Un pobre guey writes "The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) press release claims that 95% of music file downloads in 2008, an estimated 40 billion files, were illegal. Oddly enough, digital music sales are up: 'The digital music business internationally saw a sixth year of expansion in 2008, growing by an estimated 25 per cent to US$3.7 billion in trade value. Digital platforms now account for around 20 per cent of recorded music sales, up from 15 per cent in 2007. Recorded music is at the forefront of the online and mobile revolution, generating more revenue in percentage terms through digital platforms than the newspaper (4%), magazine (1%) and film industries (4%) combined... Despite these developments, the music sector is still overshadowed by the huge amount of unlicensed music distributed online. Collating separate studies in 16 countries over a three-year period, IFPI estimates over 40 billion files were illegally file-shared in 2008, giving a piracy rate of around 95 per cent.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE: Flickr pool

Flickr member mskogly posted this heavily modified, psychedelic freak-out-mobile -

Noah (6) and Leo (4) creates their own art car. The original car is a pink barbie monstrosity (who gives a pink car to a boy?), that could only be improved by gluing a boxload of found trash and marbles on it.

Looks like some real fun was had here - definitely should be more toys out there designed directly by kids. - Toy Art Car Project 2008

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The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy has an opening for a science fiction writer in residence, paying $16,000 for four months' work at 14h/week. The work consists of "public readings, workshops, evaluation of submitted manuscripts, and one-on-one meetings with writers from the general public," with leftover time for your own projects.

My first experience with a real writer was when Judith Merril was the writer in residence at the Merril Collection (then called The Spaced Out Library). Judy read and critiqued my manuscripts and mentored and tutored me, and inspired me to be a writer. The collection is the largest public sf/f reference collection in the world -- you can get lost in the stacks for days.

There's one week left to apply for the position -- this is quite an opportunity!

Eligibility Criteria:

• Canadian citizen or permanent resident of Canada

• Minimum of five novels or short story collections of science fiction, fantasy or horror, published by a professional publishing house

• Active in the writing profession

• Experience in teaching creative writing

• Intend to work on a new project, normally intended for book-length publication

PDF Link

One of the great arguments of the digital age has been over the effects of video games on aggression — especially if you have ever heard the name Jack Thompson. A recent study suggest the counterpoint once again, that violent video games really don't have that much impact. "The authors performed six studies in total, but they were in broad agreement, so we'll only discuss the more compelling ones here. For the experimental portion, these involved playing an essentially identical game with different degrees of violent content. One group of participants was randomly assigned to play the game House of the Dead 3 on the different extremes of its gore settings, while a second was split between those who played the normal version of Half-Life 2, and a those who played a modified version that turned the adventure into an elaborate game of tag. In both cases, the primary influences on enjoyment were the sense of competence and satisfaction, along with the immersive nature of the game. Generally, females rated immersion as more important, while males went for competence (and consistently rated their own expertise very highly). Violence didn't register when it came to enjoyment, even for those with pre-existing violent tendencies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I remember a decade or so ago stories of online coupon offerings where companies would use a single coupon code, and not realize that people would share it with tons of others. However, those types of promotions went away after companies started using unique codes for promotions to make sure people couldn't share them too widely. Apparently, however, the folks who work for marketing at Carl's Jr. were unaware of how news of deals spread online. They offered up a promotion at a basketball game, where certain attendees were texted a code to download a coupon for a free burger. However, all attendees were given the same code... which was quickly leaked online and Carl's Jr. was forced to cancel the promotion after a lot more people than expected started to show up with the coupon. It's hard to believe that no one involved in the promotion had any idea that this would happen.

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Another homespun variant of the open source board - this time the design is driven by size with all components mounted on the microprocessor's back. An impressive feat made a little bit easier by using the Lilypad
Arduino variation which lacks acrystal - still way cool. [Thanks, Mook!]

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An anonymous reader writes to tell us that a company has demonstrated a new form of wireless communication that uses light instead of radio waves. "Its inventor, St. Cloud resident John Pederson, says visible-light embedded wireless data communication is the next step in the evolution of wireless communications, one that will expand the possibilities in phone and computer use. The connection provides Web access with almost no wiring, better security and with speeds more than eight times faster than cable."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that a company has demonstrated a new form of wireless communication that uses light instead of radio waves. "Its inventor, St. Cloud resident John Pederson, says visible-light embedded wireless data communication is the next step in the evolution of wireless communications, one that will expand the possibilities in phone and computer use. The connection provides Web access with almost no wiring, better security and with speeds more than eight times faster than cable."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Steven Johnson is the author of six books, most recently The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth Of America, for which he is currently on book tour. He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

One of the major themes of The Invention of Air, and one that will have special appeal to BoingBoing readers, is how committed Joseph Priestley and the American Founders (particularly Franklin and Jefferson) were to the open flow of ideas. Priestley used every available information network of the day to share his discoveries and insights: he published nearly five hundred books and pamphlets over the course of his life, and wrote endless correspondence to his colleagues, documenting in exhaustive detail the techniques behind his experiments.

When you read through those original documents and letters, there's a distinctly open source vibe to the approach that they all took. Franklin argued for sharing his scientific discoveries--sometimes before he was even convinced of their accuracy--because releasing early and often would "attract the attentions of the ingenious" who would then go on to improve his original discoveries. Priestley famously invented soda water during experiments at a neighboring brewery, and then happily gave away his formula to anyone who would listen. (Anticipating Cory's wonderful OpenCola project by a couple of centuries.)

I've been talking about this quite a bit on the various stops on the book tour, and it's naturally caused some people to ask about my own research method. And it turns out there's a pleasing symmetry between the story the book tells and the information networks of our own time, because this is the first book that I have written where Google Books played an absolutely indispensable role. An amazing number of Priestley's original writings (along with other texts from that period) are available from Google as downloadable PDFs, with scans of the original page design and typography, along with full-text searching. Many of these are texts that would be very hard to find even in a major research library, and of course, even if you could find them, you wouldn't be able to search them. (You'd barely be able to turn the pages, given how old the books are.) There are also some fantastic archives of correspondence available online, most notably the Franklinpapers.org site, which has a searchable database of every surviving letter Franklin wrote or received.

One thrilling thing about these Google Book resources is that you can now link directly to an individual page of a book that has potentially been out of print for centuries. We need to think a bit more about how to standardize these links, given multiple editions and multiple library sites that might have digital copies. But what you can see happening, slowly but surely, is the Memex and Xanadu and the Information Superhighway -- all those inspiring dreams of information utopia -- finally crossing crossing over into the vast universe of books. Slowly, over time, a page typeset in 1771 might start to get a whole new life, thanks to the growing authority we grant it through that elemental gesture of making a link.

So to bring things full circle, I offer up a link to the page where Priestley describes his discovery and technique for manufacturing soda water. I think he'd be delighted to know his words were still in circulation more than two centuries later.

In the past, we've noted various lawsuits where Google searches done by the accused were used against them in a court of law. There was the guy who searched on "neck snap break," days before his wife was murdered, and then there was the woman who searched on "how to commit murder" and other rather damning phrases like "instant poison" and "undetectable poisons," before her husband was murdered. In yet another such case, an investment banker has been convicted of a hit-and-run that killed a woman, after his Google searches soon after the accident turned up the phrase "hit and run." The guy had claimed that he believed he hit a deer, but his Google searches suggested he knew it was a person. Beyond just searching for the phrase hit and run, he also did searches on: "auto glass reporting requirements to law enforcement," "auto glass, Las Vegas," auto parts, auto theft, and the Moraga Police Department. Since the incident was in California, the thinking was he was looking to get the damage to his car repaired out of state to avoid any suspicion from the auto repair place. While the guy appealed the ruling saying that even with those searches he didn't have any actual knowledge he had hit a person, the appeals court didn't find that to be very convincing.

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Neil Chase at our advertising parter company, Federated Media says:

Several authors have recently found every ad zone on their pages filled with ads for Vimax, which is supposed to enlarge a certain body part. We don't run ads for stuff like that, and of course no FM author or staffer could possibly need it anyway.

But there's malware floating around out there that hijacks your computer's DNS settings and puts its own ads into your zones. Unlike regular viruses, it can attack both PCs and Macs. It seems to often come with free video-processing software.

