Riding around in a convertible with the top down is a great way to enjoy the nice weather. French artist Benedetto Bufalino takes the concept to a whole new level with the Seat Ibiza hot tub.

Made from a formerly-functioning Seat Ibiza sedan, the car has been modified to create a jacuzzi tub. The roof, windshield, and windows have all been removed to open up the vehicle and make it into more of a container.

The seats, steering wheel, and all other controls were also removed and a watertight liner was inserted to complete the transformation.

Bubbles of warm water swirl around to remove your stress while you soak up the sun. Like any other outdoor hot tub, this one looks like it would be an amazing way to spend a few luxurious hours.

As a car, the Ibiza probably held four or five people. As a hot tub, you could probably squeeze in that many – but having it all to yourself would be even nicer.

The post Hot Rollin’: Car Becomes Artsy but Functional Jacuzzi Tub first appeared on Gajitz.

Riding a manual wheelchair everywhere you go can be exceptionally tiring, which is why Rio Mobility has introduced the Firefly, an electric attachment that easily clamps on to most manual wheelchairs. The small device attaches in less than a minute and turns the manual wheelchair into a type of power trike.

The Firefly lifts the wheelchair’s smaller front wheels off of the ground and replaces them with a larger single wheel. The wheel is attached to a power pack and a set of motorcycle-like handlebars. The device features an odometer, a speedometer, a reverse gear, a parking brake, a twist throttle and two brake levers. In other words, it’s almost like turning your chair into a cool little power chair that gives you the power to go back to your manual chair whenever you like.

With a top speed of about 11 MPH and a range of 15 miles per charge, the Firefly seems just about right for running errands on those days when you’re just not feeling up to going the manual route. The contraption only weighs a little over 30 pounds, so it’s portable enough to keep in your car. The Firefly costs just under $2,000, which could buy you a lower-end electric wheelchair that isn’t convertible – but the Firefly gives you the ability to choose whether you want to travel under arm power or battery power.

The post Handlebar Attachment Turns a Wheelchair Into a Scooter first appeared on Gajitz.

Audio preservation has evolved to the point where centuries-old recordings become computer files. From Edison’s phonograph that recorded onto wax cylinders, to vinyl (possibly the most debated form of recording), to the compact disc, these shifts focused primarily on audio quality. But there have been recordings for just that purpose: to preserve the audio. So when a possible recording showed up in the pages of a book, media preservationists took notice.

A few years ago, a survey was done of the different time-based media objects in the stacks of Indiana University’s Bloomington campus. An amazing 569,148 different forms were identified. What the report didn’t mention, however, was a hidden ‘record’. A member of the Media Preservation Initiative (MPI) at IU Bloomington discovered a circular picture buried in a volume of German reference books. While not the first ever audio recording, it revealed much more upon further inspection.

The disc-shaped image was titled “Der Handschuh,” which is a poem by Friedrich Schiller. The MPI investigator proceeded to apply some slick audio recording tricks to the image. After a high-resolution scan was done of the image, the spiral was converted into parallel lines by a process called polar-to-rectangular-coordinates transformation. The lines were then ‘pasted’ together used audio editing software.

If it hadn’t gotten tricky yet, it certainly did on the next step. According to the MPI’s website, the engineer “[ran] these images through ImageToSound, a program that converts them into WAV files as though they were variable-area optical film sound tracks.” A stereo track was made into a WAV, and the seemingly mundane picture in the book came audibly alive.

The image turned out to be a demonstration on how the lines theoretically contained enough information to produce sound. The technology was first created by Emile Berliner, the creator of the gramophone. But the picture found in the depths of Wells Hall at IU Bloomington turned out to be “the oldest known recording of a complete literary work in the German language.” It’s eons behind that FLAC rip you did of a CD in terms of audio quality, but the fact that it was digitized from a book is one amazing feat. The WAV file can be heard at MPI’s website.

The post Ripping Pages: Book Image Becomes a Digital Audio File first appeared on Gajitz.

Science has a love for making things go faster. Take the million-year process of converting algae into crude oil for example. Scientists from the Department of Energy have created a way to cut the time down to less than one hour. And as a bonus, the process creates a reusable byproduct.

Working at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the team used a chemical reactor that takes a wet algae slurry and puts it through a process called hydrothermal liquefaction and catalytic hydrothermal gasification. The term may be dizzying, but after steeping in conditions at 662 degrees and 3000 PSI, the result is crude oil, along with a water/phosphorous byproduct.

“It’s a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and temperatures we use are much higher,” Douglas Elliott, the team leader of the project, said in a press release. They hope that with further refinement, the crude oil can be converted into burnable products, such as fuels for planes, diesel engines and even cars. And the process creates a self-sustainable product. “There are bonuses,” Elliot went on, “like being able to extract usable gas from the water and then recycle the remaining water and nutrients to help grow more algae.”

The post Instant Oil: Making Crude With Algae In Less Than an Hour first appeared on Gajitz.

Despite cassette tapes’ reputation for offering low-quality sound, this tape-to-MP3 converter exists. It looks a lot like an old-style cassette Walkman, but it’s got a slot to slide in an iPhone or iPod Touch on one side. All you have to do is insert the cassette tape, dock the iDevice, and press play – the included app converts the music to MP3 format.

You can listen to your favorite cassettes from the device by plugging in a pair of headphones, or you can connect the device to a stereo system. The Cassette to iPod Converter is available from Hammacher Schlemmer for around $80 – which is actually a pretty good deal if you still have a huge stack of cassettes sitting around, waiting for their comeback.

The post Cassette to iPod Converter Modernizes Your Music Collection first appeared on Gajitz.