sbilstein writes "I'm currently a sophomore studying computer science with a penchant for international travel. While I do realize that the internet precludes the need for us geeks to travel farther than our desks, I'd still like to take a few courses taught in English or Spanish (the two languages I'm fluent in) somewhere outside of the country. The trouble is I can't go to just any school, because like any other engineering degree, I have to take technical courses every semester. So I need a school with a something at least similar to a computer science program in the states. Has anybody here from the US studied abroad while doing computer science? Was it worthwhile? Or anyone from outside the United States recommend a university program?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You heard it here first, this thing is great!

http://tweetree.com/davewiner

It pulls in content it knows about like Flickr pics and YouTube videos so you can view inline.

It figures out the threading of replies (sort of) and displays them inline.

Other services they have direct support for: TwitPic, FriendFeed, Seesmic, Qik, Lala, Blip.fm, Xkcd.

It also figures out when you're pointing to a picture and sucks that in, and it gets the titles of web pages you point to.

And it's true to the design of your web page on twitter.com.

This is brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. And exactly what I asked for, which of course makes me happy!!

These guys are brilliant. Great stuff. They'll be rich next week so be nice to them.

Please don't sell this to Loic.

"cheesecake"

i4u writes "The new generation of netbooks debuting at CES 2009 will add touch and will have twistable screens to use them in tablet or notebook style. Intel is set to introduce a new Classmate netbook with a twistable screen and touchscreen at the CES 2009. Back in October Asus alreadt said it is planning to introduce touchscreen Asus Eee netbooks early 2009. Asus is exhibiting at the CES unveiled pre-show that takes place already on January 6th. Expect the Asus Eee Touch to be already unveiled then. Gigabyte has outrun all of them with the Intel Atom powered M912V that has been on the market already for a while. Adding a touchscreen is rather easy. More difficult is to offer a touch optimized UI. Lets see what the netbook vendors are going to invest on the software side."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "Microsoft's vision of your computing future is on display in its just-published patent application for the Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience. The plan, as Microsoft explains it, involves charging students $1.15 an hour to do their homework, making an Office bundle available for $1/hour, and billing gamers $1.25 for each hour of fun. In addition to your PC, Microsoft also discloses plans to bring the chargeback scheme to your cellphone and automobile — GPS, satellite radio, backseat video entertainment system. 'Both users and suppliers benefit from this new business model,' concludes Microsoft, while conceding that 'the supplier can develop a revenue stream business that may actually have higher value than the one-time purchase model currently practiced.' But don't worry kids, that's only if you do more than 52 hours of homework a year!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The holiday break is a good time for 30/40/50/etc.-somethings to take trips down memory lane and dig up games from their childhood. For those of us who either don't have old systems in their attics/basements or who have grown bored with their contents, there are always emulators.

The hassle with emulators is finding games to play on them: if you have the original disks, you can, with some effort, transfer them to your computer. There's also the path of least resistance, downloading ROMs, but that opens up complicated set of legal and ethical issues. Another option is to find emulators that include the ROMs--legally. Here are a couple I've found:

Miner 2049er and Bounty Bob Strikes Back
Big Five Software, makers of two of the best old-school platform games, released a dedicated emulator that plays the 8-bit Atari computer versions of both.

Classic99
Harmless Lion obtained permission to include the TI-99/4a system ROMs and many TI classics, including Hunt the Wumpus, Parsec, and Tunnels of Do... (OK, I just lost about half the readers of the blog here. Oh, back so soon? I know you are just looking for info on how to play Tunnels of Doom).

(These two bundles are Windows-only, but they played fine for me under VMware Fusion.)

Parabellum's Java Vectrex Emulator
The Vectrex Game ROMs are available for free, which makes it possible for Vectrex emulator developers to include the games along with their emulators. This emulator is cross-platform; you can download versions for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

PDRoms
Be sure to check out the wealth of homebrew ROMs available. These are created by the community, and although they aren't the games you remember from your youth, they have an old-school feel and many are as good as the best from the old days.

Know of any other legal emulator/ROM combos out there? I'm sure there are more; post them up in the comments, please! My wish? Shamus.

Gaming Hacks
It doesn't take long for an avid or just wickedly clever gamer to be chafed by the limitations of videogame software or hardware. If you want to go far beyond the obvious, there's an awful lot of free fun you can have, using the creative exploits of the gaming gurus. Gaming Hacks is the indispensable guide to cool things gamers can do to create, modify, and hack videogame hardware and software.

