Hasta La Gadget!

The Bloom Box is the latest energy miracle that sounds too good to be true: Debuting with a wide-eyed segment on 60 Minutes, it promises to be clean, cheap and backyard-friendly, the solution to our energy problems. What is it?

The heart of the box is a fuel cell. Though Bloom Energy‘s CEO K.R. Sridhar—a former NASA scientist—says it’s a new kind of fuel cell. And though it’s cleaner than any combustion engine out there, it still relies on fossil fuels and biofuels—not just hydrogen, like some other kinds of fuel cells do. Nevertheless, the folks at Bloom are doing something that could help make reduced emissions a reality for big businesses first, and then later, for homes.

To get a good grip on why we should care about this thing, let’s first look at the basics of fuel cell technology.

Fuel Cell Basics

Like a battery, a fuel cell is an electrochemical cell, basically meaning it derives electricity from chemical reactions. Sandwiched between two electrodes—an anode and a cathode—is an ion-conducting material called an electrolyte. Fuel flows in one side, over the anode. An oxidant flows into the other side, over the cathode. What happens, very basically, is that the fuel and the oxidant react, like strangers locking eyes across a room. The metaphorical sparks that fly from that encounter are actual electrons, which flow into the fuel cell’s circuit. Bingo, electricity. As with any molecular reaction, the recombination of atoms produces some waste as well—like water or carbon dioxide. So while it’s cleaner, there’s definitely a byproduct.

To be clear, a fuel cell’s not like a battery; it’s like a power plant. Once it converts fuel to energy, it sends that energy out the door. And as such, it requires some peripheral way to physically storing the fuel ingredients, and some way to capture produced electricity—such as a battery.

There are a several different kinds of fuel cells—unsurprisingly, since they were invented in the 1830s. Generally, they are categorized based on what their electrolyte is made out of, but sometimes they’re referred to by their fuel and oxidant, which varies too. You’re probably most familiar with “hydrogen fuel cells,” like for cars and small electronics. These are in fact proton exchange membrane fuel cells, which happen to use hydrogen as a fuel and oxygen as an oxidant. (The PEM fuel cell is what is specifically diagrammed above.)

Solid Oxide Fuel Cells

Bloom Energy’s Energy Servers are of the solid oxide variety of fuel cell. There’s two ways to do up an SOFC: A tubular design, which you can see above, or a planar design, which is what Bloom uses, as you can see below, since it allows them to be stacked into very neat boxes.

A solid oxide fuel cell is made out of all solid state materials—that is, every major component is made out of ceramic-like stuff. Bloom Energy claims their fuel cells are made out of “sand” baked into ceramic squares, and that’s just what an SOFC is. The exact material is a slightly secret sauce as are the black and green “inks” that coat the ceramic plates. Bloom’s got a pretty nice little Flash animation showing the basic process.

The major thing about an SOFC versus other fuel cells is that the material composition means they can run crazy hot—up to 1800ºF, says the US Department of Energy—and have to, since the ceramic materials don’t become active until they reach a certain temperature. Only at this temperature can they perform the chemical reactions with the fuel and oxidant we talked about above. The problem with the high operating temperatures is that traditionally it has lead to higher maintenance costs. You know, stuff breaks down. The goal for this technology is to have an “uptime” of 99.99%, as cited by cited by Scott Samuelsen, who’s the director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California-Irvine. Bloom’s own trial at Google cites a 98% uptime.

The types of fuel cells you hear more about—the “methanol” ones that can already power laptops—do their business at a much lower temperature. Toshiba has one that typically runs at 120º to 200ºF. Though Bloom’s is obviously not a tech that could be a laptop’s power source, the Bloom Box’s higher operating temperature is a big advantage over “legacy” fuel cell technology. Bloom Energy VP of Marketing and Products Stu Aaron told me it gives them “fuel flexibility.” They can use biogases from land waste or fossil fuels like propane—so far in demos it’s been an even split between biogases and natural gas—whereas low-temp fuel cells require hydrogen in a much purer state that has to basically be refined or extracted via chemical processes.

