Just recently, we discussed whether or not ceasing Saturday delivery was a good idea or not for the USPS. John Potter, the US Postmaster General, recently said that the postal service's business model is as outdated as the newspaper industry's. Potter said:

"Twenty years ago we would laugh at the notion that a newspaper would ever embrace the idea that maybe the channel of the future is electronic and that you may have to change your business model,"

Sure, similarities between the industries definitely exist. Craigslist is a much cheaper and more efficient marketplace for local goods than the classifieds section in the newspaper ever was, and email is a much cheaper and more efficient means of communication than snail mail. That said, whereas for the newspaper industry, delivering a daily, physical newspaper to households may actually be an endangered business, the business itself of delivering physical items to households is still very much in demand. After all, with so much shopping happening online nowadays, someone still has to deliver the goods (until replicators, a la Star Trek, are perfected). In fact, for over a decade now, we've been talking about this opportunity to optimize the "last mile," and as of yet, nobody has really even come close to solving this problem.

That said, the USPS is a government institution, and even though it does not take any tax funding to run, an attempt to attack this opportunity may best be mounted by the private sector (like UPS and FedEx), especially when you consider the USPS's projected $238 billion shortfall for the upcoming decade. So, since it's not a private business, the best solution for the USPS may be to simply accept its diminishing role in the daily lives of Americans, and focus on continuing to run as efficiently as possible for as long as it remains useful. That said, the other solution may be to remove the government-mandated monopoly and privatize the USPS, and then let that private entity decide whether or not to invest in the business. Either way, it seems silly to ask taxpayers to invest anything further in the USPS since so many alternatives exist already. We should definitely all be appreciative of the part that the Postal Service has played in the foundation of our country, but what else can be done?

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Check out this excellent instructable that shows you how to bend mains wire into a roller coaster track for a ball bearing.

More:

• How ball bearings are made
• HOW TO - Make a ball bearing trampoline game
• Right on Track - Rolling Ball Sculpture

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superapecommando writes in with news that in the UK, Liberal Democratic peers will soften their filtering amendment to the Digital Economy Bill, to allow those wrongfully accused of illegal filesharing to sue the rightsholders in court. The previous version of the Bill had drawn instant criticism from some of the world's largest technology companies, including eBay, Google, and Yahoo, who signed an open letter against the filtering proposal. Blogger Glyn Moody summed up opposition to the Bill, stating that in its previous form, it was "utterly one-sided, where the only winners are a music recording industry too lazy to change, and the losers are everyone else."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've talked a lot about the fact that adveritisng is content and content is advertising. But, it seems worth mixing a bit of e-commerce into that story as well. As we've been noting (separately), many of the business models that work today have a strong direct-to-consumer component -- giving them a "reason to buy." And, in fact, here at Techdirt, we've begun to blur those lines ourselves -- with various community offerings, including unique opportunities for companies to participate and/or sponsor online conversations, but also with our own CwF+RtB offering, which is really an e-commerce setup.

In the long run, business models are going to combine all these different elements. As we've noted, one of the key scarcities out there is attention -- and that's been the arena that the media business has always been in.

So perhaps it shouldn't be all that surprising to see traditional e-commerce players beginning to realize this themselves from the other direction. That is, many large online retailers are suddenly recognizing that they get a lot of traffic and they can sell that traffic to advertisers (including advertisers from their own competitors) at a nice premium. Of course, I'm not convinced that traditional banner/text advertising will really be all that lucrative in the long term, but it would be interesting to see online retailers work harder at giving people additional reasons to visit their sites beyond just the products alone. We've seen some glimpses of this, such as when Amazon tried to do an online talk show, but I'd bet that we're going to start seeing some much more creative online retail efforts that introduce "content" into the mix more effectively to create other types of scarcities.

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Red Red Robots make murals for kids' room walls. In this "Fantastic Forest" mural, a girl's name, "Eliza," is spelled out by fanciful characters speaking the appropriate letters... But the "I" is being said by a robot. Gettit? Asimov, an inveterate punster, would have loved this.

Red Red Robot Murals (Thanks, Arian!)

A paper in Proceedings of the NAS showed that scientists were able to successfully predict who owned which keyboard and mouse based on the bacteria left behind on the keys. Each of us carries a wealth of micro-organisms (you've got 100 times more non-human cells in your body than human cells!) and that microbial nation is distinctive -- maybe as distinctive as a fingerprint. Wired talked to a microbiologist who wasn't impressed with the technique for criminal forensics (we don't know yet if microbial nations are static or if they change over time, nor how unique each one truly is), but they do note that microbes are useful in forensically distinguishing between identical twins.