If it happens to you, rest assured that it's happening only in your Web browser and not to your readers. Here's what to do:

* For Mac users: Apple's forums have info about a couple fixes in this thread

* For PC users, several people suggest Trend Micro's free HijackThis tool.

bsharma is amongst the hordes of people wanting us to share the news that long beleaguered retailer Circuit City has finally decided to close for good, asking for court approval to close the remaining 567 US stores. "Whalin said management mistakes over the past few years combined with the recession brought down Circuit City. 'This company made massive mistakes,' he said, citing a decision to get rid of sales people and other mismanagement. What's more, given the credit market freeze, Whalin added that no manufacturer wants to sell to any retailer who doesn't have money to pay for the merchandise. At the same time, Whalin said there's still a very slim chance that one or more firms that have expressed an interest in buying Circuit City could still buy it out of bankruptcy over the next few days."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bsharma is amongst the hordes of people wanting us to share the news that long beleaguered retailer Circuit City has finally decided to close for good, asking for court approval to close the remaining 567 US stores. "Whalin said management mistakes over the past few years combined with the recession brought down Circuit City. 'This company made massive mistakes,' he said, citing a decision to get rid of sales people and other mismanagement. What's more, given the credit market freeze, Whalin added that no manufacturer wants to sell to any retailer who doesn't have money to pay for the merchandise. At the same time, Whalin said there's still a very slim chance that one or more firms that have expressed an interest in buying Circuit City could still buy it out of bankruptcy over the next few days."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a little (free) Inaguration Day fun for the kiddies -- a downloadable paper model of Air Force One being offered by National Geographic -- part of a package they have on their site about the First Plane.

Build your own Air Force One

More:

• Hybrid Air Force One

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Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Frank Melton says that even though the city council voted against an ordinance making it unlawful for people to wear saggy pants he still intends to issue an executive order enforcing the dress code. The city council voted 4-2 against the ordinance, saying it was unconstitutional.

"I certainly respect the Constitution," Melton said, "but we have some issues that are much bigger than the Constitution."

I'm not going to argue with him. Anyone smart enough to fold a handkerchief like that (see above pic) must know what he's talking about. Here are a few simpler ones you can try.

(Via The Agitator)

Perhaps it's no surprise that, following the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, people are freaking out and blaming technology, as if that will prevent another terrorist attack. First, there were the calls to ban Google maps and now a large number of police are sweeping through all of Mumbai to find open WiFi networks and get the owners to shut the networks down. Of course, there are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons for offering an open WiFi network, but it seems that no one is even considering that. Because such networks were used in the past by terrorists and possibly could be again, they all must go.

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As you may already noticed, promotional efforts are currently afoot for the forthcoming film adaptation of Neil Gaiman's horror-fairytale Coraline. The animated film is noted for, among other things, being entirely handmade. It's also the first stop-motion animated feature to be shot in stereoscopic 3D.

As part of the promotional effort for the film, the studio, LAIKA, sent 50 unique, handmade boxes to their 50 favorite blogs. MAKE got one! Box #44 showed up at our doorstep. Our photo editor, Sam Murphy, took these pics. It's a gorgeous piece, beautifully executed and suitably strange. All of the boxes are different. Check out the one that NOTCOT got. Ours is "SEEDS," theirs is "WIGS." NOTCOT is also keep a page on all the boxes they find online.

Thanks for the cool swag, guys! We love you, too.

Official Coraline Website

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Alex Roussekov writes "The book "Zen of SOA" by Tom Termini introduces an original view to the challenging world of SOA. He refers to the Zen philosophy as a "therapeutic device" helping SOA practitioners to get rid of prejudices and opinions in order to apply a clear mind-set based on real-life experiences and the application of technology knowledge. Each chapter of the book is prefaced by Zen Truism that the author suggests to "revisit, reflect on it longer, and see if you are able to establish a truth from the narrative, as well as from your own experiences." In fact, the book is about a SOA Blueprint outlining a methodology for building a successful SOA strategy. The target audience is C-level Executives, IT Managers and Enterprise Architects undertaking or intending to undertake adoption of SOA throughout their organizations. I strongly recommend the book to all SOA practitioners involved in implementation of SOA." Read below for the rest of Alexander's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Planet of the Apes font, free for the taking. (Via Filled With Chocolate Pudding)

WorldChanging's Alex Steffen sez, "Politics is never a matter of perfection, but from time to time, politicians make decisions so massively wrong that they stun us. Such is the appointment of Ray LaHood for Transportation Secretary, whose qualifications are minimal and ideas are anachronistic:"

In case you haven't been following the news, LaHood is a conservative Illinois Republican with little transportation expertise and almost no administrative experience, who has earned a LCV lifetime voting score on critical environmental issues of 27 percent, and who maintains deep financial connections to the very industries he's now supposed to regulate. He may be no worse than most of those who've lead the Department of Transportation, but his appointment is a profoundly uninspiring vote for business as usual at a time when we need change, and an strong indication that the administration doesn't get that energy policy, technological innovation, urban planning, environmental sustainability and transportation are all bound up together, and no solution to our problems can be had without tackling them all together.

LaHood's appointment is so disappointing to transportation advocates who've been waiting eight years for change, that they're boiling with indignant disbelief, branding him "an unbelievably disastrous pick," "Status quo we can believe in" and "same.gov" (a dig at the Obama transition site, change.gov). As one insider summed it up: "It's a real read-it-and-weep moment."

LaHood supporters point out that the president-elect promised to appoint Republicans, and LaHood is trusted by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Obama had to throw Republicans a bone somewhere, they argue: why not Transportation?

Because given the crises we face, the U.S. Department of Transportation is not a minor agency. This year it had a $58 billion budget and employed almost 60,000 people. What's more, the Secretary of Transportation will guide the spending of vast amounts of stimulus spending, oversee the auto industry bailout and be responsible for a raft of critical policy decisions that will dictate the shape of our cities and the choices we have for getting around for decades -- and thus indirectly our energy policies as well, since transportation is where much of our energy use goes. In fact, in an era of climate change, energy crisis and economic distress, Transportation may be one of the most important posts in the president's cabinet.

Ray LaHood and Changing our Thinking About Transportation (Thanks, Alex!)

Czech artist David Cerny was given £350,000 from his government to oversee the creation of a sculpture featuring the work of artists from all 27 European Union nations.

Instead, he got together with his pals and made an eight-ton sculpture called "Entropia" that depicted Romania as a "Dracula theme park," the Netherlands as being underwater "with only the tops of minarets sticking out," Bulgaria "as a series of squat toilets," Sweden as being "packed into an IKEA box" and so on.

I think he should be paid double.

The original intention was indeed to ask 27 European artists for participation. But it became apparent that this plan cannot be realised, due to time, production, and financial constraints. The team therefore, without the knowledge of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, decided to create fictitious artists who would represent various European national and artistic stereotypes. We apologise to Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra, Minister Karel Schwarzenberg and their departments that we did not inform them of the true state of affairs and thus misguided them. We did not want them to bear the responsibility for this kind of politically incorrect satire. We knew the truth would come out. But before that we wanted to find out if Europe is able to laugh at itself.

At the beginning stood the question: What do we really know about Europe? We have information about some states, we only know various tourist clichés about others. We know basically nothing about several of them. The art works, by artificially constructed artists from the 27 EU countries, show how difficult and fragmented Europe as a whole can seem from the perspective of the Czech Republic. We do not want to insult anybody, just point at the difficulty of communication without having the ability of being ironic.

Grotesque hyperbole and mystification belongs among the trademarks of Czech culture and creating false identities is one of the strategies of contemporary art. The images of individual parts of Entropa use artistic techniques often characterised by provocation. The piece thus also lampoons the socially activist art that balances on the verge between would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space. We believe that the environment of Brussels is capable of ironic self-reflection, we believe in the sense of humour of European nations and their representatives.

Statement by Czech artist David Cerny

This may be the most disturbing robot video I've seen this year. Got a better one? Post it in the comments. Via Buzzfeed.

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An anonymous reader writes "Brian Aker has announced that Sun has open sourced the Netscape Enterprise Server under the BSD license. This is the evolution of the original server Netscape sold in the 90's during the rise of the first bubble. Almost twenty years later, Apache's original competitor is now made available for anyone to use under an open source license."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that Warner Bros. Studios and Fox have settled over the rights to Watchmen. It was pretty much a forgone conclusion once the court sided with Fox and said that Warner couldn't open the movie without agreeing to pay up. And, indeed, Warner will be paying a chunk of change, plus a percentage of the profits -- all for a movie that Fox had less than nothing to do with. Legally, it may be right, but from a common sense standpoint it makes no sense at all. Fox did everything possible to say that this movie should not be made. And it took none of the risks that Warner took... but now it gets a ton of money for it.

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As can be seen in this chart, "Google search results for "KH(Ax)N" for x=1 to 100," there's a real spike of "AAAAA"s around 40 and 50. That's a lot of reptitious typing! Also, you have to admire the bloody-minded preserverence of the folks over there at 97-100 "AAAAA"s. Also, RIP, Ricardo Montalban.

