kamapuaa writes "The NY Times has an article about how real-time license plate scanning is changing the car repo business. MVTRAC is one of several companies providing technology to track car license plates automatically, in order to populate private databases. This new tech is used by car repo companies to help banks or other lenders repossess cars; by police to find stolen cars or to locate ticket scofflaws; or really for whatever application MVTRAC and its competitors feel like pursuing, as the new-found industry lacks any kind of government oversight."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reader edgeofphysics provides a technical sidelight on the earthquake in Chile this morning — some details on how the European Southern Observatory protects the mirrors of the Very Large Telescope when an earthquake strikes. "Given that Chile is one of the most seismically active countries in the world, how do astronomers protect their giant telescopes that have been built or are being built in the Chilean Andes? This blog post discusses how Chile's most advanced facility protects its priceless 8.2-meter primary mirrors in the event of an earthquake."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apparently, New York received two feet of snow during their latest storm. We were hit a little harder here in Pittsburgh, receiving just a nose more.

Puns aside, this is a pretty funny snow sculpture. My favorite for the season has been the fire-breathing snowman, but I have been too occupied with getting the stuff out of my way to take advantage of it as a building material. Have you built anything fun out of snow this year? [via neatorama]

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mdsolar writes "Following the Vermont Senate's 26-to-4 vote not to approve a 20-year license extension for the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, the Vermont Public Service Board will consider revoking its operating license as well. Meanwhile, the plant continues to operate without its Director of Nuclear Safety Assurance, who has been placed on administrative leave; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has merely issued a Demand for Information rather than shutting down a plant that is lacking a full compliment of safety personnel. It may be that the NRC is not capable of doing what is needed with regard to Entergy, the plant owner, which is also facing prosecution by the Mississippi Attorney General."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is amazing, on Tuesday Roger Ebert will be using his own voice (made from old recordings) while on the Oprah show.

After I lost my speaking voice, everybody thought they had this brilliant idea. "Hey! Why don't you just take your voice from your old shows and put it on a computer?" Sounded good to me. I kept getting suggestions: "I know this guy who says it would be easy." Either there wasn't a guy or he didn't think it would be easy. In the meantime, I was using off-the-shelf computer voices on my laptop. My wife Chaz loved a voice named Lawrence, who had a British accent and sounded like a slightly crabby headmaster. Then I found a new Mac voice named Alex, who sounded like he knew when a sentence had ended. ??One day I was moseying around the Web and found the name of a company in Edinburgh named CereProc. They claimed they could build voices for specific customers. They had demos of the voices of George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger. (I amused myself by having them argue with each other.) In August 2009, I sent an e-mail to Scotland and heard back from Paul Welham, the president of CereProc, and Graham Leary, one of their programming geniuses.??They said they needed good quality audio to work with. Hey, no problem. I'd been doing movie reviews on television since 1975 and had hours and hours of old programs. But it wasn't that simple. They listened to the old shows, and discovered (1) somebody else was always interrupting me, (2) I sounded all worked up a lot of the time, and (3) you could kinda hear the soundtracks of movies playing in the background.

....had an idea. Before I lost my voice due to cancer-related surgery, I'd recorded commentary tracks for some movies on DVD: "Citizen Kane," "Casablanca," "Floating Weeds," "Dark City" and, ah, "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." These tracks had been recorded separately from the movies, so they could be edited to fit scenes. They might be "pure" audio. I asked two friends of mine, Ronnie Sass of Warner Bros. and Kim Hendrickson of the Criterion Collection, if they still had the original digital recordings. They rummaged in warehouses and found they did. So did New Line and 20th Century-Fox, studios for which I'd also recorded commentary tracks.

This began a back-and-forth process with CereProc, which had to transcribe every recording with perfect accuracy so they could locate every word. The "normal person" may use 5,000 words, not all of them on the same day. A college professor may use 15,000. Shakespeare used more than 25,000, but he was making up a lot of them as he went along.

Anyway, CereProc didn't need to hear me speaking a specific word in order for my "voice" to say it. They needed lots of words to determine the general idea of how I might say a word. They transcribed and programmed and tweaked and fiddled, and early this February, sent me the files for a beta version of my voice. I played it for Chaz, and she said, yes, she could tell it was me. For one thing it knew exactly how I said "I."

This was the voice I used in predicting the Oscar winners when Chaz and I taped a segment Friday of "The Oprah Winfrey Show." When it was just me talking with Oprah, I used Alex. That show will air on Tuesday, so you can hear for yourself. Yes, "Roger Jr." needs to be smoother in tone and steadier in pacing, but the little rascal is good. To hear him coming from my own computer made me ridiculously happy.

You can check out the CereVoice demos here.

