scale

Kitchen scale weighs in on multitasking

I used to have an old mechanical kitchen scale. Rickety and imprecise, it served more as decoration than as an actual scale. While it served no needed purpose in my kitchen, it sure looked cool. It had small images of meats and vegetables printed or painted on its surface. Though it didn't do much actual measuring, it did make for a nice cookbook stand. While this Maya Kitchen Scale may not have little pictures of common food items on it, it makes up for its lack of kitsch by being actually useful in the modern kitchen.

I tend to … Read more

ParaScale software clusters servers into enterprise cloud storage

Cloud storage is getting a lot more feasible for the enterprise.

ParaScale, a start-up that develops cloud-storage solutions, announced Monday the availability of its ParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS) software. The software, once installed on any standard Linux platform, enables the server to be linked with others to act as one massive file repository that offers high parallel throughput. … Read more

Oxo weighs in on portion control

As we make our way into spring, we're forced to acknowledge whether or not we've stuck to our New Year's resolutions. The weather is nicer, and with bathing suit season inching closer, we're trading in the fattening comfort foods of winter for healthier options.

One of the key factors in effective diets is portion control, something that becomes more and more difficult to do in a world of gigantic portion sizes and cheap value meals. By arming ourselves with the tools necessary to avoid overfilling our plates, we are setting ourselves up for successfully shedding that … Read more

Kitchen scale takes the heat

It's always nice to find an appliance that merges one necessity with the other. It saves time, effort, and money when you can use one thing to do multiple tasks. Learning how to cook can be a daunting challenge, but with the proper tools and accessories, anyone can cook. Having the capability to properly weigh foods and monitor temperatures goes a long way in the kitchen. As cooks experiment with kitchen tools, eventually they find some items that are indispensable. Many would be lost without the aid of a kitchen scale and a thermometer.

The Breville ikon Kitchen Scale … Read more

A more accurate way to serve up a spoonful of sugar

If you're a baker, you know that precise measurements mean everything. So much so, that expert bakers tell us ways to spoon flour into measuring cups in order to avoid compacting the flour and using too much. For smaller measurements, using methods like this are much more difficult, if not impossible.

Using standard measuring spoons can result in too much or too little ingredients (like too much yeast or too little baking soda), completely changing the consistency of the finished product. This precision spoon scale by Admetior alleviates this problem by having a digital weight measurement built right into … Read more

Porsche Design has some hang ups

If you think that I've been blogging heavily on Porsche Design-inspired kitchen gadgets lately, then you'd be right. I can't get enough of the cool designs and brushed aluminum look of their line of housewares. But I've saved the best for last in the trifecta of Porsche Design kitchen gadgets with this wall-mounted kitchen scale.

If you've read enough of my other posts (it's all right if you haven't, we can still be friends), then you'll know that I live in a space-challenged apartment in Brooklyn. OK, by Brooklyn standards, it's … Read more

The Invisible Man: A scientific breakthrough

Today, your eyes might not deceive you. But soon, they very well might.

Some extremely clever people at Cal (the one at Berkeley) have created a material that can control the direction in which visible light travels.

Apparently, this mystery material, some details of which might be revealed in Science and Nature magazines this week (People and OK weren't interested), deflects light around an object as perceived by an insouciant eye.

"In the case of invisibility cloaks or shields, the material would need to curve light waves completely around the object like a river flowing around a rock," the leader of the Cal researchers, Xiang Zhang, told London's Times newspaper.

In essence, you are looking at, say, the Empire State Building or a John Malkovich-piloted Boeing 747 full of nasty missiles. If these objects are coated with the material, your eyes will see light from behind them, hence creating the illusion that the object in question simply isn't there. I know that there are terrible consequences that may leap to mind in these examples.

For the more technically-minded amongst you, I can tell you that the material the scientists created had to have elements engineered to within 0.00000066 of a meter. This appears to be in a realm that might make wafers suddenly feel ridiculously overweight.… Read more

Digital luggage scale saves money and muscles

As more airlines start charging for checked luggage and extra bags, penny-pinching fliers who shove all their clothes into one suitcase may face overweight bag charges or thrown-out backs.

Balanzza's Digital Luggage Scale is made to prevent travelers from over-packing luggage at times when a bathroom scale is unavailable.

First, the traveler wraps the scale's strap around the handle of a suitcase or bag. When they pick the bag straight up, listen for the device to beep, and set the bag down, the gadget readout will display the weight in pounds or kilograms.

The company is also producing … Read more

Ray tracing for PCs-- a bad idea whose time has come

Dean Takahashi sent me an e-mail pointing to a piece he wrote on VentureBeat describing statements Wednesday by Intel's Chief Technical Officer Justin Rattner targeted at NVIDIA. CNET's own Brooke Crothers covered the same story and provides additional background here.

The technology at issue relates to 3D graphics for PCs. All current PC graphics chips use what's called polygon-order rendering. All of the polygons that make up the objects to be displayed are processed one at a time. The graphics chip figures out where each polygon should appear on the screen and how much of it will be visible or obstructed by other polygons.

Ray tracing achieves similar results by working through each pixel on the screen, firing off a "ray" (like a backward ray of light) that bounces off the polygons until it reaches a light source in the scene. Ray tracing produces natural lighting effects but takes a lot more work.

(That's the short version, anyway. For more details, you could dig up a copy of my 1997 book Beyond Conventional 3D. Alas, the book is long since out of print.)

Ray tracing is easily implemented in software on a general-purpose CPU, and indeed, most of the computer graphics you see in movies and TV commercials are generated this way, using rooms full of PCs or blade-server systems.

Naturally, Intel loves ray tracing, and there are people at Intel working to… Read more

A scale for the Iron Man in your family

Those callous souls who gave their poor mums a Wii Fit for Mother's Day should take note: They can even the score between parents by giving a similarly subtle hint to dad this weekend. But why not be a little more creative?

Tanita is pushing its "BC-558 Tanita Ironman Segmental and Full Body Composition Monitor" as an ideal Father's Day gift. It's especially useful for those vain fathers who spend too much time at the gym and flexing in the bathroom mirror, because this scale measures the body by segments--as in arms, legs, and the … Read more