Google search results for "KH(Ax)N" for x=1 to 100 (via Negatendo)

Not only are these compositions for the SketchUp gingerbread house competition astounding, but I just love the categories. The Sprinkles price was awarded to the best additions made to a provided base model, the Swirl prize for best use of dynamic components, and the Sweet Tooth prize for most creative use of a single candy ingredient.

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theodp writes "Coming the day after it announced layoffs and office closures, Google's California Supreme Court filing arguing for the overturn of Proposition 8, which asks the Court not to harm its ability to recruit and retain employees, certainly could have been better timed. Google's support of same-sex marriage puts it on the same page with Dan'l Lewin, Microsoft's man in Silicon-Valley, who joined other tech leaders last October to denounce Prop 8 in a full-page newspaper ad. But oddly, Microsoft HR Chief Mike Murray cited religious beliefs for his decision to contribute $100,000 to 'Yes On 8', surprising coming from the guy who had been charged with diversity and sensitivity training during his ten-year Microsoft stint. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An article in the current issue of Make caught a new reader's attention so he wrote me to share a picture of his own custom-modded cargo bike.

I just picked up Make Magazine for the first time at a Barnes and Noble bookstore. I haven't read the whole thing yet but Peter Smith's article on the junk pedalers was very interesting. Especially since I also have made my own bike cart though I modified an ATV trailer to be pulled with a bike. You can view more pics.

I'll definitely be checking your 'zine out more.

In the bonds of creativity,
Nate Dressel aka Acewarloch

See also: Remake: Electric Cargo Bikes

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On Wednesday I attended the Brookings Institution's conference on "The Limits of Abstract Patents in an Intangible Economy." The conference was organized by software patent skeptics, so that perspective has been well represented. But I was struck by the dramatic differences between the views of lawyers on the one hand (who made up the majority of the panelists and audience members) and the handful of technologists on the other. The first panel focused on the economics of abstract patents, and included a mix of technologists, economist, and lawyers. All of the panelists spoke about the serious problems being caused by patents in the software industry and argued for dramatic restrictions on software and business method patents. The tone of the second panel, which focused on legal issues, was rather different. All of the panelists were lawyers, and although they acknowledged that the patent system had problems, and that these problems are especially serious in the software industry, their focus was on abstruse details of patent law. None of them supported explicit restrictions on software patents, and few seemed to feel any urgency about the need to rein in patenting in the software industry. I think this contrast is reflected in the broader software patent debate—patent attorneys and law professors who write about patent law are overwhelmingly in favor of patents on software, and prefer to argue about how to fine-tune patent law to get fewer "bad" software patents without invalidating the "good" ones. In contrast, a lot of computer programmers simply wish the patent system would leave them alone.

There are a couple of ways you can view this split. On the one hand, it's possible that the economists and technologists on the first panel are naive and don't understand the complexities of patent law. Maybe broad restrictions on patenting of software or other abstract inventions would have unintended consequences in other parts of patent law that only one schooled in the minutia of patent law can understand. On the other hand, the perspectives found on the second panel could be a reflection of the solipsism of the patent bar. Patent attorneys seem to have an unshakable faith that there's no sector of the economy that couldn't be improved by more patenting. I suspect that one reason for these different attitudes has to do with the role the two groups play in the software industry. Patent attorneys only interact with those parts of the software industry that participate in the patent system. When software engineers write useful software without seeking patents on it—a vastly more common occurrence—patent attorneys will, by definition, not be there. Therefore, patent lawyers are inevitably going to over-estimate the importance of patents to the software industry. In contrast, the average programmer deals with the patent system infrequently. For a lot of entrepreneurs, patents are basically a nuisance—they have to get some for defensive purposes, but they're not an important part of their business plans. For employees at larger firms, patents are basically irrelevant to their day-to-day jobs. No programmer starts a programming project by consulting the patent database.

As a consequence, the two communities have radically different views of how well the patent system is working. The lawyers certainly acknowledge that there's a problem, but they seem to find it incomprehensible that there could be a major American industry that's better off without patent protections. Techies understand that patents are not an important part of the software industry, and so they're much more likely to say that their industry would be better off without them.

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

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It excites me incredibly to know that a Cowboy Bebop movie is happening. But it makes me scared to think that Keanu is getting the lead in what might be my single favorite Anime series of all time. I'm very skeptical that he can pull off this role. For now we'll have to wait and speculate who the rest of the cast will be. I'm mostly curious who will get Faye Valentine. And we can only cross our fingers and hope that the soundtrack remains intact.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I learned something new today: shaving one Persian cat produces enough hair to make a handbag:

I won't be buying one anytime soon, but one must applaud the ingenuity!
(via Inhabitat)

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On his blog, Rudy Rucker writes about his recent visit to New York City. In addition to the many nice photographs he took, he included this old YouTube clip of Camper Van Beethoven's video, "Take the Skinheads Bowling," because he saw the band with his daughter Georgia, while he was there. (Georgia was the designer of The Happy Mutant Handbook.)

I’ve always loved Camper Van. They were big when we moved to California 25 years ago; Marc Laidlaw introduced me to their music. By now, the lead singer, David Lowry, reminds me of an eccentric old professor -— fit, dedicated, and prepared to speak out. My twin. They sang their big hit, “Take the Skinheads Bowling.” What a masterpiece.

“Last night I had a dream—it was about nothing.

Picturing New York by Rudy Rucker

This is quite an article. Very gratifying.

Twitter asks What are you doing? the Instant Outliner asks you to Narrate Your Work.

It's a project I developed in parallel with Radio 8, in 2001. We used it internally at UserLand to coordinate work among the people on the team who were in California, Seattle, Boston, Vancouver and Germany. We were spread across a lot of time zones and geography, but our work was remarkably well coordinated because we had what I think is the best management technology ever. As the manager of the team, I can tell you I never had a better read on what my guys were doing. I could see progress on various sub-projects, get feedback from everyone, build consensus, spot problems.

The reason why Radio 8 was such a great release was because we had a great workgroup tool -- the Instant Outliner.

We tried to release it as a product, but it didn't catch on. Partly, I think, because people were using Radio as a web server, and it was confusing that it was also an outliner. The mode flip blew up the suspension of disbelief. You had to really understand the technology to make the switch.

You also had to have a workgroup ready to use it, and that may have been the biggest reason it didn't gain traction. It wasn't hard for us to find individuals who were turned on by the idea, but when they in turn had to convince their co-workers to use the tool, that's when it fell down. It worked at UserLand because: 1. We were all techies. 2. I made it a requirement. 3. I was the boss. 4. But more importantly, I had their respect. And for some people it was impossible for them to get on board, they just weren't that organized or systematic in their work, but that may not have been apparent before we started using the Instant Outliner, it certainly became very apparent when we did. And it helped me, as the manager, know where I had to focus some attention, to help keep the individuals on track. Wouldn't have known it otherwise, esp in such a geographically diverse team.

Anyway, if people are interested, esp now that things like Twitter and FriendFeed are out there, we could try again. I actually have been working on and off on the I/O tool since we started NewsJunk last summer. During the Christmas break I took some time to convert it to run on top of FriendFeed's realtime API, and it make it much more efficient and much faster. They really do some good work down there at FF. Their back-end is a perfect match for the I/O front-end. (Which by the way, runs inside the OPML Editor.)

No matter what it's wonderful to see people discovering this work, and seeing it with new relevance given the state of technology today.

In his most recent Scientific American column, Jesse Bering writes about psychology research experiments from the 70s that could have been harmful to the researchers because they made unwitting subjects uncomfortable.

[O]ne very brave investigator set up shop in the toilet stall of a busy university restroom with a stopwatch and a periscope and used the latter to observe men at the urinals. “This provided a view,” the authors explained in the 1976 paper, “of the user's lower torso and made possible direct visual sightings of the stream of urine.”

If you processed that last sentence, you’re probably asking yourself why anyone would want such a good view of a stranger’s micturating penis. In fact, the researchers were trying to gain a better understanding of paruresis, otherwise known as “shy bladder syndrome” (or “pee-shy,” “bashful bladder” and a variety of other monikers). In extreme cases, someone with a shy bladder cannot urinate in public facilities such as airports, restaurants, or their place of employment. The idea behind this study was that invasion of personal space underlies paruresis—the closer another person is in proximity, the more trouble the pee-shy individual will have urinating. The restroom was therefore rigged so that, in addition to the observer in the toilet stall, another research assistant (called a “confederate” in social psychological parlance) stationed himself either at the urinal next to the unwitting participant or used the urinal farthest away from the participant.

