If you tend to buy ready-brewed coffee at Starbucks, buy ready-ground beans for use at home, or (shock) drink instant coffee, you might wonder what all the fuss is about.

However, if you take the trouble to roast your own beans, you might actually need some way to cool them down afterwards (they continue roasting for as long as they’re hot, apparently).

Well, EMS now uses two hot-air popcorn makers. One roasts the beans and the other has been modified to cool them down afterwards. I’m sure you can get dedicated machines to do all this, but what would be the fun in that?

The great thing is that hot-air popcorn makers aren’t really good at making popcorn (oil and pan method makes proper though slightly less healthy popcorn) but they sound as if they’re great at cooking up coffee beans!

You see what we’ll do for a decent cup of coffee?

The two devices have a similar shape, so were disassembled and then the iPod’s circuit board was connected up to the Apple Remote’s buttons.

There’s also some other clever stuff going on in there — without headphones it functions as the Apple Remote, but when the headphones are connected the device works like an iPod and automatically shuts off anything playing in iTunes on the associated Mac – though apparently it still functions as a remote which could get a tad annoying.

Anyway, it’s a cool little hack if only for its own sake.

Via

The IE6IFY site proudly proclaims: “After years of observation and reverse engineering I am proud to say I have been able to reproduce the IE6 algorithm to break even the most standards-compliant websites.”

Before I show you the results, here’s the piece of code that does the damage:

javascript:(function(){var i=0,r=function(n){return Math.floor(Math.random()*n)},f=document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].getElementsByTagName('*'),o=function(e){return typeof(e.style)=='object'&&e.tagName!='SCRIPT'},s=function(){while(!o(e=f[r(f.length)])){}return e.style};while(i++<5){s().display=r(2)?'block':'inline';s().position=r(2)?'absolute':'relative';s().margin=r(2)?'0':'1em';s().padding=r(2)?'0':'1em';s().width=r(2)?'':'auto';}})();

Whack that into your browser's toolbar and then hit it repeatedly when viewing your (least) favorite web site.

Here's what happens to Forever Geek:

And Gadzooki:

And of course Microsoft can't be allowed to get away with it:

Anyone tried it in IE6?

Watch this little robot, apparently something that’s available to buy (somewhere) coupled with an iPhone 3G S. Let it wake you up, teach it movements, and watch it “dance”.

Not sure whether this big-eyebrowed smiley robot will ever make it into production, but it’s a cool little experiment.

Via

Take a look at this rather bizarre bike. Apart from the fact that its wheels don’t have spokes, they’re not round either.

The front wheel is a rounded off pentagon while the back one is a reuleaux triangle (yeah, I went to Wikipedia too).

Apparently it’s quite smooth to ride, though it wasn’t completed in time for the Beijing Olympics that it was supposed to be in sponsorship for.

Never mind, it wouldn’t have won any medals.