The medical marijuana card belonging to bOING bOING patron saint Robert Anton Wilson (RIP) is up for auction on eBay. It's one of many of RAW's personal items that his daugther, Christina, is auctioning to help pay off her father's large debts. From the medical marijuana card auction listing:

As we all know (or should) RAW was a great champion of decriminalizing marijuana. In his late sixties, when his post-polio syndrome started getting bad, he really found great relief and was a staunch supporter of WAMM. WAMM is Wo/Man's Alliance for Medical Marijuana, located in Santa Cruz. His doctor gave him the necessary paperwork and here is his official WAMM card granting him the right to use marijuana medicinally. He is of course, patient # 2323. There is no signature, but his picture is emblazoned on the front with a twinkle in his eye...

Robert Anton Wilson's Medical Marijuana Card

Tim O'Reilly wrote in Forbes a while back that he thinks the Kindle only has another two or three years of life left, unless Amazon wises up and embraces open standards. He came to this conclusion, in part, because of his experience deciding how to publish documents on the web back in the mid-1990s. "You see, I'd recently been approached by the folks at the Microsoft Network. They'd identified O'Reilly as an interesting specialty publisher, just the kind of target that they hoped would embrace the Microsoft Network (or MSN, as it came to be called). The offer was simple: Pay Microsoft a $50,000 fee plus a share of any revenue, and in return it would provide this great platform for publishing, with proprietary publishing tools and file formats that would restrict our content to users of the Microsoft platform. The only problem was we'd already embraced the alternative: We had downloaded free Web server software and published documents using an open standards format. That meant anyone could read them using a free browser. While MSN had better tools and interfaces than the primitive World Wide Web, it was clear to us that the Web's low barriers to entry would help it to evolve more quickly, would bring in more competition and innovation, and would eventually win the day."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the past few years our two 4' x 8' raised beds have been fully dedicated to garlic production. The ultimate lazy crop, you plant garlic in the Fall, let it do its thing over the Winter, weed it a few times, cut the scapes in early July, then harvest it in late July. After a little bit of drying, you have enough garlic to last at least a few months.

Cutting the scapes, or emerging buds that flower and then turn into above ground seed pods, will help your underground garlic heads grow nice and fat. The way I see it is that the plant can focus on the work of growing the bulb below the ground instead of sending nutrients to the flowering and seedbuilding upstairs. At the three farmer's markets I have been to this week, garlic scapes have been on at least a few counters. The other day I went out in the latest edition of the rainy day, and snipped off a bucket load of aromatic garlic scapes. I left a few on the stalk, because these ones will give bulbs with fewer cloves in them.

So after you cut the scapes, what do you do with them? My first guess was, saute them in oil, dump some eggs on top and make an omelette. That worked out pretty good, but now what?

Here are a few ideas for recipes:
Garlic pesto

liked the flavor of the pesto quite a bit, but in the recipe I'm giving you I reduced the amount of garlic scapes and increased the amount of cheese quite a bit from the recipe I tried. Making pesto is an art, not a science anyway, so if you happen to stumble on some garlic scapes, give it a try and decide for yourself.

Lots of recipes from Claget Farm. Mariquita Farm has some great ideas too. The Amateur Gourmet discovers that working with them in the kitchen is at least a little bit different from octopus wrestling.

Not Without Salt has some very nice photographs along with some tasty recipes and stories about the love of garlic scapes.

What are your favorite recipes for garlic scapes? Serve them up in the comments!

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This Cincinnati gentleman was charged with criminal damaging after taking a permanent marker to a $1600 plasma TV at Sears. According to WCPO, Jordan Puckett, 20, was caught on surveillance video drawing a one foot penis on the screen. "A motive is not yet know."

Man's Alleged Organ Artistry On TV Brings Charge (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

This at the "Saint Andrew's strip" in Cholula. Felixe (Mexico) took his freshly baked TagTool to get some air in a reknowned bar where it livened up the party and inspired a healthy interactive night.

All the equipment is on the table: DIY TagTool with Arduino inside, laptop to connect it to, Wacom to draw and write, game controller to make everything (and everyone) wiggle. Hours of fun!

 

More pictures

Make: en Español

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This week on CRAFT we saw:

Wind-Powered Knitting Machine  

Recipe: Dark Chocolate Gelato

How-To: Homemade Stickers

Girlie Gundam

If you like what you see in our weekly recaps, you might consider following our RSS feed or our Twitter!

