angry tapir writes "Google and a group of partners have released a set of tools designed to help broadband customers and researchers measure performance of Internet connections. The set of tools, at MeasurementLab.net, includes a network diagnostic tool, a network path diagnostic tool and a tool to measure whether the user's broadband provider is slowing BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P-to-P) traffic. Coming soon to the M-Lab applications is a tool to determine whether a broadband provider is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic, and a tool to determine whether a provider is degrading certain users or applications. 'Transparency is our goal,' said Vint Cerf, chief Internet evangelist at Google and a co-developer of TCP/IP. 'Our intent is to make more [information] visible for all who are interested in the way the network is functioning at all layers.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As various news publications struggle to find new business models, they keep jumping back to the idea of "if we could just get people to pay..." And, then they look at the very, very, very few success stories online of charging for content (such as the Wall Street Journal) and think "hey, we can do that..." Except, they can't, for the most part. The WSJ gets away with it because the level of their reporting really is heads and shoulders above others on certain topics -- and it happens to be on topics which matter significantly to many people (i.e., they can make money based on that info). Unless you have both very specialized and highly valuable content that is not well covered elsewhere, you're going to have trouble charging. And, of course, even then you might have trouble. Cutting off people through a subscription wall presents additional problems, such as convincing any new readers you're actually worth it compared to all the free content out there -- and, most importantly, staying a part of the relevant conversation. These days, that's a lot more important than the content itself (though few newspapers recognize it yet). Also, focusing on charging simply opens up an opportunity for others to create similarly compelling and valuable content for free... and siphoning away your paying readership.

So, it's pretty surprising that anyone thinks that U.S. News and World Report has even the slightest chance of making it work, but folks at the magazine apparently think people will pay $20/year for an online subscription. It's difficult to see how this would work -- considering that there's plenty of (free) competition that covers similar material (and already has a better reputation for it). It seems like a last gasp effort by a U.S. News that has greatly trimmed back over the past couple of years.

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At Davos, Russian prime minister Putin told Michael Dell CEO, of Dell Computer: "We don't need help. We are not invalids."

CNN's Peter Gumbel, Europe editor, reports:

At the official opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Putin, now Russian Prime Minister, delivered a 40-minute speech touching on everything from why the dollar should not be the sole reserve currency to how the world needed to enter into a smart energy partnership with Russia. Then it was time for questions. First up: Dell. He praised Russia's technical and scientific prowess, and then asked: "How can we help" you to expand IT in Russia.

...

Putin's withering reply to Dell: "We don't need help. We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity." ... And, in a final dig at Dell, he talked about how Russian scientists were rightly respected not for their hardware, but for their software. The implication: Any old fool can build a PC outfit.

Putin slaps down Michael Dell at Davos

Maybe we just like these juice boxes turned into back issue boxes 'cause we like the magazines they keep. I guess if you drink a lot of juice...

Juice box magazine holder

More:

• Roll your own back issue boxes

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KentuckyFC writes "In a truly frightening study, physicists at the University of Oxford have identified a massive miscalculation that makes the LHC safety assurances more or less invalid (abstract). The focus of their work is not the safety of particle accelerators per se but the chances of any particular scientific argument being wrong. 'If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect,' say the team. That has serious implications for the LHC, which some people worry could generate black holes that will swallow the planet. Nobody at CERN has put a figure on the chances of the LHC destroying the planet. One study simply said: "there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes". The danger is that this thinking could be entirely flawed, but what are the chances of this? The Oxford team say that roughly one in a thousand scientific papers have to be withdrawn because of errors but generously suppose that in particle physics, the rate is one in 10,000."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jud Turner has created Bio-Cycle, a beautiful (unfortunately non-ridable) bicycle made out of scrap and stainless steel. Via Ecofriend:

Bio-Cycle, which has been crafted from found objects and welded steel. Of course, you cannot ride this bike by sitting on the skeleton, but this work of art definitely shows a great way to include trash into your collection of stunning masterpieces.

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photo by sadnoiss on Flickr Gakken recently released a relatively low cost deluxe theremin. Complete with iconic antennae configuration, the instrument sounds quite nice indeed. After a brief tour through relevant user-made vids, I suspect it's inspired many to actually learn how to play music the easy-to-pick-up-difficult-to-master device (and that's cool in and of itself) - Gakken Premium (Google translation) [via Theremin World] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

Sir David Attenborough gets a lot of hate mail because he doesn't give credit to God in his documentaries.

In an interview with this week's Radio Times about his latest documentary, on Charles Darwin and natural selection, the broadcaster said: "They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance."

Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give "credit" to God, Attenborough added: "They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator."

Attenborough's response to creationists' hate mail

Frank Zappa's widow, Gail Zappa, has been rather aggressive over the years in "protecting" the intellectual property associated with Frank Zappa and his music. Most recently, she tried to stop the very popular Zappanale festival, held each year in Bad Doberan, Germany. The festival has gone on for 19 years (this will be the 20th) and celebrates all things related to Frank Zappa. Last year, nearly 10,000 Zappa fans showed up. But, Gail Zappa apparently was quite upset by this, and sued the organizers for trademark infringement, demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars for daring to celebrate her husband's music without a license. Reader Clive Lines writes in to point out that a German court has ruled against Zappa, allowing the Zappanale to continue -- noting that Gail Zappa had no legitimate trademark claim, since she had not used the Zappa trademark in Germany. The court also noted that the logo used by the event organizers (involving Zappa's combo mustache/soul-patch) is allowed to remain as well -- as it's significantly different than the "official" Zappa logo, meaning there is unlikely to be much confusion.

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If a barfing unicorn needs a unicorn chaser, will the barfing unicorn serve as its own chaser?

MAKE editor and publisher Dale Dougherty has more on the well-intentioned-but-actually-awful Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA).

Years ago, Jason Gold was looking for a rattle for his new baby. He wanted something safe and made of natural materials. "I was trying to find a rattle that wasn't coated in paint or made of plastic," said Gold. Not finding any, he made a rattle out of wood. Thinking that other parents might be looking for alternatives to mass-produced items of questionable materials, he started Camden Rose, a manufacturer of wooden and fabric toys in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Today, the Camden Rattle sells for $15 through a network alternative retail stores and places like Whole Foods.

This year, Jason Gold thought the economy would be his biggest worry this holiday season. However, it turned out that the 2008 holiday season was the busiest ever for Camden Rose. The bigger worry for Gold has been figuring out if the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) will put him and many others like him out of business in 2009.

The CPSIA on the surface seems like a good idea, coming as a response to the recall of toys made in China and sold in the US that had potentially harmful levels of lead, phthalates or other toxins. The law's intentions are good but its side effects are not. Lost in the details were provisions that may deal a serious blow to America's cottage industries and individuals who make things by hand. This comes at a time when the unemployed and underemployed are seeking creative ways to make a living from home.

There are three parts to the CPSIA. The first requires independent testing and certification. "We've gone from no certification to the strictest form of certification in the world," says Gold. "It might cost me $4,000 to test my rattle." It's not just the cost of testing. The tests must be done for each component, and for each item, not for the manufacturing process itself.

The $4000 handmade rattle

I wish there were more information about this tasty-looking giant squid cake!

See also: my Flickr set of bizarre cakes.

imamac writes "It appears Cox Communications is the next in line for throttling internet traffic. But it's not throttling of course; Cox's euphemism is 'congestion management.' From Cox's explanation: 'In February, Cox will begin testing a new method of managing traffic on our high-speed Internet network in our Kansas and Arkansas markets. During the occasional times the network is congested, this new technology automatically ensures that all time-sensitive Internet traffic — such as web pages, voice calls, streaming videos and gaming — moves without delay. Less time-sensitive traffic, such as file uploads, peer-to-peer and Usenet newsgroups, may be delayed momentarily...' Sounds like throttling to me."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nathan from Sparkfun gives an excellent demonstration of sending code to AVR chip wirelessly with Xbee and the Sparkfun wireless bootloader. As he explains the setup easily tolerates a break in connection during transmisson -

We've posted a new tutorial describing how to reliably download code to an AVR ATmega168 using a XBee serial link. We created our own bootloader and modified our old Screamer VB app to make a really robust wireless bootloader.

- Wireless Bootloading for ATmega168 Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

schneecrash writes "Submitting bug reports — and waiting for responses etc — seems to be SOP for developers and users alike, these days. Every project has some sort of bug-tracker — bugzilla, trac, mailing list, etc. E.g., we currently track 200+ external bugs across ~40 OSS projects. Half the bugs depend on something else getting fixed, first. Every bug has its own email thread, etc. Management asks 'How we doin' overall?,' and suddenly everyone involved gets to work removing dried gum from the bottom of their shoe. What do Slashdotters use/recommend for centrally keeping track of all the bugs you track across all those different bugtrackers? In particular, managing communications and dependencies across bugs? So far, the best method I've managed to use is bunches of PostIt-notes stuck to the screen of an out-of-commission 32" TV (glossy, non-matte screen, of course!)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well, well, well... With Cox getting aggressive with traffic shaping, it looks like Google is trying to give users the tools to find out what their ISP is actually doing to their broadband connection. The company has teamed up with the New America Foundation and Planet Lab to offer a platform for tools to measure what's happening on internet connections. The obvious thinking: the easier it is for anyone to recognize that their broadband connection is being tinkered with, the more likely an outcry is raised, and the provider is pushed to back down (at least on the more egregious practices -- such as what eventually happened with Comcast's traffic shaping).

It will be interesting to see where this goes, or how useful it really becomes. Without meaningful competition in the broadband space, it seems like ISPs are willing to risk some consumer anger -- knowing they really don't have many other options. Still, it does suggest one more reason why specific net neutrality regulations may be premature. Let's see if providing more info along with open tools can help keep ISPs more reasonable in their network management practices.

