We did this once with a laptop battery. They are built in the same principle – smaller common rechargeable batteries.
Build Your Own Video Community With Lighttpd And FlowPlayer
August 20, 2007 – 9:30 am
I love articles like this.
“This article shows how you can build your own video community using lighttpd with its mod_flv_streaming module (for streaming .flv videos, the format used by most major video communities such as YouTube) and its mod_secdownload module (for preventing hotlinking of the videos). I will use FlowPlayer as the video player, a free Flash video player with support for lighttpd’s mod_flv_streaming module. I will also show how you can encode videos (.mp4 .mov .mpg .3gp .mpeg .wmv .avi) to the FLV format supported by Adobe Flash”
I think it brings out the greatness of open source. How with some architectural vision you can take several open source projects and build one big application. The economy aspect of it is amazing – why spend time on developing components when others already developed them? Why reinvent the wheel? use your time to build on these components and make bigger things faster. It evolution.
I admit that at first I didn’t understand why people would like to build things for free. Now I know its one of the strongest forces we have as community. People have more free time than in older days which allows to contribution / collaboration movements like open source to exist. They are not building things for free – its their hobby.
‘Crowd Farms’ could offer alternative energy
August 15, 2007 – 9:04 am
How many people does it take to launch the space shuttle? The answer is 84,162,203, all of them taking a single step in a Crowd Farming system developed by MIT students James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk. Together, they have proposed the creation of a people powered power plant (an idea similar to human-powered gyms, and sustainable dance clubs), in which people would be generating energy by simple act of walking and moving around.
more hereÂ
wikipedia edits from interesting organizations
August 14, 2007 – 4:37 pm
This is kind of cool. This site back traced IP’s of anonymous edits in wikipedia to IP blocks of big corporations. Interesting to see what employees/PR/Marketing people from these companies edited into wikipedia. Wikipedia is an open project and tools like this help with its transparency. I am all for privacy but if you want to manipulate content you need to know how to cover your tracks 
MySpace profit is $10 million on revenues of $550 million
August 14, 2007 – 1:12 pm
“News Corp. said its Fox Interactive unit, which largely consists of MySpace, turned a profit of $10 million on revenue of $550 million for the fiscal year ending June 30.”
wow
Both on the revenue and on the tiny margin they have. What do they spend all that $ on?
Twelve Tips for Growing Positive Communities Online
August 14, 2007 – 12:52 pm
The highlights:
- Are you right for this job?
- Publish conduct guidelines
- Set a good example
- Seeding: Invite and encourage civil people
- Prevent comment spam
- Work behind the scenes
- Highlight the best contributions
- Don’t allow anonymous comments
- Moderate comments and/or posts
- Require user registration
- Shut down destructive threads
- Keep your sense of humor
Puzzling Ancient Artifacts
August 12, 2007 – 7:37 am
I like history and archeology a lot. The stranger the better. When I was a kid I read Chariots of the Gods and other Erich von Daniken’s books many many times. As a kid you are less skeptical but those were different times. Today the Internet (that was not available to ordinary people those days) has so much content and there is no way to know what information is true/real and what is a hoax.
IÂ found this post on Puzzling Ancient Artifacts which was fun to read.
Wind-up MP3/video player
August 10, 2007 – 5:28 pm
saw this at boingboing
One minute of winding gives you 40 minutes of playback, and the device can also charge mobile phones and has a built-in flashlight. It plays mp3, wma, asf, wav, mp4, and has an FM radio, an analog recorder, and a photo-viewer. You can wind it for 20 hours’ worth of playback.
cool
I like these wind-up application. Just like those $100 pc’s
75% of the people who download Firefox don’t become active users
August 10, 2007 – 4:04 pm
According to the Mozilla wiki: “In order for Firefox to reach our market share goals, we need to improve our ability to retain users. Currently, approximately 50% of the people who download Firefox actually try it and about 50% of those people continue to use it actively.”
Firefox’s claims to success have been supported by clocking up the number of downloads, encouraged by payments from Google, but it turns out that 75% of the people making those downloads don’t “continue to use it actively.”
Very interesting statistics. If that is the churn on a popular, hyped download what is going on with less known software applications?
Firefox Retention 12 point plan
1. Change Firefox icon label to closer resemble action of getting to web Slide examples
2. Force the Firefox icon to easier to find location Slide examples
3. Alter the default browser settings path for better user choice Current method slide Proposed method slide
4. Major outbound brand marketing program driving brand recognition and differentiation
5. Improve download page and first run pages Slide example 1 Slide example 2
6. Launch support.mozilla.com SUMO
7. Make common plug-ins work out of the box
8. Make add-ons and personas more accessible
9. Make the web feel more human Slide example
10. Improve messaging through communication channels
11. Stickier start page
12. Change Firefox icon image to closer resemble action of getting to web
more here http://wiki.mozilla.org/Retention
