Given the shift from 6 to 9 billion people expected by 2050, and with an even greater proportion of peeps living in cities by then, sustainability will inevitably be interwoven with our urban skies. This one’s for the Bird-people.

Greening Rooftops
Whether called eco-roofs, Rooftop Gardens, vegetated Rooftops, or Sky Gardens, the roofgarden concept is basically a lightweight engineered roofing system which enables the growth of vegetation on conventional rooftops. Benefits include protection for the underlying roof structure, heat insulation for the builkding, absorbing and retaining a significant amount of rainwater, natural cooling and air filtering, greating growing area for plants and the sheer relaxy pleasure of being on a plant covered roof. These effects are real – in response to severe ‘urban heat island’ effects from urban build-up, Tokyo has recently adopted new city regulations that require buildings of a certain size to include a green roof to maximise the cooling benefit of vegetation.

Greening Gotham ( www.greeninggotham.org/intro.php) is a particularly ambitious green rooftop project, envisioning the rooftops of New York City transformed from a barren landscape into a living network of meadows and gardens. Quite nice roll-over graphics let web-visitors transform the NY skyscape, and there’s an abundance of info for adapting roofs to include vegetation, although Greenroofs 101 (www.greenroofs.com/Greenroofs101) is probably the best online resource for those wanting to adapt a roof. ( see also www.roofmeadow.com )

Rooftop Films
Melbourne seems to have festivals for just about everything – coffee, chilli, flowers, splintered musical genres, films of any country, even scarves – but is sadly without it’s own rooftop film festival. (( thankfully that’s been rectified in 2008 ))- In Brooklyn however – pitching ‘underground Movies high above the ground’ – Rooftop Films have been promoting and screening short films on rooftops for the last few years. Outdoor films and dusky skylines? Yes, pleez~!

DIY Aerial Photography
Well, you know, because you want to play up there too. 3 options :
1.Webcams – Google em, they fill the skies. Eg this live view from the highest(?) point in Melbourne – www.101collins.com.au/rooftop.html.
2. Crapcams – try www.makezine.com for PDF instructions on how to attach and control an old camera of yours on a kite~!
3. Radiocams – Get a cheap wireless camera – they’re tiny and can be dangled with fishing line over buildings or off bridges, and send a quite decent video signal to a receiver which can be plugged into a mini DV camera for recording.

Sky Power
German documentary maker Dirk Gion, travelled across Australia last year on a large skateboard with a kite attached. His site ( www.earthflyer.com ) has plenty of photos and pix, and could no doubt trigger other ideas about playing with wind.

The Sky Orchestra
Check out ( www.lukejerram.com/live_works/sky_orchestra.htm ) this crazy research project that explores ‘how one can perceive an artistic experience while asleep’. To do this seven hot air balloons with speakers attached flew over the rooftops of homes in the UK just before dawn, playing classical music specially composed for the dreamstate by renowned UK composers. Citizens were letterboxed and surveyed later about the effect on their dreams. Photos, research info and music available at the site.

More Sky Power
There’s a 500-kilometre long barrier that separates Israelis and Palestinians, and a much longer history of complex tensions. In an effort to draw attention to a desire for peace, the 10,000 Kites Project ( www.10000kites.org ) hopes to have 10,000 kites flying on May 20, 2005 on either side of the fence. Organisers believe that the mutual artistic creations between Israelis and Palestinians provide a tremendous vehicle for breaking down those barriers that have kept these people at a psychological distance, even though they are living in the same part of the world.

Even More Sky Power
Skysails ( http://skysails.info ) is a hi-tech sail company that attaches giant sails to ships – except the sails are high above the clouds. The idea is to harness the winds higher above the ocean with an inflatable aerofoil – a kite designed to fly at a height of 100 to 500 metres, towing the ship on a cable fastened to the hull. Apparently at 500 metres, winds are often stronger and less variable than at sea level and fuel costs for ships using the sail have been halved – which is significant for a 50,000 tonne cargo ship running a diesel engine.