Brave, Stupid and Curious: Dangerous Psychology Experiments from the Past (Via Mind Hacks)

Several readers sent in news of theoretical work bolstering the proposition that the universe may be a hologram. The story begins at the German experiment GEO600, a laser inteferometer looking for gravity waves. For years, researchers there have been locating and eliminating sources of interference and noise from the experiment (they have not yet seen a gravity wave). For months they have been puzzling over a source of noise they could not explain. Then Craig Hogan, a Fermilab physicist, approached them with a possible answer: that GEO600 may have stumbled upon a fundamental limit where space-time stops behaving like a smooth continuum and instead dissolves into "grains." The "holographic principle" suggests that the universe at small scales would be "blurry," its smallest features far larger than Planck scale, and possibly accessible to current technology such as the GEO600. The holographic principle, if borne out, could help distinguish among competing theories of quantum gravity, but "We think it's at least a year too early to get excited," the lead GEO600 scientist said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study says that people who are getting high-definition TV gear need to get an eye exam, too, so they can be certain they're getting the maximum benefit out of their new equipment. The recommendation comes from a study commissioned by -- wait for it -- a chain of opticians, which in no way calls into question the veracity of their argument. A spokesman for the chain says that even a tiny bit of shortsightedness can effect the quality of the picture a person sees. That's probably true, but won't the HD picture still look much better than the SD image regardless?

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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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "One commentator labels it 'another fly in the RIAA's ointment'. In SONY BMG Music v. Tenenbaum, the Boston, Massachusetts, RIAA case in which the defendant is represented by Harvard law professor Charles Nesson and a group of his students, the Judge has ruled that the hearing scheduled for January 22nd will be televised over the Internet. The hearing will relate to Mr. Tenenbaum's counterclaims against the record companies and against the RIAA. In her 11-page opinion (PDF), District Judge Nancy Gertner labeled as 'curious' the record companies' opposition to televising the proceedings, since their professed reason for bringing the cases is deterrence, 'a strategy [which] effectively relies on the publicity arising from this litigation'."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today's mod pic is the animated Hulk PC mod that advertises Maximum PC. Instead of being a modded case, it's more like the guts of a computer that got caught in an action sequence. Most of the pictures of construction are embedded in a Flash, so it's hard to use them here, but I'll still talk about what's so cool in this project after the break.

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Finally, the inebriated Canadian chemical engineering student we ran into on the streets of Vegas while he was dressed in a furry Yeti costume makes his Boing Boing video debut.

Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel Johnson says,

Our last — and dare I say least essential to the gadget nerd — video from CES is above for your enjoyment. It's also probably the one that most accurately portrays our day-to-day on the showfloor.

I have to say, I had a blast at this year's CES, hanging out with all the BBG and Boing Boing Video crew, as well as many of our friends within the industry. We puttered around like the dilettantes we are, drinks in hand, and just tried to enjoy the spectacle and the company, while still skimming off the strangest and most interesting products around.

But we couldn't have pranced around the place in good conscience if it weren't for the diligence of sites like Gizmodo, Engadget, CrunchGear, Oh Gizmo!, Shiny Shiny, Wired, Ars, and dozens of other gadget and tech writers out there sifting through products to sort the inspired from the insipid. There's no shame in having a good time when you're working, but I want to acknowledge the hard work of others when I see it.

We may all be competitors in the loosest sense, but when you're walking the floors packed primarily with local action news teams, morning madhouse DJs, and lifestyle section stringers for Ladie's Home Journal, it's hard to see all the other online tech writers out there hustling as anything other than friends.

If you prefer a direct MP4 download, well then just go ahead and download it why don't you?

Join the discussion over at Boing Boing Gadgets.

Although I primarily use Safari, this sure beats a bunch of horizontal tabs. And I'm guessing we'll eventually see iTunes-style thumbnail browsing in Safari. #

CWmike writes "The worm that has infected several million Windows PCs, Downadup or 'Conficker,' is having a field day because nearly a third of all systems remain unpatched 80 days after Microsoft rolled out an emergency fix, security firm Qualys said. Downadup surged dramatically this week and has infected an estimated 3.5 million PCs so far, according to Finnish security company F-Secure Corp. The worm exploits a bug in the Windows Server service used in Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003, and Server 2008. Qualys' CTO said, 'These slow [corporate] patch cycles are simply not acceptable. They lead directly to these high infection rates.'" This is indicative of why some are calling for Microsoft to rethink Patch Tuesday, as reader buzzardsbay pointed out.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Saying goodbye to Internet Explorer 6, via Twitter. #

Becky Hogge from the Open Rights Group sez,

After UK music collecting society people put out a video asking Gordon Brown to nearly double the term of copyright protection afforded to sound recordings in the EU, we thought we'd fight back.

Here, for your delectation is, "How copyright term extension really works". It includes the sad fact that most artists could receive as little as 50 (euro) cents from sales associated with the extended term, and may even be worse off when it comes to royalties from radio airplay. And yet the major labels - who continue to tout this flawed policy as a way to help starving artists - will pocket millions.

Those Europeans who want to do something about this, should write to their MEPs (UK, rest of Europe) and ask them to attend our European Parliament lobbying event.

How copyright extension in sound recordings actually works (Thanks, Becky!)

From the MAKE: Flickr pool

Anachrocomputer shares with us this handmade piece of digital days gone by -

Top view of the 300 baud acoustically-coupled modem that I built in 1984. I made the double-sided PCB myself with an etch-resist pen (Dalo pen) and some rub-down transfers. The main chip is the Motorola MC14412V single-chip modem, but there are also some LM311 op-amps and LM324 quad op-amps. The board is normally installed inside my Compukit UK101.

That's some well-kept shiny copper for a 25 year old board! Hmm, makes me wonder - what methods(if any) are people using to preserve their hand-etched circuits these days? - 300 baud modem, PCB

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From Ikeahacker, a moving, seasick composite table made from motorized Ikea Lack tables.

It's from an exhibition called Catalog that consists of 5 sculptures made from Ikea products. He says, "The Catalog (Blue Tables) are made from Lack tables, each one is cut and reassembled and includes a motorized leg that tilts the table gently up and down. The result is a wave-like motion.

Motorized Ikea sculptures (via Make)

Offworld has been challenged to a three-way online scrap with fellow gaming sites Rock, Paper, Shotgun and The Escapist. We've got 70 free accounts to use in Sony's Planetside to use to recruit our own army of Happy Super Mutants to destroy the enemy in good-natured virtual massacre. If you want to join us, pop over to Offworld to find out how to get a free key from me. Blog War! [Offworld]

theodp writes "With its example of how ' John Doe ' could be saved in a database as 'John Doe' (i.e., without leading or trailing blanks), purported patent reformer IBM dazzled the USPTO enough to earn Big Blue a patent last Tuesday for Automatically removing leading and trailing space characters from data being entered into a database system . The three IBM 'inventors' are also seeking a related patent for Retrieving data from a database system without leading and trailing space characters. Hey, if the patent system ain't broke, don't fix it!"

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Amenacier writes "Recent studies by Finnish and Swedish researchers have shown that drinking moderate amounts of coffee can reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease in people. The reason for this is as yet unknown, although it has been hypothesized that the high levels of antioxidants found in coffee may play a role in preventing dementia and Alzheimer's. Alternatively, some studies have shown that coffee can protect nerves, which may help prevent Alzheimer's. Other studies have shown that coffee may also help to protect against diabetes, another disease which has been shown to have links to Alzheimer's disease. However, researchers warn against drinking too much coffee, as 3 cups or more may cause hallucinations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Make a high-tech mood light from a flourescent lamp and a bunch of old memory chips.
Thanks go to Ross Orr for the original article in Make: Volume 09
To download The Bytelight MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the complete Bytelight article in MAKE: Volume 09 "The Bytelight"
and you can see that in our digital edition.

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Matt Wegner found Jeff Carter's cool IKEA furniture sculpture on IKEA Hacker. I love it, but I also think it would make me slightly motion sick.

The Catalog (Blue Tables) are made from Lack tables, each one is cut and reassembled and includes a motorized leg that tilts the table gently up and down. The result is a wave-like motion.

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Maker Profile - Steampunk premieres on Make: Episode 3 on makezine.tv at 7am CST January 17th

Make: premieres in a few new places this weekend!

Vermont
Burlington-Plattsburgh, (VT statewide)
Vermont Public Television
1/15/2009 Thurs 7:30PM

California
Los Angeles (San Bernardino)
KVCR
1/17/2009 Sat 12:00 PM

Illinois
Champaign & Sprngfld
WILL
1/17/2009 Sat 9:30 AM

Be sure to visit makezine.tv/broadcast or your local Public Television station's website for complete broadcast listings. If Make: isn't airing in your area, Contact Us to let your local station know that you're a fan of Make:!

