IT Week reports on an amazing new technology under development by Eneco that promises to revolutionize modern electronics and many other things.

The technology is a solid-state chip that uses thermionic energy conversion to generate electricity from a temperature gradient with an efficiency as high as 30%. If successful, and they’re already in talks with both Apple and Dell, this could mean big things. For example, as we all know, computers generate a lot of heat. This is one of the primary factors limiting the size of laptops; the smaller they are, the harder it is to keep them cool. But with a technology like this, that heat is no longer such a bad thing because, in the process of passively cooling the electronics, electricity is being generated that can then be contributed to active cooling or any other purpose increasing battery life. There are also plans by which this technology could replace batteries all together. By using these chips in combination with a small burner, electronics could be powered in an efficient and environmentally friendly way by burning fuels such as ethanol.

Obviously, a technology such as this has all sorts of applications. Any process that generates waste heat (which would be almost everything we do) could now also generate electricity. A suggested application is replacing the alternators in cars by using these chips to generate electricity from the heat of the engine. This would have the benefit of aiding in cooling the engine as well as improving gas mileage as there would no longer be any horsepower being wasted on spinning the alternator.

I’m left to wonder if the human body generates enough heat externally for these chips to be incorporated into clothing.

I’ve been contemplating the best way to handle my phone numbers. Currently, I only have one phone: my Motorola e815 on the Verizon network. This works just fine for me as I have no objection to only having a cell phone and no land line. The problem is that it makes it difficult to distinguish personal calls from business ones. As a result, I can’t really say how much I spend on business calls and how much I spend on personal calls, and, more importantly, I can’t say ‘I’m not working today, so I won’t answer any business calls’ or ‘I’m busy, so I’m not answering any personal calls’ very easily. To somewhat combat this I got myself a SkypeIn number a while ago. The advantage of this was that I was able to have a local Boston area (617) number while my cell phone was still a Berkeley (510) number. I set the number to forward to my cell phone, and pretty much just left it alone.

However I recently discovered that Skype wasn’t doing that good a job of forwarding calls. Sometimes it would, sometimes it wouldn’t. And the ones it didn’t forward went to my Skype voicemail instead of my Verizon voicemail meaning I didn’t even know I had a some important messages until I happened to log into Skype one day. Another disadvantage of Skype is that, come January, it will start costing me money to have Skype calls forwarded to my cell phone.

Fortunately, I think I’ve come up with another solution. Jessi and I, when I first moved out here, changed our Verizon accounts to put us on a family plan. Amazingly enough, this actually cut our monthly phone bills in half because the low-end family plan costs the same as the low-end individual plan, and we still only use about half the total minutes. For an extra $9.99/mo I can add another line to our plan. This line could be my business line (or my current line could be the business line and this one could be the personal one). That would solve all the problems of only having one phone, without tying me down to a particular location in terms of taking calls. It will only cost me an extra $120/year, compared to $30 for the SkypeIn number plus however much it would cost in calls, and I’ll get more reliable service and better voicemail. Plus, adding this line won’t increase the minutes we use at all, because I’ll be making the same number of calls, some of them will just be moved from one line to the other. Additionally, I qualify for a free upgrade to my phone thanks to Verizon’s ‘new every two’ program, so I don’t even have to pay for a new phone.

So really, the only question now is what phone do I want. I believe I’m going to go with the LG VX8300 pending some more research.