“Bits and bobbles” is a weekly, curated list of cool things I’ve seen people making on the Internet.

1. Foolproof Gardening

My dream is to have an automated vegetable garden which provides me all the produce I need. Projects like the Nourishmat give gardening a better UI.

2. Spark and Mesos

Spark is a data processing framework that is meant to compete with Hadoop. There are benchmarks that claim it is faster than Hadoop, but what I really love is the API doesn’t make my eyes bleed.

Spark is loosely related to Mesos, a distributed job scheduler. Mesos takes a compute cluster and a list of jobs and schedules them efficiently. It can schedule long-running and periodic jobs. Nice.

3. Open Source Bio Equipment

Cost of equipment makes biology prohibitively expensive for scientists in the developing world, or just curious hackers. Hacky yet effective open-source designs could bridge the gap.

4. Xmonad for OSX

Xmonad is the grandaddy of tiling window managers. It finally has been extended to support Mac OS X. I already use SizeUp but I’m inclined to give this a try.