supermehra writes "How do you move 300 desktops, locked down with Windows ADS Group Policies (GPO), over to Ubuntu desktop? We have tried Centrify, Likewise, Gnome Gconf, and the like. Of course, we evaluated SuSe Desktop Enterprise and RedHat Desktop. Samba 4.0 promises the server side, however nothing for desktop lockdown. And while gnome gconf does offer promise, no real tools for remotely managing 300 desktops running gnome + gconf exist. All the options listed above are expensive, in fact so expensive that it's cheaper to leave M$ on! So while we've figured out the Office suite, email client, browser, VPN, drawing tools, and pretty much everything else, there seems to be no reasonable, open source alternative to locking down Linux terminals to comply with company policies. We're not looking for kiosk mode — we're looking for IT policy enforcement across the enterprise. Any ideas ladies & gentlemen?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the Make: Online Toolbox, we try to focus on tools that fly under the radar of more conventional tool coverage: in-depth tool-making projects, strange or specialty tools unique to a trade or craft that can be useful elsewhere, tools and techniques you may not know about, but once you do, and incorporate them into your workflow, you'll wonder how you ever lived without them. And, in the spirit of the times, we pay close attention to tools that you can get on the cheap, make yourself, refurbish, etc.

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Last week, we looked at Ten tools you won't want to live without. This week, we follow up with a piece on shop widgets for keeping your... ah... stuff together. Anyone who's done any sort of building project, from cabinet making to robot building to scale modeling to electronics projects, knows that, eventually, you're going to need more hands than you have on your torso and/or you're going to need hands that are more precise or can endure more clamp-time than those meatbot end-effectors you call hands. This is where all manner of mechanical aids -- clamps, vises, holders, third hands, and jigs -- come into play. We put the word out and asked makers to share some of their favorite jigs, clamps, and helping hands.

What are some of yours? Share your favorite mechanical helpmates in the comments, with links, if possible. Our favorites will be added to this posting and our favorite of the bunch will earn the poster a Maker's Notebook.

The first recommended tool is not a tool at all it's an attitude towards this entire category of tools. In the lighting toolbox piece, I talked about the importance of good lighting and what a revelation that was to me. It also took me too long to realize that having a decent collection of various kinds of clamps, jigs, and third-hands/helping hands was a huge part of successfully building things. As Jason Schlauch of Dorkbot DC so aptly put it: "Go to Harbor Freight and stock up with an amount and variety of clamps that seems unreasonable at the time. It won't seem unreasonable later." I have a "policy," when I go to Radio Shack, Home Depot, or similar. I always make sure to buy something I didn't come for, not a big-ticket item (er... usually), but something like a hardware assortment, a package of connectors of some sort, adapters, some cheap specialty tool that I might only need once or twice a year, or clamps and jigs. The wisdom of this has proven itself too many times to count. (Okay, and it's also jacked up the frustration factor when I have every variety of media cable, adapter, and connector in my media toolbox except the one I need, the one I hadn't gotten around to buying yet.)

Don't forget to consider the cheapest and most readily-available clamps and jigs you likely have on hand. Lots of people suggested rubber bands, zip ties, string and rope, and tape. I would add poster putty. I use this stuff all the time for all sorts of temporary binding purposes. Jon Singer also reminds us to not forget toothpicks. Tooth picks can be used for shims, as stand-offs, to pry, stir, stab, 1001 uses.

And wooden blocks. David Edwards writes: "A small collection of little (variously shaped) wooden blocks, originally intended for small(er) children are fabulous for impromptu jigs when trying to (quickly) clamp oddly-shaped work pieces, and they're brightly painted, so they don't get lost in the scrap. And I can play with 'em while trying to figure out how to proceed. Which brings up another often overlooked jig/helping hands tool: LEGO bricks. You can form them to nearly any spec you need.

Several people recommended magnets. Our very own Brian Jepson says: "Throwie-sized magnets are great for holding things in place, especially for temporary stuff: drop of glue, magnet, and you're done."

This spring clamp is the exact sort of "frivolous purchase" I'd make at Home Depot, a $2 investment that'll pay off the next time I need to clamp something. Having a half-dozen of these and C-clamps of various sizes are a must-have for any shop. Brian Chamberlin, of Dorkbot DC, writes: "If my girlfriend is not in shouting distance, then I usually grab a simple 4" spring clamp. I have a bunch of them scattered about. They're cheap and work well in a pinch." (Ah, no pun intended, I'm sure.)

Andrew Righter says: "As for the handiest third hand, I bought this from Home Depot about six months back and it's worth its weight in gold. The first thing I did though was break the damn plastic nut that's supposed to lock it into place on a desk/lab table, so I ended up modifying it with a metal-based version and it works a lot better. The amazing thing is that the top part of the vise comes off completely so you have a nice desktop holder for multi-purpose projects. Good stuff."

I fell in love with this tool while painting and sculpting tabletop wargame miniatures. The pins allow you to clamp in objects of different sizes and shapes and it holds them in place while you work. Jason Schlauch says: "It keeps fingers away from the business end of a Dremel, gives you extra grip on smaller items, and still allows you to move the work piece around. You can also unscrew the handle and use it to clamp odd shaped items in your bench vise." $13 at Harbor Freight.

Martin Rothfield send me the photo of this weighted base he made for his Panavise. He says: "Here's my homemade weighted parts tray/base for a Panavise. It doesn't tip over no matter what. It has non-skid shelf liner glued to bottom so it doesn't slide around, either." MAKE contributing editor and Make: television producer Bill Gurstelle send us a link to this very cool wire bending jig. With it, you can create "S" hooks, fishing rod eyes, curtain rod rings, and other shapes in up to 3/16" diameter wire.

MAKE author Steve Lodefink writes: "I have an "X-type" extruded aluminum picture frame clamp (Clamp Mate 88094 Picture Frame Clamp) that I really like. Although the intended use is for picture frames, I find myself using it for cabinetry, furniture, etc. where I might have otherwise used a whole mess of pipe clamps. I often find myself needing to build wooden frames as sub-components for various projects, and this thing makes a great clamp for anything with four corners. I have even used it for the occasional picture frame or canvas stretcher. So handy."

MAKE contributing editor Charles Platt uses this simple yet ingenious method to create handles for carrying boxes:

DIY Box Handles
Make handles from half-inch plastic water pipe sawn into 5" lengths. My local Lowe's sold me six feet of pipe for around $3 and you can use any wood saw to cut it. You may feel this is a luxury, but if you want to protect your hands from the edges of the plastic tape, handles are nice to have.

Read the rest and see more pics on Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools, a great source of recommended helper tools and jigs.

Of course, for the electronics geek, the mother of all jigs, clamps, and helping hands is the Helping Hands or Third Hand tool, a device with adjustable arms terminated with alligator clips. Most also include an adjustable magnifying glass. You can get a decent one of around $10. More expensive ones have better hardware for easier adjusting, a heavier base, and a better magnifying glass. But better than better is more. You want to have at least two of these (and a Panavise) to have all your bases covered on the benchtop.

There are many variations on the Third Hand. My friend, DC geek extraordinaire Tim Slagle, made himself a "Fourth Hand," seen above: "A milli-hack I did to a standard $5 "third hand" fixture with alligator clips and a magnifying glass was to buy two of them and put all four clip arms onto one of the bases - two on each side of the base support. That way, the inside two clips can be used to hold a small circuit board while the others hold wires, or you can have two clips on each wire for better strain relief and isolation from pulling. To do this, I removed the magnifying glasses from the moveable clamp that slides along the rod, put both clamps on the same rod, and stuck the alligator clamps and joint from the second unit onto the ball ends where the magnifying glass joints went."

My favorite Third Hand is the one I built myself, using the instructions in Best of Instructables (based on the Third Hand ++ Instructable found here). When I was editing the book, I couldn't wait to be done so that I could build this project. I literally placed the order for the parts within hours of sending off the final edits to Production. I ended up putting it together at last year's Maker Faire Austin and didn't have the right tap sizes for the mount so I ended up friction fitting the threaded ends into the holes on the aluminum base. Not elegant, but so far, they've held just fine. One of these days, I want to add another arm to it and make some of the specialty arms described in the Instructable.

See last week's Toolbox for information on two other indispensable clamps and helping hands: the Panavise and hemostats.

So, what are some your favorite jigs, clamps, and helping hands> Share your thoughts in comments.

More:

• Toolbox: Ten tools you won't want to live without
• Toolbox: Benchtop power supplies
• Toolbox: Portable lighting
• Toolbox: Portable workbench
• Toolbox: From "miserable old box" to workshop showpiece

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I really dig this blog "Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves" wherein the author reviews children's books of yore that she digs up at thrift stores, library sales, and used bookstores. Even if you don't have little ones, the pages she posts have wonderful art. Above left, "Let's Grow A Garden" (1978) by Gyo Fujikawa. Above right, "Welcome Home Henry" (1970) by Muriel Batherman. Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves

Over the weekend, David Weinberger, one of the co-authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto wrote that he'd gotten a 45-page pamphlet of legalese from Verizon Wireless saying he could opt out of letting the company share "Customer Proprietary Network Information" with other groups. The rather broadly worded statement, which said the company could give info like call records to "affiliates, agents and parent companies," kicked up some fuss online. GigaOM says that this is the same issue that popped up in late 2007, when Verizon sent a similar notice to its customers. Verizon's PR bloggers say that now, just like in 2007, there's nothing to worry about -- in fact, the PR person went so far as to merely cut and paste his comments on the issue from two years ago. He says that Verizon won't sell customer's info to third parties; it just needs their consent to share it among the Verizon group of companies so it can offer people bundled services.

Given the way the company is communicating the issue -- a bill insert few people will likely pay attention to, written in a format that's pretty difficult, if not impossible, for most average people to divine any real meaning from -- it's hard to accept the explanation at face value. This is representative of the lack of transparency telcos and ISPs often take on privacy issues. Instead of clearly explaining themselves and what they're doing with customer data, they shroud their efforts in secrecy and legalese, then just say "there's nothing to worry about, just move along." If there really is nothing to worry about, why can't they do a better job of making that clear to the public? Their method of communication, and the way they explain themselves, simply increases consumers' skepticism and makes it look like they've got something to hide. In addition, making the system opt-out, rather than opt-in, doesn't help either.

