Earthbag House Plans - Small, Affordable, Sustainable New giant 3D printer can build a house in 24 hours (TruthSeekerDaily) Scientists claim to have developed a revolutionary new giant 3D concrete printer that can build a 2,500-square-foot house in just 24 hours. The 3D printer, developed by Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis from the University of Southern California, could be used to build a whole house, layer by layer, in a single day. The giant robot replaces construction workers with a nozzle on a gantry, which squirts out concrete and can quickly build a home based on a computer pattern, MSN News reported. It is “basically scaling up 3D printing to the scale of building,” said Khoshnevis. ‘Contour Crafting’ is a layered fabrication technology and has great potential for automating the construction of whole structures as well as sub-components, according to the project website. The potential applications of this technology are far reaching including in emergency, low-income, and commercial housing. With the process, large-scale parts can be fabricated quickly in a layer-by-layer fashion.
Eco Homes from the Earth: 7 Ways to DIY Wouldn’t it be nice to own your own green dream home, made with recycled and natural materials and packed with custom features? Whether you’re an experienced builder or have never picked up a power tool in your life, you can build a natural eco-friendly home with user-friendly, low-cost materials like cob, cordwood, straw and the dirt and wood from your own land. These 7 natural building techniques produce beautiful homes with a small ecological footprint and tons of personality. Earthships and Hobbit Houses (images via dominicspics, ECOnscious, Earthship Biotecture) [youtube=L9jdIm7grCY] They seem to be a living part of the very earth itself, often with nothing but a façade and some windows to betray the presence of a home in the hillside. (images via: simondale.net) Among the most famous examples of a ‘hobbit house’ is “A Low Impact Woodland Home”, self-built in Wales for about 1000-1500 man-hours (over four months) and £3000. Cob (images via: ziggy fresh) [youtube=F0KDp00n4fs] Cordwood
Is Cycling Safe? Bicycle Living Secrets: The Ultimate How To Guide While we understand that some journeys simply cannot be made by bicycle, after reading the following guide you’ll discover just how many opportunities there are to hop on your bike. Please select your country and provide a valid email address We hate spam as much as you do. Thank you for your submission. In North America, concerns about safety consistently rank as the top deterrents to bicycling. Given that safety concerns affect our choice of travel mode, I often wonder about these perceptions about the relative safety of bicycling, driving, motorcycling, transit, and walking. Comparing is not easy. Of course, numbers don’t indicate risk. The other part of risk is the numerator. With this in mind, what does published data show? Broader international comparisons are available using distance denominators (shown in the second graph). This graph also shows what bicyclists have long known, cycling is much safer in the Netherlands. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Earthbag Building Index Hempcrete: The Green Movement returns to its Roots Smoking a rope made of modern, industrial hemp might cause a headache, but not much else. Why not build houses with it instead? As the Green Movement invents itself, builders are returning to old ideas. Both thick, earthen walls and building underground to reduce heating and cooling expense are old hat these days, but building the traditional, European-style village home requires something different. Three times more durable than concrete Some builders have found their way back to hemp, a fast-growing, highly sustainable plant that produces those famously long, tough fibres. While durability and insulation are the big two, hemp lends itself to greater versatility than just walls and insulation. Dismissing chemical fertilizers, pesticides & weed killers Perhaps more importantly, hemp farming doesn’t require chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or weed killers. Hempcrete has already found a home-building niche in the US, Canada, and Scotland. (thanks to Huffingtonpost.com for the images)
Natural homes built by inspirational people and their advice... Jon runs Pun Pun an organic farm, seed-saving operation, and sustainable living and learning centre. At Pun Pun they use ancient natural building techniques with readily available, local, natural materials with little embodied energy and salvaged materials to make homes, a practical and affordable alternative to resource intensive conventional building. Jon says, "I want to be equal to animals. The bird makes a nest in one or two days; the rat digs a hole in one night, but clever humans like us spend 30 years to have a house... that's wrong." and, "Before I thought that stupid people like me … cannot have a house… because people who are cleverer than me and get a job need to work for 30 years to have a house. But for me, who cannot finish university, how can I have a house.
Creating a Store Locator with PHP, MySQL & Google Maps | Google Maps APIs | Google Developers Google Geo APIs TeamAugust 2009 This tutorial is intended for developers who are familiar with PHP/MySQL, and want to learn how to use Google Maps with a MySQL database to create a store locator-type app. After completing this tutorial, you will have a database of locations and a webpage that lets a user enter their address and see markers on a map for the locations nearest to them, within a chosen distance restriction. The tutorial is broken up into the following steps: Creating the Table When you create the MySQL table, you want to pay particular attention to the lat and lng attributes. Note: This tutorial uses location data that already have latitude and longitude information needed to plot corresponding markers. If you prefer interacting with your database through the phpMyAdmin interface, here's a screenshot of the table creation. If you don't have access to phpMyAdmin or prefer using SQL commands instead, here's the SQL statement that creates the table. phpsqlajax_createtable.sql: <? <?