This is a quick screen shot of the weather forecast for the next few days in Cape Town. It’s going to be 30 today, 32 tomorrow, 35 Wednesday and 34 on Thursday.

I’m really sick and tired of these hot days…

MacGyver fix for Neotel NeoGo Connection Problem 24/02/2010, originally uploaded by Dale Nunns.

A client of mine had all their and all their neighbours phone lines fail in one go when a roadside Telkom Junction box became the casualty of a high speed chase.

I had to quickly come up with an alternative way to get them connected to the Internet, a quick solution was a Billion Router fitted with a MTN 3G Datacard with a SIM with the MTNVPN APN enabled so that incoming connections would work for there VPN and a Neotel NeoGo card for outgoing mail.

The only problem was that the NeoGo USB adapter couldn’t get a signal inside the building, after alot of walking around and waving it in the air I found the perfect position in between the burglar bars at the window. A few elastic bands tied to it got it suspended in the “sweet spot” and its working… with between 1-2 bars of signal, but at least it works.

I’ve done this kind of thing thousands of times before, using whatever I have at hand. I don’t think you can call it a true MacGyver solution unless it uses at least one commonly found household or office item.

This is awesome, they’ve created a weapon that can identify, track and fire lasers at Mosquito’s to kill them. Now I understand that there is safety problems with firing lasers around a room, but its such a cool idea.

Like someone said in the comments on Slashdot all they need to do is put it on the top of a Roomba and it clean up the carcasses left after shooting the mosquito’s down.

Youtube video clip of a mosquito being shot down.

Slashdot article I originally found.

New York Times article from TED about the contraption.

I didn’t know this (via Neatorama)

Supposedly the pedestrian buttons on robots (traffic lights for foreigners) in the US don’t do anything and neither do the “Close Doors” buttons in elevators/lifts. I guessed the closed door button didn’t do anything as the interval between pressing the button and the doors closing always appears to be random.

I have seen that giving people a control for an aircon, even if it doesn’t do anything, completely changes what they think the?temperature?is.

The placebo affect is very cool…

Found this while scrolling through my feed reader (from here)…

Who needs a Leatherman if you have a paper clip, I loved this show… its probably because of MacGyver that I have a habit of carrying paper clips and other weird things in my pockets.

Kodachrome curtains, originally uploaded by yarnzombie.

Found this via MakeZine, its an awesome idea. The curtains are made out of slides that have been joined together with little aluminium chainmail rings.

I love this idea, although I would’ve perhaps made some kind of mosaic image using the slides. I’m guessing though that the slides will fade quickly in the sun.

I found this awesome mash-up between Google Maps and Weather Underground, its a full screen Google map with the weather on it, here is an example of Cape Town.

It’s actually a rather nice way of displaying the weather, its simple, clean and just works. I love some of these mash-ups that people have done.

Nice article on Colour theory and the subtle meaning of colour and how to use it effectively in website design, from Smashing Magazine.

I’ve been thinking about a re-design of this site which is how I stumbled across this article, still not sure what direction to go with the colours for the site though. At the moment I like the idea of a minimalistic black & white theme.

If you’ve got the time you should poke around the rest of the Smashing Magazine site, there are quiet a few nice articles on there.

This is so cool, this women (I’m assuming shes a women, could be a guy… don’t know for sure.) hacked a sewing machine to improve it. I can totally understand how frustrating it is owning something that doesn’t do exactly what you want and then deciding to make it do it.

I have a long list of items at home that I would love to do this too…

DIY Sewing Machine Retrofit