Joe Elliott

The story of two pilots landing a Boeing 747 at the wrong airport drew a lot of rolled eyes, more than a little laughter and serious questions about how on earth two experienced pilots could so make so colossal an ...

Pilots flying Boeing's massive 747 Dreamlifter accidentally landed at the wrong airport yesterday, and they've been stuck there overnight.

Over at Forbes, I’ve been posting my take on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The book was written in short verses, and each verse now has a corresponding diagram. In total, there are almost 300 illustrations.

It’s a project that was a lot of fun to draw and noodle on, and one I’m rather proud of. Have a look:

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 1: Laying Plans) 

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 2: Waging War) ‪

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 3: Attack by Stratagem) 

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 4: Tactical Dispositions) 

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 5: Energy) ‪

Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War, Illustrated (Chapter 6: Weak Points And Strong) 

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 7: Maneuvering) ‪

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 8: Variation in Tactics) 

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 9: The Army on the March) ‪

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 10: Terrain) 

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 11: The Nine Situations, Part 1) 

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 11: The Nine Situations, Part 2)

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 12: Attack by Fire)  

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Illustrated (Chapter 13: The Use of Spies)

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Hopes for speedy solar system shutttle recede

Budget cuts have forced NASA to mothball its Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator (ASRG), a power plant designed to help the agency run projects to the outer planets.…

And why is coffee like sex and oxygen?

Readers' corner  And so to El Reg Forums where Simon Rockman has fired up this foodie thread.…

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3M VHB Heavy Duty Mounting Tape is a game-changer. Goodbye glue, screws, nails, rivets and studs. In the right application, it permanently bonds plastic, fiberglass, porcelain, glass, PVC, wood, cloth, concrete and just about any other material you’re likely to encounter.

Mounting a GPS unit on a car dash? Done. Need to secure a circuit board to a metal rack? No problem. Want to stick together tricky space-age materials, like Velcro to a Kydex knife sheath? Forget about exotic adhesives; use VHB tape (it stands for Very High Bond, by the way).

Don’t mistake this stuff for temporary mounting tape. It forms a PERMANENT bond, and trying to remove it will likely remove the finish on both bonded surfaces.

-- Douglas Cawley

[This is a Cool Tools Favorite from 2013]

3M VHB Heavy Duty Mounting Tape

Available from Amazon

One of the attractive qualities about Apple products is that they can be used seamlessly across a wide range of accessories. With the introduction of the Lightning connector, this is not always the case, especially with sound/music systems. Now consumers must deal with interface adapters and/or replace accessories.

My wife and I recently upgraded to the iPhone 5, which uses the new Apple Lightning connector interface. We have a portable Logitech speaker dock (S715i) we received a year ago as a gift, but the interface is through the original iPhone/iPod 30-pin connector. We also have an older iPod Nano with the 30 pin connector we occasionally use with the speaker. So, we fall into the same category as many Apple product consumers… we have a mixed bag of connectors across our Apple products and accessories.

I decided that I did not want to sell or scrap our sound dock, but I did not want to use the line-in connection either. I could have used a 30-pin-to-Lightning adapter, but I felt that it was too bulky and would create instability and stress on the connector when an iPhone was plugged in to the dock using the adapter. Instead, I found the CoolStream Bluetooth receiver and gave it a try.

This receiver features a 30-pin iPhone/iPod interface. What caught my attention is that CoolStream verified compatibility with our Logitech speaker, along with many other makes & models of iPhone/iPod docking stations. Furthermore, by effectively adding Bluetooth connectivity to our dock, anyone with a Bluetooth transmitting device can connect to the dock, including many Android smart phones. The CoolStream receiver effectively updated our sound dock to be Bluetooth compatible. Considering that we like our sound dock, and that a new, portable Bluetooth speaker would cost in the neighborhood of $100 or more, I felt that the CoolStream receiver was money well spent ($40 at the time of writing this article).

The CoolStream receiver is easy to use. Simply plug it in to the dock, and turn the dock on. Hold the button at the top of the receiver for 3 seconds to turn it on, and then pair the receiver with whatever device you want to use.

However, there are some downsides. The CoolStream does not have an internal battery, so the docking station must provide power. This is typically the case, unless the dock has an internal battery like the Logitech S715i. I found that when the Logitech is unplugged from its power supply, it does not supply power to the 30 pin connector, so the CoolStream receiver does not work. This configuration makes sense to maximize the battery life of the speaker, rather than using the battery to power the attached device Furthermore, some reviewers are reporting issues with using the CoolStream receiver to connect to some sound docks and car stereos. So, as always, caveat emptor. However, before replacing an existing dock or stereo to upgrade from a 30 pin iPhone/iPod connector, it is worth evaluating if the CoolStream receiver is worth the cost to extend the life of your electronics

-- Ryan Gwaltney

CoolStream Bluetooth Receiver for iPhone Dock
$40

Available from Amazon

Boeing's new 777X is getting a lot of attention for its composite wing with folding tips and its super-efficient engines, but one of the airliner's most innovative features are the tiny holes in its tail that smooth airflow and improve ...

