DIY: Build a solar water heater for under $5

from Lifehacker by Adam Pash

DIY site Instructables details how to build a solar thermal water heater on the cheap using parts from a recycled refrigerator grill and a few other bits and pieces. So how well does it work?

I let this guy run for a couple of hours one hot sunny day and heated up a five gallon bucket of cold water (measured at 70 degrees F) to over 110 degrees F. The temp that day was about 76 degrees F. If the water is allowed to sit in the panel for several minutes and then forced out (by blowing in one of the hoses) the water was measure at 170 degrees F.

The actual device isn't currently the most practical way to heat water for an entire home (it's more of a prototype), but it's a very cool idea. As for the price, you're going to have to do some salvaging to hit the under $5 mark, but even if you don't the materials should be rather cheap.

Solar Thermal Water Heater For Less Than Five Dollars [Instructables]

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Windows Tip: Restart Windows without restarting your BIOS

from Lifehacker by Kyle Pott

My alma mater, CodeJacked.com, explains how you can shave 30 seconds off of each reboot by holding the shift key while restarting Windows XP or Vista.

Sometimes, you need to reboot Windows (e.g. when installing new software), but there is no need to restart BIOS, too. However, the default is to reboot both. (That's called doing a "cold boot," rather than a "warm boot.") There's a trick that works on both XP and Vista to get it to do a warm boot instead, thus saving you 30 seconds per cycle.

As a heads-up, if you've got a complex hardware setup you could possibly run into some trouble with a warm boot. If any BIOS experts out there can shed some light on when you would (and would not) want to use a warm boot, let's hear it in the comments.

Restarting Windows Without Restarting Your PC (Vista or XP) [CodeJacked.com]

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Stuff We Like: decTOP $100 personal computer

from Lifehacker by Kyle Pott

The decTOP (originally created by AMD) is marketed as a personal internet communicator made specifically for browsing the web. In actuality, decTOP is a fanless personal computer that weighs in at three pounds and runs off of eight watts of power. DecTOP comes without an operating system (though it supports Windows CE and Linux) and although it comes with low level specs (128 MB RAM, 10 GB hard drive, 366 MHz processor), its hard drive and RAM are both upgradeable. DecTOP sells for $100 and includes a mouse and keyboard. If you're looking for a cheap computer for the kiddies, a Linux server, or a computer to run without a head, decTop is a great candidate. Mine will be shipping in 24 to 48 hours!

decTop [Data Evolution via jsco.org]

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Wells Fargo Invests in Nevada Solar One

from Earth2Tech by Katie Fehrenbacher

Wells Fargo (WFC) said this morning that it has invested in Nevada Solar One, a 64-megawatt solar plant southeast of Las Vegas. A Wells Fargo spokesperson declined to disclose the size of the investment. JPMorgan Capital led the equity investors, which also included an affiliate of Northern Trust (NTRS); Spain’s Banco Santander and BBVA and Portugal’s CAIXA were responsible for the debt financing.

Nevada Solar One is a $266 million, 400-acre solar project with more than 182,000 panels that was developed by Acciona Energy. The plant uses concentrated solar technology, which utilizes parabolic trough-shaped mirrored panels to concentrate sun onto fluid-filled tubes, powering an electricity-generating steam turbine. The electricity from Nevada Solar will be bought by Nevada Power Co. and Sierra Pacific Power Co. (SRP) through purchase-power agreements.

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Tilera’s 64-Core Processor: Power-Efficient, or Just Powerful?

from Earth2Tech by Adena DeMonte

If you’re a tech geek and you’ve spent all morning pulling up your jaw, we bet you’re recovering from today’s news that Tilera Corp. is shipping a Linux-capable 64-core processor.

Developed at MIT, the processor is more energy-efficient than one would expect for a chip with that many cores, but we wouldn’t go so far as calling it green. The chip uses between 170 and 300 mega miliwatts per core, which is impressively efficient. But don’t forget to multiply the per-core energy drain by 64. The processor delivers 10 times the performance and 30 times the performance-per-watt of the Intel (INTC) dual-core Xeon processor, claims the company.

With that many cores, though, the chip needs to be energy efficient. Otherwise, the energy bill required to run the computer or electronics powered by the chip would probably cost more than the chip itself.

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