No Tech Magazine

Dutch Book Bindings (12th - 21st Century)

Book bindings of the Royal National Library of The Netherlands. Via BibliOdyssey, where you can find a selection.

Primitive Technology Handbook

Primitive Ways makes use of the internet to teach us the lost knowledge of our Stone Age ancestors: making fire, tools, weapons, cooking utensils, musical instruments, shelters, and much more. Not everything is that useful in the 21st century, but the site contains a wealth of information and many of the diy-projects sure look like fun. Moreover, they also combine traditional skills with modern materials, like in this four-hour kayak. Some articles are extremely short, but very useful - see the Inuit Thimble, for example.

Primitive Ways is also available as a book or a dvd, but all information is freely accessible on the website. Articles also appeared in the "Bulletin of Primitive Technology", a print magazine from the Society of Primitive Technology.

Another good resource is "Primitive Technology: A Book of Earth Skills", available on Amazon. Update: "The origins of invention: a study of industry among primitive peoples".

Digital Books and Your Rights

A checklist for readers by the EFF. Previously: Second hand bits and bytes.

Pen Shaking Centrifuge

"Sometimes, if a pen stutters, you can get it going again by shaking it. But sometimes it seems to take a lot of shaking. So I figured, what if I could shake it really really hard? What if I built a centrifuge to get the ink flowing again? And so this project came about!"

Hand tool overkill. Don't miss the video (and the other projects by Matthias Wandel).

Via Make Magazine.

Modern Day Flintstones

A modern-day Stone Age subculture is developing in the United States, where wannabe cavemen mimic their distant ancestors. They eat lots of meat, bathe in icy water and run around barefoot. Some researchers say people led healthier lives in pre-historic times. Read. More here.

Kick Sleds

"Kick sleds are the Scandinavian answer to winter bicycling. Kick sleds look like Zimmer frames on runners, or like a dog-less dog sled. Like bicycles, they increase the rider's speed and freighting capacity while demanding very little extra physical input. Unlike bicycles they have no moving parts and are very easy to maintain". Read more.

The Misanthrope’s Guide to the End of the World

"Garbage eschatology (I claim credit for this neologism) is based on the premise that our technological infrastructure has acquired too much complexity for us to fix. It will kill us not by turning sentient and (for whatever obscure reason) wanting to kill us, but by stupidly and dumbly collapsing on top of us, like a gigantic Windows Vista, while we watch, powerless to prevent our impending accidental death. Technology will kill us by collapsing into a pile of rubble, turning the planet into a gigantic landfill. (...).

My view is based on the idea that the entropy of a software system (broadly defined to include the civilization-ware that runs the planet, including the mechanically embodied computational intelligence of such things as sewer systems) inevitably increases with time, past a point of no-return. Beyond that, we cannot stop it from collapsing under its own weight, and cannot marshal the resources to reverse the aging process either. The best we can do is hide and then emerge from the rubble and build ourselves Mad Max or Waterworld civilization resurrections. And don’t waste your time agonizing. We probably crossed that threshold in the 14th century, by my calculations."

Venkatesh Rao = Joseph Tainter with a sense of humour. Read the whole thing. Via Ran Prieur.