Using "inkjet" printers to "print" computer circuits.

http://www.rdmag.com/news/2013/02/physicists-show-
organic-semiconductors-withstand-sharp-bends

I love seeing articles like this.

You won't believe the 'hate' I got for including a few scenes in my books about printing circuit boards and processors with semi-conducting inks in inkjet printers. I was laughed at and ridiculed, some can still be found in the bad reviews on B&N and Amazon.

But, in 2013, it's starting to become reality.

If you stop and think about it, this is really a 3D printer for circuits, and I love the possibilities this opens up when you combine it with the world 3D printers open up for amateur inventors and home users (something I also took a lot of hate mail for). Since most things mechanical have at least some electronics imbedded, it only makes sense these two inventions will inevitably be brought together at the home user level.

Need a new tablet, but it doesn't need to be as smart or powerful as an iPad?

Just print one out. The processors in the iPad and a typical laptop are tiny and as fast and nimble as a racecar. But if all you're going to do with it is check your email, read some books, play words with friends and suduko then you really only need something with the power and smarts of a scooter, well within range of these inky things.

The printed circuits will be 'bigger', as governed by their droplet size, but bigger has advantages too. Bigger is often cheaper, and it's always easier to make gallons of 'ink' than billions of clean-room silicon chips. And the use of these new inks will let designers optimize the electronics for specialized applications, like those from above.

I believe it'll start a new way of thinking, away from smaller and smaller and into form following function. The processor inside an iPad just has to be smaller than the iPad, it doesn't need to fit on a postage stamp like it does now. It can take up the entire back of the screen if it needs too, or be part of the plastic case. And these inks, inherently, will be layered atop one another into thicker and thicker sheets. Eventually, you'll have inks that make up the screen (already do with Einks on Kindles and Nooks) and the batteries (again, already here), these transistors, diodes, and capacitors are the last few ingredients in the soup.

I see a day when, instead of printing books out with your printer, you print out Ebook readers, preloaded with a library already in them, or the latest iPhone design is just downloaded from the iStore and printed out on your home 3D printer with electronic inks, no trips into town required.

I'm just glad to be around to watch it slowly happen, with a constant trickle of articles like these.

Mom just ditched Verizon's $45/month landline...

Mom just ditched Verizon's $45/month landline... for Walmart's $15/month StraightTalk "home phone"... that uses Verizon's cellphone towers to make all its calls. Her reason, "Verizon charges too much" I love irony :)

We'll see how this works out, but with unlimited talk @ $15/m it'll have to be horrible for her to send it back.

Best way to spend a weekend ...

Best way to spend a weekend .... tea with my 2 favorite strippers... Cinnamon and Ginger :)

The NRA is so MAD...

The NRA is so MAD... they'd rather see your kids die than let common sense legislation repeal the 2nd amendment.

Did that get your attention?

Good. It isn't far off the thinking in some circles. But what a lot of us common sense gun owners are really saying is why don't we just copy the highly successful Air Marshal program and adapt it for use in schools?

The air marshal program, as you know, puts an under cover, but armed, person on every flight, or random flights (nobody really knows for sure, they're under cover!). This way the bad guys are forced to assume that all hijackers will have at least one armed marshal to overcome. That ain't easy math, as the last few years have proved.

We can use this program for schools too. But, ironically, it can cost NOTHING, AND be 100% gun free!

Again, go back to the air marshal example. The marshal doesn't need to be visible. He doesn't need to advertise. He doesn't even need to be on the plane for the passengers to reap the benefits of the program.

The same holds true for schools. You don't have to arm teachers or janitors, you just have to SAY YOU DO, and as long as the next Prozac-snorting teen-age psycho THINKS at least a few teachers and staff are ARMED, then the rampage will happen someplace else (most likely on-line in a video game, where when people shoot back it isn't so fatal).

Unfortunately, it's easy to tell when a cop is stationed at a school and when he isn't, as VA tech proves. All the shooter had to do was wait quietly until the uniform cops in their obvious cars were gone. He didn't have to fear the students, teachers, janitors, or anyone without a badge and lights on the roof.

The power of the air marshals isn't in the guns that they pack. It's in the doubt it places in the criminal mind. Who's armed? Who isn't? spotting a cop in uniform is too easy and won't save any children from harm. But not knowing which teacher is packing will. And the beauty of it all is that NONE of the teachers has to actually be armed.

You could protect a school by just putting up a dozen certificates of completion for firearms training on the bulletin board. . . names left out, for obvious reasons, of course

Google stole half my phone!

I love my Google phone.

It's saved me over $200 this last year and a half, my internet connection through is better than dialup, and it's packed with features that I'm now addicted to.

That said, I'm gonna gripe about it now too.

I use an LG Optima S(Sprint) with a 4 gig SD card and iWirelessHome.com for my provider. You would think that 4-gigs would be plenty of space to load a ton of apps. You would be wrong. I've got only a handful of apps loaded and it stays bogged down with only 10% of free (on the phone) space since I got it.

