The IPO market had almost entirely dried up already, before we reached financial meltdown in the second half of the year -- and the resulting financial crisis certainly hasn't made the IPO market any brighter. So, we certainly weren't expecting to hear of any internet companies trying to go public... but it seems at least one company thinks that now's the right time for an online porn company to go public. Apparently, Adult FriendFinder has filed to go public. The company, which used to be known as Penthouse Media Group until it bought the startup Adult Friendfinder not so long ago, is hoping to raise a bunch of money. I'd be surprised if this actually went anywhere. While some might claim that porn is always a growth market, it's a highly competitive one, and often seen as a bit sketchy on the business side. Plus, the underwriters are a little known Russian investment bank. On top of all that, it's looking to use the money not for expansion, but mostly to pay off debt. In this economic climate, with the current IPO window slammed pretty tightly shut, does anyone actually expect this one to go anywhere?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

darthcamaro writes "Little penguins all around the world are waiting for Penguin-Master Linus Torvalds to deliver some Glogg inspired Xmas cheer in the form of the new 2.6.28 kernel. Among the innovations in 2.6.28 are ext4 as stable, wireless USB drivers, better KVM support and the GEM graphic memory management technology. 'We now have a proper memory manager for video memory, the GEM [Graphics Execution Manager] memory manager,' Greg Kroah-Hartman said. 'This gives Linux much better graphics performance than it previously had.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Max Impact is the Air Force's nu metal band. The frontman, Master Sergeant Ryan Carson, was a college student majoring in opera before enlisting. He begins each concert with the invocation: "We're going to rock your face off!" From the lyrics to the Max Impact tune "Locked and Loaded":

“Walk in the shade of the clouds at night,"

"Crawling in the dirt, calling an A-10 strike,"

"Dancing in the shadows, lives are on the line,"

"Bombs are gonna fall, just in time.”

Air Force Nu Metal band (Danger Room)

Vietnam has a long history of online censorship and suppression of dissent. Back in 2002, a law was put in place requiring registration with the government before creating a website, and soon after that there were reports of arrests of people for putting "questionable" material online. Given that, it's hardly surprising to find out that the country has now officially banned "subversive" blogs. Of course, I'm sure the definition of subversive is left open to whoever is enforcing the law. But what's really bad about this law, is that it puts the liability on internet service providers -- saying that they'll be held responsible for any subversive blogs that are hosted by them. It's not entirely clear how this will impact foreign blog hosting companies, but it can't be a good thing. Apparently, the Vietnamese government is specifically planning to talk to Yahoo and Google to get them to "cooperate" in "creating the best and healthiest environment for bloggers." There's been plenty of controversy for both Yahoo and Google for how they've dealt with government censorship in China, so the last thing they need is another such controversy.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

minutetraders writes "According to some sources, by next year Cisco Systems will be in the blade server business. ChannelWeb has a story, confirmed by several sources, that the San Jose, Calif.-based networking behemoth is readying blade servers, code-named California, for a release early next year. A blade server offering would put Cisco in direct competition with the likes of Dell, HP, and IBM, companies it partners with on their respective blade server offerings, for control of the enterprise data center."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I just returned from a YouTube-induced time machine trip back to the cyberdelic 1990s. Somebody posted a 1996 episode of the long-gone TV program "Net Cafe." That evening, the guests included RU Sirius, the late, great St. Jude, and, er, me talking about cyberpunk culture, online writing, and Web zines. Wearing my bOING bOING propeller beanie (not literally), I gave a quick tour of some of my favorite weird and wonderful Web destinations of the day, including bOING bOING founder Carla Sinclair's pioneering Net Chick Clubhouse. St. Jude is featured in part 1. The inimitable RU Sirius is the star of part 2. My segment starts at the end of part 2 and continues into part 3.

The folks at Tellart have made an amazing Augmented Reality (AR) holiday card that you can play around with yourself: you'll need Flash player (version 9), a webcam, and a printer (so you can print out the AR objects).

The project was made using FLARToolkit and Papervision 3D. Check out Tellart's site for more details, including a link to the app where you can print out the objects and run the Flash program right on your own computer.

They've also included source code so you can hack this to your heart's content!

Happy Holidays from Tellart

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

bondisthebest writes "IEEE Spectrum reports "Physicists in Switzerland, led by Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva, reported last week in Nature that they have made a solid-state device capable of storing photons for as long as 1 microsecond. The invention will aid in the development of light-based quantum-cryptography networks, which are theoretically impervious to hacking but are currently limited in range to a few dozen kilometers, primarily because of a lack of a suitable way to store the quantum state of photons."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the couple months of existence, Apple's iPhone App Store has received a considerable amount of attention. The successful phone has created an exciting new platform for developers seeking to leverage the advantages of mobile devices. The only problem was, Apple has insisted upon managing the applications in the store - oftentimes without clear guidelines or enforced through NDA.

Apple was in the practice of individually deciding which applications to allow and which to ban, regardless of customer demand. The most curious and paternalistic of Apple's App Store policies was the ban on applications of "limited utility." As a result, developers weren't sure if their hard work would be deemed useful enough to warrant acceptance into the store. Yet, like so many centrally planned economies in the past, this policy failed and Apple began letting in silly applications. However, what may be silly to Apple's gatekeepers may actually prove to be valuable to consumers. Such is the case with a suite of applications that simply produce fart sounds. Dozen exist, and one developer of a fart application is reportedly making nearly $10,000 per day with his crass software. That is the beauty of free markets - consumers and producers can better decide what is valuable than any individual person or firm. The distributed intelligence and preferences are far more capable than Apple's gatekeepers.

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

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Kevin C. Tofel writes "After watching the netbook industry explode from nothing to 14 million sales in year, the time is right for Cease & Desist letters. Psion, a U.K. computer company that years ago sold a small sub-notebook called a netBook, is starting to protect the term. At least one netbook enthusiast site received a C&D for using the 'netbook' term and others are sure to follow. The site was given three months to stop using the term. Ironically, it isn't the enthusiast sites that coined the popular term. In the spring of 2008, Intel dubbed these devices netbooks to help define a market for their low-powered Intel Atom CPU."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Usually we don't see these types of stories until March Madness time, but the NY Times is writing about how much productivity is "lost" due to trying to keep up with the "data stream." Apparently research firm Basex has come out with a gimmicky calculator to determine how much productivity is likely lost, and put out a silly, borderline ridiculous press release noting that Intel claims it worked with the research firm to determine that the impact on productivity because of information overload was "up to eight hours a week." Seriously? Productivity is measured not in hours, but output. If productivity were just about hours, we'd be looking for ways to get people to work more hours. But, most people recognize that there are diminishing returns to making people work too much -- and they have time off to charge their batteries.

