My Institute for the Future colleague Anthony Townsend is collaborating with Outside.in's John Geraci in a new effort for hacking the urban environment. DIYcity is having its first NYC meet-up tomorrow, January 14, at 7pm at the Project for Public Spaces. I'm really looking forward to how the project evolves! From the overview:

Intro: How do you want to reinvent your city?

Twitter bots, aggregators, social software, mobile apps - we use these things more and more in our daily routines to make our lives better. But can we also use them to remake our cities altogether? How can these technologies be applied to transform urban spaces, changing them from the centralized, hard-coded things they are today into finely-tuned, fluid, user-operated systems that are efficient, sustainable and fit for life in the 21st century?

DIYcity is a place where people figure these things out by actually building and launching applications that address the problems around them.

DIYcity

People have been shown to have done amazing things while "sleepwalking," including driving places. However, the press has been jumping on a recent report of a woman who was found to have sleep-emailed as well. She apparently logged into her email while "sleeping" and sent a series of nonsensical emails which she later failed to recall. The whole scenario is a bit bizarre -- and reminds us how little we know about sleep and brain functions during sleep. I'm reminded of a recent episode of This American Life where they looked at The Fear of Sleep, which includes a hilarious story of comedian Mike Birbiglia's (actually very scary, and quite dangerous) battle with sleepwalking. It's the funniest story you'll ever hear concerning a man throwing himself out a window (it starts about 9 minutes in).

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Scott says:

It's a demo of my dad's new Voice Box (harmonizer/vocoder) as performed by a pair of really talented folks I found via YouTube (I found Jack and Nataly when researching user-generated videos for the new EHX site).

The Voice Box's harmonizer is vaguely like Songsmith, in that you feed it a mic and an instrument, and it can then create multipart vocal harmony -- the vocoder is totally different, it give more of that robotic man-machine sound.

Voice Box Demo by Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn

From the MAKE: Flickr pool

A friendly reminder that you needn't hold off completing that coin cell powered project - Vilxes shares this technique for going without those somewhat costly clips - CR2032 battery adapter

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CurtMonash writes "Much is being made of the deliberations as to whether President Obama will be able to keep using his beloved "BarackBerry." As the NYTimes details, there are two major sets of objections: infosecurity and legal/records retention. Deven Coldeway of CrunchGear does a good job of showing that the technological infosecurity problems can be solved. And as I've noted elsewhere, the 'Omigod, he left his Blackberry behind at dinner' issue is absurd. Presidents are surrounded by attendants, Secret Service and otherwise. Somebody just has to be given the job of keeping track of the president's personal communication device. As for the legal question of whether the president can afford to put things in writing that will likely be exposed by courts and archivists later — the answer to that surely depends on the subject matter or recipient. Email to his Chicago friends — why not? Anything he'd write to them would be necessarily non-secret anyway. Email to the Secretary of Defense? That might be a different matter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last night the wind howled in the hills of Berkeley. It could have been the sound track for the opening scene of a horror movie about global warming. It got me up at 1:30AM with a burning question. What's the best way to display a tweet?

It's not a joke, it actually happened.

So I posed the question with a few examples, and a great discussion ensued, and I think we arrived at an excellent answer.

1. I had assumed that a mini-icon would work the best, but Alexander Horre asked why not use a bit of text, so if someone makes it bigger, the link symbol would grow along with everything else. Good point, and I think that's the way to go. (Many others said the same thing, Alexander was just the first.)

2. Chuck Shotton and Steven Levy both argued for making the links work just like HTML links, but I didn't see how, until Chuck suggested that we use wiki notation, and this is very workable, and if that formatting is detected any software should recognize it and display it accordingly.

3. What software? Well lots of apps display text that came from Twitter. Facebook does, as does FriendFeed and many others. Of course I wouldn't have asked this question if I weren't too.

Here's Taimane Gardner (she's been playing the ukulele since she was five) warming up for a show by playing "Eleanor Rigby."

As the deadline for the shutdown of analog TV broadcasts and the transition to digital, draws closer calls for a delay in the switchover grow louder, thanks largely to poor management of the converter subsidy program and inadequate education. But while consumer groups and politicians fret over the few million people who will need converters but haven't gotten them, Kevin Fitchard over at Telephony Online has a nice roundup of the wireless and mobile companies that will feel the effects of any delay in the transition.

The reason for the digital switchover is to free up the 700MHz spectrum that's used by analog broadcasts. The spectrum's low frequency gives it great propagation characteristics for mobile broadband, while the sheer quantity of it the TV broadcasts occupy translates into a lot of capacity for next-generation mobile networks. Also, keep in mind that the government has already auctioned off the licenses to this spectrum, so companies like Qualcomm and Verizon Wireless, which have already shelled out billions of dollars to set up shop in it, will have to push back their investments and rollouts. This could have a carry-on effect on consumers. For instance, Cox Communications bought 700MHz licenses in many of the markets in which it offers cable TV service with the intention of setting up its own mobile networks, introducing new competition for incumbents. This transition has been pushed back for years; it's important now that the hard deadline stands, and that the vast amount of spectrum used by the analog broadcasts -- broadcasts that relatively few people rely on -- can be refarmed and put to a more valuable use.

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

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...called, handily enough, Art Machines. Looks promising. Nice list of mechanized performance art groups and machine artists on the rail.

Art Machines

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How much do you love the Jell-O clown? (1949 Cushman Archives) Jell-O clown

An anonymous reader writes "IBM Research scientists, in collaboration with the Center for Probing the Nanoscale at Stanford University, have demonstrated magnetic resonance imaging with volume resolution 100 million times finer than conventional MRI. This result, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, signals a significant step forward in tools for molecular biology and nanotechnology by offering the ability to study complex 3D structures at the nanoscale."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE: Flickr pool

Flickr member Aud1073cH turned a sweet thrift store find into something even better -

I found this little battery powered amp at a second-hand store, and converted it to a "talker" by replacing the regular speaker with a compression driver (horn driver) that I pulled from a car alarm speaker.
Plug in a guitar or toy keyboard, and have a portable talking instrument.

For a relatively small amount of effort, Talkboxes can deliver a lot of interesting sonic exploration (aka - awes robo-frampton-alien-overlord voices) - Portable Talking Amp

More:

HOW TO - build a talk box

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rye writes in to recommend a Sherri Davidoff interview with Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, who talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. (Direct Revenue was sued by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 for surreptitiously installing adware on millions of computers.) "So we've progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that's encrypted — really more just obfuscated — to an executable that doesn't even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads. ... There was one further step that we were going to take but didn't end up doing, and that is we were going to get rid of threads entirely, and just use interrupt handlers. It turns out that in Windows, you can get access to the interrupt handler pretty easily. ... It amounted to a distributed code war on a 4-10 million-node network."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While the era of DRM on music may finally be ending, it appears that some other industries still haven't quite come to terms with the two simple facts that a few industries are finally realizing: (1) DRM does not work (2) DRM diminishes the value of your product (3) DRM pisses off your users. Despite these universal truths, every digital industry seems to go through this phase where they think that they can figure out how to do DRM right. A bunch of consumer electronics makers and movie studios are apparently working together on yet another DRM standard that they swear (this time, for real!!) will actually work and will be "friendly." We've heard it before, and the end result is the same (see numbers 1 through 3 above). As per usual, they're claiming that this system will be even better than non-DRM'd content, but fail to explain how that's actually true. At best, they say it'll be more convenient, but it's difficult to see how any limitation adds convenience rather than takes it away.

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The FlightSuit is a lycra diaper for your bird, designed not to impede flight while capturing those pesky feces and hold them at a safe distance from the little feller. Use raw, or with disposable liners.

Bird Diaper (via Red Ferret)

See also: A product only my cleaning girl will love: Bird Diapers

An anonymous reader writes "New York magazine has a story about some of the flashy new ideas that are coming out of the labs of the New York Times. The piece prompted Peter Wayner to dig up some of the old Java applets he wrote to explore whether more promiscuity really stops AIDS and whether baseball can do anything to speed up the games. He notes that these took a great deal of work to produce and it's not possible to do them on a daily basis. Furthermore, they're cranky and fragile, perhaps thanks to Java. Are cool, interactive features the future of journalism on the web? Or will simple ASCII text continue to be the most efficient way for us to mingle our thoughts, especially when ASCII text won't generate a classloading error?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The magnificent Mark Ryden has a long-awaited solo show of paintings opening February 7 at Tokyo's Tomio Koyama Gallery. The exhibition, titled "The Snow Yak Show," will run until February 28. Kirsten Anderson posted a sneak preview of a few pieces at her Write Some Good Blog. Kirsten and her partner-in-crime Kenny Montana will head to Tokyo for the opening and plan to report on BB about their adventures. "Yakity Yak Ryden's Back"

Here's a little peek at a page from Robert Crumb's forthcoming Book of Genesis, a literal adaptation from the first book in the Old Testament. It's been years-in-the-making (Here's a 2004 Guardian article about it). The only other book I'm looking forward to with as much excitment as this one is Harvey Kurtzman's Humbug anthology.

The long-awaited publication of Robert Crumb’s Book of Genesis, an adaptation of the Bible story, which Norton will be publishing in Fall 2009. I had the privilege of seeing some of the pages in France two years ago, and the scope of the work has haunted me ever since. I’m sure the religious right will be all up in arms with cliché horror that a quote unquote “cartoonist” has defamed their sacred cow, but Crumb is taking this work very seriously, and Genesis is some of his best work.

R. Crumb Illustrates The Book of Genesis literally

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts has an exhibition called To the Ends of the Earth: Painting the Polar Landscape. New Scientist has a 14 images from the show. Beautiful. Shown here: "The Ice Dwellers Watching the Invaders" (around 1875) by William Bradford.

