Viking ships

This summer we visited the Viking Ships Museum at Roskilde in Denmark. The museum is dedicated to preserving five viking ships that were discovered submerged in the Roskilde Fjord. The five ships were submerged for about a thousand years and so recovering them was a challenging task. Modern replicas of the ships have been built and there is an ongoing open source project where visitors can take part in constructing a boat. 

Photo by Vassia Atanassova - Spiritia (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The summer program included hands on activities for children to make jewellery, swords, shields, axes, model boats and other viking themed crafts.

At the cafe, we enjoyed a modern Nordic meal based on the types of foods Vikings would have eaten, including mead.  

Open Source Prototyping/Construction Toy

Here's an interesting gadget for constructing all sorts of stuff with recyclable materials.

Strawbees is a fantastic prototyping toy for makers of all ages helping you build huge mechanical objects from standard straws and cardboard!

Strawbees creators, Creatables lets you create the connectors with the MakeStation, a manual die cutting machine that turns waste materials into useful objects.

Google Chrome OS

Just watched the (over 1 hour long) Google Chrome OS webcast.

Today Google released it to Open Source and gave a demo. It looks interesting and really fast, simple and secure to use.

It won't be available for a year and then you'll need a supported device to run it, but it looks very promising.

The "What is Google Chrome OS?" video below is a much shorter intro: