UnorthodoxY Archive It's wasn't what you thought

I’m feeling vindicated today, one of the ideas I’ve had for a while is that there’s a market for making affordable housing out of old train carriages, airplanes fuselages, shipping containers etc. Useful for areas where the prices make it difficult to get started on the property ladder or just where there’s a demand for easy, cheap, small footprint housing. Mostly people have scoffed at this idea — I get that a lot — but it’s actually happening. Here’s a SFGate.com article about shipping containers and here’s a proposed design for a library using recycled airplanes. I can’t find anything about railway carriages but the same ideas could apply to them. A lot of these ideas might seem a bit strange, but I think that there’s a lot of potential in unorthodox housing ideas. I just need to come up with something that’s not already been done.

Of course, they’re not really recycling the containers or the airplanes, essentially they’re downcycling them. This stage is the end of the life cycle, we’re just postponed the eventual disposal, and it takes significant resources to adapt them to their new use. Imagine if, say, train carriages where designed for eventual easy conversion to housing, or some other purpose, once they’d served their time in their first use. Instead of designing things fit for one purpose, design things that have an entire life cycle built in. For more, or just to find out where I swiped the term downcycling from, read Cradle to Cradle.

That little bit inspired by a post on Treehugger. Also from there, and almost too late, I discovered that Green Design: Creativity with a Conscience is on at the National Museum of Scotland. It ends this Sunday, but I might still get a chance to go have a look.

Speaking of things that I’ll probably never get round to seeing, the Edinburgh Book Festival launched it’s 2006 listing today. If you’ve read my previous comments about listings sites you can guess what I think of that one so I’ll skip that part and just say I gave up looking for things. I’ll pick up a paper copy at some point.

Try as I might I can’t make that link into my final bit so just have a look at a Little Illusion that’s been doing the rounds on the web. It’s pretty cool and he’s got a nice tutorial showing how to create the effect from your own photos.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme is released today, tickets go on sale on Monday, and the edfringe.com website has been updated.

Once again I’m not blown away by the website experience and I’m going to go pick up a paper copy over the weekend. The quality control shines through when you click the banner link advertising the Sunday Times, which has a free programme this Sunday, and get taken to The Beaver County Times / Allegheny Times website.

Since I ranted about ticket and event sites, I think it’s only fair I should take the time to look over this one and see if it improves on last year. My comments are after the jump, I’ll save any thoughts about the shows themselves for a separate post once I’ve looked at the programme in detail.
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So, this dude has the idea that he’ll trade One Red Paperclip for various bigger and better things until he manages to swap up to a house. It’s the sort of mad idea that people have, only this dude builds a website, a cult internet following and ends up on TV in Japan and on stage with Alice Cooper. That’s all kinds of crazy right there, good for him.

Google continues to expanded it’s set online organisation tools with the addition of Google Notebook. This is something I’ve been looking for, currently I have a few never-sent e-mails in my GMail account that act as an online notebook/todo list. Sadly Google Notebook feels quick clunky at the moment, but it’s fairly new so I hope that improves. Now just integrate that, Calendar, and Bookmarks into GMail so I can switch between them without feeling like I’m switching to another app, and so I can search across all the information in one go. Google’ll even help if you want to create your own web apps with the release of Google Web Toolkit, I’ll hopefully have some time to look at it and see what it can do over the next few weeks.

Howstuffworks jumps on the Da Vinci Code bandwagon with a refreshing look at How The Da Vinci Code Doesn’t Work.(Via Needcoffee.com)

Finally, thanks to Defamer, I give you Ceiling Cat.

Did I not tell them to create the friendly fluffy robots? Not the malfunction and take over the world type? I did? So why are there now robot cockroaches?

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

If you’re going to automate your dorm room you just know you’re going to have a big red funk button. Even if you do call it a ‘Party Button’.

Hmmm, more filler needed, read about one mans quest to infest himself with hookworm to cure his asthma. Not enough ? How about how to make really strong Vodka Jelly shots (and set light to them).

Nod and a wink to Needcoffee.com for the non-worm related links.

Hmmm, no real substance over the weekend, more links then …

Last week I said:

Thinking about it it’d be nice if GMail allowed people to plug-in new sidebar content where the Chat / Labels / Invite boxes are … There’s probably a way to do it … using something like GreaseMonkey

Turns out there is, there’s a To Do list GreaseMonkey script for Google Calendar. It only stored the data locally at the moment, so it doesn’t work across computers, but it’s just a matter of finding somewhere sensible to store things. (more…)