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Networked Refrigerated Microwave
shades6666 writes "BBC news is reporting that Tonight's Menu Intelligent Ovens has developed a refrigerated microwave that can be controlled over the net or by mobile phone. The prototype uses a Peltier cooling device.
It expects the appliances to be ready by the end of the year, costing around $2,000."
is Internet-enabled ingredients that know how to prepare themselves and then hop into the microwave!
When I walk to the pantry from my home office to get munchies for the day, I can take last night's pizza out of the refrigerator and put it in the microwave. This will save me the trip later. At lunchtime, I won't even have to wait the two minutes until the pizza is hot. I can turn the microwave oven on from my office, nearly fifty feet away!
Wow. Technology is grand. I'll hit that 350-lb mark yet!
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I may have more culinary talents than most, but if I know that I'm going to be too busy to make dinner, I'll toss a slab of beef and some potatos in the crock pot in the morning, and eat whenever I want to at night.
And it sure as heck tastes better than anything that comes out of the microwave.
Moving on...
Does anyone here think internet appliances are going to take off? The only good ideas I can see are:
A webcam in the fridge, so I could check if I needed to hit the store, and
Thermostat, so if I'm going to be gone all night I'm not heating/cooling the house needlessly.
For $2,000, the front window better be an active overlay that renders a thermal scan of the contents of the microwave, so I can see exactly how hot the AOL CD that it's nuking is getting.
"Excuse me, what's that racked next to the Cisco 7000?" "Oh, that? That's our new stackable 24-port 10/100 switch and microwave combo unit."
-- Dossy
(I wonder how many RC5 keys this new microwave can break.)
Dossy's Blog
Since microwaves don't take all that long to cook anyway, I don't see a huge need for it to start without me.
... it could just figure that out by itself and set itself accordingly.
But if you're going to the trouble of networking your microwave, how about having it do something useful.
Put a barcode reader on it so that when I pull out the box of frozen Mac and Cheese, I can scan it and have it lookup the correct cook cycle for an oven of that wattage.
Or for these things that require XX minutes on low then XX on high
A small LCD display could even display instructions at certain points in the cycle (beeping to get my attention) "Remove cover and stir, then press the START button to continue cooking."
The Polara Refrigerated Range is the same, but is a convection oven rather than a microwave. It's got a real compressor, and is available in stores now!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Fifty years ago, consumers were promised automation gadgets that would give us more free time. What do we have now? Remote controlled ovens to cook our food because we're too busy to cook it ourselves.
What have we come to?
I leave the house before the sun comes up every day. I wade through an hour's worth of traffic. I spend ten hours a day at my job, but only about twenty minutes at lunch, then wade through an hour's worth of traffic on the way home. It's dark when I get there. Weekends exist only to catch up on things I couldn't get done during the week.
I'm certain I'm not the only one out there that lives like this. Gadgets like this freezer/oven seem neat, but to me it suddenly throws into sharp contrast just what we're doing with our lives. Have we gotten so busy that we no longer have time to cook a meal? That's pretty fucking pitiful, if you ask me.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Doesn't this sound an awful lot like having a brake pedal that's also the gas pedal in a car? (but with an ethernet port!)
I can just see it now...
"This here is a brake pedal, that also runs the gas! Want to speed up? Push that pedal! Want to slow down? Push that same pedal! Want to speed up or slow down REMOTELY, when you aren't even in the car?!? Just load VNC, and click on the 'PEDAL' button on your screen!"
OOOOH! aaaaahhhhhh!
Some ideas are just too stupid to take seriously. Anybody remember the bar code reader that was supposed to revolutionize reading magazines?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.