Technology

The RV of the future

Over the years, particularly after Burning Man, I've written posts about how RVs can be improved. This year I did not use an regular RV but rather a pop-up camping trailer. However, I thought it was a good time to summarize a variety of the features I think should be in every RV of the future.

Smart Power

We keep talking about smart power and smart grids but power is expensive and complex when camping, and RVs are a great place for new technologies to develop.

To begin with, an RV power system should integrate the deep cycle house batteries, a special generator/inverter system, smart appliances and even the main truck engine where possible.

Today the best small generators are inverter based. Rather than generating AC directly from an 1800rpm motor and alternator, they have a variable speed engine and produce the AC via an inverter. These are smaller, more efficient, lighter and quieter than older generators, and produce cleaner power. Today they are more expensive, but not more expensive than most RV generators. RV generators are usually sized at 3,600 to 4,000 watts in ordinary RVs -- that size dictated by the spike of starting up the air conditioner compressor when something else, like the microwave is running.

An inverter based generator combined with the RV's battery bank doesn't have to be that large. It can draw power for the surge of starting a motor from the battery. The ability to sustain 2,000 watts is probably enough, with a few other tricks. Indeed, it can provide a lot of power even with the generator off, though the generator should auto-start if the AC is to be used, or the microwave will be used for a long time.

By adding a data network, one can be much more efficient with power. For example, the microwave could just turn off briefly when the thermostat wants to start the AC's compressor, or even the fans. The microwave could also know if it's been told to cook for 30 seconds (no need to run generator) or 10 minutes (might want to start it.) It could also start the generator in advance of cooling need.

If the master computer has access to weather data, it could even decide what future power needs for heating fans and air conditioning will be, and run the generator appropriately. With a GPS database, it could even know the quiet times of the campsite it's in and respect them.

A modern RV should have all-LED lighting. Power use is so low on those that the lights become a blip in power planning. Only the microwave, AC and furnace fan would make a difference. Likewise today's TVs, laptops and media players which all draw very few watts.

A smart power system could even help plugging into shore power, particularly a standard 15a circuit. Such circuits are not enough to start many ACs, or to run the AC with anything else. With surge backup from the battery, an RV could plug into an ordinary plug and act almost like it had a high power connection.

To go further, for group camping, RVs should have the ability to form an ad-hoc power grid. This same ability is already desired in the off-grid world, so it need not be developed just for RVs. RVs able to take all sorts of input power could also eventually get smart power from RV campsites. After negotiation, a campsite might offer 500v DC at 12 amps instead of 115v AC, allowing the largest dual-AC RVs to plug into small wires.

Augmented Reality as documentation and the "context" button

I've been a little skeptical of many augmented reality apps I've seen, feeling they were mostly gimmick and not actually useful.

I'm impressed by this new one from Audi where you point your phone (iPhone only, unfortunately) at a feature on your car, and you get documentation on it. An interesting answer to car user manuals that are as thick as the glove compartment and the complex UIs they describe.

RAID, backyard backup and the future of backup

Had my second RAID failure last week. In the end, things were OK but the reality is that many RAID implementations are much more fragile than they should be. Write failures on a drive caused the system to hang. Hard reset caused the RAID to be marked dirty, which mean it would not boot until falsely marked clean (and a few other hoops,) leaving it with some minor filesystem damage that was reparable. Still, I believe that a proper RAID-like system should have as its maxim that the user is never worse off because they built a RAID than if they had not done so.

Topic: 

The laptop in the tablet world

I have owned a laptop for decades, and I've always gone for the "small and light" laptop class because as a desktop user, my laptop is only for travel, and ease of carrying is thus very important. Of course once I get there I have envied the larger screens and better keyboards and other features of the bigger laptops people carry, but generally been happy with the decision.

Others have gone for "desktop replacement" laptops which are powerful, big and heavy. Those folks don't have a desktop, at most they plug their laptop into an external monitor and other peripherals at home. The laptop is a bitch to carry but of course all files come with it.

Today, the tablet is changing that equation. I now find that when I am going into a situation where I want a minimal device that's easy to carry, the tablet is the answer, and even better the tablet and bluetooth keyboard. I even carry a keyboard that's a fair bit larger than the tablet, but still very light compared to a laptop. When I am in a meeting, or sitting attending an event, I am not going to do the things I need the laptop for. Well, not as much, anyway. On the airplane, the tablet is usually quite satisfactory -- in fact better when in coach, though technically the keyboard is not allowed on a plane. (My tablet can plug in a USB keyboard if needed.)

