A year ago I wrote about a New Hampshire company that is selling wood pellets online, because it snagged $4 million from a venture capital firm that usually did sexier stuff - here’s the June ‘08 column. As CNet’s Green Tech blog reports, the company (now called WoodPellets.com) has gotten another $11 million in funding. [...]

The McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center takes an important step away from being just the McAuliffe Planetarium on Friday, when it opens its observatory telescope - whose images get displayed on a 58-inch plasma TV screen.
The dome houses two telescopes for viewing day and nighttime skies. The primary telescope, a Celestron 14” Schmidt-Cassegrain, uses a [...]

If you’re interested in big, deep energy questions, you might want to make the trek to Plymouth on Tuesday morning. Plymouth State is hosting a free talk by Amory Lovins, co-founder of the think-thank Rocky Mountain Institute and a prominent energy advocate - he supports the “soft energy path,” which emphasizes efficiency and renewables slowly [...]

Slashdot pointed me to this IT World story about mysterious laptops being sent to the offices of at least 10 governors, including that of Vermont, for reasons which remain unclear - the FBI is investigating. The assumption is that the machines contain some sort of malware that would sneak into the state-government network when they [...]

If I may veer into self-indulgent blog-navel-gazing for a moment, comment spam is a pain in the patoot but it’s kind of interesting to watch it change over time. The tedious robo-blast of 5000 hotlinks per spam seems to have disappeared, but the semi-intelligent comments have replaced them - with sentences that look on casual [...]

The Nanoscale Science and Engineering Research Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing (CHN), an academic/industry collaborative involving UNH, UMass-Lowell and Northeastern University in Boston, has gotten a $12.25 million renewal grant from the National Science Foundation to continue its research into translating nanoscale scientific processes into commercially viable technologies.
From the press release: [...]

In Vermont, the activist Public Interest Research Group says renewables are cheaper than nuclear power by up to half - the state utility says that’s “very, very difficult to believe.” (Burlington Free-Press story here.)The PIRG report claims that “Vermont’s energy portfolio in 2032 could be made up of 30 percent hydro, 28 percent wind, 16 [...]

How many current, and geeky, residents of New Hampshire are the topic of a wikipedia article?
I don’t mean politicians or sports folks or artists or other types of famous people. So forget Gov. Lynch and Dan “Da Vinci Code” Brown and P.J. O’Rourke - I want geeks!

I can think of three off the top of my head: Dean Kamen (whose wikipedia article is currently tagged with a notice warning that it may contain “original research”); Jon “maddog” Hall of Linux fame, who lives in Amherst; and Ralph Baer of Manchester, who built the first home video game. Maybe Craig Benson would count; he was a politican, but you can’t create Cabletron Systems without being a bit of a geek.

It’s fun to ridicule software when it goes wonky, so click through and enjoy this post from a Boston blog called One Smoot Short of Abridge, which has a screenshot of the MBTA online “trip planner” showing that a trip from Roxbury Crossing to Kenmore Square - which are, oh, maybe a half mile apart [...]

Alternative energy has been a godsend for casual tech watchers, the dot-com boom of our time: A big, broad field that produces tons of interesting-sounding ideas and companies to admire or scoff at. Most will fail, of course, and the fun part is guessing which.
Here’s a new entry: The Globe has a story today about [...]

Tux Turkel, a Portland Press-Herald reporter who often writes about energy, has a fine story in that paper today about the political and economic problems that crop up when trying to move energy (in the form of electricity, natural gas or petroleum) from one place to another - an issue that will greatly complicate attempts [...]

Lost hikers do, indeed, wander in circles, say German scientists, as reported in the New York Times. There’s a reason that the the Appalachian Mountain Club includes compass or GPS” on its list of basic equipment to take into the woods; if the sun is behind clouds, your instinct will probably mislead you.

My daughter and her husband now live in Algeria. When she recommended Skype, the on-line telephone communications service, I was a little skeptical. But, I was willing to try it out even though I thought it might be just a poorly rendered gimmick. All I needed in addition to the laptop computer was an all-in-one [...]

As an amateur machinist, I’ve collected “stuff” over the years that might come in handy one of these days real soon. One of those was a can of Dykem Blue Layout Dye. I picked this up probably 30+ years ago and use it perhaps once a year.
Recently I picked it up and felt the [...]

Tidal power seems obvious - there’s a ton of energy moving in and our along the coast every day, waiting to be tapped - but it is proving to be tough to actually create, thanks to the difficulty of keeping moving parts going while battered by corrosive seawater and environmental concerns about putting big machinery in such valuable ecosystems. Vague proposals in Portsmouth have been canned; while a test of tubular turbines (illustration above from Ocean Renewable Power) in northern Maine, where the Bay of Fundy tides can be astonishing, have produced less power than hoped.