theodp writes "Over at BusinessWeek, Ed Wallace is creating quite a stir, reporting that not only is ethanol proving to be a dud as a fuel substitute, but there is increasing evidence that it is destroying engines in large numbers. Before lobbyists convince the government to increase the allowable amount of ethanol in fuel to 15%, Wallace suggests it's time to look at ethanol's effect on smog, fuel efficiency, global warming emissions, and food prices. Wallace concedes there will be some winners if the government moves the ethanol mandate to 15% — auto mechanics, for whom he says it will be the dawn of a new golden age."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader tips a story up on Bnet.com about the growing trend for governments and others to eschew newspapers and post notices of public record on their own Web sites. It's under discussion at local, state, and national government levels, including in the SEC and the states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, so far. "If classified ads were a backbone of the newspaper business, then the very center of the spine was the public notice. Mandated by laws and courts, these often long recitations of detail were to give official notification, to any who were interested, of the legal intents and actions of both government entities and companies that found themselves under some appropriate regulation. But a growing number of state and local governments want to move public notices online to their own sites as a cost-cutting measure. Beyond newspaper economics, critics are concerned that the shift would allow government officials to effectively hide their activities from scrutiny."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mindhacks blog points to a fascinating (though also disturbing and graphic) study conducted in the mid-1980s about hallucinations experienced by the victims of kidnappings, rape, torture -- and people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs.

The reasoning behind including two 'alien abductees' was to compare hallucinations in verified versus unverified hostage situations. Cases of people who were hostages but did not hallucinate are also included.

The study found that one in four hostages had intense hallucinations, and these were invariably people who were in life-threatening situations. Isolation, visual deprivation, physical restraint, violence and death threats also seemed to contribute to the chance of having a hallucinatory experience.

Link to Mindhacks post, which includes links to the studies, and an excerpt of one torture victim's hallucination testimony, in which he compares the visual imagery experienced to a PCP trip. As the Mindhacks writer, Vaughn, says, "Worth reading the paper in full if you can, or at least from the beginning of the case studies, as it's a rarely discussed but remarkably striking aspect of human experience." (via Maggie KB)

Jay sez, "Awesome fan-made trailer for Green Lantern film (live action) starring Nathan Fillion! Cool clips from Firefly, JLU, Star Trek and much more included!"

It's so true: Copyright infringement is your best entertainment dollar!

Green Lantern Trailer (Thanks, Jay!)

Mary Roach's TED Talk, "10 things you didn't know about orgasm," will have you scratching your, um, head, in amazement as you learn the particulars of pig-wanking, the delicate matter of explaining foreplay to royalty, and the business of measuring the human penis's muzzle-velocity.

Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm (via MeFi)

viyh writes to mention that six German states have mandated pulling Red Bull Cola energy drinks off the shelves after testing found trace amounts of cocaine in the drink. "Germany's Federal Institute for Risk Assessment said Monday that the cocaine level was too low to pose a health risk. It planned to produce a more detailed report Wednesday. Red Bull said its cola is 'harmless and marketable in both the US and Europe.' It said similar coca leaf extracts are used worldwide as flavoring, and a test it commissioned itself found no cocaine traces."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joining us again this year at Maker Faire is the Western Warship Combat Club. The combat arena is much bigger than last year's. Says WWCC's Rob Wood: Last year's pond was modest compared with this one (30' x 60' vs 50' x 70').

In responding to some internal memo between Rob and Maker Faire organizers, he wrote the message below about the value of the Maker Faire and making things. This happens to us frequently, in talking to people about the Faire and MAKE. People come up to me at talks and gatherings and profess their love for what we do and the spirit of DIY that we are part of re-kindling. As we go into Faire week, and celebrate Memorial Day, it's a good idea to be reminded of why we do this. Thanks, Rob!

I do love Maker Faire. I grew up in a world where everything was put together with screws. My dad would take things apart and fix them, and I would be his helper. I don't think I ever saw him throw anything mechanical or electrical away, and I just naturally assumed that was the way things were supposed to be. By doing what he did, he was able to figure out how the world works, and with his own hands, make it just a little bit better. One summer it got so hot, my dad designed and built an air conditioner for our house. When I was 12, he got the ultimate tinkerer's job: Taking the battleship USS North Carolina out of moth balls, and transforming her into a museum ship. Dad passed away a long time ago, but when I visited the ship this past November, I felt his spirit on every deck. I guess tinkering is in my genes.

Now look what's happened: Virtually nothing can be taken apart and fixed. Just toss it. That was a wrong turn we made somewhere back there. The way I see it, you Maker Fairians are inspiring people to stop and look at what we've been doing, and find a way back to the main road. That's why I'm doing this, really. I want to be a part of that. You could say it's personal.