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Earlier this week, we discussed news that games industry veteran Dave Perry had posted a demo of his upcoming cloud gaming service Gaikai. Now that people have had time to speak with Perry and evaluate the demo, reaction has been surprisingly positive. Quoting Eurogamer: "What struck me about the presentation was that there was absolutely nothing unbelievable in it whatsoever. There were no claims of streaming 720p gameplay at 60 frames per second — games were running in differently sized windows according to how difficult they were to compress, and video itself runs at the internet standard 30FPS. There was no talk of world-beating compression systems that annihilate the work of the best minds in video encoding today, the demo was using the exact same h264 codec that we use ... And finally, there was nothing here to suggest that we were looking at a technological breakthrough that would make our PS3s and Xbox 360s obsolete... just that this was a brand new way to play games in an ultra-accessible manner." By contrast, OnLive was received with much more criticism, in part due to their dramatic promises. While playing online games with Gaikai will naturally add some amount of latency, the article points out that single player games need not lag more than you'd expect from a console controller. Meanwhile, unlike OnLive, Gaikai is not trying to compete directly with the major console manufacturers, instead trying to work with them in order to deliver their first-party games to new audiences.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We hope you're having a fabulous Independence Day weekend. To help serenade your hangover from too much fun yesterday, here's a guy playing the "Star Spangled Banner" on a baseball bat violin. Tres Americana!

National Anthem [Thanks, Shawn!]

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CNet has a story about the security measures Google employs to protect their email systems and fight the never-ending war on spam. Their Postini team, acquired two years ago, has a variety of monitoring tools and automated response systems to find and block undesirable messages. Quoting: "The system scores each message on numerous combinations of criteria, assigning a weight to each and then comparing the score to those in a database of several hundred thousand message types that have been flagged as good or bad from Postini honey pots and customer spam reports. ... To block fresh spam attacks not covered by existing heuristic technologies and viruses not covered by existing signature databases Postini relies on proprietary Zero-Hour technology to identify new outbreaks that show up in the traffic patterns and quarantine them for later rescanning. Customers can also create and build out their own white lists of message senders they trust and blacklist others they don't trust. It takes an average of 150 milliseconds for a message to be scanned by the antivirus engines that Postini licenses from McAfee and Authentium.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NicApicella writes "My new system has two sparklin' SATA drives which I would like to mirror. After having been burned by a not-so-cheap, dedicated RAID controller, I have been pointed to software RAID solutions. I now stand in front of two choices for setting up my RAID: a Windows 7 RC software RAID or a hardware RAID done by the cheap integrated RAID controller of my motherboard. Based on past experiences, I have decided that only my data is worth saving — that's why the RAID should mirror two disks (FAT32) that are not the boot disk (i.e. do not contain an OS or any fancy stuff). Of course, such a setup should secure my data; should a drive crash, I want the system up and running in no time. Even more importantly, I want any drive and its data to be as safe and portable as possible (that's the reason for choosing FAT32), even if the OS or the controller screw up big time. So, which should I choose? Who should I trust more, Microsoft's Windows 7 or possibly the cheapest RAID controller on the market? Are there other cheap solutions?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm at Laguna Seca raceway today as the guests of Fiat who sponsor Valentino Rossi, a legend in the motorcycling world.

Rossi's fans are everywhere here. They wear yellow shirts with his number, 46, on them.

Think of 46 as a brand.

They have beautiful girls wearing marketing slogans posting with umbrellas and fans.

SilverEar writes "Imagine a creature that swims and preys on others, but once it eats a certain kind of plant, that plant grows inside it, causing the predator to lose its ability to prey and start using sunlight to make its food. Its preying mouth is replaced by an eye that is needed to find sunlight. This is the Hatena ('enigma' in Japanese). The kicker: when Hatena reproduces, one offspring is a peaceful photosynthesizer with the sun-seeking eye, while the other is yet again a predator with a voracious mouth."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So you have a few extra cans left about the manse after the holiday party and are wondering what to do with them. How about building a solar panel? Free heat is good heat.

