Business Week's Steve Hamm has a short post talking about the "sudden" success of "netbooks," those mini-laptops that are suddenly selling like crazy. As he notes, smaller laptops are not a new idea, and have been tried for many years in varying formats without much success. But, for some reason, after so many different experiments, it seems that the sweet spot in terms of size, usability and price have all been found.

This actually highlights something quite common in technology innovation: the difference between the idea, the invention and the actual innovation. Just the idea alone wasn't enough to actually make the product valuable. Finding that real sweetspot is a challenge for just about any product, and it involves an awful lot of experimentation to make it work. I've been reading about the early days of a number of inventions lately, and you see this story over and over again, where the initial versions really have no market, and it's a later, totally minor tweak that suddenly makes it valuable. And, of course, the best way to get that tweak to happen quickly (and thus expand a market, and improve the overall economy) is to let a lot of different players experiment to throw a lot of ideas at the market to see what actually does hit that sweet spot. Tragically, with a patent system that grants monopoly protection at the invention stage, this is often a lot more difficult, slowing down the attempts to actually hit that sweetspot.

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I've posted a few times over the years about Greg Fleischut, an insanely-talented teenage musician I know. For the last two years, Greg has been gigging around San Francisco with his indie rock band Audiophiles, but his mom just dug up this video from two years ago that reveals Greg's acoustic roots. At the time, Greg was visiting with a couple musician pals in Massachusetts -- Etienne Cremieux and Eric Oliver -- and, of course, they got to jamming, with Etienne on mandolin and Greg (left) and Eric (right) on geetar. It is absolutely incredible, like speed metal bluegrass. The boys were 15 at the time.

Learn more about this video and support EFF!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Danny O'Brien sez,

EFF get the biggest chunk of its funding from individual donors, and a lot of that money comes in right around now -- at the end of the year.

Usually we do a quick summary of the areas our team of thirty lawyers, techies and activists have worked on, civil liberties online, privacy, fair use, free speech, protecting innovators, and battling overreaching IP laws.

But after looking over everything we've tried to handle this year -- from our real-time US election monitoring system, to our ongoing fight against warrantless wiretapping, to keeping an eye on Comcast's packet forging, to defending dancing babies on YouTube, to representing whistleblowing MIT students on the Boston MBTA -- we decided the only way we could summarise it all was in traditional cloyingly seasonal song form.

You can watch the 12 Days of EFF here. Or just skip to where we really want you to be: on our our holiday donation page. Have a great holiday -- and a free and open 2009!

Share 'The 12 Days of EFF'

eldavojohn writes "UMass Dartmouth Physics Professor Gaurav Khanna and UMass Dartmouth Principal Investigator Chris Poulin have created a step-by-step guide designed to show you how to build your own supercomputer for about $4,000. They are also hoping that by publishing this guide they will bring about a new kind of software development targeting this architecture & grid (I know a few failed NLP projects of my own that could use some new hardware). If this catches on for research institutions it may increase Sony's sales, but they might not be seeing the corresponding sale of games spike (where they make the most profit)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today's Cool Tool mailing reminded me about one of my favorite year-end publications: the Uncle Mark 2009 Gift Guide and Almanac. Put out yearly (this year and last, anyway) by Mark Hurst, who runs the Gel Conference, this guide is tremendously unglamourous (in a great way). It's laid out (and spelled out) in a rather simple, straightforward style, and covers stuff that Mark likes and believes in, regardless of whether it's the latest or most popular. On my site, Street Tech, we used to do an annual tech guide we dubbed "the world's least sexy gadget guide" ('cause we covered stuff that worked, regardless of whether it was this year's tech or not). Mark's guide is equally unsexy.

Along with his reviews of landline phones, board games, cooking tools, books on religion, "essential items" (TiVo, a wallet pen, and The Economist), the Almanac covers such how-tos as preventing a sneeze, how to always have an umbrella when you need one, leaving good voice messages, how to make sure you always have batteries in your camera, and other handy tips.

Quirky. Fun. Useful. Free.

Uncle Mark 2009 Gift Guide and Almanac

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The Synthesia "Open Synth Hardware Platform" uses a Gumstix board, FPGA chip to create a anaolog modelling synthesizer with touchscreen interface -

The synthesia platform is a project whose purpose isto create an Analogue modelling musical synthesizer; that is, a synthesizer implemented using both analogue and digital components that intends to emulate the sounds of traditional analogue synthesizers, whilst being controllable through modern-day digital protocols such as the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI).
The synthesizer platform exists upon it’s own standalone hardware, and may be controlled using a variety of existing MIDI-capable instruments, including keyboards, guitars and drums.
Additionally, the unit features it’s own innovative touch-screen interface which intends to
provide simple-and-intuitive control of the system, but with an unprecedented ability to
customize and control synthesizer parameters and sound generation.
Special attention has been placed upon the usability of the synthesizer, particularly within the realms of it being played by musicians in a live environment.
The unit’s MIDI capabilities also mean that it is easily combined with professional studio
equipment and sequencing software such as Cubase VST

- Synthesia hardware overview

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I've been posting some funny internet ephemera related to the Bush Shoe-Tossing Incident over the last few days, but what's since happened to the 28-year-old Iraqi journalist who hurled his loafers at outgoing American war criminal George W. Bush is not funny. There are concerns al-Zaidi may have been tortured or abused. He is in jail with little or no information available about his present condition or whereabouts. Boing Boing community manager Teresa Nielsen Hayden writes,

Muntadar Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush, needs to be rescued.

According to his brother Durgham Zaidi, Muntadar Zaidi is in the heavily fortified Green Zone compound in central Baghdad where the US embassy and most Government offices are housed. He’s being held there by Iraqi forces under the command of Muaffaq al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security adviser.

“He has got a broken arm and ribs, and cuts to his eye and arm,” Durgham said.

Three things the entire world knows:

1. Bush dodged both shoes with impressive speed, and didn’t seem upset.
2. It was a symbolic act of contempt, not an attack.
3. If Muntadar Zaidi had intended harm, he wouldn’t have been throwing shoes.

One more extremely important thing the whole world knows: It may have been a serious expression of contempt, but it was also funny.

Free Muntadar Zaidi now! (Making Light)

We have some serious problems with the implications of the ruling in the Lori Drew case, where Drew was found guilty of computer hacking, because a fake MySpace profile (which she did not sign up for) was blamed for the suicide of a young girl. However, Bennett Haselton, over at Slashdot takes on another problematic aspect of the case: how the ruling creates perverse incentives that could lead more kids to harm themselves. That's because Drew was punished not because of her own actions, but the actions of Megan Meier, possibly due to what Drew (or others) said to her. As such, the ruling effectively says that if a kid does something bad enough or dangerous enough, it's fine to blame someone else for saying something to them. That means if there's a kid who wants to punish someone for saying something mean to them, they can try to kill themselves, and then blame whoever said something mean to them, recognizing they're likely to get punished. It creates dangerous incentives when your punishing someone based on the actions of the actions of someone else.

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coondoggie writes "A new working model of the mysterious 2,100-year-old astronomical calculator, dubbed the Antikythera Device, has been unveiled, incorporating the most recent discoveries announced two years ago by an international team of researchers. The new model was demonstrated by its creator, former museum curator Michael Wright, who had created an earlier model based on decades of study."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This morning, I got a note from the "Playboy Advisor" - yes, the man who, for every generation, knows how to tune your stereo, tie a Windsor knot, and find the g-spot with a blindfold on:

---

Hi Susie,

Our new issue, on newsstands next week, includes a list I compiled of the "55 Most Important People in Sex" of the past 55 years.

I wanted to see if you might like to respond with a letter to the editor that addresses anyone you feel is ranked too high or too low -- and/or argue for anyone who isn't on the list but should be.

We plan to publish responses in the April issue. Thanks for considering it.

Chip Rowe
Senior Editor
Playboy Magazine

---

Hi Chip,

You should be on the list. So should I!

I'm sure you can guess; your list pissed me off - it has way too many sad pin-up girls, who are only there because of some Svengali in their lives, not because of their own efforts or sexual initiative. There's not a single man of that ilk on the list.

And how about Terry Southern?...

I do like the many scientists you included, because people will be amazed to know their achievements. The real question is, who does one have to sleep with to get on the list?

Susie

---

(Keep reading -- there's much more after the jump!)

S,

You actually were on the short list, but let's just say I lost some arguments about the final 20.Tell me two or three names of women you would have included!

Chip

---

Okay... Where is Simone de Beauvoir, Shere Hite, or Pat Califia? Joani Blank, Anais Nin, Pauline Réage?

Don't get me started!

Then there's gay liberation. How can we imagine sexual revolution without it? Kinsey was bisexual. Dan Savage deserves a place near the top.

S.

---

Wonderful! In my defense, the list is limited to last 55 years; de Beauvoir's most influential work, The Second Sex, was from 1949- and Nin is best known for her erotic diaries from the 1930s, although they weren't published until the 1960s, so you have me there. Story of O was 1953, although that's certainly close enough. Dan Savage and Southern, those are good.

Chip

---

Señor,

Okay, I actually chewed over those elder entries! Beavoir almost single-handedly led French feminism in 60s & 70s, w/out being a prude, like Steinem.

And Anais made the decision to release Delta of Venus, et al, on 70s , when they had greatest impact

The best known names are always dead, sadly. I can't wait for my posthumous PB tribute!

SB

---

Susie,

Good points. Can I add that comment about Beauvoir?

Here's the list:

1 Alfred Kinsey
2 Dr. John Rock
3 Hugh Hefner
4 Alex Comfort
5 Marilyn Monroe
6 Monica Lewinsky
7 The Rolling Stones
8 Timothy Berners-Lee
9 Peter Dunn and Albert Wood
10 Madonna
11 Helen Gurley Brown
12 Charles Ginsburg
13 Ruth Westheimer
14 Elvis Presley
15 Masters and Johnson
16 Howard Stern
17 Ed Meese
18 Brigitte Bardot
19 Estelle Griswold
20 Bo Derek
21 Catharine MacKinnon
22 Vladimir Nabokov
23 Anita Bryant
24 Farrah Fawcett
25 Erica Jong
26 Barney Rosset
27 Germaine Greer
28 Christine Jorgensen
29 Pamela Anderson
30 Frank Sinatra
31 Nancy Friday
32 Jenna Jameson
33 William O. Douglas
34 Philip Roth
35 Charles Keating Jr.
36 Candace Bushnell
37 Dr. Mary Calderone
38 Beverly Whipple
39 Alberto Vargas
40 Potter Stewart
41 Linda Lovelace
42 Mike Nichols
43 Betty Dodson
44 Dr. David Reuben
45 Ian Fleming
46 Lenny Bruce
47 Gloria Steinem
48 Robert Mapplethorpe
49 Danni Ashe
50 J. Edgar Hoover
51 Gay Talese
52 Rock Hudson
53 Bernardo Bertolucci
54 Dell Williams
55 Rudi Gernreich

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)

Luis did some circuit bending on what appears to a sound box from a talking stuffed animal or similar. The light sensitive effect is likely controlled by a photocell put in place of the unit's timing resistor. In other words - cool.
[via Matrixsynth]

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Luis did some circuit bending on what appears to a sound box from a talking stuffed animal or similar. The light sensitive effect is likely controlled by a photocell put in place of the unit's timing resistor. In other words - cool.
[via Matrixsynth]

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Is this a photo of our next president? I hope so!