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More fun from the "legion of rock stars" which takes classic rock song videos and adds in their own horrendous versions of the songs.

Shojun writes "I am very interested in building my own UAV, not just one that can fly around happily, but one that I can program to say, take photos every second as it does a barrel roll under a bus (ok that part may be a pipe dream). I have enough embedded programming experience — it's the hardware which I'm uncertain about. I can go the kit way, and then build the remaining stuff, or get some Dollar Tree Foam boards and build it all. I'm in favor of ease, however. Once the plane is built, buying a dev board seems like a possibility, but I wonder whether it's overkill. Alternatively if there was a How-to-build example on the net for such an activity that I could adapt, to the degree that I could then program in even completely hardcoded flight instrutions, I can certainly take it from there. Thoughts? Has anyone here tried something like this before?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anonymous Coward writes "'Linux vendor Red Hat, and 17 other vendors, have protested a Swiss government contract given to Microsoft without any public bidding. The move exposes a wider Microsoft monopoly that European governments accept, despite their lip service for open source, according to commentators. The Red Hat group has asked a Swiss federal court to overturn a three-year contract issued to Microsoft by the Swiss Federal Bureau for Building and Logistics, to provide Windows desktops and applications, with support and maintenance, for 14M Swiss francs (£8M; $15M) each year. The contract, for 'standardized workstations,' was issued with no public bidding process, Red Hat's legal team reports in a blog — because the Swiss agency asserted there was no sufficient alternative to Microsoft products.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anonymous Coward writes "'Linux vendor Red Hat, and 17 other vendors, have protested a Swiss government contract given to Microsoft without any public bidding. The move exposes a wider Microsoft monopoly that European governments accept, despite their lip service for open source, according to commentators. The Red Hat group has asked a Swiss federal court to overturn a three-year contract issued to Microsoft by the Swiss Federal Bureau for Building and Logistics, to provide Windows desktops and applications, with support and maintenance, for 14M Swiss francs (£8M; $15M) each year. The contract, for 'standardized workstations,' was issued with no public bidding process, Red Hat's legal team reports in a blog — because the Swiss agency asserted there was no sufficient alternative to Microsoft products.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A gem from The Prelinger Archives: An impish spring named Coily curses a fellow who complains about springs by removing all springs from his environment. When the man repents and becomes a convert to the Cult of Coily, he bores his friends by incessantly singing the praises of springs.

I believe in this and it's been tested by research: He who slams springs will later join the church (of Coily).

A Case of Spring Fever

Joe Bower got a Vietnam-era US Army Radio Headset in an antiques/surplus store, sealed in the box, for $15. Using a dissected Molex cable and a cheap 2.5mm headset jack, he was able to get the set working with Xbox Live. Now Call of Duty has that extra note of authenticity (especially 'cause there's extra static on the mic - he has plans to replace that).

US Army Headset - XBox Live mod

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This 10-DVD set of the best episodes from Candid Camera is a big hit in our house. I wasn't sure our 11-year-old daughter would appreciate the older, black-and-white skits but she laughed harder than my wife or I did.

It's fun to watch people placed in surreal situations to see how they react. For instance, in one scene the Candid Camera crew set up a one-hour photo shop along the main street of a town. People would drop off film and they'd be told to return in an hour to pick up their prints. As soon as they left, the crew would change the camera shop into a dry cleaners, complete with new signs. The same clerk (a cast member) who took the film from the customer would now be wearing a different outfit. When the customers returned, they tried to hide their befuddlement and asked the clerk for the prints. The clerk would tell them that they were in a dry cleaners, not a photo lab. The customers refused to believe their eyes and ears.

In another scene, a messenger was instructed to pick up some papers at a house, take them somewhere else to get signed, and then return the papers to the house. As soon as the messenger left, the crew removed the house (which was just a false front) leaving an empty lot. Then one of the crew members stood in front of the lot adjusting a "for sale" sign. The messengers would walk walk back and forth past the lot, unwilling to accept the fact that the house had disappeared. Then the crew member would interview the poor messenger and ask them if they needed help.

Other skits are simpler but just as fascinating. I liked the bit where a crew member would ask a person walking by to hold one end of a tape measure while he went around the corner. Then the same crew member would ask another person around the corner to hold the other end of the tape. The crew member would then walk away from both victims, who were now each holding one end of the tape. After a few minutes, one of the victims would typically walk around the corner, see the other fellow holding the tape, then return to his original spot and continue to hold his end of the tape.

Candid Camera is surreal street theater of the highest order. You can buy the set on Amazon or rent it on Netflix. Interestingly, YouTube hardly has any Candid Camera segments on it.

