Powder News: Check this Out!
Now that I have your attention 
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Here's a quick, concise, light-hearted version of the standard powder blog. Bare with me as the remainder of the blog contains some important updates to LOS at HUG.
R3: Continuing Loading and Pressure Anomaly Verification
5 weeks of careful consideration and various tests leave us no other choice than to suggest the mysterious pressure drops in R3 are a real physical effect. This comes with mixed emotions.
Hooray:
-We can validly support that some odd phenomenon resulted in rapid adsorption/loss of gaseous hydrogen. THAT is exciting.
-The final remaining test in that validation somehow encouraged loading in R3.
Boo:
-We were unable to re-stimulate the effect (which does open up much potential for discussion and consideration).
2 Hooray > 1 Boo, right?
But what could possibly have happened in the cell to cause such rapid hydrogen adsorption? What are your thoughts?
Additionally the P_Resistance continues to decline, the likes of which have yet to be seen in R4. Could piezoacoustic stimulation in R3 slowly shake out a path of lowest resistance?
R4: Loading? Yes. Hydride formation? Probably.
R4 has shown sufficient pressure decline in little time to suggest a healthy diet of hydrogen loading. However we await a definitive decline in powder impedance to match it, the electronic confirmation that adsorption is really happening. We're going to let this reactor go until the pressure decline levels off or until it loads below atmospheric pressure. Either are likely scenarios, and we've seen the latter case before.
R7: Up and Coming
We've recently purchased a textbook discussing metal-hydrogen interactions which will undoubtedly tailor the test we perform on R7. However as awesome as that is, we still have to wait for it to arrive! At this current time, R7 is vacuumed just above the mark. We'll try to tighten all the seals on the cell before moving to bakeout and addressing the protocol.
Lastly: HUG Experiment logs transitioning into new Evernote System
The HUG LENR team recharged our collective batteries with a refreshing visit to colleagues at Coolescence in Boulder, CO. The effective exchange of ideas and strategies was beneficial on several fronts, and we certainly learned a lot. More on that trip later with Ryan's official blog.
Of the many tangible ideas we walked away with, the most pertinent of these was the Coolescence team's use of Evernote as their virtual lab book. An online, shareable, freeware program that manages metadata and mimics a real notebook? What a concept! We have spent the last several days fashioning this idea to aid our LOS efforts, and it looks very promising.
The transition is already begun, and as per usual we're using powder experiments as the guinea pig. At this point we're unsure if we'll phase entirely into the new system - it mostly depends on audience reception. We want this tool to make our scientific notation and communication more effective to more people. What are your thoughts on this system?
Be sure to check out the format and the note entry entitled, "20130916 - How to: Evernote Log Book system and LOS," for the discussion starter on this proposed change. Additionally, today's experiment log entry, 20130917, contains the technical details omitted from this blog to demonstrate a proposition to present the information in 2 versions: jargon intensive (logbook) and jargon reduced (blog).
I tried to cut the science speak from this blog as a working demonstration - not easy to do! However notice there are no numbers, units, figures in this blog. The first attempt is a little hairy, but presents interesting opportunities for growth. Again, what do you think of this? Comments or concerns?
Using this format should not require you download Evernote, though the free version of the software may be advantageous in some instances. Try it out by checking the link to the HUG Powder Experiments Log: https://www.evernote.com/pub/webaish/powderexperimentslog#b=c15875cc-73a0-4ec0-972e-6fa168609a7f&st=p&n=e79eddc6-ded0-4cbd-ba17-4aea35c31ba7
We want to make an RSS feed that highlights the updates to the logbook, but we need help doing this. We've tried https://zapier.com with marginal success. Under status quo, the RSS feed only sends 'reminders' that we updated the logbook (once/day), and not actual content within the update. See for yourself by subscribing your RSS feed to https://zapier.com/engine/rss/112530/HUGpowderexplog/. Not very impressive. Does anyone have a suggestion for a useful RSS conversion? More ideally: can anyone write code to do it for us?
Comments
We would like Evernote to replace the google doc experiment log. That way the log is enriched with some pictures, graphs and analysis. Our blog entries on the quantumheat site can be made in greater efficiency because the information on experiments is already collected in single coherent place.
Our process currently is a bit sporadic. We find pictures and graphs while making the blog entry and do a quick analysis of the data. This makes our blog the only copy of this information which isn't the easiest to reference down the road.
We also have a periodic write up of the data for a phase or two of the experiment. This could be written easily if we had a experiment notebook or log with crucial information for a few weeks or month ago.
It would not replace the blog post by any means. But we are warming up to the process of making it our experiment notebook/log.
It's (allegedly) a note-taking software focused on syncronization between different devices, sharing and collaborative editing, without the clutter/distrac tion of the Web (which in a corporate/busin ess environment can be a desirable thing) but as far as I understand you want to use it as a blogging tool aimed at the general public.
I'm not sure this would work for the intended audience. Accessibility is also a bit of a pain in my opinion.
Just my 2c.
Nevernote/Nixnote works well enough to view and sync notes from Evernote. Also, Evernote can be accessed in your browser without a system application.
So far we like Evernote as a lab notebook. There is one big difference between the free and premium account as far as we can see. Shared notes and notebooks can be edited on both sides of the share with the premium account. There is also a little more storage available for a premium account. To view these notebooks, the free account is well equipped.
As for Nevernote, I did read about that, it seems it lacks several features the official program has, in addition of having an unpolished interface.
A strong yes from Ed. I have a coffee maker. It drips hot water through coffee powder. When it is near done I tap on the top. This causes a near immediate fast flow of coffee out of the powder that had been near zero flow. It is a bit of a stretch for the analogy but yes moving powder grains around with sound could cause them to form better electrical path ways. The catch phrase you may want to study is percolation. A big deal in oil field extraction.
Web services (either free or "freemium") offering RSS feeds for websites that don't, are for the most part mediocre, from what I've seen so far. They usually have limitations of all sorts, like for example limiting the amount of updates per day (which means one can't receive updates in real time, as the logs gets modified), on the amount of content per feed, or putting a limit on the number of feeds a user can receive. I tried several for the EU cells experiment log which has a broken Google RSS feed, and I've not been happy at all with them.
The one I'm using currently is page2rss.com/
This is the link for the EU cells experiment log: page2rss.com/.../...
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