(( See also sky noise polaroids, a short film made on rooftops around the world ))

Contacting gadget lovers is always difficult – the simple option of email, lost in a forest of communication possibilities. Do you chat to them on aim, ichat, msn or irc? Dive into a VOIP phone chat? Get their encryption key for truly private ping-pong, drop a line to one of their many sites, or just send a message to their watch? All of these options are available on Phil Torrone’s www.flashenabled.com, which is both a companion site for his book about using Flash for multimedia devices, as well as a depository for his lon-n-n-ng list of gadget hackery, optimisation and remixing. Fresh on the job at the new makezine.com, he took time to beam us these answers using nothing but a can-opener, a hello kitty vibrator and one of McGyver’s shoelaces:

What’s the thrust behind MAKE magazine?
MAKE looks at the world with do-it-yourself lenses. We have tons of projects, hacks, mods and articles – from everyday technology to incredibly insane inventions. We celebrate your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will. Dan Bricklin described Make Magazine quite nicely “This is a dream publication for an engineer or an engineer at heart”.

Why do you enjoy gadget tinkering so much?
As a child I didn’t care for toys – I was far more interested in taking electronics apart. My dad had to hide the tools at one point, I of course fashioned my own out of utensils, that wasn’t exactly well received. I need to know how something works in order to use it, and usually try and find ways to make it do something else, like a robot army.

Have you ever been troubled by companies about publicising hacks to their products?
Not directly, but I recently wrote an article about unlocking the new T-Mobile Sidekick II and putting “developer” applications on it. After the article hit, T-Mobile added a new requirement of faxing a request to unlock your phone, and the fax machine isn’t working. Apparently tons of people were unlocking their phones and installing RSS readers, other IM clients and other stuff T-Mobile didn’t really dig.

What do you really do with your shower webcam and ipod?
The shower cam was a project I was pitching to a high end hotel. I thought it’d be interesting to have an “opt-in” shower cam, so after all the party people hit the showers at 3am they could “tune” in to others folks doing the same thing. I needed to test the sound and waterproofing, no iPods were injured in this experiment.

Segway madness! What are those beasts like to ride?
It’s pretty much as close as you can get to a machine reading your mind and moving based on thought. For most people, if they “think” about moving forward, their center of gravity move a little forward and that’s what causes the Segway gyroscopes to move the transporter forward. When you’re going down a steep hill, at 12.5 mph, standing, it’s pretty close to flying on a magic carpet I suspect.

Can you describe that self-balancing ‘ibot mobility device’ a little more?
At Dean Kamen’s house I was able to sit in it and use it. It’s perhaps the most incredible piece of technology I’ve ever tried – like two invisible hands are holding you safely and firmly in the air, just waiting for your command to move. For a disabled person this technology changes your world, stairs, mobility, you can go and do just about anything. After I chatted with this fellow, I couldn’t help but get a little teary eyed- it’s rare to see such a lifechanging technology actually in use.

Upcoming issues on the technology battlefield?
The battles will have many names, DRM, broadcast flag, p2p, fair use…In the end, it’s all about the content cartels being able to legislate how and what technology is created. We can’t let that happen. For the first time, everyone can create, share, mix, remix and create- in parallel the movie, tv and music industries are trying to take our rights away on a daily basis. If you haven’t visited the EFF, go there now, and support them- they’re fighting the good fight.

Why haven’t we seen you shoes that ‘spell words in the air as u walk’ everywhere?
When it happens, people will never forgive me. Actually, a couple shoe companies have approached me- but nothing really came out of it. The latest version I’m working on spelling the miles and pace (for runners) when you look down. We’ll see, it usually take 100 or so bad ideas to get the one good one.

In your opinion the best mp3 player out there is ?
3G iPod, you can install Linux and record high quality audio. I use it all the time, it’s the one that has the 4 buttons that Apple discontinued and the most hackable one out there.