Retro Gaming Hacks
Whether you're just discovering Tetris or you've been a Pong junkie since puberty, Chris Kohler's Retro Gaming Hacks is your indispensable new guide to classic games. Kohler has compiled the how-to information that used to take weeks of web surfing to find and presents it in highly readable Hacks style.

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wytcld writes "Fairpoint Communications, which has taken over Verizon's landline business in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, has announced that on February 6 'AOL, Yahoo! and MSN subscribers will continue to have access to content but will no longer be able to access their e-mail through the third-party Web site. Instead, Yahoo! and other third-party e-mail will be accessed directly at the MyFairPoint.net portal. Since Verizon spun off its lines to Fairpoint in a maneuver that got debt off of Verizon's balance sheets by saddling Fairpoint with it, there was concern by the public service boards of the three states about how Fairpoint would deal with that debt. Fairpoint's profit plan: force all Webmail users through Fairpoint's portal, by blocking all direct access to Webmail portals other than its own. Will Fairpoint's own search engine portal be next? What can stop them?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ever since Twitter came out I've been developing mini-apps that connect it with other services and utilities. Some have stood up over time, esp the Flickr-to-Twitter and Twitter-to-Identi.ca functionality, and others have fallen into disuse. I thought that Voicemail-toTwitter was going to be a big one, but I don't use it much, though it's a simple call from my iPhone to create one and shoot it up to Twitter. All this experimentation was made possible by Twitter's simple API.

Then, enter FriendFeed and its API, which does a bit more than Twitter's, but then FriendFeed does a lot more than Twitter. There were some things inexplicably missing from FriendFeed's API, I lobbied for them, but they either haven't appeared, or when they did, they didn't do what I asked for. I don't know or care why, that's not what this post is about. Rather it's to say in one place what I've learned about FriendFeed-like services, and leave behind the notes, either for FriendFeed itself or for a comparable service.

1. FriendFeed should both import and export OPML subscription lists. The attributes specified on opml.org are necessary and sufficient for it to work with all other feed reader software, as far as I know, because there was a minimal set of attributes at the beginning, when Radio 8 implemented OPML import/export.

I was able to create a simple utility that exports a user's OPML from FriendFeed, but for it to really work, it should export the addresses of the feeds the user is subscribed to, not the addresses of the FriendFeed users, which is all I can access through the API. It should be possible for the user to completely disconnect from friendfeed.com and take their subscriptions with them. This is another instance of "people come back to places that send them away" -- if you give people complete freedom to leave, they feel more comfortable about staying, building their presence on your service that may come in the future.

2. There should be a simple way to notify FF that a feed has updated. We developed such a capability in the blogging world and then the RSS world around a site I started called weblogs.com. The ping protocol it used is still widely supported today both on the sending side by blogging tools such as WordPress, TypePad, Moveable Type, Blogger, etc etc and on the receiving side by Technorati, Google, Yahoo you name it. There's even a centralized pinger started by Matt Mullenwegg, pingomatic.com, that makes it easy to send pings to everyone who cares. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that FF should support this protocol, it's very simple, it would take a couple of hours at most to implement. There's even a simpler REST version of the protocol if the XML-RPC version is too much.

3. RSS description elements seem to be a big problem for FriendFeed, but I don't understand why. It's true that they are used for two different purposes: In the classic way, as the description of a longer article, or to contain the full text of an article. They can contain encoded markup. So, imho, this is how they should deal with descriptions. Say the maximum length of a comment in FF is 1024 characters (I'm not sure what the actual limit is, but it doesn't matter). First, strip all markup and then if the resulting string is longer than 1024, truncate it to 1021 characters and add three dots at the end to indicate that there's more. I don't see what else they need to do. It could be I'm missing something, of course -- Murphy's Law, etc.

In the last two cases, to get the behavior I've wanted I've had to code to the API, which seems very wrong, when there are feed-based ways to do both things. Low-tech is always the right way to go, imho. There are many people who can create feeds who can't program to an API, and they shouldn't have to for things that can be done with feeds. I know that FF has proposed richer mechanisms for change notification, I'm not going to comment on those at this time. But first, before going the complex route, support the common language already used in the market you're entering. You'll find the natives more friendly if you do, imho.

