An example of a solarcooker from solarcooker.org

I just read about something called the “Kyoto Box” over at Steve Milloy’s blog.

What is it exactly?  According to an article on the BBC website:

It is made from two cardboard boxes, which use reflective foil and black paint to maximise absorption of solar energy.

Shockingly innovative!  Furthermore the BBC article claims:

The Kyoto Box is made from cardboard and can be used for sterilising water or boiling or baking food.

However:

Covering the cooking pot with a transparent cover retains heat and water, and temperatures inside the pot can reach at least 80C. (emphasis mine)

Now that’s interesting, because it seems to me that the inventor, Jon Bohmer, has done something even more radical than (re-)inventing a cheap oven, he has somehow managed to lower the boiling point of water to only 80C when it is normally 100C!  Put in that perspective, the $75,000 he received as prize money seems like a paltry sum.

Maybe we should put him to work on cold fusion.

But the most interesting thing, as Steve Milloy puts it in his blog post:

Isn’t it interesting how the purpose of the contest is to avert climate change rather than to help poor Africans lead a better life? if you’re a poor African, do you really care about atmospheric carbon dioxide and mean global temperatures 100 years from now?

Well said.

Well, I started this post several days ago, but never got to finish it because WordPress for iPhone crashed on me and when I restarted it wouldn’t let me access this blog. I was also busy doing other things this weekend and so I forgot about it.

The cool thing is that when I started WordPress up just now and went to this blog it informed that it had auto-recovered the post and I could pick up where I left off. Seems like although there are a few bugs, they’ve got a nice auto-recover built into it.

I’ve taken a few screenshots, but I really suggest you check out the video.

As he so eloquently puts it:

THE GOOD NEWS IS: The foreign tech support people are smart, educated and eager to help, and they speak English.

THE BAD NEWS IS: They speak it in such a way that you understand only about every fifth word.

I recently had some experience with this, and it was obvious they were using some sort of script, because they kept repeating the same things over and over again. The advantage was that I good clearly understand them, but every time I asked a question, the person answered the questions as if it was the first time we were speaking.

Me: I am calling to find out how to activate internet on my cell phone.

Tech Support: Yes sir, you are calling to find out how to activate internet on your cell phone?

Me: Yes, please.

Tech Support: Sir, you are calling to find out how to activate internet on your cell phone, so I am going to find the information on how to help you with that.

Me: Okay, thanks.

Tech Support: Okay sir, you are calling to find out how to activate internet on your cell phone, so I have found the information on how to help you with that. Please follow these instructions.

I remember back in the 90’s when call centers first started using computers to answer the phones.  People could often be heard lamenting: “Can I please just talk to a real person?”

In my recent conversation with outsourced tech support, I found myself thinking: “Can I please just talk to a computer?”

Apparently, this has been happening since 2005, according to the article:

This cooling is reflected in increasing amounts of winter ice since 2005.  Not surprisingly, as the temperature gets colder, the amount of ice increases.

Or perhaps Earth Hour is already having an effect, retroactively that is.  Oh wait a minute, was Earth Hour actually meant to help fight Global Warming, or Global Climate Change? Is there a difference or does it all just boil down to rhetoric and plausible deniability?

Hmmm, I’m still not sure whether to invest in a hundred acres in Kenya in preparation for the coming ice age, or beach-front property in northern Sweden in preparation for Global Warming.

I’ll let you know how it turns our, because either way, I’ll need some VC.  Got any you could spare?

Download RSS Thumbs Widget here.

I wrote this because I was originally trying to use the very nice KB Advanced RSS Widget, but apparently, the feed parser in WordPress doesn’t support enclosures.  I still use the KB widget for other feeds on my blog.

Since I’m using SimplePie, I also could have just included the necessary SimplePie code in my template, but I wanted to include it with the other widgets on my blog and be able to move it around from within the WP Admin.  Besides, what’s the fun in that?

Requirements:

• The RSS feed from which you are pulling must contain thumbnails.  I use the plugin MediaRSS on the WordPress blog(s) providing the feed, which works great.
• Requires that both SimplePie Core and SimplePie Plugin for WordPress plugins be installed.

Installation

You MUST be using a widgets-enabled theme. If you are using pre-2.2 WordPress, you’ll also need the sidebar widgets plugin.

1. WP 2.7+: Use the plugin installer (oops, not yet, I still have to submit it to WordPress). Upload the rss-thumbs-widget folder to either /wp-content/plugins/widgets/ or /wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate the widget through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
3. Add the new RSS Thumbs widget to your sidebar through the ‘Presentation => Sidebar Widgets’ menu in WordPress.

