design « The Wampus Cat

2009/10/26

A More Efficient Refrigerator

Filed under: design, environment — The Wampus Cat @ 17:58

Chest Refrigerator I have been between jobs for coming up on two months now and I have taken advantage of this free time and the beautiful Vermont autumn by walking around a lot. Hiking is a good way for me to come up with fifteen great ideas an hour, and I have been focusing lately on houses. I have always had an interest in architecture and I am looking forward to building my own remotely situated house somewhere in the next few years. My friend and former employer JS built himself a small cabin out in the woods in upstate New York that he lived in while building a house for his family, I take that as inspiration for this whole business.

The current plan is wide and ever changing, but the basic idea is to be really, really far away from other people, get a shipping container or two from the Port of Boston (word on the street is they’re going for about four grand plus transit costs), and set up shop in those while I build the dream house. The main conceit: seasonal walls. Indoor space becomes outdoor space in the summer time. The black fly aspect hasn’t been thought through yet.

I also get to think about all the times in my years of looking I’ve come across individuals and families inventing tremendous solutions for heating, cooling and powering their homes and businesses efficiently and off the grid. I am not sure how I came across this particular site, but Dr. Tom Chalko of Australia has come up with some very, very good ways to build a house off the grid at maximum efficiency for not very much money. One of these great ideas is the conversion of a chest freezer (as pictured above) into a refrigerator. It’s considerably more efficient than a stand-up refrigerator, which is good for people off the grid and people just looking to replace their aging, inefficient refrigerator. The energy savings are so remarkable it will pay for itself after a few years, if you still pay for electricity, that is.

Other great, inexpensive ideas Tom has implemented include straightforward reflective solar heating, insulating windows with bubble wrap (it’s really cheap, really efficient, and looks good), geodesic greenhouses that withstand substantial winds, a really cool heat pump/geothermal heating system, and a common sense way to improve the efficiency of your woodstove.

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“All the News We Hope to Print”

Filed under: academia, culture, environment, humor, politics, print — The Wampus Cat @ 15:16

IRAQ WAR ENDS

I just wrote that I get way too many things to believe from AG, but they’re usually in my email inbox. Today the post office box had yet another good thing from AG, a July 4th New York Times (“liberal” is an inapt adjective). AG met up with Yes Man Jacques Servin (nee Andy Bichlbaum, Ray Thomas, etc.) in Los Angeles for an event promoting the Yes Mens’ new movie The Yes Men Fix The World at the Hammer Museum. AG managed to pick up a couple NYTs and sent one on to me. The best thing that has come in the mail in quite a long time. Thanks bucky.

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2009/08/24

“Million Dollar Blocks”

Filed under: american, design, politics — The Wampus Cat @ 12:22

Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab brings us Million Dollar Blocks, a series of maps of American cities that show the cost of incarcerating residents of single city blocks. Shown above is Brooklyn, here’s New Orleans.

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“Making Policy Public”

Filed under: american, design, politics, print — The Wampus Cat @ 11:47

The Center for Urban Pedagogy brings us a series of posters that “use graphic design to explore and explain public policy” in their Making Policy Public project. Their issues so far include one on predatory equity, a guide to street vending in New York (as seen above), a guide to the port system in the United States that helps longshoremen organize, and a guide to social security. They are good looking, and the idea is excellent. I haven’t read the posters (you can’t see the text online), so I don’t know what their politics are, or how well their topics are researched, so keep that in mind.

In a similar vein, John Aloysius Cogan Jr., executive counsel for the Rhode Island Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner, wrote an Op-Ed in the Times on August 19th about making health insurance policies easier for people to understand.

[via Candy Chang]

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2009/08/08

The Lure of the Labyrinth

Filed under: academia, culture, design — The Wampus Cat @ 15:32

CJR and I have been playing a game that her dad worked on, Thinkport’s fantastic The Lure of the Labyrinth. I’d come across the game before and never got into it, but on the second go round, I can’t stop playing. It’s supposed to be for ~5th grade kids in math class, there’s a lot of pattern recognition and arithmetic. Games that are explicitly “educational” usually aren’t that interesting to kids, but remove that “educational” tag, and you’ve got kids at at least one Chicago Public Library absolutely loving Labyrinth (CJR, worried about the silly games that the kids in the branch she’s working at were playing on the library computers, introduced them to Labyrinth. It was, and still is, a hit). The game doesn’t need to be played in a classroom, you can just sign up with a Thinkport account and go. It’s also Flash, so no downloading files necessary (except for, ah, Flash). There are some tedious parts and I wish the user had keyboard control of the character, but these are small issues. I’d recommend checking it out yourself and telling the kids you know about it.

[Image is a screenshot from one of the first narrative sections of the game.]

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Glass Trackpads

Filed under: design, macosx, technology — The Wampus Cat @ 15:12

glasstrackpad

The glass trackpads on Macbook Pros make Photoshop and Illustrator almost unusable. Constant unintended rotation and zoom.

[Original image from Notebook Check]

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2009/07/13

Brent Humphreys and His “Project Le Tour”

Filed under: cycling, design — The Wampus Cat @ 16:58

Project Le Tour is a really awesome project by photographer Brent Humphreys. I’ve seen some of these images before but they’re even better the second time. And you can’t look at that site without reading this interview with Brent. If you’re in Austin, you can see these in person at Mellow Johnny’s until July 31st. [The photo is "Labrador with Hat", number 34 on the Project site. Picked this up on A Photo Editor on RB's Google Shared Items.]

