Frosty Piss writes "Police in Finland have made an arrest for car theft based on a DNA sample taken from the blood found inside a mosquito. 'A police patrol carried out an inspection of the car and they noticed a mosquito that had sucked blood. It was sent to the laboratory for testing, which showed the blood belonged to a man who was in the police registers,' a police officer told reporters. The suspect, who has been interrogated, has insisted he did not steal the car, saying he had hitchhiked and was given a lift by a man driving the car. I'm wondering if the suspect should have denied any association with the car at all. After all, who knows where that mosquito had been?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The stupendously talented artist Mitch O'Connell emailed me this online greeting that was "glitterized" by Colleen Fry. Thank you, Mitch, and a Merry Christmas to all!

I wrote for an essay for Good magazine's blog about the rebirth of amateur science. Here's an except:

For 72 years, Scientific American ran its popular “Amateur Scientist” column, which debuted in 1928. Projects included constructing an electron accelerator, making amino acids, photographing air currents, measuring the metabolic rate of small animals, extracting antibiotics from soil, culturing aquatic insects, tracking satellites, constructing an atom smasher, extracting the growth substances from a cantaloupe, conducting maze experiments with cockroaches, making an electrocardiogram of a water flea, constructing a Foucalt pendulum, and experimenting with geotropism. Who knew you could have so much fun at the kitchen table?

Good: The Return of Amateur Science

One of the issues we regularly discuss around here when it comes to business models is the fact that anyone producing content needs to give consumers a real reason to actually buy something scarce. If it's just the same thing they can get elsewhere for free, there's not much incentive. It looks like Joss Whedon has taken at least some of that to heart. Earlier this year, Whedon got a lot of attention for the release of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, an online three-part video musical. While it seemed like some of the attention paid to it was overblown (oh my! TV people can make videos on the internet just like regular people!), that shouldn't take away from the fact that the video, itself was really, really good.

From the beginning, the plan was always to then sell a DVD of the video, but some questioned if that would make sense, since the video was available for free online. Originally, the announced plan had been to only show the video online for free for a few short weeks, and then make people pay to see it -- but it looks like Whedon changed his mind on that one, as the video has stayed available. However, as Tom writes in to point out, it looks like Whedon and the others involved in the production have realized how to give people a reason to buy the DVD: by providing a ton of useful extras that even those who watched the original obsessively will find worthwhile to pay for. It includes behind the scenes stuff, and apparently a commentary track that is as amusing as the original video itself (and, apparently, includes new musical numbers). It's good to see folks realizing that to get people to buy stuff it helps to add value, not try to diminish it.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

narramissic writes "The three MIT students who were sued earlier this year by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority for planning to show at Defcon how they had had reverse engineered the magnetic stripe tickets and smartcards said Monday that they are now working to make the Boston transit system more secure. 'I'm really glad to have it behind me. I think this is really what should have happened from the start,' said Zack Anderson, one of the students sued by the MBTA."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

COOP and Ruth's new Boing Boing t-shirts featuring COOP's awesome artwork are now shipping! I can't wait until my order arrives. There were only 69 available and Ruth tells me they are selling quickly.
Long-sleeved Boing Boing t-shirt

Over the years, we've posted about vaporized alcohol delivery systems that enable users to "inhale" their booze. Well, Kaden Harris, the incredible eccentric genius who creates antiques from a parallel universe, has constructed his own "alcohol without liquid" device. Of course, Kaden's machine, named Mr. Mister, is far more enticing than the commercial versions. From Kaden's project page:

The tech is pretty simple: It's an industrial strength ultrasonic mist generator in a sealed chamber, with a 3 outlet manifold so you and two friends can get traditionally festive in a new and exciting way.

It does wot it sez on the package.

With considerable efficiency when used with resin/ethyl alcohol solutions.

Kaden Harris's Mr. Mister

Karen Templer from Readerville blog says,

Eight years ago, we did something that, at the time, was considered frivolous by many - we started reviewing book covers, under the heading of Most Coveted Covers. I've always found it strange that book designers aren't more acclaimed (Chip Kidd notwithstanding) given how important their work is to the industry, and I wanted to name names and call attention to great work. Anyway, this week's marks the 200th installment. It's pretty groovy to scroll back through them all, and amazing that even the oldest ones among them still look good!

Most Coveted Covers: Readerville Journal.

Image: detail of the cover for Salmonella Men on Planet Porno: Stories by Yasutaka Tsutsui. Also mentioned in the Readerville roundup, one of my personal favorites: David Carr's amazing The Night of the Gun.

Sepideh Saremi, an Iranian-American blogger who runs Parsarts (and works at DECA, with whom we partnered to launch BBtv) shares word of a new series of blogger arrests inside Iran. The only really solid coverage I was seeing was in Farsi, so I asked her to please translate for Boing Boing. Here it is:

Iranian Blogger Arrests

The Amirkabir Newsletter, a Persian-language site written by students at Tehran's Amirkabir University of Technology, reports that Iranian blogger Omid Reza Mirsyafi has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison for "insulting authorities" and writing "propaganda" against the Islamic Republic.

Mirsyafi's sentence is the most recent episode in an long history of crackdowns on bloggers in Iran. Last month, Hossein Derakhshan, who is often called the "godfather" of Iranian blogging, was arrested on charges of spying for Israel. In recent years, Derakhshan's political views - which had turned increasingly pro-Islamic Republic - have made him a controversial figure in the Iranian blogosphere, but a number of Iranian bloggers today released a joint statement condemning Derakhshan's detention.

Snip from Iranian.com post on Derakshan's detention:

"Unfortunately, in recent years, numerous websites and blogs have been routinely blocked by the authorities, and some bloggers have been harassed or detained. Derakhshan's detention is but the latest episode in this ongoing saga and is being viewed as an attempt to silence and intimidate the blogging community as a whole.

Derakhshan's own position regarding a number of prisoners of conscience in Iran has been a source of contention among the blogging community and has caused many to distance themselves from him. This, however, doesn't change the fact that the freedom of expression is sacred for all not just the ones with whom we agree. We therefore categorically condemn the circumstances surrounding Derakhshan's arrest and detention and demand his immediate release."

(via Global Voices)

Lawrence D'Oliveiro calls our attention to the news that high-end women's shoe company, Jimmy Choo, is forcing a small New Zealand gifts website to give up its name using trademark law. The name of the site is Kookychoo.com, though it may be gone soon, as it sounds like the owner of the site is going to give in rather than fight. This is, of course, ridiculous. It's highly unlikely that anyone, let alone our favorite moron in a hurry, would confuse Jimmy Choo shoes with a website selling random gifts like teddy bears, bean bags and candles, among other things. Originally, Choo's lawyers just wanted to prevent the owner from trademarking Kookychoo, but now is demanding she stop using the name entirely. Since it would cost at least $50,000 to go to court should Jimmy Choo sue, the woman is likely to just give up the name. This is corporate bullying at its finest -- abusing tradmark law for no reason other than to shut down a small website that isn't competing with the company at all.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Here's your holiday snowglobe, people. You're welcome.

Fuck Snow Globe, Designed by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese. Sixth edition of 50, signed and numbered. $150 each, less if you're a member of the New Museum. (Via Trend de la Crème, Thanks, Susannah Breslin)

The Cake Wrecks blog celebrates the moments "when professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong." If you can't read the icing on the cake on the right, it depicts, er, a "fireplace." Cake Wrecks (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)

Over at Boing Boing Offorld, Brandon has presented the Offworld 20: 2008's Best Indie and Overlooked game titles. What you won't find in this list are Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto 4, Spore, or any of the other usual suspects. (I was delighted that Minotaur China Shop made the cut! Also on the list, Crosswords/2Across, ROTOHEX, N+, Rolando, and plenty more... From Offworld, where you should weigh in with your picks too:

Covering every current platform (PC/Mac/Linux, PSP, PS3, Xbox 360, DS, iPhone, N-gage), the 20 isn't just a list of independently made and under-appreciated games, it's a list of the games that celebrate what makes Offworld Offworld: the beautiful and the bizarre, and the games trying to push the medium forward and give us something we've never seen before, in whatever incremental way.

