eldavojohn writes "You might remember the tiny news that Half Life 2 source code was leaked in 2003 ... it is the 6th most visited Slashdot story with over one kilocomment. Well, did anything happen to source of the leak, the German hacker Axel 'Ago' Gembe? Wired is reporting he was offered a job interview so that Valve could get him into the U.S. and bag him for charges. It's not the first time the FBI tried this trick: 'The same Seattle FBI office had successfully used an identical gambit in 2001, when they created a fake startup company called Invita, and lured two known Russian hackers to the U.S. for a job interview, where they were arrested.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some days California is a spectacular place to be!

Filip Dujardin builds some unusual structural images from existing architectural photographs -

Every montage, says Dujardin, is one project. It begins with an idea for a specific image. Often he starts off by building a model of the form he is trying to achieve – at first in cardboard, but he has recently discovered SketchUp. He then goes on a photo safari, often just around the corner, to find suitable buildings "with a lot of the same things," so that they can be cut and pasted and serve as building material. In fact most of the fictional structures are buildings in Ghent, just resampled

Some of the works are actually quite subtle and plausible - Resampled Space [via Kottke]

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InfoWorld is running a long article all about how we're running out of bandwidth, and that's leading broadband providers to need to implement broadband caps and tiered pricing. The article mentions that some critics don't believe we're really running out of bandwidth, but then brushes them off by saying: "But assuming a looming bandwidth shortage -- whether widespread or local to certain areas -- analysts agree that two things must change...." And then the article does just that: it assumes that there must be a bandwidth shortage, and only talks to analysts who agree.

Except, as we've seen repeatedly, there's almost no evidence of an actual bandwidth shortage. The article talks about ever increasing bandwidth usage, despite the fact that folks who actually have the data have been noting that bandwidth growth has actually been slowing, and in some areas declining. Then the article claims that infrastructure improvements alone aren't enough, and that broadband providers need to implement tiered service and caps -- even though when you talk to the actual technologists at various broadband providers, they seem more than willing to admit that bandwidth growth can be handled just fine with normal infrastructure improvements.

But, of course, instead of quoting those actual technologists, the article focuses on the big analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester which are trying to sell research reports, and which make bigger headlines if they warn about impending problems. It's a pretty weak report to simply assume away the actual evidence and then focus on what needs to be done based on the non-evidence.

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chrb writes "Following hot on the heels of the G1 root exploit, Jay Freeman now has Debian ARM running on the G1. The RC30 update has fixed the root hole, but with utilities and images already available to replace the flash image with your own signed code, it looks like the manufacturer-hacker arms race is on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Turn a bunch of dead watches into... a motorcycle? Sure. Why not?

Recycle Old Watches

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For those readers traumatized by the AR girlfriend video, may I suggest "Butterflys" (scroll down and click "See the Film"), a lovingly restored 1907 Italian short dance film, director unknown, with an original 2008 score by Antonio Coppola?

Early films were mainly experimental, without a narrative framework. The dancers performed cinematographic experiments that attempted to render body movements in space and time. Dance scenes (here a serpentine dance, known as a Butterfly Dance) represent a third of the films produced.

This film, produced by the Italian company Cinès, presents viewers with one of many imitations of the serpentine dancer Loïe Fuller. The fathers of cinema all made their contribution to this essential genre. Edison and Dickson, as well as Louis Lumière and Paul Nadar propelled the first serpentine dancers to fame: Annabella (1897), Crissie Sheridan (1897), and Ameta (1903).

A bit of history:

These Butterflies twirl around with dazzling effects thanks to the marvelously restored colors. This jewel was marvelously restored. For a long time, the Morcraft company presented this film to collectors of 16mm film. A terrible version issued from a painted print revealed what the film might have been at the time of its first projection.

Color film from the '50s to the '80s is characterized by a great color instability, which turns to pink after a few years. In addition to the scratches, the original colors then look faded, sad, and insipid.

During a visit in Los Angeles, Serge Bromberg accidentally comes across the original nitrate print, which the owner Morcraft had certified having destroyed. Proof of its authenticity is found in the title, Butterflys (an obvious mistake for an Anglophone since the right spelling is of course: Butterflies) that survived on two frames, making it necessary for the restorer to make a freeze-frame, which is the case on the few surviving 16mm prints.

This nitrate print color painted in 1907 still shows the footage marks between the perforations, for, at that time, the colorists are paid by the meter! A true gem.

(Via Submarine Channel.)

spydabyte writes "I'm a current undergraduate at the Georgia Institute of Technology and have been getting offers for internships next summer. I was wondering if there is a source of information on intern markets or how a market's competitive salaries are. How do you know if you're getting a decent offer or you deserve more when you're entering a (personally) new market? Is there a definite source? Do you have your favorite? I know that many factors matter, as in location, previous experience, etc., but I think there's more to find out besides asking for my friends' current offers. If not internships, how about full time or careers? Any ideas?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr photo pool

ProdMod made this charger/light combo for use with Flip cameras using just 2 AA batteries with a DC step-up circuit - double handy! - ProdMod Video Light and Charger for Flip camcorder

More:


ProdMod LED Camera Light Kit v1.1

MintyBoost USB Charger Kit v2.0

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Today on Boing Boing Gadgets, we inspected the geometric beauty of a Linux boot sequence, prefered to pay $50 than deal with an Apple genius and contemplated the creepy uses of a realistic mask of our own face. Brownlee liked a webcam very similar to a War of the Worlds Tripod. He laughed at Valve Software's schemes to arrest a hacker by offering him a job. He found a neat iPhone app to measure his blood alcohol level, and he found a 141 MPG scooter that he can't ride at any time according to that same iPhone app. Joel remains defiantly supportive of the new Enterprise design and applauded the shutdown of a rogue ISP that reduced spam by seventy five percent. Rob meanwhile sneered at a scamgadget that promises to increase fuel efficiency up to 30 percent by plugging into your cigarette lighter. We made Beschizza a Muppet in his own likeness and Joel contemplated on how little geek grousing changes. And then there were the reviews: with an arch of an eyebrow, Beschizza reviewed some high-tech bubble wrap, while Joel reviewed a toy helicopter and looked more fabulous than he ever has. Link

Coop says: "A great clip from a documentary about Piet Schreuders (Beau Hunks Orchestra) using old surveys, maps, and L&H footage to create a digital model of Main St. in Culver City, as it appeared in the background of so many Laurel & Hardy films. Obsessive pop culture archaeology at its zenith."

Many scenes in the Hal Roach comedies were shot on the streets of Culver City, California. The brilliant designer and pop culture historian Piet Schreuders creates a computer model of Culver City as it looked in the 20's - and matches-in scenes from Laurel and Hardy comedies that were shot on site. From a Dutch documentary I wish they'd subtitle and release on DVD! You CAN get the Schreuders co-produced DVD of "The Beau Hunks Orchestra Live at The Conertgebouw" DVD from Basta (if you don't already have it!) -- check out. Background info on this clip

Plenty of people are pretty angry about the financial bailout, where it often looks like taxpayers are effectively handing over money to banks who screwed up big time by betting excessively on high risk investments, and borrowing a ton of money in the process. However, the argument from the other side (which does make sense) is that the "alternative" could be the collapse of the global financial system, and that would have such far reaching impacts that it's not at all desirable. But, that assumes the only options are to either bailout the banks or to let them fail entirely. Some are trying to come up with other options. Salman Khan and David Leinweber have come out with a suggestion that instead of bailing out banks, the government should take the $700 billion and use it to fund an entirely new financial sector. Then, as the screwed up banks fail, these new banks can take over their discarded assets.

This certainly has some appeal. The idea is that you wouldn't be rewarding shareholders in the original banks and also wouldn't be allowing the entire capital engine to seize -- and, on the flip side, you also might be rewarding the shareholders of the new banks (the American taxpayer). However, there's also tremendous risk in doing this. In effect, it's something like building a new airplane from within a troubled airplane that's flying at 40,000 feet, getting it to fly from the air, and then moving people from the troubled airplane to the new one. There's an awful lot that can go wrong. Also, in doing this in such a rapid fashion, when it's still not entirely clear what all the root causes of this crisis are, you run the risk of simply transferring the core problems to these new banks (basically taking the problems from the first airplane to the second, if we continue the analogy). Then you end up spending $700 billion to basically create a new set of troubled banks that are even more confusing, because they were put together in a rush. So, while it's an interesting idea, it seems like it would present some significant problems as well.

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This $1.99 iPhone app lets you download and read Golden Age comics.

ComicZeal's built-in downloader lets you browse our great collection of copyright-free Golden Age comics and download them straight to your iPhone or iPod Touch.

All the comics are free and you can download as many as you want.

ComicZeal works in portrait and landscape mode to suit the orientation of the page or panel you're reading.

It remembers what page you were up to for each comic in your collection and will take you straight there next time you read it.

Because ComicZeal uses pinch-zoom and fingertip scrolling you can move around the page really quickly and zoom in to detail when you need to.

The library isn't huge, but I imagine it will grow over time.

ComicZeal lets you read Golden Age comic books

CWmike writes "Gregg Keizer reports Microsoft has clarified that its upcoming Office Web service will be available to users running Mac OS X and Linux, as well as from Apple's iPhone. The key to this cross platform-friendliness: Office Web will run in Firefox and Safari browsers, in addition to IE. Introduced last month, Office Web is a lightweight version of its Office suite that runs as an online service. I think it's time for Google to embrace OpenOffice.org to take on Microsoft head-on, as CW blogger Preston Gralla has argued for and described how to go about it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Image Scanning Sequencer uses photocells with Arduino to generate streams of MIDI notes -

It uses LDRs to measure the gray-scale of specific point of a image, and triggers midi notes from a selected threshold. When the threshold is reached the velocity will be set by the darkness at that point. the darker point the higher the velocity will be.

