medium you can release a movie on, can also be written to, then what's to stop people from easily copying your movies? Also there's the "Trickle Tech Release" issue to worry about. Most big companies want to make the most amount of money possible, they DON'T want to change the world. So what i think will happen is that DMD discs and readers will be released, and then years later DMD writers will be introduced into the market. *sigh* It's such a shame to limit a great new technology like that.

Also the other bad news is that while C-3D was committed to developing the FMD/DMD tech for all possible applications, DDataINC is only interested in the movie industry. This limitation of the storage technology may mean that we may not see any FMD/DMD storage devices for computers for quite some time. Which is very unfortunate because if you simply replaced a HDD's platters with DMD Discs, you would very soon have multiple Terabyte HDDs, much cheaper than current HDDs. And the future would only be looking up from there, Petabytes anyone?

The movie industry has been nothing but bad news for the new technology industry, all it does is slow things down. Think of what would have happened if the movie industry had control of the DIVX and MP3 technology before the computer industry had it. I can tell you that we would NOT be seeing portable mp3 players, or DIVX players for a long time. The DIVX codec would not have been improved at all and we would not have the XVID codec.

But hey, there's not much we can do about it, short of keeping in mind to invent technology for the purpose of improving the world, making money should be secondary. Screaming "Get your Filthy Paws off my cool tech damnit!" at the top of your lungs sure does feel good though.

So until then people. Use your psychic powers or something, to 'will' DMD HDDs into existence. I'll keep my ZZZ eye peeled for any new psychic tech to improve the chances that we'll do anything other than just give ourselves headaches, heh.

Seven-League Boots

Last night, I fired up my laptop out on my back porch, got on the the wireless LAN and started seeking via Google to see what I could find. Unfortunately, at first I realized the same thing that David did ... there's not a lot of current information on this topic. A LOT of digging finally yielded a photo gallery from late 2003 of people racing with the boots, so from this it seemed that testing was still being done circa 2003. Apparently, the guy in the following picture is a professional athlete as well.:

By accident, I ran across some poetry written in 2003 about the boots

"These Boots Make Easy Walking

SAPOGI CHOROCHODY
Are my quick walking boots;
I'll wear them for an outing
Whenever hurry suits.

Just like the old, old story
Of seven-league magic boots
They take the effort out of
Marching along any routes.

Petrol engine on each foot -
Oh, that makes the miles fly.
But, obey the traffic lights -
You'll still get there by and by.

In just twenty five minutes
Ten miles you'll advance.
So wouldn't you make use of them
If you just had the chance?

But if by chance it's raining
A brolly strong you'll need -
Or if the wind is blowing
There's advice that you should heed.

Though mankind is clever
Mother Nature has the will.
Make sure when quickly walking
That the weather's fine and still.

by Chacha Joe

copyright ?2003 Joseph Harris www.smilepoetryweekly.com - Some weird poetry site

It took me a little more digging to discern from the footnotes that the inventor of the boots was Professor Roman Kunikov of Ufa University and now the project is in the hands of Victor Gordejev. BINGO! Finally some meat. Per a Pakastani website (again, very weird):

"Mr Gordejev says inspiration came 30 years ago when he was serving in the Soviet army. He explained: 'I always wished my boots had engines as we had to walk miles every day. That?s how I came up with the idea.'

The boots will retail for about ?600 a pair when they go on sale in Russia later this year. He added the boots had to be closely guarded from Japanese and American industrial spies during their development." - Dailytimes.com.pk

Getting warmer, I found sites in Denmark and Spanish which finally let me back to a more recent article from Ananova.com. If only I could translate from Estonian .... as in the article I saw some vague mention of "2004", but of course to me it's unintelligible.

Just what are "Seven League Boots"?

"These boots, invented about 40 years ago and called 'Saigak', let ordinary walker make up to 17 km an hour in the cross-country. Seven-league boots operate on petrol. - Pravda

One of the better articles that I've found is at Imperialyt.com.

"The boots themselves have quite an interesting story. Apparently Mr. Gordeyev was simply tired of doing a lot of walking as a soldier, so he started fooling around with the idea as sort of a joke. However, the joke panned out leaving him with a device that will allow one to run at 25 miles per hour and take strides of 12 feet. They're basically a small diesel engine on your foot, and they only take 40 grams of fuel per 12 kilometers." - Imperialyt.com

The writer of this article actually called up the manufacturing facility in Russia about the boots several years ago ...

Going further ...

"The expression "Seven League Boots" is an English idiom used to describe long and/or rapid voyages. It is based upon and old French fairy tale Le Petit Poucet dating back to the 17th century. - Suite101.com

If you can read Russian, you can check the main link to the site manufacturing these boots is ... Ecomotor, with a direct link to information here. I've found a nice Russian to English translator (which will come in handy for future articles), although I cannot seem to find any pricing or sales information.

Again, thanks to David Bostock for the challenge. Obviously there's a lot of secrecy shrouding this project as the design is unique and I'm sure that the Russian developers want to keep these a Russian export. Anyone who can read/speak Russian and lives in that area, please keep us updated as to whether one can or will actually be able to purchase these boots.