New Year’s Resolution #42: blog more. Major changes coming, but in the meantime:

I have previously written about some pretty amazing-looking lightbulbs. But imagine if you could have lightbulbs that do more than light your room, look great and save the environment. Imagine if you could wirelessly stream your music through them too.

You can, and there’s more than one way to do it.

The Klipsch LightSpeaker System does just that. It includes recessed spotlights that you screw into your ceiling, a transmitter, and a remote that you can control your invisible sound system with. However, the bulbs themselves are disappointingly standard in appearance, and there’s this ominous sentence in the description: “Not intended to replace home theater speakers.” Sounds to me like the sound quality could be a bit poor. Shame.

But don’t despair. You could get this version, designed by Castiglione Morelli (great name). They look absolutely stunning, and come with a handy attachment to transmit directly from your iPod. Bad news if you’re not an Apple junkie, though.

Finally, for those who don’t like lightbulbs, or love ceiling fans, or something, there’s the Hunter Concert Breeze Ceiling Fan. It’s a ceiling fan that can integrate into your existing sound system. There’s also an attachment for a lightbulb as well. It even works outdoors, apparently, although I’m not sure what you’d attach it to. Bad news is, you can’t buy one yet.

Still, these ideas add a whole new dimension to the idea of surround sound.

I promised to post on the winners of the Greener Gadgets Design Competition, and I completely forgot.

You may like to remind yourself of my tips – I went for Recompute (the recyclable cardboard computer) and the RITI printer, which converted coffee and tea dregs into ink for printouts.

Both of these made it to the top 13, but not to the final shortlist of 4. The final winner was Tweet-a-Watt, pictured below.

Have you ever seen anything less inspiring in your life? The purpose of this nondescript little gadget is to measure the daily power consumption of a household, and then automatically ‘tweet’ it for all to see. I can see that knowing how much you consume, and setting yourself targets to reduce the total is a good idea, but the main point of this gadget is the element that allows the Twitter updates.

Why would you want to do that? If it was supposed to create a culture of shame around over-consumption, I could maybe get behind the idea, but there’s no mention of anything like that. It just seems designed to tap into the morbid curiosity about other people’s dull existences that Twitter engenders already. (I’m not a fan. Can you tell?)

The only aspect of this that impresses me is that they have made the hardward opensource – ie you can download the design, the instructions and the scripts you need to make your own for no charge. Now that’s a good idea. Shame their product is so pointless.

I came across this idea today. I know the story’s more than a month old, but I still think it’s interesting enought to warrant a post.

The city of Oslo is trialling a scheme whereby 80 of the city’s buses will be run on biomethane from local sewage processing plants.

Apparently the buses (like the one above) only need minor modifications to change from diesel to poo-power.

As far as I can see, there are only two potential problems with this otherwise fantastic innovation. Firstly, are the buses more likely to explode, since they’ll be carrying a big tank of biomethane? And secondly, what on earth is it going to smell like?

But the important thing is that Norway is taking positive and effective action to stick to their target of being carbon neutral by 2050. Maybe instead of just replacing the bendy buses in London with a new Routemaster, Boris might consider introducing someting as good as this?

Terrafugia have successfully tested a flying car!

Admittedly, it only stayed up for 37 seconds, but that’s still really exciting. Along with hover boots and time travel, flying cars are everyone’s dream for the future.

It’s going to cost around $200, 000, and will be on sale by next year. For the moment, let’s forget about the fact that you’ll have to have light aircraft licence to drive it, or what it would cost in fuel, both financially and ecologically. Just revel in a moment of excited discovery.

According to its inventors, it’s not a flying car. It’s a ‘roadable aircraft’. I disagree. It’s clearly a flying car with wings that fold up.

I’ve seen the future. Of journalism, that is.

A group of journalists in the San Francisco Bay area have set up spot.us – a new model for the way news provision works, which they are calling ‘community funded reporting’. The project is run by the ‘Center for Media Change’, who are a ‘501(c) 3 non-profit organization that enriches our culture… by facilitating the creation, development and use of new Internet-based business models to preserve the economic and professional viability of journalism.’

The idea is that people can post ideas on the site for stories they’d like to read, and then others can pledge money to fund someone to write the article. When the total needed to fund the investigation is reached, the article is written and is licenced under Creative Commons, so that anyone is free to republish it as long as the author is credited.

At the moment, it is tightly integrated with local news provision in the Bay area, but the creators hope to be able to expand its scope in the future. The idea of non-profit news has also been taken up by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, who set up his own version, ProPublica, in 2007. This one perhaps has slightly more international clout, being located in Manhattan and staffed by high-profile ex-editors, but I have to say I admire the integral optimism of what the San Fran lot are trying to do.

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