Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Alan MacHett" <machett AT ibiblio.org>]

...though I'm not sure about everyone walking around with a pocket full of
diesel fuel:
"It could run for ten or more hours on a container of diesel fuel slightly
larger than a D battery..."

-Alan
_______________
Power on a Chip
Batteries are heavy and inconvenient. Their successors could be tiny jet
engines that provide more than enough power for cell phones and PDAs.

By David H. Freedman

...
Gas turbines powered much of 20th-century technology, from commercial and
military aircraft to the large gas-fired plants that helped supply U.S.
electricity. But these days it isn’t the hulking machines in the lab’s
museum that capture Epstein’s enthusiasm. Instead it’s a jet engine shrunk
to about the size of a coat button that sits on the corner of his desk.
It’s a Lilliputian version of the multiton jet engines that changed air
travel, and, he believes, it could be key to powering 21st-century
technology.

Though the turbine’s blades span an area smaller than a dime, they spin at
more than a million revolutions per minute and are designed to produce
enough electricity to power handheld electronics. In the foreseeable
future, Epstein expects, his tiny turbines will serve as a battery
replacement, first for soldiers and then for consumers. But he has an even
more ambitious vision: that small clusters of the engines could serve as
home generating plants, freeing consumers from the power grid, with its
occasional black- and brownouts. The technology could be especially useful
in poor countries and remote areas that lack extensive and reliable grids
for distributing electricity. A comparison to how the continuous shrinkage
of the integrated circuit drove the microelectronic revolution is
tempting. “Just as PCs pushed the computing infrastructure out to users,
microengines could push the energy infrastructure of society out to
users,” says Epstein.