Next time you’re on the beach and your phone is dying…

Solar Engineer Challenge: Turn your Altoids Tin into an Iphone Charger

Solar Powered Chargers are a fun way to charge your devices, especially when you’re miles away from a power outlet. Take your old Altoids Tin and turn it into a solar powered iPhone charger! All you need is a cheap solar cell, a basic circuit, and the Sun. On a bright day you can be charged up in just a few hours. Tutorial here.

via: diy

(via futuretechreport)

"We need to think beyond the screen and find ways to present information and ideas in a way that people can interact with in a more exciting way."

MIT Media Lab’s Hiroshi Ishii 

"Developers are like the honey badger. They don’t care. They go where the money is, and to create revenue-generating experiences they created apps. Millions of apps to encapsulate experiences in bite-sized, constantly updated little nuggets. We need the same kinds of building blocks for the IoE. Durable and useful building blocks that allow an ecosystem to bloom because developers and manufacturers can create experiences knowing that these building blocks are available for their use. And consumers must feel confident that their investments represent sustained value. So any such building blocks need to be openly available and interoperate on many dimensions: across OSes, across fields of use (car/home/office/mobile), across languages—and across all vendors. It can’t be the experience that each smart TV will require another app on every brand of smartphone in order to work. That won’t create an ecosystem. It can’t be that a washing machine can only interact with same-brand devices. That won’t create an ecosystem."

There May Be An App For That, But It’s A Broken Model

"Interfaces that can tap into emotion effectively not only create a broad fan base, they build an army of evangelists."

— Designing for Emotion

Mailbox is no Google Wave. It’s a simplistically brilliant reinvention of the inbox experience, optimizing touch on mobile to create a “why didn’t I think of that” level of intuitive interaction. I find myself “trying” to move stationary things on my mobile touchscreen that feel like they should be dynamic, and am frustrated with unresponsive navigation. Mailbox gets it. 

(Source: parislemon)

Interactive real-time projection uses face-detection software to generate live comic line drawings of people to incorporate directly into the comic strip - brilliance! New York-based artist Nova Jiang collaborated with Jake Jefferies on this interactive digital installation titled ‘Ideogenetic Machine’ which uses a camera to capture participants in real-time. The face-detection software is used to insert blank speech bubbles into the narrative.

Other hand-drawn comics are also added in between to fill the comic and generate unique comics. The content depicts a hypothetical story based on current news and events. The installation will be displayed at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art in Taichung, Taiwan from 12 October through to 23 December, 2012.

"We are there. We’re not seeing those platforms sell to us in a way that’s meaningful."

- L’Oreal’s Rachel Weiss on Pinterest, Facebook, Tumblr, and Foursquare

Platforms HAVE to strengthen advertiser tools. 

"In a world where people’s movements and transactions can be tracked—where individuals trigger non-deliberate events just by being in a certain place, physical or virtual, at a certain time—the notion of interaction itself is being fundamentally altered."

— Reflecting Human Values in the Digital Age - Sellen, Rogers, Harper, Rodden 

Human values in a #digital age. #nerd  (Taken with Instagram at UCSD Computer Science & Engineering building)

Human values in a #digital age. #nerd (Taken with Instagram at UCSD Computer Science & Engineering building)

Tags: nerd digital