To the Ends of the Earth: Painting the Polar Landscape

Here's Danielle of Danielle Ate the Sandwich singing "Dream a Little Dream of Me" and playing the ukulele.

With respect to the Bernard Madoff scam, I'd been hearing plenty of people ask "where did the money go?" since there's none left. The answer has always been pretty straightforward: as a Ponzi scheme, much of the money went back out to the earlier investors who took some money out. The rest was probably invested in various investments whose value has gone done to almost nothing in the last few months. However, this is apparently creating something of a quandary for some of those early investors who took money out -- but still had some money (theoretically) still with Madoff. Should they apply for aid from the Securities Investor Protection Corp?

SIPC acts like an FDIC for these types of investments, helping to protect investors in cases of fraud. But some are realizing that if they took money out from Madoff over the years (and some did so profitably), if they go ask for money from the SIPC, it could alert regulators to the fact that they profited from Madoff's scam -- and they could suddenly owe the "profits" they had taken out in the past. The Feds can demand that those who profited from Madoff's scam return the money -- but that will involve actually being able to track them down. For some "victims," it may be better to just keep what they have, keep quiet, and forget what they thought they still had invested with Madoff. But there are concerns for others who have already admitted to cashing out (sometimes a long time ago), are they suddenly going to be forced to return the money they took out of their accounts?

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It seems like one of the trickiest components in a wearable computer is coming up with a wearable display device that's usable, not overly intrusive, and preferably inexpensive. Last November, I posted about Raif Ackermann's Nokia-based wearable that uses a hacked Myvu Crystal headset as a head mounted display. Meant for privately watching iPod videos, the Myvu device can be easily hacked to work with a wearable system since it's basically just a very tiny VGA device.

Gregor Richards has been working on his own wearable using the Myvu. He sent us a couple of Youtube videos that demonstrate how the display can easily be mounted to a set of safety glasses, and he was kind enough to answer a couple of questions I had about the device he's planning on building with his new HMD.

I asked Gregor about the software and hardware that he'll be using in the device he's building. Here was his response.

I have two options for cursor control: The simple one is a finger-mounted optical mouse as it's usable against clothing and so it should be possible to mouse on the sleeve. The other, slightly more wild option is an arm-mounted Wii remote. A friend of mine has been messing around with that configuration and has had some success at using the rotation and pitch of your arm to move the mouse. Depending on which one is more convenient, I'll go one way or the other.

For data input I'm going the simple route. Rather than having a chord keyboard or something, I'm just going to use a very small, pocketable bluetooth keypad. Namely, the Freedom Input Slim Keypad. It was a bit pricey, but it works great, and better yet it works over bluetooth.

The computer itself will be the Pandora, for the simple reason that I was buying it anyway :) . I could certainly buy a simpler system with no internal screen, but using the Pandora has the nice benefit that there will be a user community for it, and if I feel like playing a game I'll have the game controls available. Hopefully I can turn off the internal screen in software to massively boost the battery life ... I imagine this must be possible since it should be usable as an MP3 player. The Pandora won't be shipping 'til mid-January at least.

As you can probably deduce, my plan was to build an off-the-shelf wearable as much as possible, as I usually don't trust myself tearing things apart. The display was the only component that requires significant modification, so I did it first. As it turns out, teh Myvu Crystal really made such modification fairly easy :). The total price for all of this should be around $700, a price that should be approachable on nearly any budget.

I was also really interested to know what the primary function will be, or if he has any particular application in mind.

I have no particular plans, I'm building it because it's cool :). I'll probably use it for the same things I use my PDA for now (calendar, general PIM stuff, etc), it'll just be a much more awesome way to do that. At some point I may get a full-sized bluetooth keyboard so I can more-or-less use it as a laptop, just to reduce the number of computers I have to drag around (I can tolerate the resolution for this). I actually think it would be better as something not too special-purpose, as then it can just blend into the background of my daily affairs.

Gregor is documenting the development of this device on Youtube. It's always cool to see projects like this take shape. If you've got a favorite wearable project, or if you're working on one yourself, please share a link in the comments.

Myvu Crystal Wearable Videos

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The fine folks at Oomlout, makers of several seriously sweet robot kits, have put together an Instructable on how they go through the process of fulfilling their kit orders, in this case, a 30-kit lot. The idea is to show you all that's involved in running your own cottage factory, by way of example.

You will find everything you need to get up and making your own SERB's in semi-industrial volumes, ideally you won't decide to. The real purpose of this Instructable is to act as a repository for our methods, jigs, and tricks, and to help anyone looking into producing similar style kits (or simply for those who like to see how a product is made).

Updates to come
This will be an evolving Instructable, to be updated with new tricks as and when we come up with them. Hopefully, slowly changing from the small tabletop factory we now operate towards something much grander.

I had the pleasure of putting together a SERB kit over the Christmas holiday and I'll be posting a full review of the build later this week.

Open Manufacturing - (How to Build 30 (SERB) Kits)

More:

• SERB robot with Wii Nunchuck control

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An anonymous reader writes "A spate of broken cables has brought disruption for many of the world's Web users in 2008 — and the Med has been at the center of the problems. For political reasons, the Mediterranean Sea is an Internet bottleneck through which the majority of traffic between Europe and Asia is squeezed. That traffic must must run the gauntlet of earthquakes and heavy maritime traffic to reach its destination. Better and stronger cables are urgently needed to avoid a re-occurrence of the 2008 outages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE: Flickr pool

Steinway? nope. Matt the Modulator built this classy nano-baby grand from a kit, and an incredibly cute one at that. - elekit_piano2

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In 2006, we posted about the Institute For Figuring's collaborative project to crochet a handmade coral reef. It's come a long way. The Crochet Coral Reef is on display at Santa Monica's Track 16 Gallery until February 21, along with the Toxic Reef, made from plastic trash. From the press release:

One of the acknowledged wonders of the natural world, the Great Barrier Reef stretches along the coast of Queensland Australia, in a riotous profusion of color and form unparalleled on our planet. But global warming and pollutants so threaten this fragile marvel that it may well be gone by the end of the century. In homage to the Great One, Christine and Margaret Wertheim of the Institute For Figuring have instigated a project to crochet a handmade reef, a woolly testimony that now engages thousands of women the world over.

Vast in scale, collective in construction, exquisitely detailed, the Crochet Reef is an unprecedented, hybridic, handicraft invocation of a natural wonder that has become, in itself, a new kind of wonder spawned from tens of thousands of hours of labor.

Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

This photo has been making the rounds online on Spanish and French "paranormal" blogs. Is it a bird? A toy? An insect? Or something much much... freakier? Loren Coleman weighs with a bit of Fortean skepticism at Cryptomundo. "Carnivorous flying mammal?"

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes " The U.S. President-elect, Barack Obama has selected Julius Genachowski to lead the Federal Communications Commission. This appears to bode well for a forward-looking (or at least clued) Internet policy, since Genachowski is credited with running Obama's internet-based election campaign, and, according to 'Fierce Telecom,' 'has an impressive record working with technology and communications companies: He was Chief of Business Operations at InterActiveCorp; he's co-founder of Rock Creek Ventures, which currently backs 11 internet-based start-ups, and he's also served on the boards of numerous technology and new media companies, including The Motley Fool, Web.com, Truveo, and Rapt'."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Glyn sez, "Passengers who buy a London train or tube ticket would automatically be giving their consent to be searched, under proposals now under consideration."

Senior British Transport police officials told MPs today that they wanted to change the railways' "conditions of carriage" to close a loophole that means officers using mobile knife-detecting arches at stations have no legal power to search someone who sets them off unless they have a reasonable suspicion that they are breaking the law.

Police seek new rights for searching rail passengers (Thanks, Glyn!)

The late Rufus Hussey shows off his respectable beanshooter (slingshot) skill in this video, probably made in the early 1990s. Watch him throw a quarter in the air and ding it with a rock, and shoot a Japanese beetle off a leaf. Rufus Hussey - The beanshooter man

Dorkbot DC founder Thomas Edwards, now kickin' it at Dorkbot SoCal, sent us this message, reminding us about Cabin Fever Expo, coming up this weekend, in PA:

A friend of mine told me about "Cabin Fever Expo", a yearly exhibition of what-yer-been-working-on, with respect to metalworking, model making, steam engines, locomotives, miniature gas engines, etc etc. January 17th & 18th, 2009. It's held in York PA, up I-83 about 90 minutes north of Baltimore/695.

Look for my friend running a Sherline tabletop CNC with the Linux-based Enhanced Machine Controller project:

You can check out the pictures from last year:

http://picasaweb.google.com/jschoenly/CabinFever2008#

Cabin Fever Expositions

More:

• The Internet Craftsmanship Museum
• Yankee Steam Up coverage

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Jon sends in an interesting link from the New Statesman from last month, discussing some of the history of music and copyright, specifically as it concerned 19th century music. The article is something of a response to the ridiculous, unnecessary and dangerous plan in Europe to extend copyright on performance rights, supposedly to protect "session musicians," but which really just enriches the record labels, and would do very little for the session musicians (who made their deal with the public when they performed in the first place).

There are some notable points in the article, including the fact that since France was one of the first countries to have very strong intellectual property laws for music, many musicians tried to establish themselves in France, but the music produced under that system, in retrospect, isn't considered even remotely in the same class as some of the music produced elsewhere -- even though it was the French composers who got wealthy. In other words, the system of granting monopolies did not do much to encourage better music -- but did plenty to encourage a few mediocre composers to monopolize the system to get wealthy. That's not to say that the alternative business models were good for the musicians in question (the article notes the troubles many faced), but the purpose of copyright is not to make certain musicians rich, but to get them to create better content. And, these days, there are many mechanisms in place by which musicians can make money without relying on intellectual property protections.

