Here's an interesting technique to visually represent the electrical energy being used by our household appliances and gadgets. It's a "power aware cord" design concept by Sweden's Interactive Institute:

The Power Aware Cord may be used as a "tool" for people to rediscover energy in their homes as well as an ambient "display" to see energy consumption at a glance at any given time. For instance, the effects of changing the volume on stereo equipment becomes immediately and dramatically apparent – as do appliances that are silently stealing electricity while on standby.

Also, it kind of looks like a light-saber, except floppier.

Via: Time magazine's best inventions of the year.

Maybe chasing your alarm clock around the bedroom in the morning isn't working for you anymore. Maybe your morning wake-up routine needs something a little more subtle, like this "glo Pillow" from designer Ian Walton, which Time magazine called one of the best inventions of 2007. The pillow contains a grid of LEDs that turn on and become gradually brighter from about 40 minutes before your desired wake-up time, providing a gentle, sleep-cycle friendly start to your morning.

Here's a really informative 2-part video of handyman Ron Hazelton installing a doorway arch kit. The video details the entire project from start to finish. In the video, you see Hazelton run into a the type of problem that the average home owner might encounter when doing such an upgrade, namely, discovering that the electrical box is too close to the frame of the door. Hazelton, of course, handles it with ease. Although he does make the installation of the kit look quite easy, he is obviously a seasoned pro, so take that with a grain of salt if you are thinking of embarking on your own doorway arch conversion project.

Link

Jay Leno, already a fan of green energy (his garage uses both wind and solar power), speaks with Ken Johnson of Enviro Energies about their magnetically levitating wind turbines. The video is over a year old, but information about the success or failure or the MVAWT (Magnetic Vertical Axis Wind Turbine) that Jay had installed is a little hard to come by.

This guy, on the other hand, doesn't think much of the claims made by the company.

Here is our attempt at making our own upside down tomato planter. We're not trying to duplicate the appearance of the as-seen-on-TV Topsy Turvy Tomato Planter, but instead elected to use a coco planter, which we thought was attractive and fairly inexpensive. We will post progress pics throughout the growing season and with any luck, we will have a bushel (ok, maybe not quite a bushel - but who knows?) full of upside down-grown tomatoes by the summer.

Link: DIY Upside down tomato planter

Here's what clever people can do with old skateboards. Apparently, given enough skill and creativity, clocks, tables, lamps and sofas can all be fashioned from old boards and wheels.

About the pic above, from the site:

Wrapped by neoprene which is the wetsuit material for surfers, this piece is created to the indoor/outdoor lifestyle and fits perfectly on a patio or waterfront deck. The Jet Set Lounge Chair is made of 8 decks with neoprene cushions on a metal frame. Dimensions: 32"x32"x65"

Nice stuff...

Someone over at Instructables has posted a nice little automated elevating kitchen spice rack project that, depending on your viewpoint, is either spice rack overkill or complete kitchen sweetness.

For the project, a Firgelli Automation FA-400-12-18" stroke linear actuator was used. Now if that doesn't sound like something that belongs in a kitchen, what does?

From the site:

Of course the top would typically be the granite square that was cut out originally, and the spice rack could be a coffee machine, microwave, TV, wine rack or anything else you wish to hide in your kitchen.

Link: Automated Pop-Up Spice Rack

A couple of years ago there was a Canadian company called Pulsar Advanced Technologies that announced that they were close to launching a Microwave based (instant) hot water heater, called the Vulcanus MK IV. There were a fair amount of stories on the net at the time, as it sounded like an interesting idea:

Powered by electricity and unaffected by the volatile gas markets, the Vulcanus MK4 can heat water from 35 degrees Fahrenheit to 140 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds and can source multiple applications at once: showers, dishwasher, sink usages and more. The Vulcanus MK4 is the size of a stereo speaker with a sleek modern look, making it ideal for condos and apartments, while powerful enough to serve the needs of any size family.

Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper ran the original story about the Vulcanus in November of 2005.

Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, it's now looking like the product is vaporware. The company's original website, Pulsar-at.com is now just some sort of placeholder site with faux content. The web address the company eventually moved to is also just a spamsite: Pulstech.com.

It's unlikely anyone is too shocked, given the delays and comments like this one from February of last year, where the Pulsar people told an email inquirer that they weren't planning on releasing the product at any point in the year, and this was about 14 months after the Globe and Mail ran the Vulcanus launch story in 2005.

Most DIY digital picture frame howtos people post on the net go the 'dismantle an old laptop' route. As this site notes, the scavenged laptop approach has a couple of drawbacks:

All of them involved taking the laptop apart completely and generally rendering it useless for any other activity. The screens were also smaller than I wanted ? equivalent to an 8?x12? photo, and varied considerably in contrast, brightness, and general image quality.

For my project, I wanted a desktop quality LCD screen of a size equivalent to an 11?x14? photograph. I also wanted professional quality matting and framing.

So, the author opted to use an old LCD monitor along with a hidden laptop. The trick is using two holes in the wall; an upper and a lower. The VGA and monitor power cable is fed through the upper hole and fished out through the lower hole, which is where the laptop sits, still accessible for maintenance and whatnot, but, in the author's case, hidden by a piano and usually controlled wirelessly.

Se also: previous post on DIY digital frames.

WiFi enabled digital picture frame on Amazon.com.

The New York Times real estate section has an interesting article entitled "Making Every Pixel Count", which is about the importance of properly photographing your home for online real estate sites.

From the article:

When selling properties online, agents and Web designers say that the pictures buyers see of houses and apartments for sale are often the first ? and sometimes the only ? chance for a seller to make a good impression. Less-than-flattering pictures can turn buyers off and lead to lonely open houses.

So why is this so important? Well, some stats, from the piece:

Eighty percent of people across the country who bought a new home last year used the Internet while house hunting, and they rated photographs as the most useful tool in their search, according to a survey of buyers and sellers by the National Association of Realtors. The survey also found that 24 percent of home buyers got their first glimpses of their new homes on the Web, up from a mere 2 percent in 1997.

And let's face it, this number is probably going to continue to tend upward. If you've ever searched for a house or apartment online, you've probably been surprised and/or frustrated at the lack of pictures some listers provide. As many people will tell you, all the details in the world are still taken with a grain of salt when pictures aren't provided. Unless listers are trying to hide something, why not give web searchers what they want?

And although the mere act of posting pictures is crucial to attracting web-savvy prospects nowadays, the variance in the quality of the pictures can change the buyer's impression drastically. Be sure to see the audio slideshow that accompanies the article for examples of this.

Via 37Signals