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Nifty Kitchen Appliances
Project Gamma writes "Techserver reports about how being lazy just got easier. Too lazy to read the directions on that TV dinner? Soon you may not have to. Your microwave oven will do it for you with the swipe of the package bar code across a special sensor." Okay, fine, but will it E-mail me when it wants me to stir it?
That my microwave cooked for me?
It looks like a Star Trek entity.
The bar code reader's gone spare.
Put the right bar in;
Pull the right bar out.
In, out, in, out, I really want to shout!
The microwave's on strike and has just begun to pout;
That's what lunch is now all about!
Sing a sing of kitchens,
The scanners all awry.
Four and twenty readers Quake-ing a pie.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Actually, there are those who wants to see this happen soon (except for the brain-fry). They want a web-appliance on your fridge. I still have a hard time seeing why I would need this, but hey, who knows what people wants?
Lars
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Reality or nothing.
I don't think the idea of a microwave oven cooperating with the frozen dinner will happen. Sure, the technology works (and I actually can't see why a university has to be involved to make it happen), but it needs cooperation from too many entities: more than one.
My parents still have a VCR with a bad code reader. The Swedish version of TV guide carried full page ads with bar codes for a couple of years, making it possible to drag the bar code pen across a few lines and then beam the data over to the VCR using infra-red light. It was cool, but it required someone to publish the bar codes for the most popular TV programming every week and this is expensive, so naturally it died a premature death.
Similarly with a cheaper coding scheme. Some papers used to have ~10 digit code by the program title which encoded the essential data for the VCR. But who wanted to make sure that those codes were right? Seems that idea died too.
I believe that successful technology development evolves from existing technologies. For instance, I discovered this fall that my new VCR could set the time all by itself. It simply use the time info sent out in the text-TV data. That is an excellent use of an existing technology!
Lars
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Reality or nothing.
Right, and if there's a built in barometer, it could adjust cooking times for your altitude.
Wow, with a beouwulf cluster of these, you could effortlessly run a cafeteria.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Advanced tea substitute, perhaps?
Uh oh. I bet they only support one specific OS for that part. What OS would that be? Let me guess... Hmm... RT11?
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
This is not needed. Do you really want to have to wait for your microwave to contact a website and ask it for directions to have your meal? I know I wouldn't.
;-)
Panasonic has had sensor microwaves out for years. I've got one. It's great. All you have to do is cut a slit on the tv dinner plastic wrap, put it in the microwave oven, and go through the sensor menues: frozen food -> and then either Frozen Entree or Frozen Dinner, and the senor in it automatically determines when it's done from the amount of steam comming off of the food. It's really convienient. And a much better idea than scaning the barcode. I have rarely gotten food that has been cooked too much or too little with this microwave oven. Also, it has a sensor reheat function. No more guessing how long you should put last nights pizz in the oven.
Sharp also has some cool microwave ovens. They've got cooking instructions built into it. I've used one before and I'd buy one if my panasonic oven stops working. It's got a sendor reheat and sensor defrost function too. You should check them out.
I know you can get the sharp microwaves from http://www.appliances.com but I don't think they sell the panasonic microwaves anymore
Well, it's time to go reheat last night's pizza for my lunch now
-Jeff
Sure are first glance it sounds like a totally bullshit idea. But let's be honest, who hasn't burned something in the microwave because of ambiguious instructions like "heat on High for 3 to 6 minutes"?
If the Microwave showed a little bit of intelligence and took into account the wattage of the microwave when computing cooking time it could save a lot of guesswork when working with an unfamilar microwave or when cooking something you've never cooked before.
It's a government censorship conspiracy: you must have a PC in your microwave so that when you start looking at dodgy sites, you get burnt :)
~Tim
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Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Maybe it will try to reduce my calories.
Maybe it will email the Surgeon General if I
start to eat unhealthy foods. Hate to have
a Health and Human Services SWAT team raid my house.
