The Coaster Toaster

CD Killer

Looks like this will do a pretty good job of dealing with a few CDs that you don’t want to ‘fall into enemy’ hands. I have about 150 that I need to destroy, my first thought was a microwave oven with an auto feed attachment to just make it a ‘load and go’ way of dealing with them. Another thought was to glue a stack of them together and then chuck it on a lathe and turn it into something useful. Good concept except that I’ll be gluing the base of one to the thin top cover of the next, I doubt that it would be all that strong. Plus flowing the glue would be a pain.

CDR’s are great things, but what to do about old backups? You can’t just throw them away, lest someone fishes one out of the trash. Breaking them isn’t very satisfying, and they jam paper shredders. Sticking one in the microwave oven is good fun, but the fumes are probably toxic and I don’t have a microwave. I do have this broken 52x CDROM drive though.

The Coaster Toaster

Micro-Compact Homes

mini house

I saw this on both ‘We Make Money Not Art’ and BoingBoing today,

… inspired by the highly designed compact spaces in first-class airplane cabins and Smart cars.
The tiny cube provides a double bed on an upper level and working table and dining space for four or five people on a lower level. The kitchen bar is accordingly arranged to serve these two levels. The entrance lobby has triple use and functions as a bathroom and drying space for clothing. Storage is provided off each of these four functioning spaces.

Just how cool would it be to have one of these in the back yard for guests? I still think there is a place for hotels like this in the world. I know that when I have to stay over night in a place its just to sleep, I don’t care much if it’s larger than my apartment or has a bed that you can land a jet on. Just sleep and get back on the road the next morning. And yes, I’m a big fan of capsule hotels.

Sony Librie – A Users Review

Sony libre

I happened across this while checking out some Flickr images. He had a close up shot of the screen of a Sony Librie :
Close up
So far this is the first ‘screen shot’ I’ve seen and it looks gteat! Best part of all is that it’s still visable in full sun light, as Nick says “It is like there is a small laser printer inside of the Librie, printing a new piece of future paper each time I turn the page.”
If it wasn’t so flipping expencive I’d own one. I do enjoy reading eBooks. I’m stuck with my flakey Viewsonic V36 PDA for now.

nick gray dot net

Bigger Shuffles Soon?

Bigger iPods?

Well if its not a screw up then Apple lawyers will not go hungry this month.
Larger Shuffles are inevitable. As flash storage drops in price the demand is going to keep going up – although I can see it topping out at 10GB just because transfer times. I wish that the interface wasn’t only USB 2. A Firewire 800 option would be nice.

Wouldn’t be the first time that a price comparison site has jumped the gun and accidentally revealed the existence of an unannounced new product (or screwed up and “announced” a product which doesn’t exist), but apparently some listings have turned up on Shopping.com for both a 2GB and a 4GB iPod shuffle. Neither listing includes any extra juiciness like a release date or pricing, but we’ve been hearing rumors about 2GB and 4GB iPod shuffles since May and supposedly Apple’s planning to announce a mess of new iPods at next month’s expo in Paris.

2GB and 4GB iPod shuffles?

The Raw Power of 1.5 Tesla

Tesla Damage

Magnets are fantastically wonderful things! Not just because they give us TV, electricity, and cool ways to hold papers to our refrigerators, but when they are built for medical imaging they become downright scary. Magnetic flux is measured in Teslas, the normal rating for a medical device is 1.5 to 4 T. For comparison, the Earth has a flux density of just 20-30 microteslas. A common rare Earth magnet might have a density of 1 Tesla but are quite small so they won’t pull a chair across the room (well, if you get a few hundred of them and then you’ll have something to write about!)
In the picture you can see that a cart of some sort has become wedged in the opening of some imaging device. Imagine what would have happened if there was someone in it… Well that happens sometimes. I remember a few years ago a story of a child that was killed because his oxygen tank became a deadly missile when he was being scanned by a MRI.

[via MedGadget]

Flying Objects!

‘Wiardosebn’ Bird robot kit

Weird-7

A little pricey at US$300 but it does have a gob (9) of servos and does not require solder to assemble (?). Nifty! The body is built out of laser cut (just a guess there, but it would be cheap to do) plywood so it will be quite tough. I’m a little foggy on the controls though, looks like it’s either by an RS-232C/USB port or a UHF RF remote. It also looks like the head/beak acts as a pendulum.

Bird type self-made robot of wonder kit products and two walking “Weird-7”
“Weird-7” Homepage