Weight is the enemy of efficiency. And when it comes to electric vehicles, nothing is heavier than battery packs. To spread out some of the tonnage, Volvo has concocted a way of baking super capacitors between sheets of carbon fiber ...

“I parked my XR4i next to the United States Space Shuttle because…”

What’s your best caption for this late-1980s Ford press shot?

Over the last five years, I have owned a number of hand powered LED flashlights, some of them using a “direct feed” approach (generated electricity is used directly to power the light), others using a rechargeable battery to store the electricity.

My issue with the direct feed type is, that you need to “keep the motion going.” Stop operating the generator it, and you don’t have any light. This means that — for instance — you cannot put the flashlight down if you need both hands to do a job (replacing a defective fuse comes to mind).

The rechargeable battery type tends to work a little bit better, but I’ve yet to find an affordable type where the battery capacity does not start to diminish sharply after a fairly low number of recharge cycles.

Then, when shopping at Ikea a couple of months ago, I came across the LJUSA flashlight. It’s not the nicest looking or smallest flashlight out there, but it does have a number of things going for it: It’s sturdy, quick to charge (wind lever 20-30 times for 1-2 minutes of light), and fairly bright. Furthermore, it uses a capacitor rather than a battery to store electricity, so no more degrading battery capacity. What really blew me away, though, was the price: at €3.99 ($4.99 US) they are a true steal!

I immediately bought a couple for my kids. While I had some initial concerns about the quality of the lever, both flashlights have withstood months of abuse without breaking, and still function as well as the day we bought them. I’ve since been back to Ikea, and have bought a couple of additional units to keep them handy in our car, near our home’s fuse box etc., and have also recommended them to family and friends.

-- Remko Klaassen

IKEA Ljusa hand powered flashlight
$5

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Cat videos will outlast humanity if stored on Tungsten encapsulated by Silicon Nitride

Dutch and German boffins have proposed a write-once-read-many storage medium they say should survive for a million years and may be readable after a billion.…

This 1995 BMW M3 is said to have 53k miles and to be unmodified. It looks great on OEM wheels and Avus Blue is a great color for the E36. It’s said to run and drive brilliantly. Clean, unmolested E36 M3s are getting scarce, so this could be a rare opportunity. Find it here on eBay in Ross, California with no reserve.

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Prepare to have your afternoon wasted. Lamborghini has opened up its Sant'Agata museum to the all-seeing eyes of Google Street View, and not only can you see 50 years of Lambo hotness, you can actually get inside some of the ...

A new watch from Garmin takes the age-old tradition of big, multi-purpose watches for pilots and brings it into the GPS age. The new D2 is similar to Garmin's earthbound GPS watch, but offers several features gadget-hungry pilots will appreciate.

I’ve had this amazing camp stove for about 6 months now, and it lives up to the hype (which in this case is saying a lot). First off, it burns wood. No need to bring fuel of any kind, you can run the stove off twigs and leaves, or a stick or two, which can be collected off the ground almost anywhere. Burning wood is normally very inefficient and smokey, but the BioLite has a secret weapon. It uses a small thermoelectric generator to create a bit of electricity which is then used to power an internal fan. The fan blows air into the fire chamber creating perfect combustion from regular wood, or any dry or almost dry biomass. The resulting fire is hot, and clean. There is literally no smoke; it doesn’t even leave black soot on the bottom of your pans! Once the fire is started (which takes about 2 minutes) you can pack the combustion chamber with wood, and when that wood catches, a vortex of flame will leap 6 to 10 inches above the stove. Put a pot on it, and it will boil water faster then anything short of an industrial kitchen stove top.

As if that were not enough, the internal generator creates enough excess electricity to power a USB plug on the side of the stove. It’s strong enough to power an iPad or iPhone. Getting a complete charge takes some time (longer then cooking dinner) but the stove provides such a nice open flame that it’s like having a campfire, so I just keep feeding it and enjoy the flame until whatever I need charged is done.

The stove breaks down into two parts (power unit and combustion chamber) and once cool, the power unit fits inside the combustion chamber for compact storage. It is light and rugged. I use the stove on motorcycle trips and it’s perfect for overnight campsites, or heating a lunch on the side of the road.