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Camilo Salas K. from Disorder Magazine in Chile (a very cool publication about music and culture, in the same eclectic/irreverent vein as Boing Boing) writes to us from the capital city of Santiago:

The situation right now is very bad. We are getting news of the most bad places (the south center of Chile) and the news is no good. I am listening about buildings on the floor, hospitals with a lot of people and aftershocks. Every 5 or 10 minutes we feel shakes from the earth. Right now I am experiencing a VERY LONG ONE. The news says there are over one hundred dead people and lot of injuries. I have electric light and internet, i can use my cellphone, with some difficulty, but it works.

In the most damaged areas there is no electricity or water, but you can buy food. The supermarkets are full of people, but they are working. The most difficult thing is that we dont have a lot of information about the most damaged places, but suddenly news appears about huge fires last night and people escaping from one of the prisons.

I was sleeping at 3:30 in the morning with my girlfriend. I live in the 10th floor of a 10 floor building and i woke up with a little shake. Then it was growing in intensity, and growing and growing. I get to the door and stay there. I have a lot of confidence in the strength of the building I live in, because nothing happend in 1985, the year we experienced another bad earthquake, and my building was built in the 70s. Chile has a really good earthquake standard for buildings.

So after 3 minutes or something like that, I walked out to the street and there was no light. Everyone in my building was good, afraid but good. I stayed like 4 hours down there listening to the radio, finding out what was going on.

12 hours later I don't now whats going on with the most damaged areas. The roads are cut, and this Monday was the day everyone is scheduled to go back to school.

Universities and businesses have been closed, a lot of people are on vacation, so the authorities are moving everything to the following week.

In the most damaged areas, there are buildings on the floor, houses constructed with lightweight material destroyed, and hospitals with a lot of damaged people.

I saw a picture of the museum of contemporary art and it is really damaged. The airport is not working and on TV they show that everything was on the floor. All the airplanes are detoured to argentina or peru. The old buildings are damaged, and some of the new ones, but in general, Santiago is okay.

One of the the strange things about this earthquake is that almost 80% of the population felt it. The state of emergency is in 5 regions, from the 5th, the metropolitan, and the more damaged ones, Bio-bio and Maule.

I read there was a tsunami alert and one island was striked by a very big wave, but there is no news about tsunamis on continental Chile.

Follow Disorder Magazine on Twitter.

A todos los amigos chilenos de Boing Boing, y toda la gente de latinoamerica que tienen familiares y amigos allá, les saludamos y esperamos por lo mejor para ustedes y sus familias.

An 8.8 earthquake struck Chile last night, killing at least 150 people, leaving some half a million people homeless, and setting off tsunami activity that now threaten islands in the Pacific, and coastlines from South America to Canada. Related quake activity has claimed lives and caused structure collapse in Argentina.

Chile sits along the seismologically volatile "Ring of Fire," and has a long history of strong earthquakes. While the force of this quake was some 800 to 1,000 times stronger than the quake that recently struck Haiti, the destruction and loss of life, by early estimates, seems lower—in part, say some, because the country has more wealth, better infrastructure and architectural standards, and is generally well-prepared.

As I publish this blog post, the National Weather Service reports that the waves hitting the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia were smaller than forecast, causing some to believe that the coming impact on Hawaii may be less than initially feared.

A few early resources here, please feel free to share others in the comments:

* Photographs at Boston.com.
* Google: chilepersonfinder.appspot.com
* NOAA's tsunami tracker
* USGS: Surviving a Tsunami - Lessons from Chile, Hawaii & Japan
* USGS: ongoing notifications of aftershocks in Chile. As I publish this post at 11:15am PT, there have already been 50 aftershocks, many of which were over 5.5 in magnitude.
* Once again, Robert Mackey at NYT's The Lede Blog is doing a great job gathering loose ends into must-read blogging.

(some items via @seanbonner, @mgorbis)

Like 23K others, I'm watching a live stream of a Honolulu television station previewing the tsunami that's likely to hit Hawaii in the next couple of hours.

I wondered on Twitter if any of the news orgs are launching helicopters to provide a view of the surge making landfall.

Brian Stelter of the NY Times notes: "we're about to watch a tsunami reach shore live on TV via Hawaii's local stations. Has that ever happened before?"

Tommy Russo is going to stream the tsunami landfall from Paukukalo on Qik.

I started a photo feed that tracks "tsunami" -- there are already 3 pics in the feed.

If you have any info on media coverage of the landfall please post a comment here.

Obviously safety comes first. But it also seems like an opportunity to make some media history.

eggboard writes "Martin Beck, who in 2008 co-wrote a paper describing a way to inject packets into a secured Wi-Fi system, is back with a more extensive exploit. His 'Enhanced TKIP Michael Attacks' still don't allow extraction of a key, and are limited to TKIP (not AES-CCMP) WPA-protected networks. Still, he's figured out how to put in large payloads, and to extract data sent from an access point to a client — all without cracking the network key. The attack requires proximity to sniff and inject data, but it's another crack in the older key standard (TKIP) that no one with serious security interests should still be using." Here is Beck's paper (PDF) describing the new attacks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you haven't heard of 20x200, they're site that sells art prints in editions of 200 for 20 bucks each. One of their latest ones (oddly priced at $50 each with 500 printed... they should launch a sister site!) looks awesome and has a fun maker twist, created by Clifton Burt.