If you're going to measure productivity this way, we could just as easily say that we're putting out a study showing that sleeping costs a company approximately eight hours a day in lost worker productivity! Something must be done! While I have no doubt that information overload can be a cost to productivity, it's not going to be measured in hours. If I "waste" 20 hours a week dealing with information overload, but I'm able to extract information that makes me three times as productive, the rest of the week, then that's a good trade-off. Do people actually pay companies for this sort of research?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Arcades are dead. And rightfully so: American arcades never bothered to change with the times (despite a brief dalliance with the public spectacle of games like Dance Dance Revolution). Not so in Japan, where arcades continue to evolve in surprising ways, in the stereotypical "bigger, crazier" Japanese method, as well as the more pedestrian. Case in point: Yuka Nakajima, queen of "Crane Games", those funny claw machines that are commonly ignored in department store vestibules in the States but big business in Japan. Nakajima is so adept at "UFO Catchers" (the Japanese moniker for all claw machines) that she has an entire room filled with the stuffed bears she has won and is the star of video tutorials included in the games themselves. I learned about Nakajima in the new book Arcade Mania: The Turbo-charged World of Japan's Game Centers by Brian "The Sweetest Man in Games Journalism" Ashcraft and Jean "Pretty Sweet Himself" Snow. Ash is a pal, so I was a bit worried when I first got my copy; how interesting could a book about arcades be? Turns out I had nothing to fret about. There's a whole new set of human experience happening inside Japan's game centers and it's just as varied and weird and surprising as you could hope it would be. I too often have an expectation, a caricature, in mind about Japan and its culture that occludes my perception of the people living and playing there. That's natural, of course, and perhaps even welcome: it makes a reading a book that supplants many of my preconceptions so effectively even more exciting. Arcade Mania: The Turbo-charged World of Japan's Game Centers [Amazon]

Talk about a mash-up.

The legendary  James Thurber wrote the parody,  "A Visit from Saint Nicholas in the Ernest Hemingway Manner" for the Christmas Eve edition of The New Yorker magazine in 1927. The poem's inventor,  Clement C. Moore, will never be the same.

It is my great pleasure to read it aloud:

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)

Before Christmas this year, there seems to be plenty of neat holiday themed stuff with good parts about to go unsold. Anything with an overt holiday theme will be marked down the day after Christmas, so it is possible to think ahead and provision yourself for some maker fun for the months and years ahead. Of course this could apply to Halloween Easter or any other over commercialized holiday.

Looking at the things that will go discounted later in the week, there are a few filters for considering the items. Green things will help you reduce your energy consumption for the holidays in the future. Hackable things will provide you with an object that can be hacked into holiday dressings with a decidedly different naughty/nice ratio. Items with good components can be separated that has nice systems which can be and useful for other projects.

Green:
LED Christmas lights are worth looking out for. Lights are generally rated in watts. Higher wattage means higher electricity use, so getting low wattage lights will reduce your cost of ownership over the lifetime of the item. Looking for the Energy Star logo will help you find lower power consumption devices in general. If you have really old and big Christmas lights, then they certainly use more electricity than newer series wired lights. If you can get your hands on some new LED lights after the holiday, then you could save some of next year's holiday money. How about gifting your family and friends some replacement lights so they can trash the old power sucking illuminations?

Hackable
This could apply to displays or just about anything that people consider to be gifties. If it has a program directing its operation, then you could do something with it. After Halloween, I picked up a environmentally responsive skeleton. At the store, I saw a device that was selling for about $6 usd, and it had a speaker, a wobble motor, a sensor activated programmed chip. This device could in turn be used to do other things. After some study, I figured out that the action is triggered by a photocell when the light is reduced. That means that any resistive based sensor could activate the circuit, which is currently set to run a motor, blink two red LED's and play an audio file through a speaker. At the very least, my six bucks gave me a decent experience of analyzing the function of the circuit. It took a while to find and figure out the sensor aspect of the circuit, but it was a neat challenge.

Essentially, with a hackable device, you want to be looking for components that you can understand and repurpose. Can the system be circuit bent? Could you change the function? Could you drive it with some other programmable system like Arduino, basic stamp, lego RCX, Android, iPhone or PIC microcontroller?

Good components
Look for motors, lights, speakers, anything that if you wanted to buy, you would have to go to a special store, or a catalog. You probably won't find much that can be programmed, but maybe you can find some stuff that has a couple of sensors. The more sensors the better. Switches or resistive based sensors are probably what you will find.

This season, I am seeing lots more LED flashlights and for the first time, solar powered lanterns. The ones I saw were about $8 usd and had an LED that is powered by rechargeable batteries fueled with a solar cell. It seemed like a good deal, but will be better after the holiday. Solar panels used to be really expensive. Now they are part of really cheap stuff. Change out the 600 mAh batteries with something legit, and maybe you have a good solar charger. How about a fake tree with dozens of rgb color shifting LEDs? It had a speaker system and played music. No clue how much it cost, but if it was cheap enough, it would be fun to play with it. If you can see the components, count them up, and maybe even try to build a price list for buying each of the parts. Don't forget to include shipping. If the thing is busted, even better. You might get it real cheap, especially if the people working at the store just see it as old, damaged merch and hard to move.

So what goodies can you find in the closeout bins of post holiday cheer? How can recessionary junk make you smile and happy to experiment? What could you do with a decent collection of LEDs from a string of lights? How much electricity can you save by junking your old lights and getting new ones? How much electricity does your holiday display gobble up? Could you have an entirely solar or wind powered holiday setup? Join the conversation in the comments, and of course, add your photos and video to the Make Flickr pool.

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

I guess Christmas Eve is the day to announce the Blogger of the Year. It's only the second time I've done it, and I did it last year on this day, and it seems like a good day to do it. That's what being a real blogger is like. It's like just feeling like doing something and then doing it.

I hope that makes sense.

Anyway...

In my teaser I said that this year's BOTY is a smoker, but when I told him he was the guy, he said he stopped smoking four years ago. That's very good. More blogging for the rest of us.

So who is it?

Well, it's Jay Rosen.

Now I'll tell you why.