Looking at reviews on the internet, I have seen some criticism of the stove for it’s weight. Fair enough, it’s not really a super light backpacking stove, but for me the benefits of not carrying fuel and the “greenness” of burning biomass make it preferable to a traditional camp stove. Add to that the ability to power USB, and this thing becomes truly over the top amazing.

My only issue with this stove is that it can be tricky to regulate the heat. The fan has two power settings (low/high) which helps but even on low the stove burns wood pretty hot, so it can be tricky if you just want to simmer.

I’ve noticed that they have started selling a grill top accessory which I don’t yet have, but is very high on my wishlist.

-- Mickey

BioLite CampStove
$130

I have been using an old Windows laptop attached to my TV as a home media machine for several years now. My brother was asking how he could get something similar on a budget. It seemed to me that with the passage of time, there must be something more elegant out there than the rig I set up.

After looking around for quite a while, I stumbled on some fairly obscure Chinese products and an entire community of makers who have developed the aftermarket firmware to make these little computers run nearly flawlessly. For about $40 to your door (add about $15 if you want a camera and mic) these Android sticks you get at Engel.com fit the bill. They turn your HD TV into a well-performing Android computer, including Wi-Fi, HDMI, USB, Micro SD card interface, and Bluetooth v2. Add some memory (up to 32 GB on a micro SD chip or any USB thumb drive) and it’s a fine media player and web browser. It will run most Android apps.

It gets a little warm running 1080p vids, but I haven’t had any problems from that. Be sure to get the Finless ROM, a primo firmware that is just plain better than the firmware that comes from the factory. You can add it yourself but why? So far Engel’s product is the only one I have run into with the Finless ROM pre-installed.

There are several manufacturers of these machines and none of them are household names. To add to the confusion, there are counterfeits which are sold by some vendors. Tales of poor hardware and firmware abound, with broken Wi-Fi antennas, overheating and software conflicts being common themes. The proprietor at Engel.com, Gavin Engel, seems to have chosen his line carefully from the available models.

In the six weeks or so using it, I have added my favorite media player, office suite and the Firefox browser, but the included software will also work well. I had to ditch one added app that shut down Wi-Fi, but a quick uninstall of the offending program put everything right again.

For ease of use, add a USB hub, a wireless keyboard and mouse. If you are tight on money, download the app from Engel to your android cell phone that turns it into a perfectly serviceable keyboard and touch pad for this computer. I was using that app for a time before I got an aftermarket controller.

I notice that the Engel site has an “unbricking” service. The makers at the Freaktab bulletin board tend to push the edge of the envelope with their firmware experimentation, and there are numerous reports where they have run the little things right off the rails.I suspect this should not be a problem if you don’t go root with them. Some folks there have gone so far as to run Linux on the sticks.

These computers are tiny, they’re dirt cheap and they work. I just gave it to my brother for his birthday. I’m getting another one because these will run a 1080p video better than the rig I have, which pixilates like crazy at that resolution.

-- Thomas Meacham

Engel MX1 Android 4.1.1 Stick PC
$40

The run from zero to 60 MPH is the international unit of measurement for quickness. And a team of students from the Netherlands just shattered the record in a homemade electric car.

Traveling to S.F. or L.A.? Now you can show off your impeccable taste in performance and green cred by renting a Tesla Model S from Hertz.

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            I think it was some time in the 1970s, and I was in Oxford, Ohio, early in my career as a teacher at Miami University. In any event, there was a strike in Hamilton, Ohio, and some College Republicans from Miami U were driven over to Hamilton in an armored truck and worked as strike breakers. According to an interview in The Miami Student, the student newspapers, the College Repubs mostly saw their ride and their work as fun, something of a lark.

            I mentioned this story to a conservative colleague in my department, and he said something like, "Miami students scabbed … for entertainment?" I said that I didn't think they needed money, so, yeah, for entertainment and to make an ideological point.

            He kind of shuddered and said, "You don't do that …. I mean, maybe if you have to put food on the table, but you don't scab for kicks or to make a point. It's not decent."

            Indeed.

            My colleague was an old-fashioned kind of conservative, with a strong sense of decency, a working-class background, and — whatever his complaints about unions — "scab" and "to scab" as part of his active vocabulary. Our larking, strikebreaking, scabbing students were something neither he nor I had encountered before.

            Later in my career, I was a senior faculty representative to Miami U's Student Affairs Council and kind of an informal parliamentarian. One new student member of Council moved and his buddy seconded a motion to reconstitute Council's membership. They moved to replace in the student delegation the Vice President for Minority Affairs of Associated Student Government with the Vice President for Communication. They thought it would make a neater organizational chart having the ASG liaison officer on SAC rather than the ASG VP for Minority Affairs.

