News

iol: An American inventor has come up with a fridge that throws cold cans of beer to lazy drinkers.

John Cornwell spent £1 500 creating the Beer Launching Fridge, reports the Mirror.

And his invention is attracting lots of interest since videos of it in action were posted on the Internet.

The fridge is activated by a remote control which sets off a lift mechanism in the fridge.

The lift delivers the can to an electronic catapult, which rotates until it is lined up with its thirsty target.

It then hurls the beer up to five metres to the drinker. It can hold a full 24-can crate - 10 beers in its magazine and 14 more in reserve.

John, 22, who has just graduated from university in North Carolina, said: “The idea was conceived when I was sitting on the sofa having a few beers.

“I thought, ‘What if instead of me going to get the beer, the beer came to me?’”

“About three months later I have a fully automated, remote-controlled, catapulting, beer-launching mini-fridge.

“There is a slight danger of being hit in the head with a flying can but this danger decreases the more you use it.” - Ananova.com

techtree: According to reports, Adobe will soon make its popular imaging software, Photoshop, available as a free download on the Web.

The company said that online Photoshop would be available to all Internet users as an entry-level form of the product. And, that the service would offer high quality tools in comparison with other free alternatives.

Adobe, however, warns that the bandwidth and network latency might be an issue for some users.

Apparently, this is not the first time Adobe has made its products available online. Adobe Remix, a Web-based video-editing tool, and a simplified version of Adobe Premiere Elements, is offered as a free download through the PhotoBucket.com site.

Similarly, even Photoshop will be offered through a partner. But the company said that if ad revenues are high enough, then they might consider offering their Photoshop Web services directly to users.

Speaking on the occasion, Bruce Chizen, Chief Executive Officer of Adobe, said this is an attempt from their side to be ahead of other companies like Google, who are doing it in different categories. Further, such attempts will be followed even in their future products.

It is learnt that even Google is planning to create an online version of Picasa, which is currently distributed as desktop software for free.

Chizen believes that if they offer a host-based version of Photoshop better than Picasa, then users would probably wean towards Photoshop because of the Photoshop brand and the quality associated with it.

Meanwhile, online Photoshop is expected to be available within the next six months.

newsday: This is where computers go to die a green death. Inside Hewlett-Packard Co.’s cavernous recycling plant in the Sacramento suburbs, truckloads of obsolete PCs, servers and printers collected from consumers and businesses nationwide are cracked open by goggled workers who pull out batteries, circuit boards and other potentially hazardous components.

The electronic carcasses are fed into a massive machine that noisily shreds them into tiny pieces and mechanically sorts the fragments into piles of steel, aluminum, plastic and precious metals. Those scraps are sent to smelting plants, mostly in the Sacramento area, where they are melted down for reuse.

The computer industry is ramping up its campaign against electronic waste, a dangerous byproduct of technology’s relentless expansion. HP and Dell Inc., which together sell more than half the country’s PCs, are earning praise from environmentalists for using more eco-friendly components and recycling their products when consumers discard them.

“The computer companies are definitely embracing the idea that they need to deal with their products at the end of their useful life,” said Barbara Kyle, who coordinates the San Francisco-based nonprofit Computer TakeBack Campaign. “There’s been a complete turnaround.”

But activists say far too much of the nation’s electronic garbage — not only PCs but also TVs, radios, batteries and other materials — still ends up in landfills or gets shipped overseas to poor countries, where it pollutes the environment and exposes workers to dangerous chemicals.

“The United States is not responsibly managing this waste stream,” said Sarah Westervelt of the Basel Action Network, a Seattle-based group that seeks to stop the spread of hazardous waste. “We’re allowing it to go offshore and poison developing countries.”

The push to recycle reflects a broader greening of the tech industry.