UPDATE: Yep, it's him. (Thanks, Florian!)

Click here if you're a grown-up and can handle the original version of the illustration above, with stylized, un-mosaic'ed retroboobage. Flickr user Ben Pearce has a spectacular set of seventies images from magazines, advertising, entertainment packaging, and other forms of media. Some of them include nudity, so caveat Flicktor. The sexy cocaine starship fantasy art above is my favorite, but I'm also kind of nuts about the Wookiee posse.

Photo set: RETRO (NSFW, found via Q-Burns on twitter)

Update: Bonnie from Lucasfilm sez, "That family shot of the Wookiees is cool, but not retro. It's from the movie "Revenge of the Sith" which came out in 2005."

Embedded video from CNN Video

"I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system." -- George Bush, at 1:40 in this CNN video. (via Slate)

An anonymous reader writes "A Dutch company has taken an open source Sans Serif font and added holes to it to try and save on printer ink costs. The Ecofont is claimed to save up to 20 percent of ink costs, but it allegedly took the firm a while to perfect the ratio of the maximum number of holes possible without sacrificing readability."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mac fanboys cried themselves to sleep Tuesday night with the news that Steve Jobs won't be giving any more Macworld keynotes, while Apple won't even attend the event after the January installment. There's a lot of speculation that Steve Jobs' health is behind the move, as rumors about his recovery from pancreatic cancer continue to swirl. But the more likely reason is that, like many companies, Apple's getting tired of trade shows. For many companies, the expense and complexity of exhibiting at huge shows, then having to compete with hundreds or thousands of other companies for press and industry attention, are making the shows less and less compelling. Lots of companies -- including Apple -- are instead focusing on their own events for product launches. And, of course, given Apple's penchant for control, it's hardly surprising that the company would want to go down this route. But the bigger point remains: huge trade shows used to be a great idea when physical proximity was a real barrier to business and newsgathering. But communication has gotten simpler and cheaper, travel has become much more commonplace and things like blogs and social networks give people easy ways to meet other folks in their industry, making these huge gatherings more a hassle than anything else. Meanwhile, smaller, more manageable and focused events seem to be thriving, indicating that it's the large-scale format that's getting long in the tooth.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Navs built a big ol' box of birthday noise for a friend -

Introducing the Trobetronic40 - my first DIY synth project, built for a mate's 40th birthday out of parts sourced from a knackered Korg PolySix, Thingamagoop box and various cheap components.

Must be a good friend to ransack a Polysix and a Thingamagoop for - either way, looks like a lot of fun - Trobetronic40 - DIY Noisemaker

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eldavojohn writes "We last left the story of Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China when the IOC had reached a deal with the Chinese government whereby some of the press restrictions were lifted. With the 2008 Olympics now but a memory, China has began censoring foreign news sources again. Maybe the West is making too big of a deal over this, as many Chinese citizens seem to like it that way."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John's gone ape for a retro airplane-cockpit-styled alarm clock that does nothing except wake you up and look fabulous. I'm with him -- this stuff makes me want to stand up and salute.

Absolutely gorgeous. The St. Louis Aerial Clock Radio apes the cockpit control mechanisms of a 1920s airplane, with four separate digital windows displaying the time like an altometer. But that's about it: it's merely a radio and alarm clock, without even a line-in jack or iPod dock connector. £49.95

St. Louis Aerial Clock Radio brings 1920s airplane cockpit aesthetic to your bedside table, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

The New York Public Library has joined the Flickr Commons, uploading an initial contribution of 1300 images from its photographic collections. Next, the NYPL is promising even more material!

We think of this as a sort of appetizer course, a sampler of collections accessible in greater breadth and depth on the NYPL Digital Gallery, and on-site in our network of libraries. Lush images of modern dance pioneers; haunting early cyanotypes of algae (the first photographic works to be produced by a woman); majestic geographical surveys taken along the Union Pacific Railroad, iconic Depression-era images taken under the Farm Security Administration's famed photography program; Berenice Abbott's epic documentation of 1930s New York for the Federal Art Project; stunning 19th century vistas of the Egypt and Syria; scenes and portraits of Ellis Island Immigrants, the Statue of Liberty under construction... These and more are now available to view, tag and discuss in the Flickr Commons, and are offered as an invitation to explore further on our own site or in our actual libraries. After this initial road test, we expect to post many more images into the Commons pool.

NYPL joins Flickr Commons (Thanks, David!)

December 17, 1851

"The pitch pine woods on the right of the Corner road. A piercing cold afternoon, wading in the snow. R. Rice was going to Sudbury to put his bees into the cellar for fear they would freeze. He had a small hive; not enough to keep each other warm. The pitch pines hold the snow well. It lies now in balls on their plumes and in streaks on their branches, their low branches rising at a small angle and meeting each other. A certain dim religious light comes through this roof of pine leaves and snow. It is a somber twilight, yet in some places the sun streams in, producing the strongest contrasts of light and shade."

Each day of the year Kris Holmes publishes an entry from one of Thoreau's journals, dating from 1837 to 1861.

Photo: Uqbar-is-back

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)

I have to admit that I don't watch reality TV or follow what's the latest in reality TV shows. I hear people talking about them, but it seems like half of them blend together with something about models who sing while cooking and designing fashions for eligible bachelors as an angry British guy yells at them and they hope they don't get voted off the island. Sometimes Donald Trump appears. Or something like that. So I had no idea that there's a yet another reality TV show out there on NBC called Mamma's Boy that apparently involves overbearing mothers trying to pick out potential brides for sons who apparently are unable to cut the apron strings. Sounds pretty horrific to me.

However, there was apparently a lawsuit over this one, as the guy who produces a Turkish reality TV show called Perfect Bride tried to stop NBC from airing Mamma's Boy, claiming that he holds a copyright on the entire concept of mothers and sons trying to pick out a bride (found via IPMaven). The guy claims he was trying to license the idea to a competitor of NBC, and allowing NBC's show to air would endanger those negotiations. Luckily, a court wasted little time (almost none at all) in denying the injunction, noting that there seemed to be very little likelihood that the guy would succeed in his case. Still, the case moves forward, and it's yet another symptom of a culture that has lead people to believe that you can own ideas, and anyone else who comes up with a similar idea (or, hell, improves on your bad idea) somehow owes you money.

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Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting that drillers looking for geothermal energy in Hawaii have inadvertently put a well right into a magma chamber. Molten rock pushed back up the borehole several meters before solidifying, making it perfectly safe to study. Magma specialist Bruce Marsh says it will allow scientists to observe directly how granites are made. 'This is unprecedented; this is the first time a magma has been found in its natural habitat,' the Johns Hopkins University professor told BBC News. 'Before, all we had to deal with were lava flows; but they are the end of a magma's life. They're lying there on the surface, they've de-gassed. It's not the natural habitat.' It is hoped the site can now become a laboratory, with a series of cores drilled around the chamber to better characterise the crystallisation changes occurring in the rock as it loses temperature."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[via Apartment Therapy Unpluggd]

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In October, I wrote a piece that explained why I like netbooks. It listed a set of criteria that says if something is a netbook or not. Yes, it's my opinion. But someone has to start this conversation. There have been some ridiculous ideas of what netbooks are and aren't. According to Steve Jobs, an iPhone is netbook. Heh. He's making a joke. It's funny. I have an iPhone and I like it -- but I have a netbook too.

Anyway, without further ado, here's my list of what makes a netbook a netbook.

1. Small size.

2. Low price.

3. Battery life of 4+ hours. Battery can be replaced by user.

4. Atom processor.

5. Rugged.

6. Built-in wifi, 3 USB ports, SD card reader. Ethernet, SVGA.

7. Runs any software I want (no platform vendor to decide what's appropriate).

8. Competition (users have choice and can switch vendors at any time).

9. Windows XP.

All these things are important. I think we could make room for a Macintosh netbook, but it's tough because one of the things that's super important is that we're not locked into a vendor. I could replace my netbook with an MSI or Acer, even though I've bought two Eee PCs. Apple could make their operating system run on the hardware these other guys make, so they could ship a netbook that meets these criteria. But we're all pretty sure, if they deign to make a netbook, that it won't offer users this choice. We'll have to wait to see how it feels, but I'm not sure if I'd switch to an Apple netbook, even though I use a Macintosh desktop and use Mac Minis as my entertainment center system (I have three of them). I've been able to integrate XP computers into this network without too much difficulty. (Which surprised me, when I switched to Macs in 2005, I thought I'd never use Windows again.)

Another concern came up in a recent thread on FriendFeed with Kevin Tofel of GigaOm, who is one of my closest netbook buddies. We share information and pretty much share a philosophy of netbooks. He says there's still a cloud over XP, that Microsoft says they're going to withdraw it at some point. They keep saying that. To which I said, Geez Louise guys, come on -- you have a winner. Microsoft has to be the most out to lunch technology company out there. By now you'd think they'd realize that the market doesn't want a new operating system, that XP is just fine, thank you. But they have their own reasons, like the auto makers, to do what they do. Or the journalists. The last people they'd let drive the market are the users, right? Microsoft is basically a full employment charity for operating system programmers. They should let all those programmers go, and hire some new ones from the user community, fix bugs and give the users what they want. Of if they insist, keep them employed, but please let us continue to use XP. It's not a half-bad operating system and its cheap and runs on cheap hardware. We like it!

Microsoft's attitude about XP reminds me of the National Lampoon issue where they had a picture of a cute dog with a gun pointed to his head. The headline said: If you don't buy this magazine we'll kill this dog. (Ouch.)

A.B. VerHausen writes "While OSCON and SCALE organizers ramp up plans for their events, Novel shuts down BrainShare after 20 years, citing travel costs and budget tightening as main concerns. 'Instead of the traditional in-person conference, Novell plans to offer online classes and virtual conferences to make education and training available to more people at a lower per-head cost to companies,' says the news story on OStatic.com."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The folks at Oomlout, who created the OAWR and SERB robot projects, have put up a new Instructable on controlling their SERB (or any Arduino-based bot) usuing the Wii Nunchuck.

BTW: The OAWR project is featured in The Best of Instructables. We have request a SERB kit from Oomlout and hope to have full build details on it after we've had a chance to put it together. Oomlout encourages you to make your own, but parts from them, or a full kit.

How to Control Your Robot Using a Wii Nunchuck (and an Arduino)

Best Of Instructables
Our Price: $34.99
Sale Price: $29.99
You Save $5.00!

Instructables.com has become one of the most popular magnets for makers and DIY enthusiasts of all stripes. Now, with more than 10,000 projects to choose from, the Instructables staff, editors of MAKE: Magazine, and the Instructables community itself have put together a collection of home, craft, food and technology how-to's from the site. The Best of Instructables Volume 1 includes plenty of clear, full-color photographs, complete step-by-step instructions, and tips, tricks, and new build techniques you won't find anywhere else.