Wired has an interesting look at the sport of pushing proscribed boundaries in video games. Easter eggs in games have been around for years, but now finding surprises, intended or otherwise, is becoming a driving force behind the enjoyment of games. "In games as diverse as Fallout 3 and Mirror's Edge, players are pushing to find or create unexpected ways to break past the game horizon, and turn the designers' intentions on their heads. It's only a matter of time before someone releases a game where the best version is the one you were never intended to play. That's only to be expected, says David Michicich, CEO and creative director of Robomodo, the developers of Activision's new Tony Hawk: Ride, and a 14-year veteran game designer. 'Today's news gets old quick -- we Twitter, blog, pass viral video. We thrive off the sudden excitement of the latest and most buzzworthy,' Michicich says. 'It's exciting to still feel like you can discover something new. It's stimulation, plain and simple.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Conference Board of Canada, a think-tank, took money from the province of Ontario to develop a paper on the "Digital Economy" and then copy-pasted most of the material in it from the International Intellectual Property Alliance (an American lobby group representing the music, film and software industries). Some of the material was plagiarized -- copied without attribution.

Michael Geist has some pointed questions for the authors and the funders of the report:

The Digital Ecomomy report raises some deeply troubling questions for the Conference Board of Canada, its board directors, and for Minister John Wilkinson, whose department helped fund it. In particular:

For Anne Golden, the President and CEO of the Conference Board of Canada:
* Is a deceptive, plagiarized report drawn from a U.S. lobby group consistent with an organization that claims that it is non-partisan and that does not lobby?
* How much was the Conference Board of Canada paid to produce this report?
* Does the Conference Board of Canada stand by the report in light of these findings?
* Will the Conference Board of Canada retract the report and the inaccurate press release that accompanied it?

For Stephen Toope, President of UBC, and Indira V. Samarasekera, President of the University of Alberta, both members of the Conference Board of Canada board:
* Do they condone or support the use of plagiarism in this report?
* Will they ask the Conference Board of Canada to review this report and to retract it?

Perhaps most importantly, for Minister of Research and Innovation John Wilkinson:
* How much public money was spent in support of this report?
* Does the government support the use of public money for a report that simply repeats the language of a U.S. lobby group?
* Will the Minister ask the Conference Board of Canada to refund the public money spent on this report?
* Will the Minister publicly disassociate himself from the report in light of these findings?

The Conference Board of Canada's Deceptive, Plagiarized Digital Economy Report

MAKE contributor Tod E. Kurt created this sticker, with all of the pin assignments labeled, to go on top of the ATmega chip.

Arduino chip sticker label

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An anonymous reader writes "Echelon, Microsoft, Intel, Sun and the Electronic Industries Alliance have been trying to create a home automation standard for two decades — to no avail. Now the ZigBee Alliance, proprietor of a low-rate two-way wireless mesh networking technology, says it will prevail. In six weeks, automation vendor Control4, which has about one million ZigBee nodes installed, will flip the switch on the new ZigBee Pro, which promises interoperability among light switches, thermostats, door locks, motorized shades, security systems, remote controls and some 36 million electric meters."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ScienceDaily is reporting that Scientists at Oxford University seem to have adapted a virus so that it attacks cancer cells but does not hurt healthy cells. "Adenovirus is a DNA virus widely used in cancer therapy but which causes hepatic disease in mice. Professor Len Seymour and colleagues found that introducing sites into the virus genome that are recognized by microRNA 122 leads to hepatic degradation of important viral mRNA, thereby diminishing the virus' ability to adversely affect the liver, while maintaining its ability to replicate in and kill tumor cells." Relatedly cancer drugs already approved for use may be cross-functional as a treatment for alcohol addiction. "Now, the researchers show that flies and mice treated with erlotinib also grow more sensitive to alcohol. What's more, rats given the cancer-fighting drug spontaneously consumed less alcohol when it was freely available to them. Their taste for another rewarding beverage -- sugar water -- was unaffected."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cougem writes "John Fremlin has released what he believes to be the worlds fastest webserver for small dynamic content, teepeedee2. It is written entirely in LISP, the world's second oldest high-level programming language. He gave a talk at the Tokyo Linux Users Group last year, with benchmarks, which he says demonstrate that "functional programming languages can beat C". Imagine a small alternative to Ruby on rails, supporting the development of any web application, but much faster."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Appearing at the 2009 Bay Area Maker Faire is the Mendocino Solar Motor:

The motor is pretty easy to get right. The construction difficulty is not easy or medium -- definitely "hard." It is best if you have good soldering skills, and the ability to think about the theory of the motor so that you get the polarity of the cells correct. Make sure the current flowing through the bottom of the coil flows from left-to-right every time that part of each coil is closest to the base magnet.

The Mendocino Motor is a great project for teaching kids about solar, electricity, soldering and more. The Mendocino Solar Motor should be a great maker exhibit to check out. You may want to look at the complete list of the Bay Area Maker Faire 2009 exhibitors.

