There has been a series of complaints from the White House press pool since President Obama was sworn in last week, about the fact that he's apparently not living up to his promises of transparency -- specifically in that he hasn't been giving those mainstream press members access to certain things. However, as Ethan Kaplan notes, transparency and access to the media are not the same thing -- and if the administration is putting up all of the information on the web where anyone can get it, rather than just handing stuff to the media, isn't that a lot more transparent? This is a good point, and it will certainly be worth watching how things change over time. Transparency is important, but transparency can be done in many ways, and routing around the media is certainly one of those ways -- no matter how angry it may make the press.

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By the late 1950s, postwar prosperity enabled Motorola to advocate a radio in every room in the house (as shown in the graphic that’s partially visible here). The radios were styled appropriately. These designs were made affordable, and more reliable, by the advent of printed circuit boards, fabricated initially from compressed cardboard. Vacuum tubes still imposed design limits, while the exclusive availability of AM sound meant that tone controls were irrelevant, and thus mostly nonexistent.

This character is a newly discovered sea squirt that, unlike almost all other sea squirt species, eats meat. Its "mouth" is the funnel-shaped structure that traps fish inside. The 20-inch creature was found at a depth of 13,143 feet near southern Tasmania, Australia. It's one of several animals recently discovered in the region by a team Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and the California Institute of Technology. From National Geographic:

The four-week voyage, which ended on January 17, 2009, found evidence that global warming may be linked to dying coral reefs in the ocean depths, expedition members say.

"Bizarre" Species Found -- Predatory Squirt, More

surely_you_cant_be_serious writes "Best Buy has opened up proprietary product catalog data in its online store through an open API. Through the Remix API, Best Buy can track how many people are using its information, while users can check to see where a certain product is available without visiting Best Buy's site. Web developers and bloggers can also sign up to become an official Best Buy affiliate. If approved, they can get a small percentage of a sale if someone makes a Best Buy purchase through from their site."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a couple weeks, I'm going to see a performance by the Gutter Twins, the joint project of Afghan Whigs/Twilight Singers frontman Greg Dulli and Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age fame. (If you haven't heard the Gutter Twins album, Saturnalia, it's a deeply moving and soulful collection of neo-gothic gospel.) Having emerged from Seattle's influential Sub Pop music scene in the 1990s, Lanegan was also a close friend of the late Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. Here's a duet of those two singing a searing rendition of Leadbelly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night."

Sparkfun offers another great skill-building workshop for circuit-heads in the Boulder, CO area -

We'd like to invite you to come join us for a 2 hour class on February 11th where we will share some of the tricks and techniques for solder paste application and reflow that we use here are SparkFun. SMD soldering using solder paste is the industry norm. We never had a class on how to stencil paste onto a board or how to reflow a board - we're self taught and non-orthodox.

We will be broadcasting this class free of charge, but we cannot guarantee the quality or availability. All of the topics covered in this course are covered in the Stenciling tutorial. This class will give you hands on experience. You will actually build a SparkFun electronics devices while you are here.

February 11th, 5-7pm @ Sparkfun Production - Stenciling Solder Paste

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[Photo: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid] Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Gareth Branwyn writes on technology, pop and fringe culture. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Maker Media. Recent projects have included co-creating The Maker's Notebook and editing The Best of MAKE and The Best of Instructables collections. Hello Wonderful World o' Boing Boing! I can't tell you how thrilled I am to have this opportunity. I was at a party this weekend and told someone I was about to start blogging here. “You'll have the eyes of the world on you!,” he blurted. Gulp. I'll try to only use my powers for good (and not think about how high and centrally located this soapbox might actually be). I'm especially excited to have the opportunity to blog about anything other than technology and science. I've been hand-to-hand in the personal and DIY technology trenches for a long time now and I'm looking forward to scrabbling over the top for a few weeks to fight the good fight on some other fronts. Which ones? I'm going to be making a lot of it up as I go along (the kicks are more exciting that way), but there are personal themes I'll likely fall back on. I've been slowly, but surely, writing a novel over the last two years (my first). It uses occult themes as the carrier waves on which travels the real story (about love, open source gnosis, and DNA-rearranging sex). So, I'm going to use this time as an excuse to openly research material for my book (and share interesting things I've already uncovered). I'm also a music fanatic and I miss my Mondo 2000 and bOING bOING days when I got to indulge that passion in public. So I'll likely be raving about what's on heavy rotation in my digital library. Back in my zine days, I also did a lot of coverage of, and participated in, mail art. I just recently started poking around the Web to see what sorts of mail art is happening these ays. So, I'll be sharing some of that, too. I also have ideas for some collaborative projects I might try and cajole you all into undertaking with me. We'll see. Again, a million thanks to Mark, David, Cory, Xeni, et al, for this opportunity. So, let the sex, drugs, rock n' roll, black magick, and collaborative mail art begin!

WATCH: Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here.

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Today's episode of Boing Boing video is the second in a series of excerpts we're featuring from OUTLAWED, a film produced by WITNESS, in partnership with more than a dozen other human rights groups around the world. Here was our previous installment.

In this episode, we meet a German citizen named Khaled El-Masri, who survived kidnapping, extraordinary rendition, and torture at the hands of the U.S. government and foreign governments acting on its behalf. His case has been the subject of New York Times editorials and involved a widely-reported lawsuit seeking justice in the US, which was thrown out and is now on appeal.

Here is a snip from his description of what happened when he was abducted and transferred to a CIA "black site" prison:

Here is my story. On December 31, 2003, I boarded a bus in Ulm, Germany for a holiday in Skopje, Macedonia. When the bus crossed the border into Macedonia, Macedonian officials confiscated my passport and detained me for several hours. Eventually, I was transferred to a hotel where I was held for 23 days. I was guarded at all times, the curtains were always drawn, I was never permitted to leave the room, I was threatened with guns, and I was not allowed to contact anyone. At the hotel, I was repeatedly questioned about my activities in Ulm, my associates, my mosque, meetings with people that had never occurred, or associations with people I had never met. I answered all of their questions truthfully, emphatically denying their accusations. After 13 days I went on a hunger strike to protest my confinement.

On January 23, 2004, seven or eight men entered the hotel room and forced me to record a video saying I had been treated well and would soon be flown back to Germany. I was handcuffed, blindfolded, and placed in a car. The car eventually stopped and I heard airplanes. I was taken from the car, and led to a building where I was severely beaten by people's fists and what felt like a thick stick. Someone sliced the clothes off my body, and when I would not remove my underwear, I was beaten again until someone forcibly removed them from me. I was thrown on the floor, my hands were pulled behind me, and someone's boot was placed on my back. Then I felt something firm being forced inside my anus.

I was dragged across the floor and my blindfold was removed. I saw seven or eight men dressed in black and wearing black ski masks. One of the men placed me in a diaper and a track suit. I was put in a belt with chains that attached to my wrists and ankles, earmuffs were placed over my ears, eye pads over my eyes, and then I was blindfolded and hooded. After being marched to a plane, I was thrown to the floor face down and my legs and arms were spread-eagled and secured to the sides of the plane. I felt two injections, and I was rendered nearly unconscious. At some point, I felt the plane land and take off again. When it landed again, I was unchained and taken off the plane. It felt very warm outside, and so I knew I had not been returned to Germany. I learned later that I was in Afghanistan.

Just this Saturday, Mr. El Masri filed a damages lawsuit against the government of Macedonia for their role in his unlawful abduction and detention five years ago.

"This lawsuit is possibly the last opportunity for Khaled El Masri to receive justice," said James A. Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative. "Macedonia has a chance to step up and show that it will not tolerate complicity in human rights violations by its security services."

Macedonian security forces in December 2003 seized El Masri at a border crossing with Serbia, and held him -- incommunicado -- for 23 days. El Masri was handed over to the CIA and flown to a detention center in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was interrogated and tortured. After several months, El Masri was finally released and dumped on a roadside in Albania. He was never charged with a crime.

OUTLAWED was produced around the time when the Council of Europe issued a report on the topic of rendition and torture involving America's "War on Terror." To document why those issues matter, WITNESS created a coalition with a number of US human rights and social justice 'project partners' such as Amnesty and the ACLU to distribute the video.

You can watch the film in entirety at links provided here, or purchase the documentary on DVD.

(Special appreciation to Boing Boing Video producer Derek Bledsoe. Sincere thanks to Bryan Nunez, Grace Lile, and Yvette J. Alberdingk Thijm from WITNESS. Music in this episode graciously provided by Amon Tobin / Cinematic Orchestra. Inset photo: AP)

Previously on Boing Boing Video:
"OUTLAWED" excerpts, pt. 1 -- Guantánamo Detainee Who Survived Torture.

Link to Boing Boing Video Archives.

It appears that GateHouse Media and the NY Times have settled their dispute over the NYT's Boston Globe linking to GateHouse's local events site with a snippet of the text (something GateHouse's own sites did as well). GateHouse had little to no chance of winning in court, but it looks like the NY Times totally caved in to avoid having to deal with a long and costly lawsuit. The result is pretty much bad for everyone.

It's bad for the NY Times, because in settling they've almost guaranteed that plenty of other companies will now come seeking similar "settlements." It's bad for GateHouse Media because in winning "the battle" they're losing the war. The NY Times/Boston Globe will no longer be sending them the traffic they were getting in the past. It's hard to describe the level of pure cluelessness that goes into actively turning away the kind of traffic a major media publication can provide. It's bad for readers of both sites, because it limits the usefulness of the content they get. And... most importantly, it's bad for everyone in failing to have a hard and fast precedent set that linking to such sites and including the headline and a snippet are clearly fair use. What a shame.

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CWmike writes to tell us that artificial intelligence and robotics have made another wobbly step forward with the most recent robot from Stanford. "Stair" is one of a new breed of robot that is trying to integrate learning, vision, navigation, manipulation, planning, reasoning, speech, and natural language processing. "It also marks a transition of AI from narrow, carefully defined domains to real-world situations in which systems learn to deal with complex data and adapt to uncertainty. AI has more or less followed the 'hype cycle' popularized by Gartner Inc.: Technologies perk along in the shadows for a few years, then burst on the scene in a blaze of hype. Then they fall into disrepute when they fail to deliver on extravagant promises, until they eventually rise to a level of solid accomplishment and acceptance."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an idea for a basic, but useful, Arduino project for the relative beginner. It uses an Arduino, an Ethernet Shield, and a Latronix Xport Direct to control a servo-mounted webcam over the net.

