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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)
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.
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.
Okay, so that was a joke, but seriously, can't you see a net connected microwave reporting back to the manufacturer what kinds of foods you're eating? WebVan could buy ad space on your screen, trying to sell you a more expensive kind of the food you already eat. "Hmmm, she's eating cheap Marukan ramen, I wonder if we can get her to upgrade to Nissin cup o'noodles?"
The bottom line is that more smart devices means more potential for abuse. Hell, thanks to the club cards, the store knows what I buy anyway, so they could track the food pattern back to the IP of my microwave...
Walt
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.
--
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.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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
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.
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?
Attempts to keep track of preferences between sessions all fail in the food realm because for most meals people reject cookies.