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jammag points out a look at statistics from the Popularity Contest projects on Debian and Ubuntu. These projects track the download and upgrade habits of their respective distributions' users, revealing — no surprise here — that Ubuntu users are more likely to be newbies than Debian users. The numbers reveal, for instance, that 86 percent of Ubuntu machines use the proprietary NVidia driver, where only a mere sliver of Debian machines do. Likewise, Debian users are far more eclectic in their software choice, less likely to use any default options. The article concludes with a look at the limits of what conclusions can be drawn from statistics like these. "In general, Debian users seem more eclectic in their use of software than Ubuntu users, and less likely to use an application simply because it is included by default. Debian users also seem more likely to be concerned to maintain a free installation than Ubuntu users — a conclusion that is hardly surprising when you consider Debian's reputation for freedom, but is still interesting to see being supported by statistics. ... To what extent last week's figures are typical is uncertain. Very likely, studying the figures over a longer period would produce different results. Possibly, too, those who participate in the Popularity Contests are not typical users of either Ubuntu or Debian. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zimbabwe's hyperinflation has become so extreme that the treasury there is set to print 100 trillion, 50 trillion, 20 trillion and 10 trillion notes. 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars are worth about US$300. Wait. Now it's US$290. Quick, spend it, while there's still time.

Even vegetable vendors prefer the U.S. dollar, South African rand or Botswanan pula, and most workers now demand their salaries in foreign currency. Doctors and nurses have been on strike since last September, demanding salaries in U.S. dollars. The strike coincided with a cholera epidemic that now has claimed more than 2,000 lives.

Last week, the state media reported that most teachers had left their jobs. As a result, the end-of-year examinations taken in November are yet to be graded after the markers demanded their wages in foreign currency. Schools are yet to re-open this year awaiting the examination results

Zimbabwe to print first $100 trillion note

Make a high-tech mood light from a flourescent lamp and a bunch of old memory chips.
Thanks go to Ross Orr for the original article in Make: Volume 09
View the PDF

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An anonymous reader writes "In two weeks, older emergency locator beacons will no longer be monitored by satellites. USA Today noticed that 85% of private aircraft in the U.S. have not switched to the 406 MHz beacons. I thought I'd send up a flare about this. And this should not be relevant to the airplane which landed in the Hudson River today, as that was a commercial plane and its location was known by a number of bystanders, one of whom helped crash TwitPic."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The celebrated openness of the Internet in which internet providers are not supposed to give preferential access or treatment to any Internet traffic keeps quietly losing powerful defenders. Photo credit: Norma Cornes Internet providers are still free to sell higher-speed traffic and better overall service levels, but letting big companies like Google get an unfair advantage in distributing their content online just because they can afford to pay more, represents a big threat to the democratic and egalitarian approach independent web publishers have been vouching for. Net neutrality boils down to one basic concept: Don't make audiences pay for artificially-created scarcity. That means that Internet providers of all kinds can be still free to sell "bigger pipes" and better overall service levels at higher prices. What should instead not be allowed anymore is for artificial cartels of content and Internet bandwidth providers to gang together and create preferential access routes to their own content by virtue of reserving faster and broader chunks of their bandwidth to their commercial gang partners. Here is John Blossom reporting on this story:

Net Neutrality Spin: WSJ's Take on Google's Caching Plans Draws Fire

by John Blossom

WSJ vs. Google on Net Neutrality

Talk about a bad hair day for WSJ tech journalists. When The Wall Street Journal ran an article on a Google plan to add "edge caching" servers at key internet service provider facilities, this fairly common practice to accelerate content delivery to audiences via the Web was mangled into a political imbroglio. To wit, their lead:

"The celebrated openness of the Internet - network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic - is quietly losing powerful defenders. Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers."

Google was quick to correct the WSJ's outlook, as noted on their public policy blog and in a subsequent AFP story. Their point:

"Despite the hyperbolic tone and confused claims in Monday's Journal story, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open."

Intellectual property guru and net neutrality proponent Lawrence Lessig noted that his take on Google and the political ramifications of this move were a bit off-key in the WSJ article as well:

"The article is an indirect effort to gin up a drama about an alleged shift in Obama's policies about network neutrality. What's the evidence for the shift? That Google allegedly is negotiating for faster service on some network pipes. And that "prominent Internet scholars, some of whom have advised President-elect Barack Obama on technology issues, have softened their views on the subject." Who are these "Internet scholars"? Me... I've not seen anything during the Obama campaign or from the transition to indicate it has shifted its view about network neutrality at all."

Is the Open Web a Possible Future Scenario?

With more moving pieces than a Swiss watch in Washington right now, the current political environment surrounding net neutrality and other Web access issues during a transition in Washington's power brokers is bound to be subject to as much jockeying and bullying as possible. Today the U.S. Federal Communications Commission canceled a vote on making radio frequencies available that would provide free Internet access as a public utility, bowing to pressures from both industry advocates and politicians. There's a big push for open Web access, but plenty of pressure from all points of view keeping things comfortably in neutral for now. Net Neutrality and related issues such as public Web wireless frequencies seem to boil down to one basic concept: Don't make audiences pay for artificial scarcity. Carriers are still free to sell "bigger pipes" and better overall service levels, but artificial cartels based on reserving audience-facing Internet bandwidth for private use will only create more challenges for publishers in the long run. If you want to have proof that this is so, just take a look at the balkanized state of mobile service carriers that lassoed content providers for many years into deals for distribution on their private networks. What publishers now confront are scattered and overpriced deals for growing but underperforming mobile markets, even as the carriers now reach for ad revenue shares to sweeten their take.

Net Neutrality and Its Implications for Online Publishers

Proprietary mobile breakthroughs such as the iPhone and the Amazon's Kindle are great for publishers in many ways, but they represent a relatively small share of the potential marketplace for mobile content and ultimately just continue the myth that artificial network scarcity can benefit the publishing industry as a whole. All these devices do is lock publishers in to proprietary networks that are bound to make it harder to reach their audiences cost-effectively. The truth is that the fastest-evolving, most cost-effective technology changes are best for publishers, making it imperative to enable an environment in which mobile and Web technology providers are not resting on proprietary laurels that hinder the development of Web and mobile markets for publishers. Without these breakthroughs, the audience reach that content producers need to make mobile networks a highly profitable distribution medium is not likely to materialize. Let's keep the future of publishing out of the hands of companies that still can't tell us whether to dial "1", an area code or nothing extra to make a phone call to the next town. Net Neutrality will ensure that there is a cost-effective, rapidly evolving electronic distribution infrastructure that serves publishers best.

Originally written by John Blossom for Shore and first published on December 15, 2008 as "Net Neutrality Spin: WSJ's Take on Google's Caching Plans Draws Fire".

About the author John Blossom's career spans more than twenty years of marketing, research, product management and development in advanced information and media venues, including major financial publishers and financial services companies, as well as earlier experience in broadcast media. Mr. Blossom founded Shore Communications Inc. in 1997, specializing in research and advisory services and strategic marketing consulting for publishers and consumers of content services.

Photo credits: WSJ vs. Google on Net Neutrality - Olga Demchishina Is the Open Web a Possible Future Scenario? - Alfredo Angeles Net Neutrality and Its Implications for Online Publishers - Wikimedia Commons

For years, we've found it amusing when various technophobes or techno-pessimists would bemoan the fact that kids spent so much time online as compared to doing "real" things like reading books. This seemed odd to us, as there was a long period of time where the alternative was kids watching TV. It seems like having kids actively engaged in communicating with others through text is a great way to improve both reading and writing skills -- and there's been plenty of evidence to suggest that, in fact, kids writing skills are getting much better. And, now, the latest report finds that (despite Nick Carr's claim that the Google-era is killing our desire to read long form articles and books) more people are reading such things than just a few years ago.

Basically, the decades long trend of people (of all age groups and backgrounds) reading less seems to have been reversed. However, as Valleywag notes, the head of the National Endowment for the Arts refuses to accept the idea that the internet played a major role in the upsurge in reading. There certainly could be other factors -- and it wouldn't be at all surprising to find out a variety of different reasons for the higher reading rates, but it seems odd to out and out say the internet was a lot less important than other factors.

