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quiddity writes "Following the Goofy USB Devices post, one has to know what can be self-powered when the batteries all die. You can handcrank your Gameboy, recharge your cellphone or pda (even grandpa), wind up a webserver (with minions, a beowulf..), see in the dark, and project a movie. What else can we propel through the next blackout/apocalypse?" Some of these devices have have been on Slashdot before; what cool hand-powered tech hasn't been and should be?

destinyX writes: "Lineo an embedded linux company and inventors of uClinux (microcontroller linux) produced an intresting 'batteryless' webserver." A very cool creative re-use! You never know when you'll be out in the desert with nothing but a convenient ethernet cable leading toward an oasis I guess.

The always excellent Russ Nelson sent us a report on the competition for the lucrative title of "World's Smallest Web Server". Apparently there are a few folks going for it. He writes "HP has one. Dallas Semiconductor has one (only $50). MMC Embedded has one that isn't even in the running, although it does have COM1-4 and LPT1. Dawning Technologies' entry is a joke: far too big to be "smallest". Stanford has one which is best known. And Rt-Control has one named uCsimm because it fits in a SIMM module. The latter two get bonus points for running Linux. Phar Lap claims to have one, but it's a non-starter, being PC-104 based. Dekad Ltd says theirs is really small, but they don't have an Ethernet interface. The one from iReady really seems to be the smallest, but it too lacks Ethernet. Emware's one is so small it doesn't need any hardware (how they claim it's smallest without reference to any hardware, I'll never know). "

The uClinux guys have announced that they are finished testing the uCsimm and are now taking pre-orders. For US$175, you get a SIMM-sized unit with a 16MHz Dragonball processor (the very one used in the Palm Pilots), 2MB of Flash, 8MB of RAM, and integrated 10baseT. Since it can apparently drive a QVGA LCD, I guess it might be good for my fridge? :) uClinux is Linux without an MMU and more info can be found at the uClinux.org site.