Many people have written with questions about my thermal depolymerization column. You can find the relevant follow-ups at http://www.kantor.com/usatoday/thermal_depolymerization.shtml.

Looks like a flawless landing for NASA’s Opportunity.
Actually, the real reason I’m posting is to get my “Opportunity Knocks” headline in before everyone else.

1927 - 2004

Before I wrote this column I had already started collecting information on TDP. It’s still a decent starting place for learning more. Check out http://www.kantor.com/useful/thermo.shtml.

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Follow-Ups

A few people have written to be asking the same (or a similar question) regarding the efficiency of the TDP process.

Specifically: How much energy is used to power it? Does it use more energy to process the animal/medical/industrial waste than it gets back in oil? (If so, that would make TDP a terrific waste-disposal system, but not a good energy producer.)

Jason Preiser was the first to question this. He wrote:

This turns out not to be the case. According to the company, about 15 percent of the fuel that comes out of a TDP plant is used to power the plant itself — the other 85 percent is new energy. So if a TDP plant generated 100,000 BTUs worth of oil, it would only use about 15,000 BTUs to power the process.

According to Changing Worlds’ Terry Adams:

(For you purists, he does point out that “Turkey offal is not really a good fuel so the ‘100 Btu’s in’ is only a theoretical value.”)

He also wrote:

A couple of people also questioned TDPs efficiency in terms of the laws of physics — you know, energy cannot be created or destroyed. One was Mark Ellison who wrote, “It takes energy to turn garbage into oil using TDP, and, of course, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics tells us that the energy content of the oil so obtained will be less than the energy used to create it.”

Create, yes. But the energy in, say, turkey offal is created when the animals eat and drink. It’s stored in their bodies. The energy content of the oil obtained through TDP is less than or equal to the energy used to to create it (e.g., turkey food and water), but greater than the energy used to extract it. That’s what makes it an exciting energy source.

The bottom line: TDP produces more energy from the garbage that’s thrown into the ‘hopper’ than is used to power the process.

Because I own my own domain names, when I need to give an address to a Web site — say, TV Guide’s — I often give out an address I can trace back. For example, when I signed up at tvguide.com I used tvguide@[one of my domains].

So now I’m getting spam to that address. There’s only one way for that to happen, as I have never used “tvguide@” anywhere else: TV Guide sold my address. TV Guide sold my address to someone who is either a spammer or who was willing to give it to spammers.

And that’s exactly why I use addresses like that. Now I know not to give my business to TV Guide.

Remember the old Atari 2600? The classic video game console? It came with “Combat”?

Now shrink it. Smaller. How about to the size of the joystick? Yeah, you can now buy a single joystick that contains 10 classic Atari games. Just a neat, neat idea.

In my MRAM column, I quipped, “Ask your local PC repair guru (if you can find one).”

One Jeffrey Leventhal wrote to tell me about a site he founded called ComputerRepair.com that looks like it can help with the process. (A quick search on my ZIP Code came up with more than a half-dozen folks with a variety of expertise.)

The site is slick, and if his map is accurate it can help find techs in lots of places.

I learned a lesson today, and I’m glad it was part of a test.

I’m an amateur photographer; I shoot 35mm film. (I also use a digital camera, but that’s another story.) One of the best purchases I’ve made is a Nikon CoolScan III film scanner. It’s outdated now, but I still love it. It turns a single 35mm negative into a 25MB+ TIFF file. (And I was impressed with 6 megapixel cameras!)

By the way, this is not a film vs. digital thing.

When I get a roll of film back from processing, I use the prints as sort of contact prints — that is, I use them to pick out my favorite shots. Then I scan the respective negative and use Photoshop to crop, clean, and generally fix the picture, which I then print out as (usually) a 5×7.

I use a terrific scanning program called VueScan that gives me many more options than Nikon’s annoying-to-use NikonScan software. But scanning at that super-high resolution takes time, especially when I use VueScan to make three or more passes to get the best quality.

So my idea was to get the photo place to do the scanning for me: a Photo CD.

