Author Archives: Lee Devlin

About Lee Devlin

I'm Lee Devlin from Greeley, Colorado.

The Kindle

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My friend Peter cares deeply about climate change and so he includes a line at the bottom of all his emails that admonish the reader:

Please consider the environment before printing this document.

As a consultant to HP and prior to that, an HP employee for 24 years, I worry about the prospect of people no longer printing out documents on paper and depriving HP of the profits that come from selling ink cartridges. But I can certainly understand Peter’s sentiment since, with the exception of photos, much of what’s printed ends up as trash a short time later. The same happens with newspapers and magazines. For me, books create another problem. I tend to hang on to many of my books after I’ve read them just in case I want to re-read them or refer to them in the future and this requires finding space to store them all. And it doesn’t help that I read books on an intermittent basis, sometimes abandoning a book half way through only to pick it up a few months later to finish it and then give it its rightful place in my ever-growing number of bookshelves and boxes. It’s not unusual for me to read several books at the same time. This drives my wife crazy in her efforts to keep our house neat and orderly. So I’ve long hoped for the day when I could have books that take up no space and yet are instantly accessible whenever the mood struck to read one of them. In short, I needed a practical electronic book reader.

E-book readers are not a new idea, but like many nascent technologies, they appeared on the scene well in advance of cost effective technology or even a convenient way to purchase content that would have allowed them to compete favorably with traditional books. In the past year, Amazon.com launched what is arguably the first mass-marketed e-book reader called the Kindle. The Kindle appears to have achieved a level of success that had eluded previous e-book reader products, including several competent designs from well established companies like Sony.

A few essential features for an e-book reader are ease-of-use, portability, and long battery life. Thanks to the introduction of high resolution e-ink displays, which draw very little power, a new generation of e-book readers has emerged that has allowed the e-book a better chance to gain market acceptance.

Another important e-book feature that had been lacking previously was the ease of content acquisition. Amazon has done a great job in this area thanks to their significant offering of more than 140,000 e-book titles in addition to many popular magazines and newspaper subscriptions. But the biggest breakthrough for Kindle, in comparison to its competitors, has been the content acquisition and delivery method. Amazon decided to take on the considerable challenge of installing a cellular modem in each Kindle. The logistics of this undertaking are significant. By partnering with Sprint, Amazon can get wireless data coverage over most of the U.S. which alleviates the need for a customer to install any software on a PC or even physically connect the device to a PC to periodically load content on to the Kindle (although it is still an option). The books and magazines can be purchased directly from and delivered to the Kindle, lending considerable temptation for customers to buy books on impulse. Kindle owners are even able to download significant samples of books that include a ‘buy it now’ button at the end of the sample thus eliminating much of the friction of an e-book acquisition. After all, who wants to stop reading a book after you’ve already read the first 20 pages and can’t wait to see what happens next?

I’ve downloaded books previously and attempted to read them on my laptop or PC but I found it difficult. Part of the problem was that I wanted to take the book with me, from room to room, or with me when I traveled. That’s not easy to do with a laptop computer because it’s awkward and heavy to carry around a notebook computer for reading. It also takes a while to boot, and with each program I install on the laptop, the boot process slows down even more. Secondly, the battery life on my notebook is only 100 minutes, hardly enough time to make it a convenient reading device. All rechargable batteries lose capacity as they age. And it costs about $120 for a new battery pack. So, like many others, I tend to live with this continually decreasing battery life rather than replace the battery every year. But the biggest downside of reading something like a downloaded book on a laptop has been that there was no easy way to keep my place in the book. Each time I rebooted the computer, I needed to re-find my place in the book. That’s just not acceptable. Granted, things are getting better with software e-readers, but the other disadvantages of laptop computers as e-book readers are just too hard to overcome.

E-book readers have done a lot to get around these problems. The Kindle will last for several days of reading on a charged battery that is 1/10 the size of a typical laptop battery (6 Wh vs 60 Wh). And when the battery loses its capacity over its life, Amazon offers a replacement battery for $20. I can change the battery myself, something that I can’t do very easily with my iPod. Instead, Apple recommends I return their products to a service center at considerable inconvenience and significant expense to replace the battery. So I congratulate Amazon for making the Kindle battery easy to replace and offering it at a reasonable price.

After using the Kindle nearly every day for a few weeks, I like it more and more, particularly the ease of acquiring new books at a reduced cost over conventional books. Best of all, these e-books take up no space around the house. The only downside is that I can’t borrow or lend the Kindle books like I can with a physical book. And sharing the Kindle with Terri is not easy since only one person can use it at a time. Amazon allows up to 5 Kindles on a single account that would all have access to my growing e-book library, but that would be expensive. I guess that’s the downside of digital media, it’s so easy to copy that if they don’t protect it by locking it to each customer, then no one will pay for it. In some ways, that’s more fair to the author too, since a book that gets passed around means that there is less compensation for the author per book. But unlike physical books, you can get free books that are out of of copyright. There are about 20,000 books, including many classics, available for free on feedbooks.com in a ‘mobi’ format which is compatible with Kindle.

I couldn’t wait to tell Peter about my Kindle because I thought he’d be interested in a ‘green’ reading device which will save a few trees. Also, it consumes so little energy that I can recharge it with a small solar panel. But instead, he seemed somewhat suspicious of the newfangled gadget and asked me how it ‘felt’ and how it ‘smelled’ indicating that these are important sensory experiences when it comes to reading books. Terri is equally suspicious and cannot imagine replacing her paperbacks with this gadget. She’s agreed to run an experiment by reading a book of her choosing on it. However, her patience for new technology is limited and for her to be pleased with it, it would have to be superior in every way to a paper book, so I’m not holding out much hope that she’ll become an e-book convert.

I generally don’t buy the first generation of a new technology product. In fact, I had planned to wait for Amazon to offer a second generation Kindle prior to getting one, figuring that it would have many improvements over the first genera
tion. But after learning that the Kindle design would not be refreshed this year, I decided to get one. It also helped by getting an offer for a $100 discount through a credit card promotion Amazon offered, so I got one for $259. I see they are back up to $359. If I continue at the rate I’ve been buying books, Amazon should make a good profit from me. I’ve already read 6 books in 3 weeks, 2 free ones and 4 that I purchased from Amazon. I also converted several large 100+ page industry reports to a Kindle-compatible format and read them on a plane trip to California. So I’ve really been getting a lot of use out of it.

I think that the e-book reader market shows great potential and after a few false starts it just may be poised to catch on and allow people do their daily reading without killing as many trees in the process.

National Renewable Energy Lab visit

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A few weeks ago I visited the National Renewable Energy Lab open house in Golden, CO with a few other members of the Northern Colorado Clean Energy Network. I’d wanted to see this facility for some time, and figured that an open house on a Saturday would allow some of our members who normally are unable to attend our energy tours during the week to join us. As it turned out, we only had 4 members of our group show up. Despite the low turnout, we had a good time carpooling there and back because we got to chat for a few hours about renewable energy topics.

The NREL has a visitor’s center and there was a presentation in progress when we arrived about how to do an energy audit on one’s home. Several of us had just been to an NCRES presentation on this topic recently so we did not sit down to listen to the presentation. The presentation took up much of the visitor’s center display area, making it impossible to talk without disrupting the presentation so our ability to wander around inside was a bit limited.

The exhibits were very nicely constructed and a docent explained the various renewable energy programs underway and the purpose of the various buildings on the campus. There are numerous projects going on all over the facility, but unfortunately they are off-limits for visitors. Only the visitor’s center is accessible. I had expected this to be the case, and so I tried to gather some information about what would be necessary to get a tour of the actual laboratories in the hope that some future visit would allow us to get better access to what’s going on in the labs. I can see that it will be a challenge as they are not set up to handle tours of the actual labs.

The docent who was our guide had spent most of his career in the power field, and I had a long discussion with him about transmission of power over high voltage DC lines. Transmitting power over DC lines is counter-intuitive for most engineers who were taught that you can only transmit utility scale power on AC lines. But thanks to advances in high power semiconductor components to handle utility scale power, DC power transmission lines are becoming more common to deliver electrical power long distances and to help isolate grids through interties. This method of transmitting power will become more important in the future as some of the best potential sources of renewable power generation such as wind and solar tend to be far removed from population centers. HVDC power transmission has the advantage of being able to isolate the grids so that the need to control the phase of the AC power over long distances is not required. The largest DC line in the U.S. is the Pacific DC Intertie which takes hydroelectric power from the Columbia River in Washington State and delivers it to customers in the Los Angeles area.