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We scored a very limited supply of Arduino Duemilanove in a variety of 10 different colors. Pick your fave flavor and specify upon ordering - we'll do our best to fill all requests. And won't you be the envy of your hacker-space when you roll up with a white/red/goldenrod Duemilanove! - Arduino Duemilanove And don't forget, this week is our "Year of the Ox" sale - All this week we have a 10% off sale this week in the Maker Shed, use code "2009OX" at the time of checkout - Happy Chinese New Year! Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

Alcor Foundation, the larger of two companies that maintain people in cryopreservation, stores cryopreserved bodies, heads, and pets in beautifully made stainless-steel cylinders known as dewars. These are vacuum-insulated (like giant thermos flasks) to minimize the boiloff of liquid nitrogen. Each whole body is packed in a separate aluminum pod, four pods to a dewar. The upper ends of the pods are visible in the picture on the right, which I took looking down into the mouth of a dewar through the liquid nitrogen, which is colorless. A winch and chain are used to lower pods into storage.

For more information check www.alcor.org

patentpundit writes "BioArts International announced today that they have delivered the world's first commercially cloned dog, a 10-week old Labrador named Lancey, to Florida residents Edgar and Nina Otto. According to the press release issued by the company, "BioArts International is a biotech company focused on unique, untapped markets in the global companion animal, stem cell and human genomics industries. The Best Friends Again programis a collaboration between BioArts and the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation in South Korea, home to the best and most experienced dog cloning team in the world." The technology that makes this animal cloning possible stems from the cloning patents developed at the Roslin Institute for the cloning of the now famous, or infamous depending on your view, Dolly the sheep."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sqworl is a handy utility for collecting and sharing a number of links. It creates a short shareable link, similar to TinyURL, but instead of the link taking you to a single destination, it sends the recipient to a custom link group that you've assembled. Or, in the words of Sqworl-maker Caleb Brown:

Sqworl is this thing that you can use to turn a bunch of long dumb website links into one single smaller link with pretty web previews.

You can think of this a bit like a link presentation. You add a number of links to a link group, and give them each a description. Sqworl will take a screen grab of all the links. The result is a concise set of links, each with a thumbnail and a description, that you can safely send off in an email without worry of it getting garbled-up.

Sqworl [via ReadWriteWeb]

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The folks at EMS Labs like candy message hearts as much as the next nerd, especially when you create the messages yourself, but who likes the way these things taste? They don't. So they came up with a larger shortbread version, a "grown up version" of a phony-holiday classic.

Improved Custom Message Hearts

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When the Senate unanamously agreed to delay the digital TV transition to June, it seemed like a formality that the House would agree as well. Apparently not. Plenty of people have spoken up about how silly it is to delay the transition, and it appears that our Congressional Representatives actually have voted down their version of the bill, meaning that the transition date is still on for February... for now. It wouldn't be at all surprising to see some horse trading, where some Reps get some sort of payoff in order to change their vote.

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An anonymous reader writes "The Digital TV transition delay bill has failed to pass the United States House of Representatives. By a vote 258 to 168 in favor of changing the date, the bill has failed as two-thirds of the votes are required for it to pass. The delay bill was once perceived as inevitable, [but the House] has now apparently made February 17th the date of transition once again. Now the question remains, will they attempt to pass it again by the deadline?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Observation: If you can not or will not laugh at yourself, everyone else will.

Wait a minute there's more to it.

If everyone is laughing at you, hard as it may seem you could join in the fun. You'll probably get a really nice hug if you do.

"cheesecake"

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

This man is Curtis Henderson, one of a handful of people who took the concept of cryonics seriously enough to devote his life to it forty years ago, when it seemed even more frivolous than it does today. Henderson had inherited a modest trust fund, most of which he spent on The Cryonics Society of New York, which he ran from his home in Sayville, Long Island. The rusting cylinder behind him was a very early one-person cryonics capsule. I found it (containing no human remains, I hasten to add) in his back yard when I photographed him around 1990.

Currently Henderson lives in Florida. The Cryonics Society of New York was disbanded long ago. I don’t know what happened to the capsule.

John Young and his friend are making a line of nerd merit badges. "Attach to your jacket, your backpack, or the lid of your overclocked, battle-scarred laptop. Start a nerd sash!"

Open Source Contributor

Nerd Merit Badge 01

Open Source

Requirements: Make an accepted commit to any open source project.

$3.99 plus $1.00 S&H in the USA

Hugh Pickens writes "For years, the computer industry has made steady progress by following Moore's law, derived from an observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore that the amount of computing power available at a particular price doubles every 18 months. The Economist reports however that in the midst of a recession, many companies would now prefer that computers get cheaper rather than more powerful or by applying the flip side of Moore's law do the same for less. A good example of this is virtualisation: using software to divide up a single server computer so that it can do the work of several, and is cheaper to run. Another example of 'good enough' computing is supplying 'software as a service,' via the web, as done by Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Google, sacrificing the bells and whistles that are offered by conventional software that hardly anyone uses anyway. Even Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon: the next version of Windows is intended to do the same as the last version, Vista, but to run faster and use fewer resources. If so, it will be the first version of Windows that makes computers run faster than the previous version. That could be bad news for computer-makers, since users will be less inclined to upgrade only proving that Moore's law has not been repealed, but that more people are taking the dividend it provides in cash, rather than processor cycles."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On the RepRap site, they have a short piece on hacking the Solarbotics GM3 gearmotors. The GM3's are the standard motor used in the RepRap extruder. The piece covers locking the internal clutch to get more torque, lubricating the gears, and an easier mounting solution. These tweaks can obviously be useful in other motor applications.

Hacking the GM3 Gearmotor

In the Maker Shed:

All this week we have a 10% off sale this week in the Maker Shed, use code "2009OX" at the time of checkout - Happy Chinese New Year!

Solarbotics Gearmotor GM_3
Our Price: $5.50

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In a move that's basically baiting the FCC and Congress to see if they will act, Cox has announced that it's going to experiment with rather aggressive traffic shaping, granting priority to bits that it feels have a great priority. Why Cox gets to describe what gets a priority and what doesn't seems pretty questionable. Cox is also the company that implemented a three strikes policy on file sharing without telling anyone.

To be honest, this seems like a really tone deaf move by Cox -- and I'd imagine that plenty of telcos and cable companies are pissed off about Cox calling extra attention to the topic right now. There's been plenty of talk of new net neutrality regulations in Congress, and with Cox putting the issue so squarely on the table, it's as if they're begging for such regulations (or at least to be slapped down by the FCC). You would think they would at least wait until it wasn't an issue getting so much attention before drawing extra scrutiny and daring regulators to act.

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Alex Steffen sent me this link to a gallery of cemeteries in parking lots.

Tullahassee Creek Indian Cemetery – Sand Springs, Oklahoma

Situated right between an ATM and a postal drop box, this Indian cemetery comprises about 1/4 acre of isolated turf in a parking lot outside Tulsa.

It was founded in 1883 and took less than a century to become the inadvertent centerpiece of a strip mall.

nandemoari writes "After flirting with open source development for some time, Microsoft has made another step towards real commitment with the release of source code for Web Sandbox, a program used to test and secure web site content. The Sandbox source code will be released under the Apache 2.0 license, an open source license agreement allowing the content creator to maintain copyright while permitting others to develop the product for their own use. Microsoft has gradually been increasing their involvement with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) since 2008 when they agreed to fund development of certain ASF initiatives."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Outdoor Life magazine recently featured the fishing lures from the CRANKbait! art exhibition my friend Steve Lodefink curated. (I painted the blue bumbleswine at the top.)

Brion Gysin is one of my favorite artists, and his thinking and interests influenced me in myriad ways. Gysin is perhaps best known as the "discoverer" of the cut-up technique popularized by his best friend William S. Burroughs, and the co-inventor of the trance-inducing Dreamachine. Gysin was also a pioneer of sound poetry and multimedia collage that, in my mind, underpins remix culture, quick-cut video editing, and nonlinear Web experiences. Above is a video of the artist at work on his calligraphic and roller paintings.

Here's a sneak peak at Amy Crehore's hand painted ukuleles, which will be on display at her upcoming "Dreamgirls and Ukes" exhibition.

Paintings and ukes for my show at Thinkspace gallery, Los Angeles (Feb 13-March 6).The paintings just need to be framed and the ukes are 90% done in these photos. These hand-painted, restored, antique ukes will all be set up by a luthier, but they are also fine art objects that will hang in the gallery setting next to the paintings. Most are from the 1920's and 30's, so they are pretty rare.

Amy Crehore's Dreamgirls and Ukes

Best use of shag carpet ever

Here's a great overview of different ways to refrigerate:

"Your refrigerator is one of the largest consumers of energy in your home. In an average home, refrigeration burns 125 watts per hour. You can, of course, take steps to reduce the amount of electricity your refrigerator uses--by shag carpeting it, for example. But why not replace your fridge with something entirely renewable?"

My favorite is shag carpeting your refrigerator:

Project: Insulation Of Existing Fridge
Renter friendly.
Project Time: Weekend.
Cost: Inexpensive ($50-100, depending on type of insulation used and size of frame to hold it).
Energy Saved: High. Average refrigeration uses 8 percent of the household energy budget. Insulating your refrigerator can reduce energy use by up to 50 percent.
Ease of Use: Easy. Does not affect day-to-day use.
Maintenance Level: Low. Lengthens life of fridge by reducing the compressor load.
Skill Levels: Carpentry: Moderate.
Materials: 2 × 4s, insulation, paneling, connector plates, screws, and nails.
Tools: Saw, drill, hammer.

And you can also go fully carbon-free for refrigeration, although you lose lots of your ability to regulate temperature.

Here's the zeer pot, my favorite version. I'd like to see one of these that adds its own water and maybe turns on supplemental, on-grid refrigeration when/if it gets too warm. Anybody know of other (particularly well-documented) energy-efficient DIY refrigeration?

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Ape Lad sez, "This year is the 40th anniversary of the Haunted Mansion. These lovely purple shoes, featuring the spooky wallpaper design, are being sold as part of the upcoming festivities." Man there's some good stuff in that merch preview and also a lot of junk. I'd love these shoes, and the dessert plates, the candelabra and the chess set (oh, the chess set!). But does the world really need yet another set of crummy pins?

Haunted Mansion 40th Anniversary Event (Thanks, Ape Lad!)