Jay is one of those guys who has spent 20 or 30 years really studying something, really understanding it. He developed a theory about his subject of study, but instead of stopping there, Jay is always learning, asking questions, considering whether his understanding of the world actually reflects what's happening. And he does all this out in the open, on a blog, and most recently, very deliberately and systematically, on Twitter.

This is the future of news.

That's what Jay studies, but as it always is, you teach what you most need to learn, so Jay's study of news, ironically (or maybe not so ironically) is a demonstration of how news will work in the future. We will still need domain experts, people who spend 20 or 30 years studying something, learning and challenging their assumptions -- so that when something happens in their field of study we have someone with a historic perspective who can tell us What It All Means.

Of course we can't get by with just one person in each domain, we need many. And that's where people like Jay are so valuable -- they don't just have their own theories, they also tell you about theories other people have, and he points you to them.

Does this sound familiar?

12/12/05: "People come back to places that send them away."

That's what blogging, when it applies to serious study, is all about. And Jay is the best example I can think of, so that's why I chose him as my Blogger of the Year for 2008.

There are others who perfectly exemplify this principle. I'm thinking of Doc Searls when it comes to fires in Santa Barbara. When I hear there's a fire down there, I know where to go. Doc takes it very seriously, and I'm not kidding about that. I don't have a special interest in Santa Barbara, but I do have an interest in examples of the way news will work in the future.

And there's Paul Krugman at the NY Times. I'm very pleased to honor a blogger at the Times, to show that it doesn't matter where you hang your hat -- real blogging can happen anywhere at any time. The thing that makes Krugman such a fantastic example is the same thing I like about Jay's blogging and Doc's -- he sends where you need to go to find out what you need. It's the same principle of the web, applied over and over again. When it works, it works because they trust you to come back after sending you away.

Next year's BOTY, knock wood, praise Murphy, etc -- will share this quality, with these fine people and NakedJen. When they write it's not a business model, it's their passion for knowledge, both of self and the rest of existence.

Phil Sp. writes "Government Attic, those fine investigative pack rats, have outdone themselves this time. Just posted: a declassified NSA document entitled A History of Communications Security, Volumes I and II: The David G. Boak Lectures [PDF] from 1973 and 1981. This is an absolutely fascinating look into how the NSA viewed (views?) communications security and touches on all sorts of topics, including public key crypto, economics, DES, tamper-resistance, etc. It was seemingly from a collection of lectures to new employees. The first 85 pages are heavily redacted but the remaining 80 or so are largely intact. It even concludes with a cryptogram puzzle for the reader!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paging Dr. Tyler Duren... a new untapped unlimited fuel source has been found...

Liposuctioning unwanted blubber out of pampered Los Angelenos may not seem like a dream job, but it has its perks. Free fuel is one of them. For a time, Beverly Hills doctor Craig Alan Bittner turned the fat he removed from patients into biodiesel that fueled his Ford SUV and his girlfriend's Lincoln Navigator. Love handles can power a car? Frighteningly, yes. Fat--whether animal or vegetable--contains triglycerides that can be extracted and turned into diesel. Poultry companies such as Tyson are looking into powering their trucks on chicken schmaltz, and biofuel start-ups such as Nova Biosource are mixing beef tallow and pig lard with more palatable sources such as soybean oil. Mike Shook of Agri Process Innovations, a builder of biodiesel plants, says this year's batch of U.S. biodiesel was likely more than half animal-derived since the price of soybeans soared.

But it's not legal...

Using fat to fuel cars might be environmentally friendly, but it's definitely illegal in California to use human medical waste to power vehicles, and Bittner is being investigated by the state's public health department.

More:

MAKE - Volume 03, Making Biodiesel
The best way to learn how to make your own backyard biodiesel is to start with a one-liter batch. It's easy to make a small batch that will work in any diesel engine. You won't need any special equipment--an old juice bottle will serve as the "reactor" vessel--and on such a small scale, you can quickly refine your technique and perform further experiments. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this!

(Flash video embed above, MP4 download is here.)

This week, the Boing Boing tv crew is taking a week off, and we've been revisiting some of the episodes that mean the most to us over the past year.

For me, for many reasons, the three episodes we produced from a K'iche Maya pueblo in the Guatemalan highlands were the most personally important. I'll embed one above. It's about taking a traditional sweat bath, which is something they might well be doing today there during the holidays, provided there's enough water -- that only comes every few days. Here are all three:

(1) BBtv WORLD: Through the eyes of the pueblo.
(2) BBtv WORLD: Migration, and a Mayan Sweat Bath.
(3) BBtv WORLD: El Molinero.

And other episodes of "BBtv WORLD" about Guatemala are here. But I also wanted to take this opportunity to share something else that means a lot to me. Last night, I scanned some of the hand-drawn Christmas cards from participants in an international non-profit I work with there, and uploaded them to Flickr. These were private cards, sent from folks in the pueblo to project participants in the US (in other words, they weren't for sale or anything, they were just heartfelt communication from one person to another).

I'm sharing some of them here with permission. They're beautiful and very meaningful to me.

Some of the cards refer to the old Mayan gods (for instance, references to "Ajaw", or "Tzaq'ol and Bit'ol", primordial entities who were present at the creation of all things), other cards refer to to Christianity. Some were created by children, others by adults, and the one with the Mayan house and the big Christmas tree and the volcano, thumbnail above? That man is considered the best painter and illustrator in the town. Every one of the cards, all in a stack next to me on my desk here right now, every one reflects soul, kindness, and hope.

To really appreciate them, click on "all sizes" and look at the larger size. The one I received personally read, "Feliz Navidad, y Paz a Todas Las Naciones Del Mundo." I know the woman who drew it, and she's survived so much. I extend that greeting to each of you who reads this blog post today. Friends I know, and friends I do not.

Flickr set: Christmas cards from a K'iche Maya Village in Guatemala

Keita Takahashi, creator of Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy, drew a special holiday greeting for Boing Boing Offworld readers. Detail above. Here is the whole thing: "Happy Holidays from Offworld (feat. Keita Takahashi)"

With the story earlier this week about Australia's Broadband Minister, Stephen Conroy, considering adding BitTorrent filtering to the country's ISP filtering/censorship program, it was notable that Conroy said he was paying close attention to the commentary about the program online -- including various blogs and social network systems like Twitter. That was actually a small glimmer of hope mixed in with the ridiculous policy -- but it appears that Conroy has decided he'd really rather not listen to the conversation on his own blog. While that post about BitTorrent filtering got a lot of attention, it also got a ton of comments, and now Conroy and his team are turning off their blog and closing down the comments. Way to communicate with the people...