In it you'll find time-manipulators, slacker assassins, satellite viewed superheroes, vector vegetation, bubble blowers and balls of tar, techno invaders and spirits of the wind, and, refreshingly, not one single space marine.

The Offworld 20: 2008's Best Indie and Overlooked Games

MojoKid writes "Shortly after Intel released their new Core i7 processors about a month ago, Dell announced a new update to the XPS 730 with Core i7 tech under the hood. The new Dell XPS 730x is first and foremost a technology update but the chassis has also been buffed up a bit. The Intel Core 2 processor and NVIDIA 790i Ultra SLI chipset powering the original XPS 730 line have been swapped with the new Core i7 processor and an Intel X58 Express chipset based motherboard. The XPS 730x retains the original 730's ability to support both Crossfire and SLI multi-GPU graphics. Like all XPS 700 series machines since the XPS 710, the XPS 730x is available with optional factory overclocking and a H2C edition featuring a two-stage liquid cooling system. And yes, it rips through Crysis quite nicely and puts up rather impressive benchmark numbers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at Fancast.com, I'm posting a number of reviews and "appreciations" of films, trailers, and television episodes you can watch at this site for free (In previous BB posts, I've explained the site, and why I'm blogging there). Here's a snip from my latest contribution, about full-length features and trailers there featuring the fabulous Pam Grier.

COFFY: BLACK. STACKED. AND PACKED WITH FURY.” So begins the funky baritone voiceover in the trailer for Coffy, a blaxploitation classic starring Pam Grier as a sexy anti-drug vigilante. The 1973 film is one of the true greats of the genre, written and directed by Jack Hill. Foxy Brown (1974) also a Hill creation, and also starring Grier, was another important work from this period. You can watch trailers for both on Fancast.

Foxy and Coffy were two of the first “soul cinema” flicks to feature a female protagonist. Previous works of the genre generally presented women as accessories of male success, whose purpose was to support their man, whether for good or evil intent. Grier was unstoppably hot, but also vengeful, righteous, and well-armed. She spent about as much time on screen seducing men as she did shooting them.

These two films are also are notable because they presented drug dealers and men who managed prostitution rings as bad guys. Previous films of the genre presented pushers and pimps as noble characters making the best of the hard lot they’re dealt the ghetto. In “Foxy” and “Coffy,” however, they are not outcasts who deserve empathy, but villains who exploit the vulnerable — and must therefore be killed by Grier.

Action/Adventure: Blaxploitation Trailers and Movies on Fancast (link includes discussion thread over there, thanks!)

MORE: “JACK HILL: The Exploitation and Blaxploitation Master, Film by Film” offers an extensive filmography of Hill’s works. And if you’d like to watch the films in entirety, I recommend picking up “Fox in a Box,” a DVD collection that also includes Grier in “Sheba, Baby.”

Hello there, I am Benjamin J Heckendorn, video game modder, author and part-time karaoke aficionado. You may have seen my site before located at www.benheck.com.

I have been asked by MAKE to blog about some of the best PC mods I have seen, and so over the next few weeks I shall take you all on an amazing journey as we look at them. Please keep in mind that these may not be the best ever, or technically superior, but they're the ones I find interesting.

Let's begin with today's pick, shall we?

Today's pic is the Porsche SLI Machine Wheel PC (full name apparently). I came across this one on the web and was immediately struck by how cool it is. I'll explain in detail after the break.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Mods | Digg this!

depression era holiday ads
happy hanukkah from brooklyn
communist christmas
befriend a geek
a charlie brown ad agency

previously on web zen:
winter zen 2008 part 1

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Robert Popper, who also happens to be the author of the superbly funny 2008 relase The Timewaster Letters, shares the seasonal Tarvuist greeting above. A hearty "Tarvu men-hatty noonah!" to you all, and best wishes for December 25 festivities. Praise Tarvu!

It's no secret that plenty of folks are up in arms over Australia's plan to censor internet connections. From the beginning, it was clear that this was quite a slippery slope, and that slope appears to be getting even more slippery. A bunch of folks have sent in the news that the country's Broadband Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy is already talking about using the system to filter and block file sharing and BitTorrent as well, falsely claiming that the technology exists to do so effectively.

It might just be something of an off-the-cuff statement, but so far Conroy and others in the Australian government appear to have been incredibly tone deaf to the complaints about the filtering system. It is worth noting that Conroy claims in a blog post that he's monitoring the complaints on various websites and social networks -- even to the point of following certain keywords on Twitter. That, at least, shows a surprising (but good) recognition of where he should be reading about the protests. Unfortunately, though, so far it doesn't appear that any of those complaints have resonated.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Lucas123 writes "A researcher who built a car slightly larger than a strand of DNA won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for experimental nanotechnology. James Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice Univ. built a car only 4 nanometers in width in order to demonstrate that nanovehicles could be controlled enough to deliver payloads to build larger objects, such as memory chips and, someday, even buildings, like a self-assembling machine. Tour and a team of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers constructed a car with chassis, working suspension, wheels and a motor. 'You shine light on it and the motor spins in one direction and pushes the car like a paddle wheel on the surface,' Tour said. The team also built a truck that can carry a payload."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hack a stock NERF chaingun it into a high-rate-of-fire beast. This viral video for an energy drink is a terrific how-to video to introduce your non-Maker friends and relatives to toy modification. They admit that this is dangerous and will probably damage the motor -- they are pushing four times the voltage than it was designed for.

The paint job is awesome -- brushing on the highlights reminds me of a real-world version of how I used to paint 3D guns when I worked in the video game industry.

My favorite mod is the three-digit LED round counter. Hats off guys! Great job.

Mana Energy NERF How-To via Boing Boing Gadgets

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Toys and Games | Digg this!

If you're still looking for a great last-minute gift, how about a subscription to MAKE or a gift certificate for the Maker Shed? Better yet, how about a customized version of the gift card or gift certificate? I took one of the gift cards and the DIY Design Electronics Kit and made a sort of still life--the 556 timer fit perfectly into the IC drawn on the gift card.

I got to thinking it might be fun to actually hook all this stuff up so that it works, as you can see below. I think I'm going to need some smaller clips if this is to be freestanding!

MAKE Gift Subscription
Maker Shed Gift Certificate
Downloadable MAKE Cards

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Paper Crafts | Digg this!

Back in 2005, Mike coined the term "the Streisand Effect" to describe the situation where an attempt to suppress information generates increased publicity for that information. Our latest example comes via my friend Matthew Yglesias, who on Friday had some choice words for a center-left organization called Third Way. Matt blogs on a site run by Center for American Progress (CAP), though with full editorial control over the posts on his particular blog on the site. Despite calling Third Way out, the post got little overall attention on the blog.

On Sunday, however, readers of Matt's blog were treated to this creepy post in which Matt's boss, Jennifer Palmieri, noted that his posts don't reflect the opinions of the Center for American Progress, and then insisted that CAP has "a great deal of respect for [Third Way's] critical thinking and excellent work product." This is a great illustration of the differences between traditional and web-based media. In a traditional paper publication, everything is subject to editorial control, and in all likelihood Matt would have been asked to tone down his criticism of Third Way before his writing hit the presses. But Matt's blog gets posted unfiltered, complete with curse words and spelling errors. The immediacy of Matt's blog is a big part of what keeps readers coming back to the site. And it's also what made Palmieri's post so damaging.

Although Matt's blog is hosted on CAP's site, it's Matt's blog, and readers expect to get Matt's unfiltered opinions. Having Matt's boss hijack his blog in order to publicly reprimand him is really jarring. And then there's the Streisand Effect. Everyone would have forgotten about Matt's original post within a few days had someone at Third Way not called Matt's boss and demanded an apology. Instead, the entire liberal blogosphere is talking about Matt's post... and about Third Way's thin skin. The backlash is going to do far more damage to Third Way's reputation than Matt's original post could have.

