[20-10-2006] A little something for you all to play with on a cold winter's night while sitting round a roaring Sony battery fire...
You can't buy this yet, but Prof Alan Epstein at MIT has come up with a way of powering laptops using a miniature butane burning jet engine. His team are currently involved in building a prototype by bonding a bunch of shaped silicon wafers together. I think the team should talk to Sony and Dell, who are the leading industry experts at powering laptops with flames! "Dell, this is Houston - we have lift off!"
http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2006/10/08/tiny_jet_engine.html
Something you can buy now, though, is a wallet specially designed for geeks (especially aging ones). It's a US style three panel wallet designed to look like the old two tone dot matrix printer paper - it even has the sprocket holes. And the killer is that printed on the outside is the first 3,000 digits of pi - cool, very cool - and at only $25, you will even have some money left to put in it!
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/10/10/dynomighty_dot-matrix_wallet/
Now here's a toy for real geeks, even if it's not on sale anywhere! The UK's Highways Agency has deployed a very big magnet with which it 'sweeps' the hard shoulders of our motorways for metallic refuse. The magnet is bolted on to the front of a road sweeper and so far has scoured no less that 32,000 km of motorway in the south of England. While doing so it has collected more than three tons of scrap including nails, wrenches, wheel nuts, and money. I think they should put one in the next instalment of Grand Theft Auto!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/19/street_cleaning_magnet/
And for those into steampunk - here's a working steampunk laptop. Typewriter keyboard, wooden spacebar, morse key, the works. There's a picture and more details at the URL.
http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2006/10/13/handmade_steamp.html
http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2006/10/08/tiny_jet_engine.html
Something you can buy now, though, is a wallet specially designed for geeks (especially aging ones). It's a US style three panel wallet designed to look like the old two tone dot matrix printer paper - it even has the sprocket holes. And the killer is that printed on the outside is the first 3,000 digits of pi - cool, very cool - and at only $25, you will even have some money left to put in it!
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/10/10/dynomighty_dot-matrix_wallet/
Now here's a toy for real geeks, even if it's not on sale anywhere! The UK's Highways Agency has deployed a very big magnet with which it 'sweeps' the hard shoulders of our motorways for metallic refuse. The magnet is bolted on to the front of a road sweeper and so far has scoured no less that 32,000 km of motorway in the south of England. While doing so it has collected more than three tons of scrap including nails, wrenches, wheel nuts, and money. I think they should put one in the next instalment of Grand Theft Auto!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/19/street_cleaning_magnet/
And for those into steampunk - here's a working steampunk laptop. Typewriter keyboard, wooden spacebar, morse key, the works. There's a picture and more details at the URL.
http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2006/10/13/handmade_steamp.html