My favorite Visitor’s Center exhibit was the section of the GE 37-meter wind turbine blade. I’ve seen these blades up close during our Ponnequin Wind Farm tour, but was curious about the materials of construction. With the section exposed, I saw that the materials looked identical to those used in my LongEZ and Cozy. They consisted of wood, foam, fiberglass, and epoxy albeit on a much larger scale that what is used in my planes.

Me and Ed Miccio standing next to the GE blade section

You can see that the spar and caps are very thick on these blades.


The Cozy uses the same materials and construction techniques as the wind turbine blades.

The NREL visitor’s center is open from 9-5 Monday through Friday and I’d highly recommend that if you ever find yourself in the vicinity of I-70 at exit 263, you should stop by for a short visit and self-guided tour.

Midnight Engineer’s Forum

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Each year I attend a conference in Denver that grew out of a magazine called ‘Midnight Engineering‘. The magazine was dedicated to engineers that loved the work so much they could be found doing it at all hours, even in their spare time, hence the magazine’s name. Many of the readers were entrepreneurial types engaged in moonlighting activities. A yearly conference called Entcon was started that became like a ‘real-time version of the magazine’. It was a great networking event with lots of interesting people that kicked off with skiing in the Rocky Mountains followed by a weekend of presentations and informal networking sessions.

The magazine is out of print, but a conference which is now called Entconnect is still going on each year in Denver around the last week of March.

We don’t get a chance to talk much with the other conference participants throughout the year, so I’ve put together a forum on Yahoo Groups. If discussions about entrepreneurship, tech startups, and free agent engineering appeal to you, perhaps you’d like to join the group.

Remembering Geoff Peck

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A few weeks ago, my friend and helper on the HP Media Vault Yahoo Group, Chris, was asking me some questions about taking his first trip to the EAA convention in Oshkosh this summer. Chris found me through my Media Vault website and it turns out that we share a lot of interests. He was the first Media Vault owner to compile the Linux kernel which impressed me because he had no prior Linux experience and was only 14 years old at the time. He’s been a highly valued source of help in providing product support and also runs his own Yahoo Group called Hacking the HP Media Vault. He even runs his own computer repair business. Look him up if you’re in the St. Louis area and need some computer help.

One of the interests we share is aviation. The annual EAA convention at Oshkosh, called Airventure, is coming up next week and Chris is planning to attend it with his dad. He was asking some questions a few weeks ago about the byzantine pricing schemes the EAA uses for admission and was having some trouble trying to figure out if his junior membership qualified him for a guest admission pricing for his dad. He wasn’t getting anywhere with the folks at the EAA since it was an unusual request. Most junior or student members have at least one parent who is a member of the EAA and so the people who staffed the help desk hadn’t encountered a situation like this before. I figured that I would call upon someone who I knew who helped write the Airventure admission software for the EAA, Geoff Peck, to help sort things out.

Geoff Peck and I go way back. Geoff was the originator of Usenet’s rec.aviation subgroups back around 1992. Prior to that, there was a single rec.aviation group of which I was an avid reader and occasional contributor. I always admired the way Geoff answered aviation-related questions. His responses were always so well-reasoned and professional. Always calm and authoritative, his writing style was what I aspired to sound like when I wrote.

It had been a few years since I had communicated with Geoff. At one time, he used to organize daily meetings for lunch at Oshkosh, with everyone meeting at the base of the control tower around noon. He’d also help organize a dinner at the Granary, and he’d pass around his laptop for people to use to make a rec.aviation posting entitled “Live from Oshkosh”. This was back in the early 90’s, which was long before the Internet and Web became mainstream. It was even before Deja News (now Google Groups) began archiving the Usenet postings, so much of this history is lost to time. I would look forward to seeing Geoff each year, manning the booth for his flight planning company, Enflight, patiently talking with customers and eager to help other pilots.

So, I did a quick Google search on his name to get to his personal website and make sure I had a good email address for him. You can imagine my concern when the first hit Google returned was entitled: “Remember Geoff Peck” at his personal website. I read with dismay that he had died in a plane crash in Colorado on his way back from Oshkosh in August, 2006. I read the NTSB report with astonishment that Geoff, a highly skilled 4400-hour ATP-rated flight instructor, would perish in a classic box canyon trap.

Today I was reminded about the incident again when I got an email from the AOPA describing his accident. Here is the text of it:

“On Aug. 7, 2006, the pilot of a Piper PA-28R-201 Arrow was returning to California after attending EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wis. While attempting to navigate through mountainous terrain northwest of Salida, Colo., the pilot made a wrong turn and flew into a box canyon. Unable to outclimb the terrain, the aircraft struck a stand of pine trees and came to rest inverted. The crash killed the 4,400-hour airline transport pilot and seriously injured his passenger.

