Thursday, November 16, 2006

wireless power


An MIT professor presented an interesting paper at an American Institute of Physics forum this week: a description of a method to wirelessly transmit power to mobile devices. Unlike existing approaches that use inductive coupling (and normally require devices to be quite close together), this approach makes use of resonance and devices can be several metres apart.

More details are available in this MIT news release, and the paper describing the theory involved is available here.

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Sunday, November 05, 2006

round 'em up



I just gotta get me one of the EFF's "Fair Use Has A Posse" stickers! Equally as tempting would be the unusual "Andre the Giant Has A Posse" stickers... who thinks this stuff up?

Saturday, November 04, 2006

bittorrent guide

Still faithful to your classic P2P software, but feelin' the urge to experiment with the hot new P2P application everyone is talking about? Check out Brian's BitTorrent FAQ and Guide and go get yerself some torrent goodness...

Friday, November 03, 2006

veggie cannon


I was intrigued by the concept of Make magazine the first time I heard about it. Come on: shop projects for geeks? What was there not to like?

Ditto one of the first podcasts I've seen from Make: a weekend project to build a veggie cannon . Powered by hairspray (I kid you not - could I make this stuff up?). Any description of this mighty veggie cannon that I might provide would pale in comparison to the real thing - go visit this link watch the video to see for yourself.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

posting from google docs

When Google Docs and Spreadsheets was announced, I couldn't resist giving it a try. The mini-tour claimed documents could be posted to your blog and carry over tags you assigned in Docs & Spreadsheets, so I thought I'd give it a go (with this posting).

speed your surfing

After reading this post by NYT columnist David Pogue, I couldn't resist trying out this free web service that claims to speed up surfing by caching DNS requests. It could be just me, but web pages do seem to load more quickly now. The OpenDNS approach itself is also interesting: you tweak the settings on your home router to point to the OpenDNS service, and that's it! No software required on your computer.

Sweet.