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I’ve been building bikes for a bit now and doing what I can to document the process in between the sheer joy of building and learning stuff. I thought I’d share with the Make crowd what I’m learning and how. I’m starting from only the most basic bike fixing knowledge and building from bits and bobs, learning about different standards, (did you know there are four kinds of bottom bracket thread? I did not!), different geometries, how to build wheels, and so on.

Bike stripping - Link.

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Originally from MAKE Magazine on November 29, 2007, 2:00am

Liane sent in this handy little tutorial for how to make a homemade parabolic mic - Link.

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Originally from MAKE Magazine on November 29, 2007, 7:00am

In what the study calls “the efficiency paradox,” consumers
have taken money saved from greater energy efficiency and spent
it on more and bigger appliances and vehicles, consuming even
more energy in the process.

Originally from ENN: Energy, ReBlogged by Leah Gauthier on Nov 29, 2007 at 10:40 AM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on November 29, 2007, 9:40am

Atlanta, Georgia - First a word about something called “greywater”. Greywater is basically washwater. As homeowners, we make a lot of it each day. It's all wastewater excepting toilet wastes and food wastes derived from garbage grinders. No surprise, this partially used water can be re-used in your home for toilet flushing and watering gardens. Good for you, good for your water bill and good for the environment. Especially in drought stricken parts of the country like Georgia where the state's Environmental Protection Division declared a level four drought for sixty-one counties in the state.

Originally from ENN: Green Building, ReBlogged by Leah Gauthier on Nov 28, 2007 at 08:39 AM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on November 28, 2007, 7:39am

a set of elaborate visual metaphors of the Foreign Exchange (Forex) trading to “present Forex data in a simplified & user-friendly manner that makes it accessible to ordinary users”. the ultimate goal is to allow users to practice play, or deposit funds for real money trading.

in “Forex Marathon”, users can pick a currency & have it compete in a foot race against other (hopefully weaker) currencies. in “Globe Trader”, the trading portfolio is managed by forging relations with other currencies on the map of the world. in “Forex Match” 2 currencies go one-on-one in a tug of rope against each other.

[link: etoro.com|via techcrunch.com|thnkx Marcus]

play it simultaneously with the email airport simulation & the 3D shopping city.

Originally from information aesthetics on November 28, 2007, 2:43am

2 new visualization projects developed by Yahoo’s design team Yhaus, currently limited to a large-size documentation movie.

query bursts depicts individual IP numbers that start very popular bursts of search queries. each particle shows a query from a unique location worldwide.

bookscape represents about 250,000 illustrations taken from children books, originally collected by the Open Library Project. the experimental interface uses dynamic resampling of image data to place all the images in a single zoomable space, arranged alphabetically by title.

[link: design.yahoo.com & design.yahoo.com|thnkx Ben]

Originally from information aesthetics on November 27, 2007, 1:01am

Originally from BLDGBLOG on December 1, 2007, 10:58am

a geographical 3D terrain map of the human brain created from a reference photo. a real digital elevation model was then used to create contour line data, relief shading & to plan where the roads and features should be placed for map compilation. real-life New Zealand public domain data was then added for the surrounding islands.

[link: unitseven.co.nz]

Originally from information aesthetics on November 29, 2007, 11:49pm

an animated educational film designed in an infographic style about what politicians claim to be protection of freedom, but what is here referred to as “repressive legislation”.

[link: huesforalice.com|thnkx Martin]

see also trusted computing movie & some other infographic movies at my YouTube account.

Originally from information aesthetics on November 28, 2007, 2:55am

Like some mechanoid Arab Godzilla, Dubai emerges from the desert haze and Persian Gulf coastline, super-sizing itself as it goes. A mega-project studded spectacle that unavoidably boggles the mind. Audaciousness on such a scale, and yet alongside that arab saying “My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel,” it’s hard not to think of it as foundations for the world’s most elaborate ghost town.

Vat Ist Dubai?
Back in 1971 the modern emirate of Dubai was created with the formation of the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven emirates on the Eastern side of the Arabian peninsula, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Surrounded by oil-rich nations and within short distance of most of Europe and Asia, Dubai has established itself as a key financial centre and trading route destination, featuring the world’s largest human made port. And they seem to like that kind of scale there.