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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Several sources are reporting that in spite of LHC hype, Fermilab's Tevatron has produced another feat for scientific discovery. Currently the world's most powerful operating particle accelerator, the Tevatron has allowed researchers to observe a rare single Top Quark. "Previously, top quarks had only been observed when produced by the strong nuclear force. That interaction leads to the production of pairs of top quarks. The production of single top quarks, which involves the weak nuclear force and is harder to identify experimentally, has now been observed, almost 14 years to the day of the top quark discovery in 1995."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

California State Senator Joe Simitian has introduced new legislation designed to tighten data breach notification requirements, forcing businesses to provide more information about any data that has been leaked in addition to notifying state authorities. What was not included in the legislation was imposed compensation requirements for data breach victims, and according to Simitian are not likely to be for quite some time. "Instead, the next focus of legislation, he said, would likely be on who should bear the cost of sending out notifications to consumers. For example, should a credit card processing company that experiences a breach be responsible for the cost of notifying bank customers? When retailer TJX discovered in 2006 that hackers had accessed credit and debit card numbers passing through its network, banks were left notifying the customers, then had to sue TJX to get compensation for those costs. Heartland Payment Systems, which experienced a breach of credit and debit card numbers in January, has recently been sued by banks to recover their breach notification costs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As some entertainment industry folks continue to insist that BitTorrent tracker search engines have no redeeming value, we keep hearing more and more stories of content providers willingly and eagerly putting up their own torrent trackers, knowing that it's an incredibly efficient means of distributing their content. In the past, we've seen TV networks in Australia and Canada do this with individual shows, and now TorrentFreak is reporting that the government-owned Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) has set up a BitTorrent tracker for distributing a bunch of its shows, noting that: "This type of distribution is reliable, cheap and popular with our audience." Indeed. Not only that, but by running its own tracker, NRK realizes: "we will get better statistics and gather important data about how this technology works." Even better, it plans to share some of that data for others to learn from as well.

The shows will be DRM-free, and it's looking to employ a Creative Commons license on the content "to allow full freedom for our audience." Definitely nice to see someone not going down the same well-trodden road of self-defeat:

"It is important for us to start experimenting with new distribution methods. We don't want to do like the music industry. Running around thinking that people will keep driving down to a record store when they can have the content delivered with the push of a button at home."

If only some others in the entertainment industry would recognize the same thing.

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Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel's celebrating the CGSociety's "Steampunk: Myths & Legends" contest winners' page, highlighting Gabricio Moraes's rendered image "Steamnocchio," which is a damned fine piece of work. But it's not a patch on Guillaume Dubois's "Alice's Adventures in Steamland," if you ask me.

CGSociety's Steampunk art contest winners, incl. "Steamnocchio"

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

And you thought AIG's $62 billion quarterly loss last month was bad -- turns out that the company has a further $1.6 trillion in outstanding derivatives exposure, according to this leaked memo that AIG sent to the US Treasury in order to beg for another $30 billion. Aig Systemic 090309 (via The Dynamics of Cats)

narramissic writes "On Friday, Judge William Chandler III of the Delaware Court of Chancery approved a settlement that will roll back a Yahoo employee severance that was implemented by Yahoo's former leaders. Some investors, including the vocal Carl Icahn, described the plan as a poison pill, arguing that the severance payouts would be so expensive that no company would want to acquire Yahoo. The settlement narrows the reasons why employees can quit and receive the severance, removing some of the incentives for them to leave the company in the event of a Yahoo acquisition, whether by Microsoft or some other suitor."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This Romain Jerome watch is a special very limited "Roswell" edition from their Moon Dust DNA Collection. It appears to model the UFO crash site at Roswell. At least, that's what the crash site looked like to me. "Romain Jerome Moon-Dust DNA The Truth About Roswell Watch, Is A Mystery To Me" (via Boing Boing Gadgets' Twitter news faucet)

TechDirt is reporting that in response to the frustrations with Apple's app store dictatorship, a few developers are looking to set up their own alternative app stores. Alternate app stores would only work on jailbroken phones, making their adoption scope limited, so the question is whether Apple will go after these start ups on the legal battlefield. "Apple, which collects a 30% commission from sellers on its store, doesn't break out the site's revenue. Brokerage firm Piper Jaffray estimates the site generated about $150 million in sales last year and projects total sales will grow to $800 million this year. Apple did not respond to requests for comment. But it has said in the past that with the iPhone it was trying to strike a balance between a closed device like the iPod and an open device like the PC."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fellow mutants: A number of the residents of greater Boingdom (Boing Boing, Offworld, Boing Boing Gadgets, and Boing Boing Video) are heading to San Francisco from 23-27 March for the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC), and we're planning to do a comprehensive package of live and produced video reports for your enjoyment.

Boing Boing Video Live! @GDC09 will be a daily broadcast from our secret headquarters near the GDC, and want to invite you to join the Boing Boing luminaries, video game industry legends, veterans, grunts, Super Mario cosplayers, and telesynced viewers in a riot of awesomeness.

If you work in the game industry, have strong opinions about the future of gaming, or want to change other people's opinions about any area of game development, publishing, and distribution -- or just want to hang out with us and play Laser Twister(tm), give us some information about yourself and what you would bring to the broadcast here.

Mad was so successful that its publisher, EC, created its own knock-off called Panic. It wasn't edited by Harvey Kurtzman, though; it was edited by Al Feldstein. Here's the Wikipedia article abut Panic. From Steve Stiles' article, "It's a Panic!":

What Panic also earned was a storm of indignation that burst over Gaines' head with the very first issue, and all over the holiday of "Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Men." It's strange that Gaines didn't see it coming, but some people got very annoyed with a satire of "The Night Before Christmas." To put it mildly.

The lead story was provocative enough -- an eight-page satire, drawn by Jack Davis, of crime novelist (and comics writer) Mickey Spillane's work, titled "My Gun Is the Jury." Feldstein set about to parody Mike Hammer's rather gory crime solving techniques, labeling the satire "Sex and Sadism Department." In page after page "Mike Hammershlammer" blows away a variety of beautiful women ("I let her have it, right in the gut, a little below the belly-button..."). In the last few panels Mike has shot Stella --only to discover that "she" is a "he." Not only that, but Mike "himself" is a female transvestite! That was pretty heavy stuff for the 1950s and came to cause Gaines considerable grief, as did the last story in the first issue!

Incidentally, Feldstein took over Mad after Hugh Hefner lured Kurtzman away from Mad by offering him his own humor magazine called Trump. It folded after three issues.

You can download scans of all 12 issues of Panic. (They're in the cbr format -- download a reader here.)

Every new entertainment innovation has resulted in hand-wringing by the existing industry about how it's going to kill the business. Player pianos? Evil. Would destroy the sheet music industry. Recorded music? Would send musicians to the poorhouse and end live music. Radio? Would destroy the recorded music business. Home taping? Killing music. The VCR? The "Boston Strangler" to the movie industry. Notice a pattern? Every single one of them, in actuality, helped grow a market much bigger than that which preceded it. Yet, for some reason, no one in the industry (or, all too often, among the press who repeat their complaints) seems to notice this.

So here we have Business Week -- usually less susceptible to these sorts of claims -- repeating totally unsubstantiated arguments from music industry insiders that it's now legal online streaming services that are killing the music business. The fact that most of these services are really little different than traditional radio (which helped build up the massive recorded music industry) seems to zip right by without mention.

The problem is that the author of the article, and most of those quoted in the article, incorrectly seem to think that the only way the music industry makes money is in the direct sale of music. Thus, the fact that people listen to streams for free (or small royalties) is somehow seen as "bad." The fact that radio works on basically the same principle isn't even touched. The fact that there are tons of other ways for musicians to make money -- and for many of them it helps to have more people listening to their music via these services isn't even the same area code as the article.

Instead, the entire article seems to be based on a complaint from the guy who heads the National Music Publishers' Association , whose business has always been predicated on the house of cards of music licensing. Every time a new technology comes along, the publishers demand a new level of licensing. Right now they're pushing hard for yet another duct tape solution: adding another license for such online streaming services, and Business Week played right into their hands with a non-critical piece describing the "issue" in the exact terms they want people to be thinking about.

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The Detroit Institute of the Artist (DIA) is holding an exhibition of "The Art of Norman Rockwell." As pat of the fun, the DIA invited folks to draw their own "Evening Post" covers answering the question, "Who's your family?" The delightful results can be seen on Flickr. "The DIA Evening Post" (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

Matt_dk writes "Move over, Morning Star. Once Canadarm2 helps install the fourth and final set of solar array wings to the International Space Station later this month, the Station will surpass Venus as the brightest object in the night sky, second only to the Moon. The Space Shuttle Discovery is set to deliver the power-generating solar panels and Starboard 6 (S6) truss segment to the ISS on the 125th mission in the Shuttle program, known as STS-119/15A (slated for launch on March 11)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matt_dk writes "Move over, Morning Star. Once Canadarm2 helps install the fourth and final set of solar array wings to the International Space Station later this month, the Station will surpass Venus as the brightest object in the night sky, second only to the Moon. The Space Shuttle Discovery is set to deliver the power-generating solar panels and Starboard 6 (S6) truss segment to the ISS on the 125th mission in the Shuttle program, known as STS-119/15A (slated for launch on March 11)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stefan Hermann, a hardware hacker in Berlin, has come up with an interesting suite of plug-in sub-circuit prototyping modules for Arduino, called JEP ("Just Enough Prototyping") Shields.

JEP shields are complete circuits for Arduino microcontrollers. They are modular in construction such that the functionality of each can be stacked through pin headers.

Every JEP shield has its own patch panel - two rows of female pin headers, which give access to all Arduino pins. In/out pins of the JEP shields have their own screw terminals, providing a secure connection to peripheral components, like motors or sensors. Every shield has 3 onboard trimpots which can be used to calibrate sensors or digital inputs.

So far, Stefan has shields for FET-N (for juicing current and voltage on Ardunio projects when needed), Opto (3x Optocouplers), Relais (2x relays), Motor (2x motor drives), and Quadro-beta (4x motor drivers).

You can download the Eagle files now and Stefan will have boards available soon via Fritzing.

JEP Shields Introduction

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Vigile writes "To many observers, the success of the GPGPU landscape has really been pushed by NVIDIA and its line of Tesla and Quadro GPUs. While ATI was the first to offer support for consumer applications like Folding@Home, NVIDIA has since taken command of the market with its CUDA architecture and programs like Badaboom and others for the HPC world. PC Perspective has speculation that points to ATI addressing the shortcomings of its lineup with a revised GPU known as RV790 that would both dramatically increase gaming performance as well as more than triple the compute power on double precision floating point operations — one of the keys to HPC acceptance."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We all know about the somewhat "benevolent dictatorship" position that Apple holds concerning its iPhone App Store -- at times arbitrarily banning apps from the store. This has (reasonably) upset some, who feel that it's not particularly fair that Apple gets to decide what works and what doesn't -- and now a few are even looking to set up alternative app stores, though they'll only work on jailbroken iPhones. The article speculates on whether or not Apple will send its lawyers after these upstarts, noting Apple's decision to file a protest against an attempt to have the Library of Congress make clear that jailbreaking an iPhone does not violate the DMCA. However, if Apple is smart, it makes sense for them not to do so. After all, they make more money from each phone sold -- and increasing the value of the phones by allowing more apps to run on it should only help sell more of the devices.

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I'm traveling in West Africa for a couple weeks, shooting video along the way. Thought I'd blog a few stills shot on the smaller of several cameras I brought, the Kodak Zi6, which I adore. No, I wasn't paid to say that. The Zi6 shoots surprisingly good HD video, with reasonably good sound for a "Flip-sized" device. Below, some stills from video footage I shot yesterday. More in this evolving set.

