These folks obviously have lots of free time, but are absolutely awesome in their use of it. Found via Gilles Tran’s blog.

Aunt Barb sent this my way and it’s just cool.

A company that makes heat to electricity converters put together this fancy-schmancy demo where they use a candle to power an LED that’s brighter than the original candle (EcoGeek).

Ever wonder how efficient a candle is at producing light? The answer can be found here. In this image Nextreme Thermal Solutions is using a new thermoelectric material that can convert some of the heat from a candle into electricity. That electricity is then run through an LED. The LED and the candle combined put off more light than two candles would.

The demo itself was pretty slick, but the heat to electricity technology should have an impact and let industrial applications get a little power back from their waste heat. As always, it depends on the price.

Scientists need better PR folks. I mean seriously. It’s Nov 4 and they’re publishing scientific breakthroughs like people will listen. What did they find? Oil producing fungus (also Yahoo):

“This is the only organism that has ever been shown to produce such an important combination of fuel substances,” said researcher Gary Strobel from Montana State University. “The fungus can even make these diesel compounds from cellulose, which would make it a better source of biofuel than anything we use at the moment.”

The scientists are now working to develop its fuel producing potential, according to a paper published in the November issue of the journal Microbiology.

One poster had written:

Real programmers type cat | cc and get it right the first time.

The other replied:

Some of us don’t have to cling to safety blankets like that. We prefer the simplicity of cat > a.out

The start of SiOnyx has prompted a rash of articles on “Black Silicon”. The Tree Hugger article was very “Rah Rah!” while the After Gutenberg article was much more grounded. The idea is that some R+D folks came up with a way to enhance the surface of a silicon wave to improve it’s ability to absorbe photons. Conspicously missing from this was a write-up on whether any electrons were kicked out by this absorbtion. After all, if that absorbtion doesn’t create electrons, it’s creating heat. I can make anything create heat by painting it black.

This was the most facinating graph I’ve seen in a while. Would you believe that the amount of money in money market accounts varies inversely with the stock market? It does have large implications for market timing. Not so much right now, but in the future.

My wife and I got these cool Motorola phones a while back, the W490. We put some 2 GB memory cards in them and record videos of our kid with them. It mounts like a USB drive and we copy the videos off. Great fun for the whole family. Unfortunately, the phone saves it as a .3gp (WTF?). Being a Linux fiend, it just took a little Googling to get the video converted to a mpeg-2.

Step 1: Convert to MPEG 2

ffmpeg -y -i file.3gp -sameq -f mpegvideo -ar 32000 -ac 1 file.mpg

Optional Step 2: Flip video if you put the cell phone on it’s side

mencoder -vf rotate=2 -ovc lavc -oac copy file.mpg file_flip.mpg

Linux ROCKS!

A long time ago, I didn’t trust that the current web-mail provider du jour would always and forever be my link to the outside world. And I don’t expect Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google to implement e-mail address portability. So, I got my own domain name and forward the e-mail to whatever service I’m currently using for web e-mail access. Right now that’s Google. But, when I follow the iPod Touch (henceforth referred to as the iTouch) directions for connecting it to my GMail account, I have to use the blarg@gmail.com e-mail address. But, no longer.

To work around it, Add an account (From inside the Settings->Mail, Contacts, Calendar) and choose other. Enter your regular e-mail address and name, but pull the IMAP and SMTP server information from GMail’s iPhone help. Of course, to get SMTP to work, you need GMail to acknowledge that you’re using that e-mail address. That’s a story for another time.

I had moved on from D2Audio almost 2 months ago now, but I’m still ecstatic for them that the acquisition went through.

Intersil Corporation, a world leader in the design and manufacture of high-performance analog solutions, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire D2Audio Corporation, a privately-held innovation leader in the design of digital audio power amplifiers for consumer, commercial, automotive and professional audio applications.

D2Audio was founded in 2002 as a privately-held company in Austin, Texas. D2Audio is the developer of the world’s only intelligent digital amplifiers, the Digital Audio Engine(TM) (DAE) family of ICs, which deliver superior sound quality. The patented D2Audio technology monitors, perfects, and enhances audio quality with real-time digital feedback.