John Sisler

Just downloaded Dethklok and updated all my iStuff

Just enjoyed reading my son’s fathers day book. He thinks I’m 50. http://twitpic.com/8065i

Just finished decorating Jack’s playroom for his birthday tomorrow. Weather looks like we’ll be inside.

Still at work, i was ready to go 15 minutes ago and found a personal site was down. Now it’s pretty again. http://forsale.sisler.info

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I’m guessing that not too many Dvice readers woke up this morning to find a blank screen instead of the Weekend Today Show, but I think that over the coming weeks most of us will find that the analog switch off affects us all in ways we didn’t expect.

Personally, I recently realized that the little Sony Watchman portable I sometimes carry to sporting events and on trips is now little more than a fancy paperweight, and that I no longer have even the thinnest excuse for not ditching that old TV I never use sitting in my bedroom.

My Mom is one of those people with an old school TV and a roof antenna, but luckily I was able to get her set up with a converter box on my last trip West. Now I suppose I’ll need to try and talk her through re-scanning the box’s channel lineup over the phone. Sound’s like fun.

What’s your experience of an analog TV free world (well, USA) been like so far?

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Raytheon has just been granted a one-year contract from the Navy for the preliminary design of a 100 kiloWatt FEL (Fee Electron Laser) for warships. The laser beams could be used against missles, airplanes, or even boats. Take that, you silly pirates.

Once designed, the naval operators could adjust the wavelength of the laser, which wasn’t possible with conventional lasers. This helps compensate for the varying humidity associated with ship-born situations.

This one-year preliminary design phase is one-third of a $150-million project. Do you think they could work along with the similar project that the Army’s working on? Nah… that might actually save tax-payer dollars.

Via Popular Mechanics

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One of the perks of being an architecture firm such as Spain’s Selgascano is that you get to design yourself an awesome place to work. Check out Selgascano’s “office in the woods,” designed by the company’s Jose Selgas and Lucia Cano. It’s one long, tunnel-like office covered by a curved transparent acrylic window that’s 20 millimeters thick and lets in plenty of natural light. The 110-millimeter-thick opaque wall is made from layers of insulated fiberglass and polyester, and shades the office.

To keep things inside cool, one of the ends of the office is attached to a pulley system and the slab can be raised or lowered, letting in some fresh air. Explore more of the office in the woods below, thanks to the gorgeous photography of Iwan Baan.

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The average student’s backpack is loaded with a bunch of books. For the average robotic student? A backpack stuffed with a computer, which allows that ‘bot to read said books.

Ninomiya-kun, a robot built by Japan’s Waseda University (along with a few of the country’s other technical institutes), is loaded with character recognition software that allows its camera-eyes to pick out consecutive words on a page and read them out loud in sequence. The end result? It can read books.

Right now, Ninomiya-kun’s voice is still a bit, well, robot-y, but the researchers working on it hope to give it a bit more feeling. It can recognize over 2,000 kanji and the supplementary alphabets of Japanese, hiragana and katakana, and is pretty good at reading elementary texts. Click Continue to see a demo of Ninomiya-kin doing its thing.

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In the long march toward a green power grid, a lot of eyes are turning toward nuclear power. While the problem of what to do with the waste remains unresolved (waste is typically stored on-site), a new, more compact reactor design might make the issues of cost and construction time less of a concern. Babcock & Wilcox’s small-scale reactor is one-tenth the size of a normal one, and it’s able to generate 125 MW of power.

B&W says the power will cost less than $5,000 per megawatt. With an average home consuming about 1 kW, the reactor could lead to some seriously cheap power — possibly even cheaper than this mini reactor from Hyperion.

All of this, of course, puts aside the issue of nuclear waste, which would be presumably the same amount as a normal-size reactor. At least B&W has equipped the pint-size reactors to be able to store waste on-site for their entire 60-year lifespan. That seems to be good enough for the Obama administration (for now), so if this new design can help get us on the road to safe, practical nuclear power, we say bring it on!

Babcock & Wilcox, via Treehugger

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Pizza is serious business. So you want to go into cutting a pizza with the right tools. The Pizza Pro is a pizza slicer shaped like a power saw. Sure, it’s not really a power saw and there are no batteries or electricity required, but just the form alone should lend the air of seriousness that you’re craving to your pizza-eating festivities.

I Want One of Those via GeekAlerts