WINDOWFARMS DIY: A step-by-step guide

A friend of mine has got me quite excited about windowfarming. You could say the idea is growing on me. I live in a flat with a poor excuse for a balcony and has these 'shiny' white tiles which I don't wish to get covered in soil. A windowfarm seems like the ideal alternative in such cases to introduce some greenery that is both clean and self-sustainable!

This particular 'windowfarms DIY guide' grows three plants and costs less than R300 to put together. The full DIY guide “How to make your own window farm” can also be downloaded at windowfarms.com

Windowfarm DIY - Materials Needed:

• Water
• 3 x Net Cups
• Large cable ties
• String or fishing line
• 1 x 5 litre water bottle
• Nail, screw or eyehook
• 3 x 1.5 litre water bottles
• 2 x tube / pump adapters
• 3 x tree bark starter cubes
• Duct tape, paint or thick fabric
• 1 x bottle of hydroponic plant nutrients
• 5 litres Hydrotron expanded clay pellets
• 1 x two-way air pump (for 100 litre fish tank)
• 3 x plants with all dirt removed from roots (or use seeds)

The 12-step program to building your own window farm:

STEP 1: Gather all the tools and ingredients you will need to make your own windowfarm. You will also need things like a permanent marker or felt-tipped pen and a sharp knife.

STEP 2: Using the cap of one of the 1.5 litre water bottles, trace circles on on the bottom-centre of each 1.5 litre water bottle and cut them into holes.

STEP 3: Now we need to create a space for each plant. Trace and cut large holes on the bottom part of each 1.5 litre bottle as illustrated.

STEP 4: Next we need to create an entrance in the 5 litre water bottle for the pumping tubes. Use the cap from this bottle to trace and cut a circle in the top shoulder of the 5 litre bottle.

STEP 5: We now need to cover the 1.5 litre bottles so that the plant roots don't photosynthesize. You can either use fabric paint to do this, or simply wrap them with thick tape. Cover two thirds of all three bottles as illustrated.

STEP 6: Once wrapped up we need to stack the three 1.5 litre bottles by inserting the tops of the bottles into the holes cut in the bottoms as illustrated. Attach the bottle stack to the rod and air lift tube using cable ties.

STEP 7: Next we need to connect the pump to the air lift tube. Make two small insertions for the needle tips up from the bottom of the air lift tube. Place holes on opposite sides of the air lift tube so that the pipes do not overlap.

STEP 8: Cut the adapter tubes and pump tubes to the appropriate lengths. Sleeve half of the adapter tube over the end of the pump tube as illustrated. Using tape, wrap the air pump needles until the threading is covered and sleeve those into the open end of the adapter tubes. Insert the needles into the air lift tube and secure these to the rod using cable ties.

Note: Make sure the mouth of the air lift tube is pointing straight down – flush with the rod. Ideally you want the whole tube to remain as straight and vertical as possible. Insert the rod with the tubing into the 5 litre base bottle. Make sure the mouth of the last plant-holding 1.5. litre bottle of the stack feeds into the mouth of the 5 litre base bottle.

STEP 9: Bend the top of the air lift tube and insert it into the top of the first plant-holding bottle – forming a “U” shape inside the bottle, with the end of the tube pointing down. Attach the air tubes to the pump. Full the 5 litre base bottle with water to test your pump. Water should spurt out the air lift tube into the top plant-holding bottle and begin draining down through the other bottles. If everything is working, you can then add plant nutrient into the reservoir (5 litre bottle).

STEP 10: Place your plants into net cups and cover with clay pellets. You can either completely shake out the roots (to prevent dirt entering the system and clogging the pipes) or you can start your plants from seed by placing these in compost sponges.

Note: If you decide to start from seed, run your system without plant nutrients for the first week. If you start with adult plants, leave the lights off for the first few days. This will help the roots grow better and will help the plants recover from 'transplant shock.'

STEP 11: Place each plant of choice into the large openings of the 1.5 litre plant-holder bottles. Switch on your pump and viola! Adjust each bottle so that the plants are facing the light source from your window.

Important Note: Take caution not to place your windowfarm too close to an electrical outlet. Loop your cords before plugging them in to prevent water from flowing along them towards the outlet.

