Category: starred

Alphabet books are great for kids. The colorful pages and illustrations help children learn what words correspond to each letter. I remember reading these when I was a kid, and you likely do too. I wish I…
via MightyMega
The Complete Star Trek Alphabet from A to Z

Infento is kind of like an Erector set for wagons, bikes, trikes, and snow sleds. The kid-sized vehicles are constructed from dozens of supplied components using a hex key, letting kids and parents work together to build various new rides.
via The Awesomer
Infento Constructible Rides

If you’re like me, you have probably wondered how much Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise would cost to build if it were real. Billions? Trillions? Is it like $500,000 in Galactic Credits? I know that I have always…
via MightyMega
Infographic: What Would the Starship Enterprise Cost?

Whether you’ve got DIY projects to do or the occasional home repair, everyone needs a solid collection of tools. The Sweethome spent hundreds of hours of research and testing to create a list of the 22 best tools and toolbox.

In the guide, you’ll find specific recommendations for a screwdriver, tape measure, drill, utility knife, hammer, and other essential items. Although the entire kit costs $500, you can grow your collection over time.

Alternatively, we’ve got recommendations for what to put in your toolbox for different levels of DIY, so you can pair that with The Sweethome’s product recommendations.

The Best Tools and Toolbox | The Sweethome

via Lifehacker
Get the Best Tools for Your Workshop with This Guide

Mobile phone data can provide a rich source of information for understanding human activity. Now, researchers from MIT have built a tool that visualizes cell phone use in cities around the world, for any of us to study.

The new tool, called ManyCities, is a collaborative effort between the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT and Ericsson. It compiles mobile phone data — such as text message traffic, number of phone calls, and the amount of data downloaded —from base stations in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Hong Kong between April 2013 and January 2014. It’s all anonymised, so there’s no sensitive information on display, but there is enough data to understand usage patterns, even down the the scale of small neighbourhoods.

What’s nice about the site is that there are plenty of intuitive interpretations of the data available from the get-go. So, you can see how phone use varies geographically, say, or by time, spotting the general upward trend in data use or how holidays affect the number of phone calls. And then you can dig deeper, to compare data use over time between different neighbourhoods or cities: like, how does the number of texts sent in Hong Kong compare to New York? (It peaks in Hong Kong in the morning, but in the evening in New York, by the way.)

There are other ways to look at the data, too, including smart tools that cluster different areas by usage patterns — essentially classifying regions as residential or commercial depending on phone use — or tie in demographic data, to gain a richer picture of why different behaviours are observed in different locations.

It’s easy to see how this kind of data could be used by all kinds of organisations to understand behavior in cities, providing all kinds of people — and not just telephone companies — with insights that can be used to plan and forecast activity and demand. It’s a shame the data isn’t available in real-time, but one suspects it might not be too long before that’s the case.

[ManyCities via arXiv Blog]

via Gizmodo
This Website Lets You Study Cell Phone Use In Cities Around the World

Non-stripping, self-countersinking screw
via Cool Tools
GRK R4 Multi-Purpose Screws