kenblakely writes "We've known for a while that the Department of Homeland Security was collecting travel records on those who cross US borders, but now you can see it for yourself. A Freedom of Information Act request got this blogger a look at DHS's file on his travels. Pretty comprehensive — all the way down to the IP address of the host he used to make a reservation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MIDIimplant is an ultra-compact way of adding MIDI control to an analog synthesizer, converting the protocol to control voltage signals. Considering the size and functionality, it appears to be a pretty good deal @ about 100 bucks(80EUR) for those interested in adding digital control to a classic synth - or perhaps just good inspiration for one's own homebrew version. - MIDIimplant [via DeviantSynth]

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There's a moral panic style study being released that claims that many teens "display risky behavior" on MySpace. Of course, when you look at the details, it's not quite so fear-inducing at all. Basically, some kids talk about drinking, drugs and sex online. That's nothing new. But the way this study is being presented, it makes it sound as if the risky behavior is the fact that kids are talking about this stuff. The article doesn't talk about the actual drugs and sex so much as the talking about it, as if that's the problem:

Many young people who use social networking sites such as News Corp's MySpace do not realize how public they are and may be opening themselves to risks

That seems backwards to me. It would seem a lot better to find out that kids are actually talking about this stuff openly, where they can (hopefully) get good advice to keep themselves safe, rather than keeping quiet and experimenting totally in secret. Yes, there definitely are some risks involved in talking about this stuff publicly. For years, we've wondered what will happen when the MySpace generation runs for office, and we've also seen how social networking profiles can be used against an individual in pursuing a career. Of course, there are some who wonder if this widespread openness will lead to a more accepting population. For example the fact that Barack Obama used cocaine at one point in his life was barely mentioned at all during the campaign -- in part because he had openly admitted to it years earlier. It's only the surprise "gotcha" type info that seems to cause real problems.

That isn't to say that kids today shouldn't be at least aware of the potential consequences of over-sharing information, but I worry that a study like the one being discussed here leads to eventual misplaced blame and worries over a problem that might not be nearly as significant as some make it out to be.

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Ed Begley, Jr, says:

Thought I would send along this video from my friend Jay Leno about a new wind turbine called the MagWind from Enviro-Energies that he and I will be installing soon. As many of you have asked about "vertical axis wind turbines," I thought you'd like to see the latest in this technology.

Jay Leno's wind turbine

Randell Mills, founder of BlackLight Power, claims to have invented a reactor that makes hydrogen atoms drop to an energy state below ground level, which causes them to release "100 times as much energy as you’d get by just burning the hydrogen." IEEE Spectrum interviewed several physicists about it, and they say it's poppycock. Nevertheless, the company developing the technology has received $60 million in funding.

“This is scientific nonsense—there is no state of hydrogen lower than the ground state,” says Wolfgang Ketterle, an MIT scientist and a Nobel Prize laureate in physics. “Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and it’s had time enough to find its ground state.”

Anthony Leggett, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and also a Nobel laureate, says that quantum mechanics is “consistent with just about everything we know about atomic physics, so the onus is firmly on anyone who wants to discard it to prove his case.” He adds, “I don’t see that [BlackLight] has got anywhere near doing this.”

But turn to Randell Mills, the founder, chairman, chief executive, and president of BlackLight Power, and he’ll tell you that this lower-energy hydrogen, which he calls hydrino, is very real indeed.

“We produce hydrino on demand,” he tells IEEE Spectrum, adding that his team has isolated and characterized hydrino’s properties using spectroscopy and has even created hydrino-rich materials it can provide for analysis.

BlackLight Power says it's developing a revolutionary energy source—and it won't let the laws of physics stand in its way

snydeq writes "Security researchers from Invisible Things Lab have created software that can 'compromise the integrity' of software loaded using Intel's vPro Trusted Execution Technology, which is supposed to help protect software from being seen or tampered with by other programs on the machine. The researchers say they have created a two-stage attack, with the first stage exploiting a bug in Intel's system software. The second stage relies on a design flaw in the TXT technology itself (PDF). The researchers plan to give more details on their work at the Black Hat DC security conference next month."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of our most viewed and discussed postings of '08 was Claude Paillard's stunning triode video where he makes a vacuum tube triode from scratch. While poking around the Web, looking for other videos he might have done, I bumped into this documentary about the 2006 European Triode Festival in the Netherlands, celebrating the 100th anniversary of this game-changing electronic component. To celebrate, a copy of the DeForest Audion (the first triode) was replicated. This video documents the build.

More:
<a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/04
/revisiting_claude_paillar.html">Revisiting Claude Paillard's triodes
Make your own vacuum tubes?

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Just got an email from Andrew Grumet with an amazing story.

He writes: "Julie Powell, who blogged her way through a Julia Child book on blogs.salon.com. Then the blog got her a book deal and some minor celebrity. Now they're making a movie out of it... with Meryl Streep!!! (in the role of Julia Child).

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1135503/

Chris Lydon did a podcast with Julie Powell in his pioneering 2004 series where he interviewed many of the early bloggers.

ArduPilot - Arduino compatible UAV controller. You'll need a GPS module ($60) and, for all but the most stable planes, a commercial stabilization unit ($70), but still the least expensive autopilot. it's also a 100% Open source hardware project, schematics and Eagle files on the site. This sold out in 7 minutes today, but don't worry, backorders are fine as per Chris. Sparkfun is making another hundred, which should be available later this week. Then more next week to keep up with demand...

This is a Arduino-compatible autopilot board designed by Chris Anderson and Jordi Munoz of DIY Drones. This is a basic navigation-only autopilot that requires a GPS module and separate stabilization unit such as a FMA Co-Pilot to create a functioning Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The hardware and software is all open source. The board comes with all the surface-mount parts already soldered, but requires the user to solder on connectors. Firmware is already loaded, but the autopilot software must be downloaded and loaded onto the board by the user. It can be programmed with the Arduino IDE. All details and instructions can be found at the project's home page.

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Heads up, the next Handmade Music meet-up will happen Thursday of next week @ 3rd Ward in Brooklyn. This time we've even got someone to bring the drinks! Eminent Eventmaster Peter Kirn of CDM writes up the details -

Handmade Music is now a monthly affair at the wonderful 3rd Ward in Brooklyn, and increasingly, I want to work on adding an online, virtual component for the rest of the world to share. That means we’ll be looking for new works to share. The setup is this: for people in-person, we’re looking for installations, short performances, or projects you’d like to show off informally, science fair-style. Projects don’t have to be completed finished – in fact, this is a great way to get feedback on something you’re working on (and we certainly welcome repeat presentations as you make more progress, especially now that we’re monthly). We also welcome visual and audiovisual projects; we’ll have a projector onsite. (You’ll need to share if you can’t bring your own projector, but we can give you at least a few minutes of projection time.)

New for January 15’s event:

• Free beer, sponsored by Pabst Blue Ribbon, plus our usual refreshments
  
• DIY TV: Make Magazine screen music projects from their new Make: television, produced with Twin Cities Public Television and American Public Television, with a talk by Make’s Phil Torrone
  
• Better weather? (hopefully) no torrential freezing downpours like our debut last month (see, and you folks in other parts of the world were jealous…)

Thanks to everyone who persevered the haul through crappy weather last time. We've got an awesome space at 3rd Ward to showcase your work - head over to CDM to submit projects - Handmade Music 1/15/09 Call for Works

Check out pics from the last Handmade Music

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Tom Teodorczuk of the Guardian interviews BB guest blogger alum Clay Shirky about the future of media. For traditional media, he says, "2009 is going to be a bloodbath."

The things that the Huffington Post or the Daily Beast have are good storytelling and low costs. Newspapers are going to get more elitist and less elitist. The elitist argument is: "Be the Economist or New Yorker, a small, niche publication that says: 'We're only opening our mouths when what we say is demonstrably superior to anything else on the subject.'" The populist model is: "We're going to take all the news pieces we get and have an enormous amount of commentary. It's whatever readers want to talk about." Finding the working business model between them in that expanded range is the new challenge.

Why pay for it at all? The steady loss of advertising revenue, accelerated by the recession, has normalised the idea that it's acceptable to move to the web. Even if we have the shallowest recession and advertising comes back as it inevitably does, more of it will go to the web. I think that's it for newspapers.

Clay Shirky on traditional media

knifeyspooney writes in with an Ars Technica report that a federal judge has issued a strong rebuke to government lawyers attempting to invoke the "state secrets" defense to quash a lawsuit over warrantless wiretapping. This is not the high-profile case the EFF is bringing against the NSA; instead the case is being pursued by an Islamic charity that knows it had been wiretapped. "At times, a note of irritation crept into [Judge] Walker's even, judicial language. At one point, he described the government's argument as 'without merit,' and characterized another as 'circular.' He also seemed impatient with the Justice Department's refusal to provide any classified documents addressing Al Haramain's specific claims for review in chambers. 'It appears... that defendants believe they can prevent the court from taking any action under 1806(f) by simply declining to act,' wrote Walker."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reader Darren sent in a link to an "opinion" piece in the UK's Independent by Stephen Garrett, a managing director of a TV production house that apparently makes some popular UK TV shows (he names Spooks, with which I am personally unfamiliar). The article is basically no different than any of the thousands of poorly thought out and badly argued demands from entertainment industry execs for government protectionism in the face of the giant "internet threat." Garrett goes through all of these mistakes pretty early on: comparing file sharing to the theft of physical property, twisting basic logic around to suggest that ISPs bear the responsibility of stopping file sharing (rather than, say, the entertainment companies learning to adjust their business model in the face of a changing marketplace), and playing the old and easily debunked ripple effects card in discussing the "damages" done.

