Kitchen Fire Extinguisher

Food-safe fire-killer

You need a fire extinguisher in your kitchen. One that really works well rather than one that looks really good. Most fire extinguishers that easily put out a kitchen-type fire use a mix of chemicals that are not food safe. Cleaning up the sticky powder left after a short blast for even a small grease fire will be quite a chore. The benefit of this new Kidde extinguisher is that this regular 3-pound, high power, dry powder class B/C fire extinguisher is packed with only sodium bicarbonate, or baking powder. It will extinguish fires as well as equivalent models, but the deposit left is not only edible, but a cleaner in its own right. While testing this extinguisher in our kitchen I had no qualms in tasting the discharge: it was indeed just bicarbonate of soda. Put out the test pan fire, too.

Eventually technical standards...

...will become as important as laws.

Laws are codified social standards; but in the future, codified technical standards will be just as important as laws. Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig says, "Law is becoming irrelevant. The real locus of regulation is going to be (computer) code." As networks mature, and make the transition from ad hoc prestandard free-for-alls to fluid hot spots of innovation, and then into full-fledged systems with deeply embedded standards, standards increasingly ossify into something like laws.

Standards also harden with age. They become resistant to change and they descend into hardware. Their code gets wired into the backs of chips, and as the chips spread, the standard infiltrates ever more deeply.

An elaborate process of legal overview monitors and analyzes our lawmaking. So far we have little of the sort for our standard-making, although these agencies, such as the ITU (International Telecom Union) will soon be as influential as courts. Standards are not just about technology. They are about soft and fuzzy things such as options and relationships and trust. They are social instruments. They create social territory.

A network is like a country in that it is a web of relationships regulated by standards. In a country citizens pay taxes and adhere to laws for the benefit of all. In a network, netizens feed the web first for the benefit of all.

Can-Gun 1

Comfy spray can gun

Using your index finger to press and steer a can of spray paint gets old very quickly. If your paint job lasts more than a few minutes, you really should use a snap-on pistol grip. It saves your knuckle, keeps paint off your trigger finger, and gives you an easy way to guide the spray. For years I've used an earlier model of this grip (called simply Can-Gun), but that one was only operated with a single finger trigger. This new version uses your whole palm. It's comfortable, quick-on and off, and the only way to spray. I had a 5-can job on a chain-link fence and the Can-Gun made it kind of fun. Even for small spray paint jobs, I slip one of these on.

Fifty Dangerous Things

Mildly risky fun

The idea of this thin book is that danger is something kids need to learn to handle by experience. The 50 small experiments in this book can potentially cause a minor injury (although they are unlikely to), but are never really seriously dangerous. In fact most of them aren't dangerous at all, but at least they are fun. There are no special techniques, secret formulas or exclusive knowhow here that everyday knowledge or a quick internet search would not turn up. The activities are the kinds of things kids will sometimes do on their own -- at least in the past. It's too bad a book like this is needed today, and maybe you, or folks you know, don't need it, but if the kids in your life live a very structured and constantly supervised existence, this is a way to supervise a little danger. The book is designed to be read either by parents or kids. Most activities have clear instructions. We've been going through the book, letting the kids choose. It encourages them try stuff, and to see the trade off in risks and gains in many things. Mostly we use this as a primer for more dangerous things to try later on.

I was associated with the genesis of the Well,...

...one of the first public computer conferencing systems to be plugged into the internet. The Well was conceived and built by others, but as director of the poor nonprofit that owned it, and as one of the first participants to join when it opened, I was involved in creating its policies. It became clear almost from day one that the technical specifications of the software that the Well used directly shaped the kind of community growing within it. Other models of conferencing software used elsewhere produced different kinds of communities. The Well's software--as implemented by the Well--encouraged linear conversations and community memory; it discouraged anonymity, but encouraged responsibility for words and topics; it permitted limited forms of dissent and retraction, and it allowed users to invent their own tools. It did all this primarily by means of Unix code--by the software standards set up within the Well--rather than by posted rules. The community it shaped was distinctive and long-lived. In fact the community, with all its quirks, is still going, even though the software that runs it has evolved into a web browser interface. The behavior-changing standards remain. The power to mold a community by code rather than regulation was eventually articulated by Well users into a serviceable maxim: Peace through tools, not rules.

