The mission of Inveneo, a nonprofit group of inveterate high-tech adventurers, is to bring developing communities that never reached a 20th century level of infrastructure into the 21st century. Its bicycle-powered system brings not just VoIP but also e-mail and Web browsing to remote areas, using a combination of Linux and the Asterisk open source PBX. Link.
Our pals over at Phone Scoop are auctioning off one silver RAZR, one black RAZR and one BLNC Bluetooth car kit to benefit our friends at the EFF, it’s the EFF’s 15th birthday this week. So if you want to help the EFF and score a cool phone, have at it. If you happen to win, we’ll help you get your own content on the phones too (videos play nicely on these). Link.
I’ve always thought the Build-a-Bear stores in malls are kinda neat, the kids can build their own Teddy bears they way the want. I even made one once as a present. What I didn’t know- it seems it’s not so clear is what happens to the information the kids type in the computer terminal to get their bear birth certificates. The “opt in” preference apparently is pre-checked. The SF Chronicle has a story about this. The bears are cool, just watch the kids and don’t have them put their personal info at the end. Might be a good way to teach them about “opting out” [via] Link.
We blew out our amp this year and were planning on tossing the thing. I was looking at it and figured that it would probably be the perfect height for a monitor stand. The only real problem was that the thing weighed a ton. It was easy weight to get rid of though. Old electronics were a lot more serviceable than they are now. I took out five screws on the bottom and the whole thing slid out from the wooden case. It took about five minutes to remove all the knobs and the faceplate. Link. Flickr photos here.
A German designer calling himself Seppoman has built a Midibox control system into a sofa. If two people are sitting down, they can output three control values – left and right buttock weight and how far the person is leaning back. Obviously, the possibilities are pretty much endless. Previously, Seppoman built an incredibly cool rackmounted Commodore 64 SID synth. [via] Link.
“A hardware engineer has managed to sucessfully connect a full sized PC keyboard to the Sony PSP handheld. It looks as if the hardware mofication has done with several different xlink cable connectors and modified to interlink with each other. Obviously, the software side of things are not complete but this is still a very interesting modification.” [via] Link.
13 pounds of gummy bears, sorted out, melted, and layered into an empty tub of animal crackers. A day and a half of work. He used different colors so the gummy bear has stripes, as each layer of melted bear was poured in. [