**If my laptop is now going to be used in a more stationary way, primarily in hotel rooms and remote work situations, perhaps now a larger one with a bigger screen and keyboard makes sense. ** In fact, the name laptop becomes a misnomer. With the tablet your prime choice when in a place with no table, you would almost never put the computer on your lap.

Planes are a particular problem. It's not safe to check LCD screens in your luggage, so any laptop screen has to come aboard with you, and this is a pain if the computer is heavy.

With the tablet dealing with the "I want small and light" situations, what is the right laptop answer?

One obvious solution are the "convertible tablet" computers being offered by various vendors. These are laptops where the screen is a tablet and it can be removed. These tend to be Windows devices, and somewhat expensive, but the approximate direction is correct.

Another option would be to break the laptop up into 3 or more components:

  • The tablet, running your favourite tablet OS
  • A keyboard, of your choice, which can be carried easily with the tablet for typing-based applications. Able to hold the laptop and connect to it in a permitted way on the plane. Touchpad or connection for mouse.
  • A "block," whose form factor is now quite variable, with the other stuff.

Topic: 

We need a security standard for USB and other plug-in devices

Studies have shown that if you leave USB sticks on the ground outside an office building, 60% of them will get picked up and plugged into a computer in the building. If you put the company logo on the sticks, closer to 90% of them will get picked up and plugged in.

Time for the post office to let anybody print postage with no minimums

For some time, the US Postal Service has allowed people to generate barcoded postage. You can do that on the expensive forms of mail such as priority mail and express mail, but if you want to do it on ordinary mail, like 1st class mail or parcel post, you need an account with a postage meter style provider, and these accounts typically include a monthly charge of $10/month or more. For an office, that's no big deal, and cheaper than the postage meters that most offices used to buy -- and the pricing model is based on them to some extent, even though now there is no hardware needed.

Modify E-book reader designs for digital signs

One of the useful attributes of electronic paper (such as E-Ink) is that it doesn't take any power to retain an image, it only takes power to change the image. This is good for long-lasting E-readers, and digital signs are one of the other key applications of electronic paper, though today they are sold with a focus on the retail market.

Topic: 

Car users frustrated with their tech

The latest JD Power survey on car satisfaction has a very new complaint that has now the second most annoying item to new car owners namely problems with the voice recognition system in their hands-free interface. This is not too surprising, since voice recognition, especially in cars, is often dreadful. It also reveals that most new tech has lots of UI problems -- not every product is the iPod, lauded from the start for its UI.

Terminal mode or a standard mounting port for mobile phones in cars?

It's very common to use mobile phones for driving activities today. Many people even put in cell phone holders in their cars when they want to use the phones as navigation systems as well as make calls over a bluetooth. There's even evidence that dashboard mounting reduces the distracted driving phenomenon associated with phones in cars.

Watson, game 2

Not much new to report after the second game of the Watson Jeopardy Challenge. I've added a few updates to yesterday's post on Watson and the result was as expected, though Watson struggled a lot more in this game than in the prior round, deciding not to answer many questions due to low confidence and making a few mistakes. In a few cases it was saved by not buzzing fast enough even though it had over 50% confidence, as it would have answered slightly wrong.

Watson, come here, I want you

The computer scientist world is abuzz with the game show world over the showdown between IBM's "Watson" question-answering system and the best human players to play the game Jeopardy. The first game has been shown, with a crushing victory by Watson (in spite of a tie after the first half of the game.)

Tomorrow's outcome is not in doubt. IBM would not have declared itself ready for the contest without being confident it would win, and they wouldn't be putting all the advertising out about the contest if they had lost. What's interesting is how they did it and what else they will be able to do with it.

Dealing with a general question has long been one of the hard problems in AI research. Watson isn't quite there yet but it's managed a great deal with a combination of algorithmic parsing and understanding combined with machine learning based on prior Jeopardy games. That's a must because Jeopardy "answers" (clues) are often written in obfuscated styles, with puns and many idioms, exactly the sorts of things most natural language systems have had a very hard time with.

Watson's problem is almost all understanding the question. Looking up obscure facts is not nearly so hard if you have a copy of Wikipedia and other databases on hand, particularly one parsed with other state-of-the-art natural language systems, which is what I presume they have. In fact, one would predict that Watson would do the best on the hardest $2,000 questions because these are usually hard because they refer to obscure knowledge, not because it is harder to understand the question. I expect that an evaluation of its results may show that its performance on hard questions is not much worse than on easy ones. (The main thing that would make easy questions easier would be the large number of articles in its database confirming the answer, and presumably boosting its confidence in its answer.) However, my intuition may be wrong here, in that most of Watson's problems came on the high-value questions.