The sequencer plays the notes as a arpeggiator, i chose for this playback method because i dont have a midi device that can play 24 keys at the same time.. There are 2 different arpeggio modes. One rearranges the playback sequence to the active notes velocitys. And the second mode changes the arpeggio playback speed to the amount of notes that are active. If this mode is not selected the playback speed is set by a potentiometer. These modes can also be combined.

- Image Scan Sequencer

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Popular Mechanics was at Steam Powered, the California Steampunk Convention, and has a piece on their site of favorite gadgets from the con. Seen here, from top to bottom: The Stroh violin, Holly Conrad's mechanical wings, and Kevin O'Hare's box camera digital casemod.

10 Best Old-Is-New Gadgets from 2008 Steampunk Convention

More:

• Fyriel, the alchemical steampunk faerie
• Steam Powered reaching pressure
• "Maker" is what I do, "steampunk" describes the style
• Steampunk conference report, part II
• The Etsy Steam Team

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A dinner party set for a serial killer, designed by Amy Lau, for Showtime's design house, this being the "Dexter" dining room, natch. Here, $2500 blood spatter embroidered chairs, gore coated plates, fingerprinted glassware. Also: video. Wherefore art thou, Patrick Bateman? (Via Coolhunting.)

dtolman writes "Scientists at the Keck and Gemini telescopes stole the thunder of Hubble scientists announcing the first picture of an extrasolar world orbiting a star. Hubble scientists announced today that they were able to discover an extrasolar world for the first time by taking an actual image of the newly discovered exoplanet orbiting Fomalhaut — previous discoveries have always been made by detecting changes in the parent star's movement, or by watching the planet momentarily eclipse the star — not by detecting them in images. Hubble's time to shine was overshadowed though by the Keck and Gemini observatories announcing that they had taken pictures of not just one planet, but an entire alien solar system. The images show multiple planets orbiting the star HR 8799 — 3 have been imaged so far."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A little over a year ago, I tried to explain why metered broadband or capped broadband slows down innovation. However, many have responded that as long as the basic caps are reasonably high, it shouldn't be a big deal, because, "how much bandwidth do you really need?" People note that the only ones who might be using up the 250GB caps announced from Comcast can only be downloading non-stop movies. But that's not really the point. The real question is what innovations are we not seeing because of limited bandwidth. Not so long ago, the very idea of something like YouTube was preposterous, but thanks to abundant bandwidth it became possible. But something like YouTube is just a tiny way down the path to what's possible.

Tim Lee has a great post making the point that it goes well beyond just "how much bandwidth does a single person need" or even looking at what specifically they're downloading, to recognizing the change in tradeoffs for creating applications if bandwidth is effectively unlimited. As he notes, in any engineering situation, there are resource tradeoffs. If you're building an application, there are tradeoffs to making a client side app vs. a web-based app, for example. However, if bandwidth is truly abundant, the very nature of those tradeoffs change and it allows for entirely different types of development, often in ways that are difficult to fathom right now.

Lee gives a few random examples of what unlimited bandwidth might allow as the tradeoffs change:

People with cable or satellite TV service are used to near-instantaneous, flawless video content, which is difficult to stream reliably over a packet-switched network. So the television of the future is likely to be a peer-to-peer client that downloads anything it thinks its owner might want to see and caches it for later viewing. This isn't strictly necessary, but it would improve the user experience. Likewise, there may be circumstances where users want to quickly load up their portable devices with several gigabytes of data for later offline viewing.

Finally, and probably most importantly, higher bandwidth allows us to economize on the time of the engineers building online applications. One of the consistent trends in the computer industry has been towards greater abstraction. There was a time when everyone wrote software in machine language. Now, a lot of software is written in high-level languages like Java, Perl, or Python that run slower but make life a lot easier for programmers. A decade ago, people trying to build rich web applications had to waste a lot of time optimizing their web applications to achieve acceptable performance on the slow hardware of the day. Today, computers are fast enough that developers can use high-level frameworks that are much more powerful but consume a lot more resources. Developers spend more time adding new features and less time trying to squeeze better performance out of the features they already have. Which means users get more and better applications.

The same principle is likely to apply to increased bandwidth, even beyond the point where we all have enough bandwidth to stream high-def video. Right now, web developers need to pay a fair amount of attention to whether data is stored on the client or the server and how to efficiently transmit it from one place to another. A world of abundant bandwidth will allow developers to do whatever makes the most sense computationally without worrying about the bandwidth constraints.

So the question is not how much bandwidth does any person really need. It's how will the entire ecosystem of what we can do change when bandwidth is completely abundant?

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lamona writes "The main source of the bibliographic records that are carried in library databases is a non-profit organization called OCLC. Over the weekend OCLC 'leaked' its new policy that claims contractual rights in the subsequent uses of the data, uses such as downloading book information into Zotero or other bibliographic software. The policy explicitly forbids any use that would compete with OCLC. This would essentially rule out the creation of free and open databases of library content, such as the Open Library and LibraryThing. The library blogosphere is up in arms . But can our right to say: "Twain, Mark. The adventures of Tom Sawyer" be saved?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

svnt writes "Janella Spears wiped out her husband's retirement account, remortgaged their paid-for house, and took out a lien against the family car in an attempt to cash in on the deal. A undercover officer involved with the investigation called it the worst example of the scam he's ever seen. Thoughtfully, Spears has gone public with her story as a warning to others not to fall victim."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've been saying it for as long as people have been building businesses on advertising on the web, it's not a longterm thing. Now we're at the end of the road.

Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing that it's in now, when it does, we will have completely moved on from advertising.

The web will still be used for commercial purposes, people will still buy things from Amazon and Amazon-like sites, but they will find information for products as they do now, by searching for it, and finding out what other people think, not by clicking on ads and buying things on the pages they link to.

No one needs advertising, and there are much better ways to sell products.

It's the first thing companies cut when business dries up, and it'll be completely forgotten when the economy comes back. Growth will come from putting your commercial information where people will find it when they're looking and that won't cost anything.

Remember that perfectly targeted advertising is just information.

I'll give you an example.

The other day I broke the carafe on my Cuisinart coffee maker. Looked up the model on Amazon, found the related entry ("people who bought this also bought this") -- and there it is. Click the Buy Now button, whole transaction from breakage of carafe to the order, about 5 minutes. No advertising involved.

When I bought the coffee maker originally I had no idea that Cuisinart even makes one. I was of course aware of the brand, did they advertise to make me aware of it? Not sure, I don't recall ever seeing one, but they probably did run an ad somewhere. That kind of advertising might have a future of some kind. But I chose this brand of coffee maker because people who had one really liked it, and the other brands, their users didn't like them so much. I wanted hot coffee that stayed fresh, and was willing to pay extra for it. I should have known they make fragile carafes and overcharge for replacements, but they got me.

I've been saying it for as long as people have been building businesses on advertising on the web, it's not a longterm thing. Now we're at the end of the road.

Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing that it's in now, when it does, we will have completely moved on from advertising.

The web will still be used for commercial purposes, people will still buy things from Amazon and Amazon-like sites, but they will find information for products as they do now, by searching for it, and finding out what other people think, not by clicking on ads and buying things on the pages they link to.

No one needs advertising, and there are much better ways to sell products.

It's the first thing companies cut when business dries up, and it'll be completely forgotten when the economy comes back. Growth will come from putting your commercial information where people will find it when they're looking and that won't cost anything.

Remember that perfectly targeted advertising is just information.

I'll give you an example.

The other day I broke the carafe on my Cuisinart coffee maker. Looked up the model on Amazon, found the related entry ("people who bought this also bought this") -- and there it is. Click the Buy Now button, whole transaction from breakage of carafe to the order, about 5 minutes. No advertising involved.

When I bought the coffee maker originally I had no idea that Cuisinart even makes one. I was of course aware of the brand, did they advertise to make me aware of it? Not sure, I don't recall ever seeing one, but they probably did run an ad somewhere. That kind of advertising might have a future of some kind. But I chose this brand of coffee maker because people who had one really liked it, and the other brands, their users didn't like them so much. I wanted hot coffee that stayed fresh, and was willing to pay extra for it. I should have known they make fragile carafes and overcharge for replacements, but they got me.

I went to GAMA-GO's holiday sale in San Francisco on Saturday and it was pandemonium (the fun kind). I was really happy to meet a bunch of BB readers who stopped by! Next time I have a party, I'm going to offer hoodies and t-shirts at 75 percent off. Maybe I'll have a line around the block too! This Saturday, November 15, the mayhem heads south to the Bigfoot Lodge in Los Angeles. GAMA-GO's Greg Long says, "There will be items for men and women plus some extremely rare non-production samples!"
GAMA-GO Los Angeles Holiday Sale

Say hello to your new Dennou AR girlfriend. Feministing deems her a "virtual torture victim"; Gizmodo declares the 3D webcam hottie "entrancing, if a little perverted." NSFW?

Here's a simple solder fume filter/fan made from a plastic CD spool case, aquarium filter material, and some scrounged electronics.

Fume Extractor [via the Make: Flickr Pool]

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eldavojohn writes ""Some of your classmates are trying to contact you!" reads one e-mail. Attempts to remove yourself from the mailing list may only result in more mailings from the site of ill repute. Well, Ars Techica brings us news of a suit against Classmates.com. You don't need to look far for anti-classmates.com sentiment spreading like wild fire across the tubes." Good next target: ads that say "you've already won" some expensive toy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Convicted felon Ted Stevens (R, Alaska) may lose his Senate Seat after all. As vote tallies trickle in, his opponent, Democrat Mark Begich is in the lead.