In April of 2007, John Maeda quietly posted a haiku he had written to his blog. It was entitled think-make-think, and to me it fulfilled the potential of Maeda's simplicity. Over the next few months, that haiku often found its way to the forefront of my mind. When our studio acquired the remnants of a discarded arrow sign, it was clear to me that think-make-think was a perfect fit, both in form and function.

Buy the print on 20x200.

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Last month, we discussed news that President Obama's 2011 budget proposal did not include plans to continue NASA's Constellation program, choosing instead to focus on establishing a stronger foundation for low earth orbit operations. Unfortunately, as government officials prepare to shut down Constellation, they're warning that it won't be a quick or simple process due to the contracts involved. From the Orlando Sentinel: "Obama's 2011 budget proposal provides $2.5 billion to pay contractors whatever NASA owes them so the agency can stop work on Constellation's Ares rockets, Orion capsule and Altair lunar lander. But administration officials acknowledge that this number is, at best, an educated guess. ... Many inside and outside of the space agency, however, think the number is too low. The agency has signed more than $10 billion worth of contracts to design, test and build the Ares I rocket and Orion capsule that were the heart of Constellation. But government auditors said last year that the costs of some of those contracts had swelled by $3 billion since 2007 because of design changes, technical problems and schedule slips. How much NASA will owe on all those contracts if the plug gets pulled is unclear. Many of the deals are called 'undefinitized contracts,' meaning that the terms, conditions — and price — had not been set before NASA ordered the work to start. That means the agency will need to negotiate a buyout with the contractor — and that can be a long and painful process, according to government officials familiar with the cancellation process."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Why, they must spit two or three gallons a day!  They ain't died fast enough, these old men!"--Mrs. T.E. Bagley, Whitney, Texas, 1949

John Ptak comments on a story from a 1949 issue of LIFE. The photos are fantastic.

It isn't, I guess, so much a story about their sitting as it is a story about their not sitting, about how it came to be that their lumber was removed and the men forced to find another place to take in the sights and construct their great edifices of commentary and asides.

The story appears in LIFE Magazine of 15 August 1949, and lays the whole drama out in two splash pages, with bare editorializing and some great photos.

The story goes like this: "In 1922 D. (Doctor Dee) Scarborough, the druggist in Whitney, Texas, put up a bench outside his store, and immediately it became a loafing headquarters for the gaffers of the Brazos River Valley. 'Year after year they sat there looking like a jury of irritable terrapins, whittling, spitting and passing judgment on everything that passed. But finally reform caught up with them." It caught up to them, even if everyone was wearing a collared shirt.

The Great Battle of Sitting and Spitting: Whitney, Texas, 1949

A few weeks ago, the Pasadena Playhouse, a historic theater just outside of Los Angeles, announced that it's totally out of cash and shutting its doors. The news was a blow to the L.A. theater world, as the Playhouse has nearly a 100-year history of great performances and arts education. It was especially bad news for the Furious Theatre Company, the Pasadena Playhouse's current company-in-residence, known for its challenging, intense, controversial, and critically-acclaimed productions. It was also bad news personally, as my brother Robert Pescovitz had been deep in rehearsals with the rest of the Furious ensemble for their latest production, a contemporary black comedy about government/corporate conspiracy titled Men of Tortuga, by Jason Wells. The show was supposed to open last weekend, and suddenly Furious found itself scrambling for a new space. At the eleventh hour though, Furious managed to secure the Pasadena Playhouse for one more month to stage this play. The rescheduled opening night is tomorrow, Saturday, February 26. I haven't seen Men of Tortuga yet, but it sounds like a terrific piss take on corporate politics and shady power brokers. The show runs until March 28.

Three power-brokers scheme with a weapons specialist to assassinate a despised opponent... Too bad they’re all such incompetents. The bungling only gets worse as Maxwell, the senior power-broker, takes a young idealist under his wing. Suddenly his long-dormant conscience begins to reawaken. This comedic thriller discloses a sharp parable that takes a crack at the nastiness of covert governmental and corporate operations.

Furious Theatre Company: Men of Tortuga

UPDATE: Furious Theatre Company has kindly offered Boing Boing readers a $10 discount on tickets. When purchasing tickets online, just enter the code: boingboing

spidweb writes "Much virtual ink has been spilled over Ubisoft's new, harsh DRM system for Assassin's Creed 2. You must have a constant internet connection, and, if your connection breaks, the game exits. While this has angered many (and justifiably so), most writers on the topic have made an error. They think that this system, like all DRM systems in the past, will be easily broken. This article explains why, as dreadful as the system is, it does have a chance of holding hackers off long enough for the game to make its money. As such it is, if nothing else, a fascinating experiment. From the article: 'Assassin's Creed 2 is different in a key way. Remember, all of its code for saving and loading games (a significant feature, I'm sure you would agree) is tied into logging into a distant server and sending data back and forth. This vital and complex bit of code has been written from the ground up to require having the saved games live on a machine far away, with said machine being programmed to accept, save, and return the game data. This is a far more difficult problem for a hacker to circumvent.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What do you get when you combine Mr. Wizard, Harpo Marx and "Adventures with Bill"? I'm not sure exactly, but the exploits of Dr. Ernest Otherford get pretty close.

In this segment, the good Dr. Otherford explores the power of static electricity.

Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user johnwilson1969 via CC

My friend Gareth Branwyn, chief blogster at Makezine.com, had a picture of himself drawn as a robot that I thought was pretty cool. Investigating that idea led me to the befunky.com website. Tons of interesting ways to rendering your portrait without having to know or have Photoshop. The interface is easy too. Impessive!

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that an independent board of scientists will be appointed to review the workings of the world's top climate science panel, which has faced recriminations over inaccuracies in a 2007 report that included a prediction that Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035, although there is no scientific consensus to that effect. That brief citation — drawn from a magazine interview with a glaciologist who says he was misquoted — and sporadic criticism of the panel's leader have fueled skepticism in some quarters about the science underlying climate change. Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program, said the review body would be made up of 'senior scientific figures' who could perhaps produce a report by late summer for consideration at a meeting of the climate panel in October in South Korea. 'I think we are bringing some level of closure to this issue,' says Nuttall. One area to be examined is whether the panel should incorporate so-called gray literature, a term to describe nonpeer-reviewed science, in its reports. Many scientists say that such material, ranging from reports by government agencies to respected research not published in scientific journals, is crucial to seeking a complete picture of the state of climate science."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lucas123 writes "After the DOJ launched an investigation last fall into price fixing by major optical disk drive manufacturers, a home electronics retail store filed a class-action lawsuit this week seeking triple damages for what it is claiming to be long-standing collusion between Sony, Samsung, Toshiba, LG Electronics and Hitachi to raise and fix prices on the drives. The suit claims the vendors used trade organization forums as meeting places to discuss the price fixing. 'These are big Asian smoke-stack industries where they're investing in big fabrication plants. You can't have a technology destroy the business,' said the attorney representing the plaintiff. 'If you fire up a big fab plant with CRT tubes, and the next generation technology destroys it, then you have a big fab plant manufacturing buggy whips. So they have to make sure the price points for these [newer] technologies ... don't destroy existing markets.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "The US has not had to truly think about its air defense since the Cold War. But as America embraces the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, Newsweek says it's time to consider how our greatest new weapon may come back to bite us. Smaller UAVs' cool, battery-powered engines make them difficult to hit with conventional heat-seeking missiles. And while Patriot missiles can take out UAVs, at $3 million apiece such protection carries a steep price tag, especially if we have to deal with $500 DIY drones."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After some investigative hacking, Wil Lindsay added Monome functionality to a low cost Bliptronic 5000 melody generator using an Arduino + Arduinome source code. If the devices mentioned in the previous sentences leave you a tad confused, suffice it to say - the above-demonstrated hack adds nicey-nice versatile functionality to a $50 grid of LED buttons. For more info on how it's done, check out the Arduino sketch and relevant hardware hookup infos @ Stray Technologies. [via Matrixsynth]

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distantbody writes "The flight sim project FlightGear has reached version 2.0. From the website: 'Highlights of this new version include: Dramatic new 3D clouds, dramatic lighting conditions, improved support for custom scenery, and many many new and detailed aircraft models.' Full list of improvements here. And of course the screenshots. The release coincides with the release of SimGear v2, the 'set of open-source libraries designed to be used as building blocks for quickly assembling 3d simulations, games, and visualization applications' on which FlightGear is based."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bitserf writes from New Zealand: "Our overlords in government have decided to try and push through some file sharing legislation. In the bill remains the controversial provisions for three-strikes removal of internet access, though interestingly, nothing prohibiting users from moving to other ISPs. Text of the bill can be found here. Interesting timing, considering ACTA negotiations due to be held in Wellington in April."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barence writes "If your handset doesn't get you out and about, tramping through mud, climbing around and hunting for hidden treasure, then something needs an upgrade. The iPhone, Blackberry's Storm and Bold lines, and many Symbian and Android handsets now sport GPS, which makes your smartphone the ticket to join a global movement of outdoor games. These are outbound challenges that pit teams and solo players against themselves and each other in the search for hidden treasure, undiscovered landmarks and hidden spots all over the world. This article delves into several of the best smartphone-friendly real-world games, each of which is a bridge between the online and offline worlds."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ABC After-School Specials hit their zenith (or nadir) with The Day My Kid Went Punk, a punksploitation show to rival the CHiPS "Rip and Destroy" episode (and yes, that's Bernie Kopell, the doctor from the Love Boat, as the outraged dad).

The Day My Kid Went PUNK

Jason sez, "Six photos of me, Jason, under the 'Jason' sign at Epcot's The Living Seas attraction taken over the years 1989-2005. See me start as a gorky 15 year old in short shorts, pass through the fanny pack years of the 90s, and move on to become the grizzled, bearded sysadmin I am today." There is a well-brought-up man indeed! I have a similar series of pics of me with the Haunted Mansion sign that I keep meaning to post.

Jason at The Living Seas (Thanks, Jason!)

Steve Silberman sez, "Holy Terry Gilliam prototype: The original, trippy 1933 film version of Alice in Wonderland by Norman 'Monkey Business' McLeod, starring Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, and W.C. Fields, now on DVD with a rave from Alice: 'A revolution in cinema history!'"

But only one can boast the endorsement of the original Alice: the 1933 Paramount "Alice in Wonderland," being released to DVD by Universal Studios Home Entertainment ($19.98, not rated), the current rights holder. In a Jan. 7, 1934, article in The New York Times, Alice Liddell, quoted under her married name, Mrs. Reginald Hargreaves, expressed admiration for the film that Hollywood had wrought from the story Carroll had invented for her some seven decades before.

"I am delighted with the film and am now convinced that only through the medium of the talking picture art could this delicious fantasy be faithfully interpreted," she declared, her words possibly burnished by a Paramount publicist. " 'Alice' is a picture which represents a revolution in cinema history!"

Another Trippy Rabbit Hole

Alice in Wonderland (1933)

(Thanks, Steve!)

Oh, this is very good news: the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie will be based on Tim Powers's kick-ass, World-Fantasy-Award-winning novel On Stranger Tides, the greatest undead pirate story of all time. Go, Tim! Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. (Thanks, Rob!)

An anonymous reader writes with this interesting bit of speculation: "NASA can put humanoids on the Moon in just 1000 days. They would be controlled by scientists on Earth using motion capture suits, giving them the feeling of being on the lunar surface. If they can achieve this for real, the results for science research of our satellite could be amazing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When we talk about the various new business models that work well for content creators, one of the complaints that some of our regular critics have pointed out is that if most of the people are getting the content for free, and only a small group of superfans are paying, aren't those who pay getting "ripped off" somehow -- leading to them eventually jumping on the free-rider bandwagon and leaving no one to pay? Reader JJ sent over a well-articulated version of this argument by a self-described cynical musician in a Polish hard rock band. He describes this as: The Hunt For The Big Dope.

Tragically, this is a total misunderstanding of the economic arguments people make. In fact, it's a gross distortion of the argument to make it easy to dismiss, rather than taking the time to understand it. In fact, what we're really arguing is the opposite of finding the big dope. It's about using content to create fewer dopes, replacing them with people who are willingly buying something of value that they actually want. It's the old system that was focused on getting big dopes to pay for things they didn't need or want. The new business models that we talk about -- focused on giving people a reason to buy -- are about just that: offering scarce value, above and beyond the content, that is worth buying -- and that helps fund the content creation. There's no big dope in this scenario, because the people who are buying get a lot more than just the content, and they're thrilled with the transaction. Everyone comes out of the transaction better off.

If you believe in the "big dope" theory put forth by this guy, then anyone who buys a car is a "big dope," because they're financing all of those commercials, which they get to see on TV without paying for them. The percentage of people who buy a car that they saw in a TV commercial compared to the number of people who actually see the commercial is a tiny, tiny number. But does that make those buyers "big dopes?" Of course not. They got something they wanted (a car). Yes, that's a more extreme example, but when you recognize that the content is acting as an advertisement for the bigger reasons to buy, making them more valuable, the analogy fits perfectly. A large percentage of people will never buy products they find out about via an advertisement. But some do. And if enough do, and the product they're driven to buy is scarce and valuable enough, the company makes money. Same thing for content creators.

They're not looking for "big dopes." They're looking for people who want to make an informed decision, in which they get something of additional scarce value, well beyond the content. That sure beats the old system, which appeared to be focused on hiding the content to force a bunch of dopes to pay without knowing what they'd get -- leading them to be disappointed all too often. No offense to this particular musician, but I'd rather have the system I describe, with no dopes at all, than the old one he appears to pine for, in which all your fans are considered dopes.

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CWmike writes "A federal judge has dismissed a year-old lawsuit against Microsoft over alleged antitrust violations for the 'downgrade' rules it set for Windows Vista and XP. The order put an end to the lawsuit filed by Emma Alvarado in February 2009. In her original complaint, she accused Microsoft of coercing computer makers into forcing consumers who wanted to run Windows XP to first buy Windows Vista, or later, Windows 7, before they were allowed to downgrade to XP. The judge rejected Alvarado's accusations, saying that the plaintiff had not proved Microsoft benefited from the downgrade practices that it created and that OEMs implemented."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photos of the prototypes of the Make: Electronics Components Packs. Our art department is still working on lovely sticker art for the cases. Each will also come with a cool Maker Shed Electronics Cheat Sheet (with resistor code values, etc).

