Saw already twice (Joi’s and Matt Jones’s) this morning a link to Mission Bicycles, an interesting project just started where you can design your own bike, that starts as a “light steel frame fixed gear bike with high quality components, a custom paint job, no visible branding”.
That reminded me of Stefano and SlyWay, an Italian bike design studio I’ve been involved with in their early stages of, a few years ago. I went to check the website and I’m glad to see it now features several videos and models.
They still focus on the recumbent concept but apparently have several different “interpretations” of it. Quite cool!
I need to nag them though for the absence of microformats and whatsoever form of interaction on the website (well, there is a network, but pretty static). However on youtube you can find a few videos… enjoy! :)
Game Mod was a six hour long workshop with the objective of showing the participants that it is not required to understand code to experiment and play with it.
Although they had no experience in coding, the task of each participant was to make a mod (modified version) of a game built in Processing.
Just a link to this article by Emily in SmartMobs that reports a study about how broadband access could spare the planet 1 billion tons of greenhouse gases.
How would faster downloads and Web page loads curb the annual flow of globe-warming gases, and by how much? According to the report:
– Telecommuting, a “zero emission” practice, eliminates office space and car commutes: 588 million tons.
– E-commerce cuts the need for warehouses and long-distance shipping: 206 million tons.
– Widespread teleconferencing could bring one-tenth of all flights to a halt: 200 million tons.
– Downloading music, movies, newspapers, and books saves packaging, paper, and shipping: 67 million tons.
well, actually “just” 56. 56 archetypical geeks that Scott Johnson illustrated and aggregated in this poster as well as making them available as individual portraits (prints also available here).
Seeing this poster made me remember a conversation had a long time ago with Lilia and Phil Wolff on the many natures (or many types) of geeks (yes since you can be an art geek, or social science geek, a mind geek and so on…).
So next sunday in Rome there’ll be the PiuBlogCamp that is supposed to be summa of the experience of Barcamps in Italy since the BzaarCamp of September 2007 to today.The idea is more than interesting. However, the wiki looks quite full of participants but quite poor in ideas and proposals for conversations. Also asking a little bit around to the people who’ll be there lead to many “hmmm not really sure what I’ll be speaking about” answers”.Is the BarCamp phenomena in Italy coming to a dead end? What can still be learned, what shuold be changed and what needs to stay? I hope the people in Rome will discuss these topics too.As for myself, I think the things we never experimented in Italy and would definitely make a difference are:
opening up to international audience (i.e. supporting english speaking participants )
experiment with a full two-day (and night in between) event.
I may not be able to attend, but in case, one potential presentation, badly needed in my opinion, would be on free hugs:
Some text will go here explaining who am I and so on.
For the time being, just Google me.
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