Net Work
Alan Winstanley
This month’s Net Work brings readers a round-up of trends emerging in the Internet and further
afield in the fast-changing world of technology..
W
ay back in Net Work
October 2018, I described
how in 2004 a CNBC news
anchor interviewed an earnest young
fellow called Mark Zuckerberg. He’d
started a small social media site for
US universities called ‘The Facebook,’
which he thought might attract a few
hundred users but, by then, the head
count had jumped to 100,000. The site
was originally dedicated to students
eager to share their profiles and contact
details, which allowed visitors to find
‘interesting information about people,’
as he put it. The cringe-inducing
CNBC interview is still online at:
https://youtu.be/cUNX3azkZyk
One in three
Facebook now has some 2.6bn users
around the world, according to Statista. It’s most popular in India (349m)
followed by the US (194m) – as of the
start of 2021. Viet Nam has nearly twice
as many users (74m) as the UK. While
Facebook has plenty of detractors, often
centred on matters of privacy or monetisation, there is no doubt that the
social media giant has become an integral part of many an Internet user’s
online experience. Facebook is here
to stay, and provided you tread carefully, it’s not all bad: there are plenty
of topical Facebook groups covering, say, fascinating local history and
countless hobbies or specialties such
as restoring vintage radios, collecting
old bottles or seashells (or even old
mains plugs!), or making contact with
long-lost friends or colleagues through
A young Mark Zuckerberg explains the idea
behind his new media site, ‘The Facebook’
(Image: YouTube / CNBC 2004)
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arcane groups like the
(chosen at random) RHP
Bearings (Ferrybridge)
Appreciation Society.
As the new year gets
under way and some
of us reflect on years
gone by, searching for
old mates or workplaces on Facebook can
become an immersive
and evocative experience, often turning up
photographs of old acquaintances, offices,
factories, old company
trucks, military aircraft,
commercial vehicles or It’s worth running a ‘privacy check-up’ in Facebook to confirm
your preferences. Access it via your account.
pictures of distant locations. Suddenly, a Facebook feed comes goods, furniture and so on too, noting
alive with group members reminiscing some groups are ‘public’ rather than
about friendships or swapping photos, being for members only. These groups
scanned from decades-old collections often avoid the drudgery of selling on
of slides and prints stored in old bis- eBay, and are arguably a safer bet than
buying or selling more widely on the
cuit tins for moments like now.
Much has been written about the pros dedicated Facebook Marketplace. (One
and cons of Facebook and there are in six Brits surveyed by ThinkMoney
had been scammed in Facebook Marplenty more resources online – when
there’s a problem it’s often quickest to ketplace, says ThinkMoney at: https://
Google for the answer. There will un- bit.ly/pe-mar22-tm)
As regular users know, Facebook uses
doubtedly be a community Facebook
an awful lot of powerful analytics and
group covering your locality or interests
– simply search for some keywords or artificial intelligence when displaying
names on the Facebook homepage. In contents or showering us with adverts.
fact, thanks to the use of geoIP, which It’s also a bit clever at suggesting other
tries to triangulate your physical location groups that might be of interest: the
(give or take a little), soon advertise- creepy feeling of being ‘monitored’
ments and news from local media or this way doesn’t seem to bother regsuppliers will pop up in your Facebook ular users though. Facebook says it
feed. Many small businesses don’t even employs both AI and human moderahave a website and rely on having a tors to screen out nefarious material as
best it can – let’s not get into politics or
Facebook presence instead.
elections – but it pays to be discerning
Facing up to Facebook
and vigilant. (Always ask yourself if
Facebook has tried to make it easier for suggestions are really in your interest,
users to understand all the privacy impli- or just to promote the sender.) It’s also
cations. Before joining a Facebook group, worth checking your privacy settings;
determine whether it’s a public or a pri- in your Profile, click the down-arrow
vate one and whether it’s hidden from ‘Account’ button (menu ribbon, top
public view – look at the group’s ‘About’ right) to access them, and run a ‘Privasummary. In public groups it may pay to cy check-up’ to confirm your current
be more measured with one’s postings,
status. A useful ‘View As’ button lets
especially if they risk coming back to you see your own Profile as the rest of
haunt you years later. There are often the world (ie, those who are not your
some local ‘selling groups’ for trading ‘Friends’) would see it.
