Category: Technology

Now You’re Cooking With … USB?

Cooking with USB power Remembering that your typical USB port delivers 2.5 W doing anything other than lighting up a novelty hub or a clever little tree is about all you can do. Not quite. A clever fellow in Japan set out to prove this wrong. By using six five port USB expansion cards he has upped the thermal output from a wimpy 2.5 W to a respectable 75W! Oh yes, you can see where this is going. This looks like this is his second attempt at computer assisted gastronomy, he tried to cook an egg before. This time he succeeded in frying some beef rib meat (Sukiyaki anyone?) Good thing he has improved his design so we can all follow in his footsteps and … er, well we can imagine that we will follow in his footsteps, and be cooking a tasty dinner while leveling up in WoW.

動く！改造アホ一台
(Japanese version translated by the never sleeping giants at Google)

Bankquest: Fight your way to riches


This is a clever way to get kids in the habit of saving their money. It’s a traditional piggybank with a twist, the more you save the more gold your little character in the RPG game on the front gets to spend. Think of Tamagotchi that eats quarters. You can save around 50,000 yen (about $500US) so it’s a pretty good deal for a kid. Heck, good for an adult too because the interest rates in Japan are .5 %.

[via Boing Boing Gadgets]
Bankquest – Akihabara News

The Repeater

Fish
Ah, the amazing power of biological evolution. How this simplicity escapes some people I don’t know.

Here’s an evolutionist’s dream: 10,000 planet Earths, starting from the same point at the same time, and left to their own devices for four and a half billion years. What would happen? Could you go on safari from one planet to the next seeing an endless procession of wildly different organisms? Or would many of the planets be home to life forms that are broadly similar?

The Repeater – The Wild Side – Olivia Judson – Evolution – Opinion – New York Times Blog

BattleBots on ESPN in ’08?

Looks like the sound of gnashing gears and grinding steel may once again grace the television sets of America. Noted sports cable network ESPN has been talking to BattleBots about a possible hook up later this summer. I for one am looking forward to it, nothing quite like seeing two hundred plus pound remote controlled cars beating the crud out of each other. Ah, technology…

(page might be down, last I looked the server’s log files are filling up its hard drive!)
Welcome to BattleBots.com : News and Press

Solar-thermal plant In Arizona

I’ll be the first one to say it, someone is going to complain about the reflection of the collectors. I would assume that things like this are taken into account but you can never tell in this litigious world.

Abengoa Solar Inc., a Spanish technology company that has several smaller solar-thermal projects in Spain, North Africa and the United States, will build and run the Solana Generating Station. Solana will use 2,700 "troughs" of mirrors lined up across former alfalfa farmland, focusing sunlight on tubes in the middle of the troughs. The tubes will be filled with a petroleum-based chemical that will heat up to 735 degrees, and transfer their heat to water, making steam and spinning turbines in two 140-megawatt generators. The petroleum liquid is reused in the tubes, not burned. The plant also will use molten salt to store heat and continue generating electricity for as long as six hours after the sun sets. That’s key in Arizona, where residents use the most electricity between 5 and 6 p.m., when the sun is low in the sky and common solar panels struggle to generate electricity.

[via lonelocust]
$1 billion solar-thermal plant near Gila Bend to supply APS customers 

New Holographic Display Technology

Advances in display technology are simply amazing. I hope to see holographic display units so common place that they are used in cheap kids toys like and LCD would be used today.

The new material is comprised of photorefractive polymers. These chemicals have photoelectric properties that make them well-suited to storing the optical interference patterns used to produce holograms. When a photorefractive polymer is exposed to a pattern of bright and dark areas, electrons are released from the areas exposed to high-intensity light and migrate to areas that are darker. Once in place, the electron-rich areas diffract light differently from the electron-poor ones, allowing the original interference pattern to be reproduced when the material is exposed to light

Holodeck 0.1: the durable, rewritable holographic display