Dave Kellam

Changes are afoot at eightface, I can’t help it. This week, we bid farewell to Bastard, the white grungy/erasure theme that landed the site on DesignShack and CSS Beauty. In all honesty, it was just supposed to be a place-holder design while I dug around inside the WordPress guts. The new layout is called Tool (feedreaders, this would be your cue to launch that rusty browser). It’s based on the Bastard, so there may be odd remenants kicking around for a little while.

Most of the template is in place, the only major thing left is the footer, right now it looks kind of flat and ugly. Parts of the design were heavily influenced by Matt Brett’s current layout; mostly the nav-bar and some of the CSS hover stuff (you could say the grunge, but that’s my territory too). The nav-bar is all one image, that’s uses some clever positioning via styling.

The template started on a whim yesterday afternoon, but there have been a few other major changes over the last week. I’ve introduced a portfolio page, mostly to figure out what I’ve actually produced. I experimented with the live archives plugin, but find that it chugs a bit. The other major change was replacing Jerome’s keyword plugin with Ultimate Tag Warrior. It has a lot of nice-friendly options built-in.

It’s been about a month since the last desktop change, so I was itching for something new. I’ve been combing through some of my old stuff, trying to put together a portfolio page and found this wallpaper that I never finished. Made it in March of 2004, seems fine to me. Also had the presence of mind to make it at a nice big resolution, so there are a few different size options.

Download: Hello Goodbye

Glorious 1600×1200
Oddly-shaped 1280×1024
Wonderful 1280×960
Middling 1024×768

I would also like to point out that I seem to have some bizarre stuffed animal fetish for wallpaper. Also, this one has Optimus Prime in it.

MIT has unveiled the production version of Negroponte’s $100 laptop. It’s hard to express how happy I am. It has the potential to make a huge difference in terms of African connectivity. Not just for education but in terms of an expanded business base and a route for freedom of speech.

My interest lies mostly in some research I did for my alternative practicum at teacher’s college. I was looking into the possibilities for internet aided learning in remoter regions of Sierra Leone. Cell coverage is spotty, but it’s improving by the day with new telecomm service. So, getting a data connection is possible, the harder part is maintaining an adequate power supply for your computing equipment. That makes that hand-crank on the laptop one of the most important features.

I investigated a number of solutions, eventually settling on handheld pdas and portable solar arrays. The power consumption is fairly minimal, the batteries are rechargable and you have the possibility of using a laptop as a central base-station. The laptops and/or pdas could come from anyone really. There are relatively inexpensive portable solar arrays available now that are capable of powering most of those devices. My ideas were partially inspired by Ben Saunders’ trek to the arctic and his blogging via pda (he used this rollable solar array).

The Junction Box is also an amazing piece of hardware. Combining a few of Negroponte’s laptops and portable Wifi router with direct cell-network capabilities creates some pretty cool options — like a mobile classroom. You could slap one of those in a jeep, but a pile of laptops in the trunk and drive around from school to school.

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Just wanted to post a few photos from the roll of film I got back recently. They’re not news to those valiant flickr stream observers, but my posts over there aren’t as freqent with the semi-broken digital camera.

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