Top to bottom: A voudun ceremony on the streets of Ouidah, men dressed in the regalia of the gods and ancestors.

A voudun fetish market in a village on the way to Ganvie -- you can see the carcasses of leopard and other wild cats and protected species in this particular market stall, along with python skins.

Gasoline for sale on the roadside. I'm told a lot of this is smuggled in from Nigeria, just next door.

And those last three stills: en route to, and inside the village of Ganvie, which was founded in the 1700s as a refuge for people of the Tofinu ethnic group. They were trying to avoid being captured by the dominant, warring Dahomey ethnic group, who sold captives into the slave trade. The entire village is built on stilts, over the water. About 30,000 people live here now, I'm told. Everything is water, there's not really any land. Everyone moves around on the boats you see here, and even the market where women sell fish and cassava and herbs and fruits -- all of that is on boats, sitting in the water.

The women here traditionally wear intricate tattooing on their bodies, and some tattooing and scarification on their faces. As we were pulling up to the one shop/hotel/whatever that welcomes tourists, another boat pulled right up next to us, paddled by a beautiful tattooed/scarred young woman selling some kind of sweet starchy bread balls. I think the thing I'll remember most about Ganvie might be watching her flirt with and bat her eyelashes at our Beninois fixer/driver, who sat next to me on the boat.

There are a lot of really fascinating things about how daily life in this community works. One of these is how they farm fish. This lake, Lake Nokoué, is actually hard for things to grow in, so each family plants reeds to form "plots" in the water, to encourage fish to nest and breed there. The plots are carefully guarded and tended -- it's hard for me to imagine how they tell them apart, it's not like they have signs on them or something. If one family's plot is doing really well, they might sell the amount of fish beyond what they need to survive. If another family isn't doing well, they might work as laborers on a more successful family's plot.

Closing the loop on the issue with the BMW.

1. The car is drying out. Nice weather over the last couple of days helped. I guess we'll find out when it starts raining again if it still leaks.

2. The independent repair service, H&B, did great, non-warranty work. $120.

3. BMW wanted $800 for the same work.

4. BMW of North America never got back to me.

5. Weatherford BMW, the dealer that sold me the car is a real piece of work. They completely lost me as a customer. In the future, when my car needs warranty work, I'll drive to San Rafael.

6. Thanks, as always, to the Scripting News readers -- a fountain of knowledge and good will!

uC Hobby has a new piece up on using Arduino, the Processing language, and a Sharp GP2Y0A21YK0F IR distance sensor to create a robot vision system. The builder, Cory Barton, writes:

I recently acquired a few Sharp GP2Y0A21YK0F IR distance sensors. This is an inexpensive proximity sensor which can detect objects from 10-80cm. These sensors only detect objects within a narrow beam, so I decided to mount mine on a servo, so that I could pan the sensor approximately 180 degrees, and take multiple readings to build up an idea of what obstacles are in front of my robot. I like to visualize things, so I decided to write a small program in processing to visualize the sensor data for debugging and to help me better understand what the sensor is seeing.

Visualizing Sensor With Arduino and Processing

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Amandine Alessandra's "Books as Type" is a lovely little typeface made out of cleverly stacked books. Book as Type (Thanks, Denis!)

Ransom Riggs says I just finished a new short film project [for mental_floss]. As far as I know, it's (one of) the only short films ever made with mocap technology (the actor wears a neoprene suit covered in reflective dots ... my animators learned from robert zemeckis himself) and almost certainly the only short film to ever dramatize the nightmarish "gray goo" scenario, in which, Sorcerer's-Apprentice-like, a hapless would-be evil genius unleashes a plague of nanorobots which devour the earth. It's on YouTube -- in HD.

An anonymous reader writes "Campbell Smith, CEO of the RIAA equivalent in New Zealand, has written an opinion piece for one of New Zealand's largest daily papers, in which he tries to justify the new 'presumed guilty' copyright law. This law allows recording industry members to watch file-sharing activity and notify ISPs of users who are downloading material. The copyright holder can then demand that an ISP disconnect that user — without the user ever having a chance to demonstrate their evidence."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In September 2008, I got six baby Plymouth Barred Rock hens in the mail. They began laying eggs on March 6, 2009. The eggs are about 1/2 to 2/3 the size of "large" eggs I buy in the store (see the photo of the little egg on the left; click to make bigger).

Tthe eggs my hens have been laying have nice thick shells because I give my hens plenty of crushed osyter shells. But one egg, which I pulled from the nesting box on Saturday, had no shell. It was like a rubber trick egg. Enjoy this video of me prodding and squeezing it repeatedly.

Nicole Paquin sings a peppy number called "Mon Mari C’est Frankenstein."

Boingboing's current guestblogger Paul Spinrad is currently Projects Editor for MAKE magazine. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Wendy, their two children Clara and Simon, and their cats Ron and Nancy. 

In this post I asked boingboing readers what mini-essays by me they would want to read, and now it's time to pay the piper. Here are the votes tallied from the first 103 comments, in descending order, followed by the goods. Since some interest was expressed in all of them, I'll hit them all with at least a line or two. The top vote-getter was "D) Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth, like exist in other cultures," with 35 votes. I guess it's true! Anyway, for those interested, thank you for your interest!

D) Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth, like exist in other cultures. (35 votes)
M) Styles of dress follow people's differing views of human perfectability (22 yes)
L) Laughter and crying serve to carve new cognitive pathways in a hurry. (20 yes)
H) Poetry will become popular again. (19 yes, 1 no)
B) My cynical Public Service Announcement campaign idea to get more people to major in Science and Engineering. (17 yes)
I) "Method" acting changed the role of celebrity in all cultural disciplines, starting in the late 1940's. (17 yes)
C) Was Jesus a comedian? (17 yes, 1 no)
J) The 6th-8th Century Iconoclast Controversy in Eastern Europe has fantastic dramatic potential. (16 yes)
F) Control vs. Love: breadth-first, top-down vs. depth-first, bottom up search strategies that work in opposition. (12 yes)
G) Some countries "get" rock 'n' roll better than others. (14 yes, 2 no)
K) Where there is vice, there is connoisseurship. (12 yes)
A) What is a crackpot? (7 yes, 1 no)
E) We need a communications language standard for networked devices, and why this is more of a social/political problem than a technical problem. (3 yes, 1 no)

Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth, like exist in other cultures. 

If you wanted to design the perfect consumer, what would they be like? How about someone who thinks and acts like a "typical teenager" their whole life? Empathy, patience, and responsibility are hard to monetize, so there's huge commercial interest in keeping these out of our repertoires. (Sorry, together teens-- you know the stereotype.) All the seductive advertising got to me, anyway, on some level, even though I don't consider myself a big consumer type.

A coming-of-age ritual would counter the industrial production of overgrown boy-men and girl-women. Speaking personally again, I think that if I had grown up knowing that I could screw around and count on people's indulgence until I was, say, 26, and then after a big public ritual everyone would expect more, I would have risen to the occasion, as would all of my pals. Other things we call rites-of-passage (moving out, supporting yourself, getting married, having kids) can certainly have the same effect, but you can do all of those things while still just always trying to see what you can get away with.

The bar mitzvah age of 13 is too young, as one example. I'm guessing that when people came up with that age, more was expected of 13-year-olds than is today. I'd push it out, to allow for things like college and some good years of sowing wild oats. As the ritual itself, what do you think? It's great that this question got the most votes, and I just wish I had some hard information to contribute. For those of us who, like me, haven't read our Joseph Campbell, let's hop to it, and we'll all try to figure something out. Meanwhile, I love the comment from the man who marked his change by cutting his hair, and also find it interesting that a couple of generations ago, men wore hats all the time. How did you get your first hat? Did your father and grandfather ceremoniously take you to a haberdasher?

Styles of dress follow people's differing views of human perfectability. 

Let's say you're an alien who comes to Earth and happens to land in the middle of an abortion rally. Both sides are there waving signs, which you can't read, but you notice differences in the way each side is dressed. On one, colors and patterns match more closely, fabrics are smoother and more uniform, hair is neater, there are more suits, and jewelry is finer. On the other side, patterns are louder, hair is looser, materials are rougher, there's more eclecticism and asymmetry, and more costume jewelry. You wonder, is this species fighting about what they should wear?

There are many flashpoint issues surrounding reproductive and drug policy, and I think they have to do with differing views of human weakness and what to do about it. If people should be guided by divine ideals, you don't want laws to assume (and reward) falling short, and you want to wear things that are as neat and coordinated as possible. If people are fascinating, flawed animals whose missteps should be expected and provided for, you're more liable to wear things that reflect the complex collage we all live.

Laughter and crying serve to carve new cognitive pathways in a hurry. 

One theory I remember from a psycholinguistics class ascribes humor and laughter to suddenly resolving a tension. Like "What has four wheels and flies? / A garbage truck" or seeing someone fall and then realizing they weren't hurt. They're all "aha!" moments that revise your model of what's true, and the brain gets extra juice in order to carve revised pathways, so the new understandings stay permanent.

When you lose someone you love, you also need to carve new pathways in order to remake your model of the world. But it takes much longer and requires much more juice.

Aside: What made the Anthony Perkins character in Psycho so creepy is that (spoiler alert!) he found a way around having to process his mother's death, and so he never learned what death means.

Poetry will become popular again. 

Manifesto

The heroes of the small screen, the humans,
Sharpen their points,
And pierce the media thicket with the power of concentration.

My cynical Public Service Announcement campaign idea to get more people to major in Science and Engineering. 

This is an idea for a series of 30-second promotional spots. They're totally dishonest because they imply that you can't do as much good for the world as a liberal arts major (for example), but if you see this as a war, then I guess all's fair!

In straight-ahead Errol Morris style, each spot would present a real person in mid- or late life who regrets not having pursued science or engineering, talking about the wrong turn they took. Formula: I was interested in and good at science/engineering, but for stupid reason A, I pursued/majored in B instead. 3) So now I'm doing unsatisfying-C while my scientist/engineer friends are doing meaningful-D. Examples:

"...I was also always great at BS-ing, so when the math started getting too hard, I decided to switch to B, and then I went into advertising. Now, if I reach the pinnacle of my profession, I can convince people to buy more cars and liquor. Meanwhile, my old friend Sam, who studied Civil Engineering, is bringing clean, safe water to poor people in India. Pursue BS, and that's what you get."

"...But I also noticed that there were more babes at the Art library than the Engineering library, so I majored in something else. Now I grub for grants to do minor variations on the one concept I'm quote-unquote 'known' for, while my college buddy Alex, who did Chemical Engineering, is figuring out how to stop the spread of brain cancer."

"I was intimidated by all the hot-shot guys in those classes, so I changed to B and wound up in Law school. Now I work 70 hours a week doing corporate law to pay off my debt while my college roommate Carol, who studied Biochem, is figuring out how proteins fold. I'm happy for her."

