One of the most serious problems facing developing nations and areas affected by natural disaster is the lack of potable water.

Tony Flynn, of The Australian National University, has developed an ultra-cheap, ultra-low-tech water filter capable of removing virtually all E. Coli bacteria from a water supply.

The filter can be made from terra cotta clay mixed with coffee grounds, molded into a cup-like shape, then fired in a manure-pile. The manure will burn at temperatures of up to 700????F, which will burn away the coffee ground inclusions. The resulting pores are large enough to allow water to pass, but small enough to trap bacteria and other pollutants.

The VNV Nation show was spectacular.

I’ll post more later. Now I must fall over.

Ouch, looks like Wired is putting a mild smack down upon Michelle Delio.

I’m sure it’s unbelievably nerdy, but I think this mossgraffiti is freakishly cool.

I’ve got a lot of MP3s, and I’m slightly obsessed with managing them. The problem is, I don’t know which ones are listed in my iTunes Library, and which ones aren’t.

Here’s how I used Spotlight to locate all the missing, “un-databased” MP3s.

First off, currently it’s not easy to create a Smart Folder that will match on a Boolean NOT. It’s possible, but not easy. The way to do it is to enclose the NOT term in parentheses, with a hyphen. For example, “bugs(-aphids)” would show all instances of “bugs”, and not “aphids”. As far as I know, there’s no good way to search for an empty set, or “”.

Apple to Supply iBooks for Cobb County

Apple???? today announced that the Cobb County School District has selected Apple as its supplier in the largest ever one-to-one computer learning initiative. The district’s program, named “Power To Learn,” plans for Apple to provide iBook???? G4s to every student and teacher in the district, starting with deployment this fall of more than 17,000 iBooks for teachers district-wide and students at four high schools designated as demonstration sites. Pending school board approval, the second and third phases of the program will equip all Cobb County high school and middle school students with iBooks beginning in 2006, resulting in a total deployment of 63,000 iBooks.

Mmm, salt.

This is how not to install Tiger on an older G4:

Insert DVD.
Listen to DVD whir.
Realize you only have a CDRW installed, not a DVDR.
Mutter obscenities.
Re-visit the horror of installing the CDRW into the G4.
Locate old slot-load DVD-Rom drive.
Crack the G4 case and splice in the DVD-R.
Install Tiger, and be amazed.

Ahh, the first bits of fallout from Trent’s experiment: a mashup of The Hand that Feeds and the Ghostbusters theme song titled The Ghost That Feeds.

The O’Reilly developers have compiled a quick list of really useful bash Tricks.