 

They've been months in the making, in fact, the robo-elves in the Shed are still putting their greasy little end-effectors on the finishing touches, but I wanted to show 'em off to you anyway. It's the Make: Electronics Components Pack 1 and Components Pack 2, almost everything you need to build the projects from Chapter 1-4 of our tech bestseller Make: Electronics (e.g. sorry but we don't provide the lemons for the lemon battery experiment -- but don't think we didn't consider it!). In fact, we carefully considered everything that goes into these kits, and what they go into -- nice, sturdy compartmented plastic storage cases.

Pack 1 has over 200 components, Pack 2, over 100. And because nearly all of the projects are breadboarded, when you're done doing the experiments in the book, you'll still have nearly 300 components and two cases to get you off and running in your newfound electronics hobby. We say nearly 300, because some of the parts are intentionally harmed in the conducting of these experiments. But not to worry, none of the expensive ones. What are a few fried resistors amongst friends?

Component Pack 1 sells for $99.95 and is available for pre-order now and will be available mid-March. You can sign up to be alerted to Component Pack 2's availability and price. It too should be available mid-month.

Wanna get free shipping on the Component Pack 1? The Shed currently has a deal. Until the end of February, get free shipping on all orders over $125! Just enter coupon code FEBSHIP to your cart prior to checkout. Prior to entering the code, make sure your cart totals at least $125; free shipping will then be pre-selected from the drop-down shipping option.

And don't forget, Maker Shed also offers the Deluxe Toolkit, which includes the tools you need for the book (and getting started in electronics in general), a copy of Make: Electronics itself, and the newest edition of our popular Maker's Notebook.

In the Maker Shed:

Deluxe Make: Electronics Toolkit
Our Price: $124.99
Do you want to learn the fundamentals of electronics in a fun and experiential way? Not sure where to start, or what tools you might need? We've taken care of all the questions with our deluxe tool kit from the Maker Shed, featuring our best-selling book, Make: Electronics.

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An anonymous reader writes "Less than one second Linux boot! This video shows an OMAP3530 capturing video data from a camera and rendering it to an LCD display — the video appears on the LCD display in less than a second from reset."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For years we've tried to explain the difference between ideas and execution, and how lots of people have ideas (in fact, many have the same ideas entirely independently), but without good execution, those ideas aren't really worth much at all. This point comes up a lot in the debates we have over the patent system -- with patent system supporters often overvaluing the idea part, and grossly underestimating the importance of execution. Often this is because they've never built a real business, and don't realize how little an initial idea plays into the final product. The two are often oceans apart. But stopping others from executing well (or forcing them to fork over a ton of money) just because they executed well where you did not? That doesn't seem like encouraging innovation or promoting progress at all.

DSchneider points us to an excellent recent Jeff Attwood post about the differences between the idea and the execution. It's well worth reading as it covers a bunch of different things, including a common refrain made against those who successfully execute: that they were only able to do so because they were "well-connected." As he notes, being well connected may get you an initial head start, but if you can't execute well, no one will come back. The idea, alone, is almost meaningless.

Attwood highlights this by pointing to a recent letter to a mailing list from one of the guys who started a crowdfunding operation called Fundable a while back, which failed miserably (and very spectacularly in public, with an open letter posted to its website laying out all the dirty laundry). There were all sorts of problems with the execution, which the guy even admits:

Yes, Fundable had some technical and customer service problems. That's because we had no money to revise it. I had plans to scrap the entire CMS and start from scratch with a new design. We were just so burned out that motivation was hard to come by. What was the point if we weren't making enough money to live on after 4 years?

The "technical and customer service problems" underplayed how significant some of those problems were. And yet... now that other crowdfunding platforms are getting attention, such as Kickstarter, this guy is crazy upset that they "stole his idea."

I feel that this story is important to tell you because Kickstarter.com copied us. I tried for 4 years to get people to take Fundable seriously, traveling across the country, even giving a presentation to FBFund, Facebook's fund to stimulate development of new apps. It was a series of rejections for 4 years. I really felt that I presented myself professionally in every business situation and I dressed appropriately and practiced my presentations. That was not enough. The idiots wanted us to show them charts with massive profits and widespread public acceptance so that they didn't have to take any risks....

I cannot tell you how painful it is to watch 5 assholes take your idea and run with it and not even give you credit. I hate all 5 of them for that. If I see them, I may punch each one of them in the face. If you have never started your own company and then had someone else steal the credit for what you worked hard to develop, you don't understand.