Arduino Webcam Servo Project

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Car radios in the 1930s were plagued with electrical interference from naked electrical sparks in the automotive ignition system. This Super Power Auto Radio contains a “Magic Eliminode” (presumably, a diode in the power supply) so that you won’t need a “spark plug suppressor” (a capacitor on the electrical system), but I’ll bet some crackle was still audible.

The “universal control” that could be mounted at the center of the steering column seems an exciting idea—but in an era before pushbuttons, let alone signal-seeking electronics, you would have been finding your favorite stations by peering at the tuning dial. Today, in a more safety-conscious era, the dual threat of regulation and litigation would make such a device vanishingly implausible.

As guest blogger here for the next two weeks, I'm going to introduce myself mostly by using the word “former.” I am a former science-fiction writer and editor, former publisher of little magazines, former instructor of computer graphics, former computer programmer and author of computer books, and former senior writer at Wired magazine. These days I design and build prototypes of quasi-medical equipment to induce rapid cooling after cardiac arrest, am writing an introduction to electronics, and am a section editor for Make magazine. I'm serious about photography and I love exploring the western states.

I have a wide range of obsessional interests, which will color my blog entries. Some will be “lite” while others may be opinionated.

I'll start lite.

The Motorola Museum: 1

The headquarters of Motorola in Schaumburg, Illinois contains a museum where the company's innovative history is illustrated with beautiful presentations of past products. I visited the museum about 10 years ago. I’m not sure of its current status.

My favorite exhibits showcase the golden age of radio, when vacuum tubes still ruled—although their power consumption required substantial lead-acid batteries in portable equipment, making it heavy and bulky as a result.

No sign of a headphone jack for the Motorola sports radio; perhaps your companions would be so enthralled by the magic of portable game commentary, they'd be happy to put up with the noise.

Two very sweet high-end pieces of hardware arrive in our Maker Shed for the discerning Arduinaut -

Arduino Nano

Arduino Nano is a surface mount breadboard embedded version with integrated USB. It's small, complete, and breadboard friendly. It has everything that Diecimila has (electrically) with more analog input pins and onboard +5V AREF jumper. Physically, it is missing power jack and power select jumper. Since the Nano is automatically sense and switch to the higher potential source of power, there is no need for the power select jumper.

The size & features of the Nano seems perfect for squeezing Arduino control into a preexisting enclosure … say maybe a guitar pedal?- Arduino Nano Board

TouchShield Stealth

The TouchShield is a 128×128 pixel OLED screen on a PCB shield. It is Arduino-ready and brings advanced I/O capabilities to the Arduino platform! This is the new Stealth Edition, which has an all-blacked out board that looks pretty slick on top of the dark blue Arduino. It’s also higher quality, machine soldered and assembled, with a few internal trace re-routes to make it a little lighter, faster, and power-redundant. Compiling and uploading applications to the TouchShield is done through a one-click button in the Arduino Environment, making it easy to write awesome applications.

Countless applications for a nice screen like this hmmm mayhaps some 3D graphics? - TouchShield Stealth

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It looks like attempts at patent reform this year may come in small pieces, rather than a big comprehensive plan. For example, Rep. Adam Schiff and Rep. Darrell Issa have reintroduced some new legislation that would create a pilot program to enroll certain judges in a program to educate them on patent issues. On the face of it, this sounds good. After all, more education on issues related to patents seems like it should help avoid some of the more ridiculous outcomes we've seen in patent courts in the past. So, it's no surprise that some are excited about this proposed program.

However, just as when similar legislation was introduced in the past, I'm worried about unintended consequences. Specifically, there's a big question in terms of who is going to be doing this "educating" and what the "curriculum" will entail. After all, when a specialized patent court, the CAFC, was first created, even though not all judges involved were patent lawyers, those who had less experience simply deferred on many issues to those who came from that world -- and, as we've seen too often, patent attorneys view the world differently than many technologists -- and seem to think that patents are the answer to many questions. So, if the "education" program simply comes from patent attorneys, then the end result could be much, much worse, because judges will have been taught only one side of the issue. That would be very troubling.

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mikemuch writes "IE8 has left beta as of noon Pacific time today. The development team now considers the browser platform- and feature-complete, but won't say how long until it goes gold. PCMag.com got an early look and has posted a full review of Internet Explorer 8 RC1. The release candidate differs only slightly from Beta 2, most notably in tweaks to its InPrivate Browsing feature, aka porn mode. That feature has been decoupled with InPrivate Filtering, which blocks third-party content providers from creating profile of your browsing habits. RC1 also improves on performance, especially in startup time, but still trails Firefox and Chrome in JavaScript speed. Protection against the relatively new threat of 'clickjacking,' where a site tries to get you to press buttons underneath a sham frame page, has also been added — the first browser to include such protections. Versions for 32-bit and 64-bit Vista, as well as for 32-bit XP are available, but Windows 7, which will ship with IE8, is stuck with an older beta for now."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackszine fans and readers, the Hackszine site is moving to a section of MAKE soon http://blog.makezine.com/archive/hacks/ - we're doing *a lot* of site updates on MAKE and this is the easiest way for us to do this and still keep the hacks content flowing. If you read hackszine via RSS you might not notice, but if something odd happens please let us know.

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Chris Edmundson snapped a photo of this "augmented" school bus parked outside Gama-Go's global corporate headquarters.

richlv writes "Popular Unix console file manager Midnight Commander has experienced a stall for the last few years. Most distributions (including the conservative Slackware) shipped patched packages or snapshots. Despite that, everybody had a favorite bug or two — either inability to specify ssh connection port, or problems with interrupted FTP sessions. Or maybe copying of larger datasets. Or maybe the infamous 'shell is still active' message, which often brought unexpected changes of current directory with it. Whatever it was, we either cursed it every time, or learned to live with it. It seems that finally something many were waiting for has happened — there's some activity on mc development. Check out the new homepage, and let's hope revival is both healthy and lengthy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While developing the Roboduino, Scott had to calculate how many amps his project could deliver to attached motors. He wrote up his findings (and how he arrived at them) as a helpful article -

As a review, the total heat generated by the regulator is just the energy in minus the energy out. This is how linear regulators work—they turn excess energy straight into heat.

heat generated = (Vin-Vout)*I

(there’s also quiescent current in there which is the current used by the regulation circuity, but this is around 50mA, so we’ll ignore it for brevity).

So, if Vin = 9V, Vout = 5V, and I = 1amp, the heat generated would be about 4W.

As it turns out, our board was only able to dissipate about 2W. A bundle of 20 1/4W resistors (100ohms, 10ohms total) was used as a dummy 1Amp load at 5V. A thermal couple measured regulator temperature at the solder joint. Current was measured before it entered the Roboduino’s input.

Plus the article continues on the subject of amperage, explaining how a circuits trace width determines how much current it can handle. - PCB as a Heat Sink

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Rob Hof points us to an interesting idea proposed by Andy Beal: that while competition from Microsoft and Yahoo wasn't putting very much pressure on Google to keep innovating in ways to keep users happy, the worldwide financial recession is serving that purpose instead. Financial crises can certainly drive companies to be more innovative, though it's certainly not a pleasant experience. Of course, innovating through a recession is also a lot trickier than innovating against a competitor in good times. It takes some different skills than innovating against competitors. They do both involve focusing on customer needs, but those needs change in the down times. The challenge for Google (or, well, anyone) is recognizing that shift in consumer needs and making sure that any changes are designed to serve those new needs, rather than just the old ones.

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All week save 10% on all items in the Maker Shed using code 2009OX; happy Chinese New Year!

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New evidence suggests that moderate alcohol use might somehow lower the risk of erectile dysfunction. The causal relationship isn't entirely clear. From New Scientist:

After accounting for differences due to age, smoking and heart disease – all risk factors for ED – (University of West Australia epidemiologist Kew-Kim) Chew and colleagues found that drinkers experienced rates of impotence 25% to 30% below those of teetotallers...

The study did not examine how alcohol seems to protect against ED, but he thinks antioxidants in some kinds of alcohol play a role. Other studies suggest that both red and white wine protect against heart disease via a similar mechanism.

One theory holds that ED and heart disease are both manifestations of the same disease. Indeed, Chew found that men who suffer from ED are more likely to go onto develop heart disease.

"Alcohol stops men being a flop in bed"

An anonymous reader writes "A new bill is being introduced called the Camera Phone Predator Alert Act, which would require any mobile phone containing a digital camera to sound a tone whenever a photograph is taken with the phone's camera. It would also prohibit such a phone from being equipped with a means of disabling or silencing the tone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With a patch to both the Android kernel and browser, Luke Hutchison was able to add usable multitouch support to the T-Mobile G1. If you aren't concerned about updating your firmware, this is a hack that you can use on your device today, despite this not being an official component of the device's design.

I moved my original multi-touch code back into the kernel, because it turns out that currently it's a lot easier to patch the kernel and get a working Android system than it is to patch the Android java stack and get a working system. (The Android java stack that made it into the G1 was branched and polished long before the source code was released publicly, and the source code in git usually doesn't run without problems due to being in a state of flux.) You can find the kernel patch to the synaptics touchpad driver here. Many thanks to zinx for helping to polish the kernel patch and figure out the best way to get mutitouch info into userspace.

I also patched the Android browser to support multi-touch scaling, source/diffs are linked below. The patched version also includes support implemented by JesusFreke for autorotating web pages based on phone orientation (you turn the phone on its side without even sliding out the keyboard, and the web page you're viewing rotates) -- you have to manually enable this in the Preferences to get it working though.

As you might have noticed in the video above, Luke also created a demo Google Maps browser that uses the multitouch zoom gesture. The map only zooms in and out at the normal tile steps, which is a bit awkward compared to the fractional zoom on the iPhone, but I much prefer the gesture input to clicking plusses and minuses.

