Category — Cool Stuff

WriteRoom | Hog Bay Software:
A place to sit down and write
Walk into WriteRoom and your busy computer life fades away. The distractions of e-mail, the web, and your thousand desktop icons are gone. Only you and your text remain. This is a place where work gets done and procrastination has no place. When you’ve finished exit your WriteRoom, and you are back in the busy world with your work in hand.

Optical Illusions Etc: free, scary, word & picture optical illusions:
Even knowing that the two above are the same size it is hard to believe. Look at them how is it possible for them to be the same size? Well you don’t have to take my word for it, check out the video below. This time Seeing is believing!

More Everyware:

How to design systems that respect prerogatives of civil liberties, privacy, etc.? AG suggests five ethical principles:
Default to harmlessness. Everyware “should default to a mode that ensures their users’ safety.” It’s beyond graceful degredation, because everyware takes so much responsibility upon itself to take care of people.
Be self-disclosing. You should be able to see what systems are operating in a space, both to geeks and to people who aren’t wired up. This requires “a new universal vocabulary of signs” for everyware; and the ability to look under the hood.
Be conservative of face. Everyware should not “unnecessarily embarrass, humiliate or shame their users.” Nor should it completely dissolve the boundaries of privacy that people expect.
Be conservative of time. Don’t “introduce undue complications into ordinary operations.” Having physical equivalents of Clippy the Office Assistant would be a pain.
Be deniable. Everyware “must offer users the ability to opt out, always and at any point.” If ubicomp systems offer some functionality and benefit, opting out should just turn those off. (How do you opt out of being photographed by surveillance cameras?)

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I think these are fine principles for private-private relationships. I do not think they work for individual-state relationships. Also they seem to be a bit devoid of the economic relations in favor of social relations. Time for instance is as much an economic relation as a social relation.

Julie Frost’s ‘Mvura’ Water Purifier Wins Design Award:
The Mvura (African Shona for ‘water’) was one of the student exhibits at ChangeX, which we noted earlier this year. It has been granted Bronze Prize in the student category of the 2006 Australian Design Awards. Julie Frost identified that “1.2 billion people in the world do not have access to safe drinking water and 6, 000 children die every day from diseases that can be prevented by improved water and sanitation.” Her answer to this dilemma was to create a household water purifier that use pasteurization using direct solar heat to treat water. 15 litres of water is added to the drum, this can then be carried in traditional manner, on one’s head. Back at the village the drum opens out into a wide black disk, so water can be heated, in about two hours, to 65ºC. At this temperature harmful bacteria are said to be neutralised, and a soybean wax is used to indicated that the correct temp has been attained. Made from polyethylene, one of the more benign plastics, the drum is designed to be field maintainable. Cameron ’Design Like You Give Damn’ Sinclair and Victor ‘Design for the Real World’Papanek, would, I’m sure, be very proud of Julie’s endeavours. We need more like her. Other pics after the fold, and also at ::Australian Design Awards and ::University of NSW.
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brilliant…

Rare “Rainbow” Spotted Over Idaho:

From The National Geographic:

It looks like a rainbow that’s been set on fire, but this phenomenon is as cold as ice.

Known in the weather world as a circumhorizontal arc, this rare sight was caught on film on June 3 as it hung over northern Idaho near the Washington State border.

The arc isn’t a rainbow in the traditional sense—it is caused by light passing through wispy, high-altitude cirrus clouds. The sight occurs only when the sun is very high in the sky (more than 58° above the horizon). What’s more, the hexagonal ice crystals that make up cirrus clouds must be shaped like thick plates with their faces parallel to the ground.

For the first time in history, there is a chance that a feminist party, with a feminist agenda, will take place in a national parliament. This is a momentous occasion. It is nothing short of a revolution. It is something that could improve the situation of women around the world in many different ways. It would prove that feminism can no longer be ignored in politics.

http://www.feministsupport.com/

feminist initiative party platform

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the feminist initiative in Sweden is running for seats in parliament. to the best of my knowledge, this is the first organized feminist party platform running for elected national office.

26 Cheap Camping Tips:
According to the original poster:

These low-cost equipment/ideas/fixes for Scouting and camping in general [were] originally found on a F-Net Scouting board and [were] reposted on Fidonet on Nov 11/92 by Steve Simmons. The file evidently originated with BSA Troop 886 in the USA.