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The Berkeley LUG has a neat aggregation of many different places where you can acquire a desktop, laptop, or even netbook with Linux pre-installed. The list starts with a link to Dell's Linux offering, includes many independent vendors, and many updates from user comments, almost all of whom seem to be drinking the Ubuntu kool-aid. "Over the last couple of years, Linux has come a long way in terms of hardware support, and these days it is relatively rare that an installation of ubuntu/fedora will be lacking any drivers for your machine. However, installing any OS can still sometimes be a tedious task and one that scares the wits out of the average computer user. And, for the expert users out there, it's just more fun to buy a computer with Linux already on it and not have to pay the Microsoft tax."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've finally dug far enough through my pile of must-read books to have a proper look at Joi Ito's wonderful book of freely licensed photography, FreeSouls. For years, Joi has travelled the world, photographing the activists, creators, inventors, hackers and entrepreneurs he's met. Noticing that many of these people had very poor portraits in their Wikipedia entries and learning that this was because professional portraits almost always have some licensing restrictions, Joi assembled his remarkable photos into a book and online repository, licensing the whole thing Creative Commons Attribution.

Although the photos can be had for free, Joi's publisher has assembled an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous book (in a limited edition of 1024 copies!) that includes a stirring intro by Larry Lessig and essays from Yochai Benkler, Isaac Mao, Howard Rheingold, me and Marko Ahtisaari. I've been lucky enough to be in Joi's orbit for several years now and one thing is certain, any time you find Joi, you find interesting things happening, and this book is no exception.

FreeSouls is an existence proof of a different kind of creator: an amateur who is driven to create work that's as good as anything a professional might produce, but it is produced for the love that characterizes amateur activity.

Freesouls

Hugh Pickens writes "New Scientist reports that instead of identifying chemicals that could point to life, NASA's robot explorers may have been toasting them by mistake. Even if Mars never had life, comets and asteroids that have struck the planet should have scattered at least some organic molecules over its surface but landers have failed to detect even minute quantities of organic compounds. Now scientists say they may have stumbled on something in the Martian soil that may have, in effect, been hiding the organics: a class of chemicals called perchlorates. At low temperatures, perchlorates are relatively harmless but when heated to hundreds of degrees Celsius perchlorates release a lot of oxygen, which tends to cause any nearby combustible material to burn. The Phoenix and Viking landers looked for organic molecules by heating soil samples to similarly high temperatures to evaporate them and analyse them in gas form. When Douglas Ming of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and colleagues tried heating organics and perchlorates like this on Earth, the resulting combustion left no trace of organics behind. "We haven't looked the right way," says Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center. Jeffrey Bada of the University of California, San Diego, agrees that a new approach is needed. He is leading work on a new instrument called Urey which will be able to detect organic material at concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion. The good news is that, although Urey heats its samples, it does so in water, so the organics cannot burn up."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andy Oram, an editor at O'Reilly, sez

The Obama Administration decided to expand always-on, high-speed network access in the US, but there's a limit to what can be decreed in Washington. I tried to combine practices that seem to have been successful in a proposal to the recent forum set up the by White House.

Maybe half (maybe) of the US population has always-on, high-speed network access. But we need more access for more people so we can offer more educational and economic opportunities. Check out the proposal, vote for it if you like it, and get other people talking.

Local forums to implement high-speed networks (broadband): proposal open for votes (Thanks, Andy!)

Ninjakicks writes "For the business traveler (and the traveler in general, really), Wi-Fi is important — crucial, even. But more important than sustenance? That's exactly what was found in a recent survey by American Airlines and HP, where some 47% of business travelers responded that Wi-Fi was the most important airport amenity, outscoring basic travels needs such as food by nearly 30 percent."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hilary Berseth, an artist/beekeeper, makes his sculptures by coaxing bees into making their comb in specific shapes. It's no wasp factory, but it's still awfully lovely.

Artists from Rodin to Warhol to Mark Kostabi have outsourced the construction of their work. Hilary Berseth goes them one better: He constructs basic frameworks of wire and wax, then lets teams of tiny yellow-and-black art fabricators finish the job. "I knew they were ordered and regimented," the Pennsylvania artist says about his honeybees, which built the three otherworldly sculptures on view at Eleven Rivington. "I had an intuition that I'd be able to organize that, architecturally."

Berseth's armatures each go into a closed box in the spring, and then the respective colonies take over, filling out his templates with wax cells, then stuffing them with honey. "The last two seasons, I've been working with a beekeeper whose name is Jim Bobb," he says, explaining where he turns for expertise. "He has a graduate degree in mathematics from Berkeley--he's a minor beekeeping celebrity."

