Vinay Gupta has dreamed up and constructed the Hexayurt. It is a shelter designed for refugees and other people with a small housing budget. A Hexayurt only costs a few hundred dollars in materials, and can be built in just a few hours.
Adding to the excitement, the Hexayurt is entirely free. Open source housing. All the information you need to build one is at The Hexayurt wiki.
Start by watching a video about the Hexayurt. Then read up on the project at appropedia.org.
Found via treehugger.com (where Hexayurt won the Participate! competition)
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Published by Pär, August 16th, 2007
Filed under Soapbox
A highly relevant and just a tad distressing photo gallery from the BBC website shows how the world is changing, thanks to rapid global warming.
It makes you wonder about the human mind, and human behaviour.
People won’t take global warming seriously until they’ve experienced the effects personally. Until their house has been buried in a mudslip caused by excessive flooding, until the summer becomes so hot that it’s almost impossible to breathe, until raised sea levels cause entire cities to be wiped out.
I guess it’s embedded in human nature. We don’t fix things until they’re broken.
From the gallery:
More pests
Tree-eating wood beetles are likely to benefit from a warmer climate and reproduce in ever-increasing numbers.
These images show damage to White Spruce trees in Alaska caused by the pests.
Image: Gary Braasch ©
Related: Gary Braasch’s photos of global warming effects →
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Published by Pär, July 22nd, 2007
Filed under Soapbox
Best news of all week! Moller International are working on a skycar that holds big promise for the future of flying cars.
Quoted from the site:
The M200X volantor has completed over two hundred successful test flights. It has been extensively hard-tooled so that derivatives not requiring FAA certification are now available.
Recreational and utilitarian models include:
- Demonstrators for use over one’s own property (M200D)
- Versions that operate within ground effect–approximately 10 feet AGL (M200G)
- Experimental or homebuilt variants (M200E)
- Rescue configuration capable of docking with skyscrapers (Firefly 3)
Depending on the number of orders received the prices could vary between $125,000 for the M200G to $450,000 for the Firefly 3.
It looks like a jacuzzi made sweet, sweet love with a saucer and a vacuum cleaner. But damn, the thing can fly!
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Published by Pär, July 20th, 2007
Filed under Future, Soapbox
Stumbled upon Pacemaker - “The pocket size DJ system” - a while back. It’s an amazing portable audio player with DJ mixing and audio effects. Essentially all you need to cook up a mix on the fly.
It sports a 120GB hard drive, USB 2.0 support, a touchpad, and useful audio editing functionality like loop-in, loop-out, re-loop, cue point search.
Seems like the perfect tool for the DJ on the move. Or even a replacement for your iPod - the Pacemaker can play for up to 18 hours. And having the ability to connect to any stereo system for a spontaneous live mix is quite tempting!
Redgreenblue, pink
It’s a gorgeous site as well. And, funnily enough, the color scheme is strikingly similar to flowerofcables.com. I can assure you that it’s purely coincidental. I finished the new design for flowerofcables.com way before hearing about the Pacemaker, and apparently Pacemaker was launched before the new design saw the light here on flowerofcables.com. Still, fascinating that we’ve chosen a similar approach towards the colors.
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Published by Pär, July 19th, 2007
Filed under Soapbox
“I am standing waist-deep in the Pacific Ocean, both chilling and burning, indulging in the polite chit-chat beloved by vacationing Americans. A sweet elderly lady from Los Angeles is sitting on the rocks nearby, telling me dreamily about her son. ‘Is he your only child?’ I ask. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Do you have a child back in England?’ she asks. No, I say. Her face darkens. ‘You’d better start,’ she says. ‘The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they’ll have the whole of Europe’.”
This excellent article lets us in on some of the thoughts and motivations of a group of people that, sadly, have disproportionately large influence over world events.
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Published by Pär, July 18th, 2007
Filed under Soapbox