Highlights:
* 336 pages, 6-5/8 x 9-3/8, same dimensions as The Best of MAKE and MAKE magazine.
* Over 120 projects!
* Projects cover everything from food hacking and making home furnishings from junk to building robots and CNC milling machines. And in-between you'll find projects on arts, crafts, costume-making, tool tips, themed photo galleries, and tons more.

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One of the founders of British online gambling site PartyGaming yesterday pleaded guilty to a charge of transmitting bets across state lines -- and agreed to pay the US government $300 million. The exec, Anurag Dikshit, wasn't one of those nabbed by US authorities as they changed planes in the US, but rather he came forward on his own in an attempt to clear the legal air surrounding him and his company. It appears that the US government has rewarded him with leniency: he's free on $15 million bond with some loose travel restrictions ahead of his sentencing -- scheduled for December 2010. This latest news follows the guilty plea of an executive of NETeller, which processed payments for gambling sites, who forfeited $100 million to the government, while the company itself coughed up $136 million. So from these three instances alone, the government has taxed, er, fined, gaming sites and execs over half a billion dollars. If revenue generation is the goal, why not simply legalize online gambling, then regulate and tax it? That way, the government gets its slice, while US citizens can enjoy some protection while betting, instead of being forced into the grey market where they're largely at the whim of site owners.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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A Modest Proposal:

Raising the Minimum Age for Porn

"Can a girl of 21 really know what she is consenting to when she signs a release form for a pornographer? Does she really understand what the ramifications might be later in life?

"That is why I propose that we raise the minimum age of consent to participate in pornography to 65..."

Jon Swift, the author of this proposal, is perhaps the hardest working satirist in the English language since his redoubtable namesake.

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)

quarterbuck writes "While Google is saying that personalization is the key to search, Yahoo is taking a different view of the topic. Yahoo announced plans to retain user data for no longer than 90 days and to anonymize data. Even if Yahoo is not your favorite search engine, it is a good move in the direction of online privacy if it will force others to follow suit." Reader Mike adds "Yahoo did say, however, that it will keep some data for up to six months for security and fraud reasons, as part of some 'specific and limited exceptions.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Time is running out for those of you planning to give artificial beards this year for the holidays. Erin Dollar is selling them on Etsy.

Handmade beards

On his blog Monster Brains, Aeron posted this gorgeous print of a what appears to be a prehistoric animal hootenanny. He writes:

I would like to request the help of anyone familiar with this kind of prehistoric creature illustration. I'm collecting work to present as a week long post devoted to dinosaurs next spring. I'm interested in illustrations of dinosaurs more along the lines of those found in this previous post where the interpretations aren't exactly scientifically accurate, but are perhaps more fantastic, thanks!

Pre historic animals and reptiles

(Flash video embedded above, here's a downloadable MP4.)

Today's episode of Boing Boing tv is an OFFWORLD feature -- this time, Joel and Rob visit the annual chiptunes music gathering Blip Festival 2008, better known as "blipfest."

Joel interviews several artists in this episode who create music inspired by the aural texture of old-schoold video games: Mr. Spastic, Jellica, and Nullsleep.

---

Join the conversation about this episode over on Offworld.

---

Previously: Blipfest 2008: Joel interviews chiptunes artist Bubblyfish.

(Special props to Beschizza for doubling as director of photography for these episodes! Holy Brother of Mario, what can't that guy do. Seriously. )

Steven Johnson's latest book, The Invention of Air, is a wide-ranging, learned, engrossing biography of the polymath pioneering scientist, Joseph Priestley. Priestley, a contemporary of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, was a kind of radical scientist/politician/theologian, an all-but-unimaginable combination in today's world of politicised science and deep fractures between faith and empiricism.

Johnson uses the life of Priestley to illuminate a theory of history that holds that great people are neither an inevitable product of their times, nor luminous, supernatural geniuses -- rather, they are the product of an ecosystem of influences, technologies, climate, and energy (literally -- the story of stored energy in coal, saltpetre, and plant-bound carbon are vital to the story). He pulls this off deftly, with a series of insightful, beautifully realized anaecdotes from the life of Priestley and his contemporaries -- his allies and his many enemies -- that make the idea of history being shaped by webs and networks seem absolutely true.

Who was Priestley? He was a slapdash, overexcited scientist with an absolute knack for apparatus design, fantastic intuition, and boundless energy -- his novel instruments and flighty nature led him to discover oxygen and the role plants played in its production (an insight that Benjamin Franklin helped build into the foundations of the modern notions of homeostasis). Likewise, he invented club soda, wrote the standard textbook on electricity (used for a century thereafter) -- but he also stubbornly held onto a belief in phlogiston, the mystical substance that allowed matter to burn, refusing to let go of this idea long after everyone else in the field came to believe in oxidization. But he was also a firm believer in open sharing of knowledge, a voluminous publisher of results and cross-pollinator of ideas who refused to be confined to one discipline.

Priestley was also a minister, an eccentric and dissenting one, who, by the end of his career, had denied the divinity of Christ and helped to found Unitarianism -- writing a book that condemned the exaltation of saints and Jesus as pagan beliefs, a book that brought Thomas Jefferson back to Christianity, promising a faith divorced from mysticism and spookery. But Priestley was also a firm believed in Revelations, convinced that they foretold the falling of the ten crowns of Europe, and that the realization of their surreal predictions was at hand. This -- along with his support for the French Revolution -- got him exiled from England, literally chased out of his home by a torch-wielding mob who burned his lab and house to the ground.

An exile in America, Priestley took up the cause of civil liberties and, along with other early Republicans, inspired Adams to pass the Alien-Sedition Act (one of the darkest chapters in the history of American civil liberties), though Adams never got around to using it on Priestley himself. Closely allied to Jefferson, Priestley took up the cause of politics and led the charge against Adams' regime and his campaign against the revolutionary French Republic, all the while preaching Unitarianism, Revelations, Phlogiston, and a series of remarkable, cross-disciplinary scientific discoveries that he made on his homemade apparatus.

Johnson's life of Priestley conjures up a man who was, in many ways, absolutely 21st Century: a miscellarian who relied on conversational networks to feed his fascination with technology, a fascination that was simultaneously all-consuming, ill-informed, and brilliant. But Priestley also epitomizes the late 18th century in his boundary-crossing revolutions in science and religion and politics, helping to change the course of history. As Johnson says, "The roving, untutored, connective intelligence was not particularly suited to defining the bylaws of a new scientific paradigm. But it was exceptionally well suited for exploding the old conventions, for pushing the field into its revolutionary mode. Some great minds become great by turning the rubble of an exploded paradigm into something consistent and meaningful. Others become great by laying the gunpowder, grain by grain."

Johnson's a wonderful science writer, but it's his scientific histories -- Emergence, The Ghost Map and now The Invention of Air that I like best. Like Levy's Hackers, Johnson's science histories bring these people and their passions to life in a way that is at once familiarly geeky and inspiring.

The Invention of Air, Joseph Priestley on Wikipedia

I have to be honest and admit that I had no clue that National Lampoon was even a public company, but apparently it is. Either way, the company probably best known for its various National Lampoon's Vacation movies (and, yes, I'm aware National Lampoon has done much more...) appears to be in deep deep trouble after both the SEC and the Justice Department came down hard on the company for attempted stock manipulation (Eric Savitz wins for best headline on this one: Coming Soon: National Lampoon's Litigation Vacation). Apparently, the company's CEO allegedly paid stock promoters to illegally manipulate the stock upwards, giving them kickbacks for buying the stock in order to increase the price beyond what the market had decided the stock was worth. On top of that, he was accused of providing the stock promoters with confidential and non-public information. If convicted, National Lampoon's CEO could face 25 years in jail. Stock manipulation is no laughing matter, apparently.

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Trigger writes "At our work we were decomissioning six old HP/Compaq servers to clear up space for new servers and, naturally, each server had a fairly large raid array. Instead of formatting every hard drive (would have taken weeks performing a DoD level wipe) and disposing them all together with the servers, I decided to disassemble the hard drives and recycle them into something neat. With a lot (a lot) of patience, I made this shiny Xmas tree. In total there are around 70 old SCSI hard drives, between 9gb and 18gb in size each. They were nice and chunky, oldschool style. There were quite a few different hard drive models, which is good because they each had different bits which I could use. The Xmas tree is made with parts from hard drives only except for one nut which I had to purchase for $0.39." It's good to see that this guy has plenty to do at work.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trigger writes-

At our work we were decomissioning six old HP/Compaq servers to clear up space for new servers and, naturally, each server had a fairly large raid array. Instead of formatting every hard drive (would have taken weeks performing a DoD level wipe) and disposing them all together with the servers, I decided to disassemble the hard drives and recycle them into something neat. With a lot (a lot) of patience, I made this shiny Xmas tree. In total there are around 70 old SCSI hard drives, between 9gb and 18gb in size each. They were nice and chunky, oldschool style. There were quite a few different hard drive models, which is good because they each had different bits which I could use. The Xmas tree is made with parts from hard drives only except for one nut which I had to purchase for $0.39.

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Mind Hacks reports on a Consciousness and Cognition article about a "36 year-old woman with a long history of excessive daydreaming where she'd spent long periods of time wrapped up in a fantasy world." The woman is not mentally ill, and can tell the difference between the real world and her daydream universe.

Her condition reminded me of the "Jet-Propelled Couch" chapter in The Fifty Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales by Dr. Robert Lindner. The chapter was about a Los Alamos physicist who had been sent to Lindner because he was acting strangely at work, often going into a trance-like state. Because the physicist had a high level security clearance, his superiors were quite worried about his odd behavior.

It turns out that the physicist believed himself to be John Carter, the protagonist in Edgar Rice Burrough's series of science fiction adventure novels that take place on Mars. The physicist was coincidentally also named John Carter. The physicist told Lindner he was able to teleport himself to Mars and have the same kind of adventures the fictional John Carter had. The physicist kept detailed maps and records of his adventures, accumulating 10,000 pages of notes! I won't spoil the rest for you. It's an incredible story. (You can read the "Jet-Propelled Couch" chapter through Google Book Search)

I first read A Princess of Mars, Burrough's tale of adventure on the red planet, when I was in junior high school. (Dejah Thoris, the princess in the novel, may have been my first crush.) A few years ago I re-read A Princess of Mars, prepared to be utterly disappointed. But I loved it just as much as I did when I was 12 years old. Burrough's description of the Martian animals and societies, particularly the hideous six-limbed green Martians', is a hoot, and the plot moves along at a fast clip. It unfolds much like a contemporary science fiction movie. It's fallen out of copyright, and you can download it for free from Project Gutenburg's site.

We did a massive Arduino gift guide this year and a few folks asked if we had a PDF of it, so here it is! Remember the last day of shipping from the Maker Shed is this Friday, December 19th!