Mega Mega Mega
Higher than 800m tall when finished, will be the world’s tallest structure : the Burj Dubai. Then there’s ‘The World’, a collection of 300 artificial islands - that means yes, each one is being constructed - that form the shape of the world’s continents. ( Apparently Australasia has already been sold to a developer from Kuwait.) The World (( “Take a tour of the world, and view our corporate video” ) is not to be confused with The World’s Largest Shopping Mall - due for completion in 2008, and not to be confused with the worlds largest shopping mall which already exists in Dubai. Nor should The World be confused with the Palm Islands, the three largest artificial islands in the world. There is already one giant indoor ski resort ( while it is 40-50 degrees C outside! ), and a second one is planned, complete with revolving mountain. Also revolving - each floor of a planned rotating skyscraper, a ‘tower in motion’ with heliport, swimming pools, outdoor gardens and floors that rotate independently from each other ( from stored solar energy) . There’s a Chess City planned, with 32 tower blocks of 64 floors, each in the form of a chess piece, The Restless Planet dinosaur theme park featuring more than 100 moving animatronic dinosaurs, a pyramid and a building called Atlantis that will cost $600m and include a “swim-with-the-dolphins encounter programme”, an actual underwater hotel and recently proposed - one of my favourites - ‘The Cloud’, still in concept design but has to be seen to be believed, a small village ( complete with lake and rotating bridges ) elevated 300 metres in the air above Dubai ( “a translucent floating island” ) and supported on slanting legs resembling rain. Check the artist sketches, I like the guy playing cricket at the base.

All those projects just end up sounding like science fiction in the end…. for a better sense of Dubai out of controlness, try this all you can eat photo explanation of why one fifth of the world’s cranes are currently at use in Dubai.

Arriving in Dubai
Turned out just before June, that the cheapest available Melbourne to Istanbul ticket ( for arriving by a certain date to play pixels with artificialeyes.tv ) was with Emirate Airlines - which also meant a stop off in Dubai, flying in over the desert to a sudden and abundant sprouting of buildings, hyper-green landscapes and football fields, resources from all over the world converging at this one particular location and seeming to swell after every blink of the eye.

Browsing through Open Skies ( the in-flight magazine for Emirate Airlines ), confirmed I was not remotely / ballpark / galaxies near their target market. Having passed on the calf-skin credit card holder ( only a few hundred euros ) and other delectable duty free items, scanning and skimming the magazine highlighted a few key phrases such as :
“open the door to a new member of the global elite,” “(real estate brand) xxxxx, the defined height of luxury,” “from the developers of some of the world’s most prestigious properties, we present…”, and while I quite liked “peerless opulence awaits the elite few”, it was hard to go past “a global landmark of grandeur & elegance, to give new meaning to opulence and exclusivity… at this premier luxury address….. owning a Rolls Royce is one of the premium entitlements of luxury living …. A fleet of luxury cars will will be part of your personal asset on a shared ownership basis.”

And then flipping open the newspaper revealed an ad for a sand-dune tour guide that used a fleet of Hummers… which maybe makes sense here of all places - its not like they’d run out of oil. Except as it turns out, they will run out of oil within 20 years in Dubai, and have already made plans to shift from this, revenues from petroleum and natural gas contributing to less that 3% of Dubai’s 2006 economy.

Bleary Half-day Impressions?
Heat. Wealth. Heat. Airport wi-fi. Photo sharing site Flickr.com inaccessible, banned for not matching the cultural and/or politicial views of the UAE. More advertising aimed at people with much fatter wallets. Read about the huge underclass of mostly foreign workers enabling all of this to be built, some 250,000 mostly Indian and Pakistani men who lived in camps and would earn in 6 months, enough money to stay one night at the hotels they were building. Read that although Dubai is one of the more liberal Emirates, gay and lesbian visitors were urged to be cautious with their behaviour, as the punishment for homosexuality is kinda severe…. the death penalty!

And as Andy Nicholson from the Guardian observes (in a juicy article) :
“There is no hint of democracy in Dubai. There is a consultative council whose members are nominated by the ruling family. A group of five old Arab families control the entire emirate. Not the modern centre of the Arab world but, more than that, the Arab centre of the modern world.”

Further reading? Wikipedia for the bare bones, Mike Davis for the gravy >> Sinister Paradise : Does the Road to the Future End at Dubai?

Tags: dubai, craziness

Originally by jean poole from { { { { - - Sky Noise — >>> on July 19, 2007, 5:50pm

It’s great that your iPhone has a data plan and a killer mobile browser, but when you’re sitting at the airport waiting to catch a plane with your laptop right next to you, wouldn’t it be nice to use your full-on desktop browser? Out of the box your iPhone won’t allow you to tether your EDGE data connection to another computer wirelessly, but with a little ingenuity on your part you’ll be browsing the net on your laptop through your iPhone’s data service in no time.