"My buddies were mostly liberal arts majors, so that was the easy path. Now I work for an investment bank, and if I do a really good job, it means some rich people get even richer. But my friend Keven, who studied Aeronautical Engineering, and now he's building autonomous robot aircraft for putting out fires and rescuing people."

And so on. The stories must be real, not acted, which is where some actual work would have to get done. But if the subjects wanted the video to obscure their identities, all the better-- they would just look that much more pathetic. Possible tagline: Engineering - Make something of your life. It's in the grand tradition of sobering, cautionary, and presumably effective PSAs about V.D., drugs, etc.: Don't let this happen to you!

"Method" acting changed the role of celebrity in all cultural disciplines, starting in the late 1940's. 

When actors began stepping into their roles rather than viewing acting as a craft, it brought more attention to who they were personally. Audiences knew that Marlon Brando's "Stella!" was a window into his own emotions. As critic Richard Schickel recalls, "People who saw him as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 cannot forget the sense that they were seeing the beginning of something for which there was no precedent."

Maybe there's no cause-and-effect, but other fields soon shifted their focus the same way. Swing music's tight arrangements and orchestras gave way to Bebop's small-combo improvisation and personal signature styles. Abstract Expressionist paintings came entirely from what the artist dreamed up, with no observations the viewer could share. Beat writers rejected editing as separating the reader from their raw, original thoughts. In all cases it feeds celebrity-- to appreciate their work, you think about the artist.

Kerouac's On The Road manuscript, written on a roll of teletype paper, is currently on a museum tour. Writing that way helped him avoid breaking his flow, and if he also more self-consciously thought it might become a precious relic some day, a quasi-religious object the way Pollock's paintings were valued records of his artistic trance at the time, he was right.

I learned this stuff from reading Richard Schickel's Intimate Strangers and Leo Braudy's Frenzy of Renown, both fascinating books about the phenomenon of celebrity.

Was Jesus a comedian? 

I'd seen numerous references to Lenny Bruce's notorious "Religions, Inc." routine, and when I finally read it, I didn't find it that funny. Sure, I appreciated that it was revolutionary at the time, but in the years since, so many of us have accepted Bruce's comparison between organized religions and corporations that it's no longer daring or funny to point it out.

Humor tends not to age well. If being "edgy" means testing the edge between taboo and acceptable, then each generation turns edgy into obvious or even doctrinal as it moves the line.

Jesus reportedly called out hypocrisy and put authority in its place, and his words resonated with people, but the accounts we read are filtered through subsequent generations. If the Sermon on the Mount (or the sermons it summarized) was so daring and dead-on that it had its audience howling in the aisles, and if the surrounding culture eventually came to accept the views it expressed, how would later generations describe the event in their accounts? To say that it provoked laughter would be unthinkable.

The 6th-8th Century Iconoclast Controversy in Eastern Europe has fantastic dramatic potential. 

Another great chapter from Frenzy of Renown describes the Iconoclast Controversy, which raged on and off from the sixth to the eighth centuries. Christian churches under the Byzantine Empire developed a tradition of icon painting, and the lay worshipers loved praying to these icons. But bands of iconoclasts, who saw this as un-Christian idol-worship, began storming into churches, ripping the icons off the walls, and smashing them.

Meanwhile, the top of the church hierarchy felt that the icons had too much power over people, and interfered with their authority. So a series of Byzantine emperors began to secretly support the iconoclasts in smashing icons. So the iconoclasts, zealots who justified their views with scripture, took payoffs from the Byzantine Empire to destroy the most precious possessions of the icon-worshipers, many of whom were mendicant monks. Wheels within wheels!

Towards the end of the controversy, one pro-icon author was captured by iconoclasts who branded his forehead with some of his pro-icon verses. After the Byzantine Empire withdrew its support for the iconoclasts, he obtained a high position in the church.

Control vs. Love: breadth-first, top-down vs. depth-first, bottom up search strategies that work in opposition. 

A great meta-recipe for systems that learn and adapt is to have opposing forces fighting each other. It's the basis for our legal system, and I see this dynamic everywhere.

One of my favorite pet pairings is Control vs Love. As I see it, Control uses a breadth-first, top-down search strategy, whereas Love is depth-first and bottom-up. Control without love causes large-scale death, destruction, and suffering in the service of generalizations and abstractions. Love without control gets pulled this way and that, universally sympathetic but unable to step back and build systems that are ultimately more helpful. Together, locked in eternal combat, they keep the excesses of the other in check.

Another requirement for the recipe is that the opposing motivations should prompt similar actions. This allows for infinite flexibility within a spectrum of motivation. When the rules of the game are set up like this, something clicks, and complexity grows.

And so, for example, the artist seeking connection and artist seeking fame search for the same cultural niches to occupy and grow from. The careerist who always wants to prove himself right follows the same course as the ethical professional who always wants to do a good job. The seducer follows the true lover's thought process when determining his next move.

I like the commenter's suggestion that "Love vs. Control" could be an album title!

Some countries "get" rock 'n' roll better than others. 

Some countries expect young people to move away from their childhood home and strike out on their own. In others, extended families are more close-knit, and young people tend to live close to their parents, grandparents, and other relatives. The wealthy English, who traditionally hired nannies and sent their children away to boarding schools at young ages, represent the first extreme. But in the U.S. as well, young people have more distance from their families than in other countries.

The rock 'n' roll that drives the genre comes from young people who want to connect with each other over something that they love but that their parents would hate. The first type of country breeds this type of rebellion, but in more family-oriented countries, the rock musicians are more liable to produce a derivative form, by applying rock-sounding style to melodies and music that the whole family can understand and enjoy.

Where there is vice, there is connoisseurship. 

Briefly, connoisseurship develops in part as a rationalization: alcohol, tobacco, etc.

What is a crackpot? 

Someone who produces non-disprovable, non-quantitative, descriptive generalizations. Whether it's Sigmund Freud or Lyndon LaRouche, it's all the same impulse.

We need a communications language standard for networked devices, and why this is more of a social/political problem than a technical problem. 

It should be a simple but complete language, not just a protocol. Then you could do anything you want in the communications layer, rather than applications themselves having to handle multiple protocols redundantly. You could write fancy cross-platform rules to control when and how to send or open all of your communications, and how to handle the ones directed to you. In the 1980's, Adobe got its start by doing the same thing with a page description language for printers, PostScript, and look what happened to them!

We recently pointed out the statements made by The Cure's Robert Smith, insisting that business models involving giving away music for free, such as the one used by Radiohead, couldn't work. This seemed rather odd, given that not only did it work fantastically well for Radiohead, we've been seeing it work for a lot of different bands for many years. So, to claim that it simply can't work was blatantly false and easily proven as wrong. Given that... you might think Robert Smith would recognize the fallacy of his logic, admit he was wrong and maybe learn a little. Or not...

An anonymous reader points us to Smith's blog post in response to the criticism of his statements where he digs in to repeat the original, easily proven as false, claim and calls those who disagree with him "cretins." Or, rather, "CRETINS" since he uses the CAPS LOCK button to full effect (though, appears to have a faulty space bar at times). Oddly, to get around the fact that the model did, in fact, work for Radiohead, he pretends he didn't say that it couldn't work for Radiohead (though, that's exactly what he did say), but claims he actually meant that it couldn't work for everyone else. Then he brushes off Radiohead's success by noting:

ANY FAMOUS ARTIST WITH A HUGE AND DEVOTED FAN BASE(OFTEN ARRIVED AT WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM A WEALTHY AND POWERFUL 'PATRON' ORTWO?) CAN AFFORD TO DO WHAT HE, SHE OR IT WANTS... INCLUDING GIVING THEIR ART AWAY AS SOME KIND OF 'LOSSLEADER' TO HELP 'BUILD THE BRAND'

Masnick's law, anyone? Even that statement is somewhat self-contradictory. If the band is "famous" with a "huge and devoted fan base" then... um... why do they need to "build the brand"?

And, then, of course, he falls into that old fallacy that we see way too often:

IF THIS 'ART FOR FREE' IDEA BECOMES THE CULTURAL NORM THEN HOW DO ARTISTS EARN THEIR LIVING?

It really does amaze me how people's brains seem to stop as soon as "free" enters the picture. But, once again, for you first timers, just because you give one thing away for free, it does not mean you give everything away for free, and thus you earn your living selling those other things. But, of course, apparently anyone who uses logic and understands actual business models doesn't count:

AND QUITE HONESTLY

AS ANYONE THAT DISAGREES WITH THIS POINT

IS UNLIKELY TO BE AN ARTIST

I DONT REALLY CARE TOO MUCH WHAT THEY THINK... !!!

Fair enough. But when plenty of actual artists are understanding this and making plenty of money in doing so, it seems rather silly to ignore the points they're making, doesn't it. Or... wait, is Radiohead not an artist? And, then, there's the final sign off:

I WONDER HOW MANY OF THE PROFESSIONAL APOLOGISTS OUTTHERE WRITE THEIR SHIT FOR FREE?

Well, I don't get paid anything specifically to write this blog. But I do get paid, in part thanks to giving away all this content for free. Just as Smith could get paid by embracing a business model where he gives his music away for free...

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Last year, minor league baseball team the Calgary Vipers traded pitcher John C. Odom to the Laredo Broncos in exchange for 10 maple baseball bats worth $665. At first, Odom took the odd trade in stride, even joking about his new, embarrassing nickname of Batman. Three weeks after the trade though, he quit. And six months after that, Odom was dead of an accidental overdose of heroin, methamphetamine, the stimulant benzylpiperazine and alcohol. Before his death, the bats were bought by Ripley's Believe it or Not for $10,000 that went to the team's children's charity. Ben Walker of the Associated Press tells the whole sad story. Form the AP:

Calgary team president Peter Young and Laredo general manager Jose Melendez nearly traded (Odom) for a slugger, but it fell apart. Melendez proposed buying Odom’s contract for $1,000. Young rejected that, saying the Vipers didn’t do cash deals because they made the team look financially unstable.

Bats, though, the Vipers could use. At $665 for 10 bats—made by Prairie Sticks, double-dipped black, 34 inches long, model C243, Laredo agreed to the unusual deal.

“This was not done as a publicity stunt,” said Young, now the Vipers’ director of baseball operations. “I talked to John several times and told him this wasn’t done to embarrass him..."

On June 5 in Amarillo, the “Batman” theme played while Odom warmed up for Laredo, and he tipped his cap to the sound booth. But he was battered for eight runs in 3 1-3 innings and mercilessly taunted by the crowd. (Broncos manager Dan) Shwam went to the mound.

“The chants, the catcalls, they were terrible. I had to get him out of there for his own good. He was falling apart, right in front of our eyes,” Shwam said.

"A tragic end for minor leaguer traded for bats" (Thanks, Jason Weisberger!)

In a recent blog post, CNet's Jon Oitsik has called for a policy shift with respect to data encryption. A new standard by the Trusted Computing Group promises the availability of self-encrypting hard drives soon, and leading some to call for the immediate adoption. Will this create even more security problems due to lazy custodians, or should someone responsible for keeping your information safe be required to move to the new hardware? Hopefully the new hardware comes with a warning to continue to use other data protection measures as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

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Today we present "Legends of Exos," an animated short from the PSST! Pass It On film series.