Get Multi-Touch Zooming Support on your T-Mobile G1

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Many of you may still be huddled around the cast iron stove down at the local feed store, spinning snowed-in tall tales with the other old codgers, but it's getting to that time of the season where thoughts drift ahead to springtime and the glorious sights, sounds, and smells of the spring fair.

Okay, so it may be more likely that you're huddled around a space heater, twittering on your tricked-out G1 whines about how freakin' cold it is and how you have a flu you can't shake, but you're probably starting to dream about springtime too, and *your* favorite fair: Maker Faire!

To help sustain you for a few more weeks of harsh winter, get you thinking about the Faire, and maybe some cool projects you'd like to demo there (oh, and to save you a few bucks), we've put advanced, discounted tickets on sale. Order your tickets before March 2 and get 20-50% off the regular ticket price (see link below for details). Also, we have an offer to get a free Adult Day Pass (a $25 value) to the Faire for each subscription to MAKE and CRAFT you purchase.

Maker Faire Tickets

Find out more about Maker Faire.

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Two of Rudy Rucker's terrific earlier science fiction novels -- The Sex Sphere, and Spacetime Donuts -- have been re-released with Rudy's own paintings for the cover art.

I really like Rudy's paintings, and have been trying to get him to trade one of his paintings for one of mine.

(click image for big)

I snapped a photo of this beauty shop sign on Ventura Boulevard in Encino. It's a comedy of errors, addenda, and half-hearted attempts to correct the errors. The $ inside the 0 of the 10 is fun. The whole thing is delightful. I'd take this over a boring corporate sign any day.

Warner Music Group sure does have a way of shooting itself in the foot repeatedly these days. The company, which keeps claiming that it's not as bad as the public makes it out to be, sure is working hard to suggest otherwise. You may recall that, beyond trying to institute a music tax (which is a bad idea) and suing any innovative startup that has anything to do with music, the company is also in the middle of a dispute with YouTube over how much money Google should pay Warner Music for any uploaded video that includes any bit of Warner Music Group music. This has served to piss off some of Warner's own musicians, and now it's pissing off fans as well -- whose anger (warning: that video is not even remotely safe for work if your speakers are turned on) is getting directed right back at Warner Music.

The latest, as sent in by Rachel M. Welch, is that Warner appears to have taken down a super popular video of one guy, Corey Vidal, singing all parts to an amusing 4-part acappella tribute to Star Wars, to the tune of a number of different John Williams' songs. The actual acappella song is sung by a group called Moosebutter (who is not signed to Warner Music) and Corey's video of their song was done with Moosebutter's full support. You can still see Corey's video on other sites of course: It's worth noting that this is not Corey's first battle with Warner Music. Last year, he apparently put up a video of him dancing to a short segment from a new song from Madonna... before the song was actually released. Warner Music had the video taken down -- even though Madonna herself apparently put up her own video saying she supported such fan-made videos. Either way, Corey filed a counternotice on the takedown, and since Warner Music failed to respond, the video was put back up.

It's not at all clear if this new takedown is related to the last one, but it's extremely difficult to see how Warner Music has the slightest claim here. The song is written and performed by Moosebutter, while the video was done by Corey, and while the song does use some melodies from John Williams songs, I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone familiar with copyright law (other than, of course, entertainment industry IP lawyers) who doesn't think the song is pretty clear fair use. It's transformative, not derivative. It's a parody. It doesn't harm the commercial value of the original works. Moosebutter is also confused as to why it was just Corey's video taken down, when many others use the song as well. It's as if Warner Music purposely targeted the most popular viral video with this song in it. In fact, I'd argue the only harm done to the commercial value of Warner Music was done by Warner Music itself in having this video taken down. In the meantime, I've sent a note to the folks at Warner Music to get a comment... and will add it here should they ever reply.

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Back in September when the credit freeze was first becoming a matter of public discourse, I listened to a fantastic episode of This American Life that explained in layman's terms, what the crisis was about. This was followed up by a great FreshAir interview with NY Times financial reporter Gretchen Morgenson. Both highly recommended.

After those two shows I thought I understood, but the other day I had a flash of insight that brought it home in a much more personal way.

I'm lucky in many ways, one of those is that I have a good savings account that basically allowed me to retire at a very young age. Managing this nest egg is super important for me, it's what I live off. So in January I got the willies about the stock market and sold everything, moved it into cash. I did eventually start buying stocks again, slowly, but let's keep it simple and assume everything I own now is either in government bonds or the most conservative money market fund possible.

Turns out I was early, I saved a lot of value by selling in January, because later in 2008 a lot of other people did the same, causing the market to crash. At that point I never once entertained the thought of buying bonds or stocks of any kind. Never mind the explanation of not knowing which banks had a dishonest balance sheet or toxic assets, I was basically keeping my assets in a shoebox under the bed. I was and still am totally risk averse. I won't lend my money to anyone, I'm keeping it all for myself. I don't care if I earn zero interest, or even negative interest. I want to hold, hold, hold. As close as possible. I'm scared, freaked out even by what I see in the financial world.

There you have it. I'm not lending money to anyone. Same with everyone else. That's exactly why the economy is stuck.

You want to go first? I don't.

That smiley is there just so you know that there's still something worth laughing at in this crazy mess we call an economy.

BTW, what made me think of writing this up was an email I got from Citibank this morning offering unprecedented rates on a CD to which I said out loud "Fat chance buddy."

Spacedonkey writes "Researchers at Intel, RTI International of North Carolina, and Arizona State University have made ultra-thin 'micro-refrigerators' for computer chips. The device uses a thermoelectric cooler made from nanostructured thin-film superlattice that can reduce the temperature by 55C when a current passes through it. In testing, it reduced the temperature on part of a chip by 15C without impairing its performance. The researchers say the component could be particularly useful for cooling hot spots that frequently occur on multi-core chips."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pink Tentacle reports that some bunraku robots from 1970 World Expo in Osaka have been restored for an exhibition at the National Science Museum in Tokyo.

Modeled after classic bunraku puppets, each pre-programmed robot is driven by around 20 pneumatic cylinders that move the arms, torso, head and face in sync with accompanying audio.

The video above shows one that transforms into a demon. Bunraku puppet robots resurrected

Police in Tanzania have recently arrested almost 100 people suspected of murdering albinos and/or selling their body parts to witchdoctors. Apparently the limbs, hair, and even genitals are used in some folk medicine. The government has responded by pulling the healers' licenses to practice. The healers are reportedly ignoring the ban. From BBC News:

"We have so many patients and clients who depend on us," (herbalist Haruna Kifimbo) told the Citizen (newspaper). "I believe it would have been better if the PM had consulted us before announcing the ban."

In the most recent case last Wednesday an albino man - named as Jonas Maduka - was killed in Sogoso village in the north-western Mwanza region.

He was reportedly eating dinner at home when some people called and asked for his help.

When he went outside he was strangled, before his assailants chopped off his leg and made away with the limb.

"Tanzania witchdoctors flout ban"

Tabistry? Yup. At least according to this site it's the "art of creating versatile textile out of ordinary soda/bear/soup/fruit/other can pull tabs woven together with fabric, ribbon, cord, wire, jump rings or any other material." Some of the work is quite lovely. Seems a little... inappropriate to make a kid's hat from beer can tabs, but hey...

The Art of Can Tabistry

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In the earliest days of the Mac, there were two big stops on every rollout tour, Boston and Berkeley. The two biggest international Mac users groups were in Boston and Berkeley. It made a lot of sense cause the two yearly Mac shows were in Boston and San Francisco and of course Berkeley is just across the bay from SF, and honestly it's even more Mac than SF is.

It's been a long time since the Berkeley group met (the Boston group still appears to be meeting), as far as I know, but on Thursday in Berkeley Raines Cohen, one of the BMUG founders, is hosting a revival of BMUG at the Hillside Club of course, to celebrate 25 years of the Macintosh.

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1516528/

We'll take "A look back, a peek at some Mac history movies, conversation and insights," says Raines. $20 suggested donation, net proceeds benefit Alameda County Computer Resource Center. 6-9PM with a Chinese dinner after.

Video by the band Zobie Zombie recreates John Carpenter's The Thing with stop-motion animated GI Joes.

Someone at Trackybirthday.com used photos of people in the Washington State Legislature to create these weirdly fascinating animated gifs that flash quickly between two people. Office Party

stoolpigeon writes "Have you ever been reading a book or watching a film and as the plot moves to involve some use of technology you begin to brace yourself, and the cringe as you are ripped out of the story by what is an obviously ignorant treatment of matters you know well? Do you find the idea of creating a "gui interface using visual basic" to see about tracking an ip address as more fit for a sitcom rather than crime drama? And if so, have you ever wondered what it would be like if one of us, a geek, wrote a techno-thriller? What if someone who grokked our culture and understood our tech wrote something? Would it be great, or would it just get bogged down in the techno babble?" Keep reading for the rest of JR's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

About a year ago, Mark Cuban had excellent suggestion for helping to promote movies: give away the soundtrack to the movie to everyone who attended the show in the theater. That would help give everyone another reason to pay to go see the movie and provide them something extra. At the same time, it would help promote the musicians involved in the soundtrack. It was such a good idea that, of course, most moviemakers have completely ignored it. But not all. Parker Mason writes in to let us know about Ryan Gielen, an executive producer of a new indie film that's been getting some buzz at various film festivals, called The Graduates. Gielen read Cuban's post too -- and was so inspired by it that he decided to try to use the suggestion, in a slightly modified fashion. Rather than making you go see the movie first, he's releasing one free track a week leading up to the release of the movie. Or, if you want to speed things up, you can buy the entire collection of songs... for $0.99... total.

They're not giving away all the tracks, but at least half of the soundtrack. They worked with a bunch of indie bands for the movie -- and most jumped on the idea pretty quickly, recognizing that the more successful the movie was, the more attention they were likely to get. He admits that bigger bands almost certainly wouldn't go for such a thing (nor would bigger movie studios), but they might be missing out on a lot in fearing the free promotion.