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2009/07/10

Keep It Simple! (Coffee, that is)

Filed under: design, food-and-drink — The Wampus Cat @ 13:36

So. I usually brew coffee in a Chemex, of Pittsfield, MA, that I picked up right down the street here in Hyde Park at the Freehling Pot & Pan Company. I think they’re quite beautiful. JPDM’s dad brews coffee in one, has for years, and now so does CJR. (You can buy them here.)

I found this great filtercone coffee brewer on Sweet Maria’s this morning. I’ve been buying things from Sweet Maria’s of Emeryville, California for years now. When it comes to coffee, they really know their stuff. They have all kinds of information on roasting, brewing, and drinking coffee (I myself only have experience with the latter two). Their site is a real goldmine. I have a filtercone coffee brewer too, they’re cheap and simple, and don’t generate much waste if you use a reusable filter. (The benefit of the one pictured above over mine is that you can hold the hot water in the filter with the grounds for the recommended 3-4 minutes, rather than just pouring it through. Better coffee that way.)

I picked up my coffee grinder from Sweet Maria’s a few years ago, the Solis Maestro Plus burr grinder. Solis is now selling them as Baratza’s, but they look just about the same. This is a tremendous grinder, I’ve never had a problem with it: perfect grinds for drip and french press, and the grinder itself feels very well constructed. Sweet Maria’s has them. [Solis photo from UltimateCoffee.net]

If I was in the market for a new grinder though, there’s no doubt in my mind it would look a lot like this. It’s a Zassenhaus hand-cranked burr grinder. No electricity required. J’s got one like this one, it’s great. (Again! Sweet Maria’s sells ‘em.)

The world of making coffee is huge, even before you get to espresso and home-roasting and the rest of it. I like simple drip coffee, but there’s something to be said for electric drip coffee. The best coffee I’ve ever had was made in Clover vacuum machines, there’s one such machine at Z&H in Kenwood (just north of Hyde Park on 47th Street) and a bunch at Intelligentsia (which used to be a Chicago thing but I now here is the place to go in Los Angeles). There are some vacuum coffee makers for your house, I’ve never tried them but they look great. And then, the new darling of coffee devices, the Aeropress. I’ve never used one of these either, but they’re supposed to be the most anything can turn coffee making on it’s head for about $20. Good coffee makes you happy. It’s not expensive to make, and it’s fun. Go buy some coffee and get to it!

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On Backpacks

Filed under: design, hiking — The Wampus Cat @ 12:49

Just like my dad, I have a sturdy collection of outdoor gear. I have a few things left that I could pick up (like a SVEA stove and a way fancy 4-season tent, but probably more like a way regular 3.5-season tent), but really, I’ve got it all. There isn’t much point to go to the outfitter any more except to get rope or more little Nalgenes, or find a new place to walk around in the woods.

Some things I have a lot of, like backpacks. I spent my childhood using Dana Design packs. My dad swears by them and he has a small collection at home in Vermont now. I came of age in the lightweight / disposable gear era (where you buy new backpacks every few months because the old ones have separated into their constituent parts, not to point any fingers). I have gone through four backpacks that became either unrepairable or so complicated to repair that I just couldn’t figure it out. The first big pack that I myself owned was an Osprey, shortly after their manufacturing moved to (I believe) Vietnam. The internal frame on that broke after 4 months, I tried to fix it with duct tape but it’s a pernicious problem and that pack doesn’t get much use any more. The Osprey had a single point of failure, these packs seemed to be points of failure themselves. One thing that never ripped was the shoulder straps; everything else was fair game. This type of backpack is pretty cheap, and I guess many people regularly replace this style of pack. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, we’re supposed to be behaving ourselves so that everyone can enjoy the outdoors way into the future, not enjoying it now ourselves fast-and-light and generating a lot of waste throwing something out that is produced quite far away.

So, Dana Designs, pre-K2. Their Bomb Pack is really good looking, durable and heavy. The material holds together so even if you do rip it, someone as unskilled with thread and needle as I am can fix it pretty easily. Dana Designs, of course, is gone now, but Dana Gleason is still making packs under the Mystery Ranch marque, a lot of them made almost completely or completely in the United States, and all nice, like this one.

I opted for packs that remind me a lot of the old Bomb Packs. I wound up with two that will last me the rest of my life, made by hand for me by Randy Rackliff in Jackson, New Hampshire with the Cold Cold World label. We talked it over last summer for a while and I got a big box in the mail one day containing a Chernobyl and an Ozone. The Ozone is my every day pack, I load it up for work, take it to the Dunes, use it as a carry-on and as an overnight pack. It’s made of thick black Cordura, 1000D all around. The only things wrong with it are my fault for not specifying (the top needs to be removable). The Chernobyl is the only backpack I use for hiking any more. It’s amazing. It fits well, is very durable, and is blaze orange. The whole pack. I am never mistaken for a deer any more. For longer trips, it won’t be appropriate, it’s just not big enough, but for anything up to 4 nights, you couldn’t ask for anything more. Both packs are the exact opposite of disposable. I would highly recommend them (other people feel similarly about packs Randy has made them).

And as for the picture above, weird stuff pops up on eBay all the time. That picture is of one of the rarest backpacks I’ve ever seen up for sale, one of Warren Chouinard’s Basically Absurd Technologies rucksacks. Easily 35 years old and it looks to be in great condition. Naturally it’s got a Buy-It-Now price of $350, but for good reason. Someone out there will get a piece of history, the rest of us can just get a look. Be sure to check out the BAT single point hammock the seller has a photo of, as well. Amazing!

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2009/06/02

Tesla Model S

Filed under: design — The Wampus Cat @ 20:18

Tesla Model S

I just found Tesla’s collection of photos of their cars on Flickr. This is the Model S, their sedan. It looks a lot like the Quattroporte.

[Photo via Tesla Motors Image Library]

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