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Seth Godin asks the question, "When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?" And answers it: "deep investigative reporting." But that reporting is only two percent of the daily rag, and the other 98 percent is stuff the web does well:

What's left is local news, investigative journalism and intelligent coverage of national news. Perhaps 2% of the cost of a typical paper. I worry about the quality of a democracy when the the state government or the local government can do what it wants without intelligent coverage. I worry about the abuse of power when the only thing a corrupt official needs to worry about is the TV news. I worry about the quality of legislation when there isn't a passionate, unbiased reporter there to explain it to us.

But then I see the in depth stories about the gowns to be worn to the inauguration or the selection of the White House dog and I wonder if newspapers are the most efficient way to do this anyway....

Punchline: if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we'll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it's a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.

The reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.) Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction. The magic of the web, the reason you should care about this even if you don't care about the news, is that when the marginal cost of something is free and when the time to deliver it is zero, the economics become magical. It's like 6 divided by zero. Infinity.

When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?

Here's another tube amplifier kit that is pretty easy to build with some basic electronics skills. These amps make nice living room ornaments although the transformers on the top should probably be avoided if you have young children.

via UnPlggd

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An anonymous reader points out this report at News.com.au which says that "THE first Australian 'Google phone' set to go on sale within weeks has been delayed indefinitely, with the manufacturer Kogan forced to refund early buyers. In a statement released this afternoon, the company said the delay was 'due to future interoperability issues.'The Agora reached a very late stage of development, manufacturing had commenced and we were within days of shipping the product to customers," company founder Ruslan Kogan said in a statement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

London based ?artist Haroon Mirza makes interesting handmade music projects out of old speakers, homebrew amplifiers, old radios, motors, and buckets of water. This piece is called "Canon Remix" and plays off of the vibrations that these speakers cause. Check out the site for lots of videos of his other musical projects.

Haroon Mirza

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While we wait for the details of President-Elect Obama's "broadband stimulus" package to emerge, one aspect of such a plan hasn't gotten a lot of attention: just exactly what the government will consider to be a broadband connection. For a long time, the FCC considered anything that delivered over 200kbps downstream to be broadband, though last year, it raised the minimum cutoff to 768kbps. It's not a coincidence that's the minimum speed offered by many cable modem or DSL providers, making it seem as if the government standards were shoehorned to fit the market, rather than designed to encourage any growth or higher levels of service. So a key part of any broadband plan will be where the administration sets the bar for what's considered broadband, and what will be eligible for the government benefits. For what it's worth, Qwest has said broadband should be considered to be a minimum of 7Mbps, corresponding to service it's currently rolling out. It doesn't seem likely that the government would make the leap from 768kbps to 7Mbps in one fell swoop, but only by setting the minimum at a reasonable level -- and holding incumbent telcos to their commitments -- will broadband policy stand a chance of being effective.

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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This is a great instructable from the people over at oomlout that documents their process of getting an Arduino powered robot kit to the market. There are a lot of things to consider when setting up a 'tabletop factory' and this is a great resource for getting started. They cover everything from the tools they used, to final quality control of the finished products. There are a lot of tips and techniques that could help anyone interested in creating kits.

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).

More about How-to: Get 30 robot kits to market

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Gamasutra reports that Jolt Online Gaming is teaming up with Activision to revive the Zork franchise in the form of a casual, browser-based MMO. The Legends of Zork website provides some basic background information: "The Great Underground Empire has recently fallen and the land is in disarray. The Royal Treasury has been sacked. The stock market has collapsed, leading even mighty FrobozzCo International to fire employees from throughout its subsidiaries. A craze of treasure-hunting has swept through the remnants of the Great Underground Empire. The New Zork Times reports that trolls, kobolds and other dangerous creatures are venturing far from their lairs. Adventurers and monsters are increasingly coming into conflict over areas rich with loot. It's a dangerous time to be a newly-unemployed traveling salesman, but it's also a great time to try a bit of adventuring." Gamasutra also has a brief interview with Jolt's CEO, Dylan Collins. There's no word yet whether or not players are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The retro media centre was Thomas Thomassen's Final Major Project in BA (Hons) Modelmaking for Design and Media at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth -- it's an atompunk* tailfin fantasy that would look absolutely fantastic atop your giant console TV, serving as your home's media hub. Thomassen's documented the whole process from design to build -- great tips if you want to try it on your own.

Mini Media Centre: retro design - modern functionality (via Make!)

*Yes, I used "atompunk" solely to irritate you. Yes, you. Atompunk, atompunk, atompunk. Atompunk**.

**Steampunk***

***Howdyalikethemapples?

The Purple Pedals project consists of 20 solar-powered, geotagging, photo-taking, flickr-uploading bicycles called the ybike. It's also a really interesting look at why a major sponsor would fund such an unusual project. There is a great list of assets at the end of the post that you might want to check out.

So how does Yahoo benefit from the project? Compared to traditional marketing it's a hell of a lot cheaper. It's also more novel-instead of talking about innovation it actually makes innovation, creating self-generating press along the way.

More about the ybike 1.0

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Panasonic has released a firmware update for the Lumix DMC-LX3 digital compact camera. With version 1.2, the EXIF data is correctly displayed on all JPEG files. It also improves the white balance in flash mode when connected to the DMW-FL220 flash unit. Furthermore, the shutter speed is now correctly set while the image stabilization is turned on in the Intelligent Auto and Scene mode.

Just a few weeks ago, the NY Times had a blog post talking about how some recruiters were telling World of Warcraft players to avoid mentioning their gaming on resumes, as many employers were telling recruiters to avoid gamers, on the theory they "cannot give 100 percent because their focus is elsewhere [and] their sleeping patterns are often not great..." Of course, in different companies, you get very different views on that same subject -- and CIO magazine is running a profile of Starbucks' new CIO, where they actually play up the fact that he was "one of the top guildmasters" in the online game. In fact, those who have worked with him note that his experiences in WoW have given him more leadership ability than the MBA he also happens to have. So, for the WoW gamers out there who despaired after reading the NY Times article, perhaps just go looking for a different type of company.

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Thomas sent us a link to his Retro mini-media center build. Coming from a product design and model making background, I can really appreciate the work that went into this amazing PC enclosure. Thomas did a great job documenting everything from the initial sketches to the details of the build process. Thanks Thomas!

This is a mini site I put together for my Final Major Project in BA (Hons) Modelmaking for Design and Media which I did at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth. I have included materials which show most of the process I went through from the design sketches to the final product.

More about this amazing Retro mini-media center

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Retrovirus writes with a link to a Register story which says that the UK's "Ministry of Defence confirmed today that it has suffered virus infections which have shut down 'a small number' of MoD systems, most notably including admin networks aboard Royal Navy warships."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Retrovirus writes with a link to a Register story which says that the UK's "Ministry of Defence confirmed today that it has suffered virus infections which have shut down 'a small number' of MoD systems, most notably including admin networks aboard Royal Navy warships."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lastly, Panasonic has released the DMC-LS85 digital compact camera, a successor to DMC-LS80. Similar to the LS80, it is bundled with an 8.1 MP sensor and 2.5 inch LCD with 230,000 dot resolution. The optical zoom has been increased to 4x (33-132mm equiv) and the image processor has been upgraded to Panasonic Venus Engine IV. The camera also includes features such as MEGA O.I.S, Intelligent ISO Control, Face Detection and Intelligent Scene Selector.

Panasonic has launched the DMC FS7 and FS6, a pair of budget-level digital compact cameras. Both feature 4x zoom lenses, starting at the slightly wide-angle 33mm equivalent. Both the 10.1 megapixel FS7 and the 8.1 megapixel FS6 feature Panasonic's Mega O.I.S image stabilization system and the latest, fourth generation of the company's Venus Engine image processor.

Panasonic has introduced the DMC-FS15 ultra compact digital camera. This 12.1 megapixel camera with a 2.7 inch LCD incorporates a Leica DC Vario-Elmar lens with 5x zoom starting at 29mm equiv. It includes features such as AF tracking, Intelligent Exposure, Face Detection, Intelligent Scene Selector, Mega O.I.S. (optical image stabilizer), Intelligent ISO Control and HD video recording.

More on US Airways 1549, the plane that water-landed in the Hudson river in New York -- the first photo from the scene was this stunning image from Janis Krums from Sarasota, Florida, who put the photo in his Twitter feed as his ferry steamed toward the rafts to pick up the passengers. What a fantastic, iconic shot.

And Kottke has a fantastic roundup of amateur reporter coverage of the crash, everything from nautical charts and flight-path mashups to learned discussions of the effect of birds on plane-engines.