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

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

stoolpigeon writes "John Scalzi, the author of Hugo Award-nominated science fiction novel Old Man's War, has built what started as a story serialized in his blog into a series of full novels and short stories. The latest installment in the OMW universe, Zoe's Tale, is quite a departure from the previous three books. It is the first of Scalzi's sci-fi novels written intentionally as young adult fiction. In a move that I am sure will continue to fuel Scalzi/Heinlein comparisons, Zoe is a precocious young woman thrust into a world of adventure and danger. In just three years Scalzi has built an impressive resume as an author of fiction, and Zoe's Tale will be no small part of what looks to be an influential and outstanding career." Keep reading for the rest of JR's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For your holiday chipmusic listening pleasure, Doctor Octoroc has released "8-Bit Jesus." The digital download is free. Brandon has the details, and the discussion, over at Boing Boing Offworld!
"Octoroc releases the full 8-bit Jesus"

No, it's not a joke. Researchers at the University of Bari, Italy, studied how MDMA (ecstasy) and loud music impact the sexual activity of rats. They report their results in the scientific journal European Reiew for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences. According to their experiments, MDMA impaired the rats' sexual behavior while loud music seemed to increase the number of rats getting it on. From the paper abstract:

However, combined treatment of MDMA and music stimulation did not fully restore normal sexual behavior as the animals reaching ejaculation still showed a marked reduction of copulatory efficiency. These findings demonstrate that the systemic administration of a single low dose of MDMA, alone or in combination with loud music, which is commonly present in certain environments such as rave parties, notably impairs copulatory activity of male rats.

"Effects on rat sexual behaviour of acute MDMA (ecstasy) alone or in combination with loud music"

Faldo writes "There's a three part interview with a computer security expert on BanThisURL that goes into the flaws in the Aussie net filtering scheme. In addition to SSH tunnels and proxies, more worrying problems like trojaning the boxes to set up man in the middle attacks (which the interviewee has done in his lab), cross site scripting and the Australian blacklist leaking are all discussed. Worrying and relevant, especially since Thailand's blacklist has just been leaked."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Friday, we wrote about how the likelihood of eventual lawsuits created a chilling effect that shut down Mixwit, a useful online mixtape service provider. It seemed quite unlikely that Mixwit was violating copyrights, as it didn't host any music nor make the music that people played through available for download. However, that won't stop the record labels who seem to believe that any service that lets you play music must first receive the big record labels' blessing (and, in case you were wondering, that blessing costs a lot of money, and often equity).

Earlier this year they sued one such startup, called Project Playlist. Similar to Mixwit, Project Playlist doesn't host any music. It just sends a search query to a variety of search engines, finds results of publicly available music via those search engines and then aggregates the results into a playlist. It then allows you to create widgets with that playlist. All of this should be perfectly legal. Project Playlist simply has no way of knowing whether the music found via various search engines is legal or not. It's not doing any of the hosting. It's not allowing downloading for infringement purposes. It's difficult to see what possible complaint the record labels have with it, other than the simple fact that it's a good innovation that people like, and no one's paying the big record labels for it.

Of course, lawsuits take some time, and apparently (unlike some other startups) Project Playlist hasn't simply folded when the lawsuits showed up. The company, which has raised a significant amount of money and has brought on experienced internet execs seems to be fighting back. So what did the record labels do? Well, they went after third parties, such as MySpace and Facebook who host the widget from Project Playlist. This is even more untenable than the lawsuit against Project Playlist. MySpace and Facebook are even further away from any liability, because as open application platforms, they don't even know much of what their applications do, let alone that one may be going to search engines, finding publicly available songs, putting them into a playlist and letting people stream them.

But, why should anything like that stop the record labels? So, late last week, MySpace gave in and locked out Project Playlist widgets while Facebook seems willing to push back on behalf of users. MySpace's move really isn't that surprising, since MySpace launched its MySpace Music offering to terrible reviews and (from the buzz we've heard from insiders) much less use than projected. MySpace Music competes directly with Project Playlist, so the company must be thrilled about an excuse to shut down access to Project Playlist, even though the end result might just drive users away, and make app developers that much more cautious about betting on MySpace as a platform.

Apparently, record label folks are claiming that Facebook's refusal to block Project Playlist is "irresponsible," which is laughable coming from the recording industry -- perhaps the most irresponsible and short-sighted industry around. Facebook knows that it has the law on its side, and at best the recording industry can launch a wasteful, money-sucking lawsuit against it, which will only drive music fans further away from the recording industry. If the record labels want to talk "irresponsible" they should look at themselves in the mirror first.

Update: Interesting timing here. Apparently Sony BMG has worked out a deal with Project Playlist. While News.com designates this as "good news," I'm not so sure. Yes, it's probably good news from the standpoint of avoiding a lawsuit, but it's bad news from the standpoint that Project Playlist was pressured into signing a deal that legally it almost certainly does not need. It's now set a precedent that rather than stand up for its rights, if you threaten enough, the company will fork over money (and potentially equity). Once again, this just reinforces the record labels' incorrect position that no one should be allowed to innovate in the music space without paying a toll to the big record labels.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

My son and I put together this blinking LED Christmas tree kit, and then hung little MAKE gift subscription and MAKE gift certificate ornaments from it. It was a lot of fun -- he got to learn about anode vs. cathode sides of the LEDs as he fit them into place for soldering.

The gift cards and gift subscriptions make wonderful last-second gifts for all you procrastinators out there! You can print out the assets yourself, available here and here.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

Via Ecofriend:

Old and broken down auto parts are nothing more than trash for some, but for people like Armando Ramírez they are no less than treasure. The artist transforms these objects into sleek, black and silver chess sets. The horses, pawns and everything that you see on a chess set. To complete the chessboaround objects are rolled into a specially crafted die machine that transforms them. Armando uses everything from screws and bearings to a car's electrical system.

We've got a massive DIY chess roundup here, and you can even make a chess board double as secret-agent storage.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Gaming | Digg this!

Joanna at Morbid Anatomy found a beautiful photo gallery of animals preserved in formalin.

Fortean artist/prankster Jeffrey Vallance created a Santa Claus Family Tree tracing the genealogy of "wild people." Climb the curious branches over at Cryptomundo. Santa's Family Tree

(This post is a followup item to "Ukrainian Teen Serial Killer Gang Document Their Crimes on Cellphone Video.")

On Friday, a friend shared an item with me about a gang of teenage serial killers in the Ukraine who killed their victims basically by torturing them to death -- they documented the crimes on cellphone video, and showed up to their victims funerals. Social networking websites and "shock" websites each played a role in the story, and why my friend suggested it for the blog. While the death video was part of the story, it wasn't the entire story, and it wasn't necessary to link directly to it -- or watch it myself -- to share what was relevant to Boing Boing about the story. So I did neither, and warned readers of that fact in the blog post. I'll repeat: There was no direct link to the "shock video" from BB at any time.

About 300 comments on that entry later, I thought it might be helpful to post a note from my friend. A number of commenters reacted to the post in a way I did not expect.

Part of why I shared this is because my friend lost a loved one to murder.

That friend's interest in this story now wasn't motivated by prurience -- mine wasn't either. My friend's email continues after the jump, and I post it here not as some kind of vain validation for an editorial decision, but because I thought it was beautiful and moving.

How I encountered the story, or "Why it's not about the shock value"
- Anonymous

I am the submitter. Yesterday I was flipping around Encyclopedia Dramatica, gathering what I considered acceptable lulz from among the more horrifying articles there. Some things there are funny, some make me furious and some are just gross.

The front page randomly featured the article on the Ukranian teen serial killers, who I had not heard of, so I clicked on it. My life has been affected by murder of a loved one, and recently a sick internet "fan" detailed a lengthy fantasy of my rape and torture on their webpage, which left me feeling bad all week.

Because of these things, I was drawn to look at a story about killers even though I knew it would make me feel bad.

