While I'm spouting crazy ideas...
Why don't they sell LED replacements for refrigerator lights? Think of it, your fridge and freezer are the last place you want a conventional, hot tungsten lightbulb. They are also a pain to replace. Put in an LED replacement and never worry about it again. Cool illumination that lasts some 100,000 hours. White LEDs or a blend of colors for a natural hue, maybe Red so the light doesn't hurt your night vision during midnight snack raids, or Green to give the food a ghastly glow and help keep the diet going. Surely the The LED Light guys have the answer somewhere?
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email thisE4 Engineering has an article on the EnviroMission Solar Tower. This 1km tall tower (six tenths of a mile) is "fed" hot air from solar heated panels below, the hot air rising and spinning internal wind generators. Hmmm...I wonder if they could use two towers, the air being sucked down one tower before being drawn up the other, harvesting moisture in the process? Imagine, cities of the future sucking clouds dry as they pass overhead. ":^)
Hats off (safety helmets on) to Dane and James and their new water rocket. Can't wait to see some launch pictures...certainly the touchdown of such a monster warrants a photo.
Cherry, grape, pear...whatever they are, the small tomatoes are now ripening. Good for impromptu snacking.
I'd been thinking my old Palm PDA (pricey daily aggravator) had finally bitten the dust. Window shopping at the local Staples I found Handspring's Treo 90. Sweet little unit. Fits in your hand like a sliver of half worn soap. It uses the same form factor as the Treo cell phone combo, which might be fun and useful if Sprint (or anyone else for that matter) could figure out how to distribute cell signals to our neighborhood. As luck would have it my Palm picked up on its pending relegation to the junk heap and decided to miraculously heal itself.
I've been Jaguar'ized. Most of the time & effort was in preparation, trying to figure out what to backup. The upgrade was cake. Pop in the disk, agree to the EULA and do something else while they mold the Mac into its new form. Afterwards everything was mostly as I'd started with the addition of a few new icons in the dock (iChat, Sherlock, a couple others). Played around with them a bit. Checked out the System Prefs...many new things there, some not as obvious. Changed to the new Graphite appearance. Checked out some of the new sharing options (printer, windows...cool). Glad to see that file find has escaped the clutches of Sherlock.
I'd also upgraded to Mozilla 1.1 and while checking things out ran across the The Global Civil Society Laptop. My kind of computer appliance. Here's a few quotes:
You have to get power somewhere, why limit yourself to one source? The global civil society laptop gets power from anything you can clamp it to- from solar cell to car battery, funky native power outlet, or someone rubbing their hands against a balloon. I thought I'd avoid red for positive and black for negative.... aren't there enough color problems in the world? Besides, that would imply that you could screw things up with the incorrect polarity... which you can't. That's the nice thing about the GCSSPS...it'll take anything you give it.
If you're running on a potato or watch battery, and it's not a lot of power, the system merely slows down. If you attached it to an arc welder and really, there's probably too much power, it runs a lot faster. If it gets too hot, you can always submerge it in a lake or river. (It's all vacuum-sealed and waterproof)
Grommets make it easy to attach a handle, shoulder strap, or mount it on the wall. Attach to a fishing line and drop the whole thing down a well for cooling or archival purposes. Chain it to yourself for a quick security solution. If you ever had to mount a server to an elephant or an iceberg, you know that grommets make the job a whole lot easier.
PDA's have feelings too ya know.