But rather than going through those same old tired arguments again, this seemed like a good opportunity to take on a later argument he makes, which I've heard from others as well:

At a time of economic downturn, saving jobs and securing economic activity is more important than ever. Investment in new forms of bringing entertainment to the public depends on legitimate sales of material, whilst lost opportunities of innovation is the tab picked up by those who do pay for content for those who refuse to do so.

This, like Garrett's earlier points, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. Saving jobs and securing activity is not more important than ever if those jobs and that economic activity are inefficient, unnecessary or hinder other important economic activity from taking place. Historically, almost every example of government protectionism has been to protect exactly those types of jobs and economic activity, and the end result is disastrous. Rather than adapting to changes in the market, the protected industry holds onto the past, while those industries in other countries adapt, evolve and improve. In the end, the "protected" industry simply can't compete, the jobs are lost anyway, and it's much more difficult for the new industry in those countries to grow and catch up to foreign competitors.

Garrett's suggestion of special protectionism in the entertainment industry in the UK is exactly the wrong solution for the industry and would lead to many more problems down the road. I would hope that people in the government in charge of deciding this stuff would understand this -- but so far, the UK's Culture Secretary has shown himself to have difficulty grasping some basic economic realities, so don't be surprised to see him buy into this sort of argument.

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Vivian Caccuri's Submerged Songs tracks the movement of four carp and uses that data to control an audio mix -

Submersed Songs is a sound installation that generates mp3 player remixes through the movements of four live fish. The animals' movements and the proximity among them work as a parameter for mixing and spatializing the audience's music tracks in real time.
This system constantly mashes-up two different songs recorded by different users. The two tracks are submitted to different modification processes, building a real time continuity between the swimming of the carp fish and the levels of distortion- which can vary from an intense reverberation to a simulation of hearing underwater.

I imagine a smaller version could be used to augment control voltages on a modular synth setup ... hmmm. Submerged Songs [via Califaudio]

[Oh snap! Looks like Marc already covered this one awhile back.]

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dan of the north notes a change of direction at Groklaw. Pamela Jones (PJ) writes: "I think we need to use this time to perfect our work and ensure Groklaw's preservation. It will require shutting down the daily articles and News Picks, at least for the forseeable future, but I'm convinced it's important to do it. One of the core purposes of Groklaw has always been to create a reliable record for historians and law schools to use our materials to teach and inform. ... I choose to make sure our work as fully reliable, comprehensive and, to the degree humanly possible, permanent. ... Groklaw's collection of materials is really valuable. I'd like to ensure that it survives. ... We've covered the SCO litigations since May of 2003, and it's the only complete record of this important phase in IT history."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Justin Hall twittered this website:

"The Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition has joined BlueServo in a public-private partnership to deploy the Virtual Community Watch, an innovative real-time surveillance program designed to empower the public to proactively participate in fighting border crime. The TBSC BlueServo Virtual Community Watch is a network of cameras and sensors along the Texas-Mexico border that feeds live streaming video to www.BlueServo.net. Users will log in to the BlueServo website and directly monitor suspicious criminal activity along the border via this virtual fence."

Virtual Stake Outs - Live Border Cameras

Fascinating Slate article about how Newspapers "tried to invent the web." A lot of it absolutely true -- I thought I was in the "videotext" industry when I started out in tech in the early 80s, so much so that I named my company Living Videotext. I made countless trips back to NY to meet with people at CBS and Dow Jones, to try to anticipate the kinds of authoring tools we'd need, and how news would flow in the new system we were anticipating. That's why I wrote ThinkTank, I thought of it as an environment for authoring and reading news.

I became a netizen on Compuserve's CB radio, and wrote my own bulletin-board software, LBBS, which then became TankCentral, a way for ThinkTank users to share outlines. When we merged with Symantec, I was still hung up on the idea of the outliner as the way of modeling online discourse, that's why I pushed for us to merge with Think Technologies, and also another company which we didn't get a deal with, who went on to become Microsoft Mail. I felt that MORE was the best way to do networking.

Had Sidhu done a halfway decent job with the Mac networking APIs, I am sure the web would have happened on the Macintosh in the mid-late 80s. We spent countless man-months trying to get MORE to network. When it finally happened, Unix was the central OS for our communication future, and low-tech interfaces took the place of Apple's much more sophisticated networking.

You know it would be great to have a conference someday with all the people who tried to make the web happen before it happened. I'd see a lot of old friends there.

Pocket-Sized sent in a link to this article about the photography of Justin Quinnell. Using a pinhole camera made from an aluminum can, Justin was able to take super-long exposure, 160 degree angle photos over a 6 month period. The photo above was exposed from the 2007 winter solstice to the following summer solstice.

In the photos, you can clearly see the path taken by the sun each day, marking the passage of time. Justin has dedicated the project to his father, who passed away on the 116th sunrise that was captured.

You can make your own pinhole camera to take long exposure shots like this. Justin put together a howto that documents his own method. The hardest part is finding a good solid place to mount the camera where it won't be disturbed for months at a time.

One interesting thing that he mentions is scanning the film at high-res without even developing it. I've never heard of doing this, but I presume that if it works, it's a one time shot. Does anyone have experience with this that would care to comment?

Pinhole Photography By Justin Quinnell
How To Create 6 Month Exposures

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Kris DeGraeve, of the dynamic Kris and Carly duo, sent us a link to her latest project, a beautiful inlaid box with a secret compartment. A really nicely detailed Instructable.

Hidden Treasure Box - Inlaid Wood Box with Hidden Compartment

Related:
Kris and Carly dress like cake!

From the pages of MAKE:

Checkmate, Mr. Bond!

Read this article in MAKE: 16: Spy Tech, Page 84. To get MAKE, subscribe or purchase single volumes.

Subscribers--read this article now in your digital edition!

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Joe Mullin is back to let us know about the latest patent insanity, starting with a post about a whole bunch of patent infringement lawsuits based on patents held by Scott Harris. You may recall Harris because he was a lawyer for a big law firm, but was quietly filing patents on the side, and then apparently working out deals whereby other companies licensed those patents to be used in infringement lawsuits against big companies -- including companies represented by the very same firm Harris worked for. Not surprisingly, he lost his job and was sued. A few months back, the lawsuit was settled and Harris's patents have, miraculously, been showing up in a bunch of recent patent lawsuits.

But the real stunner in the latest set of lawsuits is that one of the patents is being used to sue Oprah. Yes, that Oprah. Apparently, Harris is claiming that his patent on enhancing the touch and feel of the internet is violated by Oprah's book club. Yes. Her book club. Violates a patent (according to the patent holder). Now, my critics will be the first to point out that I'm no patent attorney, but reading over the patent, it certainly appears to be a patent on displaying a book online. How is that possibly patentable material? Wouldn't it be great if this got Oprah looking into the ridiculous state of the patent system in the US these days, and how it's often being used in such bogus ways? While it probably won't happen, it certainly could help dispel the old myths of the patent system as promoting innovation and finally get the issue in front of the public in a way that they would realize just how damaging the system has become and how widely it's abused.

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An anonymous reader writes "A war has erupted on the Internet between Israel and Palestine, alongside the war being fought on the ground in Gaza. A new report claims that a group called the 'DNS Team' has defaced an Israeli Website, with anti-Israel graphical images — one in a series of instances of 'e-vandalism.' This sort of e-vandalism, says the author, is not only an inconvenience for Webmasters, but many of the images contain malware links and 'redirects or Flash links to Jihadist forums or blogs.' However, while the Jihadist forums are registered in Saudi Arabia, they are hosted by companies like Layered Tech and SoftLayer in Plano, Texas. On the Israeli side, 'A fascinating approach over the last few days is being made by an Israeli Website, "Help Israel Win," which provides a download so your PC can become part of a worldwide pro-Israeli botnet. So far 7,786 have joined, already a fairly powerful global computing force...'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A pair of 'punked out goggles and headphones, posted to a Russian photo site.

Gadgets

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Phil Schiller delivered the keynote at MacWorld, the first after the Steve Jobs era of keynotes. Here is Engadget's live blog. The big news, predicted by many rumor sites, was the introduction of the unibody 17" MacBook Pro. As rumored, the battery is not removable, but it's claimed to provide 8 hours of battery life (7 hours with the discrete graphics): "3x the charges and lifespan of the industry standard." $2,799, 2.66 GHz and 4 GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive, shipping at the end of January. There is a battery exchange program, and there is an option for a matte display. The other big news is that iTunes is going DRM-free: 8M songs today, all 10+M by the end of March. Song pricing will be flexible, as the studios have been demanding; the lowest song price is $0.69. Apple also introduced the beta of a Google Docs-like service, iWork.com.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As was rumored last night by Greg Sandoval at News.com, it appears that Apple has worked out a deal with the major record labels (being confirmed as I type) where they will give up DRM (which is the direction they've been moving towards anyway) in exchange for variable pricing of music -- which they've been salivating over for years. This has been a major source of contention between Apple and the record labels. Steve Jobs has stood firmly by the $0.99/song price, while the record labels specifically wanted to be able to price hit songs at higher prices. The dropping of DRM is nice, but hardly that surprising, given that pretty much every other online download store has been going DRM free. This just puts the final nail in the coffin for music DRM. One nice tidbit: you'll apparently be able to upgrade your older DRM'd purchases to make them DRM free. That's a good (and slightly surprising) move.

