Pinball hacker extraordinaire Bill Bumgarner has had great success with the Cobb compact Grill: four cheeseburgers, five potatoes, two heads of garlic. All with just seven pieces of charcoal:

Altogether a delicious meal. And I have to admit a bit of amazement at the Cobb. I was expected a grill that made significant sacrifices in the quality of the cooking experience to yield a portable and versatile grill.

Not so. The thing is dead simple to use. The only temperature control is the number of bits of charcoal you put in at the beginning. Beyond that, it is pretty much just a matter of planning the cook around the cooking times of the various ingredients' cooking times with a goal of opening the Cobb the minimum number of times.

At $120, It's not super cheap, but it's the most compact grill I've ever seen. And think of all the money you'll save on charcoal.

All On One Grill: Cheeseburgers & Grilled Whole Potatoes

Equal parts hydroponic garden, aquarium, and interactive art, the Farm Fountain is an experiment in self-contained, indoor ecosystem design created by artists Ken Rinaldo and Amy Youngs. The idea is that you can raise edible fish and cycle their waste nutrients through a hanging garden which filters the water before returning it to the aquarium.

Their 4th generation Farm Fountain is currently on display at the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand until January 2009. From the Farm Fountain website:

This project is an experiment in local, sustainable agriculture and recycling. It utilizes 2-liter plastic soda bottles as planters and continuously recycles the water in the system to create a symbiotic relationship between edible plants, fish and humans. The work creates an indoor healthy environment that also provides oxygen and light to the humans working and moving through the space. The sound of water trickling through the plant containers creates a peaceful, relaxing waterfall. The Koi and Tilapia fish that are part of this project also provide a focus for relaxed viewing.

The plants we are currently growing include lettuces, cilantro, mint, basil, tomatoes, chives, parsley, mizuna, watercress and tatsoi. The Tilapia fish in this work are also edible and are a variety that have been farmed for thousands of years in the Nile delta.

A Basic Stamp program controls the pump mechanism, allowing the plants to be watered at regular intervals for a set period of time. Depending on available natural light, supplemental lighting can be provided by a combination of fluorescent and grow-spectrum LED lighting, switched from a standard light timer. Ken and Amy worked out a lot of the details during the construction of their 3rd Farm Fountain design (pictured above) and they've assembled a how-to instructional gallery which you can use to design your own Farm Fountain system.

There are a lot of external inputs required to keep the ecosystem healthy for a long period of time including fish food, PH and nitrate monitoring, and general gardening tasks. Once you've gotten accustomed to it, though, it's probably not much more work than maintaining a lawn, and a lawn can't give you tomatoes in the middle of winter.

Farm Fountain - a sculptural ecosystem you can eat

Casein, a protein found in milk, can be easily precipitated from standard moo juice with vinegar and turned into a malleable homemade plastic. Coffeebot wrote an Instructable that shows you how:

The final product is quite rigid when it's thick (1/8 inch or thicker), moderately pliable when it's a little thinner, and brittle if it's paper thin. It's also sandable and paintable.

I guess casein-based plastics used to be all the rage for buttons, jewelry and pens at the beginning of the 20th century.

Homemade Plastic From Milk [via MAKE]

See also: Moldable plastic from styrofoam

This starvation override can take effect after only 16 hours of fasting. When the fast is cancelled by a sufficient caloric intake (read: real food), the body will shift its natural wake time to coincide with the event. So if you want to ditch your jet lag, or if you want to get up earlier in the morning, it might be as simple as fasting for the 16 hours prior to the time you would like to wake up, then eat a big meal. Your body will then override its normal light-based rhythm and wake at that same time going forward.

I'm going to give this a try. I've struggled all my life with getting up in the morning. Interestingly enough, I've also never eaten breakfast. My first meal of the day is lunch, which means I am basically fasting for over 16 every day between dinner and lunch the following afternoon. Perhaps if I skip dinner one night, eat breakfast early in the morning, and then start eating breakfast regularly, I'll turn into a morning person. I'm not really expecting results, but it's worth a try and I'll let you all know how it goes.

