Kellbot has a few cool posts on building a digital knucklebuster to accept credit cards at craft shows and not pay ridiculously high fees for a simliar bank-provided wireless setup. Here’s the post on initial success in hacking the printer! Success! I’ve managed to print to the thermal printer by sending commands over my homemade connector cable in HyperTerminal. Read more at www.kellbot.com |
Personal Globalization: A friend of mine in Germany told me about this incredible slate of incentives the Chilean government is offering tech firms that want to relocate there.
The country that led the way in nationwide pension reform (for better or worse) is trying another experiment to lure tech-saavy folk down to one of the most beautiful countries on earth. They’re THROWING BIG MONEY at people who create tech jobs. What’s the catch? You gotta learn Spanish…and that’s about it. | Chile Wants Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses, Your Tech Entrepreneurs |
| Are you an immigrant who is fed up with waiting for years for a green card which you may never get? Or a tech entrepreneur looking to dramatically cut costs? I’ve got a suggestion for you. Move South. No, I don’t mean to Los Angeles or San Diego, I’m taking about way down South in Chile. They’ll welcome you with open arms and offer you incentives which will cut your burn rate more than half. And you’ll get to live in a land which makes even California look drab. |
| But first, you want to check out the country, right? The government will give you 60% of your due diligence costs, or up to $30,000, to visit and explore Chile. And they’ll grant you another $30,000 to launch your company in Chile. If you work from one of their tech centers, the government will pay for 5 years of rent (up to $1 million) or split the costs if you want to locate elsewhere in this gorgeous country.Read more at www.techcrunch.com |
Apparently, Wired agrees with point #29 from my SIGINT speech. The future will be more modular, and hackable. The BUG was the example I gave there and Wired cited it as well! Future of Open Source: Hack This Gadget |
Take Bug Labs. The New York-based company makes modular open source hardware components that can be snapped together and programmed to build custom devices with specialized functions. The central building block of the BUG hardware stack is the BUGbase, a $250 portable computing device with an ARM processor, memory, a rechargeable battery and various ports. Additional modules, which are sold separately and snap into the BUGbase, can be used to add speakers, GPS, camera, motion sensors and an LCD touch screen. They have also announced support for new modules that will add WiFi, 3-G and a tiny video projector.
Read more at www.wired.com |
Patently wrong…but conceptually right. | Prediction: @kiva and Grameen bank will take over the US banking system because they can measure risk cost effectivelyRead more at twitter.com |
Shocking, but mostly true |
Backlash: Women Bullying Women at Work
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It’s probably no surprise that most of these bullies are men, as a survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group, makes clear. But a good 40 percent of bullies are women. And at least the male bullies take an egalitarian approach, mowing down men and women pretty much in equal measure. The women appear to prefer their own kind, choosing other women as targets more than 70 percent of the time. |
Just the mention of women treating other women badly on the job seemingly shakes the women’s movement to its core. It is what Peggy Klaus, an executive coach in Berkeley, Calif., has called “the pink elephant” in the room. How can women break through the glass ceiling if they are ducking verbal blows from other women in cubicles, hallways and conference rooms? Read more at www.nytimes.com |
Neighbors lending to neighbors… In addition to getting your loan back with interest, community lenders get the employee discount of 30% off all purchases at Greenlight until the loan is paid in full. And they’ll get special “community lender privileges” like advance notice of author appearances, sales and other store functions throughout the life of the bookstore. |
After conferring with our lawyer and accountant, Rebecca and I have finalized the new terms of the loan and promissory note for community lenders. Basically, we’re giving lenders the option of choosing their own interest rate, between 2.5% (just above the minimum required by the IRS) and 4% (just above the prime rate). The loans of $1000 or more will be paid back by Greenlight Bookstore with quarterly payments over five years, beginning one year from the opening date of the bookstore (this gives us a grace period during the traditionally difficult first year of business). Interest begins to accrue on June 1, 2009, and will be compounded annually. Read more at abookstoreinbrooklyn.blogspot.com |
I don’t know whether to file this under creepy, or ridiculous, but being able to communicate directly through EEG read telepathy? Wow. Pentagon Preps Soldier Telepathy Push |
Forget the battlefield radios, the combat PDAs or even infantry hand signals. When the soldiers of the future want to communicate, they’ll read each other’s minds.
At least, that’s the hope of researchers at the Pentagon’s mad-science division Darpa. The agency’s budget for the next fiscal year includes $4 million to start up a program called Silent Talk. The goal is to “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.” That’s on top of the $4 million the Army handed out last year to the University of California to investigate the potential for computer-mediated telepathy. Read more at www.wired.com |
Put your feet on the desk and WORK! Here’s some truly rigeekulous fashion hacking from those geniuses over at NYC Resistor. I had a blast today at Diana’s fashion hacking event, and I made these nifty pants that sort-of function as a keyboard. I can play tetris at least! It was fun to make them, and if you’d like to make your own you can download the files from Thingiverse. It was nice to spend the day working on a goofy project with no real value with my friends. Oh, and now I have some super-sexy nerd magnet shorts. Awesome. Read more at www.nycresistor.com |
I love a good materials hacking article! Frustrated with the high cost of materials for their 3-D printers, UW mechanical engineering students developed a better solution using ceramics and food products. Check out the awesome results! 3-D Printing Hits Rock-bottom Prices With Homemade Ceramics Mix |
About five years ago, Mark Ganter, a UW mechanical engineering professor and longtime practitioner of 3-D printing, became frustrated with the high cost of commercial materials and began experimenting with his own formulas. He and his students gradually developed a home-brew approach, replacing a proprietary mix with artists’ ceramic powder blended with sugar and maltodextrin, a nutritional supplement. The results are printed in a recent issue of Ceramics Monthly. Co-authors are Duane Storti, UW associate professor of mechanical engineering, and Ben Utela, a former UW doctoral student. |
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