Engine access: Sterndrives, part 2 (Doing It Right)

A while ago, I showcased a few sterndrive installations of varying quality, and pointed out some of the engine access problems that result when these units are shoehorned into too-tight spaces. Here's an example of one that's done relatively well. The boat is a 19-foot Doral runabout, built in Midland, Ontario in 2007.

Cat bridgedecks: Think about the underside

How do you spot an upside-down cat if the boat's white and the wave tops are white?

It's easier than spotting a capsized ballasted monohull, for sure (finding one of those often requires deepwater SONAR). But after hearing about the textbook rescue of a PDQ 32 that flipped near Fort Bragg, California a few days ago, one comment in particular caught my eye:

CAD in the Cloud: How it might work

I'm a bit amazed by the recent hype over cloud computing. Google Docs, Salesforce, Amazon EC3, the list goes on: the tech blogs are falling over themselves to keep up with the latest software-as-a-service and cloud offerings. Listening to Google's PR team, one might think that we're about to give up on stand-alone computers altogether.

Direct-to-torrent TV: Pioneer One's interesting approach

I don't normally follow the entertainment industry, but this thing is spreading like wildfire across the Net and I think it's worthy of mention. The half-hour pilot of Pioneer One was released on Bittorrent less than five days ago, and has already made Slashdot and racked up close to 70,000 HD and 150,000 Xvid downloads so far.

World robotic sailing championship 2010

Take an eclectic fleet of experimental radio-controlled model yachts. Add a mix of engineering and computing students from around the world. Add coffee, shake, and let the engineers work for a year. Then turn the boats loose on the race course- and leave them entirely to their own devices. That is the essence of the World Robotic Sailing Championship.

Matthew's blog