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The worlds most populous places are surrounded by shantytowns--especially those hard hit by disaster. How do we rebuild cities like Tacloban, destroyed when typhoon Haiyan swept through the Philippines? How do we provide affordable housing to repopulate the abandoned core of our own urban centers?

These arent new questions--there just never seems to be a satisfactory answer. For the last half of the 20th century, all kinds of modular designs were tried, but no one wanted to live in a leaky Bucky dome. Worse yet, the mass-produced modular homes of the 1950s were all exactly alike, leaving little room for adapting them to their environments. But what if you could 3-D print an entire house, and customize the open-source design to your liking?

This September, I joined Eric Schimelpfenig of SketchThis.NET at Maker Faire, New York to see the 3-D-printed house he helped design and build, and find out whether it really is viable.

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Schimelpfenig knows more about 3-D modeling and kitchens than pretty much anyone on the planet. Hes worked with Google on Sketchups development, is a columnist for Kitchen & Bath Design News, and runs U.S. social media for high-end kitchen storage company, Kesseboehmer. He also founded and runs SketchThis.NET, which developed a premier kitchen design plug-in for SketchUp and provides SketchUp training for individuals and companies.

Its probably more accurate to say that Schimelpfenigs 3-D-printed houses, the Wikihouse, was assembled rather than built. The structure was engineered to be snapped together with fewer than 100 screws to hold it together. The modular wall sections snap into place and are movable, so rooms can be rearranged as easily as you might rearrange furniture. Even plumbing and electrical outlets can be rearranged within the open floor plan.

The entire project was designed in Sketchup, and this kind of flexibility is making Sketchup the de facto 3-D modeling software for architects, and in math and computer science programs at K-12 schools. A complete model of the house is free and open source, the Wikihouse Open Source Construction Kit. With a few thousand dollars for plywood, and a CNC milling system to cut out the structural forms, youre good to go.

I interviewed Eric after the event, and heres what he had to say about the project:

What possessed a bunch of computer nerds, none of whom had professional construction experience, to want to design and assemble a house in a couple of days?

The idea was to tell the story about how Sketchup can be used as an end-to-end design tool. This isn't a new story. We've been able to do this with software for many years now. What's unique about this project is that we utilized a totally new way to build a house. Typical wood-framed construction is easy to draw in Sketchup or other software, but it's hard to engineer it to be safe. This is why people go to architecture and engineering school. Building this way only allows a small group of people to be in control of the design process. Sure, you can hire an architect to design a house for you, but for many this is out of reach. With Wikihouse and Sketchup, design is now available to people that aren't formally trained in architecture or design.

Originally posted here:
An Open Source House That Bucky Fuller Would Love

Ways to Display Content in Joomla

By: justinlewis406

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Ways to Display Content in Joomla - Video

How to use google maps on Word Press
How to use Google Maps.

By: Bruce Mackay

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How to use google maps on Word Press - Video

LONDON -- In what was described as an unusually unanimous decision, selfie has been chosen as word of the year by the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary, beating out twerk and a host of other Internet and social-media-related terms, such as bitcoin, that have exploded onto the verbal scene in recent years.

It seems like everyone who is anyone has posted a selfie somewhere on the Internet, Oxford Dictionaries said on its blog, without offering an accompanying selfie of the writer. If it is good enough for the Obamas or the pope, then it is good enough for Word of the Year.

Use of selfie, to mean a self-portrait typically snapped with a smartphone and shared over social networks, has risen 17,000% in frequency over the past 12 months, Oxford Dictionaries said. Twerk experienced a notable midyear surge, thanks to Miley Cyrus, but has not proved quite as popular or universal.

Although it was the runaway winner for the panel charged with selecting the 2013 word of the year, selfie was already on Oxford Dictionaries list of words to watch last year, like a song moving up the Billboard singles chart. It made it into Oxford Dictionaries online version three months ago, but hasnt yet broken through to the magisterial Oxford English Dictionary, or OED.

Perhaps surprising to some, the term was first recorded in Australia, not the U.S. or Britain, in 2002. An abashed and probably hungover participant in an Internet forum posted a self-portrait taken after a drunken accident on a set of stairs.

I had a hole ... right through my bottom lip, the post said. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.

Adding the suffix -ie is a characteristic linguistic trait Down Under, as Oxford Dictionaries noted and as any visitor quickly discovers. Un-self-conscious antipodeans really do say barbie (on which one slips an extra shrimp), cozzie (for swimming costume, or swimsuit to an American) and, of course, Aussie.

As for selfie, early evidence shows a variant spelling with a -y ending, but the -ie form is vastly more common today and has become the accepted spelling of the word, Oxford Dictionaries declared definitively, adding, It could be argued that the use of the -ie suffix helps to turn an essentially narcissistic enterprise into something rather more endearing.

The triumph of selfie is part of the larger and seemingly unstoppable proliferation of words and technological terms that lexicographers have struggled to keep up with. In August, Oxford Dictionaries added terms such as phablet and digital detox to its online version.

On the short-list with selfie for word of the year was bitcoin, the online currency, and showrooming, the practice of checking out a product in a brick-and-mortar store, then going home and ordering it at a cheaper price on the Internet.

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'Selfie': 2013's word of the year

Other shortlisted buzzwords included 'twerk' and 'binge-watch' -- meaning watching lots of TV.

'Schmeat', meaning a form of meat synthetically produced from biological tissue, was also a contender.

Selfie can actually be traced back to 2002 when it was used in an Australian online forum.

The word gained momentum throughout the English-speaking world in 2013 as it evolved from a social media buzzword to mainstream shorthand for a self-portrait photograph.

Its linguistic productivity is already evident in the creation of numerous related spin-off terms showcasing particular parts of the body like helfie (a picture of one's hair) and belfie (a picture of one's posterior); a particular activity -- welfie (workout selfie) and drelfie (drunken selfie), and even items of furniture -- shelfie and bookshelfie.

"Using the Oxford Dictionaries language research programme, which collects around 150 million words of current English in use each month, we can see a phenomenal upward trend in the use of selfie in 2013, and this helped to cement its selection as Word of the Year," Judy Pearsall, Editorial Director for Oxford Dictionaries, said.

'Twerk' became popular courtesy Miley Cyrus' MTV VMA performance.

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Selfie is the word of the year! (Psst! The Pope's got one too)