It's confidence is important. If it does not feel confident it doesn't buzz in. And it has a serious advantage at buzzing in, since you can't buzz in right away on this game, and if you're an encyclopedia like the two human champions and Watson, buzzing in is a large part of the game. In fact, a fairer game, which Watson might not do as well at, would involve randomly choosing which of the players who buzz in in the first few tenths of a second gets to answer the question, eliminating any reaction time advantage. Watson gets the questions as text, which is also a bit unfair, unless it is given them one word a time at human reading speed. It could do OCR on the screen but chances are it would read faster than the humans. It's confidence numbers and results are extremely impressive. One reason it doesn't buzz in is that even with 3,000 cores it takes 2-6 seconds to answer a question.

Indeed a totally fair contest would not have buzzing in time competition at all, and just allow all players who buzz in to answer an get or lose points based on their answer. (Answers would need to be in parallel.)

Watson's coders know by now that they probably should have coded it to receive wrong answers from other contestants. In one instance it repeated a wrong answer, and in another case it said "What is Leg?" after Jennings had incorrectly answered "What is missing an arm?" in a question about an Olympic athlete. The host declared that right, but the judges reversed that saying that it would be right if a human who was following up the wrong answer said it, but was a wrong answer without that context. This was edited out. Also edited out were 4 crashes by Watson that made the game take 4 hours instead of 30 minutes.

It did not happen in what aired so far, but in the trials, another error I saw Watson make was declining to answer a request to be more specific on an answer. Watson was programmed to give minimalist answers, which often the host will accept as correct, so why take a risk. If the host doesn't think you said enough he asks for a more specific answer. Watson sometimes said "I can be no more specific." From a pure gameplay standpoint, that's like saying, "I admit I am wrong." For points, one should say the best longer phrase containing the one-word answer, because it just might be right. Though it has a larger chance of looking really stupid -- see below for thoughts on that.

The shows also contain total love-fest pieces about IBM which make me amazed that IBM is not listed as a sponsor for the shows, other than perhaps in the name "The IBM Challenge." I am sure Jeopardy is getting great ratings (just having their two champs back would do that on its own but this will be even more) but I have to wonder if any other money is flowing.

Being an idiot savant

Watson doesn't really understand the Jeopardy clues, at least not as a human does. Like so many AI breakthroughs, this result comes from figuring out another way to attack the problem different from the method humans use. As a result, Watson sometimes puts out answers that are nonsense "idiot" answers from a human perspective. They cut back a lot on this by only having it answer when it has 50% confidence or higher, and in fact for most of its answers it has very impressive confidence numbers. But sometimes it gives such an answer. To the consternation of the Watson team, it did this on the Final Jeopardy clue, where it answered "Toronto" in the category "U.S. Cities."

My phone should know when I start a trip

Every day I get into my car and drive somewhere. My mobile phone has a lot of useful apps for travel, including maps with traffic and a lot more. And I am usually calling them up.

I believe that my phone should notice when I am driving off from somewhere, or about to, and automatically do some things for me. Of course, it could notice this if it ran the GPS all the time, but that's expensive from a power standpoint, so there are other ways to identify this:

Where will 3-D cameras like Kinect lead?

This year, I bought Microsoft Kinect cameras for the nephews and niece. At first they will mostly play energetic X-box games with them but my hope is they will start to play with the things coming from the Kinect hacking community -- the videos of the top hacks are quite interesting. At first, MS wanted to lock down the Kinect and threaten the open source developers who reverse engineered the protocol and released drivers. Now Microsoft has official open drivers.

I'm loving the Shweeb concept

There was a bit of a stir when Google last week announced that one of the winners of their 10^100 contest would be Shweeb, a pedal-powered monorail from New Zealand that has elements of PRT. Google will invest $1M in Shweeb to help them build a small system, and if it makes any money on the investment, that will go into transportation related charities.

While I had a preference that Google fund a virtual world for developing and racing robocars I have come to love a number of elements about Shweeb, though it's not robocars and the PRT community seems to not think it's PRT. I think it is PRT, in that it's personal, public and, according to the company, relatively rapid through the use of offline stations and non-stop point to point trips. PRT is an idea from the sixties that makes sense but has tried for almost 50 years to get transit planners to believe in it and build it. A micro-PRT has opened as a Heathrow parking shuttle, but in general transit administrators simply aren't early adopters. They don't innovate.