Practical Electronics | March | 2022
All of this takes enormous networking and data processing power, and
for any readers who might be interested, I wrote about the construction of
Facebook’s first European data centre
in Luleå, Sweden in Net Work, May
2016. It explained how an ‘ideal’ data
centre would have an effective ‘Power
Usage Effectiveness’ (PUE) of 1.0 (see:
https://bit.ly/pe-mar22-pue). Facebook
has 3.4 million square metres of data
centres around the world and is very
proud of their ‘green’ credentials. A third
data centre was due to come online in
Sweden during 2021, and Facebook
states that its global operations have now
achieved ‘net zero’ using 100% renewable power, which is no mean feat. You
can read more about Facebook’s data
centres at: https://datacenters.fb.com
Living in the metavirtual world
As many readers will know, Facebook
underwent a major change of identity
during the latter part of 2021 when it
rebranded itself as ‘Meta’. Facebook
is now a ‘Meta company’, Facebook’s
Portal LCD screens are now co-branded as ‘Meta’s Portal family’, Meta built
its first European data centre in Luleå,
and so on. The group has been busily
erasing its old name from swathes of
its websites and swapping out logos.
In his video keynotes published late
last year, Mark Zuckerberg, now 37, has
some clear visions of where he thinks
the connected world is heading next.
He expects we will be hanging out in
a virtual space dubbed the ‘embodied
Internet’. We’re told that ‘Meta’s focus
will be to bring the ‘metaverse’ to life
and help people connect, find communities and grow businesses.’ It seems
we’re nearly done with communicating
using tiny screens on mobiles or staring
at little faces on flat-panel Zoom or Team
meetings all day long. He foresees the
‘metaverse’ as a virtual 3D world, one
where its participants will live out new
experiences in a virtually created space.
The future ‘metaverse’ will embrace
VR to connect everyone together. There
is even the suggestion that users will be
able to ‘teleport as holograms’. Images of
Cortana, the holographic character in the
XBox Halo video games, spring to mind
(https://bit.ly/pe-mar22-halo). Microsoft
adopted Cortana’s name
for its own virtual helper,
to rival Google Assistant
and Apple’s Siri. The
‘metaverse’ will also
appeal to educationalists, social networkers,
gamers or families chatting via video feeds, and
no doubt some sectors of Mark Zuckerberg – actually, his avatar – meets and greets
business and commerce others in a metaverse get-together.
will embrace the metaverse
Sony’s mobility aid
concept wholeheartedly in years to
come. There are even trends emerging The move towards adopting electric veof ‘buying virtual space’ in a metaverse: hicles grinds on, as does the rumour mill:
for example, the website https://decen- the industry’s worst-kept secret is that
traland.org is a virtual world owned by Apple, the world’s first $3tn company,
its users, where you can buy and sell is working towards building its first EV
pretty much any virtual property includ- (‘Project Titan’), but nowhere will any
ing ‘land’. It’s predicted that business official confirmation be found. That is
and commerce will be queuing up to sometimes a sign that Apple is indeed
set up shop in these virtual worlds. As up to something and intends to surprise
a sign of where things are heading, take us all. Trials and test reports of self-driva look and have fun building your own ing cars, based on a Lexus SUV, have
been attributed to Apple in recent years.
guest avatar at Decentraland.
Will the EV bubble ever burst? WorldMeta is investing billions of dollars
creating a metaverse and of course it wide, electric car and truck projects are
already has history in the form of the now too numerous to mention, although
Oculus virtual visor, marketed by Meta in January 2022’s Consumer Electronics
Quest (www.oculus.com). The Oculus Show (CES) in Las Vegas, one consumer
Research labs explore VR, AR and AI, ‘gadget’ on show was an electric vehicle
and are tasked with looking ahead five prototype from none other than Sony.
to ten years. Both Sony and Apple are The Vision S-02 concept car is Sony’s
developing latest-generation VR head- second iteration of an electric vehicle,
sets too. Some of the ideas are plainly this time having an SUV form factor.
fanciful at this stage, and although some Sony’s first car, the Vision S-01 saloon
of the basic technologies already exist, revealed in 2020 is undergoing tests in
the metaverse itself is still some way off, Europe; car enthusiasts see this as a preZuckerberg admits. As if Covid lock- cursor to production, but the car appears
downs, working from home and webcam to be Sony’s testbed for utilising mobile
exchanges aren’t enough, the metaverse 5G to upload vehicle telemetry to the
will leave us with even fewer reasons cloud. Since April last year, Sony has
to interact physically with one other, go been working with Vodafone Germany
to school or college or even turn up for to test 5G communications with their
work at the office. You can learn more car, and Sony’s EV reportedly managed
about Meta’s visions, if you can spare to drive by itself, switching seamlessly
an hour, by watching the Welcome PR between 5G antennae. Using its smartphone experience, Sony also aims to
video at: https://bit.ly/pe-mar22-fb
Microsoft is also entering the metaverse use 5G to update the car’s software and
fray. The purveyor of Windows, Teams interact with other 5G services.
Sony is, however, establishing a new
and Office software is bringing holograms to Teams virtual conferencing, division – Sony Mobility – to explore the
where users can express themselves by viability of small-scale EV production,
building their own avatar. Watch out this perhaps with Tesla’s market in mind,
year for Microsoft Mesh, which utilises and a YouTube video showcases the first
Hololens VR headsets to enable users Sony car at: https://youtu.be/P0cQQvvM5Qk. Meantime, the company says
anywhere in the world to collaborate.