The Hive Mind (via Make)

It's amazing what you can do with a plastic drop cloth and an iron, as Parsons student Ryan Riegner demonstrates with his sculpture, Eleflate. He writes:

By far one of my more favorite projects at Parsons, my inflatable elephant was originally intended to be placed over New York City MTA subway grate vents on the steet. The air current of the passing train would animate and bring to life a seemingly meaningless piece of trash on the street. However, the weather had been horrible all week so the demonstration was conducted indoors. The actual material is just painters plastic melted together by an iron. I bought a great stuffed animal elephant from FAO Schwatz, and deconstructed it, blew up the patterns to life size, and then remade the pattern. I only used a eight inch box fan to inflate the entire sculpture.

Via the Parsons CDT blog.

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The NZ couple who took off after a bank error dropped NZ$10,000,000 in their account have been finked out by a relative's Facebook update, which tipped off authorities that they're in China.

But their chances of being caught have increased after they were joined overseas by Ms Young's sister, Aroha Hurring, who posted details about their location on her Facebook page.

Police believe the trio are in China after Ms Hurring foolishly updated her status to say she was drinking the local Asian beer and enjoying the heat.

Her mother Sue Hurring, who runs a hairdressing salon in Blenheim, has been helping police with their inquiries.

"Well, you've got to have a laugh," she said. "It is bizarre.

"She's never pinched a thing in her life. Probably as a little girl, yes, but so honest."

Facebook blunder betrays NZ millionaires (via Consumerist)

Jamie found an amusing bit this morning on Scientific American where the author proposes that Dogs Breeds are Different Species. Now some of you might recoil when you hear this suggestion, but if you read the article to see why he makes this suggestion I suspect you'll crack a smile and appreciate the elegance of the solution.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Eric's new LITE2SOUND kit sounds like a lot of fun. He reports on some early experimentation using the board's photodiode sensor -

pointing it at a computer CRT yields a strange humming tone that varies depending on what the screen is displaying. The LED in an optical computer mouse plays strange chirping whistles. Infrared remote controls make wild bursts of noisy data. You're hearing frequencies from lines of code executing in a microprocessor... stuff that was never intended to be heard. When you combine LITE2SOUND with a laser pointer, things get really interesting. There is bizarre audio from a vinyl record as it spins on the turntable, using a laser instead of the needle. Listening to reflected laser light as you move it over the surface texture of objects is often a surprise; it plays the texture like a phonograph needle. You can even pick up unusual sounds from a guitar string as the laser reflects off of it. There are still many things to try...

Further explanation, ordering info and a bunch of interesting sound samples can be found over on ericarcher.net.

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An anonymous reader writes "Today, as every May 25th, geeks all over the world celebrate Towel Day and carry a towel in honor of Douglas Adams. The popular author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy died in 2001 at the age of 49, but his work lives on. According to the book, a towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Hence its symbolic role in this celebration. This year, for the first time as far as we know, Towel Day is being supported by the British publisher of Adams' books, who organizes a photo competition."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Wow - Gomhi made these incredible little speakers out of actual eggshells! -

Handcraft loudspeakers using chicken eggshell as cabinet. They sound narrow, but I'm pleased about the result.
Driver unit is Hi-Vi B1S.

(I'll kindly omit the usual "egg" puns) I'd imagine cutting the shell so neatly would be a rather delicate process - take a closer look on Flickr.

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viyh writes "North Korea conducted a nuclear test on Monday, South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted a ruling party official as saying. A magnitude 4.7 earthquake was recorded by the USGS in North Korea. South Korean President Lee Myung-bak has called an emergency meeting of cabinet ministers over the test, Yonhap said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Flickr member Segwaymonkey got the new Spikenzielabs' SpikenzieLabs Drum Kit-Kit and was inspired to create a set of laser-cut pads for it. Sweet. I love the engineering of the vibration-dampening "springs."

The Drum Kit Kit Laser Cut Rig

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theodp writes "Ever get a workaround for a bug from a vendor that's so rigoddamndiculous that there has to be a clueless MBA or an ornery developer behind it? For example, Microsoft once instructed users to wiggle their mouse continuously for several minutes if they wanted to see their Oracle data make it into Excel (yes, it worked!). And more recently, frustrated HP customers were instructed to use non-HP printers as their default printer if they don't want Microsoft Office 2007 to crash (was this demoed in The Mojave Experiment?). Any other candidates for the Lame Workaround Hall of Fame?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kellbot of NYCResistor built this sweet Katamari Damacy controller from a mouse, Arduino, and PSX controller -

A long time ago, in a galaxy identical to this one, I wanted to make a life-sized Katamari, and use it to play Katamary Damacy on PS2. My friend Eric Skiff shot a video, and while it's not quite a polished project, I decided it's time to share it with the world.