As debate over the massive economic stimulus bill continues, the trade group representing US mobile operators has weighed in, with its head, former-NFL-star-turned-congressman-turned-shill Steve Largent, saying that unless open-access rules are removed from the broadband section of the bill, carriers will be "hesitant to participate". News to Steve: the stimulus bill, and this section, aren't necessarily intended merely to further line the pockets of incumbent mobile operators. While he thinks open-access rules "will deter providers from taking advantage of the grant program," one would have to imagine that if incumbents sat on the sidelines, plenty of new entrants would be more than willing to open their businesses to the government support and use it to craft new mobile broadband networks that would provide some much-needed competition in the space. Furthermore, such open access requirements didn't stop Verizon from shelling out several billion dollars for spectrum licenses last year. It seems that the CTIA loves it some stimulus -- as long as it doesn't stimulate any potential competition for its members.

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

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doug141 writes "Lessons learned in video games may transcend computers, PlayStations and Wiis. New research suggests that virtual worlds sway real-life choices. Twenty-two volunteers who played a cycling game learned to associate one team's jersey with a good flavored drink and another team's jersey with a bad flavored drink. Days later, 3/4 of the subjects avoided the same jersey in a real-world test. Marketers and lawyers will take note."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PJRC Electronic Projects has come out with the $19 Teensy AVR development board. It uses the AT90USB162, which eliminates the need for a separate USB-to-TTL chip:

The Teensy is a complete USB-based microcontoller development system, featuring a 16 MHz AVR (AT90USB162) processor, in a very small footprint! All programming is done via the USB port. No special programmer is needed, only a standard "Mini-B" USB cable and a PC or Macintosh with a USB port.

Key Features:

• USB can be any type of device
  
• 21 I/O pins
  
• AVR processor, 16 MHz
  
• Single pushbutton programming
  
• 15.5K usable Flash memory
  
• HalkKay bootloader
  
• Free software tools for Mac OS X, Linux & Windows
  
• UART, SPI, 4 PWM, 2 timers
  
• Tiny size, 1.2 by 0.7 inch
  
• Very low cost, only $19
  

Teensy USB Development Board [via AVR Freaks]

Details about Arduino support, and known issues.

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This gorgeous video was made by improvising a camera-stabilizer on an empty plane seat and shooting timelapse of the squiggles made by the cities the plane flew over. The creator, Flickr user Ettubrute, sez, "On my night time flight back to SF from Amsterdam, I noticed that the lights from cities were making the clouds glow. Really spectacular and ethereal - it was really seeing the impact of urban environments from a different perspective. Each glow or squiggle represents one town or city! ...We were around the midwest at the beginning of the clip, and there were fewer cities once we hit the rockies. the bridge at the end is the san mateo bridge." Glowing Cities Under a Nighttime Sky (via Kottke)

The Crooked Timber politics blog is holding a literary salon on the works of Charlie Stross, with commentary from a variety of writers and specialists in different disciplines, including Nobel-prizewinning economist Paul Krugman and sf writer Ken Macleod.

But what makes Stross’s version different from everyone else’s is that he’s noticed something: the fantasy thought experiment, in which someone brings modern science and technology to a backward society, isn’t a fantasy. It is, instead, something that’s been tried all across the very real Third World, as businessmen and aid workers fanned out across nations in which the typical person, two generations ago, lived no better than a medieval peasant. And you know what? Modernization turns out to be pretty hard to do.

I may have a better sense of this than most, because I’m an economist of a certain age. When I went to grad school in the mid-70s, I thought about doing development economics – but decided not to, because it was too depressing. Basically, circa 1975 there weren’t any success stories: poor countries remained obstinately poor, despite their access to 20th-century technology.

Since then the success stories have multiplied, with China and India finally emerging as the economic superpowers they ought to be – though if truth be told, we really don’t know why development economics started working better around 1980. Even now, however, there are lots of places that have access to modern technology, and use it – but remain, in the ways that matter most, firmly stuck in the poverty trap. Feudalism with cell phones is still feudalism.

Charles Stross book event (Thanks, Austin!)

These heels, shown at left, were made for a dude. Speaking selfishly and subjectively, I am not entirely sure how I would personally feel about the idea of high heels on a dude who was the potential object of my own affection. But I suppose it depends on the dude. If it were, say, Noel Fielding from the Mighty Boosh, i would not flinch or reach for the emergency pair of Converse, stashed by the door for just such a crisis -- no, I would swoon ever more swoonfully. Anyway, Susannah Breslin points us to these kickers by Stuart Weitzman, crafted for a certain glam-rock star, and here is a blog post about them.

MCM, author of the fabulous anti-DRM kids' book "The Pig and the Box," sez,

Two years and a lot of learning later, I'm finally re-releasing my anti-DRM book "The Pig and the Box" in a snazzy Second Edition. The new version is more kid-friendly (at the suggestion of some teachers and librarians) as well as having a shinier cover. And even better, I finally figured out the whole "distribution" angle, so you can buy it practically anywhere in the world (even Japan!)

This is part of my "12 Books in 12 Months" project, where I'm launching a slate of Creative Commons-licensed titles throughout 2009. Next up is the third book in the SteamDuck series, and then the start of an "open source" action series called "TorrentBoy".

Oh, and as always, the books are all downloadable as free PDFs, so collect and trade 'em with your friends!

The Pig Book Returns (Thanks, MCM!)

I decided to make a quick video of me soldering together the Plug-in Bread-Board Power Supply from the Maker Shed. This power supply makes a great addition to anyone's electronics lab. Here's why:

This power supply module plugs straight into common bread boards, allowing you to cleanly and easily power your board with a wall wart plug or with wires into screw terminals. It features a variable voltage regulator that can be set to output 3.3 or 5V with a jumper, or any voltage if a potentiometer is added. The input has a rectifier that accepts AC or DC (polarity doesn't matter)--just make sure the input is about 2V greater than the output you want. Skill level: beginner.

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All this week get 10% off you order in the Maker Shed, use code "2009OX" at the time of checkout - Happy Chinese New Year!

In the Maker Shed:

Plug-in Bread-Board Power Supply

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suraj.sun writes "AT&T and Comcast, two of the nation's largest Internet service providers, are expected to be among a group of ISPs that will cooperate with the music industry in battling illegal file sharing, three sources close to the companies told CNET News. The RIAA said last month that it had enlisted the help of ISPs as part of a new antipiracy campaign. The RIAA has declined to identify which ISPs or how many. It's important to note that none of the half dozen or so ISPs involved has signed agreements. But as it stands, AT&T and Comcast are among the companies that have indicated they wish to participate in what the RIAA calls a "graduated response program.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I know there is no shortage of "man on the street" photos from last week's historic presidential inauguration, and I'm a little late getting to this -- but I was particularly fond of these portraits. And of all the images in photographer and producer/director Rene Lego's lovely Flickr set here, I liked the moment captured above the best.

Obama Inauguration (Rene Lego/Flickr)

The BBC has struck a deal to put all of Britain's publicly owned paintings online -- presently, 80 percent of the 200,000 publicly owned paintings are not on display. This is ferociously awesome, at least on the face of it, though one can imagine all kinds of ways they could screw this up (crappy EULA, stupid Flash-based DRM, low-rez only, wasting license-fee money trying to keep non-British IP addresses out of the collection, etc). But, assuming they do this the way you'd expect something built by and for the Internet would work, this is the best news for free culture that I've heard since the BBC announced that they were going to put all their archives online for free remixing. Let's just hope that this promise is an easier one to keep -- it's an embarrassment to see this once-great beacon of public service reinvent itself as a DRM platform (iPlayer) and a glorified video retailer for Americans (Worldwide).

The BBC is to put every one of the 200,000 oil paintings in public ownership in the UK on the internet as well as opening up the Arts Council's vast film archive online as part of a range of initiatives that it has pledged will give it a "deeper commitment to arts and music".

Mark Thompson, the BBC director general, unveiled the ambitious plans today at a London event showcasing the corporation's music, arts and culture output for 2009 and beyond.

The move may help the BBC get back on the front foot after almost a week of negative headlines over its refusal to broadcast the Gaza humanitarian aid appeal.

A partnership with the Public Catalogue Foundation charity will see all the UK's publicly owned oil paintings – 80% of which are not on public display – placed on the internet by 2012.

BBC to put nation's oil paintings online

Ed Note: one of Boingboing's three current guest bloggers, 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. (You can see a video interview introducing the book here.) He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

I've been so busy posting about Lost and Candy Land, that I haven't had a chance to say anything about what we're working on at outside.in, which in many ways has been the most exciting project of all for me over the past few years.

When John Geraci and I first started tossing around ideas for the site, our common passion and interest had been this notion that geographic space--and particularly urban space--had an invisible layer of data flowing through it that was tantalizingly close to you as you explored a neighborhood, but that was generally inaccessible other than through the chains of face-to-face, word-of-mouth conversation. Not only were there a million stories in the big city, there were a million in every neighborhood, and a thousand on every block: the overpriced condo that sold last week; the new bar that just got denied a liquor license; the mugging that took place a few months ago; the school principal that everyone's thrilled with. (This is what Dan Hill wonderfully describes in The Street As Platform.) All this data was out there in people's heads -- and increasingly in local placeblogger sites -- but there was no easy way to discover it geographically. There was no easy way to say: I'm standing on this corner in this town -- what are the locals talking about right now?

So we started outside.in as an attempt to answer that question. The Radar service we launched last year was our first interface that really tried to give you that micro-local perspective. But one of the things that's become clear to us is that question--what's happening around me right now--is even more compelling and fascinating when you're asking it via a mobile device standing on a street corner. And so I'm just incredibly excited about the application we've just released for the iPhone, Outside.in Radar. You load it up, let it geo-locate you, and then you'll see all the blog posts, news stories, Tweets, and discussion threads that involve places within 1,000 feet of where you're standing. If one of those places sounds interesting, you can go check out a dedicated place that shows you all the stories we've tracked that are associated with that place. You can also zoom out to see all the stories in the neighborhood you're currently occupying, or the wider city.