With the small point of NOT BEING ABLE TO PUT METAL IN A MICROWAVE overlooked, your suggestions are otherwise fantastic.
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t's bad enough that the shopper-privacy-invasion card (or your ATM card, or your checking account number) keeps track of everything you buy, this would let Big Business see exactly when you ate it.
This is already happening in the US with supermarkets that provide certain UPCed cards that give the consumer a discount on some items while simultaneously logging all items purchased in a central database. It's mostly used for tracking trends on a population scale, but the privacy implications for individuals are still immense.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I'm gradually getting tired of these no-brain "inventions" which serve the money and not the people.
Me too. Yet everytime someone invents another worthless piece of junk (IMHO) like this, it's touted as being something worth it. At least they don't call it the next best thing since sliced bread, but that's because we all know it isn't. "Advances" like these are simply recessions into the pit of human desparity; we don't need anything more to make us lazy. If you're having troubls using a microwave, then get off your butt and read the instruction manual. If that doesn't work, then learn from experience. If that doesn't work, cook everything yourself.
Ok, so maybe none of those choices work. The thing is, this is pointless! It's insane! It's inane! I can't believe that any self-respecting person would use this, simply because I, in my twisted world of thought, see inventions such as these to be superfluous and extremely ridiculous.
It serves money more than people, because it's one of those gizmos that may have some flash-bang, but don't have real usefulness. How many people are going to want it to look up all sorts of directions on how to cook their food. Does everybody want their food cooked the same? NO! And as someone else has mentioned, if you're on the net with it, could you not be hacked? Now, I have no real ideas as to what that would bring for the user/owner, but I wouldn't want to find out either. The real usefulness of these things is to take more money out of your pocket, and if they're ever actually bought.. then they've served their purpose. You might as well throw it away.
Just my.. $0.002 worth
Insert mind here.
I heard about a project like this a few years back, although I believe they were encoding the timing on the barcode, not a url. Privacy concerns aside, this is terrific for people with sight disabilities. If you can't read the instructions on the box, there's no way you can cook the meal, which reduces your ability to be self-sufficient. Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
OK, quick question for you and the previous poster(s). Do you people actually put correct info on your Safeway card form? I got one the first day they had their little temp person with a clipboard, and I've been using it ever since. Sure the tellers always call me "Mr. Smith" when they hand back my card, but I get the sale price, shop at the store I prefer, and still get the occassional 5% coupon.
Intolerant people should be shot.
Better hurry if you want Debian food. I don't suppose it would be as pleasant to stick your Woody in the microwave.
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
I have wired a rice cooker, a toaster, and my coffee maker on X10 control. Between the 3 of these devices, you can get quite a bit of cooking done. Granted, you won't be eating like a king, but it sure beats a microwaved dinner.
With a rice cooker, I wash the rice and load it in the night before. I compensate for the fact that the water's soaking the rice by using less water; and it works pretty well. With a toaster, I can load the bread in advance, pull it down, and power it on to toast. Rice cookers are great because they'll steam veggies (I'm a healthy geek), make marbled eggs, and cook certain meat dishes. I use my tea maker for tea and coffee, but if I get desperate, it works great for instant noodles too 8)
All this is connected to my Linux box, using BottleRocket (on Freshmeat), so about an hour before I go back home I ssh in and issue away the commands. I can't wait till I can do this on my handspring visor, but until then dropping in to a public access terminal (I'm a college student) works.
... SiKnight
Sounds like a good idea, but why use the Internet to download instructions based on the bar code?
Why not just encode the recipe into the barcode itself?
Seriously, how much data can the recipe consist of? High. 3 minutes.
This would eliminate privacy concerns.
- overflow
I've stopped shopping at stores that have club cards (which means I have dumped my former-favorite supermarket).
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Click on the word "reports", it's a different URL.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
- When you make a non-cash payment, you're losing your discounts and your anonymity.
- You can't take advantage of unexpected sales to stock up using the discount card (unless you carry a lot of cash).
