Thanks to my luscious man!

I’m talking about kitchen appliances. And not the big ones like refrigerators and dishwashers. No, I’m talking about toasters and blenders.

I’m talking about Breville.

Breville makes some of the best performing, coolest looking, and highest tech small kitchen appliances around.

You got a toaster for your wife on your anniversary?  You spent how much on a blender?

Oh yes.  And I’d do it all again.

But before you write me off completely, allow me to present the evidence:

The BTA820XL

This little number is the one that started it all for us.  3 words:  No toaster handle.  There is no lever to press down.  It is fully motorized.  Put your bread in the slot, press the button, and without a sound the toaster automatically lowers your bread and begins its task.  Curious to see how things are going, then just press the “Lift and Look” button and the toaster will lift the bread and give you a quick peek into its progress.  But you won’t have to wait long; this is the fastest toaster I’ve seen.

Still not convinced?  3 more words:  A Bit More.  Honestly, this was the feature that did me in.  How often has your toaster popped, but you realize that the toast is not quite done enough?  So you jam the lever back down again.  Unfortunately the toaster is still hot, so the stupid little temperature sensor thinks things are all done, and pops the toast right back up.  So you try to outsmart the toaster and give the toasting control a push to the right and mash the lever back down.  This works until you move on to some other part of your breakfast and forget that you’ve just pressed your toaster into the service of turning your bread into charcoal.  Which it does.  And then you’re left with either making a huge mess by scraping the burned layer off with your butter knife, or starting the process all over again.  Bleh!  Not so with The Greatest Toaster On Earth.  Just press the “A Bit More” button.  The BTA820XL dutifully, quickly, and in a fully automatically motorized way returns your not-quite-there-yet toast to the heat.  And what do you get?  In a few moments — your toast with “A Bit More.”

The BBL600XL

компютри

This blender continues the love with more great design, more high-tech buttons and an LCD readout.  Yes, yes, it blends well, is sturdy, and has a powerful 750 watt motor and all the usual blender features.  But it also has a smoothie button.  What’s the big deal?  Don’t most blenders have different buttons with things like “puree” and “liquify” on them?  Yes, they do.  But most blenders aren’t this blender.  You see, the smoothie button activates the automated smoothie program in the eerily smart brain of the BBL600XL.  The LCD countdown timer starts and the blender gets to work.  While swirling your bananas, frozen strawberries, and whatever else you’ve stuffed into its gullet, the blender actually detects chunks of ice and measures the consistency of the smoothie to continually adjust the speed and spin pattern of the blades.  Seriously.  I’m not making this up.  Nor have I fallen victim to clever marketing.  I’ve tested the thing.  When it hits a block of ice or a frozen chunk of fruit, it will almost seem to attack the thing, keeping it in the blades until it has been obliterated.  If your mixture is a little thick or a little thin, the blender will adjust, delivering to you — at the end of the countdown — a smoothie that lives up to its name.

Once the kit has dissolved into the mass of bricks that is his collection, I will sometimes see an echo of the original model — usually triggered because some sub-assembly is still intact. Usually though, Reid will start with a new idea and build something unique. I love his thinking, and watching his creative process.

Here’s a quick tour of some of his original work. Be sure to click on a picture and browse around the gallery. There is more there than is shown here.

The Sail Car

This one has rigging like a sailboat. Or a solar sail perhaps. Ingenious and asymmetrically aesthetic.

Armed Roadster

For those times when all you need an open top and a couple of guns.

Industrial Truck

This one has quite an industrial look and a wire mounted front to back. A towing hook or a conductive wire perhaps? I need to ask Reid.

Armed Freighter

For when you need to carry some boxes and keep someone from stealing them

Space Tow Truck

I couldn’t quite tell if this was one vehicle or one vehicle towing another. Reid didn’t seem to care. Which I also thought was pretty cool.

My Favorite

Definitely my favorite. Quite a bit of life for such a small number of bricks.

R2’s Ship

Even an astro droid needs his own ship.

The Snorkel

I love the front end on this one.

Executive Touring Truck

I’m not sure, but it looks like he’s having a good time.