As for the pricing, there's now three tiers: $0.69, $0.99 and $1.29. Hit new songs will go for the higher price while older, less popular songs will have their prices drop. The announcement isn't that surprising, but it is definitely a shift. What will be worth watching is how this impacts sales. It really may depend on how the record industry plays this. If (as seems likely) they put too many songs in that high priced level, it's going to lead to backlash. However, if they really embrace that lower price, it could encourage more folks to download music. I also wonder if it will push competing music download stores, such as Amazon.com to lower its prices even further as well.

While this definitely is a shift from the way iTunes has always worked, in the end, it's really not a huge shift. The industry was moving in this direction anyway, and killing off DRM was long overdue. The variable pricing is the type of thing that the big record labels will likely screw up, but in the long run is probably a good thing. The $0.99 per song fee has always been too high, and accepting variable pricing will eventually lead to those prices decreasing (not increasing, as the industry expects).

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Is the way they display individual twits so bold and big.

http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/1099906420

The other guys should follow this cue.

paleshadows writes "The first issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal (DDJ) was published in January 1976. A few days ago, Herb Sutter (the chair of the ISO C++ committee and a long-time DDJ columnist) announced through his latest blog post that, 'as of January 2009, Dr. Dobb's Journal is permanently suspending print publication and going web-only.' This follows an earlier announcement that PC Magazine is to become digital-only, too, as of February 2009. To those of us who enjoy reading such stuff away from the computer these are bad news, as there seems to be no other major technical programmers' magazines left standing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A little update, there is now a Make: television torrent. Make: television debuted online and on public television (broadcast / cable tv) January of 2009. The series encourages everyone to invent, revent, recycle, upcycle, and act up. Based on the popular Make magazine, each half-hour episode hopes to inspire viewers to think, create, and, well, make.

"Making" TV and web history, Make: television has debuted in all of the following places - Viewed or downloaded DRM-free, in HD on makezine.tv - available on Vimeo, YouTube, blip.tv and iTunes... and now on LegalTorrents. That's right you can use any BitTorrenting p2p client to download the first episode of Make: televison. The more folks who download the show, the faster the downloads get.

Torrent resources & links

• Make: television premiere, episode 101 on LegalTorrents.
• BitTorrent client.
• uTorrent client.

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Wow: All Power Labs has converted a Honda Accord to run on trash:

We may not yet have a flux capacitor for time travel, but we do already have the equivalent of "Mr. Fusion", which if cleverly applied, will enable you to run your car on everyday "trash"-- today. This "magical" device is called a gasifier. And what it does is called gasification. ... This redeployment was made possible by the gasification of waste biomass, using simple gasifiers about as complex as a traditional wood stove. These small-scale gasifiers are easily reproduced (and improved) today by DIY enthusiasts using simple hammer and wrench technology.

A video of the gasification-powered car in action:

And, see Instructables for documentation of the whole conversion. Finally, a good use for all that scrap wood piled up in my backyard...

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Loligo Lothario sez, "With all of the recent postings on cephalopod oriented erotica (or tentacle porn, as it is coarsely called), I had wondered if you had not stumbled on this musing on why those fixated on tentacles really lack imagination, and how other invertebrate oriented erotica can be really really hot. Invertebrates are amazingly kinky, as pointed out in some lovely marine science blog The Oyster's Garter as it looks at the sex lives of tunicates, slugs, and more. So really, why can't we get beyond the tentacle, I ask?"

Taking a step to the side, let us briefly consider phylum Mollusca class Bivalvia. Yes, bivalves at first seem boring - little sessile clam-like things that they are. However, bivalves engage in the one behavior that heretofore I think sounds like the most delightful sexual activity ever. Free spawning. I mean, seriously, think of it, you catch a sudden whif of the right scent, the right temperature, or a little shake, and then EXPLODE in pleasurable gamete release. I, myself, have had this happen right in my face in an orgy of mussel bukkake, but picture the potential for some nubile nymphet subjected to the experiments of a dastardly doctor in fusing the sexual needs of a scallop with the body of his scientific muse.

This is of course not to mention the abilities for bivalves to form threadlike attachments with their byssal gland, and the ever shape-changing, muscular, pulsing, turgid, bivalve foot. Or, the bizarre, soft, delicate anatomy of free swimming shell-less bivalves who, if airborne, could wreak erotic havoc on an entire countryside if presented by the proper author or animator.

A Brief Essay on the Sad Lack of Imagination in Invertebrate Oriented Erotica with Brief Notes on the Lascivious Nature of Both the Lophotrochozoa and Ecdysozoa, or, Getting Beyond "Hur hur! That Squid Tentacle Looks like Penis!"

It's all so good to talk about new media, 2.0, participation, collaboration, real-time web, mashing-up, agile development, remixing, or lifestreaming but what value do these discoveries have when as soon as we turn our heads home and to our kids we still force them to go through an education system that embraces none of such fantastic discoveries? Photo credit: Dmitriy Shironosov Why has it that advertising, marketing and new media have been able to rapidly deeply transform their own survival paradigms and have embraced principles exactly opposite to those that made them rich before but none of the discoveries and realizations we have made in this paradigm shift have contaminated our world wide educational system? Too early to ask? Why? Is it because we have often no direct business interest in education? Or is it because we have long stopped asking some good questions about what kind of value such school systems really provide? The tacit assumption here is that it is that we have been realizing for a while that true, useful, memorable learning takes place when there are conditions and a setting very different from the one offered by a classroom: Focus on the learning, not on the teaching, getting away from information stuffing and realizing the value of direct understanding and engagement, discovery work, exploration, opportunity to make lots of mistakes, interaction with elders/ experts, passionate peers, are just some key elements we have realized make a true difference in creating a setting where true learning can take place. And the internet itself offers so many great opportunities to bring together those who really want to learn with those who know and want to share. Why then do we need to compromise for second-hand experts and hand over the greatest amount of official learning time our kids will spend with someone whose only credentials are mostly made up of certifications of tests sHe has taken? Given the times, wouldn't reputation and work produced be better "metrics"? I think it is about time that each kid wanting to learn something seriously should have the opportunity to do so by accessing the real world, he is supposedly being prepared for, and being granted a passport to access it as an explorer / assistant / lurker / collaborator depending on the situation. Newsrooms can open up to those who want to learn how to online media, just as much as a shoe shop or an auto mechanic can reserve days or time slots for having people who are there to watch, help, learn. For what are more theoretical matters students should be free to choose their teachers, and not be forced to be matched by sheer chance to instructors and peers who have nothing do with their interests and preferences. If the learner is the one who needs to come out with something of value from this long forced confined training, sHe should at least have the option to choose from whom to be instructed and be given the opportunity to do that learning path with other people cultivating the same interest and preference. Or not? Collaboration, conferencing and video technologies offer the opportunity to any student to potentially attend and make up a personalized curriculum of instructors and experts to learn from that doesn't require moving to Stanford, California, nor to wake up everything morning at 5 to take a train and two lousy buses. Or not? So, what's up everyone? Besides the few guys out there spending serious time researching and lecturing on today's educational challenges what are you doing to harmonize a little more what you have learned in the world of media and communication to the universe of learning and education your kids are immersed into? Feel free to shoot me back your criticism or ideas in the comments section of this post, and allow me to share with you a first short set of very brief video clips I have asked a few friends to record while I was preparing my LeWeb08 presentation: Howard Rheingold, Jay Cross, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Nancy White, Gerd Leonhard and Teemu Arina have all accepted to record a few short videos for me while addressing some of the issues relating to our educational system and its future. In this first part (tomorrow Part 2) my questions are targeted at understanding what kind of education system we have, what do we really get out of it, and whether the infinite exams, tests and pieces of paper we get from them are really useful for living a successful / meaningful life. Well, here are some interesting views to start.

Is Our Educational System Broken?

The Paradox of 2.0 - Robin Good

Robin Good on the Paradox of 2.0 - Le Web 2008 from Erno Hannink on Vimeo. Duration: 2':35"

What I Learned in the School System - George Siemens

Duration: 1':16" Most of what I've learned in the formal education system, especially at a K-12 level, doesn't necessarily have a huge impact to where I am and what I am doing today. If I was to say what's the one skill that's most critical, I'd have to say typing. That's the one skill that I learned in K-12 system that, to this day, serves me on a daily ongoing basis. Otherwise, so much of what I need today, I encounter, whether it's a skill that I need to develop, which is driven by passion and interest, sometimes by work requirements, or whether it's knowledge that I need to complete a particular task, whether it's in work or just through my personal hobby or interest, almost everything that I use on a regular basis today has come as a result of me wanting to learn it, rather than being forced to or being put in a position where it was part of a curriculum. So if anything, our schools system today should foster the creation of a passion, it should encourage individuals to pursue what it is that they most love doing and eliminate barriers to achieving what people actually want to do.