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jonr writes "At the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show, Sony presented the new camera from its Cyber-shot product line. The DSC-G3 comes with a Zeiss lens with 4x zoom, a large 3.5" touch display, and 4GB of internal memory. Most interesting is the camera's software that includes, among other things, face and scene recognition, based on Busybox and Kernel 2.6.11 for the Access Linux Platform. The camera also has built-in Wi-Fi."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a great design for a solar tracker, using bicycle wheels and a linear actuator (salvageable from an old satellite dish):

Even simpler, this tracker uses an old clock to drive a gear for the tracker:

What other useful designs have you found?

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eldavojohn writes "The New York Times is reporting on MIT's migration away from large lectures as many colleges and universities have. Attendance at these lectures often falls to 50 percent by the end of the semester. TEAL (Technology Enhanced Active Learning) gives the students a more hands on approach and may signal the death of the massive lecture hall synonymous with achieving a bachelors of science."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Americans are rediscovering the fusty fix-it shops and unassuming secondhand stores on their local Main Streets.

Reuse is the subject of this story by Ben Arnoldy in the Christian Science Monitor. The economy is creating new business for small, local repair shops, as Americans seek to extend the life of the things they own. The article cites examples in the San Francisco Bay Area and in the Boston area, where people are frequenting repair shops to fix shoes, bicycles, and vacuums.

"We were a mend-and-make-do society, and we have completely changed. We don't fix anything anymore. We use, throw away, and buy more," says Bruce Buckelew, a former IBM engineer who has repaired more than 30,000 computers and put them into public schools, nonprofits, and low-income households in Oakland, Calif. "The worse the stock market gets and the bleaker the job market, the better for reuse, actually."

<img src="http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0112/csmimg/AREUSE_P1.jpg"

Buckelew's Oakland Technology Exchange West is not only restoring equipment that would otherwise be thrown away but they are upgrading it and returning it to use by people who couldn't afford new computers. In general, most computers are designed to be upgraded, although not everyone is able to do it themselves. Many type of electronics are not designed to be easily fixed or upgraded.

"What's different from the last time we had a recession is that a lot of the products are not repairable because parts are not made for them – they are considered disposable," says Vicky Evans, owner of Phil's Electric Center in San Francisco,

Clearly, we need product designers and manufacturers to be thinking more about extending the lifecycle of a product rather than shortening it. Creating user-servicable products seems like the way to go, along with making sure to supply parts along with the information required to do the repairs.

A talk by Dmitry Orlov compares how the collapse of the Soviet economy affected its people and how the same might affect Americans, whom he views as ill-prepared.

In the United States, you often hear that something "is not worth fixing." This is enough to make a Russian see red. I once heard of an elderly Russian who became irate when a hardware store in Boston wouldn't sell him replacement bedsprings: "People are throwing away perfectly good mattresses, how am I supposed to fix them?" Economic collapse tends to shut down both local production and imports, and so it is vitally important that anything you own wears out slowly, and that you can fix it yourself if it breaks.

Another aspect of reuse is that "used things" retain more value. Second hand stores, also covered in Arnoldy's story, are seeing good sales, compared to the drop in sales at retail stores, some of which are even closing. Second hand stores are not only a source for used clothing; they're buying clothing for resale and those sources are local. A friend of my daughter's works as a buyer in a second-hand store in the Bay Area and she confirmed that business was up before and after the holidays. There's more interest in selling clothes once you no longer need or want them. Like buying a new car and selling it as used, the actual value of the item is the difference between those two prices, not its sticker price. Increasingly, there are some people who prefer not to be seen in "new" clothing and prefer the lower prices at second-hand stores. So it's not only practical, but in some cases fashionable.

Repair shops and second-hand stores are part of a new landscape that's emerging. It's one way we can become more resourceful.

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Videogum has some funny things to say about this commercial for Microsoft's Songsmith. The technology actually looks kind of neat -- you sing anything you want and the program creates bland instrumental music to match your vocals. But the commercial itself is hilariously clunky.

In 2009, even the lamest cultural contributions have some kind of underlying self-awareness. Like, even the people who work for Bill O’Reilly, or the SkyMall catalog, are aware that what they work on sucks. But a job’s a job and they probably find a way to have fun with it (especially at the SkyMall catalog.) So that’s why this REAL commercial for Microsoft’s new Songsmith software (you sing at it and it creates horrible musak to accompany you) is completely insane. Not only is it apparently earnest and not a parody, self- or otherwise, it seems like it comes from a bizarro parallel universe where irony was never discovered. It’s like Microsoft found some kind of home-schooling Christian commune in the woods and hired them to make their commercial.

Funny commercial for Microsoft's Songsmith

(Flash embed above, MP4 download here.) Television host and gadget-o-phile Drew Carey visited with the Boing Boing crew in Las Vegas to roam the blinking, beeping halls of CES 2009. He was there with his lovely fiancé, and her three year old son, Connor. Today's episode documents Connor's search for talking robots and "tiny cars I can ride in." Along the way, Drew stops at the Intel booth to check out a $47,000 VR racing system that puts you in the driver's seat on famous racetracks around the world -- the system includes topographically accurate maps, down to the pebble, of famous tracks.

Join the discussion for this Boing Boing Video over at Boing Boing Gadgets.

Previous "live from CES" videos on Boing Boing Gadgets:
* CES Video: Asus Netbookstravaganza, with Bamboo, Gold Lamé, and Lamborghini (MP4)
* CES Video: Palm Pre Hands-On with Joel and Brownlee, post-review huddle with Ars Technica (MP4)
* Boing Boing Gadgets at CES: Video Report, Day Two (MP4)
* Boing Boing Gadgets at CES: Video Report, Day One (MP4)

As the nation gears up for the inauguration of a new President and Congress and state and local governments laying out their legislative priorities for the coming year, one group says that in addition to pressing issues like the economy, legislators should take up a nationwide ban on cell phone use while driving. They've trotted out the usual rhetoric, equating yakking while driving to drunk driving in an attempt to evoke an emotional response, but ignoring some salient facts. First, while it's hard to argue that driving while talking is completely safe, it may not be as big a risk as some of these groups would lead us to believe. Second, the laws are very hard to enforce and don't automatically decrease the number of accidents. Instead of adding another law narrowly focused on one particular behavior, why not more stringently enforce existing traffic laws dealing with dangerous driving? Laws already exist covering all manner of unsafe driving; perhaps a good way to make the roads safer would be to increase enforcement of them and work to clamp down on all types of unsafe driving, rather than single out particular ones.

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

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ubergamer1337 writes "Next semester I will be participating in a college study abroad program known as Semester at Sea. The gist of it is that over four months 600ish students sail around the world on a converted cruise ship, visiting diverse port cities while taking classes when we are between ports. Debates about its educational merit aside, my internet options while I will be at sea will be severely limited. We get just 100 minutes of internet access for the entire voyage, and once thats gone the only internet access we have is a university email address, which is limited to messages under a megabyte with no attachments. I have been pondering different ways to staying in contact with friends and family back at home without running to an internet cafe in every port, and I have already decided that I want to set up a blog that can be updated by email, but I wanted to ask the collective wisdom of Slashdot if anyone knows of any other ways to transmit more then just your standard message through email. Some things I would be particularity interested in being able to figure out would be a way to send photos (encode them as text?), and a way to get Wikipedia pages etc. emailed to me."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A music video directed by Kangaroo Alliance for Buddy System. MP4 here. See also Clap Paw. (Thanks Susannah Breslin, via antville, via promo.)

This image, drawn in ink on heavy paper, and annotated "3/4 in. connectors," was in a box of papers and files that I shipped from my storage locker in Toronto. It's incredibly familiar, but I have no idea what it is. Anyone recognize it?

The excellent faux-educational brit comedy series "Look Around You" launches on Adult Swim this Sunday Jan 18th, at 1 am. (Thanks, Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz)

Orestes Pursued by the Furries, A remix of Adolphe William Bouguereau's 19th century masterpiece "Orestes Pursued by the Furies." 'Shopped by "anonymous," brought to our attention by Boing Boing community member Takuan.

An anonymous reader writes "Sony's stand at CES had a small area set aside for flexible OLED screens, along with three mock-ups of possible OLED devices (including one stunning ultra-portable with no hinge and a single display for both screen and keyboard). There was also a working OLED screen being bent back and forth while playing a video clip. Does this mean roll-up, low-power colour screens will soon hit the market? Not unless OLED prices come down — Sony's stunning XEL-1 OLED TV costs $2,500, but only has an 11in screen ..."

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All too often these days, we've seen murderers try to pass off the blame for their crimes by blaming video games. This comes after years of techno panic around weak and often misinterpreted studies concerning links between video games and violence. Despite the fact that there's been no actual evidence that video games lead to increased violence (and the fact that youth violence has continually dropped as video games became more popular should be quite telling), it makes for a great news story -- and, thus, a great excuse for murderers. Luckily, no one's buying it.

In the latest such case, where teen-aged Daniel Petric shot both his parents, killing his mother and wounding his father, after they took away his copy of Halo 3, a judge has rejected Petric's claim that it was his video game addiction that inspired the murder (and subsequent attempt to frame his father). It probably didn't help the teen's case at all that there was evidence he had planned the murder for weeks, rather than spontaneously acting following the video game confiscation. The judge still does, unfortunately, suggest that the video game warped Petric's mind, despite little proof that was true. However, the judge notes that even if he was under the influence of the video game, that's no defense for what he did.

In the meantime, of course, politicians are still overreacting to the still unproven idea that video games lead to violence -- to the point that Rep. Joe Baca has introduced a law that would require health warnings on video games, similar to cigarette warnings, saying that: "WARNING: Excessive exposure to violent video games and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior." So, it certainly looks like politicians and the media will continue overreacting when it comes to video games and violence.

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This week I have 3 modifications of the Maker's Notebook. I started out by adding a small pocket inside the book to keep a pen. Next, I added a snap closure to keep everything secure. Finally, I added a pocket to the back of the book for keeping acetate film to use as overlays for my sketches.