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Elsa Zaldívar just won a Rolex award for her work turning loofahs, a sponge-like cucumber that I thought grew underwater but apparently doesn't, and recycled plastic into a sustainable building material:

You can read more on the awards page here. I eagerly await the promised how-to video; any readers able to find her specific recipes or more details about the project would be greatly appreciated!

(via Worldchanging)

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

Hogwash McFly writes "My boss gave me one of those USB-powered red LED scrolling displays as a Christmas gift, and while cycling the usual 'I read your emails' and 'ID10T Error' messages will be entertaining for a day or two, I was wondering if it could be put to more constructive uses. The configuration file is plaintext and supports different scroll speeds, flashing, bitmaps, and WAV sounds. The font is defined as 5x5 pixels per character, also stored in plaintext as 5 hex values, one for each vertical line of pixels. A dynamically generated message could prove useful in my day-to-day work on the helpdesk, but are there any interesting uses beyond network notifications and news feeds?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Vaughan, aka PC Konk the clown, was made to strip down to his underwear at Birmingham Airport, England when his costume set off the metal detectors. He was booked to do an in-air charity show for disadvantaged children. Apparently, PC Konk was good humored about it. From The Guardian:

A piece of metal on his costume set off the security alarm, prompting security guards to confiscate his plastic handcuffs and order him to strip down to his shorts and T-shirt.

Staff also demanded he put the liquid for his plastic bubble-blowing saxophone into a clear sealed plastic bag.

"I'd made sure I'd bought plastic handcuffs and a plastic whistle but I hadn't realised that the costume had a metal band – I thought it was plastic," said Mr Vaughan, from Shard End, Birmingham.

Clown strip-searched before children's charity flight

This week, oddity auction scout Michael-Anne Rauback has been on the hunt for unusual vintage chairs, not to buy but just to... appreciate. She shared with me her three favorite finds, starting with this gorgeous Pedro Friedeberg Hand & Foot Chair from the 1960s. I'll post the others over the next two days. Pedro Friedeberg Hand & Foot Chair

Musicians and human rights group Reprieve launched a "silent protest" against the use of music for torture and interrogation. For example, the playlists at places like Guantanamo Bay and other US military prisons/bases has included such hot platters as Deicide's "Fuck Your God" and the theme song from Barney The Purple Dinosaur. Musicians like Trent Reznor want to stop the insanity. From Danger Room:

Chloe Davis, a researcher for Reprieve, told Danger Room the Zero dB campaign was planning to work with prominent musicians to lobby the incoming administration.

"It is really important that we seize the chance to alert Obama to this practice," she said. "... I think there will be people on the other side trying to catch Obama’s attention, saying we need to be tough. We’re trying to counter that message."

Rockers To Press Obama on Music Torture

Earlier this week, we discussed how MySpace had blocked Project Playlist's widgets in response to record label complaints (and, of course, its own desire to have a competitor to its MySpace Music offering locked out) while Facebook left it up. We were surprised to see some claim that Facebook was being "irresponsible" here, because Facebook has a pretty strong legal defense. Of course, it's probably a legal battle that Facebook doesn't want to be involved in, so the company has now followed suit and disabled the Project Playlist app, claiming it violated Facebook's terms of service.

This is yet another example of the recording industry's effort to use chilling effects to get its way, such as by going after third parties to do its dirty work. Third party service providers, such as both MySpace and Facebook, have clear liability protection thanks to the DMCA's safe harbors. Yes, the record labels are in a legal battle with Project Playlist -- but that's between the labels and Project Playlist (and most agree that it's really the record labels using litigation for "negotiating" purposes, rather than based on any strong legal backing). It's not surprising that MySpace of Facebook caved -- why should they fight someone else's legal battle -- but it highlights the problems of when companies like the major record labels are allowed to go after third parties. Those third parties will often fold, because they don't have the incentives to fight. It's an abuse of the law to get others to do the RIAA's unsavory business.

And, in the long run, it's only going to hurt both MySpace and Facebook. If I were a developer for either platform, knowing that they would fold like a cheap card table as soon as some bigger company shows up with a bogus legal claim, I'd focus my development efforts elsewhere. Either MySpace or Facebook could have taken a stand, knowing that any lawsuit would likely get tossed after a quick safe harbor review, and developers would have known that those platforms were safe places for developers. Now... it's probably time to look elsewhere.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Ky Michaelson, better known as The Rocketman, is one of the world's leading rocket powered vehicle builders. He was featured in MAKE, Volume 05, and says he got his start using a Gilbert chemistry set at the age of 12. This JATO rocket powered sled is meant to take the strain out of the uphill journey, but I have to wonder what it's like to fire it off during a downhill run.

Super sled ride

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

Here's a project I did this Christmas. It's the "Gift of Robot Invasion" LED Christmas Tree Ornament from The Best of Instructables, Volume 1. The bot is made out of copper plumbing parts, scrap circuit board, dead transistors for hands, the bottom of a beer can (for the bot's satellite dish) and paper clips. The circuit is a solar cell, rechargeable batteries (made into a backpack on the bot's back), a flashing LED, a resistor, diode, and a 3904 transistor. This little guy hangs around soaking up the sun's rays all day, and then when the sun goes down, he surreptitiously blinks messages back to his robot overlords in some galaxy far, far away.

My evil little bot is also sending another not-so-subtle message, as he waves the flag of the Maker Shed Gift Certificate. Your gift recipient can use this gift certificate to help fund his/her own robot invasion. And ultimately, isn't that what the holidays are all about?

The original Instructable can be found here.

Find more roboty goodness here:

Holiday Gift Guide: Robots!

Also from the Maker Shed:

Best Of Instructables
Price: $29.99

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.

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

Following last week's announcement that the RIAA was going to back off using mass lawsuits, some were pretty confused by the RIAA's subsequent claim that it had actually stopped filing such lawsuits back in August. In fact, it turned out to be an outright lie, as plenty of lawsuits had been filed pretty much right up until the announcement. However, the RIAA is now trying to explain its "no new lawsuits" message by claiming that it actually meant no new lawsuits in the pipeline. The ones filed since August were apparently already "in motion" and apparently in RIAA-land once you kick off the process of filing a bogus lawsuit based on flimsy evidence, the inertia is simply too powerful to pull it back and stop it from running its course. Or did I misunderstand the RIAA's statement on the matter?