Are Schools Useful Learning Environments? - Jay Cross

Duration: 0:44" ..... is what I've learned in school. Schools are for socialization, not for learning. I was happy to have a good sendoff with school, but I have learned more in every six months on the Web that I've learned for instance in Princeton and Harvard, I can tell you that. It's not what people teach anyway, It's what people learn, and learning is the responsibility of the learner not the teacher. I'm a little down on universities, although I know it's good to have resource centers and things like that, but increasingly the knowledge of the past is not the wisdom of the future.

What Interests Do Universities Serve? - Gerd Leonhard

Duration: 0:52" "Whose interest do school and universities currently serve?" I think of course in many cases they kind of serve their own interest and... well, maybe not entirely serving their own interest, but it is something of course that has become a self-perpetuating thing. I think academia general needs to really open up and see what's out there in terms of knowledge and intelligence that's not part of this kind of world yet. To me learning is something that goes on everywhere between people, not between authorized professionals. Of course the question of quality comes up here. I think that is a real concern that we create peer pressure, so to speak, about quality and merit which we have on the Web in many cases. I do think that there's a huge trend towards the Web becoming the open learning platform. I hope it's not going all be about "Google.edu", but chances are that is going to be a substantial part of it.

What Kind of Education Do We Get in Schools? - Nancy White

Duration: 0:21" "What kind of education do we get in today's school?" I think I'd have to turn the camera around at my son to answer that question, but I know that by watching as a parent, I'm worried about what I see in school, I see people trying to get in the "test score mode" rather than really learning. And if learning is to become a life-long practice, which I believe it is, we need to change the way we're teaching in schools.

Whose Interests Are Universities Serving? - Teemu Arina

Duration: 1':21" "Whose interest schools and universities serve?" I think that schools who have adapted something like learning management systems, are not really serving learning, but they're serving teaching and control. And from that point of view, these systems are none the best methods for learning. There are more like good methods for managing people, courses, information. But not learning. On the Web people have been talking about personal learning environments. That's the idea that you construct your own learning environment. And in that world I see the future of these institutions and universities to be more like learning resource centers. Where you go, it provides a meaningful environment networks, and the people who are working on these things, may be even coaches who can help you to find the right communities, sort of tap into the right information. This come up with your own way of understanding these things. It's about scaffolding. These institutions will be about scaffolding, and it's not a tight-up environment with walls, but rather part of a network itself and interacting with the networks at the same time.

Do We All Need a Degree to Be Successful? - Nancy White

Duration: 0:35" My son's going to take this video, so he's going to love this one. The question is: "Do my sons need a degree and why?". This is a really interesting question because both my sons stepped out of schools and one is going back. I think there's this push in the US that you need a degree in order to make a decent wage. But I look at what I do now, and a lot of what I do now has been formed by things I've learned since I left school. So, I think it depends on how motivated you are and how much you're an ongoing learner. I think there's definitely a place for certain kinds of degrees but... everybody? I don't know!

Will We Need Degrees in the Future? - Teemu Arina

Duration: 1':17" "Would someone need a degree in the future?" I think in the future we will learn from multiple sources, from multiple people, from multiple information systems, and also from the past as well as current future. In that world we will also provide degrees not based on one single source: the university. But we will gather these fragments which happen in interactions online. When I'm going to one school, to one course, to one conference like LeWeb, or I'm blogging, whatever these different events are, someone could go through that and provide me some kind of evaluation for my future boss: "This guy has been really thinking about these things many years." It's not just what he's done and written down, and what kind of numbers you got in tests, but also what other people are saying about him. It's also about what other people say about you, what is your impact on the network, and how you manage to do that impact, that is going to get you forward.

Will We Need Degrees and Certificates? - Stephen Downes

Duration: 1':02" We can ask: "Do my sons or my daughters need a degree to get ahead in tomorrow's world?", and the question really depends on what they're trying to do. if they're going to be involved in academic employment where they'll be judged, lacking if they don't have a degree, then they're going to have to get that piece of paper. That's a matter of pragmatic practicality. But if they are involved in creative or artistic fields, in fields where your work is your calling card, where you can prove your worth with good code, good work, good writing, whatever, then NO, they are not going to get a degree. I think in the future we're going to see more and more scope for employment in the creative fields, and less for employments in more traditionally academic fields. So I think they'll be able to get by without a degree. But, again, it would depend on their choices.

Special thanks go to the kindness and generous sharing attitude of my friends:

• George Siemens - eLearnSpace
• Jay Cross - <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/jaycross">Internet Time Blog
• Gerd Leonhard - Media Futurist
• Nancy White - Full Circle Associates
• Teemu Arina - Dicole
• Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web

Originally prepared by Robin Good and Daniele Bazzano for MasterNewMedia and first published on January 6, 2009 as "Education And Learning: A Paradigm Shift? - Part 1 - Is Our Educational System Broken?"

BinaryGrind writes "I just got started taking Computer Science classes at my local university and after reading Universities Patenting More Student Ideas I felt I needed to ask: How do I tell if any of my projects while attending classes will be co-opted by my professors or the university itself and taken away from me? Is there anything I can do to prevent it from happening? What do I need to do to protect myself? Are there schools out there that won't take my work away from me if I discover TheNextBigThing(TM)? If it does happen is there anything I can do to fight back? The school I'm attending is Southern Utah University. Since it's not a big university, I don't believe it has a big research and development department or anything of that ilk. I'm mostly wanting to cover my bases and not have my work stolen from me."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some high school students in Maryland are reportedly taping fake license plates to their cars, then speeding past speed cameras so that owners of the cars with the real license plates get fined.

Students from Richard Montgomery High School dubbed the prank the Speed Camera "Pimping" game, according to a parent of a student enrolled at one of the high schools.

Originating from Wootton High School, the parent said, students duplicate the license plates by printing plate numbers on glossy photo paper, using fonts from certain websites that "mimic" those on Maryland license plates. They tape the duplicate plate over the existing plate on the back of their car and purposefully speed through a speed camera, the parent said. The victim then receives a citation in the mail days later.

Students are even obtaining vehicles from their friends that are similar or identical to the make and model of the car owned by the targeted victim, according to the parent.

Local teens claim pranks on county's Speed Cams (Via The Agitator)

Last year, we wrote about the absolutely ridiculous limitations placed on the lawyers pushing forward on behalf of the Al-Harmain Islamic Foundation to sue the federal government for warrantless wiretapping. As discussed, courts have thrown out most legal challenges by groups like the ACLU, because those groups have no proof that they were spied on -- thus they have no legal standing in the eyes of the law. The one exception to this is Al-Harmain, because the government accidentally revealed a classified document admitting that it spied on the group without a warrant. Except... even though the government revealed the document, in a bizarre twist, it's demanding that the document is still secret, and it seems that Al-Harmain's lawyers can barely even mention the document's existence, let alone the contents of it. The earlier post goes through some of the ridiculous twists and turns Al-Harmain's lawyers needed to go through (including responding to a Justice Dept. filing that the lawyers weren't even allowed to read).

With all of that to go up against, it seemed quite likely that the government would succeed in getting the case thrown out -- but amazingly, it appears that the lawsuit will go forward and the lawyers in question will get security clearance, and the judge in the case will actually be allowed to see the "secret document" that isn't really that secret any more. This may be the one and only case that can actually challenge the legality of the federal government's warrantless wiretapping program, so this is fantastic news.

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How are you getting the latest news on the Apple keynote on Twitter?

Who are you following?

Here are some of the people I'd watch...

http://twitter.com/Gartenberg

http://twitter.com/gruber

http://twitter.com/Veronica

http://twitter.com/LeoLaporte

http://twitter.com/ryanblock

http://live.gdgt.com/2009/01/06/live-macworld-2009-keynote-coverage/#sort=desc

Chris Pirillo has the audio. What a trip. You get his editorial comment and the applause is deafening. Hilarious!

MAKE Technical Advisory Board member and lovable hardware hacker Joe Grand has been continuing to post all of the schematics, source code, and technical design details of his contributions to the Prototype This builds. Ten episodes have aired so far for the season and there are three more to go (air dates unknown). There's a lot of useful stuff up there that lots of people can learn from and build upon.

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I've always really liked jellyfish. I can spend hours zoning out at the jelly exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And I'm almost as enthralled with these jelly sculptures made out of plastic bottles by Gulnur Ozdaglar, which I discovered on Design Sponge. Ozdaglar makes all kinds of wonderful things out of PET bottles.

--Bruce (Thanks, Shawn, for getting me to add Design Sponge to my RSS reader in an attempt to make me just a bit stylish!)

tertium non data

(Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)

Let's not go into this next year with blind enthusiasm or crushing anxiety, but with a great sense of kinsmanship and and eager promise. Let us all work together to do what we can to grow our network into a future titan of industry. One that contributes to the community and the economy, global and local.

#

Thelasko writes "It appears that the US Government's digital converter box program is running out of money. If you sign up after the program runs out of money, you will receive your voucher if the program receives more funding. Older analog televisions will no longer work without a converter box after February 17."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Campaigning law prof Charlie Nesson wants the whole world to see how the RIAA shakes down students, so he's asked for the proceedings to be webcast. The RIAA wants to hide under a rock:

A Harvard Law professor representing some students sued by the recording industry for illegally downloading music has filed a motion to broadcast online the proceedings of two cases being heard by the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts.

