Cheap Prefab Housing + More

Sunday 25 May 2008 at 09:53 am Great thinking - Nice and cheap quick-setup housing.

On a tenuous home and garden related note - this is awesome - a folding greenhouse.

For some reason I started googling 'container house' and the first hit is a kiwi site - Container Architecture. Nice way of recycling - shame there are no pictures of real houses. These look interesting though.

Fascinating - NIHONJIN, BURAKUMIN: Portraits of Japans outcast people. You don't really hear about this type of thing. Its surprising how groups of people always get left behind no matter how technologically advanced the country is.

Super geeky - Science of keyboard design. Taking the mechanics of keyboard design to a whole new level.

Geeky - RAID 5 Compact Flash Adaptor. Get a bunch of old CF cards and roll your own disk.

Will this become more popular - Time to destroy your mail servers. An IT Director mentioned their company had moved from Notes/Domino to Google Apps and Mail. I was mystified. I can see benifits for a small organisation or for a very large organisation that needs to offload a bunch of work (ie student email at a University) but you're giving away a serious competitive advantage by outsourcing your messaging and groupware infrastructure. Its also interesting to see IBM offer hosted Notes.

Fascinating - The future without IPv6. I wonder if this will really work out as described ? IPv6 has been around for a few years now and no one I know has thought seriously about implementing it.

This looks to be a kiwi site - Read at work. Kind of interesting way to procrastinate while appearing to work.

If they pull this off it looks like Google will have a real iPhone competitor - Live images and video of the Google Android phone interface. The immersion stuff looks fantastic - use your phone like a compass and Google Maps will rotate to match.

Awesome art - Displacements. Films a room then whites it out and plays back the film using the white room as a screen.

Nice idea - Obecalp Tablets. Available online. Read the name of the pills backwards.

Amazing Watches + More

Sunday 18 May 2008 at 4:56 pm Amazing watches - multiple face watches. The Meccaniche Veloci looks awesome if a little chunky.

Coming from the 'Bah Humbug' generation of IT, talk of pandering to the Thumb Generation just seems pointless when most IT shops are still struggling with a raft of other fundemental problems.

Interesting - Pros & Cons of SharePoint. Interesting to read some of the side-bar items too - I wonder if people would buy a Facebook appliance to allow people to create intranets ?

A clock that tells the time typographically - Analogy. Nifty.

A couple of useful geek tools - put Fedora 9 on a USB drive and a whole site dedicated to putting Linux distros on a USB stick.

Personally I just can't get into it but I can see the appeal given theres so little sci-fi/space-opera on tv - The Science of Battlestar Galactica does what it says on the tin. Explore some of the hard-science behind the BSG universe.

Wonderful - Real Life Hobbit House. Not sure if it would be code compliant in NZ.

More wonderful - figures made from flowers.

Another plant box variation - Rainwater Harvesting Vertical Garden.

Via PenQuest comes an interesting story Fountain Pens boost self-esteem.

Nice - Fractal storage box.

Interesting staff-retention technique - Zappo pays new employees to leave.

Nice - pretty awesome 78rpm record sleeve art.

Interesting reading - Why Iceland has the happiest people on earth.

Funky idea for your laptop lid - turn it into a blackboard.

Holy F@#k!

Friday 16 May 2008 at 7:20 pm A must read if you're a interested in IT security - Exploiting Network Cards.

Be afraid if you run a firewall on x86 hardware!

Daily Life of Lois + More

Wednesday 07 May 2008 at 3:29 pm Awesome art and a wonderful homage to the daily grind - Daily Life of Lois.

Useful beginners guide to learning Cocoa - Masters of the Void. For all those budding iPhone programmers. Remember if you can program the iPhone you're going to be in demand.

So it turns out all those UK security cameras don't help solve or reduce crime. So what do they get used for ? Catching crapping dogs apparently.

If you're an amateur gardener this makes for interesting reading - The Three Sisters and again The Three Sisters. The perfect complementary selection of veges.

An oldy but a goody - 'hello world' in multiple computer languages. If you install compilers or dev software and need to make sure the basics work then you could do a lot worse than running a quick 'hello world' test before going any further. And as an added bonus people might actually think you know what you're doing.

Another nice piece - Phone Cord Sheep.

More technology related 'art' - Birth Clock. The clock only starts when you break the glass. The idea is that when you're done pondering you can 'break' the sculpture which both brings it to 'life' and starts a timer to tell you how long its been since you came to your momentous decision. Reminds me of Enos Oblique Strategy Cards to help you get out of a dead-end.

If you only write the occassional web page but balk at using a text-editor or paying for an over complicated HTML authoring tool then take a look at the multi-platform Kompozer which is an unofficial evolution of NVu. These both trace their roots back to the ancient Netscape Composer.

Interesting - Cloud Computing. This is actually pretty awesome - we're implementing new systems and none of them seem to take on board the benefits to be had from abstraction.

Genius - Convert those CD's to 45's.

Fascinating - fixing a 20 year old BSD bug.

Rebuttal - NAND Engineers Perspective on why SSD's will eventually replace HDD's in computers.

Insane - Guy builds his own film manufacturing system. 'Film' as in pre-digital analog media for cameras that really go 'click'.

Nice - PowerPoint Test Card. Useful eyecandy before you kick into your presentation.