The folks at the RIAA and at various major record labels have complained to us that we don't give them a fair shake, but every time we think about giving them the benefit of the doubt, they pull out some totally bogus claim like "no new lawsuits" and, when called it on, follow it up with a whopper about these legal wheels in motion, as if they had no way of stopping the lawsuits from actually moving forward. Do they really think that everyone is stupid?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

This is my small Christmas gift to you: Ten things I have changed in my life and which have provided me with an opportunity to live a richer, happier and more joyful life, one in which I feel gradually more and more in control of where I am going. Tired of gifting you with new media tools that allow you to communicate and collaborate better, I have decided to share with you today, something special, something you can find only here. It is my small Christmas gift to you and it is made up by ten little changes I have brought into my life and which have brought a tangible bit of more happiness and joy into my weekdays. I had been thinking for a while about what Christmas gifts to share with you today and tomorrow, but nonetheless some good ideas brainstormed with my newsroom team, I have decided to go back to some spontaneous, heart-felt and passion-driven writing for these special two-days. In this article, I have decided to share ten small personal things I have changed in my life and which have provided me with big, tangible results. These are not things I have learned in a self-improvement course or by reading a Stephen Covey's book. These are my own personal discoveries at which I have arrived at by doing my own homework. Find some time and stop in your busy life to ask yourself too which things you could drop, eliminate, add and mix-in to make your life a happier one. My solutions are only good as inspiration for some but may not be best for everyone out there. I am not advocating these as the medicine for all pains, I am just wanting to inspire you to take time and think with your own head what you could change in your life to make it a happier one. Here's my own in-progress recipe. Have a wonderful Christmas if you celebrate one:

1) Stop Being Dependent-Addicted To Old Media

Drop all time-wasting devices that you do not need anymore to realize your goals: phone, television, newspapers. They are the best distractors, time wasters and intruders into your life path, that the less you see them the better. I have put my mobile in perpetual silent mode and check on it a couple of times a day to see who is still searching for me in the old media world. My TV is long gone and I don't buy a newspaper since over 15 years.

2) Make Your Workspace A Wonderful Space

Find your own shrine where to work, think and do the things you love. If you are surrounded by people you don't like and your desk is inside a ugly, badly lit and cold place start thinking about finding an alternative to it. Once you have your own place, work on it and take care of it as a monk would do with a temple. Make it shine so that each time you get there, you are greeted and inspired by the very things you like most. And start from the lighting. A different light can deeply change how you perceive and feel inside a space.

3) Drop Your Fake Friends

There are way too many of them in this category and these are the people that are always sucking something from you but never share anything back. These are the people who are always lamenting and destructive and who have never have a word of love and compliment for someone else. These are the people you hear complaining and blaming such and such for ruining their lives or breaking their plans but never taking responsibility for it. Steer clear of them this year and less company is not always a bad thing. Try.

4) Give Something Great To Kids. Daily

It doesn't matter if they are your own or if they are someone's else kids. What counts is to tune in into their frequencies and to share with them something good, something they love to get from you: your attention and your willingness to play. Their ability to re-charge you and inject some true toxin-free positive energy in you is unmatched and their ability to let go is contagious. Get this disease asap.

5) Listen

Start listening more when someone else is talking to you. Don't just get into a race for who has the latest news or has downloaded the coolest toy last. Start listening for what often doesn't get to be said: pain, anger for something, need for help, confusion about where to go. The more you become an active listener to the real needs of your friends, the more your friends will be providing back with the energy, love and support you may need when you will be in difficulty.

6) Be A Talent Scout

Search for small, hard to find little flowers and help them bloom. No, you don't need to go searching in the grass for these. These are all around you under a human guise. These are the little heroes, the passionate workers and inventors who are all around you. Help these individuals, give them advice, share your skills and your experiences with them, and where you can, give them opportunities to do the things they like most.

7) Don't Blame Yourself

Use each and every opportunity, as well as any mistake you make, to learn something valuable and to move on. Don't blame yourself when you can learn and move on to the next opportunity immediately. Making yourself and others guilty is just a huge waste of time. Life is a learning park and when you take every instance of it to find what to change and improve in yourself, you get the highest kick life can provide you with.

8) Don't give up

If what you have been working on doesn't turn out to be the success you had hoped for, don't give up on it. You may have screwed the ingredients, or you may have cooked it too little, or you may have just forgot to get the right amount of water. In all cases, if you are after something important, something you badly want, do not give up as you stumble into the first set of obstacles. Change road, ask your peers, get elders advice, seek alternative solutions, look up to successful others, try again and again, but do get in some way or other to your chosen goal. Make it a life habit.

9) Have Serious, Professional Fun

Learn how to have fun and make it a serious sport. This is going to be one of the most desired skills a human can have, and as time goes on, one that will be increasingly more valuable. The age of consumerism and happiness generated by buying more and more packaged goods is about to see its downturn. Next stop is learning to have real fun, not the one served up by packed disco ballrooms or old-media stylized crowded movie theaters and stadiums. The new fun is done by sharing and performing with the people you love: your friends.

10) Don't Conform

I know this sounds a bit crazy, but in the end you really need not to conform if you want to fully realize yourself. Go after what makes YOU happy, and pursue it. Stop doing things you must do because others feel you should. Stop being together with people you don't feel you belong with. Stop living in a neighborhood that sucks if you are serious about changing your life. Most of all, stop thinking that I have got all the solutions and that you are not as good as I am. You are. You only need to stop listening to all those games happening around you, where you can never play your best moves. Don't fight the game, change it.

Originally written by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on December 24th 2008 as "How To Be Happy Without Becoming A Monk - 10 Things I Have Changed To Live A More Self-Directed Life"

CRAFT blogger Rachel (Average Jane Crafter) found this cool free font, Molecular Typography, designed by Mithila Shafiq.

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

One of our biggest complaints with ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that was initially written by the entertainment industry, and is being used to effectively sneak through new copyright law requirements around the world (every time you hear an industry supporter claim that copyright laws must be changed to live up to "international obligations" you know they're leaving out the part where it was the same industry that wrote those international treaties), is that the whole thing is being negotiated in secret. So, it seems rather amusing that the latest (secret) negotiations resulted in a press release saying that they discussed how they need to be more transparent (found via Michael Geist). So, after holding a closed door meeting, they let everyone know that they discussed how it really sucks that they hold these closed door meetings? Here's a suggestion: instead of issuing a press release afterwards next time, why not open up the meetings?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Jenny @ CRAFT writes:

Label-Free posts about the work of textile artist Leah Evans, who creates hand-stitched, map-inspired quilts that encompass a variety of techniques, including reverse appliqué, needle felting, hand-dyeing and embroidery.