Mark Begich (D) - 132,196
Ted Stevens (R) - 131,382

Markos "Daily Kos" Moulitsas, who's been following the numbers closely, claims that the remaining ballots come from Democratic-leaning districts. Nate "538" Silver has more. If Begich even builds a 0.51 percent lead over Stevens (he's at a 0.29 percent lead now), he escapes a recount and takes over the seat. This would, among other things, close Sarah Palin's escape hatch out of Alaskan politics. It would also lock down 58 Democratic Senate seats (counting Joe Lieberman), with the Minnesota Senate race looking better for them every day. (Democrat Al Franken has gained hundreds of votes as the state recounts ballots, and the Republicans have shown their panic with lawsuits and op-eds trying to cast doubt on the count.)

Reason: Ted Stevens, Walking the Bridge to Nowhere

Eric Goldman knows I sure do love wacky and ridiculous lawsuits against various tech and media companies, but the latest case he sent over may set a new standard. At least in the past, those lawsuits were something close to understandable -- if totally unbelievable. But the latest lawsuit, Barboza et al v. Fox-32 WFLD-TV et al is simply incomprehensible. The plaintiff, which seems to be an individual, a film company, an advertising company and a psychic reading company (or perhaps all a single entity wrapped into one) is suing a whole bunch of tech and media companies, including News Corp., Google, MSNBC and a bunch of radio and TV affiliates of CBS, ABC and others. For what? I have absolutely no clue and would appreciate some help trying to decipher it. There's something about sexual harassment. Some other stuff about copyright or potentially patent infringement, and then a whole bunch of gibberish. Oh yeah, and something about human brain telepathy.

You can basically pick your spot at random to get a sense of the utter oddity of the lawsuit. There are words there, but they're sorta thrown out at random: For this, he's demanding $450 million. The lawsuit will, of course, be thrown out in no time flat (if it hasn't already been tossed), but it's posted here for your enjoyment (or bewilderment).

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Over at BB Gadgets, Rob spotted this delightful LED Motherboard Menorah for Hanukkah. It's $25 from Fredlare.com but I'm sure not a difficult DIY project. They should offer a kit version of this too!
LED Motherboard Menorah (discussion at BB Gadgets)

Jules was created by David Hanson of Hanson Robotics. Jules: another creepy robot

From Craft magazine: Fetus cookie cutter

London artist Roger Hiorns covered every square inch of an abandoned apartment with blue copper phosphate crystals. Called "Seizure," it looks like a magical cave from some fantasy novel. From Shape And Colour:

After reinforcing the walls and ceiling and covering them in plastic sheeting, 80,000 litres of a copper sulphate solution was poured in from a hole in the ceiling. After a few weeks the temperature of the solution fell and the crystals began to grow. The remaining liquid was pumped back out and sent for special chemical recycling.

Roger Hiorns's crystal apartment (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

Lenore and Windell of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories make cool-looking kitchenware items out of Lego. Kitchenware made from Lego

nerdyH writes "Canonical will port Ubuntu Desktop Linux to the ARMv7 architecture. The announcement sets the stage for Intel to lose the traditional 'software advantage' that has enabled x86 to shrug off attacks from other architectures for the last 30 years. How long can it be before Microsoft responds with a Windows 7 port? I mean, x86 just can't do 'idle power' like ARM ... Nokia's N810 tablets can standby for several weeks, just like a cell phone, keeping you 'present' on IM, behind IPv4 NAT the whole time. The first Atom MIDs are standing by for 6-7 hours."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Psy-fi favorite Chris Reccardi has a new show opening this Saturday at M Modern Gallery in Palm Springs, California. The headspinning music-themed exhibition, titled Cosmodelic, runs until December 17 and is also viewable online. Chris Reccardi's Cosmodelic show

Morning links from Radley Balko's The Agitator:

• Washington's $5 Trillion Tab. "We’re now quickly approaching 50 percent of the annual U.S. gross domestic product."

• Lobbyists Swarm the Treasury for Piece of Bailout Pie. "Then there is the National Marine Manufacturers Association, which is asking whether boat financing companies might be eligible for aid to ensure that dealers have access to credit to stock their showrooms with boats — costs have gone up as the credit markets have calcified."

• Flickr set of NYC in the 1930s. "Was there a better time for style than the art deco era?"

• Color photos of World War I.

• Court Rules Against White House in Missing E-Mails Case. "Judge Henry H. Kennedy, a Clinton appointee, rejected the Bush administration's claim that federal courts lacked the authority to require the White House to recover the e-mails."

• Watch the clock in this time lapse video of a dog who really knows how to enjoy life.

• Mobile treadmill. "The proud creators of SpeedFit are now looking for investors."

Classes from SparkFun & tutorials...

For awhile now, we've been offering classes on various topics to friends and family of SparkFun. We are now opening them up to the public! Our first class is December 3rd, 2008 at the SparkFun office and will cover surface mount soldering. This is the first of growing offerings in our new classes category.

If you've ever soldered a header or connector into a PCB, you've probably experienced how tricky it can be to get the thing centered, straight, and flush. Our in house QC manager found an ingenious solution so that all of your headers will be mounted cleanly onto your PCB. Checkout this new tutorial!

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I understand Maker Faire Austin is done and gone, but I'm still thinking about how much fun it was. Over the next week or 2, I'll continue to share some highlights from the most make-tastic event Austin's ever seen.

Thanks to our friends at South by Southwest, and especially filmmaker Jonathan Zmikly, for this excellent Maker Faire Austin video:

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Mashable Open Web Awards
A few makers sent in this widget to make it easier to vote for MAKE in the how-to category of the 2nd annual Open Web Awards, if you like us and what we've been cooking here vote for us! The widget above has MAKE and the category filled out already, just enter an email addy and hit submit! You'll need to put a real email address so you can confirm via the link they send out.

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Washington Post: "For Iran's leaders, the only state of affairs worse than poor relations with the United States may be improved relations."

Let this be a lesson to our hawkish friends. When you growl at your enemies, often you're helping them. If you say "Okay let's talk," all of a sudden it's hard for them to get the support of their people.

Around the world, everyone with Internet access watched our election, and much as we were fixed on it, so were they. The techniques Obama used in North Carolina, Indiana and Missouri will work just as well in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and with the citizens of our friends, India, Japan, France and Germany.

That's why leaders of all those countries should be heeding the lessons of the 2008 election here in the US. This was not just a turning point for one country, it was a turning point for politics everywhere.

Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art came across this Flickr gallery of old Scholastic book covers. I loved these books when I was growing up, and recognized many of them in the gallery. Shown here are four of my favorites: 100 Pounds of Popcorn, Encyclopedia Brown Strikes Again, Beyond Belief, and Spooky Magic (the art is terrific on this one!).

Nostalgia for the Scholastic Book Club

Back in 2005, we wrote about a Canadian Supreme Court decisions that cleared Montreal company Mega Brands from charges of trademark violations for creating Mega Bloks as a competitor to Lego's well known interconnecting blocks. For years, Lego owned patents on its blocks, but those patents expired and, as has been known to happen, competitors entered the space. Lego, of course, decided that rather than compete on the merits, it would continue to try to avoid market competition through the use of trademark and copyright law. Despite losing in Canada, the company still pushed its trademark claims in Europe -- but a European court has now sided with Mega Brands as well, in noting that no trademark should be allowed on the concept of interconnecting blocks.

It's quite likely that Lego will appeal this decision, as the company has quite the reputation for being overly aggressive when it comes to protecting its offerings. However, hopefully the company will realize that actually competing in the marketplace isn't such a bad thing sometimes.

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"Superego," directed by Supervert, for Ballardian Home Movies: The Final Cut. (Via La Petite Claudine.)

JOHN: Big Ballard is watching you! And joined by a smaller version of himself. Ballard argues with himself over an unheard question. As we watch, we are given permission only to be refused a second later. We are eventually told ‘no’ twice and our audience is over. That the responses are from Sam Scoggins’s movie about The Unlimited Dream Company and the ‘90 questions from the Eyckman Personality Quotient test’ give the film a different meaning, that you’re being fed the results of a psychological experiment, while appearing to participate in one yourself.

SIMON: This film manipulates footage from the Scoggins film and is just a little disconcerting. It’s like being given a glimpse into a malfunctioning brain, with its psychopathology unashamedly on show, brandished like a weapon. Ultimately the synaptic process is unfathomable and the viewer, like all readers of Ballard, is left on the outer, able to only impotently guess at the intent, forced to fill in the dots herself…

The original Gears of War was one of the most popular games of 2006, helping to solidify the Xbox 360's place in the console market. Since then, it's sold about 5 million copies. When word leaked out that a sequel was in the works, many wondered if Epic Games could reach the bar set by the first game. As it turns out, they could. Gears of War 2 will feel very familiar to those who have played its predecessor. Games often have a way of reinventing themselves as sequels come and go, but Epic stuck to the basics of what had already worked so well, and simply set about improving, polishing, and fleshing out the Gears world as much as they could. Read on for the rest of the review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A friend is at the NewTeeVee conference in San Francisco, and I was thinking about going myself, I'm sure I could sneak in, but decided to stay in Berkeley when Steve Garfield posted a link to the video stream, which I'm watching now.

It's very good quality. And while the conference is going on, I'm doing the same thing I'd do if I was there -- browsing the web, posting items to Twitter and FriendFeed, and listening with about 1/12th of my mind.



It's all the same. Life is good!

