Brilliant Weekend Edition
Loony resorts, retro productivity software, edible batteries and more!
New social networks are popping up all over the place! I finally got into the invitation-only Bluesky, which is Jack Dorsey’s federated alternative to Twitter. (If you’re on Bluesky, you can follow me here.) Substack Notes is somewhat newish. It’s a nice place to chat with your favorite authors, including Yours Truly. (If you subscribe to this newsletter, you already follow me on Notes.) And Meta is planning a Mastodon-like add-on to Instagram. You can’t follow me there because Meta shadowbans Facebook critics like me. See you on the social nets!
Mike’s List of Brilliantly Bad Ideas
1. This loony company is planning a series of moon-shaped resorts
Canadian company Moon World Resorts Inc. is planning four moon-shaped resorts costing roughly $5 billion each in Las Vegas, Dubai, China and Spain. (Wait, Spain?) The bottom half of the moon hotel would feature 4,000 rooms, an out-of-this-world spa, a 2,500-seat theater, a planetarium, a 5,000-seat event center, a 10,000-seat arena, a nightclub and a casino. The top half would be an “active lunar colony” where visitors could spend 90 minutes in a spacesuit driving around a fake lunar surface in a moon buggy.
2. Relive the glory days of Windows 95 with this retro Notion template
Notion is a highly customizable, expandable productivity and note-taking web application from San Francisco’s Notion Labs Inc. Now, Notion fans can make their own Notion look like Windows 95 with a template called Notion 95.
3. Finally, an edible battery
Brainiacs at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Milan invented an edible battery. The rechargeable power cell is made entirely out of food-grade materials and is designed to power “edible electronics.” Specifically, the battery is constructed from a cathode made of quercetin, which is a pigment found in almonds and capers. The anode is made out of vitamin B2. The separator is seaweed. Charcoal boosts electrical conductivity. And the electrodes are covered in beeswax and pastry-quality gold foil. It’s all supported by a structure made from ethyl cellulose. The batteries are ideal for small electronics made for kids or pets, for internal medical use and for those hungry late nights when there’s nothing in the fridge.
Mike’s List of Brilliantly Good Ideas
Zoo is a free open source AI art “playground” from Replicate. Type in your prompts, and on a single page see results from stable-diffusion 1.5, stable-diffusion 2.1, DALL-E, kandinsky-2, .deepfloyd-if and material-diffusion.
Emojiton is a free AI-based search engine for finding emojis.
Language Reactor is a site that helps you learn foreign languages while watching Netflix or YouTube.
Mike’s List of Shameless Self Promotions
How remote work is changing American culture
Do you really need a CISO?
Why robot vacuums have cameras (and what to know about them)
Read my ELGAN.COM blog for more!
Mike’s Location: Veneto, Italy!
(Why Mike is always traveling.)
1. Vegas odds makers are not too concerned about folks hitting up the virtual moon thing. They figure it's way easier for people to hook up at Vegas than sealed into space suits surrounded by virtual moon dust. Anyway, if it turned out to be a thing, Vegas would clone it immediately.
2. There are already enough dead UI's to swoon over available online. A Win 95 UI would probably be a last choice to reminisce over. What, insert the occasional blue screen? :-) But yeah, nostalgia is a fickle beast.
3. Kudos to the IIT for their endeavors, however I prefer the tried and true potato battery where there is a whole internet recipe collection to feast on. Creating a kind of carb consciousness.
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I will definitely try and use the Emojiton pgm, could save lots of search time.
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We've spawned two of the gens as WFH types. Interesting article over in CW. Future friction could be the more WFH existing could create a kind of Exurban sprawl developing with everyone dropping stuff into the water table everywhere, (including paving the earth over) possibly forcing jurisdictions into a new round of zoning rules. Also, as usual the real estate people will be there to jack up Exurban cost of living into the stratosphere, as usual. Except maybe in places like Houston Tx. where I guess anything goes, in the future, not likely, but that city might break away and acquire/annex the balance of Texas territory, maybe with the exception of El Paso.