The internet and the web also contain toolish standards that invisibly shape our behavior. We have ideas about ownership, about accessibility, about privacy, and about identity that are all shaped by the code of HTML and TCP/IP, among others. Currently only a small portion of our lives flow through these webs, but as cyberspace subsumes televisionspace and phonespace and much of retailspace, the influence of standards upon social behavior will grow.

Google Apps Mail

Custom Gmail account

I don't mean your personal Gmail account, or an iPhone app for Gmail.

I mean using Google Apps as an invisible email provider for your small business or even large business. For instance, when you send mail to me at kk@kk.org, that mail is processed by Google Apps Mail. Same for mail to anyone else here at kk.org, or Quantified Self, etc. Behind the scenes of my own domain names Google does the mail.

You can think of this as a custom Gmail account. It gives you several advantages.

* Google does a fantastic job of filtering spam. It gets 95%, with no false positives. (I then apply a second Baysian filter with SpamSieve, to give me almost zero spam and zero false spam. For me there is no spam problem. Gone!)

* While I normally read my mail on my "desktop" client, I can access my mail on the road from any computer in the world (with the usual precautions) by logging onto Google Apps (not the Gmail url).

* I have an indefinite backup of my mail on Google's servers, worry free. I've used this backup more than once.

* Yet I still retain my own domain named email without it being a generic Gmail account. You can run yourbigcompany.com through Google Mail Apps.

* I don't have to run a mail server or keep software and security updated.

* Once I set it up (five minutes) this setup applies to everyone in my office/organization who also gets his/her mail at these domains.

* It's free.

Before Google starting offering this free "custom Gmail app" as part of their App suite including Google Docs and Google Calendar (which are also fantastic cool tools), I gained some of these similar results by forwarding all my mail through my free ordinary Gmail account and then back to me at my own servers. That hack worked, but this new custom mail app is much easier to setup, maintain and use. I first became aware of it when my wife's work (Genentech) moved their entire 10,000 employees' mail to a custom Google Apps system. Now you can too. It is part of the migration onto the "cloud," especially for small businesses.

Google Apps Standard edition is free. Larger institutions and corporations switching their email over to Google Apps may want the paid Premium Edition ($50 per user per year) with more perks, features, storage and support.

Hacking Warning

Cool Tools and other blogs on my site have been targeted by hackers. A few days ago they succeeded in inserting invisible links to other sites with malware apps. When that happens visitors to any pages on kk.org can get a warning from Google or their browser that this site, kk.org, may be infected. We've spent the last two days going through the site and did not find any virus, or malware, though there were links to another site with malware on the "iframes" of our pages. These were removed within a few hours of detection a few days ago, but visitors may still get a warning because it takes time for browser filters to update. I apologize for the alarm and hassle. We are working with the server host, blog software, ad network, and security consultants to make sure it does not happen again.

-- KK

The Devil and Daniel Johnston

This is one of those amazing stories that sticks with you forever. In the beginning a few decades ago Daniel Johnston is a very talented kid who makes weird art and music and also records his life on film. He hopes to be a famous artist some day. But his art and life get weirder and weirder. He keeps recording his life, but it is clear to others he is going crazy. He is racked by "demons" -- which is what his Bible-believing parents and Daniel himself believe. Yet, Daniel acquires thousands of true fans who see him as a genuine outsider artist and musician who makes visionary basement cassette tapes. Over time Daniel slips into self-destructive behavior until he is "rescued" by his father who whisks him away in a small plane. Then Daniel yanks the keys out of the plane in flight. It's the devil in Daniel Johnston his father says, and by now you believe it. You just gotta see this movie, in large part made by Daniel himself. It's a cult classic.

-- KK

The Devil and Daniel Johnston
Jeff Feuerzeig
2005, 110 min.
$17, DVD

Read more about the film at Wikipedia

Rent from Netflix

Available from Amazon

As more of the economy migrates to intangibles...

...more of the economy will require standards.

But consumers will groan under the load of decisions. There is a yin-yang tradeoff in the new economy. The yin, or positive side, is that consumers keep most of the gains in productivity that are earned by technology. Competition is so severe, and transactions so "friction-free," that most of each cycle's betterment goes not to corporate profits but to consumers in the form of cheaper prices and higher quality.

The yang, or downside, is that consumers have a never-ending onslaught of decisions to make about what to buy, what standard to join, when to upgrade or switch, and whether backward compatibility is more important than superior performance. The fatigue of sorting out options and allegiances, or recovering from them, is underappreciated at the moment, but will mount. The joy of the new economy is that the next version is almost free; the bane is that no one wants the hassle of upgrading to it, even if you pay them to do it.