Since I did 3 mods to my Maker's Notebook, I decided it would be cool to give away 3 Maker's Notebooks. All you have to do is post your modified Maker's Notebook in the MAKE Flickr photo pool and tag it "mymakersnotebook". Next Tuesday I will ask everyone at Make to help me pick our favorite 3 modifications. The winners be announced next week and they will receive a new Maker's Notebook to hack up all over again!

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Good luck, and I'll see you next week with the results!

var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/arts_culture/How_to_Tuesday_Maker_s_Notebook_contest';

In the Maker Shed:

 
Pick up The Maker's Notebook ($19.99) for all your big ideas, diagrams, patterns, etc. Exclusive to the Maker Shed: Sticker sheets and a band closure to customize your book.

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An anonymous reader writes "The Australian Communications and Media Authority has commenced legal proceedings in the Federal Court against several local and international companies over allegedly unsolicited SMS spam. It's the first time the regulator has used its powers under the Spam Act to pursue an alleged SMS spammer through the Courts. Other companies have been fined or committed to an 'enforceable undertaking' to avoid this type of action (although these are not without issue). Another firm accused of SMS spam accused the regulator of being overzealous after it received a formal warning. The regulator appears to have instituted a crackdown on the premium mobile content industry in recent months, culminating in this latest action."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michelle @ CRAFT points us to instructables user tobias.tankes' embroidered retro digital watch. If you've got access to a computerized embroidery machine, you can use his instructions to make your own.

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Here's an interesting acoustic sculpture by Jim Lee - he says it produces a "kind of choral moan reminiscent of a beehive". Make sure you listen to the audio (links on his site), it's a really cool sound.

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There's been a lot of talk about how the rise of text messaging is affecting people and how they communicate. We've seen reports about texting's impact on families (verdict: not clear), on the English language (verdict: it's safe), and on students' grammar (it's okay too). But one more area texting is having an impact: young people aren't using their index fingers as much. Apparently because younger people are using their thumbs to text all the time, it's become the digit of choice for activities like ringing doorbells. So will index fingers go the way of the appendix and become some extraneous appendage unneeded by modern man? I just tried typing this post with only my thumbs, and based on that, I think they, and their six other friends, are safe for some time yet.

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

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mrspin writes "DivX looks set to continue to be the video format of choice for 'grey' content, with the company announcing that version 7 adds support for H.264 video and, more significantly, the Matroska (MKV) container. Anybody familiar with Blu-ray rips found on BitTorrent sites or other filesharing networks will instantly recognize the MKV file format in combination with the H.264 codec as a popular way to deliver High Definition video on a PC. And now that DivX is throwing its weight behind the Matroska container, MKV support should increasingly find its way on a range of non-PC devices, such as Blu-ray players, HD digital televisions and set-top boxes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak offers his curmudgeonly take on the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet, which Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. But even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims, your geek side still has to admire it for the programming tour-de-force that it was, implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II." On the brighter side, one of my favorite things about Visicalc is the widely repeated story that it was snuck into businesses on Apple machines bought under the guise of word processors, but covertly used for accounting instead.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tom Igoe, author of Making Things Talk, is in the rainforest in eastern Ecuador, applying his sensor and embedded hacking skills to tracking monkeys (from Part 4 of his adventure postings):

This morning, Kevin and Tony and I went to look for titi monkeys. We didn't find any, but we did manage to get lost, or as Tony prefers to put it, "got to know the forest a little better." It was a good hike, but frustrating for them because no monkeys were found. I did another test with the GPS micro-mini, and got the same results. I'm pretty sure it's going to take a bigger antenna to make it work.

This afternoon, we ran some tests of signal strength of 2.4GHz using XBee radios. Transmitter was sending 1 sample of AD0 and AD1 at 80 ms intervals for all tests. I don't necessarily want to use XBees, but they were the only high frequency radios I had in hand to test with. The current telemetry gear works in the 148 - 152MHz range, which supposedly gives better penetration through the foliage.

...

We can probably go up to 100 grams on a large monkey. Here are the weights of the things we've currently got. Small monkey radios: currently 54g (big one), 22g (small one), large monkeys currently 45g. Logomatic v2 plus battery: 51g. Xbee Pro plus LilyPad power supply plus small LiPoly battery: 27g.

Tom's posted four parts to his monkey tracking adventures; keep an eye on his blog for more posts.

• Monkey Tracking Adventures (part 1)
• Monkey Tracking Adventures (part 2)
• Monkey Tracking Adventures (part 3)
• Monkey Tracking Adventures (part 4)

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?These chandeliers by Stuart Karten are made from hundreds of dollar bills in different currencies including dollars, euros, and pesos. In a time when the US national economy is ailing from recession, the idea of putting money somewhere you can see it (such as directly over the dinner table) might seem crazy, although it might also remind us that in today's hard time there's nothing more comforting than "cold hard cash".

Kurrency Chandeliers via Core77

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An ear-jarringly extensive exploration into what happens when a Thingamakit watches way too much FREAKING TELEVISION! Yeah well, either way the effects of the screen refresh rate produces some interestingly strident tones - and that's a pretty sweet paint job to boot.

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mytrip sends a reminder that starting today, visitors to the US from 35 visa-waiver countries will be required to register online with the Department of Homeland Security in advance. The DHS is asking people to go online for the ESTA program 72 hours before traveling, but they can register any amount of time ahead. Approval, once granted, is good for 2 years. DHS says that most applications are approved in 4 seconds. If an application is rejected, the traveler will have to go to a US embassy and get a visa. CNet reports that information from applications will be retained for 12 years, and eventually up to 75 years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

?"Array" is an art installation at the Yamaguchi Center for the Arts and Media (YCAM) consisting of a field of columns that create a light and sound array that shifts with viewers movements through the space. This project is similar to the "Constellation" project in Covent Garden, London that contains 600 custom designed LED mirrored tubes which is featured at the link below. Interesting use of space and custom circuitry to control both sets of lights.

United Visual Artists

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Once again, Eric demonstrates the intricately beautiful results of mathematics/electronics -

The patterns are synthesized with a Lagged Fibonacci Generator (LFG) circuit built with discrete logic chips (CD4000 CMOS). The LFG is an algorithm sometimes used in cryptography to generate encryption keys. I'm exploring it as a pattern generator for algorithmic art and music. Although cryptographers like the LFG because its output is similar to white noise, I find that through creative electronic filtering, the intricate details of its cyclic patterns become visible, and we can appreciate the details.

A near complete version of the circuit used is available for viewing here. [via Matrixsynth]

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There's been a fascinating story coming out of Korea over the past few months, concerning the (formerly) anonymous online commentator who went by the name Minerva. He accurately forecasted some of the early days of the financial collapse last fall, and suddenly the press talked him up and everyone wanted to know who he was. Then he claimed that the Korean government had told companies to stop buying US dollars -- forcing the government to put out a statement denying this was true. Then, following a few weeks of searching, he was arrested for spreading false information and (a week later) his identity was revealed (along with a background that shows he wasn't particularly well connected or knowledgeable -- he likely made some lucky guesses).

But, it does raise questions about the fine line between making predictions and spreading false information. Because he had been so accurate with his earlier predictions, many started to assume that he was well-connected, and any future predictions he made would also be equally accurate. It seems that, once again, the old saw that "past results is no guarantee of future performance" was ignored. Now, there may be a difference in terms of how the information was presented -- in terms of whether he specifically claimed to know for certain that the Korean government had done what he said, as opposed to just predicting that it was about to happen -- but it seems like the line between a prediction and "spreading false information" gets pretty thin once everyone thinks you know what's going on better than anyone else.

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This art project called "Yokohama Soundscape 2007" allows visitors to shine light with infrared flashlights onto a miniature model of Yokohama, Japan. As the beams move around the city, a camera above tracks their presence and plays samples recorded from the locations of the city being targeted. We've mentioned this project here in the past, but here's a nice video showing it in action. Overall, it's an interesting way to integrate geographical mappings to sound placement in the city.

Yokohama Soundscape 2007

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Attention Ann Arbor makers - GO-Tech will be gathering this eve @ a new earlier time of 7 pm. Dale writes -

We'll have the Five-Minute Timer Contest (see below) and a talk on EMC2, the open source CNC software that many of us use. We'll also have our usual 5-minute presentations on projects.

The Five-Minute Timer Contest goal is to design a timer to time presentations at our meetings. It should semi-accurately time the presenter, and give some audible or visual indication when their time is up. Portability, coolness, and robustness will be helpful. Cool prizes supplied by O'Reilly, publishers of Make.

Coming up at the February 10 meeting--a build night. We'll be forming groups and building interactive displays for a local non-profit "robot" store. We'll have Arduinos, electronic parts, and fabrication tools and supplies to go from idea to realization. Team projects will be judged that same night, with prizes. (More details revealed at tomorrow's meeting.)

GO Tech (formerly NotBAGO) is a meeting for Ann Arbor (MI) area readers of Make Magazine, Circuit Cellar, Home Shop Machinist, Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools, slashdot, etc. That is, people who are interested in and make things using technology, whether that's a metal-cutting lathe or a Python script. A kind of generalized mixture of CerealBar, DorkBot, Oxford Geek night, and Portland Machinist Guild. We have machinists, electrical engineers, software folks, industrial control types, and so on. We share projects, information about tools and ideas, and connect with like-minded people. Everyone is welcome. We've been meeting since 7/07.

After introductions, we have 5 minute presentations by anyone who wants to talk. Available are wi-fi, video projector (VGA or video input), Mac laptop, extension cords, and copier.

Our new location is A2 MechShop at 240 Parkland Plaza Suite B, Ann Arbor, MI 48103. For more directions and to sign up for GO-Tech emails, see http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/notbago/

We're all still moving in and getting settled at A2 MechShop, but as before we'll have plenty of space for meeting and even indoor space for demonstrating robots, etc.

