microflarets

technology ∩ social change
Bike chain clock, by Andreas Dober.

Bike chain clock, by Andreas Dober.

Google has released the source to its Chrome OS (a Linux variant) which is firmly targeted at netbooks. Interesting differences include

  1. All applications are web applications
  2. Everything is sandboxed (for security, similar to what the OLPC OS, Sugar, does)
  3. All data is stored in the cloud

Put it on a touchscreen pixel-qi tablet, add Wikipedia and a decent pdf reader, and you get Hitchhikers guide version zero.

This isn’t getting enough attention.  The UNSW has commercialised a vanadium redox battery (a battery with liquid cathode and anode and a solid electrolyte) with multiple demonstrations, including a 2.5MW wind farm on King Island, Tasmania.

A similar device developed at MIT is an entirely liquid battery (liquid cathode, anode and electrolyte that remain separate due to their different densities).

I think the UNSW version is safer (you don’t have to have to keep it at 700C) although it delivers a lower current per kg.  Whichever one is adopted, there is no doubt that this type of battery may be only practical (and scalable) alternative to pumping-water-up-a-hill storage of electricity — a device which is needed more desperately than renewable power atm.

I want a pair of Coxto Campers  but cannot find them short of flying to Sydney to window shop. if anyone has seen them, let me know.

I want a pair of Coxto Campers but cannot find them short of flying to Sydney to window shop. if anyone has seen them, let me know.

being a supporter of individual liberties online (read: paranoid), I’ve been following freenet development. I’m also interested in distributed computing (the internet is, after all, a massively parallel computer with no downtime). Now, these things have been combined in swarm.