I’ve written occasionally about how LED lights will gradually displace incandescent bulbs in most applications over the coming decade or so, and this is already happening – look closely at the tail lights of that truck you’re passing, or the traffic light you’re stuck at, and also note how you can buy LED bulbs to replace your existing incandescent bulbs right now, they’re just a little pricey and a little dim for most applications. There’s news today that major progress has been made on the dimness front – researchers in Japan have managed to almost double the luminosity of LED’s. I think this means you’ll be able to manufacture a bulb that’s sufficiently bright to replace incandescents for most household uses. At what cost, I don’t know (and given that the inventor is leaving his research job to commercialize this, my guess is ‘not cheap’ to start), but it’s another step down the path.

Regular visitors may have noticed how I’ve been gradually sprucing up this site over the past month or so. New server, new design (crabbed from elsewhere this time), new tools (streaming music is back, a wiki, and others yet to be revealed) and more integration with public tools (most of which is invisible aside from the presence of commenters outside our social circle – I’m getting indexed in some engines I had kept blocked in the past – there’s more of this to come as well). Anyway one of the next things on my list is dealing with bookmarks. In the past I kept a sitebar installation going. I’m tempted to move everything over to del.icio.us but a little worried that the firefox extension is going to slow down my browsing tremendously. Anyone have any experience with this? The idea is you store your bookmarks in del.icio.us and use a browser plugin to synch your local browser’s bookmark list with the del.ico.us server. You can do the same thing with sitebar and your local browser, the difference is there is some benefit to maintaining a public profile in del.icio.us that you don’t get in sitebar in terms of traffic to my site. I’d prefer not to have to maintain two sets of bookmarks, invariably they get out of synch. So. Anyone running the del.icio.us extension with a huge bookmark list and synching it with firefox? How’s the performance?

I’ve mentioned qumana in the past. It’s a fairly good weblog editing tool for Windows. It’s no ecto, but really it’s one of the better tools on windows. They recently updated to version 2.0. What’s most interesting about this is a feature they’ve added, which is all about integrating keyword ads into your weblog posts. I’m not a fan of this, really, and I’m not sure that their model of building their own keyword ad network will play out well for them, but if it helps subsidize the ongoing maintenance of a decent weblog editor and they don’t force their adword schemes on you (which for now at least they don’t), then more power to them.

I’m on a tagging kick today. Let’s say you’re wanting to get started with tagging, but since you’re new at it you’re a little unsure what tags to use. You may find that tagyu can help. It’s a tag suggestion tool – paste in a block of text and tagyu will offer up some suggestions. There are tools to help you integrate this into your workflow, including wordpress and movabletype plugins and a bookmarklet.

I dumped the text of this post into tagyu and got the following suggestions:

tools del.icio.us blog tagging tags

All appropriate in my estimation.

I’ve already installed the wordpress integration stuff (Ultimate Tag Warrior), I just haven’t turned it on yet, I’m waiting for a few things to settle themselves before I integrate tagging into this site.

So tagging’s all the rage these days, thanks to the emergence of tools like flickr, del.icio.us and technorati. If you’re on a Mac, take a look at Spotmeta and imagine applying the same principles to the file system of your local computer. This is pretty slick stuff, and it’s free. Note however that it’s fairly early in its development, so be sure to check the known issues page periodically.

Check out Synfig, a really promising looking open source cross platform 2d animation tool. There are binaries for Windows and MacOS and source for linux folk. The developer warns that this is a preview release and not ready for real production use, but some tinkering with the windows version suggests that this has a ton of potential. If you’ve ever wished you could play around with professional-level 2d animation tools, here’s your chance.

Check out the freeplayenergy Freecharge Weza, a power generator that uses a foot pedal to generate electricity. It’s a bit spendy at ~$300 but if you paired this with a ~$40 power inverter you’re basically able to power any device you need to through human power, from a car battery to your cell phone. This thing would be awesome on our annual camping trips and I already have an inverter. Their site doesn’t give you its weight, but with a lead acid battery in it I’m sure it’s too heavy for backpacking. It would be fine for our boat camping trips though.

[via futurismic]

Check out this excellent little device – it’s a USB ->IDE and SATA adapter, allowing you to quickly mount your internal 2.5″ or 3.5″ IDE or SATA drive without having to install it in a computer. I have an IDE-only version of this and get a fair amount of usage out of it. I’m glad to see a combination device with SATA is on its way. Hopefully they’ll be just as cheap as the $14 IDE one I bought.

[via akihabara news]