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

nerdyH writes "Novell's recent openSUSE 11.1 release includes a new end-user license agreement modeled after Fedora's EULA, says Community Manager Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier in this detailed interview. Zonker says distributions should apply the 'open source principle' and standardize trademark agreements and EULA, similar to how the OSI sought to reduce open source license proliferation a few years back. But with Fedora and openSUSE being so different, can one size really fit all? And, will open source licenses ever finally get translated into languages besides English? (Zonker says that translation into 7 languages was done for openSUSE 11.1.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Hybrid Sound" is a large-scale sculpture that doubles as a high-powered speaker system that distorts and causes a large echo effect. Interesting build and check out the project page link for a Quicktime movie of this thing in action.

Hybrid Sound via VVORK

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

USA Today is reporting that Homeland Security is looking to start scanning blogs, forums and message boards to try to track terrorists and terrorist activity. My first reaction to this, honestly, was shock. Shouldn't they have been doing this already? As in, for many, many years? To be fair, the article suggests that the real difference here is that in the past Homeland Security has done static searches that they check on every so often -- and now they're hoping for a more real-time solution. Even so, it strikes me as odd that Homeland Security didn't already have something that was at least close to real-time in alerting them to certain things online. For all the talk of sophisticated monitoring on internet activities, could it be that we're really that far behind in internet terrorist monitoring?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

The Plasticfanpiper lives up to his name demonstrating a homemade 'membrane pipe' apparently built from straws balloons, and plastic valves - must be a pretty sturdy build to stand up to the air pressure.
[Thanks, Stephen!]

A quick search for "membrane bagpipe" turned up this interesting how to -

Looks like fun - but of course the sound created is a bit of an acquired taste ;)

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

Bert Simons is an amazing paper sculptor living in the Netherlands. His work is incredible, and there are some details about his technique and portfolio on his site.

One thing that is fascinating is his technique for 3d scanning. His early explorations in 3d modeling were done with a cheapie laser from a saw. After upgrading the laser and camera, he got better results.

He is apparently using Blender to do his computer compilation work of his three dimensional subjects.

There isn't a huge amount of information about this great paper artist, so if you know more, add your comments below.

Have you tried something as bold as digitizing your girlfriend? Do you know of anybody doing stunning work in unusual media? What are your techniques for turning flat pieces of paper into objects in the round? What can you do with Blender? What is the best way to learn Blender? Add your coments, and submit your photos to the Make Flickr pool.

Thanks for the comment Robot Hacker!

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

Over at his personal blog, occasional Techdirt contributor Tom Lee weighs in on an interesting discussion going on around the blogosphere about who, if anyone, is to blame for the precipitous decline of the newspaper business. My sympathies are with the pessimists: in principle, there are a lot of things newspapers could have done to better manage the transition to Internet-based news, but as a practical matter it's really difficult for large organizations to adapt to disruptive technologies. Tom makes some sensible points about the newspaper business, but then makes a claim about the broader advertising industry that I didn't agree with. Tom suggests that the online advertising market may be fundamentally doomed because now that advertisers can more precisely measure the effects of advertising, they're discovering that it "just doesn't work very well."

I think there are a couple of problems with this. In the first place, advertising has never "worked very well" in the sense that any given ad impression doesn't exactly get the viewer to run out and purchase the product being advertised. In the traditional advertising business, companies didn't know which specific ad will work on which specific viewer, so they adopted a scattershot approach where they exposed millions of customers to dozens of ads and hoped a few of them would have the desired effect. But despite our ignorance about precisely which ads "work" on which viewers, it's pretty clear that advertising "worked" in the aggregate. McDonalds and Coca Cola clearly get some value from the millions of dollars they spend on TV and print ads.

On the Internet, the scattershot approach is no longer necessary. Digital media allows advertisers to be a lot more specific about the users they want to target and to collect a lot more data about their effectiveness. Tom suggests that this is a bad thing because once companies discover their ads aren't working well, they'll stop spending money on them. But the flip side is that advertisers can measure when a particular ad is working, and that ad inventory becomes correspondingly more valuable. Even better, better measurement means that the average ad should improve over time. Ads that don't work can get dropped more quickly, and the ones that perform well can be put on heavy rotation, emulated by other advertisers, and so forth. That can only be good for ad revenues.

Tom also suggests that advertising is doomed because the Internet makes it a lot easier to avoid it. But peoples' hatred for advertising isn't inevitable. It's a consequence of the limitations of 20th century media technologies that required advertisers to adopt "scattershot" approaches to advertising. There was no way to target car ads at the 5 percent of the population that's in the market for a car at any given time, so the other 95 percent of us had to sit through endless car commercials. But online there are lots of ways to more narrowly target ads at people who are likely to be interested in them. In the long run, as we've said before, advertisers are going to have to realize that content is advertising. If you can make ads relevant, interesting, or entertaining, people aren't going to try as hard to avoid them. Search engines do this by only showing ads relevant to the particular keyword a user entered. Other advertisers have figured out that if they make their commercials fun to watch, people will be more willing to watch them. Of course, it's hard to predict whether the total amount of advertising revenue will go up or down over the next decade. But as long as people buy stuff, companies will be willing to spend significant amounts of money to influence their decisions.

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

An anonymous reader writes "I would like to know if there are any resources on the Web or elsewhere describing how to configure a Windows PC for an older parent not living in the same household. Assume little computer familiarity or aptitude. Some stuff is obvious, like using only a few large icons for favorite Web sites, or an icon perhaps for composing email and another for checking email. Other considerations are eliminating nuisance messages from Windows update and antivirus/firewall. What works and what doesn't? Can anyone who has worked/volunteered at a senior center offer some insights?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andrew sent us a link to his LEGO ball contraption. It consists of conveyor belts, lifts, and sawtooth mechanisms. He plans on bringing this to one of the Great Ball Contraption events.

Having recently gotten back into Lego, and wanting to build something cool that I could also bring to Lego events, I decided to make a few Great Ball Contraption (GBC) modules. Inspired by the action of the three all put together, this video became a fun project to see how dramatic moving little soccer balls around a circuit could be...

A little more about the LEGO ball contraption

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

A recent visitor to TechShop in Menlo Park, CA said that he was amazed by a story he was told on his tour. Initially, there was concern that tools would walk out the door at TechShop. In practice, though, the opposite has proved to be true. Members of this community-based workshop brought tools from home and left them at TechShop for others to use. So TechShop was ending up with more tools than they started with. TechShop co-founder, Jim Newton, confirmed this story:

It is absolutely true. People have a real sense of community with TechShop, and bringing in tools from home is one of the ways that it is manifested. Makers are generally much more socially-responsible than outside folk. I think that's largely what drives the way people care for and contribute to TechShop.

