Hasta La Gadget!

Don’t think of the iChef as an automatic oven. Think of it as an oven with a cookbook built-in. And also as an automatic oven.

IChef is a touch-controlled computer-brain that comes installed with ovens from Gorenje, the European appliance-maker. Much like the automatic controls on a camera, it doesn’t actually do anything you couldn’t do manually, but it sure makes things a whole lot easier.

To start, you touch the clock and the icon-driven touch-screen fires up. From here, you can go simple by just finding the food you’re about to cook, estimating its weight and pressing “go”. Or you can gat fancy with the MyBake, ProBake and StepBake modes.

These let you program up to three cooking steps into the machine so you could set a pie to first defrost, then bake, then hold warm until you’re ready. Or you could bake and then finish under a hot grill, or just use multi-stage temperatures. Several presets are available, or you can dial in your own (temperature and time are set on dials just like clocks in iOS). These modes also work with a probe thermometer, so you can start to see the possibilities.

Even better, you can save your own “recipes”, so you no longer have to remember that the internal temperature of that piece of beef shouldn’t go above 140ºF. Instead, you could have a roast-beef setting that would start warm to cook the meat evenly, go high to brown it and then cut the oven when the probe thermometer hits 130ºF and allow the meat to rest. Neat!

The first iChef ovens will ship in European this spring. I started reading the press release and figured iChef for a gimmick. Now I’m trying to work out how to fit something bigger than a toaster-oven into my tiny kitchen.

iChef+: Revolutionary Oven Touch Control [Gorenje. Thanks, Greta!]

See Also:

• The Six-Foot-Tall Sixty-Second History of the Microwave Oven …
• Review: Hamilton Beach Countertop Oven with Convection and …
• Review: Krups FBC5 Toaster Oven Belongs On Battlestar Galactica …
• Review: Avanti DT502SS Oven Toasts Like There's No Tomorrow …

Nokia has to do something big if it wants to crack the US smartphone market. We can agree on that, right? And believe us, Nokia wants this — nothing will make the mighty Finns (and the company’s global investors) prouder than to gain some traction in the home of Apple pie and Google desserts. So how will the company do it? With
Symbian? Oh, hell no.
By introducing another MeToo handset? Nope, with MeeGo on a rockin’ platform like the rumored N9 slider pictured above.

Nokia announced its hardware plans for Maemo 6 a long time ago. At that time, the company was clear that it would continue using TI OMAP processors. Much has changed since then, however. In addition to several key leadership changes including a new Canadian-born CEO who spent much of his time working in the US, Nokia has joined Intel to roll up Maemo 6 and Moblin into MeeGo with Nokia’s first Maemo 6 MeeGo/Harmattan handset pushed into 2011. Simultaneously, Intel has also been doing its best to show its new Moorestown platform as a powerful ARM alternative, even showing off MeeGo handsets exploiting a Lincroft SoC and Atom processor core.
And Intel has said that Medfield-based smartphones (Moorestown’s
successor) would arrive in the middle of 2011.

So why the build-up? Well, we’ve just been tipped to a claim by
Prosessori, a respected Finnish technology magazine, that the Nokia N9 will launch with a 1.2GHz Atom processor. Better yet, it could be unveiled as soon as Mobile World Congress in February, presumably during Stephen Elop’s keynote. Do we believe it? Not entirely, but it is possible given the chain of events that have taken place. And you can bet that the first commercially available Intel smartphone with a brand new Nokia user experience would certainly grab headlines in the US and around the world. Something that should translate into high-end market share (and profits) if it’s as “exciting” as Elop claims.

[Thanks, Janne]

Nokia N9 to bust loose with MeeGo on Intel Atom power? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Jan 2011 07:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Think of a traditional hybrid and you probably think of a Toyota Prius. Then, after you’ve woken from your nap, you probably envision some complex system of batteries and electric motors and gears to capture power when braking and spit it back out when accelerating. Chrysler is now looking to deploy a different way, a seemingly much simpler way that’s all based on hydraulics. The vehicle is outfitted with a low-pressure reservoir of hydraulic fluid and a high-pressure chamber filled with nitrogen gas. When braking, pumps move the fluid into the nitrogen chamber to compress it and then, when accelerating, that compressed gas is used to push the fluid and drive the wheels. It’s a setup that was actually developed by the EPA and is currently in use by some commercial vehicles, most notably UPS trucks, but a hybrid Town & Country minivan could bring it to consumers — though not until 2012 at the earliest. Now, there’s a good chance the idea of a hybrid minivan is threatening to put you back to sleep, so we wish you pleasant dreams.