NOTE: You’re probably asking yourself: “Isn’t the EDGE data network that the iPhone uses SLOW?” Well, yes it is. But if you’re at all like me, sometimes a slow full-screen browsing session is better than slow browsing on the small screen.

I’ve only tested this method on my MacBook Pro, but since SSH is platform independent, this should be a workable solution on Windows, Mac, or Linux.

What You’ll Need

For this guide, you’ll need:

• A computer with Wi-Fi capable of creating an ad-hoc computer-to-computer connection (yours is)
• A jailbroken iPhone (If you don’t know how to jailbreak your iPhone, the easiest way is to make sure you’re running 1.1.1 firmware and then start here.
• The OpenSSH iPhone application (I’ll show you how to get this below)
• An SSH client on the computer you’re using. If you’re on a Mac or *nix machine, you should be fine. Windows users should check out how to install OpenSHH with Cygwin.

Prepare Your iPhone

Assuming you’ve already got Installer.app installed on your iPhone (which you will have installed if you’ve gone through the jailbreak mentioned above), the first thing you need to do is install OpenSSH. So head to your iPhone’s home screen and fire up Installer.app. Now go to the Install tab and tap on System -> OpenSSH and tap the Install button. Once it installs, exit Installer.app.

Start Up Your Ad-Hoc Network

This process differs depending on what operating system you’re using. As I said above, I’ve only tested this on a Mac, but I’ll point to instructions on how to do the same on Windows as well.

If you are using a Mac, just click the Airport icon in your menu bar and click on Create Network. Then just give your network a name and–if you like–a password.

On a Windows PC you’ll need to set up Internet Connection Sharing. You can find instructions for doing so here. Good luck!

Once you create your network, your computer won’t be able to connect wirelessly to any Wi-Fi hotspot, just other devices.

Connect Your iPhone to Your Computer

To get your computer and iPhone talking, you’ll need to connect your iPhone to the ad-hoc network we created above. To do so, go to the Settings application, tap Wi-Fi, and select your ad-hoc network from the list of available networks.

Once you’re connected, tap the blue arrow next to your new network to get info on your connections–namely your IP address. Write that puppy down because you’ll need it in a second.

Connect Your Computer to Your iPhone’s Internet

Now it’s time to make use of the SSH server we installed on our iPhone. From this point on, we’re basically following our previous guide to encrypting your web browsing with an SSH SOCKS proxy. Open up your command line application of choice and enter the following:

ssh -ND 9999 root@YourIPAddress

…where YourIPAddress is replaced with whatever you wrote down above.

If this is the first time you’re SSHing into your iPhone, it may take a bit for your secure key to be generating, so give it at least 30 seconds. You’ll be asked if you’re sure you want to continue connecting (answer “yes”) and then you’ll be prompted for a password. At the time of this writing, the default password for OpenSSH on your iPhone is alpine, though you should change the root password when you get a chance.

After you’ve entered the correct password, the prompt will appear to hang. That’s actually what should be happening, so you’re on the right track.

Set Your Browser to Use SOCKS Proxy

At this point you just need to set your browser or operating system to use the SOCKS Proxy we’ve just set up to route our internet connection through the iPhone’s EDGE connection. Gina’s post shows how to do this with Firefox, though I’ll admit I had some trouble getting the proxy to play properly with Firefox on my Mac. Your mileage may vary, but as an alternative I’ll show you how to set it up in Safari, which worked well for me.

First, open the Safari Preferences, go to the Advanced tab, and click the Proxies “Change Settings” button. Make sure you’re looking at your Airport advanced settings and are viewing the Proxies tab. Tick the SOCKS Proxy checkbox, enter localhost in the section labeled SOCKS Proxy Server and 9999 in the port next to it. Hit OK and Apply your settings. Then just head back to Safari and you’re ready to browse.

Couldn’t This Work Better?

I’ll admit that my SSH/SOCKS chops are slim, so it’s very likely this method could be built on to work even better than what I’ve set up above. That said, I can now browse from my laptop for free anywhere I’ve got my iPhone, so it could be worse. There are other methods available for tethering your iPhone, particularly this one, but I like the comparatively easy setup and cross-platform-ness of my setup. Alternatively, if you’re feeling particularly adventurous/bored, you can boost your iPhone connection to 3G speeds by tethering the iPhone to a 3G mobile phone (which would be absurdly cumbersome). Tethering your iPhone to your laptop may be against AT&T’s terms of service, so keep that in mind if you decide to go forward with this. If you’ve tried this or a similar method and have your own tips, let’s hear them in the comments. Thanks to Lifehacker reader Vinod Panicker for the great idea.

