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Is this Swedish town that's routing heat from its crematorium to local homes morbid or brilliant? Let's just call them brilliantly morbid.
So many options to describe this product: "stick your hands up a (USB) monkey for warmth" or "cheat the chills with chimp USB mitts." I'm sure you can do better. It's a pair of monkey-shaped USB hand warmers, for when you're typing in the cold, or you're a sufferer of chilly hands. They get up to 46 degrees in just five minutes, have a built-in wrist support for "supporting your tired wrist when using Mouse or Keyboard" and they'll fit hands up to 17 x 11 cm, or thereabouts, and when they're up to temp you can even disconnected them for freestyle use. [Gadget4All]
Generally, I don't consider radiators to be all that interesting (unless it is shaped like a Lego brick), but this coiled radiator design from Ciussai is definitely an exception. The metal wire tubing can be wound and stretched much like a garden hose, which gives it far more functionality than simply heating a room. For example: you can coil it around a bar to dry clothes or lay it on your bed to warm things up on a cold night. I don't know how safe all of this is, but I love the idea. And the best part is that it can actually be purchased from Ad Hoc—although pricing details are unknown.
Sure, that Thanko cooling fan keyboard was a great addition to your desktop for the summer, but temperatures have gotten chillier now and we're all wondering how to keep our wrists warm. Why, with Thanko's upgraded heating AND cooling keyboard, of course! The wintertime edition has three different warming spots that'll make your hands all toasty. And if things get too hot, switch it back to fan mode to cool your fingers off. This miraculous weather-weathering peripheral is available on the Thanko website for roughly $US50. [Thanko via Akihabara News]
If you're planning on a long distance ski trip or a mountain climb this winter, check out Ardica's new power and heat platform for outerwear. Not only will Ardica-enabled jackets charge your gadgets (up to 11 full charges on your mobile phone and 20 on your iPod), it'll also keep you nice and warm for either nine hours on low heat or three hours on high. If you'll be in the cold for even longer than that, just bring along a second battery.
Winter is just around the corner and, with gas prices still unstable, it's now even more important to monitor your thermostat. That's tough and annoying though, which is why gadgets like Ecobee are coming out on the market. Ecobee has an integrated programmable smart thermostat with a WiFi-enabled touchscreen that automatically sets your household to conserve energy at the press of a button.
Researchers in Japan and at Penn State have come up with a ceramic material that allows people to heat up their food twice as fast, allowing them to spend less time staring at the microwave and more time living their (read: our) rich, fulfilling lives. The new cookers are made up of 20% magnetite and 80% petalite, which unlike traditional bowls, heat up alongside the food so that the food isn't passing off heat by warming up the bowl. As an added bonus, the container stays hot for 15 minutes, meaning you really need oven mitts to transport this thing, Jason Statham style. If you can't wait for technology to catch up here, it's already on sale in Japan. [Live Science]
There's clearly something going on with the Swiss and hot water: first "extreme jacuzzi-ing" on top of Mont Blanc, and now they're going to use waste energy kicked out by servers to warm a swimming pool. It's a simple concept: take the heat from the server room air-conditioners at a new data centre, and direct it through heat exchangers to the water in the town pool. The town, Uitikon, will get a hot pool and all they had to pay for was some of the connecting gear since the heat would otherwise have been vented. Cool! ... or rather, hot! Darn eco-friendly too. [Sydney Morning Herald]
The Electroscape fireplace from Platonics has a remote-controlled LED lighting system built in. Ahh—nothing warms you up on a frosty 21st Century morn better than some funky LED lights that you can mix, from single colour to multicoloured, from the cozy comfort of your armchair. You can even specify what arty "fire" objects are displayed inside: driftwood, pebbles or gravel. The fireplace pumps out 2kW of heat from its element, though, rather strangely, Platonics says this is an optional add-on. Maybe those LEDs get really hot. Available now for around US$3100 in the UK. [Platonic fireplaces and Ubergizmo]
If you can guess what this is at first glance then you're a better man than I ...