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Conrad sez, "I discovered that my parents bought ten of the most popular national papers in the UK the day after the September 11th and stored them in the attic, so I decided to take photos of the front pages and put them on Flickr. It's interesting to see the tabloid reaction compared to the broadsheets." Newspapers of September 12th 2001 (Thanks, Conrad!)

This is really great looking camera stabilization rig. It certainly can compete with the professional models and seems to cost a lot less. I really like the universal joint that allows for some incredible movement.

Inspired by the Steadicam Merlin, and unwilling to spend £500 on that device, I set about making my own, following the basic principles of the Merlin and other similar designs viewable on the internet.

More about DIY: Camera stabilizer

From the pages of MAKE:

• $14 Video Camera Stabilizer - You don't have $10,000 to spend on a Steadicam? Make this ultra-low-cost video camera stabilizer and see how much better your video shots turn out. Read this article in MAKE: 01: Make Premiere, Page 84. MAKE: Digital EditionSubscribers--read this article now in your digital edition!

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Ocean Tomo is a company that's been around for a few years, trying to establish itself as the auction house for patents. I've already made clear how troubling I believe its business model to be, but the company always tries to put a friendly face on it, claiming that it's not about aiding so-called "patent trolls" but actually reducing the problem of patent trolling. However, that (of course) isn't what's actually happening. A patent on personal recommendation systems ("if you bought x, you'll like y") was bought via Ocean Tomo by what seems likely to be a bunch of lawyers under the company name Quito (though, it's not entirely clear who's involved) and is now being used in a lawsuit against thirteen big internet companies that employ any type of rating system. The companies being sued are: Netflix, Amazon, Yahoo, RealNetworks, last.fm, Pandora Media, Slacker Inc., Veoh, Hulu, NBC Universal, CBS, News Corp., and Strands.

As you look through that list, you'll recognize that some have done significantly innovative work in taking the concept of an online recommendation system and actually making it useful. The simple idea of doing recommendations is pretty straightforward. Making it work well? Not so much. Hell, that's why Netflix is offering $1 million to anyone who can improve their recommendation engine by just 10%. The basic ideas expressed in the patent are not where the value in these recommendation systems lies. It's in the actual effort of figuring out how to make them work better. This patent has nothing to do with the actual success of a recommendation system, but the holders of it may now get a pay day just for holding the patent, thanks to Ocean Tomo's auctions. And, of course, this means that all of those companies that were actually innovating will, at the very least, now need to spend legal dollars defending against this massive innovation blocker.

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dhavleak writes "Microsoft Research has come up with Microsoft Tag: '...just aim your camera phone at a Tag and instantly access mobile content, videos, music, contact information, maps, social networks, promotions, and more. Nothing to type, no browsers to launch!' Device support is fairly extensive (iPhone, WinMo, BlackBerry and more), and tag scanning appears to work quickly and reliably from different distances and angles. Long Zheng has an overview on his site. The Tag is similar to a barcode, but has obvious visual differences — colored vs. black and white, and triangles vs. squares or lines. The technology looks interesting, but will it get the adoption necessary to be successful? What applications do you see for such technology?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What does it take to make it as a startup in the web 2.0 world? Does it matter whether you are a European company or a Silicon Valley one? Are the chances and opportunities the same? Photo credit: LeWeb '08 and Ustream Just a month ago at LeWeb08, the two-day Paris event was concluded by a great live session with the Gillmor Gang, a small group of high caliber media technologists and entrepreneurs who, back in 2005 launched a podcast based on a conference call among them to discuss whatever felt hot at the moment. From this unique and memorable live session of the Gillmor Gang, in which LeWeb organizer Loic LeMeur participates actively, I have extracted this delicious 11 minutes of conversation focusing on the differences, the pros and cons, the prejudices and myths, the stereotypes and untold truths about how the real and imagined differences between entrepreneurship on this and that side of the ocean. Steve Gillmor, Hugh McLeod, Marc Canter, Loic LeMeur, Michael Arrington and Loren Feldman give life to a hot and fascinating discussion about the differences between USA and Europe when it comes to launching your own Internet company. Check it out. I found it both enjoyable and insightful. Here is the video with its text transcription:

Entrepreneurship Styles: USA vs Europe - The Gillmor Gang At LeWeb '08

Duration: 11'10''
English Text Transcription

Entrepreneurs in America Just Have to Play the Game

The tech conferences in Europe, this is my first tech conference in Europe... they seem different.
American events tend to be a lot more elevator pitches, it's kind of people coming to you and talking like a robot: "Hi, I got this little startup, here's what I do". The European ones... they don't do that so much, but they're very understated... and it's like, to work, to get really pumped up about something takes a lot more work. That's my observation.
Marc Canter, you spent a lot of time in Europe, what do you think about the differences between conferences the Valley and Europe.
Ok, so the game, the reason why Loic moved to America, is to play the game. To suck up to the VCs, go over and hang out with Michael Arrington, and that's the game. But here in Europe you don't have a game like that! You got to go out there and hassle on your own, with your own company, with your own ideas, maybe you don't even speak English as your first language...
Yeah, which is insane right?
Yes, it's fucked up! But here's the thing... In one sense an European entrepreneur is more pure entrepreneur. Because he can't play the game. So, he, or she, has to stand on their own, whereas Americans, you go sleep with somebody, whatever...
That is a bunch of horseshit, ok? Real horseshit. [...] I find it offensive.

Is Silicon Valley an Insiders' Game?

I want to finish. Loic, you moved to San Francisco, you live up a 101 or 280, you go hang out on Sand Hill Road. That is an insiders' game, you got an insiders' track, you have a much greater likelyhood success.
It's not an insiders' game, that's a loser attitude!
It is a loser attitude. Marc, calling Silicon valley an insiders' game is...
Totally!
...you're not the loser, you've made some incredible things in life, but people who tend to that, tend to be losers. It's not that... people who say "I've been unsuccessful in Silicon Valley", which is probably the most merit-based society in the world, it is to say: "I just wasn't successful so somebody caused failure". I would actually like to hear Loic talk about the differences because he's been an entrepreneur in both continents, and I think he's going to disagree with you.

In Europe You Have Time for Lunch

The differences? You don't know how to take time and have lunch. Here, especially here in Paris, we take like two or three hours to have lunch. Because you want to know people, and "there" I feel that it's something which is like you want to go so fast, and there's always a point. Like if I'd call you Michael, you'd be like: "Why are you calling me?" By default it's like "what's the point?", "why are you calling me?" I invited someone out to a dinner and he said: "Why?". "Why?" Why should we have dinner? It's like always why. Why, what's the purpose. Always. ...and here we just have a lunch for two hours and we have fun and there's no why. That's one (difference).
Is it the two-hour lunches and the constant pleasantries? And all the wine drinking? That's the reason why Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, are all American companies? Why Skype was sold to an American company? Why Europe constantly looks to United States for leadership and technology? It's because you spend your days... (The crowd boos) Go ahead and cheer, but the point is: look how many American speakers did Loic brought to this conference to come and talk on stage. Why isn't it the other way around?
I can answer that. I can already feel the shit I'm going to get for getting so many Americans here at the last session. But I think it's very good that you take the time and come here, because we can understand better why. And I still don't know exactly the answer, but one of the answers is obviously that you're all at the same place.

Silicon Valley Is The Center of the Business World

So, Silicon Valley is fantastic and that's one of the reasons why I moved there, even tough I really love here up in France, is that: you want to do a deal with FriendFeed, you drive around the corner and what I love, now that I gave you some shit about the lunch, is the deal with Bret Taylor was... Let me tell you the story: when I wanted to integrate my company with FriendFeed, I e-mailed on a Sunday at midnight Bret, the founder of FriendFeed. Midnight. I got a mail in ten minutes, back: "Hey sure, that's interesting. Let's talk." Another cultural difference, now to your advantage, is in Europe you tend to say: "Ok, alright, for an appointment we'll see, we'll plan", and it's already a little complicated. Bret, he just said: "Yeah, just come by". I said: "When?" "Well, just come by", so that's something you need to learn. And I took my car and I went there, on Wednesday, three days after, we were integrated with FriendFeed. That is the part of Silicon Valley which I really really love, is that everything is centered. Here you have to fly, you have to fly to UK, you have to fly to Germany, you have to fly to all around, and that's one of the reasons why I started this. At least for two days we're in the same room.

Another Difference between American and European Entrepreneurship Styles

I want to say something, ok? Europe! You can be more efficient, you can integrate features in three days. America! enjoy your meals. Do you know what I'm saying? Both are kind of wrong. We need the joie de vivre, we have to enjoy life, you only have one life, you know? Silicon Valley, they don't have lives. All they do is work, alright? But see how efficient it is. So, Loic, he gets some work done. So I say to Europe, please work more efficiently,
But you'd be surprised how much joy you get out of winning. It's important. If you're going to put the effort into creating a startup, but you're only going to be half-assed about it, because you need to balance your life out, you're going to lose, because you have to compete with people... I mean, in the United States, we're starting to get our ass kicked by Asia, because they work harder than us. And the problem is Europe's rich and people like working 35 to 40 hours a week, and so if you're an entrepreneur, and you work 50, 60 hours a week you think you're really put (I know, I'm just talking out of my house right now), but there are reasons... I'll tell you, the other reason why is the tax structure. The tax structure here is just ridiculous. If you have a startup, and you make it big here, here in Paris... Are you looked down on for being successful? Are you looked down on for making money?