I had one that I got for one sale at one store back in October (I'm still eating the results). I carried it until I had to pry back a bolt on a door... it made such a good emergency key I think I am going to get another one.I may make a practice of this. Those cards have to cost money. Having each one appear in the store's database once or twice and then never again makes it look like their shopper loyalty is reduced on top of their direct costs. It may make them more likely to terminate it.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Sure, it takes a reasonably constant amount of energy to cook most microwave foods; cooking energy doesn't vary seriously until you have time variations which change the heat loss a lot. This suggests a rather simple workaround: print the cooking requirements in kilojoules, and let the user divide that by watts to get seconds. Okay, simple for geeks. The average person cannot even understand the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour (and believe me, I've run into it); when their oven doesn't even list the wattage for the various power settings (and how many do?) they are going to be completely out of their depth. Even a geek would have trouble with that; imagine taking 5 minutes digging through the user manual so you can cook a 2-minute burrito. This is convenience? Here, gimme those two sticks, I think I can rub them together and make a fire (and my steak might just get done first).
The advent of Internet-delivered cooking instructions is a privacy nightmare, of course. It's bad enough that the shopper-privacy-invasion card (or your ATM card, or your checking account number) keeps track of everything you buy, this would let Big Business see exactly when you ate it. But for the consumer who has so far had to guess at the translation from "3-5 minutes on medium" to the settings for their under-cupboard or full-size microwave, this is a godsend. The UPC code goes out, the packet that comes back encodes "Defrost requirements 9 KJ at 150 watts typical, cook requirements 60 KJ at 500 watts typical" and the oven can play it from there with power levels and duty cycles. No muss, no fuss. People will love it, and have no idea what they're revealing about themselves or what it will do to the rest of their lives. And that is a shame.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Yet another reason why I'm a cash customer and make no apologies for it.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I think someone mentioned this earlier, but what about having the instructions encoded *in* the barcode, rather than having it encode a url? This seems like it would be simpler, and avoid the privacy issue altogether.
I vaguely remember some computer magazine a long time ago having programs that you could key into your computer, but also having the program encoded in a bar code, so you could just scan in the code. Where was that?
Also, is any of this research with the Media Lab's Counter Intelligence project?
You are underestimating the stupidity of the average American. Otherwise, we wouldn't need instructions such as "heat and serve" on a can of soup. "Uhhh... how am I supposed to eat what's in this here metal can?"
So, to add to your microwave cooking directions:
6) When microwave dings, open the door and remove the food. It might be hot, because you have just been cooking it.
7) Peel the plastic film off the tray. It might be hot, because you have just been cooking it.
8) Insert a fork into the food in a scooping fashion. You might need to use the fork to break certain food items into smaller pieces first.
9) Lift the fork towards your face, while making sure the food stays on the fork. Put the fork partially into your mouth, so that the food comes off of the fork and into your mouth. The food might be hot, because you have just been cooking it. Do not eat the fork. Do not stick the fork into your eye.
10) Repeat steps 8 and 9 until there is no food left on the tray, or you are no longer hungry. WARNING: Attempting to continue eating when you are no longer hungry may result in vomiting.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Now this takes out all the guesses of microwaving things that don't come with microwave instructions: forks, spoons, AOL CD's, and small rodents.
I just saw a little clip the other night on TV how Microsoft and Maytag are teaming up to make "smart appliances", though I can't seem to find any mention of it on the Web anywhere.
How long before the script kiddies are able to freeze over my produce drawer and defrost my freezer?
# kitchen_killa -t xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
-> connecting to oven
-> turning on burners
-> connecting to fridge
-> programming icemaker (infinite l00p)
-> done!
-> gr33tz out to Babba Booey and the former h4ck3rz at KitchenAid.
When the idea of affordable (read:free) access to the net became an idea, many people turned to us sysadmins asking "well, what can we do with internetworking"?.
