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Democratic Ecology: Philippe Starck's Cheap Designer Wind Turbine For Your Home
Posted by Brian Lam at 6:30 AM on July 3, 2008
Famous designer Philippe Starck recently revealed he felt a certain shame that all the things he'd designed were not essential for living. This turbine which he designed with the help of generator company Pramac, can theoretically provide a single home with 20-60% of all the electricity it needs. The name, which needs work, or at least the prefix "turbo" in front of it, is "Democratic Ecology." If the performance is indeed true, at US$633, it's actually a steal and I'd order one right now. [inhabitat via Boingboing]
How secure are your passwords? Probably not very. The guys over at Popsci have a neat partial solution to that problem: a DIY alphanumeric random password generator. Made with an Olimex AVR development board and some custom software, the gizmo produces 16-character passcodes on its LCD at the press of a button. No dictionary words, no girlfriends' names. Just nice, secure random letters and special characters. All it takes is $43 worth of stuff, and some soldering. The only problem: in the published version, passcode saving isn't enabled, so you'll have to write those secure beasties down somewhere. If you make one, give it a post-1988 case won't you? [
The Revolution Door is a concept from New York designers Fluxxlab that puts otherwise-wasted kinetic energy from a revolving office door to good use—generating power. Fluxxlab's rationale is that humans exert a chunk of their own energy when pushing a revolving door around, and it may as well be captured via gears and an electricity generator. If you think about the thousands of doors across the country spinning around all day, everyday, then maybe they've got a point. Obligatory design diagram, and a schematic showing how the idea turns your breakfast into green lightbulb-lighting power after the jump.
As you know, nothing gets a woman hotter than a really cheesy pick-up line. Or better yet, a really cheesy and wildly inappropriate line—"Oh, I'm sorry, I thought that was a Braille name tag" for example. Fortunately, even the shy awkward geek can get in on the action thanks to our good old friend the gadget.