One of the key points Gielen makes is that to get The Graduates attention, they had to do something different because:

We don't compete exclusively with low-budget films. We compete with everyone. So what do we have to offer our potential audience to set us apart? A great film and a great soundtrack isn't enough, we need people to know about it.

Of course, it also helps to have good music, which is why the team working on the movie went out to find indie bands that they actually liked, which they felt would really mesh well with the movie and match well with the tastes of the target audience. But, of course, someone will stop by in the comments to explain why such a thing could never work on a bigger scale.

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MAKE: is designing a new limited edition t-shirt emblazoned with a striking quote from President Obama's inauguration speech. The next 100 subscribers to the magazine get to vote on the final design and will receive one of the shirts. As the President said:

"...It has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom."

Make: The risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things

Part of the Arduino schematic (via)

Mikey Sklar has a good overview of how to get started designing circuits:

A blog reader asked me earlier today how to get started with circuit design. After very little thought I replied directly via e-mail, but I'd like to share my $0.02 with the rest of our readers who might be interested. Hopefully others who are already on this path can drop a line in the comments for this post about how they got into electronics/circuit design/microcontrollers.

Check out the rest of his post here, and please share your own suggestions for budding designers!

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An anonymous reader writes "During CES a group of overclockers with access to liquid nitrogen and liquid helium for the extra boost of coldness cooled an AMD Phenom II X4 chip to -232 degrees Celsius. Once they got the chip cooled to this frigid temperature, they pushed the clock speed all the way up to 6.5GHz, which is a world record for a quad core CPU and they dished out and astonishing 45,474 3DMark05 score!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Our current guest blogger, Steven Johnson, is going to stick around for the next couple of days because he got a late start (and because we love his entries so much). In the meantime, we've got a special treat in store -- Gareth Branwyn and Charles Platt are both going to guest blog for the next two weeks.

They'll be posting their own bios shortly, but here's a brief introduction:

Gareth is one of my oldest friends. He's a wonderfully creative designer, maker (budding amateur roboticists should seek out his highly praised book, Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots), and brilliant writer and editor. We got to know each other in the late 1980s when we saw each other's zines (mine was bOING bOING, his was Going Gaga) listed in Factsheet Five and we swapped subscriptions. We've been friends ever since, and have collaborated on a bunch of projects together.

Charles Platt and I have known each other professionally for many years (he wrote some of my favorite articles for Wired when I was an editor there, later, when I was an editor at Wired Books, I republished his novel, The Silicon Man). Charles is also an amazing maker of things -- designing and building everything from board games that are 100% skill and 0% chance (other than who gets to go first) to medical equipment that can save people's lives. Over the years, we've become good friends.

Both Gareth and Charles are editors at MAKE, and their contributions delight me and MAKE's readers.

Please welcome Gareth and Charles!

In one of my meetings last week in Washington DC, during a discussion on copyright, someone mentioned (in an offhand manner) that I should look into the copyright questions surrounding the rather iconic Barack Obama campaign poster that, by now, you've probably all seen: However, as many (though not all) people know, this poster was not created by the campaign, but a street artist named Shepard Fairey, who admitted that he just grabbed a photo of Obama from Google Images in order to create the photo, but had no idea who had actually taken the photo. Thus, as was pointed out to me, technically, all of those posters were almost certainly violating someone's copyright. It was an interesting question, but before I even had a chance to look into it, one of our readers, Mark Rosedale, sent in a story about exactly this question. Apparently, after some research, a photo journalist from Philadelphia named Tom Gralish had tracked down the original photograph -- complete with a copyright credit to freelance photographer Mannie Garcia, who was apparently on assignment from the Associated Press in 2006 when he took the following photo: The good news, of course, is that, in a follow up, Garcia seems perfectly happy that his photo was used, and not at all upset: "I know artists like to look at things; they see things and they make stuff. It's a really cool piece of work." In fact, he admits he did not even realize that his own photo was the inspiration, though, he says "it always seemed so familiar." He does admit: "I wouldn't mind getting a signed litho or something from the artist to put up on my wall."

Still, there may be some unresolved questions here. Considering that the work was done for hire by the Associated Press, it's possible that the AP might actually own the copyright on the photo -- and we've already seen that the AP has, at times, had a somewhat twisted view of copyright, especially when it comes to fair use. And, of course, with the Obama administration filling the Justice Department with big copyright supporters, perhaps the DoJ should begin investigating such infringement...

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conductive plate design - designboom by ami drach + dov ganchrow + + photography: moti fishbine via NOTCOT. This could be made "real" by embedding the heating elements inside a plate and using the foil as design accents...

At a time when almost every object around us seems to suddenly get Smart; From MP3 jackets to GPS cars to Smart bombs. It seems appropriate to take that age-old baked piece of mud that we like our ancestors eat off of – the ceramic plate, and fuse it with contemporary technological know-how. We use the conductive properties of silk-screened gold or Amorphic Metal films in the same manner printed circuit boards or car windshield defrosters work. Hook up the plate to an electrical source and the current will run through the "decoration" keeping food stuff warm. Ornate graphic patterns are given "function"- in the most modernist sense of the word. Here is a chance to take a fresh look in our bowls and discover they contain twice as much! Dinner on traditional table wear with a Smart dressing, Bon Apatite'.

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Ottawa boy's invisible invention warns birds about deadly windows via Hacked Gadgets.

Eighth grader Charlie Sobcov wants to stop birds from dying in collisions with windows, but he doesn't want to ruin anybody's view.

For his latest school science fair project he has invented painted, plastic decals that can be placed — discreetly — right in the middle of a window pane.

"This paint is a colour that birds can see but humans can't," he said Wednesday on CBC Radio's All in a Day. "It's like putting a big stop sign in the middle of the window."

The colour is ultraviolet, beyond the range of colours visible to humans. That means the "stop sign" lets birds know the window is solid, but is nearly invisible to humans.

Similar flying falcon-shaped decals already exist on the windows of some buildings, but unlike Sobcov's, they are black and can obstruct part of the window.

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An anonymous reader writes "John Schiefer, the Los Angeles security consultant who in last 2007 admitted wielding a 250,000-node botnet to steal bank passwords, sometimes from work, says he's spent the past 15 months working as a professional in the security scene while awaiting sentencing. Prosecutors are pushing for a five-year sentence, noting the exceptional threat he represented to society."

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.

Anyone with children over a certain age will tell you that one of the best things about being a parent is how much time you get to spend playing games with your kids. In my case--I have three boys, aged 2 to 7--the experience has always had a split-screen quality to it: half belonging to the 21st century, the other belonging to my childhood in the mid-seventies. We spend a ton of time together playing Little Big Planet on the PS3--or more accurately, we spend a ton of time with me marveling at their skills at Little Big Planet and woefully attempting to keep up with them. But there’s also the parallel track, where I get to revisit the games that I played as a child. Just last week it was Battleship. Before that it was Sorry, Bingo, Go Fish, Candy Land, and so on.

There’s a consistent theme to all these old-school game introductions: almost without exception, I have been mortified by the pathetic game that I’ve excitedly brought to the kids. Not because they’re made out of cardboard and plastic, instead of 1080p HDMI graphics. (My boys still spend just as many happy hours with Lego as they do the PS3.) What’s irritating about the games is that they are exercises in sheer randomness. It’s not that they fail to sharpen any useful skills; it’s that they make it literally impossible for a player to acquire any skills at all.

Take Battleship. I spend thirty minutes setting up the game, explaining the dual grids and how one represents their fleet, and the other represents their opponents’. I have to explain the pegs, and the x/y coordinates of the grid, and the placement of the ships themselves. And then when we’re finally ready to go, I explain how the actual game is played.

“So pick a random point on the grid,” I explain, “and see if he’s got a ship there.”

“Nothing? Okay, now you pick a random point on the grid.”

“Nothing? Okay, let’s do it again…”

I hadn’t thought about this until I actually played the game again last week, but there is absolutely nothing about the initial exploratory sequence of Battleship that requires anything resembling a genuine decision. It is a roulette wheel. A random number generator could easily stay competitive for the first half. But even when some red pegs appear on the board, the decision tree is still a joke: “Now select a co-ordinate that’s next to the red peg.” That’s pretty much it. Yes, at the very end, you might adjust your picks based on your knowledge of which ships you’ve sunk. But for the most part, it’s about as mentally challenging as playing Bingo.

And Battleship might as well be Battleship Potemkin compared to something like Candy Land, which was fiendishly designed to prevent the player from ever having to make a single decision while playing the game. You pick a card from a shuffled deck, and follow the instructions. That’s it.

I realize that games of pure chance have a long history, but that doesn’t make them any less moronic. (And it goes without saying that Checkers, Chess, Go, and other strategy games are great tests of decision-making.) I take this as another example of how much more mentally challenging kids’ culture has become in recent years. The digital generation doesn’t seem to have much of an appetite for games structured around total randomness. My older boys have been playing Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii since they were four and six, and there is more decision making in ten seconds of that game than there is in ten hours of Candy Land or Sorry.

Just as a thought experiment: Imagine what the manual for Super Mario would read like were it structured like Candy Land:

To explore Super Mario Galaxy, just hit the “action” button. At that point the game will randomly determine what action you have selected, and whether it was successful. When the action is over, hit the button again to see what’s next!

You think that game would have been a runaway hit? Even dressed up with accelerometers and adorable graphics? Of course not. But that’s what most of us who grew up before videogames accepted as normal when we were five. I’m not big into the “moral message” interpretation of pop culture, but plenty of critics of digital games are, so just for the record: what sort of message does Candy Land send to our kids? (And I’m not just talking about all the implicit advertisements for cane sugar products.) It says you are powerless, that your destiny is entirely determined by the luck of the draw, that the only chance you have of winning the game lies in following the rules, and accepting the cards as they come. Who wants to grow up in that kind of universe?

Last week during the inauguration "makers" were mentioned by name - we received hundreds of emails, tweets & IMs asking us if we heard that (and if our new president was a MAKE subscriber). Here's part of the quote...

Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

A few makers and even our own team suggested we do something to celebrate "makers" in the speech as we kick off the next four years of our nation's journey. So here's what we have and we also need your help.