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DaringDan writes "As part of the recent MacFUSE 2.0 release Amit Singh has added support for an insane number of filesystems on the Mac. This video from Google and this blog post pretty much explain everything in detail but to sum-up Singh has written a new filesystem called AncientFS which lets you mount a ton of UNIX file formats starting from the very first version of UNIX. Even more interesting is that they have also taken Linux kernel implementations of filesystems like ufs, sysv-fs, minix-fs and made them work in user-space on the Mac, which means its now possible to read disks from OS's like FreeBSD, Solaris and NeXT on OS X. ext2/ext3 don't seem to be on the list but apparently the source for everything is provided so hopefully some enterprising soul can apply the same techniques to ext2? One of their demos even has the old UNIX kernel compiled directly on the Mac through the original PDP C compiler by somehow executing the PDP binaries on OS X!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've seen so many states with grandstanding politicians trying to ban the sale of certain video games to kids -- despite the fact that every single law that's been passed along those lines in the US has been thrown out as unconstitutional. In the end, politicians know this -- yet they still keep pushing for such laws, so that, come election time, they can make a false claim in their campaign ads about how they "protected the children." The truth is, all they really did, was waste taxpayer money on a lawsuit that was a clear loss from the beginning. That's why it's great to finally see one state at least investigate the issue a bit, with a Pennsylvania task force quite clearly telling state legislators that such a video game sales law is a bad idea. Instead, the task force suggests that, if the legislature really wants to do something, it could fund more research into the impact of video games on kids, or more reasonably, it could fund more educational programs, to discuss the impact of video games. So, now the question is whether or not politicians in Pennsylvania will heed this advice... or if they'll still push forward on a plan to waste taxpayer money?

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A quick note for the last minute shoppers...

Orders placed Dec. 17th - Choose FedEx 3-Day Saver
Orders placed Dec. 18th - Choose FedEx 2-Day
Orders placed Dec. 19th - Choose FedEx Overnight

Stop by the Maker Shed store and check out THE place for open source hardware, Arduino & Arduino accessories, electronic kits, science kits, smart stuff for kids, back issues of MAKE & CRAFT, box sets, books, robots, kits from Japan and more.

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1sockchuck writes "Facebook now has 140 million users, and in recent weeks has been adding 600,000 new users a day. To keep pace with that growth, the Facebook engineering team has been tweaking its use of memcached, and says it can now handle 200,000 UDP requests per second. Facebook has detailed its refinements to memcached, which it hopes will be included in the official memcached repository. For now, their changes have been released to github."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

1sockchuck writes "Facebook now has 140 million users, and in recent weeks has been adding 600,000 new users a day. To keep pace with that growth, the Facebook engineering team has been tweaking its use of memcached, and says it can now handle 200,000 UDP requests per second. Facebook has detailed its refinements to memcached, which it hopes will be included in the official memcached repository. For now, their changes have been released to github."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gorgeous photo set of art made from maps via NOTCOT & store.

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Earlier this year, a Ritto, Japan man was paralyzed at his retirement party when his pals tossed him into the air but missed catching him. Last month, the 60-year-old died of blood poisoning. From Reuters:

"He worked until the retirement age. We had been looking forward to going to various places as a couple and were excited that we would be able to spend a relaxing time together," (a Japanese newspaper) quoted the man's wife as saying.

"No matter what I say he won't come back, but I want to find out why this happened."

"Japanese man dies after retirement party hijinks" (via Fortean Times)

einer writes "Facing a budget shortfall, New York State Governor David Paterson crafts a budget that taxes iPod music downloads and other 'digitally delivered entertainment services.' On the chopping block is $700 million in school aid and $3.5 billion in health care subsidies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andrew sez, "Thought you might like to hear that a DVD of Neil Gaiman's lecture/interview with Henry Jenkins is going on sale today and that some great clips are already posted on Henry's blog: http://henryjenkins.org/2008/12/from_neil_gaiman_to_j_michael.html. Definitely worth a gander."

Our first speaker, appropriately enough, was Neil Gaiman, whose work spans comics (The Sandman), fiction (American Gods), cinema (Mirrormask), television (Neverwhere), the blogosphere, and much much more. Gaiman gave a memorable opening lecture on the nature of genre and its influence on the creative process, which is best known for an extended rift on how pornography and musicals follow similar conventions. It was inspired by Linda William's Hardcore, but Gaiman took it in his own idiosyncratic directions. As the evening continued, we had a great conversation, which ranged across his career, talked about some of the key themes in his work, and especially dug deep into his ideas about myth, storytelling, and popular entertainment. Anyone whose ever heard Gaiman knows he's a charming and engaging speaker with lots of interesting insights into cultural history and media theory.

From Neil Gaiman to J. Michael Straczynski: News on the Julius Schwartz Lecture Series (Thanks, Andrew!)

Monday night's "Muppet (of Burlesque) Show" in Los Angeles appears to be exactly what you'd imagine. Well, sort of. It apparently wasn't Muppets as burlesque dancers but rather burlesque dancers as Muppets. LA Weekly's Erin Broadley has a report, accompanied by a slideshow of photos by Shannon Cottrell. From LA Weekly:

Vixen Violette as Fozzie Bear stepped on stage wearing a brown, terrycloth hoop dress and matching knee-high boots, dancing to Elvis Presley's "Teddy Bear"; Scarlett Letter as Sam the Eagle took to a podium to rant about the topic of nudity ("Outrageous!"); Anastasia Von Teaserhausen as the Swedish Chef hand-crafted a giant hamburger consisting of the various meats and cheeses that made up her skirt (plus the heads of lettuce she wore as a bra); Red Snapper did her best Elton John to "Crocodile Rock" and was attacked by a giant stuffed crocodile; a corseted and velvet gloved Vixen Magdalene gothed things up a bit with her Dr. Steel Show; Isabella Star as Miss Piggy auditioned to be an Opera star; Lux La Croix as Rizzo the Rat kicked off her heels, got gangster and bumped her tail to Dr. Dre's "Rat Tat Tat"; Jewel of Denial rocked out and stripped down to Emmet Otter's Riverbottom Nightmare Band; and Dizzy Von Damn! as Gonzo the Great closed out the night with excellent pasty twirling technique and a Muppet version of Frank Sinatra's "I Did It My Way."

"Muppet (of Burlesque) Show at Monday Night Tease"

Meggiecat points us to Cheeky Magpie's blog, where I found these papercraft reindeer - it looks like a fun holiday project for kids!

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In just four weeks, Make: premieres on public television stations nationwide. But you can watch a preview right now. Here's Cyclecide's Paul Da Plumber and his Bicycle Rim Shot made out of recycled parts from the SF dump.

View the clip above, get the M4V and/or subscribe in iTunes. And don't forget to comment on this week's Make: television post.

Make: premieres on www.makezine.tv and on public television nationwide in January. To find out when it's on in your city, call your local public television station and ask for the "Viewer Services" department.

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Earlier this year, some politicians in California, which is struggling with massive budgetary problems, proposed adding a tax to iTunes downloads. Now, Governor David Patterson in New York is proposing the same thing. There's no functional reason for this, other than the fact that the state desperately needs money, and so it's trying to add taxes to just about anything it can find. Of course, back in the old days, the point of a sales tax like that was to contribute to gov't-funded infrastructure (roads and such) that allowed folks to go and buy something. There's no such rationale for taxing internet downloads. It's a blatant money grab and Patterson seems to have no problem admitting that.

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Noby Noby Boy is the forthcoming PS3 game from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi. Over at Boing Boing Offworld, Brandon does his best to understand (and explain) the aim of the game. Also, video and comments! From Boing Boing Offworld:

Just what Noby is is hard to explain, but the fundamentals are simple: you control a Noby "BOY" with both analog sticks: one for the head, one for the tail, flexing, stretching, and eventually tying yourself in knots, in a playground world that's otherwise devoid of goals. And, as 1UP's preview points out, a Noby "GIRL", suspended in the heavens, is similarly stretchy, but only as a progress-bar reflection of the combined total of collective Noby Noby Boy player progress.

"It's a stretch: Explaining Katamari creator's new Noby Noby Boy" and "Another new look at Noby Noby Boy"

BB pal Tim Biskup just issued a bunch of new limited-edition prints and other goods, including this fantastic sterling silver ring featuring Tim's "Helper" character. Seen here is the ultra-limited ruby eyeball edition. Mark F got one and man is he jazzed about it!
Tim Biskup's Flopdoodle Store

Plans are underway to build a beach with refrigerated sand at the new Palazza Versace hotel in Dubai. A substructure of pipes will circulate coolant under the sand to keep guests' feet from getting burned. Giant fans are also proposed to generate an "ocean breeze." The eco-impact of the scheme is a concern. The whole thing reminds me of the domed beaches and ski resorts covered in Iara Lee's cyber-era documentary Synthetic Pleasures. From the Times Online:

Soheil Abedian, founder and president of Palazzo Versace, said he believed it is possible to design a refrigerated beach and make it sustainable. “We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on,” he said. “This is the kind of luxury that top people want...”

Versace's plans have shocked environmentalists. Rachel Noble, the campaigns officer at Tourism Concern, which promotes sustainable tourism, said that the carbon generated by such projects would contribute to climate change, whose worst effects would be felt by the poor.

“Dubai is like a bubble world where the things that are worrying the rest of the world, like climate change, are simply ignored so that people can continue their destructive lifestyles,” she said.

"Chill out, you beautiful people, the Versace beach is refrigerated" (Times Online), "Cool Sand Likely To Make Environmentalists Hot" (National Public Radio)

On this day in 1903 @ Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright made some of the first sustained flights. The first flight was a approx. 120 feet lasting about 12 seconds. As you travel this holiday season this about how far we've come in just 100 years! It might not seem that way if there are delays though!

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bogaboga writes "TG Daily reports that Microsoft quietly released the first update to its IE8 beta 2 to its closest partners last week. This new version only scores a dismal 12/100 on the Acid 3 test, though the score improves significantly if one leaves the [browser] window open for at least a minute. It is marked as 'Release Candidate 1.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists have discovered an average of two new species a week in Southeast Asia's Greater Mekong River region. Unusual animals found in this incredibly rich and diverse habitat include Desmoxytes purpurosea, a pink millipede that spews cyanide to defend itself, and Heteropoda maxima, a spider that may be the world's largest with a 12 inch legspan.
National Geographic's slideshow of the animals, and more background at the World Wildlife Fund

This holiday video card installation by AKQA uses 49 microwave ovens stacked in a dark space and timed to sequentially turn off so that the only thing left is their blinking, unset clocks which resembles twinkling stars in the night sky (you need to watch the video until the end to see the full effect). The timed ovens going dark reminds me of a city at night fall where people are turning off lights in their apartments while getting ready for bed... Happy holidays to all the Makers out there!

via Mr Starfish

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Smart Projects is a special holiday pack of 10 Arduino boards in an array of colors - neat! Unfortunately I do not find myself in need of 10 Arduinos … at least not right now :/ - Arduino Duemilanove Color [via Arduino Blog]

Arduino Duemilanove

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bshell writes "With Christmas around the corner I know we are all thinking about religion, or at least maybe wondering why this one religion dominates the rest for these few weeks. A fellow named Rodrigo Braz Monteiro (amz) posted this list comparing each programming language to a religion. Guaranteed to make you chuckle and generate a good long thread here on slashdot. Great way to pass the time as work winds down this week and we relate to our own programming faiths during this very special time of year. Merry PHPmas." Fortunately Pastafarianism is referenced.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Charles Platt helped pick a winner from our "Will these vehicles run? A puzzle from the past" contest -- MAKE reader shabadu please email me to claim your prize, a Maker's Notebook!

