Why pay $20,000 for a commercial link to run your television station when a $10 kitchen wok from the Warehouse is just as effective?
This is exactly how North Otago’s newest television station 45 South is transmitting its signal from its studio to the top of Cape Wanbrow, in a bid to keep costs down.
45 South volunteer Ken Jones designed the wok transmitter in his spare time last year when he wanted to provide wireless broadband to his Ardgowan home.
s TV station on air - 22 Feb 2007 - National News - New Zealand Herald - [via] Link.
Artist Bethan Laura Wood made these clever teacups that reveal designs over time -
Stain is a set of a teacups designed to improve through use. This project examines the assumption that use is damaging to a product (For example, scratches on an iPod).
The interior surface of the cup is treated so as to stain more in predetermined places. The more the cups are used, the more the pattern is revealed. Over time they will build up an individual pattern dependent on the users personal way of drinking tea.
The Evening Chronicle has an article on a teen-turned-fuel baron… sorta -
He happily admits he’s hopeless at school - but Steven Henderson is Tyneside’s very own oil baron.
Northumberland’s answer to JR Ewing has built his own oil refinery in the shed at his home in Stamfordham Road, Eachwick, near Ponteland, which he uses to produce 1,000 litres of bio-diesel a week.
He collects waste cooking oil from pubs and restaurants and each weekend he processes it into environmentally-friendly bio-diesel.
It is then used by his dad to power his farm’s tractors and vans saving him around £300 a week.
From the pages of MAKE: Making Biodiesel. The best way to learn how to make your own backyard biodiesel is to start with a one-liter batch. It’s easy to make a small batch that will work in any diesel engine. You won’t need any special equipment–an old juice bottle will serve as the “reactor” vessel–and on such a small scale, you can quickly refine your technique and perform further experiments. MAKE 03 - Page 68. Subscribers–read this article now in your digital edition or get MAKE 03 in the Maker store.
Jake sent in this an already venerable IBM Model M retro-fitted with glass and nickel keys and mounted in a polished brass frame… Steampunk Keyboard Mod - Link.
These little bots make cockroaches believe that they’re one of them, at least that’s what the roaches want us to believe -
LEURRE will propose a modeling protocol to be applied to the calculus of emergence in mixed-societies and study its properties. Its goal is similar to research in collective intelligence or self-organization, namely to understand how phenomena at one level of biological organization (here social) emerge from the properties of lower-level units (individual behavior). Having determined the pathways of information flow among the units and their behavioral rules, analytical and numerical models enable to predict the properties of the mixed society.
LEURRE is mainly concerned with the dynamics and the emergence of collective patterns. We consider three types of entities: the animals, the robots and the chemical/physical variables (e. g. pheromone, sound, building material, resource, shelter,. . . ).
The robots and animals (the autonomous agents) are characterized by their position, orientation, activity and internal state (e.g. a physiological variable, memory,…).
A MAKE reader sent in this Wireless/Wii Hack for SNES and NES controllers - Take original NES/SNES controllers, add an iPod battery, an RF chip and a 16F84A microcontroller and you’ll have wireless retro controllers that work with the classic console titles on an un-modded Wii - Link.
Productivity guru, That Phone Guy, and everyone’s favorite electronic hobo, Merlin Mann, launches his “The Merlin Show” Monday February 26 via iTunes. We all probably owe it to ourselves to tune in!
From March 1st - April 7th, the Graffiti Research Lab is declaring NYC an OPEN CITY. All the streets and walls have been turned over to the bombers, pranksters and protesters. As a triumph for the GRL’s foreign conquests, and for all the anonymous public works made by servants of the street at home and abroad, Eyebeam is presenting an exhibition and series of free screenings and workshops that reveal the tools and tactics of graffiti writers, artists, protesters, pranksters and hackers who are reclaiming our cities by any means necessary.
Presented by Eyebeam, Open City: Tools for Public Action is an exhibition documenting the ingenuity of graffiti writers, artists, protesters, pranksters and hackers reclaiming the public realm. By presenting the artifacts and tools of the artists, the exhibition offers a deeper look at the means and motivations of urban action and creativity. Open City hopes to inspire its audience to make their own tools for public action. To encourage community participation, a series of screenings, presentations and workshops exploring tool building, tactics and approaches to communication by any means necessary will occur at Eyebeam throughout the month-long exhibition. Among the means and materials presented will be: paint, tape, stencils, digital projection, large-scale public pranks, hacking urban infrastructure, homemade markers and ink recipes, lasers, etch, the internet, social engineering and activist robots.
Cory Doctorow:
Will sez, “Gizmodo has decided to declare war against the RIAA, rightly noting that they get their money from us (the consuming public) and that if we don’t like what they do, we can do something about it. It’s a good rant, and they offer nice alternatives to buying RIAA controlled music like attending concerts and buying music from emusic.”
Alright, we’ve been following the RIAA’s increasingly frequent affronts to privacy and free speech lately, and it’s about time we stopped merely bitching and moaning and did something about it. The RIAA has the power to shift public policy and to alter the direction of technology and the Internet for one reason and one reason alone: it’s totally loaded. Without their millions of dollars to throw at lawyers, the RIAA is toothless. They get their money from us, the consumers, and if we don’t like the way they’re behaving, we can let them know with our wallets.
I’ve always been skeptical of entertainment industry boycotts — I question how big a popular movement you can build by telling people not to listen to popular music — but maybe it’s time. I haven’t bought anything from an RIAA member in six months (the new Beatles Love mashup disc), and before that, I’d probably gone six more months. They just aren’t making anything I want anymore, and there’s so much stuff out there in Internet land from creators who aren’t set on destroying democracy, privacy and free speech that it’s almost impossible not to boycott these bastards.
SaveTheInternet.com — the activists who killed the 2006 Senate attempt to destroy Net Neutrality — have just released an amazing video in support of a new law that would make Net Neutrality the law of the land. I’ve never sen a more lucid, more BS-free, and more entertaining treatment of the question. If the people around you don’t understand Net Neutrality, show them this. Show this to five friends this weekend, sign them up, and Save the Internet.
Cory Doctorow:
Ryan sez, “This is an old Anti-Drug PSA from TVOntario, it somehow found its way to a Boston public library, where a couple of amateur film makers remixed and recut it into the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen.”
I don’t know if this would be quite so satisfying to someone who didn’t grow up with TVOntario’s shows, as I did. This runs a little long — as does most surrealism — but it has moments of pure stoner brilliance.
Windows/Mac/Unix (Firefox): The Send Tab URLs Firefox extension lets you quickly compose an email containing a list of all of the tab URLs in your current window.
Send Tab URLs lets you compose a list of up to 24 tabs in a plain, numbered, or bulleted list through your default email app (it worked in Gmail, though unfortunately line breaks weren’t working). A Send Tab URLs option will be added to your File menu, and you can add an optional button to your toolbar if you prefer. I’d love to see an option for a keyboard shortcut. If you often email lists of URLs, this extension promises to be invaluable. If you’re more of a one-link-per-email type (and a Gmail user), you should check out the GmailThis bookmarklet. Send Tab URLs is free, works wherever Firefox does. — Adam Pash
No Comments »