The TechShop experience reminded me of a story on community tool-sharing that I read in our local paper earlier this year. Dustin Zuckerman started The Santa Rosa Tool Library, a lending library for tools. It's a terrific Remake idea. Not everyone can afford to buy each and every tool they need. Many tools are needed for a single project and won't be used much otherwise. Renting is always an option, but it's not cheap. Almost as importantly, storage is a premium for many people and finding space for a collection of tools can be a problem.

Tool sharing is not a new concept. The previous news article points out examples in Berkeley of tool lending under the auspices of public libraries. Here's an article on how to start a tool sharing program from Mother Earth News. Tool sharing just makes more and more sense today, whether organized as a community resource, a maker co-op, or an informal neighborhood arrangement where individuals simply let their neighbors know they are willing to share their tools. Perhaps someone will develop a website app for small groups to create an inventory of tools that are available for sharing. (Anyone?)

In a recent discussion of this topic among friends, one person suggested that she found people reluctant to borrow tools, even when they were offered to them. Telling people you were willing to share a tool wasn't enough to make it happen, at least in her experience. Some people may think that borrowing creates a sense of obligation, which makes them uncomfortable. Perhaps makers can help change this mindset, by choosing to value interdependence over independence and recognizing how it fosters a better sense of community.

I'd enjoy learning about your experiences, large-scale or small, at home or work, with tool sharing.

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

In the latest financial crisis, we've seen even more focus on casting blame than following most financial crises. It may be because of the sheer size of the mess this time, and it may be because the events that led up to this mess are a lot more difficult to understand than in the past -- and may even feel more nefarious. However, the deeper you look into the crisis, the harder it is to directly assign blame for the majority of the mess. Yes, there were scammers and fraud on the margins, but for the most part, everyone was doing things in a way that makes sense. This, among other things, is a key point brought out by Henry Blodget's article in The Atlantic about why these types of collapses happen so often. Basically, there is some amount of irrationality in the system, but over time, as more and more people seem to be making money against the irrationality, more and more explanations are made for why that irrationality is actually rational. And since the irrational activity goes on for so long, it becomes nearly impossible for most people to really believe that things are so irrational. So, it's not that there's anyone who did anything wrong that needs to be blamed, so much as we need to blame ourselves, for not taking enough time to recognize that what seems irrational in the beginning actually is irrational.

Of course, along those lines, it's important to realize that, as painful as market corrections like this are going to be, the end result is often beneficial. During the bubble period, lots of money gets thrown at certain things (infrastructure or products) that post-bubble are available for quite a discount. Bubbles help build up new institutions, and even if the original investments get washed away, something good often comes out of them in the end. It may not be clear yet how this financial crisis will eventually work out, but now is a decent time to be looking for opportunity in the carnage rather than worrying about who to blame.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

schlangemann writes "Check out the paper Towards the Simulation of E-commerce by Herbert Schlangemann, which is available in the IEEEXplor database (full article available only to IEEE members). This generated paper has been accepted with review by the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE). According to the organizers, 'CSSE is one of the important conferences sponsored by IEEE Computer Society, which serves as a forum for scientists and engineers in the latest development of artificial intelligence, grid computing, computer graphics, database technology, and software engineering.' Even better, fake author Herbert Schlangemann has been selected as session chair (PDF) for that conference. (The name Schlangemann was chosen based on the short film Der Schlangemann by Andreas Hansson and Björn Renberg.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Marcus wrote in to tell us about his latest ping pong ball electronics project, the Gravitron. In half of a ping pong ball, he's crammed 12 LEDs, an accelerometer, and an ATmega168 for a brain. If you pick it up and tilt it, it will light the highest LED. It's sort of poetic.

If you're as impressed as I am with his efficiency of space, check out Marcus' other ping pong ball experiments on his blog.

Gravitron - Playing around with gravity

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

Lawsuits involving companies upset at competitors buying Google Adwords based on their names have been covered to death, with a variety of court rulings (some good, some awful) over the years. In part due to all this legal activity, Google has cut back on some of what's allowed -- specifically limiting the use of trademarked names from others within an ad if the trademark holder complains. This likely goes well beyond what the law requires. For example, trademark law has always allowed the use of competitive names for comparison purposes. That is, Pepsi can say: "compare Pepsi to Coca-Cola!" and it's not a violation of Coca-Cola's trademark. But, with Google's policy in place, Pepsi can't use that as an ad if Coca-Cola complains.

Unfortunately, that can make things tricky for activists trying to highlight activities by certain companies. Jim Harper points us to Chris Soghoian's detailed analysis of this situation, where AT&T has been able to block ads from AT&T critics, because they happen to use AT&T's name in their ads. That's pretty clearly an abuse of trademark law, as it was never intended for such things. Of course, Google, as a private company, is free to do whatever it wants, and in this case it's clearly trying to minimize lawsuits -- but it is a bit troubling that the end result of this policy is to allow trademark law to be misused to block activist speech.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

jmcbain writes "The ACM issued a set of recommendations supporting Barack Obama's stated goal of making science and mathematics education a national priority at the K-12 level. The ACM is urging the new administration to include Computer Science as an integral part of the nation's education system. 'The new Administration can play an important role in strengthening middle school education, where action can really make a difference, to introduce these students to computer science,' said ACM CEO John White." Is CS such a basic subject, at the level of science or math, that it makes sense to (try to) teach its principles to every elementary school child?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this month, we noted that the FTC had cracked down, yet again, on a company for putting up a bogus spyware scanner. The company would get people to their site where it would supposedly "scan" their hard drive for spyware. Of course, the scan was entirely bogus, and the scan would always tell you that your computer was rife with spyware. Then the site would tell you to buy its anti-spyware product for about $40. Of course, that anti-spyware product did absolutely nothing. The FTC ordered the company to shut down, but apparently the company is ignoring the order. It's now reached a point where a court has found the company in contempt and ordered it to pay $8,000/day until it complies. The execs in the company have had their assets frozen and the judge is now threatening to have them arrested. Sure, scamming may be easy money, but you would think these guys would at least shut down this operation and move on to some other bogus scam, rather than outright ignoring the court and the FTC.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

With Christmas coming up, I wanted to buy something cool and electronic and gadgety, fun and impulsive, under $249 on Amazon. But I couldn't find anything I don't already have. When I was a kid the world was filled with toys I lusted for but couldn't have. Today, I have the opposite problem -- I want to want something, but I already have everything I want.