Nikropht writes in -

We received a few HTC ExtUSB connectors from PodGizmo. The first thing we thought of, was making the T-Mobile G1 send the audio to an iPod Speaker set we have. There is a sea of iPod accessories, so naturally the dock connector has a well known pinout. Figuring out the pinout for the HTC ExtUSB connector wasn’t too hard, I just split open my hands free adapter I got with my T-Mobile Dash.

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Hello folks I'm back again with my PC Mod pic of the day- Project: Passive, built by Ville 'Willek' Kyrö.

This guy went ahead and build a PC that uses all passive cooling, that is, no fans whatsoever! Let's take a quick glance at what he did, and I'll tell you why I think it's so awesome.

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, the Boston case in which the defendant is represented by Prof. Charles Nesson and his CyberLaw class at Harvard Law School, the defendant has requested that audio-visual coverage of the court proceedings be made available to the public via the internet. Taking the RIAA at its word — that the reason for its litigation program is to 'educate the public' — the defendant's motion (PDF) queries why the RIAA would oppose public access: 'Net access to this litigation will allow an interested and growingly sophisticated public to understand the RIAA's education campaign. Surely education is the purpose of the Digital Deterrence Act of 1999, the constitutionality of which we are challenging. How can RIAA object? Yet they do, fear of sunlight shone upon them.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a short piece about challenging car-dominated car culture (and, to a lesser degree, high-priced bike shops) in an unlikely city:

(via Treehugger)

We've got the Yellow Bike Project in Austin, which has suspended its bike-earning program while building out a new space but has kept a very-respectable commnity bike repair shop in action. What does your community have to help denizens create their own green transportation?

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Om just wrote a one-year retrospective on the big event last December that set his life on a new course. It's a beautiful piece. For people like Om and myself, it took a big wakeup call to help focus us on what's important.

What can I say. I still eat red meat, but I stopped smoking and I work out every day. I've lost a fair amount of weight this year, which makes me feel better, but there's more to lose.

I still blog, I can't not blog, basically -- it's in my blood along with lots of other stuff that keeps me alive. I'm also addicted to humor and irony. Greatness in others inspires me more than anything else.

That's why I love Om -- he's always had a warmth and charm, people notice that, but in the last year, he's grown in ways that weren't possible before. That's what wakeup calls do for you if you're listening.

So -- Om gets many more years of life, and we get many more years of Om. Win-win.

In 2004, when I made a decision like the ones Om describes, when I dropped a project that would have shortened my life, a very smart man, Michael Winser, posted a note about dropping things that bounce and those that break. Unfortunately his post and the speech it refererred to are no longer online. But the short story is worth repeating.

"A rubber ball will bounce and someone else can pick it up. That's your work life. The glass ball is family, friends, your health. Drop it, and if you're lucky it'll just crack. If you're not so lucky, it'll break into a million pieces. No matter what it'll never be the same. The people were shocked because I dropped a rubber ball, deliberately. Had to do it. If you don't understand, ponder it, and you'll learn something about life that's important. No Web project is worth dying for. Well, maybe it's possible that one is, but this one ain't it."

Maybe our little community is ready to grow up in a new way -- people get sick and sometimes they get better, but sometimes they don't and sometimes the outcome depends on what they do. In 2004 I guess people didn't believe that heart disease is a killer, or didn't accept that I had it, or that I might act to protect my health. Maybe now we're ready to face that?

That's what Om's story is all about -- I know because it's my story too.

Fortran IV writes "Volunteer-powered anti-malware site CastleCops appears to have closed shop. As of Tuesday, December 23, the CastleCops home page notes: 'You have arrived at the CastleCops website, which is currently offline. . . . Unfortunately, all things come to an end.' It was reported back in June that Paul Laudanski, founder of CastleCops and its parent Computer Cops LLC, was taking a full-time job with Microsoft and was 'looking for new management' for CastleCops. The site has also long had problems with funding and with hostile action from spammers. The actual shutdown seems to have taken the security community by surprise; as late as Tuesday evening Brian Krebs was still recommending CastleCops on his Security Fix blog."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

These lovely images were created with PSCombine, a random image combiner program. From the site:

I've written a program that randomly selects photos from my collection and then combines them with a random opacity and blending mode. Generally, I generate 5,000 random combinations then manually sort though them and select my favorites. About 1 in 150 make the cut.

