Web Album Generator. I’ve blogged this before but I saw another mention of it – ornj.net - Web Album Generator – I need to try it out this weekend. OK I tried it out. Makes pretty clean pages. But a pain to import photos, and the pages are static so updating will be a pain. Not the right solution.

Microsoft Plus! DME. I bought Microsoft Plus! Digital Media Edition this week and tried it out. It was cheap at Costco, <$10 after rebate. I mostly wanted to play with the Photo Story feature. Photo Story was pretty easy to use, but I am not sure how often I will. You pick a bunch of photos, add a voiceover if you want (I’ve never been able to get microphones to work well with Windows), add a soundtrack if you want, and it all gets jammed together as a WMV file. You can’t go back and change it later – adding or deleting photos, or appending content to it. That is the biggest problem. Nor can you burn to a dvd tho i am sure some third party program would let me burn the resultant WMV to a dvd, but the resolution of the resultant WMV isn’t so great. I can’t see myself using Photo Story that much as a result.

araneae – lightweight html editor. From Lockergnome, I found araneae.com. I often need a really lightweight html editor, this seems like a reasonable one.

WHere is Raed. The popular baghdad blog – Where is Raed ?

Project for the New American Century. Rich pointed me to this – Project for the New American Century. Worth reading.

Calculating Pneumatic Cylinder Velocity. John was nice enough to share with me some practical calculations for determining velocity and size of an air cylinder. This is kind of long but I want to save it here for myself…a wealth of practical knowledge here.

Velocity is dependent on flow.

S = (Q x 144 x 12)/(A x 60), where

S = speed, in/sec Q = flow, cubic ft/min A = piston area in sq inches 144 = 144 sq inches per sq foot 12 = 12 inches per foot 60 = 60 seconds per minute

For example,

* say you have a Parker 1.25DXPSS-8.00, 1 1/4” bore. * Area is 1.2 sq inches. * At 1 cubic foot per min, that cylinder will move at:

(1 x 144 x 12)/(1.2 x 60) = 24 inches per second

* That says your 8” stroke cylinder extends in 1/3 a second. In practice, it will take a little longer depending on the force available to accelerate the load. More on that later.

So, here’s the quick and dirty: size your cylinder to produce twice the force needed to balance the load (20lb load, provide 40lbs force) and unless you have a really big cylinder or your supply lines are very long (over 200’) or very small (less than 1/4”), you’ll be fine.

More gorey details below.

Pressure plays a part in a couple of ways. The first is in overcoming the resistance to flow in your air lines to produce the given flow rate you want. The higher the flow, the greater the pressure drop. So you may have 60psi available at your compressor but at the end of your 100 ft of 1/4” tubing, only 30psi at a flow of 1 cubic foot a minute. (I’m only making these numbers up. I don’t know the actual values for this situation, just trying to illustrate the point. )

The second way pressure plays a part is in providing the force to accelerate the load. Say you have a 20lb load. That cylinder needs 20/1.2 = 17psi just to balance the load. At that pressure, it will not lift it, it will only keep it from dropping. You need more pressure than that to accelerate it upwards. If you had 30psi available at the cylinder, it would produce 30 x 1.2 = 36lbs force. So you’d have 36 - 20 = 16 lbs of force available to accelerate the load.

If either of us remembered our physics, we could calculate the rate of acceleration but we’d have to convert lbs to mass and some other ugly stuff. The easy way to do this is to make sure you can produce double the force needed to balance the load (20lb load, provide enough pressure to produce 40lbs force by the cylinder). And as you can see from the example above, unless you’re talking about a big cylinder being fed by a tiny (or very long) line, the time to extend the cylinder is next to nothing. Most times, you have to put some kind of flow control on the outlet to slow the cylinder down to keep from slamming it too hard.

In my haunt this past year, I had 12 cylinders going. Each about 1 1/4” bore. All were fed from about 150’ of 1/4” tubing. I set my pressure at the compressor regulator to give me 60psi. All my cylinders extended in about a second.

The only time I’ve had trouble is with homemade cylinders. I made some out of PVC a couple of years ago. They leaked so bad, my compressor ran almost non-stop.

muvee. A friend recommended muvee autoProducer - DVD Edition yesterday – looks worth trying.

Haloscan. I dumped this today. Server was down too often and was killing page loads. Sorry for lack of comment support. Send me an email if you want to say something…

Activewords, again. I had an initial problem with ActiveWords but Buzz called me up and twisted my arm to try again. He is a ver persuasive guy so I will try again!

Pneumatic Circuits Texts. After looking at many of these, this seems like the best one – Fluid Power: Theory and Applications (4th Edition). A couple of very good chapters with the basic calculations for sizing components, valves, reservoirs, and compressors. I was surprised at how expensive textbooks had become – back in the day, they cost me $25 new or less used. Now they are $100 new. Wow.

Aircylinders. A good source for my pneumatic needs – aircylinders.netfirms.com

Ohio State beats Wisconsin. Ohio State making a surprising run in the Big10 championship – Go Bucks! – ESPN.com - NCB - Recap - Ohio State at Wisconsin - 20030314

Homeland Security Graphics. Ha ha ha ha ha – Message

Peter Lewis on Convergence. In Fortune.com, Peter states the case that convergence is more of a vendor dream and not really an end user demand, and hence it is not really likely to happen. I’d agree mostly. I actually think we are headed for a world of data/network convergence, but device divergence. It is getting cheaper and cheaper to make all kinds of devices, thanks to contract manufacture, contract design, better supply chain management, build to order, etc. So I think we’ll see more kinds of devices, not fewer. But the devices that win will be the ones that support standard protocols and data formats out the back side, so that my data can be used anywhere, is portable to my next device, is viewable from other devices, etc.

Office Beta comments. I haven’t tried the Office beta yet but some have – Sean took the Red Pill and nothing happened : Sam Gentile’s Blog