Boing Boing buddy Ape Lad points out that simple anagrams yield 18,258 better possible titles for the new Bond movie Quantum of Solace (which I can't wait to see). Anagrams yield better plot points, too. Here are my favorites. A photoshopping contest for these movie posters would be fun:

* Macaques Fool Nut
* Macaques Fun Loot
* Canal Mosque Tofu
* Coequal Atom Funs
* Ocean Qualms Tofu
* Clam Sofa Unquote
* Cumquats Loaf One
* Toucans Qualm Foe
* Fame Squat Uncool

biohack writes "An article in the New York Times provides interesting insight into online communities of people who believe that they are subjected to mind control. 'Type "mind control" or "gang stalking" into Google, and Web sites appear that describe cases of persecution, both psychological and physical, related with the same minute details — red and white cars following victims, vandalism of their homes, snickering by those around them.' According to Dr. Vaughan Bell, a British psychologist who has researched the effect of the Internet on mental illness, '[the] extent of the community [...] poses a paradox to the traditional way delusion is defined under the diagnostic guidelines of the American Psychiatric Association, which says that if a belief is held by a person's "culture or subculture," it is not a delusion. The exception accounts for rituals of religious faith, for example.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yet another severed foot in a shoe has been found in British Columbia. For BB readers who may have lost count, this is the sixth foot that has turned up in the region in 14 months. As my brother Mark says, it may be evidence of "the ultimate foot fetish." Not sure about that, but something is definitely afoot. From CNN:

The shoe -- a left New Balance running shoe -- was found about 11:30 a.m. Tuesday on the south arm of the Fraser River by a Richmond, British Columbia, couple, police said...

Four of the five feet discovered between August 2007 and June 2008 were in running shoes made between 2003 and 2004, and the other was made in 1999, according to police. Royal Canadian Mounted Police have released photos of the shoes, hoping someone can help identify the remains.

Apparent 6th severed foot found in British Columbia

Previously on BB:
• Posts about the saga of the severed feet

Just posted! Our new lens review featuring the Pentax smc P-FA 50mm 1:1.4. This is the latest in our on-going series scrutinising the optical credentials of the camera manufacturers' various "fast fifties", and looks at a lens which has been around since the days of 35mm film. Designed as a fast 'standard' prime, it's now being pressed into service as a short portrait telephoto on the APS-C sensor. So how well has it adapted to this new role?

After days of resistance, I have finally succumbed to the cuteness of the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam. Live streaming puppy play, all day, every day. "The six Shiba Inu pups (3 boys and 3 girls) turned 5 weeks old on November 11th. This is the first litter from their mom, Kika."
Puppy Cam (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson and Lisa Mumbach!)

TriGears by Oskar van Deventer, and Bram Cohen via Jorn...

TriGears is a special puzzle. There are three gears set so that turning one gear turns the other two. If the three gears were in a flat plane they would, of course, jam. Oskar had the gears bevelled and set them at 60 degrees so that they all mesh in the middle. This apparently has no practical value and would not be a puzzle if Oskar had not made the teeth of the gears of varying width and of varying spacing. The object of the puzzle is to place the three gears in their holder such that they spin freely and do not jam. There is only one way to do this (see the solution). All other assemblies quickly jam. Once solved, the puzzle becomes a toy in that it is very satisfying to keep spinning the gears.

More here too...

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Snip from dosenation's review of Christmas on Mars, a new sci-fi feature film coming out on DVD this week from The Flaming Lips:

[T]he film is a low-budget, mostly black and white sci-fi movie about an American outpost on Mars in some distant future. The crew has been there for a year, during which time they've all slowly begun to go insane from the isolation and the unbelievable nature of their situation; a recurring theme is "Man was not meant to live in space." It's Christmas Eve, and a scientist played by Steven, the band's guitar player (who turns in a surprisingly good performance), is trying to organize a singing of Christmas carols to help lift spirits, but the guy who is supposed to play Santa goes crazy and throws himself out a hatch onto the surface of Mars. As they go to collect the guy's body, an alien super-being appears, played by Wayne. He never speaks. Meanwhile, some clueless technicians accidentally destroy the last remaining oxygen generator thingie, so they're all going to die. Oh and also, the movie starts with Wayne the alien super-being spitting some weird cosmic ejaculate out of his mouth that flies through space and impregnates what turns out to be the only woman you ever see on this outpost, played I believe by Wayne's wife.

Link to review by Scotto at Dosenation, and here's the Amazon Link for Christmas on Mars (Thanks, Gareth!) Trailer/teaser for the film follows:

This from the Daily Mail:

Jules has 34 internal motors covered with flexible rubber ('Frubber') skin, which was commissioned from roboticist David Hanson in the US for BRL.

It was originally programmed to act out a series of movements - as can be seen in the video - where 'Jules' talks about 'destroying Wales'.

The technology works using ten stock human emotions - such as happiness, sadness, concern etc - that the team 'taught' Jules via programming.

The software then maps what it sees to Jules's face to combine expressions instantly to mimic those being shown by a human subject.

Jules was created by David Hanson of Hanson Robotics

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Over at We Make Money Not Art, Regine has a post up about an international art fair in Italy that included the work of Guatemalan performance artist Regina José Galindo, whose work addresses "social injustice, gender discrimination, racism and the governmental atrocities of her own country." Earlier this year 2008, she began a project in protest of America's booming industry of private prisons -- and that project involved her own family.

For her performance, America's Family Prison, Galindo rented a cell for $8,000 from Sweeper Metal Fabricators Corp and had it transported to the Art Pace gallery in San Antonio TX.

The artist, her husband and their 2-year-old daughter locked themselves in the mobile prison unit for 36 hours. Gallery visitors could peep through the narrow windows of the brightly-lighted cell and observe the family as they tried to occupy themselves with books and drawings during their voluntary detention.

The performance refers in particular to T. Don Hutto "Family Residential Center," a for-profit private prison located in Taylor, near Austin, and operated by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private jail company in the world with one of the highest stock market values on Wall Street.

T. Don Hutto is the first prison authorized by the state to lodge whole families: men, pregnant women, adolescents, children, women, and even babies. The inmates are not necessarily criminals, very often they are detained there while their immigration status is determined.

Below, an excerpt from a documentary about life in T. Don Hutto Prison. More of that documentary, and more photos of Galindo's installation with her own family, here: Artissima: America's Family Prison (WMMNA, thanks Susannah!)

Urban Prankster writes -

Montreal group Les Fourmis came up with a clever use for campaign signs after the recent Canadian election– turn them into birdhouses and put them up around the city. I wonder how many millions of campaign signs there are in the US right now heading to a landfill?

Photo set here. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

Judge Miriam Hall Patel, who among other things, is known for her decision that effectively killed off Napster (which I still believe interpreted copyright law incorrectly, and put the liability on the wrong party... but that's another post). Apparently, Patel has also been spending some time thinking about how to repair copyright. She gave a speech this week at Fordham Law, where she laid out the details of her plan that are certainly... different. The idea would basically be to establish a hybrid public-private entity that would effectively determine everything having to do with music and copyright. If this makes you cringe, you're not alone.

On the good side, the suggestion includes the idea to wipe out the massive patchwork set of copyright royalty and licensing rules that are so much of the problem today. Every time some new technology comes along, we end up with yet another new patch on copyright law, making it so that it's nearly impossible these days to do much of anything with music without having to hire a lawyer to figure out which six or twelve different stakeholders you'll have to pay.

But, that's about all that's good here. Everything else looks like it's setting up a huge bureaucracy (the fact that it would be a mix of public and private representatives is rather meaningless) that would effectively decide everything having to do with music. There would be compulsory blanket licensing, and you would have to apply for a special exemption to get out of it.

Then there's the ugly part. She would require any new device manufacturers or application developers to get approval from this new body before creating any new products. Yes, she wants to create a board to approve new innovations and determine what is and what is not allowed. This should scare pretty much everyone. That's not how innovation works, and any such plan would basically move all innovation in the industry outside of the US, allowing everyone else to leapfrog us quite quickly.

It's great that people are trying to come up with out-of-the-box ideas, but this one, perhaps needs a bit more time marinating in the box.

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Handy tip, MAKE Flickr photo pool member Superlocal writes -

I am always forgetting my prepaid numbers esp when i'm in a city for a few days, so i just snap the number on my iPhone camera and make it my wallpaper, so it's easier to get at whenever i meet someone who needs it. (i know it's a bit blurry but at least it's mostly legible)...

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rallymatte writes to mention that camera maker RED has announced a new digital stills and motion camera system that includes one model that can shoot up to 28K at 25 fps. The new system will come in three tiers, scarlet, epic, and their top of line model which wont be out until possibly 2010. Still image capture will range anywhere from 4.9 megapixels to an insane 261 megapixels. In addition to some impressive "traditional" hardware RED also announced a 3D camera.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

arcticstoat writes "The wait for AMD's next-gen CPUs is finally over., as the company has now officially launched its first 45nm 'Shanghai' Opteron chips for servers and workstations. 'AMD's move to a 45nm process relies on immersion lithography, where a refractive fluid fills the gap between the lens and the wafer, which AMD says will result in 'dramatic performance and performance-per-watt gains.' It's also enabled AMD to increase the maximum clock speed of the Opterons from 2.3GHz with the Barcelona core to 2.7GHz with the Shanghai core. Shanghai chips also feature more cache than their predecessors, with 6MB of Level 3 cache bumping the total up to 8MB, and the chips share the same cache architecture as Barcelona CPUs, with a shared pool of Level 3 cache and an individual allocation of Level 2 cache for each core.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeffery Rudell shows how to make this holiday reindeer out of fusible interfacing over on Craft Stylish. You could do this to make any origami model sturdier; it's a neat texture, too.

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Last month, we launched Disco, and today we're happy to announce the second installment of the Ballroom Family of stock web icons over at the IconShoppe. It's called Square Dance, and it's a simple little set of rounded-square icons that come in 7 colors, 3 sizes and 2 formats (GIF and PNG). And just like Disco, it's also reasonably priced at just thirty-nine bucks.

I've been meaning to put more time into stocking the shelves of the 'Shoppe for a while now, and Meagan has been handling the meticulous color/format production of these new sets, with more to come.

