👻Ghost Manufacturing, Return of Firefox OS, and Inflatable Homes

Just pump concrete

Oct 17, 2022

Hey friends! Welcome to this week’s edition of The Land of Random.

I celebrated my 30th birthday last weekend! My Dad flew into town and we had a great time hanging out.

I’ve almost got enough saved up to get an Anycubic Vyper 3D printer - my planned birthday present to myself. It can print wood filament (a combination of plastic + wood) which i’m pretty excited about.

I’ve mentioned it once or twice but I really want to print a radio to house an old phone and bluetooth speaker to create a "Lofi / Vaporwave” radio.

How’s your October horror movie marathon going?

We watched Antlers this week - and I’d like to watch Deadstream and VHS 4 soon.

Oh! i still need to watch the Chainsaw Man anime that just premiered. I remember reading the manga two years ago. It was good - but sad.

Have you been keeping up with MSCHF’s latest Keys4all drama? This one went REALLY viral on TikTok - even more so than those dang plastic bricks of fake money.

Basically - they hid a car somewhere randomly in the US and sold 5000 people all the same key to unlock and drive it. Here’s the URL to check it out.

I imagine this will end with the car blown up or burned or something of the sort - as happened to hitchbot.

RIP Hitchbot.

ALSO - This game is gonna break the internet when it comes out. It’s the most uncanny valley game I’ve ever seen. Go pro style FPS!

Anyway, shall we hop on in?

👻Ghost Manufacturing

Want to buy some Land of Random coffee?? orrrr canned coffee???? or Tea????

Nah - I’m not selling any coffee or tea or bottled water - but I could with Ghost Label.

It’s essentially a dropshipping solution for coffee, tea, water - and more.

If Liquid Death can sell water with great marketing/branding and make millions - why can’t you?

I’m partially joking of course - because you KNOW if Mr. Beast decided to sell “Beast Water” it would sell merely on name power alone.

Anyway - here’s how Ghost Label works - I’m summarizing their page.

Select your product
Fill out the specifications (size, etc.)
Send a request and wait for Manufacturer offers
Pick an offer
Monitor its fulfillment + pay Ghostlabel’s fee upon delivery

I played around with some of the options that Ghost Label has for coffee - and there’s a lot of options to choose from.

Ground dark roast caramel coffee in a metal can? Check!

Organic coffee? Check!

Canned cold brew with oat milk? Check!

The fee isn’t too bad either. Let’s say it costs $5,000 for the manufacturing of my “Land of Random” coffee. I only have to pay around $338 as a fee to Ghost Label - not bad considering that they handle all the stressful stuff like finding manufacturers.

I’ve never seen anything like Ghost Label before - but it looks like it could be a fantastic solution for entrepreneurs who want to dip their toes in the food and beverage niche.

Heck I’d say it behooves a lot of NFT projects to check this out lol.

It simplifies the whole idea of white labeling your own food/beverage down to a stress-free science.

You never know - you might have the next Liquid Death idea on your hands.

Check out Ghost Label at the link!

Ghost Label

🔥Return of Firefox OS

Once upon a time, Firefox was king of the browsers.

Now? Though it has a small but loyal fan base - it’s declining. It only accounts for around 4 percent of internet users - as opposed to 20 percent back in the day.1

Chrome won the war - and Firefox never recovered.

A lot like this - but Firefox Quantum never saved the day . . .

Firefox even gave phones a shot - with their very own Firefox operating system.

Yeah - here’s an example from 2013. Phones were so small back then . . .

Firefox OS was deprecated in 2016 because hardly anyone used it - but made a comeback in 2018 with the Kai OS fork.

Kai OS is a fantastic solution for bringing tech to developing nations - and I’d honestly consider switching to a phone with it if it had Spotify.

The first major commercial adoption of B2G/Firefox OS was seen around 2018 with KaiOS, a widely popular commercial fork of Firefox OS that promised to be a modern OS for inexpensive feature phones. Although KaiOS turned out to be disappointingly closed and oriented to tracking users and shipping advertising, it was quickly forked in GerdaOS, a custom ROM that promised to bring back some of the openness of Firefox OS to KaiOS devices such as newer Nokias, and kill the intrusive user trackers in the process. (source)

Another Firefox OS fork, Capyloon has also emerged onto the scene.

the Capyloon project is not just a heavily modded (still somewhat closed) KaiOS as was Gerda, but a functional, fully open-source Firefox OS build for modern Linux phones, such as the PinePhone Pro, Purism Librem 5, and Pixel 3A. (source)

Both are very much niche forks for niche communities - but it’s great to see Firefox OS’s legacy live on, even though mainstream adoption failed.

Who knows? Maybe Kai OS will continue to gain traction and get more app support - a tribute to Firefox OS.

Check out Capyloon here - there’s a desktop build you can download and test on Mac and Linux computers.

🏠Inflatable Homes

Here’s a brilliant idea - create an inflatable house - and pour in concrete to create a permanent house.

Wow! Why didn’t I think of that??

That’s the idea that startup Automatic Construction is working on.

Bell calls his system Inflatable Flexible Factory Formwork (patent pending). Here’s how you get from a balloon to a house. First, the rolled-up form gets delivered to the construction site. . . The form gets rolled out on a concrete slab or other foundation, then inflated with an air pump . . . Then a ready mix truck shows up—these trucks can mix concrete on their way to a site or at the site itself—and pumps concrete into the form. . . Bell told New Atlas, “For our 100-square-foot and 200-square-foot prototypes, the inflation took 7 to 10 minutes with air. Then the concrete pump filled them in 1.5 hours.” Once the concrete has dried, the form isn’t stripped away; it stays right where it is, serving as an airtight barrier for waterproofing and insulation. The final step is to add all the things that make a house look and function like a house rather than a giant clay art project, that is, a facade, windows, doors, drywall, HVAC, and plumbing. (source)

Hypothetically, you could build a house in a day or two with this system!

Automatic Construction is still very new to the scene - they’ve only built a few homes so far.

To date, the company has built prototypes for a 100-square-foot and a 200-square-foot structure, and they are now working on two ADUs and a 650-square-foot, single-story house in Upstate New York. The house would take about 15 minutes to inflate, and a little over an hour to be filled with concrete. It would cost about $10 to $30 per square foot. Compared to the average cost for new construction in the U.S., which ranges between $100 and $200 per square foot, that estimate is rather impressive. (Source)

I’m very curious to know HOW plumbing and electricity are configured - I imagine we’ll find out more as the company matures.

The website is so bare bones that we know nothing of pricing - yet.

Until then - we’ll have to be satisfied with just inflatable homes for camping - like this bubble tent.

Go check out Automatic Construction at the link!

Automatic Construction