Charge your iPhone with your bike

A couple more brief scenes from San Francisco:

Outside Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference, Rock The Bike has set up pedal powered units that can generate up to 600 watts. Its dynamo gadget lets you plug in your iPhone (and most any gadget), and it'll charge just as fast as via a wall socket.

Demonstator Paul Freedman (pictured) told me his company main business is catering to events like this. And no wonder. At $US2125, its generator is a bit rich for the average cycling Apple fanboy.

Also catching Keallhauled's eye (and here we've strayed beyond the Dreamforce conference borders) was a local pushing electronic cigarettes.

These are are not a quit smoking aid.

Quite the opposite: you still get your full nicotine hit - it's just that's its via water vapour - which looks like smoke when you breathe it out but, being water vapour, is odor-less.

I asked the guy does this mean you can smoke inside legally. Yes, he said, and to evidence his claim he "lit up" where we were standing - in the middle of a Westfield mall, in the midst of a city that's as regulation crazy as any other and bans indoor smoking. Nobody stopped him. The water vapour steam, which carries the nicotine to your lungs, doesn't look quite as filmic as real smoke when exhaled, but it will fool people at a distance, or in a darkened bar. Close up, in broad daylight, they look heroically naff.

After a $US74 up front cost, re-usable e-cigarettes and their nicotine cartridges are billed as half the day-to-day cost of the real thing. And they don't make your hands, hair and clothes stink of tobacco.

In New Zealand, these e-cigarettes are a grey area. A few online niche retailers are stocking them, but according to anti-smoking campaigner Dr Murray Laugesen, no electronics cigarettes have been approved here Smoke-free Environments Act as an alternative to deadly tobacco cigarettes.

Dr Laugesen wants them to be. Nicotine-carrying e-cigarettes can help you to cut down. And their nicotine-less version gives you somethng to do your hands if you're a habituated social smoker.

But I'm wondering what the doc thinks of the US marketing push on full nicotine e-fags to skirt public smoking bans and assist you to smoke in as many places as possible, not to quit.

Our salesman above said there was no second hand smoke issue with liquid nicotine (and I'm sure no one who wears a tie with a denim jacket lie). The US Food and Drug Adminstration (FDA) says the jury is out.

Wot no plain packaging? (click to zoom).

Lastly, if you're trying to give up smoking but eating more snack food to compensate, then consider a a switch to kale (a close relative to wild cabbage).

But not that junky organic vegan kale, but raw organic vegan kale. Mmm mmm: