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 I wonder how this companies sales have done over the past year...I would expect they have gone up a bit.
http://www.scangauge.com 
I'm going on a long car trip in June, maybe I'll pick one up. I'm not sure if I could save that much gas on a long highway trip but it might come in handy afterwards.
 Like a grandfather clock. This is brilliant, but not produced yet.
To "turn on" the lamp, the user moves weights from the bottom to the top of the lamp. An hour-glass like mechanism is turned over and the weights are placed in the mass sled near the top of the lamp. The sled begins its gently glide back down and, within a few seconds, the LEDs come on and light the lamp, That is very cool. The LED lightbulb should last a lifetime so you are looking at a family heirloom. Kind of a 21st century candle.
 Check out this cool demo for the Prius' main gear.
http://eahart.com/prius/psd/ There is a simulation at the bottom of the page that let's you vary the input parameters and watch the gearing adjust. The PSD is a planetary gear set that removes the need for a traditional stepped gearbox and transmission components, and also the familiar rev-lurch-rev-lurch of acceleration in an ordinary gas powered car. It acts as a continuously variable transmission (CVT) but with a fixed gear ratio. Cool stuff. They need to get their car designers to work on the car though because it is the ugliest thing on the road...well maybe that Pontiac Aztec thing was uglier, but it's close.
Are you a fan of James Bond? Yeah me too. Do you dig the scene "The Spy Who Loved Me", where bond and lovely agent "triple-x" take their lotus and drive it right off the dock into the water and it becomes a submersible? Yeah me too. (even when dubbed in Italian) Well Rinspeed has made a concept car submersible out of a Lotus Elise.
 Crazy but true.
This guy Peter Rakos, created an entire rendering engine/technique in Excel. I'm not sure it is quite up to the requirements of Halo 3, but it is still a nifty example of how versatile Excel can be. Check out the video. And you can download the excel files yourself and try it out.
 This is cool.
On a typical dive, the Poseidon Discovery lets divers stay underwater at least three times as long as scuba gear can, and since you don’t exhale into the water, you don’t create bubbles or noise that can scare off fish. Instead of being limited by the amount of air you bring with you, a re-breather extends your time underwater by scrubbing what you exhale. How about a 3 hour dive instead of a 1 hour dive.
The envelope was seriously pushed in Pirates of the Caribbean 3. That scene was probably the biggest cinematic event that's happened to date. Up until about 20 years ago there was only one side, and that was us, and now there's two sides. and uh it's made movies better. John Frazier - Effects Specialist, of the physical/mechanical variety. Wired Article: How Physics and Computers bring an Ocean to Life for the Movies
 So the concept here is good...I guess. Use the alluring aroma of bacon to help you wake up in the morning but I just can't imagine the greasy smell lingering in my bedroom forever after days and days of the Wake n' Bacon alarm clock.
So you have to get a frozen piece of bacon and put it inside the alarm clock every night...hello health department. And what about vegetarians? Kinda reminds me of the "memo" machine from "Risky Business".
 Check this out.
An enterprising midwesterner, George Lawrence, devised and patented this ingenious system of kites and wires, right, that carried a 46-pound panoramic camera 800 feet into the air. Kites! Brilliant.
 If the X-Prize worked to get the private commercial space race kicked off and it was only $10 Million, what would a payout of $1 BILLION do for results.
This is an ambitious set of problems laid out by the Victory Project. To the first person(s) that solves any of these Problems: - Develop a cure for breast cancer.
- Develop a cure for diabetes.
- Reduce greenhouse emissions from petroleum powered automobiles by 95% without increasing the cost of a normal car more than 5%.
- Achieve 150 miles per gallon of gasoline in a 3,000 lb. car, using EPA standards; without increasing the cost of a normal car more than 10%.
Is it big? Yes. Is it different? Yes. Will it work? Yes. This is inspiring. But some of these might take the full Billion dollar prize to develop. They're looking for donations, feel free to contribute.
I want to revisit this topic. It's been awhile since I talked about it. For a quick review go and read this article: Job v3.0 - 21st Century Jobs I want to focus on crowd patronage. There are a variety of people out there now attempting succeeding? at this route of self-financing. The journalist Michael Yon mentioned in the article above is but one. Here is someone else trying to fund their effort via the web. Jill's next record Bringing people with a need in touch with people that want to fulfill that need. In this case it is Jill Sobule's wish to create a record. She has been frustrated by an industry that seems to be in obliteration mode. I am very skeptical as to whether she would have been able to accomplish this in any way prior to the internet, Because if you are interested in her music you can go out and find a video of her and see what she's all about. You can then go read a review of her shows. 10 February 2002: Tin Angel -- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania And then, if you are convinced that she makes good music and music you want to be made so that you can listen to more of it...you can click click and give her some of your money. Easy. Connecting the crowd to the producer. ...how would you do that in 1988?