What impresses me about Shweeb is its tremendous simplicity. While it's unlikely to replace our cars or transit systems, it is simple enough that it can actually be built. Once built, it can serve as a testbed for many of PRT's concepts, and go through incremental improvements.

Using the phone as its own mouse, and trusting the keyboard

I've written a bunch about my desire to be able to connect an untrusted input device to my computer or phone so that we could get hotels and other locations to offer both connections to the HDTVs in the rooms for monitors and a usable keyboard. This would let one travel with small devices like netbooks, tablet computers and smart phones yet still use them for serious typing and UI work while in the hotel or guest area.

I've proposed that the connection from device to the monitor be wireless. This would make it not very good for full screen video but it would be fine for web surfing, email and the like. This would allow us to use the phone as its own mouse, either by having a deliberate mouse style sensor on the back, or using the camera on the back of the phone as a reader of the surface. (A number of interesting experiments have shown this is quite doable if the camera can focus close and can get an LED to light up the surface.) This provides a mouse which is more inherently trustable, and buttons on the phone (or on its touchscreen) can be the mouse buttons. This doesn't work for tablets and netbooks -- for them you must bring your own mini-mouse or use the device as a touchpad. I am still a fan of the "trackpoint" nubbins and they can also make very small but usable mice.

The keyboard issue is still tough. While it would seem a wired connection is more secure, not all devices will be capable of such a connection, while almost all will do bluetooth. Wired USB connections can pretend to be all sorts of devices, including CD-Roms with autorun CDs in them. However, I propose the creation of a new bluetooth HID profile for untrusted keyboards.

When connecting to an untrusted keyboard, the system would need to identify any privileged or dangerous operations. If such operations (like software downloads, destructive commands etc.) come from the keyboard, the system would insist on confirmation from the main device's touchscreen or keyboard. So while you would be able to type on the keyboard to fill text boxes or write documents and emails, other things would be better done with the mouse or they would require a confirmation on the screen. Turns out this is how many people use computers these days anyway. We command line people would feel a bit burdened but could create shells that are good at spotting commands that might need confirmation.

Topic: 

An open source licence for FOSS platforms only

Here's a suggestion that will surely rankle some in the free software/GPL community, but which might be of good benefit to the overall success of such systems.

What I propose is a GPL-like licence under which source code could be published, but which forbids effectively one thing: Work to make it run on proprietary operating systems, in particular Windows and MacOS.

The goal would be to allow the developers of popular programs for Windows, in particular, to release their code and allow the FOSS community to generate free versions which can run on Linux, *BSD and the like. Such companies would do this after deciding that there isn't enough market on those platforms to justify a commercial venture in the area. Rather than, as Richard Stallman would say, "hoarding" their code, they could release it in this fashion. However, they would not fear they were doing much damage to their market on Windows. They would have to accept that they were disclosing their source code to their competitors and customers, and some companies fear that and will never do this. But some would, and in fact some already have, even without extra licence protection.

An alternate step would be to release it specifically so the community and make sure the program runs under WINE, the Windows API platform for Linux and others. Many windows programs already run under WINE, but almost all of them have little quirks and problems. If the programs are really popular, the WINE team patches WINE to deal with them, but it would be much nicer if the real program just got better behaved. In this case, the licence would have some rather unusual terms, in that people would have to produce versions and EXEs that run only under WINE -- they would not run on native Windows. They could do this by inserting calls to check if they are running on WINE and aborting, or they could do something more complex like make use of some specific APIs added to WINE that are not found in Windows. Of course, coders could readily remove these changes and make binaries that run on Windows natively, but coders can also just pirate the raw Windows binaries -- both would be violations of copyright, and the latter is probably easier to do.

Topic: 

Towards frameless (clockless) video

Recently I wrote about the desire to provide power in every sort of cable in particular the video cable. And while we'll be using the existing video cables (VGA and DVI/HDMI) for some time to come, I think it's time to investigate new thinking in sending video to monitors. The video cable has generally been the highest bandwidth cable going out of a computer though the fairly rare 10 gigabit ethernet is around the speed of HDMI 1.3 and DisplayPort, and 100gb ethernet will be yet faster.

Topic: 
Tags: 

Software recalls and quick fixes to safety-critical computers in robocars

While giving a talk on robocars to a Stanford class on automative innovation on Wednesday, I outlined the growing problem of software recalls and how they might effect cars. If a company discovers a safety problem in a car's software, it may be advised by its lawyers to shut down or cripple the cars by remote command until a fix is available. Sebastian Thrun, who had invited me to address this class, felt this could be dealt with through the ability to remotely patch the software.

Pages