The Vente-Privee Example

It's more complicated than that Michael. Have you heard of Vente-Privee? Michael? Have you heard of a company, a startup called Vente-privee? (Loic LeMeur asks other panelists).
I'm sorry, but it isn't a matter of we don't know the company. I don't understand what the hell you're saying. I don't understand the words that you're saying.
I'm trying to make a point here. This startup you've never heard of is doing 600.000.000 euros in revenue. And the point is none of you have heard of it. Why? Because you don't care. You don't give a shit.
That's bullshit. I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. You don't think that in a worldwide depression we're not interested in somebody who's is making 600.000.000 euros? Come on! It's bad PR, it's what it is.
Loic, what the hell is your point? I've three full-time writers covering Europe by the way. I didn't know what company you said because I didn't understand what you said. It's great that they're making 600.000.000 euros in revenue, but what's your point? That there's a company here doing well that most of us haven't heard of?
Yes, that's the point.

American Startups Have More News Coverage

And somehow that proves that European entrepreneurs are as good as American entrepreneurs?
You don't get the same coverage, we've been hugely...
So start blogs! Start a blog, and...
I know that and you're covering Europe and that' great, but the point is: it's very very tough for hugely successful companies to get above national borders. Like Vent-Privee is very very well-known here and honestly doesn't really care of being on TechCrunch. And it's just super successful. I didn't mean it in any bad way, but my point is that if you're a startup in Germany and you're extremely successful, before you're known globally it takes a lot more time than if you were in Silicon Valley. And how do we fix this? By having TechCrunch France, and UK, and by having Robert come here, and so I think it's great you're here, now that I have said that, but it's also in both sides. It's us trying to connect more with you guys there, but it's also you trying to understand more what's happening here...

End
Watch the full video of the Gillmor Gang session at LeWeb08. (note: in the transcription, I have left out a couple of comments made by Robert Scoble, not to censor him, but because I personally didn't find them very relevant to what was being discussed - Scoble's words are left intact in the video but have been edited out in the text transcription in order to make the text of the whole discussion easier to understand for who cannot see the video)

Originally broadcasted by Ustream during LeWeb '08 and first published on January 12th 2009 as "Entrepreneurship Styles: USA vs Europe - The Gillmor Gang At LeWeb '08".

Bill sent in this cool project that uses an Arduino and a WiiFit balance board to control a marble labyrinth game. It looks like a lot of fun! [Thanks Bill]

Plug an Arduino and two servos into a wooden labyrinth board game then add some programming and a WiiFit board and you have instant fun. The robotic labyrinth game debuted as our regular weekly CCCKC meetings resumed after the holidays. It was an instant hit and now videos capturing this inaugural event are showing up around the Internet.

More about a Labyrinth game controlled by an Arduino and Wii Fit [Cowtown ComputerCongress]

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Fee sez, "The government releases the 1911 census in the UK today, three years ahead of the normal 100 year embargo. The website allows family historians to search for ancestors using names and birth dates, and provides a lot more information than previous censuses, including the length of marriage, number of children, including those who have died, and more accurate information about places of birth. That's the upside: the downside is that it costs 10 credits to view a transcript, and 30 credits to view the actal census return filled in by an ancestor... and 60 credits cost £6.95. As a friend said, it seems a bit odd that the tax payer can be asked to pay for the original collection of the material, and then stiffed to this extent for access to the information."

Use the census to search for your ancestors (Thanks, Fee!)

You know what a tweet is and how they're displayed in Twitter.

Pretend you're a time traveler from 2003 and someone told you that a primary software interface was going to include bare naked urls, would you have believed it? I wouldn't. I still don't accept that it's the best way to display a tweet.

These days lots of software displays them, not just Twitter. And they all have the same problem -- how to display the urls. I haven't seen a lot of approaches. I'd like to generate some, to gather different non-raw-url approaches. Here's an example:

Where are the Users at the User Generated Content Expo?

We don't shorten urls just to conserve space within the 140-character limit, shortening urls also makes our writing more legible. For that application we could go the full distance and collapse the url down to an 11-by-11 icon. If so, what should the icon be? Here are some examples of vast collections of free mini icons.

I'm assuming the best approach is to shrink the url to an icon and store it to the right of the text but if you knew the big ugly url was going to shrink to an icon, you might start putting the urls in the middle of sentences in ur tweets.

Maybe a mini-icon isn't the best way to go, maybe there's another way altogether to neaten up tweets and make them more readable? (And yes, I know some people will say the way Twitter does it now is the best possible way, please assume we're all considering that possibility as well).

I'm interested to know what people think.

I really like the resolution the maker was able to obtain using the surface mount LEDs. Check out the whole video for several different clock variations. At the end they even display a rotating cube. Cool! Unfortunately, there isn't any more information about the build, but I will keep scouring the Internet. If you know who made this, leave a comment below and I will update the post. Thanks!

The Propeller Clock found on YouTube [older version of the clock]

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Chinese authorities have apparently finally issued licenses for mobile operators there to operate 3G networks, following years of delays. The country had been talking about getting 3G going since 2003 or so, but its tech protectionist bent saw it forced to take delay after delay until it could finally get its homegrown TD-SCDMA standard into acceptable working condition, while 3G networks built on existing, widely accepted industry standards flowered elsewhere in the world. It's great that China's offered up an alternative to the WCDMA and CDMA2000 standards, and one that might not carry some of the same intellectual property burdens as those two, translating into lower costs. But by this point, any such benefit the standard might offer has been rendered fairly meaningless by the long delay in getting it to market -- meaning China's protectionism will probably have done more to hurt the country's position in technology than to help it.

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

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I just got on the inbound BART from the Berkeley station, and I have wifi through the Cradlepoint but I don't have a net connection because we're underground.

However, in a few minutes, between Ashby and MacArthur, we will emerge and my router should be able to establish a connection. This probably will happen a lot faster than if I had used the software on my laptop to connect cause it's pretty clunky and slow and sometimes takes two or three times to connect. The Cradlepoint seems to do this much better.

And you'll know it's working because you're reading this.

r2k writes "Apple's iTunes Plus files are DRM-free, but sharing the files on P2P networks may be an extremely bad idea. A report published by CNet highlights the fact that the account information and email address of the iTunes account holder is hidden inside each and every DRM-free download. I checked, and I found I couldn't access the information using an ID3 tag editor, but using Notepad I found my email address stored inside the audio file itself."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reader Glenn points us to a blog post by NY Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni, where he points out just how ridiculous it is that a restaurant in NY is being forced to change its name over a trademark dispute. The restaurant was originally called Forge, shortened from owner Marc Forgione's last name. However, a restaurant in Miami called The Forge sued Forge claiming a trademark violation, saying: "You can't open a restaurant on somebody's coattails. It's just not legal."

Well, first of all, it's actually perfectly legal to open a restaurant on somebody's coattails. See all those different pizza places or fast food joints? They all started somewhere, and others copied the idea -- and we all think that's a good thing, because it's called competition. But, more importantly, there's no indication whatsoever that Forge was even remotely riding on The Forge's coattails, or that any diner in New York would somehow be confused that Forge was somehow connected to the (very different style) Miami restaurant. As Bruni writes:

How likely is it, really, that a patron of the Miami Beach restaurant The Forge is going to be looking for an offshoot of it in New York, when the Miami Beach restaurant hasn't advertised or promoted such an offshoot?

How likely is it that, among the gazillion restaurants in New York, this patron will find his or her way to Mr. Forgione's Forge and, after looking at its rustic, brick-walled setting, mistake it as a sibling to a place in Miami Beach whose waiters apparently wear bow ties?

How many diners are really going to be lining Mr. Forgione's pockets with money that rightfully belongs near the Everglades, or making assumptions about The Forge in Miami Beach based on meals at Forge in TriBeCa? Especially in an Internet era when diners are better informed than ever?

When trademark disputes are even getting angry rants from food critics, you have to think something is seriously wrong with the way trademark law is working these days.

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I love this self-made roboticist's "30 Second Son" robot (named for its mean time between failures). It pulls him around his rural Chinese village in a clanking rickshaw while making funny faces and chanting, "I'm a rickshaw-pulling robot. Wu Yulu is my Dad, I take him out about town.".That's about the perfect robotic application if you ask me. We should send one to Mars. Wu Yulu, the inventor, has lost a house and a wife to his robotphilia (the wife came back),

Chinese farmer robot inventor (via Dvice)

Molly Steenson gives us a glimpse of her forthcoming thesis on "postal services and pneumatic tube systems in the late 19th and early 20th century, especially in Paris" -- the original, fascinating series of tubes:

Fueling communication through pipes that ran under cities at speeds of up to 50 km per hour, the pneumatic post served as an urban subterranean communication network from the 1850s into the early 21st century, first in Europe, then the United States, and by the early 20th century, South America and Australia. Depending on the city, pneumatic tubes shuttled telegrams or letters and packages, both commercial and personal, as an antidote to increasing urban congestion and traffic on the streets above. Messages delivered by pneumatic dispatch surfaced in post offices and train stations, where messengers carried them by bicycle (or later, motorcycle or truck) from the post or telegraph branch to their final destinations. For commercial buildings, pneumatic tubes offered ready communication systems between and within any enterprises that required the movement of receipts and paper. At once buried and tangled, emerging into the interiors of buildings and offering varied interfaces for its users, the pneumatic tube presents an enigmatic image of modernity--the merger of construction and communication.

Pneumatic networks preceded electrification, first powered by steam and only by electricity in the early 20th century. They enjoyed a long lifespan. Implemented first in London in 1853 as an information conduit between the London Stock Exchange and the Central Post Office, the technology quickly transferred to other cities. Berlin began its Rohrpost in 1865; Paris built its first pneumatic networks in 1866 and began public Poste Pneumatique in 1879; Philadelphia followed suit for first class post in 1893 and New York in 1897. Urban tube networks existed for a surprisingly long time, remaining in operation until 1953 in New York, 1984 in Paris and 2002 in Prague (where it was only taken out of service by a flood that destroyed much of the tube infrastructure).