The professor, Charles R. Nesson, argues in the motion that to stream the court proceedings over the Internet — or as the students put it in their request, 'admit the Internet into the courtroom' — would help the public understand the legal issues at play in the industry’s lawsuits against thousands of computer users, many of whom are college students.

The plaintiff, the Recording Industry Association of America, which announced last month that it would stop bringing new cases against students in favor of working with Internet Service Providers to take action against repeat offenders, has described its lawsuits as an educational effort focused on illuminating the consequences of illegally sharing music — something Mr. Nesson takes a jab at in the motion.

'Surely education is the purpose of the Digital Deterrence Act of 1999, the constitutionality of which we are challenging,' the motion reads. 'How can RIAA object? Yet they do, fear of sunlight shone upon them.'

Defendants in Music-Industry Lawsuit Ask for Trial to Be Broadcast Online (Thanks, Michael!)

Jeremy Keith's entry is chockfull of links regarding HTML5. Like it or not, there is some fascinating stuff happening out there in the markup world. Also see Eric Meyer's write-up of the newly redesigned An Event Apart (also written in HTML5) and John Allsopp's foward-thinking piece for A List Apart, where he writes about applying semantics to HTML attributes. #

ruphus13 writes "Now, the suits and the geeks can unite — Barry allows BlackBerrys to serve as modems for Linux machines. From the news post, 'Barry, created by open source software vendor Net Direct, lets you not only sync your contacts and calendar but also use your smartphone as a computer modem. Sure, it's not as fast as T1 or cable, but you can't beat it if you're stuck somewhere with no Internet access. Currently, there are packages available for Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva, and Fedora (although syncing is not supported on Fedora 9). Most older BlackBerrys work just fine with Barry, but the newest generation of devices — the Storm and Bold — are not yet fully supported.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Powering Down: Q&A with Saul Griffith...

Forget about a new gym membership or diet. The most important New Year’s resolution for 2009 may be slimming down your energy footprint. Saul Griffith, a MacArthur genius grant winner and president of Makani Power, believes that a mass movement is necessary to avert catastrophic climate change. To that end, he and his colleagues created WattzOn, a personal calculator that allows users to track energy consumption down to the last apple they eat. In addition to calculating things like travel, WattzOn also factors in less obvious contributors to our energy footprint like our possessions, food consumption and government activities on our behalf. This can bring some surprises: Griffith, who bikes to work, assumed he had a small energy footprint until WattzOn showed him he was “a planet f***er.” In This Q&A, he explains why we should scrutinize our power consumption and how this can improve our health and quality of life—even without that gym membership or fad diet.

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Here is a recap of the 25 projects that I built for the MAKE blog in 2008. It's been a great year at MAKE, and I look forward to doing a lot more builds in 2009. If you have any build suggestions for the upcoming year, please leave them in the comments below. Thanks!

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Passing through the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Lincoln Gallery last night, I was drawn to this incredible column of light and text created by artist Jenny Holzer. The Reynolds Center calendar has this to say about the work, titled "For SAAM":

The sculpture, which is approximately 28 feet tall and 4 feet in diameter, features texts from four of the artist's series--Truisms, Living (selections), Survival (selections) and Arno--and includes some of her best-known statements. The texts are programmed to swirl and travel around the body of the piece. By varying the height, font, intensity and direction of the scrolling letters, Holzer activates the transparent column and the surrounding space with light that reflects off surfaces in the gallery. It is on display in the museum's third floor Lincoln Gallery with other contemporary artworks from the permanent collection.

It's part of the museum's permanent collection, and you can find more information at the SAAM web site. Smithsonian Magazine has an interview with the artist about the work.

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As some of you may know, in a week and a half I'm giving a presentation at the music industry MidemNet conference, focusing on how Trent Reznor's various business model experiments highlight the future of the music industry. I'll be putting the final touches on my presentation this week, and it's great to find one additional data point: the top selling MP3 download on Amazon last year was Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV album, which you probably know Reznor put under a pretty open Creative Commons license (and even gave away a bunch of the tracks himself). In other words, you could go on pretty much any file sharing system out there and legally download the music for personal use... and yet it was still the top selling downloadable album (this is on top of all the money earned by Reznor's other business models associated with this album). Certainly puts a nice little cherry on top of the theme of my presentation.

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NRK, the Norwegian public broadcaster, has had to pull its legal MP3 archive of all 212 Beatles songs. Turns out the agreement they had with the local rights society didn't mean what they thought it meant.

Our new agreement with rights holder TONO gives us rights to publish radio and TV shows we aired a long time ago. But the agreement NRK has with rights holders IFPI and FONO only allows us to publish shows that has been aired the last four weeks. And since “Our daily Beatles” was aired in 2007, we have to pull it from the podcast (see below for details about the agreements).

NRK pulls “Our daily Beatles” podcast because of rights (Thanks, Oyvind!)

Ethan Ham sez,

Turbulence.org recently released “Tumbarumba,” a project by Benjamin Rosenbaum and myself (Ethan Ham). Tumbarumba is an anthology in the form of a browser add-on. To read the stories, readers must stumble upon them while browsing the web. The browser add-on will occasionally insert a story fragment into a web page as it loads it. The result is a disorienting surreal sentence that sometimes is nonsensical and sometimes amusingly close making sense. If the reader spots the fragment, they can interact with it in a way that will cause the full story to appear—albeit in the format of the web page on which it was found.

The authors in the anthology are:

Haddayr Copley-Woods, Greg van Eekhout, Stephen Gaskell, James Patrick Kelly, Mary Anne Mohanraj, David Moles, John Phillip Olsen, Tim Pratt, Kiini Ibura Salaam, David J. Schwartz, Heather Shaw, Jeff Spock

Tumbarumba (Thanks, Ethan!)

Sol-Invictus writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads. Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework. A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client. Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices. KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3. DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PaperKraft links to this neat (and free!) Cubeecraft 2009 robot papercraft calendar. The face is changed with each month, and extra faces store inside the head.

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Syuzi over at the Fashioning Technology blog writes:

Designed by artist Amy Johnston, Hidden Agendas is an open mesh collar constructed from 45 RFID tags. Each tag, which can be read by an RFID reader, is programmed to display an image, quote, or question about tracking, surveillance and projection of identity.

Besides the impracticality of this particular design, I think this is an interesting medium for artists to explore. I'm interested to know what kind of tag and reader she's using and what the visualization software really looks like.

More:

Shisha Embroidered RFID Tags on CRAFT

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A UK campaign to raise money to buy London bus-ads to promote atheism was a massive success -- 800 of the busses took the streets today, and the campaign is spreading around the world.

Today, thanks to many Cif readers, the overall total raised for the Atheist Bus Campaign stands at a truly overwhelming £135,000, breaking our original target of £5,500 by over 2400%. Given this unexpected amount, I'm very excited to tell you that 800 buses – instead of the 30 we were initially aiming for – are now rolling out across the UK with the slogan, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life", in locations all over England, Scotland and Wales, including Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, Cardiff, Devon, Leeds, Bristol and Aberdeen.

From today's launch, two hundred of the buses will run in London, because the campaign was originally started as a positive counter-response to the Jesus Said ads running on London buses in June 2008. These ads displayed the URL of a website which stated that non-Christians "will be condemned to everlasting separation from God and then you spend all eternity in torment in hell … Jesus spoke about this as a lake of fire prepared for the devil". Our rational slogan will hopefully reassure anyone who has been scared by this kind of evangelism.

The atheist bus journey (Thanks, Paul!)

My PC mod pic of the day was built by a young German modder named "Froop". It's an awesome Chernobyl-based PC case he calls "Unit 4". It also has some themes from the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

For a closer look at all of the painstaking detail he put into this, see the rest of the story!

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CommonCents noted an Apple announcement a few hours before the anticipated keynote. He says "Apples' latest must have gadget does away with the keyboard. With the new MacBook Wheel, Apple has replaced the traditional keyboard with a giant wheel."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Julian Gough sends us his NYT piece, "A Modest Proposal For The Publishing Industry": "It's a piece in yesterday's New York Times. It's a parody of all the recent, massive, Treasury bailout plans. (Having done banks, insurance and cars, the Treasury are now solve the unread books crisis for us). It is written as an official statement from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, using language taken directly from all his real statements (with just a few key words changed)."

"As we all know, lax writing practices earlier this decade led to irresponsible writing and irresponsible reading. This simply put too many families into books they could not finish. We are seeing the impact on readers and neighborhoods, with 5 million readers now behind on their reading. Some are just walking away from novels they should never have been reading in the first place. What began as a sub-prime reading problem has spread to other, less-risky readers, and contributed to excess inventories.

These troubled novels are now parked, or frozen, on the shelves of libraries, bookstores, and other reading institutions, preventing them from financing readable novels. The inability to determine the worth of these novels has fostered uncertainty about novels in general, and even about the cultural condition of the institutions that own them. The normal buying and selling of nearly all types of literature has become challenged.

The role of the ratings agencies cannot be overlooked in the creation of this crisis. The Pulitzer, Booker and the National Book Foundation continued to award these novels their top ratings, even as unread copies piled up all over America.

A Modest Proposal For The Publishing Industry on nytimes.com (stupid registration required), A Modest Proposal For The Publishing Industry on Julian's site (no registration required!) (Thanks, Julian!)

