Category: nifty

TAKING ON GLOBAL FOOD WASTE WITH A SIMPLE SHEET OF PAPER | INDEX: Design to Improve Life®

 

FreshPaper uses spices to combat food decay
FreshPaper uses spices to combat food decay

TAKING ON GLOBAL FOOD WASTE WITH A SIMPLE SHEET OF PAPER | INDEX: Design to Improve Life®.

While the world’s farmers harvest enough food to feed the planet, it is estimated that up to 50% of the global food supply is wasted. Fenugreen is taking on this enormous, yet often overlooked, global challenge with a simple design, FreshPaper. Low-cost, compostable and infused only with organic spices, FreshPaper keeps produce fresh for 2-4x longer, and holds the potential to change how the world keeps its food fresh.

Tutorials – Servers > Telnet as a Diagnostic Aid

I don’t know about you, but I can use a reefresher now and again for things like surfing with Telnet to determine if 301 re-directs work…

In a nutshell, you’ll want something like this:

telnet eastvalley.freedomblogging.com 80[cr]
Trying 69.25.233.100…
Connected to eastvalley.freedomblogging.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
HEAD / HTTP/1.1[cr]
Host: eastvalley.freedomblogging.com[cr]
[cr]

Note: italic items are sent by the server, whilst non-italic items are typed. Also NOTE the double carriage return ([cr]) at the end.

Tutorials – Servers > Telnet as a Diagnostic Aid

Chris Harrison – Pseudo-3D Video Conferencing with a Generic Webcam

Interesting mechanism for enabling 3D video conferencing:

When conversing with someone via video conference, you are provided with a virtual window into their space. However, this currently remains both flat and fixed, limiting its immersiveness. Previous research efforts have explored the use of 3D in telecommunication, and show that the additional realism can enrich the video conference experience. However, existing systems require complex sensor and cameras setups that make them infeasible for widespread adoption. We present a method for producing a pseudo-3D experience using only a single generic webcam at each end. This means nearly any computer currently able to video conference can use our technique, making it readily adoptable. Although using comparatively simple techniques, the 3D result is convincing.

Pseudo-3D

Chris Harrison – Pseudo-3D Video Conferencing with a Generic Webcam

Regular Expression Tools

  • RegExr is an excellent web-based utility that helps you construct a RegEx query by showing you results in real time. Hits are highlighted as you write your expression. 
  • Regular Expression Tutorial - This regular expression tutorial teaches you every aspect of regular expressions. Each topic assumes you have read and understood all previous topics. So if you are new to regular expressions, I recommend you read the topics in the order presented.
  • tuaw tip regular expressions for beginners

Farbtastic: jQuery color picker plug-in | Steven Wittens – Acko.net

Farbtastic Color Picker widgetFarbtastic is a jQuery plug-in that can add one or more color picker widgets into a page through JavaScript. Each widget is then linked to an existing element (e.g. a text field) and will update the element’s value when a color is selected.

Download Farbtastic 1.2 – 8 January 2007 (License: GPL).

Farbtastic: jQuery color picker plug-in | Steven Wittens – Acko.net

UMW Blogs support videos for WPMu 2.6

Jim Groom

Jim Groom, who administers the UMW group of WordPressMU blogs has placed a whole slew of videos online, which help users with WPMU, as well as migrate from WPMU-1.3.3 to WPMU-2.6.

Click on image to view site

The inimitable Andy Rush (a.k.a. EduRush) and I have been working diligently to create a whole slew of screencasts documenting the new interface for WPMu 2.6. We’ve finished a whole bunch of them over the last week or so and published them on the now official UMW Blogs Screencasts site, so below is a list of the screencasts we have created. All of the screencasts are Creative Commons and while they’re currently published as SWF files, we will be uploading them all to Blip shortly. Keep in mind that these screencasts are specific to the UMW Blogs installation, but they still may prove useful for anyone who wants to point people to a quick overview of the administrative backend, the changes between versions WPMu 1.3.3 and 2.6, and a very tab-specific discussion of the how to manage a WordPress blog.

