Ohm Sport XS750 Electric Bike Test Ride

Back in November I had the opportunity to try a Ohm Sport XS750 electric bicycle for a day, so I though I'd post a review about it. The day long test ride was graciously offered to me by The New Wheel, a cool electric bike retailer in North Beach. So on a sunny Sunday morning, I embarked upon a 30 mile long ride around San Francisco.

Ah, crap! We're running out of Neodymium, too...

We already knew that we were running out of oil, and in recent years experts have started to worry that we are running out of Uranium to power the world's Nuclear power plants. But now, new reports show that we are also running out of Neodymium and Dysprosium, two rare metals used in the manufacturing of the powerful permanent magnets found in electric car engines and wind turbines.

HTC Thunderbolt gets 26 Mbits/second!

Yep, 26 Mbits/s. That's the amazing download speed I was able to get on my friend's HTC Thunderbolt running on Verizon's 4G LTE network. We were at Rosamunde in San Francisco's Mission district, with four out of four bars of signal strength. The upload speed was 5 Mbits/s.

The RoboEarth Project and The Rise Of The Machines

The field of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence seems to have been making significant progress these last couple of years. A few months ago, IBM's Watson supercomputer was able to beat the two best human players at Jeopardy. It is capable of understanding questions formulated in normal English language on a variety of fields like science, history or popular culture, and come up with an answer in less than a second.

Giant 'straddling bus' rides above traffic

The Chinese are building a giant tramway that rides on stilts high enough so that it can ride over cars on busy streets, avoiding traffic jams. Cars will also be able to drive under them so as not to be stuck behind them when they are stopped at a bus stop.

This is the car we will all be driving in 2020

       

Forget about the fancy $30,000+ gas-guzzlers showcased at the Detroit Auto Show, the Indian made Tata Nano is the kind of car we will be driving 10 years from now. It weighs only 1,300 lb, has a 624cc, 35hp gas engine, it does 62mpg and it costs only $2,200. That's one-tenth the price of a baseline Toyota Prius.

When gas will cost $10 a gallon and with ever dwindling resources and incomes, i believe this will be the only kind of car that will make sense - or the only one that we'll be able to afford.

Sprint finally turns on 4G in San Francisco

At last, I can use the ridiculously superior speeds of the 4G network on my HTC EVO! Sprint turned on the service in San Francisco on December 28th, but for some reason it took a few days before was actually able to connect. I did some tests and was able to consistently get from 8 to 11 Mb/s download speeds in the Mission (Valencia/Mission streets, from 18th to 25th streets).

That's outside in the streets, tho. Inside buildings, the signal strength is very weak and i am lucky if i get 3 Mb/s, when i get a connection at all. So indoors, it usually falls back on 3G. WiMax technology, sprint's choice for its 4G network, is notorious for having poor indoor coverage. Also the coverage map shows quite a few blind spots in the City.

There are technological solutions out there to address these issues, but they are expensive for operators. Lets hope Sprint will be willing to foot the bill and improve coverage in the future.

Sprint 4G Coverage in SF

So now, i actually have a faster internet connection on my phone than on my DSL at home... Isn't that great? ;)