Filed under: Household

It’s far from an out-of-the-box solution that some green(er) dryers are, but the folks at Hydromatic Technologies think their new “Dryer Miser” technology is the cure for all your clothes drying woes, and the most energy efficient solution short of hanging ’em out to dry. The key to that, it seems, is the system’s reliance on hydronic technology, which consists of a specially-engineered fluid that gets heated up in a self-contained system to dry the clothes. That apparently not only cuts the energy consumption of the dryer by up to 50 percent, but actually cuts the drying time by up to 41 percent as well. As you can see above, however, it’s not exactly the most elegant solution, and according to the company, it’ll initially only be available as an after-market kit that’ll need to be installed by a qualified technician. No word on what it’ll cost though, but the company is shooting for it to be available in the fall of this year.

[Via I4U News, image courtesy of Gizmag]

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Filed under: Cellphones

The House of Representatives just took a long weekend break without voting on the Spy bill sent down from the Senate. As such, our beloved carriers’ hopes for immunity from those pesky US privacy laws have disintegrated. At least for the time being — the fight between the baddies and goodies (however you define that) isn’t over by a long shot.

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Filed under: Home Entertainment

We’re still not totally convinced this isn’t just some joke gone too far, but given the fact that they’re accepting PayPal payments as we speak, we’re going to have to go with “scarily real.” The FM DockRadio is simply an FM radio for your Bose SoundDock. Obviously the iPod doesn’t have an FM radio tuner, so the need is there, but we’re guessing the $89+ cost isn’t going to fly for something as incredibly janky and featureless as this. Especially when we could just go out and buy a Coby for twenty five cents at Costco — which plays CDs and keeps you warm.

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Filed under: Cellphones, Features

Our up-close experiences with mobile wizardry at Mobile World Congress this year have ranged from the mild to the wild, and today, we’ve got the whole range. Any guesses which are which in this particular batch, hmm?

Read – Motorola’s bargain basement MWC offerings
Read – Nokia’s S60 touch UI at MWC
Read – Polymer Vision’s e-ink Readius
Read – Nokia’s high-rolling N96

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Filed under: Laptops

You know how much we love SSDs around here, but getting one the legit way currently involves poking a rather large hole in your wallet — so we were pretty interested to see how a jury-rigged SSD built using that CompactFlash-to-SATA adapter we spotted a while back would hold up. While we probably would have sprung for something a little larger than the 4GB drives used in the test, the results are pretty encouraging: DIY SSD drives were overall faster than the 1.8-inch traditional drive found in the MacBook Air, and even a little faster than the VAIO TZ’s 64GB SSD. The drives were bested by a 7200rpm 2.5-inch drive and a 128GB SATA SSD, as you’d expect, but what we weren’t expecting was the negligible hit on power consumption — it looks like SSDs really don’t use less power, as the unchanged battery life of the SSD MacBook Air hinted. Still — you know we want one. Check out all the results and a little howto action after the break.

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