Category Archives: Gadgets and Tech
If you spend the better half of your life visiting uproarious rock concerts and the like, here’s the perfect apparel for you. The next time you step out to watch the Prodigy or Slipknot for instance, chuck your old band T-shirt away and done this awesome one, that converts all the sound energy being blasted out of those speakers into usable electricity, that you could charge your phone with! Using an A4 panel with a modified film that works like a giant microphone of sorts, the T-shirt absorbs the sound energy and converts it into electricity using compressing interlacing quartz crystals. The electricity created is then stored in a battery which in turn is capable of juicing up your portable devices!
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Afghanistan, a land that has suffered multiple punches from war, is now being hooked on to the internet, in an eco-friendly and innovative way. United States aide workers are working on a pilot project in Afghanistan called the FabFi, the project is essentially an inexpensive internet setup that costs just about $60, and makes use of everyday items enabling Afghanis to connect to the internet with substantially high speeds. Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and funds chipped in by the group members themselves, the project uses homemade RF reflectors made from wood, metal, plastics, stone, clay, or any other locally available product and can be juiced up with an automobile battery, making it sustainable and less grid-reliant!
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With the rate at which fossil fuels are slowly depleting bowels of the earth, humankind sure as hell needs to find newer ways to power up, and is seemingly doing so on a respectable scale these days. Researchers at the RMIT University in Melbourne have come up with a fantastic way to keep you powered up, on the go. These brainy folk are busy sculpting shoes that could, if all goes as planned that is, generate energy as you move, making use of piezoelectricity coupled with a thin film microchip coating, perfect to generate energy that could turn your gym-time more fruitful than ever.
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Laptops tend to waste a whole lot of space on the backsides of their screen-panels. Putting this space to constructive use, Samsung has come up with a solar-powered laptop that besides using pre-filled energy from the grid, also charges up with energy from the sun. With two hours of sunlight exposure generating enough charge to keep this one running for one additional hour, the NC215S solar-powered netbook comes with a 10.1″ 1024 x 600 matte display, 1GB of RAM, and a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N570 dual-core processor, enough to get your work done on the go in a jiffy in an eco-friendly way!
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Green workout machines have always left us grinning. Besides burning those calories away and giving your body a more human-like and a less-snowman like figure, these machines also generate electricity. To add to the bandwagon, we’ve brought to you the Wattbike. This one replicates a true cycling experience as far as possible, and allows for bicyclists to train hard, at the saying time showing just how much energy they’ve created by cycling. In short, the Wattbike tells users just how much energy they’ve expelled and produced while training. Also, this one makes notes of just about everything, like the time you spend on it, your heart rate and such which can then be accessed via a computer or a smartphone.
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If you’ve got your facts right, might have noticed how amplifying a bamboo can really be. Using just these simple principals, designer Anatoliy Omelchenko came up with a green non-electricity using speaker for the iPhone 4. Using the natural resonance of a bamboo to amplify sound, the bamboo-speaker simply intensifies the stereo effect of the iPhone 4’s speakers. Measuring a foot long, these bamboo speakers are laser cut and finished by hand and are as eco-friendly as ever, given that bamboo grows fast unlike other sources of timber.
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Most of us carry plastic table-ware on trips to the outdoors that can be disposed off quickly. Well, since the world’s turning into a plastic waste-land gradually, it’s better late than never to begin trimming the use of plastic. Designer David Stockton has come up with a pretty impressive way to carry out your table-ware to the outdoors and have them washed too! Portable and easy to use, this dishwasher and dinner-set holder combined works just fine and kicks the use of plastic disposables out. To power it up, all you need to do is set the crank-shaft rotating, helping you pack a bit of muscle at the same time too!
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We’ve come across smart-building energy-saving technology by IBM before. Now, General Electric has teamed up with German technology company EnOcean for yet another intelligent building-energy monitoring system that will help boost building energy efficiency. Targeted at commercial and residential buildings, the system uses a bunch of automated technologies to keep close tabs on energy usage. Also, the technology requires no batteries and wires whatsoever, allowing it to be placed in inaccessible areas of buildings, out of the way of residents. Called HabiTEQ system, this one runs a building’s lighting, heating, ventilation, blinds and security wirelessly.
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Emirates, one of the largest airlines, has just thought of a pretty unique and feasibly practical way to save a load of paper from ending up in the waste. The airline is now offering digital boarding passes, using internet-enabled mobile devices instead of paper. Currently available only to passengers flying out of Dubai, the system allows passengers to log on to the airline website, and receive a mobile boarding pass, either via email or SMS that shows up as a barcode on the display screen of the mobile device. The barcode is then read and works as a boarding pass, instead of using traditional paper boarding passes.
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We’ve had a bunch of green screens before, and the Sunflower Monitor design just jumped on the bandwagon of eco-friendly computer peripherals. Designed by Marko Vuckovic, this concept screen design uses solar energy to power on. From the outside, it looked pretty standard, with an added touch of curves and a sleek-as-hell stand. The insides though took our breath away. The Sunflower packs solar sensors, four in all, that track the sun to generate energy. Also, this one hooks on to a joint design, allowing it to be turned around in just about any direction. And the fact that it uses solar energy to power up will help reduce electricity bills too, particularly if used in those large glass-walled offices instead of energy-sucking CRTs.
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