Very cool - thanks for sharing! Schematic and further details are available on the project's blog entry. [via NYCResistor]

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By way of the Evil Mad Scientist Labs' monthly Linkdump comes these wonderful examples of beehive art, built by the bees themselves, with a little help from a scaffolding of wire and hive frames, constructed by the artist/beekeeper, which the bees then build out with honeycomb. Nifty.

Beeswax art and design

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[Photo from Bouyant Safety Paddle]

Joe caught the kayak bug, but didn't want to pay to have one shipped to his home in Hawaii, so he made one.

In the summer of 2005, I bought a dealer demo Perception Sonoma 13.5 and a used Honda Element. I bought the kayak thru Ebay from Adventure Sports, and the Element thru Craigslist. After 18,000 miles and paddles in Arizona, Ontario, Saskatchewan and British Columbia it was time to go home. Freight for the kayak back to Hawaii was more than $300 with packing. I decided to leave the kayak on Vancouver Island and buy or build one on Maui.

His build documentation shows the process he used to make is own kayak on the picnic table in the back yard.

Working outside, ventilation was never a problem. Wind, dust, leaves, insects, birds, chameleons, noise restrictions, sunlight, proximity to living quarters all impacted the build. Wind broke the EPS foam before I got started. Dust and leaves fell on the wet epoxy. A big, black bee burrowed into the EPS. Birds were always chirping and chameleons entertained me from the fence. I used hand tools whenever I could to prevent noise fines from the condo association. Sometimes I had to slather on the SPF and wipe sweat out of my eyes. Mrs. was constantly after me about EPS balls and glass threads on her fancy Indich carpet.

You can check out the rest of the story. Some of the build process would have gone better with a hot wire, and the choice of materials doesn't look like they are the way he would do it again. He did, however make a kayak that met his needs for practicing rolls. Have you made a kayak or other boat? Tell us the story!

[via DIY Happy]

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In the age of sharing, collaboration and real-time communications, wouldn't it be fantastic if anyone had the opportunity to present her ideas live to a real, sizable public audience? Why isn't it there yet a virtual presenter soapbox open to everyone? Photo credit: Darko Novakovic After the likes of Flickr (for images), YouTube (for videos), Slideshare (for slide presentations) why isn't there a public, open service that provides a live podium and a matching audience for those with great ideas to share? Wouldn't it be fantastic if you could just go to such an online service and be provided with an easy-to-use toolset of communication, collaboration, presentation and promotion tools to make your voice be heard? Why not support and leverage the growing crowd of live presenters and the valuable engagement, the attention, the following and the unique content that they could generate? Here all the details:

Virtual Presenter Soapbox: A Live Stage For Everyone To Present Great Ideas

by Robin Good

Sharing The Trend

If you look around, there is a growing number of professionals delivering online courses and webinars, as well as new online destinations devoted to provide know-how and expertise to both private or public audiences. Look at the emerging social learning networks and live learning marketplaces that have started to spring up. These are all instances of an increasing move toward further expanding our communication venues and of a spontaneous, growing desire from individuals to share and present their ideas to others. If you are already an expert, a successful corporate VP or a published book author, maybe you can get a few conference organizers to invite you to speak. But outside of this restrictive elite, there is little or no space for you to go out and present your ideas in front of an audience worth of that name. Yes, you may go to a barcamp or to a user-group organized event and share your PowerPoint and get a good kick out of it, but your reach remains usually limited to those attending and to the location of where you deliver it. Wouldn't instead be wonderful if anyone had an online free resource to go to deliver and store live public presentations? While there are plenty of web conferencing services out there that one can sign up to, most tend to be internal, private communication tools, not venues through which "extend" and further distribute one own's message. Think of a YouTube of public live presentations were presenters and audiences are matched to their topics of interest. You have an idea to present about a new collaboration approach? Put the event info up and promote it to your networks and contacts. Then meet some basic requirements (must have presented before, to at least x number of people, has met a minimum quota of registrants, etc.) and then the system allows you to be matched to the platform extended audience by letting you expose your event info to those who have expressed interests in the same topics you cover. Log in on the date and time of your event and deliver your idea live to as many people you want while using the delivery approach of your choice. You don't have to worry about anything as the event is automatically recorded alongside its user-generated content artifacts (chats, whiteboards, images, etc.).

Finding The Nuggets

Yes, I know what you are thinking. You have seen the likes of YouTube and Flickr and you are afraid that this could be another gate to a flood of low-quality, useless, hard-to-browse stuff. But, Wikipedia and Del.icio.us, and more recently FriendFeed, have found effective ways to keep spam and irrelevant stuff away while allowing most valuable content to be surfacing to the top or become readily accessible. They have all used their audiences to do the filtering. By leveraging user engagement, not just for contributions but also for moderation and filtering, these UGC platforms have gradually learned how to clean their own junk, and to tap into their great stuff. Great content could be surfaced by leveraging multiple metrics and indicators: followers, views, actual time on page, syndication, "likes", re-tagging, etc. By leveraging the convergence of social media metrics with classic web traffic and audience indicators it would probably be easier to let quality self-surface to the top.