The fatigue will only worsen. The net is a possibility factory, churning out novel opportunities by the screenful. Unharnessed, this explosion can drown the unprepared. Standardizing choices helps tame the debilitating abundance of competing possibilities. This is why the most popular sites on the web today are meta-sites that sort the abundance and point you to the best.

Since the network economy is so new, we as a society have paid little attention to how standards are created and how they grow. But we should notice, because once implemented, a successful standard tends to remain forever. And standards themselves shape behavior.

Perplexus

Brilliant 3D maze

This is a cool 3-dimensional maze that is easy to get started and hard to finish. You need to steer a small metal ball along an ingenious obstacle course by rotating the clear plastic globe. There are 100 stations along the way, including some difficult topsy-turvy turns. All ages can get into it. We've found the puzzle to be extremely addictive to anyone who gets started. Because it's like a 3D video game without the electronics, the very physical nature of playing -- turning it this way and that -- is very satisfying. In addition, the maze is like a sculpture, the design of the route is geekily brilliant, and the elegance of the eternal return of the steel ball within the sphere is a stroke of genius. Perplexus has the glow of a work of art. It makes me happy just to pick it up.

Tending the Garden of Technology

Many months ago science writer Andrew Lawler made the long trek to Pacifica and conducted an interview about my book in progress. An edited version of that conversation has just appeared in the magazine Orion. Lawler gets to the heart of the book very quickly. 

KELLY: At a deep level, the act of discover and the act of creation are identical. The steps that you would take to find something are exactly the same steps you'd take to make something. So you can say that Edison discovered the lightbulb and Newton invented gravity.
 
LAWLER: Wendell Berry might say that is all well and good, but technology doesn't change the essential nature of humanity. It doesn't make us better people.
 
KELLY: I disagree with Wendell. We have created our humanity. And I think our humanity has been created by technology. Our humanity is defined by things we have invented. Like the alphabet. Our culture is one thing we've created. But I also think there has been an evolution of morality. Culture and cultural inventions are part of the Technium -- they are technologies. 

There's more at the digital version of Tending the Garden of Technology in Orion.

Jailhouse Tech

There's an emerging category of street technology which might be called Jailhouse Tech. The material constraint of a prison inspire fantastic innovation and re-use of made parts. A lot of the devices made in this manner are crude weapons, but others include eating implements, tattoo instruments, music, and other tools. Here are some examples from a prison in Mexico City by Gabriella Gomez-Mont.

Electric cooking stove made with wire and brick.

From the fantastic interview with the artist who works in this prison and who facilitated the photographer who shot these images:

Now that it is over and done with I can tell you this. For the eight prisoners that helped us it would have easily meant another extra seven years in jail, and for us instant lock-up until they set bail. Especially because of having in our possession—or even presence–those knives made from the metallic edges of the windows!  In there, they menace and kill people with those, we would all gotten into so much trouble if we had been caught with them. I don’t even know if those particular knives that we photographed that day had already been used for some sort of bloody business or not, I preferred not to ask; but it would have been even worse.

Weapons.

The 2-Billion-Eyed Intermedia

Every year the literary agent John Brockman (who represents me) hosts a virtual salon focused on a single question.

This year the question was "How has the internet changed the way you think?"

My answer was only one of 170 others, posted on Edge.

I learned a lot from the incredibly different ways people relate to this thing. In some cases I found myself thinking, "oh, yes, this brings clarity about what is really happening." My favorites responses are: Danny Hillis, Sherry Turkle, Clay Shirky, Sam Harris, Stewart Brand, and George Dyson.

Here is what I said:

We already know that our use of technology changes how our brains work. Reading and writing are cognitive tools that, once acquired, change the way in which the brain processes information. When psychologists use neuroimaging technology, like MRI, to compare the brains of literates and illiterates working on a task, they find many differences, and not just when the subjects are reading.

Researcher Alexandre Castro-Caldas discovered that processing between the hemispheres of the brain was different between those who could read and those who could not. A key part of the corpus callosum was thicker in literates, and "the occipital lobe processed information more slowly in individuals who learned to read as adults compared to those who learned at the usual age." Psychologists Ostrosky-Solis, Garcia and Perez tested literates and illiterates with a battery of cognitive tests while measuring their brain waves and concluded that "the acquisition of reading and writing skills has changed the brain organization of cognitive activity in general is not only in language but also in visual perception, logical reasoning, remembering strategies, and formal operational thinking."

