director chair with a twist

Designed by Spanish studio Mr. Simon, these chairs can be stacked into a sideboard (they refer to it as a desk), thus serving as a multi-purpose piece of furniture.

Cóm-oda is made from wood and cotton, the chairs detach from the whole and provide additional seating for impromptu guests.

If you like it and don’t live in an area where you could buy one consider makeing one as a DIY project. What about recycling some wooden pellets to form the armrests and the other parts of the frame. I am sure someone handy can put the pieces together into a sturdy and modern looking transformer furniture. Put a couple of these modern lamps above it and you’ll have a modern home winner.

Get some inspiration below and, if you decide to put your woodworking skills to the test, please consider posting back a picture of the thing. And make an instructable and let the world know how to do it. Open source should be everywhere for people to benefit.

Add a frame to a director chair, put a good measure of imagination and engineer thinking and you'll end up with this.

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Take a spray paint (by all means take the zero/low VOC variety) and paint all your preferred pieces in glossy white, or use somecardboard pieces to make psychedelic colored stripes, or…you get the idea. Create something to fit in your space.

I hope your interior is as clean as modern as your new decoration items...

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a wall lamp that brings eye comfort and a warm feeling of "home"

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Originating from Argentina, this Cold porcelain, aka “porcelana fria”, is a modeling material mostly used to sculpt small figurines and  decorations, but is also ideal for beads and jewelry. It is called cold porcelain because it does not need to be fired. As it dries, it becomes hard, with a velvety, slightly translucent, finish, just like true porcelain. You can dye or paint it.

But the most appealing feature of this material is that it can be easily obtained at home and espritcabane.com brings up a recipe posted by an Argentinian cold porcelain pioneer, Andrea on her blog :

In a salad bowl (or non-stick pan) mix 3 cups of white glue and 3 cups of cornstarch. Add one tablespoon of white vinegar, one tablespoon of glycerin*, 2 tablespoons of canola oil. Blend thoroughly with a wooden spoon. Heat in a microwave oven or in a saucepan on the stove.

For microwave heating: Cook in a microwave-compatible recipient for 2 to 3 minutes on high (for a 800W oven; longer for a less powerful oven). Stop every 30 seconds to mix. During the last 30 seconds, stop every 10 seconds to check the consistency of the mixture. As soon as the dough becomes thick and lumpy (like ricotta cheese), remove from the oven.

Stovetop: Cook in a saucepan over low heat for about 15 minutes. Stir with a wooden spoon. As soon as the dough becomes thick and lumpy (like ricotta cheese) and starts to pull away from the side of the pan, remove from heat.

Cooking is the only tricky step to making cold porcelain. You need to cook just long enough to thicken the dough but not too long, otherwise it will be too hard and impossible to work with.

Coat your working surface and your hands with cold cream or hand cream. Knead the dough until it has cooled. It can be quite hot to begin with, so take care. The dough is sticky and lumpy at first, but as you knead it, it becomes smooth and supple. Make a large ball and store it in an airtight container for 24 hours before using it.

So get creative and if you enjoyed this article spread the word:

Sun Leftovers for late dinner cooking

After spending some time in Nigeria, where people rely mostly on wood to cook their meals, which  leads to all kind of respiratory illnesses as well as pollution,  MIT professor David Wilson designed a solar cooker that stores the sun’s power in the form of a melted mineral salt which can then deliver the heat for 25 hours at a time with constant  temperatures of above 450 degrees Fahrenheit, about 250 degrees Celsius. The sun’s radiation concentrator is a Fresnel Lens that heats a Sodium Nitrate container and melts the salt at high temperatures. This melted salt is preserved for delivering the heat at later times.

This great concept can become reality if the MIT students working on a prototype of Mr’s David Wilson  project will find interest in such a product. Hopefully this will happen sooner rather than later.

I personally would love to have a version that can be fitted outside a kitchen window so it stores the heat of the sun and then it could be used to slow-cook different meals and when time is right can be used to prepare warm food for immediate use. Even in the winter this technology is capable of delivering great energy economies.

There are though some health concerns linked to sodium nitrate. It must be perfectly sealed inside the container. Any leach of this substance will make the design more dangerous than useful. Wikipedia warns that:

Like sodium nitrite, sodium nitrate forms nitrosamines, a human carcinogen, known to cause DNA damage and increased cellular degeneration.

Sun Leftovers for late dinner cooking

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green packaging, compostable car parts

Just want to quickly point this out: ecovative, the company that has developed the green packaging and insulation materials made using mushroom mycelia, and which I have already covered in a couple of blog posts, have made some significant steps to go into mainstream products.

First they have teamed up with Dell to provide the packaging for the computer giant’s product and second they have make inroads into automotive’s plastic dominated industry by a deal with no other than Ford to help create compostable car parts such as bumpers, side-doors or dashboards.