New favorite thing to listen to on the short walk to the office: a bite-sized, 5-minute MP3 of the latest NPR news via their iPhone-friendly mobile site (via). #

One of the great things about the web, obviously, is that it allows for much more efficient communication that opens up new and useful offerings. For example: the web offers the ability to find other people traveling to the same general place you're heading and to set up a convenient carpool. It's good for the environment. It's good for traffic. It just makes a lot of sense. Unless, of course, you're a bus company and you're so afraid that people will use such a system rather than paying to take the bus. That's what happened up in Ontario, as earlier this year we wrote about a bus company that was trying to shut down PickupPal, an online carpooling service, for being an unregulated transportation company. TechCrunch points us to the news that the Ontario transportation board has sided with the bus company and fined PickupPal. It's also established a bunch of draconian rules that any user in Ontario must follow if it uses the service -- including no crossing of municipal boundaries -- meaning the service is only good within any particular city's limits.

It's better than being shut down completely, and the service can still operate elsewhere around the world, but this is yet another case where we see regulations, that are supposedly put in place to improve things for consumers, do the exact opposite. Just like we've seen elsewhere, you get regulatory capture, where an established industry uses the regulations not for their intended purpose, but to actually drastically limit the competition.

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Ubuntu Kitten writes "Since October the community-generated database of cards known to work with Ndiswrapper has been down. This is apparently due to an on-going site redesign, but right now the usual URL simply directs to a stock Sourceforge page. Without the database, the software's usability is severely diminished but this raises an interesting question: Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users? If so, for how long should the support last? Web servers cost money, especially for popular sites. While developers can sometimes find sponsorship, is it possible to get sponsorship simply for infrastructure and user services?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ubuntu Kitten writes "Since October the community-generated database of cards known to work with Ndiswrapper has been down. This is apparently due to an on-going site redesign, but right now the usual URL simply directs to a stock Sourceforge page. Without the database, the software's usability is severely diminished but this raises an interesting question: Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users? If so, for how long should the support last? Web servers cost money, especially for popular sites. While developers can sometimes find sponsorship, is it possible to get sponsorship simply for infrastructure and user services?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Theodore Gray @ PopSci writes -

All the components of glass can be found in two places: the beach and the laundry room. It’s possible to melt pure white-silica beach sand into glass, but only at temperatures of 3,000 to 3,500°F. Washing soda, lime or borax (a traditional laundry aid) added to the sand disrupts the quartz-crystal structure of silica and reduces the required temperature to a more practical, though still dangerous, 2,000°F, which I achieved with a backyard grill and a vacuum cleaner. Glass is thought to have been discovered around 7,000 years ago by Phoenician merchants when cooking fires were built over sand that, by chance, had some of these substances mixed in.

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Gio points out this unusual recipe for a circuit board drill using an an old cassette tape motor - it actually looks pretty comfy to hold, but any malfunction in that coupler/drill bit would likely not be comfy - be sure to wear the appropriate safety gear, suit of armor, etc. - Make@home PCB drill.

More:

Homemade high speed drill

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This "Banana Chandelier" was made from dozens of discarded banana cartons found in the streets and is held together only by paper fasteners. Pretty impressive structure to have in your house although looks like it might be a fire hazard.

Anneke Jakobs via Point and Click Home

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Ostracus writes to tell us that Wired has an interesting summary of some of the best fictional doomsday devices. These devices have featured heavily in movies, television, and fiction, their list includes favorites from Dr. Strangelove to Futurama. What devices have they missed? "By the time Futurama's sci-fi satire hit the scene, creator Matt Groening had the doomsday-device shtick down. Case in point: the Spheroboom. This highly explosive space/time-bending device isn't just the prized jewel of the show's mad scientist, professor Farnsworth. It also destroys anyone/anything not wearing a 'Doom-proof Platinum Vest.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Raphael Abrams (MAKE MP3 player and Twitchy fame) and Max explore the smelly process of high voltage cooking.

More:

HOW TO - Build a five foot tall Jacob's ladder.

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"True" is a performance project that uses myoelectric sensors attached to the performer's bodies that effects the lights and sound of the entire piece. Also effecting the sound, oscillators are attached to the metal scaffolding on both sides of the stage and are shaken in sync with the music and performer's actions. Watch the video above and you can check out the show in person at the Japan Society in NYC from November 13th (today) until November 15th.

True

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1sockchuck writes "If you had 100,000 servers, would you put them on top of a former nuclear fuel facility? One of the world's largest web hosts, 1&1 Internet, is building a new data center on a site in Hanau, Germany previously used by Siemens to produce mixed oxide rods made from enriched uranium and plutonium. The site has been cleaned up, and 1&1 is converting it into a "green" data center powered by renewable energy and using free cooling to save on air conditioning costs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When The Daily Show ran with its "Palin is so dumb" jokes, I was actually wondering where the jokes ended and the truth began (while laughing at the same time). And it seems I'm still left somewhat puzzled -- due to the reports that MSNBC fell for a hoax in which Martin Eisenstadt claims to be the source for the rumor that Sarah Palin didn't know if Africa was a country or a continent.

... the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate hoax that has been going on for months.

But the reported hoax is about how Eisenstadt isn't a real person and that his blog and job at the "Harding Institute" are entirely made up. That doesn't quite address whether or not Fox News (which broke the Africa story) used Eisenstadt as a source, though.... And it's actually very easy to mis-read the report on the hoax as saying that the whole Africa anecdote is untrue because the source was fake. However, no one knows who the real source is for Fox's story (except for Fox News, of course). So it's very possible that Fox didn't use Eisenstadt as a source, and with all the hoaxes going around recently, it's also possible that there's a very elaborate string of hoaxes going on. In fact, the joke continues as Eisenstadt states on his blog: "I deny any and all accusations that I somehow don't exist."

I'm willing to grant that Palin knows Africa is a continent, but Fox News isn't running an apology for its own reporting (as far as I can tell) -- so where does this joke really end?

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This photo sculpture by Canadian artist Susy Olivera creates a 3D polygon person with photos and foam. This particular piece is called "Time is Never Wasted" and resembles a dead body from a video game like Grand Theft Auto or similar.

Susy Oliveira via Neatorama

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Have you ever felt frustrated, when trying to open a web page that takes forever to load? Those sites with tons of videos, images, and fancy graphics are definitely cool, but if my Internet service provider bandwidth can't keep up with it, frustration sets in and I rapidly move on to something else. Photo credit: mipan As an online publisher, the time it takes for your readers to fully load a web page on your site is absolutely of critical importance. Beyond a five seconds wait impatience sets in, and after ten seconds or more many of your readers will start to leave. In the following report, the home pages of the most popular Technorati 100 blogs have been tested for file size and download speed. How long does it take to for a typical reader to load the home page of any of this highly popular blog sites? Pingdom, a web service that specializes in monitoring the availability and response time of websites, has armed itself with precision analysis tools and loads of time to find out more closely the effective page load time for these popular sites. Here all the details: Intro by Daniele Bazzano

Load Size Analysis of The Top 100 Blogs

Introduction

This report presents an analysis of 100 top blogs, picked from the Technorati top 100 list. For each of these blogs, the front page (homepage) has been analyzed to see how large its download size is and what contributes the most to this size. We have chosen to not present the blogs individually in this report, but have instead focused on them as a group to get more general data.

Total Blog Front Page Size

Click above to enlarge image The size difference between the different blog front pages was very large. One front page was close to 6 MB in size, though it is an extreme case and should not be considered representative. Most blog front pages, 93%, were below 2 MB in size.

• The average total size of the front page was 934 KB.
• 35% had a front page larger than 1 MB.
• 26% had a front page smaller than 500 KB.
• 39% (the largest segment) had a front page between 500 KB and 1 MB.

Images and Scripts The Largest Contributors to Size

Click above to enlarge image When averaging all the 100 blogs included in the survey, it was clear that the single largest contributor to the size of the front page was images, which in itself should not come as a surprise considering that today’s blogs often are very visual and contain many images.

• Images: 61.3%
• Scripts: 17.2%
• HTML: 15.3%
• CSS: 5.9%

Number of Images per Page

View image Click above to enlarge image On average, there were 63 images included on the front page, though the number varied greatly. Some had less than 10 images, while others had more than 100. You can see the distribution in the diagram below. In addition to images in the posts themselves, images are also common in the design of the layout of the blog, which can explain the large number found in some blogs. Both images included in the HTML and the CSS are included in this count.

Number of Scripts per Page

Click above to enlarge image On average, there were 9 script files included on the front page, and here too the number was very varied between the different blogs. The page with the most scripts had as many as 35 script files included. Scripts are often included from external sources, for example visitor statistics scripts such as Google Analytics and Sitemeter. Other examples are Wordpress plugins, which often add their own Javascript files to the blog.

Key Strategic Advices

a) Blog Readers Without Broadband Left Stranded

As this survey has shown, three out of four blogs have front pages larger than 500 KB, and more than one third have a front page larger than 1 MB. With an ideal, perfect connection, this is how long it takes to download 1 MB (1048576 byte) of data:

• 56 kbit/s modem: 2 minutes and 30 seconds
• 256 kbit/s (minimum limit for broadband): 33 seconds
• 384 kbit/s (3G “low speed”): 22 seconds
• 1 mbit/s (low-end broadband): 8.4 seconds
• 10 mbit/s: 0.84 seconds

Note, however, that this assumes that the bandwidth is utilized to 100%, which normally won’t happen. The above numbers just show you the theoretical upper limit. In short, blog readers with slower connections will have problems loading the front page of many of today’s blogs, at least with images enabled.

b) Size and Speed Optimization of Blogs

Since images constitute almost two thirds of the size of the entire page on average, it would seem logical to start the optimization there. This can be done in two ways (which are not mutually exclusive):

1. Optimize the size of the images. Depending on its content, an image size can be optimized by choosing an appropriate format, compression level, color depth, and other relevant settings.
2. Use fewer images (many blogs have a large number of small image elements). This will also have the positive side effect of fewer requests being made to the web server which is also beneficial for performance. One way of having fewer images is the use of so-called sprites, where several images are stored in one.

