

Wireless electricity enables next generation of annoying packaging - bootload
http://hackaday.com/2011/01/28/wireless-electricity-enables-next-generation-of-annoying-packaging/

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pyre
The advertisers will not stop until every person on the face of the planet has
some sort of attention span deficit disorder just due to the sheer amount of
flashing, screaming, annoying crap that's all vying for your attention on a
constant 24/7 basis so that you buy their products. Futurama's 'prediction' of
advertisements beamed directly into your dreams isn't a far cry from something
that an advertiser might do.

~~~
sliverstorm
If flashing screaming crap becomes the norm, I will be busy working on a pair
of Adblock Plus Glasses.

I'm not quite sure how they'd work, but were there's a will there's a way!

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chopsueyar
_I designed two counter-technologies to help people defend their personal
space from unwanted electronic intrusion. Both devices were designed and
prototyped with reference to the culture-jamming “Design Noir” philosophy. The
first is a pair of glasses that darken whenever a television is in view._

<http://www.ladyada.net/pub/research.html>

~~~
bad_user
Yes, then offer those glasses for free; sponsored with ads shot straight in
your retina.

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buro9
OK, I'm going to put my hand up here and say I don't know what I'm on about...
but hear me out.

Cereals have iron in them, literally iron shavings are put into cereals to
ensure that the population receive a good portion of the RDA.

Iron is particularly susceptible to induction (all metals are, but iron
moreso), and iron when exposed to an electrical magnetic field then magnetic
hysteresis is going to occur resulting in the iron in the cereals taking on a
much stronger magnetic field than is currently natural.

Has this kind of effect been investigated such that this kind of packaging is
known not to have any negative effect on the consumers of magnetised food?

Additionally, my second thought concerned the use of RFID for stock check, and
whether a shelving system laced with induction systems is going to interfere
with RFID in any way?

Basically... I'm trying to invent reasons this might not appear on a shop-
shelf soon. I really don't want to enter a supermarket and be presented with
something that looks like Vegas.

~~~
sbierwagen
Nope.

Hysteresis is a short term effect, measured in seconds. Full on magnetization
won't happen to microscopic particles of iron at room temperature and
atmospheric pressure in a tiny, rapidly changing, magnetic field.

And even if they became as magnetized as they possibly could, (which isn't
very, because these are _small_ particles) they're still going to be digested,
reduced to single atoms, and bound to
transferrin/ferritin/hemosiderin/hemoglobin proteins. Metallic iron doesn't
naturally exist in the human body. The only people NMR imaging is
contraindicated for are metalworks and such who are routinely exposed to high
velocity metallic iron fragments, (via angle grinding, etc) that mechanically
embed themselves in the skin, fingernail beds, eye orbits, etc. Completely
unnoticeable in everyday life, less so when you climb inside a superconducting
magnet.

Also, they're not _shavings_ ; they may be produced that way, but food-grade
iron is milled down to a fairly fine mesh. It's a powder. There's no sharp
edges.

Mild aside: Iron was so rare in the ancestral environment that humans never
evolved a mechanism for excreting it, and it's heavily recycled. All ingested
iron is metabolized, which means iron poisoning is fairly easy. This means
that breakfast cereal, which is popular with children, who tend to have very
low body weight, doesn't contain _much_ of iron. The box of corn flakes I'm
looking at only has 108 milligrams of iron in 340,000 milligrams of corn
flakes.

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buro9
Ah, interesting.

Although, now you've removed my ability to create a real objection to this
packaging beyond "Ah, the goggles, they do nothing".

~~~
ams6110
Well don't despair too much, there's still plenty of good reasons to avoid the
heavily processed organic matter that is "breakfast cereal"

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markkanof
Wow, I feel bad enough about the waste I create with a regular cereal box. Now
I will have to seek out an electronics recycler to dispose of every piece of
food packaging.

~~~
sliverstorm
You could always switch to oatmeal. The non-packet kind, instant or steel-cut,
has much less packaging, and it's almost certainly healthier for you.

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klinquist
I saw this at CES. Some of the more interesting applications the company had
in their booth:

* Charge your Tesla simply by driving it on top of a pad in your garage. They claim it's only 7% less efficient than the current plug charger.

* Soup in a self-heating container. Place the container on your inductance charging pad, press a button on the container. The container itself contains a heating element.

~~~
patrickk
You can charge mobile devices by placing them on a pad. The Palm Pre had this
out of the box. You can retrofit other phones like the iPhone to have this
ability also.

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StavrosK
The Pre has inductive charging? That's very interesting... I wonder if I can
buy a pad for my Desire HD.

~~~
sbierwagen
Kinda. The Touchstone charging system is an optional-- and not terribly
cheap-- (US$50) accessory.

I use it, it's pretty neat. There's an advantage beyond the obvious: the
charging puck is always stuck to a surface[1], and the phone should always be
stuck to the puck, (using magnets built into the back of the phone) so I tend
to lose the phone a lot less often. The OS can also tell if you're using the
induction charger, if you pull it off the puck while the phone's ringing,
it'll automatically pick it up, and switch to speakerphone if you put it on
the puck during a call.

There's also disadvantages. It can't transmit as much power as the USB cable,
and it's quite inefficient, getting fairly warm in use. If induction chargers
ever became popular, presumably the hippies would get upset about the
pointless waste of electricity.

[1]: There's double sided foam tape on the bottom of the puck that's actually
the first application I've ever seen of the gecko setae "superglue" that
various tech sites have been banging on about for the last decade. It never
loses its stickiness, but also gets dirty astonishingly easy.

~~~
StavrosK
I see, thank you. Too bad about the energy waste.

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noonespecial
EL films, coils, micro-controllers? MMMmm parts. The "toy surprise" just got a
whole lot geekier.

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mason55
Do you think these boxes will have a cereal port?

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sliverstorm
Guys, the future _is here_.

And I'm not just being facetious. I mean, good lord.

~~~
ben1040
Next thing you know, the cereal boxes will be telling us about the new life
awaiting us in the off-world colonies.

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jamesbritt
That is fantastic.

Annoying adverts? Sure, but countless cool shit, too.

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j_baker
Someone needs to hack together a cereal-box-b-gone, similar to tv-b-gone[1].

[1] <http://www.tvbgone.com/cfe_tvbg_main.php>

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bradleyland
What a tremendous waste. In one corner of the mind-sphere, we have a renewed
focus on green technology, and the other, we have glowing cereal boxes.

One step forward, two steps back.

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JoeAltmaier
One tic less annoying that the gumball machines that holler at you in the
grocery store.

We will need a logarithmic scale of ad intrusiveness?

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hackermom
I can't wait to have the AC EMR from the coils of the shelves mess with my
cellphone and my VISA's magnetic strip etc. as I walk up and down the aisles
to find my son's favorite cereal brand.

