Month: January 2009

Otalo – vacation rental search engine

On By Rick McIn travel1 Comment

A new service is getting good press.

Otalo is a vacation rental search engine. Save time and search all the vacation home rental sites at once (kind of like Google, but for vacation rentals).

Just enter what you need once, and let Otalo search all the different rental sites for you. It’s easy to use and you can specify everything you want in a vacation home rental. You can save your favorite rental homes from all the different sites in one central place and share your list with friends and folks with whom you’re planning your vacation. Even if you’re not actively planning a vacation, you can just browse the world, looking at all the cool homes in exciting places. …

About Otalo

I have a lot of friends looking for vacation rentals through one service or another. Otalo wants to list EVERYTHING available in one place.

life-changing invention – adaptive glasses

On By Rick McIn good news, health & fitnessLeave a comment

About half the people in the world need corrective lenses.

Yet when you travel in the developing world, very few people wear glasses or contact lenses. They can’t afford them.

Taxi drivers, bus drivers work “blind”. It’s terrifying!

Josh Silver, a retired physics professor at Oxford University, has developed what he calls “adaptive glasses”. His specs are made of “tough plastic with with silicone liquid in the lenses. When purchased, each lense will have a syringe attached to it, and the wearer will be able to adjust the amount of liquid in the lenses — which essentially changes the prescription — without the need for an optician.”

About 30,000 pairs of his glasses have been distributed in trials in Africa. They work.

Michael Lewis
Zulu man wearing adaptive glasses. Photograph: Michael Lewis

They plan to sell these at $1 each.

… Silver calls his flash of insight a “tremendous glimpse of the obvious” – namely that opticians weren’t necessary to provide glasses. This is a crucial factor in the developing world where trained specialists are desperately in demand: in Britain there is one optometrist for every 4,500 people, in sub-Saharan Africa the ratio is 1:1,000,000.

The implications of bringing glasses within the reach of poor communities are enormous, says the scientist. Literacy rates improve hugely, fishermen are able to mend their nets, women to weave clothing. During an early field trial, funded by the British government, in Ghana, Silver met a man called Henry Adjei-Mensah, whose sight had deteriorated with age, as all human sight does, and who had been forced to retire as a tailor because he could no longer see to thread the needle of his sewing machine. “So he retires. He was about 35. He could have worked for at least another 20 years. We put these specs on him, and he smiled, and threaded his needle, and sped up with this sewing machine. He can work now. He can see.” …

Guardian – Inventor’s 2020 vision: to help 1bn of the world’s poorest see better

official website – Adaptive Eyewear

(via Engadget)

construct an island out of plastic debris

On By Rick McIn good news2 Comments

TreeHugger readers will know of the Pacific Gyre, the “island of garbage twice the size of Texas” slowly spinning in the ocean. Like everything in life, it can be seen as a serious problem, or an opportunity. Michael Barton, in his graduating thesis at the University of British Columbia, proposes to gather it together for “the construction of a synthetic land commodity.” He won an award of Excellence from in the Annual Canadian Architect Awards for “The Enthalpy of Empty Space.” …

TreeHugger

barton-island

Good idea.

Twilight – vampire craze

On By Rick McIn books, movies, music, product endorsements2 Comments

Buffy might have been a fad. But the new TV series True Blood seems to be a hit. (I saw episode #1. It was OK.)

And the staggering success of the Twilight novel series by Stephenie Meyer makes me believe this is a real “craze”. There’s almost a blood lust for these books.

Twilight is a series of four vampire-based fantasy/romance novels by the American author Stephenie Meyer. It follows the adventures of Isabella “Bella” Swan, a teenager who moves to Forks, Washington, and finds her life turned upside-down when she falls in love with a vampire named Edward Cullen. …

The Twilight series is popular among young adults, having sold 20 million copies in the United States and over 5 million further copies worldwide.

Wikipedia

Disclosure. Even I’ve read book 1. And quite enjoyed it. (These are the first and last Romance novels of my life.)

Book 1
Book 1

Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1)

The author said she based book 1 Twilight on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. That’s a bit of stretch.

She posted a musical playlist to accompany book 1. Cool. It’s somewhat similar to the movie soundtrack which has already sold over a million copies.

Click PLAY or watch the Twilight Movie trailer on YouTube.

The film scores an overall approval rating of 50% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not good.

Actually, I thought it was quite good. Well cast. But some of the changes made to the book were unnecessary. Better would have been to stay more true to the details of the original.

I’m planning to read Book 2 in the series next. Leave a comment if you have an opinion on the vampire craze.

Canadian Banks solid?

On By Rick McIn economicsLeave a comment

I’ve complained much about Canadian banks in the past.

