California RoHS law

OK, so you might think you are not selling your products in Europe and you don't have to worry about RoHS. Nah!
Beginning in January 1, 2007, a California law will ban the sale of some electronic devices if they are prohibited from sale in the EU because they contain certain toxic metals.
At present CA’s RoHS law will be similar to EU RoHS Directive, but narrower in the scope of affected products and the number of restricted metals.
Here are some highlights of the CA's RoHS law:

• It applies only to so called “covered electronic devices,” which are defined as video displays with >4" screen (such as CRTs, CRT and LCD TVs, computer monitors, laptop displays, plasma televisions).
• It does recognize all exemptions adopted by the EU.
• It restricts only four out of six substances (Lead, Mercury, Cadmium, and Hexavalent chromium) and does not restrict the use of PBBs and PBDEs. However, the use of flame retardants such as PBDEs is already banned under California Health and Safety Code since June 1, 2006.

Complete info is available at California Department of Toxic Substances Control. Also, you may want to get RoHS, WEEE and China RoHS manual as well as China RoHS EFUP guidelines translation.

Enhanced web searches for generators and power supplies

No matter how good Google search algorithm is, a purely mechanical algorithm can't always determine which sites are really useful and which are not. In addition, no search algorithm can know exactly what kind of info you are looking for. We all know that general purpose search engines bring up a lot of junk.
To address these issues Google recently launched Custom Search Engine (CSE) program which enables you to enhance your search by using human expertise and by specifying what type of info you are looking for. Particularly, my content is intented to improve your search experience in topics related to electrical generators and power electronics/SMPS.

EXAMPLES. Say, you want to choose a home generator and looking for something to start with. If you select my Guides/Reviews category, on the first search results page among other buyer's guides you will find a link to a very handy Consumer Reports' rating of generators. Otherwise, with a regular Google search this link is not among the top search results.
Alternatively, if you are looking for physical principles of electric generators you may want to eliminate commercial and advertising sites which represent more then half of the top results in "electric generator" query. Even if you try a more specific query like "how electric generator works", many relevant pages are still not at the top. Why? Because a search engine goes mainly by keywords you entered- obviously it does not know how generators work. Many web pages that describe in depth generator theory just do not use all these terms and won't show up in your top results. They do use more important terms though- you can't really describe generator's operation without using such words as Faraday, induction or magnet. That's why these terms are added to my "Generators/Physical principles" label. If you select this label, they will be automatically added in background to your query as additional search terms. This will make your refined search results more relevant and will weed out unrelated pages. In addition to this, web pages that I've personally reviewed and found useful for this topic will increase in importance within your refined search results and will be marked accordingly while spam sites and sites with unrelated or useless content will be pushed down in your custom search results.

You can do your search from my respective search engine page http://www.smps.us/smps-search.html or http://www.generators.smps.us/generators-search.html.

I encourage you to give it a try and see the difference for yourself. Note, this is a work in progress. I keep testing different keywords and algorithms to provide you with the most relevant search results. All comments are welcomed. To subscribe [by using any email address] click on this button:
Last revised on 2013.

Internet plagiarism

If you publish a website you may want to know if someone copied its content without your permission and is taking your work as their own. There is a nice free online tool that can help you combat Internet plagiarism: www.copyscape.com. You can enter your URL in their search box and they'll list sites that have sentences and phrases identical to yours. You'll even see the duplicated text highlighted.

When I run their search for my site among the results was a British company named Powerstax. Their Power Glossary page contained a number of definitions (such as Isolating power supply, Linear power supply, Off-line power supply, SMPS) from my copyrighted page http://www.smps.us/smps-glossary.html.

I sent a complaint to their webmaster and to other individuals whose email addresses were listed, but no one responded.

Note that definition of power electronics term on my page generally differ from those you may find elsewhere. I put up this web page because I felt the definitions given in textbooks and other sites are often inaccurate or even misleading. For example, the term Isolation is often defined as absence of current path between two circuits. In reality, it is only absence of DC current pass- as we know many isolated circuits still allow some capacitive AC current.

I was curious if the rest of the terms on Powerstax glossary page are unique. So, I run Copyscape search for their page. Guess what- the search returned glossaries of several other power supply sites. Of course, when it comes to these sites I can't know for sure who copied whom. I do know this when it comes to my site though.