Turning polar dipping into energy

Yes the same thing that causes your skin to curl, the annual tradition of swimming in the cold Atlantic water, could be the key to the world every increasing demand of energy. The article in Wired.com talks about a very familiar with the ocean, Dr. John Piña Craven. He's got a degree in ocean engineering, a one crazy, but proven idea to transform the fridgid temperatures of the ocean bottom into energy. The basic premise, is sink a large pipe to the bottom of the ocean, start a siphon pump, and boom, you've got endless energy with very little needed to be done to keep it going. Not only that, but you can collect the condensation a provide fresh drinking water; free air conditioning; and according to Dr. Craven, use the cold water to accelerate plant growth. Really great read.

Sources:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/craven.html

Blood Power

Neat article posted on slashdot about using your blood for power. Japanese Scientist apparently figured out a way to draw electricity out of glucose using vitamin K3 (both found in the human body). The device generated enough electricity (0.2 millawatts) to power a small blood sugar level and then transmits that level. This would be great for artifical organs. Anyone want a truly built in cell phone charger?

Sites:
IOL.co.za
Slashdot.org

My personal web butler, Google.com

Found a great arcticle about Google searches today, it's called Search History (beta of course). Not only does it track your searches, but it also tracks what links you click on. They allow you to search your history and give you the results by the most recent searches. They give you the option to "pause" and delete search queries. Very neat, check it out.

Nate

Links:
Google Labs: Search History
Search Engiene Watch

Gmail FS

If you have a Gmail account, a great acessory is Gmail File System. It's free and it works pretty nicely into a windows operating system (with a little tweaking of course). It took me a while to get it configured right, so I thought I would write this little tutorial.

First thing I did is create a new account. Then I installed GmailFS. This is where the work comes in, getting your firewall configured right. The GmailFS runs through the Windows Explorer Shell, so be careful how much access this program has to the internet. You need to let through three things to get it to work properly; DNS, Google.com (for account authentication), and gmail.google.com. Using your log of firewall activities will make this alot easier. First, create expert rules that allow outgoing connect to Gmail and Google (with Zone Alarm, just add in the host and it looks up the IP address). Then create a rule that blocks everything (the first rule should have presedence over the later, this keeps other programs from going in or out). Then try to access you Gmail Drive from your "My Computer". It should pop back an error to you. Examine your firewall log; you should see a UDP request looking something like *.*.1.1:53, this is the DSN request. Create a new rule which allow an outging connect with that IP and that only allows a UDP connect for DNS on port 53, and that should do it.

Hope this helps. Enjoy.
Nate

Sources:
Gmail
Gmail File System
Zone Alarm

An oldie but goodie. Build a Giant TV/Monitor

Skimming around Toms Hardware when I noticed a great arcticle that came out last December. Great read. It talks about building your own XGA Projector for very little money. Enjoy.

Toms Hardware Article: http://www20.tomshardware.com/howto/20041201/index.html

Ride the Light - A silicon photonic chip!

Great article in the future of semiconductors, and it's called light. A startup company called, Luxtera has created a way to intergrate the properties of fiber optics and silicon. Although this isn't an entirely new idea, the size and speed is. From just a CPU sized device, they can send up to 10 Gigabits a second, or as the article pointed out, "it's fast enough to send a DVD movie in four seconds. Could we be seeing the start of central computing again, where all your data is held online, say at Google. Just the other month, there were articles circulating about Google buying so called "dark" fiber and what they coud use it for. Very cool read.

Forbes article: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2005/0411/068.html
Luxtera: http://www.luxtera.com/

Portable Firefox

Found a new version for Firefox for those who are on the run, Portable Firefox. This is what the creator of the new version says about his portable version.

Portable Firefox is a fully functional package of Firefox optimized for use on a
USB key drive. It has some specially-selected optimizations to make it perform
faster and extend the life of your USB key as well as a specialized launcher
that will allow most of your favorite extensions to work as you switch
computers. It will also work from a CDRW drive (in packet mode), ZIP drives,
external hard drives, some MP3 players, flash RAM cards and more

My blog revamped

This is the inagrual blog for Top Dawg Tech, where when I find a neat tech article, I post the link. Enjoy