Filtering out the ED-style mockery of the root information, I was left surprised to read about a current teen serial killing spree of this magnitude that I had not seen mentioned in US news.

Google News had virtually nothing on it. Google Search led to lots of shock and horror sites. I decided against watching the video and actually held my hand up to block some images from view as I read some posts about the story. It was staggeringly horrible, even just to read about.

Nonetheless, it struck me as interesting that a gruesome story like this, which the US media usually covers in gory detail, was getting little media attention here, but was sort of telling itself via cellphone video and social media like forums and blogs.

The combination of "international story going untold in the US" and "criminals use cellphone cams and social networking alongside heinous crimes" made me think of Boing Boing, as a place where news breaks concerning human rights, international stories and technology. I was thinking that with great articles on steampunk teapots and unicorns, Boing Boing had also recently covered the riots in Greece and other human rights issues abroad.

I wish I had written this up when I originally sent the story in, but to be honest, I never expected so many people to immediately boil the whole thing down to a twice-removed link to the murder video. It was about the information and the story, to me. The murder video is two sites away, linked down on the bottom third of another site I linked containing the transcript.

There's no way I can imagine anyone reading the initial story, then the linked transcript, and then clicking on that video link and expecting anything other than horror. I submitted the story, and I didn't even watch it because I knew from the transcript that it would be beyond my limits.

I apologize for not starting the whole thing off with more clarity, but at heart I just wanted to present a striking story about violence, technology and information.

It was important for me to let everyone know that this story was not submitted out of a desire to revel in the video. It deeply affected me, as I'm sure it has you all. If anyone clicked, read, scrolled and clicked again to watch the video mentioned in the story, you're braver or more foolhardy than I.

I don't think she needs to apologize. Anonymous, thank you for sharing this with me, and with the world.

Previously: Ukrainian Teen Serial Killer Gang Document Their Crimes on Cellphone Video

National Dollar in San Francisco apparently sells less than everything.

narramissic writes "The National Security Agency has patented a technique for figuring out whether someone is messing with your network by measuring the amount of time it takes to send different types of data and sounding an alert if something takes too long. 'The neat thing about this particular patent is that they look at the differences between the network layers,' said Tadayoshi Kohno, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Washington. But IOActive security researcher Dan Kaminsky wasn't so impressed: 'Think of it as — if your network gets a little slower, maybe a bad guy has physically inserted a device that is intercepting and retransmitting packets. Sure, that's possible. Or perhaps you're routing through a slower path for one of a billion reasons.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE: television is right around the corner! Check out the countdown clock on the MAKE: blog page. January 3rd online - hitting Public Television shortly after!

In this week's smashing video post, Walter Kitundu and Luigi Anzivino rig a baseball bat to a camera that captures flash photos at the exact moment the bat strikes a piece of fruit. View the clip above, get the M4V and/or subscribe in iTunes.

Luigi and Walter have their plans on flickr.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Make: television | Digg this!

While Lori Drew was eventually convicted under computer hacking laws, originally prosecutors in Missouri refused to charge her, noting that it was pretty clear she had not broken any laws in Missouri. Not surprisingly, the emotionally-tinged case meant that politicians had to rush into the void, hastily passing a law to make it illegal to be a jerk online. Of course, prosecutors couldn't go back and retroactively charge Drew, but they apparently haven't wasted much time in making use of the new law, charging at least seven people under the new law for a variety of "cyber" harassment attacks, mostly involving annoying someone with text messages. Of course, as some are noting this is a waste of taxpayer money, burdening the court system with annoyances that should be settled informally among people. Have we really reached a point in society that people have to run to court every time someone acts like a jerk towards them?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

I've noticed that Mike Arrington tends to use Posterous for pictures he posts while traveling, pics of his dog Laguna, random stuff. I wondered why he used it instead of Flickr, which is what I generally use for pictures and small movies, and today he wrote a review and explained -- it's because it takes absolutely nothing to set up. You just send an email to post\@posterouscom add an enclosure if you like, and it automatically creates a blog if it doesn't know you (you're identified by your email address) and then creates a post to hold the enclosure and text. This is the way we like our software, easy to get started with, and with instant rewards. Good work!

I tried it out, enclosing a copy of the MP4 video of Singin In The Rain from 1929, with a bit of text scarfed from scripting.com, sent as an email to Posterous, and sure enough a moment later, it sends back a pointer to a blog with a long weird name, and I click on the link, and there's the text and the movie.

After that I went back and read the email, it said they were happy to meet me, and I could sign up for an account and my Posterous blog would then have a nicer name. Seemed like a good deal. It suggested \"dave\" -- but it turned out to already have been taken. I then tried "d" -- that was too short, then "dw" which it approved, and now I've got yet another presence on the www.

Now come the questions.

1. Does it have an API? If not, then it's fairly useless as a blogging tool. It should, at a minimum support the MetaWeblog API, so that tools written for WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and all the blogging tools I''ve written (Radio, Manila, lots of one-offs) are compatible. It should also support the weblogs.com ping protocol, which will let it integrate with virtually every service of the "live web" (and as far as I know they do support it).

2. I reviewed their RSS feed for my site, and it's pretty good! They don't fuss around with multiple versions of the feed, and their RSS is mostly plain vanilla, i.e. really simple, the kind that every RSS processor will understand. Now a few things they could do to simplify even more.

a. They declare three namespaces at the top of the feed, but only use one. The other two should be removed.

b. There's no version number on the <rss> element. Since they use namespaces, it must be 2.0, because RSS didn't get namespace support until 2.0.

c. It does no harm to use a CDATA on the <description> element, but it isn't necessary since all the characters are properly encoded.

d. I don't like that the permalink is encoded in the <description>. Unfortunately this has become common practice in RSS, but the information is already in the <guid> element, which is good. They're presumably replicating it because some reader doesn't display the permalink from the <guid>. I say deal with the problem where it's located, get the reader to display the permalink. Because of this extraneousness, software that behaves well the permalink will be displayed twice, unnecessarily. Yuck!

e. Same with the link to the comments. RSS 2.0 has a <comments> element. I wish people would use it.

f. Finally, they use Yahoo's Media RSS namespace to convey the information about the MP4 movie I enclosed. I guess some software they want to work with isn't looking for the base <enclosure> element that was designed for exactly this use. In cases like this, I support both, because it should be possible to write a podcatcher or, in this case, a movie-catcher, that conformed to the original spec and knew nothing about Media RSS, which came later and is an optional extension. The way Posterous has coded it, such a catcher app will completely miss the movie. This is the way breakage creeps into a community, and breakage is, of course, bad.

But on the whole, they did a very nice job, otherwise I wouldn't bother with the feedback.

Josh Bearman posted some photos of poodles groomed almost beyond recognition.

From Pink Tentacle, this video of "a bioluminescent deep-sea siphonophore — an eerily fantastic creature that appears to be a single, large organism, but which is actually a colony of numerous individual jellyfish-like animals that behave and function together as a single entity."

Stephen Birch writes "Following closely behind the mid-November 2.06 release of VirtualBox, Sun Microsystems has released version 2.1. This has a number of new features, but one of the most interesting is the ability to run a 64-bit VM inside a 32-bit host. Another useful feature is integrated host-based networking; no more fiddling around with network bridges. Sun is really giving VMWare a run for their money."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stephen Birch writes "Following closely behind the mid-November 2.06 release of VirtualBox, Sun Microsystems has released version 2.1. This has a number of new features, but one of the most interesting is the ability to run a 64-bit VM inside a 32-bit host. Another useful feature is integrated host-based networking; no more fiddling around with network bridges. Sun is really giving VMWare a run for their money."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Get your Christmas decorating done instantly, while having a blast, with the Instructables Christmas Cannon. You've been Christmas'd!

Christmas Cannon

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Holiday projects | Digg this!