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Snapkeys Virtual Keyboard

I was so amazed by this technology that I had to write about it on my blog. After seeing it briefly on an article that came in my feed reader, it fixed itself into my brain and wouldn’t let go. I’ve spent so much time trying to find an ergonomic keyboard that can be used with one hand or allow typing when jogging or whatever saves time while you are doing other things than staying in front of a computer. And no match whatsoever for this one.

Snapkeys Invisible Keyboard types Bye-Bye to QWERTY antiques

The typing process has been assimilated by 5 graders in a matter of minutes, which makes it even more mesmerizing. Here’s a video on youtube that proves the concept:

It’s soooo simple, take a look at these children doing it on the first demonstration of the technology:

Unfortunately it won’t come as an app, instead the patented technology will come as a part of the mobile and tablet OSes as the developing company negotiates with all phone manufacturers to have it included in the core of the OS. I bet many clone apps will copycat the functionality but they only expect the feature to be rolled out in Q3 this year in some devices. People that already have a tablet will want such functionality so they will welcome any way to bring it to their devices. So do I.

My only wish is that tablets would also implement a back-typing touch-sensitive area on the sides of the tablets so you won’t cover the screen or smudge your fingers all over its sides. Somebody should come with a better idea to implement it. If you don’t have any give me a call. I tend to do a great job at envisioning the future and finding better ways of doing things .

Tell others about this great evolution of the keyboard:

keep it clean

All DIY lovers out there, this one won’t have any fancy description, just the picture.

Admired it? Ok, now go clean up the table and see what difference this might make.

Tell others to stay clean…and make them your friends

Traveler's "office" - a better way than bed-working

A while back I changed my job  (which involved a lot of traveling) in order to have a few years (no plans to go back to hectic traveller’s life but who knows) of quietness, stability, sense of belonging to a place. I was even asked at the interview why switch, as the current position didn’t suppose traveling. All good. A few months. Too few.

The project I was on was just kicking off and the company needed a boost so they proposed a 3 months business trip to a nordic country. I have gladly accepted it.

Here I am in a company-rented apartment, lying in the bad with the laptop frying my future and all of a sudden thinking of a nice, ad-hoc or collapsible, traveler-friendly solution of laptop desk.

I know I have discussed this matter in a previous article on perfectcube but a bed laptop stand is good for occasional movie watching or short sessions of work. For a more engaging activity one needs to stray away from distraction. A chair, a proper position and optimized space for a laptop and a mouse/graphic digital pen is needed.

A minimalist, ergonomic chair might look like this:

or this (DIY ?):

One might argue about the comfort or even the validity of the product but it’s small, it’s comfortable and ergonomic enough for a few hours in fronnt of the laptop. Remember  you’re already after 8 hours of office work, so unless you’re home-officing it’s enough for a day. These chairs have been proven to keep a good posture and for a limited amount of time they’re the best you can get as size is concerned.

One good laptop stand that I could find on the internet is this one:

It also sports a chair but I would rather switch that for a kneeling version as opposed to sitting on a bike chair for a few hours.

As a traveler you probably don’t want to carry with you much gear, so as little weight as possible is advisable. The table for the laptop should be big enough to accommodate the laptop and  some mouse space but unless it’s carbon fiber and it’s a part of your luggage case you don’t want to carry one. What should it be replaced with? Well, if you stay in a hotel you might use a clamping system to make one  a storage-board from your wardrobe:

It’s most probable that this kind of solutions even exist, one of them being the sitkneelchairs.co.uk’s:

, but for a traveler a lighter, aluminium-frame, no-board, clamping system, memory-foam/silicon pads etc is needed. It will most probably has its own case.

Is there anybody there interested to make such a design in sketchup or whatever design software to incorporate all these ideas? I’d be more than happy to post it here as a conclusion of my article. If not, one day I might find time to make a sketch.

If you would like to see such a design here please spread the word, someone might be willing to take the plunge.

Another breed of soap dispenser is born

This is another example of  “why didn’t I think of that”, so I won’t rant much on that but I will at least give credit for this simple but ingenious product and the philosophy behind it to Eindhoven grad Nathalie Stampfli who got inspired by cheese graters and peppermills. Nathalie explains that:

Today, most of the soap we use is liquid soap, which contains a lot of water. Block soap instead is more concentrated and therefore has some ecological benefits: you don’t transport unnecessary water around. In place of plastic bottles you can simply use paper for packaging. The solid blocks can easily be piled and allow a greater space efficiency in a truck.

Why not simply  use of soap bars?

I don’t like the weird slippery feeling when I use them. It gives me goose bumps. And under the shower, it always slides out of your fingers. Hand soap also often gets dirty and accumulates bacteria when more than one person is using it.

Here below you can find some pictures of the two products, one wall-mounted and the other handheld:

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