Gadgets

"The only place to go is down." That's what the congregation of Boston's Trinity Church decided. The landmark building, built in 1877, needed a new heating and ventilation system. Surrounded by public squares and huge high-rises (including the famed John Hancock Tower), the church has no backyard where builders could hide the unsightly equipment. After investigating a variety of technologies, the historic congregation-which has been meeting in various buildings since about 1735-decided to go with a geothermal heat pump (GHP).

Worker, presenter, painter: Acer's Tablet PC changes to suit your needs.


It's a regular laptop whose display swivels for presentations and folds back on itself to form a tablet. It'll be available by the end of this year at about the same price as a comparably equipped laptop. It'll also weigh less than 3 pounds and get 3 hours of battery life.

With the Polara ($1,799), Whirlpool brings refrigeration technology to the oven. A strange pairing, at first glance, but consider the benefit: You put food into the combo unit before you leave for work, and it stays cool. Then, at a time you specify, it switches from refrigeration to oven mode so that dinner's ready when you walk through the door. Tonight's Menu of Brecksville, Ohio, has created a similar prototype that connects to the Internet, enabling you to adjust start time from work.

It's day two of the 2002 international Consumer Electronics Show, and I'm wired and exhausted. I've been sharing the Las Vegas Convention Center with 110,000 people from around the world, and it feels like I've bumped into every single one of them. It's the same thing every year, yet I always come back, for this is the only place you can get a peek at the latest stereos, TVs, PDAs, phones, and other devices about to hit the market.

8:10 a.m. I arrive at the Evansville, Indiana, offices of Hi-Tech Investigative (www.hitechinvestigative.com), and find owner and local sleuth Jesse June sitting at his desk-minus the trench coat and top hat, but still smoking the mandatory Lucky Strike (OK, it was a Marlboro Light). At 70 years old, June doesn't look like he's at the forefront of spy technology.

The Golden Rule

Stick with one manufacturer, and you can use the same battery in all your tools-as long as they have the same voltage. So don't go for a 9.6-volt drill if you think you'll want an 18-volt reciprocating saw later. The descriptions below will help you determine how handy you really are around the house-and, thus, your future cordless tool needs.

The Unhandy Handyman

When Bluetooth hit the scene in 1999,
it promised the seamless and wireless transfer of information among cellphones, PDAs, and other devices. Unfortunately, it hasn't happened yet. When will Bluetooth become everyday reality?

Random person on the street

5 to 10 Years: "If at all-the trend is toward multiuse
devices."
-Stan Zukowski, Emmaus, Pennsylvania

Visitors to popsci.com

1 to 3 Years: 32%; 3 to 5 Years: 24%; 5 to 10 Years: 15%

Man on the inside

DEFYING THE LAWS OF PHYSICS AWARD

You are the sunshine of my windowless basement.

"I'm here to meet girls," she says.

So ends my first conversation at the recently opened Remote Lounge in New York's East Village, a bar experience unlike any other (except for my crash and burn). The girl who brushes me off is cute, and after lengthy internal debate I'd made my virtual move—bringing her up on my video screen and calling her on the inter-table phone.

Until we're networked from head to toe with integrated body computers seemingly anticipating our moods and desires even before we do, we'll have to settle for some of the intriguing devices that merely hint at what the future holds.

The love child of two-way Family Radio Service (FRS) and Global Positioning System technology, the Rino 110 ($169) from Garmin does more than simply keep track of your location: It beams your position to others in your group who are using the same radio, and plots everyone's whereabouts on its LCD. It's also completely waterproof,
a first
for FRS radios.

A higher-end Rino 120 model ($249) is also available. It has the same features, but adds 8MB of internal memory
and additional mapping capabilities.

>Edited by Suzanne Kantra Kirschner with Jenny Everett

"Alert! Teenagers on the stairs!"

That's my voice coming from a new product called Voice Alert, a sort of electronic baby sitter that'll warn you when kids are near the swimming pool, say, or when animals are getting into your trash at the curb. The basic system ($249 at www.voicealert.com) comes with a pair of infrared motion sensors and a wireless receiver.

Product designers the world over have

Recently, IBM distributed 75,000 copies of a manifesto entitled Autonomic Computing: IBM's Perspective on the State of Information Technology (and posted it online). We asked the author, Paul Horn, senior vice president, IBM Research, to explain why his essay is so important.