Pilbeam Engineering

In my eternal quest for more toys to play with, I stumbled across an advertisement in my local Craigslist for a 15″ MacBook Pro for $600. I would include the ad text here, but I see it’s been deleted…

Anyways, the specifications looked good but the low pricing caused my suspicions the be aroused – and duly so. After I emailed in my inquiries about the unit, the seller informed me they were in fact in Manchester, UK. They were kind enough to include several photos like the one below:

Recognize the US-style electrical outlet?

Anyways, they informed me that they would like to use DHL to perform the transaction, and sent me a link to DHLs UK website – this was all well and good, of course, although I was surprised the scammer would choose such an obviously legitimate company to try and hook me. I had actually looked at DHL’s fraud warnings on their website (from the link that the scammer had sent) with some amusement.

I then asked the scammer what I needed to do to proceed, and the individual was kind enough to reply that “she” needed my name and address and would take the laptop to DHL to be shipped…and sent a link to the service we would be using if I agreed. This service meant that I would get several days to try out the laptop, and if I approved I would give DHL approval to pass the payment on to the seller.

Oddly enough, the link the seller sent THIS time was not in fact DHL. It looked and smelled like DHL…but certainly was not. The site (http:www.expressline-dhl.com) always seemed to put you through to the one page describing the service…was not a page that used dynamic content (as DHL’s real website does), and had no verifiable ownership through a service like WhoIs. This was the final evidence in my mind that this was truly a scam. So, in my eternal concern for my not being robbed of my money, I sent the following to the seller:

“Dear Rachel

Adam”

Since then I have received no response, but I will continue to pester this scammer for as long as I can in the interest of “making the transaction” in a way that will benefit the both of us.

Beware!

I will post more information as it becomes available.

-Adam

Since getting a netbook, I have been keeping an eye more and more on the status of integrated/embedded graphics processors. As a video and entertainment enthusiast, I’m always curious to see what new fun capabilities are being rolled out.

Up until most recently, small low-powered devices could barely play standard poor quality web video. With the advent of the netbooks, a push has been made to improve the multimedia performance on that front. Intel has released the GN40 chipset (not seen in any products as yet!) which boasts basic 1080P web playback, but admittedly no Blu-Ray capability. NVIDIA’s much acclaimed ION platform is now to be rolled out (according to Engadget) into several products, and hopefully more will come along.

The ION graphics system is an extremely small, low power solution to high end graphics. While not on a par for gaming, these units can provide high resolution and accelerated video decoding, as well as supporting DirectX 10 and digital display output. The ION system also supports high-fidelity 7.1 audio decoding.

What does this mean for users everywhere? Netbook users, who currently struggle to play even 720p video in a entertaining fashion will be able to enjoy their movies and videos without worry of overloading the power-sipping Atom processor. With the NVIDIA CUDA technology, as supported by the ION, more advanced video functions such as encoding can be passed off to the GPU as well, permitting performance that could be brought on par with a smaller desktop.

For the Home Theater users this means a small, low-power unit still capable of playing 1080p Blu-Ray content. With software packages such as Windows Media Center and XBMC on the open-source front supporting GPU based video decoding, free solutions are readily available to provide low-power, low-noise entertainment.

I’m anxious to see how it plays out, they can’t cripple the units too much on the CPU/Ram side so that the interfaces still run smoothly, but a well designed product should provide an elegant solution for smaller, more powerful HTPCs.

Since I was a kid, I’ve always been fascinated with flying. I had Microsoft Flight Simulator 5 on our 386 (and later our 486) that I would play a lot, and was always fascinated by flight. Since then, I realize that unless you happen to be a professional pilot, the opportunity to fly an aircraft yourself is limited to either the rich hobbyist, or the model hobbyist.

However, I’m also interested in new technologies that show promise, especially if building them is simple enough for me. Enter…the lifter. These “toys” (for that is all I’ve seen of them in my research so far) are effectively small triangular structures with electrodes running on the top and bottom of them. The largest one I’ve stumbled across in research was 5 meters across, and was made at a college in Japan. Here’s a picture of a lifter:

Image from http://www.rense.com

Effectively, once a high voltage electric charge is produced across the air gap, the device begins to float. The upward motion of the device is stopped by tethers that keep it from floating out of reach of the electric wires that bring power to it.

Now, there seems to be a ton of controversy over these devices. There are the non-scientific nuts out there claiming this is some sort of gravity distortion, and the super-scientific people who claim it’s a simple wind generator (through ion charges, similar to an Ionic Breeze system). Frankly, based on what I’ve read, not enough research has been done to verify what’s going on. I personally do not feel there’s gravity manipulation…a few thousand volts of electricity isn’t going to undo the Earth’s tremendous pull…however I’m anxious to see what can be done with this phenomonon.

Obviously, since the best these experimenters have done is life a mouse in one of these machines they must be extremely inefficient. It seems to me that time has to be taken to determine what construction methods work best, and thoroughly document as many observable results as possible to get a feel for how these devices work.

Having said that, I find it interesting that much research and internet news on these systems stopped around 2003 or so, with some sporadic pieces of information until 2005. Now the only website that seems to have any semi-complete information is the page of Jean-Louis Naudin which has attempted to document many successful lifters made around the world, with pictures and video. This site was last updated in July of 2008.

Since the materials commonly used to build lifters (balsa wood, foil, and thin gauge wire) are more than readily available, I see no reason why (once a suitable power source is procured) I can’t make my own investigations into the forces behind electrokinetic flight.

Hopefully as I learn more, and start building, I can bring the results to light here in as credible a fashion possible…and if improvements can be made, this same technology that allows a small electric craft to take flight could eventually cause a much larger vehicle that can carry a person aloft.