The RIAA and the record labels who make up its main membership keep asking folks like us to "trust them" when they come up with new plans to force people to hand over money. They say that we shouldn't criticize them until the plan is set, but they haven't yet shown the slightest reason to grant them an ounce of trust. Just last week, we suggested that they stop suing people, if they were so intent on turning over a new leaf. And, while they did finally announce plans to abandon mass lawsuits, the fine print is anything but encouraging (and, it's increasingly clear that it was done more to save money than out of any more reasoned strategy).

However, there was a bit of surprising news that came out of the press barrage after the announcement about giving up on the mass lawsuits: the RIAA claimed that it had stopped filing lawsuits months earlier. That certainly didn't fit with the story we had just seen earlier in the week of new lawsuits, and now Ray Beckerman has put together a list of recently filed lawsuits by the RIAA and its major record label members in the last few weeks.

In other words, the RIAA has been caught lying yet again. Shocking. And, yet, they expect us to "trust them" to come up with a better solution -- one negotiated in backrooms behind closed doors without major stakeholders getting to take part? Forgive us for being skeptical that any such deal will be reasonable. What's really disappointing, though, is to see some major tech publications get taken in by this, insisting that somehow the RIAA really has turned over a new leaf. You would think that reporters covering this space wouldn't be so gullible.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

I'm giving a friend some Shapelock for Christmas this year - it's such cool stuff, I can't wait to see what she does with it! I realized that by traditional standards, that's kind of an odd present, and it made me wonder what other people have given or gotten as gifts. I asked some Makers about their most memorable gifts and they shared these stories.

Adam Savage (Mythbusters) "The weirdest thing I've ever gotten was a pair of Mythbusters Sock Monkeys."

Mitch Altman (inventor of the Brain Machine and TV-B-Gone)

"I live in a one-room studio apartment, so I have to be very selective what I bring into my small space. My mom was the kind of person who needed to give presents to be happy, and not wanting to squeeze me out, she would give me small items she picked up on her travels from around the world, some of which I kept, others of which I'd give away, in turn. I thought the most interesting items for a mom to give her son... was an opium pipe from Morocco (intricately carved and crafted, made from brass and wood), and a drug scale from Thailand (made of tree bark, full of details of various Budhist iconography). I still have these in my little room. One of the items I gave away was a loin covering from Nigeria that didn't smell too good."

Robert Thompson (author of Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments)

"I'll have to think about that one. I usually only give and receive normal gifts, like the time I gave Barbara a set of metric sockets for our anniversary.

Paul Jones (my friend and tech advisor on the chem book) was supposed to bring me back a present the last time he was in Hawaii, and it would probably have made your oddest list. He was out there on a grant capturing sea slugs, which he needed for his work on photochemistry. (Did you know that some animals, including these sea slugs, do photosynthesis just like plants? I didn't.) At any rate, he forgot to bring home a sea slug for me. Either that, or he thought I was kidding."

Kaden Harris (author of Eccentric Cubicle)

"Just before Christmas In 1998, I met Kaia 'The Sourceress' Howe, at a time when the ebbs and flows of our respective lives were emphatically pegged on 'ebb'. The holiday season was spent licking our wounds, hunkered down in her flat surrounded by her densely packed collection of amazing 'stuff', which runs the gamut from a grass skirt from the movie 'South Pacific' to carb rebuild kits for a 65 Dodge Dart. She'd just moved house, and there were a *lot* of settling in details still pending, so I spent much of my time doing my whole 'improvisaional fabrication' thing, bodging together furnishings, storage and interior design stuff from whatever I could lay my hands on. It was a surreally intense and emotional period for both of us, and 'Making' was our in-house therapy/ lessons for life learning lab.

Truly, truly life changing.

At some point Kai asked me what I was going to do with my life... I kinda mumbled something and went back to sanding down skidwood. She said " I think you need to be an artist".

Best. Gift. Ever."

Lenore Edman (Evil Mad Scientist and Peggy)

"We were once given a rubber chicken, but I had always wanted a rubber chicken, so perhaps that wasn't such an odd gift. I hung it by its
feet from the cookbook shelf, which seemed like a good place for it.
However, it was a really terrible (though brand-name) rubber chicken, and after having had it for a while, I realized that I don't need a rubber chicken any more. Do you know anyone who needs an awful rubber chicken?

This year for his birthday, Windell received a duck call. It is exceedingly authentic, with a camouflage neck cord, instructions for use with several types of ducks, and dual functionality (both reed and whistle). It is quite useful for playing along with Monochrom's latest collection, which has one piece with a wonderful part for duck call.

Chris once received a box full of flying screaming monkeys for his birthday. Although they were the hit of the party, this is not a gift that I recommend to anyone. Naturally, most of them were regifted to someone who was thrilled to receive a bag full of flying screaming monkeys until his toddler developed a flying screaming dislike of them."

Gareth Branwyn (MAKE blogger and editor, The Best of Instructables)

"I have a history of giving people odd and unusual gifts. I used to get most of my presents from American Science & Surplus (sciplus.com). One year, I gave everyone Poo Pets. These were *handmade* statues of various critters (rabbits, turtles, "stool" pigeons) pressed out of manure. You put them in your garden and they slowly dissolved, fertilizing as they wasted away. Wrapped, the presents had a very... earthy odor, which somehow appealed to me. Another year, I gave Butterfly Gardens. These were a box with butterfly larvae and food in them (actually you had to send in a coupon for the larvae). You watched the larvae turn to chrysids and then into butterflies. You then let the butterflies go free. Another year, everybody got bags of rocks -- geodes, actually. You wacked them with a hammer to reveal the crystalline structures inside. Some of them had no crystals, or not-so-great crystals, some revealed spectacular little crystal worlds, so there was chance involved. One year, I did most of my shopping from the Archie McPhee catalog (mcphee.com). That was fun. I bought all sorts of goofy bug-decorated pocket protectors, wind-up tin robots, and other Pee Wee Herman-worthy fare. For myself, I bought a gallon jar of plastic and rubber trinkets and charms, thousands of pieces. I used it in mail art, in a "bagazine" edition of my zine, Going Gaga, to decorate presents, as shut-up toys for visiting kids, etc. I still have about 3/4 of a gallon of this stuff in the plastic jug in my bedroom closet."

Marc de Vinck (MAKE blogger, Fun with the Arduino Starter Kit)

"I made this silver & wood ring (and ring-box) for my girlfriend back in college. It's all made by hand, even the tubing for the hinge is hand-drawn down from flat sheet stock. I guess she liked it since we have been married for over 10 years now!"

Becky Stern (MAKE/CRAFT blogger, Twitchie Scorpion)

"The strangest gift I've given is a handmade catnip fetus toy. I crochet or felt the body, stuff it with poly-fill or wool, and hide a bit of catnip in the center. Cats love them! Very popular with the hipsters."

---

What are yours? Post them up in the comments!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Holiday projects | Digg this!

Kevin 7Kbps writes "Censorship Minister Stephen Conroy announced today that the Australian Internet Filters will be extended to block peer-to-peer traffic, saying "Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial". This dashes hopes that Conroy's Labor party had realised could be politically costly at the next election and were about to back down. The filters were supposed to begin live trials on Christmas Eve, but two ISPs who volunteered have still not been contacted by Conroy's office who advised "The department is still evaluating applications that were put forward for participation in that pilot." Three days hardly seems enough time to reconfigure a national network."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barence writes "Mozilla CEO John Lilly has admitted the Firefox maker's relationship with Google has become "more complicated" since the company launched its own browser. Mozilla is dependent on Google for the vast majority of its revenue and has previously worked closely with the search king's engineers on the development of Firefox. But that relationship appears to have cooled since Google released Chrome in the summer. "We have a fine and reasonable relationship, but I'd be lying if I said that things weren't more complicated than they used to be.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michelle @ CRAFT writes:

Renee of The Domestic Scientist made this Space Invaders cross-stitched guitar strap for her husband... his guitar is next for modding.

8-bit game graphics make great cross-stitch pattern because they have a very similar resolution. Keep that in mind for creating unique cross-stitch patterns for your crafty friends and family!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this!