To convey the idea that the internet would as common as refrigorator, most people used the "your toaster can tell your phone when to order more bread", or, "The capuchino maker can tell you fridge you need more milk." These examples were used much in the same way foo-bar is used to describe a variable (i.e.:"Once domain foo.and domain bar are linked, you'll have a "foo-bar link"). When using this little phrase, we don't expect the customer to actually register foo.com and bar.com and link them, they're just examples!
Now here, we have an appliance company (uppon hearing that TTML was the wave of the future (toaster to toaster markup language) actually puts research into the effort.
It's funny, laugh!
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These penny-ante little functionality upgrades are BOOOORING! The proper cooking profile for a meal should be coded ONTO THE MEAL PACKAGE, where it can be read & followed by the microwave.
In short, I want the microwave to have two buttons - Start and Stop - and THAT'S ALL! I just want to buy the damn package w/a funky encoded label, put it in the box, push the Start button, the microwave reads the label & knows exactly what it's supposed to do to cook that particular meal.
(Microwaves might also have some atmospheric-condition sensors like barometer & humidity, which can be used to modify the cooking profile for local conditions).
Of course, you'd have to come up w/some kind of standard for the label encoding, and the microwaves would have to be able to read it (ala a cheap version of the laser readers @ the checkout counters?).
I wonder if you could deal with "normal" (non-packaged) food by having some way of detecting how the microwaves are interacting w/the food (reflect/scatter characteristics?) and to modify the transmission. For instance, if you detect that the food is about to explode because it's absorbing too much energy too fast, the microwave should probably cut back the power a bit.
Why would the package have to be metal?
:)
You can encode the data as fine-grained barcode, or perhaps one of those 2D bar codes. Hell, if you want to get funky, you could encode the data into the picture on the box and the microwave could use a CCD camera & decryption software to get it out. Or, you could outfit the package with a circuit which transmits the data via LED or radio-link when it is _powered_ by microwaves! (damn, my creative juices are flowing good right now
Let's take that a little farther - you could use the microwaves to power little mechanical stirrers in the package to help distribute the heat around for proper all through cooking. You could deliberately create metal strips in the package which deliver radiant heat from the microwave energy to the right places in the package to facilitate browning of your food (I believe they already do something like this for those "hot pocket" thingies).
Perhaps you could even make the package do animated displays powered by the microwaves!
"Hey, who are you guys? What's the straightjacket...wait a minute, don't you dare put that on ME!"
P.S. Does anybody have any guesses/knowledge whether the "harmful" effects (to the magnetron, I assume) of metal in a microwave apply if you have a circuit which is designed properly to accept & use the microwave energy?
I wouldn't worry as much about someone turning off someone's fridge. I would worry about someone cracking the database on the company's web server and changing all the cooking times around. Making the microwave think that popcorn needs to be on high for 50 minutes rather than 5.
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"If a problem has a single neck, it has a simple solution."
Attempts to keep track of preferences between sessions all fail in the food realm because for most meals people reject cookies.
Privacy considerations,
How can this afflict the privacy of the homeowner. I can imagine a lots of ways this can be abused by corporations.
Security considerations,
Do we really need to have everything connected to the net, what if a hacker disconnects/turns on the refrigerator/microwave while the owner is on vacation.
(it doesnt imply its connected to the net yet i feel its relevant)
I'll be impressed if it's able to heat it EVENLY. I've given up on the whole microwave dinner thing due to the fact that it's more work than cooking a real meal to get the whole thing hot, and not burned. Ugh. Half burnt, half cold microwave lasagna. Ugh.
-- Hi! I'm a
So here we have something else to take a little of the brainwork out of living. It does sound like a good idea, since I'm one of those cooking-impaired people (still can't even make french toast). However, if you subscribe to the oft-mentioned Star Trek philosophy, all this convenience is supposed to be freeing the human race up to pursue other intellectual and physical pursuits like exploration and research. So, why is it with all this we're getting more stressed and more violent every day???
Something to think about...
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