Hasta La Gadget!

Environmentalists would have you believe that leaving the faucet running while you brush your teeth puts an unnecessary drain on the environment. We always disagreed, and if Jin Woo Han’s concept Mini Hydro Turbine ever goes into production we might finally have something to back up our argument. The device would capture the “free” energy of your tap to spin a little generator, in theory producing enough juice to charge up an electric toothbrush or shaver. That actually sounds somewhat reasonable, but Han’s suggestion of powering your boiler with this thing is probably a bit optimistic. It would also take quite an optimist to think this could some day appear in a bathroom made of tiles and not pixels, but we’ll keep on hoping; pairing this with a turbine toilet might enable us to take our homes completely off the grid — or our bathrooms at least.

[Via Gadget Lab]

Filed under: Household

Mini Hydro Turbine concept could bring renewable energy production to your bathroom originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Your iMac is about to undergo surgery.

(Credit: Apple)

If you were following me on Twitter last week, you probably know of the disaster that hit me hard Tuesday night: my 24-inch aluminum iMac, sporting a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 320GB hard drive, failed.

I quickly determined that it was a hard-drive failure. I tried running Disk Utility off my Leopard install disc to repair it. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. I then tried repairing the invalid sibling link and invalid node structures. Once again, I failed.

Remembering that I also failed to pay for AppleCare, I decided that I needed to find a way to salvage my hard drive. So I tried connecting my iMac to my MacBook through a FireWire cable to get the contents off of it. That didn’t work.

At this point, it seemed that I was out of options. I determined that it definitely was my hard drive that failed on me, so I could still use my iMac with a new hard drive, but there was one catch: removing the hard drive and replacing it would be extremely difficult, since unlike most other computers, opening the case with a few screws and popping out the hard drive was impossible with my iMac.

Believe it or not, that 24-inch aluminum iMac has only one screw on it, and it only gives you access to the RAM. To access the hard drive, I had no other option but to crack open my beautiful 24-inch iMac with the aid of suction cups. And I decided to share my experience with you.

Here’s my step-by-step guide on how to crack open your iMac and replace your hard drive. (Disclaimer: Neither I, nor CNET, nor any of its affiliates is liable for any damage that might occur to your computer by following these steps. Follow them at your own risk.)

…

Originally posted at The Digital Home

The next iterations of the iPhone and iPod Touch are likely to have 802.11n wireless radios inside, offering lower power consumption, longer range and faster data rates. More importantly, it will mean that you can hook your handheld up to your n-enabled home network and not slow everything else down.

This news comes from detailed, painstaking and probably tiring study of the 3.0 iPhone firmware, revealing an iPod Touch resource file which shows a change from the current Broadcom BCM4325 wireless chip to the newer BCM4329. This chip also supports Bluetooth and FM radio, although expect this last to be disabled on Apple hardware.

Of course, if the Touch gets 802.11n, the iPhone will almost certainly get it too. This move would put all current Apple hardware on the n specification, a curious fact given the very recent upgrade to the Airport base-stations allowing simultaneous b/g and n networking.

Next-gen iPod touch, iPhone to support low-power 802.11n [Apple Insider]

Product page [Broadcom]

See Also:

• Time Capsule and Airport Extreme Get Sociable

The people behind Pogoplug may have raised the price to $100, but they managed to deliver a way to share any USB drive over the internet that’s incredibly easy—and it even works with iPhones.

Pogoplug is just a white brick with one USB port, one Ethernet port, and one power cord. You shove in any USB drive into the port and the data instantly gets accessible over the internet. The drives can be formatted in any of the following file systems: NTFS, FAT32, HFS+ (non-journaled) or EXT-2/EXT-3. You can even plug in a USB hub and dock multiple hard drives onto this thing. (No printers or other devices though.)

One of the main points Pogoplug seems to have focused on is getting the setup process automated to such a point that anyone with the ability to plug in things and click the “next” button on a web page can most likely get this working. That means your parents, your grandparents and your spouse (if you married for looks) can get an external USB drive onto the internet with little to no help from you.

Using Pogoplug is just as simple as setting it up. You, as the account owner, can hit up your Pogoplug.com share from any web browser and upload/download/view files from there. If you’re on the same local network as your Pogoplug, it’s smart enough to use your Wi-Fi/Ethernet to transfer files faster. There’s also Mac and Windows software that loads the share as a network-mounted drive.

