Solar Flare

Some great reflections on future trends from the Economist. I’m particularly enthralled with the third: public participation in development of cities and communities via mechanisms such as crowdfunding. Imagine: green spaces developed not by government committee and taxpayer dollars, but by citizens with a vision.

Some effects of this trend: More public works being dreamed up by citizens and funded...

Huffington Post article: Poor Indoor Air Quality Linked To Workers’ Low Cognitive Function

“When lowered CO2 levels were coupled with lower pollutants in buildings, cognitive scores were a whopping 101 percent higher than in conventional buildings.”

This includes lowering indoor VOC pollutants from materials such as fire retardants, paints...

Medium post: How Society Will Be Transformed By CryptoEconomics

Noah Thorp paints a remarkably deep and thorough picture of the emerging technological landscape with regards to economics, corporations, and personal data. You’ve read the singularity sci-fi (Accelerando). Here are the nuts and bolts of how it will come to be. Great changes...

I’m pretty sure this is a huge and epic deal. Here we see the launch of Tesla as an energy company with solutions that have world-wide applicability. Far beyond just being a luxury and novelty car maker, they’re going to become one of the major forces of this century.

Huffington Post Live article: ‘Indie Web’ Group Wants To Take Back The Internet

Enlightentech crew talking to Huffington Post about data freedom, indieweb, etc. Awesome interview!

Wired Business article: Meet the Hackers Who Want to Jailbreak the Internet

My good friend and collaborator on Enlightened Structure projects, Harlan Wood, was featured in this article after our visit to Indie Web Camp in Portland this summer (and an honorable mention of yours truly). This year’s IWC...

Note: I’m using the Raspbian distro, but I imagine this would be very similar on other distros since there’s no package manager involved. I’m just using the latest binaries available from the node.js project.

The version of node.js in Raspbian apt is too old to run pump.io, so we’ll have to install the .tar.gz version that’s available on node’s site....

I recently decided it was complete bullshit that you can’t just plug in an external monitor and switch to it easily in Ubuntu. In OSX you’ve been able to do this for years. You just plug in your external monitor and it automatically switches to the last known good configuration for that monitor.

Anyway, with a little searching I discovered...

I’ve been working on creating a slick UI for WikiGini, a new genealogy project I’m building. As part of that I’m using the “Best In Place” jQuery plugin for in-place editing, and the corresponding gem for Rails 3. I’ve also been...

I’m working on a Chrome extension that will link phone numbers within pages so you can call them with Skype. It’s rough, but check it out if you’re interested:

• on GitHub at https://github.com/jacksenechal/Skype-for-Chrome

• or the extension on the Chrome web store

In particular, I haven’t figured out how to make the external...