I’ve researched how to improve fuel efficiency for some years now. I haven’t had a vehicle of my own until just a few weeks ago, which made me look into this subject one more time and I found a couple of new mods that I had not seen before. They are the discoveries of Somender Singh and Ron Hatton (a.k.a. Gadgetman).

Somender’s groove goes in the cylinder’s head and helps reach the gas in the squish zone, while Ron’s groove goes in the fuel/air delivery system and helps better vaporize and mix the gas in the combustion chamber. The way they work is different from each other, but I find it interesting that they both require just grooves to be created in the metal, which is why I’m posting about them together.

Somender Singh

http://somender-singh.com/

Somender’s observation was that in the squish zone of the combustion chamber, meant to squish the gasses into the center, there was an incomplete combustion. He also concluded that it added resistance to the piston. His solution was to add one or more grooves that would help channel the gas from this zone towards the sparkplug on compression, and then allow the combustion to reach that zone. The results from making this simple modification are very impressive from photographic documentation.

He isn’t charging for this, he’s open-sourced it and the groove isn’t tricky to make at all, the instructions are simple and watching/reading the stuff below should allow you to understand well enough the technique.

http://somender-singh.com/content/view/7/31/

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Singh_Combustion_Chamber_Turbulence

http://www.google.com/patents?id=HscHAAAAEBAJ

Ron Hatton

http://www.gadgetmangroove.com/

Ron, on the other hand, tried to improve the mix of the air with the gas, and added his groove to the fuel/air delivery system. This is the part that lets more or less air into the engine carrying fuel with it, it’s what you control with your gas pedal, which should probably be named air pedal. He explains that these grooves create a toroidal (donut shaped) flow and improves the amplitude of the air pressure. This more compressed air/fuel mixture, when entering the combustion chamber through the intake, expands abruptly improving the volatilization of the fuel. Gas doesn’t burn well as a liquid, even as a small dropplets, compared to it in a gaseous state, which is when it’s mixable with the oxygen gas to combust. Also, fuel vapor is several times less dense than liquid fuel, which means you require less gasoline. All this contributes to the fuel efficiency.

This groove is more tricky, though. The shape has to be right to cause these effects and getting it so takes a bit more knowledge about it. Ron has a certification program to train those who want to learn it, which you can read more about in his website. You can have your car modified by him or someone in his network if you don’t learn it yourself.

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Gadgetman_Groove

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=opTnAAAAEBAJ

In conclusion

Both modifications require the timing of the engine to be adjusted for the improved conditions. Both help keep the temperature down as well, oil lasts longer. Both improve combustion meaning there’ll be less wasted fuel in the exhaust, dirtying the engine and polluting the environment, and wasting your money.

In essense you use less gas, get more power, engine will last longer: pretty efficient if you ask me.

I’m planning to add both to my engine and will report back. I haven’t seen anybody mention using both together yet, so I’ll add them separately to see what difference each makes. I’m hoping to see great results with both.

I’m from Argentina, meat is really good there, we brag about it and export it. I’ve eaten meat almost daily all my life. Becoming a vegetarian is hard, meat is tempting.

The last half of my life I’ve lived in Mexico and, in my opinion, meat here sucks. But in all the years I’ve lived here, that hasn’t stopped me from eating it plenty, that’s how I was brought up. So how does someone like me become a vegetarian? Well, it took some learning to realize why I should and accept that it may not be a good thing to eat meat.

The first thing that made me consider it seriously was not a dietary reason, but a moral one. Watching the Earthlings documentary, one of the scenes even made me cry, but that didn’t stop me fully,  after a short while I was back to meat, even if in lesser amounts or frequency.

Other documentaries, like Food Inc., left a clear understanding that the way meat is produced now, it’s not fit to eat. “Raising them naturally, with respect and a healthy lifestyle would be the solution”, I thought and kept eating meat.

Then Ana bought Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days that talked about a raw diet and we watched it. It was extremely interesting to me because of what I learnt about the nutritional levels of organic raw food. The health aspect to this raw diet interested me. The documentary was showing the progress of a group of insulin dependent diabetics who -most of them- got so healthy that they didn’t need the shots any more.

Although they said it didn’t include meat, I was planning to include raw meat (e.g. tartar, sashimi) in my raw diet if I ever did it.

Then I watched another documentary on raw dieting called Supercharge Me! Then I also searched the web for raw diets and recipes and found plenty of stuff to work with. Still, I had not taken the decision and upgraded it to action. See? It sounded nice and refreshing, but somehow I thought that lack of meat would result in a protein deficiency.

And then I watched a couple of documentaries by the same person, Dying to Have Known and The Beautiful Truth, which talked about Dr. Max Gerson. I was very interested now because of the health statements. It was talking about dozens of people recovering from all sorts of diseases, including cancer, using Dr. Gerson’s approach. And he was seeing results with this about a century ago!