In "Legends of Exos" we are launched into a psychedelic land of stained glass, tracking a warrior on his way to battle. His attack segues into a lovable world of fuzzy woodland creatures but concludes with a finale that Burton fans will find comforting.

PSST!3 Pass It On is collaborative film project is composed of 17 films made by 51 teams of directors and animators from around the globe. Each film is broken into three parts -- beginning, middle, and end -- and each part is created by a different team.

Check out the PSST!3 website for more on the project, and you can purchase DVDs of the entire collection there, too. We’ll be bringing you more from PSST!3, as well as insight from Bran Dougherty-Johnson, in upcoming episodes of Boing Boing Video.

(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.)

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Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

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I switched because I was Mired In Malware.

I got a new EeePC 1000HE last week, and after just a few hours of use, it's infected with a rootkit virus of some kind. Really clever. Spent three hours last night trying to eradicate it, but in the last three or four years, the malware guys have gotten a lot more clever.

Contemplating switching to the Hackintosh flavor of netbook.

Ran Ad-Aware, getting ready to run Spybot. Downloaded Combofix. I'm going to try to resurrect this baby. Also considering doing a fresh install of Windows but that sounds like more work that Leopard. And then you're still using Windows.

You can read all about my trials on Twitter. But this problem is now serious enough to demand its own blog post. I'm going to see the silver lining here, a chance to learn a lot. Albeit stuff I never wanted to learn.

Of course there will be the moralizing and I Told You So's. Thanks in advance for sharing your wisdom. I agree you are superior and wiser and a better person, in every way.

I don't use MSIE. Please no need to tell me not to use IE. I use Firefox.

Laura says:

Organizers of the TED Conference today announced they would begin the search for the inaugural class of TEDGlobal Fellows to participate in the TEDGlobal Conference in Oxford, U.K. This announcement follows the successful TED Fellows program launch at TED2009 last month in Long Beach, California. The program will accept applications for fellowships from March 6, 2009 through April 3, 2009. For more information about how individuals may apply for a TEDGlobal Fellowship, please visit. TED Fellows may apply or be nominated by another individual. To nominate a candidate, email fellows@ted.com.

Audrey Kawasaki, one of my favorite living painters, posted about the sculptures of Jin Young Yu. Seen above is "A Familly In Disguise." Aurdrey writes, "strange and ghostly, very up my alley." Mine too! Jin Young Yu

Nice editing work makes this short video of bridges being blown up to the sounds of the Barber of Seville. I hope Obama's infrastructure rebuilding plan includes lots of bridge demolitions so that we can look forward to more fun videos like this! (Via Arbroath)

My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents; I’ve always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism.

#

brothke writes "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America is the third of James Bamford's trilogy. Bamford started this with The Puzzle Palace in 1982 and Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency in 2001. The Shadow Factory is likely the last book Bamford will find the NSA cooperative to, given his often harsh treatment of the agency and its directors. It is also doubtful that former NSA Director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden will grant Bamford additional dinner invitations, given his portrayal of Hayden as a weakling who could not stand up to Dick Cheney and other in the Bush administration." Read below for the rest of Ben's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For years we've been writing about various abuses of the patent system, and how they damage innovation. There are times when we hear about abuses of the patent system that actually put lives in danger -- often around the pharmaceutical industry. At least in that case, you can sometimes understand the basic reasoning (even if it's actually incorrect). However, we recently came across an example of the patent system being abused in such an egregious manner that it's putting many lives at stake...

Bob Austin, who for many years has worked in major metropolitan fire and EMS departments, had the idea of creating an open source medical dispatch system. Such a system would have numerous benefits. Beyond being a free system, it also would allow best practices to easily bubble up in a way that actively would help save lives. If another EMS department could improve on the system, they easily could do so and contribute it back to the community.

One of the parts of the system was a project called Cards 911, which was a useful document for use by emergency dispatchers. Basically, it gave them a simple script to follow when an emergency call came in, asking where they were, the nature of the emergency, how many people injured, etc. The answers to certain questions would lead the dispatcher to different parts of the document using hyperlinks. The entire document (and, yes, it was just a document) was created in OpenOffice Writer and was offered either as a document file or a PDF file. In other words, this was basically a script with hyperlinks in it, that helped an emergency dispatcher get the necessary information, and help the caller as quickly as possible -- and it was free and open.

Who could possibly complain about that?

Apparently the lawyers for a company called Priority Dispatch Corporation, who sent a legal nastygram listing out ten patents that the company held, which the lawyers implied the Cards 911 project violated. Remember, this is a script written as a document. The lawyers were careful never to actually say which of the ten patents the cards violated, but simply listed them all out and said "Our investigation has revealed that the... Guide Cards may infringe on one or more of Priority Dispatch's patents and/or copyrights." Not only that, but the lawyers then demanded that all physical and electronic copies of the documents be destroyed.

Given the position they were in, as open source developers doing this for the good of the public, rather than as any sort of business endeavor, the folks involved in the project complied with the demands of the lawyer. They destroyed everything, both electronic and physical and agreed not to work on any emergency dispatch systems in the future. The project is no longer available, and our emergency dispatch systems are that much worse off because of it.

Furthermore, in investigating this further, it appears that it would be impossible to craft any sort of competing product that lives up to NHTSA and ASTM official standards without violating Priority Dispatch's patents, based on the what the company seems to believe they cover. If you would like to see all ten patents for yourself, they're listed here:

• 5857966
• 7106835
• 6607481
• 6106549
• 6078894
• 6076065
• 6053864
• 6010451
• 6004266
• 5989187

The whole situation is rather sickening, and I'm really hoping that folks here might be able to help see if we can get this project back on track. Priority Dispatch's decision to scare these open source developers into submission for merely offering up a free project to help save lives is really a rather disgusting use of the patent system, and obviously goes against the very purpose of that system: "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." Instead, such things are being actively stymied in a way that puts all of us at risk.

The folks working on this project have no money (and no intention of making any money from the project), but they could use some help. In my discussions with them, they simply wanted me to know about their story, and weren't asking for help per se, but it would be great if we could, as a community, come up with ways to get this project moving again, so that we can all be safer. If anyone has thoughts or ideas on how to help Bob, please let us know in the comments, and let's see what can be done. At the very least, please help spread this story and let others know about it.

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This guy has posted tape recordings of the action taking place at video arcades during the 1980s, including the Just Fun video arcade in Ithaca, NY in 1982.

We recorded our video game experiences from 1982 until 1988 in a variety of locations on the east coast. Most of the recordings come from Ithaca, NY, Albany, NY and Ocean City, MD. Other locations include Lancaster, PA, Falmouth, MA, Rehoboth Beach, DE and Key West, FL.

Luckily I stored all fourteen audio tapes in a safe place and rediscovered them when I moved the rest of my stuff out of my parents house in 1997. In the last several years I digitized these nostalgic recordings to preserve and share them.

Experience the magic and the wonder of the early years of coin-op video games. Hear the classic arcade ambience like you haven't heard it in over a quarter of a century! The blend of several video games being played simultaneously, the kids yelling and the quarters clanking. We will never hear such beautiful chaos quite the same way again....

(via Cool-Mo-Dee)

Dan Gillmor is a guest blogger at BoingBoing.

If you're a Verizon Wireless customer and care about your privacy, David Weinberger has news:

A small legalistic pamphlet from Verizon arrived today telling me that I have 45 days to opt out of “agreeing” to let Verizon share Customer Proprietary Network Information, i.e., “information created by virtue of your relationship with Verizon Wireless,” including “services purchased (including specific calls you make and receive,” billing info, technical info and location info. They promise to only share this with “affiliates, agents and parent companies.” It will definitely not be shared with “unrelated third parties” … unless, perhaps that third party pays Verizon to become an affiliate, whatever the heck “affiliate ” means.

There's an opt-out, but it took him some doing to find it, including a call to customer service. And as he says, accurately, "The whole thing sucks."

UPDATE: The BB Gadgets crew has detailed instructions on how to opt out. 

Does any other wireless company have this kind of privacy-invading policy?

Link

Up for auction on eBay is this fantastic cosmetics compact that Salvador Dali designed in 1935 for fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Over the years, Dali worked with Schiaparelli several times. From Dali Planet:

He inspired printed fabrics for her collections, in which the pattern represents the torn flesh of animals, and made her a skeleton dress, a pink belt with lips for a buckle, a hat like an upside-down shoe, another hat shaped like a giant lamb chop and a lobster-print frock that was worn by the Duchess of Windsor for a pre-wedding portrait for Vogue by photographer Cecil Beaton.

The Duchess seemed unaware that the lobster was positioned almost as a fig leaf or a long arm reaching up to the precise part of her anatomy that had caused the abdication crisis.

SCHIAPARELLI DALI COMPACT POWDER BOX ROTARY PHONE DIAL (Thanks, Richard Metzger!)

Dan Gillmor is a guest blogger at BoingBoing.

I'm jazzed to be here! Thanks to Mark and the BB crew for the invite.

As a former journalist-for-pay who gives public talks about the changing nature of media, I'm often asked an excellent question about serendipity. Are we losing it?

The question comes up in the context of, well, context in the way journalism -- especially in daily newspapers -- is presented. Here's what I mean: Look at the front page of the New York Times. You're likely to see a story about a topic you didn't know you cared about until you saw it.

This is one of the genuine values of editors at institutions like the Times. They make sure we're in a position to learn about something they consider important or interesting, or simply worth the reading. The juxtaposition of the "didn't know we cared until we read it" story with the day's more obvious news is serendipity for those of us who want to be reasonably well informed and enjoy being surprised.

On the Web, where we often go looking for things we already know we want to read or watch of hear, serendipity is something we have to find for yourself. And for me, one of the places I've always found it is here on BoingBoing, where I find myself in amazed, amused and everything but apathetic as I scroll down the page each day to see what the crew has come up with now. This has made me a BB fan, verging on addict.

So to be invited to guest-blog here is a joy. My plan: Add some serendipity. 

Naturally, I'll post about the future of media and information, including a new project I'm starting in the next few days, but I'll also be indulging my own tendency to head off on tangents. Sometimes they're relevant to my work, often not. I'll do my best, at any rate, to make sure they aren't boring.

UPDATE: As I'll have to do periodically here, a disclosure: I own a small amount of New York Times Co. stock, which is worth way, way, way less than what I paid for it.

ScienceDaily is reporting that a new ice chain structure may provide a better method for seeding clouds and causing rain. "Ice structures are usually built out of simple hexagonal arrangements of water molecules and this hexagonal building block motif is easily observed in the structures of snowflakes. However, during their studies Dr Angelos Michaelides and co-workers from the Fritz Haber Institute, Berlin, and the University of Liverpool have discovered a natural nanoscale ice structure formed of pentagons."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're pleased to present our next guest blogger, Dan Gillmor! Dan is director of the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. He heads the Center for Citizen Media, an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School and Arizona State, and is author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (O'Reilly Media, 2004), a book that explains the rise of citizens' media and why it matters.