If you’re looking for more cool ways to put that iPhone to use, check out my iPhone book.

Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker who enjoys a good iPhone hack–hell, he wrote the book on it. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Originally from Lifehacker on November 29, 2007, 11:00am

Originally from Transmaterial on December 1, 2007, 10:59am

As part of the exhibition on Apartheid, the courtyard of CCCB in Barcelona is occupied by a thought-provoking installation by Johannesburg artist Jane Alexander. “Control of Arrivals” is an area closed off by high tanks, razor wire and surveilled by with watch towers. Inside are pale, long creatures who look half-human, half-animal.

The installation is based on Melilla’s border fence, a barrier between Morocco and the Spanish city of Melilla.

Constructed by Spain, its stated purpose is to rein in the influx of immigrants to the Spanish enclave and, therefore, to the European Union. There is considerable pressure by African refugees to enter Melilla, a part of the European Union. Although the border fence is a six-meter-tall double fence with watch towers, refugees frequently manage to cross it illegally, avoiding the attempts by Spanish police to take them back to their home countries. Detection wires, tear gas dispensers, radar, and day/night vision cameras are planned to increase security and prevent illegal immigration.

Beyond this reference, the installation can also be seen as a comment on the ever more rigid mechanisms of separation, discrimination and control extensively set in place by politically and economically dominant countries over the majority of the world. “Europe uses tanks to stop those coming from the South reaching the continent, while building motorways for those who come from the North”, wrote Josep Ramoneda in the exhibition catalog.

Jane Alexander has created a fascinating body of works, the most famous of them being The Butcher Boys (1985/86), three lifesize humanoid-like beasts whose figures seem to be devoid of their outside senses - their ears are nothing more than holes in their heads and their mouths appears to be covered with thick roughened skin.

I took some pictures fo the installation and there are some images from the show on here and on the cccb website. Picture of border fence from 20 minutos.

Originally from we make money not art on November 30, 2007, 12:59am

Originally from Life as an Artificial Lifeform on December 1, 2007, 10:59am

Originally from 3quarksdaily on November 27, 2007, 12:01pm

Originally from 3quarksdaily on November 29, 2007, 10:56am

Originally from 3quarksdaily on November 30, 2007, 5:13am

Originally from 3quarksdaily on November 30, 2007, 5:20am

I just noticed that in the new issue of the New Yorker Michael Specter has written an article on the viruses in our genome. I wrote about this research in the New York Times a year ago. I haven’t had a chance to read the article through yet, but I was mortified to come across this line…

Until recently, the earliest available information about the history and the course of human diseases, like smallpox and typhus, came from mummies no more than four thousand years old. Evolution cannot be measured in a time span that short.

What happened to the New Yorker’s legendary fact-checking staff? Scientists can make important observations of virus evolution in their labs in a matter of weeks. HIV evolved from a chimpanzee disease to a human one over the past few decades. Perhaps Specter meant something more specific than “evolution,” like the evolution of human beings and their viruses over the past few million years. But that’s a charitable interpretation.

Anyway–let me know what you think of the piece.

Update: Wed. 11/28 4:20–Having read the piece, I must say it’s very good. It gets into a lot of cool experiments and the even cooler implications about how viruses may have shaped us. Some of the wording could have been made more precise, like the sentence I cited above, but having struggled to convey this sort of material myself, I shouldn’t be casting too many stones. I am also a bit confused by the ending, in which a scientists claim that HIV is driving the evolution of resistance mutations in humans and that resistant humans will acquire viruses in their genomes that will mark the creation of an entirely new species. I can’t tell if he’s saying that a reproductive barrier will emerge between the resistant humans and other humans, or if the resistance genes are supposed to simply take over the world population through selection. No matter which he means, speciation doesn’t work that way.

Read the comments on this post…

Originally from The Loom on November 27, 2007, 3:45pm

‘Emotion’ used to mark the insurmountable border between a man and a machine. Only in a distant future (science fiction, usually) machines were able to be intertwined with emotions. Actually, in real life, emotions are tracked, transmitted and mediated by machines. The brand new CCCS, Centre For

Originally from Neural.it :: media culture, hacktivism on November 29, 2007, 1:42pm