While some other SOFCs use the hot exhaust generated by the reaction kind of like a cogen—a means of capturing heat emitted by a power generator, so that it too can be converted to electricity—Bloom’s Energy Servers simply recycle the heat within the cell, since the temperature generated by the reaction is almost exactly the heat needed for the reaction to happen. The rated efficiency spec for their current energy server is greater than 50%, compared to around 10% to 15% for solar (though University of Delaware-led researchers did recently hit a world’s record of 42.8% for solar).

Again, to be clear, the energy generated isn’t emission-free: These servers generate a small amount of CO2 when converting natural gas or bio-gas. It is less than what would get released if the same fuel was combusted, however. Customers can pick which of the two kinds of fuel they’d like to use; the trade off is between “optimizing for cost or carbon reduction,” depending on the company’s priorities, says Aaron.

Electricity In Bloom

Right now, the only box that Bloom is selling is a 100-kilowatt-hour energy server, which you can check out there. Inside are thousands of solid oxide fuel cells—each one able to power a light bulb. The cells are arranged in stacks, which are aggregated into modules, and so on, with a common fuel input. Right now, they’re just for corporations—like Google and Coca-Cola—and run about $700,000 to $800,000 each. The goal’s to get them down to three grand, where they’d be suitable for home use. That may still sound expensive, but they pay for themselves in 3-5 years, says Aaron, with an energy cost of 8-9 cents per kW hour vs. the 13-14 cents it typically costs in California. (It saved eBay $100,000 on their power bill.)

But cost is where the real skepticism comes in. Fuel cells aren’t a voodoo technology. They work. They produce energy. What analysts, and others, are wondering is whether Bloom’s really cracked the secret to making them cheap, at least some day. The critic that CBS trotted out on 60 Minutes, Green Tech Media’s Michael Kanellos, says that while there’s a 20 percent chance we’ll have a fuel cell box in our basements in 10 years, but “it’s going to say GE.” Which is fine with me, actually, because that means another season of 30 Rock jokes.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about fuel cells, terrorist cells or Boom Blox here with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

Apple has banned sexy apps. But apps from Playboy and Sports Illustrated remain. Why does Apple care what turns me on?

If you need another example of why the iTunes App Store‘s walled garden is flawed, Apple has been only too happy to oblige, capriciously and arbitrarily removing an unknown number of “sexy” apps without warning. All that’s missing to complete the metaphor is a flaming sword.

Some of those apps were certainly garbage, but it seems most were simply slideshows of women in various states of undress.

Jenna Wortham, writing for The Times, quotes Apple’s Phil Schiller: “It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see.”

By Apple’s own count, there are over 130,000 apps in the App Store. With a selection that varied, I’m sure there’s something to offend everyone.

How about an app that discusses abortion and birth control law? Maybe an app that helps you hook up with gay guys? How about an app that teaches you how to evangelize the fundamentalist Christian religion?

Think about that last one for second and the furor that would erupt if Apple made a sweeping ban of religious apps from the App Store. I am not a Christian. I would be concerned if my child were discovering religion before I’d gotten a chance to talk to them about it. (Especially since that would mean I had given birth to a baby without a mother, completing—if adventitiously—my dream to be the Male Madonna.)

Yet I wouldn’t blame Apple for letting the app be sold, just like I wouldn’t complain that I found it morally offensive, its existence alone threatening and insulting. And to be clear, I’ve got absolutely no problem with the “Grindr” app pictured here being on the app store. Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em. It’s simply a great example to highlight how subjective Apple’s ban has been. That image is right there on its App Store page.

Look, we know censorship is wrong. We’ve been having this conversation as a society for a couple hundred years, and if you haven’t learned by now that freedom of speech negates freedom from offense, there’s nothing I can do to convince you except renew your subscription to Hustler.

