Would be a ton more useful with half a dozen USB connectors or some facility for moving power inside too, but even for one drive this is a very smart object indeed.

via Josef

Sterling has an excellent bit about “information munitions” – little cameras with cryptographic signatures and GPS to verify time and place an image was created at, and audit trails on image modification.

It’s interesting that, even without all that, a camera phone can still rock the world.

I left this comment on Worldchanging years ago, and I distinctly remember the concept, but I’m totally unable to find where The Chairman talked about it. There’s a Viridian Note which discusses the idea, but I could swear that there’s a Sterling rant where he discusses dropping thousands of cameras with forensic features into war zones as human rights monitoring tools. Cascio discussed an “earth witness” phone too at one point, but that wasn’t it.

Anybody with a mind like a steel trap or access to insane search skills able to find it? It might have been in a video or audio talk by Sterling which would explain why it isn’t indexed. Can We Find it?

In Audacity, invert either the front or the rear track.

What happens is that the ambient noise which hits all four mics about equally is significantly subtracted out, leaving the voices (which are significantly different between front and rear mics) synchronize out.

Works really well, I was amazed.

NGO-in-a-box offers a set of peer reviewed and selected Free and Open Source software (F/OSS), tailored to the needs of NGO’s. It provides them not only with software, but also with implementation scenarios and relevant materials to support this.

http://ngoinabox.org/

Just add water

via Cool Tools

http://toolmonger.com/2008/05/08/climb-chain-link-fences-the-easy-way/ – for climbing chain link fences

Take two disks of glass, one black, one clear. Let us say they are 4″ in diameter, of indeterminate thickness.

Now take a ring, say 1″ thick, 4″ in diameter, made from a strong insulator. Separate the two disks with this ring, enclosing some air.

Now evacuate the air, leaving a vacuum gap between the two glass disks, except at the edge of each disk, where the ring holds them apart.

Now place this ring into, say, the top of a highly insulated box. Let us say the black side of the “Solar Energy Diode” faces into the box.

Infrared energy will pass through the clear disk, hit the black disk, be converted into heat, and then trapped inside the box by the vacuum gap between the black and clear disk. In this way, incoming solar energy can be trapped inside of the box, with only a little energy escaping back through the black disk, vacuum, and clear disk into the surrounding area.

In the converse case, the Solar Energy Diode is turned around, black disk out, making heat flow more easily in the other direction. In this orientation, black body radiation from the items in the box flows through the clear disk, through the vacuum gap, and then strikes the black disk, being converted into heat.

An exercise for the interested reader: can a half-silvered mirror (a one-way mirror) be used to make this Solar Energy Diode more effective?

Couple with a solar funnel to create an effective solar oven, or with a solar funnel, pointed at the night sky, with the disk in the “black-side-out” condition, to create an effective solar refrigerator.

Who’s going to manufacture???

Pure, simple. Who’s got it?

http://www.rei.com/product/770230 – $115 == $40 a watt, that’s Not Right.

http://www.modernoutpost.com/gear/details/sf_solar_uno_slim.php – another candidate, fifty dollars, much closer… but still, $20 a watt… that’s Not Right either.

So, what we have here is ear plugs that have three soft rubber flanges and an engineered plastic stick. Somehow what this produces is a funny thing – ear plugs you can’t hear. Things are quieter, but sound just the same otherwise. Soon, you forget that they’re there.

Apart from the plastic stick coming out of your ear, that is.

I’m finding them a little uncomfortable but I have weird ears.

That additional flattening of the response curve really makes a big difference. So much of the experience of regular ear plugs is muffling, the sense of insulated, muffled private space. These don’t produce it. It’s just quieter. Very interesting from a psycho-accoustic point of view too.

Iceland may not be the ideal place to test these. Concert venues are loud to the point where a 29db foam plug is barely enough, so I’m expecting to take these as well as the others simply to handle places where 20db is insufficient.

For twelve bucks a pair, I think these are pretty much an essential buy.