Al's Blog-o-Sphere

Why an interest in LED flashlights? Well, it’s an offshoot of the bicycle lighting research I’ve done. Both are ever-changing with better technology coming along every year, mostly due to the advances in LED design.

This is totally unscientific, but based on two LED flashlights I currently own. I have an older one that has multiple LEDs that comes nowhere close to these two, so I thought maybe most people don’t realize what is out there in this niche market.

The one thing that makes these flashlights different than their predecessors is their high-powered, high efficiency Cree XR-E LED. If you are not familiar with this company, or think you know about LED brightness based on what you may have seen in the past, you are in for a surprise.

Both of these flashlights are super-bright. Bright enough to be painful to look at. Bright enough to shine a light across a room in full daylight. In darkness, they are comaprable to much larger incandescent flashlights in a fraction of the size and weight. Continue Reading…

What if everything ran on gas? I’ve got news for you, everything DOES!

Maybe you saw the Nissan commercial with the appliances powered by dirty, smoky gasoline engines. If not, here it is:

The presumption is that if those are so nasty, and are better because they run off of electricity in reality, then a car that runs off electricity should be nicer too. They are pushing hybrid and full electric cars, with the governments support, on the public, leading them to believe they are cleaner, better and cheaper. But it’s not that simple.

Here’s some facts. Continue Reading…

I haven’t been posting much here lately. Things have been keeping me busy enough that I haven’t really had much time to ponder what to put here.

One thing I’ve been really busy with has been our robotics team. I’ve posted about it here before and although there is lots more I could say about the whole program, this is the main aspect I’ve been personally involved with. Well, one of them…

A sample of the upper-left corner of one of four autonomous routines for the Warlocks robot. This determines what the robot does during the part of the match it operates on it’s own. This is one corner of one of four Autonomous modes. It doesn’t even fit on the computer screen all at once. The Teleop code that runs the robot when the drivers take over is just as complex.

Continue Reading…

I spent about four hours today working online because I installed Internet Explorer 9.

No, there were no problems with IE9. That time was spent fixing this web page.

IE9 installed smoothly and looks nice and sleek, seems to run fast and I’m told is much improved over older versions of IE. Microsoft would like to forget IE6, I’m sure.

But, as always, Microsoft’s vision of how HTML should work is slightly different from everyone elses’. Actually, all the major browsers vary in small ways. But as soon as I viewed this blog in it, I noticed the font I am using for the titles didn’t load and the default font was displayed. A minor annoyance, but I wanted to see why it didn’t, what it would take to fix, and if it was still working in the other browsers I have. Continue Reading…