Peter Green is clearly my kind of guy. Or, at least, he’s the kind of guy who would take a Mac mini and turn it into a laptop.
I spent a few weeks a while back working out what I’d need to do to turn my PowerBook into a wearable Borg attachment. Turns out, it’s not that difficult: monitor glasses, a Bluetooth chordal keyboard and trackpad, and Bluetooth wireless connections to the cellphone for Internet when Wifi isn’t available. The only problem I didn’t get around to gracefully solving: re-engineering my backpack to provide suitable cooling to a snugly encased (and poorly ventilated) PowerBook running at full tilt, but the beta version had that issue solved with (if you will) a hot-swap cold pack.
Mind you, I chickened out on actually building the thing out of fears that I’d fry my laptop. Oh, and fears that no one would speak to me, ever again. But I do have an extra laptop or two lying around….
Gotta love it when there are people in the world weird enough to make the weird people feel good about themselves…
Speaking of which, I actually have a question about the Borg attachment plan: solar panels for when the battery runs out?
(bright idea)
(groan…)
Yes, I considered solar panels. The main problem there is that unless you live in Arizona, you’re just not going to generate enough juice to power anything more than an iPod. And I’m not crazy enough (so to speak) to wear a tinfoil hat to maximize the solar input.
What’s more interesting is an idea I saw published last year, which was a biokinetic mechanism to translate pendular motion into electricity, built into a backpack. We generate much more energy with wasted motion than the sun pours into our cross-section. But so far as I know, that’s not yet shipping.
I’ll reiterate an idea I’ve had before — my 65W battery stores as much energy as a low-calorie rice cake. If anyone came up with a way to power our devices directly from stored body fat, there’s your unlimited low-wattage energy supply right there. Power your laptop for 12 hours and burn off a half-ounce of fat. Tell me that wouldn’t make a billion dollars in six months.
1) No comment on the tinfoil hat (political or otherwise)…
2) Pendular motion – they have wristwatches that work this way; I’d bet this is coming soon.
3) Rice cake: yes, it would make a billion dollars, as soon as you figure out what would power the device you’re talking about. My guess is it takes more to do the conversion than the conversion generates. Otherwise, it’d be here already (but maybe that’s too cynical…)
I think the bigger problem on the rice cake issue is that the only way I can see to convert biochemical energy into electricity would be with surgery.
And even then, my conversion of 1 ounce of fat to 24 hours of runtime assumes perfect efficiency. The human body is notoriously inefficient. If the conversion runs at 10% efficiency (which might be high), then you’re talking about a half-pound per day — which would be great for some of us, but that’s a business model that needs a fleet of lawyers.