Only for Windows and Photoshop CS3 or CS4. Download here. via NotCot

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Loic Le Meur wants Twitter's search to emphasize people who have more followers over those that have fewer. I think this is a bad idea. On FriendFeed, Jeremiah Owyang wants priority given to people he follows. This is a better approach, imho. Loic's means centralization, and Jeremiah's goes the other way, it shards search into many networks, and lowers barriers to entry, where Loic's approach raises them.

I favor Jeremiah's approach because I think the twitterverse is just starting and that the killer apps of this space, the users (as always) haven't arrived yet. We're still fumbling around with inadequate tools, doing things for the first time. It's way way too early to lock things down. And if authority is what we're after I doubt if number of followers equates to authority. Too many really smart people have very few followers.

Authority-based search was a great innovation in 1998, but that was ten years ago. We know what it's good for and what it's not. An example -- breaking news, although some people think that's what is good for, sometimes it doesn't work well at all. After the election I stopped watching cable news, and really slowed down on reading news sites. They were nowhere near as stimulating as they were before the election, and I had had enough of the news at least for a while. I needed a rest. But I never stopped reading Memeorandum and Techmeme, refreshing many times a day, and I have a renewed interest in Twitter as a source of news. My attention shifted to the online media.

Sometime in the last 24 hours war erupted in Gaza. I saw the first pictures in the AFP photo stream about then. I wasn't fully aware of what's going on cause photos only tell you so much. I knew people were dying. Then it got worse, pictures of dozens of dead people started showing up. But-- and here's the point, nothing showed up on Memorandum until early this morning. Whatever its algorithms are, they are surely authority-based. They work if a certain set of bloggers are interested in a story, but if they're enjoying a holiday or focused on other things, they miss it. So don't put your full faith in authority, you'll miss news.

Another one -- I saw a note from Lisa Rein on Twitter, wondering when MSM was going to pick up on the strange circumstances around the death of Mike Connell, Karl Rove's 45-year-old IT expert, who was asking for protection because he feared for his life. Who knows why the press isn't covering it, I don't know how true it is, but maybe it is true and maybe someone is hushing it up. It has happened before.

Happy birthday Louis! French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur was born 12/27/1822 pioneered the creation of vaccines for rabies, anthrax and helped developed pasteurization (he helped invent the method to stop milk and wine from causing sickness). Drink up!

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Urban Studies - For Geeks, a Frat House and Lab, All in One - NYTimes.com... Great article on NYC Resistor!

Diana Eng is one of seven women in the collective. A former contestant on the television series “Project Runway,” she created a sweatshirt with a digital camera embedded in the hood that takes a picture when the wearer’s heart rate is elevated, creating snapshots of the day’s excitements.

“My designs were too nerdy for ‘Project Runway,’ ” Ms. Eng said with a giggle. “But here they fit right in.”

To help pay the rent, the collective offers classes for $25 each on topics from basic electronics to the art of laser-cutting Christmas decorations.

The group’s success has not gone unnoticed.

“Resistor blew the doors off the scene here,” said Eric Moore, a hacker from Bushwick who is forming his own group. “They’re the next generation of American hacking. The rest of us are just trying to catch up.”

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I love the funny and characterful scenes that Lenny & Meriel manage to capture with their Sparebots sculptures -- like this dude, obviously ready for a bellyful of button cell.

Sparebots

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Newscloud writes "As PC Mag reported last week, Apple OS X 10.5.6 can break some MacBook Pros leaving some users (like me) with a dead backlit black screen after the Apple logo appears. While I initially thought I had a hardware failure, it turns out that there is a fix as long as you have an external display, keyboard and mouse. The problem only appears on the second restart, so if you sleep your MacBook a lot as I do, you might not realize the problem is related to the OS update you did the week before. The problem was related to older, incompatible firmware that Software Update wasn't flagging before the upgrade. This definitely gives weight to the argument for waiting a bit to run software upgrades."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stair Porn blog has amazing images of unusual and creatively designed staircases - check out the beautiful Lello Bookshope staircase in Portugal.