Now, I have started my own company, and I've had lots of other people either come up with the same idea separately, or even blatantly decide to do something similar to various aspects of our business. So I do know how it feels. And, certainly when you first hear about it, it may be annoying, but it's really just a challenge. I'll be honest, there are times when others have done a better job executing on ideas than I have in the past, and in the end you either compete, or you tip your hat and move on. Competition breeds innovation and better execution since you know you need to do more. And that means not screwing up your technology and customer service and not lashing out and blaming others when someone else executes better.

And, the thing is, given what we write about, and all the business model examples we've see over the years, we're pretty damn familiar with many of the players in the whole "crowdfunding space." There have been lots of players who have come and gone, and there are at least a dozen players in the space today. And it's not because they all "took" the idea from this guy, but because lots of people recognized that it's an idea that makes sense. Kickstarter is certainly getting a ton of press these days, but that's mostly because of some top notch execution on its part.

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Vik Olliver put up a great tutorial about how you can successfully drill down the middle of a shaft using a standard drill press and cheap vice. To do this, you drill the part backwards, by putting the drill bit in the vice and the part in the drill press chuck. The trick is that you can line up the vice precisely by placing the drill bit into the chuck upside down, lowering the tool, then using it to align and clamp down the vice. Once the vice is secured, you release the drill bit from the chuck (but not the vice), and put the part in the chuck. Of course, a lathe might be preferable, but sometimes you have to work with the tools you have! [via Hack a Day]

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You may recall a few years back that a teenager, Whitney Harper, who was getting sued by the record labels/RIAA for file sharing, claimed that the amount she should have to pay up should be less than the $750 statutory minimum, because she was an "innocent infringer," unaware that what she was doing in listening to music was against the law. In fact, she didn't even realize she was sharing files, but thought she was just listening to music, like radio. Surprisingly, the lower court actually agreed with her and said that $200 per song (for the 37 songs) was an appropriate amount. But, of course, the RIAA appealed, as (despite claims to the contrary in the Tenenbaum and Thomas-Rasset case) they need those huge potential amounts to use as a sledge hammer against file sharers. Unfortunately, an appeals court has overturned the lower court ruling, and said that the statutory minimum of $750 per infringement should apply -- saying that the innocent infringement defense isn't applicable because the CDs the music came on (which she never saw) had proper copyright notices.

As you may know, copyright law does allow for reduced statutory damages on innocent infringement, "where the infringer sustains the burden of proving . . . that [she] was not aware and had no reason to believe that . . . her acts constituted an infringement of copyright." Given the details of this case, that seemed to apply -- but the appeals court was having none of it. In the decision, it argues that the law says an innocent infringer defense cannot be applied (with one exception irrelevant to this case) if a proper copyright notice "appears on the published . . . phonorecords to which a defendant . . . had access."

The court the says that because copyright notices are found regularly on CDs, then Harper effectively "had access" to those recordings, at least enough to know they were covered by copyright. Not surprisingly, I find this argument to be quite troubling. If we assume it is accurate that Harper was using LimeWire as if it were a radio to listen to music, then how would she know that she was violating the copyright on the recordings at all? Would someone listening to the radio know? What about someone listening to Pandora or Spotify. Based on this ruling, anyone can be put at risk of much larger statutory damages for copyright if they simply don't know if the online streaming service they're using has properly cleared the copyrights. That does not seem like a conclusion that makes sense, or would have been intended by Congress. Did Congress really intend for each user to do the research before using any online music service to make sure those services had properly cleared the copyrights?

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Michael Scott points us to the news that a French court has ruled that an IP address is not enough to identify a single individual. Now, obviously, many of us agree with this general point, and we've brought that up time and time again in the past when lawsuits insisted that a single IP address was enough to identify a user. And, given that France now has its three strikes law which will be based in large part on entertainment companies indicating a single IP address as evidence of infringement, this might seem like a good ruling. But in this case, there's another side to it which is important. The reason why the court ruled that an IP address doesn't identify an individual, is to say that it is not a privacy violation to get someone's IP address.

This isn't a new issue. We discussed a similar case before, and I actually think, on the whole, it's correct. An IP address shouldn't be considered private information directly, since it doesn't identify a individual and you effectively have to give it out just to use the internet. But for people who argue that revealing IP addresses is a violation of confidential information, they might not like this ruling very much. On the whole, though, I think in the long run it's better to have a world where the courts recognize that an IP address does not identify a user, even if it means that IP addresses aren't considered private info.

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Sexy Librarians is just one of several fantastic embroidery patterns made by Sublime ? Stitching and for sale in the Boing Boing Bazaar. There's also Meaty Treats, Vital Organs, and Lucha Libre. Check them all out here. And check out the rest of the Makers Market for more maker-made marvelousness.

