For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been unable to post to GraniteGeek. My newest laptop, running Vista Ultimate has had a few glitches, but nothing I could point to and pin on the operating system.
Just as an experiment, I hooked up the old laptop running XP and sure enough, I can log on [...]

Keene was the first city in New Hampshire, and one of the first that I know of anywhere, to seriously add biodiesel to its fleet. It started back in 2004, when a lot of public works officials feared that non-petroleum-based fuel wouldn’t do well in cold weather, or would mess up engines. The [...]

The Saint Elias Mountains from the window of aTwin Otter aircraft en route to an ice core drill site in May 2002. Photo by Cameron Wake, UNH.
Cameron Wake of UNH has pulled up ice cores in Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, China, Pakistan, the Canadian Arctic, Greenland, and Antarctica - now he’s going to a relatively tame spot, [...]

The Union-Leader has a story about BAE Systems in the Nashua area getting part of the Micro Autonomous Systems (small independent robot) contract from the Army. The idea - as explained publicly, anyway, you never can tell with defense contracts - is that they will be "spybots", giving soldiers the ability to find out what’s [...]

As I noted in an earlier post, I (and staff writer Joe Cote) had a set of stories in the Sunday Telegraph about alternative electricity production in New Hampshire, or lack thereof. Here’s the relevant chunk of information:Electricity production capacity in New Hampshire in 2007, in megawatts, by fuel source:Nuclear…………….1,222Natural Gas……..1,146Coal……………………565Oil……………………….481Hydro………………….462Other…………………..100 (Includes alternative energy sources)
(This [...]

The Globe’s Hiawatha Bray (best byline in the business) has a story about Tele Atlas, a Dutch mapping firm with U.S. headquarters in, of all places, our Lebanon. The company collects on-street geographic data for GPS and other systems, and has a corporate goal of "mapping every address on Earth".
Cool stuff. But what’s it doing [...]

Thanks to Slashdot, I found this great speech by a guy named Clay Shirky that could have been just the standard "Internet good, TV bad" talk, but which handles the issue in a well-done, interesting way.
His most intriguing move is to estimate that wikipedia has absorbed 100 million hours of human-thought, which he [...]

The Globe has a great little piece today about how start-ups die with no notice. It detailed a store that planned to bring together all cell phones and cell-phone plans so people could compare them - which sounds great to me, but which fizzled.
From the story: "No one issued a press release, and the company’s [...]

So you might have written a paper and filed it ina new folder; the first version you wrote resided in its original folder. Youreturn later to polish the file, but you’re confused as to the differencesbetween the file versions? What’s changed? What hasn’t?

ExamDiff has your answer. It’s a tool for visualfile comparison (text files [...]

I’m writing a story for the Sunday Telegraph about alternative energy that has turned out to be pretty pessimistic - once you calculate how much solar/wind power actually exists in NH (virtually none), then the chirpy stories about a local guy putting up a few photovoltaic cells aren’t so compelling.
The excellent CNet Green Tech blog [...]

The online forum Testy Copy Editors features, not surprisingly, copy editors who are testy (as in "grumpy", not as in "about to sit through their SATs"). The discussions mostly consist of complaints that newspapering is going to hell in a handbasket, but sometimes they hit on about specific questions.
Those questions tend to be [...]

As is the case with the online world, some of the more interesting and difficult issues in biotech come not from the technology, but from its intersection with mores and laws. An example is whether firms and insurance companies can take your genetic details into account when making decisions about you (specifically, whether they can [...]

By "in depth" I mean "only two three data points" … but that’s pretty detailed for the Web, isn’t it? My conclusion from this not-exactly-ready-for-publication study is that increasing your speed from 60 to 70 mph reduces your gas milesage a whopping 14 percent! Slower really is better.
A portion of my commute is on the [...]

Remember the dismay over "colony collapse syndrome" - the apparent problem in which huge numbers of bee colonies were dying or disappearing for no obvious reason? Now it has hit Britain, too, but they have a much better term for it, reports the BBC:Mary Celeste Syndrome. (Thanks to the Knight Science Journalism Tracker for spotting [...]

The Washington Post says that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, at a U.S. Senate hearing that touched on Net neutrality, "said in his testimony that it appeared Comcast had singled out contentfor delay over its network, even when the network may not have beencongested with overuse. He also said he doubted the company’sstatements that it would [...]