Tag Archives: innovation

Thoughts

Apple releases Boot Camp!

In a surprising move, Apple has released software that makes it super easy for people to install and run Windows on Apple machines. This is interesting on all levels. I can understand the benefits, but this is a huge risk as well. There are plenty of caveats to this. I wonder what’s going through Steve Jobs’ mind here. He’s clearly inviting a side-by-side comparison of operating systems by doing this, and hoping that hardware and looks alone will persuade people to buy a Mac. Now people will have a choice when purchasing hardware for Windows. Will they be willing to pay more for a Mac? We’ll see! I for one hope so. :-). Here is the link.

➡ Updated 2/17/08: We know what happened by now, don’t we? Apple’s become even more popular, and Boot Camp has been integrated into Leopard, the latest version of OS X.

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Reviews

The Henri Chamoux Archeophone

It is because of Mr. Chamoux’s creation that we can preserve musical history, come down to us in the form of cylinders from the good old days. I just had a listen to a few MP3 files published by the good folks at the UCSB Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project, and I am truly thankful to Mr. Chamoux for building the machine. I am also grateful to UCSB for taking the time to preserve an important part of our heritage. There’s a Wired article on this as well, written by Rachel Metz, which is where I found out about all this wonderful stuff. (Photo courtesy of the Phonograph Makers’ Pages)

Chamoux

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Reviews

MonsterPod: the gooey tripod

This has got to be one of the coolest products I’ve seen so far. It’s made of a visco-elastic morphing polymer that will stick to virtually anything, and these two fellows, a father and son team, made it into a tripod for compact digital cameras. I hope they sell a whole bunch of them, it’s pretty cool stuff! Here’s their site.

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Reviews

A personal plane that flies and drives

Just caught this article on Discovery News. I’ve seen concepts like this before, but they usually looked just plain awful. This one actually looks cool, and I hope very much that it makes it to market. The fuel economy would be better than my MINI’s, and that’s impressive!

There are two photos available. The first is with the wings folded, ready to park in the garage. The second is with the wings extended, ready for take-off. (Photos courtesy of Terrafugia.)

Terrafugia 2

Terrafugia 1

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Thoughts

Offset electricity costs through wind turbines

I live in a high-rise condo building, and during one of our building’s board meetings, the discussion arrived at the topic of reducing electricity costs. Immediately I thought about the possibility of placing wind-driven turbines on the top of our building. There is always a good breeze up there, and the electricity produced by the turbines could help offset the energy costs for the building. One of the board members promised to look into the matter, but so far, nothing’s come of it.

Perhaps the costs for the turbines are still prohibitive for many buildings, ours included. But I can see a market for this kind of a product, if the costs are brought down enough so that a cost-benefit analysis of such a solution can show its viability in the long-term.

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