We are going to give away 100 t-shirts with this quote, or part of the quote to the next 100 new MAKE subscribers. They're not for sale and this is going to be "limited edition" as they say. Just go to makezine.com/subscribe and enter code CHANGE. You'll get a year of MAKE, celebrating science, engineering, how-tos, projects and makers - and if you use this code you'll get a shirt.

But there are 3 shirts right now, one design has a couple different colors - the other design is more of the quote. So, here's how we're going to figure this out. First, subscribe to MAKE with the code, next up VOTE - we've set up a poll (below the shirts) - vote on which one you like the best and in a week or so we'll announce which one it is and if there are any left we'll post up the link / code again.

Design #1

Click the image for a larger view & to see the back.

---

Design #2

Click the image for a larger view & to see the back.

---

Design #3

Click the image for a larger view & to see the back.

---

Make: The risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - the t-shirt!
( polls)

---

REMEMBER, go to makezine.com/subscribe and enter code CHANGE to get 1 out of the 100 shirts we're going to make...

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Barence writes "The European Commission could force Microsoft to bundle Firefox with future versions of Windows. The revelation came as part of Microsoft's quarterly filing with the Security and Exchange Commission. Among the statements is a clause outlining the penalties being considered by the European watchdog, which recently ruled that Microsoft is harming competition by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. The most interesting situation outlined in the filing would see either Microsoft or computer manufacturers forced to install Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari by default alongside Internet Explorer on new Windows-based PCs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well, gosh darn it. Apparently, folks who believe that freeing up your music can help you make more money are actually the enemy of musicians everywhere. At least that appears to be the opinion of ASCAP, the group that's supposed to represent songwriters' interests -- but often does the exact opposite. The latest is that ASCAP has put together a private luncheon for February 3rd... and on the agenda: "working together to counter the growing prevalence of the 'copy left/free culture' pontificators in the public discourse about creators rights."

Wow.

Is ASCAP really so confused that they think that the rise of such "pontificators" is harming musicians and songwriters? We're seeing story after story after story of musicians who find themselves much better off after embracing new business models based on the fundamental economics of music. For ASCAP to somehow think that these alternative models represent a force that needs to be "countered" just shows how incredibly out of touch ASCAP really is. It's a shame that a group that is supposed to represent the best interests of songwriters (unlike the RIAA who has always been about representing the best interests of the big record labels) is so confused.

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AtariKee writes "Universe Today is reporting that a small 10m asteroid, discovered earlier this month and named 2009 BD, is passing within 400,000 miles of Earth. Although the asteroid poses no threat to the planet, the site reports that the asteroid is still very interesting, as it may be a rare co-orbital asteroid (as in, shares the same orbit as Earth)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I can't say how comfortable these might be, but what a great LEGO pair of chucks!

More:

Cardboard Shoe Show in NYC

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I was looking through the old catalogs photostream that Evil Mad Scientist linked to recently, and found this very cool book of puzzles from 1914.

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MichaelSmith writes "A New Zealand man who bought a second hand MP3 player from a store in the US found it loaded with the names and personal details of American soldiers, as well as a mission briefing and information about equipment. Chris Ogle says he will return the unit to the US Defense Department if asked, and that it never worked as a music player anyway. A slightly different version of the story is available from TVNZ."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MichaelSmith writes "A New Zealand man who bought a second hand MP3 player from a store in the US found it loaded with the names and personal details of American soldiers, as well as a mission briefing and information about equipment. Chris Ogle says he will return the unit to the US Defence Department if asked, and that it never worked as a music player anyway. slightly different version of the story is available from TVNZ."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just as some new research has come out suggesting that there's no causal link between video games and real world violence, wouldn't you know that some researchers at Brigham Young University would put out a report claiming that video games are bad for you in many, many different ways. Game Politics notes that it's no coincidence this report is coming out just as the state of Utah is looking to introduce new legislation regulating video games (just like regulations that have wasted tax payer money and been thrown out in state after state after state).

This study didn't focus on violence, necessarily, but looked at a variety of different factors between gamers and non-gamers and found out that video gamers came out worse on every single factor. So, according to the study, gamers have worse relationships with friends and family, lower self-esteem, and... they're more likely to smoke pot. At least the study's author preached a bit of moderation in response:

Everything we found associated with video games came out negative... [But] I don't want parents to go out and yank all video games. It's like TV. We have to choose what's good and bad and practice moderation.

Could have been worse... but the results still seem pretty questionable.

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"Here is looking at you, Kid" by Berlin-based artist Aram Bartholl, is a low-tech way of fixing the annoying aspect of video conferencing where participants are not making "eye-contact" through their web cameras. Rather than looking at the camera, the typical person stares at their screen, thus not making eye contact with the person they are chatting with. The device is made of a mirror, some glass with mirror foil, and a piece of cardboard, in order to mimic what a teleprompter does to text for a TV news anchor. The result allows the viewer's eye contact to connect with the person and a final manufacturer fix might be to integrate the camera behind the LCD screen so that you can actually look directly at the other person.

Here is looking at you, Kid

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Inspired by a particularly excellent episode of the IT Crowd, Flickr member iamthechad built this device which contains the entirety of the internet ... and it has a power switch ... which should under no circumstances ever be used!

If you're scratching your head right now, go watch this. - The Internet!

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mamaphoenix writes "Paul McDougall of InformationWeek reports Computer enthusiasts who want to get their hands on the trial version of Microsoft's next operating system have just two more weeks to do so. The company says it will end availability of Windows 7 Beta on Feb. 10. There are a couple of loopholes, however. Users who started to download the OS before that date will have until Feb. 12 to complete the process. Also, Microsoft will continue to distribute product keys beyond Feb. 12 to users who have previously downloaded Windows 7 Beta but have yet to obtain a key. 'We are at a point where we have more than enough beta testers and feedback coming in to meet our engineering needs, so we are beginning to plan the end of general availability for Windows 7 Beta,' said Brandon LeBlanc, Microsoft's in-house Windows blogger, in a post Friday. Microsoft will post warnings on its Web site that the download program for Windows 7 is about to end starting Tuesday. A final version of Windows 7, Microsoft's follow-up to Windows Vista, is expected to be available in late 2009 or early 2010."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The "CubeCheater" iPhone app allows you to take a picture of your existing puzzle and the application will walk you through the solution to the puzzle. Although we're not sure if we want to encourage cheating here at Make, we like the ingenuity of apps like this that mathematically deconstruct objects in order to find out how they tick.

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Pete from Sparkfun made some digital level meters with a decidedly analog feel. Some op-amps and an ATMega168 on an LCD backpack board make the magic happen. -

Let's first define the problem. I've got an AC signal that I need to turn into a simulated needle movement. Where am I going to get the signal from? The definition of a VU meter necessitates taking it from the source that's driving the speakers. But I've got a thing about putting things parallel to my speakers, so instead I'll take the signal from my computer audio output. That signal's likely to be in the hundreds-of-millivolts range instead of volts to tens-of-volts, and it's a lot more convenient logistically (my computer is closer to my desk than my amplifier). It's already not a true VU meter. That lasted long.

Hey certified VU or not, it still looks cool. Read more from his adventures in pseudo-analog metering - Graphic LCD VU Meters

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theodp writes "Imagine a technology that lets you pay for products just by waving your cellphone over a reader. You wouldn't have to if you lived in Japan, where people have been using it for the last five years to pay for everything from train tickets to groceries to candy in vending machines. While nearly everyone who's tried it has liked this form of payment, consumers in the United States won't be able to wave-and-pay anytime soon: The companies that must work together to give the technology to the masses can't agree on how to split the resulting revenue."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've already covered how some Warner Music musicians are pissed off about Warner Music demanding more money for its music showing up on YouTube, and now it's also causing additional problems for musicians. For example, the band Death Cab for Cutie has YouTube videos of its music on its own website... but not after Warner Music's actions forced them offline. People on the band's own website clicking to view its own videos are told that they are not available due to Warner Music. At some point, you have to wonder when Warner Music is going to realize just how badly it's screwed this up.

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"Laptop Orchestra" is an interactive synaesthetic instrument designed to allow for real-time performances. Attached to the system is a conductor podium consisting of a grid of metal stems that activate or deactivate each machine by touches from onlookers. This action can in turn generate an almost infinite number of compositions.

Laptop Orchestra via Network Research

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Make subscriber Trevor built a simple drawing interface using Arduino and Processing -

There are two potentiometers (horizontal and vertical) plugged into two of the analog inputs of Arduino. The board reads the state of the two potentiometers, and sends them as an ordered pair via USB (technically, it's via serial, but there's a built in USB-serial converter on the Arduino) to the computer. A small program written in Processing uses the ordered pairs coming in from the board to draw a line on the screen. As you turn the knobs, you can draw on the screen, just like an Etch-A-Sketch. Over time, the lines fade and disappear.

Nice - this is another great example project to build upon. Visit his site and read more about the setup, download the source code and experiment with your own modifications. - Etch-A-Sketch with Arduino

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I found this interesting instructable about making a postal scale from old CDs. The completed scale seems accurate enough for most peoples needs. Check out the link for more information about the build, including how to accurately calibrate the final scale using quarters.

More about making a Postal scale from old CDs

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There have been a series of criticisms to Chris Anderson's concept of "The Long Tail" lately. While most don't hold up under scrutiny, a few have made some good points that don't actually go against the long tail concept, but may adjust some of how people understand it. Of course, people love to jump and declare something completely dead, so there have been a few stories making the rounds claiming that the long tail era has been disproved. Somehow, however, when evidence to the contrary shows up, it doesn't get nearly as much attention. eMusic has published a report noting that, indeed, their own sales show a pretty clear long tail distribution, with at least 75% of all of the music they stocked being sold at least once in 2008. Once again, though, it comes down to the filters. eMusic has some good features (they could be better, honestly) to help people find new and obscure music -- and that helps spread interest to new acts. So, once again, it appears that the long tail is still very much alive, but it does still depend on the filters being used.

