Breakfast Egg & Muffin Toaster

neat

I’m a big fan of neat do-dads that are multi funcional, well except for those scanner/fax/printer monsters, those pretty much suck across the board. The Egg and Muffin toaster looks like something that I’d be happy to have in my kitchen.

This new multi-function toaster can not only toast your bread, it can cook an egg and warm up a slice of ham. Breakfast ready to eat in about four minutes. That’s a great idea, hehe.

“With the new Egg & Muffin Toaster, Back to Basics continues to prove its ability of bringing to market new and better ways for the consumer to make the food they love,” said CEO Randy Hales. “CWe’re again creating a ‘light bulb’ moment for small electrics, this time in the toaster category.”
350 000 Egg & Muffin Toaster units will be available in stores around September and sell for $49.99. I Wonder if this lovely item will be available here in Europe also”

Breakfast Egg & Muffin Toaster – sunny links for rainy days.

Optimus Keyboard

keyboard

The Optimus keyboard has been getting some press lately, and I can see why. With a fully configurable keyboard layout there is no limit to how this can be customized. Each key switch has an OLED cover that will display just about any image you can fit in what looks to be a 40×40 pixel matrix. Typing in Japanese? No problem, just select the soft overlay and your now looking at a Japanese keyboard. Editing video? All your task keys are now highlighted and set. Same thing with games. No more hunting for the right keys to figure out how to fire the guns. Just look for the icon.
Will it support a fast refresh so you can display messages on your keys? I don’t know but that would be quite cool to be able to see your latest email message subject on the space bar.
Might be out next year for a kings ransom I’m sure, but wouldn’t it be sweet to have one.

Best. Keyboard. Ever.

keyboard, OLED, Optimus, cool

Antique Mac Web Servers

SE/30

I own a Color Classic as well an a much abused SE/30 (I added an Apple logo shaped window to it’s side) and I’ve been wanting to get some more use out of them before they fail totally. In the past I’ve tried to use the SE/30 as a web cam server, it kind of worked but it was slow and almost impossable to configure because the Quickcam software is too large for the screen. The Classic has an AAUI card in it but after a rather impressive blue smoke event with a weird media adapter I have pretty much written the card off.
I decided to do a bit of searching and see if anyone had tried building a useful Internet machine out of these antiques and was quite happy to discover that a few had. One of particular note is the Classic web server. Its online and even has a small downloads section that is running off it’s FDHD. You might think, “big deal, there are millions of web servers out there”. Well that might be true but look at the specs of this one:

Specifications:
CPU – 8MHz Motorola 68000
RAM – Maxed out at 4mb
Hard Drive – 40mb
Floppy Drive – 1.44mb 3.5″
Monitor – Built in 9″ black and white
Ethernet Connection – Asante EN/SC 10T SCSI to Ethernet Adapter
Operating System – Macintosh System 7.5
Server Software – MacHTTP
Web Browser – MacWeb 2.0
Screensaver – Basic Black

Yeah, not what you would call a powerhouse!
From there I noticed the link to the ‘68K Macintosh Web Server Directory‘. That is like pure gold! Gobs of ‘old world’ macs serving up pages fo rthe world to see. The SE/30 Webcam Server. Now he cheats a bit, his webcam is Firewire’d into an iMac and the SE/30 just serves the images up. The page you see is coming from the SE/30 though.
The one I want to build will have the computer do everything. Take the picture and serve it up to you. I might have to settle with just FTP’ing the image to this page and serving it up from there, my ISP has this thing about servers.

cool, antique, server, Macintosh, Apple

Pinholegraphy

Pinhography

This is agreat site devoted to a love of pinhole photography. I discovered Xiao Shan’s home page when I was looking at his Flickr photostream. As you can see by the image I’m using for this story, Shan likes to improvise and create unique cameras out of whatever is around, I like the zebra cameras myself but the coffee cameraas are a very close second. Its a great place to kick start your brain if your looking for a photo project and you get to see some beautiful photos too.

PINHOLEGRAPHY

photo, pinhole, camera, Japan, DIY

OfficeGuns – Slayer of Cans

Can killer

This is cooler than the Mini Claymore by far!
I built one of these at home last night and got some pretty good results. The pencils could have used something to stabilize them in flight, fins or maybe something to give it a bit of spin. Other than that I was able to shoot them across the room with ease. This might be the perfect thing to deter the pigeons from eating the cat food…

OfficeGuns – Guns Advanced – Super Maul

clever, improvised, office, guns,

Medical Scans Can Trip Airport Radiation Detectors

Radiation

Up until now I used to worry about if I had been around anything with gun powder in it when I was going to board a flight, I have read reports of people tripping the security devices by having powder residue on themselves because of things like target practice, hunting or reloading shells. Now you have to be careful that your last medical procedure doesn’t come back to give you a hard time.

Certain medical scans can render people radioactive enough to trigger false security alarms at airports for up to a month, a Lancet article warns…
The Lancet piece highlights the case of a 55-year-old commercial pilot referred for cardiac investigation. Doctors carried out a scan using a radioisotope of the element thallium. Two days after the scan the patient travelled to Moscow as a crew member.
While passing through customs, the radiation detector alarms were triggered, and the patient was detained for questioning. After extensive interrogation, he was released, but experienced the same problem at the same airport four days later.
Eventually the airport security officials gave him a card to carry while travelling that explained his scan was to blame.

Medical Scans Can Trip Airport Radiation Detectors

medical, security, radioactive,