Josette from O'Reilly sez, "Call for makers! It is now official the long awaited first UK Maker Faire will take place in Newcastle, UK on March 14th-15th! Maker Faire seeks to inspire, inform, connect and entertain thousands of Makers and aspiring Makers of all ages and backgrounds through the public gathering of tech enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, students, authors and commercial exhibitors."

Maker Faire seeks to inspire, inform, connect and entertain thousands of Makers and aspiring Makers of all ages and backgrounds through the public gathering of tech enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, students, authors and commercial exhibitors.

The first UK Maker Faire will take place in Newcastle 14-15 March 2009 as part of Newcastle ScienceFest - a 10 day festival celebrating creativity and innovation.

In the last decade Newcastle has joined forces with neighbouring Gateshead and has transformed itself into one of Europe's most exciting places. Architectural icons such as the gigantic Angel of the North (whose 54m wingspan is longer than a jumbo jet!) best symbolises the region's unquenchable thirst for creativity and sense of fun.

Maker Faire, Newcastle, UK 14-15 March 2009 (Thanks, Josette!)

Molly sez, "Robbins Barstow's film Disneyland Dream was included in this year's National Film Registry (25 films selected by the Library of Congress annually). He is a tireless advocate for amateur film and a great supporter of Home Movie Day. Steve Martin wrote to Robbins Barstow after the news of Disneyland Dream being selected for the Film Registry. Martin appears in the home movie, he's 11 years old and worked selling guidebooks. Go home movies!"

We've blogged Robbins's amazing home movies here before. The man's a hero of the medium. Well-deserved congratulations indeed.

From the Library of Congress’s press release:

Disneyland Dream (1956)
The Barstow family films a memorable home movie of their trip to Disneyland. Robbins and Meg Barstow, along with their children Mary, David and Daniel were among 25 families who won a free trip to the newly opened Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., as part of a ‘Scotch Brand Cellophane Tape’ contest sponsored by 3M. Through vivid color and droll narration (”The landscape was very different from back home in Connecticut”), we see a fantastic historical snapshot of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Catalina Island, Knott’s Berry Farm, Universal Studios and Disneyland in mid-1956. Home movies have assumed a rapidly increasing importance in American cultural studies as they provide a priceless and authentic record of time and place.

The film, along with 15 other Barstow Travel Adventure titles, is available for viewing and downloading at the Internet Archive.

Robbins Barstow’s “Disneyland Dream” Named to National Film Registry, Steve Martin and Disneyland Dream (Thanks, Molly!)

Amidst a number of high profile appointments today was the position of associate attorney general. The high-ranking position has been awarded to Tom Perrelli of the prominent law firm Jenner & Block. By all accounts, Perrelli has led an impressive legal career spanning public service and private practice. However, his most recent tenure in private practice has had him representing the recording industry. Although specifics are hard to come by, according to his official biography, "Mr. Perrelli regularly represents the recording industry in cutting-edge intellectual property, technology, and anti-piracy litigation. He has represented the recording industry in a host of cases arising under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), as well as in copyright infringement and digital piracy litigation. He has also represented the record industry and recording artists in a series of copyright royalty proceedings before the Copyright Royalty Board."

Of course, Mr. Perrelli's job was to represent the interest of his clients, but given the questionable legal tactics the RIAA has pursued in its litigation and the problems with the Copyright Royalty Board, there is reason to pause regarding his appointment. But, as Matt Yglesias writes, since the RIAA has relied so heavily on litigation, it's probably a good bet that they chose the best lawyers they could.

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.

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This iPhone app, called "Brushes", lets you add a painterly effect to your pictures or create your own finger paintings from scratch. The sketches above were created by Disney artist Stef Kardos using the app and shows the potential of this cool piece of software. There's even a link to a Flickr group of "Brushes" users so you can check out their creations.

via Core 77

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Erica points out this vid on cat groomer Danielle German - Unhappy tossing all the hair leftover from a thorough longhaired feline shave, Danielle decided to try spinning the otherwise unwanted fur into a "silky yarn" fit for an owner's purse. If that sounds like creep salad to you, consider some stylish pet hair apparel. Still no? - understandable, how about as a simple garden pest repellant?

More:

Knitting with... Dog Hair? on CRAFT

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ptorrone writes "Make: television debuted online and on public television (broadcast / cable tv). The series encourages everyone to invent, reinvent, recycle, upcycle, and act up. Based on the popular Make magazine, each half-hour episode hopes to inspire viewers to think, create, and, well, make. Each episode can be viewed or downloaded DRM-free, in HD on makezine.tv — the show is also available on Vimeo, YouTube, blip.tv and iTunes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

?This giant snow sculpture was spotted in Switzerland and resembles the country's most hilarious TV psychic, Mika Shiva. The head is over 2 meters high and would probably scare off most onlookers with its crazy smile.

via PieceOPlastic

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Sam's Tagtool is a digital drawing tool well suited for live performance. Simplifying basic controls for visual art creation, the device makes use of a Boarduino to process fader/button input for a mini-ATX PC with graphics tablet. Instructions are available for building either a suitcase or mini version - bringing the straightforward interface of a musical instrument to visual artists/animators = Excellent.

Check out more examples and info @ Tagtool.org [via Ladyada's ranting]

DC Boarduino

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Shawn posted this vid covering the full build process for the ever popular MiniPOV3 kit from Adafruit Industries. Surely helpful for those getting started with the kit - Thanks Shawn!

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"Wind-Up Bird(s)" is a public art installation that employs a mesh wireless network of XBee radios to control a flock of mechanical woodpeckers in Lillehammer, Norway. Apparently after they were deployed, it only took 15 minutes before a real woodpecker joined its mechanical counterpart on the tree. Check out the link before for some video of them in action and some good shots of the circuitry design for this project.

Wind-Up Bird(s) Project Page

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It's been a few weeks since the WSJ announced that the RIAA was supposedly dropping its lawsuit strategy, in favor of a backroom deal with ISPs, negotiated under dubious circumstances by NY's Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, whereby those ISPs would start cutting off connections from those accused (not found guilty) of file sharing. However, since then, we've heard from a variety of ISPs who don't like the plan, and Wired went on a wild goose chase trying to find a single major ISP that has agreed to the plan and came up empty. Of course, most of them refused to comment. The only one who said anything straight up was Verizon -- who had earlier confirmed that it had no interest in doing a deal with the RIAA. The big cable companies and AT&T have shown some interest in the past -- but now refuse to admit that an agreement has been worked out.

The big question is why?

If this is such a great deal for consumers, as Cuomo and the RIAA insist, then why wouldn't an ISP want to step right up and proudly admit to such a deal? Obviously, it's because they know that such a deal is a sham, based on no legal reasoning, that will harm their position in the market and piss off customers. The RIAA will likely claim that no deals have been announced because the details haven't been finalized -- but again, that makes no sense. We've been questioning from the beginning why these negotiations haven't been more open. And with record labels like Warner Music and EMI insisting that they want to be seen as more open and willing to hold a "conversation" with critics, the fact that no one will talk openly about this backroom deal shows what a bunch of liars they are again. They don't want an open conversation. They want the government and ISPs to protect their business model, and they've convinced Andrew Cuomo to fall for it.

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He used to break bones. Now former Hollywood stuntman Robert Mc-Donald uses popsicle sticks to break world records. McDonald has built three Viking-ship replicas out of ice cream sticks. All have been seaworthy. including his latest beast, built from 15 million popsicle sticks over three years. He's now working to break another record by sailing the ship across the Atlantic Ocean in true Viking fashion "I have a dream to show children they can do anything:' he says. "If they can dream it, they can do it" In fact. That's what started McDonald down this popsicle path - he wanted to encourage his 8-year- old son to aim high and believe he could succeed, all the while making the world a better place. He is adamant about creative recycling - all the ice cream sticks he used were previously used or imperfect, and were donated by the Ola ice cream company in Europe. McDonald's home port is in the Netherlands. "[We're] demonstrating how amazing objects can be created from everyday, recycled goods,' he enthuses.

"Creative" and "fun" pepper his conversations. And he lives what he speaks. In April 1986, McDonald rocked his way into the world record book by rocking in a chair for 340 hours. Last year, he grabbed another record by sailing a ship made from 370,000 ice cream sticks, the Baby Ola Bison. The bigger replica is 5O feet long and weighs in at a hefty 13 tons, including more than two tons of glue Named Mjollnir (milner) - the Viking god of thunder - she is an open craft with no protection for the sailors whatsoever. The 6-person crew 51eeps in true Viking style: hammocks strung across the deck. Her voyage across the Atlantic began in mid-April McDonald heads the Sea Heart Ship Foundation, a group spreading fun to kids in hospitals around the world. Captain Rob (as the kids call him) recently returned from a hospital tour of Florida, the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, where he gave away 28,000 stuffed animals in 14 days (yet another record).

obvikingship.com/index.php

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 6, page 24 - Shawn Connally.

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The iTurn allows you to control a servo via the iPhone's built in accelerometer. This looks really easy to do, and it could be used in a lot of different projects. Check out the link for more information.

The iPhone or iPod Touch has an accelerometer that detects how the device is oriented. As the devices moves off axis (from straight up and down) the screen rotates. I want to use that feedback to control the position of a motor or servo or cause specific events to happen depending on the device's position.