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This is a really simple and inexpensive way to elevate your laptop. The basic components are a box and "a leg". Basically it's a modified shoebox with something added to elevate the back of your laptop. It certainly is inexpensive, and it seems to work quiet well too!

I am the happy owner of a macbook. What i always found annoying was that the screen was lower than my monitor while i was using my second monitor to view the content in dual screen.

More about the DIY no-cost laptop stand

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timbrown writes with word that "On 22 January 2009, Kent Police seized an Indymedia server hosted by Manchester-based colocation facility UK Grid and run by the alternative news platform Indymedia UK. The server was taken in relation to comments on an article regarding the convictions in the recent Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) trial. Seven activists were sentenced to a total of 50 years in prison." The complete story is worth reading; timbrown continues: "I'm posting this as a concerned UK administrator who hosts a number of sites. The message appears to be clear: the UK establishment does not want political content, legitimate or otherwise, hosted from these shores. The message has been noted, however free speech must be supported even where it may not be agreeable."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE subscriber Lynn writes in about the Internet dog feeder which allows this lucky dog to get food even when the owner is away from home. From the video I would guess that the maker is fairly young, which makes this project even more awesome. Apparently the project was completed in about an hour. Now that's a quick project with some nice results.

Every once in a while you stubble across something on YouTube that strikes you as both entertaining and educational. I was searching around when I found the "Internet Dog Feeder" by Tyler. I don't know much about who is behind the project, but it for sure works well and is a very cool design. Of course it uses the ioBridge IO-204 module to drive a continous rotating servos from a web page that also has a live camera feed of the dog's bowl. Tyler can log on to his web page and see if the bowl is empty and send some food. With a click of the mouse, the servo spins to fill the dog bowl.

More about the Internet dog feeder

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Well, here's an odd one. Apparently, an analyst at NPD Group, Stephen Baker, is worried that the rising popularity of netbooks is bad for the tech economy. He's claiming:

"History tells us that when we offer lower-priced products, it tends to drive down the average selling price across the board. The net result is to drive down revenue overall, even if there are more units out there."

I'm curious which tech history books he's reading, because that seems to go against pretty much every history of technology evolution I've ever seen. If you've watched the tech industry over the past few decades, things always get cheaper. It's the whole Moore's Law thing at work -- and every time things get cheaper, it allows for more to happen, making products more valuable to more people, and tends to expand, not contract, the wider overall market. Yes, the average selling price decreases, but that's a tautology. Of course if you decrease price, average selling price goes down. That's not analysis, that's saying 2 = 2. But to then say it means overall revenue goes down isn't necessarily true -- and in many tech sectors isn't true at all. In the end, providing a good product, at a reasonable price that many, many people want, is never "damaging" to the economy. It may shift things around, but it always opens up new opportunities.

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Do you want to understand the metrics, mechanics, and levers of engagement required for effective viral customer acquisition? Photo credit: arrow Many viral marketing approaches have been used over the years, but while they were able to capture large numbers of users, they proved ineffective because they failed to engage customers for the long-term. In this article Eric Ries shares his strategic vision on how to engage customers for the long-term. While a viral marketing strategy may initially be a good approach to reach your audience, there's much more you can do to keep the interest of your customers alive. And that's where "viral loops" come into place. Viral marketing loops allow you to acquire new customers in such an unobtrusive way it doesn't even looks like marketing or advertising at all. But what is exactly a "loop"? How do you keep a high level of interest on a product and suggest other people to do the same? Find out now: Intro by Robin Good

Engagement loops: beyond viral

by Eric Ries

Viral Loops

There's a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join. Today, I was comparing notes with Ed Baker (one of the gurus of viral growth). We were trying to broaden the conversation beyond just viral customer acquisition. Many viral products have flamed out over the years, able to capture large numbers of users, but proving transient in their value because they failed to engage customers for the long-term. Our goal is to understand

• the metrics,
• mechanics,
• and levers of engagement.

Levers of Engagement

Let's start with the levers of engagement. What can you do to your product and marketing message to increase engagement?

Synthetic Notifications

The most blunt instrument is to simply reach out and contact your customers on a regular basis. This is such an obvious tactic that a surprising number of companies overlook it. For example, IMVU runs frequent promotional campaigns that offer discounts, special events, and other goodies to its customers. From a strictly "promotional marketing" point of view, they probably run those campaigns more than is optimal (there's always fatigue that diminishes the ROI on promotions the more you use them). But there is a secondary benefit from these activities: to remind customers that IMVU exists, and encourage them to come back to the site. The true ROI of a synthetic notification has to balance ROI, customer fatigue, and the engagement effects of the campaign itself. When you live with your own product every day, it's easy to lose sight of just how busy your customers are, and just how many things they are juggling in their own lives. A lot of engagement problems are caused by the customer completely forgetting about the provider of the service. Direct notifications can help ameliorate that problem.

Organic Notifications

Facebook, LinkedIn, and other successful social networks have elevated this technique to a high art. They do everything in their power to encourage customers to take actions that have a side-effect of causing other customers to re-engage. For example, from an engagement standpoint, it's a pretty good thing to automatically notify a person's friends whenever they upload pictures. But it's exponentially more engaging to have each person tag their friends in each picture, because the notification is so much more interesting: "you've been tagged in a photo, click to find out which one!" Similarly, the mechanics of sending users notifications when new friends of theirs join the site is a great organic re-engagement tactic. From the point of view of the existing customer, it goes beyond reminding them that the site exists; it also provides social validation of their choice to become a member in the first place. As with synthetic notifications, organic notifications are subject to fatigue, if they are not used judiciously. On Facebook, "poking" seems to have fairly high fatigue, whereas "photos" has low (close to zero?) fatigue. Ed adds this account:

"When I first joined Facebook, I used to poke my friends and get poked back for the first few weeks, but now I rarely, if ever, poke people. Photos, on the other hand, is probably the primary reason I go to Facebook every day. Because they are constantly new and changing, I doubt I will ever get tired of looking at my friends photos, and I will probably always get especially excited to see a new photo that I have been tagged in."

Positioning

The ultimate form of engagement is when the company doesn't have to do anything explicit to make it happen. For example, World of Warcraft never needs to send you an email reminding you to log in. And they don't need to prompt you to tell your guild-mates about the new epic loot you just won. The underlying dynamics of the product, your guild, and the fun you anticipate takes care of those impulses. This is true, to a greater or lesser extent, for every product. After you've acquired a customer, why would they bother to come back to your service? What do they get out of it? What is going on in their head when that happens? I wrote about this challenge for iPhone developers, in an essay on retention competition: the battle over what icon the user will click when they go to the home screen. At that point, there's no opportunity for marketing or sales; the battle is already won or lost in the person's mind. It's analogous to walking down the aisle in a supermarket. Just because you're already a Tide customer, doesn't necessarily mean you'll always buy Tide again. However, if you've come to believe that Tide is simply the only detergent in the world that can solve your cleaning problems, you're pretty unlikely to even notice the other competitors sitting on the shelf. Great iPhone apps work the same way. Marketing has a discipline about how to create those effects in the minds of customers; it's called positioning. The best introduction to the topic is Positioning (I highly recommend it, it's a very entertaining classic). But you don't have to be a marketing expert to use this tactic; you just need to think clearly about the key use cases for your product. Who is using it? What were they doing right before? And what causes them to choose one product over another? For example, a common use case for teenagers is: "I just got home from school, I'm bored, and I want to kill some time." If your product and its messaging is all about passing time while having fun, you might be able to get to the point where that is an automatic association, and they stop seriously considering other alternatives. That's exactly what the world's best video games do.

Seeing the Engagement Loop

We're just starting to weave these techniques into a broad-based theory of engagement, that would complement the work that has been done to date on viral marketing and viral loops. Notice that all of these techniques are attempting to affect one of a handful of specific behaviors that have to happen for a product to have high engagement. Do these sound at all familiar?

1. A customer decides to return to your product, as a result of either natural interest, or a notification (organic or synthetic).
2. They decide to take some action, perhaps influenced by the way in which they came back.
3. This action may have side effects, such as sending out notifications or changing content on a website.
4. These side effects affect other customers, and some side effects are more effective than others
5. Some of those affected customers decide to return to your product...

This is essentially a version of the viral loop. Let's look at a specific example, and start to think through what the metrics might look like if we attempted to measure it:

1. Customer gets a synthetic message saying: "upload some photos!" Some percentage of customers click through.
2. Some percentage of those actually upload.
3. Those customers get prompted to tag their friends in their photos. Some percentage of them do (A), and these result in a certain number of emails sent (B).
4. Each friend that's tagged gets an email that lets them know they've been tagged. Some percentage of them click through. (C)
5. Of those, some percentage are themselves convinced to upload and photos. (D)

Calculating the "Engagement Ratio"

If we combine the quantities A-D using the same kinds of formulas we use for viral loop optimization, and the result is greater than one, we should see ever-increasing engagement notifications being sent. This will lead to some reactivation of dormant customers as well as some fatigue, as existing customers get many notification. Our theory is that the key to long-term retention is creating an engagement loop where the reactivation rate exceeds the rate of fatigue. This will yield a true "engagement ratio" that is akin to the viral ratio. This makes intuitive sense, since the key to minimizing fatigue is to keep things new, exciting, and relevant. For example, user-generated content that includes of friends, especially if it includes you ("Joe tagged you in a photo. Click here to find out which one!") is usually going to be newer, more exciting, and more relevant than synthetic notifications ("Did you know you can know upload multiple photos at a time with our new photo uploader?"), or even than more generic organic notifications ("You've been poked by Joe."). High "engagement growth" with low fatigue is how you get the stickiness of a product to near 100%. You can try to churn out, but your friends keep pulling you back in. That's an engagement loop at work.

