Here's a cool little tech toy ...

... a free-piston 100kW multifuel generator that weighs 100kg, will fit under the hood of a subcompact car¹, has no rotating parts, is 50% efficient overall², and will run on anything from biodiesel to hydrogen.  At 25kW per 125cc module, this should eat conventional small generator manufacturers for lunch.

[1]  The four-module 100kW unit is 11 inches square by 26 inches long.  You could put a single 25kW module between the rafters in your garage, or under the kitchen sink, and in terms of space usage you'd scarcely notice it was there.

[2]  Pempek claims electrical efficiencies as high as 95%.

The very latest in steampunk

REAL steampunk, that is.  The Difference Engine (or a full-size, working model thereof) will be on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for six months, beginning May 1.  The machine was commissioned from the Science Museum in Kensington, London by Nathan Myhrvold, but Myhrvold agreed to let it be displayed at the Computer History Museum for six months before it takes its permanent place in his home.  Construction of the Difference Engine took three and a half years at a cost of a million dollars.

Horton said that Myhrvold — who is expected to be on hand at the May 1 exhibition ceremony at the Computer History Museum — is a collector interested in, among other things, historical computers.  And as someone with the resources to pay for a difference engine, he did so.

(Richard Horton is metals and engineering conservator at the London Science Museum, and the lead engineer on the construction of the difference engine.)