There are a hundred iPhone apps that let you find a nearby Italian restaurant. And that's great -- finding a nearby restaurant is a useful function. But I think a lot of us want something more out of the geo-web; we want the grain and the serendipity of human conversations and gossip to help us explore physical space. I think this app is a big first step in that direction. A couple of caveats, though. For now, it's U.S. only. And while it will sometimes find content outside of the top 100 or so urban areas in the U.S., there's much more data in the mid-sized to big cities. We're also actively working to speed up the load times--this first version is a little slow to fill up with data. (There will be a free upgrade that's faster shortly.) But if you walk around a few neighborhoods with it for a couple days, I think you'll find there's something genuinely new about the experience--it's like exploring a community with a neighborhood maven one tap away on your phone. And I know you'll immediately start thinking of other ways of using the data we've assembled over the past two years; the possibilities for new geo-interfaces are really extraordinary right now, and I'd love to hear any thoughts for v2 and beyond.

Outside.in Radar for the iPhone

The main backers of the online video site Hulu, NBC Universal and News Corp., are two of the stronger supporters of our copyright system, and have, at times, been known to push to make it even more stringent in order to "protect" their works. So, it's interesting to see them discovering that draconian copyright rules can come back and bite them as well. We were just covering some of the problems various TV shows have had being put on DVD due to licensing problems, and now it appears those same problems are making it difficult to get some shows up on Hulu -- despite the fact producers would like those shows online.

One of our readers, named Mark, wrote in to let us know that he and his wife had been watching the old TV show The Pretender on Hulu, when they realized that some of the episodes were simply missing (including the entire final season). He wrote to Hulu to ask why, and was told:

"Thank for letting us know that some episodes from The Pretender appear to be missing from our lineup. Individual episodes are sometimes held up due to rights issues, quite often related to music used in the show - and that's the case this time - some of the music in episodes 17 and 18 couldn't be cleared for online streaming. We'll continue to request them from our content partner, but at this time we can't offer them though we'd love to."

It's still difficult to understand why we would ever design copyright law and licensing policy in this manner. After all, having certain songs included in a TV show is never going to hurt the commercial viability of a song.

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arcticstoat writes "Following last year's reports of a scheme to 'ban' pirates from the Internet via ISPs in the UK, it looks as though the UK government has now decided to back down on the plan, saying that it hopes it won't have to apply 'the heavy hand of legislation'. The UK's Intellectual Property Minister, David Lammy, said that 'I'm not sure it's actually going to be possible,' as a result of the complexities of enforcing such legislation. Lammy also revealed that he had a different opinion on file sharers than many people in the music industry. He pointed out that there's a big difference between organized counterfeiting gangs and 'younger people not quite buying into the system'. He added that 'we can't have a system where we're talking about arresting teenagers in their bedrooms. People can rent a room in an hotel and leave with a bar of soap — there's a big difference between leaving with a bar of soap and leaving with the television.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

patentpundit writes "Word has started to circulate that President Barack Obama may be close to appointing John W. Thompson, the outgoing chief executive of network security firm Symantec Corp., to be the next Secretary of Commerce. According to the LA Times, over the last several days Thompson has spoken on the telephone and met with key senators, and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), a member of the commerce committee that would hold confirmation hearings for any appointed Secretary of Commerce, is 'extremely supportive and hopeful he'll be the nominee.' The appointment of Thompson to head the Department of Commerce would be an exceptionally interesting choice given that only days ago President Obama asked Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, to lead his open source charge and conduct a study and report back regarding the feasibility of the US government forgoing proprietary software and moving toward open source software solutions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

patentpundit writes "Word has started to circulate that President Barack Obama may be close to appointing John W. Thompson, the outgoing chief executive of network security firm Symantec Corp., to be the next Secretary of Commerce. According to the LA Times, over the last several days Thompson has spoken on the telephone and met with key senators, and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), a member of the commerce committee that would hold confirmation hearings for any appointed Secretary of Commerce, is "extremely supportive and hopeful he'll be the nominee." The appointment of Thompson to head the Department of Commerce would be an exceptionally interesting choice given that only days ago President Obama asked Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, to lead his open source charge and conduct a study and report back regarding the feasibility of the US government forgoing proprietary software and moving toward open source software solutions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instructables user westfw has a very in-depth guide about different microcontrollers which includes the differences between the different architectures and practical tips.

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My friend Michelle has been hooping, and sent me this link to instructions for making your own hoops, including a collapsible version with bungee cord inside.

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Last week, there was a story on News.com about how Connecticut's Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal, who's been on quite a crusade to "protect the children" from social networks, was demanding MySpace hand over info on sex offenders registered on the site. This seemed a bit odd, because MySpace and other social networks had already agreed to weed out the accounts of various sex offenders. Yet, as the article noted, an investigator (who was involved in a separate legal battle with MySpace) happened to find profiles of registered sex offenders still on MySpace including (gasp!) some who even used their own mug shots as their photos. Yet, as Sean Garrett points out, the whole thing seems pretty questionable. Why would a sex offender trolling the site for kids use their own mugshot -- and equally creepy descriptions that are pretty clear tipoffs. The whole thing seems quite likely that someone found the sex offender page and set up a fake MySpace profile.

Of course, it's possible the page was actually put together by the sex offender in question, but it doesn't look like anyone actually bothered to confirm that it's real. Instead, it's being used as a political prop by politicians and reporters of the horrible type of people found on MySpace. As Jim Harper notes, will Richard Blumenthal be investigating the reincarnation of Elvis Presley on Facebook next?

No one's trying to downplay the serious issue of sexual predators, but study after study after study has shown that the issue has been blown way out of proportion by politicians and the press who seem to love creating moral panics so they can claim they're "protecting the children." It's as if they stop thinking and all skepticism goes out the window the second anyone claims that sexual predators might be on social networks -- despite the fact that studies have shown the best way to combat the rare cases when children are approached by such miscreants is better education. Children who are educated on the risks are quite good at avoiding such contact. Yet, that doesn't make for such great headlines and probably doesn't help Attorneys General when it comes to re-election time.

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bowman9991 submitted a story that ought to make even the most stone hearted amongst you cry. He says "Travis Wright, one of the writers behind Eagle Eye, has been working on a sequel to Ridley Scott's Sci-Fi classic Blade Runner. Script proposals have explored the nature of the off-world colonies, what happens to the Tyrell Corporation in the wake of its founder's death, and what would become of Rachel. Travis said he intends to write a script "with or without anyone's blessings." Director Ridley Scott appears interested in a sequel too. At Comic-Con in 2007 Ridley said, "If you have any scripts, you know where to send them." It's doubtful he'll have time anytime soon though. He's already stated his next two science fiction films will be an adaptation of Aldous Huxley's Brave New Word with Leonardo DiCaprio and an adaptation of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Craig continues his series of art-devices with I. M. Chip Blue, a curiously chatty box of electronics -

Here is I. M. Chip Blue, the fifth in my series of Enigma Gadgets. Like the others, it's based on the Arudino microcontroller and uses the Quadravox QV300 speech module. The QV300 is programmed from the factory to speak 240 common technical terms including units of measure, numbers and colors. I. M. Chip Blue also contains a Memsic 2125 accelerometer. I have programmed it the device to speak nonsensical sentences based on a set of rules. The rules vary depending on the way the device is oriented.

Be sure to watch the video oh Chip's monologue over at DryReading Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

?Here's an oldie, the "Bikelophone System" from 1995 is a slide instrument consisting of magnetic pickups attached to the body of a bicycle so that anything connected to or effecting the bike is amplified. Objects wired up included bass strings, scrap wood, metal bowls, and a tone generator which apparently created some "cacophonic terror". Still, a pretty cool build on this instrument which looks like it might be perfect for a solo.

Bikelophone via Networked Music Review

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javipas writes "Google developers have announced a new feature part of Gmail Labs that everybody was waiting to see realized. Offline Gmail will allow users to have a partial copy of its Gmail account on their PCs, and access their messages while being offline. The magic of Google Gears comes to the rescue, but the process will not be complete. The syncronization will update the online and offline copies, but Google will use an algorithm that will determine the messages downloaded on each sync (the first being the most important) based on several parameters that point out that message's relevance. This measure will save the process from downloading pieces of information not quite valuable. US and UK english users can enjoy this feature through the Gmail Labs section."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

coondoggie writes "A federal court today spanked two telemarketers with some $1.2 million in civil penalties for violating the Federal Trade Commission's Do Not Call Rule. According to the FTC, the companies called consumers whose phone numbers were on the Do Not Call Registry without having obtained their express written agreement or having an 'established business relationship' with them. One group's telemarketers also allegedly abandoned many calls, by failing to connect the calls to a sales representative within two seconds after consumers answered, as required by law, the FTC stated. The cases were filed by the Department of Justice on behalf of the FTC."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're always looking for interesting examples of companies using infinite goods to sell scarcities, and George Johnston points us to one side business that Blizzard Entertainment seems to have gotten into to make more money from World of Warcraft. The company already gives out its basic software for free, but sells the (scarce) service of connecting to its game servers to play (even though there are "free" servers out there, many end up paying for the official one, because it's better, more stable, and has many more players). However, Johnston noticed that Blizzard has also done a deal with a 3D printing company (usually used for things like rapid prototyping) to allow game players to buy 3D models of their players. This is unlikely to ever become a really big business, but it highlights, yet again, that there are numerous different scarcities around any particular product -- and a good business is one that goes out and explores that wide variety of options to figure out what they can sell.

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Here's a good idea - take something fun and make it functional. Hmmm, let's say a remote-controlled moon light for instance ...

I decided that it would be more interesting if the model moon actually reflected the current phase of the moon based on the date. I did this by replacing the original PCB with an arduino and a DS1307 realtime clock module from Sparkfun. The DS1307 module maintains the proper time and date, while the arduino calculates the current phase of the moon based on the date. The RTC module contains a coin cell battery backup that enables the internal clock to maintain the proper time, even without power, for up to 17 years!

- Hack the ThinkGeek R/C Moon Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

?Here's a cool how-to on building a portable USB charger for your gadgets. We've covered similar builds like this on Make before, but this one has a good parts list and walks you through each step of the build with attention to detail. This kind of thing is handy when you need to charge your gear and are nowhere near a laptop or a MintyBoost. Just don't use this charger indiscreetly when flying on an airplane.