STEPS 12 (OPTIONAL):

• If there is not enough natural light for your windowfarm, check out windowfarms.com for ideas.
• If you are worried about your windowfarm tipping, attach the rod to your windowsill with a nail and string.
• There is also an option of creating a silencer for your windowfarm if the noise of the air pump is too much. Refer to the website for more.

I hope you found this Windowfarms DIY Guide helpful.

Happy eco-farming!

FREE: The ultimate real-time video studio & virtual camera

PCWinSoft is giving away free licenses for ScreenCamera.Net - the real-time layer-by-layer frame-by-frame object-oriented video studio and virtual camera software. ScreenCamera.Net is priced at $99.95 but, for a limited time only, it is being offered up for FREE, with no gimmicks.

ScreenCamera.Net is a real-time video studio built upon an object-oriented layer-by-layer frame-by-frame proprietary technology of PCWinSoft.

When you install ScreenCamera.Net, a virtual camera is installed on your system, just like a store-bought webcam. This camera is high definition and works like a canvas for the user to play with. ScreenCamera.Net is a lot of fun to work with and is a very powerful piece of software.

How ScreenCamera.Net Works:

ScreenCamera.Net works with layer-by-layer technology. The user drops objects onto a canvas one on top of the other. Supported ScreenCamera.Net objects include: screenshots from any available monitor, webcam capture, IP cameras, TV tuner card video, devices attached to TV tuner video, movie files of any extension, audio tracks of any extension, image files of any extension, text stamps, date-and-time stamps and polygons: ellipses, rectangles and triangles.

ScreenCamera.Net also allows for animation of objects in a frame-by-frame framework similar to Adobe Flash. You can have rolling texts (horizontal and vertical), fade in and fade out effects, and you can play with the colours of objects, their positions and size in a vectorial fashion.

ScreenCamera.Net frame-by-frame technology also allows you to have several layers and switch between visible and invisible layers. This means you can share your desktop monitor and switch from that to a webcam time stamp and then back again with a fade in fade out effect. You can also keep several IP cameras on the same video output for surveillance purposes, for example.

In a business context, ScreenCamera.Net can transform your business video conference calls. If you are a gamer, you can record your gameplay with your logo over it in real-time. If you’re out for lunch you can leave a visual animated message rolling on the camera. The possibilities are endless and the more you play with it the more you'll discover new ways to arrange and utilise objects.

ScreenCamera.Net Compatibility

ScreenCamera.Net is compatible with Skype, AIM, Google Chat, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, UStream.tv, Blog.TV, LiveStream, UStream.TV, and any video conferencing application (local or in the cloud) that are compatible with webcams.

ScreenCamera.Net comes equipped with a powerful scheduler that lets you program ScreenCamera.Net to record and/or take pictures at regular intervals. It can also be used to program multiple scheduling tasks.

ScreenCamera.Net also comes equipped with a video browser, an image browser, a video player, an image viewer and an image printer.

ScreenCamera.Net is also a broadcast server. With the click of a button you can broadcast video content on the web. After the broadcast begins, you can copy the live video broadcast embed code and paste it on the homepage on your website. So, with ScreenCamera.Net, you can choose to broadcast using 3rd party tools or you can choose to broadcast right from the device itself.

• ScreenCamera.Net will run on Windows 2000/XP/2003/Media Center/Vista/Windows 7/Windows 8 and requires at least a 1.3gHz processor and 256mb of memory.

• To receive your free copy of ScreenCamera.Net simply register here

• Here is a useful list of video tutorials for using ScreenCamera.Net

• This offer is valid until the end of January 2013

ONEWEBDAY 2012: Participation & reaction on Twitter

On September 22, Intel celebrated OneWebDay 2012 along with thousands of other active Internet users from around the world. Intel awarded the most active Internet users from Spain, Russia, South Africa and Germany with Intel Ultrabooks.

The aim of this OneWebDay Ultrabook giveaway was to surprise highly active Internet users in each country by rewarding them with newly developed technology to ensure they get the most of their beloved World Wide Web.

The new Intel Ultrabooks were given to the following internet users:

• @davegreenway - South Africa
• @david_arraez – Spain
• @casi – Germany
• @ekozlov- Russia

Congrats to these lucky Internet users!