I've been lethargically trying to purchase a Wii for months now, without success. Apparently you have to be quite serious about hunting one down because they're sell out everywhere that they crop up. Amazon.com reported that when they had them in stock, they were selling 17 of them a second! If the technology in this clip starts to make it mainstream, we're going to continue to be constrained on these puppies. The clarity of the description of the technology, as well as the demonstration itself, is first rate.
Make sure to check out Johnny Lee's other Wiimote projects.
 Beautiful.
While there are plenty of pie in the sky nano-technology dreams out there: space elevator ribbon, artery cleansing robots, oxygen increasing blood. But in reality those are still far off. What we will end up seeing in our day to day lives will be more mundane applications that appear to have marginal impact on change, but over the long term may have as much impact as the grandiose ideas. For example here: Nano-layered plastic sheet is strong as steel This stuff could be used in a lot of applications ranging from grocery bags to space vehicle linings. It will all depend on how efficient the process can become. It sounds like the process uses simple materials and that there is potential for big automation. It will be very interesting to see what other "mundane" nano-technology innovations come out over the next several years.
This is cool and actually one of the clearest explanations of what makes up the header information of the packets that are flying around the intertubes. Gallery includes: IPv4, IPv6, TCP, UDP and ICMP. 
 That is for touch typers.
http://matias.ca/halfkeyboard/demo/ This is cool. It means never having to let go of the mouse again. They've got an online demo that lets you try out the technology.
This is just dang cool and once again shows us how the world does not stand still. Innovation continues apace. http://translator.live.com/Default.aspx?MKT=en-US So you say...big deal that's just like babel fish from years ago. Well yes and no. techRivet Translated Voila'. There's techRivet translated for you. 
Still you doubt it. Been done already. OK, check out the techRivet homepage. Look up in the top of the right hand column see the translator drop down? For the vast international audience of the techRivet blog, this must be a welcome relief. Choose language, click and go. And for techRivets IT staff it was a simple implementation. I didn't even have to get the Project Managers involved just spoke to the developer directly and he had it up and running in a matter of minutes. (The layers of bureaucracy over here is mind numbing). The UI is intuitive and easy and configurable. All goodness. Windows Live is starting to bear fruit for Microsoft. Once the Office suite goes online it will be an interesting change of the playing field. ht: Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com
All open API's...meaning, you Mr. Phone company can take this platform and use it on your technology. Freaking cool. And as an aside doesn't Sergey Brin have a weird eye thing going on? Freaky. Is he trying to compel us with his evil mind-powers?
 Would Deep Thought have been so dismissive about the new supercomputer from NEC? The NEC SX-9 Vector Supercomputer System. (Although Milliard Gargantubrain is a much cooler name for a super computer.)
- Consisting of 16 nodes.
- Capable of a peak vector performance in excess of 100 GFLOPS.
- Available in six colors including periwinkle.
The SX-9 is the current fastest supercomputer in the world. It closes in on the PFLOPS range. World's fastest vector computer goes live. Update: Ok I lied about the colors, you can only get it in black.
So I've read this great book just lately called: A Man On The Moon. It's really cool. The author, Andrew Chaikin, does a great job. He interviewed a lot of the astronauts and gives a great telling of the adventure. I highly recommend it. Well one of the subjects that he covers in the book is how the first spacecraft were very much like floating latrines. The capture and disposal of calls-of-nature was a rather crude amalgamation of poorly functioning technology. I was curious how this might have changed over time. I  mean there are now a significant number of women going up into space as well. Some of the technology described in the book about the Apollo mission just wouldn't work. I mean...well...how do they do it? Here is a good article from the BBC that describes it clearly. How do you 'go' in space? So now you know. Thought you might like to have that question answered. Update: What other finalist in the entire list of weblog finalists would have an article on space toilets. Once again techRivet breaks the mold.
 This is brilliant.
Eye-Fi. Here's how it works. - You get the Eye-Fi card.
- You plug the Eye-Fi SD card into your machine.
- Onboard software initializes the SD card.
- You put that card in your camera and you're done.
When you use it. - Take pictures.
- The Eye-Fi card uploads the picture automatically to your computer.
- You don't have to connect any wires
- you don't have to tell it
- no buttons
- it just does it
- You can also tell it to automatically upload those photos to an online photo account of your choosing.