There's a lot of good stuff here. Most people seemed to get the right answer (so far as I can tell), although they used different paths to reach it. My vote goes to shabadu because he sums it up so succinctly (brevity is always a virtue), he writes clearly, he mentions a couple details that other posters missed, he gets everything right (so far as I can tell), and he adds a note of humor at the end. I regret that he didn't attempt the calculation regarding the first vehicle that Theodire Minick included, but Minick seems to use some unstated assumptions that bother me. For instance, he assumes that the lead balls have potential energy based on a 4-foot difference, but how did he come up with that number? It has to be a guess, and therefore doesn't justify his calculation to umpteen significant figures!

I don't think any of the posters took into account the likely behavior of the balls on the roof. When the vehicle accelerates (assuming it does) the balls in the channel will tend to roll backward relative to the vehicle, because of their inertia. Therefore they will roll off the channel at increasing speed relative to the vehicle, and therefore they will hit the chute lower down, with greater kinetic energy, creating a more powerful forward thrust. On the other hand, their rearward motion will cause them to hit the lower chute at an increasing angle, which will deliver less forward thrust.

Of course the balls will not roll along the upper channel with zero friction, especially if they tend to rub against each other; and the balls in the reservoir over the cab will be significantly constrained. Therefore their mass, in addition to the mass of the vehicle, must be overcome by the forward thrust. However, the aggregate mass will diminish as the number of balls diminishes, and this will enable the vehicle to accelerate faster. Since this is a complex system involving factors such as the friction of lead against lead and the precise contouring of the ball containment system, no precise calculations are possible.

A simple way to look at the first vehicle is to assess the energy which would be required to lift the balls up onto the roof in the first place. This is the most energy that you can get back out of the system by allowing the balls to drop. In practice you will get less, because of frictional losses everywhere in the system.

Another issue which was not addressed is the question of "where the energy goes" in vehicle number two. The motor, after all, is doing work, circulating the water. If that work is not translated into motion, what happens to it? The answer of course is that it is converted to heat by friction between the water and the pipes. I would expect the water to become perceptibly warm as the truck sits there churning the water around and around while going nowhere.

And here's Shabadu answer...

In the first vehicle, the falling balls will apply a forward force. Just like pool balls bouncing off a bumper, the falling ball will be deflected backward by their impact with the second trough. According to Newton's third law of motion ("To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.") the vehicle will also deflect forward from this same impact. In an ideal system this will move the vehicle forward. However, any deformation of the second trough or the tires, and friction in the axles, and even wind resistance, will very likely overpower any forward force applied by the falling balls.

The second vehicle won't move at all. The same principle that applied forward force to the first vehicle exists in the second one, so the water hitting the trough does give it a forward force, but since the water is collected it hits the back of the trough/pipe when it turns at the bottom to return to the pump. This impact applies a second force in the opposite direction of the first. In addition, the frictions, deformations, and wind resistance that might completely stop the first vehicle would be even more detrimental in this vehicle because the water will probably have less momentum than the lead balls, which provides less force to be transferred into movement of the vehicle.

On the other hand, the second vehicle does have a better chance of moving after the police arrest the first driver for dropping huge lead balls all over the road.

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Agies sez, "Kaja Foglio has dug up a 1907 children's book illustration of what Santa will look like in 2007. It's the first pair of desktop images on the page." Santa in 2007: A vintage vision of the future from a children's book published in 1907 (Thanks, Agies!)

Over the summer, you may have seen the video that got passed around quite a bit of a NYC police officer going out of his way to slam a Critical Mass cyclist to the ground. As you may have heard, the officer wrote up a report claiming that the cyclist ignored his commands to stop and tried to steer his bike into the him. From the video, that's obviously false, though the cyclist ended up having to spend a day in jail based on the report: The good news is that the officer, Patrick Pogan, has now been indicted and charged both with a misdemeanor assault and felony counts for falsifying his report. Obviously, none of this would have transpired if it weren't for the tourist filming what happened and then putting the video up on YouTube. We talk about abuses of power via technology quite often, but it's good to see an abuse of power stopped thanks to technology as well.

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In this six-part video, Richard "God Delusion" Dawkins interviews stage hypnotist/magician Derren Brown about the techniques used by "psychics" to fool people (and maybe themselves) into thinking that they have extrasensory powers.

Richard Dawkins interviews Derren Brown (via 3 Quarks Daily)

cedarhillbilly passes along a piece from TheHill.com on the chilly reception that tech firms and lobbying groups are giving to a bill promoting union formation, which has a chance of passing in a more strongly Democratic congress and with a Democratic president. "Up to now, large tech groups have been on the sidelines in what is likely to be one of the roughest fights in Congress next year. A few, however, are preparing to weigh in. That makes other tech lobbyists nervous that, by doing so, the industry could sacrifice relatively good relationships with Democrats and, therefore, jeopardize some of their other legislative priorities."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

?This gel-remote control which was redesigned by Panasonic as something that is "waiting to be touched" actually seems a bit more freaky than functional. Constructed from a soft, flesh-like gel, the remote appears to be cold when turned off. When on, a soft light glows from its middle and the device begins to mimic the motions of "breath" by moving ever so slightly. Just be careful not to lose it in a sex shop, otherwise it might be mistaken for something else.

via Next Nature

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Adam writes in -

You can buy weighted bases that are specifically made for the Panavise 201 Jr; but I had the materials lying around and a lot of times making stuff is funner than buying it.

I used a 2.5lb plate weight (or dumbbell weight) for the weighted base. The only modification needed was the drilling of three holes for mounting the Panavise.

- Easy (and cheep) Panavise weighted base

More:

HOW TO - build the Arms of Assistance

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?Korean designer and maker Sang-Kyun Park has come up with the "LightDrops" umbrella that employs a Polyvinylidene Fluoride (PDVF) conductive membrane that transforms the energy from falling raindrops into electrical energy that causes LEDs embedded inside the umbrellas to light up. The heavier the rain, the brighter the lights get, thus illuminating your view. Next up would be to use a windmill on the top of the umbrella to store even more storm energy and build a plug to power your mobile devices from the inclement weather.

via Yanko Design

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A number of people have asked for more info on how I modded the Gakken SX-150 analog synthesizer for pushbutton usage. If you'd like to add a DIY keyboard youself, check here's my recipe -

Parts - Feel free to experiment with other resistor/trimpot values and using more/less switches. The basic idea here is to divide up the resistance of the original control strip into sections which are then connected via the switches to the stylus wire.

• 7 x pushbutton switches (I picked up some cheap ones here)
  
• 7 x 4.7K resistors (I used 1% tolerance, but 5% is fine)
  
• 1 x 100K trimpot
  
• prototyping perfboard

Schematic -

(click for larger view)

I removed the cut a piece of 'pad-per-hole' perfboard about the same size then built the keyboard circuit per the above schematic. I ran wires through the preexisting holes used for the control strip and soldered them internally to the appropriate board connections. After testing it out, I secured the board in place using a bit of hot glue.

I find the pushbutton/keyboard setup to be a lot more fun than the control strip, but I still have that stylus hanging about. Hmm, perhaps the strip could be mounted additionally in another area … Well until then, you can see the finished product at work in the original video I posted -

Once you experiment a bit with your own design, you'll likely notice how simple and versatile it can be. I picked up the basic concept a while back from Ray Wilson's excellent Music From Outer Space. Drop a line in the comments if I've left anything out/etc - and most importantly, Have fun!

SX-150 Analog Synthesizer Kit

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Last week, UK Cultural Secretary Andy Burnham laid out a highly questionable argument in favor of copyright extension on performance rights in the UK. The logic he used made little sense, and seemed to be based on a odd belief that musicians had some sort of moral claim on money more than 50 years after they recorded songs -- ignoring plenty of evidence that any extension wouldn't actually benefit most musicians, but would enrich the major record labels.

Now, SteveD points out that Andrew Gowers has responded to Burnham's suggestion and trashed the idea impressively. Gowers, you may recall, is the former Financial Times editor who was asked to explore issues having to do with copyright by the UK government. After spending quite some time researching the issue, he produced the so-called Gowers Report, that explained why copyright extension was a bad idea. Later, Gowers admitted that all of the evidence suggests copyright should actually be much shorter, not longer.

Gowers response to Burnham is worth reading in its entirety, as it skewers pretty much every point that Burnham put forth. Here are just a few tidbits:

As political speeches go, this is pretty silly. A moral case? You might just as well say sportspeople have a moral case to a pension at 30.

Copyright is an economic instrument, not a moral one, and if you consider the economic arguments -- as I did two years ago at the request of Gordon Brown -- you will find that they do not stack up. All the respectable research shows that copyright extension has high costs to the public and negligible benefits for the creative community.

Consumers find themselves paying more for old works or unable to access "orphan works" where copyright ownership is unclear. Small businesses that play recorded music such as hairdressing salons and local radio stations face a hidden extra "tax" in the form of higher music-licence fees. Do they really need this at this time?

Mr Burnham will no doubt find such arguments uncool. But even on his terms, the case for extension does not work. Twenty years' extra earning power in 50 years' time does nothing to put more money in the pockets of struggling performers now: two thirds of lifetime income from an average compact disc comes in the first six years after release.

And it will not alter the incentives for creation one jot. As Dave Rowntree, Blur's drummer, told my review: "I have never heard of a single band deciding not to record a song because it will fall out of copyright in only 50 years. The idea is laughable."

The rest of it is worth reading as well, and near the end he puts in a key point, addressed to the music labels: "Please focus on innovation, not on trying to eke more rent from the successes of yesteryear." Indeed.

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This project attempts to physically represent the amount of "rock" at a concert. It uses an Arduino and pressure sensors on the floor to measure the movement of the audience. It takes that data and creates a visual representation of the "rock" factor.

An idea popped out of Radio 1 Interactive a while ago. This would be a device that measures 'rock' - how much the band and the crowd are rocking at a gig - called The Rockterscale. It would display the amount of rock at the venue and on the web in real-time, maybe even showing it at other gigs and encouraging bands and crowds to out-rock each other. But, until now, no-one has really tried building it. But we were due another hardware hacking session so we decided to build the Rockterscale.

