Skype fail is a horror film. 

That’s me, Kit, and Kit. You can’t tell from this screengrab, but the Kit from the other computer was talking and moving and drinking coffee. Totally spooky.

Oh, dad.

Just bought this gorgeous piece of equipment. Hope it’ll fit on my desk.

Gonna be super broke for a depressingly long while now.

mikehudack:

laughingsquid:

Wired Reread, Exploring Old Wired Magazines

Impractical for actual phone conversations, but hell, it’s more attractive than a cell phone belt holster.

evangotlib:

weliveinthefuture:

“Google-funded startup Makani has already proven that kites have value as an energy source. Now the GE-chartered Beluga SkySails cargo vessel has shown that kites—yes, those lightweight things you fly from strings—can act as propulsion systems on ships.

The vessel, chartered by GE’s Project Logistics team to carry power-generating equipment, boasts the first towing kite propulsion system for a commercial shipping vessel. The parasail-like kite attaches to the ship’s bow and pulls it through the water. The SkySails system can carry a load of eight to 16 tons—a number that is expected to increase to 32 tons by 2012 as the technology matures.”

via mikehudack:hilker:hippieflavor:Fast Company

===

Is the kite pulling the ship or is the ship flying the kite?

Syriana II: Go Fly a Kite

In my head, the crew of the ship spends all day singing and dancing to this.

mikehudack:

caterpillarcowboy:

infoneernet:

abcsoupdot:

MIT’s Digital Food Printer Creates Nutritious Meals

Here’s an interesting thought: What if eating greener and more sustainably meant printing your meals? Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran, a couple ingenious minds at MIT, have come up with a way to do just that. Hailed as ‘The Cornucopia’, this 3-D printer concept is a personal food factory that fuses the digital world with the realm of cooking by storing, precisely mixing, depositing, and cooking layers of ingredients with no waste.

Inhabitat

This sounds gross.

We live in the future.

My brain has maybe exploded a little. Is this genius? Disgusting? Emblematic of all that is wrong with modern 1st-world society? The solution to worldwide hunger? Will it make me look fat?

peegeethirteen:

soupsoup:

rillawafers:

iPhone Becomes a Universal Remote This February

TIGHT NICE.

That’s pretty effing sweet, my Harmony One isn’t going down without a fight though.

Yes please.

agrammar:

airgordon:

knickknack:

pragerd:

Do you remember the one laptop per child project  that was all the rage a year or two ago?

It’s coming closer to a reality, and this is the laptop that will cost $75 and looks better than your Macbook.

It’s going to be released in 2012.

Full Article

Yves Behar, FTW.  A year or so behind schedule but the second iteration is sure to be an impressive debut.  Technology aside, let’s not forget the social and cultural barriers affecting the introduction of such a device.  But given the turbulence of the last release, I’m sure OLPC will pull through.

Cool computer and concept, but honestly, how first world is this shit? “Hey, let’s get those poor fucking Africans some laptops! What, you want some water or food or other basic services? Well, you can’t. But I can invite you to Google Wavves.”

In my limited experience I would say: you’d be surprised.

There’s a signature experience, I think, for Westerners first visiting less-developed nations. You expect, maybe, to see children who lack basics. Children begging. You expect, maybe, to see children entranced by things like your sturdy Western shoes. Material things you have and they don’t. But for a lot of people, what’s less expected — and way more striking — is the way they will meet a whole lot of relatively healthy, curious young children who will ask them for pens. For spare pencils. For some notebook paper. Sometimes you can hand a child a 99-cent breast-pocket notebook and the child may react like an American kid getting an Xbox. Some places you can hand a child a map or a picture or a book and the child may pore over it like a Dead Sea scroll. Feel free to purchase pens and notebooks and plane tickets and confirm this. Money? Pshaw. Can I have your pen.

Why? Because for every child who grows up without access to basics (food, shelter, potable water) there are a few more who get enough of the basics to grow up, but are starved for information and education, and will grow up without having been exposed to much of the world beyond the basics of how to get the food, where to draw the water, etc. The reason Westerners are struck by the experience of being asked for things like pens and paper is that we tend to think of poverty in terms of material comforts. And suddenly, perhaps, they’re staring at a child with just as much intelligence, curiosity, and potential as they ever had as children, and the difference between them isn’t strictly about “material” comforts — it’s about this child lacking intellectual tools we take for granted. Tools that allow us to take our intelligence and curiosity and learn so, so much about the world. And the Westerner will probably be sharp enough to realize that the window is small — that once the 8-year-old pen-begger in front of them becomes 10 or 12 or 14, the opportunity will have shrunk. That child will be working.

As was said above, there are huge cultural barriers to introducing things like these computers into developing areas — both in making them do things that are relevant to the people there, and in acclimating children there to their use. But part of the thinking behind them, obviously, is that expanding the worlds of those children who do have the luxury of being educated — who have food and water and time yet — is a good long-term investment in improving the lives even of those who don’t have the basics. This is, after all, the thing we’re constantly marveling about with computers: that a single one of them can carry incredible amounts of information, all the images and texts and maps and video some kids have no access to, plus the ability to sit and manipulate information, to write, to record, to deal with signs.

And even if you go hungry now and then, that doesn’t mean you’re beneath the potential to feed your head, you know?

sweethomestyle:

amscar:

This is exactly how we use our HDTV, too.

Twittergraphy

List of phrases from the third edition of “The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code,” published in 1891, as posted by Ben Schott in a NYTimes Op-Ed.