Institute for Social Banking
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Toaster made with iron ore gathered by hand
Beautiful project about the difference between mass production (and consumption) and handmade. I hope I am right in feeling people are getting tired of 20th century consumerism and re-appreciating handicraft.
This toaster was built from scratch by Thomas Thwaites, a design student at the Royal College of Art, London, as a project in extreme self-sufficiency and to highlight the effects of mass production we take for granted.
Using a £5 ($8) toaster as a model he spent a 9-month period, gathering the raw material by hand from mines across the UK and processing them himself. He smelted the iron ore in an old microwave.
The final product cost close to £1200 ($2000), more than 200 times the cost of his shop-bought model. The toaster will be on display at the RCA Summer show in London this week, where Thwaites hopes to “toast [visitors] something”.
New Scientist: Picture of the Day
via technoccult.net
Frietrevolutie, donderdag 17 februari
Where is my Android 2.2 update?
My Motorola Milestone is still stuck with Android 2.1, even though the US version, the Droid got the 2.2 update months ago and that update was promised for Milestone in Europe an equally long time ago.
The main improvements in 2.2 are installing apps to SD in stead of internal memory, something I desperately need, since I am getting the “Low on space” warning and there aren’t any apps I can or want to remove.
The feature that lets you use your Android as a wifi hotspot, sharing the mobile data, would be handy too. Now I can use a USB cable and tethering, but that just isn’t as handy.
So hopefully the Froyo update reaches my phone soon.
The Majority of Android Phones, Right Now, Are Running Android 2.2, “Froyo”
A bit over half of all Android devices are running Android 2.2, also known as “Froyo.” That’s based on Google’s reporting, itself based on devices that have accessed the Market (even if only for app update checks in the background) within the last two weeks. The second largest share is Android 2.1, “Eclair,” with just over 30 percent. Android 2.1 is technically an update to Android 2.0, which also falls under the “Eclair” name, but that’s a separate bit of confusion that’s in the past now.
via lifehacker.com
Twitter Is Having A Bad Day: Bizarre “Blank Page” Is The New “Fail Whale”
In a previous post I was complaining that Tumblr was down a lot and didn’t even provide a Fail Whale. Well at least it provided some message explaining that the site was down. Now Twitter seems to have gone down so terribly that they didn’t even manage to show their all too famous Fail Whale. Good thing I’m not unseeing it any more, no thank you: Identi.ca for me! 😉
Notice that everything’s seemed kind of unusually quiet in the blogosphere all day ? From lagging tweets to the emergence of the new “@anywhere boosh” blank screen (“Fail Whale without the Whale”) error, it seems to me at least like the sundry unspecified Twitter issues on the loose this morning and afternoon are actually CAUSING a slow news day. While the delay on the tweets was thankfully resolved a short while ago, users are still reporting the blank page error.
The problems are affecting both the website and clients. Some 3rd party client users are also noticing interesting tweet crawling errors and the clients crashing altogether, like this random cluster of tweets at the bottom of a Tweetdeck search for tweets from “Mediagazer” performed by Atul Arora. It’s unclear if all the problems are related.
While Twitter says it’s working on fixing the issues and that the blank screen has only appeared for a small number of users but wouldn’t comment on any specific cause. It seems like, at least from the timing of complaints, that the situation is ongoing. I’m seeing reports coming from outlets as diverse and mainstream as The Washington Post and The Village Voice that something’s rotten in the state of Twitter. In fact I just got the screen image above while searching for tweets to include in this post. It’s not just you.
@davewiner
Dave WinerWhat is @anywhere boosh and why am I getting redirected there?about 16 hours ago via webRetweetReply
@danstar88
Danielleokkk when i just pressed ‘home’ on my twitter page it took me 2 a blank page called @anywhereboosh…about 1 hour ago via webRetweetReply
Sorry for the errant tweets, folks. The Twitter API and some filtering went awry. We’re working on it but the flood should be over.
via techcrunch.com
“Social Unrest” OECD paper
How does a governement react to social unrest, like what we have just seen in Egypt and Tunesia? Although said governements might not have had a plan of action, don’t think other governements haven’t thought of this jet. Here is a draft version of a paper written for OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on the topic of “Social Unrest” as part of the OECD/IFP Project on “Future Global Shocks”: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/57/62/46890018.pdf
It must be clear that this paper wasn’t written as a response to the unrest in North Africa and Arab countries. One case study is that of the unrest in Greece from 2009 onwards. Other case studies are Pandemic flue N1H1, Hurricane Katrina and Cyber security. The question asked in this paper is not how to better handle a flue pandemic or a natural desaster, but how to asses the risk of social unrest as a result.
I think everyone who is interested or involved in direct action and social movemnts should read this paper very carefully as it shows how governements are thinking about what we do and how they could respond. This kind of papers show a) that governements are really scared of their people and b) they plan on making sure they have their people under control in every situation.
More info on OECD can be found here: www.oecd.org Its official mission is “to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.” But it is off course clear that this institution exists to protect the intrests of governements of the West.
They didn’t see it comming
A very interesting image in hindsight, from The Economist, showing “States of combustibility” or the risk of social unrest in 2010. Notice that Tunesia and Egypt are marked as Medium risk, not higher than for example the United Kingdom or France.
Derrick Jensen: Endgame
Having long laid waste our own sanity, and having long forgotten what it feels like to be free, most of us too have no idea what it’s like to live in the real world. Seeing four salmon spawn causes me to burst into tears. I have never seen a river full of fish. I have never seen a sky darkened for days by a single flock of birds. (I have, however, seen skies perpetually darkened by smog.) As with freedom, so too the extraordinary beauty and fecundity of the world itself:
It’s hard to love something you’ve never known. It’s hard to convince yourself to fight for something you may not believe has ever existed.
Post a Copyrighted Picture, Face a $150,000 Lawsuit – Technology Review
An example of an image Righthaven will not be suing over. (cc) Horia Varlan
We’ve all heard about the RIAA’s mass lawsuits against people who share music online, the MPAA’s crusade against movie-sharers, and the way “patent trolls” sue other companies for infringement of patents in their portfolios.
Now the newspaper industry appears to have found its own champion: Righthaven. The Las Vegas-based law firm just filed yet another lawsuit on behalf of its newspaper clients, this time against bloggers who re-posted a picture from a Denver Post article of a TSA “enhanced pat down.”
Copyright infringement on the Web is nothing new, but what’s different about Righthaven’s suits is that it’s testing an area of the law in which the rights of website owners have long been sacrosanct: material posted by users of message boards and other public forums.
Not only is Righthaven suing the owners of those sites — it’s also, in some cases, suing commenters themselves.
What’s especially intriguing about Righthaven’s new model is that it is uniquely Google-enabled. The company basically waits for a piece of content to go viral, then buys the rights to that content from the original owner and, equipped with nothing more than a Google search, identifies and then sues whoever copied a given image or piece of content.
Advocacy website Righthaven Lawsuits estimates that so far the company has netted $308,000 in its nearly year-long campaign to badger website owners into settling out of court. When Righthaven sues a site, it demands not only the full $150,000 per infringement allowed by the Copyright Act, but also the domain of the offending site — even when it’s a site like The Drudge Report.
How ridiculous can copyright get? Quite ridiculous it seems!
View on the Douro river from the hotel room.
Taken with picplz at Hotel Porto Antigo in Cinfães, Portugal.