- Sweet.
The only hitch is you need a wireless network. I have Cat-5 all through my house so I would need to turn on my wireless router, but most people are wireless now I expect. This is a brilliant implementation because it does not require you as a user to buy a new camera to get this automatic functionality. All you need is to replace you SD card and you are good to go. Great product design.
I was wrong...I know, I know what you're thinking, it is crazy isn't it. But when I said back here: [Accelerating Change and MP3 Players] that a 2 Gigabyte MP3 player would look like this: I was wrong. this: in 2011, will likely be a terabyte mp3 player. Researchers have developed a low-cost, low-power computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers' pockets within a few years. Unbelievable. But only in a totally believable way. This is a result of accelerating change in its purest form. Here we have Michael Kozicki, director of ASU's Center for Applied Nanoionics, a field that probably didn't even exist 5 years ago and certainly 10 years ago, taking the breakthroughs in one avenue of research and applying it to another. The beauty of it is, this doesn't need to be a whole new form of technology, this new memory can be made with much of the same technologies as what is currently in use in the industry. Kozicki says the technology can be built from materials commonly used in the memory industry, which should help keep manufacturing costs down. Remarkable.
Connectivity: The bandwidth available to people is increasing at a rate of 50% per year. Not quite as fast as Moore's law for silicon, but still extraordinary. 
Here is a more up to date estimate that takes into account the number of websites and requests. 
Faster and faster it goes. How long have you been watching videos online? Two years? Three? Not longer surely. Do you watch any actual TV shows on your internet connection? You will soon. Bioengineering: The human genome is mapped and I have heard some people say, "So what, they haven't done anything with it." Mapping something and understanding something are two different things. Give the processor speed increase time to be applied against the genome and there will be plenty that comes from it. It cost approximately $13 Billion to decode the human genome over the course of 13 years. ...the price of sequencing DNA has fallen rapidly with the advent of these machines. Today, the price tag on a human genome decoded with sequencers of the type used in the Human Genome Project would be $25 million to $50 million. It drops to around $1 million with next-generation machines available today and could be as low as $100,000 by 2008. Now THAT is an improvement in cost. "The last year has been the most exciting period in genomics since the days of the Human Genome Project," says Eric Lander, first author on the project's first published draft of the human genome and now head of the Broad Institute for genomic medicine in Cambridge, MA. "Sequencing is becoming cheap enough and powerful enough that it can be applied to about any problem. It's standing the field on its head." Francis Collins, Remarkable, faster and cheaper by factors of a thousand or more. And I wouldn't expect it to stop there. Someday Kinko's will be able to give you your DNA sequence in 10 minutes for $42.95. Space Technology:  Lotsa cool stuff going on. It finally appears that the private sector is getting involved. We have a variety of Billionaires interested in spending their money here.
- Elon Musk (PayPal): SpaceX
- Paul Allen
- Google guys: XPrize sponsorship for a unmanned moon landing
- Richard Branson: Virgin Galactic
Of these the most interesting to me is Elon Musk's attempt to develop an entire space program on his own. He is focused on a less expensive, modular rocket system. He is positioning himself to be the only US based rocket launch provider for the ISS after the space shuttle is decommissioned. Not a bad place to be. This is actually the technology that fits the least in the singularity paradigm, but it is finally vibrant and growing after years of stagnation. Nanotechnology: One of the holy grails from this technology is fab-labs. Basically a "replicator" from Star Trek. Well there's nothing like that on the horizon, but what is being developed is the cross pollination of silicon wafer technologies being leveraged across to make nano-machines. Still conjecture and wishful thinking. Virtual Reality: From online games like World of Warcraft and Elfquest before it we now have the virtual world of Second Life and dotSoul virtual reality is here to stay. Get you avatar and enter the multiverse. You can set up your own virtual reality server for free: Worldforge.com Check out these goggles: [http://www.sensics.com/products/pisight.php] This video is extraordinary: This has only just begun and lends itself very well for the tinkerer / inventor. Computer Power: We are still increasing at Moore's law. And Moore's law only applies to the silicon chip, the phenomenon can be traced back further across previous technology and the doubling time holds back to vacuum tubes._thumb.png) And there is plausibility that as we exhaust the capabilities of silicon that other technologies will enter and the speed increases will continue. Conclusion: Now you can see why the singularity is considered the point beyond which we can't predict what will happen. All of these groups of technologies is increasing in performance and coming down in cost. Some by extraordinary amounts, some by more modest amounts. There is feedback loops intertwined amongst some of these technologies. The only thing we can do is keep our eyes open and watch. Predicting is likely to be wrong, whatever it happens to be about.
