Half Baked Ideas

Have you ever been slashdotted, Dugg, or attacked by the web 2.0 clones? Have you had the bill from your hosting supplier asking for £10/Gigabyte overbandwidth?

Well, it can be very annoying. Here is the best idea ever for a cheapass way of getting around using any bandwidth... the Coral Cache failover.

The basic premise of this HOWTO is to set up your website to use someone elses bandwidth instead of your own. You do this on the sly, and generally without too many people noticing.

So... what to do:

Detecting bandwidth
You will need to know when you have been web2.0-ko'd. Bandwidth detection depends on what platform and technology you are using on your website. I am not going to go into any code examples of how to detect bandwidth, as this is a fairly non trivial task for every platform.

There are many millions of radio broadcasts that go unrecorded every year. Some of these are insignificant, and not worthy of recording, but there are some that are more worthy.

What about all of the old broadcasts from the first foray into the radio world. Wouldn't it be great to be able to hear every radio broadcast that was ever made?

I have a solution. As we are led to believe, radio broadcasts from earth leak from our planet into space. Space is a vast area, in which radio waves can travel away from earth at the speed of light.

All that would be required to recover these old broadcasts would be to travel to the point in space where the radio broadcast is just entering. You would be able to record the broadcast as if it were on your home radio set.

Lets admit it guys and girls... we don't really enjoy cleaning the kitchen. It's dirty, smelly, and make your hands wrinkle up.

I think I have the ultimate solution, and I thought of it while I was in the car wash.
Those Car wash machines have three giant rollers, one for each side of the car, which spin at high velocity and clean the bird crap away. It got me thinking... why can't I do that on my kitchen surfaces. The idea was formed.

Abstract
You clear everything away from you work surfaces. Press a button and sit back. A roller will come from the top of a cupboard, and start spinning. It will roll gently across all of the worksurfaces cleaning as it goes.

A Linux computer to drop into the place of a MS server when it inevitabally break.

This is an idea for a distro for running from on any workstation that takes over the functions of the full server, if only temporarily.
The system would work in three parts.
Part one
This comprises of a multiplatform client that sends information to the server (see part two)
This client would collate information regarding shares and permissions, take a backup of users and logins, and save information regarding mail. When I say mail, what I mean is information regarding pop3 connectors, and smtp information. If the server currently runs ISA server to manage the internet, the basic information will be recorded, only the basic rules will be saved.

I propose a way to generate power from your shoes

The shoe is lined with thin strips of piezo electric material, that when flexed produces a current.

This is then fet into a small rectifier and conditioner circuit, and then used to charge a small battery in the heel. Batteries are interchangeable for each charging, and are super lightweight.

Once the battery is removed, it clips into a general purpose power unit.

The power unit is a small block that houses the battery, and provides many different size outputs for common devices.

This has never ceased to amaze me: Manufacturers of graphics cards never include a decent RGB converter.

So much for high quality video capture and playback. Packages like MythTV are going to hit a dead end soon. Until card manufactures take note, we are doomed to use composite, and VGA converters. Bah

How about that for an idea? anyone? (yes thats you Nvidia/ATI)

This is a suggestion for a totally radical design for a shirt.
It has embedded cabling and headphones, as well as an array of connections, and hidden pockets.
This is perfect for the stealth listening in the office.

click for bigger

This is the front and side view of the shirt. There is a small stiched in compartment for the cables to go. (Maybe they are already pre stitched in). There are small earbud compartments in there too. (Think the smallest sony earbuds).