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kaufmanmoore writes "UK culture secretary Andy Burnham calls for a website rating system similar to the one used for movies in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. He also calls for censorship of the internet, saying, 'There is content that should just not be available to be viewed.' Other proposals he mentions in his wide-ranging calls for internet regulation are 'family-friendly' services from ISPs, and requiring takedown notices to be enforced within a specific time for sites that host content. Mr. Burnham wants to extend his proposals across the pond and seeks meetings with the Obama administration."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Multichannel News reports that a woman from California has initiated a potential class-action lawsuit against Comcast for making customers rent a set-top box without giving them the option to buy it outright. Quoting: "The action, on behalf of Comcast Corp. customer Cheryl Corralejo, alleges that the set-top rental practice represents an 'unlawful tying arrangement resulting in an impermissible restraint of trade.' In addition to violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the suit alleges the practice violates business and professions codes. ... [It also notes] that premium video and the set-top descramblers are two distinct products, yet the cable providers require that the hardware be rented from cable companies, rather than permitting consumers to purchase the set-top hardware in the open market.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A look at the future of technology and trends in this issue of the Media Literacy digest. Photo credit: Jay Cross In this issue: George Siemens deals with changing paradigms in education, a new report about the Twittersphere, two interesting studies on the importance of video games in online learning, and a top ten of everything that's going to be hot in 2009. What seems to be crucial for Dr. Siemens, is the access people have to educational resources. Media trends and technology role in our lives are the bread and butter of this weekly digest. Here you can find education-related pointers and tools that may help you make greater sense of the deep changes that new technologies and media are bringing. Here all the details: Intro by Daniele Bazzano

eLearning Resources and News

learning, networks, knowledge, technology, trends by George Siemens

Top 10 Forecasts for the Future

I’m not sure why future forecasts always require 10 items. Why not 6? or 11? Does selecting a nice round number like ‘10? provide a glimpse into our assumptions that the future will exhibit some type of order? The World Future Society has listed its top 10 trends for 2009 and beyond. Some are fairly obvious (growth of electricity access, urbanization). Others are intriguing in terms of implications to education:

"Professional knowledge will become obsolete almost as quickly as it’s acquired. An individual’s professional knowledge is becoming outdated at a much faster rate than ever before"

and "Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030".

The Pirate Hoax

The Pirate Hoax is generating strong reactions. Basically, a professor asked his students to a series of fabricated resources posted on Blogs, Wikipedia, and YouTube, and promoted on Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. The project was discontinued once actual historians - colleagues of the professor who initiated the project - “bought into the hoax”. Deliberating posting fabricated information has ethical dimensions. Not everyone is amused. Michael Feldstein sees the project as teaching vandalism, and in the process, calling into question sites like Wikipedia. I understand that perspective. My own view is different. This project is not about Wikipedia or even the potential fallibility of user-generated content. This project highlights the importance for everyone, even so-called experts, to be constantly vigilant about all information sources. Everyone who encounters information online should be aware that it can be easily created by anyone. When gatekeepers such as journals and encyclopedias play a less important role in restricting information access, the openness creates a shift in where we determine information’s value and authenticity. Information is now validated at the point of consumption, not creation.

Quest for Expertise

How long does it take to become an expert? Generally, a 10-year rule is applied. I’ve seen this referenced in numerous books and articles, most recently in Gladwell’s new book Outliers. On a recent (long) trip, I had time to read both Outliers and Expertise and Expert Performance. The 10-year rule figures prominently in both, though the latter takes a research-focused approach. As a follow up to those two books, I enjoyed reading Quest for Expertise (via Stephen Downes). The author of the post searches for the origin of the 10-year rule and in the process, presents numerous resources on expertise. The topic of expertise will become more important to consider. The creation of sites like Wikipedia raises the profile of amateurs while also questioning the role experts play in “everyone creates, everyone participates” environments.

Trends with Games

Video games warrant far more attention than they receive in traditional media. The odd TV program or magazine article tries to address the significance of this field. But to understand gaming requires participation. The days of N64 have yielded to online, immersive, multiplayer, and interactive (Wii) games, and high powered consoles. Games are not confined to consoles either. PSP, Nintendo DS, and Gameboy (a bit dated) offer constant play. It’s very hard to overhype the gaming industry for size and growth. And it’s not just young males either. Profiles of gamers are changing (average age: 32). Two great resources to give you a sense of the scope of the field:

• Video Game Design: 1990-2008
• Video Gaming Trends

(Links via Trends Spotting)

Industries in Transition

I have the rather biased view that higher education will be subject to enormous change in the next decade. It won’t just be change around the edges (new programs or new technology added to existing methods) like we’ve experienced in the past. It will be change that systemically redefines the enterprise of education. With this perspective in mind, I find broad industry shifts like capital movement to eastern countries, global awareness of environmental issues, and the rise of participative culture intriguing. In some instances - such as with newspapers and car manufacturers - the industry transitions have been forecast for decades. And yet, when change finally strikes, it leaves most people baffled. News You Can Lose analyzes the decline of the newspaper industry. There are lessons here for educators…

State of the Twittersphere?

