feathering life

gubernatorial: of or pertaining to a governor.
man, that is boring. who picks these things? im geting my WOTD from urbandictionary.com from now on.

draw on anything and be able to erase it instantly

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this is the solar cooker we’ve been working on for rural tibet/china

i’ve been working on a solar cooker for tibet/china for a while now. the primary goal is to use this as a cooking method instead of using biomass that they are using now that is both causing extreme sickness and death and also polluting on large scales. hoepfully this will help alleviate both of these awful problems and help out people. it is going to be produced with mostly locally sourced materials for under $17, and we have a great plan to continue monitoring emissions information for other NGOs to use for their technological or policy implementation. this bad boy can be rotated to track the sun and is completely collapsable so villagers can take it with them to cook while doing other activities if they are away from home. it is portable too for the nomads. it can be easily sewn and repaired by villagers, who have a long heritage of tentmaking and enjoy this procedure greatly. the legs can be staked for high winds and we are working on a heating module for it to help heat the house while not in use for cooking. we entered it in the IDEAS competition and won some money! we’ve been getting some great coverage including a segment on the discovery channel! if you want to learn more more detailed and technical information about the technology/business plan/monitoring plan is all available on our website or contact me:
OneEarthDesigns

Also, here’s a timelapse video of Catlin and I working on it the night before filming the Discovery channel interview:
SolSource Timelapse

the final frontier of breakfast…(with maine blueberries)

this could possibly be the most amazing thing i stumbled upon one night while in maine with julie: the double pancake. the concept: cook a single pancake until it gets crispy and you cannot hold yourself back from eating it anymore, and then dip that in the batter again and cook that! you should end up with a softer outside pancake with a crispy inner pancake! oh my god! i know! i said the same thing as soon as i bit into it! i think i am the first person to ever have done this, if anyone knows otherwise, please let me know. you can do all sorts of wonderful combinations, a chocolate chip inner pancake dipped in a banana pancake batter! or a medley of fruit. whatever your heart desires. click the picture to see how badly you want to eat.

a quick hack to turn your bike into a (unstable) tandem bike

supplies needed:

• good bike
• bad bike (not like a villain, just not in the best shape), but with a good front fork
• a welder
• a grinder
• random steel tubing
• or you could just steal my seat i made

alright, so get your front fork, and bolt it onto your rear dropouts, or if that doesnt fit, weld on some dropouts you make out of random steel lying around (or aluminum if you are fancy and know how to TIG weld (2 things i am not (good at))). weld some steel tubing to that, weld a seat to that, connect some stuff, its all pretty self explanatory from the picture, but voila! now someone can sit there and you guys can ride around and be so happy laughing into the sunset and the fresh fall breeze. get some fresh squeezed lemonade, take a sip, and realize how good life is.