In general, we have trouble with things like speed cameras and red light cameras -- both of which don't tend to do much of anything to make the roads safer (rather, there's evidence that they lead to more accidents). The reality is that they are really about boosting revenue for local governments, not about safety -- which explains why plenty of places have been found illegally changing parameters to make them bring in more revenue.

But the biggest problem of all is just that these cameras aren't reliable at all, and without any human witness it seems unfair to charge someone with a crime -- especially when they do things like charge a stationary brick wall with going 58mph or accuse a woman of driving a car at a stunning 480 mph. And, of course, when you have an automated system sending out violation notices, you just know it's going to get gamed. That's exactly what appears to be happening. Slashdot points out a story of students in Maryland making fake license plates matching other students' plates, slapping them on their cars and speeding by speed cameras in order to get other students slapped with fines. And, of course, others have seen similar attempts for more nefarious reasons. At what point did we decide it was okay for automated systems to issue fines without any human review?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Ian Lamont writes "DefectiveByDesign.org is waging a battle against DRM with a 35-day campaign targeting various hardware and software products from Microsoft, Nintendo, and others. On day 11 it blasted iTunes for continuing to use DRM-encumbered music, games, TV shows, movies, audiobooks, and apps with DRM, while competitors are selling music without restrictions. DefectiveByDesign calls on readers to include 'iTunes gift cards and purchases in your boycott of all Apple products' to 'help drive change.' However, there's a big problem with this call to arms: most people simply don't care about iTunes DRM. Quoting: 'The average user is more than willing to pay more money for hobbled music because of user interface, ease of use, and marketing. ... Apple regularly features exclusive live sets from popular artists, while Amazon treats its digital media sales as one more commodity being sold.' What's your take on the DRM schemes used by Apple and other companies? Is a boycott called for, and can it be effective?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This iPhone app lets you run the ARToolKit v.4.4 on the device at 10fps with realtime tracking and more features to come! Check out the video to see it in action, pretty limitless things you will be able to do with this like augmented reality mapping onto physical landscapes as you walk down the street.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

From the MAKE: Flickr pool

Brian shares his design for a simple sound-based memory game using a Picaxe microcontroller -

What it does
MemSounds is a sound based memory game played in rounds. In the first round it plays one of 4 different sounds at random. Each sound represents a different switch in the device. After the sound is played you get a turn to copy the original sound by pressing a switch. If you get the sound right, MemSounds will play two sounds in the next round and so on. The limit is about 100 rounds.

- MemSounds The sound-based memory game

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

Warner Music desperately wants people to believe that it's not the evil record label that people make it out to be, but it's going to have a very difficult time proving that's true when it keeps doing strategically braindead things like pulling all its music off of YouTube because it's upset Google won't pay more money. This is classic Warner Music. The company almost always overvalues its music, compared to the services that help promote that music, and is always demanding a larger cut. Last summer, it did a similar thing and pulled its music off of Last.fm. With plenty of other startups, the company has a history of suing until they agree to cough up a huge chunk of equity. This, of course, is the same company whose boss, Edgar Bronfman Jr. just a year ago declared that the industry had made a mistake in going to war against consumers, ignoring the fact that it was his own speech back in 2000 that basically kicked off that war.

To be honest, Warner Music should be hugely thankful that Google is paying the company anything for music on YouTube. Legally, Google has no reason to pay a dime. Thanks to the DMCA safe harbor provisions, if Warner wants to go after anyone, it should be going after those who upload the videos, but Google worked out a totally unnecessary (and somewhat questionable) deal to pay the labels for a promise not to sue users. However, it looks like Warner Music is getting excessively greedy again. Perhaps it's the recent reports that Warner's larger competitor, Universal Music is bringing in significant cash from YouTube that got Bronfman and crew angry, but it's doing exactly the wrong thing in pulling its videos.

Pulling the videos off of YouTube doesn't punish Google. It punishes fans: the folks who Warner desperately needs on its side, though it's been failing at that for a long, long time. Google's response should be "good riddance." Let's see how Warner Music copes with angry musicians who want fans to promote their music on YouTube, while seeing plenty of other bands build up larger audiences that way.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Video publishers are in for some good news today. There is a new web service that lets you pull together multiple video feeds from sites like YouTube, Hulu, Comedy Central, and more in order to create your own Internet TV station. Photo credit: iloveotto And if you love Post-it notes, I have an awesome Web 2.0 solution that will do what the Post-it note did to your desk... organize your online and offline world, and help you remember where you found all those interesting things. In this issue of the Visual Communication Sharewood Guide, I will share with you those two tools, plus six more that include, among other things, great solutions to let you create and embed charts easily, as well as a new web-based image and photo editor. Here is the list of my hand-picked visual communication pearls:

• ffwd - A web video aggregator that allows you to create your own personalized TV station on the Web by pulling video together from any source.
• Evernote - Allows you to capture information online and offline using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time from you computer or other web-enabled device.
• ZapLive TV - Allows you to stream live video on the Web and create your personal TV channel.
• Hohli Charts - Allows you to create almost any kind of chart easily and then embed or share it anywhere on the Web.
• PiZap - Fun web-based photo editor that allows you to add different effects like stickers and thought bubbles, and then share them easily throughout the Web.
• Polyvore - A web-based collage creator and social network.
• Meez - A site that allows you to create a customizable 3D avatar of yourself that can be your virtual you.
• Dezignus - A community of graphic designers that offers a bunch of free resources and inspiration to help you with your design project.

Here all the details:

Visual Communication Tools

1. Ffwd Ffwd is a social video aggregator that allows you to create your own TV channels by mixing content from around the web, and discover new videos recommended by ffwd based on your favorite shows and interests. Ffwd aggregates content from all over the web, including but not limited to Hulu, YouTube, Funny Or Die, and Comedy Central. Ffwd also allows you to create your own custom TV channel from that content, and then share it with others. To help you share your content with others, ffwd recently released a feature called Twitter Connect that lets you populate your Twitter stream with ffwd channels and videos. Additionally, ffwd also offers a bookmarklet that lets you send any video you find on the web to your Twitter buddies with a single click. Finally, through their ffwd API, ffwd wants to make access to the videos being shared through ffwd available on any platform, whether it be on your desktop... in the living room... or mobile, by providing developers with an easy way to build applications that work seamlessly with ffwd. http://ffwd.com/



2. Evernote Evernote does for the web generation what Post-it did for their mothers and fathers. Simply put, Evernote allows you to capture information whether online or offline, and makes that information accessible and searchable at any time by seamlessly synchronizing your new notes with your database on the web. Your database of 'memories' can then be accessed across all the devices and platforms you use, including your web-enabled mobile device like the iPhone or from Windows and Mac computers connected to the internet. Evernote works like this: offline you can snap photos of any thing from whiteboards to business cards to wine labels, and Evemote takes those images and puts it online (on their servers) so you can access that information from any device that is connected to the internet. To simplify retrieval of all that information you have stored, Evernote makes text within those images searchable. Online or on your computer, Evernote can be activated with a click of a button and Evernote can save the full HTML of the web page you are viewing, save only the text that you have selected, or your screenshot. Evernote also allows you to generate tags for every web page, text element, or image that you save so that you can easily find it later. Your notes can then be searched by tag, date, and even location (Evernote Mobile has a geo-location feature that automatically tags your note with the location where it was uploaded). http://evernote.com/



3. ZapLiveTV Ever wanted to create your own live TV station? ZapLiveTV allows you run your own free live TV station over the Web. ZapLiveTV streams your live broadcasts via the Internet for viewers all over the world. All you need is a camera and a computer connected to the internet, and ZapLiveTV does the rest. You can even stream your content in from a mobile phone. ZapLiveTV is a p2p based streaming service like JustinTV. So what that means is that the quality of the video that is being streamed depend on the number of people watching it. The more people watching the video, the better the streaming. Also like JustinTV, you can chat live as the video is being streamed. http://zaplive.tv/



