How are plug-in hybrids a great idea?

I just don't get it! If a plug-in hybrid, which runs partly on conventional fuel, and partly on electricity, needs to plug in to a regular electrical socket to charge its battery (or whatever it is that powers the electric motor), then it defeats the purpose of being environmental (or ecological) friendliness. How, you ask? Elementary, my dear Watson!

To charge the battery, you have to use electric power that's most likely generated from thermo-electric power stations that use coals. So, you're actually increasing the consumption of electric current that was produced in an environmentally unfriendly way to start with. I mean, you wouldn't have consumed the electricity that you would be had you never had an electric car in the first place, so my guess is that the extra electricity that you're drawing from the grid will nullify any decrease in the fumes that your car would be emitting. Or so I conjecture.

Am I missing something vital here? Fill me in please.

Resurrecting an MP3 player

I have this MP3 player purchased more than three years ago. It's made by a company called iRiver, and the model that I own is an H320, a hard-disk based player which can do the following:

Play MP3 and WMA (of course!) Play FM (hmmm) Record FM (hmmmmm) Record Voice with an inbuilt microphone (cool) Record through line-in (that's neat) A line-out jack (standard :-|) USB port () USB 1.1 host (now, that's something! It means that you can connect compliant, self-powered devices (that means almost all of them) directly to it and transfer files) Display text files Play video (AVI and a few other formats)

That's quite handy, don't you think? Thank you.

Anyway, this device was playing dead ever since I tried to connect it to my new laptop. That was nearly six months ago. I'd been meaning to open it up and see what the problem with the battery was (I'd assumed that the problem was with the battery), but since I didn't have a screwdriver of the right size, I left it for later. It was only when a friend asked for some songs from it that I realised that I had stored all my TNS collections in it! Now, I simply had to do something.

So, I went to a friendly neighbourhood computer shop and asked the technician to see if he could open the thing up, check up the battery and supply a replacement if he could. Making it clear that they didn't deal in batteries for anything other than laptops, he obliged nevertheless by opening it up. I decided to take it from there, and here's a picture-by-picture illustration of what happened.

This was how it looked before I pried it open.

This is what it looked like after opening the case. Notice the black edges? Nothing but insulation tape.

This is a part whose purpose I couldn't figure out, but going by the fact that there are wires connecting it to the body, I'd guess that it's the battery. It's wrapped around in insultation material.

The thing on the right looks like the hard-disk.

Notice the thin edge between the gaps in the blue material? It's actually the edge of the circuit board. The metal at the bottom is for the connecting screws to be seated.

The blue material is quite rubbery, and I think it's mainly for shock absorption.

At this stage, I decided to connect it to the PC once again; you know, just to see if things would be different now. And were they!

To my surprise, the thing started charging from the USB port, something it had stoutly refused to do in my earlier attempts at making it work. I gladly disconnected it from the PC, and hooked it up to the standalone charger, and now it's getting filled with juice quite contentedly.

So, while I really don't know why merely opening up the MP3 player should resolve the problem of it refusing to start up, it feels good to have my MP3 player back in action. Welcome back, iRiver, I missed my ARI and TNS collections among others :-)

Science in public service

Nigeria. What comes to your mind when you hear the name of that country? Email scams offering you a share in the many millions left behind by a dictator in return for a small favour? I used to think so too, until I came across the above article. Warms my heart to know that satellites in space don't help only those who are cartographically inclined, but also farmers and those who find medical help inaccessible.

Upgradable cellphone towers!

Years ago, when the phone line modem ruled supreme as far as Internet connections were concerned (yes, there was an era before broadband, as much as it may be difficult to believe for people weaned exclusively on broadband), I remember reading a news article reporting that a company - Motorola, if my memory serves me well - had come out with a software modem! The idea was strikingly novel. After all, the modem merely converts binary data to analog signals and back, and there's no technical reason why software couldn't do it. The brilliant idea, for all its potential - cost savings over the price of a modem, and upgradability to higher speeds immediately come to mind - didn't really kick off, and phone line modems continued to rule the roost until they were made more or less obsolete with the advent of its speedier cousins, the ADSL modem and the cable modem.

They say that there's no force on earth that's more powerful than the force of an idea whose time has come. I believe that the time has now come for the idea of software replacing the functions that were once the exclusive domain of hardware. This time, though, it's the radio component in cellphone towers that's finding its existence being challenged by the young upstart, the software radio! And come to think of it, it makes excellent sense too. I mean, how great is it to have your cellphone tower upgrade to the next greatest technological advance in radio communications technology.

Go Vanu!