Earthquaaaake!

[bill]

Bill, not sure if you know the answer, but aid efforts here are mostly to get cash to the Japanese Red Cross - is that the ony/best place that is distributing on the ground help or are there other charities out there that desperately need donations?

You're probably best off with the Japan Red Cross for donations from abroad. If you give to your local Red Cross I don't know how much of the funds make it over here. There are a ton of new (to me) charities popping up in the wake of this disaster, and I'm incredibly wary of who I give money to.

[eurotrash]

There is quite a few plugins for wordpress that people can put on installations.   On some sites I am using Japan Disaster Appeal which was written by an Aussie - it is easy to edit to put in charities local to your country if you feel safer.

[Gurtie]

yeah I used the British Red Cross initially (with the advantage they can reclaim tax) and then for the work donation we used the Google Japanese Red Cross thing (no tax back but it was a collection so technically we couldn't anyway).

I always wonder who's the best people to donate via though. Normally Oxfam is on the ground but Red Cross was obvious here because they are. That doesn't mean there aren't even better charities that we just haven't heard about though, although the Red Cross would presumably redistribute if necessary.

[eurotrash]

Map visualises crowd-sourced geiger counter readings from across Japan.   Nice use of technology in the current circumstances.

http://japan.failedrobot.com/

[bill]

http://japan.failedrobot.com/

That's awesome! Thank you. They may be out there, but I haven't seen anything out there like this in Japanese. I wonder how tough it would be to copy this idea and localize it...

[eurotrash]

My Japanese is non-existent beyond sushi, sashimi and saki (それより) but maybe this is what you are looking for Bill

http://jsdo.it/motoishmz/rdC2

There is also this for levels in drinking water http://www.pachube.com/feeds/21287

There is a list of tools, categorized here http://1rick.com/quaketools

I got these from #geigermaps - maybe you want to have a gander.