While technology moves forward, buzzwords apparently do not. Technorati publishes an almost annual state of the blogosphere (btw - I hardly ever use Technorati - Google Alerts seems to suffice). In the spirit of true creativity (?) we know have the state of the twittersphere. Growth has been tremendous for Twitter. I haven’t heard much about abandoned accounts - a key complaint about blogs. Twitter is just easier. It’s highly social, it accommodates a range of strong and weak ties, and it doesn’t require much effort to contribute. Plus, as a bonus, you don’t have to strive for coherence.

Changing Shape of Universities?

In an effort to create a more articulate argument for why systemic changes are required in higher education, I’ve spent the last several months digging through resources, articles, and books. Most resources are not publicly accessible. Articles require journal access, books usually don’t allow direct links to chapters. It’s difficult to share or engage with those resources when access is restricted. I’ve been aware of Tony Bates’ work for several years… and finally took the time to dig deeper into his articles / book chapters. Fortunately, he posts much of his work on his site. Thanks for making your work available, Tony!

Originally written by George Siemens for elearnspace and first published on December 24th 2008 in his newsletter eLearning Resources and News.

About the author To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book "Knowing Knowledge".

Photo credits: Top 10 Forecasts for the Future - pablo631 The Pirate Hoax - Supertr Quest for Expertise - Tom Grill Trends with Games - Alexandr Stepanov Industries in Transition - Vladimir Tarassov State of the Twittersphere? - The World in the Satin Bag Changing Shape of Universities? - petrol

William Robinson writes with news that the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), an instrument developed by NASA and sent aboard India's Chandrayaan-1, has confirmed the presence of iron-bearing minerals on the moon. This marks the beginning of an extensive examination of the composition of the lunar surface. "Isro officials said M3 would help in characterising and mapping lunar minerals to ultimately understand the moon's early geological evolution. 'The compositional map that will come out of M3 will have fantastic data on geological formation of the moon,' the official said. Researchers said the relative abundance of magnesium and iron in lunar rocks could help confirm whether the moon was covered by a molten, magma ocean early on in its history. Iron and magnesium will also indicate melting of the moon, if it happened and how it formed later. This metallic element has been found in lunar meteorites, but scientists know little about its distribution in the lunar crust."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The idea of building with bottles isn't new, but most existing bottle buildings have fallen into disrepair. It's rare to find such a perfect and intact edifice as the bottle chapel built by restaurant owner and folk artist Martin Sanchez.

Sanchez has created an urban oasis, a Garden of Eden, hidden behind shrubs, trees, and a wrought-iron fence at his Tio's Tacos restaurant in Riverside, Calif. Sanchez' complex is located on a city block near the historic Mission Inn, and has several outdoor elements that he's continually creating, appending to the complexity of his design.

There's the sculptural chapel made out of ferro-cement, beer and soda bottles, bits of tile and glass, and fabulous statuary from his home country of Mexico. There are several gardens created out of found objects -- trash and ephemera otherwise thrown away -- that he's rescued and put to his own visionary use.

Down garden paths made of stone and bottle caps, remnants and rummage, you're led to a unique urban environment where broken Barbie dolls and other children's toys grow like flowers amidst the tree branches and handmade wrought-iron arches.

Sanchez has been working on his creation for almost ten years. Patrons of the restaurant can walk beneath cooling streams of water flowing from a fountain garden made of broken pieces of clay and old pipes, discarded bicycles, and other items. There's an incredible path through an archway lined in tubing that's pumping jets of water, creating an obstacle course where one can walk without getting wet.

Inside the restaurant, tile mosaics of sea creatures such as lobsters and marlins cover the tables and floors. Sanchez welcomes everyone to view his beautiful creation, and he hopes it will bring the viewer as much joy as it has brought him to build it.

>> Tio's Tacos: makezine.com/go/sanchez

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 13, page 29 - Marlow Harris.