How to Make a Portable USB Charger

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Just posted! Lens reviews on DPReview are one year old today, and we're celebrating this auspicious anniversary with appropriate aplomb. Our 25th review features the Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II, a bargain offering that sells for less than $100, yet features an optical design refined over decades of service as the standard lens supplied with 35mm film SLRs. So how does it measure up against F1.4 lenses costing three times as much?

"FielDrum" is an acoustic drum built with a system of magnets that pull the performer's hits so that they complete the correct drumming motion. Imagine if you were learning to play and your instructor was always there, guiding your hits to the correct location on the drum. The system emulates this sensation through controlled magnetism. Pretty interesting concept, although don't expect it to show up in Rock Band anytime soon.

Graham Grindlay Projects via Architectradure

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

Mandiberg covered a bicycle in retroreflective vinyl. The above pic combines two shots of the same bike - left side taken with flash, right side without. Wow!

We used Scotchlight 680 vinyl. When the bicycle is in the beam of a light (like a car's headlight, or a camera's flash,) it reflects back super bright. When it is not in the light, it is just jet black. Ideally, it will aid in nighttime bicycle safety.

Likely to shatter previous bicycle safety records! (do they have those?) - Bright Bike

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Back in 2005, we marveled at the success that Skype backers had in talking up the price of the company, eventually suckering convincing eBay to put together a $4 billion deal for it. This was what we dubbed the "Skype Billion-Dollar Buyout Plan" in which companies used press hype to create valuations far above their actual worth (see YouTube and Facebook for a couple of examples). Of course, what eBay was never really clear on was how it planned to make money from Skype, and it later went back and forth on whether it had given up on looking for the mythical "synergies" between Skype and its core auction business. Last week, eBay's CEO conceded that those synergies were "minimal" -- leading to more speculation that eBay might spin Skype off.

And thus the cycle begins again, with a figure of $900 million to $1.2 billion tossed out there as a potential starting point for the second version of the Skype Billion-Dollar Buyout Plan. What's interesting is that just like four years ago, Skype's financials are murky, as Om Malik points out. The company also still faces the same big problem: monetization. As Skype gets bigger, that problem could become even more difficult. After all, if Skype continues to garner more and more users, more and more calls will shift from the paid SkypeOut service to free Skype-to-Skype calls. Skype is said to be profitable (although there's no indication of how profitable), but it seems pretty clear that it hasn't been the runaway success that would have justified its $4 billion price tag. While it's possible that any current sale could carry a more realistic price, somehow we imagine that eBay will try to use the same tactic that drove up its price for Skype to drive up the next buyer's price.

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

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Maestro writes "There must be many parents (and soon-to-be parents) here at Slashdot. What are your thoughts on umbilical cord blood banking? This seems like a major question for our newborn; the question is almost as stressful for us as naming the baby. Given Obama's stance on stem cells, the topic is timely. My understanding is that while the current uses for cord blood are limited, the sky's the limit for the future of stem cell therapies. But with the initial cost over $1000, and ongoing yearly fees, is it worth it?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday on Boing Boing Gadgets: • We hung Jeeves and Wooster top hats from the ceiling and called them lampshades. • Rob slathered the walls of his house with anti-WIFI paint. • Panasonic's new Lumix digicams went both waterproof and metallically chromatic. • We discovered an acceleration pedal that does nothing but make vroom vroom noises. Finally! I can stop using my mouth! • Beer tab corsets sparked commentary debate about whether it was possible to get good beer in a can. Answer: yes, duh. • This new Korean MP3 player has a really cool pixelart UI. • Kim Jong Il intends on launching five rockets to drag the moon back to North Korea. • Joel saw a plot to sneak product ads into Windows 7 context menus. • We waxed eloquently for a recumbent Big Wheel for adults. • We hung out in the cockpit of NASA's space shuttle in high-def. • Brownlee secretly photographed an avatar of breathtaking physical violence using a netbook, and wondered who Asus' Marlboro Man would be. • Rob started a PhotoShop contest: what will this liquidated Circuit City become? And more besides! Come read! Link

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.

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I may be one of the few people who came to the Eels through Hugh Everett III, father of principle Eel, Mark Oliver Everett, aka "E." Mark's father is the originator of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. The many-worlds interpretation figures heavily in the work of Robert Anton Wilson, and so it was one of my Discordian brethren (Hail, Eris!) who said: "Hey, did you know that Hugh Everett has a son in some alt.rock band called Eels?" As soon as I heard 'em, I was gill-hooked, but good. 2005's "Blinking Lights and Other Revelations" was certainly a revelation to me -- a two-CD set of 34 songs without a stinker in the bunch. E has said it's about "God and all the questions related to the subject of God. It's also about hanging on to my remaining shreds of sanity and the blue sky that comes the day after a terrible storm, and it's a love letter to life itself, in all its beautiful, horrible glory." For me, it also served as something of the soundtrack to the loss of my wife. I still can't listen to "The Stars Shine in the Sky Tonight" without completely losing my shit. Mr E knows from loss. His father, who barely interacted with him as a child, died when Mark was 19. His schizophrenic sister committed suicide in 1996, and two years later, his mother died of cancer. So much of E's music seems to encode all of this loss, along with a deep, dysfunctional social disconnect, and a visceral sense of confusion over who he is and what he should make out of all that's happened to him. But like all artists who resonate, Mark Everett seems to have an alchemical ability to transmute all of this sordid business into transcendent bits of sound poetry, music that, even when it's sad, the melodies, the musicality, the poetics, and all of its "beautiful, horrible glory" are so strong, it lifts up, rather than drags you down (at least, in this case, it does for me). Last year, the BBC released a wonderful documentary called "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives," which followed Mark Everett as he retraced the steps of his father, trying to learn more about the dad he never really knew and the physics theories he could never really understand. All in all, it's a rather quiet piece (not bad or boring, just quiet and small), but there are some truly potent moments, like when he hears his father's voice on tape for the first time, or when he finally figures out (basically) what the many-worlds interpretation really means, and when he hears himself on tape, in the background as a child, playing the drums and then bragging about how great he is. The scene where he describes finding, at 19, his dead father on the bed is one of the most heartrending things I've ever seen. That one scene explains at least half of the hit you get whenever partaking of an Eels' song. The entire BBC documentary used to be on YouTube, in four parts. Alas, it's been taken down. While links last, you can see it in two parts, on Veoh, here and here.

Make:NYC Meeting 10 at Make:NYC - TONIGHT!

Make:NYC Meeting 10 - Wednesday January 28th, 6:30PM

Oh, you know you want to! Come join us for Make:NYC Meeting 10!

Challenge: The Mechanism - One

Think you can assemble a ticking, spinning, working gizmo in under two hours? Who cares!? It'll be fun to try. Using basic building materials Make:NYC supplies, designs will be tested for accuracy. Specifications and rules for your gizmo will be provided when you arrive.

Yes, it's free.

Show and Tell

Meet your fellow NYC Makers and show off your creations! Bring your gadgets, gizmos, sketches, ideas, anything you'd like to put in the spotlight. We encourage NYC Makers to collaborate on and discuss DIY projects. If you're planning to bring a project, drop us a note at meetings@makenyc.org.

If you'd like to attend we have plenty of space for everyone, but please RSVP!

Location:

NYC Resistor, 5th Floor (Google Map)
397 Bridge Street between Fulton Mall and Willoughby
Brooklyn, NY 11201

A/C/F to Jay St-Borough Hall
B/Q to Dekalb Avenue

M/R to Lawrence Street

2/3 to Hoyt Street

Meeting time is 6:30PM.

See you there!

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"A custom-made life is better than a Wal-Mart world," says Sean Barrow. Tall, dark, and tattooed, Barrow looks more like a rock star than the avid eco-design aficionado he is.

His post-apocalyptic appearance at first glance seems at odds with the elegant, minimal, Japa-nese-inspired aesthetic he studies and employs in his sustainable furniture making. But both display his practical approach to 21st-century salvage: to reveal rare beauty and utility from former chaos.

Case in point: the sleek Electron Monument, a bewitching handmade side table that hides an array of outlets for electronic devices and their chargers. "'Charging station' sounds so unsexy -- hence the name," laughs Barrow, who installed six outlets, capable of handling power blisters as well as standard plugs, in the table's inside base.

Sitting high on salvaged metal legs, the box is made from spalted pin oak that Barrow snagged from a dying tree (which creates the zigzagged black segments in the wood grain), and held together by wooden finger joints. The removable top is reclaimed and sanded zebrawood and rosewood, with sides angled in at 13 degrees (a favorite angle he uses in much of his furniture), finished with nontoxic Osmo oil.

The most compelling feature of the Monument is the hypnotic, softly glowing cobalt light in the front of the box, with machined metal pieces added to create an abstract power-outlet motif. Using almost no energy, it is illuminated with an LED plucked from an old night light.

The combination of traditional Asian design, sustainable resources, and the sci-fi hieroglyph glowing from within the Electron Monument make it a perfect example of Barrow's work, and one of the coolest ways to hide your electronic clutter.

Sean Barrow: skrewgun.com

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 8, page 24 - Kirsten Anderson.

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Do you buy into everything you read, or do you analyze, research, and question what you learn? Are you willing to start reconsidering the way you read and select your trusted news sources? Is a new media literacy really needed? Photo credit: Yurok Aleksandrovich You live in the era of information overload. Technology is becoming increasingly cheaper, and it's not in the hands of an oligarchy anymore. But if anybody can create, publish and distribute media, how can you find the info that really matters in this jungle of data? What's the best way to separate "the news from the noise"? New media journalism researcher and online publisher, Dan Gillmor, looks in Part 1 of this article, at what should be the guiding ethics of this emerging media literacy, such as credibility issues in new media, the problems of privacy, and those key journalistic values that the Internet revolution and those riding it may have lost track of in their rush to create commercial value. Here all the details: Intro by Robin Good

Principles of a New Media Literacy

Intro

Media are becoming democratized. Digital media tools, increasingly cheap and ubiquitous, have spawned a massive amount of creation at all levels, most notably from the ranks of the grassroots in contrast to traditional, one-to-many publications and broadcasts. The networks that made this possible have provided vast access to what people have created–potentially a global audience for anyone’s creation. But the expanding and diversifying media ecosystem poses some difficult challenges alongside the unquestioned benefits. A key question: In this emergent global conversation, which has created a tsunami of information, what can we trust? How we live, work, and govern ourselves in a digital age depends in significant ways on the answers. To get this right, we’ll have to re-think, or at least re-apply, some older cultural norms in distinctly modern ways. These norms are principles as much as practices, and they are now essential for consumers and creators alike. They add up to a twenty-first-century notion of what we once called “media literacy,” which has traditionally all but missed the emerging methods of participation that are becoming such a key element of digital media. (This is only one reason that we should seek a replacement for the expression “media literacy” - because it connotes something that has become quaint to the point of near-irrelevance.)