More about The Rockterscale

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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Are you looking for an effective way to collaborate and organize ideas with other people? If you're still into voice and text chat, you might want to give mind mapping a try. Mind mapping is a cool way to share your ideas in total freedom, without the need to follow a structured approach, but just shooting your best thoughts as they come out of your head. And the good news is that there are many tools online that let you draw your own mindmaps. Today, I scouted the Web to suggest you the best ones. A MindMap created with MindMeister Since Robin Good introduced me to mindmaps a few months ago, I don't grab a piece of paper or open a text document anymore to plan what I need to do. I just open my favorite mindmap tool and start scattering ideas around. What I like best about mindmaps are the ease and freedom with which you can visualize your ideas, and clearly understand the relationships between them. You set a core idea, which could be expressed by a sentence, a word, or an image, and then you start adding other ideas around this core concept. You can then see all your ideas at once and re-arrange them visually creating links between ideas and concepts that may be / appear initially unrelated. Curious? Do you want to know more about mindmaps and how to organize your ideas more effectively? In this new Sharewood Guide I have collected the best services out there on the Web to draw a mindmap. Here below the set of key basic characteristics that I have utilized to compare these selection tools to draw your own mindmaps, so that you can easily find the best fit for your needs:

1. Price: Evaluate if you prefer a free service or a more complete solution with additional features.
2. Software / Web-based: Specifies if you can use the tool inside your browser or you have to download and install a software on your hard-disk.
3. Platform: Check if you can run the service on your operating system.
4. Free trial: Indicates if the service allows you to evaluate it for free during a limited period.
5. Collaborative working: Not all mind mapping services allows you to collaborate in real-time with your teammates. Find the ones that does.

Here all the details:

Mind Mapping Tools Comparison Table

go to the table! *Please refer to individual vendors sites for additional pricing solutions.

Draw Your Own MindMaps

1. MindMeister MindMeister is a free web-based tool to draw mindmpas and share them with your team. Instead of taking advantage of fancy animations, MeindMeister provides a clean working environment: the interface is very simple, and it's easy to add nodes to your core idea. Mindmeister is Ajax-based, so the service doesn't require any third-party player to run inside your browser, resulting to be very light and fast to utilize. Interesting feature is the possibility to export your mindmpas in a number of file formats, including .rtf, .pdf, and .jpg. Free to use up to six mindmaps, MindMeister offers different pricing solutions. http://www.mindmeister.com



2. Mindomo Mindomo is perhaps one of the best free web-based mind mapping applications. Mindomo comes with a very elegant interface which mimics Microsoft Office. Flash-based, the service offers many different export options and formats, alongside a rich choice of layouts to arrange your ideas. Mindomo supports multimedia files and image uploading, as well as organic style maps. The free version is ad-supported but you can switch to one of the available pricing solutions. http://www.mindomo.com



3. MindManager MindManager is one of the best mind mapping software on the market. Easy to use and fully-featured, this tool is a must-have for enterprise and personal use of mindmaps. Mindmanager allows you and your team to collaborate on the same mindmap making it easy and fast to have a brainstorming session over the Web. MindManager works on both Pc and Mac platforms, and it is priced at $299 for Pc users and $129 for Mac users. You can try and evaluate the service for 30 days (Pc version) or 21 days (Mac solution). http://www.mindjet.com/



4. iMindMap iMindMap is the "official mindmap software", created under the guidance of Tony Buzan, mindmap evangelist. Available for both Windows and Mac machines, iMindMap lets you draw rich and full-featured mindmaps, adding nodes and arranging them in a very natural way. Collaboration with other users is not allowed. Starting price is set at $99. iMindMap offers a seven-day trial period to test out the service before buying it. http://www.imindmap.com/



5. bubbl.us Bubbl.us offers a simple, efficient way to draw a mindmap. Still at an early stage of its development, bubbl.us is a free flash-based online tool that works directly in your browser, so you don't need to install any additional software to your computer. Enhanced with animated effects, unlike other solutions bubbl.us does support collaborative working for sharing a brainstorming session with your team. http://www.bubbl.us/



6. FreeMind FreeMind is an open source, free mind-mapping software written in Java. The service offers a minimalist interface and covers the basics of mindmaps drawing like hyperlinking and retractable branches. Perhaps the most popular solution on the Web, FreeMind takes advantage from being a cross-platform solution that works seamlessly on your machine independently of which operating system it runs. FreeMind does not support collaborative creation of mindmaps. http://freemind.sourceforge.net/



7. Topicscape Topicscape is an information organizer complementing Mindmanager by taking mindmaps to a 3D landscape. The application uses a three-dimensional interface to help you draw 3D mindmaps for better organization and planning procedures. Topicscape requires a bit of practice to use, but is definitely worth taking the effort because of its stunning mind mapping approach. Topiscape offers different pricing solutions starting at $69, and you can test the software with no charge for 30 days. http://www.topicscape.com/



8. PersonalBrain PersonalBrain is a cross-platform solution to draw mindmaps. PersonalBrain goes beyond the traditional concept of organizing ideas by adding a built-in calendar feature for events you add to your mindmap. Enriched by other features like zoomable image icons, transparencies, and integration with Microsoft Outlook, PersonalBrain is tailored to professionals who wants to get the best out of mind mapping possibilities. Free to use in its light edition, the tool provides different commercial solutions. Collaborative working on mindmaps is not supported. http://www.thebrain.com



9. Mind42 Mind42 is a free web-based mind mapping application that runs inside your browser. Very user-friendly, the tool lets you share your mindmaps with your teammates or publish your mindmaps on the Web. The interface is very simple and you can add images to your nodes, as well as hyperlinking them. Export to .rtf files is allowed. Mind42 offers also different commercial solutions to access more possibilities to create your projects. http://www.mind42.com



10. Mapul Mapul is a simple, web-based solution that lets you draw your own mindmaps. Based on Microsoft Silverlight technology, Mapul offers many different features like image-adding, and an efficient arrangement of branches, tailored to a better mindmap handling. Unlike other similar tools, Mapul has support for Russian and Arabic languages. The service is offered at $7 / month, and offers the possibility for a free trial before buying it. http://www.mapul.com



11. Kidspiration Kidpiration is a mind mapping software tailored for Educators and students. Tailored for K-5 learners, Kidspiration enhances thinking, literacy and numeracy skills using visual learning principles. In reading and writing, Kidspiration strengthens word recognition, vocabulary, comprehension and written expression. Not suitable for real-time collaboration with other users, Kidspiration is available for Windows and Mac platforms,with a starting price of $69. You can try the software for 30 days before buying it. http://www.inspiration.com/Kidspiration



12. Gliffy Gliffy is a free web-based solution to draw diagrams and flowcharts. It is not specifically designed to create mindmaps but the style of arranging ideas and organizing branches is just the same. Gliffy does not allow real-time collaboration, but the service keeps tracks of all the changing made by collaborators, just like a wiki. The free version has limited features, but iyou can upgrade to the Premium account for a monthly fee of $5 which is intended to last at least three months. http://www.gliffy.com/

Originally prepared by Stefanos Karagos and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia and first published on December 17th 2008 as "Mind Mapping: Best Tools To Draw Your Own MindMaps - Sharewood Guide".

Next to an intersection with the main road to Mulanje works a group of men with basic tools. One of them was actively welding with a scratch built arc welder.

Wire was wrapped around a group of metal plates, and the whole thing was housed in a basic wooden frame.

To turn it on, the power wires to the transformer were connected hook style to the AC electric supply coming out of the store room.

There was one guy doing the welding, and he was also alternating between bashing away at a brake disk from a Toyota, trying to remove a part of the wheel hub. The banging was what originally caught my attention. He was beating away at it with a hunk of steel, fatiguing the metal of the hub for removal.

While I was there, he repaired two bikes, one by welding the pedal post back on to the crank.

While shooting the pictures of him welding, I protected my eyes by looking at the display of the camera and shielding my eyes by placing the camera in the line with the arc. The welder used no goggles. US safety inspectors would not have been pleased if they had been with me. I didn't realize it until I looked at the photos afterwards, but his technique was to do 'blind welding' He would attach the ground to the bike, close his eyes, and scratch at the point he wanted to work with the electrode. When the current flowed and the electrode melted, he worked it until it was close, then would stop, open his eyes, check his work, and continue on or finish up.

Since most Malawians have little or no access to the energy of fossil fuels, people get around by either walking or using bicycles. These bikes are used for everything, carrying heavy loads, personal transportation and serving as taxis. They almost all have sturdy steel racks on the back. The bikes are made in China or India, Humber was a common brand name.

If you lived a life with very little access to the leverage of fossil fuels, like the people of Malawi and many other countries, how would you get things done? Have you seen or done a project like this? how could access to a tool like this change a person's or a community's possibilities? What are your safety procedures for welding? Contribute to the discussion in the comments and add your photos and videos to the Make Flickr pool.

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This is a DIY version of commercially available carbon fiber trekking poles. The end product cost less, and they can be easily customized to suit your individual needs.

I thought it would be fun to see if I could make my own Carbon fiber trekking poles on the cheap that would rival the more expensive, commercially-produced ones out there. So, here we go!

More about DIY: Homemade carbon fiber trekking poles

In the Maker Shed:


The Best of Instructables Volume I

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DynaSoar writes "Spaceport America received an early and double holiday gift this week: first, the expected (positive) FAA environmental impact report, and second, the hoped-for but not immediately expected 'launch site operator's license.' With this license, and with the previously accomplished creation of a tax district, two of three pieces are in place as required by the New Mexico legislature to receive its funding package. The third, a lease with a space services tenant to use the facility, may come this week also, in the form of a contract with Virgin Galactic. While timing is impossible to predict, the contract is a virtual certainty. The New Mexico Spaceport Authority fully expects it, and so has projected late 2010 for completion of hangar and terminal facilities. Virgin Galactic also seems confident, as they have already screened and submitted their first 100 customers (called the Virgin Galactic Founders) to their contracted medical and training supervisor. They are busy screening their second 100 'spaceflight participants' (NASA and RKA having decided that only those who can tack 'career' on the front of it deserve to be called 'astronauts')."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dutch artist Bauke Knottnerus created these "Phat Knits": "a series of giant threads used to create, knitted or not, interior products." Love this stuff -- like being miniaturized and set loose on a chunky sweater!

PHAT KNITS (via Yanko Design)

Thanks to all the fretting and worrying about the financial trouble and potential demise of many mainstream newspapers, it's become something of a curiosity that more students than ever seem to be going into college journalism programs (found via Romenesko). However, as the article details, it all makes sense once you realize the simple fact: while newspapers may be in trouble, journalism is actually doing quite well.

Just as many people mistakenly believe that the recording industry represents the music industry, the newspaper industry is hardly a proxy for journalism. Journalism, these days, has expanded well beyond newspapers, and a big part of the problem is that newspapers just aren't as good a medium for news as various other platforms. The second important point that the article above makes clear: journalism, by itself, isn't necessarily a profession. For many students, they see journalism as important training for other professions -- such as law, PR, consulting or management. That's a point that's often ignored these days. The ability to clearly explain what's happening, gathering facts, understanding various viewpoints, and coherently summarizing all the points of view is actually a really valuable skill beyond just journalism. So, don't fear for "journalism." It's going strong. The problem is newspapers who haven't been able to shift course in the midst of a rapidly changing market.