Business Factors

What about the business side of things? How could this idea be made economically sustainable from a business standpoint? Well, this is a tough one, my dear, but I have tried to put myself in the situation. Here my starting points if I were to make my idea into a sustainable reality:

• Adopt a freemium approach. Allow for all basic live presentation and delivery services to be provided for free alongside paid premium services providing additional features to produce, deliver and distribute content more effectively. Consider automatic presentation transcriptions, translations, ability to widgetize and redistribute, commercial distribution via high-quality video downloads or DVDs, merchandising of your brand, co-partnering to promote your physical paid events and workshops, and so on.


• Extract and create valuable content from user contributions. Identify, remix, aggregate, edit and assemble high-quality content collections on specific themes or topics and turn them into high-priced niche learning solutions that could be commercialized to target corporate customers.


• Partner with a "presentation and communication skills" university to complement the natural need for live presenters and communicators to refine and improve their key professional skills.


• Create an intelligent system to support successful presenters into matching their talent and know-how with relevant brands or events looking for individuals with their traits and get a share of the pie.


• Adopt a social media marketing strategy. If such an idea sharing and presentation platform was to adopt the same social network marketing strategy that has made Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media community building venues so popular,it could rapidly build engaged, swarming audiences interested in specific topics.


• Utilize CC licensing for all content to be presented live allowing easy redistribution and encouraging editing, remixing and mashing up of it.


• Facilitate reach and distribution by providing a shareable, re-embeddable live events viewing platform to be integrated in any blog or web site.


• Centralize and manage all of the meta-information about such live events, creating value added services from it, while allowing maximum decentralization of the delivery of the live events.

Dream or Opportunity?

The new web is all about speaking from human to human in a true voice, without the false hypocrisy of corporate communications and traditional broadcast-style advertising communications. What you care about today is the people, the individuals and the ideas behind the companies and products you like to use. But how many opportunities and venues are available for you to present your ideas and vision publicly and in front of a live, real audience? My live public venue idea is both an exercise in virtual entrepreneuring as well as a vision for something that I would want but that's not there, yet. It reflects my desires, passions and ideals and paints a scenario I think would benefit all of parties involved. Individuals with ideas would have a new open venue to share them with those interested in it. Better yet, such venue should enable them to more easily be matched with those potentially interested in listening. Those seeking inspiration, models, guidance or a passionate follow-up conversation would find through this open platform a treasure trove of resources to attend, contribute or participate into. Communities would spontaneously emerge around topics of interest and would generate further demand and consumption of additional live events. Infrastructure provider would benefit from formidable exposure and from opportunity to engage specific communities with useful premium features and other alternative monetization approaches.
It's a wild idea, I know, but that's what I would really like to see: more people getting a chance to share their thoughts and ideas in front of a public audience, and a web conferencing company clever enough to recognize what appears to me as a unique marketing and commercial opportunity.

Originally written by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia, and first published on May 25th 2009 as "Virtual Presenter Soapbox: A Live Stage For Everyone To Present Great Ideas"

Photo credits: Sharing The Trend - Didier Kobi Finding The Nuggets - Ryan Pike Business Factors - Alex Kalina Dream or Opportunity? - Endhals

Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that a Spanish woman who is thought to be the world's oldest blogger has died in Muxia, the northern coastal town where she was born on December 23, 1911. María Amelia López's posts, which chronicled her civil war memories, failing health, left-wing views, and cantankerous humor, attracted a global following and more than 500 readers have left tribute messages on her site after her family published a final post to announce her death. The blog began in 1995 as a gift from her grandson Daniel, with whom she lived, who had no idea what he was unleashing into cyberspace after he taught her to navigate the Internet after she pestered him to download biographies of poets and politicians. He later become her chief assistant, typing in her words as she dictated. 'Now so many people write to me that I can't hope to reply to them all, though I want to,' she explained. 'My grandson complains that he has to work as well, he can't spend all his time typing.' López said in an interview that the Internet had given her a new lease of life and in one of her last posts, published in February, she wrote; 'When I'm on the internet, I forget about my illness. The distraction is good for you — being able to communicate with people. It wakes up the brain, and gives you great strength.'" The Times adds, "Mrs Lopez became the world's oldest blogger on the death of 108-year-old Australian Oliver Riley in June 2008. The new holder of this unofficial title is unknown, although the actor Kirk Douglas, 92, who blogs regularly on his MySpace page, could be in the running. Twitter's oldest microblogger is the 104-year-old Briton Ivy Bean."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On the Data Mining blog, an intriguing set of notes from talks on social influence by Duncan Watt and Jon Kleinberg at the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media:

3. Diffusion of information may 'long circuit' the small worlds of social networks. In Kleinberg's presentation regarding the study of the largest internet chain mail (a petition) he described the role of the threshold model of diffusion in which we require multiple receipts of a stimulus (e.g. a chain mail letter) to pass it on, we are more sensitive to our immediate community - our strong links - than to small-world building weak links. This seems to have some relationship with Watt's work on Challenging the Influentials Hypothesis and both his criticism of the disease analogy and his focus on the importance of the network structure, not some magical power of the 'influential'.