Issues of Credibility

Trust and credibility are not new to the Digital Age. Journalists of the past have faced these questions again and again, and the Industrial Age rise of what people called “objective journalism” - allegedly unbiased reporting - clearly did not solve the problem. We don’t have to look very far, or very far back in history, to note some egregious cases. The New York Times’ Jayson Blair saga, in which a young reporter spun interviews and other details from whole cloth, showed that even the best news organizations are vulnerable. Fox News still maintains a slogan of “fair and balanced” - two falsehoods in three words. The Washington press corps, with dismayingly few exceptions, served as a stenographic lapdog for the government in the run-up to the Iraq War. And so on. But the credibility problem of traditional media goes much deeper. Almost everyone who has ever been the subject of a news story can point to small and sometimes large errors of fact or nuance, or to quotes that, while accurately written down, are presented out of their original context in ways that change their intended meaning. Shallowness is a more common media failing than malice. Traditional media boast processes, however, aimed both at preventing mistakes and - when they inevitably occur - setting the record straight. The new media environment is rich with potential for excellence. But it is equally open to error, honest or otherwise, and persuasion morphs into manipulation more readily than ever. Consider just five examples, two from the political world:

1. The 2004 U.S. congressional elections were notable in many ways, not least the widespread adoption of blogging and other conversational tools by candidates, staffs, and supporters. But in South Dakota’s U.S. Senate race, the campaign of Republican challenger John Thune paid two local political bloggers whose work influenced the state’s major newspaper; not until after the election, which Thune won, was their paid role widely known.


2. Venture capitalists have poured considerable funds into a startup called PayPerPost, a company that serves as a go-between for companies wishing to get bloggers to write about products and services. Although PayPerPost encourages bloggers to disclose this arrangement, the disclosure can be easily hidden or omitted entirely at the blogger’s choice. This practice has drawn well-deserved contempt from those who favor transparency in media, and equally derisive rejoinders from paid bloggers who don’t care what people think of what they do.


3. Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart, among other major companies, have been caught paying bloggers directly or indirectly to promote the firms or their products - but without disclosing their corporate ties. The stealth marketing, also called “buzz marketing,” caused mini-uproars in the blogging community, but a frequently asked question was whether these campaigns were, as most believe, just the tip of an influence iceberg.


4. President-Elect Barack Obama has been the target of mostly shadowy, though sometime overt, rumors. They range from the laughable to the truly slimy. What they have in common is a single factor: They were plainly designed to poison voters in swing states. They were equally plainly having an impact; a nontrivial percentage of Americans is not sure whether he is a Muslim. (Obama’s staff created a special section on the campaign website aimed at countering the rumors.)


5. On blogs and many other sites where conversation among the audience is part of the mix, we often encounter so-called sock puppets - people posting under pseudonyms instead of their real names, and either promoting their own work or denigrating their opponents, sometimes in the crudest ways. As with the buzz marketing, it’s widely believed that the ones getting caught are a small percentage of the ones misusing these online forums.

Craig Newmark, founder of the craigslist online advertising and community site, famously says that most people online are good and that a tiny percentage does the vast majority of the harm. He is undoubtedly correct. In the traditional news world, even though we understood the prevalence of minor errors in stories, even by reputable journalists, we also understood that, by and large, the better media organizations get things pretty much right. The small mistakes undermine any notion of absolute trust, but we accept the overall value of the work. In a world with seemingly infinite sources of information, this equation is harder to solve. But we can make a start by being better informed about what we read, hear and watch.

Supply Side: Watching the Watchers

One of most serious failings of traditional journalism has been its reluctance to focus critical attention on a powerful player in our society: journalism itself. The Fourth Estate rarely gives itself the same scrutiny it sometimes applies to the other major institutions. (I say “sometimes” because, as we’ve seen in recent years, journalists’ most ardent scrutiny has been aimed at celebrities, not the governments, businesses, and other entities that have the most influence, often malignant, on our lives.) A few small publications, notably the Columbia Journalism Review, have provided valuable coverage of the news business over the years. But these publications circulate mostly within the field, and can only look at a sliver of the pie. To be fair, the news media do cover each other to some degree. But most of that coverage focuses on reporting related to corporate maneuvering and profiles of stars - not bad to do but not sufficient to what the public needs. Only very occasionally do journalists for major media organizations drill in on each others’ successes and failures as journalists. When they do it, they tend to do it well; it is unfortunate that they don’t try more often. The Internet has been a boon to media criticism in several key respects. First, bloggers and Web-only publications are providing some of the toughest and best work of this kind.

• Salon’s Glenn Greenwald tends toward overwrought descriptive language, but he reports with enormous depth and is singularly persuasive in showing how American journalists have continually botched even basic duties when it comes, for example, to covering the debate over government electronic surveillance.
• In Los Angeles, blogger Patrick Frey (”Patterico”), a lawyer, relentlessly watches and critiques - also sometimes with over-the-top language - the Los Angeles Times’ coverage, particularly political stories.

Both of these writers make clear their political leanings, left for Greenwald and right for Frey; readers refract that information through their own lenses to make their own decisions. These two writers are among legions of people who have taken up media criticism, not as their primary occupation but as a part of what they do in their daily lives. When they care about something, they care about the journalism covering that topic - and now they have a way to discuss what they’ve seen. Their work, however, is diffuse. The diffusion is a natural aspect of the Web’s distributed nature. Several sites, including one I’m co-founding seek to generate and collect some of the criticism. There are two of note.

1. The admirable NewsTrust project (I am an advisor) asks people to rate articles from major media organizations and blogs across a variety of criteria that, we hope, adds up to quality.
2. In the United Kingdom, the Media Standards Trust is doing brilliant work to promote better journalism, and its Journalisted project aims to create a database of journalists to encourage transparency and accountability.

The word “accountability” resonates. Apart from raw market mechanisms and the legal system’s bludgeon of libel lawsuits - both, sadly, are flawed as countermeasures to poor journalism - we have had a largely unaccountable press. New media tools are pulling down some walls and helping to create the possibility of deeper nonlegal accountability. More thorough and robust media criticism, and a conversation around it, will serve us all better.

Demand Side: Democratization Means Participation

As noted previously, the democratization of media is well under way. This takes two major forms.

1. First, the tools of creation are increasingly in everyone’s hands. The personal computer that I’m using to write this essay comes equipped with media creation and editing tools of such depth that I can’t begin to learn all their capabilities. My phone boasts video recording and playback, still-camera mode, audio recording, text messaging, and GPS location, among other tools that make it a powerful media creation device.
2. Second, we can make what we create widely accessible. With traditional media, we produced something, usually manufactured, and then distributed it - put it in trucks or broadcast it to receivers in a one-to-many mode. Today, we create media and make it accessible: People come and get it. This distinction is absolute crucial, because although there is plainly an element of distribution here, even in the traditional sense, the essential fact in a one-to-one or many-to-many world is availability.

This democratization gives people who have been mere consumers the ability to be creators. With few exceptions, we are all becoming the latter as well as the former, though to varying degrees. Even more exciting, media democratization also turns creators into collaborators. We have only begun to explore the meaning, much less the potential, of this reality. Media saturation requires us to become more active as consumers, in part to manage the flood of data pouring over us each day but also to make informed judgments about the significance of what we do see. When we create media that serves a public interest or journalistic role, we need to understand what it means to be journalistic, as well as how we can help make it better and more useful. This adds up to a new kind of media literacy, based on key principles for both consumers and creators. They overlap to some degree, and they require an active, not passive, approach to media.

Why This Matters

We are doing a poor job of ensuring that consumers and producers of media in a digital age are equipped for these tasks. This is a job for parents and schools. (Of course, a teacher who teaches critical thinking in much of the United States risks being attacked as a dangerous radical.) Do they have the resources - including time - that they need? But this much is clear: If we really believe that democracy requires an educated populace, we’re starting from a deficit. Are we ready to take the risk of being activist media users, for the right reasons? A lot rides on the answer. End of Part 1

Originally written by Dan Gillmor for Dan Gillmor: Blog and first published on December 26, 2008 as "Principles of a New Media Literacy".

About the author Dan Gillmor's principal gig these days is the Center for Citizen Media, a joint project with Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Dan Gillmor also writes articles and has published a book called We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (2004; O'Reilly Media), and is working on a new book about media in the digital age. From 1994-2005 Dan was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press.

Photo credits: Issues of Credibility - Josef Muellek Supply Side: Watching the Watchers - vacuum3d Demand Side: Democratization Means Participation - Andres Rodriguez Why This Matters - Marc Dietrich

At the beginning of January we noted -- with some amount of surprise -- that it appeared that the FTC was preparing a workshop on DRM. When I was in Washington, DC recently, I had the chance to meet some of the folks putting that workshop together, and now they've sent over a more detailed list of topics up for discussion at the session, and it does seem like a pretty good list -- covering pretty much the entire range of questions concerning DRM, specifically from a consumer perspective. It's definitely an encouraging sign that folks at the FTC are recognizing that DRM can be used to do harm, rather than just (as the industry would have you believe) to "open up new business models."

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(Image: Tyler Hicks for the New York Times.)