As air enters the 2 holes on the sides near the bottom, the sun is heating up the soda cans all painted black to absorb the heat. The cans have holes drilled in the bottom, so the air being drawn in at the bottom works its way through all the heated cans and gets hotter and hotter as it approaches the top. With convection, more and more air is drawn in through the bottom and the heat rises. A single hole drilled in the top of the frame is where all this heat comes out, and I have to tell you - it's friggin' hot and it comes flying out of there at full speed.

This could be a handy way to provide a bit of daytime heat to a shed or garage that it otherwise useless during the depth of winter.

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Hugh Pickens writes "Using Netflix as a business model, Osman Rashid and Aayush Phumbhra founded Chegg, shorthand for 'chicken and egg,' to gather books from sellers at the end of a semester and renting — or sometimes selling — them to other students at the start of a new one. Chegg began renting books in 2007, before it owned any, so when an order came in, its employees would surf the Web to find a cheap copy. They would buy the book using Rashid's American Express card and have it shipped to the student. Eventually, Chegg automated the system. 'People thought we were crazy,' Rashid said. Now, as Chegg prepares for its third academic year in the textbook rental business, the business is growing rapidly. Jim Safka, a former chief executive of Match.com and Ask.com who was recently recruited to run Chegg, said the company's revenue in 2008 was more than $10 million, and this year, Chegg surpassed that in January alone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The latest cheap trick from Can-rockers Cheap Trick is an album released on an 8-track tape. Bah! My album will be released in the form of incidental grooving on the side of a thrown pot made in the style of ancient Greek potters!

As you might imagine, finding a manufacturer today for the 8-track version of Cheap Trick's The Latest wasn't easy. "There was a lot of looking under rocks," admits Frey, who finally found a small plant in Dallas, Tex., for the retro-fit. "They're expensive to make, and they don't make very many at a time," he says of the cartridge which will sell to the public for something close to $30.

The new album, issued on Cheap Trick's own label, is comprised of 12 songs broken into four sets of three songs each - suites that unfortunately don't fit nicely into the four 10-minute programs of standard 8-tracks, but which may be available at some point as a three-for-the-price-of-one deal on iTunes. As Frey explains the discount, "We're kind of more worried about being ignored than being ripped off."

Cheap Trick brings back the 8-track

Tim sez, "This is the pre-launch page for the Bayer 'Didget', a blood glucose meter which plugs in to the DS / DS Lite's Slot-2. Consistent glucose testing by the diabetic child (or adult, presumably) is rewarded with points in a game that can be used to buy items or unlock levels. As with the the 'iPlayer' hardware video decoder for the DS which Cory recently posted, the downside is that the new DSi doesn't have a Slot-2.

Bayer's DIDGET meter was developed in conjunction with Paul Wessel -- the parent of a child with type 1 diabetes. Paul noticed that although his son Luke was constantly losing his blood glucose meter, he could always find his Nintendo Game Boy. It was this observation that inspired Paul and Bayer to work together to develop the first and only blood glucose meter that connects to the Nintendo DS and Nintendo DS Lite gaming systems to reward children for good testing habits.

Bayer's DIDGET Blood Glucose Meter (Thanks, Tim!)

Eric sez, "The operator of a monorail at Walt Disney World died Sunday morning when two monorails crashed. About five or six guests were on the monorail at the time of the accident, but they are not seriously injured." It happened at the Ticket and Transportation Center station.

A person who was on the scene reported to the news stations that they head a loud explosion and saw the mangled trains in the station. They tried to run to get people out of the front of the crashed train. They saw a family make it out, but the driver [ed: news report cuts off here]

The monorails involved were the pink and purple trains, according to Local 6 in Orlando; pink was moving and hit purple, which was stationary.

Breaking news: Two monorails crash at Disney World overnight, one Cast Member dead (Thanks, Eric and John!)

