Technology for Luddites
Penterbak shows a dozen scale models of traditional Dutch Windmills. The text is in Dutch, but that should not stop you. Above: a saw mill. Some building plans are here, here and here. Related: Wind powered factories – the history (and future?) of industrial windmills.
Low-tech energy revolution in Africa by William Kamkwamba and the Moving Windmills Project. Simple diagram (pdf). Image by Tom Rielly (TED).
More pictures and plans at Sandy’s Can Cars (via Ikkaro). Related: 26 paper models of vintage cars.
Mike Sheldrake makes surfboards out of interlocked ribs of cardboard, coated in fiberglass sheet. Many pictures and full instructions online. Via Makezine.
“Intel’s fabrication plants can churn out hundreds of thousands of processor chips a day. But what does it take to handcraft a single 8-bit CPU and a computer? Give or take 18 months, about $1,000 and 1,253 pieces of wire.”
The crack garden. “A crack team of guerrilla gardeners will undertake tactical missions to etch similar tectonic fissures in the parking lots of failed suburban malls and abandoned inner neighborhoods of post-industrial cities. With pneumatic drills or with pick axes and some elbow grease, they’ll wound the earth’s (un)natural asphalt skin, so that forgotten ecologies may return and hopefully fester”. Via Pruned. More how-to information here.