This list is HUGE. Here are my favorite ideas:

Channel lock pliers make good pot holders.
Nylon rope can be used as shoe laces.
Use a large zip lock plastic bag, filled with air, as a pillow.
A plastic bottle makes a good latrine for cold weather camping. (You don’t
have to ‘go’ very far from your sleeping bag). Keep it just outside the tent flap.
Carry several pieces of lumber cut into two-inch squares to summer camp and
use these to level platform, tent, and cot.
Old shower curtains make great ground tarps.
Waterproof matches by dipping them in nail polish.
Waterproof matches by dipping in melted paraffin.
Make fire starters by filling paper condiment cups with saw dust and pouring
paraffin into the cup.
A length of chain and a piece of coat hanger bent into an S-shape will allow
you to hang your lantern from a tree limb.
Keep batteries in prescription bottles.
Prescription bottles also make good match safes.
In fact, prescription bottles (or 35mm file containers) make good storage places for small items of all sorts.
A frisbee will add support to paper plates when the plate is place inside
the frisbee.
Laundry lint makes good tinder.
Keep the water in your canteen cooler by wrapping the canteen in foil.
When it comes time to pack up at the end of a camp, a wet toothbrush, face
cloth and bar of soap wrapped in foil won’t dampen the other things in your
kit.
To prevent batteries from wearing down if a flashlight is accidently nudged
on while you’re traveling, put the flashlight batteries in backwards.
To protect your feet from blisters, smear soap on the inside of your inner
sock at the heel and underneath the toes. Carry along a bar of soap and,
when you feel your feet become tender, give it a try.
To keep mosquitoes away rub the inside of an orange peel on face, arms and
legs.
Wrap fishing gear in foil to keep line from tangling and hooks from rusting.
By lining the compartments of a tackle box with foil, you can prevent rust
damage to plugs and other equipment.
To remove musty smell from canteen, put three teaspoons of baking soda into
the canteen with a bit of water. Swish it around and let sit for an hour,
then rinse out the canteen.
An empty plastic soda bottle, cut off to a convenient height, will work as a
camp bowl. You may want to sandpaper the cut to smooth the edge.
Save inner cardboard tubes from kitchen and toilet rolls, stuff with waste
paper and use as fire-lighters.
Use zip-lock bags for mixing foods, be sure it is closed tight and the top
is held shut before shaking or kneading.
Duct tape can be used to repair most everything on a trip. Use it to patch
tents, mend poles, hold up schedules, patch torn shoes, hold poles for
mosquito nets to cots, etc.
If you like these, check out the entire list

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heck… i use some of these in everyday life….

The TV Thing:
As with all TV Things, everything could go horribly wrong. But this is the deal I’ve been waiting for, with people who understand the project and format I want to work in. And you know something’s going right when people in TV are telling you to go more experimental and take more risks. This isn’t your US network tv experience.

I’m writing the pilot at the moment. (And I should particularly thank Joss Whedon and John Rogers for their insights into the process.) More details will hopefully follow as the project progresses. Or, you know, a tearstained screed if it doesn’t.
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this sounds entirely cool

Researchers teach computers to turn 2D images into 3D:
Filed under: Robots

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University appear to have solved a problem long thought impossible, teaching computers to turn static 2D images into 3D models. It was apparently a hot area for research in the 1970s but was virtually abandoned in the 80s after attempts to devise the machine learning necessary proved too demanding for the computers of the time. The key to Carnegie Mellon’s research, apart from better machines, is the ability for computers to detect visual cues (such as a car) that can be used to differentiate between vertical and horizontal surfaces — easy for us humans, but enough to turn even the most powerful computers into an incoherent mess. Apart from turning your vacation snapshots into a whole new experience, one of the big applications for this technology is obviously robotics, where it could boost their vision systems, improve navigation, and basically endow them with one more skill necessary to keep us in line after the uprising.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

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this is nifty… imagine what it could do in virtual worlds for perspective management.

FRIDAY IS BLOOMSDAY!:
Bloomsday on Broadway XXV: Passion! Politics! Plus Samuel Beckett Centennial Celebration!

This Bloomsday marks a quarter century of annual Joycean reveling at Symphony Space, and will celebrate the life, language, lusts and literature of James Joyce’s Ulysses over twelve-plus hours. This year’s focus is on Mr. Leopold Bloom’s spiritual son, Stephen Dedelus (aka James Joyce), with readings from Ulysses, Portrait of the Artist and Dubliners. We will also celebrate the centenary of Joyce’s spiritual offspring, Samuel Beckett, with readings from his work. The marathon concludes with Fionnula Flanagan reading the complete uncensored monologue of Molly Bloom until the wee hours of the morn.
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yes it is.