Most apps seem to demand that they stay on the phone and can't be moved to the SD card, which kinda makes having an SD card pointless. To add insult to injury the most demanding of these Phone-Only apps come from Google itself. It's YouTube app eats 4 phone megs. But it's chump change compared to the Google's Store. That started out as 400k when you uninstall it back down to factory settings, but as soon as you want to download an app, all of a sudden thrifty little Google store turns into Google play and eats 15megs, right off the top, and refuses to move to the SD card. But even that is small potatoes compared to Google maps that goes from 4megs at factory to 26megs after it updates to the latest version.

Google is the biggest memory hog in my Google phone, and you would think they would be much better about it. They now how precious and limited phone ram is, and they Hog the Hell out of it!

I rolled back all my Google builtin apps and my phone still works just fine, the maps get me where I need to go, my factory YouTube works just fine, and now I've got 70 extra megs freed up for other fun apps.

But it's a shame to have to do that. It's a shame that Google maps and Google play don't play well with the SD card. It's a shame that Google doesn't see this as a horrible problem that is literally sucking all the fun and productivity out of an otherwise fantastic product.

It's a shame Google keeps getting in Google's own way.

Hunger games

Ok, so, I'm a writer. An author, if you will. Last year, the IRS qualified it as "Hobby income", this year it will qualify as a job, but just barely. I have been cranking out about a novel a year since 2001 and I have 7 novels that I've called my hummingbird series.

Most authors read, and by read I mean they read a lot. It's common for authors to read dozens of books a year, if for nothing more than to "keep up" with the trends. A large number of those books are assigned to them to be read by their publishers so that one in-house author can make an 'honest' recommendation/review of another in-house author's book. It's a kind of 'I'll wash your back if you wash mine' thing, and is pretty much mandatory at most traditional publishers.

As an Indie, I've never been asked to do such a thing, and I never will. Even so, I don't read other people's books.

I haven't read a novel in a decade or more, probably closer to two decades.
Sure, I read the paper, keep up on some science mags and such, but I haven't read fiction since highschool.

I'm dyslexic, and that single flaw slows me down a lot. I read to myself slower than others can read something aloud. But that's not really what holds me back. I have to proofread a novel, mine, somewhere between four and a dozen times in a year. That's my dozen novels worth of reading in a year, and it wears me out.

As I crawled out from under my decade-old rock and slough off my mold and moss, I get a few books for my birthday a few weeks ago, Suzanne Collins's "The Hunger Games".

Yeah, after a decade of editing my own books, I couldn't help but nitpick at sentence structure, typos, flashback placement and such, but lets put that aside. Lets put it all aside because no book is perfect and, with absolute honesty, nobody really cares about these tiny blemishes except the snooty, want-to-be elitist class that just point them out to feel superior. The most popular tweets and blogs are full of far worse offenses, and nobody cares. Nor should they.

I took a week out of writing to read all three, cover to cover. For me, we're talking 8-16 hours a day, every day, for over seven days.

I liked them, enjoyed them really, and just couldn't put them down no matter how many nitpicky 'flaws' my editor's I's saw. I now see why so many of my few, but growing, fans say my series reminds them of hers. They're not the only ones to see it now.

But that isn't the point of this. Again, I don't do reviews.

I noticed something change in myself that I didn't anticipate. Sure, the series is moving, but I'm not talking about that. There is a reason to read other people's books that I never noticed before. No, it isn't to give glowing recommendations to other authors that work at your publishing house, an often mandatory form of free advertising. No, it isn't even for the entertainment value, of which in this case was very high.

It forced my mind back into that of the reader like nothing else has. I couldn't help but drop the author/editor side of my mind and become the reader of my teenage years. That's kind of priceless.

My entire series had been written on the assumption that nobody would really read it anyway. I was writing them for myself and for the characters that lived in them, but nobody else. The reader never entered my mind.

I assumed I'd be a failure, like most authors are, then I'd swallow my pride, say "at least I tried" and throw myself back into some other occupation, preferably one that paid more than $40 a month.

As a reader, I noticed she's very visually descriptive, where I rarely am. I tend to have a rigid rule of thumb that the description should take as long to read aloud as it takes the character to look at it. A glance should be a few words. A study might take a page or two. Probably I should do more of that, even though I tended to skim the fashion and food parts of her story, other's probably didn't. I forgot that others can skim parts they care nothing about too. . . that other readers might need more, or even want more. In other words, I probably write too selfishly for my own good.

There's a lot I learned while taking this week off from writing and dedicating it to reading.

It was more than just an enjoyable series, I think it may have changed my perspective in a way that a decade of writing never could.

And the perfectly swirled icing on this Peeta cake was I got to devour a delicious story in the process.

What does "bomb shelter" mean? Pends on who you ask

What does "bomb shelter" mean? Pends on who you ask