"The results demonstrate that bacterial DNA can be recovered from relatively small surfaces, that the composition of the keyboard-associated communities are distinct across the three keyboards, and that individuals leave unique bacterial 'fingerprints' on their keyboards," wrote Knight and his colleagues at the University of Colorado, Boulder in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...

"If humans are thought of as a composite of microbial and human cells, the human genetic landscape as an aggregate of the genes in the human genome and the microbiome, and human metabolic features as a blend of human and microbial traits, then the picture that emerges is one of a human 'supra-organism'," argued a 2007 Nature paper lead-authored by Peter Turnbaugh, a Harvard microbiologist.

You're Leaving a Bacterial Fingerprint on Your Keyboard

Forensic identification using skin bacterial communities

(Image: Toshiba M30 keyboard cleaning -IMGP7931, a Creative Commons Attribution image from footloosiety's photostream)

I'm intrigued by this Time Out review of Kitchen Front, a restaurant at London's Imperial War museum that serves accurate re-creations of the (mostly horrible) food eaten in Britain during WWII's rationing period. Time Out gave it two star for food quality and full marks for accuracy (in the print edition, at least -- they haven't recreated this online). It sounds like a uniquely wonderful and horrible dining experience, especially as the food is prepared by a well-loved firm of caterers who've really gotten into the spirit of things.

Salt was the dominant flavour of 'Mrs Harwood's lentil and cheese pie'. It tasted floury and bland - my grandmother used to make the same dish. I couldn't fault it for authenticity. It came with a dollop of sludgy green pease pudding, just as it might have been in the war years.

The baked potato, though, was quite good, served with a fishy filling and a proper 1940s salad - English lettuce, rings of spring onion, no dressing.

Sweets include scones filled with 'mock cream' made from margarine beaten with caster sugar, tasting exactly as you'd imagine it to, ie nothing like cream at all... [B]e warned that for a more fortunate generation brought up on meat, sweets, fats and deftly used spices, the drabness of austerity cooking can come as a bit of a shock

I've subscribed to the print edition of Time Out for a few years now here in London -- it's the only print magazine I still subscribe to, in fact -- and I just love it to pieces. As aspirational reading about all the things I would do if I wasn't all the time running around like my ass was on fire, it can't be beat. And every now and again I get to actually follow some of its advice (I've been trying a lot of the coffee mentioned in its Best London Coffee feature last month -- yum!) and I'm never disappointed.

Kitchen Front

Andrew from League of Steam sez, "A hilarious 3-minute web video in which the League of STEAM (steampunk ghostbusters/monster hunters) attempts to capture a mean little leprechaun. Slapstick humor, top-quality special effects, and cool steampunk gadgets and guns: the perfect geeky/sci-fi flick for St. Patrick's day! Enjoy!"

Lovely work, guys -- nice use of the Wilhelm Scream!

Adventures of the League of STEAM - "Fool's Gold"

ElectricSteve writes "Researchers have been searching for a highly targeted medical treatment that attacks cancer cells but leaves healthy tissue alone. The approach taken by scientists at Washington University in St. Louis is to use 'gold nanocages' that, when injected, selectively accumulate in tumors. When the tumors are later bathed in laser light, the surrounding tissue is barely warmed, but the nanocages convert light to heat, killing the malignant cells. ... Although the tumors took up enough gold nanocages to give them a black cast, only 6 percent of the injected particles accumulated at the tumor site. They would like that number to be closer to 40 percent so that fewer particles would have to be injected. They plan to attach tailor-made ligands to the nanocages that recognize and lock onto receptors on the surface of the tumor cells. ... The scientists at WUSTL have just received a five-year, $2.1M grant from the National Cancer Institute to continue their work with photothermal therapy." Note that Gizmag features a stupid Subscribe nag that covers your screen after about a minute; sounds like a job for NoScript. Last year we discussed somewhat similar research using titanium dioxide nanoparticles to target a particular kind of brain cancer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yvan Arpa's coprolite watch is a US$11,290 timepiece with a face made from fossil dinosaur turds and a band made from black cane-toad skin (normally poisonous, rendered inert through processing).

The thing is, coprolites just aren't that valuable. Dinosaurs left behind a lot of crap. This site sells coprolite at $8 per pound (it makes a wicked gift!).

Swiss luxury watch made of fossilized dinosaur feces, toad skin costs $11,290 (Photo) (Thanks, Jonathan!)