More about iTurn: Turn a servo with your iPhone

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Hugh Pickens writes "The city has always been an engine of intellectual life and the 'concentration of social interactions' is largely responsible for urban creativity and innovation. But now scientists are finding that being in an urban environment impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory and suffers from reduced self-control. 'The mind is a limited machine,' says psychologist Marc Berman. 'And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.' Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy city street. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to redirect our attention constantly so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. Natural settings don't require the same amount of cognitive effort. A study at the University of Michigan found memory performance and attention spans improved by 20 percent after people spent an hour interacting with nature. 'It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan,' says Berman. 'They needed to put a park there.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In our house, we haven't had cable tv for about 6 years. When we moved in, there was an antenna on the roof and coax cable to a bunch of locations where tvs could go. In the basement is a signal amplifier that seems to help all the equipment find the signal. It took some getting used to, but most of what we watch is on over the air broadcast anyway. Free over the air broadcast is the way it should be. The 40ish year old antenna on the roof was recently replaced with a fresh one from the dump.

Most of what is on tv is useless, so why pay for the mind numb? Well, I am not the only video consumer in the manse, so when the big date for Analog to Digital broadcast comes along, I will have to do something.

At this writing, a few stations are dropping their analog signal. A football game here, morning cartoons there, public service announcements hinting at what is to come and eventually the screen will go blue.

So not everything can be watched online, though there are some great resources for watching.

Hulu, youtube, Vimeo, PBS and lots of other online outlets will help keep you up to speed with lots of good video based information.

Make:TV may be reason in itself to get a digital converter box for every tv in the house.

The most useful piece of information on the change from Analog to Digital I have seen is a show on PBS. They have a half hour segment where the hosts go through a neighborhood and help check out the houses' digital connectivity. Take a look at the show and see where you stand.

What is your plan for the great Analog to Digital changeover? Where do you get your information? What do you like about digital tv? How do you record tv shows now that video tape is just about extinct? What are your solutions to surviving and prospering in the digital tv age? Add your comments to the discussion and contribute your photos and video to the Make Flickr pool.

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Don't want to pack away all those fun colorful Christmas lights? Check out this informative writeup on how to use holiday lights with battery power. It was written primarily for the bulb based lights, but LED strings should work even better than the bulbed ones.

Remember that each bulb uses half a watt-hour per hour. So 12 bulbs use 6wH per hour. Our batteries store (8 batteries x 1.2V x 1800mAh = ) 17,280mWh, or 17 wH. Therefore our 17 wH battery pack will power this 6-watt strand for almost three hours.

What fun are you planning for your excess Christmas lights? Post up your photos and video in the Make Flickr pool and add your comments to the conversation.

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Asteronimo writes about SliceModeler for Sketchup:

Based on TIG's Slicer script I wrote a plugin that slices a solid 3d model along 2 axes, f.i. an X- and a Z-axis. You can enter separate parameters for each axis. After the slices have been created it calculates the slots for each intersection which allow the cross sections to interlock in an open cell framework, like an egg crate. This process is used in rapid prototyping and can be used to create molds for casting or forming parts.

SliceModeler looks like it could be a neat resource. 3D landscapes, making physical models of data and more. Check out his project page for more info.

Slicemodeler is based on the work of John Sharp. You might want to check out this interview. Here are some photos that are also related to John Sharp's work. Sharp has a few books that have inspired these innovative ideas, Sliceforms: Mathematical Models from Paper Sections and Surfaces: Explorations With Sliceforms.

How do you turn your dreams into three dimensional reality? Are there any techniques or tools that your find essential? What inspires you to learn and create? Add your voice to the comments, and contribute your photos and video to the Make Flickr pool.

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Why would you make an Arduino on stripboard? The maker has a hard time getting PCB's made where he lives. Check out the site for details about the build. As a special bonus, you can see what happens when you solder a capacitor in backwards. BOOM!

More about making an Arduino on stripboard

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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One of the biggest problems with various "three strikes" or "graduated response" plans that involve ISPs slowing, degrading or removing internet connections from those accused of file sharing is the fact that they're based on accusations of file sharing, rather than actual proof and conviction. One of the most draconian of such plans has shown up in New Zealand, where the country's copyright minister yelled at those who pointed out how problematic the law was -- insisting that ISPs need to be responsible for stopping file sharing. Of course, many musicians recognize how problematic this is as well, and a bunch of them are getting together to protest the law in New Zealand, pointing out that "guilt upon accusation" is a horrible policy, and, even as musicians, they don't want such actions to be taken in their name.

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Kyle Fokken makes amazing mixed media sculptures. Check out the gallery section on his website to see a lot more of these beautiful artworks.

My work is based on a love of antique toys from the late 19th and early 20th centuries as viewed from a modern perspective. We are drawn to relics that trigger memories of days gone past, both bitter and sweet. In my artwork, I fuse this nostalgia with naïve "visionary" art. Folk art, "visionary" and "outsider" art are often made by people with few materials in which to make art other than industrial packaging and scrap material. I infuse this "outsider" aesthetic into my artwork through my use of found objects and rough construction. Like these artists, I'm not a "junk sculptor" because my focus is not on the found object itself, but on how I can use it in my work to fulfill my vision. I use this technique as a metaphor to imply the bond between parent and child "making do" with available materials and the cultural handing down of values and ideals.

More about Kyle Fokken: Visceral artist [Gawker Artisis]

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Liu Jianhua recreated the Shanghai skyline from dice and poker-chips -- the gigantic piece was displayed at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, Italy. The close-up detail view (shot by Flickr user cinghialino and licensed Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike) is spectacular.

Liu Jianhua - Unreal Scene (2008), Liu Jianhua - Unreal Scene (2008) (detail view) (via Neatorama)

Thomas sez, "China's People's Liberation Army has made Sex education part of the detox methods for getting people over Internet addiction. They claim it works, but one woman under their care has acquired 68 virtual husbands."

Here, in addition to military-style discipline, some 60-odd patients at his center undergo a three-month regimen of counseling, confidence-building activities, sex education, and in about 60 percent of the cases, medication. The treatment is designed to address underlying family and psychological problems, and boost their self-confidence.

There are a handful of young women here, going "cold turkey" from "Audition" and similar games, where players engage in dance battles, decorate virtual homes, and have virtual husbands and babies. (One female patient had amassed 68 "husbands," says Tao, with a sigh).

In an increasingly wired China, rehab for Internet addicts

Jason writes in...

I thought you and the rest of the MAKE team might enjoy this story. I had been wanting one of your notebooks for quite some time, and I finally received one as a birthday gift from my wife back in October. She does not fully appreciate my fascination with your blog and is often amused by the eccentric project ideas I get from your website. As a result, she really does not know what the notebook is for or why I thought it would be so cool to have one. Last week, she came out into the kitchen, took me by the hand, and led me to the place where I was last using the book. When we arrived at our destination, she pointed to the notebook and said: "I am pretty sure that is NOT what they meant by 'Maker's Notebook'." Priceless.

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Good project for remake... maybe. Mechanix Illustrated - 1947

Hangover Heaven is the apt name of the unusual bonnet at right. Originally developed by makeup man Max Factor for the benefit of actresses who wish to refresh their faces on hot studio sets without spoiling their makeup, the facial ice pack was quickly diverted to another purpose by festive Hollywoodians. The headpiece, adorned with water-filled plastic cubes, is kept in the refrigerator while the water freezes.

---

Blind Can Now Read Printed BOOKS... Modern Mechanix, 1932.

ORDINARY printed books can now be read by the blind, thanks to the genius of M. Thomas, a French inventor, whose remarkable device is illustrated on this page, photo-electric cells, which, as is well-known, are sensitive to light, hold the secret of the machine’s operation.

The book to be read is placed on a moving carriage beneath a lens, and the page is illuminated by a powerful lamp. Suppose that the word being read contains the letter “R,” which is used as an example in the accompanying drawings.

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Build A Glider-Copter, Mechanix Illustrated, 1954

AN 86-lb. helicopter glider, believed to be the smallest aircraft in the world today, has been developed and flown by Bensen Aircraft Corporation of Raleigh, N. C, for use in engineering tests of lighter-than-man helicopters. Like soaring gliders and sailplanes, the helicopter glider has no engine; it is towed by a car until it becomes airborne and will stay in the air as long as it is towed or as long as there is sufficient wind to keep its rotor blades turning.

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My pals Rita King and Josh Fouts have just completed an ambitious public diplomacy report on using virtual worlds to create understanding between Islamic and western societies. The book itself is presented in Understanding-Comics-style graphic novel format. They're holding a public launch in New York this month and I expect the report will hit the web around the same time.

After a year of research spanning four continents and interviews with dozens of people across the virtual world of the Internet Dancing Ink Productions is pleased to announce the release of our findings from the Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project on Thursday, January 29 at 6 PM Eastern at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Space is limited so please RSVP to attend the event.

The report will include a trilogy of deliverables, including formal public diplomacy policy recommendations for the Obama Administration; a broadcast-quality short machinima documentary; and a graphic book chronicling the people, places and findings of the project.

Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds report to release January 29

An anonymous reader writes "Next month, New Zealand is scheduled to implement Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act. The controversial act provides 'Guilt Upon Accusation,' which means that if a file-sharer is simply accused of copyright infringement he/she will be punished with summary Internet disconnection. Unlike most laws, this one has no appeal process and no punishment for false accusation, because they were removed after public consultation. The ISPs are up in arms and now artists are taking a stand for fair copyright."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You may recall that last year, the video hosting website Veoh had a big win when a court ruled that the site was protected by DMCA safe harbors from infringement committed by users. Of course, that particular lawsuit was only one of a few that Veoh is involved in. In a separate case, brought by Universal Music Group, UMG made some somewhat twisted arguments as to why Veoh shouldn't qualify for DMCA safe harbor protections. Basically, it said that Veoh gave up its safe harbors by creating copies of the video in transforming their format and creating copies that were in smaller "chunks" than the original. UMG also went out on a limb claiming that the fact that users could stream videos and download whole videos also took away their safe harbor protections. It's hard to see how those arguments make any sense at all, and it sounds like UMG lawyers were just throwing every possible argument against the wall, knowing they had little to work with.

The good news is that the judge has rejected all of those arguments, saying none of them seemed to mean Veoh gave up its safe harbor protections. The lawsuit isn't over yet, and the court hasn't ruled on whether Veoh (overall) is protected by the DMCA, but in rejecting UMG's weakly reasoned arguments for why Veoh had given up those protections, it suggests that Veoh is likely to prevail here too.

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Here is an absolutely stupendous video of Screamin' Jay Hawkins in full witch doctor regalia performing "I Put A Spell On You". (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

Here's a neat instructable by user sensoryhouse on building a rolling peg board tool cart instead of buying an expensive tool chest. This way all your tools are visible, and you can still roll them out of the way when need be. He uses scrap metal to weld together the frame that holds the peg board. He welds the casters right onto the bottom of the frame, but I'd recommend welding an attachment plate and affixing them with fasteners in case one goes bad. As this is a beginning welding tutorial as well, don't forget to wear proper safety gear (including long sleeves and a high collar to prevent a sunburn)!

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Phorm is the highly controversial behavioral advertising firm that teams up with ISPs to spy on your surfing habits and deliver targeted ads. The practice has raised a number of legal challenges and protests from users who were "tested on," without their knowledge. While Phorm has been found to be legal in the UK, its practices have still engendered widespread anger. Yet, the company seems particularly deaf to those concerns, and is talking about plans to expand internationally, despite the fact that similar schemes have run into legal troubles elsewhere. Perhaps before looking to expand internationally, Phorm should work on fixing its business model.

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marciot writes "It's interesting to look back at Ray Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 from a decade ago. He was dead on in predicting the ubiquity of portable computers, wireless, the emergency of digital objects, and the rise of privacy concerns. He was a little optimistic in certain areas, predicting the demise of rotating storage and the ubiquity of digital paper a bit earlier than it appears it will actually happen. On the topic of human-computer speech interfaces, though, he seems to be way off." And of course Kurzweil missed 9/11 and the fallout from that. His predictions might have been nearer the mark absent the war on terror.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE: Flickr pool

• HOW TO - Breadboard memory game
• Behold ... the Rusty Growler!
• One tasty motherboard ...
• DIY gadget makeover
• Light to sound converter circuit
• Handmade lens cap

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Today on Offworld we saw Rock Band's vocal pitch recognition get trumped by some ace theremin playing on Portal theme song Still Alive, and downloaded a new unofficial theme for the PlayStation 3 featuring gorgeous HD paintings of cult Genesis shooter Gunstar Heroes. We then got more musical and listened to an album composed on DS synth Korg DS-10, as well as a one-man gadget orchestra featuring two DSs, an iPod Touch, an iPhone and a Kaossilator, and watched LittleBigPlanet creator Alex Evans go back in time to its early prototype days from a recent Wired store event. Finally, we took a look behind the design of indie adventure Aquaria, tried to decipher the code behind Subversion, an as yet un-detailed game that hopes to generatively model everything from entire cities down to a pen lying on each office desk, saw one man's new wrap-around Patapon tattoo and a beautiful motion graphics piece on the history of games, and timed how long it would take for an autonomous Katamari to clean your living quarters, Roomba style.

Problems and potential conflicts coming from the bond ratings agencies were well-known well before our financial crisis hit, but still many are pointing the blame finger at those ratings agencies. And, it's certainly tempting to do so. Just as with the famed financial analysts during the late 90s tech boom, the credit agencies appear to have rated certain debt offerings very highly, despite recognizing how intrinsically risky the investments were. Given what happened following the dot com bubble collapse, it's quite likely that the bond rating agencies Moody's and S&P will get slapped down for their "mistakes."

But that would be a mistake. Both Moody's and S&P were merely expressing an opinion on the credit-worthiness and risk of the various debt offerings. An opinion should never be considered illegal by itself. The problem was that people started relying on these opinions as if they were factual realities. And who's to blame for that?

Well, in part, it's the government -- which wrote the rating agencies' ratings into law, requiring certain regulated institutions to maintain a certain percentage of "highly rated" bonds in order to engage in certain activities. That made it so the real focus was on the opinions of Moody's and the S&P, rather than on what investors believed the actual risk was on those bonds. As the link here notes, why not let the market decide what the actual risk is on these bonds, rather than trusting the (somewhat questionable) opinions of individuals who are biased and conflicted?

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Problems and potential conflicts coming from the bond ratings agencies were well-known well before our financial crisis hit, but still many are pointing the blame finger at those ratings agencies. And, it's certainly tempting to do so. Just as with the famed financial analysts during the late 90s tech boom, the credit agencies appear to have rated certain debt offerings very highly, despite recognizing how intrinsically risky the investments were. Given what happened following the dot com bubble collapse, it's quite likely that the bond rating agencies Moody's and S&P will get slapped down for their "mistakes."

But that would be a mistake. Both Moody's and S&P were merely expressing an opinion on the credit-worthiness and risk of the various debt offerings. An opinion should never be considered illegal by itself. The problem was that people started relying on these opinions as if they were factual realities. And who's to blame for that?

Well, in part, it's the government -- which wrote the rating agencies' ratings into law, requiring certain regulated institutions to maintain a certain percentage of "highly rated" bonds in order to engage in certain activities. That made it so the real focus was on the opinions of Moody's and the S&P, rather than on what investors believed the actual risk was on those bonds. As the link here notes, why not let the market decide what the actual risk is on these bonds, rather than trusting the (somewhat questionable) opinions of individuals who are biased and conflicted?

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An anonymous reader writes "The Milky Way is spinning much faster and has 50 per cent more mass than previously believed. This means the Milky Way is equivalent in size to our neighbor Andromeda — instead of being the little sister in the local galaxy group, as had been believed. One implication of this new finding is that we may collide with Andromeda sooner than we had thought, in 2 or 3 billion years instead of 5."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Leadbeater created a service that distributes Wikipedia entries over DNS using TXT records. Simply looking up a TXT record for any subdomain of his service will pull a summary of the Wikipedia entry for the title of the same name.

I had written some code to take wikipedia articles and summarise them. I wanted to offer this for use in various places, now the obvious way to offer it is just a web service (via REST, SOAP, etc), but that's boring and I had a cunning plan. Why not offer it over DNS - it is basically a huge associative array and DNS is designed for this stuff.

So I wrote a little nameserver which returns the results as TXT records. There are some obvious limitations for example responses are limited to around 430 bytes (it only does UDP). It has advantages too, it gets cached at your nameserver and it is also faster than HTTP (no need to setup a TCP session).

Here's an example command line entry that will pull a summary of the Makezine article from Wikipedia:

host -t txt makezine.wp.dg.cx

makezine.wp.dg.cx descriptive text "Make (or MAKE) is a quarterly magazine published by O'Reilly Media which focuses on do it yourself (DIY) projects involving computers, electronics, robotics, metalworking, woodworking and other disciplines. The magazine is marketed to people who enjoy \"ma" "king\" things and features complex projects which can often be completed with cheap materials, including household items... http://a.vu/w:Make_(magazine)"

It's basically a big hashtable of Wikipedia stored in SQLLite and served up by a custom DNS server, returning the info in a TXT record. The server code hasn't been released yet, but it sounds like it's written in Perl. It's made by the author of Parse::MediaWikiDump and Text::Summary::MediaWiki, which he wrote to parse through the full Wikipedia dump and generate summary blurbs that will fit in the 430 byte limit.

Think about it. There's just something fundamentally cool about the world's greatest encyclopedia distributed and cached on name servers around the earth. Not that this particular hack will be used enough for that to happen, of course, but it's interesting that it's possible on existing infrastructure, without anyone having to install anything. A small glimpse of the future of universal cloud storage, all riding on the Internet's oldest protocol.

Wikipedia over DNS
Slideshow from David's presentation at the London Perl Workshop 2008

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I have significant problems with any sort of compulsory licensing scheme, which basically gives the power to a tiny group of people to establish the business models and cost structures for an entire industry. It's as if people who support compulsory licensing don't believe the free market works at all. The latest example of this is that the Copyright Royalty Board, which controls pretty much everything having to do with copyright compulsory licenses (despite often showing little to no understanding of technology) is now saying that anyone who broadcasts music online should have to submit full playlist data on every song they play to SoundExchange, the RIAA-spinoff in charge of "distributing" (if you call what it does distributing) money to copyright holders. While some entities already do this, it does seem like quite a burden for others, but that's what you get when you let a small group of people decide all the rules.

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