I am still working on Jenny’s Gateway laptop. I got her HP laptop working pretty well using Windows 2000 and she reported that they were able to surf and get a paper written for school this week, though they couldn’t print from the laptop. But the Gateway is the one that eats up hard drives and the fourth hard drive is now showing problems. The laptop just won’t boot. For some reason it did boot a couple of times for me and I was able to install her copy of Office 2007 on it, but then I opened Word, the computer froze and I’ve never been able to get back into Vista again. I can use a Vista installation disk to boot the computer and I can boot it using Ubuntu, but Vista won’t reinstall because it doesn’t think there is a hard drive there. Interestingly, Ubuntu sees the hard drive and installs no problem. I even tried installing Windows 2000 by formatting the hard drive, but Win2k wouldn’t recognize the hard drive either. I tried different partition schemes involving Ubuntu and Windows and then formatted the whole drive with Ubuntu and tried to install Windows over it and still nothing. Ubuntu does say that there are some bad sectors identified on the hard drive.
Win2k All Over Again
My friend Jenny has been having problems with her computers. She has 4 computers in her house and only one of them was still working. So I went over there last Saturday to work on them which is when I found out about heat pipes. That computer was still overheating some, but the bigger problem was that a virus (or something) had associated all .exe files with Windows Media Player and they wouldn’t run anymore, just open the media player (which in turn couldn’t do anything with the .exe files since they aren’t music or video). Since all anti-virus software is an .exe, this prevents fixing it. And I couldn’t re-associate .exe since Windows Explorer wouldn’t open (it’s an exe too). So I wound up taking the hard drive out, scanning it in my desktop computer that I brought over there (I actually brought my new and old desktops over since one has SATA hard drive connections and the older one has IDE and I wasn’t sure what kind of drive the affected computer had in it; it turned out to be SATA and mounting it was no problem except that in the BIOS I had to enable that hard drive port instead of the computer just recognizing whether a drive was present or not). A scan turned up 79 viruses or threats, at least some of which were trojans (sometimes browser “cookies” are considered threats, but they don’t really do any damage, unlike trojans). So Kaspersky got rid of all of the viruses. The computer would run and could browse the web, but you still couldn’t open executables and it would overheat and shut itself off in a few minutes. But I found a Microsoft online wizard named Mr. Fix It that would reset the .exe association and that worked perfectly. There are also a lot of shady website out there that offer fixes like that, but I didn’t want to try anything like that with a site I wasn’t familiar with.
Building a New Light
Last year the big American LED maker, Cree, introduced a new LED called the XP-G. It was similar to their earlier XP-E, but had a bigger light emitter. I got a light with this LED in it recently and liked it. Then on the flashlight bulletin board someone was talking about ordering some of these LED’s from a supplier in Australia. Cree will sell you LED’s, but only 1,000 at a time. There don’t seem to be many US suppliers, so this company, Cutter, is maybe the best bet. But they charge $12 minimum for shipping an order to the US. So a guy in Hawaii was trying to organize a US-based group buy to divide the shipping costs, even though he also had to charge us for shipping once the LED’s were in the US (he bought 10 LED’s total).
Heat Pipe
Heat pipes are one of those weird things that you don’t realize are all around you until you start looking. It is a copper tube with a near vacuum in it. It also has some liquid in it (usually water or ammonia). The idea is that if the bottom part of the pipe gets hot, the liquid evaporates and the gas rises to the top of the pipe. Then you cool off the top of the pipe and the liquid inside condenses on the inside of the tube and runs down the side of the tube all over. It is like a refrigerator but without any moving parts.
Heat pipes are used in heat sinks that cool off computer processors. They are also surrounded by fins and a fan that help cool the top part, so even if you open up your computer you may not see them. I learned about these this weekend helping friends out with their computer which was overheating. I am still not exactly sure what was going wrong, whether the liquid had escaped the tube or the tube had somehow deformed and was no long making contact with the slab of copper that goes on top of the processor (or if something software-related was making the processor work too hard). I put in some small metallic disks (dimes) to shim the tubes down into making contact with the copper slab and got some thermal compound to put around them as well and hope that will work. But if the liquid has escaped then it will never work. You could also buy a new CPU cooler but this particular computer is very compact and it is hard to find coolers this small. It only has two L-shaped heat pipes in the heat sink. I looked inside my Dell and it has 3 U-shaped heat pipes with a bigger fan. Wikipedia says a heat pipe is more efficient at moving heat than a solid piece of copper.
Diverging Diamond
I read a neat article recently at work about a graduate student who came up with a new way of laying out a highway interchange. The problem with interchanges is the traffic that has to turn left to get onto ramps or the crossroad. Left turns make for conflict points for possible accidents and make traffic signals less efficient because only 1/4 of the traffic gets to move at one time. Also, since left-turning traffic backs up into traffic going straight, you put them in dedicated storage lanes. So a 4-lane road might have 4 through lanes and 2 left-turn lanes on the bridge adding expensive bridge square footage (about $100 per square foot). So what this guy did was said why not put an intersection at each end of the cross-road that shifts traffic to opposite sides of the road so that people actually drive on the wrong side of the road over the bridge? If you are on the left side of the road already, it is easy to turn left onto the ramp. And people coming off of the ramp who would be making a left could also make an easy left (if they are turning right they merge in on the other side of the intersection so it still works like an easy right). Anyway, this is called “diverging diamond” interchange as opposed to a regular old diamond interchange. The nice thing about it is that existing interchanges can be retrofitted to a diverging diamond. Another advantage is that by eliminating the need for left turn lanes, the bridge only has to carry two-way traffic, so it saves on the width of the bridge or lets you increase capacity of the interchange without widening the bridge and buying up the gas stations and restaurants that always show up on the corners.
After touting the interchange for several years with research spent on analyzing the design through traffic simulations, they found out that France already had a couple of these. But the first one in the US was just opened last year in Missouri and Georgia plans on doing several as well. You can click on the picture below for a bigger version. Notice from the crosswalks that pedestrians walk down the middle of the bridge.
Another similar concept, only without driving on the wrong side of the road, is a tear drop interchange where you put traffic circles (they are actually squished into tear drop shapes) on each end of the interchange. Here is an aerial view of one in Colorado. With traffic circles there are no left turns, everyone makes right turns. Another approach is to make the whole interchange a giant traffic circle: at the north end of the circle a bridge carries westbound traffic and the bridge on the south end carries eastbound traffic. You would need two (narrower) bridges this way but still avoid building left-turn lanes. Here is an aerial view of one in New York.