Since scripts came in second, size wise, here are a few tips that apply to reducing the impact of scripts on the load time:

• It can be a good idea to see if it is possible to reduce the number of scripts used on a blog. Are all of them really necessary? Are there for example scripts present from Wordpress plugins that you are not using anymore?
• Since reducing the number of requests to the web server is a good way to enhance performance, it is often a good idea to merge all your scripts (or at least most of them) into one file, making it one single download.
• Another factor to consider is that by including external scripts, a blog’s load time can be affected by loading issues with that external script (which is outside the blog owner’s control).

These are just a few advice regarding these specific areas. Website optimization is a huge subject and going into detail here would be outside the scope of this report.

Conclusion

There will of course be some size variations depending on the current content presented on the blogs, but the overall, average data is not bound to change much and is highly relevant, especially considering the large sample base. Since many blogs try to attract a large number of readers, they may be doing themselves a disservice if they let their blog size get too big, which will result in a slow-loading blog. Browser-side caching will help things a bit for frequent readers, but any new or casual visitor will have to load the page in its entirety and some may give up before it is finished or at least get frustrated. (And no one wants frustrated readers.) Even broadband users would benefit from smaller page sizes with fewer objects on them. This would speed up the responsiveness of the website for them as well. Ultimately it would also be beneficial for the blog owner since it would put less stress on his server(s) and demand less bandwidth. We suspect that not all blog owners are really aware of how large their blog pages actually get, so we hope that this report will prove helpful in raising discussion around this subject. Some blogs are bound to be large, especially if the content relies heavily on images, but many others could most likely significantly reduce their download size (and download speed) with the few simple measures we mentioned above.
N.B.: The data was collected with the Full Page Test in Pingdom Tools, which is a Web-based tool provided freely by Pingdom. It will load and analyze all elements of a web page and present the data in a way that can be examined and filtered with a simple interface. The tests that provided the basis for this report were performed on October 30, 2008.
Originally written by Pingdom for Royal Pingdom and first published on November 5th 2008 as "Load size analysis of the top 100 blogs".

About the author Pingdom is an uptime monitoring service, monitoring the availability and response time of websites, servers and services on the Internet. Pingdom was created by Sam Nurmi, founder and previous CEO of Sweden’s web hosting company, Loopia.
Photo credits: Total Blog Front Page Size - Pingdom Images and Scripts The Largest Contributors to Size - Pingdom Number of Images Per Page - Pingdom Number of Scripts Per Page - Pingdom Blog Readers Without Broadband Left Stranded - Gino Santa Maria Size and Speed Optimization of Blogs - Lisa F. Young

Have you ever felt frustrated, when trying to open a web page that takes forever to load? Those sites with tons of videos, images, and fancy graphics are definitely cool, but if my Internet service provider bandwidth can't keep up with it, frustration sets in and I rapidly move on to something else. Photo credit: mipan As an online publisher, the time it takes for your readers to fully load a web page on your site is absolutely of critical importance. Beyond a five seconds wait impatience sets in, and after ten seconds or more many of your readers will start to leave. In the following report, the home pages of the most popular Technorati 100 blogs have been tested for file size and download speed. How long does it take to for a typical reader to load the home page of any of this highly popular blog sites? Pingdom, a web service that specializes in monitoring the availability and response time of websites, has armed itself with precision analysis tools and loads of time to find out more closely the effective page load time for these popular sites. Here all the details: Intro by Daniele Bazzano

Load Size Analysis of The Top 100 Blogs

Introduction

This report presents an analysis of 100 top blogs, picked from the Technorati top 100 list. For each of these blogs, the front page (homepage) has been analyzed to see how large its download size is and what contributes the most to this size. We have chosen to not present the blogs individually in this report, but have instead focused on them as a group to get more general data.

Total Blog Front Page Size

Click above to enlarge image The size difference between the different blog front pages was very large. One front page was close to 6 MB in size, though it is an extreme case and should not be considered representative. Most blog front pages, 93%, were below 2 MB in size.

• The average total size of the front page was 934 KB.
• 35% had a front page larger than 1 MB.
• 26% had a front page smaller than 500 KB.
• 39% (the largest segment) had a front page between 500 KB and 1 MB.

Images and Scripts The Largest Contributors to Size

Click above to enlarge image When averaging all the 100 blogs included in the survey, it was clear that the single largest contributor to the size of the front page was images, which in itself should not come as a surprise considering that today’s blogs often are very visual and contain many images.

• Images: 61.3%
• Scripts: 17.2%
• HTML: 15.3%
• CSS: 5.9%

Number of Images per Page

View image Click above to enlarge image On average, there were 63 images included on the front page, though the number varied greatly. Some had less than 10 images, while others had more than 100. You can see the distribution in the diagram below. In addition to images in the posts themselves, images are also common in the design of the layout of the blog, which can explain the large number found in some blogs. Both images included in the HTML and the CSS are included in this count.

Number of Scripts per Page

Click above to enlarge image On average, there were 9 script files included on the front page, and here too the number was very varied between the different blogs. The page with the most scripts had as many as 35 script files included. Scripts are often included from external sources, for example visitor statistics scripts such as Google Analytics and Sitemeter. Other examples are Wordpress plugins, which often add their own Javascript files to the blog.

Key Strategic Advices

a) Blog Readers Without Broadband Left Stranded

As this survey has shown, three out of four blogs have front pages larger than 500 KB, and more than one third have a front page larger than 1 MB. With an ideal, perfect connection, this is how long it takes to download 1 MB (1048576 byte) of data:

• 56 kbit/s modem: 2 minutes and 30 seconds
• 256 kbit/s (minimum limit for broadband): 33 seconds
• 384 kbit/s (3G “low speed”): 22 seconds
• 1 mbit/s (low-end broadband): 8.4 seconds
• 10 mbit/s: 0.84 seconds

Note, however, that this assumes that the bandwidth is utilized to 100%, which normally won’t happen. The above numbers just show you the theoretical upper limit. In short, blog readers with slower connections will have problems loading the front page of many of today’s blogs, at least with images enabled.

b) Size and Speed Optimization of Blogs

Since images constitute almost two thirds of the size of the entire page on average, it would seem logical to start the optimization there. This can be done in two ways (which are not mutually exclusive):

1. Optimize the size of the images. Depending on its content, an image size can be optimized by choosing an appropriate format, compression level, color depth, and other relevant settings.
2. Use fewer images (many blogs have a large number of small image elements). This will also have the positive side effect of fewer requests being made to the web server which is also beneficial for performance. One way of having fewer images is the use of so-called sprites, where several images are stored in one.

Since scripts came in second, size wise, here are a few tips that apply to reducing the impact of scripts on the load time:

• It can be a good idea to see if it is possible to reduce the number of scripts used on a blog. Are all of them really necessary? Are there for example scripts present from Wordpress plugins that you are not using anymore?
• Since reducing the number of requests to the web server is a good way to enhance performance, it is often a good idea to merge all your scripts (or at least most of them) into one file, making it one single download.
• Another factor to consider is that by including external scripts, a blog’s load time can be affected by loading issues with that external script (which is outside the blog owner’s control).

These are just a few advice regarding these specific areas. Website optimization is a huge subject and going into detail here would be outside the scope of this report.

Conclusion

There will of course be some size variations depending on the current content presented on the blogs, but the overall, average data is not bound to change much and is highly relevant, especially considering the large sample base. Since many blogs try to attract a large number of readers, they may be doing themselves a disservice if they let their blog size get too big, which will result in a slow-loading blog. Browser-side caching will help things a bit for frequent readers, but any new or casual visitor will have to load the page in its entirety and some may give up before it is finished or at least get frustrated. (And no one wants frustrated readers.) Even broadband users would benefit from smaller page sizes with fewer objects on them. This would speed up the responsiveness of the website for them as well. Ultimately it would also be beneficial for the blog owner since it would put less stress on his server(s) and demand less bandwidth. We suspect that not all blog owners are really aware of how large their blog pages actually get, so we hope that this report will prove helpful in raising discussion around this subject. Some blogs are bound to be large, especially if the content relies heavily on images, but many others could most likely significantly reduce their download size (and download speed) with the few simple measures we mentioned above.
N.B.: The data was collected with the Full Page Test in Pingdom Tools, which is a Web-based tool provided freely by Pingdom. It will load and analyze all elements of a web page and present the data in a way that can be examined and filtered with a simple interface. The tests that provided the basis for this report were performed on October 30, 2008.
Originally written by Pingdom for Royal Pingdom and first published on November 5th 2008 as "Load size analysis of the top 100 blogs".

About the author Pingdom is an uptime monitoring service, monitoring the availability and response time of websites, servers and services on the Internet. Pingdom was created by Sam Nurmi, founder and previous CEO of Sweden’s web hosting company, Loopia.
Photo credits: Total Blog Front Page Size - Pingdom Images and Scripts The Largest Contributors to Size - Pingdom Number of Images Per Page - Pingdom Number of Scripts Per Page - Pingdom Blog Readers Without Broadband Left Stranded - Gino Santa Maria Size and Speed Optimization of Blogs - Lisa F. Young

Nick has a nice post about visualizing sound on an Arduino. He uploaded the Processing and Arduino code so you can try it out yourself. This looks like a good place to start learning about the Minim library and Processing.

I modified another old Processing program of mine to graphically react to sound using the Minim library. The program outputs the sound level to an Arduino connected to a breadboard, creating a sound level meter using LEDs. The code is a bit sloppy (and uncommented!) as I quickly tried to prototype these ideas.