(Left) Sony’s Vision
S-02 concept EV (left)
is a testbed for sensors,
5G and telemetry; it may
see limited production
in the future. Pictured
with the earlier S-01
saloon. (Right) Sony has
been testing 5G mobile
systems with Vodafone in
Germany since last year.
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Russia’s 21,000 tonne Akademik Lomonosov is a floating nuclear power plant supplying electricity to the Arctic city of Pevek. (Image: Rosatom)
it is ‘currently conducting functional
verification tests in Europe toward the
release of Level 2+ advanced driver
assistance systems (ADAS) on public
roads.’ Modern cars, whether electric or
fossil-fuelled, increasingly have driver
aids such as GPS, road sign recognition,
collision avoidance or radar blind spot
assistance, so maybe the next generation of aids is waiting in the wings. In
Europe (and likely heading our way),
new cars are mandated from mid-2022
to be fitted with Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA), a GPS and traffic-sign
speed limiting feature intended to force
cars to slow down, as discussed in previous Net Work columns.
Next, electric trucks
There is of course relentless pressure
on battery design and production as the
car and truck market gradually migrates
from petrol and diesel in the coming
decades. Electric semi-articulated lorries
(or ‘semis’ in the US) are in the pipeline, although Tesla has postponed its
plans for a semi until sometime later
this year, citing battery and component shortages. At CES 2022, American
truck maker Kenworth exhibited their
new electric semi (see: https://bit.ly/
pe-mar22-ken) which has an estimated
range of [up to] 150 miles: a diesel lorry
fitted with dual tanks can have a range
of easily ten times that figure. Another design problem the freight industry
faces is the need to lug a constant dead
weight of rechargeable batteries around,
which could make a lorry’s operating
costs unviable. Although planes and
(petrol/diesel) road vehicles gradually get lighter as they consume fuel,
electric vehicles carry the same dead
weight all the time. (Incidentally, similar
trade-offs affect our electricity supply
lines: it’s cheaper to string catenaries
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of air-cooled aluminium wires between
pylons, but sometimes there’s no choice
but to bury thick cables underground,
which is costlier. Utility companies try
to optimise the mix to minimise costs,
but recent power outages due to bad
weather are likely to see costly cables
buried underground anyway.)
The search continues to raise rechargeable battery density and reduce the
weight and volume, as well as eliminating the end-user’s real worries (‘anxiety’)
about range and charger availability.
Another factor is the time needed for
recharging an EV. Israeli manufacturer
StoreDot claims to have achieved a major
milestone of producing silicon-dominant
Extreme Fast Charge (XFC) battery cells
that charge in ten minutes and maintain
at least 80% of energy storage capacity
after 850 consecutive cycles. The firm
aims in early 2022 to accomplish 1,000
consecutive XFC cycles, StoreDot says,
and their new chemistry has produced a
Li-ion battery that can be fully charged
in just five minutes. More details are at:
www.store-dot.com
Is there enough capacity?
The problem of generating enough electricity to power a new breed of electric
vehicles, when there is barely enough
capacity in the network or a sufficient
number of EV charging points, has
been well aired in Net Work and in the
short-to-medium term these problems
show no sign of abating. The issues
affecting Russian gas supplies in an increasingly volatile Eastern Europe have
yet to be played out, and it seems certain
that small modular (nuclear) reactors
(SMRs) will play a key role in providing electricity in the future. The jury is
out, in mainland Europe anyway, as to
whether SMRs can rightly be classed as
‘green’ energy.
NuScale sets its sights on Europe
Last month, I mentioned that the US
multinational NuScale had ambitions
to deliver its own ‘VOYGR’ scalable
77MW SMRs into Eastern Europe. In
Ukraine last September, the US Trade
and Development Agency deftly granted funds to Ukraine’s Science and
Technology Centre to see whether NuScale’s SMRs would be a good ‘fit’ in
that country, and if regulations got in
the way, how they could be ‘changed’,
says NuScale. Last December, NuScale
signed another Memorandum of Understanding with Kazakhstan Nuclear
Power Plants in central Asia to adopt
VOYGR reactors. NuScale has been
buoyed by the early interest and is
planning to go public and form NuScale Power Corporation, with 60% of
operations still controlled by the engineers and project managers of the
Fluor construction company.
Although NuScale’s design received
approval in the US last July, its aim
to deliver its first working SMR is
at least half a decade away, in 2027.