If alphabetic literacy can change how we think, imagine how Internet literacy and 10 hours per day in front of one kind of screen or another is changing our brains. The first generation to grow up screen literate is just reaching adulthood so we don't have any scientific studies of the full consequence of ubiquitous connectivity, but I have a few hunches based on my own behavior.

When I do long division or even multiplication I don't try to remember the intermediate numbers. Long ago I learned to write them down. Because of paper and pencil I am  "smarter" in arithmetic. In a similar manner I now no longer to try remember facts, or even where I found the facts. I have learned to summon them on the Internet. Because the Internet is my new pencil and paper, I am "smarter" in factuality.

But my knowledge is now more fragile. For every accepted piece of knowledge I find, there is within easy reach someone who challenges the fact. Every fact has its anti-fact. The Internet's extreme hyperlinking highlights those anti-facts as brightly as the facts. Some anti-facts are silly, some borderline, and some valid. You can't rely on experts to sort them out because for every expert there is an equal and countervailing anti-expert. Thus anything I learn is subject to erosion by these ubiquitous anti-factors.

My certainty about anything has decreased. Rather than importing authority, I am reduced to creating my own certainty — not just about things I care about — but about anything I touch, including areas about which I can't possibly have any direct knowledge . That means that in general I assume more and more that what I know is wrong. We might consider this state perfect for science but it also means that I am more likely to have my mind changed for incorrect reasons. Nonetheless, the embrace of uncertainty is one way my thinking has changed.

Uncertainty is a kind of liquidity. I think my thinking has become more liquid. It is less fixed, as text in a book might be, and more fluid, as say text in Wikipedia might be. My opinions shift more. My interests rise and fall more quickly. I am less interested in Truth, with a capital T, and more interested in truths, plural. I feel the subjective has an important role in assembling the objective from many data points. The incremental plodding progress of imperfect science seems the only way to know anything.

While hooked into the network of networks I feel like I am a network myself, trying to achieve reliability from unreliable parts. And in my quest to assemble truths from half-truths, non-truths, and some other truths scattered in the flux (this creation of the known is now our job and not the job of authorities), I find my mind attracted to fluid ways of thinking (scenarios, provisional belief) and fluid media like mashups, twitter, and search. But as I flow through this slippery Web of ideas, it often feels like a waking dream.

We don't really know what dreams are for, only that they satisfy some fundamental need. Someone watching me surf the Web, as I jump from one suggested link to another, would see a day-dream. Today, I was in a crowd of people who watched a barefoot man eat dirt, then the face of a boy who was singing began to melt, then Santa burned a Christmas tree, then I was floating inside mud house on the very tippy top of the world, then Celtic knots untied themselves, then a guy told me the formula for making clear glass, then I was watching myself, back in high school, riding a bicycle. And that was just the first few minutes of my day on the Web this morning. The trance-like state we fall into while following the undirected path of links may be a terrible waste of time, or like dreams, it might be a productive waste of time. Perhaps we are tapping into our collective unconscious in a way watching the directed stream of TV, radio and newspapers could not. Maybe click-dreaming is a way for all of us to have the same dream, independent of what we click on.

This waking dream we call the Internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts, or to put it more simply: I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing online. For some people the disintegration between these two realms marks all that is wrong with the Internet: It  is the high-priced waster of time. It breeds trifles. On the contrary, I cherish a good wasting of time as a necessary precondition for creativity, but more importantly I believe the conflation of play and work, of thinking hard and thinking playfully, is one the greatest things the Internet has done.

In fact the propensity of the Internet to diminish our attention is overrated. I do find that smaller and smaller bits of information can command the full attention of my over-educated mind. And not just me; everyone reports succumbing to the lure of fast, tiny, interruptions of information. In response to this incessant barrage of bits, the culture of the Internet has been busy unbundling larger works into minor snippets for sale. Music albums are chopped up and sold as songs; movies become trailers, or even smaller video snips. (I find that many trailers really are better than their movie.) Newspapers become twitter posts. Scientific papers are served up in snippets on Google. I happily swim in this rising ocean of fragments.

