Miles off the paved highway and at the end of a long, bumpy driveway that cuts deep into the woods, Mick Womersley puts the finishing touches on his solar panel-topped home. It’s not your ordinary rural dwelling, even one designed to be ecologically sound. Womersley, a human ecology professor, and his wife Aimee Phillippi live comfortably in a house built of roughly 200 straw bales. Link.
Pretty much all the pieces are there. The circuit has been designed, the programming is nigh complete and all that is left is building the casing, minor tweaks here and there, and finally assembly. Even though the Silver face did take a while to come in we are still on a good time table. The prototype will be in dip packaging the final Belt Buckles will be printed for sip packaging. Photo here and more about the project here.
Here’s a way to put vacation photos on display without holding friends captive. Link a group of slides taken at some far-flung locale together to create a lampshade that offers a colorful, indoor escape-from bad lamp design, if nothing else. On your next excursion, bring along a few rolls of slide film (bonus: it’s less expensive than the print variety) and try taking thematic shots of bad motels, perhaps, or exotic plant life. Link.
Cool project from Michael J. Mahon – At the outset, when designing NadaNet, I envisioned that it could be used to support parallel computing on Apple II machines. To add more processors and save space, I decided that I would package several Apple //e main boards together, without keyboards or peripheral slot cards. (I didn’t disassemble the Apples myself, but found a box of Apple //e main boards being sold as an auction lot for about a dollar each!) I settled on a wooden cube about one foot on a side which I slotted to hold up to 8 main boards. For whimsical reasons, I called it an “AppleCrate”. [via] Link.
I’m hoping more and more micropayment systems take off…PayPal announced new micropayments processing fees for digital goods. The new pricing will provide merchants with a more affordable way to process payments for low-cost digital content such as video games, online greeting cards, news articles, mobile phone content and digital music. Link.
Popcasts is an aggregator of ‘most popular podcasts’ (e.g. top 10 podcast). It lets you see at a glance, on just one page, what is popular in dozens of different podcast directories, without you having to constantly check the individual directories for the latest ranking results. It scans and synchronises with pre-registered podcast directories or ranking sites every hour and generates RSS feeds for each top 10 podcast. The sites registered to Popcasts include: Apple iTunes Podcasting, Odeo, Podnova, podfeed, iPodderX, PodcastPickle, Podcasting NEWS and Podcast Alley. Link.