There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy. (via Consumerist)

Ryan Radia takes a look at the news that cable TV providers are teaming up to track viewing habits and questions whether or not there's a real privacy issue there. He comes to the conclusion that there isn't one for a few reasons. First, he notes that the data is anonymized and aggregated. That's true, but not very convincing. We've seen over and over again that there's no such thing as an anonymized dataset. There's almost always something in the data that can reveal at least some of the participants. Perhaps that's more difficult with things TV watching habits -- but not impossible. Next, he points out that the legal and PR impact of any real privacy violation would be pretty damaging on these companies. Finally, he suggests that the benefits of the tracking outweigh any negatives -- which, again is not very convincing. Just because a company can better target ads to you doesn't seem like an excuse to give up your privacy. That said, I do tend to agree that this isn't much of a privacy violation at all, but if the cable companies were smart, they should at least be extremely upfront about how the process works, and let people voluntarily "opt-in" to it, rather than being forced to join. Hell, they can offer incentives to do so. It's worked for AC Nielsen for years.

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Casemodder Sheyr produced this stunning Castle Wolfenstein-themed PC, called the FuG-01/ET. It features a field phone, bullet-holes (!), and has a matching keyboard and mouse. Bravo!

Besides the side-mounted telephone one of the most striking features on this case are the dual electric gauges. One measures amperage, the other core voltages. This can be implementing by simply buying some cheap multimeters that use a needle, mounting them into the case and attaching their leads to the system's power inputs.

As with many of the case mods I've covered the modder has once again taken the time to "distress" the paint job and give it a used look. This can be done simply by sanding the existing finish on a case, but for a great look you can apply a couple coats of slightly different colored spray paint (say, dark gray and light gray) and then sand certain areas to reveal the layers. The bullet holes are a great addition, it really lends to the feel of the unit.

I realize the "distressed paint" theme has shown up in several of my Best PC Mod picks... I guess it's because Make asked me to pick out the mods I personally found interesting, not necessarily the most complex or fancy. In my online journeys I've seen plenty of awesome mods, many award-winning, but to be honest if I didn't find them visually appealing I passed them over for this series.

Benheck's PC Mod Pick of the Day - Wolfenstein PC! (via Wonderland)

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez:

For two years now, I have been begging the U.S. Congress to loan me DVDs they have of congressional hearings so I can load them up to the Internet Archive. So, I was pretty steamed to see all 4 of the senior leaders of Congress cut a shameless ad for YouTube, making YouTube the official video purveyor of both the House and Senate.

Sure, they talk about how this is only one of many avenues that the modern new socially aware Congress will pursue, but you don't see Pelosi and Boehner cutting any ads for the Internet Archive or C-SPAN (let alone Yahoo or MSN).

In the case of the Internet Archive, the Speaker's actions are especially puzzling, considering Brewster Kahle is one of her constituents and I assumed probably even voted for her! I did note that the Google official PAC gave $34,000 to the four actors who appeared in their ad.

4 resources, decide for yourself if this stinks:

1. The Official Congressional YouTube Ad

2. My remix of that ad, replacing YouTube with yahoo, yowza, yippee. Just try and takedown this public domain data!

3. My report 2 years ago to Pelosi about their webcasts. Not like we haven't been waiting patiently in line!

4. The Federal Election Commission report by Google's PAC. Public.Resource.Org doesn't have a PAC.

(Thanks, Carl!)

In Minnesota, where it's -21F (that's -29.4C for everyone else), Birdchick is amusing herself with a spray-bottle full of hot water: shpritz it into the air and it turns into instant ice-needles that tinkle prettily to the frozen ground below. I love people who really know how to enjoy themselves, no matter what the weather's doing.

Too Cold To Go Birding (via Make)

LightLane is a concept gadget that paints a bike lane around your bicycle with laser-light as you pedal through the night:

Enter LightLane, a safety concept from the clever designers at Altitude, Inc. The system projects a virtual bike lane (using lasers!) on the ground around the cyclists, providing drivers with a recognizable boundary they can easily avoid. The idea is to allow riders to take safety into their own hands, rather than leaving it to the city.

Superb Idea: Bike Lane That Travels With You (via Dvice)

The British food watchdog is asking fast-food restaurants to add calorie-counts to their menus -- and want to adopt a set of "traffic light" labels that indicate dangerously high levels of salt, fat, sugar (or, presumably, eyeball-gnawing maggots, see post below). Pizza Hut is in.

Men in Britain now get a quarter of their food energy intake outside the home, while women get 21%. A number of chains, including KFC, Starbucks and McDonald's, already offer nutritional information on websites or leaflets, but now the catering industry will be expected to go far further. Officials at the agency hinted that if the calorie counting was a success, the drive for information could see an extension of the traffic light scheme, which applies to food sold in stores for home cooking and consumption. Red labels suggest levels of salt, sugar or fats are too high, amber shows they are at medium level and green at a low level. The calorie counting might also reduce portion sizes.

Food watchdog puts calorie count on the takeaway menu

Casu marzu is an illegal Sardinian cheese that is served riddled with writhing maggots that try to jump into your eyeballs as you eat it.

Casu marzu is considered toxic when the maggots in the cheese have died. Because of this, only cheese in which the maggots are still alive is eaten. When the cheese has fermented enough, it is cut into thin strips and spread on moistened Sardinian flatbread (pane carasau), to be served with a strong red wine.[6][7] Casu marzu is believed to be an aphrodisiac by local Sardinians.[1] Because the larvae in the cheese can launch themselves for distances up to 15 centimetres (6 in) when disturbed,[5][8] diners hold their hands above the sandwich to prevent the maggots from leaping into their eyes.[3] Those who do not wish to eat live maggots place the cheese in a sealed paper bag. The maggots, starved for oxygen, writhe and jump in the bag, creating a "pitter-patter" sound. When the sounds subside, the maggots are dead and the cheese can be eaten.[9]

Casu marzu (via William Gibson)

(Image: Snob food.jpg, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo in the Wikimedia Commons, uploaded by Shardan)

The Female Mechanics calendar showcases 12 woman mechanics working hard at challenging, technical jobs, looking competent, happy and awesome. Keith calls it a "21st century Rosie the Riveter calendar," and says, "I bought a copies for my daughters." Fantastic.

2009 Female Mechanics Calendar (Thanks, Keith!)

Instructables user dylan2106 writes:

I often find getting out of bed in the morning a bit tricky. When i have somewhere to be at a certain time, i get up pretty reliable. However when I want to get up it always seems that I manage to turn off my alarm clock before fully waking up. Put it on the other side of the room? Multiple alarms? Sooner or later I acclimatise, and fall back to old habits... This instructable will hopefully show you how to put your alarm under lock and key! This is the safety alarm clock.

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Emb3rz writes "DarkReading.com brings us news of a new approach to phishing that targets online banking sites. Here's the novel part of it: it doesn't involve any of the typical attack vectors we all know and love. Instead, it uses JavaScript from a remote page to detect if you have a banking site open, and prompts you for info via popup if you do."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The cost of basic fixed-line voice telephony is quickly falling towards zero. Plenty of companies offer free voice calls (with various hoops to jump through), and the cost of VoIP service continues to drop. This is trickling over to mobile voice service, too, as three of the top four US operators now offer unlimited voice and text plans for about $100 per month. But even that price ceiling is under pressure: Cricket and MetroPCS, two smaller operators that focus on the low end of the market (and don't offer the footprint of bigger operators), have been offering unlimited plans for under $50 per month, and today, Sprint's Boost Mobile brand joined them. It's unlikely that the major operators will enthusiastically fall into line, but in the current economic environment, it's hard to imagine these cheaper unlimited offerings won't pull some customers away and put pressure on the bigger operators' prices. The bigger operators still have a number of competitive advantages, including bigger coverage areas and a wider choice of handsets, but they may find those appeal to fewer consumers if the price gap remains.

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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Here's another Make: Books PDF excerpt, this time from Eccentric Cubicle. In the introductory chapter, author Kaden Harris explains the philosophy of improvisational fabrication:

A Maker's life is rarely fully funded, with an unlimited budget, a state-of-the-art shop facility, and a team of brilliant young assistants poised to spring into action and help bring a creative vision into reality. In terms of toolage, raw materials, and skillset/knowledge base, "work with what ya got" is pretty much standard-issue methodology for [insert really high percentage here] of us. Whether this situation ultimately proves to be limiting or liberating depends entirely on your attitude towards "comfort zones, working outside of."

Now, I've never met an out-of-the blue creative impulse that didn't warrant at least two sketches, a few Google inquiries and a cursory rummage through the parts bins. Before I know it, it's 6:00 the next morning, and I'm waist-deep in technology I know almost nothing about, watching the coffee distill, wondering "what the Hell was I thinking?" and counting down the minutes until the scrap yards open their gates.

Comfort zone? What comfort zone?

