Help Lilia update her welding shop so that she can support her family.  It's the first of the month, it's time to make good on my personal pledge to help someone just a little bit each month.

You too should make a pledge to find a little bit of money to donate to someone who needs it for whatever reason every month.  It doesn't matter if you donate to a Kickstarter project and end up helping to launch some great idea or if you go with one of the growing list of competitors in the micro-lending space.  Just give what you can and make someone's world a little better today.

Daniel Reetz figured out a great way to transform cheap cameras and some common material into a book scanner.

From The New York Times: John Updike’s Archive: A Great Writer at Work

An advance look inside an archive, at Houghton Library at Harvard, of
John Updike’s working materials.

http://nyti.ms/b7MYjr

IDEO and Steelcase Unveil a School Desk for the Future of Teaching
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/fastcompany/headlines/~3/fkegFrgp048/ideo-and-steelcase-unveil-schooldesk-for-the-future-of-teaching

In this era of micro lending and crowd sourcing it seem to me that a site sponsoring the adoption of good, modern school equipment (like these school desks) for all public schools is a good idea.  Let's raise awareness of the needy public institutions while we work to remedy the situation.

Something that's interested me lately is sustainable building materials and techniques.  It's gratifying to see all the work going into making bamboo into a desirable, effective and environmentally friendly material.  I find it beautiful and from what I've read it seems to be durable too.  Maybe I'll have a chance to build or renovate a home using some of this material.

Kilts and some Vibram FiveFinger "shoes", the only question is what do you wear on top?  Button down shirt, un-tucked, or a busted t-shirt with a snappy saying?

A well specified method for program version names.  Use it.

When a compiler can compile itself then use the resulting executable to compile itself again and everything works, well that's a happy day.  It's called "self-hosting" and it's not easy to accomplish.  LLVM is a very cool new approach for compiler construction, and it's gaining speed.  It is written in C++ and the C/C++ front end is called Clang.  Clang isn't identical to GCC, which is the gold standard out there for open source compilers and it was only recently that Clang was able to self-host.  Another sub-project of LLVM is the integration of the LLVM back-end into the GCC compiler itself, that's called Dragon Egg and just today it too is self-hosting.  Congrats to all the LLVM engineers and all those who helped to make this work.

• Pubget seems to be a good clearing house for academic papers.  As opposed to Google Scholar which is great a search but always leads to a login page to pay for access,PubGet knows about your academic or personal subscriptions to journals and other online sources for papers.  Searches point to downloadable papers in one step saving huge amounts of time, and that's the value proposition for Pubget.
• Academic.edu is trying to capture the entire global academic hierarchy.  Think of it as the single global address book for all of academia, which is nifty and fairly useful in a somewhat hierarchical system.  (I'm not sure how they merit a '.edu' top level domain, they must have friends in all the right places...)