Postal services and pneumatic tubes (via Beyond the Beyond)

Update: Molly adds, "the image you used is actually from the Hotel des Postes in Paris and has nothing to do with tubes. It was used for processing mail -- in order to get the mail to the basement without causing the postal sacks to explode, the architect, Julien Guadet, designed the chutes you see in that picture. The center of the chutes is an elevator, used to move the post for sorting. I'll post more about that soon."

I like these graffiti photoshop tools on top of this Berlin subway ad featuring three pretty ladies. It's all there, too, the brush palette, the repeated clone stamp in the history window... subtle. Via Wooster Collective.

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Thelasko writes "While I was in college, I had the opportunity to take an elective course in Industrial Psychology. One section of the course covered hiring practices and the validity of 'personality testing' to screen applicants (Google link for non-subscribers). The Wall Street Journal has a long article discoursing on how such tests are used in today's economy. While personality tests may be designed to uncover underlying personality traits such as honesty, critics claim that the tests instead reward cheaters." The article talks mostly about the tests' use in winnowing candidates for retail positions — deciding whom to interview. Anybody encountered them in an IT or more technical context?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Police officials in New York City are investigating how to jam terrorists' cell phones during attacks, following the Mumbai attacks a few months ago when terrorists coordinated their activities via phone. While disrupting criminals' and terrorists' communications could be a useful tool in security forces' arsenal, it's also worth mentioning that technologies like phone jammers can't really work selectively; that is, they can't pick out particular devices, they simply jam everything in a particular area. While this would crudely accomplish the goal of jamming terrorists' phone calls, it would also preclude any other calls, including those of civilians and authorities. Fortunately, this concept isn't lost on NYC police, who say that not blocking calls, and being able to monitor them instead, could be more useful. But even then, it's not clear how authorities could pinpoint terrorists' phones to monitor their conversations without trolling through all the calls being made in an area. At this point, blocking all cell calls during a terrorist attack or large-scale emergency seems like overkill that could be more harmful than helpful.

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

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The Buffalo Beast has published its annual "50 Most Loathsome People in America" list.

21. Michelle Malkin

Charges: It's a remarkable achievement in unconscious projection that the author of a book called Unhinged could lose her fucking marbles over a patterned scarf in a donut ad, but that's what Michelle Malkin did when she sounded the nutbar clarion call and sicced her half-cocked league of masturbators on Rachel Ray and Dunkin Donuts for the flatly absurd notion that they were sending a message of solidarity with Palestinians. Right, Michelle -- you just can't sell donuts without joining the intifada these days. What did the nauseously spunky Ray do to incur the wrath of the Malkinoids? She wore a black and white scarf. A paisley scarf. A scarf that was clearly not a kaffiyeh, which, by the way, is just a hat that Arabs wear, not some universal symbol of jihad. In terms of completely false outrage, the only thing that rivaled this travesty of reason this year was the "lipstick on a pig" metaphor panic. But what puts this embarrassing sham over the top is that Dunkin Donuts actually apologized and pulled the ad, rather than try to explain to the fact-phobic horde that they were just blind, raging idiots with the collective brain-power of a lobotomized howler monkey.

Exhibit A: "If your neighbor's got an "Obama '08" bumper sticker or lawn sign, you might want to double-check your door locks at night."

Sentence: Deported to China for wearing red T-shirt.

The Buffalo Beast's 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2008 | Mirrored here

Most of the time when we think of fermentation, we think of the process that produces alcohol in beer or wine. I was making beer yesterday, producing a dark liquid from steeping grains. At the end, I added yeast which will convert those sugars to alcohol over the course of a few days. In a week or so, I'll have a nice porter. I've also been making cheese, which also ferments. After I've added culture to milk (goat or cow), the curds form and separate from the whey, and then I can mold and dry the cheese, as I'm about to do in the photo below. I was making soft cheeses, either sprinkling salt on the cheese or soaking a cheese such as feta in brine.

This summer, I made a variety of pickles but my favorite ones were the simplest, adding salt to water, and letting the pickling cukes sit in this solution for a week or so. These were deliciously sour pickles that remain reasonably crunchy, and they were better than canned pickles which relied on vinegar. This is an example of lacto-fermentation.

Mark Frauenfelder, Make's Editor-in-Chief, writes on BoingBoing about something that's on my list to try soon -- making sauerkraut. It's essentially pickling cabbage using lacto-fermentation. Mark uses a red cabbage, which is quite colorful. I used the same kind of stoneware container for making pickles.

Now, I grew up in a household that had sauerkraut on the stove and I have to tell you that when I entered the room and smelled it, I did an immediate about-face. Because I couldn't stand the smell, I couldn't go so far as tasting it. However, this new "fresh" sauerkraut is not the same; it's not like the stuff that came out of cans. This fermented sauerkraut tastes better and it's supposedly even better for you.

What's amazing to me is how much these natural processes have in common. (And like most biological processes they take time.) I would never have thought I'd see connections in making beer, cheese, pickles or sauerkraut. But they could all be chapters of the same book. While the finished products are familiar to us, the processes of making them are not. Essentially, these are means of preserving food that comes in season and creating something that lasts much longer. One can imagine that in the days before refrigeration knowing how to generate products from milk, grain or vegetables was a necessary art. Some of the art came from observing how food goes bad and learning how to control that process, adding sugar or salt as a preservative, or converting sugars into alcohol. These arts are refined by nearly every culture, and experimenting with subtle but different variations is also part of the fun.

There are probably more home brewers and cheese makers today than there ever were. Most of them are hobbyists, but there's also a re-emergence of artisanal foods based on the re-discovery of these arts. For me, I enjoy these products, which are good to share with friends, but controlling these natural processes is a satisfying learning process in itself. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

On Elpeleg writes "The Perl Foundation is giving out grants for Perl development ranging from $500 to $3,000 in February 2009. You neither need to have a large, complex, or lengthy project nor be a Perl master or guru. You are encouraged to submit a proposal if you have a good idea and the means and ability to accomplish your Perl project. The deadline for proposal submissions is January 31, 2009."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot points us to the latest in the never-ending saga of SCO trying to claim infringement in Linux. Despite massive setbacks that should have just ended the quixotic campaign, it appears that SCO is looking to sell off its actual businesses in order to keep the lawsuit campaign going. It's amazing that after losing pretty much every aspect of this campaign from the very beginning, that folks at SCO still think it's worth pursuing.

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Are you a maker living in the Twin Cities? Paul Sobczak is putting out a call for area hackers and makers to collaborate on creating a local hacker space.

On January 6th I launched Twin Cities Maker, a website dedicated to realizing a high-tech maker shop in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.

The goal of the website is to find people interested in creating a maker shop, and give them an avenue to start talking about it.

A maker shop as I have coined it is membership based physical location where people combine their talents and capitol to create a workshop with tools and classes, that are out of the range of the individual.

Think of a maker shop as a membership based gym like the YMCA but instead of racket ball courts and yoga lessons, there are CNC routers, and micro-controller classes.

Maker shops have been growing in the last few years here in the United States and abroad. Some specific movements to note are the NSF funded Fab Lab, the community based hacker spaces initiative, and California based Tech shop.

At Twin Cities Maker we would like find out the interest level in such a maker shop and to see what type of high-tech equipment is wanted, be it laser cutters, 3D printers, or T-shirt screen printing presses. We also are starting the conversation on where the maker shop should be located and how to fund the endeavor.

I invite anybody interested from the Twin Cities or elsewhere to join the conversation and help the project get off its feet.

As a Minneapolis resident, this is something I've been thinking about as well. I guess it's about time we get a maker shop started! If you're interested in this, go give a shout in the Twin Cities Maker forum, and leave us a comment here as well.

Twin Cities Maker

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It's so easy and fun to make sauerkraut that there's really no good excuse to buy it from a store. Plus, home made sauerkraut is full of living microbes that might be good for you. (Read news reports that kimchi -- spicy korean sauerkraut -- could be a bird flu remedy.)

Store bought sauerkraut is often not even real sauerkraut -- it's just cabbage soaked in salty vinegar. Even store bought brands of sauerkraut made from lacto-fermentation have usually been cooked to the point that they're no longer alive.

I've been making my own sauerkraut for years, based on my grandmother's "recipe" (it's hard to call it a real recipe, when the only ingredients are cabbage and salt), which is pretty much the same recipe found in the wonderful book, Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Ellix Katz. This book shows you how to make a wide variety of fermented foods: beer, wine, mead, miso, tempeh, sourdough bread, yogurt, cheese, and other more exotic foods. Katz, a long term HIV/AIDS survivor who lives on a queer intentional community in Tennessee, is a "fermentation fetishist." In the introduction to his book, he writes:

Wild fermentation is a way of incorporating the wild into your body, becoming one with the natural world. Wild foods, microbial cultures included, possess a great, unmediated life force, which can help us adapt to shifting conditions and lower our susceptibility to disease. These microorganisms are everywhere, and the techniques for fermenting with them are simple and flexible.

Wild fermentation involves creating conditions in which naturally occurring organisms thrive and proliferate. Fermentation can be low-tech. These are ancient rituals that humans have been performing for many generations. They are a powerful connection to the magic of the natural world, and to our ancestors, whose clever observations enable us to enjoy the benefits of these transformations.

Recently, I made a 3-quart batch of sauerkraut from two heads of purple cabbage, weighing about 2.5 lbs per head. Here's how I did it:

Tools and ingredients: Sharp knife, 1-gallon stoneware fermenting crock (I bought one online from Simply Natural Foods for $30.50), wooden lid for 1-gallon crock, scrubbed and boiled rock to weigh down wooden lid, large plastic bowl, cutting board, something to mash the cabbage down into the crock (I used a 1-quart mason jar, you can use your fist if you want), 2 heads of cabbage (5 lbs), 3 tablespoons of non-iodized salt (sea or kosher).