This looks very interesting. A place for you to control your own medical records. http://healthvault.com/ When it's your job to protect your family's health, you need every advantage. Imagine if you had a way to collect, store, and share the health information critical to your family's well-being. HealthVault is the new and FREE way to do just that. This is an interesting move by Microsoft, I think it is an astute marketing decision. The concern over controlling your health care and the growing technical competency of the general users...the timing seem fairly on the mark.
 Remember "Total Recall", the sci-fi movie from 1990? Great movie, Arnie was at the peak of his action hero era, Sharon Stone was Hot, Michael Ironside was bad, lot's of gratuitous violence.
yeah...coool. Well the opening scene had Sharon and Arnie eating breakfast and the entire wall of their dining area was a television. They turned on and off parts of it. Now it's a television, now it's a tranquil screensaver (wallsaver?). Well Sony is just about to come out with an ultra thin TV. The next generation television has a screen with a thickness of just three millimeters (0.12 inches), which was made possible because the organic display is self-luminescent and does not require a backlighting. [linky] So...less than a quarter inch thick. You could tile your wall with these things and voila', life imitates art. Of course they're like $2000 per right now, but that price will come down. Oh...ok, only because you asked. CHICK FIGHT!
For those of you with a commute, this might allow you to get more done. Although up here in the Great Northwest you might want to waterproof you desk first.
We here at techRivet pride ourselves in our commitment to bringing our vast reading public only the most innovative achievements and inventions dealing with important technically problems facing us in the world today... Then we find something like this and just marvel at the innovation, creativity and purity of mind that it took to create it. 300 hp V8 engine...Chainsaw!
 Quantum chip rides on superconducting bus
The connection of two Qubits on a chip for the first time. This is a crucial first step, a proof of concept, that will lead to true quantum computers. In effect, says Johannes Majer, a member of the Yale team, the researchers have created "a quantum bus". A bus is used in conventional computers as a conduit for information among the various components – but its quantum chip equivalent has never been made before. With the predictions for the end of Moore's law I refer you back to Ray Kurzweil's great essay on accelerating change that stipulated the doubling of computing power was not bound to the integrated chip. The phenomena both preceded the integrated chip and will in all likelihood continue after the silicon chip is no longer viable. The creation of a working quantum computer might be as momentous an event as the creation of the transistor. History will of course judge.
 Just an example of accelerating change.
There were rooms and devices in history that could be categorized as planetariums dating back to the 13th century, but the first true planetarium was created in Munich in 1920. [ref. linky] [wikipedia] That planetarium used a metal dome with holes poked in it to project the lights onto a domed ceiling. This technology remained largely unchanged for 60 years. Since then we have seen rapid change. With computer processing power increasing continuously it is now possible to provide dynamic content up onto  the dome. I went to a local planetarium last year and the experience was more like a trip through space than a lecture from an instructor. It was remarkable. But it doesn't stop there. We now have sophisticated programs available to everyone for free that exceed the capabilities of ANY planetarium that was built before the year 2000. Stellarium [linky] is only the most sophisticated example. The power of a full planetarium placed in your hands for free. Accelerating Change: This is only one trivial example of accelerating change in our lives. We have the capabilities at our fingertips that only large institutions have had in the past. And even those institutions, whether business or government, have only had THOSE capabilities for a hundred years or so, before that essentially nobody could do these things. And we take it all for granted. We shouldn't. We live in an age of miracles. It is not an age of once in a blue moon someone gets healed by some mysterious means or someone walks on water or something trivial like that. It is an age where the miracles are so common and ubiquitous that they have become mundane.
 Buy a Laptop for a Child, Get Another Laptop Free
This appears to be a worthy endeavor. Buy a computer for your child and they will donate a second one to a child in the developing world. If you have a kid that needs a computer, this might be a great idea. He said that if, for example, donations reached $40 million, that would mean 100,000 laptops could be distributed free in the developing world. The idea, he said, would be to give perhaps 5,000 machines to 20 countries to try out and get started. Reference: [One Laptop Per Child - homepage]
[Hardware Specs]
[Software Specs]
http://www.matthewmassey.com/Testing.htm This is just plain cool. I wanna build one. Not that my wife would enjoy having a military level piece of high voltage death created in my garage...but a man can dream can't he. The simple high voltage railgun was tested in May 2005. Previous to firing a current limiting resistor was placed on the railgun and the voltage across the barrel was raised to determine at what voltage flash over occurred. The pulse power supply is capable of operation at 10,000 Volts. er...that's a lot.
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