Amazing, Cheap, DIY Soil Moisture Sensor
This is brilliant way to start with testing soil on your own. You can get very creative with the data coming out of this sensor (or keep it simple). Great blog BTW.
Idea: Kickstarter as Venture Capital
Kickstarter‘s pretty cool. For example, their platform enables you to follow organizations seeking funding, and see the number of people invested in it. That’s great for its target audience. But to really turn loose the power of micro-angels, you have to focus on the other side of the equation and build a platform that’s focused on the investors.
This means building a new, companion platform. It would be pretty cheap and a lot of fun with plenty of payoff. Some key features:
- Empower investors to collect influence and reputation for their investments. Encourage this through enabling people to see investor profiles. The kinds of things you’re interested in, how they’ve done.
- Enable partial payments. Rather than all-or-nothing, staggered benchmarks for iterative development. For example, if I’m building a shed, slice it into a few different chunks – foundation, walls, roof, finish. Price out each step, show results, garner feedback, then solicit funding for the next step.
- Biggest difference is you have enforce tangible returns for their investment (feel-good entrepreneurship isn’t sustainable) – even though returns will, 90% of the time, be long-run and low, it’s something, and it reinforces people’s attraction to a particular cause. Now they’ve got something to win in addition to lose. More people will play ball.
Go Vote for ShareCrop
The name needs some work, but its a pretty cool project along the lines of OurHarvest. They’re in the running to land $50k to build it as part of this contest. Go vote.
Reps. Rothman and Frelinghuysen Are Corrupt
Why don’t we call this what it is? (Emphasis mine.)
Reps. Steve Rothman and Rodney Frelinghuysen got nearly $10,000 in contributions from key defense contractors in the days surrounding their votes last week to keep funding a fighter jet engine that the military does not want.
The day of the vote, Frelinghuysen got a $1,000 contribution from General Electric’s political action committee, and it was his second $1,000 contribution from GE in May. The day after the vote, he added another $1,000 from Rolls-Royce North America PAC, forms filed with the Federal Election Commission show.
Rothman, D-Fair Lawn, got $2,500 from GE two weeks before the vote, and $4,000 from Rolls-Royce the week before that, FEC reports show.
Previous contributions in the current election cycle from the two companies’ PACs totaled $10,000 for Frelinghuysen and $3,000 for Rothman, FEC records show.
Voltage Pictures = Extortionists
I had no interest in watching the movie anyway, but this unethical extortion under the guise of law on the part of the producers seals the deal.
While the initial rumors said that there would be “tens of thousands” of lawsuits — and some had predicted over 100,000 — at least the initial burst is for 5,000 people.
They’ll drop the lawsuit if you just pay $1,500.
I won’t watch the movie, or any other stuff by Voltage. Here’s their contact info by the way (stolen from an extremely lame site):
| Voltage Pictures 6360 Deep Dell Place Los Angeles, CA 90068 USA P: (323) 464-8351 F: (323) 464-8362 Email: sales@voltagepictures.com |
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