Category: outside

This is awesome. It’s a simple device that uses burning wood (or similar) to generate not only heat for cooking, but simultaneously cooling for storing food, and electricity. That’s pretty amazing. It’s aimed at developing countries and is a very specifically targeted device that to me seems like it could actually make a difference. Who needs a $100 laptop when you can’t even feed yourself?

The city of San Francisco has a corporate parking ticket program that bills companies monthly for their parking ticket fines. It’s intended for companies that do deliveries or on location services. The top three accounts in 2006 by dollar amount were UPS ($673,334), FedEx ($434,046), and Airborne Express ($140,845).

The idea of charging companies monthly for their parking tickets is a bit odd, but I see the logic in it. It’s just not possible for UPS drivers to find legal parking on every one of the 100 stops a day they make. It can sometimes take 45 minutes just to find parking for our Mini Cooper! Parking tickets are just a part of doing business in a major city and shaving off some of the human time needed to process all those tickets (UPS recieved 11,788 in 2006) just makes sense.

The SF Chronicle article has lots more interesting details.

The issue of network neutrality has been in the news a lot lately. Basically, it’s the concept that network access providers (ISPs, think DSL and cable internet) should be legally required to provide their customers with 100% unbiased access to the entirety of the content available on the Internet. Some of them want to be able to restrict your access to competing service providers. Voice over IP is the catalyst as many of the network providers also offer their own Voice over IP services. There’s a lot of misleading rhetoric being employed on both sides of the issue, but it is an important one for the long-term value of the Internet. The Save The Internet site is one of the main focal points of the ‘good guys’ side. There’s now a free song from a group of musicians called The Broadband aiming to bring people to the website and raise awareness about the issue. Similarly there’s an interesting video highlighting some of the main points involved. It’s worth watching.

(Sorry for the lame picture accompanying this post. The good guys don’t seem to have anything much better available.)

A recent New York Times Magazine article called “Mass Natural” discusses Wal-Mart’s plans to add add organically grown food to it’s stores. I didn’t even know Wal-Mart sold food so I’m pretty out of the loop on that. Anyway, they’re a gigantic retailer of whatever they sell so this move would have huge ramifications on the entire organic food industry. I’m a big believer in eating as much organic as possible and see the methods of the industrial farm industry to be basically evil. Conventional industrial farming goes for quantity over quality as far as the food goes and very little, if any, thought is put into the quality of life for the animals and the land. Giant retailers like Wal-Mart who are always trying to push down prices are one of reasons the farmers have cut corner after corner and we have ended up with food that is pumped full of antibiotics and other lovely inedibles like cardboard.

Organic farmers, on the other hand, tend to go for quality over quantity, and organically grown food typically costs quite a bit more than conventionally grown. It also tends to be sold in smaller stores and that drives prices up as well, of course. Wal-Mart has said they will only charge 10% more for organic food over similar conventional food. That sounds sorta awesome since organic food will be available to more people, but will the organic food they sell really be as good for us we’ve come to expect? That’s very unlikely. It will likely be shipped from other countries at great expense to the environment, and may even be unhealthy since the farms will use basically the same methods they use now but without the crutch of antibiotics.

Anyway, the article is great and everyone should go read it now. And don’t shop at Wal-Mart.

Some people at MIT have been working for awhile on developing a laptop computer for use by people in the developing world. The goal is for a rugged computer designed to be used mostly outside that only costs $100 per unit to mass produce. They have also designed a custom user interface built on Python, GTK, Gecko running on Linux. The goal is to encourage interaction and communication and provide an Internet platform for people who have likely never used or perhaps even seen a computer before. It’s a noble concept and I hope they go far with it!

Pictures of the first prototype have been unveiled and it looks pretty goofy. It does make me want to touch it and play with it, though! More details and some interesting commentary at Ars Technica.

The major networks are finally doing something smart in their fight to keep their advertising properties relevant in the age of the DVR. The major television networks are experimenting with a variety of part advertising/part entertainment concepts now. These include fake commercials for the fictitious “Hanso Foundation” aired during episodes of Lost (as part of a larger “Lost Experience” concept involving non-televsion content), fake comedic PSA’s shown during episodes of The Office, and a $2 million interactive game called “Gold Rush” being put on by CBS and AOL. I don’t think I’ll personally be tempted to actually watch commercials again (the shows just really aren’t good enough to make me watch commercials!), these steps will likely work for some of the viewers out there in TV land.

This was passed to me and I think it’s pretty nifty. It’s a pair of glasses that requires piercing the bridge of your nose to wear. This exact concept has come up (somewhat jokingly) in various conversations I’ve been involved in over the years and has now become reality. To help explain away the ‘extreme’ nature of these things, the creators said, “Paying … to have someone cut your eyes and shoot a laser in them (just so you don’t have to wear glasses) seems extreme to me…”. Viva la future!