While I rush into the Net to hunt for these tidbits, or to surf on its lucid dream, I've noticed a different approach to my thinking. My thinking is more active, less contemplative. Rather than begin a question or hunch by ruminating aimlessly in my mind, nourished only by my ignorance, I start doing things. I immediately, instantly go.

I go looking, searching, asking, questioning, reacting to data, leaping in, constructing notes, bookmarks, a trail, a start of making something mine. I don't wait. Don't have to wait. I act on ideas first now instead of thinking on them.  For some folks, this is the worst of the Net — the loss of contemplation. Others feel that all this frothy activity is simply stupid busy work, or spinning of wheels, or illusionary action. I think to myself, compared to what?

Compared to the passive consumption of TV or sucking up bully newspapers, or of merely sitting at home going in circles musing about stuff in my head without any new inputs, I find myself much more productive by acting first. The emergence of blogs and Wikipedia are expressions of this same impulse, to act (write) first and think (filter) later. I have a picture of the hundreds of millions people online at this very minute. To my eye they are not wasting time with silly associative links, but are engaged in a more productive way of thinking then the equivalent hundred of millions people were 50 years ago.

This approach does encourage tiny bits, but surprisingly at the very same time, it also allows us to give more attention to works that are far more complex, bigger, and more complicated than ever before. These new creations contain more data, require more attention over longer periods; and these works are more successful as the Internet expands. This parallel trend is less visible at first because of a common short sightedness that equates the Internet with text.

To a first approximation the Internet is words on a screen — Google, papers, blogs. But this first glance ignores the vastly larger underbelly of the Internet — moving images on a screen. People (and not just young kids) no longer go to books and text first. If people have a question they (myself included) head first for YouTube. For fun we go to online massive games, or catch streaming movies, including factual videos (documentaries are in a renaissance). New visual media are stampeding onto the Nets. This is where the Internet's center of attention lies, not in text alone. Because of online fans, and streaming on demand, and rewinding at will, and all the other liquid abilities of the Internet, directors started creating movies that were more than 100 hours long.

These vast epics like Lost and The Wire had multiple interweaving plot lines, multiple protagonists, an incredible depth of characters and demanded sustained attention that was not only beyond previous TV and 90-minute movies, but would have shocked Dickens and other novelists of yore. They would marvel: "You mean they could follow all that, and then want more? Over how many years?" I would never have believed myself capable of enjoying such complicated stories, or caring about them to put in the time. My attention has grown. In a similar way the depth, complexity and demands of games can equal these marathon movies, or any great book.

But the most important way the Internet has changed the direction of my attention, and thus my thinking, is that it has become one thing. It may look like I am spending endless nano-seconds on a series of tweets, and endless microseconds surfing between Web pages, or wandering between channels, and hovering only mere minutes on one book snippet after another; but in reality I am spending 10 hours a day paying attention to the Internet. I return to it after a few minutes, day after day, with essentially my full-time attention. As do you.

We are developing an intense, sustained conversation with this large thing. The fact that it is made up of a million loosely connected pieces is distracting us. The producers of Websites, and the hordes of commenters online, and the movie moguls reluctantly letting us stream their movies, don't believe they are mere pixels in a big global show, but they are. It is one thing now, an intermedia with 2 billion screens peering into it. The whole ball of connections — including all its books, all its pages, all its tweets, all its movies, all its games, all its posts, all its streams — is like one vast global book (or movie, etc.), and we are only beginning to learn how to read it.

Knowing that this large thing is there, and that I am in constant communication with it, has changed how I think.

The Story of India

One of my favorite historians, Michael Wood, tells the fantastic history of India by visiting the places where it happens. Best of all, he describes the IDEAS that each place launched. The story of India spans thousands of years and thousands of miles, and five episodes. Wood is both intelligent and genial, and deeply familar with the subcontinent, so you get an incredibly insightful tour of this vast land. Wood takes you to unexpected corners deep inside the culture. I've read a lot of Indian history, seen a fair number of documentaries about the country, and I have traveled extensively throughout India over many years. This is by far the best treatment of this still rising civilization I've seen.

The Story of India
Michael Wood
2007, 345 min
$30, DVD & Blu-Ray (2 discs)

Official website

Read more about the film at Wikipedia

Rent from Netflix

Available from Amazon

In the network economy, ever-less energy...

...is needed to complete a single transaction, but ever-more effort is needed to agree on what pattern the transaction should follow.

