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Halfbakery

halfbakery.com

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Re: Halfbakery

#31

Post by Analemma_ »

johnnyforeigner wrote: post #11

Half Bakery is some awesome old-skool internet stuff. Back in the late 90s it was one of my favourite haunts. Sadly they lost all their content somehow and didn't have a full backup so, funny though it is now, there was some epic stuff on the old site that is lost forever.

For all the gripes about cloud computing, the fact that amateurs can set up a website but also have one-click backups and redundancy is worth something. There’s a lot of offbeat web history that’s gone forever because someone’s hard drive crashed.

Re: Halfbakery

#32

Post by sulam »

grogenaut wrote: post #30
rockostrich wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also Ember [1] (also a kickstarter I think) that just made a mug with a heating element and controller to keep your beverage at a specific temperature. Using materials with specific phase change temperatures sounds like an innovative solution, but it's also grossly engineering a problem that can be solved better by $10 worth of components. [1] https://ember.com/products/ceramic-mug

I'd also be really worried about toxicity and materials that changed phase at that temp... Or well any temp. Can it leech through the walls? I wouldn't be Keen on dropping molten steel in my coffee either.

Seems clear that the stainless steel is to keep the material out of your liquids. It is not molten! Keep in mind you regularly put stainless steel in your mouth and lick it.

I’d say this is a reasonable use.

Re: Halfbakery

#33

Post by freedomben »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #17
gjem97 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On-demand water heaters are really only feasible if you have natural gas or propane heat in your house. The electric ones are quite feeble and expensive to operate. This is a good idea. My intuition though is that the additional up-front costs of this type of setup would be enough of a barrier that adoption would be slow.

My brother uses an on-demand electric water heater he built himself (he is an ee) and it works just fine. Also, it's less expensive to operate than a tank-type heater, as there is no cooloff loss.

I tend to think cool off loss is much less of a problem than people think. The insulation around those heaters is incredible.

I once turned off my water heater before leaving on vacation, and when I got back after a week the water in the tank was still probably 10 to 15 degrees F warmer than room temperature.

Re: Halfbakery

#34

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

mlkmt wrote: post #19
johnnyforeigner wrote: post #11

Half Bakery is some awesome old-skool internet stuff. Back in the late 90s it was one of my favourite haunts. Sadly they lost all their content somehow and didn't have a full backup so, funny though it is now, there was some epic stuff on the old site that is lost forever.

I remember browsing it in the 90s... remember any epic stuff from back then?

hamster dance

Re: Halfbakery

#35

Post by zoul »

al2o3cr wrote: post #16
zelos wrote: post #10

That's kind of clever: http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Eutectic_20water_20heater#151... Although rendered kind of pointless with modern on-demand boilers.

There was a pretty successful Kickstarter a while back for a product ("Coffee Joulies") that was exactly that, but for your coffee mug. Little bean-shapes made of stainless steel, filled with material that changed phase at 140F.

It was pretty successful, but the product did not work: https://marco.org/2011/08/10/coffee-joulies-review

Re: Halfbakery

#36

Post by maxerickson »

rockostrich wrote: post #18
al2o3cr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a pretty successful Kickstarter a while back for a product ("Coffee Joulies") that was exactly that, but for your coffee mug. Little bean-shapes made of stainless steel, filled with material that changed phase at 140F.

There's also Ember [1] (also a kickstarter I think) that just made a mug with a heating element and controller to keep your beverage at a specific temperature. Using materials with specific phase change temperatures sounds like an innovative solution, but it's also grossly engineering a problem that can be solved better by $10 worth of components. [1] https://ember.com/products/ceramic-mug

A battery powered mug with an app isn't really any simpler of a solution than fancy ice cubes.

Vacuum mugs already advertise hours of heat retention. Most hot drinks aren't going to taste better after sitting for hours and hours anyway.

Re: Halfbakery

#37

Post by yawz »

wpietri wrote: post #27
johnnyforeigner wrote: post #11

Half Bakery is some awesome old-skool internet stuff. Back in the late 90s it was one of my favourite haunts. Sadly they lost all their content somehow and didn't have a full backup so, funny though it is now, there was some epic stuff on the old site that is lost forever.

Very old school indeed! From the about section: "The halfbakery software is implemented as one big C CGI program, edited with vi, compiled with gcc, invoked by an Apache http server."

Wow! A blast from the past. I started my career in the mid-90s writing software with exactly this same stack.

Re: Halfbakery

#38

Post by maxerickson »

grogenaut wrote: post #30
rockostrich wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also Ember [1] (also a kickstarter I think) that just made a mug with a heating element and controller to keep your beverage at a specific temperature. Using materials with specific phase change temperatures sounds like an innovative solution, but it's also grossly engineering a problem that can be solved better by $10 worth of components. [1] https://ember.com/products/ceramic-mug

I'd also be really worried about toxicity and materials that changed phase at that temp... Or well any temp. Can it leech through the walls? I wouldn't be Keen on dropping molten steel in my coffee either.

It's isolated components of vegetable oil:

http://discovermagazine.com/2013/september/21-running-hot-an...

Not really terrifying.

Re: Halfbakery

#39

Post by yawz »

mlkmt wrote: post #19
johnnyforeigner wrote: post #11

Half Bakery is some awesome old-skool internet stuff. Back in the late 90s it was one of my favourite haunts. Sadly they lost all their content somehow and didn't have a full backup so, funny though it is now, there was some epic stuff on the old site that is lost forever.

I remember browsing it in the 90s... remember any epic stuff from back then?

Accepting the risk of being downvoted heavily...

Young men + new to browsing + some imagination = Pamela Anderson was epic by then.

Re: Halfbakery

#40

Post by tinix »

I know this isn't 100% relevant (but used to contain half-baked ideas, for sure), but this old-school throwback also makes me remember AfroTech mods... Anyone else remember that guy?

http://afrotechmods.com

Seems he's updated his site since the olden days... It used to be a cardboard box image with link maps over the image regions and hand-drawn stuff on the box. :D

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