You don't need to buy a starter culture -- there are lactic acid bacteria floating around in the air ready to go to work on the cabbage. I find that amazing.

For the rest of the instructions and lots of pretty (and one gruesome) photos, click the link below.

Steps:

1. Cut the cabbage into thin slices, then break apart and put into bowl. I usually cut a few slices, break them up, put them in the bowl, sprinkle in some salt, stir it up and repeat. Here's a photo of the salted cabbage:

2. Put the salted cabbage into the crock one handful at a time, mashing it down as you go along. It's important to pack it as tightly as you can, because that way the salt will draw out the water from the cabbage so fermentation can occur.

3. When all the cabbage has been packed into the crock, put the wood cover on it. If you don't have a cover, try a plate that fits, or a plastic bag filled with water.

4. Put a rock on top of the cover. The idea is to keep the sauerkraut submerged under the brine, because lacto-fermentation is anaerobic. If the cabbage is exposed to the air, scum will grow on it. Cover it with a cloth and put the crock somewhere out of the way. Once or twice a day, push on the rock to smash the cabbage down.

5. Unicorn chaser alert! About a week into the fermentation process, I removed the rock and was treated to this delightful sight. In Wild Fermentation, Katz writes: Many books refer to this mold as "scum," but I prefer to think of it as a bloom." I skimmed the stuff off, put the rock back on the wood disk, and covered it with the cloth.

6. Another week went by, and I decided to try the sauerkraut. The wooden disc had become so waterlogged and swollen that I couldn't lift it out of the crock. I had to make hooks out of a clothes hanger, insert the hooks into the hole of the wooden disk, and tug it out. It took quite a bit of effort to get it out, but look at the pretty magenta tint it received from soaking in the brine for 2 weeks!

7. The sauerkraut fit into three 1-quart mason jars, which I put in the refrigerator. I have some at least once a day, and frequently I have three servings a day. It lasts a long time around here because my wife and kids won't touch it. They do like pickles, however. I think I'll have to make some sour cucumber pickles using lacto-fermentation so they can join me in being a fermentation fetishist.

Yesterday's piece on investigative research in the blogosphere was one of the most polarizing pieces I've ever written, going all the way back to the first email essays I wrote in 1994. Those really upset a lot of people, because I saw where my industry, which now is pretty much gone, was getting swallowed up in the open formats and protocols, both technologic and human, of the Internet. Now, 15 years later, I stand by any of those pieces. I've become a better writer, for sure, I'm better able to anticipate people's objections, I have a better sense of what people are ready to hear, but every once in a while I just ignore all that, and write what I really think.

I had a good but brief talk with Howard Weaver, who proudly told me he had two Pulitzer Prizes, and who recently retired from McClatchy. We found we had a lot to talk about, and we're quite close in age, and I think for two aging guys we've still got some flexibility in our thinking. He lives in Sacramento, just a couple of hours away by car. I'm sure we'll get together, and when we do, I don't doubt it will be interesting and productive.

That said, a fair number of other people expressed anger at me and my piece, but always with remarkably honest words like "You seem to be saying" or "I suspect you believe" or somesuch. Those are big red flashing warning signs, your inner-editor should stop and ask for a rewrite, because you're using whoever you're writing to as a foil, somehow you want to express something, to be heard, and you need this crutch -- this symbol to be angry with. I wish somehow I could make people filter these things for themselves. We all want to be appreciated for our individuality, no one wants to be treated as a symbol.

Or I could just write a followup, like this one.

I also wrote a piece about economics, but if you take it at face value you'll see it's another media story. I had just listened to 1/2 of yesterday's Meet The Press, and was disgusted that the reporters on the roundtable were basing their analysis on a lie. Then later that day Jay Rosen, who is a great teacher of things I am very interested in, provided a framework for all this. The media and the people they interview have an agreed upon set of assumptions, Jay calls this the sphere of consensus, and it doesn't matter if they're true or not, and many of them are not. They have a finite set of them, so any reporter only has to master the list, and then each politico he or she interviews is asked to recite his or her poetry about each item on the list. They judge the quality of the pol by the quality of their prose and how ruffled they get. The more ruffled, the more points for the journo, the less ruffled, the more for the politico. It's a game.

There are some people who are regulars on the shows who clearly don't buy into this nonsense. Krugman for one. I was also struck by a Fresh Air interview with Chuck Todd last week where he explained how he was learning the ropes as a member of the elite priests of the Holy Church of Checklists. But I think of Todd as one of the few who think independently, and forms his own theses and tests them scientifically. This is my kind of journo. I also like Brook Gladstone and Bob Garfield, because they sometimes break out of this straight jacket themselves.

Ladies and gentlemen, whether you're a pro or an amateur, I think the real difference between the men and the boys, the women and the girls, is this. In these challenging times do we have the guts to admit that the government prints money, and accept the complexities that come with that, and ask our politicos what happens when they've exhausted that option, instead of asking them nonsense questions about cutting expenses or raising debt, and watching the politico just sidestep it and answer the question they really want to.

In other words, I think the reporters who get so angry with me are doing so because I don't buy into the Sphere of Consensus Jay talks about. Instead I buy into the Sphere of Don's Amazing Puzzle. I know that my eyes deceive me every day, they see only what they expect to see, and unless I develop methods to check my vision, I will keep believing in systems that don't work.

Dozer writes "With the Windows 7 public beta out, Ars Technica has an in-depth look at the release. There's praise for Windows 7's UI changes and polish as well much-needed changes to UAC, but also a warning that those who have problems with Vista won't like Windows 7 much better. 'If you couldn't stand Vista's UI (whether it's because you didn't like Explorer, Aero, Control Panel, UAC, or anything else), Windows 7 is unlikely to do much to help, as it builds on the same UI. If Vista's hardware demands were too steep, Windows 7 will likely cause you the same grief, as its hardware demands match. And if Vista didn't work with a program or device you need to use, Windows 7 will offer no salvation, as its compatibility is virtually identical.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm picking up a broken 1957 RCA Victor Deluxe 21" B&W television from a friend who's moving tonight, because she knows I like mid century design and rebuilding things. So, what to do with it? Secret bar with hinged top, hydraulic lift, and dry ice? Blond wood wormhole portal through space-time? Puppet theatre??

I've seen people build aquaria into them here, and retrofit an LCD panel into them here.

I'd love to hear your ideas in the comments.

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Remember back in the late 90s when people freaked out on various email lists when people would go nuts with the "reply-all" function, leading to annoying conversation threads no one wanted to be in on? Then, the rest of the world discovered how to properly configure email list management software, such that you could have discussion lists and announcement lists, and all was good in the world. Apparently, the US State Department never got that far, and it's just now coming to terms with the fact that incorrect reply-alls can be annoying. So, annoying, in fact, that the State Department has now sent a note to all foreign outposts, saying that it will punish those who abuse the reply-all function (thanks to everyone who sent this in) and complaining that reply-all "floods" were taking down the mail system in a form of a denial of service attack. Honestly, though, this just makes me wonder what the State Department is doing that its mail servers can't handle a bunch of diplomats hitting reply-all around the same time. That's quite different than a true denial-of-service attack. If that's really all that it takes to take out State's email server, I would imagine foreign hackers are gearing up a decent-sized real DoS attack on those servers by now.

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Today on Offworld we saw Super Mario in real life (with a guest appearance by.. Obama?), a new blog for cult Super Nintendo game Earthbound, still waiting for its long overdue official revival in the West, and listened to the soundtrack for one of our most anticipated DS games, EA's Henry Hatsworth. We also saw what happens when Mega Man takes on every boss character at once, looked at an indie community's fantastic mutual effort to create a 2D platformer engine and looked back at Klonoa, one of Namco's most underappreciated franchises, saw an awesomely retro-futurist version of Pong coming to WiiWare as part of a new PixelJunk-esque art-game series, and, as above, saw the first gorgeous Audrey Kawasaki-esque concept shots of Marian, the first full debut game from indie dev Infinite Ammo.

coondoggie writes "It's not the first time researchers have tried to emulate flapping as a way to fly aircraft, but US Air Force-funded researchers are now looking at how bats move to help them develop future micro-aircraft. According to these researchers, birds, bats, and insects have some highly varied mechanical properties that researchers have so far not utilized in engineering flight vehicles. The idea is to reproduce bat mechanics and develop technology could lead to small, remote controlled aircraft able to move in places where fixed-wing aircraft have a hard time — like the interiors of buildings, caves, or tunnels.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Former Make intern Jake McKenzie is part of the team of students at UC Berkeley who made the Efficient Cooling and Ventilation System, powered by the Make Controller:

Most cooling systems today do not take into consideration that compartments within the system may represent drastically different thermal loads.

...

The Efficient Cooling and Ventilation System (ECVS) attempts to solve this problem by controlling the intensity of airflow so that each compartment will receive an amount of cooling air proportional to its thermal demand. Instead of cooling each room evenly, more airflow goes to where it's hot, and less to where it's cold. This avoids overcooling compartments that are near ideal temperature while not compromising the cooling demand of the warmer compartments. If ECVS were implemented in the computer room example, it would restrict the cool air supply to all other rooms besides the computer room, allowing the central cooling unit to focus its cooling power on the computer system instead of the entire building. The cooling unit therefore runs at a much lower rate and uses only the amount of energy it needs.

Efficient Cooling and Ventilation System (ECVS)

Buy the Make Controller in the Maker Shed today!
A next-generation family of modular, programmable controller boards. The MAKE Controller Kit is an absolute delight to program, and connecting real devices to it is very simple.
Features

• Self contained unit--ready to connect to sensors, motors, etc. straight out of the box. No additional hardware needed.
  
• Comes with simple/common functions pre-programmed on chip for immediate experimentation. Download free software from MakingThings to begin programming/interfacing.
  

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