The campaign also triggered a lot of buzz amongst Twitter users in different countries and was supported by Intel’s local Twitter pages. Technology fans might be interested to know that Intel has its own local Twitter pages in many countries and interacts with its followers several times a day (including weekends).

Intel Africa

To find out more about Intel’s social media activities in South Africa as well as how participation and Twitter reactions regarding OneWebDay 2012 went, be sure to check out the following: Intel Africa: @Intel_Africa

Let us know if you participated in OneWebDay 2012 and what you think if this global campaign that supports fair and open use of the Internet.

- Sponsored Post

INTEL GIVEAWAY: For the love of the web and technology

OneWebDay is the day to celebrate a wonderful thing we all love and cherish. Something most of us would be lost without – the Internet. OneWebDay is a global event held every September 22 (since 2006) to celebrate the Internet and also to raise awareness of the importance of open networking principles that have made it the success that it is.

Intel are celebrating OneWebDay by giving away Intel Ultrabooks in Spain, Russia, South Africa and Germany. How did they get selected? For their love of the Internet! They’ve been highly engaged and active online and Intel wanted to reward them by giving them an Ultrabook to ensure they get the most of the online world with a proper Ultrabook.

The suggested theme for this year’s events is to emphasize local content as a way of making the Internet available and useful for our communities. Earlier in the year a joint report of the Internet Society, UNESCO, and the OECD – The Relationship Between Local Content, Internet Development, and Access Prices – revealed just how important local content is to building a connected society.

Mr Markus Kummer from the Internet Society stated:

“This study confirms the strong relationship between local content and Internet infrastructure. Keeping the traffic local and building up local content is key for improving access to the Internet. As the volume of local content increases around the world, the Internet becomes more relevant and has a greater impact on improving the lives of local communities.”

The coming rollout of many more Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) in many non-western scripts can only serve to accelerate this process.

So how can you participate in OneWebDay?

• On September 22, celebrate OneWebDay on Twitter by singing praise to the benefits of an Open Internet by using the hashtag #OneWebDay
• Add the OneWebDay badge to your website/blog. Organize and participate in local events. Check what groups are in your area and collaborate!
• At local events, and in social media, feature local content makers, bloggers, wikipedians, webcasters, websites, etc.
• Contribute a story to the OneWebDay stories blog. Tell us what your favorite local content sites are and why, and comment on other people’s stories. There are some great stories and videos on here already from previous years. Be sure to check them out.

Susan Crawford, the founder of OneWebDay, offers some more background as well as other ways we can get involved with OneWebDay in this video interview with Rocketboom.

Susan Crawford of OneWebDay

I was interested to learn how OneWebDay was inspired by Earth Day. A view of our fragile Earth from the perspective of space makes us understand that we have something important to protect. Like the web, and issues of censorship, lack of access and not enough personal input, we need to work together to protect it and steer it in the right direction for the future. Let's get involved!

Useful Links:

• The Internet Society – started in 1992 by the founders of the Internet as an organizational home to the Internet Engineering Task Force. The Internet Society now has more than 100 organisational and more than 28 000 individual members in over 80 chapters around the world - all working to ensure best practices, policies and development of the web.
• At-Large – the community of individual Internet users who participate in the policy development work of ICANN. Currently, more than 100 groups represent the views of individual Internet users throughout the world, participating in building the future of the worldwide Domain Name System (DNS).

- Sponsored Post

QLIKTECH: Free Olympic Games App available for download

The 2012 Olympic Games fire off in London on 27 July! Team South Africa will be 125 athletes strong, including Oscar Pistorius, who will make history as the first double amputee to compete on the track.

To give South Africans all the stats, facts, trends and trivia from 1896 to the current Olympic games, QlikView has launched a cool, free app for your computer called the QlikTech Global Games App. The Global Olympic Games App provides users with a wealth of information at their fingertips, including a plethora of historical data on past events.

QlikTech’s Global Games App provides a springboard for examining each country’s past successes, uncovering new facts and aiding predictions for medal winners this year. This unique Olympic Games App enables users to dive deep into information from past competitions over the last century and extract interesting facts and statistics on the different events.

The QlikTech Global Olympic Games app is also available for mobile - on iPhone, iPad, or Android devices.