Thus "feeding the web first" increases in necessity. Businesses can expect to devote great intellectual capital on formulating, negotiating, deciding, forecasting, and adhering to emerging standards. The question "Which platform do we back?" will not be confined to PCs. It will be asked in regard to calendars, cars, accounting principles, and even currencies.

For maximum prosperity...

...feed the web first.

Arriving at standards is often easier said than done. Standard-making is a torturous, bickering process every time. And the end result is universally condemned--since it is the child of compromise. But for a standard to be effective, its adoption must be voluntary. There must be room to dissent by pursuing alternative standards at any time.

Standards play an increasingly vital role in the new economy. In the industrial age, relatively few products demanded standards. You didn't need a consensual network to make a chair and table. If you obeyed some basic ergonomic conventions--make table height 30 inches--you were on your way. Those industrial products that operated in networks--such as the electrical or transportation networks--demanded sophisticated standard-making. Anything plugged into the electrical grid had to be standard. Automobiles manufactured by separate factories shared standards on such things as axle width, fuel mixtures, placement of turn signals, not to mention the many standards of road construction and signage.

All information and communication products and services demand extensive consensus. Participants at both ends of any conversation have to understand each other's language. Multiply one conversation by a billion, factor in a thousand different media choices, and then start to count three-way, four-way, n-way conversations, and the amount of consensus-setting skyrockets.

The final stage in the life cycle of networks...

...is the embedded phase, where one standard is so widely accepted that it becomes embedded in the fabric of the technology and is thereafter nearly impossible to dislodge--at least as long as the network exists. Regular 110-volt AC power is well embedded at this point (although, as the power grid becomes global, there could be some surprises). ASCII text is likewise deeply embedded--at least for phonetic languages. Some of the conventions of voice dial tone are so ubiquitous worldwide as to be permanent.

In any phase of innovation--prestandard, fluid, or embedded--standards are valuable because they hasten innovation. Agreements are constraints on uncertainty. The constraints of a standard solidify one pathway out of many, allowing further innovation and evolution to accelerate along that stable route. So central is the need to cultivate certainty that organizations must make the common standard their first allegiance. As standards are established, growth takes off.

The Book of Genesis Illustrated

Underground Bible

As literature, the biblical book of Genesis has it all: sex, violence, angels, war, murder, heroes, incest, world-wide disasters, spooky mystery, and a timeless story. All it needed was illustrations by the comic genius R. Crumb and you'd have a underground manga hit. And that's what this book is. Crumb brilliantly did not alter or omit any words from the scriptural text, and even toned down his drawings to a PG-13 rating. But man, is this strong drink. It will burn your eyelashes. Like it must have done 2,000 years ago. Now you have absolutely no excuse not to read the first book of the Bible.

Daemon * Freedom(TM)

Internet doomsday scenario

Every once in a while a science fiction book unleashes a vivid, important alternative vision of the future that has not been fleshed out before. Daniel Suarez does that with Daemon, a fasted-paced thriller about a world in which a virtual bot takes over. Sort of a digital Armageddon, only worse. It's a techno-thriller more informed than a Tom Clancy novel, more plausible than The Matrix, more graphic than War Games, and more thought-provoking than Neuromancer -- yet it introduces a science fiction future new to all of them. Here the ghostly bot upends the world by using technological blackmail to take control of more everyday infrastructural systems. Suarez, an information technology and security consultant in real life, makes this scenario entirely plausible even to a technology booster like myself. In fact his scenario is now being seriously considered by the intelligence and security agencies. In a stroke of genius, Suarez shows why this takeover by the bot might be something we choose to allow! The story is not a bit academic or abstract. Instead it is an action-packed made-for-Hollywood script. Warning: the ending is a cliff-hanger, concluded in the second book, Freedom(TM).

Long Way Down

Two guys ride motorcycles 10,000 kilometers from the tip of northern Scotland down to the southern tip of Africa. As you might expect, this is a great 3-month road trip, with accidents, adventures and much to learn. Since it's the same two celebrity actors who rode motorcycles from London to New York "the long way around" (also a recommended True Film) there's a lot of good natured fun and horsing around. It's hard not like the company of the two personable chaps. In short, this is a buddy flick. In seven hours they give you an enjoyable and decent orientation to the continent of Africa.

Long Way Down
Ewan McGregor, Charley Boorman, David Alexanian and Russ Malkin
2007, 510 min.
$40, DVD (3 discs)

Official website

Read more about the film at Wikipedia

Rent from Netflix

Available from Amazon