Seeing the Whole

Engagement loops are a powerful concept all by themselves, and they can help you to make improvements to your product or service in order to optimize the drivers of growth for your business. But I think the value in this framework is that it can help make overall business decisions that require thinking about the whole rather than just one of the parts. For example, let's say you have a viral ratio of 1.4. Your site is growing like wildfire, but your engagement isn't too good. You decide to do some research into why customers don't stay involved. When asked to describe your product, customers say something like "Product X is a place to connect with my friends online." Turns out, when optimizing your viral loop, this was the winning overall marketing message. It's stamped on your emails, landing pages, UI elements - everywhere. Removing a single instance of that message would make your viral ratio go down, and you know that for a fact, because you've split-tested every single possible variation. As you talk to customers, you notice the following dilemma. Customers have a lot of options of places to connect with their friends online. And, compared to market leaders like Facebook and Myspace, you discover that your product isn't really that much better. Consequently, you are losing the positioning battle for your customers when they get home from school and ask themselves, "how can I connect with my friends right now?" Worse, your product isn't really about connecting with friends; that's just the messaging that worked best for the viral loop, where customers aren't that familiar your product anyway. To win the positioning battle, you could try and make your product better than the competition, or find a different positioning that allows you to be the best at something else. Let's assume for the sake of argument that your competitors offerings are "good enough" and that you cant' figure out how to beat them at their own game. So you decide to try to reposition around a different value proposition, one that more closely matches what your product is best at. You could try and drive home that positioning with an expensive PR campaign, superbowl ads, and whatnot. But you don't have to - you have a perfectly good viral loop that is slowly but surely exposing the entire world to your positioning messages. Here's what this long example is all about. When you go to change your messaging, imagine that your viral ration drops from 1.4 to 1.2. Disaster, right? Not necessarily. Since your viral ratio is still above one, it's still getting your message out, albeit a little slower. But if your new positioning message improves your engagement loop by more than the cost to your viral loop, you have a net win on your hands. Without measuring your engagement loop, can your business actually make tradeoff decisions like this one?

Connecting Engagement and Viral Loops

The two loops are intimately connected, in a figure-eight pattern. Customers exit the viral loop and become part of the engagement loop. As your engagement improves, it becomes easier and easier to get customers to reenter the viral loop process and bring even more friends in. And as in all dynamic systems, there's no way to optimize a sub-part without sub-optimizing the whole. If you're focused on viral loops without measuring the effect of your changes on other parts of your business (of which engagement is just one), you're at risk of missing the truly big opportunities.

Originally written by Eric Ries for Lessons Learned and first published on December 16, 2008 as "Engagement loops: beyond viral".

About the author Eric Ries serves as a venture advisor for Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and is the author of the blog Lessons Learned. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting.

Photo credits: Viral Loops - Sergey Lavrentev Levers of Engagement - Leah-Anne Thompson Synthetic Notifications - Elnur Amikishiyev Organic Notifications - Dellyne Positioning - Andres Rodriguez Seeing the Engagement Loop - photo25th Calculating the "Engagement Ratio" - Junaid Khalid Seeing the Whole - Marc Dietrich Connecting Engagement and Viral Loops - Stephen Coburn

Do you want to understand the metrics, mechanics, and levers of engagement required for effective viral customer acquisition? Photo credit: arrow Many viral marketing approaches have been used over the years, but while they were able to capture large numbers of users, they proved ineffective because they failed to engage customers for the long-term. In this article Eric Ries shares his strategic vision on how to engage customers for the long-term. While a viral marketing strategy may initially be a good approach to reach your audience, there's much more you can do to keep the interest of your customers alive. And that's where "viral loops" come into place. Viral marketing loops allow you to acquire new customers in such an unobtrusive way it doesn't even looks like marketing or advertising at all. But what is exactly a "loop"? How do you keep a high level of interest on a product and suggest other people to do the same? Find out now: Intro by Robin Good

Engagement loops: beyond viral

by Eric Ries

Viral Loops

There's a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join. Today, I was comparing notes with Ed Baker (one of the gurus of viral growth). We were trying to broaden the conversation beyond just viral customer acquisition. Many viral products have flamed out over the years, able to capture large numbers of users, but proving transient in their value because they failed to engage customers for the long-term. Our goal is to understand

• the metrics,
• mechanics,
• and levers of engagement.

Levers of Engagement

Let's start with the levers of engagement. What can you do to your product and marketing message to increase engagement?

Synthetic Notifications

The most blunt instrument is to simply reach out and contact your customers on a regular basis. This is such an obvious tactic that a surprising number of companies overlook it. For example, IMVU runs frequent promotional campaigns that offer discounts, special events, and other goodies to its customers. From a strictly "promotional marketing" point of view, they probably run those campaigns more than is optimal (there's always fatigue that diminishes the ROI on promotions the more you use them). But there is a secondary benefit from these activities: to remind customers that IMVU exists, and encourage them to come back to the site. The true ROI of a synthetic notification has to balance ROI, customer fatigue, and the engagement effects of the campaign itself. When you live with your own product every day, it's easy to lose sight of just how busy your customers are, and just how many things they are juggling in their own lives. A lot of engagement problems are caused by the customer completely forgetting about the provider of the service. Direct notifications can help ameliorate that problem.

Organic Notifications

Facebook, LinkedIn, and other successful social networks have elevated this technique to a high art. They do everything in their power to encourage customers to take actions that have a side-effect of causing other customers to re-engage. For example, from an engagement standpoint, it's a pretty good thing to automatically notify a person's friends whenever they upload pictures. But it's exponentially more engaging to have each person tag their friends in each picture, because the notification is so much more interesting: "you've been tagged in a photo, click to find out which one!" Similarly, the mechanics of sending users notifications when new friends of theirs join the site is a great organic re-engagement tactic. From the point of view of the existing customer, it goes beyond reminding them that the site exists; it also provides social validation of their choice to become a member in the first place. As with synthetic notifications, organic notifications are subject to fatigue, if they are not used judiciously. On Facebook, "poking" seems to have fairly high fatigue, whereas "photos" has low (close to zero?) fatigue. Ed adds this account:

"When I first joined Facebook, I used to poke my friends and get poked back for the first few weeks, but now I rarely, if ever, poke people. Photos, on the other hand, is probably the primary reason I go to Facebook every day. Because they are constantly new and changing, I doubt I will ever get tired of looking at my friends photos, and I will probably always get especially excited to see a new photo that I have been tagged in."

Positioning

The ultimate form of engagement is when the company doesn't have to do anything explicit to make it happen. For example, World of Warcraft never needs to send you an email reminding you to log in. And they don't need to prompt you to tell your guild-mates about the new epic loot you just won. The underlying dynamics of the product, your guild, and the fun you anticipate takes care of those impulses. This is true, to a greater or lesser extent, for every product. After you've acquired a customer, why would they bother to come back to your service? What do they get out of it? What is going on in their head when that happens? I wrote about this challenge for iPhone developers, in an essay on retention competition: the battle over what icon the user will click when they go to the home screen. At that point, there's no opportunity for marketing or sales; the battle is already won or lost in the person's mind. It's analogous to walking down the aisle in a supermarket. Just because you're already a Tide customer, doesn't necessarily mean you'll always buy Tide again. However, if you've come to believe that Tide is simply the only detergent in the world that can solve your cleaning problems, you're pretty unlikely to even notice the other competitors sitting on the shelf. Great iPhone apps work the same way. Marketing has a discipline about how to create those effects in the minds of customers; it's called positioning. The best introduction to the topic is Positioning (I highly recommend it, it's a very entertaining classic). But you don't have to be a marketing expert to use this tactic; you just need to think clearly about the key use cases for your product. Who is using it? What were they doing right before? And what causes them to choose one product over another? For example, a common use case for teenagers is: "I just got home from school, I'm bored, and I want to kill some time." If your product and its messaging is all about passing time while having fun, you might be able to get to the point where that is an automatic association, and they stop seriously considering other alternatives. That's exactly what the world's best video games do.

Seeing the Engagement Loop

We're just starting to weave these techniques into a broad-based theory of engagement, that would complement the work that has been done to date on viral marketing and viral loops. Notice that all of these techniques are attempting to affect one of a handful of specific behaviors that have to happen for a product to have high engagement. Do these sound at all familiar?

1. A customer decides to return to your product, as a result of either natural interest, or a notification (organic or synthetic).
2. They decide to take some action, perhaps influenced by the way in which they came back.
3. This action may have side effects, such as sending out notifications or changing content on a website.
4. These side effects affect other customers, and some side effects are more effective than others
5. Some of those affected customers decide to return to your product...

This is essentially a version of the viral loop. Let's look at a specific example, and start to think through what the metrics might look like if we attempted to measure it:

1. Customer gets a synthetic message saying: "upload some photos!" Some percentage of customers click through.
2. Some percentage of those actually upload.
3. Those customers get prompted to tag their friends in their photos. Some percentage of them do (A), and these result in a certain number of emails sent (B).
4. Each friend that's tagged gets an email that lets them know they've been tagged. Some percentage of them click through. (C)
5. Of those, some percentage are themselves convinced to upload and photos. (D)

Calculating the "Engagement Ratio"

If we combine the quantities A-D using the same kinds of formulas we use for viral loop optimization, and the result is greater than one, we should see ever-increasing engagement notifications being sent. This will lead to some reactivation of dormant customers as well as some fatigue, as existing customers get many notification. Our theory is that the key to long-term retention is creating an engagement loop where the reactivation rate exceeds the rate of fatigue. This will yield a true "engagement ratio" that is akin to the viral ratio. This makes intuitive sense, since the key to minimizing fatigue is to keep things new, exciting, and relevant. For example, user-generated content that includes of friends, especially if it includes you ("Joe tagged you in a photo. Click here to find out which one!") is usually going to be newer, more exciting, and more relevant than synthetic notifications ("Did you know you can know upload multiple photos at a time with our new photo uploader?"), or even than more generic organic notifications ("You've been poked by Joe."). High "engagement growth" with low fatigue is how you get the stickiness of a product to near 100%. You can try to churn out, but your friends keep pulling you back in. That's an engagement loop at work.