Photographer Glen E. Friedman, who is the subject of our Boing Boing Video episode tomorrow -- he shot some of the greatest skateboarding photos of our time -- pointed me to this interesting story in the NYT from a few days ago. Glen asks, "Isn't there someone [reading this blog post] who can figure out how to get this guy some more boards for these kids?" Snip:

Afghan youth have learned to recover almost instantly from such routine violence. One person determined to inject some normalcy into their lives is Oliver Percovich. A 34-year-old from Melbourne, Australia, he plans to open this country’s first skateboarding school, Skateistan, this spring. He sees sport as a way to woo students into after-school activities like English and computer classes, which are otherwise reserved for the elite.

“Teenagers are trying to dissociate from old mentalities, and I’m their servant,” Percovich said. “If they weren’t interested, I would’ve left a long time ago.”

Now, when he pulls his motorcycle into a residential courtyard here, a dozen youngsters pounce before it comes to a stop, yanking six chipped skateboards with fading paint off the back. The children, most participating in a sport for the first time in their war-hardened lives, do not want to waste any time. Their skateboard park is a decrepit Soviet-style concrete fountain with deep fissures. The tangle of novice skaters resembles bumper cars more than X Games.

But Percovich has raised the money needed to build an 8,600-square-foot bubble to house the nonprofit Skateistan complex, and the Kabul Parks Authority has tentatively donated land. He is still waiting for official permission to begin the project. And since a spate of kidnappings and the car bombing in late November, he has reduced his daily sessions at the fountain to once or twice a week.

Among those who look forward to his visits is Maro, an elfin 9-year-old girl who was terrified of skateboarding at first. “It gives me courage, and once I start skating, I completely forget about my fears,” she said.

Full story, pics of super cute Afghan kid skaters, and a neat video all here: Skateboarding in Afghanistan Provides a Diversion From Desolation (NYT). Here is the Skateistan website. And here's how you can help.

This weekend, game-lovers will gather in cities around the world to participate in Global Game Jam, in which participants have exactly two days to build a game. Here's a snip from the press release:

From 5:00pm Friday January 30th through 5:00 pm Sunday, February 1, over a thousand college students, faculty and industry members will join together for a 48 hour game building marathon popularly known as a Game Jam. Participants will be given the details of the game design theme, constraints and mechanics allowed when the clock hits 5:00 p.m. in their local time zone. As the time zones change, so will those constraints, to mitigate any advantage global location might give one team over the other. While individual and regional Game Jams have been held wherever gamers congregate in the last few years, never has there been one of such size and scope as the Global Game Jam (GGJ).?

[Keynote Speaker] ?Kyle Gabler (...) indie Developer of the popular game “World of Goo,” said, “The next big transformation in gaming won't come from a large game studio with million dollar teams and marketing budgets, it will come from some kid in their bedroom with a few pieces of free software and a never ending supply of caffeine and motivation. I can't wait to see the scraggly, brilliantly hacked together beginnings of some of the next great games crawl out of these 48 hours.”

A number of us from Boing Boing, Offworld, Gadgets and Boing Boing Video plan to be present in various locations, and we'll be producing Boing Boing Video episodes from the madness. Are you attending? We'd love to hear from you in the comments if so!

Here is an overview on how it works. Snip:

The theme and constraints for participants in the Global Game Jam will be announced at 5:00PM on Friday, January 30, 2009 in your time zone. Each local jam is allowed to manage things the way the see fit, but we hope that everyone will follow our recommendations so we share a common experience and everyone is working from a level playing field. Please show up to the jam on time. Below is a typical set-up for a game jam, each jam will vary, please check with each jam to see their schedule. Do not come to the Jam with a team. Everyone will have some time to think and pitch an idea. Collaborate with new friends or peers you admire.

* Here's information about all the locations.
* Here's legalese, like who owns the resulting games. Bottom line: whoever develops 'em, as in, you.

(Thanks, Jolon and Global Game Jam Costa Rica crew!)

The Narrative Fallacy writes "In the aftermath of disclosures that Belkin employees paid users for good reviews on Amazon, David Pogue reports in the NYTimes that Carbonite has gone one better with 5-star reviews of its online backup services written by its own employees. Pogue recounts how Bruce Goldensteinberg signed up for the backup service, and all went well until his computer crashed and he was unable to restore it from the online backup while Carbonite customer support kept him on hold for over an hour. Frustrated, Goldensteinberg started reading Carbonite reviews on Amazon and a few of them seemed suspicious. 'They were created around the same date — October 31, 2006 — all given 5 stars, and the reviewers all came from around the Boston, MA area, where Carbonite is located,' including a review by Swami Kumaresan that read more like a testimonial. 'It turned out that Swami Kumaresan is the Vice President of Marketing for Carbonite. His review gives no indication that he is employed by the company.' Another review posted by Jonathan F. Freidin extols Carbonite without mentioning Freidin's position as Senior Software Engineer at Carbonite. 'It doesn't matter to me that Carbonite's fraudulent reviews are a couple of years old,' writes Pogue. 'These people are gaming the system, deceiving the public to enrich themselves. They should be deeply ashamed.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Typographer and designer Aehrich O'Dubhchon, who designed those beautiful title cards for our John Hodgman "Spamasterpiece Theater" videos, created some amazing business cards with articulated hands. WANT!

The photographer and craftsman Todd Schellinger asked me to design some metal business cards for his studio Hand + Eye. He gave me pretty broad creative license, asking only that it speak to the tradition of craftsmanship that he brings to each job.

Designing for metal presents many challenges and opportunities. I knew from the start that I wanted to make something that would transform from one state of being to another. What I ended up producing was a semi-articulted metal hand that could hold onto an envelope or an invoice.

Hand + Eye, A Metal Card (blackhoundblue.com)

Kristen's Zombie Hello Kitty cake combines every wonderful thing: zombies, Hello Kitty, ganache, and trademark infringement. Well done that cake-maker!

Kristin's Hello Kitty Birthday Cake

Link, you can buy them here if you are so inclined. (Thanks, Aaron Rowe)

Previously: "Citizen videos" spread online showing BART police officer shooting unarmed man to death

Wikipedia's list of confidence tricks is a globe-spanning journey through con-jobs ancient and modern. Required and fascinating reading:

A clip joint or fleshpot is an establishment, usually a strip club or entertainment bar, typically one claiming to offer adult entertainment or bottle service, in which customers are tricked into paying money and receive poor, or no, goods or services in return. Typically, clip joints suggest the possibility of sex, charge excessively high prices for watered-down drinks, then eject customers when they become unwilling or unable to spend more money. The product or service may be illicit, offering the victim no recourse through official or legal channels.

The Melon Drop is a scam in which the scammer will intentionally bump into the mark and drop a package containing (already broken) glass. He will blame the damage on the clumsiness of the mark, and demand money in compensation. This con arose when artists discovered that the Japanese paid large sums of money for watermelons. The scammer would go to a supermarket to buy a cheap watermelon, then bump into a Japanese tourist and set a high price.

List of confidence tricks

A million congrats to Neil Gaiman for winning the prestigious and much-deserved Newbery Award for his young adult novel The Graveyard Book, a magical ghost-story retelling of The Jungle Book. You earned it, Neil!

What I look like the day after I win the Newbery (Thanks, John Mark!)

The Places We Live is an utterly riveting narrated Flash slideshow of the world's slums. It takes the form of a series of panoramic photos of slums around the world, with voice-over from people who live there (in translation). I'm currently watching the segments on Dharavi, in Mumbai, said by some to be the largest slum in the world. I visited Dharavi with an NGO last September while researching a book and it made quite an impression on me as a place of immense self-reliance and industry, but also bitter poverty. I'm working on a scene set there now, so this could not have come at a more opportune moment for me.

The Places We Live (via Kottke)

Today on Offworld, we saw a number of fantastic fan created work: from the latest in Olly Moss's Penguin Classics-inspired cover art, this time the pure essence of Valve's Half-Life, to an amazing Photoshop-meets-MadWorld faux magazine ad for Sega's upcoming hyperviolent Wii game. We also heard news of two new Wii channels we hope make it to the states soon: an enhanced Wii Fit channel that connects users directly to health professionals and an extension of the photo-printing service that lets you print business cards featuring your Mii. Elsewhere we again went behind the music of cult RPG Mother 3 and its classical influences, heard that we'd be playing more remade Banjo Kazooie on Xbox Live Arcade in April, downloaded new free indie game soundtracks from our new favorite net-label, considered buying a new Sam & Max resin statue, and best of all, saw that classic EA strategy/board game Archon is officially heading to the iPhone.

In a recent blog post by Scott Adams, he notes his desire for a rewind button on life. The post starts out by talking about seeing something through a window that he didn't quite catch, and wishing for a rewind button on the window -- like a DVR (the post then goes off on an angry tangent about auto repair these days that doesn't actually seem connected to the rewind part). That struck me as interesting, because I've caught myself wanting the same thing recently. The more I've used a DVR, the more I get annoyed at things that don't have such a capability. For example, when listening to the radio or just talking to people, there are moments when I find my brain asking to rewind, in part because it's become so accustomed to the possibility of rewinding TV. I wonder if this will lead to more demand for devices that record everything you see. Traditionally, such "backup brain" devices have been talked about for the purposes of recalling and categorizing stuff -- but if there's increasing demand to simply replay what you just heard or saw, it could become useful in unexpected ways.

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Via Neatorama, how to hack into construction signs:

It will ask you for a password. Try "DOTS", the default password. In all likelihood, the crew will not have changed it. However if they did, never fear. Hold "Control" and "Shift" and while holding, enter "DIPY". This will reset the sign and reset the password to "DOTS" in the process. You're in!

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An anonymous reader writes "The World Trade Organization yesterday released its much-anticipated decision involving a US complaint against China over its protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights. The US quickly proclaimed victory, with newspaper headlines trumpeting the WTO panel's requirement that China reform elements of its intellectual property laws. Yet the reality is somewhat different. As Michael Geist notes, the US lost badly on key issues such as border measures and criminal IP enforcement, with the international trade body upholding the validity of China's laws."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If I were more of a global traveler, I’d like to compile a book of pictures of table settings in different nations, showing the remarkably different ways in which human beings eat on an everyday basis.

This picture is of a typical evening meal at the house where I stayed in Aomori. For reasons that seem primarily rooted in tradition, economy, and availability, fish is the primary source of protein. Local supermarkets offer at least ten times as much space for fish compared with meat (whereas in the United States, the ratio is reversed).