From 1994 until early 2005 Dan was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. During 2005 he worked on media projects at Grassroots Media Inc. Before becoming a journalist he played music professionally for seven years.

Here's a more complete and up-to-date bio of Dan.

Please welcome Dan to Boing Boing!

The new Arduino Duemilanove is available in the Maker Shed. It's a big bump in memory, which will allow for even more amazing code. I know I can always use a little more room for storing variables, and the new ATmega328 is the perfect solution.

NEW! The Arduino Duemilanove has been upgraded to a more powerful microcontroller: the ATmega328. It's fully compatible with the previous ATmega168, but with twice the memory. That includes flash memory for storing sketches (32 KB instead of 16 KB), RAM for holding variables (2KB instead of 1KB) and EEPROM for saving data when turning off the board (1 KB instead of 512 bytes). Also the speed (in the bootloader) has been raised for uploading new sketches from 19200 baud to 57600 baud.

Learn more about the New Arduino Duemilanove in the Maker Shed

More:

How-To Tuesday: Arduino 101 potentiometers and servos

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An anonymous reader sent in the following story about how some large software companies are suddenly increasing the number of "software audits" they're doing of enterprise buyers. Most enterprise software contracts include license terms that allow the software provider to "audit" the buyer, to make sure they're not abusing the license. As the article notes, however, such audits usually only come at one of two times: (1) when a company threatens to switch to another vendor or (2) when the company has received info from a reliable source that the license was being abused.

However, it looks like with the economy in freefall -- and IT spending being cut back, some enterprise software companies might be thinking that another way to squeeze some money out of customers is to audit them and force a larger bill on them. Of course, this seems like a plan that could backfire in a big, big way. As noted in the article, being audited is not a pleasant experience at all. It's basically a vendor claiming that it thinks you're breaking your agreement. It's not the best way to build up a strong relationship of trust. Because of that, a sudden increase in totally unexpected and uncalled for audits may seriously damage a company's reputation and drive them to proactively look for alternatives from companies who trust them. Treating your customers like criminals is never a good idea...

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Savage Aural Hotbed is a Maker-type band who bangs, grinds and pounds at their shows. They'll be performing at Make: Day this Saturday, come check them out! If you're curious about how they'll adapt their set (and noise level) for the Science Museum, you'll just have to come and check it out for yourself.

When asked how they describe their sound, this is what they said.

Think of anytime someone has ever blown across a beer bottle, used their mom's pot lids for cymbals, or made a washtub bass. Now, run with that kind of thinking...run real far...maybe even try the long jump. The guys in Savage Aural Hotbed have trained themselves to think that way; to find the musical potential in everyday stuff. They'll start with a pretty simple everyday kind of thing that every kid has tried (or wanted to try...), and take it to the nth degree. Remember going to the movie theater with your junior high pals and blowing through your empty candy box to make the cellophane wrapper make funny noises? Now imagine some composer type sitting in the back row, and instead of getting irritated with the kids, he strokes his goateed chin and goes, "Hmmmm..."

OK, sweet.

Make: Day is this Saturday, March 14th from 10am -3pm at the Science Museum of Minnesota!

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Al writes "A company called Presto hopes to exploit the painful amount of time it takes for Windows computers to start up by offering a streamlined version of Linux that boots in just seconds. Presto's distro comes with Firefox, Skype and other goodies pre-installed and the company has also created an app store so that users can install only what they really need. The software was demonstrated at this year's Demo conference in Palm Desert, CA. Interestingly, the company barely mentions the name Linux on its website. Is this a clever stealth-marketing ploy for converting Windows users to Linux?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A serious drawing by Marc Johns. #

• Joel told us 12 things the latest Trek trailer taught us.
• Verizon customers: Learn how to opt-out of its plans to "share" your personal information.
• 30-year-old whisky was reviewed. Yes, C₂H₆O is a gadget.
• 60 second video clip: The last unsold product on the last day of Circuit City's liquidation.
• Bruce Branit's World Builder is amazing.
• The solid state drives in Sony's Vaio P are awesome, but the drivers for its video chip are not.
• Unearthed: Ambulephebus sonysymphonia
• There was a white chocolate keyboard, complete with a comment thread where you can complain about people calling white chocolate "Chocolate."
• People would rather pay $400 for a Peek with free lifetime service than $40 for one where you pay $20 a month.
• The Chairman is a very expensive cellphone.
• Yes, you can use risers with video cards.
• Sun predicted all the predictions in its 1993 progno-video.
• Behold! Star Wars on Betamax.
• We learned that Fox is to strip special features from rental DVDs.
• Rob reviewed Outlets to Go.

I read recently an article in the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest by Lisa Anne Auerbach called "d.d.i.y. Don't Do It Yourself:"

D.I.Y. used to mean grabbing a Sharpie™ and starting one's own revolution through words and actions. Now it means going into debt at mega-stores, consuming more and more materials manufactured overseas, raping the earth, destroying forests, creating garbage, and mucking up our lives with badly fixed toilets, leaking tile floors, ill-fitting sweaters, bowing floorboards, crooked walls, and ugly mosaics. We are bankrupting competent carpenters. We are destroying the careers of electricians and hvac crews. Our d.i.y. travesties of home improvement leave us with closets full of under-used tools and sheds full of extra wood and steel wool and toxic chemicals and mastic and caulk. These closets don't really even shut correctly; our hinges aren't straight and we brashly scrape the undersides of our doors with a plane, hoping that two crookeds will combine into one straight. Our D.I.Y. adventures in making our own clothes, clutter our homes with extra fabric, yarn, and sewing supplies. The clothes we manufacture are good for a couple times out and about, but our learning curve is steep and the seams don't always stay together. Our D.I.Y. exuberance for cooking unfamiliar cuisines fills our cabinets with jars of exotic spices, specialized contraptions, bamboo steamers, Moroccan tangines, the requisite fondue set; all items that will flood thrift stores shortly after whichever particular cooking trend is succeeded by the next. Guests to our homes smile and swallow appreciatively; does this really mean our cooking adventures are successful? We are constantly experimenting with something new, with no time to perfect anything before our next project looms on the horizon, bringing with it a new supply of gadgets and raw materials.

The trickery of advertisers makes us feel like human beings, while in reality we are, in the minds of the global mega-companies who have us all on a short leash, slavish consumers. D.I.Y. has become just another tactic to rip away our humanity, turning us into operators of cash machines and credit cards. We exist to be ripped-off and profited from. D.I.Y. panders to our beliefs, while at the same time ripping us a new asshole and sending our hard earned money straight to hell. We are stewing in our own fat. Our utopia is on layaway, with an option for 1.5% cash back if we sign up for the right credit card. We have become hungry monsters, drooling to take back production for ourselves, whatever the cost. Our ethos has been gift wrapped and sold back to us. Our revolution has been pilfered.

Her point in the end seems to veer back toward the positive, community-based makerdom that we see here on our site and many others every day. She calls for us to share our expertise with others in a bartering system. For me, most of the fun in making comes from learning new skills and tools, although I can see her point about amassing garages full of supplies and tools you never use. What are your thoughts about the article? Post them in the comments.

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Hugh Pickens writes "The US and the UK are trying to refurbish the aging W76 warheads that tip Trident missiles to prolong their life and ensure they are safe and reliable but plans have been put on hold because US scientists have forgotten how to manufacture a mysterious but very hazardous component of the warhead codenamed Fogbank. 'NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency,' says the report by a US congressional committee. Fogbank is thought by some weapons experts to be a foam used between the fission and fusion stages of the thermonuclear bomb on the Trident Missile and US officials say that manufacturing Fogbank requires a solvent cleaning agent which is 'extremely flammable' and 'explosive,' and that the process involves dealing with 'toxic materials' hazardous to workers. 'This is like James Bond destroying his instructions as soon as he has read them,' says John Ainslie, the co-ordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, adding that 'perhaps the plans for making Fogbank were so secret that no copies were kept.' Thomas D'Agostino, administrator or the US National Nuclear Security Administration, told a congressional committee that the administration was spending 'a lot of money' trying to make 'Fogbank' at Y-12, but 'we're not out of the woods yet.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few years back, a few bands, including Cheap Trick and the Allman Brothers sued their record labels claiming their cut of iTunes sales wasn't right. It was basically a contractual suit. Since there are a million and one different licenses to deal with, the record labels were treating digital sales the same way they treated CD sales -- of which the artists get a tiny tiny percentage. However, these bands noted that it seemed like digital sales was much more similar to a deal where they were licensing their music for use in another product -- such as a commercial or a movie. In those deals, the bands get a much bigger cut. A little while later, Eminem filed a similar lawsuit -- though somehow (great lawyers there...) thought that it was all Apple's fault and sued Apple. It looks like that got sorted out eventually, and Eminem refocused the lawsuit on Universal Music. And... didn't get very far. Last week a jury found that Universal Music was right: a digital sale is just like a physical sale, and thus the significantly lower royalty rate applies. You can bet pretty much every major record label just breathed a huge sigh of relief (even though an appeal is likely), because a ruling in the other direction would take away a hefty chunk of margin from their digital sales.

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An anonymous reader writes "It's not sci-fi, but rather advanced robotics research which is leading Intel to envision shape-shifting smartphones. 'Imagine what you would do with this material,' says Jason Campbell, a senior researcher at Intel's Pittsburgh Lab who's working in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University. 'If you want to carry the device, you'd make it as small as possible by making it pack itself as densely as possible. When you go to surf the Web, you're going to make it big.' The material being studied is transparent silicon-dioxide hemispheres, which can roll around each other under electrical control to create different shapes. The lab has built 6-inch long actuators, which it's working to reduce to 1-mm tube-sized prototypes. When will we see a shape-shifting phone? 'In terms of me being able to buy it, that's a difficult forecasting problem, because I have to guess about manufacturing costs,' Campbell said. 'I won't do that. But we hope the science will be proved out in three to five years.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an unusual goal for a project - nothing. Though designed for apparently no productive results, the simple hand-operated Do-Nothing (aka Kentucky Do-Nothing) is capable of drawing ellipses if outfitted with a writing implement - plus it could definitely teach those new to basic woodworking a thing or two. In fact making a do-nothing is quite definitely doing something! Yah, anyways -

This is a fairly easy machine to build. Takes a few hours to cut out the pieces and a few more to glue together and let dry. I have chosen a simple layered design so that those without a router or other means of cutting a T slot could easily complete this project.

So, don't just sit there - go make nothing err … something.