Desert island, you and 3 devices?
I suppose I could get tactical and assemble devices in order to get saved from the island, but I’d be quite content with a solar panel, my 15” Powerbook g4 and an Aibo – man’s best friend and all…

PS ( check www.segway.com – you know you want to )

For those still waiting patiently for the 21st century to arrive, a dip this week, via the web-world of automobile obsessives, into the gas guzzling future of personal tranportation.

Up In The Sky – It’s Bird, It’s A Plane – No, It’s A Flying Car!
“No matter how you look at it the automobile is only an interim step on our evolutionary path to independence from gravity. That’s all it will ever be. Moller International’s M400 Skycar volantor is the next step.” – believe the hype@ www.moller.com/skycar ?

Only from the Northern hemisphere nation who brought the world the Gulf War, parts I & II, and is the world’s largest, massively in debt, consumer of oil, would we expect should an appropriate invention for our times : ‘the flying car’. Inventor Paul Moller believes in a future where ‘personal transport vehicles’ will be available that are ‘as safe, efficient, affordable and easy-to-use as automobiles’. At the moment you can leave a $500,000 deposit which will deliver you a skycar ( once tests have been finished ), that can carry 4 passengers, travel at around 350mph, hover with one engine failed and use automotive gasoline. NASA cats are behind it too – or at least one of them is ( a NASA janitor perhaps?), and Daniel Goldin’s vision for a gas-guzzling future is to:
“Enable doorstep-to-destination travel at four times the speed of highways to 25% of the nation’s suburban, rural and remote communities in ten years and more than 90% in 25 years.”

Car-Parking In 2020
We have just over 6 billion people on the planet currently. We’ve yet to reach 1 billion for cars yet though, a prospect General Motors predicts will happen by 2020. That’s one thousand million cars. Chinese officials hope to have 140 million of those cars on the round in 2020, more than currently on the road in the States. More ambitiously, the forward thinkers at Toyota expect that we’ll have some 3.25 billion cars on the road by 2050. Given there’s a UN estimated 9 billion peeps on the planet by then, that’s a personal transportation vehicle for one in three of us. What per centage of those are flying vehicles is up for grabs, as will be all the inner-city rooftop parking spots.

Fuelling The Future
“The solution to the problem of the auto won’t be found under its hood.” – Alex Steffen, from worldchanging.com, reminding that public transport, energy efficiency, bicycling, walking, and better urban planning can do more for improving transport in cities than technological advancements.

Funnily enough, a car causes more pollution before it’s ever driven than in it’s entire lifetime of driving. ( Think : extracting raw materials, transporting raw materials and producing the car). Pollution aside, 3 billion cars is a lotta gas guzzlin for gas we won’t have. Try googling ‘Peak Oil’ for a glimpse of the ending era of ‘cheaply accessible oil’ ( or read here : www.energybulletin.net/primer.php or see the freakish doco – www.endofsuburbia.com). They disagree about when it will happen, but most International energy bodies and institutions agree and understand that we will have less oil available in coming decades. Car manufacturers understand this too, and are already making plans to shift to hybrid engines that can switch between fuel and electricity – allowing energy to be partially gathered via renewable sources. They are also interested in hydrogen powered vehicles.

Is Hydrogen The Bomb?
Many speculators are keen on ‘hydrogen’ as a major fuel source of our future. Burning hydrogen produces a ‘smoke’ which is in fact water ( H2O), so a hydrogen economy would have definite benefits such as reduced air pollution. However as The Australian Technology Association point out, given that hydrogen needs to be separated and stored using energy from other sources to do so. In that sense hydrogen is a battery and not a fuel, and will still require lots of energy from elsewhere to make useful. By asking ‘How on earth do we charge the battery that is the hydrogen economy?’, the ATA remind that although hydrogen itself is attractive, there is still a long way to go to sustainably fuel our future.

Oh, “&” …
For my money, George Jetson’ll have a modem and a bicycle.