It’s hard to find anything unhealthy in this setting. The caloric content is minimal. Nothing is fried, and nothing is heavily loaded with fat or sugar. I guess it’s no surprise that the Japanese still show few signs of obesity, unlike the populations of most western nations, and have an astonishing average life expectancy of 79 for men, 85 for women. (In the United States, the average numbers are 4 years lower.)

At an indoor minimall in Aomori I found this skin-tight black-and-gold-printed t-shirt, apparently catering to a Japanese teen subculture that pays lifestyle homage to punk bands of the 1980s, especially the Sex Pistols. I couldn’t resist buying it even though the idea of wandering around my neighborhood in the USA with “LOvE HErOiN” on my chest seems a little unwise. (Of course, confessed cocaine user Barack Obama will be ushering in a new regime of tolerance real soon now.)

Among the various incantations on the shirt, “Have a nice punky day” seems not quite congruent with the message that Sid Vicious delivered—but the Japanese always tend to add a feelgood spin. This is, after all, the nation where even the shrine at Hiroshima sells key chains with a happy Hallmark-style romantic message on the back (see below).

I've been wanting to record some NPR shows that don't have podcasts, and I'd like to record FreshAir as soon as its available, so I've been looking for software that runs on the Mac that will do this, and this evening I stumbled across Radioshift, and installed it.

I decided to go with this app because I use Audio Hijack Pro and really like it, and figured this would have the same fit and finish, and so far it's even nicer that Audio Hijack Pro

I'm curious if anyone else is using this app and if so what do you think of it?

Do you use some other software on the Mac to record Internet radio?

I was able to set up a subscription to FreshAir in a couple of mouse clicks in less than 30 seconds. It's hard to believe it's that easy, but if you think about it, why shouldn't it be that easy? Here's a screen shot of what the subscription looks like. If you choose to edit the subscription this is what you get. Choose Preferences from the File menu.

In other words, if you use AHP, it's exactly what you would expect. Nice work! Now let's see if it does its job tomorrow morning. Maybe I can find something to record in the middle of the night. Yup. I've got it programmed to record three shows, with the first starting at 3AM.

At the beginning of January, I thought it was amusing that Verizon was launching its own backup service for a stunning $31/month (with a limit of 50GB of backup storage). That seemed fairly ridiculous, given that you could get an unlimited backup service from Carbonite or Mozy for $5/month, or using JungleDisk with Amazon's S3 for exceptionally low prices as well (depending on how much you use -- but 50GB comes in at way less than $31). Now comes the news that Comcast is also launching its own backup service, with a few different price points, but starting at $5/month for only 10GB and going up from there. It's not a bad service to offer -- and, surely, Verizon and Comcast see these as ways to lock in consumers, since it now has possession of their backup data -- but it seems quite odd that these companies would offer "value added services" where the prices are more expensive than rolling your own, which doesn't come with the lock-in. And, as noted, with Comcast, using the service counts against their new broadband caps, so there isn't even a benefit there. These ISPs seem to be missing the point of these value added services. If you want to get people to use them, they should actually add value.

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Crazy Taco writes "Tom's Hardware reports on newly discovered screenshots that reveal Microsoft is planning to release their newest version of Windows in multiple confusing versions ... again. The information comes from the latest version of the Windows 7 beta, build 7025 (the public beta is build 7000), and shows a screen during installation that asks the user which version of the OS he or she would like to install. Who's up for guessing what the difference is between Windows 7 'Starter' and Windows 7 'Home Basic?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ed Note: one of Boingboing's three current guest bloggers, 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. (You can see a video interview introducing the book here.) He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

In part because my books have had a habit of weaving multiple disciplines together, and in part because I've written quite a bit about technology, I'm often asked about the tools I use to research and write my books. Given that Boingboing has its own wonderful multi-disciplinary sensibility, and of course a major obsession with DIY movements, I thought it might be fun to say a few words about the writing system I've developed over the past few books.

My word processors have varied over the years: I swore off MS Word after Mind Wide Open, and used Nisus Writer for Everything Bad and Ghost Map; had a quick dalliance with Pages, and then actually returned to the latest version of Word for Invention. But the one constant for the past four books has been an ingenious piece of software called Devonthink, which is basically a free-form database that accepts many different document types (PDFs, text snippets, web pages, images, etc). It has a very elegant semantic algorithm that can detect relationships between short excerpts of text, so you can use the software as a kind of connection machine, a supplement to your own memory. I wrote about this several years ago for the Times Book Review, and I still get emails from people every couple of weeks asking about the software. (The Devonthink guys should put me in an infomercial.)

Since I wrote that essay, I've developed a new approach to using Devonthink that was enormously helpful in writing Ghost Map and Invention. The first stage, which is crucial, is a completely disorganized capture of every little snippet of text that seems vaguely interesting. I grab paragraphs from web pages, from digital books, and transcribe pages from printed text -- and each little snippet I just drop into Devonthink with no organization other than a citation of where it came from. This goes on for months and months; I read in a completely unplanned and exploratory way (increasingly online, thanks to Google Books and other sources) and just drag anything that seems at all interesting into Devonthink.

When it comes time to actually write the book, I usually have a pretty clear sense of how the chapters are going to be divided up. With Ghost Map, for instance, there's a cool little trick I figured out before I started writing where each chapter maps to a single day in the epidemic, but also connects to one of the themes of the book: the shit and scavengers, miasma, the map. (No one seemed to notice this in any of the reviews, but it's one of the things that I'm most proud of with that book.) And so in the last stage before I actually start writing, I create a little folder in Devonthink for each of the chapters. And then I sit down and read through every single little snippet that I've uncovered over the past year or so of research. And as I'm reading them on the screen, I just drag them into the chapter folder where I think they will be most useful. Some snippets get dragged to multiple folders; most don't make it into any folder. But I read through them all, and in reading through them all, I have a completely new contextual experience of them, because I'm at the end of the research cycle, not at the beginning. They feel like pieces of a puzzle that's coming together, instead of hints or hunches.

And the added bonus here is that Devonthink has a wonderful feature where you can take the entire contents of a folder and condense it down into a single text document. So that's how I launch myself into the actual writing of the book. I grab the first chapter folder and export it as a single text document, open it up in my word processor, and start writing. Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I'm looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes. It's a great technique for warding off the siren song of procrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

It was a close race the entire time and up until the end, winning by 2 votes - design #1 from the "Make: The risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things" t-shirt design won (above). We listened to your feedback and added quote attribution and the flag is blue on the back. There are still a few left, if you're not a subscriber become one now and use the code CHANGE - you'll get a year of MAKE and this t-shirt. If you are a subscriber, don't worry we'll have a way for you to get this shirt too at a discount, stay tuned!

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I really like the effect that's used in Invisibilia, a series of photographs that have had the subject replaced with an illustration:

Maybe the pictures illustrate the idea that we all want to remove ourselves from life, and replace ourselves with fictional, self-created versions of ourself. We want to fictionalise our own existence, and impose order and narrative where there is none. Or maybe it's just tracing. Either way, I hope you enjoy the pics.

The fun part is that you can do this with your own photos fairly easily. The artist has provided a tutorial that walks you through the process he uses to trace and replace portions of the original image.

Invisibilia and Tutorial [via Neatorama]

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Ed Felten has a post up noting that it appears DRM is in retreat, at least in certain areas, such as music. Of course, he points to Apple's agreement to get rid of DRM as a key factor -- but also notes that the former "DRM Watch" blog, from one of DRM's biggest supporters, is now called Copyright and Technology. Still, while it does appear that some are realizing the pointlessness of DRM, it's still not really dead yet. We noted that Apple still uses DRM in many areas and Microsoft just brought back DRM in its mobile music offering. Of course, that will backfire too, but it shows that there are still people out there who seem to believe that DRM actually has some kind of benefit.

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I'm going on G4TV's Attack of the Show tomorrow, Wednesday 28th at 7pm ET. I'll be bringing along the Burrito Blaster, cigar box guitar, and pole-mounted camera rig. It's like show-and-tell, only with Kevin Pereira, instead of Mrs. Masten's fourth grade class!
Check your cable listings for other times, it'll repeat during the night and the next day. It should be pretty exciting; Kevin wants to feed someone a burrito fired from the air cannon. Hide the children.

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coondoggie writes with a NetworkWorld piece that begins, "Researchers at Purdue will soon experiment with an unmanned aircraft that pretty much flies itself with little human intervention. The aircraft will use a combination of global-positioning system technology and a guidance system called AttoPilot ... to guide the aerial vehicle to predetermined points. Researchers can be stationed off-site to monitor the aircraft and control its movements remotely. AttoPilot was installed in the aircraft early this year, and testing will begin in the spring, researchers said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You may recall a few years ago that in the (still ongoing!) fight between Antigua and the US at the World Trade Organization (WTO), that the WTO came out with a ruling where the US declared immediate victory, though the details showed that actually the WTO had sided with Antigua. The US merely declared victory, and got its (wrong) story out to the press first.

It appears that's happening again.

Earlier this week, plenty of attention was paid to a WTO ruling concerning US disputes with China over a variety of intellectual property issues. The US Trade Representative quickly declared victory (pdf) and that's the story most of the folks in the press went with, claiming that this was a US victory where the WTO largely supported the US. Some even called it a major victory, while others were surprised that China seemingly was fine with the ruling.

Perhaps that's because if you actually read through the details, you realize, as Michael Geist points out, that the US actually lost very badly. There were three issues at stake -- and the only one the US "won" was the most minor of the three. On the two big issues, concerning China's border measures concerning counterfeit goods and its IP enforcement system within the country, the WTO sided strongly with China, and chastised the US for providing rather bogus "evidence" (often consisting of newspaper articles, rather than actual evidence) in support of its position. It seems like the only mainstream publication that actually bothered to read the report, rather than the USTR's "day is night" version of the events was Forbes, who notes that the USTR was being misleading in claiming victory. Of course, given how the US acted after it lost the Antigua case in the WTO, we can expect the US to appeal the ruling or... just ignore it and continue pretending the WTO actually ruled in its favor.

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