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An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist reports on how competitions to devise better packing algorithms could help cut the environmental impact of deliveries and shipping. A new record setter at packing differently-sized discs into the smallest space without overlapping them has potential to be applied to real world 3D problems, researchers claim." Ok the title might be a little ridiculous, but the ridiculous packaging used to ship a few tiny objects by some shippers is pretty shameful.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've posted a bit about abrasion holography in the past, but since then, "science hobbyist" extraordinaire Bill Beaty has posted the above vid demonstrating some great examples of his technique. The process is surprisingly simple, requiring simple material and a bit of patience -

Scratch-holograms can be made on CD cases using a couple of thumbtacks poked through a stick. Or get fancy and use a professional compass and black painted polycarbonate. Or automate the process with a paperclip stuck into a motorized electric eraser.

Along with instructions on how to draw your own, a comprehensive explanation of the effect works is available on Bill's site. [Thanks, BJ!]

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An anonymous reader writes "I love cabbages has reverse-engineered Adobe's ADEPT DRM (e-book protection). On February 18, I love cabbages released code that decrypts EPUB e-books protected with ADEPT and followed that up on February 25, with code that decrypts PDF e-books protected with ADEPT. On March 4, I love cabbages was given a DMCA take down notice. And there's plenty of evidence he got it right. DS:TNG (Dmitry Sklyarov: The Next Generation)?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The MAKE crew was in attendance at yesterday's FIRST robotics event in NYC. Every year this competition fills the Javits Center with a ton of creative and constructive energy -- oh and robots too! Machine athletes battled for supremacy and many Parents & kids came by to say hi and talk bots. Check out more of the action photos on Flickr.

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For years and years and years, we've been hearing about hugely ambitious projects to try to create "thinking" machines that can absorb a ton of information and spit out facts. Yet, every time, when the true tests begin, the project never gets very far, for a variety of reasons. First, the technology usually isn't that good. Having a computer decide what is "truthful" isn't exactly an easy problem -- especially when plenty of humans can't even agree on what is, and what is not, truthful. Second, these companies have failed to come up with a reason why anyone would really want/need to use such a thing. After all, how useful is a "truth" machine compared to a simple search engine? These projects come and go, and there's always someone insisting that the holy grail is on its way. The latest is Stephen Wolfram, something of a high tech oddity. He built a tremendous success with Mathematica and clearly is a sort of techie's techie. That's why it's not as easy to simply dismiss his claims to have created just such a knowledge system. That said, I'm still not convinced there's a particularly good use case for the product -- and, even if it's much better than what's come before, chances are it still has an incredibly long way to go. Wolfram is a super smart guy -- and I do hope he's figured out how to really create such a thing, but given how many similar claims we've seen in the past, it seems only wise to express some significant skepticism.

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Looking for a free service to host your first blog site? Doubtful about which hosted blogging service to choose? If you are still not ready to code and configure your blog by yourself or do not have the budget to hire a webmaster, a free hosted blog publishing service is positively the best road to take for the time being. In this mini-guide I have personally identified and reviewed the best free hosted blog publishing services out there. Free, hosted blog publishing services are very easy to set up and configure and generally require you only a few minutes to get you fully started. You create an account, choose a pre-designed template, set your own site name and key content elements, adjust privacy settings and you are ready to roll.

• The key advantages of having a hosted blogging service instead of a self-hosted solution to be installed on your server are basically the advantage of having a software tool, at zero cost, that gets automatically updated without any intervention from you and which allows you to start blogging immediately.
• The down sides are generally a much lower ability to customize and control the look and feel of your site, and to do other advanced customizations which may include adding specific functions or features to your site.

In choosing a free hosted blogging platform you should be careful in checking how easy it will be, if and when you will want to, to move your contents and site structure to a self-hosted, server-based blogging platform. You should also check and make sure that if you later decide to move on a more platform, you will be able to keep your site name and domain. The more powerful, among such free hosted blogging platforms also allow you to do web traffic analysis, spam filtering, mobile posting, and a lot more. To help you choose your ideal free blogging solution, I have here selected a few basic criteria that you can use to help yourself differentiate and evaluate your ideal hosted blogging service:

• Look and feel: how much control you have over looks and how many pre-designed templates are offered.
• Privacy settings: how much can you control the setting of restrictions for who can access what on your blog.
• Traffic Analysis: the ability to see the traffic statistics relative to your site. How many visitors, page views, time spent on the site, and so on.
• Mobile blogging: the ability of your blogging platform to host blog posts coming directly from your mobile phone.
• Domain Name Mapping: this feature allows you to have any domain name for your blog and to have to settle down for a generic or blog-platform branded site name and domain.
• Content Export: the ability to easily export your site structure and contents to another blogging platform at a later time.
• Support Forum: a community forum where you can freely pose technical support questions.

Here all the details:

Create a Blog

1. WordPress
   
   WordPress is by far the most popular free service on the Web to create a blog. Highly customizable thanks to the impressive quantity of plugins and themes you can install, WordPress blogs can also take advantage of a good spam filter, RSS, real-time traffic statistics, and an impressive community support that helps you sort your blogging issues. But if you need an ad-free blog, a customized domain, content-export features, or advanced privacy options, you can upgrade to WordPress premium features. Prices available on the site.
   http://wordpress.com
   
   
   
2. Blogger
   
   Blogger is a free service from Google to create a blog. You can start building up your blog immediately if you have a Google account, and also use your AdSense and Analytics settings inside it to check ad earnings and traffic statistics. Blogger also supports multi-authors to create community blogs, RSS, several template customization features, post-via-mobile, and adjustable privacy settings. You also have a big support community behind you to sort your blogging issues out. Blogger, though, doesn't support unique domains. No premium accounts available, as well: you get all the features available at a free level.
   https://www.blogger.com
   
   
   
3. Windows Live Spaces
   
   Windows Live Spaces is a free service from Microsoft to create a blog. You can access Live Spaces with your Windows LiveID, and integrate inside your blog the content you have on other Microsoft services, like SkyDrive. Your blog, or "Space", is organized in re-arrangeable modules around the page. Advanced customization modifying the CSS or HTML code is not available by default. Advantages are: you can set privacy settings, use RSS feeds, post from mobile, and have limited traffic analysis features. A drawback is you cannot have a unique domain name for your blog or export your content at a later time. Great support provided by the Live community. Premium accounts not available.
   http://home.live.com
   
   
   
4. LiveJournal
   
   LiveJournal is a virtual community where registered users can create a free blog and receive constant support from other members. Inside LiveJournal you can build your own list of friends and read their updates (and / or let them read yours) via RSS feed. There are several customization possibilities either you want to mess with your CSS or not. With a paid account you can also protect your updates selecting the users who can access your blog, or even be the only one who can read it. Traffic statistics or customized domains are not available by default at any level. Paid accounts with pro features, like exporting your blog content to another platform, or use the "phone to blog" option, that allows you to post directly from your mobile. Starting from $5/2 months.
   http://www.livejournal.com/
   
   
   
5. Vox
   
   Vox is a powerful free service that helps you to create a blog. Powered by Six Apart (the company who owns the MovableType blogging platform) Vox only needs your registration data to get you started. Just choose one of the very essential templates, add your content (text, video, images or audio), set your privacy settings and you're done. A powerful feature of Vox is the integration with video and photo sharing sites like Flickr or YouTube. No premium plans available, mobile posting, nor traffic analysis feature, or having a unique domain name. But robust SixApart customer service is at your disposal to solve your blogging issues.
   http://www.vox.com/
   
   
   
6. Xanga
   
   Xanga is a community-supported blogging service that allows you to create a blog for free. Simply register and start customizing your blog layout with one of the several templates offered. Then share your content via RSS syndication. If you have the skills, you can even customize the CSS of your blog. You can also protect your updates by selecting the people who will have access to them. No traffic analysis, customized domains, or mobile posting features available. Good problem-solving forum support Premium accounts with more features are starting at 4$/1 month.
   http://www.xanga.com/
   
   
   
7. tripod Lycos
   
   tripod Lycos is a popular online service to create a RSS-syndicated free blog. If you already have a Lycos account, you can start right away managing your blog online, or take advantage of the integration with Microsoft FrontPage. No traffic statistics, mobile posting, export your content, or privacy settings features available. Also limited forum support. Other advanced customization features (like having a custom domain), are available in the advanced plans starting at 4.95$/month.
   http://www.tripod.lycos.com/
   
   
   
8. blog.com
   
   blog.com is a free service to create your own blog. After a simple registration process you can create an ad-supported blog you can syndicate via both RSS and Atom feeds. You can purchase a premium account starting from $ 4.95/month for the Plus option. Premium accounts also allow you to get other advanced features like setting the privacy settings of your blog, or customize the CSS (which is advisable since free blogs have scarce theme selection possibilities). No traffic statistics, customized domains, content-export or mobile posting features available. Scarce forum support.
   http://int.blog.com/
   
   
   
9. Yahoo! 360°
   
   Yahoo! 360° is a free service to create your own blog. You need a Yahoo! account in the following countries: USA, Canada, Australia, UK, Ireland, France and Germany. To start, log in, choose the colors of your blog (available templates are pretty much all the same), set your privacy settings, and then begin sharing your content (RSS syndication available). You can even post from your mobile using the free Yahoo! Mobile option. Yahoo! 360° has no premium accounts, customizing domain possibilities, nor traffic statistics features. Robust support available from the Yahoo! community and experts.
   http://360.yahoo.com/
   
   
   
10. blogr
    
    blogr is a free service that helps you to create a blog and share your own content right away. Currently in Alpha (development) status, blogr has a very simple interface where you can post your writings, photos, and videos with the minimum effort. You can organize your content in one of the (few) available templates and syndicate via RSS. Drawbacks are the very limited set of feature you have: no traffic statistics, mobile posting, privacy settings or customized domains. Good forum support. Premium accounts are not available at the moment.
    http://www.blogr.com/
    
    
    
11. Squarespace
    
    Squarespace is a powerful solution to create a blog. Thanks to its easy-to-use interface, you can adjust, set, and even drag&drop elements in your layout with no technical knowledge. Additional features include privacy settings, traffic analysis, RSS, and explanatory tutorials to get you started right away. No mobile posting. Registration is needed. You can try Squarespace for free for 14 days, and then switch to one of the paid plans starting from 8$/month that also allow you to customize your domain name and receive support from a dedicated customer service.
    http://www.squarespace.com/
    
    
    
12. TypePad
    
    TypePad is a full-featured service that helps you create your own blog easily. There are more than a hundred templates to customize the look and feel of your blog. TypePad main characteristics include: post from mobile, post from Facebook, RSS, traffic statistics, spam filtering, ads management, and much more. Good forum support, but no content-export features. You can try TypePad for free for 14 days, and then select one of the additional pricing plans starting from 4.95$/month.
    http://www.typepad.com/

Other Great Lists of Free Blog Publishing Hosts and Services

• SherifAbdou - 10+ Websites that offer free blog hosting

  SherifAbdou puts up a recent list of the top 10 blogging services that allow you to create a blog free of charge. Description provided for each service. (Updated January 26, 2009)



• The Times - 40 Free Blog Hosts

  The financial blog of the South African newspaper The Times lists the 40 most popular service (and provides a brief description) that offer you free space on the Web to create your own blog. (Updated May 29, 2008)



• Mashable - 40+ Free Blog Hosts

  The popular tech blog Mashable proposes its own list of free hosted blog publishing services. Services are divided in four categories and a brief description is provided for each one of them:
  • Danga Software Powered: LiveJournal and otehr platforms that use similar software
  • Themed blog sites: blog services that allow you to create a blog focusing on a specific niche
  • WordPress powered: services to create a blog based on the WordPress platform
  • Various platform: general free blogging services with popular and less popular picks.
  (Updated August 6, 2007)



• Stephen Miller - 190 Free Blog Hosts

  Programmer and entrepreneur Stephen Miller makes a big list of 190 free blog publishing services for all tastes. Unfortunately, Miller provided no description, so you have to check out each service for yourself. (Updated January 1, 2007)

Originally prepared by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia, and first published on March 9, 2009 as "Create A Blog: Best Free Hosted Blog Publishing Services - Mini-Guide".