The UK’s Rolls-Royce SMR is not far
behind the curve, with plans for its
own SMR having been submitted for
approval to the regulatory authorities. China also has great ambitions
to dominate the global SMR market
in years to come, and a fully operational SMR recently went on stream
in China and is said to be generating
electricity into the locality. According
to the IAEA website, the Shidao Bay-1
200MW reactor has been ten years
in the making and made its first grid
connection on 20 December – more
details at: https://bit.ly/pe-mar22-shi
China, along with other countries, is
also exploring the viability of nuclear
reactors that use thorium (instead of
uranium) dissolved in liquid fluoride
Practical Electronics | March | 2022
salts which can also act as a coolant,
instead of using water. The idea originated in the US in the 1940s, but
American trials in the 1960s revealed
potential problems with corrosion and
poor efficiency, according to Live Science. China’s water-free, molten-salt
reactor would be a world first in a
country where supplies of thorium are
plentiful, and the fact that no cooling
water is needed would make the plant
ideal for siting in the Gobi Desert, for
example. It is understood that China
completed a small 2MW pilot project
last year, but it will be another eight
years or so before a commercial version is ready: China then expects to
export the reactor globally.
Floating power plant
I sometimes wonder why, following
a natural disaster such as a hurricane
or tsunami, a nuclear-powered ship
or submarine couldn’t simply rock up
offshore and supply its own power to
the stricken shoreline. No doubt there’s
more to it than hooking up the vessel’s batteries using some hefty jump
leads, though...
In 2019, Russia launched the world’s
first purpose-built floating nuclear
power plant (FNPP). The 21,000-tonne
vessel Akademik Lomonosov uses two
35MW reactors and is the first in an
expected series of low-power transportable power plants. Russia has applied
its experience of building nuclear-powered icebreakers to produce a floating
power station that can power remote
regions, places where the overland
delivery of electricity or the use of renewable energy (wind, solar) would
be impossible.
After setting sail from Murmansk,
the Akademik Lomonosov is now serving Pevek, Russia’s northernmost city
where it is permanently moored to a
dedicated pier after replacing an old
coal-fired power station. The vessel’s
nuclear power plant has a lifespan of
about 40 years, and special dams were
built to safeguard against icebergs or
collisions with the shoreline. Russia’s
Rosatom agency adds that the ruggedised vessel operates in inherently
safer maritime conditions than any
nuclear-powered icebreaker would.
The fascinating story of the Akademik Lomonosov can be found online
at: www.fnpp.info
A hybrid tools heads-up
Last month, I showcased one or two
tools from the Ryobi 18V OnePlus range
of tools, including a soldering iron, that
share a common 18V Ni-MH battery.
The American market is much larger
than the European one for Ryobi and
an interested user mentioned Ryobi’s
‘hybrid’ soldering station, the Ryobi
P3100 that appears on some websites.
Then one or two other ‘hybrid’ tools
came to light, including a work light
and a portable fan. The idea is that
these hybrid tools work on either 18V
batteries or the mains, which would be
an ideal solution for, say, a multi-purpose soldering station that could be
used on the bench or in the field. But
before you take the plunge, readers,
beware: these tools are for 110V mains
only and even though they appear on
European and UK websites (including
Amazon UK) at silly prices, there is no
sign of any 230V version. In fact, the
mains voltage rating isn’t mentioned
anywhere, not even on any product
web page. Whether Ryobi would introduce a 230V hybrid for Europe is
therefore doubtful, as they seem to
take it for granted that customers use
the 110V mains.
I noticed another twist on the Ryobi
OnePlus range, namely using an 18V
battery to charge a smaller ‘slave’ power
tool. The Ryobi Mini hot melt glue gun
RGLM18-0 (or P306) has a base station
that cradles on an 18V battery and takes
Ryobi’s ‘hybrid’ 18V OnePlus tools such as
this P3100 soldering station can also run
from the mains. Beware, though, they are
110V AC only.
about four minutes to heat up, making
it quite slow to get going. The glue gun
uses 7mm hot-melt sticks and its compact design is intended for hobbyists
and crafters. Only by searching YouTube did I find how it really works – the
tool has no battery but builds up sufficient heat to melt a whole glue stick
(see: https://youtu.be/X0Nd-va_lwg) in
between charging.
Meanwhile Dremel, the hobby power
tool company owned by Bosch, recently
introduced what it says is the world’s
first ‘smart’ brushless rotary tool, the
model 8260. It has a 12V Li-ion battery and Dremel claims a 20% power
improvement over its most powerful
mains-corded tool (the 4300). It can connect by Bluetooth to the Dremel app to
easily control, monitor and manage the
rotary tool, receiving ‘tool management
and performance alerts’ on a smartphone
or tablet along with accessory and material guidance, which anyone who has
grappled with Dremel’s accessory codes
might appreciate. A YouTube promo
video at: https://youtu.be/HbO-nVvvYeA
drove me to distraction, unfortunately. It
lists at US$169.99 but has yet to arrive
in the UK or EU.
The author can be reached at:
alan<at>epemag.net
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Practical Electronics | March | 2022
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