Yummy Wakame

… whether you’re out celebrating tonight or staying in snug, have a great one! Next year promises to be exciting so hold on tight.

I can’t believe it snuck up on us already.

Some passionate entrepreneurs share stories, adventures and lessons in their quest to do great business on the Dark Continent. A truly inspiring blog.

Watch it on YouTube

Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space.

By Johnny Chung Lee, Carnegie Mellon University. For more info and the software visit johnnylee.net

Via Chad through Nathan.

What an unusual family, a feat of unbelievable organisation…

So this may be ancient news, but I just found out about it today. If you’re a fan of iGoogle, the personalized homepage by the makers of the Internet, then you’ll undoubtedly know a little bit about the whole themes aspect of that page.

Apparently, if you check out your iGoogle page at 3:14am (Pi) you can see some nifty secret stuffs.

I have been hoping for awhile that Google would allow designers and developers to create some of their own themes.

I’m pretty excited about this pen, still under development… or at least it was one of 32 design works displayed by the graduating students of the Product Design department of SADI. The QUAD Pen has an electronic sensor in its tip that records every movement into a tiny memory chip within the body. The best part is you can write on virtually ANY surface, even the air, unlike the FLY Fusion Pentop Computer which requires special paper (the ad is a bit misleading about this).

Its important to note that these sorts of pens are unfortunately not tablets for wireless on-the-fly drawing like tablet pens. That would be truly great. The data thats stored in the chip is later transferred to your PC. It would be great if Samsung could make a pen that draws like a tablet and works on Macs too.

Swapagift
Buy, donate, sell, or swap gift cards.

Today’s tip suggested on Ideal Bite

Sustainable Harvest International – Replanting rainforests and supporting families with the tools and materials they need to improve their standard of living while protecting the environment.

The outstanding features that make SHI different to most charities is their commitment to environmental, economic and social sustainability. Every project that’s co-ordinated addresses all three, with a huge focus on implementing sustainable land-use practices that alleviate poverty while restoring ecological stability to areas of land that have been plundered or deforested.

SHI is one of the most efficiently run charities I’ve seen in a long time. A quick checkup on the Charity Navigator shows how the vast majority of donations is spent on the programs, and the founder earns one of the most moderate salaries I’ve seen in the charity sector. Its impressive to see how much they have achieved with a very modest yearly revenue.

Reforest Two Acres – $30
Provide families with the training and tools they need to reforest two acres of tropical forest in Central America.

Plant a Whole Acre of Chocolate – $40
Give a family seeds, nursery materials and training to plant an acre of organic multi-story cacao in their community. Cacao (what is used to make chocolate) is a valuable cash-crop that can be grown in plots that mimic the natural forest. These multi-story crops provide families with a diversity of produce, mitigate global warming and create wildlife habitat.

Plant Three Family Gardens – $45
Malnutrition is a very real threat for countless families living in Central America. This Gift of Hope provides three families with training and seeds to grow organic vegetable gardens that will give children nutritious food to eat and families can boost income by selling excess produce at the local market.

Donating is only one of the ways you can help. You can also volunteer in Central America with Sustainable Harvest International where you get to travel, experience different cultures and fight poverty and deforestation in Central America. Upcoming trips go to Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama!

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I just can’t get enough Man Stroke Woman. NSFW due to language.

Watch it on YouTube

I have a bit of an obsession with The Dead Man Street Orchestra – a close group of hobos / musical gypsy’s who catch rides on freight trains across the country and play their hearts out on the streets for fun. If you’re living in the warm South this winter you might be lucky enough to stumble on them.

I don’t think I could just go travelling with these guys for a few months and ever be the same again. The photos promise that.

This lifestyle is contagious – check out this amazing gallery I found of other kids travelling by train. When I first came across these pics I thought they were the Deadman Street Orchestra but an anonymous commenter helped me out.

Musical influences:
“Beans, Rum, home made instruments, trash percussion, gypsy fiddle, sing a longs, old folks, trampin folks, young folks, workin folks, bums who ride for free, free time, free music, free morning coffee, rollin cigerettes, tuning A quarter 1/2 step sharp, loveable black and red dogs, back porches, sushi, and beans, a cold beer in a hot boxcar, and a tune ya just wanta play all day…”

The entire Dead Man Street Orchestra album is available in mp3’s and won’t cost you a single bean of course! Recorded in the woods at Mutant Fest this year.

Brother can you

see also an older post about:
The Dead Man’s Street Orchestra
and another gallery post about them I cant find right now but plan to put here later. (Let me know if you know where it is!!)

The very latest from Fuji’s pocketsized Z series –
FUJI Finepix Z100FD in Brown

We’ve taken some incredible shots with Nathan’s Z2, including gorgeous night photography and reams of video footage, so I’m lusting over the potential of the Z100FD. Its so great to have a camera able to take photos without a flash in ultra low light, so small it can fit into your backpocket everywhere you venture.

• Fuji Z Series
• PDF Brochure with specs

Watch it on YouTube

Thanks Ken!

Thanks Pieter!

Earth Class Mail is a service that basically allows you to have your snail mail sent to them so that you can view it online instead of in your own mail box. They show you scanned copies of all of your mail, and then you can choose which bits you’ll read and what will get shredded.

From their website:

With an online PO Box you’ll manage your postal mail as easily as your email.

View scanned images of your sealed envelopes online, then choose to have your mail securely scanned into a PDF document, recycled, shredded or forwarded to you or someone else.

I like the recycling bit so much, we get pound after pound of SPAM in our mailbox, plus the price is right starting as low as $10/month. This service seems exceptionally cool save for the fact that it seems like it might take 1 – 2 extra days to receive mail (one for them to scan it, one for them to open it after you’ve said you want to read a particular piece of mail?) though I can’t be sure of that.

Rafael Morgan’s Once Was comb is a poignantly nifty little design intended to remind you that what you’re using now used to be something else. A helpful little way to remind us that everything has a history…

Branch boasts “Sustainable Design for Living” and offer everything from children’s backpacks to end tables to candles to cutlery, with a very IKEA-meets-1000 Villages feel. From their website:

As a social activity, shopping gets us out into the various neighborhoods in our city, allowing us to connect with other people along the way. As a cultural excursion, it gives us a chance to discover what’s new and interesting in the world. And, of course, we derive some joy from finding just the right gift for someone, or for ourselves.

At the same time, there’s an element to shopping that we find quite troubling. We buy things that appeal to us—we love a product’s styling, for example—though we may have little idea of where a product comes from. What materials went into its manufacture? Did the wood used to make that chair contribute to deforestation in Asia? Were toxic chemicals used to create the lustrous finish? The people who actually fabricated the product—were they paid a fair wage and provided a safe, comfortable environment in which to do so? How far did the product have to come in order to get to the store, and how much fuel was used in that process? And what of the lifespan of the products we buy? Eventually—sooner or later, but eventually—a product will outlive its useful life. What then? Does it get thrown away? Is it made such that it’ll sit in the landfill for hundreds (or even thousands) of years before it degrades? And in going through that process, will it release toxins into the environment?