Houston Community Newspapers Online – Green fuel, made at home

Green fule, made at home

From the article:

The “Rivera Method” takes such agricultural refuse as cracked soy beans, rice and cotton seed hulls, grain sorghum, milo and jatropha and turns them into bio-crude oil. This crude – or Vetroleum, as Rivera calls it – can then be further refined into everything from gasoline to jet fuel and just about every petrochemical in between.

With this process, just one bushel (60 pounds) of organic waste can yield about six gallons of bio-crude, Rivera said.

…

“Our biggest problem is that we are too good to be true,” Rivera said. “We can literally replace every gallon of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel in the United States using just 12 percent of the waste byproducts in the country.”

And if that wasn’t enough, the sole byproduct from the crude-making process is fertilizer: 737-grade, all organic fertilizer.

“The fertilizer is worth about 15 cents per pound, but the fuel byproduct is worth much more,” said General Manager Gerald Brent.

Sustainable Power currently houses five of these Vetroleum-producing reactors within its Baytown facility, the largest of which is capable of continuous output in just under nine minutes of operation. In addition to the central reactor, the company has also built four much smaller reactors that can be delivered to potential investors in order to both assuage doubts and test the viability of local farm wastes.

The eventual goal, Brent said, is the construction of 400 reactors at the Baytown facility – each capable of producing 6,000 gallons of bio-crude a day – and a (Vetroleum-powered) 500 megawatt energy plant capable of servicing 400,000 homes.

Brent expects the facility to be ready within the next 12 to 18 months. “We have to build this from the ground up. This is just our proof-of-concept,” he said.

Read more – Green fuel, made at home »

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . It’s the Platform, Stupid | PBS

Bob's Weekly Technification

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . It’s the Platform, Stupid | PBS

Robert X. Cringely Cars are the key to U.S. energy consumption. The dominant automotive platform here, whether you drive a truck, a car, or a motorcycle, relies on gasoline-fueled internal combustion engines. That’s the platform we are unlikely to change quickly. So how do we leave that platform intact and unchanged, ask nobody to significantly sacrifice, yet still achieve the noble (and Nobel) goals of lower fuel consumption, lower greenhouse gas emissions, lower pollution levels, dramatically lower oil consumption, lower cost, and lower geopolitical vulnerability for our country? There’s only one way I know to accomplish this: change the fuel.

This happened to a certain extent in Brazil during the ’70s and ’80s by embracing ethanol. But ethanol has less energy per gallon so fuel consumption goes up and mileage goes down. Ethanol can’t be shipped in pipelines also used for oil. Cars have to be modified to run on it and even then there are issues about internal corrosion. Ethanol is far from perfect. What’s needed is a replacement for gasoline that looks and feels and tastes just like gas to your car but isn’t made from oil. Then the platform could remain completely unchanged yet my 1966 Thunderbird (and the world) could benefit starting with the very next tankful.

There is such a fuel, developed by a husband and wife team of scientists working in Indiana in cooperation with Purdue University. This new fuel, called SwiftFuel, is right now intended for airplanes, not cars, but the lessons are the same.

ALA’s New Print Styles + hasLayout

Perplexing little CSS issue that’s dogged me for ages: Why does MSIE have weird positioning some times? It could be because of hasLayout, and all you need to do, is apply position:relative to the CSS declaration:

A List Apart: Articles: ALA’s New Print Styles

The only little oddity here is position: relative. I included that because IE/Win has a tendency to make elements disappear if you pull them upward like this. The cure is to position them, which I suspect triggers the hasLayout flag. I don’t pretend to understand all the nuances of hasLayout, but recent information from Microsoft and third-party sources has shed quite a bit of light on the subject–it would appear that many of the layout problems that bedevil us in IE/Win are the result of an element not having hasLayout.