Sorapot Teapot. Just Add (Hot) Water You know, if you’re going to demo your product on video, at least do it properly. To the untrained eye, the clip of Joey Roth using the high-tech teapot, the Sorapot, to make a cuppa seems fine. It certainly shows… You know, if you’re going to demo your product on video, at least do it properly. To the untrained eye, the clip of Joey Roth using the high-tech teapot, the Sorapot, to make a cuppa seems fine. It certainly shows how the steel, glass and silicone pot works.
But Joey, next time you make tea, talk to somebody from Britain. You don’t pour water from a thermos, however stylish it might be. You need boiling water. Boiling. Not boiled or just “quite hot”, but 100ºC H2O.
I’ve blended feelings about the design, too. The Pyrex should be a much better insulator than metal, keeping the tea hot, but the metal bar to lock the pot shut seems fiddly, and when upended to receive the boiling water, the Sorapot looks a little wobbly. And for $180 you could buy 12 classic ceramic teapots. Still, if you’re buying this to stick on a shelf in your bachelor pad, it’s probably perfect.
Laser Etched QR Codes: Digital Graffiti For Gadgets Forget stickers. Real geeks show their commitment with something more permanent: laser engraving. And Jason Fields takes your etching and raises you one QR code. Sure, it’s too big for most tiny QR readers to handle, and the gray on…
Forget stickers. Real geeks show their commitment with something more permanent: laser engraving. And Jason Fields takes your etching and raises you one QR code. Sure, it’s too large for most tiny QR readers to handle, and the gray on gray isn’t exactly contrasty, but Jason has squeezed in his “email signature file, postal address, with links to my blog and twitter pages as well”.
Jason’s iPhone was engraved free by the Instructables guys, who had an etching machine set up at the Web 2.0 Expo booth. And it seems he might not be the only person to have had the idea. This Flicker page shows another Instructables-provided QR code on an iPhone.
Far more serious than beaming a salted snack advert into space, scientists at Pennsylvania Say University in State College advocate that if we really want to catch the attention of aliens, then we should cover half the moon in mirrors, and send coded flashes of light into space. Always assuming ET’s not too bored by us, that is.
Properly angled and lined up to reflect light from the sun, the mirrors could be used to increase the amount of light reflected by the Earth-Moon system by up to 20%. Any alien eye scanning the heavens—or, more likely, an automated system like SETI set up by aliens—should be able to easily spot the modulations. A set of prime numbers in flashes would be a good choice, since these are easily distinguishable from natural variations. Furthermore, pop photovoltaic cells on the other side of the mirrors, beam the energy to Earth by microwaves and you’d have enough power to seriously impact the climate crisis. Not a bad idea, eh? [New Scientist via KurzweilAI]
Rubik’s Cubes are nice if you actually want to think, but how about for those times when you’re just sitting there and you want something to fiddle with? The Neocube has 216 spherical neodymium magnets that connect and make a cube, a sphere, or any other obscene shape that springs to mind. Show me a man who doesn’t like playing with magnets and I’ll show you a man I don’t much care for. All yours for just $34.95. Bonus video after the jump.
Far more serious than beaming a 
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