The issue at hand is that Apple doesn’t have to abide by the laws we’ve put in place in our society because the App Store is part of its business. Often I feel like that’s a good thing—or at least fair dinkum. They built it; they get to run it.

With a closed ecosystem comes a lot of responsibility. Apple has taken on the heavy mantle of arbiter, ostensibly to manage quality. I can forgive them for that, even if I don’t like it. But the only reason to ban blue apps is taste. And if these apps were a matter of taste, why were they approved in the first place? What will the next set of apps be that Apple decides are inappropriate long after people have spent hundreds of hours creating and marketing them? Ban apps because they’re poorly designed—not because they’re simply sexual.

Apple is making a moral judgement, declaring that nudity and titillation is something that should made hidden and shameful. It’s disappointing that a company so publicly supportive of progressive sexual rights would react so orthodoxly.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Apple is trying to take the easy way out, talking about degradation of women and the innocence of children, but allowing content from established brands—brands that exhibit sexual material meant to arouse—simply because they’re well known and thus “safe”. Apple is aping the sexual posturing of conservative American society, defining what expressions of sexuality are acceptable to even acknowledge.

Sure, there’s still plenty of smut out there on the internet, readily accessible through the iPhone’s Safari web browser. That’s not the point.

Apple has made a declaration: that sex and sexuality are shameful, even for adults. But only sometimes. And only when people complain.

Unfortunately, they’ve accomplished the opposite. The only thing I’m ashamed of is Apple.

Oh sure, the world may be off creating underpowered, web-based tablets, but Lenovo’s not giving up on those who still need an old-fashioned, fully-powered tablet PC (all 10.1 of you). Truth be told, powerful is exactly how we would describe the new X201 Tablet with its new Intel low voltage Core i7 CPU and 4GB of RAM. But beyond being one of the speedier 12-inch laptops out there, its capacitive touchscreen now lets the touch-happy among us alternate between taking notes with its Wacom stylus and putting two fingers down to zoom or scroll. Sounds like a near perfect experience to us, but before tossing over $1,900 we figured you’d want to make sure it really is. We’ve been putting the X201T through the paces over the last few days, so hop on past the break for our full review.

Continue reading Lenovo ThinkPad X201 Tablet review

Lenovo ThinkPad X201 Tablet review originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So you’re fed up with Google, and you’ve got a litany of reasons. You don’t even have to explain—I’m just here to help you crawl out from under the shadow of the big G, step by step.

You don’t have to be ready to commit to a full overhaul of your online lifestyle to understand why someone might want to yank their data from Google’s servers, and hand it off to someone else: You’ve got Google’s CEO deafly rehashing fallacious arguments about privacy—”If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”—and hesitating on a drawback; you’ve got contextual advertising that seems just a little too closely tuned to that sexxxy love letter your girlfriend sent you while you were on that business trip; you’ve got that violently insane ex husband who now knows where you are because of Google’s clumsy Buzz rollout. Most of all, you’ve got reasons, and you’re ready for change.

The decision to close your Google account has to be carefully considered—after all, this is the place that stores your email, your documents, your contacts, your photos, your news, and even your health records. But this level of investment to one service is as good a reason to leave as it is to stay: If looking at your Google Dashboard, which lists all the services you use, and the amount and type of information you store on them, doesn’t make you feel a little uneasy, then hell, what would?

Anyway, I’m not here to make the case for you to drop Google altogether—it’s not something I’m prepared to do, for a start—I’m just here to tell you how to do it. Here’s everything you need to know about life after Google.

Search

It’s easy to forget that there are other search engines in the world, because Google has been so plainly dominant over the last few years. But they’re there, and they’re actually pretty good.