            The Chairman of Council was the highly effective — as in "iron-fisted" — University "Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students," and Consigliere for Enforcement (my formulation) for the University President. The Chair turned to me and said, "Can we do that?" I thought for a moment and replied, "Well, Student Affairs Council lacks power to actually do very much, so we'd be advising the Trustees to impose on Student Government a change in the ASG constitution and by-laws. We can advise that; it's just that the Trustees as a matter of principle don't have the authority to order such a change — no outsiders can change a group's constitution or by-laws — and as a matter of politics, it would be, let's say, imprudent." Whoo, boy, would it have been imprudent! They'd have looked tyrannical over a relative trifle, and racist, since the word "minority" at Miami University meant Black, and we were notorious for having very, very few minority students. "So, yes, we can advise the Trustees to act inappropriately, but they will probably politely ignore us or send the recommendation back with a rebuke."

            The Chair turned to the President of ASG and unofficial head of the student delegation. "Does ASG want us to make this change?" he asked. The Student Body President said "No!" very emphatically, adding that the proposal had come to ASG from the two movers, and ASG had voted it down. Indeed, the idea had received just about no support except from these two guys and some allies from a group that had sprung up on campus recently, and with a lot of money. (A reporter for The Miami Student was convinced the student group was shilling for some rich big-wigs in Ohio politics, but he couldn't prove it and get the story published. The reporter thought the highly traditional Miami Student was about to get challenged by the Midwestern foreshadowing of The Dartmouth Review.)

            The two young men repeated that replacing the student VP for Minority Affairs with the VP for Communication would be logical and make for a cleaner ASG table of organization and a more coherent student delegation.

            And then, significantly, one of my older colleagues spoke up: an Asian-American Christian conservative from the Department of History.

            Assuming but not calling attention to the irony, this historian pointed out that his two younger colleagues on Council had a point about the abstract logic of tables of organization but left out a crucial factor, or at least a crucial factor for conservatives. Whatever the soundness of their arguments in terms of abstract logic, their predecessors in Associated Student Government hadn't been stupid, and there were historical reasons why ASG had as part of their delegation their VP for Minority Affairs, historical reasons that were still valid. As a principle of parliamentary procedure, the burden of proof lies with those wishing to change things, and as a principle of traditional conservatism, "Unless it's necessary to change things, it is necessary not to change things."

            These two guys from the Right of the College Republicans — remnants of the YAFers and precursors of Tea Party Youth — were engaging in the sort of abstract, historically ignorant — and proud of it!— futzing around with organization that drives traditional conservatives up the wall. They were engaging in this exercise not to actually get something done but to stir up racial issues and to appeal to some outside audience. This pissed off pretty much everyone else on Council, including our energetically authoritarian Chair.

            The motion had been made and seconded, and received in its favor the votes of the mover and seconder and failed, miserably,

            Except, of course, the motion undoubtedly succeeded with its intended audience, who were not the Miami University people who would vote on it. The reporter for The Miami Student never did identify the sponsors of our New Right activists, but the circumstantial evidence is that they were alive and powerful in places like Cincinnati, Canton, and the Ohio General Assembly.

            My historian colleague was respectable Old-Old-Right Conservative, in the tradition of Edmund Burke; the two punks on Council were the new version, and what we are seeing more of today: wise-ass theorists, with impressive financial backing, guys who don't care much about tradition or history or, in a lot of cases, morality, decency, or just plain manners. These were the Miami U version of what Randy Newman identified (let's say through a synecdoche and the imperatives of rime), as "college men from LSU / Went in dumb — came out dumb too": far too refined to be "rednecks / […] keeping the niggers down," but willing to earn brownie points, and money, by trying to ensure that minority students wouldn't be guaranteed a voice on a Council, in a seat open to, and sometimes taken by, straight WASP or WASC males.

            (As a priest explained to me, there was no contradiction that Miami University, like many public universities, has a plurality of Catholics and is still WASPish: many MU students were WASCs, White Catholics, sufficiently assimilated and homogenized that for all practical purposes, they're WASPs.)

            I envy the energy and cockiness of these New Right students, especially the ones who'd risk getting their asses kicked as scabs. I envy their certainty. But these folk are cocky and certain mostly, I suspect, because they're privileged, because they've never encountered a problem Mom and Dad and family connections and wealth couldn't get them out of. And they have their theories (God, do they have their theories!) often enough — like, for a while, Miami alum Paul Ryan — out of Ayn Rand

            So let us praise old conservatives, such as my two colleagues, and let us be very, very suspicious about the new varieties passing themselves off as conservatives. The New Right punks, female as well as male, have their theories and their rich supporters, and they want to push things around — and willing to push people around; they call themselves conservatives, but in their actions they repeat the worst mistakes and habits of radicals.