Continue reading Chrysler announces battery-free hydraulic hybrid tech, compresses gas to make power

Chrysler announces battery-free hydraulic hybrid tech, compresses gas to make power originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Jan 2011 07:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on January 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

Google seems to be dishin’ out new products and services, left and right. Some of them make the cut, other’s don’t! There’s quite the list of services that haven’t been as fortunate as others, like the original Google Video. What happened to it anyways? I’m talking about the one released into beta back in January of 2005 which was to enable users to “search the content of television programs from leading TV content providers including PBS, the NBA, Fox News, and C-Span.” It’s been replaced by the Google Video as you know it today, where you are able to watch actual videos, instead of searching the transcripts and content as the initial version offered.

Back in January 2005, the product manager for Google Video wrote up a short snippet on the Google Blog giving his compelling reason as to why Google Video was needed. He talked about being stuck in a hotel room for a few days in Wisconsin for a wedding, trying to find something to do, and flipping through channels, “idly watching some travel show when a thought hit me: surely someone, somewhere must have produced a travel show episode about Wisconsin, maybe even about that cheese factory. But of course there was no way to find it.” Thus Google Video came along. Above is a screenshot that shows a listing of television shows that matched what you were searching for.

In their press release, Google talked about all of the cool features it was going to have, like:

• Preview page: Displays up to five still video images and five short text segments from the closed captioning of each program.
• Upcoming episodes: Shows when the program will be aired next.
• Search within the show: Enables searching for specific words within a given program.
• Program details: Offers program and episode information including channel, date and time.
• Change location: Finds the next time and channel where a program will air locally according to zip code.

After searching for a program, you could click on the results and get more detailed information.  The screenshot above is an example of a result for Nightline with short snippets available at different time increments.  From there, it let you know when the show would be coming on next, and the time it would air based upon your zip code. These screenshots came from an archive from what used to be the “Help” page for the original Google Video. Unfortunately or fortunately, this service didn’t last too long.

The Google Operating System blog has put together a more detailed list that includes other Google services that just couldn’t make it… like:

• Google Answers- Recently closed in November, they just couldn’t compete with the well established Yahoo! Answers.
• Google X – It was designed to look similar to OS X, kinda cool.. .but Google didn’t want to risk a law suit from Apple. The link is a mirror of what Google X actually looked like.
• Google Compute – Yes, this one put your computer to work for other people when you weren’t using it! Using the Google Toolbar, Google Compute used your computer to help with calculations and research projects. Google was going to carefully select “worthwhile endeavors” to help, but Google Compute didn’t last long enough to do this.
• Google Viewer – This one displayed your Google search results as a Slide Show.

So long, farewell Google services….

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Related Posts:

Google Video Gets Frames – Focuses on SearchFunny Google Satire from The OnionYahoo Makes Video SiteGoogle Discontinues Services: Notebook, Video, Jaiku, and MoreVideo Of Google’s Future Homepage

We’re sure that a time will come when we’re slightly less amazed by Kinect hacks but, right now, we’re still just seeing one more impressive than the last — and we’re certainly OK with that. This latest comes to us from a group of students at the University of Washington, who had the bright idea to pair Microsoft’s device with some of the robotic surgery projects currently being developed by the university’s BioRobotics Lab. That combo isn’t quite the sentient, Kinect-enhanced robo-surgeon you may have feared, though. The students are actually using Kinect to provide force-feedback to the actual, human surgeons controlling the robotic equipment — something that would have been a $50,000 proposition without Kinect. As you might expect, however, the Kinect-based system isn’t quite ready to be used for actual surgery as it is — while it gets the job done as a proof of concept, the students note that the sensors will need to be scaled down, and the resolution improved in order to be deemed suitable for surgical use.

University of Washington students hack Kinect to aid in robotic surgery originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Jan 2011 06:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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