Other cool things you can do: Grab the iPhone app and stream MP3 files, view JPG files, open PDF/Doc files over Wi-Fi or 3G. If you load your entire music library you can stream your songs, one by one, off the built-in music player. Or, download files locally onto your iPhone. And, you can share anything (it’s folder-based) on your drives to anyone else using their email as a unique login.

Everything about this is good. We streamed songs stutter-free over 3G onto our iPhones. We can keep important files on there so you can grab them on the go without having to punch through your NAT or set up a dynamic DNS service for your router. We can share large files with people without having to upload them first to a file-sharing site.

Here’s the bottom line. It’s insanely easy to use, there’s no monthly fee, and it’s only $100. Other solutions, like Windows Home Server, require you to set up an entirely separate computer. This just needs a USB drive and an elementary level of computer knowledge. The only downside is that you better hope Pogoplug remains in business, or your $100 file-sharing gadget just turned into a $100 projectile. [Pogoplug]

Incredibly easy to set up and use for Windows and Macs

Has an iPhone client

Easy to share files with others

Costs $100 and can only be used as long as the company remains in business

The newest Wi-Fi router from Fon will add support for networked storage and automatic downloads to its internet-sharing capabilities.

On April 21, Fonera 2 will go on sale in Europe for €50 ($68). It will be available worldwide in May. (The official dollar price still has to be confirmed.)

Like the original Fonera and Fonera+ routers, the principals of this hippie-love-in-styled product still apply. You buy the router and hook it up to your internet connection as normal. The trick is that the router shares a part of your bandwidth on a public-facing connection. Other Fon owners can log in and use this public network for free. In turn, you — as a Fonera owner — can travel the world and use other Fon hotspots. It’s a neat idea and everybody wins, except the money-grabbing telcos.

The new version adds even more. You can hook it up to a hard drive and leave it running, pulling down BitTorrent downloads or files from sharing sites like RapidShare and Mega Upload. It does this all without a computer, so once you have it set up you can take your laptop out on the road and look forward to a new episode of Criminal Minds when you get home. It also uses less power than leaving a computer on all day and night. As Fon CEO Martin Varsavky says in the video, with computer-based overnight downloads, "the money you’re saving on the movies, you’re actually spending on electricity."

More: The USB port means you can hook up hard drives and access them over the network, working as a NAS (network attached storage) device as well as for backup of your computers’ data. We’re not sure if the router works with Apple’s Time Machine software, but as Varsavsky is using a Mac and mentions "Time Machine" in his video, we assume it does.

The Fonera 2 also automatically uploads any videos found in a folder named "YouTube" — just make the folder, pop in the video, plug in the USB drive and walk away.

Enough? No? OK, what about hooking up a USB 3G dongle and sharing the connection over Wi-Fi? That’s exactly what is happening in the video.

This collection of features is fantastic, and exactly what a router should be doing. When is the best time for heavy download activity? When you’re out, away from home and not using the connection. What is a router? We see it as a simple translator between us and the outside internet, but it really should be a hub for all our networking needs, including NAS and 3G.

In fact, the only thing the Fonera shouldn’t be used for is as a Wi-Fi hotspot at, say, CES. This January, a certain unnamed Wired.com editor brought his Fon router to set up a network at the Wired nerve-center in the Las Vegas Convention Center. It was only as the show started that we discovered the router would take 24 hours to upgrade its firmware. Luckily, we are nerds and we travel with Ethernet cables.

Interestingly, some progressive European telcos actually like Fon, because it enforces
reciprocal sharing, rather than freeloading — which means that Fon
users have to pay for their own internet service at home if they want
to use the Fon network abroad. We’ll see if they take the same benevolent attitude towards the Fonera 2, which also encourages heavy use of both the upstream and downstream components of the bandwidth they supply.

Fonera 2.0 goes for sale on April 21st in Europe [Martin Vasavsky’s blog]

Fonera 2.0 now works with Rapidshare, Bittorrent, Flickr, you name it [YouTube]

See Also:

• FON Offers Free Routers To San Franciscans
• Open Source Wi-Fi Service Claims Ten Million Hotspots In Network …
• Fon and BT in Internet Sharing Love-In