Science Friday: Circadian Clock Sets at Lunchtime [via ParentingSquad]

Here's the latest espressotronic creation in the long human tradition of modifying machines to produce the perfect cup of coffee.

The goal of this project is to create a computer interface for my Gaggia Espresso machine replacing the factory thermal switches with a PID controller and the "steam" and "pump" toggle switches with a LCD/button menu system.

...

The machine works great! I get better stability and control than I was expecting, and it came together pretty quickly with no major problems. Additionally, I still need to finish fine-tuning the PID parameters to maximize stability.

The creator, Nash Lincoln, got a few of his ideas from a similar project which used a PIC and an NES controller to manage a Rancilio Sylvia machine. Between the two of these projects, you should have enough inspiration and technical knowhow to start hacking your way toward your own espresso nirvana.

Gaggia Espresso PID Arduino Mod - Link
Rancilio Silvia "PID PIC NES" mod - Link
PID Without a PhD - Link

If you like coffee and a little cryptanalysis in the morning, here's a really interesting hack-in-progress: figuring out the coding used to program beverages in the Tassimo coffee machine.

Chris R. Chapman writes:

I've been working on reverse-engineering the Braun Tassimo T1200/T1400 hot beverage system from its barcoded T-DISC brewing pods.

The barcodes are used to "program" the machine to make a particular beverage using a specific amount of water at a particular temperature and for a certain duration of time. My efforts have been directed at discovering a "map" between the barcodes and how the machine controls its brewing processes.

I haven't been entirely successful yet - I've managed to decode the barcodes, and have run some experiments to try and surface some patterns - no dice!

Chris receives bonus points for using the infamous :CueCat to read in the barcodes placed on the top of each brewing pod. While he hasn't yet been able to determine exactly what the program controls, it does look like each program is composed of a 6 digit decimal number.

What does it mean? The future of DIY programmable coffee pods needs your help.

Hacking the Tassimo single-serve coffee machine - [via] Link

bbum acquired a bunch of excellent salmon, and shows us how to fillet it without making an awful mess:

...if you are willing to exercise a bit of knife work, it isn't hard to breakdown a whole fish into fillets. What cost $15/pound fully processed, can be had -- typically much fresher -- for well under $10/pound.

In my case, I get my fish from Patrick O'Shea of Mission Fresh Fish. His crew shows up at the Mountain View farmer's market, but I go to the market on Saturday mornings in Saratoga; no craft vendors, all food.

Patrick was kind enough to show me exactly how to clean a salmon. Whereas I had shredded the meat previously, I can now take a fish apart into perfect fillets in a matter of minutes!

I know I'll be returning to this page. I can't even skin salmon without making a mess - Link

Related:

• 3 whole salmon - Link
  
• Smoking "Pot" (With an IP address) - DIY "Big Green Egg" - Link
  

A couple weeks ago I heard about a study which showed that nuking a grungy sponge for 2 minutes was effective at sterilizing it. This was quickly followed by reports of a number of small fires involving dry sponges. Lesson learned: wet your grubby sponges before superheating them.

There are a number of interesting things to do with the household microwave. Of course, there are a number of materials which will spark or ignite, but my personal favorite is David Reid's method for casting small amounts of soft metals like bronse, silver, and gold. On the less dangerous side, there's also the strange and unexpected growth phenomena of marshmallows or bars of soap, though I'm not sure what this is good for besides entertaining the kids with Peep battles.

Finally, you can do a lot of conventional things with a microwave as well. The guardian recently released a top 10 list on the subject. There are hacks for softening citrus fruits for juicing, heating up plates for serving, and sterilizing potting soil before planting seedlings.

What's your favorite microwave hack? Let us know in the comments!

As featured later on Mythbusters (and mentioned on the Make blog awhile back), Wildwood Survival shows how to make a fire without tools, using just a can of coke, a chocolate bar, and some tinder. A follow-up post provides some alternative methods for "people who would like to make a solar reflector from the bottom of a can, but don't want to put in too much muscle."

For more food hacking ideas, check out Slashfood's roundup of top 25 food hacks or the Food Hacks Instructables group. For more on survival and hacking the great outdoors, outdoorhacks.com is worth a look.