Well, a Picture CD. Kodak has two kinds of CDs, you see. A PhotoCD holds one roll of film and has multiple resolutions of each image. It’s a high-end service. The newer Picture CD holds several rolls because it only stores one copy of each picture in a high-resoultion JPEG file.

I figured I’d check out the quality of the $8.00 Picture CD. Reviews I read indicated I would have good-quality scans — not as good as my CoolScan did, but more than good enough for Photoshopping and printing. The negatives would serve as my archive copy.

What I got back was crap. It was on a plain ol’ blank CD (Imation brand), and contained some junky Fuji-branded software to browse the images.

The images were terrible. Small (2MB), low-res, poorly scanned. Crap. The numbering system it uses puts the images out of order in the browser, and even though you can print an index print, it doesn’t tell you the file names.

Garbage.

Of course I have the negatives, and the CD is certainly adequate for picking out the photos I want to scan, but the idea of saving myself some time and effort went down the tubes.

One of these days I’ll try a Kodak-branded service. Preferably both Picture CD and PhotoCD. But Fuji? Forget it.

I will never again use a scanning service

I wear contact lenses — specifically, Acuvue 2s. They’re one of the most popular brands of two-week disposables.

Thing is, when Acuvues first came out, they were sold as one-week disposables. Then word got out that if you took them out and cleaned them every day or two, you could wear them for two weeks. (One saleswoman even asked me if I was on the “one-week plan” or “two-week plan.” When I said “two,” she said, “Then this is a six-month supply.”)

Anyway, I was running out of my contacts, and didn’t seem to have the time to get to the doctor for an exam. So I started stretching the amount of time I wore my Acuvue 2s. Two weeks. Three weeks. Four. Remember, I was cleaning them every couple of days (and with a protein-removing cleaner).

Six weeks. Eight. Finally I ordered new lenses. And after about 14 weeks with that one pair, I tossed them. I expected that when I put my fresh lenses in I would see how dirty the old ones had become. Nope. No difference.

I suspect your eye-care professional (and his insurance company) would never tell you to wear these contacts more than the officially-prescribed time: two weeks. Ditto for Johnson & Johnson. And ditto for me: I’m no doctor and maybe I just dodged an eye-infection bullet.

But I see things a little differently now.

In my USA Today column on cell-phone technology, I ended with the word “Kretenoj.” For those curious — and those who read to the very end — that’s Esperanto for “idiots.”

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If you go the the AT&T Wireless site, you’ll notice that camera phones don’t appear to be on the menu. That’s your clue that AT&T isn’t using a CDMA-based network. For now.

Sharm El-Sheikh is a mecca for scuba divers, says the CNN correspondent, ‘yet with all that expertise, they are unable to positively identify the cause of the Egyptian charter-flight crash.’

How incredibly stupid is CNN? All that scuba expertise, and they can’t find the cause of an airline crash? That’s like saying, “Despite all the cardiologists in the town, they were unable to fix the drilling rig.”

(And let’s not even talk about calling a Middle Eastern city a “mecca” for anything. That’s like saying “Rolls Royce is the Cadillac of automobiles.”)

I mentioned in my column on RSS that I use a great product called intraVnews to read my RSS feeds. I still do. But I had problems getting it to run on one of my machines. I finally gave up and uninstalled. Part of the uninstall process is a quick survey: Why did I remove it? I answered truthfully.

An hour or so later I had an e-mail from one Peter Bruinsma who works there, asking me some quick technical questions. Turns out that because I have my PocketPC connected to my computer, Outlook never really shuts off. And intraVnews needs Outlook off.

I shut down the PocketPC connection software (Activesync), reinstalled intraVnews, and bingo — worked perfectly.

That is one great bit of customer service. So again — intraVnewsM: highly recommended.

I had originally posted my USA Today columns on this site, because I was able to not only put up the unedited versions, but to add images and sidebars that USA Today doesn’t support.

Turns out that 1) my stuff is only lightly edited, and B) I don’t really have a lot of images and such to add.

It seemed more important to have a column follow-up section instead — a place I could post additions, corrections, comments from others, and that sort of thing. (Besides, I’d rather have folks read my stuff on the USA Today site so I get the page-view credits.)

So now, on the top of the home page you’ll see a space for just those kinds of things.