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Stefan sent in this circuit bent video mixer. I really like the effects it generates, I only wish there was more information on how it was made. [Thanks Stefan]

This is a DIY videoprocessor with Audio In which reacts to Audio in via RCA or through the build in microphone. Build into an old TI-99 case. It creates some nice colourful effects even from Black and White footage

More about the Bent videomixer

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Photograph by Muriel Thies

If you love the look of movies such as The Nightmare Before Christmas and The City of Lost Children, there's a sculptor out there after your own heart. In fact, none of Stéphane Halleux's darkly whimsical renderings -- robotic wheelchairs, squat submarines, armored cars, men with mechanical bat wings, animal soldiers wearing hand-stitched leather gas masks, a 30-inch cyclist whose suit includes electrodes that generate energy -- would be out of place in these fantasy flicks.

Two years ago, the former comic-book illustrator got sick of drawing "uninteresting things for other people" and started building the lanky-limbed, roboticized characters he enjoyed doodling -- ominously cartoonish forms that are futuristic yet also recall the past.

Now, Halleux works on his sculptures full time out of his home in the Belgian countryside, where he lives with his partner and their two boys. He sketches the rounded and slumped shapes, then coaxes the creatures from wood, metal, and hide, using scrounged antique parts for appendages and each of the fine details.

"It's as if these old, saved elements, full of history, were giving a soul to the final work," Halleux says of his recycled materials. "I like crazy mixtures, unlikely associations, advanced technology mixed with mechanisms of long ago."

The seemingly mechanical conformations give the impression that they are capable of rolling, taking off, or -- in the case of the cyclist -- pedaling. But actual movement is all in the spectator's mind, Halleux says.

"Each one has an invented history. If I really wanted to animate them seriously, the form and atmosphere would suffer. I think imagination is stronger than a working light or a turning propeller."

>> Halleux's Collection: www.stephanehalleux.com

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 11, page 20 - Megan Mansell Williams.

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Every year when I go home for the holidays, I wind up setting up new computers, printers and cameras, as well as troubleshooting and de-lousing all the old ones. For most of my relatives' desktops, total computer meltdown takes about 3 months from time of install. So by December, most of these machines can be nicely classified as "a project".

This year, while I'm working on everyone's machines, I'm hoping to give the gift of free software. To do this, I'll be distributing flash drives with useful open-source desktop applications that I think will get the most traction. You can't expect everyone will become a full-on Linux convert overnight, but if I'm going to be installing office suites, digital photography tools, and antivirus software, now is a perfect time to introduce the great open source applications that will meet everyone's needs.

Anti Virus

The first thing that needs to be done on many machines is to run a virus and adware scan. ClamAV is a solid open source virus scanner that's used by server administrators to scan and filter email coming in and out of corporate networks. There's a derivative of this program, ClamWin, that adds a desktop interface to the package, and you can use this to effectively scan and clean a Windows box before installing anything else.

There's also a Mac version called ClamXav which I've included a link to for completeness. At this point in time I haven't really experienced any adware or virus issues in OS X, but the download is there if you need it.

On a side note, I've noticed so many problems on relatives' machines that are directly related to commercial virus scanning utilities. I've never installed these, so I don't know if it's a misconfiguration issue or that the hardware/OS combination isn't speedy enough to handle on-the-fly scanning of everything that's going on, but my first move is usually to uninstall these programs. More often than not, performance problems seem to be the direct result of a virus scanner. This is my opinion only, but I'd recommend removing any existing anti-virus software, or at least disabling the real-time scanning features before installing ClamWin. Better to use a safe browser and scan down downloads manually, in my opinion.

Safe Browsing

One of the best things you can do for Windows users is to install Firefox. It provides a more secure browsing experience and lessens the exposure to adware, popups, and virii, without damaging the user experience with so many warnings you can't differentiate problems from normal behavior. It's a solid install for Mac users as well, since there are a number of Firefox addons which can add additional security features to your browsing experience.

Secure Browsing and Communication

Encryption and anonymity features can be very important, especially for laptop owners and users who want to email information securely. If you know a very mobile laptop user, there's a reasonable chance that their laptop will get lifted or lost at some point. I've included GPG on my gift sticks so that sensitive files like bank and tax records can be encrypted in case of loss.

Also recommended is the Tor anonymity routing tool. If you're browsing the web in a public space, it will help to prevent local snoops from monitoring your communications. You'll still need to use SSL enabled (https) sites to ensure end-to-end encrypted connections, but Tor will help to keep those connections anonymous.

There are also Firefox plugins for GPG and Tor. The GPG plugin allows you to easily encrypt and decrypt data within web applications. If you know a GMail or webmail user, this will allow them to secure communication on these mail systems. Torbutton for Firefox provides a simple way to enable and disable the Tor network. Browsing with Tor can be heinously slow, so it's nice to only use it when necessary.

Word Processing, Spreadsheets, and Office Tools

Most people use MS Office at work, but don't have the latest version (or any version at all) at home. The Google Docs online apps do a reasonable job, but OpenOffice.org is a much more robust suite, can do most everything MS Office can, and it will function offline. It's the largest install on my gift drives—the installer weighs in at about 150MB for both the Mac and Windows versions. If you know someone who has a pirated or ancient copy of MS Office, though, installing OpenOffice on their machine might make for a great gift.

Photography and Image Manipulation

If someone gets a camera this year, forget about the crappy bundled software that comes with it. Even in the best case scenario, it's a crippled version of a popular app that will leave anyone wanting. In the worst case, well, some of the bundled photo tools rank right up there with bundled printer applications, which is to say that I can't write about how I really feel about them.

GIMP is awesome. Install it for your family and show them how to open, crop, scale and save JPGs. If they can get past that, teach them how to color correct and desaturate images. It's the 99% of what most people need to know to get the most out of their photography.

As of this writing, the native Darwin version of GIMP for OS X is still too buggy to use. The X11 version runs reliably, but you'll need to get the X11 package that comes with XQuartz or install it from the OS X install disks.

The Software

Without further ado, here are the downloads for all the above packages, separated by platform.

For Windows Users:

Downloads:
Firefox 3

Tor (Install guide

GPG4Win (Based on GNU Privacy Guard)

ClamWin Antivirus

OpenOffice.org

GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program

Firefox Extensions:

Torbutton for Firefox

FireGPG GPG Firefox extension - use GMail/Webmail securely

For Mac Users:

Downloads:
Firefox 3

Tor (Install guide

Mac GPG (Based on GNU Privacy Guard)

ClamXav Antivirus

OpenOffice.org

GIMP for OS X - GNU Image Manipulation Program
This requires X11, which you can install with the XQuartz-Project if you have Leopard. With 10.4 (Tiger), you'll need to install the X11 package from the optional installs section of the OS X disks.

Firefox Extensions:

Torbutton for Firefox

FireGPG GPG Firefox extension - use GMail/Webmail securely

Easy Download Option

I collected all of the installers for both Windows and Mac platforms into a single zip file that you can download from Sourceforge. At the time of this post, these were the latest stable binary installer releases for all of the above files, excluding the Firefox extensions, which you'll need to open in Firefox manually after installing it on the destination machine. You should be able to download either the giftstick-mac.zip or giftstick-windows.zip (or both), unzip it to a 500MB flash disk, and go on a free software installation binge.

Please note that the source files and latest releases for all of these programs are available at the sites listed above. The GiftStick zips are provided as a convenience for grabbing all of these applications in a single download. If this turns out to be helpful for a lot of people, I'll try and keep the GiftStick downloads up to date.

Considerations

The Mac files come out to about 360MB (bigger if you need to keep both 10.4 ad 10.5 installers), and the Windows files are at about 220MB. You can fit either on a 512MB or larger flash drive, or toss files for both platforms on a 1 Gig drive. I'm going to do the latter and help people with the installs and training, but you may want to consider putting this on a couple $30 drives and leaving them behind. Maybe it will get passed along to other potential free software converts.

Of course, there are many other open source packages that I've missed here. If you think I've left out anything essential, please share a link in the comments.

Hack on, and happy holidays!

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Today's XKCD swallows its own tail with a great flowchart explaining how to read flowcharts.

Flow Charts

Frances from Google Book Search writes in with news of their embedded book previewer:

It allows people to programatically search, access, and preview books digitized as part of Book Search. For an example of the viewport in the wild, here's the Book Search iGoogle gadget that incorporates the previewer. Just install it on your iGoogle page and then click on a book to see a preview. I haven't seen a lot of cool uses of the previewer yet (which is why I'm pinging you), but I think there is potential for it. For example, I want to see someone annotate a bunch of books (maybe make an app engine app that lets people do this generically?) and then allow users to navigate around the book based on the comments - imagine the potential for collaborative reading or interpretation of a text. Using the API you can move forward or back in a book, zoom in or out, show the current page number, jump to a page, or search within the book.

My Google Book Search Library, API documentation (Thanks, Frances!)

Cyberpunk legend Rudy Rucker has put a volume of high-quality reproductions of his delightful, surreal paintings up for sale on Lulu.com. It's called "Better Worlds." Rudy explains,

I took up painting in 1999 and quickly I fell in love with the medium. I started with oils, and switched to acrylics, as they’re more amenable to quick set-up and clean-up. My studio is a plastic chair and table in our back yard.

I enjoy the exploratory and non-digital nature of painting, and I love the luscious mixing of the colors. Usually I make a quick sketch with broad brush. Sometimes I have a specific scenario in mind, other times I don’t think very much about what I’m doing, I just paint and see what comes out. Sometimes I’ll even start with an abstract pattern and slowly tweak the blobs into objects. Once I know where I’m going, I’ll polish the painting through two or three or even more iterations. I’m never in a rush to finish.

My pictures are realistic in the sense that they contain recognizable objects and landscapes, but fantastic in their use of heightened colors, cartoony simplifications, and odd scenarios. Many of images are telling a little story.

Better Worlds by Rudy Rucker on Lulu, Better Worlds on Rudy's blog

A new study of 86 galaxy clusters in the early universe has provided independent confirmation of the existence of dark energy. In its absence, gravity's pull should have caused the number of clusters to increase by a factor of 50 over the last 5.5 billion years. What is observed is a factor of 10 increase. "Together with earlier observations... the new data strengthen the suspicion — but do not prove — that dark energy is a weird antigravity called the cosmological constant that was hypothesized and then abandoned by Albert Einstein as a 'blunder' almost a century ago. If that is true, the universe is fated to empty itself out eventually, and all but the Milky Way's closest neighbors will eventually be out of sight. ... Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins and the Space Telescope Science Institute, said: 'If this was a fox hunt and dark energy was the fox, I think they have closed off another escape route. But there is still a lot of terrain left for the fox, and we've seen little more than a glimmer of fur.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few years back, after noting the trend of laptop companies to start building in cellular data modems into their laptops, we wondered when it would reach the stage where mobile operators would subsidize the cost of a laptop, just as they subsidize the cost of mobile phones in many cases. In early 2006, we started to see such subsidized laptops go on sale in Europe, with the mobile operators selling the laptops directly for well below list price, as long as you bought into a long term data plan. The whole idea seemed a bit strange, as mobile operators have long ranted long and hard about how much they hate, hate, hate subsidies, and how they wish they could do away with them. So, why add them to laptops?

