One Glimpse Of The Wireless Future [Slashdot]

Wired article on how college campuses are providing wireless access to students, and how the students and professors are in turn innovating the tech to change campus life and learning. Pretty cool stuff.

1:19:03 PM    

A Role for Solar, but It's a Cameo. BP Amoco has 157 solar-powered gasoline stations in the United States and 220 throughout 16 other nations, with plans for more. By Phil Patton. [New York Times: Science]

I'm glad to see someone doing this, as I think local co-generation is the way to go in the future. Being able to both generate (via solar/wind) and store (flywheel) energy locally will go a long way towards both lowering the cost of such installations as well as minimizing brownouts during peak load times.

6:32:31 AM    

Be It Ever So Humble: Trash Home. Earthships, a radical building design concept that uses garbage as the principal construction material, have landed in Europe. By Daithí Ó hAnluain. [Wired News]

While I find the thought of tire fires in my home to be less than desirable, I think that the Earthship ideas regarding thermal mass, cisterns, and greywater are good, especially for remote areas that are off the grid. For a cabin/retreat, I think the system is ideal, as well as in desert areas, as the structures need as little as 10" of rainwater annually to support life.   

9:01:39 AM    

Big Screens Ready to Show Pictures on Memory Sticks. Many of the larger televisions to be introduced by Sony this summer and fall have a built-in Memory Stick slot on the control panel that allows viewers to insert a small removable storage card and look at digital photographs right there on the big screen. By J.d. Biersdorfer. [New York Times: Technology]

Sony is going for ubiquity in with their Memory Stick technology. I could have used this last night as I fumbled through my four sticks trying to find a particular shot to show a friend last night.

5:00:16 AM    

Honey, Who Shrank the Circuits?. In a breakthrough that sets the stage for integrating devices into the wires themselves, scientists report new advances in nanotechnology. By Lakshmi Sandhana. [Wired News]

Um, wow. W O W. This is like the holy grail of nanotech, being able to build itty bitty devices right on the wires. Die sizes will either shrink, or the dies as we know them will simply cease to be, and the largest parts on you computer will be the display and the batteries. Then again, in some of the MEMS based power generators come to be, you'll just need to top off the tanks every so often, not unlike a refillable butane lighter.

9:36:24 AM