Over time, this seat-of-the-pants approach to Making coalesced into something that's almost definable, and definitely learnable: The Philosophy of Improvisational Fabrication. Common sense from a Maker perspective, it's based on the following pillars...

Follow this link for the full excerpt.

Previously:

• Fashioning Technology book excerpt: Sewing Soft Circuits
  

Buy Eccentric Cubicle by Kaden Harris in the Maker Shed today!

Who says office cubicles need to be dreary? In this book, author Kaden Harris of Eccentric Genius introduces aspiring and die-hard Makers to a highly entertaining parallel universe of surreal office-based projects that are sure to pique the curiosity of even the most jaded office mates. From desktop guillotines and crossbows to mood-enhancing effects and music makers, each project presents a different set of challenges and opens new avenues of Maker lore.

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When markets fall, a young stock trader's thoughts turn to water purification tablets and meat gel. Here's a snip from a feature in New York Magazine about freaked-out workers on Wall Street who gazed into the abyss with a closer view than the rest of us, and made survival plans:

In his book Wealth, War, published last year, former Morgan Stanley chief global strategist Barton Biggs advised people to prepare for the possibility of a total breakdown of civil society. A senior analyst whose reports are read at hedge funds all over the city wrote just before Christmas that some of his clients are “so bearish they’ve purchased firearms and safes and are stocking their pantries with soups and canned foods.” This fear is very much reflected in the market—prices of corporate bonds have been so beaten down at various points that they suggest a higher default rate than during the Great Depression. Meanwhile, while the overall gold market has fluctuated, the premium for quarter-ounce gold coins—meaning the difference between the price for gold you can hold in your hand and that for “paper gold,” such as exchange-traded funds—rose to an all-time high of 20 percent. “Gold is transportable, it’s 100 percent liquid, and it’s perfectly divisible in the context of ounces, bars, or coins,” says the head of a California research firm who keeps a supply of it, along with food, water, and guns, on hand. “And most important, there’s no counterparty”—i.e., it’s an investment beholden to no one, and perhaps one of the few assets that will retain value if the financial system collapses.

While it may look like these Wall Streeters are betting on such a collapse, their embrace of survivalism is an outgrowth of their professional habits of mind: Having observed the economy’s shaky high-wire act from their ringside seats, they are trying to manage their risk and “hedge” against a potential fall. “It’s like insurance,” says an investor who has stockpiled MREs and a hand-cranked radio. “And by the time you need it, it’s way too late.” Leave it for others to weep for the collapse of the social order. These guys would prefer to be in a high-speed boat or ex-military vehicle, heading off toward their fully provisioned compounds in pursuit of the ultimate goal: to win the chaos.

What's Making Hedge-Funders Paranoid (NY Mag)

Image: Here is what an MRE (Meal Ready to Eat) looks like when you are ready to eat it. The Flickr user who shot and uploaded this, Adam Henning, says "This is Chicken with Salsa, one of the better (yes, I said better) MREs that they Army makes."

This is hardly the first time we've seen high school administrators try to censor the student newspaper because they were upset about article -- only to find the students simply moved over to the web and were able to get their message out to a much wider audience. The latest, coming to us via Romenesko, involves a student newspaper in Faribault, Minnesota. The superintendent got upset that the students wouldn't share the results of an investigative report before publishing it, and so he shut down the newspaper completely.

Without skipping a beat, the students set up shop online, entirely independent from the school (they even got a site that hosts student newspapers to give them free hosting). They'll continue to publish, but without support from the school (though, the teacher who was an adviser to the paper, will continue to informally advise the team). Basically, the students are realizing what plenty of others have discovered in the past: it's tough to shut people up these days, now that there's a big internet out there. The superintendent who shut them down doesn't seem to mind much either, saying: "It's well within their right. Any group of students could put together a website like that. That's the way life is in this electronic age." Of course, if that's the case, why did he bother shutting down the paper in the first place?

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Today on Offworld we saw two Resident Evil revivals with both an Umbrella Umbrella and a mod team's attempt to recreate the whole of Raccoon City inside Valve's Left 4 Dead. We also saw a new iPhone game/app that lets you solve or incite a lover's quarrel musically, and pondered Minotaur China Shop creator Flashbang's newest game, based on its rhythmic-squid inspiration. Elsewhere we banked with Space Invaders, saw the Dude-a-Day dude abiding with games related dudes, picked our way through a fantastic set of 8-bit inspired pixel fonts, and saw how Guitar Hero 1.0 would have fared in the text-adventure era. Finally, we saw Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto and Will Wright's Spore honored by none other than the Jim Henson Company, listened to an unofficial but officially sanctioned Fallout 3 soundtrack, and got early word that Leonard Nimoy-voiced Dreamcast sim Seaman might be hitting the DS, as its iPhone related spin-off gets rejected by Apple.

Current contributor Zouheir Alnajjar lives in Gaza, and he produced this video segment about a group of young men identified as "Palestinian militants who make - and set off - homemade rockets headed for Israel." The video includes details on how chemical compounds in these homemade weapons are isolated from readily available, free materials, such as animal waste. This was filmed before the recent attacks that lead to the current combat. Snip from video description:

For years Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas have fired these homemade rockets into Israeli towns and settlements as a means of resistance against the IDF and Israeli occupation or embargoes. Thousands of rockets have fallen on Israel and over a dozen have been killed. Collective Journalism, Current's citizen journalism program, works by combining perspectives from around the world to create a picture of the world we live in.

Gaza Rockets (Current.com, thanks Brent Marcus)

It's funny how you can use a technology countless times and the knowledge of how it works can still rank somewhere between very little and zero. In the spirit of taking things apart and in the interest of getting to know everybody's favorite media format in more intimate detail, Björn Edström dissected the MP3 format and created this most excellent manual for making your own MP3 decoder from the ground up.

Even though MP3 is probably the single most well known file format and codec on Earth, it's not very well understood by most programmers - for many encoders/decoders is in the class of software "other people" write, like standard libraries or operating system kernels. This article will attempt to demystify the decoder, with short top-down primers on signal processing and information theory when necessary. Additionally, a small but not full-featured decoder will be written (in Haskell), suited to play around with.

This article reminded me of a bunch of Commodore 64 manuals I've been hanging on to. These are the 6 page user guides that came inside the box when you purchased something like a printer or a modem. Most of them, right on the back page, have a printout of driver code for the device. You would literally type in the source code off this single page, toss it in your own programs, and you'd understand exactly how the device worked from the moment you started using it.

I've got way cooler things than a 300 baud modem on my desk these days, and I can appreciate that I likely won't ever have the same level of deep knowledge with these devices, not like I did with the stuff I played with in the 80's. That said, it's awfully illuminating to dig all the way down from time to time, to get familiar with the inner details of the technology you use every day.

Let's build an MP3-decoder!

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BobB-nw writes "The U.S. federal government is accelerating its efforts to secure the Internet's routing system, with plans this year for the Department of Homeland Security to quadruple its investment in research aimed at adding digital signatures to router communications. DHS says its routing security effort will prevent routing hijack attacks as well as accidental misconfigurations of routing data. The effort is nicknamed BGPSEC because it will secure the Internet's core routing protocol known as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). (A separate federal effort is under way to bolster another Internet protocol, DNS, and it is called DNSSEC.) Douglas Maughan, program manager for cybersecurity R&D in the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, says his department's spending on router security will rise from around $600,000 per year during the last three years to approximately $2.5 million per year starting in 2009."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EFF and the ACLU has filed yet another lawsuit against the government, highlighting another scary abuse of power that feels straight out of a police state, rather than the free society we supposedly live in. Specifically, the FBI and other law enforcement officials raided the offices of two different activist organizations and seized all of their computers. There are two issues here that are important. First, if the FBI was concerned about the computers being used in commission of a crime, they easily could have followed the same policies used to get records off of computers at libraries (part of the issue is that these organizations offer public access computers to folks visiting their offices). The second issue is that both organizations act as publishers, and federal law makes it clear that the government can't just seize computers of publishers except in extremely narrow circumstances. So, in either circumstance, the Feds should not have seized the computers.

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Steampunk maker Professor Fzz rebuilt a hydrogen/oxygen rocket kit into a thing of Victorian era beauty. He used a 12V 3.3Ah lead-acid battery to generate the hydrogen, and built a control system to monitor battery charge and fire the rocket. He also built his own spark igniter from a voltage generator, and constructed a lovely copper-pipe lanuchpad. Gorgeous work.

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The Tap'd Instructables contest is generating some really cool entries, including this soda-bottle-based herb garden:

Any suggestions on maximum plant size that will work with this much soil space?

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