More about Visualizing sound with an Arduino

In the Maker Shed:


Bare Bones Arduino Board Kit (Unassembled)

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Photograph by Noah Weinstein

Teen firebug Billy Gordon knew what to do when he saw matches on sale at the supermarket. Buy 20,000 of them. And when he got them home? Use them to build one gigantic, strike-anywhere match.

He measured an ordinary 2¼-inch kitchen match with digital calipers, then scaled it up precisely to 8 feet. That meant he needed an explosive match head 7 inches long, laid on 1 inch thick.

"I've been doing pyrotechnical projects my entire life," says Gordon. At age 8 he dismantled fireworks and concocted new ones under parental supervision. By his teens he had taught himself to breathe fire, using kerosene or paraffin. His recent Instructables projects (screen name: Tetranitrate) include flash powder, thermite, exploding paint, an egg-timer detonator, "fire shaving" (mmm, burnt hair), and a really-not-advisable laser tattoo (mmm, burnt flesh).

Now 20, Gordon splits his time between his intern gig at Instructables HQ in San Francisco and NYU's Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, N. Y., where his studies in electrical engineering have sparked nonflammable projects like an LED chess set, hand-cranked Lego USB charger, and spy camera shirt.

To make the mighty match head, he spent weeks cutting the heads off 15,000 cardboard safety matches. He mixed in 30 ping-pong balls dissolved with acetone to make nitrocellulose glue, then glommed it all onto a 4× 4 post. For the giant strike-anywhere tip, he snipped 250 wooden kitchen matches and glued those on top, one by one -- risky business, as the slightest impact could have set the whole thing off. A little paint to brighten it up, and it was showtime.

When igniting the giant match, Gordon didn't actually singe off his eyebrows, but at least one reader felt compelled to ask. At a show-and-tell night for Instructables users, he swung the colossal firestarter against a sandpaper striker, detonating an unexpected 6-foot fireball that nearly forced him to drop the hot potato.

"For about a half-second I was thinking, 'Great, this works,' then it quickly went to, 'Crap, I might burn myself!'"

How-to and Video: instructables.com/id/giant-match

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 15, page 24 - Keith Hammond.

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This is a really cool laser light show that can display vector images via two high-speed galvo scanners. This isn't a simple DIY project, but there is a lot of information and source code available to help you get started.

More about PIC-based laser light show [About Microcontroller]

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Earlier this year, we pointed out that if you're a broadband provider implementing some kind of broadband cap, and you're hyping it up by showing off just how many emails can be sent under the cap, there's a problem. Obviously, ISPs are using the number of emails as a criteria because emails use up almost no bandwidth -- so no matter what the cap is, the answer is "a lot." But, of course, the number of emails you can send is meaningless. There's no big email epidemic that is what has ISPs claiming they need to put in place limits. As Broadband Reports notes, it's all incredibly demeaning to focus on the number of emails you can send:

Those would all be relevant measurement criteria, were we all idiots.

People don't care about how many emails they can send. They want to know if they'll actually be able to download more than half an HD movie. Focusing on emails is like telling someone that a full tank of gas in their car will allow them to travel six hundred million millimeters. That's meaningless for someone who wants to know if they can actually get from San Francisco to Los Angeles on a single tank of gas. If these ISPs really feel the need to implement caps, at least be honest about what it means for customers.

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Death Metal writes "Companies in Europe have begun to roll out an advanced biometric system from Japan that identifies people from the unique patterns of veins inside their fingers. Finger vein authentication, introduced widely by Japanese banks in the last two years, is claimed to be the fastest and most secure biometric method. Developed by Hitachi, it verifies a person's identity based on the lattice work of minute blood vessels under the skin."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is a really amazing sculpture by Thomas Traxler that uses solar power to create even more sculpture. I really like the end product, and how it creates a physical representation of the data gathered throughout the day.

Powered by nothing but sunlight and some threads, Thomas Traxlers' "The idea of a tree project" shows us how objects can grow during the course of a day. The installation is powered by a couple of solar cells which power the entire device, causing the process to move faster or slower depending on the amount of available light. The speed of the process determines the amount of saturation of the thread, giving a visual recording in the resulting object.

More about "The Idea Of A Tree" by Thomas Traxler

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Here's the MAKE 2008 gift guide from MAKE volume 16 (PDF). If you have your printed copy of MAKE it's on page 18, a pull out, and in the digital edition it's at the end.

I also wanted to post up a great article by our associate publisher Dan Woods called "The value of a good hands on project"...


Editor and Publisher Dale Dougherty came by my desk the other day pointing at a Newsweek folded back to a chart that ranked retail winners and losers for the past quarter. "Look what came in right behind gasoline stations on the high-growth list," he said, pointing to the circled chart. "Hobby, toy, and game stores." No one who owns a car will be surprised to see that gas stations top the growth chart, but hobby and game stores? We're in the midst of some gray economic times, and folks generally think of hobbies and games as discretionary pursuits, no?

Dale and I were intrigued by the chart because it mapped so closely to our own Maker Shed experience -- a pronounced upswing in interest in kits. To be sure, part of our success is the result of a team of smart editors and staffers who've uncovered beautiful kits and projects that really resonate with our audience of inquisitive makers and science enthusiasts. However, I think the underlying data is telling us something important about ourselves and the kind of value we derive from a good hands-on project.

Perhaps it's the constructive distraction of focusing ourselves on something other than the recession, something where we have a reasonable chance of controlling the outcome. Maybe it's the satisfaction of picking up a new skill, dusting off an old one, or simply learning how something works (or doesn't). Maybe it's the memories that live long after the project is done.

And there's definitely something intrinsically satisfying about passing along skills -- even the simplest of skills -- to a younger maker. What kid doesn't enjoy a workbench, a few tools, and a good project on a rainy day?

Even though many of us are nixing the vacation we'd thought about, driving that funky clunker of a car for another year, or putting the bathroom remodel on hold, the basements, garages, and backyards of this planet are coming alive with experiments, tinkering, and the making spirit.

So this holiday season, whether you provision a project from recycled materials and repurposed

The chart mapped so closely to our own experience: a pronounced upswing in interest in kits.

hardware lying around the house, or decide to buy a project kit from the Maker Shed (makershed.com) or somewhere else, give yourself and someone you care about the gift of making something together.

And if you're in a position and the spirit moves you, consider giving the gift of a science kit to a deserving school or teacher. They need your help more than ever before.

Photography by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid.

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We've written about similar stories plenty of times in the past, but Adam writes in to let us know about a new article highlighting companies who sue those who leave negative reviews of their business online. The businesses complain that the negative reviews can have a serious impact on business -- which no one doubts. But, assuming that the review is truthful or just an opinion, there's really not much that can be done about it. Most companies would be better served responding to the criticism, rather than busting out the lawyers. Even if they feel the criticism is unjustified, it makes more sense to address the points, rather than pulling out the blunt threat of a lawsuit.

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Jason Sahler writes "Recently St. Lucie County in Florida announced that it has teamed up with Geoplasma to develop the United States' first plasma gasification plant. The plant will use super-hot 10,000 degree Fahrenheit plasma to effectively vaporize 1,500 tons of trash each day, which in turn spins turbines to generate 60MW of electricity — enough to power 50,000 homes!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's always struck me that font embedding is a huge omission from the web standards toolkit. If you're not satisfied with Georgia and Verdana, you usually need to turn to images or Flash to get the typeface you want. Tools like sIFR have made this a lot more functional, allowing you to write standard HTML and have Flash dynamically replace content in the page, but using Flash just to display HTML text seems a little unsavory. Typeface.js changes all this, providing a standards-compliant way to deliver a rich type experience using HTML and Javascript with no proprietary technologies.

typeface.js uses browsers' vector drawing capabilites to draw text in HTML documents. For a good while, browsers have had support for vector drawing -- Firefox, Safari, and Opera support the <canvas> element (as well as SVG), and IE supports VML.

You declare the particular fonts to use with the font-family attribute, just as you would normally do in CSS. Then you add the "typeface-js" class to any HTML element that should be rendered by the typeface library. The actual embedded font is delivered to the page in the form of another javascript file, which contains the vector information for the particular font face.

The cool part is that any Truetype font can be easily converted to the javascript format using a perl utility that comes with the package (or a web form provided on the typeface.js site). Simply convert any fonts that your page requires and add them to your html using the script tag. The whole process is at least as convenient as building font swfs for use in sIFR, making it a worthy open source alternative.

Typeface.js - HTML/JS Font Embed Library

Previously:
HOWTO - Use rich fonts in your web design with sIFR

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Check out these handy tips from Cool Tools, including this one:

Spray-On Cooking Oil As Expedient Wetsuit Remover

As a triathlete, I practice the transition during every training session, meaning I try to remove my wetsuit in super fast time. Every Friday last summer I swam in a lake in my Promotion triathlon wetsuit. I spent the whole summer struggling to get off my wetsuit. I tried slopping some water down the front before getting out of the water, Superglide and all kinds of things. My Ironman friend swears by Pam Spray On Cooking Oil. He's used it for 17 years and has had no damage to his wetsuits. You can't buy Pam in the UK (at least not cheaply). All I could find was Frys spray on oil. I bought a pump-action one since this is more eco-friendly. I got to the lake one Friday and sprayed a generous coating on my legs. I was sure the oil would come off during my hour-long swim so I didn't really expect it to work. As I clambered out of the water I unzipped my wetsuit, ripped it down to my waist and then pulled it off my legs. I couldn't believe how effective this is. Triathletes normally try to pull a wetsuit down enough that they can tred on it to pull the rest of it off. I hadn't managed to do this all summer, but on my first attempt using cooking oil, I was instantly able to get the wetsuit down. Absolutely perfect! -- Carl Myhill

Photo from emsef on flickr.