I'm probably not alone in saying that I used to code adventure games on my TI-85 when I was younger, but Sam Heald's Super Mario reproduction is so much cooler:

Super Mario features beautiful graphics courtesy of Bill Nagel, 13 unique enemies, 64 unique background tiles (some with animation), fast scrolling, powerups like growth or flower-power, fireballs, a somewhat-challenging boss, an animated ending scene, and an expansive easy-to-use World editor that can be run on a calculator.

I came across this app on the Brown-eyed Albino's Blog, where there's a list of everything you need to get the game up and running on your calculator. There's also this Youtube post which walks you through installing everything on a TI-84 (screen cap above).

Super Mario v1.2 program source
TI-84 Super Mario installation instructions

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Michael Eriksen writes "The Danish amateur rocket group Copenhagen Suborbitals has successfully test fired their rocket (article in Danish). It is a 90,000 kW monster delivering a total of 140,000 N. According to the group, this is by far the biggest amateur rocket ever fired in Europe. The final goal is a manned (!) low-orbital flight."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Friday morning, we wrote that Boxee had come up with a workaround to get Hulu content accessible again via Boxee. Basically, it just started accessing the content via Hulu's RSS feed: which is exactly how the RISS feed was meant to be used. It's just that the Boxee software would act as the "reader" of choice. It was difficult to see how Hulu could complain without appearing ridiculous: it would effectively have to say that only certain RSS readers could use it's feed... and that's exactly what the company did. By Friday evening, Hulu had a technical block in place. Of course, it didn't take long for Boxee to figure out a workaround to that block, and supposedly (at the time I'm writing this) the service is back -- though, Boxee has now added a little indicator to its software to let you know whether Hulu is accessible or not...

Everyone knows that Hulu's content partners are actively trying to block Boxee, but it's extremely difficult to see what their complaint is. Boxee is simply a different browser, accessing the content exactly as the companies offered it. Users of Boxee can still access Hulu on their computer, it's just in a less friendly UI. All this really does is make plenty of legitimate TV watchers decide to go elsewhere for the content. It simply makes no sense to say Boxee can't access Hulu. It would be like CNN denying mobile web browsers from accessing its site.

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Boingboing guest blogger Paul Spinrad is Projects Editor for MAKE magazine. He enjoyed everyone's attention enormously. 

Guestblogging for Boingboing has been a real treat-- I always love the discussions here, and as anticipated, I learned and will continue to learn a lot from this opportunity. Thank you!

If you're interested, check out my website Premises, Premises, devoted to one-paragraph descriptions of new business ideas and inventions. I haven't updated it in a while and need to re-do it using all the great free online community tools available now, but I think many of the ideas there have real potential. Others are just for grins, and most are somewhere in between. Deciding which is which is left as an exercise for the reader. It also lists other "ideas sites" -- which is a genre I love and have been following, although it has yet to succeed as a frame.

FWIW, with this post about atheism I apologize to any atheists who thought I was saying they should shut up or be untrue to their beliefs-- that's not what I wanted to say! I am an atheist myself, by Greta Christina's definition of certain enough although I've always been fascinated and inspired by religion. I like these quotes:

"Religions fulfill deep-seated psychological needs for people, and if you don't get it from a specific religious doctrine, you'll get it from the kind of films I like to make. A film like The Terminator is consciously meant to give a sense of empowerment to the individual."
--James Cameron, American Film, July 1991

"We think heaven on earth is a real possibility. There are resources enough to create it. And people are intelligent enough to advance it. Now all that remains is to market it."
--Olivier Toscani, (media director of Benetton), Colors #12

Thanks also to Mark F. and all of the other boingers for their help and support-- and I'll see you on the boards! I will leave with another favorite quote, from Flaubert, which I got from my father (it's originally from Madame Bovary):

"Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity."

Marty writes "The PlayStation 3 has recently seen an explosion of releases of emulators and games for the Yellow Dog Linux distro for PS3; once you have installed Yellow Dog Linux you then have the ability to try out MAME, SNES, Amiga, Dos, Commodore and Atari emulators (that's the tip of the iceberg) and such games as Quake 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen 2 and Alephone. Time to start installing Linux on your PS3?"

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This St Thomas Creations toilet flushes basically, anything. Huge, vasty supplies of euphemistic carrot-batons, entire chess-sets, and so on. I kept waiting for the child safety warning about its capacity to swallow whole toddlers.

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

After years of wrangling, Nina Paley's acclaimed, brilliant short film, Sita Sings the Blues is finally available as a free, open-licensed downloads. Paley spent a shocking amount of time and money fighting over the copyrights to the 1920s jazz music that is integral to the film (some have likened it to Betty Boop in Bollywood, which is catchy, but fails to capture the fantasticness of the film), Paley's finally secured a license that allows her to distribute the whole movie, for free, forever, under a remix-friendly license.

I hereby give Sita Sings the Blues to you. Like all culture, it belongs to you already, but I am making it explicit with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Please distribute, copy, share, archive, and show Sita Sings the Blues. From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes.

You don't need my permission to copy, share, publish, archive, show, sell, broadcast, or remix Sita Sings the Blues. Conventional wisdom urges me to demand payment for every use of the film, but then how would people without money get to see it? How widely would the film be disseminated if it were limited by permission and fees? Control offers a false sense of security. The only real security I have is trusting you, trusting culture, and trusting freedom.

That said, my colleagues and I will enforce the Share Alike License. You are not free to copy-restrict ("copyright") or attach "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) to Sita Sings the Blues or its derivative works.

Congratulations, Nina! It was a long ride, but man, was it worth it!

Sita Sings the Blues (Thanks, Andrew!)

Recently on Offworld I wrote up quite possibly the most heartfelt game suggestion I've made thus far, for Steph Thirion's iPhone debut, Eliss (right). It's a game of abstraction and economy: you could say it's "just" a game of splitting and joining circles, but the elegance and novelty of its design (it is one of the first true multi-touch games), and the Tetris-like innate sense of order and accomplishment at its core make it one of the most original and essential games for the platform. Elsewhere, we looked into the dreams of the Noby Noby Boy and saw hints of multiplayer and maracas on the way, gawped at the outlandishness of the first trailer for Russian strategy game Stalin vs. Martians, took a playable look back at the origins of 2D Boy's World of Goo, and read that the co-designer of Sonic is creating a new Pac-Man game. We also somewhat accidentally discovered that Arkedo's Big Bang Mini was headed to the Wii after downloading its excellent free blip-pop soundtrack, saw the first images of a new 'Art of the Game' exhibit opening in Italy, read Parappa the Rapper creator Masaya Matsuura's take on the music game industry he helped birth, and saw peerless games magazine Edge get 200 different covers for its 200th issue. Finally, we discovered that Radiohead's Paranoid Android redone in Mario Paint is way more wicked than it deserves to be, and that Behemoth's Castle Crashers was nearly a Lucha Libre comic book spin-off, saw a very Pilotwings-ish game and a new spherical 3D tower defense game coming to the iPhone, and watched an amazing iPhone promo from Bomberman creator Hudson, which calls Fieldrunners out by name in announcing its own original tower defense game.

theodp writes "Over at IBM, the Lotus Notes team has 'invented' preventing the use of their own product during meetings. Self-described patent reformer Big Blue has asked the USPTO for a patent covering Suppressing De-Focusing Activities During Selective Scheduled Meetings by forcing meeting attendees to 'submit to the computing system suspension requirements.' What's next — a patent for Verizon for blocking cellphone usage during movies?"

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We're setting up a mini Maker Shed in the California room at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference in San Jose, and you buy kits and build them right there. From 11am to 6pm on Tuesday March 10 and Wednesday March 11, come into the Maker Shed, and buy a kit like the Brain Machine, MintyBoost, MiniPOV, Super TV-B-Gone, and more--then take it over to the workshop area and build it right here.

Even if you've got no experience soldering, we'll have expert hackers (including Mitch Altman, pictured above) here to help you get started. If you've never soldered before, many of our kits are great for first-timers. As a bonus, during the times that Mitch isn't in the Maker Shed, Michael Shiloh and Judy Castro will be demonstrating their newest kit, Xippy the Robot (pictured below). You'll be able to buy Xippy kits, and Michael and Judy will help you build it.

Tonight (3/8/2009) is the last night of ETech early bird registration, so you've got a few hours to get in cheap. Apply discount code et09ffd to get 40% off that price: ETech Registration Page. ETech Maker Shed: Tuesday and Wednesday.

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Our pal Drew Friedman painted this great moment in freak history.

This recent piece is a depiction of my old friend (and favorite artist) Robert Crumb presenting his original "Cheap Thrills" comic strip cover art to Janis Joplin, (with various members of "The Holding Company" lurking behind), backstage at the Filmore West in San Fran' in 1968. It was commissioned by the private collector who owns the original Crumb "Cheap Thrills" art, as a companion piece to hang along side it in his office. Interestingly, Crumb's original intention was for this art to run on the back cover and a portrait of Joplin to run on the front. But Joplin loved the the comic strip art so much, (she was an avid underground comics fan, especially the work of Crumb, and already at that point in her escalating career, had the power to hire her own cover artist), she decided to run it on the front. It's arguably the SECOND most famous album cover ever, after Sgt. Pepper. One amusing side note: bending no doubt to pressure, Crumb wore his hair for a time at it's longest in '68, which I try to show. Joplin was also encouraging him to "loosen up" and wear "hippie clothes and beads" but he just couldn't go that far.

Drew Friedman paints Robert Crumb presenting Cheap Thrills album cover to Janis Joplin

foxxo writes "I'm a library worker, so I get lots of questions about our collection when I'm out in the stacks. I'd love to be able to access our online catalog and give patrons more comprehensive guidance without directing them to the reference desk. What options are available for a portable device with Wi-Fi connectivity, full-featured Web browsing, and (most importantly) no cellphone-style activation and service fees? Size is important, too; I need something I can carry in my pocket, not a micro-notebook with full keyboard. (And I am a library worker, so low cost is key!)" One device that sounds interesting in this category is the GiiNii Movit (not yet released, but shown off at CES). What can you recommend that's out there now?

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