Features:

• Provides a control panel where you can specify name, two feeds (one feed is also okay), how many items to display from each feed, what html should come before and after the feed(s) and the individual posts (defaults are <ul></ul>, and <li></li> respectively).
• If there is more than one thumbnail associated with a post, it will pull only the first one.
• Degrades gracefully.  If there are no thumbnails for a particluar feed or post, only the post title is included with a link to the post.

The Options and what they do:

Title

Pretty obvious, I think.  If you put a title in here, then that shows up, otherwise it doesn’t.

Feed 1 & Feed 2

The urls, including http://, but not including feed:, of the feeds you want to use.  The plugin uses SimplePie, so if you don’t know the exact url, SimplePie might be able to locate it.

Both feeds will be merged together and appear in the same list.

Max number of posts per feed (Default: 2)

If you have two feeds, then each feed will only be allowed to show x number of posts.

Total number of posts

This is the total number of combined posts that will be shown.

Before Feed, After Feed

The HTML you would like to have appear before the list begins.  Defaults to <ul> and </ul> respectively.

Before Item, After Item

Same as above, except this appears before each post.  Defaults to <li> and </li> respectively.

Here’s some example code using the default before and after values:

<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://link-to-blog-one">Blog One Name:</a><br /><a href="http://permalink-to-post">Post Title<br />
<img src="http://link-to-thumb.jpg" /></a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://link-to-blog-two">Blog Two Name:</a><br /><a href="http://permalink-to-post">Post Title<br />
<img src="http://link-to-thumb.jpg" /></a>
</li>
...
</ul>

TO-DO List

• Add support for multiple instances of the widget
• Templating
• any suggestions?

If SimplePie ever comes out with a widget, then this plugin will (probably) become obsolete.

If you like this plugin please considering making a donation:

The occasion is the European Leadership Forum where regional, national and other leaders from all over Europe have gathered to discuss issues which the mission faces, as well as new things that God is doing in YWAM in Europe. One of the topics which Jeff Fountain, who is the current director, presented this morning is transition of leadership from himself to a new Europe Director. It’s fitting then, that we are positioned here at the old dividing line between East and West, where almost exactly 20 years ago, such amazing transition took place with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

We were also privileged to hear Camille Bishop speak on transition today, too. It was very good teaching to hear in general, but especially in light of the current transition within YWAM European leadership.

This evening, we’re on our own for dinner, so EuroCom will probably have a working dinner to discuss the session we will be leading tomorrow morning on communication.

I think I’m finally used to being on a boat, since yesterday afternoon and evening after we arrived, I kept feeling like I had the flu or something. I just had a strange feeling in my head, which I finally realized was due to the gentle, yet noticeable rocking of the boat.

You can even attach all kinds of files to your e-mail and they will go online, pictures will be displayed, multuple pictures will be displayed as a gallery, YouTube links as an embedded YouTube video, etc.  Check out all the cool things you can do with it in their FAQ.

Signing up for a Posterous account is dead simple.  Actually, you don’t even have to sign up at all, all you have to do is send an e-mail to post@posterous.com and within a few minutes you’ll get an e-mail back confirming your post and a link to that new post.  There’s also a link to edit or delete that post.

At this point, they only give you a temporary subdomain, but there’s also a link in the e-mail which will take you a page where you can give your account a password and choose your own subdomain (if it doesn’t already exist, of course).  I chose thedonkey.posterous.com.

The cool thing about it is that you can use posterous.com to post to your other sites via e-mail  as well.  One reason this is cool, is that I have been looking for a quick way to post to Twitter via e-mail, since twitter itself doesn’t allow this.  I’ve tried the Twitterrific (link opens in iTunes) app on the iPhone, as well as the online services hahlo.com and PocketTweets.com, but sometimes it’s just easiest to fire up an e-mail message and send it that way.  With Posterous it gives you individual addresses for each service, or one address to post to all services.  For instance, if I send an e-mail to twitter@posterous.com, it will post to only my twitter account.  Cool, huh?

Another cool thing I’m going to try and use it for is updating my Facebook status via e-mail.  Once I’ve set up Posterous to use my Facebook account, I just send an e-mail to facebook@posterous.com and it will update my status.  Double cool.

I’ll post back here about how it’s going.  Maybe even via Posterous.

Right now, I’m enjoying a latte.  Hmmm.