4. Hohli Charts Looking for a simpler way to create charts? Hohli Charts helps you to easily produce charts of different types and sizes that you can embed, share through a link, or copy as an image file. The site runs on Google’s chart API, CSS and Javascript. Hohli Charts lets you create anything from bar, line and pie charts to Venn diagrams, scatter plots and radar charts. The charts you create can vary in size and different sizes can be selected to fit the design layout of your website, blog, presentation, or whatever other purpose you have in mind for you chart. Hohli Charts brings simplicity to the chart creation process as well. From beginning to end, you can create and preview your chart without ever having to select a 'next' button. After selecting the type of chart that you want to make, you just need to continue scrolling down the page and fill in the necessary information. If you are curious about how your chart will look while you create it, Hohli Charts offers a preview feature that follows you around and provides real time previews as you edit your chart. http://charts.hohli.com/



5. PiZap PiZap can be both fun and useful. PiZap is a free online photo editor, but it takes a different approach to online photo editing than other services like Adobe Photoshop Express and Flauntr. If you are looking for a true photo editor, then PiZap is not for you. The photo editing effects are limited with PiZap, but where PiZap shines is that it gives you a way to quickly jazz up your photo by adding your own elements to it (thought bubbles, stickers, emoticons, symbols, etc) through a simple drag and drop interface. On­c­e y­ou­ h­av­e fin­ish­ed­ working­ on­ y­ou­r m­asterp­iec­e, y­ou­ can save a web-ready JPEG to display on your favorite website, social network blog, or even save it to your computer. PiZap adds another twist by allowing you to place your finished photos on physical objects like T-shirts and mugs, and then order them through the site. http://pizap.com/



6. Polyvore Polyvore is a free, easy-to-use web-based application for mixing and matching images from anywhere on the web and a social network. At the moment Polyvore seems to be geared toward (and dominated by) fashion and would-be fashion designers. Creating your image collage is easy. Polyvore lets you create your collage through its drag and drop interface. After you have created your collage, you can publish and share it with your friends and the Polyvore community. It is that community aspect that makes Polyvore unique. As a user, you can of course import your own items (photo clips), but you can also use items imported by other users to use in your collages. Furthermore, if you click on items that other users have imported there is a link to the site where that user found it so if you are interested you can buy that item. And finally Polyvore actively supports its community by creating contests where you have to make outfits that fits a certain theme, and the contestant with the best outfit receives a trophy to display on their profile page. http://polyvore.com



7. Meez If you have ever wanted to create your own 3D online avatar to serve as the face for your online identity, then Meez is your answer. Meez is your customizable digital identity which you create and use to represent yourself everywhere you go on the Internet. You can personalize your Meez to look like you do in real life or try on a completely new look. It's up to you. Meez offers dozens of hairstyles and outfits to create intricate downloadable avatars that can dance via fun animations. Users can also choose from a wide variety of backgrounds for their avatar. Most things are free, but some cost Coinz bought via PayPal or a credit card for 10 cents each. Once you have created your Meez avatar, you can export him or her and embed your Meez into any website. Or you can take a snapshot of your Meez and use that as your profile picture. http://meez.com/



8. Dezignus Dezignus a community made by a graphic designer for graphic designers, or those who are interested in graphic design. The site has everything from tutorials to free graphics that designers can access and use on their projects. Free downloads include vector images, Photoshop brushes and shapes, textures and backgrounds, icons etc. But I think what makes Dezignus really great is the community component of it. Someone without any graphic design experience (like myself) can find a lot of interesting tutorials and information about graphics design that is shared by the community. And for professional designers, the community at Dezignus follows the latest design trends to help designers stay up to date on what is relevant. http://dezignus.com/

Do you see any mistakes with these reviews? Would you like to suggest other visual communication solutions? Would you like to share your own experiences with any of the solutions reviewed? Please leave a comment below.

Originally written by Andre Deutmeyer for MasterNewMedia and first published on December 22th 2008 as Visual Communication And Video Publishing - Selected Tools And Web Services - Sharewood Guide Dec 22 08.

An anonymous reader sends us to GM-volt.com, an electric vehicle enthusiast blog, for the news that last week EEStor was granted a US patent for their electric-energy storage unit, of which no one outside the company (no one who is talking, anyway) has seen so much as a working prototype. We've discussed the company on a number of occasions. The patent (PDF) is a highly information-rich document that offers remarkable insight into the device. EEStor notes "the present invention provides a unique lightweight electric-energy storage unit that has the capability to store ultrahigh amounts of energy." "The core ingredient is an aluminum coated barium titanate powder immersed in a polyethylene terephthalate plastic matrix. The EESU is composed of 31,353 of these components arranged in parallel. It is said to have a total capacitance of 30.693 F and can hold 52.220 kWh of energy. The device is said to have a weight of 281.56 pound including the box and all hardware. Unlike lithium-ion cells, the technology is said not to degrade with cycling and thus has a functionally unlimited lifetime. It is mentioned the device cannot explode when being charge or impacted and is thus safe for vehicles."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The future of travel... Wesley writes-

For years I've assumed that one of mankind's greatest fantasies has been to develop a practical, personal jetpack. But if the covers of Popular Science serve as any measure for this sort of thing, then it seems that for the past few decades man's been dreaming less about rocketing through the sky than he has about riding in some kind of giant wheel.

The revelation struck me as I was skimming Google's new archive of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines for interesting cover art. As I quickly realized, the magazines' covers featured some crazy new vehicle every few years eschewing the apparently pesky and cumbersome multiwheel concept in favor of one enormous gyre.

Of course, once I noticed the pattern, I had to go back and scan all the issues methodically to see just how many variations have appeared over the generations.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Retro | Digg this!

About a year ago my town started moving seriously towards Single Stream Recycling and Pay as You Throw for trash. These were initiated as a way of giving people an incentive to recycle instead of tossing everything in the trash. The trash was a pretty big part of the budget for waste removal in the town. One of the first steps in this process was to institute the recycling initiative. Instead of separating all of their plastic, glass, metal, cardboard and paper, people could just toss it all into one recycling bin and then bring it to the newly dubbed Recycling Center, which people still call the dump.

Getting rid of trash and other refuse is all related to the commodities markets. Somebody has to be willing to pay for your stuff, or you will. As a result, tossing trash into the pit was costing the town about $90 usd a ton to get rid of it. Then a town employee would drive a truck with the trash to a relatively nearby town where the trash would be fed into an incinerator and burned to generate heat, turning a turbine and in turn generating electricity.

As the world economy slows down, it seems that the commodities market is falling off. This appears likely to affect the ability for organizations and municipalities to get rid of their recyclable materials cheaply.

Recycling at the time was a hot commodity, where the equation worked a bit differently. Instead of the town paying to get rid of the recycling, a vendor would drive their own trucks and use their own bins, even providing a compactor to collect our recycling at no charge for the town. Free recycling and transport vs $90 a ton plus shipping for trash. This provided an opportunity for people to control their personal costs while also controlling the costs of operating the facility for the town.

As part of the community education process, we organized a Transfer Station Field Trip for members of the Transfer Station Advisory Board, some town employees and a reporter for the local paper. We drove the route that our recycling goes, from Duxbury to Andover, through the City of Boston.

When we arrived at the recycling plant in Andover, MA, we got to see how our recycling is sorted. It was a fascinating collection of machines with conveyor belts, vibrations and magnets all calibrated to separate the various parts of the waste stream so they could be packed up and shipped to a vendor for further processing and then sold back to us.

What do you think of recycling? What are some of the best resources for Recycling, Reuse and Reduction of waste? Does recycling work? Does it do the job, or is it a stopgap measure? What can towns and cities do when the market for recycling craters? How else can you reduce the waste leaving your life? does your school recycle any or all of its' paper? What is your best Dump Score? Have you built, maintained or otherwise used equipment that is designed to sort things by their physical qualities? When you throw something away, where does it go? Add your comments below and please contribute photos and videos to the make Flickr pool.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this!