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Rob Spengler writes "Last.FM co-founder Richard Jones says the biggest asset the company owns is 'hundreds of terabytes of user data.' Jones adds, '... playing with that data is one of the most fun things about working at the company.' Last.FM, for those who have been living on Mars for the last two years, is the largest online radio outlet, with millions of listeners per day. The company surpassed Pandora and others largely due to its unique datamining features: 'Audioscrobbler,' the company's song/artist naming algorithm, can correctly determine a track even with tens of thousands of false entries. Jones says sitting on that much data has even helped police: 'thieves listening to music on an Audioscrobbler-powered media player have helped police in the US, UK, and other countries track down users' stolen laptops.' Does sitting on a mountain of data make Last.FM powerful enough to start making a stand against the record industry? CBS certainly thinks so — they bought the company for £140 (~$200) million last year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

They usually work so well, it's easy to forget about all the electronics crammed inside a compact fluorescent light bulb. MAKE reader Ollie AJ1O sent us a link to ham Michael J. Rainey's (AA1TJ) "Das DereLicht" radio, a transmitter made almost completely from the parts of a defective CFL bulb.

This electronic puzzle was a result of my changing a defective compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) in my kitchen. For some reason, I began to wonder if it would be possible to build a QRP CW transmitter using the electronic components salvaged from this derelict lamp.

Indeed, I'm pleased to report that a perfectly serviceable transmitter may be constructed! The only additional components required were the quartz crystal, and four of the five components needed for the output lowpass filter. The resulting transmitter produces up to 1.5 watts on 80m.

For all the hams out there: what's the coolest radio hack you've created or heard of? Send us a shout in the comments.

Das DereLicht - Ham Radio From A CFL Bulb

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ClaraBow writes with this excerpt from MacWorld: "A small Indiana company has sued tech heavyweights Microsoft, Apple, and Google, claiming that it holds the patent on a common file preview feature used by browsers and operating systems to show users small snapshots of the files before they are opened. ... Cygnus's owner and president Gregory Swartz developed the technology laid out in the patent while working on IT consulting projects, McAndrews said. The company is looking for 'a reasonable royalty' as well as a court injunction preventing further infringement, he said. ... Cygnus applied for its patent (# 7346850) in 2001. It covers a 'System and method for iconic software environment management' and was granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office in March of this year."

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knapper_tech writes "The scope of the auto industry troubles continues to increase in magnitude. The call to retool and develop new vehicles has been made several times already, but with all of the challenges from labor prices and foreign competition, how exactly can the industry retool itself to be more competitive? In light of superior competition facing losses, there doesn't seem to be enough room in the industry moving forward. In the context of finding a new place in the auto industry, the future isn't bright. Calls for no disorderly collapse of the cash-strapped big three and a reluctant congress can only point to an underlying lack of direction. However, consider two other standing economic challenges. The airlines have continued to struggle due to fuel prices and heightened security. Consumers backed off of SUV's due to high fuel prices, and while those prices have eased in the face of global recession, the trend will pick up again with growth in China and India leading the fight for resources. In short, things are moving less, and the industries that support the movement are in need of developing new products while consumers are in need of a cheaper method of transportation." Read on for the rest of knapper_tech's thoughts.

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Dig the psychedelic service provided by Apple Authorized Service centers back in the day. Far freakier than today's Genius Bars. Detail above. Joel posted the full painting over at Boing Boing Gadgets.
Happy Authorized Boxing Day

An anonymous reader writes "Gazan resident Abed Ar-Rahman has revealed what he is claiming as an alternative to cooking gas that he developed since Israel has prevented deliveries of cooking gas to Gaza. He invented a device using chemical substances available in Gaza, which burn when mixed and brought into contact with oxygen. The first component is a metal filter that controls the interaction between 40% of the oxygen in the surrounding air, the inflammable substance and some other substances."

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An anonymous reader writes "Gazan resident Abed Ar-Rahman has revealed what he is claiming as an alternative to cooking gas that he developed since Israel has prevented deliveries of cooking gas to Gaza. He invented a device using chemical substances available in Gaza, which burn when mixed and brought into contact with oxygen. The first component is a metal filter that controls the interaction between 40% of the oxygen in the surrounding air, the inflammable substance and some other substances."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Probably only a mockup, but such a wonderfully weird idea that I wanted to share. From Momentum:

Iron Saddle
Who hasn't suffered from 'cold butt' while riding in winter, at least in the northern parts of the continent?... A battery, a 12 volt iron (without steam option) and voila! Toasty Buns! And of course if you are truly nimble you can iron your clothes while you ride.

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