In 1987, a study published by Jim Gray and Gianfranco Putzolu evaluated the trade-offs between holding data in memory and storing it on a disk. Known widely as the "five-minute rule," their research was updated and expanded 10 years later. Now, as jamie points out, Communications of the ACM is running an article by Goetz Graefe with another decennial update, evaluating the rule using hardware and software typical of 2007, with an eye toward how flash memory will affect the situation. An excerpt from Graefe's conclusion: "The 20-year-old five-minute rule for RAM and disks still holds, but for ever-larger disk pages. Moreover, it should be augmented by two new five-minute rules: one for small pages moving between RAM and flash memory and one for large pages moving between flash memory and traditional disks. For small pages moving between RAM and disk, Gray and Putzolu were amazingly accurate in predicting a five-hour break-even point two decades into the future. Research into flash memory and its place in system architectures is urgent and important. Within a few years, flash memory will be used to fill the gap between traditional RAM and traditional disk drives in many operating systems, file systems, and database systems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PCWorld recently tested the 3G networks of AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint in 13 different cities across the US. They've now posted the results, which show that Sprint and Verizon are neck-and-neck for reliability, while AT&T has consistently higher upload rates. From the article: "Across more than 20 testing locations in each of the 13 cities we tested, Verizon had an average download speed of 951 kbps. Verizon demonstrated good reliability, too; the network was available at a reasonable and uninterrupted speed in 89.8 percent of our tests. Sprint's 3G network delivered a solid connection in 90.5 percent of our 13-city tests. Sprint's average download speed of 808 kbps across 13 cities wasn't flashy (at that speed, a 1MB file downloads in 10 seconds), but dependability is an important asset. The Sprint network performed especially well, both in speed and in reliability, in our test cities in the western part of the United States. The AT&T network's 13-city average download speed in our tests was 812 kbps. Its average upload speed was 660 kbps. Reliability was an issue in our experience of the AT&T system: Our testers were able to make a connection at a reasonable, uninterrupted speed in only 68 percent of their tests." What have you noticed about the various carriers in your city?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

These scissors are the most versatile ones I have seen. They were a gimmie at a Revereware shop that closed recently, buy one get one. I bought about four pairs with different colored handles. The black handled ones live on the workbench, a red handled pair stays in the kitchen and some others are reserved for crafting.

What makes them incredible? They are sharp, stainless steel scissors with decent sized handles, suitable for big hands. The two sides come apart for easy cleaning. The ends of the handles have large and small screwdrivers, and one side sports a bottle opener. Inside the handles is a grippy section for opening difficult jars. They are suitable for lots of kitchen and other tasks in the house, garden, and yard.

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William Gibson's Neuromancer was first published 25 years ago. Dr_Ken writes with an excerpt from an article at MacWorld that delves into the current state of some of the technology that drives the book: "'Neuromancer is important because of its astounding predictive power. Gibson's core idea in the novel is the direct integration of man and computer, with all the possibilities (and horrors) that such a union entails. The book eventually sold more than 160 million copies, but bringing the book to popular attention took a long time and a lot of word-of-mouth. The sci-fi community, however, was acutely aware of the novel's importance when it came out: Neuromancer ran the table on sci-fi's big three awards in 1984, winning the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula Award.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Look what happens when you go to the check out the Life Size Mousetrap...Some crazy beaste comes galumphing through the place.

Yikes. Anybody got details on the build?

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

• Solar night light circuit art

• High speed glass breakage

• Creep out your babysitter!

• DIY air rocket

• Candy PCB most likely ROHS-compliant [above, bottom-right]

• FedEx wine rack [above, bottom-left]

• Power drill coffee grinder [above, top-right]
  
• Compressed air rocket goes up, must come down … somewhere? [above, top-left]

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An anonymous reader writes "After scoring a surprise electoral win in Sweden and getting high-profile support in Germany, The Pirate Party is coming to Canada. The party's goals are fairly simple. People should have the right to share and copy music, movies and virtually any material, as long as it is for personal use, not for profit. It opposes government and corporate monitoring of Internet activities, unless as part of a criminal investigation. It also wants to phase out patents."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We added a lot of new products to the Maker Shed this week. They ranged from new micro-controllers and electronic kits, to physics experiments and desktop sized weaponry. There are more new kits in the works. Keep an eye on the blog for more information.

New kits in the Maker Shed

• Fiber Optics Kit
  
• ScrewShield for Arduino
  
• ARMmite PRO
  
• Arduino Projects Pack
  
• ArduPilot
  
• Desktop Onager
  
• Fire Piston Kit

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"

Here's my friend and neighbour Matt Webb (part of the Schulze and Webb design consultancy) addressing Copenhagen's Reboot conference on what the role of a designer was and is in the 21st century. It's a great Webbrant, thought-provoking, learned, wide-ranging, weird and great.

Reboot (via Warren Ellis)

A reader writes, "Take one part Threadless shirt design and one part cake mix, add in some fondant and frosting and you have Threadcakes: An online cake contest based on transforming Threadless designs into cakes."