The best alternative to Google, by a long shot, is Microsoft’s Bing. It’s an evolution of the Live search engine, and it’s offers a distinctly different experience than Google: it’s far from minimalist, with a colorful interface, content-tailored results pages, and and emphasis on reducing clicks, rather than reducing clutter. Coming from Google it can be visually jarring, and the fact that the results for common searches are different—if not better or worse—means that at first, you’ll get the feeling that it isn’t working right.

Give it some time and some patience, and you’ll realize that it’s pretty damn good. And even if search isn’t perceived as the biggest threat to your privacy, it’s important to make the switch anyway—after all, it was Google search that was the gateway to all the other Google services, which you’re now trying untangle yourself from.

Honorable Mentions:

• Yahoo
• Wolfram Alpha
• Collecta
• Mahalo

Email

Back when it launched in 2005, Gmail lured users with insane amounts of free storage space: One gigabyte. Impossible. This caught the dominant services of the day completely off guard, and made their free webmail seem utterly ancient.

Today, that one gigabyte has grown to nearly seven, and on the surface not much has changed about ol’ Gmail. Meanwhile, the companies that were blindsided back in 2005 have had plenty of time to catch up to, and in some cases, exceed Google’s offering. Here’s how to make the full switch:

Backing up your Gmail: There are a number of ways to do this, but one stands out as the easiest: The email client method.

1.) Download Thunderbird, a free email client from the same people who make Firefox (Download for Windows, OS X)
2.) Enable IMAP access on your Gmail account, by clicking the Setting link in the top right of your inbox, navigating to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, and selecting the “Enable IMAP” radio button

3.) File > New Mail Account
4.) Enter your name and Gmail address, after which Thunderbird should find your mail settings automatically, and set itself up as an IMAP client: (If this doesn’t happen, consult Google’s guide for a manual setup.
5.) Once the account is set up, open Thunderbird’s Account Settings panel, and navigate to the Synchronization and Storage tab. Make sure “Keep messages for this account on this computer” and “Synchronize all messages regardless of age” are both selected.
6.) Wait for your messages to sync to your computer—this could take hours, especially if you’re near your Gmail storage limit.

What you’ve done here is imported all of your Gmail messages into a local client—Thunderbird—which lets you browse them, search them, or back them up to an external hard drive for posterity. And if you switch to another IMAP-based service, you can import these old messages into your new account simply by dragging them from your Gmail inbox folder in Thunderbird to your new account’s inbox folder.

Contacts are a trickier question, but at the very least you can use Gmail’s contact exporting tool (under your Gmail inbox folder list) to create a CSV file or or VCard, for importing into a client like Thunderbird.

The best alternative service: As long as it’s been since Gmail showed up on the scene, the webmail scene hasn’t seen many exciting new players—Google has a knack of preempting new competition when it moves into a product category. So, for the best remaining alternative is a veritable oldie: Yahoo mail. Consider the facts:

• It’s still free
• It offers unlimited storage
• POP access is available in the free version, and with a little fiddling, so is IMAP access
• Free text messages in certain countries
• The interface doesn’t look like it was designed in 1999, like certain other webmail clients.

The matter of Buzz: Now, when you ditch Gmail, you’ll also be losing Google Buzz, which is a sort of location-aware status update system that nobody has really had the time to get into yet. Don’t worry: Buzz was a response to other services, not a trailblazer, so you’ll be served just fine sticking with Twitter (which lets you update you status with geolocation), FourSquare (which lets you alert your friends as to which particular establishments you visit, and see what other people think of said establishments), and Facebook (for posting media and accepting comments on it). Buzz didn’t have time to become vital, so switching away from it should be easy.

Calendar

Exporting your Google calendars: This one’s easy. Just:

1.) Navigate to your GCal settings page, and click on the Calendars tag.
2.) Export calendars to an ICS file, like so:
3.) That’s it!