Sublime ? Stitching

I'm not sure what's going on here but it appears to be an ode to space elevators. The uploader's YouTube channel also has similar videos saluting the Pioneer and Voyager space probes as well as one talking about terraforming Mars. [via the Space Elevator blog]

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PCM2 writes "ABC News is reporting that the US Secret Service is in dire need of server upgrades. 'Currently, 42 mission-oriented applications run on a 1980s IBM mainframe with a 68 percent performance reliability rating,' says one leaked memo. That finding was the result of an NSA study commissioned by the Secret Service to evaluate the severity of their computer problems. Curiously, upgrades to the Service's computers are being championed by Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who says he's had 'concern for a while' about the issue."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You may recall, back before The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden, a story came out about how the lead police investigator in the case just happened to take a job at Warner Bros. movie studio while The Pirate Bay investigation was still ongoing. This, obviously lead to quite reasonable questions of conflicts of interest, and even corruption. It's hard to see how anyone could justify a police investigator agreeing to a job with a party in a lawsuit that he was currently investigating. But, for whatever reason, the police decided to protect one of their own, and saw no reason for an investigation.

The job at Warner Bros. only lasted (as originally intended) for six months, and then the guy, Jim Keyzer, went back to work for the police. TorrentFreak is reporting that he's now in charge of the IT crime unit, which has the mandate to investigate file-sharing cases.

At the very least, this raises extremely serious conflict of interest questions. The guy was involved in an investigation, hired for a "temporary" job by one of the parties in that investigation -- and then after the job is over, he goes back to work for the police on other investigations that will almost certainly involve the company he took money from for six months. I can understand people taking jobs back and forth between the public and private sector, but the timing of all this seems very suspect, and it seems like the Swedish police should at least set things up so that the conflict of interest is removed, and someone else is in charge of such investigations for the time being.

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I'll be attending a screening of the much-tweeted horrorschlock instaclassic Birdemic tomorrow night in LA, hosted by Tim & Eric ("Season Cinco" of their show debuts Sunday night, and also promises to be great).

Directed by James Nguyen, Birdemic is sort of The Birds meets The Room. Richard Metzger has a comprehensive post about Birdemic over at the LA Times "Brand X" blog. LA folks: The Saturday night Cinefamily screening of Birdemic is sold out, but they've added a second one for March 5. And LOL and behold: Birdemic's on Twitter.

NotAnIndividual writes "On an ice fishing trip two months ago, I lost my iPhone somewhere in the snow. I searched and searched, but to no avail. But just this weekend when moving the ice hut, lo and behold there it was. I quickly threw it into a bag of rice and placed it under a lamp to defrost. Three hours later I plugged it in. I wasn't expecting much. I mean, really, it had been frozen in snow for the last two months! To my surprise, the Apple logo popped up. I put in the SIM card and voila, my iPhone was back. My apps, my contacts, my music and more importantly my life were back. And this is the same iPhone that I dropped in a cup of coffee a few months ago! This got me wondering how much damage a cell phone can actually take. How have other Slashdot users punished their phones without actually killing them completely?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tofu Wrestling. Feel free to be outraged, disgusted, or turned on. (NSFW, via Brooklyn Vegan.)

Illustration for "The Many Arms of Promotion," by Alicia Traveria for Venuszine.

Our pal, Jenny Hart, of Austin's Sublime Stitching, has a monthly column called "Crafting a Business" over on Venuszine. There's a lot of information here applicable to any type of crafting/making business.

It seems to me that somewhere between working average day jobs and having your own successful business, there would be a scary transition. How did you handle that? Any tips for crafty women who would like to do the same but who don't have the courage?

You bet it was scary. Lost sleep, constant worrying, and seemingly endless work at two jobs: my day job and my dream job. It still is scary. But the scary part is different now. Attempts at making bigger strides, having more demand than resources to meet those demands, managing money wisely, and trying to find financial backing and business people in the industry who get the DIY movement (psst ... they don't) to possibly partner with. I've often felt very much like running a successful business is discovering the emperor has no clothes. Only, you're king at your own company, which means you're the one feeling naked.

From: Starting a small business is all about being innovative and savvy and learning from mistakes

What professional advisers should a small-business person hook up with at the beginning?

Every business will eventually need a lawyer and an accountant, but small businesses can often do without either for a while. A lot will depend on the kind of business you're running. If you need to incorporate right off the bat or have copyright, trademark, and/or patent concerns, then you'll want a lawyer right away. Even small service firms are wise to have a lawyer available for assistance with wording contracts, partnership agreements, and so on, though you can get a long way on the advice of books, small-business resource centers (many states have government-funded programs to help entrepreneurs with basic contract templates and such), and the occasional e-mail or phone call to a lawyer just to make sure your T's are crossed and your I's dotted. As for accounting help, if you're like us and start out as a partnership (the equivalent of an LLP in the U.S.), you can probably get away with just having a bookkeeper (which is a lot cheaper than an accountant), but if and when you incorporate, you'll need an accountant for sure.

From: Knowing how and when to hire a good adviser

You can read all of her columns to date here.

More:

• Maker Business: Magnolia Atomworks, part 3
• Maker Business: Magnolia Atomworks, part 2
• Maker Business: Magnolia Atomworks
• Exploring the business of making
• Maker Business: Venturing out...

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