So I turned to Twitter.

I got back a bunch of suggestions, and promised to blog them, for others who might be inspired to buy themselves a gift, in this the standard gift-giving season. Alas, so far, there's been nothing I wanted enough to buy. There were some that seemed promising, though, and I totally appreciate the thought that went into the suggestions.

ltrosien asks if I have a Slingbox. I do and love it. It's mission-critical. A week ago I watched Meet The Press on an American Airlines flight from NY to SF. When you think of the path the show took to get to me, it's pretty amazing. Downloaded from a satellite via DirecTV, out through the Slingbox to the net, to the Gogo gateway in Dallas (if I remember correctly) then to the proper cell tower and to the airplane and to my laptop, and it all worked -- no fuss no muss. Amazing.

mike1mb suggests an Asus souped up router with built in hard drive, a BitTorrent client, USB port, the kitchen sink and more. Man this one was tempting. It increases the range of your wifi 3 times. Wow. And I love everything that Asus makes. But... It would arrive, I would install it, marvel at the possibilities and then be bored. I can't use any of its capabilities. I already have way more storage than I use. The whole house is covered by two Airport Extreme routers. I have BitTorrent mastered, and it's nice that it works when your computers are turned off, but there are several computers in my house that are always on. Further, the one reviewer on Amazon said the fancy extras didn't really work. It's been out since 2006 and I've never heard of it till today, so that doesn't bode well. So even though it was tempting, I passed.

moneyries says: "Pimp out your game collection. Get Gears of War 2, Left 4 Dead, Dead Space, Call of Duty: World at War, etc. Add Netflix." I only play casual games, no time for all those other games I've never had time for, and I have Netflix, thinking of cancelling it cause I've watched everything I care about. Sighh. When you're bored you're bored, I guess!

CathleenRitt suggests a Take Anyware personal pocket safe. Hmmm, that's interesting.

deepikaur and dberlind suggest a Flip Video camcorder. Okay that's a maybe. I don't have one, but my Canon PowerShot SD1100 takes fine movies and I have it with me all the time. Do I really need another small device for taking movies? I don't think so, but I'm prepared to be talked into it. I've given Flips as presents, and they've always been well-received.

DinkyShop suggests a $5 rechargeable powered USB 4-port hub for a laptop from Woot.

Give the gift of MAKE this year, and spruce up your gift card while you're at it! For example:

Here's a noise-making card/circuit that I built using a 555 timer IC and some other junk parts I had around the house. The robot "talks" by squeezing the leads of one of the capacitors that make his body. Mr. Frauenfelder's head controls the pitch of the squeeling, the on/off of this sound is "controlled" simply by keeping the potentiometer just ever so lightly plugged in to the breadboard underneath the card so that the sound stops when it gets disconnected, allowing the robot to talk. Also, the trunk of the tree is chocolate.

Thanks to my amigos Torlando Hakes and David Stith for making the paper part of the card! They really brought some cute craft to my squeaky squonk.

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

DynaSoar writes "NASA has signed two contracts with US commercial space ventures totaling $3.5 billion for resupply of the International Space Station. SpaceX will receive $1.6 billion for 12 flights of SpaceX's planned Dragon spacecraft and their Falcon 9 boosters. $1.9 billion goes to Orbital for eight flights of its Cygnus spacecraft riding its Taurus 2 boosters. Neither of the specified craft has ever flown. However, the proposed vehicles are under construction and based on proven technology, whereas NASA has often contracted with big aerospace companies for services using vehicles not yet even designed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It seems with the various industries we talk about that are under pressure -- such as newspapers or record labels -- people are extra concerned about lost jobs due to changes in the market. Not surprisingly, those at risk find the whole thing very unfair, and often lash out at some of the causes of the changes, but it's quite natural for jobs to go away when markets change. What's left out is the fact that those same changes almost always tend to create or enable many new jobs. Jack Shafer, over at Slate, is pointing out that journalists and newspaper execs shouldn't necessarily bemoan the loss of jobs in the industry, noting a long list of other industries where market changes meant a massive loss of jobs at one time or another, and no one's really complaining about the death of the slide-rule industry. So the next time you hear someone complaining about job losses in an older industry, feel free to note just how many new jobs were created thanks to the same tools (these days, often the internet) that caused that market shift in the first place.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

TED2009 (Technology, Entertainment, Design) announced their speaker program. Above is a screen shot of the speakers whose last names begin with the letter M. You can click here then on the tab "Program" for detailed information about all the speakers.

I've attended last two TED events and they've been very inspiring and humbling. I'll be at the upcoming TED in Long Beach, California, too, liveblogging like I did last year and the year before!

adamengst writes "If your bank uses the Extended Validation certificates that require a higher level of identity checking on the certificate authority's part (as at least one Seattle bank does), you may not be able to download transactions using the Mac version of Quicken. Quicken doesn't gracefully ignore extra information in EV certificates as older Web browsers do, but instead throws an error and refuses to download transactions. Intuit says they're working on a fix — but users may have to wait 'a couple of months,' and even then the fix may not be applied to versions before Quicken 2007."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, I'm off to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with a new generation of children who've never seen the Pacific Ocean like this before.

Someone called MBA one of "10 Things You Have to See Before You're 10" which made me smile- but it's a really a place that invites multiple pilgrimages over a lifetime.

Here are live webcams of their OuterBay exhibit, Kelp Forest, Aviary, Otters, and others. Just remember there's no substitute for petting the head of a manta ray- softer than goofer feathers.

The MBA is a revelation compared the aquariums I visited as a child in the 60s... where you peered into a series of "boxes" with plant and marine life hiding around. With MBA, it's like the sky- or in this case, the ocean- opens up. The anchovies swirl over your head- yes, you read that right. The comb jellies, as seen above, seem to be sending you secret messages. The architects of MBA give as much thought to mind-blowing design as they do to science, and so it's no wonder the whole environment is a psychonaut's delight.

The latest gizmo from MBA:  Seafood Watch for Your Cell Phone

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)

(Image via Travelmuse)

Mother Earth News has an introduction to blacksmithing here. Check it out; via the comments, here's an introduction to building a forge out of a brake disc:

Also check out purgatoryironworks 35+ other videos here!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Something I want to learn to do... | Digg this!