QlikTech's Olympic Games App

Some Interesting Olympic Games trivia:

• China didn’t win it’s first gold medal until 1984
• The youngest ever Olympian was only 10 years old
• There’s a 62-year age difference between the youngest and oldest Olympian
• South African athletes have won a total of 70 medals - 80% won by males and 20% won by females
• The tallest competitor of all time is Tommy Burleson, a Basketball player from the USA who measured in at 7ft 3inches
• The heaviest competitors on average aren’t those competing in the fields of Judo or Wrestling, but Basketball and Baseball - weighing in at 194.7lb and 191.9lb respectively

Davide Hanan, MD of QlikView South Africa comments, "Business Discovery is all about deriving insights and enabling people to make more informed decisions based on data. QlikView’s Global Games App provides a fun way for users to find meaning in the mass of information available on past competitions.

With an increased focus on simplifying data for businesses and advancements in the way many of us interact and play around with information day-to-day, our ability to identify relationships and patterns, connect the dots and predict consequences is improving all the time. The Global Games App is a great way to get into the spirit of the competition and uncover interesting facts along the way."

For more information, or try out QlikTech’s Global Games App, visit: http://www.qlikview.com/global-games-app

APPLE TECH: The Leap Motion Sensor coming soon...

There's something very satisfying about touchscreen technology. I suppose it's that you are the input as oppose to a keyboard or keypad. Using natural hand movements and gestures in just intuitive. If you are used to using a phone with a touchscreen, try playing on one that is not 'touch' and see how frustrating it is.

Desktop PCs are starting to take the leap forward toward becoming fully touchable too. Techsperts at Apple have developed the Leap Motion Sensor, which takes things even further than touch. Rather, the Leap makes your Apple fully responsive to nature hand motions and gestures without the need the leave grubby fingerprints on your screen.

Introducing the Leap Motion Sensor

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d6KuiuteIA[/youtube]

Here's the Leap Motion Sensor splurb off YouTube:

"Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It's more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen. For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements."

The Leap Motion Sensor is scheduled to be released next year for just $70 and can be pre-ordered at Leap Motion.

GBCSA: Creating a sustainable future brick by brick

THE Green Building Council of South Africa is an independent, non-profit organisation which aims to ensure that all commercial buildings are built and operated in an environmentally sustainable way. The goal is to ensure that all South Africans can work and live in healthy, efficient and productive environments.

The GBCSA was formed in 2007 and is a full member of the World Green Building Council. The official certification of green buildings in South Africa falls under the Green Star SA Rating System. The GBCSA released a really great explainer video at the end of 2011, which explains everything in animated detail:

The Green Building Council of South Africa
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMNslIsmb9w[/youtube]

A “green building” is classified as a building which is energy efficient, resource efficient and environmentally responsible.

"It incorporates design, construction and operational practices that significantly reduce or eliminate the negative impact of development on the environment and occupants. Building green is an opportunity to use resources efficiently and address climate change while creating healthier and more productive environments for people to live and work in" - www.gbcsa.org.za

In practice, this encompasses the use of design, materials and technology to reduce energy and resource consumption with the aim of creating improved human and natural environments. Specefic green building measures include: (taken from www.gbcsa.org.za)

• The use of renewable energy sources;
• Water-efficient plumbing fittings and water harvesting;
• The use of energy-efficient air-conditioning and lighting;
• The use of environmentally friendly, non-toxic materials;
• The reduction of waste, and the use of recycled materials;
• Sensitivity with regard to the impact of the development on the environment; and,
• Careful building design to reduce heat loads, maximise natural light and promote the circulation of fresh air.

To achieve certification, building owners submit documentation to the Green Building Council of South Africa. Submissions are assessed and a score is given. Certification is awarded for 4-Star, 5-Star or 6-Star Green Star SA ratings. The South African rating tool is based on the Australian Green Star system.

"The rating system sets out a "menu" of all the green measures that can be incorporated into a building to make it green. Points are awarded to a building according to which measures have been incorporated, and, after appropriate weighting, a total score is arrived at, which determines the rating" - www.gbcsa.org.za

A great example of a 6-Star Green Star SA accredited building in South Africa is the Vodafone Site Solution Innovation Centre (SSIC). It is said to be the greenest building in the southern hemisphere.