Influence - not as simple as Gladwell would have you believe!

Elektroschock writes "Wine attempts to implement the Windows API layer on Linux. There are some limitations and an important one is the missing DIB engine, bug 421. Chris Howe comprehends the dissatisfaction of core developers with the arbitrary project governance: 'Sorry to sound like a stuck record but the Wine website still lists "write a DIB engine" as a requirement, and every time someone does, the patches disappear down a hole because they're "not right." Someone document what "would be right," or take "write a DIB engine" off the list. I'd love to have a go at documenting it myself, but I don't have the time to reverse engineer it from a few years' worth of rejected solutions.' The latest attempt of Massimo Del Fedel satisfied all requirements set previously for the long standing bug 421, and his optional engine seems to work fine by all Wine quality standards. He seems to be extraordinary stubborn and insusceptible to mobbing. Usually it is extremely frustrating for developers when the goalpost is constantly moved. When is the right time for project members to fork when their chief maintainer does not respond anymore or pursues an adverse commercial agenda?"

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We got this one folks!

Topics include: Maureen Dowd of course, the Church of the Savvy, One year of Twitter for Jay. Why is user interface so damned hard? 10 years since Edit This Page. And an inspired choice for Inspiration of the week, Elvis Costello's recording of Nick Lowe's classic What's So Funny About Peace Love and Understanding.

One of the best Reboots yet, imho.



PS: As usual subscribe in your podcatcher or iTunes.

gbickford writes "Adeona, the first open source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop, was featured on Slashdot last year. I was stoked when I read about how it worked and I installed it immediately. I just went to look for updates on the site and was greeted with a giant warning message stating, 'Adeona is currently not working.' It seems that OpenDHT, the distributed hash table that stores the location information and photos, has been fairly unstable lately. The developers claim that this is "largely because the back-end OpenDHT system is not able to tolerate the load imposed by Adeona. OpenDHT removed the need for a centralized database with tracking information, which in effect prevents a 3rd party from tracking a user's whereabouts. OpenDHT was Sean Rhea's Ph.D. project back in 2005 and he has decided to officially bow out of maintaining it as of July 1st, which has left the developers of Adeona looking for another back end to store location information and photos. The source code for Adeona is available and they are actively seeking developer contributions on the developer's list. Do any developers have ideas on where to put scads of information in a free, reliable, anonymous, and secure manner?"

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[Photo from Urban Threads]

There is a nice set of instructions for the project on Urban Threads:

For embroidering or sewing on leather, you'll want to pick up some leather needles. The thing about sewing on leather is that the holes your needle leaves behind won't be invisible like when you sew on regular cloth, and you want a small, special needle to keep the damage and tear-age to your leather at a minimum. Large needles can actually perforate your leather enough that you basically just punch off a section. Not what we're going for here.

The photos and text are informative, and the design could be rolled out to meet many different needs.

Make a whole bunch to slip on a belt and you've got one sweet utility belt. A pouch this size will fit everything from credit cards and cash to a passport if needed, and makes a great travel pouch. Make a smaller, daintier one for more dressy outfits in need of a little spice. You can customize it to any shape or any need.

[From the MAKE Flickr pool]

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An anonymous reader writes "Istanbul's popular (and crowded) Istiklal shopping, cafe, and restaurant street is being outfitted with 64 wirelessly controlled, tamper-proof face-recognition cameras attached to a computer system capable of scanning 15,000 faces per second in a moving crowd for a positive match. The link from Samanyolu, badly translated by Google, states that 3 cameras are in place so far and that if trials are successful, this will mark the first time such a system, previously used by Scotland Yard and normally reserved for indoor security use, will be put to use in a public outdoor setting. It also notes that each camera controlled by the system is capable of 'locking onto' the faces of known criminals and pickpockets detected in the crowd and 'tracking' their movements for up to 300 meters before the next, closer placed camera takes over." Hit the link for more of this reader's background on the growing electronic encroachment on privacy in this city, which will be the European Capital of Culture in 2010, causing him to ask, "Is the historic city of Istanbul turning into the new London?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.