Imagine a half dome, sitting a few feet above a campfire. The dome captures smoke, and combusts it with a fresh burst of oxygen, then radiates the heat to those nearby.
Campfires are already fairly efficient, but they still produce a large amount of smoke – wasted heat, unburnt fuel. Collecting it to a single point, heated by the fire below, and adding oxygen to complete the combustion seems like it could be a nice idea.
I’ve been thinking a bit ahead this morning, about what things may look like a year or two down the road. The Anne Marie will be outfitted with an incredible water filtration system, so that if need be I could fill up my tanks from a stagnant puddle and still have cleaner water than what comes out of a municipal tap. But I’d rather get cleaner water from the start, and I’ve been looking to rainwater collection.
Collecting runoff from the bus isn’t particularly easy, at least if I want to keep it mobile, so I’ve been considering other options. One method is a collapsible catchment system. It turns out that one inch of rainfall is about 0.6 gallons per square foot, which means a 10′ x 10′ structure is just about enough to fill a 55 gallon barrel with only an inch of precipitation. I’m sure a 10′ x 10′ canopy could be easily inverted to make this extremely simple to construct, and compact to store.
There was a very long discussion on a website I read about whether or not “Pay what you want” for music included “nothing.” It was an interesting back and forth, but there was this one little gem that popped out in the discussion.
God I hate modern consumers like you. “I’m going to take this apple, vendor. IF I like it, and I have some extra money, and I don’t have anything else I want to spend it on, and I’m feeling generous, I might pay you some amount that may or may not meet or exceed your asking price. But only if I feel like you’re making exactly what it cost to produce that apple, and not a cent more, because then you’re a greedy 1% asshole.”
It’s more like “You’re a convenient apple cart and I like you so I’ll buy an apple for $1 from you on the way to work even though apples are theoretically freely available from trees.”
The corollary being “And boy I’m glad you’re not a dick who goes around through the countryside chopping down and burning every wild apple tree you see to ‘protect your livelihood’ and ordering every kid you see picking free apples shot.”
Nishi and I took a nap this evening, sleeping right through dinner and messing up any possibility of going to bed early. We tried, valiantly, to fall asleep, but I had no chance. I lay awake thinking of things, and all the interesting ideas that I’ve had this summer that I’ve lost through my memory sieve. Determined not to lose this one, I hopped on my laptop, and here I am.
I was imagining an odd door chime, which rings each time a door is opened. It works by rolling a ball down a xylophone, which after a bit of googling I found has been done to great effect. The xylophone would be mounted to a slightly off center pivot point so it would favor one side over the other. As it pivots, the ball would roll down, guided by rods on either side of it. Opening the door would advance a cylindrical alternating inclined plane (think the mechanism in a clicking pen), which would pivot the xylophone back and forth. Opening the door would play a tune, and then opening it again would play the same tune backwards. I find this especially amusing, since a different tune would play for arrivals and departures. Now, all I need is a door. And some sleep.
In which I redefine a word that has a universally accepted definition to create a unified subculture of people who previously lacked a label in order to make future profits by marketing to an invented demographic. Ready? GO!
Freethinker
1. A person who spends their free time thinking. A person who thinks for leisure.
2. A person who does not require compensation for their thought.
3. Unemployed.
And probably, my new computer. The Motorola Atrix, announced at CES the other day, is the phone I’ve been waiting for. While it isn’t exactly as I hoped it would be, and their laptop accessory is horribly executed, the “webtop” dock they have is pretty damn near what I wanted. I’m really hoping AT&T doesn’t mess up the operating system too much, because the potential of this hardware with untainted Android installed is incredible.
If they were to rework the laptop version to be a bit thicker with more battery life, and move the phone to serve as the trackpad, it could be usable. Or just make the keyboard all-in-one I envisioned.
Inspired by a recent xkcd, I figured I’d post some ideas I’ve had that have come to life (though not by my hands).
My decentralized web idea is beginning to take shape in a big way – decentralized DNS. Though under this method, content would still be centralized, it’s only a small step from one to the other, and arguably DNS is the only part of the idea not yet implemented in one way or another.
Between the Bars is a website that has successfully executed my Prison Blog idea, and I’m so incredibly glad. This was a project I kept wanting to get around to, but haven’t had a stable enough address to do so. Suffice to say, I’m helping out as much as I can.
Oh, and then there’s the oh-so-close-but-not-quite Eee Keyboard which I wanted to see as a smartphone dock instead of the underpowered overpriced mistake in stores today.
I’ve been carrying quite the arsenal around with me this summer, and it’s proved so helpful I don’t think I’ll stop. I suppose it’s a bit of a carryover from last summer’s trip. In my shorts, I currently have a flashlight, lighter, pocket knife, notepad and pencil, and my cell phone. I could go on and on about the knife, since it has been solely responsible for fixing the bus the last few times it has broken down, but this post is about the flashlight.
It’s kind of an odd tool, and I didn’t realize how often I would use it until I started carrying one around with me. I started keeping one in my pocket last summer to check the flow of the oil as we filtered, and found other uses for it since it was on hand. I bought a better light, and kept it with me this summer. Since it’s a little expensive, I’ve looped the lanyard around my belt loop to keep from losing it if it falls out of my pocket. It’s nice to have it that handy and secure, but a pain to get off the belt loop, and as a result I’ve been doing a lot of illuminating from hip level.
At the craft store the other day, I picked up some snaps. I put the male end on my belt loop, and the female end on the end of the lanyard (it turns out all you need to attach snaps is a hammer). And now my light is quickly connected or disconnected from my hip. My attire is slowly becoming perfectly utilitarian, and I’m pleased.
Been dreaming a lot recently, being unemployed and all. The dreams all tend to drift towards the same future, which I’m going to work like hell towards. Living off the grid, supporting myself with homegrown food and power. However, an important part of this dream is that I need other people there. I imagine a decent sized group of people (a dozen or so) working together on interesting and idealistic projects. I know the people who I would want to join me, but I don’t know if they would. I’m saving up money for this now, but I know very few people who are doing anything similar. I wish I knew a way to convince people to join me so I wouldn’t be alone in this.
Until then, I’ll keep dreaming.
I was watching TV the other day, and I saw a commercial for the Sleep Number bed. It’s a commercial I’ve seen hundreds of times, but something struck me about the product that hadn’t struck me before. It is an incredibly odd way of going about making a personalized bed. The entire selling point of a sleep number bed is that you can customize it to your liking, so it won’t be either too firm or too soft. To do this, you press a little button which either inflates or deflates your mattress. All of this technology is built into the bed you buy.
I wonder how often people change their settings. I can’t imagine just picking a random number each night, just to spice things up. I imagine most people find something that’s comfortable for them, and stick with it – identifying with their ‘sleep number’ as they do in the commercials. So that means the technology required to get the bed to the appropriate setting is used exactly once. That first day (or two) a person is getting used to the bed, inflating and deflating, trying to get it just right, and then never touching it again.
It seems to me that someone could make a killing by undercutting the price of the Sleep Number bed and centralizing all of that technology. Or maybe it’s just cheap enough that it doesn’t even matter. But it struck me as an odd way of selling something. Sort of like buying the largest belt available because you know it will be able to fit just right, even if there is a lot of excess hanging off.