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For well over a decade, we've seen nothing useful come out of investments in broadband over powerlines. It's been a money-sucking pit that has rarely worked particularly well, and never found many customers. The biggest and most hyped-up experiments failed pretty miserably, and just last month it seemed like we could officially declare BPL dead. Apparently, IBM did not get that memo, as it just invested nearly $10 million in a BPL offering for rural customers. We give them props for their optimism in a technology that has been nothing but trouble for years, but unless they've come up with something radically different than all those failed projects, we expect to be reading a story in another year or two about this project shutting down as well.

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YouTube Contest Challenges Users To Make A 'Good' Video, from the folks at The Onion, who are actually creating rather a lot of "Good" videos. (LOL, Sean Bonner)

Apparently, America's president-elect is a Mac user, a Pac Man fan, and likes sticking stickers on one's laptop. I really dig the pac-man eating the Apple logo. Is that a Speck clear MacBook cover? Commenters: let the Apple/Obama fanboy flamewars fly! Our moderators have firehoses at the ready.

Incidentally, if I'm looking at these photos right, it looks like he uses a Crackberry, not an iPhone. And Biden is also evidently a Mac user, at least on the road. And as long as we're on the subject: I met Al Gore briefly last week, and he was packin' an iPhone. Although, I was so star-struck at the moment, I may have hallucinated that part along with the swarms of solar-powered United Nations black helicopters. DISCUSS.

POTUS uses a Mac (9to5mac.com, via friends list)

You could fill an outline... with what some people don't grok about outlines!

Via Scott Rosenberg, a post from a guy who loves outlines, worrying about a guy who doesn't.

Truth is this: Outliners don't force you to do anything, and they are the opposite of rigid, and people who say they are, probably have only written outlines on paper and have never used an outliner on a computer.

I know a lot about this -- there probably are just a handful of people on the planet who have invested any effort in convincing people to use outliners, and I'm one of them.

I still use an outliner, I'm using one right now to write this. I never do any serious writing in anything else. The ability to move stuff around with the mouse is very important to me. It frees me from worrying about order because I can edit it. It has the opposite effect of imposing rigidness on my work, it makes it fluid.

After years of selling RSS, I came up with this phrase to explain it -- Automated Web Surfing.

In the same way, after years of talking about outlines, really decades -- this is what I came up with -- Text on Rails.

Khemisty writes "Evolutionary changes are supposed to take place gradually and randomly, under pressure from natural selection. But a team of Princeton scientists investigating a group of proteins that help cells burn energy stumbled across evidence that this is not how evolution works. In fact, their discovery could revolutionize the way we understand evolutionary processes. They have evidence that organisms actually have the ability to control their own evolution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Via BB, Kevin Kelly writes:

This is Tanya Vlach's new eyeball. She lost her real one in a car accident a few years ago. I met Tanya at a film festival recently. During our conversation she said she was looking for help in turning her artificial eye into a eye-cam. You know, a mini web cam inside an eyeball. It would capture live video and stream it to a memory somewhere and also perhaps eventually assist her own vision in real time. She confessed that she was not technologically adept enough to hack it on her own.

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Jon sent over an opinion piece in the Boston Globe, written by Harvard professor Harry Lewis, discussing the slippery slope of dangers related to internet censorship. He notes a number of recent stories of various governments in the US and around the world that move down that slope -- having governments trying to define what sort of information is "harmful" and banning it. However, as Lewis notes:

Determining which ideas are "harmful" is not the government's job. Parents should judge what information their children should see - and should expect that older children will, as they always have, find ways around restrictive rules.

From there, he notes that the growth of moral panics leading parents to overreact to "threats" of kids online can be just as bad for kids:

Yet for every child caught talking to a pedophile online, hundreds would be discouraged from searching the Internet's vast electronic library for truths their parents will not tell them.

Controlling every word children are saying and hearing, from birth to age 18, isn't child protection; it's the perfect preservation of prejudice and ignorance.

While there probably isn't too much new or different for Techdirt readers, it's still a good read.

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Google is aggregating their search data to estimate flu activity by state, they say up to two weeks faster than the CDC.

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and discovered that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

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gollum123 writes "The US Supreme Court has removed restrictions on the Navy's use of sonar in training exercises near California. The ruling is a defeat for environmental groups who say the sonar can kill whales and other mammals. In its 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court said the Navy needed to conduct realistic training exercises to respond to potential threats. The court did not deal with the merits of the claims put forward by the environmental groups. In reinstating the use of sonar, the top US court rejected a lower federal judge's injunction that had required the US Navy to take various precautions during submarine-hunting exercises. The Bush administration argued that there is little evidence of harm to marine life in more than 40 years of exercises off the California coast. It said that the judges should have deferred to the judgment of the Navy and Mr Bush. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said overall public interest was 'strongly in favor of the Navy.' 'The most serious possible injury would be harm to an unknown number of the marine mammals,' Chief Justice Roberts wrote. 'In contrast, forcing the Navy to deploy an inadequately trained anti-submarine force jeopardizes the safety of the fleet.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Micah Sifry writes:

While much of the tech industry and blogosphere is pondering who President-elect Barack Obama might appoint as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer--Eric Schmidt? Jeff Bezos? Larry Lessig?--a bunch of heavy-hitting public interest groups in Washington and a couple of civic-minded techies out in Seattle have each launched promising interventions in the discussion.

The first one, out yesterday, is a new site called ObamaCTO.org. The site is basically a feedback forum centered on one question: What should be the CTO's top priorities?

ObamaCTO is built on Uservoice, which enables anyone to create an account, post their own idea, comment on any idea, and distribute up to 10 votes to help rank all the ideas posted. ObamaCTO.org just went live, so the number of participants is pretty small, but my guess is it will get a lot of participation soon. Some of the ideas being posted aren't really the responsibility of a potential CTO, however, and it's not clear how the site's managers will filter those out.

Obama's CTO: Never Mind Who; What Should S/he Do? (techpresident.com)

In technology and government, really everything, I like two-party systems. It keeps everyone on their toes, and keeps the customer front and center (or voter, same thing). That's why I care.

In a comment on an earlier post, a reader asks if the Republicans really deserve to survive or if I have had any Republican heroes. The answer is who cares whether they deserve to survive, that isn't for me to decide. Or looked at another way, if the Republicans don't deserve to survive, neither do the Democrats. Neither party has been any good, not in my lifetime, probably never.

If you doubt me, read Glenn Greenwald's latest in Salon. That should scare the shit out of you if you think the Democrats, even with President Obama, are so great. They aren't. They might be pigs every bit as corrupt as the Republicans have been. We're going to watch this very carefully with a skeptical eye.

Truth is -- like many people, if not everyone -- until Obama, my vote has always gone to the lesser of two evils. Someday I look forward maybe to choosing between two honorable, competent, adult, intelligent candidates. Can't do that without a second party, and right now the Republicans are what we got.

I'm not going to work for them, and I didn't work for the Democrats. I was tempted to go out and canvas for Obama, but I just gave money and wrote what I think here on my blog and on Twitter and FriendFeed and anywhere else people would listen. But I kept my record clean. I am not part of a party, even though I am political.

(click images for full size)

My six Plymouth Barred Rock chickens are about 8 weeks old. They seem happy in their coop, but I feel sorry for them when I see them futilely scratching around in the wood shavings that are bereft of tasty grubs, beetles, worms, weeds, and seeds. I want to let them roam around freely in my yard, where they can aerate the soil, gobble the weeds and vermin, and fertilize the grass. But I think they’re still too young and small to let loose in the yard. For one thing, a couple of semi-wild, semi-friendly cats like to visit our cats and kids regularly, and I don’t think my young hens would stand a chance against them. Also, even though our property is completely fenced in, the chickens are still small enough to squeeze through openings.

After a little research, I came across two solutions that would allow the chickens to safely spend their days in the yard. One is electric net fencing -- a kind of mesh that has fine exposed wires woven into it. You can move it around anywhere in the yard, and the shock it delivers will keep the chickens in and the predators out. According to Harvey Ussery, the “21st Century Homesteading” columnist for Mother Earth News, electric net fencing “carries an unpleasant (but not harmful) surprise for unwelcome curiosity seekers.” I don’t like this idea, partly because I don’t want to be the cause of animals receiving shocks, but mainly because I’m certain I’d be the frequent recipient of “unpleasant surprises” from coming into contact with the fence while it was activated.

The second solution, a chicken tractor, was much more appealing. These are basically portable pens without a bottom that you can move around to different spots in your yard so your chickens can eat all the scary bugs crawling in the grass and dirt. This seems like a good solution. The top hit on Google is a gallery of 140 chicken tractor photographs, compiled by Katy of The City Chicken. It’s neat to see all of these hand-made tractors. No two are identical. Many are made from salvaged materials.

(The tractors remind me of the coconut scrapers I came across in Rarotonga. Everybody made them from scratch and so they were all different, reflecting the skills, patience, and temperament of the maker.)

After perusing the photos in the gallery and using Amazon’s Look Inside! feature to read a portion of Andy Lee and Pat Foreman’s book, Chicken Tractor: The Permaculture Guide to Happy Hens and Healthy Soil, I went to work designing my own. I liked the A-frame style the best, because it seems easier to make and more stable than a box-shaped tractor.

This was a good excuse to get acquainted with Google SketchUp, a free application that lets you create 3D models. I downloaded it and watched a few of the training videos, which were enough to get me to the point where I could design a humble tractor. My goal in designing the tractor was to come up with something that was very basic, used as few components as possible, used as few different dimensional-sizes of lumber as possible, and provided a comfortable and shady shelter for my hens. Here’s what I have so far.

(It will be made from lumber and plywood. The open areas will be covered with 1/2-inch wire screen.) You can download the Sketchup file here.

If you have any suggestions of how I can simplify or improve my design before I start building it, I would be grateful to hear them.