Threadcakes Gallery! :: Threadcakes: A Threadless Cake

Behold the awesome suction power of the airplane toilet, capable of slurping up an entire roll of toilet paper in one go. Don't clog the tank, though, or chunks of shit-ice will start to fall off the undercarriage, killing people with icy B.M.s (pun courtesy of Mr Spider Robinson).

The Airplane Toilet Paper Experiment (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

pmontra writes "The City of Venice, Italy, started to offer free Wi-Fi to residents (Google translation from the Italian source) on July 3 2009. Tourists and other visitors will pay 5 Euros a day for the service starting from September. The hot spots are connected to a ten thousand kilometer (6,250 mile) fiber optic LAN the City started deploying in the '90s. The first day of free Internet access has been celebrated with a digital treasure hunt in the channels of the lagoon city."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RobGoldsmith writes with this snippet from Space Fellowship: "If you've never seen a spaceship with your own eyes, now's your chance. The International Space Station (ISS) is about to make a remarkable series of flybys over the United States. Beginning this 4th of July weekend, the station will appear once, twice, and sometimes three times a day for many days in a row. No matter where you live, you should have at least a few opportunities to see the biggest spaceship ever built."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After a fourth of July BBQ, I was tuning around on the radio and made contact with Vince, K4AOC (operating as K2L) the 13 Colonies Special Event station in South Carolina. July 1- July 5th was the 13 Colonies 4th of July Special Event during which all thirteen original colonies were on the air with special event call signs: K2A-NY K2B-VA K2C-RI K2D-CT K2E-DE K2F-MD K2G-GA K2H-MA K2I-NJ K2J-NC K2K-NH K2L-SC K2M-PA. Make contact with all thirteen colonies to earn the Thirteen Colonies certificate.

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Dark night, bright flashes, ooooh, ahhhh....hmmmm, how does that work? Here is a collection of how those flashy bangs and pops do their thing.

How Stuff Works does a typically thorough job explaining the hows and whys of fireworks.

When the fuse burns into the shell, it ignites the bursting charge, causing the shell to explode. The explosion ignites the outside of the stars, which begin to burn with bright showers of sparks. Since the explosion throws the stars in all directions, you get the huge sphere of sparkling light that is so familiar at fireworks displays.

Pyrouniverse is up for giving the abstract on how they are loaded, but keep their lips sealed on the ancient family secrets.

Fireworks tubes are made by rolling thick paper tightly around a former, such as a dowel. Though they can be made by hand, most firework/tube factories use machinery to manufacture tubes.

The shells that hold the individual charges are loaded with various metals and other ingredients.

Inside a shell are pellets that, when burning, produce the colors in a fireworks explosion. Various compounds create various colors -- strontium gets you red; barium, green; copper, blue; sodium, yellow. Aluminum, titanium and magnesium brighten the flames.

The Boston fireworks show has a tradition of drawing huge, potentially panic attack producing crowds. Each of the charges have been built and are planned and manufactured for months in advance. When the time comes, they will be fired off in coordination with the music emanating from the stage.

They downloaded the soundtrack onto a specially designed computer system and began the time-consuming work of matching their arsenal of Roman Candles, Comets, Meteors, Spinning Wheels, and other fireworks with the rhythm of the music.

"You judge what to use by the feel of the music,'' Art Rozzi said. "You have to know what you've got. You have to know if you're going to shoot a lot or a little. And you have to keep in mind the finale, so you're not giving anything away.''

Though many cities have fireworks shows, lots are also dampening the fuse this year because of the expense and budget priorities. For the lucky remainders, people have been prepping the sites for the past few days and weeks.

Each firework is encased in a shell that looks like an oversized light bulb wrapped in brown paper. Inside, one fuse launches the firework like a rocket, while another has a time delay that makes it burst in the air.

The fireworks are made of gunpowder and beads that form various shapes and colors depending on the chemical pigments and how they are arranged inside. They come from all over the world, though most are from China.

[Image from Wikipedia]

The color of a compound in a firework will be the same as its color in a flame test. Not all compounds that produce a colored flame are appropriate for coloring fireworks, however. Ideal colorants will produce a pure, intense color when present in moderate concentration.

Check out the wikipedia entry for more details, and a trip around the world detailing ways that fireworks are used in other cultures.

Share with us in the comments your experiences of making and deploying fireworks.

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