Making their way west from Oshkosh, the San Jose-based pilot and his passenger had arrived at Harriet Alexander Field (elevation 7,523 feet msl) in Salida around 8 p.m. on the day before the accident. The following morning, the pilot used his laptop computer to obtain a DUATS weather briefing and file a VFR flight plan to Milford, Utah. The density altitude in Salida that morning was about 9,400 msl, meaning aircraft flying in the area would perform as though they were about 2,000 feet higher than their actual altitude.

According to the airport manager, the pilot asked which route he should take to Utah. The pilot wanted to fly west across Monarch Pass (elevation 11,312 feet msl). The manager suggested that he instead fly south through the lower-elevation Poncha Pass before turning west. The pilot ignored the advice. The airplane took off around 10 a.m. and turned toward Monarch Pass.

The Arrow flew west along U.S. Highway 50, which eventually runs through Monarch Pass toward Utah. Over the town of Maysville, however, the pilot began following County Road 240, which runs northwest through a box canyon for about 10 miles before dead-ending near the canyon’s terminus.

Several witnesses saw a low-wing, single-engine airplane flying northwest up the canyon. One witness, located about two miles from the accident site, went to investigate when the aircraft failed to fly back out. He discovered the wreckage and the lone survivor sitting on a rock nearby. The injured passenger had no memory of the events leading to the accident.

The Arrow crashed at 10:20 a.m. at an elevation of about 12,000 feet msl. Terrain surrounding the accident site quickly rises to between 13,000 and 14,000 feet msl. The aircraft’s throttle was found in the full-forward position. The vertical speed indicator showed a climb rate of 130 fpm. NTSB investigators estimated the Arrow’s groundspeed at the time of the crash was 59 knots.

The board concluded that inadequate preflight planning and preparation caused the accident. Contributing factors were the pilot’s lack of familiarity with the geographical area, his becoming lost and disoriented, his decision to disregard the advice of local pilots, and the high density altitude, which reduced the airplane’s climb performance.

This accident illustrates the unique hazards of mountain flying. Summer temperatures can push the density altitude to heights that approach or exceed a light aircraft’s service ceiling, despite what the altimeter might be reading. Moreover, to a pilot unfamiliar with the terrain, the mouth of one canyon can look very much like another. Is it a mountain pass leading to the relative safety of lowlands beyond—or a dead end? Like the proverbial blind choice between the lady and the tiger, picking the wrong door can end very, very badly.”

I tried to imagine the decision-making that had led up to the accident and I have begun to wonder if Geoff had a weather issue like mountain obscuration and chose to fly northward to see if he could get around it. In doing so, he inadvertently followed a box canyon that he was unable to climb out of. I’m surprised that despite the mention of the AWOS weather conditions at Monarch Pass, weather was never mentioned in the cause of why, instead of flying over Monarch pass, Geoff would fly north and end up in a box canyon. The Monarch Pass AWOS reported at 9:50 a.m.:

Wind, 210 degrees at 14 knots; visib
ility, less than 1/4 statute mile, light snow; ceiling, 100 feet overcast; temperature, 7 degrees C.; dew point, 6 degrees C.; altimeter, 30.82 in. Hg

The accident investigation seems to indicate that he was lost, believing he was over Monarch Pass when in fact he was 8 miles north. After looking at the AWOS report, I can’t help think that Monarch Pass was not safe to fly through with a 100′ ceiling and so Geoff headed north looking for a more favorable weather conditions. It surprises me that there was no mention of the mountain obscuration as being a factor in this accident. Also, not taking the advice to use Poncha Pass is understandable too. Poncha Pass doesn’t cross the continental divide. So even after crossing Poncha Pass, it would be necessary to immediately turn west and cross the continental divide at an elevation similar to that of Monarch Pass (11,312 feet MSL).

I can attest to the fact that the Rockies can be difficult to climb over, especially in the summer when density altitude becomes a bigger factor, and with any amount of westerly wind, there will likely be down drafts making the climbing more difficult as you fly from east to west. Also, trying to squeeze under some low ceilings to clear a mountain pass can be a particularly bad idea.

We will miss Geoff, but not the final flying lesson he taught us and that is to be careful flying around the Rocky Mountains, especially when attempting to cross over them.