Since the same symptoms were exhibited on both laptops, my first suspicion was our Linksys wireless router. I rebooted it but the problem was still around. I had upgraded the router earlier in the year to 802.11g from an ancient (at least in tech-years) 802.11b unit also from Linksys. That one had been upgraded from an an even more ancient proprietary 5 Mbps Proxim unit. Ah, the joys of early adoption, but that’s another story. I reconfigured the wireless settings to see if something was misbehaving there. No luck. I began to doubt the problem was with the router.

My suspicions turned to wireless interference. Interference in the 2.4 GHz spectrum occupied by the most popular Wi-Fi networks (802.11b/g) can be a fairly common occurrence, and the frequency of interference is increasing as wireless computer networks become more popular. The problem here was that no matter where I placed the laptops in the house the symptoms remained consistently inconsistent. This was true even when the laptops were in the same room as the wireless router. Furthermore, the problem showed up no matter which channel I selected in the 2.4 GHz spectrum, which is fairly unusual. Over the next couple of days I tried several things to try to diagnose the problem. Nothing seemed to make a difference. And nothing was getting better. I was stumped.

Then I remembered an article I had read a few months ago on ZDNet. The article, alarmingly titled “How to jam your neighbor’s Wi-Fi legally,” was about a new breed of wireless networking products that are now on store shelves. These products are usually labeled “Draft N” or “Pre-N” and promise amazing things. Things like 12X the speed and 4X the range of regular 802.11g. Ready for the catch? There are two of them really. First, all of these products have been released ahead of the true IEEE wireless standard called 802.11n (thus all the references to “N”). So none of them are compatible with each other, and there’s no guarantee they’ll be compatible with the standard once it is published sometime next year. So if you buy one now, chances are very good that you’ll have to throw it out and buy something new in order to get compatibility with the standard. But it’s the second catch that’s the doozy. Pay close attention:

According to ZDNet, every “Draft N” or “Pre-N” system completely obliterates any regular Wi-Fi network that happens to be nearby.

That’s right: Obliterates. As in gone. Up in smoke. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

While Airgo’s third generation product achieves record breaking throughput, it annihilates any legacy 802.11 b/g product in the vicinity and effectively shuts them down. The other products from Broadcom and Marvel weren’t quite as devastating to the neighbors, but the damage is still severe. What’s crazy is that these products are FCC legal and are being sold on store shelves today. This is a serious problem in the city where town homes and condominiums are right next to each other and it’s even a problem for businesses which primarily uses 802.11 b/g.

Having remembered the article, I went back and reread it. Then I did more research. The kind of symptoms described by the testers certainly sounded similar to what I was experiencing. Since it seemed that the only thing that survived the onslaught of a Draft N or Pre-N system was ANOTHER Draft N or Pre-N system, I decided to go out, buy one, and see for myself.

Looking into reviews online, the Belkin Pre-N system — while not the newest generation — seemed to have the best mix of reliability, range, and performance. Besides, I figured that since it was a little older it might be a little cheaper, and I wasn’t too fired up about spending the $300 it was going to cost to get into this, especially since I was convinced that I was going to have to spend another $300 once the real 802.11n standard was published. I found a local source for the Belkin, and soon had the whole thing installed and up and running on the network and our laptops.

The results? Crystal clear reception and blazing fast speeds.

I felt a little guilty while I was installing it, imagining that I could hear the cries of despair from my neighbors as their wireless networks collapsed. My neighbors’ networks had shown up tentatively over the years. I’ve enjoyed watching them sprout up. They’d been good neighbors, and since their owners didn’t know to move them off of the usual default wireless channel 6, they’d been easy to avoid. But this was technology survival of the fittest. Some new interloper was laying waste to the landscape, and there was no way I was going to go another day without my wireless connection.

But had there really been an interloper? I’ve had the new “Pre-N” system up and running almost a week now. While the problem I was having last weekend has certainly disappeared, was another new wireless system really to blame or had it been something else? The truth is that over the week I’ve been unable to confirm that my problems were caused by a new Draft or Pre-N system. Was some other freak interference to blame? Was I now the evildoer laying waste to my unsuspecting neighbors?