So I searched some more and found The Gerson Therapy, a recording of Dr. Gerson’s daughter, Charlotte, where she explains the details of it so well that it cleared up a lot of questions I had. She focuses on cancer treatment, as does her father’s book, so the diet is a bit stricter, but the things she covered regarding nutrition are useful to anyone.

The approach has two main areas: deficiency and toxicity. But I’m talking about meat vs. vegetables, how does toxicity relate to that? Well, for starters, meat is pretty toxic, including the one left stuck in your digestive tract rotting. Vegetables and fruits can be toxic if grown with chemicals, but organic, grown without poison and with good rich soil, would be fine.

She makes a good point, at least I considered it so, and that is that our bodies didn’t evolve from carnivores. So I find it reasonable to assume that meat is not the best diet for a body that wasn’t developed for it. I had recently already experienced feeling better with less meat and more fruits in my diet.

We consume lots of nutritional supplements at home to stay healthy, because “food is not enough”, but this may be different. What if food actually nurtured us and supplementation was not nearly as needed? Miss Gerson explained how much protein there is in vegetables, as well as minerals and enzymes, and how you actually get plenty following Dr. Gerson’s advice.

He uses juicing techniques as a way to allow getting the equivalent of lots more food nutrition per day, the juice carrying most of the nutrients, which would not be possible eaten because of the volume added by the fiber. These are in addition to what one eats, so they work as a DIY nutritional supplement.

Now I’ll have to find organic produce and buy it in big amounts, but not spending in meat would save a lot of money too. Eventually I’ll grow my own, I know plenty on the subject to grow good plants with plenty of nutrients.

Such a diet makes a lot of sense not just from a biochemistry perspective, but also from a biophysics one, which I studied some time ago. Improving all those systems in the body with the proper diet, will have a dramatic impact in the overall well-being of the organism.

So I’m pretty sold on the concept now. Will I not ever eat meat again? I doubt it. I do think, though, that after a while without it, detoxifying the body and getting good nutrition from vegetables and fruits, it’s unlikely I’ll really feel like eating meat.

I hate to waste water, my wife does too. She grew up in a town where water was really scarce during the dry season. Every drop counted.

Today the town has most of the water it needs, but waste is not good in any way. And every drop still counts, here and anywhere on the planet.

One way to save water is water reuse.

Grey water is waste water that doesn’t come from the toilet. It can be water from the shower, bath tub, dishwashing or laundry.

This can be used to flush the toilet. If the soap or detergent used is biodegradable, which it should be anyway to not contaminate, it can also be used to water the plants and lawn.

Grey water systems are usually a bit sophisticated because they may have some filtration and traps, and tubing and drip irrigation systems installed, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Some toilet makers have models where the cistern’s cover is a washing basin, so you wash your hands with the water that fills de cistern after you flush, and that grey water will be used in the next flush. There are kits to convert a normal toilet to this system, too.

A big source of grey water, and wasted water if not used, is the laundry machine. And it can really be a lot of water, even if you have a very efficient model. Well, I had an idea to stop wasting it and it didn’t require a big expense in tubing and plumbing or other devices.

I had a big plastic waste bin in a corner, which we weren’t using anymore, and put it to good use in this project. I placed it next to the laundry machine and stuck the draining hose into it. That’s it!

Now, after its wash or rinse cycles, the bin fills up with the water and we use small buckets to empty it, watering the plants around the house. We can also leave the water in the bin and use it to flush the toilet if we want to.

This same thing could be done with dish washing machines too. This is not complicated stuff at all.

We don’t feel so guilty about doing laundry now.

I’ve been thinking how one could create a simple blog, yet pretty complete, without using any open-source script.

The most complex and sensitive part seems to be the users management and commenting, but if they are limited to the comments section, that is now easily solved using a free service one just adds to the page, e.g. Disqus.

One could even do without a database and use just files to store the content for each page. That means one would do the updates with a text editor and FTP client.

The posts would include all the data unique to that post, while a template file would include the unchanging elements in all pages.

Sorting the blog posts would be done using the file names. Using a format that includes the date it is meant to be posted, one could back-date or schedule a post easily. URLs can be made nicer using .htaccess rules.

Although categorization and tagging are harder and less efficient to achieve without a database, a single file could be used to list the tags and categories with their posts in arrays, I guess.

A database may not be much more trouble, though. Same with a simple form to create and edit the posts.

Searching can be done using Google’s site search.

For files use Amazon S3, or Flickr and YouTube for added social exposure and potential word-of-mouth. No need for fancy file managers in the blog script.

I’d need to create a script that generates the feeds.

Pinging can be done by hand with a free service like Ping-o-matic, but it’d be better to figure out how to automate it.

What am I missing?

It sounds like an interesting project. I may attempt it…

I’ve been online for a few years, as have many of you, but haven’t really kept a blog ever, until recently.

Most of what I wrote is in forums I was a part of. Some posts were only valuable there, but others were good even outside of them.

The fact that some of those places have gone offline, or may go offline, worries me. I wouldn’t like to lose those writings.