Almost two years ago, we wrote about how Sling Media, makers of the popular place-shifting Slingbox, was upset at various services that let people watch TV via their computers. Of course, that's exactly what the Slingbox is intended for -- but the twist here was that the TV was hosted somewhere else. Basically, a few companies set themselves up so that you could buy a Slingbox and a TV connection, but, rather than installing it in your own home, it would be hosted elsewhere. That's useful, say, if your an American living abroad, but still want to be able to watch American television. It was difficult to see what was wrong with any of this, as it seemed to be exactly what the device was designed to do -- and everyone who was supposed to be getting paid was still getting paid. Cable or satellite TV providers got an extra customer (one who doesn't even live in their territory, so it's actually a bonus!) and Sling sells another box.

The good news is that over those past two years, Sling (now owned by Echostar) apparently hasn't done much to stop these services. The bad news is that it's still complaining about them. Newsweek has an article that highlights how creative people have become in figuring out ways to do more interesting things with their Slingboxes so that they can watch content remotely. This is exactly the sort of thing a smart company would encourage. It makes the device more valuable and should help them sell more Slingboxes. So, it's too bad that a company that built such a cool and useful device is instead telling people they're not allowed to do these things with products they bought. Remember the good old days when you bought a product and actually owned it?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

I had a chance to check out the Cosmic Hand Dance Actualization Machine by Nicholas Rubin at the ITP Winter Show 2008. It's a really interesting interactive display that uses a unique domed display. Check out the link for a lot more information about this amazing interactive artwork. Thanks Nicholas!

The Hand Dance actualization machine consists of a frosted hemisphere with an array of infrared distance sensors mounted along the rim and underside. It controls a Processing sketch of shimmering, psychedelic imagery that is projected onto the surface from underneath. The IR sensors allow the user to move their hands spatially within the volume to control specific aspects of the animation.

More about making the The RV10000: Cosmic hand dance actualization machine [ITP page]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

Peace Corps Online writes "The NYTimes ran a story this week about a group of scientists who have built a neonatal incubator out of automobile parts, including a pair of headlights as a heat source, a car door alarm to signal emergencies, and an auto air filter and fan to provide climate control. The creators of the car-parts incubator say that an incubator found in any neonatal intensive care unit in the US could cost around $40,000, but the incubator they have developed can be built for less than $1,000. One expert says as many as 1.8 million infants might be spared every year if they could spend just a week in the units, which help babies who are born early or at low birth weights regulate their body temperature until their organs fully develop. Experts say in developing countries where infant mortality is most common, high-tech machines donated by richer nations often conk out when the electricity fizzles or is restricted to conserve power. 'The future medical technologists in the developing world,' says Robert Malkin, director of Engineering World Health, 'are the current car mechanics, HVAC repairmen, bicycle shop repairmen. There is no other good source of technology-savvy individuals to take up the future of medical device repair and maintenance.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gorgeous snow art in Seattle via Wooster Collective.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

From the MAKE: Flickr pool

• Vibrobot sports adjustable nose-pot [above top-left]
• Visible atari punk console ... in progress [above top-right]
• Experiments in breath transmisson [above bottom-left]
• Arduino solenoid drummer [above bottom-right]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Photography | Digg this!

Travis Deyle wrote in about Snackbot, an in-progress human-robot interaction project at Carnegie Mellon:

Back in May 2008 it was announced that CMU professors Sara Kiesler and Jodi Forlizzi (from the HCI Institute) and Paul Rybski (from the Robotics Institute) were awarded $500k in Microsoft's Human-Robot Interaction funding to develop a social, snack-selling robot to traverse Newell-Simon and Wean halls (press release). After seeing a prototype appear on Flickr in July, we've all been waiting patiently to see pictures of the final version. Well, the wait is over -- photos of the new CMU snackbot, conceptual designs, and construction photos are contained below! It appears that the CMU team is progressing nicely.

What impresses me most is that the physical design of the robot manages to express its function so clearly. The posture is helpful, but not servile. The spacing between the eyes and the shape of the mouth is attentive and non-threatening, a combination that seems difficult to achieve in most humanoid robots. It's really a smart design.

Jodi Forlizzi has a few of photos posted to Flickr (shown above), and the team's industrial designers Erik Glaser and Josh Finkle have a number of images of the design process posted on their sites. It's well worth checking out, as you can see a number of concept sketches, as well as a bunch of gratuitous robot guts.

Snackbot! -- A Social, Snack-Fetching Robot
Jodi Forlizzi's Snackbot Photos
Erik Glaser's Snackbot Photos
Josh Finkle's Design Sketches (click Industrial Design -> Snackbot)

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in hacks | Digg this!

badger.foo writes "We've seen stories about the slow bruteforcers — we've discussed it here — and based on the data, my colleague Egil Möller was the first to suggest that since we know the attempts are coordinated, it is not too far-fetched to assume that the controlling system measures the rates of success for each of the chosen targets and allocates resources accordingly. (The probes of my systems have slowed in the last month.) If Egil's assumption is right, we are seeing the bad guys adapting. And they're avoiding OpenBSD machines." For fans of raw data, here are all the log entries (3MB) that badger.foo has collected since noticing the slow bruteforce attacks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

writes in - Super Electrofluorescent Profanity Machine via Giz.

The Super Electrofluorescent Profanity Machine, or Four Letter Word (for short), is a bit of electronics cobbled together out of vintage Cold War-era Soviet vacuum fluorescent tubes and custom driver circuitry. It was designed and built by me.

The device does two things: the first (mundane but utilitarian) thing that it does is tell you the time. It's an accurate clock whose numbers glow brightly enough to dimly illuminate a dark room, serving as an effective night-light. It probably won't wake you up, unless you can't sleep in the presence of dim green lights.

The second (less mundane and utilitarian) thing that it does is generate random four letter words, which it displays for you at a rate of one per second. Every English word consisting of exactly four letters is possible, and the device is programmed to predispose the generation of words that you can pronounce, as opposed to incomprehensible trash. As the name of the device implies, even the more profane of English words is possible (though not necessarily probable). The effect is strangely hypnotic - the short length of time that this device spent on my desk at work was deliriously unproductive.

The main board has three buttons, one for switching the device between word-mode and time-mode, and two for setting the time. Included is a header to break the buttons out...

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

The sensor module for BugBases is out! - The BUGvonHippel. BUGvonHippel is a breakout board module which includes a female USB 2.0 port...

BUGvonHippel -  We've talked about it before, but it's finally here!  Named after Prof. Eric von Hippel at MIT who inspired it's creation, the BUGvonHippel further enables developers to create new and interesting "hardware mashups" by connecting their BUG to a universe of other devices and interfaces.  Bug Labs will be showcasing the BUGvonHippel with several demos at CES, but it's available now in our online store for $79...

The vonHippel module has a female breakout board as well as direct connections to the circuit board for size standard wires.

• Power
• DAC
• ADC
• I2C
• I/O X
• GP I/O
• SPI
• I2S
• SERIAL
• GROUND(x2)

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

ICANN posted its proposal for expanding gTLDs late in October, and now the US government has issued its scathing response (PDF, 11 pp.), from the departments of Commerce and Justice. The initial criticism is that John Levine sent a note to a policy mailing list and summarized the concerns raised as ranging from "...insufficient attention to monopoly and consumer protection, to lack of capacity to enforce compliance, to overreach into non-technical areas such as adjudication of morality, to what they'll do with all the extra money since they are a non-profit. Their first concern is that in 2006 the ICANN board said they would commission a study on economic issues in TLD registrations such as whether different TLDs are different markets, substitutability between TLDs, and registry market power, issues which are fairly important in any new TLD process. Here it is two years later, they're rushing to set up the new TLD process, but there's no study. 'ICANN needs to complete this economic study and the results should be considered by the community before new gTLDs are introduced.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's the simplest design I've found for my favorite type of turbine. Check out Otherpower for a discussion on sourcing suitable motors, and see Makezine's plans for the Chispito for a traditional blade design.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this!