Creek Indians donate $180,000 to cover funeral costs for 23 Alabama tornado victims
Recent tornado killed 23 in tiny town on Alabama-Georgia border, including 4 children, and 7 people from one family.
Luxurious end-of-world shelters for the super rich
Vivos Massive Underground Survival Bunkers from Vivos Group on Vimeo.
When the food riots come and the ocean waves are pounding against the Chrysler and TransAmerica buildings, where will the rich people be? Inside their spacious disaster bunker, eating gourmet meals and playing board games with other 0.01 percenters.
From Core 77:
[Vivos Indiana] is an "impervious underground complex" built in a Cold-War-era nuclear shelter and kitted out with luxury amenities. The idea is that you sign up in advance and plunk down $35,000 per person ($25,000 for kids) to secure one of the 80 spots available within the shelter. In the event of disaster, travel to the publicly-undisclosed location in Indiana and make it inside before they lock it down, and then you can survive for a year amidst leather couches, 600-thread-count sheets and gourmet chow.
Bunnie Huang's open Geiger counter: design notes and reference
Bunnie Huang, cracker of the Xbox and creator of the Chumby, wanted to do something to help people in Japan following the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. He created a reference design for a cheap, reliable, stylish Geiger counter for everyday carry, under the auspices of Safecast, a group that works on ongoing disaster relief in Japan. Being a consummate hardware hacker, bunnie has documented the steps he took along the way to create his free/open Geiger counter.
Read the rest
After much discussion and review with the Safecast team, we decided that a key component of the user experience should be a graphic display, instead of a 7-segment LED readout. Therefore, a 128×128 pixel OLED panel was incorporated into the design. The OLED panel would be mounted behind a continuous outer shell, so there would be no seams or outward design features resulting from the introduction of the OLED. However, as the OLED is not bright enough to shine through an opaque white plastic exterior shell, a clear window had to be provided for the OLED. As a result, the naturally black color of the OLED caused the preferred color scheme of the exterior case to go from light colors to dark colors. User interaction would occur through a captouch button array hidden behind the same shell, with perhaps silkscreen outlines to provide hints as to where the buttons were underneath the shell. I had originally resisted the idea of using the OLED because it’s very expensive, but once I saw how much an LND7317 tube would cost in volume, I realized that it would be silly to not add a premium feature like an OLED.
