I was about to post the exact same idea. I don't know if it would be efficient (plus mechanicaly lifting up a building is an engineering nightmare to do) but it would be a very elegant way of storing solar energy, or energy recovered from lost calories.
I discovered it (the skinos brand) in greece this summer (Halkidiki-sithonia : magnificent beaches), just with an ice cube. Very unusual smell (reminiscent of pine trees) and very nice taste. I am still to find someone who dislikes it.
Even when it comes to electronic music, most of the stunning new sounds we come across are achieved by hacking or tweaking simple systems : over use of compressor, overuse of LFO for dubstep basses, bitcrushing, use of half defective samplers producing slightly out of tune sound, prepared pianos...
Hope to see some improvements for the A+ in the future either. There are not many low power alternative to it right now (the zero would be but too scarce right now). Out of the box a pi 3 is roughly sucks 300/400 mA whereas the A+ is arount 100 and 50/60 can be achieved by tweaking it.
Few verifiable facts? I'm sure you can verify that the author really has a garden and controls weeds using round-up (why remove weeds by hand which is totally feasible, part of growing a garden responsably, and an infinite source of satisfaction upon achievement?), and has had no symptoms of intoxication (yet). Point proven!
Somewhat (maybe) related : another world from Éric Chahi used to support the pc speaker as sound output, and had digitized sound effects and voices (very low quality but still incredible).
The PC port of Pinball Fantasies could also play MOD music through the internal speaker fairly nicely. My personal favorite is still the "Magic Mushroom" disk, which played the audio part of an Air-O-Zone air freshener commercial, all in 360K. :)
hey. your story intrigued me, so i found it and hosted it somewhere more free. Its quite rare these days. It doesn't work in Dosbox on OSX unfortunately so I couldn't see it.
This is:
echo Magic Mushroom
Echo --------------
echo This Program was made by the R&D Team at
echo the Cleveland Corp. of Australia at Hendra
echo To turn 'Magic Mushroom off press any key
echo Bye,Bye,Bye
It may not work in dosbox, but mushroom.ovl is just raw 8-bit[1] linear audio sampled at 8kHz so you can load it up in your raw-audio-capable app of choice. On linux try "aplay mushroom.ovl", for example.
[1] Actually only 6 bits per byte are used; presumably this was done to improve decoding speed or something.
The result is 6 bits of resolution, along with a high pitched squeak during playback, depending on the output circuitry and speaker characteristics (it's less noticeable when a low-pass filter is added).
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Spelljammer_-_Pirates_of_R... had full music and sound effects through PC speaker. Very low quality, yes. But, it was amazingly close to the merely low quality audio of most PC games of the time even when you did have a sound card.
There ils also an issue with making different cars from different car makers cooperate efficiently. When an accident can't be avoided, involved cars would need to share info and processing power to behave optimaly and act as master and slaves.
I immediately ordered one. It does not have a camera port though, I hoped there were ways to operate the camera through the GPIO but could not find anything.
edit: That was the computer that inspired 10-year-old me never to get a job that required me to use a computer. That general sentiment lasted until 14-year-old me was introduced to a 486 with a 14" color screen and I realized there might be something to this whole computer thing.