The best alternative: Yahoo calendar is fine, but in the spirit of spreading your vital info around, let’s go with Windows Live Calendar. One you’ve created a Live ID—you pretty much need one of these nowadays—you’re automatically given a Live Calendar account. To import your Google Calendars, just do the following:

1.) Open Live Calendar
2.) Click “Subscribe”
3.) Import the ICS file you exported from Gmail, like this:

Photos

Not that many people use Picasa, so this one should be easy. Plus, there are some obviously superior alternatives.

• Flickr doesn’t stop at being a great photo sharing site, it’s also an amazing resource for photographers, both expert and amateur. Storage is limited with a monthly upload cap.
• Photobucket is a simple gallery service, with an emphasis on sharing over archiving. Storage is limited to 1GB.
• Shutterfly is another super-simple service, with unlimited storage (Google doesn’t even offer that for free)
• Facebook shouldn’t be counted out—its photo compression may be aggressive, but it does allow you to upload and tag a virtually unlimited number of photos.

Documents

A lot of people find themselves using Google Docs because it’s just so damn convenient—you receive a document in your Gmail account, and suddenly, hey, it’s in the Google Docs service! That’s how they get you. And interestingly enough, despite Google’s acquisition of Writely and subsequent improvements on in the Docs service, there’s still an objectively superior online document editing service out there.

ZoHo Docs is a full online office suit (among other things) which does virtually everything Google Docs can do, and often more. It offers deep document editing, offline editing (!), and collaborative editing. Document compatibility on ZoHo is absolutely tops, and the formatting and editing options far exceed Google Docs. There’s a text editor, a spreadsheet editor and a presentation editor, to name a few.

Pulling the Plug

So, you’ve migrated what you can, and settled into you new services nicely. Now, it’s time to close your Google account out, once and for all? Are you ready? Are you sure? Ok.

For any grievances you may have about Google’s privacy practices, you have to give them credit for making the process stupidly easy.

1.) From any Google page, click the Settings link in the top right, then Account Settings from the submenu.
2.) Next to “My Products”, click the “Edit” link
3.) From here, choose to delete individual services, or close your Google Account altogether.

4.) Confirm that you want all of your data deleted.
5.) DO IT.

Feels strange, doesn’t it? For anyone with enough spite and motivation to follow this guide, though, I suspect “strange” could be replaced with any number of more gracious adjectives. So, ex-Googlers: Do you feel better now?

We couldn’t cover every last Google service and piece of software, so if you have more tips and alternatives to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you’d like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy diversifying, folks!

Twenty years ago today, Adobe Photoshop 1.0 was released. And it changed the world as we saw it. Because it literally edited our vision.

Click on the image to see the high definition timeline

Photoshop is the invisible hand that touches everything around us. From advertising and commercials to the front page of magazines and political propaganda; going through motion pictures and art, Photoshop is everywhere, pushing the limits of reality, and morphing the world around us to fit what companies want us to believe, buy, and enjoy.

Back in 1987, when Tom and John Knoll created it, nothing could have predicted the deep impact this tool would have in our lives. At that time, there was photo manipulation, but it was reserved to a knowledgeable few, using airbrushes—which required a lot of expertise—and the first Quantel paint boxes—which required lots of money and training.

Photoshop—running on the first color Macs, accelerated by graphic cards by Radius and RasterOps—democratized all this. Image editing became accepted as a tool, and as the power of the machines increased, everything started to become possible for everyone. Like the first industrial oil paintings democratized art in the 19th century—with Cezanne, Monet, Gauguin, and VanGogh quickly taking advantage of the new cheap medium—Photoshop became the new inexpensive way to create new realities and alter the world surrounding us.

When Photoshop 3.0 introduced layers, things got even more dramatic. Together with tools like clone stamping and warping, Adobe’s image studio became the beautiful monster that it is today, capable of creating the most stunning works of art, and the most twisted works of marketing.

Happy 20th Anniversary, Photoshop. Here’s a toast for the next 20 wonderful and terrifying years.