So I decided to start going back to them and see what I can rescue as a post here, where they’ll be under my control.

I’ll post them here with their original dates. Because of that, they won’t be obvious at the top of the homepage, but they’ll be there in the archives.

Eventually, I’ll organize them with tags and they should be easy to find.

Have you ever done something like this?

Here’s an idea I’ve had for a while, but haven’t talked about much with anyone, although some time ago I wrote about how the oil spill could be cleaned leaving no chemical residues behind and actually enriching the soil. Now I’d like to talk about cleaning up plastic waste as well as other petrochemicals.

The approach mentioned for the spill could be used to clean up rivers where factories dump their stuff, and this could be aided introducing plants and clams that’d help the process too. Lands contaminated by machinery with stuff like fuels or oils, could be cleaned up with the mushroom as well.

Mr. Paul Stamets participated in a test to clean a land contaminated with fuels and oils and in this video he briefly explains what happened:

Now, how to apply that to plastics is what seems to be the problem. I don’t know if mushroom would grow on plastic, that’s doubtful, so it would need to be turned into something else to facilitate it, and I found a good simple way.

It involves heating the plastic to melt and boil it without burning it, apparently. I’ve seen other machines to process tyres and plastics in such a way before using pyrolysis, but were way bigger, the machine in the above video is more portable.

He’s obviously making it simpler to operate and usable inside closed spaces, but the technology is as old as coal making from wood, so you don’t need computers to control it, especially if you don’t care to get very refined results as he is. It’s basically a pressure cooker with a bubbler. Implementing this techonology doesn’t have to be expensive or difficult. Plastics don’t even need to be pre-sorted.

All I’ve seen so far had the intention of making more fuel off the waste, not food. You’ll notice when he sets the oil on fire to prove it is oil, how dirty it burns. It doesn’t solve contamination, it’s just in another form. We need to work with nature.

Oyster mushroom in compost

I haven’t seen someone make the connection between this technology and composting the product with mushrooms yet. It is very likely that the mushrooms can take care of the solids resulting from this process too, so the oil and solids could be mixed before inoculation.

This is a solution that could help clean up water and land. Landfills could be turned from a waste heap into several feet of rich top soil. The plastic trash in the oceans could be collected into large ships with this technology on board, processing the waste as it sails, going back to land only to empty its bowels to enrich the soil in the coasts.

We can clean up all this mess in a short time with some good willing people and organizations.

You know, I’ve always disliked this kind of software or sevice. Never trusted it.

One time I decided I’d try an app to do it, installed it, got a few accounts in there. It crapped out on me a couple of days later and the logins were lost into bit barf.

Never used another password manager again after that.

I’ve been writing down my logins in paper, and had that in a safe place since. Is it the safest way? No, but it’s worked for me the past several years. I always find them back when I’ve needed them so far.

Not long ago, after I started some internet projects that required tons of new accounts in several services spread across the web, it started being a pain and I thought I’d give password managers a new look.

Well, there was Roboform which was quite recommended, but it cost money and I wasn’t really interested. It’s been my experience that I should search for a while before a purchase, so I kept looking for options.

And I found a pretty good one. Yeah, I know you figured out which one… LastPass.

They named it like that cause it’s supposed to be the last password you’ll need to remember, the one to the account you have with them.

Well, I still remember many, many of the other ones I use, but I haven’t had to remember them if I didn’t want to, cause LastPass has been pretty good at what it was supposed to do.

My concern has still been to have something crappy happen like before, where I end up losing what I had saved. Well, I didn’t stop writing down the passwords in my usual place, but LastPass has saved me plenty of time every time I need to login, let me tell you.

Is my info secure with them? Well, I read a lot about that and I got quite confident that it will be, and it has been. I haven’t heard about bad experiences so far. From what I read, the info is encrypted in a way they themselves can’t read it, only you after you login can get it unscrambled.

I decided to believe them and I’ve been happy so far and thought I’d share this too.

Oh, and it’s free, too, unless you go advanced with features I don’t remember. Free has plenty, does all I need and a bit more. You can read more about the service in their website, go inform yourself well before you make this decision, like I did.

I’m just sharing that I’ve had a good experience so far hoping you’d find it valuable and make your work a bit easier.

I just read my friend Gary lost a 400 word write-up he copied, but forgot to paste, so I thought I’d share something I do to add an extra layer of security when I write long things that I wouldn’t want to lose by mistake, power outage, etc.

I simply open up my Gmail account, hit the “Compose Mail” link and start typing in the email body box. I use this even if what I’m writing is not an email, but a post or article that’ll go somewhere else. I’m actually writing this post in a Gmail draft.

I use Gmail because it has this nice auto-save feature that will keep a copy of my work in the Drafts folder for me.

I also have the habit of hitting Ctrl+S to save often, which works in Gmail too, but I have this habit from before with any editor software I use.

I don’t use Google Docs much, so I’m not sure if text documents have the same autosave feature there, but it’s most likely. So this tip is probably not very useful for Docs users.