Seeing the Whole

Engagement loops are a powerful concept all by themselves, and they can help you to make improvements to your product or service in order to optimize the drivers of growth for your business. But I think the value in this framework is that it can help make overall business decisions that require thinking about the whole rather than just one of the parts. For example, let's say you have a viral ratio of 1.4. Your site is growing like wildfire, but your engagement isn't too good. You decide to do some research into why customers don't stay involved. When asked to describe your product, customers say something like "Product X is a place to connect with my friends online." Turns out, when optimizing your viral loop, this was the winning overall marketing message. It's stamped on your emails, landing pages, UI elements - everywhere. Removing a single instance of that message would make your viral ratio go down, and you know that for a fact, because you've split-tested every single possible variation. As you talk to customers, you notice the following dilemma. Customers have a lot of options of places to connect with their friends online. And, compared to market leaders like Facebook and Myspace, you discover that your product isn't really that much better. Consequently, you are losing the positioning battle for your customers when they get home from school and ask themselves, "how can I connect with my friends right now?" Worse, your product isn't really about connecting with friends; that's just the messaging that worked best for the viral loop, where customers aren't that familiar your product anyway. To win the positioning battle, you could try and make your product better than the competition, or find a different positioning that allows you to be the best at something else. Let's assume for the sake of argument that your competitors offerings are "good enough" and that you cant' figure out how to beat them at their own game. So you decide to try to reposition around a different value proposition, one that more closely matches what your product is best at. You could try and drive home that positioning with an expensive PR campaign, superbowl ads, and whatnot. But you don't have to - you have a perfectly good viral loop that is slowly but surely exposing the entire world to your positioning messages. Here's what this long example is all about. When you go to change your messaging, imagine that your viral ration drops from 1.4 to 1.2. Disaster, right? Not necessarily. Since your viral ratio is still above one, it's still getting your message out, albeit a little slower. But if your new positioning message improves your engagement loop by more than the cost to your viral loop, you have a net win on your hands. Without measuring your engagement loop, can your business actually make tradeoff decisions like this one?

Connecting Engagement and Viral Loops

The two loops are intimately connected, in a figure-eight pattern. Customers exit the viral loop and become part of the engagement loop. As your engagement improves, it becomes easier and easier to get customers to reenter the viral loop process and bring even more friends in. And as in all dynamic systems, there's no way to optimize a sub-part without sub-optimizing the whole. If you're focused on viral loops without measuring the effect of your changes on other parts of your business (of which engagement is just one), you're at risk of missing the truly big opportunities.

Originally written by Eric Ries for Lessons Learned and first published on December 16, 2008 as "Engagement loops: beyond viral".

About the author Eric Ries serves as a venture advisor for Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and is the author of the blog Lessons Learned. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting.

Photo credits: Viral Loops - Sergey Lavrentev Levers of Engagement - Leah-Anne Thompson Synthetic Notifications - Elnur Amikishiyev Organic Notifications - Dellyne Positioning - Andres Rodriguez Seeing the Engagement Loop - photo25th Calculating the "Engagement Ratio" - Junaid Khalid Seeing the Whole - Marc Dietrich Connecting Engagement and Viral Loops - Stephen Coburn

Happy Chinese New year, it's the year of the ox - 2009 is year of the ox - according to the Chinese calendar, the ox is an animal that brings prosperity through hard work. The outgoing Rat symbolises "wealth". I'm happy to jettison the celebration of stupid, we are what we celebrate, good or bad - reality tv, irrational ideologies, ponzi scheme economies, the dumbing down of things, good riddance to bad rubbish. I can't think of a more fitting symbol than the ox for the next year, unswervingly patient, tireless, fortitude... hard work.

Chinese New Year or Spring Festival is one of the most important traditional Chinese holidays. It is sometimes called the Lunar New Year, especially by people outside China. The festival traditionally begins on the first day of the first lunar month (Chinese: ??; pinyin: zh?ng yuè) in the Chinese calendar and ends on the 15th; this day is called Lantern Festival. Chinese New Year's Eve is known as Chúx?. It literally means "Year-pass Eve".

Celebrated in areas with large populations of ethnic Chinese, Chinese New Year is considered a major holiday for the Chinese and has had influence on the new year celebrations of its geographic neighbours, as well as cultures with whom the Chinese have had extensive interaction. These include Aboriginal Taiwanese people, Koreans, Mongolians, Nepalese, Bhutanese, Vietnamese, and formerly the Japanese before 1873. In Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and other countries or regions with significant Han Chinese populations, Chinese New Year is also celebrated, and has, to varying degrees, become part of the traditional culture of these countries. In Canada, although Chinese New Year is not an official holiday, many ethnic Chinese hold large celebrations and Canada Post issues New Year's themed stamps in domestic and international rates.

Although the Chinese calendar traditionally does not use continuously numbered years, its years are often numbered from the reign of Huangdi outside China. But at least three different years numbered 1 are now used by various scholars, making the year 2008 "Chinese Year" 4706, 4705, or 4645...

The 2009 date for Chinese New Year is January 26.

Year of the Ox".... Ox softies! from shucollections.

The Ox is the sign of prosperity through fortitude and hard work. This powerful sign is a born leader, being quite dependable and possessing an innate ability to achieve great things. As one might guess, such people are dependable, calm, and modest. Like their animal namesake, the Ox is unswervingly patient, tireless in their work, and capable of enduring any amount of hardship without complaint.

Have you started on your 2009 goals for the year? What are you making? Post up in the comments...

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An anonymous reader writes "Intel released the article 'Quake Wars Gets Ray Traced' (PDF) which details the development efforts of the research team that applied a real-time ray tracer to Enemy Territory: Quake Wars . It describes the benefits and challenges of transparency textures with this rendering technology. Further insight is given into what special effects are most costly. Examples of glass and a 3D water implementation are shown. The outlook hints into the area of freely programmable many-core processors, like Intel's upcoming Larrabee, that might be able to handle such a workload." We mentioned the ray-traced Quake Wars last in June; the PDF here delves into the implementation details, rather than just showing a demo, and explains what parts of the game give the most difficulty in going from rasterization to ray-tracing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here ya go BitTorrent & Miro folks... Torrent of Make: television episode 04 - Fire Sculpture & DTV Antenna...

Meet the Flaming Lotus Girls, a women-centric maker collaborative that creates gargantuan, fire-breathing sculptures. In the Workshop, John Park builds a digital TV antenna from wire coat hangers and a $10 video camera stabilizer. William Gurstelle shows surprising uses for cable ties, and Maker Channel contributors show off a motorized lounge chair, an eye-popping I/O brush, a vest that controls a video game with a back massage, and an explosive, giant match made from thousands of matchsticks.

Make: television in HD, is available on public television (see local listings) - also as a torrent, Miro as well as on iTunes, YouTube, blip.tv, vimeo, direct downloads - the first and only TV show in history to do this! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Make: television | Digg this!

Ed Bourgeois built one of the finest home roasters I've ever seen. Here is a list of his requirements:

1kg.+ electric roaster My goal was a roaster that could do at least 1kg green. with electric convection heat. I mainly wanted the abilities to:
1. control and monitor every function
2. remove the chaff as produced into an external container
3. create a fluidbed action with the beans but achieved mechanically rather than with heated air.
4. dump and cool in a minute or less
5. must roast very evenly
6. ability to add conduction heat when desired
7. ability to imitate various roasters
8. built with durable and dependable components
9. safe to use

And here's how he did it:

• A) Variable speed convection fan 0-5600rpm
• B) High/Low range convection fan toggle
• C) Main heater On/Off toggle
• D) Beanbats speed control
• E) Chaff canister
• F) Roasting pot
• G) Boost heater control
• H) Main heater and fan
• I) Tilt dump
• J) Bean temp. thermocouple
• K) Air temp.
• L) Volt/Watt digital display "Kill A Watt" meter
• M) Variac 0-140v for main heater
• N) Timer
• O) PID
• P) Cooling drawer- removable cooling tray
• Q) Base with Beanbat speed control gearhead motor 0-330rpm
• R) Dumping handle in back

Read more about it here.

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csn writes "On Wednesday, January 28th at 6:00 PM PST and 9:00 PM EST, the stars of the cult television hit 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' will reunite to do what they do best — heckle bad movies. Join Mike Nelson, Kevin "Tom Servo" Murphy and Bill "Crow T. Robot" Corbett as they make fun of the 1950 short film, 'Overcoming Fear,' live over the internet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Patrick Boland's photo-gallery from the abandoned shipyards of Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour are a love-note to ancient, rotting machines, each more delightful than the last:

Cockatoo Island is like Peter Pan’s Never Never Land for a photographer who likes industrial and historical decay. It’s a wonderland of rusted colour. Machines smeared with grease from a thousand men’s hands. Sandstone hewned by convicts. An apocalyptic museum of towering H.G. Wells tripods and cranes. I was entranced the minute I stepped off the ferry.

Cockatoo Island Project: Photography by Patrick Boland

Here's Bob Turek's MP3 player speaker system, built into a mannequin.

speakers, fiberglas mannequin, hand built stereo amplifier
36" x18" x12"
2008

As part of my object remix series, this stereo forces the music source into the center of attention and creates a radically new user interface.

From the MAKE: Flickr pool

• Super simple automated lighting

• MP3 Grenade! [above, bottom-left]

• Minty laser [above, bottom-right]

• Lockwasher's robo bug [above, top-right]

• Voice record/playback shield for Arduino

• Error prompt etching [above, top-left]

• PICAXE software for Mac/Linux

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

theodp writes "Remember Mr. Microphone? If you thought music couldn't get worse, think again. Perhaps with the help of R&D tax credits, Microsoft Research has spawned Songsmith, software that automatically creates a tinny, childish background track for your singing. And as bad as the pseudo-infomercial was, the use of the product in the wild is likely to be even scarier, as evidenced by these Songsmith'ed remakes of music by The Beatles, The Police, and The Notorious B.I.G.."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at Global Nerdy, Joey deVilla writes about some cool merit badges for geeks:

Just as Boy Scouts earn merit badges for accomplishments in some area of study, now we geeky types can earn Nerd Merit Badges for nerdy accomplishments. The first in the series is now available: it's "Open Source Contributor", pictured below.

(In case you don't recognize the image on the badge, it's the "Octocat", the mascot for the GitHub source code repository service.)

The badges sell for USD$3.99 and I assume that they're working on the honour system - that is, the assumption that you'll only order the badges you've earned. More badges are on the way...

Nerd Merit Badges

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