A close shave, eh, Gromit?

[unixronin]

It's general roundup time ...

First of all, a simple commentary:  The more I use Semagic, the more I dislike it.  I want my Linux back so that I can have my LogJam back.  The particular misfeature that inspires this comment this morning is that as far as I can tell, there's no way to tell Semagic not to use bloody-awful-hideously-butt-ugly Times New Roman as the default article composition font, without whatever font you select being forced in your post too.  Bad Semagic.  No donut.

Oh yeah....  and Semagic's lj-cut feature is really badly broken.  You can eventually bludgeon it into doing what you meant, but it's massively counter-intuitive and nowhere near as good as LogJam's.

Next, I finally got my OpenBSD firewall online last night after wrestling with it for several days.  I just could not get it to do what I wanted; yea, it would not lie down and be my bitch, which causeth me to wax most wroth.  Fortunately, midiamin made an observation which led me to realize that the cause of most of my problems was the firmware on my Linksys wireless router, which was very emphatic about doing things ITS way, and that wasn't what I wanted.  (For instance, even if you turn off the "firewall" on the Linksys, you can't turn off NAT.)  After doing a little rewiring, bringing up a dhcpd on yama, and disabling the dhcpd on the Linksys, all of a sudden Everything Just Worked, like it's supposed to.  Not only that, but with NAT, routing and firewalling happening on a Sun U5 running OpenBSD instead of on the Linksys, I've noticed a dramatic improvement in latency and throughput.  (Ping times from my laptop to chime.icb.net, for instance, dropped from around 70ms to around 20ms.)

About that close shave?  Well, not too long after they came out, I tried a Gillette Mach3 razor in the homes of getting a cleaner shave with less repeat passes, and found that it worked pretty well.  (I think Schick's come out with a four-blade razor since then; I happen to know, though, that Gillette spent something like ten years developing the Mach3, and the four-blade Schick came out so soon after that I suspect Schick just said "Oh yeah?  Gillette's selling a razor with three blades?  Well, we'll go one better and sell one with four!" without doing much research to establish whether four was, in fact, any better than three.)

Anyway, recently Gillette came out with something called the Mach3 Power, which is basically a Mach3 with a micromotor in it which makes the head vibrate.  Gillette claims it's their smoothest shave ever, with less reshaving.  I admit I looked at it with skepticism when I first saw it, but I picked one up from Costco the other day to try.  And you know what?  It seems to work.  A nice close shave, Gromit.

siozie spotted this:  When is a wheel not a wheel?  When it's a tweel.  A new invention from Michelin, the tweel is a non-pneumatic integrated tire and wheel with some interesting properties.  Michelin claims thay can independently optimize vertical and horizontal stiffness, which could mean the abolity to have a smooth ride and good steering response.  If it works out, it should also mean an end to flat tires and having to carry a spare.  Judging by this photo, it could be a particular boon for off-road vehicles, being able to wrap around and grip rocks and other obstructions.

From the same site comes this article on the Bombardier Embrio, a one-wheeled gyro-stabilized motorcycle that you steer entirely by leaning.  It's certainly a new take on the unicycle.  I question their decision to have "the rider activate a trigger on the left handlebar to accelerate", though ... any time you're developing a device that's very similar to another existing device, it's almost always a bad idea to change major control metaphors just because you can.  If Bombardier is modelling this thing on a motorcycle, hopefully before they actually start marketing it they'll come to their senses and give it a twist-grip throttle like a motorcycle, instead of using as an "increase power" control that which any motorcyclist is going to instinctively grab at in a sudden stop because all his riding reflexes say it's the clutch.

Colin Howell spotted this article (also on gizmag) about a new "quasi-turbine engine" that's supposed to offer many advantages over conventional Otto, Diesel and Wankel cycle internal-combustion engines.  Now, I'm not gonna say outright it's a hoax, but there seems to be rather a lot of pseudo-scientific-sounding technobabble in this article.  Excerpts like 'Because it was conceived for thermal and photonic ignition, the Quasiturbine cannot be considered as a "rotary piston engine", nor be correctly characterised by the piston paradigms', 'Electronic ignition in the piston gasoline engine is required because of intake vacuum and incompatible long duration compression "pulse structure" limitations in the cylinder' and 'For the Otto piston engine, about half the gasoline used in the transportation sector is literally wasted to fight the atmospheric intake vacuum depression generated by the carburettor butterfly-valve (the engine-braking effect). This is also responsible for nearly half the pollution generated by gasoline transportation activities' particularly trip my bogometer.

My inclination is to call bullshit on this one ...  but it could be just excruciatingly bad writing.

Right, that's enough of that, Wal!  Round the back for the ol' brandy, then ....

Comments

[attutle.livejournal.com]

That article includes a link to a whitepaper, which gives some more detail, but I think it is focused on how the engine would be used, not on how the engine works, so it is long on PR and short on tech.

I found more details at http://quasiturbine.promci.qc.ca/ (http://quasiturbine.promci.qc.ca/).

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. If this is their official site, it rather tends to reinforce my opinion of "caution, cranks at work". What's your take on it?