However, the idea has now traveled over to the US as well, in a deal between Acer, Radio Shack and AT&T allowing people to buy an Acer netbook for just $100, so long as they agree to a 2 year $60/month contract for an AT&T mobile data plan. It's still a little confusing as to why the mobile operators are agreeing to this, following so many vehement arguments against mobile phone subsidies, but perhaps they're finally realizing that those subsidies aren't such a bad thing when they get people using their services. Still, how long will it be until buyers start complaining about early termination fees for laptops like they do for mobile phones?

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Carlton Mellick III is one of bizarro fiction's most talented practitioners, a virtuoso of the surreal, science fictional tale. He was one of my students last year at the Clarion West workshop and was a real gem -- a great writer and insightful critiquer with exemplary work-habits (Carlton's the hardest-working man in bizarro, if you ask me). He's just placed a story, "Candy Coated," with Vice Magazine -- it concerns the romantic ambitions of a shallow muscle-bound womanizer whose head is a giant lollipop, whose fate unravels when he has the bad judgement to attend a fancy cheese-tasting. Vice has also recorded an audio version of the story, read by "the girl who tells you which register to use at Whole Foods over the PA."

Knob Tyler thinks he’s the strongest, toughest, most badass motherfucker on Mill Avenue. Unfortunately, Knob has a lollipop for a head. This makes him not quite as badass as he thinks he is.

While he’s strutting down the street with his white muscle shirt tossed over his sweat-drenched shoulder, Knob likes to flex his pectorals at the ladies. Whenever he says ladies, he pronounces it laydaaays. But for some reason the laydaaays are never impressed by the size of his pecs. They are too creeped out by his weird lollipop head to notice anything special about his muscles.

Knob’s lollipop head is the size of a bowling ball and light orange in color. The flavor of the lollipop is Tropical Sensation, which is a mixture of pineapple, mango, and star fruit. His tiny candy eyes, nose, and mouth are clustered together in the center of his large round face. His eyebrows are always curled downward to show how fucking serious he is about shit.

CANDY-COATED By Carlton Mellick III, Candy-Coated, read by the girl who tells you which register to use at Whole Foods over the PA (Thanks, Carlton!)

For her Masters thesis at the MIT Media Lab, Anita Lillie created a music library visualization tool called MusicBox. The project will analyze the songs in a music library and group them based on a number of different dimensions - stuff like song length, tempo, ID3 genre information, and more advanced spectral properties of the audio.

This project is killer in so many ways, but my favorite feature is that you can use your mouse to draw a path through the song graph and and the tool will create a playlist that smoothly transitions between the different genres along that path. If this ever gets released, human DJs are going to have to step up their game.

MusicBox: Mapping and visualizing music collections

Previously:
Anita Lillie's Arduino sleep tracker project

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Sean Ragan has put his old soldering iron to good use:

The upgrade left me with a surplus soldering iron and the opportunity to try a modification which first occurred to me when I was 10 or 11 and still playing around with Dad's tools in our old garage, which was to try to adapt a soldering pencil barrel to accept the threads of an X-acto Type A blade holder. The idea was to be able to conveniently adapt my trusty hobby knife for hot-blade work, useful for instance in the cutting of plastics.

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Many readers including thermopile wrote in about Apple withdrawing from Macworld Expo after this year. The other bad news for Apple fans is that Steve Jobs won't be delivering the keynote in 3 weeks — we may have seen his last "one more thing." Apple VP Phil Schiller will be doing the honors. He's "an Apple executive notably lacking in Jobs's showmanship and star power," according to the Fortune blogger. Apple's press release states that "trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers." While this may be true, the keynote addresses have been a critical venue for major new product announcements. Apple's stock is taking a 6% hit in after-hours trading, possibly on concerns about Jobs's health. Reader Harry has gathered together YouTube clips from most of the Macworld keynotes Jobs given since 1997.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apparently there are going to be a lot of people in Washington, DC, next month, for Barack Obama's inauguration. With up to 4 million visitors coming to DC, a city with a population of 1.1 million, there's the potential for a logistical mess. But at least one group is getting out ahead of things: the nation's wireless operators, which want to assure everybody that they're beefing up capacity ahead of the event... just like they do before every Super Bowl and other events where there are predictable swells in network traffic. So, even if you aren't traveling to Washington for the inauguration, rest assured that the country's operators are looking out for you, just in case. And, of course, that they're not missing out on any chance for some PR -- even if it really just highlights their own capacity limitations. One question, though: will any of them come back after the event to detail just how many calls didn't go through on their networks during the inauguration because of capacity constraints?

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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(Embedded Flash video above, and here's a downloadable MP4)

In just a few weeks, Boing Boing TV will be traveling to Vegas for The 2009 Consumer Electronics Show with the Boing Boing Gadgets guys -- Joel, John, and Rob. We're planning to broadcast video reports from the show floor. We're also bracing ourselves for lots of casino umbrella drinks.

To get us started in planning our coverage on the blog in text, photos, and in video, we thought it might be cool to hear from you, our audience. So we asked BB commenters and peeps who follow us on Twitter -- what do you hope or expect to see more of, or less of, at the world's largest electronics show this year. What exactly do you want us to bring home from CES?

In this episode of BBtv, we share your responses. They include:

? Find weird things on the fringes -- BE BOING BOING.
? OH WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN!!! (capture that on video.)
? Better netbooks, notebooks -- mobile computing.
? The most impractically ginormous flatscreen television ever.
? mobile gaming! laptops and mobile devices that allow me to get my game on out in the world.
? What notebooks or a/v devices are attendees themselves using on the show floor?
? Do not cover gadgets at all. Cats are better than gadgets. Also, they are an emergency food source during times of economic crisis.

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Sponsor shout-out: Boing Boing TV's coverage of CES 2009 is sponsored by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus. WePC.com is intended to be a site where users come together to "share ideas, images and inspiration about the ideal PC." Participants' designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and "could influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside."

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Heath and Deborah Campbell of Greenwich, Pennsylvania are angry that the ShopRite supermarket refused to spell out their 3-year-old son's name in frosting on his birthday cake. His name is Adolph Hitler Campbell. Poor kid. An area Wal-Mart later agreed to decorate the cake. Others who read the story in a local paper were apparently upset with Heath Campbell about choosing that name for his child. That made him even angrier. From the Associated Press:

"There's a new president and he says it's time for a change; well, then it's time for a change," the 35-year-old continued. "They need to accept a name. A name's a name. The kid isn't going to grow up and do what (Hitler) did...."

Heath Campbell said he named his son after Adolf Hitler because he liked the name and because "no one else in the world would have that name." He sounded surprised by all the controversy the dispute had generated...

He said he was raised not to avoid people of other races but not to mix with them socially or romantically. But he said he would try to raise his children differently.

Cake request for 3-year-old Hitler namesake denied (Thanks, Jason Weisberger!)

Today on Offworld we got an extensive look back at the design behind Chronic Logic's fluidly dynamic platformer Gish, and nosed around the new Club Nintendo campaign which has finally hit the U.S. We also saw indie adventure game Aquaria released on Steam, decoded game title anagrams, and played Lode Runner on our iPods. Elsewhere, we saw Dogmeat finally get his armor, budgeted for the downloadable DS games coming to Japan for the holidays, watched even more new footage of Noby Noby Boy, from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, and saw Joel talking with NYC Game Boy musician Bubblyfish at the recent Blip Festival.

a302b writes "A Canberra lawyer has been permitted to serve legal documents via Facebook for a couple who defaulted on a loan. He claims he needed to do this because he was unable to track them down to a physical address. At what point does our online presence become 'real?' And what opportunities are available for fraud, if social networking sites are considered legal representations of ourselves, even when they can be anonymously created under any name?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Laurent GUERBY writes in to point us to some news of a new decree from the French government, supposedly saying that all laws must be published on the prime minister's website to be valid (link in French, Google translation to English). Guerby's reading is that this means if the government does not publish all laws on the prime minister's website by May of next year, any unpublished law is no longer valid. Not knowing much French, it's not clear to me if that's actually the case, but I would love for anyone else to chime in on this. If true, though, it certainly makes sense, and makes you wonder why France hasn't been publishing laws online for years.

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Nice hack!

Emmanuel Florac and the rest of his officemates had a bit of a problem: while they could freely leave the office as they pleased, none of them could get back in. Undoubtedly, it had something to do with the new ironclad door and accompanying electronic locking mechanism that was recently installed. Try as they might, no one’s keycard would open the door.

Throughout the day, the office manager could not get a hold of the locksmith. Call after call after call ended with a simple, “we’re sorry, this voicemail box is full; please try your call again later!” As afternoon grew shorter and the evening approached, the jokingly-proposed “someone’s going to have to sleep at the office tonight” became more and more a reality.

Fortunately, Emmanuel had a better idea. All it took to open the door from the inside was a light tap on the switch, so all he’d need to do is find something that could lightly touch the door switch. Unable to find any robot-building components in the office, he sprung for the best alternative: a few cardboard boxes and an unused office PC. This is what he came up with:

The following morning at 8:00AM, one of his coworkers called him up to open the door. Emmanuel put down his cup of coffee, went upstairs to his computer, and then:

1) VPN to the office
2) SSH to the machine in the hall
3) Ran ~# eject /dev/scd0

And, click, the door was opened.

The locksmith did end up fixing the door later that day, putting the door-opening robot out of service just as quickly as it came in.

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Thinking of giving a subscription to MAKE this holiday season? We've made some print-at-home cards suitable for giving and mailing. Consider dressing up your card a bit with some LEDs! I used conductive thread and a watch battery to power the holiday lights on the front of our "Tinker, Tinker, Little Star" card. See how I did it at my Flickr set.

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Not content with the functional-yet-pedestrian-looking hipster PDA (it's just a binder clip and index cards), GTD practitioner Patrick Ng applied his rather impressive design chops to building this stunning, one-of-a-kind productivity notebook he calls the mind.Depositor.

Instead of just inserting plain index cards for random note taking, I created a GTD template to print 4 tabs on these 4x6 index cards: Next Actions, Projects, Wait for, Someday/maybe. The tabs are highly useful to classify index cards into groups, just check the box and start writing to-dos. I also used plastic index cards from KOLO's Havana box to divide "Office Work" and "Personal" index cards (labeling done with Dymo's embossers). I wish I can find better quality index cards in cream color but it is difficult, so for now I'm settled with these ugly blue lined index cards.

His 4x6 in. index cards are retained with two seriously cool-looking clips he bought in Japan. Other features include a pen holder, custom dividers for "Office" and "Personal" notes, and tons of style. I wish I could get organized enough to use something like this, but I'd just continue to customize it as a form of procrastination.

mind.Depositor by Scription
via Lifehacker

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