Enertia House

David Pogue just wrote an article about the Enertia House, a house which regulates its climate throughout the year, by creating its own atmosphere. Very cool concept:

The sunspace is always on the south, or the side that’s within 35 degrees of south. It connects to the attic, which connects to the space between the double north walls, which connects to the basement. There are metal grilles in the sunspace floor to complete the convection loop.

Read more (or buy yourself a house) at enertia.com.

Desky

Okay one more quick post for the night. I could go on, but I don’t want to use up all my good ideas…

Here is the first post in a series on all the cool apps I’ve found recently. I just got this one tonight, and I love it. Small, simple, free. In other words, perfect.

Desky is a little app that changes your desktop picture. Its beauty lies in the fact that you only have to drag a picture onto the icon and it opens up, changes the background, and quits all in a matter of seconds. And with OS X’s ubiquitous drag-and-drop capabilities, you can do cool things like drag an image right off of a webpage onto the icon in the dock, and “voila!”, instant desktop glory.

Finder gripes

MacUser has a good run through of ComputerWorld’s “15 Things Apple Should Change in Mac OS X”. The only one I really have an issue with is #7: Inconsistent User Interface. Thats where UNO comes into play. This great little utility changes all your windows to the “unified” look, which IMHO makes everything look much… awesomer.

I always thought brushed metal was kind of cheesy.

37 Signals

Apple has a nice little promo piece on 37 Signals, the creators of Backpack and Basecamp, as well as, and some would say most importantly, Ruby on Rails. I’ve been using these guys’ products for a short while now and I’m impressed. Take a peek.

V. H. McKenzie

Some really nice artwork here. My mother has a couple pieces of hers and really digs her work. I think they must have bonded over their Jamaica connection.

From her extremely sparse blog:

I am an artist living in the East Village of New York City. I am a computer graphics designer by day and a fine artist by night.

Check her out.

New iMacs

Today Apple released upgrades to its line of iMac computers, and unveiled a new member of the fam’, the 24” iMac. The entire line now sports the Core 2 Duo processors as well. Very nice. I hope my cute little 20” can’t tell I’ve been coveting other rigs.

The fastest iMac ever, the 24-inch iMac provides professional performance along with the convenience of an all-in-one design. Like its 17-inch and 20-inch siblings, it features the new 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo processor with speeds ranging from 1.83GHz to 2.33GHz. The new processor delivers up to 50% more performance than the previous 20-inch iMac. It also doubles the amount of L2 cache, the twin cores sharing 4MB between them.

Go get one. [update: Impulsive Highlighters Unite! has a nice analysis of these new machines.]

Upcoming Apple event

Apple has sent out invites to a press event, September 12 – just one short week away. The invite not so subtly evokes images of a movie premiere. I think full-length movies at the iTMS is a shoe-in, but I am rooting for a video streaming device. I think it is likely that the AirPort Express gets an upgrade, which would include video capability.

Even being the huge geek that I am, I can’t imagine watching an entire movie in front of my computer, no less hunched over my iPod. But I can imagine purchasing a movie online and streaming it to my home theatre. And considering that I haven’t returned a movie rental on time in my entire life, 15 bucks would be a screaming deal.

via MacWorld

Widgets on your desktop

Ask Dave Taylor has a very simple technique for getting your widgets out of Dashboard and onto your desktop. This is a cool little trick, but not terribly useful as the widgets float on top of all your windows. If they behaved like other windows, or just sat directly on the desktop, I would get much more use out of them.

Regardless, I think my little orange calculator has found a new home.