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While stirling engines are certainly old, the idea of using them as refrigerators is just recently catching on. Here in sleep Athens, OH a company called Global Cooling is the forefront producer of such devices (and is still hand-making a good number of them).

The nice little advantage to these coolers is that they operate with very high COP's, and are limited in lower temperature merely by available power and the boiling point of the working gas. In global cooling's case, Helium is typically used, so temperatures down to around 5K are obtainable (at which point the helium liquifies. Yeah. Cold.) Also, control of the device can be very precise, in that instead of a compressor kicking on and off, it operates constantly, quietly, and with good variable control.

LG is beginning to outfit refrigerators with Stirling pumps because they're so much better than current designs - only problem is they're not mass produced yet. Coleman has a portable unit shown here that is quite a nice unit, albeit very pricey.

One of my professors here at school is one of the pioneers of Stirling refrigeration, so I've been exposed to it a lot. If the whole country switched their refrigerators to stirling compressors, California could shut off its power grid and we'd still have a surplus of energy country-wide.

On demand electrical hot water heaters (known as tankless) have been around awhile.

Another interesting portable product which I use, and with which I am very happy, is the Coleman Hot Water on Demand; this one uses propane and is designed for camping.

Apparently they just use a really big Coleman backpacking stove.

If you can somehow place a large enough CO2 generator nearby that will attact the mosquitos to it (and drown/kill them within) instead of you, then you'll have a winner.

My enjoyment of sports would be nigh impossible without this bad boy.

Maybe they have something similar in the hotel room. It's way quieter than our normal fridge.

My wife bought one of these coolers for camping. No compressor, but it does have a small fan to drive out the warm air.

Frankly I was strangely miffed that I wasn't the first one to bring a Peltier cooler into the house.

If you're into Star Trek, you can get extra kicks from reversing the polarity and turning it from a cooler to a heater. Instead of cooling the contents to 40 degrees below ambient, it warms to 80 degrees above.

I've a friend who works for Coleman (he's one of their webmonkeys, let's give him a heart attack by putting some "referrer=http://slashdot.org"'s in his logs).

He gets plenty of fun stuff from work. One of the things they have is a little crank powered flashlight that uses a Brinkman style little incand.

It will run for a fair length of time on the batteries, but I have to wonder how much longer it would run with an LED.

Perhaps next generation....

I've a friend who works for Coleman (he's one of their webmonkeys, let's give him a heart attack by putting some "referrer=http://slashdot.org"'s in his logs).

He gets plenty of fun stuff from work. One of the things they have is a little crank powered flashlight that uses a Brinkman style little incand.

It will run for a fair length of time on the batteries, but I have to wonder how much longer it would run with an LED.

Perhaps next generation....

I live in an area of the country where temperature extermes are a way of life. I'm planning on doing this as well and I'm planning on putting the whole system in a modified coleman electric cooler. This unit, can heat the contents, or cool the contents, depending on the polarity to the peltier device. I would also add a vent with flaps that could be automatically closed and opened. A temperature sensing circuit would then measure inside and outside temperature to determine how to best vent/heat/cool the box. It would also provide a thermal shutdown feature.
Of course this is all "planned" so the chances of me actually building this might be slim :-)