Perhaps too much

fact12_1big

LONDON (Reuters) – The global financial crisis could have been avoided if every country had had a banking system like Canada’s, the governor of the Bank of Canada said on Saturday.

Asked in a BBC interview if the world could have been spared the crisis if everyone had had a banking system “as sober and sensible” as Canada’s, Mark Carney said: “Yes, I think, is the short answer.”

“What we did was that we had an absolute restriction on how much leverage, how much borrowing our banks could do,” he said.

“They didn’t like that and they would come in and complain about it regularly because it was stopping them from doing some of the sexier things that their international competitors were doing. But it turns out some of the sexier things that they were doing were quite foolish,” he told the BBC World Service.

Canada has the soundest banking system in the world, according to the World Economic Forum.

Canada avoided banking pitfalls, central bank gov. says

Leave a comment if you disagree.

I love Wikipedia

On By Rick McIn economics, internet, product endorsementsLeave a comment

And it may just be the prototype of all big web destinations in the future.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the immensely popular Wikipedia online encyclopedia, just announced that it has reached its fundraising goal for 2008, which will allow the foundation to cover its operating expenses for the current fiscal year, ending June 30, 2009. Overall, a total of 125,000 donors gave over $6.2 million during 2008, …

According to Jimmy Wales, these donations will be used to pay for the day-to-day operations of the Wikimedia Foundation, including the costs of hosting and bandwidth, as well as the salary of its small staff of only 23 people. The Wikimedia foundation will also use these funds to support outreach events like the Wikipedia Academies and to help its volunteer community.

No Advertising

The Wikimedia Foundation has always declined to run advertising on its pages. Given that it is one of the most popular destinations on the Internet, it could surely make more than $6.2 million in revenue every year, but the organization, and Jimmy Wales in particular, have always vehemently rejected this idea in favor of direct donations from users.

$6.2 Million: Wikipedia Reaches Fundraising Goal for 2008

So, the 9th most visited site in the USA runs on open source software. It’s content is generated by the visitors. It’s FREE. And does not even need advertising support.

WOW.

How could any other online encyclopedia compete?

wikipedia1

WordPress.com (the site that runs this blog) is ranked #24.

It’s free. Open source. Has very, very little advertising. And has very few employees, just like Wikipedia.

Most of the code is written by volunteers. The content put up by bloggers, like me.

=== UPDATE === Rockin’ points to this post in response:

Just caught myself intrigued by an article about Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales possibly losing his board seat. It was on gawker.com and not very complimentary (understatement). Then these few sentences about Wikipedia and made me think it really ought to be called repupedia. “Incompetence and infighting are endemic to nonprofits, of course. But Wikipedia’s bureaucracy is distinctly, fearsomely awful. The site, which dictates the online reputation of countless living people and companies, itself operates by rules that are completely incomprehensible, determined by a self-appointed group of volunteer editors who can seldom stop arguing over obscurities to explain their ways to outsiders.” Food for thought about how Wikipedia catalogues all these institutions’ and individuals’ reputations online.

Repupedia

That’s from Valleywag / Gawker … not your most reliable source. Less reliable than Wikipedia, I’d say.

Stand By Me – Beautiful International Version

On By Rick McIn musicLeave a comment

Rockin’ sent us this video as a New Year’s gift.

Thanks buddy.

The song Stand By Me performed by many artists in different countries. From Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

the future at airports

On By Rick McIn travel1 Comment

Remember the movie Total Recall? Commuters were x-rayed to reveal concealed weapons.

tsascreeners

It’s coming to airports soon. But will look like this:

SEE THROUGH SECURITY
Spiegel

Sentinel non-invasive walk-through scanner
Sentinel non-invasive walk-through scanner

AirportTechnology

… you wake on time and make your way to the airport in your battery powered car. At the UnitedDeltaContinental airlines desk you wave your phone in front of the check-in kiosk and a green light indicates that you are cleared to proceed to the security checkpoint.

At the checkpoint, an agent waves his rfid reader tag in front of the wallet in your pocket, and you stick your hand in a biometric ID reader. The agent stares at a hidden display for a few seconds and allows you to walk through the full body scanner. As you pass through the device, you think back to the days when you had to place your bags on that stupid conveyor belt, and how it always delayed getting to the gate on time.

At the gate, you connect your iPhone 5G with the gate information system, and you instantly receive a message about your upgrade request, sadly you’ll be stuck in coach again for this flight.

Boarding is delayed 20 minutes, once it begins, your phone begins to vibrate that your boarding group is allowed to get on the plane. At the gate, you stare into the airline iris scanner, and the gate attendant allows you to board. …

Gadling – The future at the airport involves your phone, fingers and eyes