Well tonight I got my answer. I was working through a configuration problem on the new system — caused by a total lack of Belkin software support for new WPA security that was compounded by conflicts in Microsoft’s own “zero config” wireless subsystem. I was changing some settings on my laptop when I saw it. For a moment after a network scan, another new network popped up with a name beginning with “Belkin_Pre-N_.” It was the telltale sign of the interloper for whom I’d been searching. Another “Pre-N” network. He was out there. Clearly he was on the limits of my reception, but I was picking him up nonetheless, and that would explain why the interference had been so inconsistent. My suspicions had been correct, and I could — at least partially — lay my guilt to rest. But now the neighbors were definitely caught between the two of us, and they were certainly well screwed.

The problem with all this is that we were supposed to protected from this kind of mess by the wireless manufacturers themselves and their membership in the Wi-Fi Alliance. The Wi-Fi Alliance is the industry group that came up with the whole “Wi-Fi” branding in the first place, and it was backed by interoperability and compatibility testing. If your product was screwed up, you didn’t get the “Wi-Fi Certified” logo to put on your box. That and the fact that consumers care about interoperability and compatibility was enough to keep the wireless manufacturers in line. Mostly. But now 80% of the shelves in the stores are taken up by the latest breed of “Draft N” and “Pre-N” products which are neither interoperable nor compatible. What’s worse, the new products are actively destructive. And yet all of them still carry the “Wi-Fi Certified” brand. Now, those in the industry may try to mount the argument that, technically speaking, the certification is only for the fact that these products can also have regular 802.11b/g computers connect to them. That’s true, except only those computers connected to the new products will work, and it sidesteps the elephant in the room: That all other networks will be annihilated.

So much for the alliance. And there goes the neighborhood.

From Scientific American, Today.

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SCIENCE NEWS August 22, 2006
Colliding Clusters Shed Light on Dark Matter
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Image: NASA Click here to see movie For more than 70 years, astronomers, cosmologists and physicists have known that ordinary matter must be surrounded by vast quantities of an invisible substance–not substantial enough to collide with atoms or stars but massive enough to keep galaxies from flying apart. Dubbed dark matter, the mysterious stuff has eluded detection through any means other than its gravitational impact, leading some to propose that Einstein’s general relativity fails to adequately describe how gravity actually works on galactic scales. Now a relatively recent collision of two galaxy clusters has lifted the veil between ordinary and dark matter, proving the latter must exist.Douglas Clowe of the University of Arizona and a team of astronomers observed the colliding clusters–known as the bullet cluster thanks to a cloud of hot gas deformed into a ballistic shape–using the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The eponymous shape formed when the superheated plasma of the larger cluster put a drag on the million-degree hydrogen and helium gas in the smaller one as they smashed into one another. But although they are colliding, the ordinary matter in the constituent galaxies, due to the vast distances between component stars, pass through each other without incident.

The galactic stars in a given cluster only make up roughly 1 to 2 percent of the mass, whereas plasma comprises anywhere from 5 to 15 percent. As the galaxies pass while the plasma is dragged, the resulting separation allowed the scientists to determine the gravitational strength of the various parts of galactic matter from that of the plasma by viewing how light passing near the cluster is bent–so-called gravitational lensing–thus potentially revealing dark matter for the very first time. Because the gas cloud is more massive, the lensing it creates should be more pronounced. On the other hand, if the galaxies have dark matter halos that continue to travel with them–as predicted by theory–then this relatively small amount of ordinary matter should exert an outsized lensing effect due to its invisible companion.

Observations with several other telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, proved that light from stars behind the colliding clusters responded to the greater gravity of the puny galaxies rather than the plasma clouds. “There has always been degeneracy before: you either needed lots of dark matter to explain the extra gravity or gravity doesn’t obey the same physical laws on these million light-year scales as it does in our solar system,” Clowe explains. “Our observations showed that the dark matter has to be there regardless of how gravity behaves on these large scales.”This proof of existence, appearing in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, does nothing to reveal what dark matter really is, however. “Over the years, we’ve pretty much ruled out all sorts of baryonic dark matter possibilities like brown dwarfs or black holes. We’re pretty much left with some new subatomic particles,” notes team member Dennis Zaritsky of the University of Arizona. “It’s a little embarrassing to claim we know anything about the universe when we don’t know what 90 percent of the matter out there is.” –David Biello