Back in 2003, we had written about how Verizon's CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, was betting big on future technologies. It was in response to a Business Week profile that oddly positioned the idea of installing fiber-to-the-home as being a huge risk. Lots of investors were against it, because it was expensive. But if you looked at where the market was really heading, you could see that it would position Verizon way ahead of the competition. Broadband keeps getting faster. While other companies were focusing on minor incremental improvements, Verizon wanted to leapfrog them all -- and has done a damn good job of it. In many of the markets where Verizon FiOS is now offered, the competition is left in the dust.

But, now, it sounds like the bean counters with a shortsighted quarterly focus may be winning out. Broadband Reports is noting that Verizon is basically giving up on any more FiOS implementations. If you're in an area that's not covered, don't expect Verizon to show up at your door with a fiber optic cable any time soon. In fact, they're using the "threat" of not installing fiber to try to get more cash from the government:

But according to long-time industry analyst Dave Burstein, Verizon's essentially cutting and running on additional deployment plans, leaving a very large chunk of their footprint on last-generation DSL and copper-based voice networks.

Burstein tells Broadband Reports that he doesn't see Verizon expanding any further (with the exception of major cities where they've signed franchise agreements) unless they get money from Uncle Sam. "They want to get on the gravy train, although I think the new, less competitive leadership is the primary explanation," says Burstein when asked why. Seidenberg, the driving force behind the first wave of FiOS, is on his way out -- and his replacements aren't quite as bullish on angering investors for the sake of this whole "future" thing.

Of course, they can do that when there isn't any real competition on the horizon. We can hope that Google's toe dipping into high speed broadband turns into a bigger deal (at which point Google becomes the disruptive future-looking company instead of Verizon), but there's still not much of an indication that the company is planning to ever roll broadband out on a widespread basis. In the meantime, of course, other countries that have much greater competition are also enjoying much faster speeds. And, rather than dealing with that, the FCC is talking to puppets (literally) about protecting kids from the evils of broadband. And we wonder why we're so far behind other countries in broadband speeds.

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The Times of India reports that "Two people were on Tuesday morning involved in a shootout with Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) security personnel around its high-security facility at Bylalu near Bangalore."

In response to DIY Movie Making Month, one of our readers, Angela Sheehan, sent us this wonderful little movie she made with her (then six-year-old) sister:

This is a stop-motion collage I made, based on drawings by my little sister (six years old at the time). Back in 2005, I was studying animation and taking classes in childhood development/learning and wanted to combine the two. I decided to make a movie with her over Thanksgiving break. I gave her some paper and crayons and asked her to write me a story. I took some video of her drawing and showing her grandparents the story and describing it to them. It was fun to see how she told the story differently to each person and all the little details she included when asked about different parts of the drawings. Back at school, I scanned her drawings in and printed out copies that I then animated to her narration. My dorm room was a giant mess of paper and a camera for about a week. It was a blast. I showed her the finished product over my winter break and she loved it. I would've loved to involve her more in the actual animation process, but my school was too far away.

Getting kids involved in rendering their stories and ideas in a more permanent, "high-bandwidth" way, is a great way to bring a sense of importance to their ideas, get them making and being creative, and just a fun way to engage with them. Or as Angela put it: "This project is part documentation, part observation and interest in children's imagination, and part sisterly bonding." And you have an awesome keepsake when you're done that you'll all cherish as they grow older.

To create The Three Girls, Angela used paper cutouts, animated using iStopMotion, with animated text and compositing in Adobe AfterEffects, and editing in FinalCut Express. [Thanks, Angela!]

The Three Girls

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Miles Davis called him "the most impressive musician in the world". He's Hermeto Pascoal from Brasil, and this is how he does it:

Aside from Hermeto's infectiously liberated attitude, this performance is unique as an exploration of the physical edge of two sound mediums. He makes entirely underwater concerts seem tame by comparison.

Full disclosure: when I was in high school I used to spend a couple of hours a day in the bathtub listening to what water did to different sounds - now I can see what a flute and an explosion of yellow butterflies would have added...

Author and Internet researcher Jonathan Zittrain got hit with a mysterious but serious illness that doctors couldn't figure out. A friend created a blog (with Zittrain's identity veiled, for privacy) to crowdsource the investigation into why he was illin'—and it looks like they've figured it out. Zittrain is on the road to recovery, and is no longer in need of help finding out why. Yay, internet, and yay, smart doctors! Get well soon, Jonathan.

Alex Ringis in Australia has been observing coverage of the "Red Shirt" protests in Thailand in recent days. Word on the street was that the anti-government protesters mixed up many tons of fish sauce (a stinky fermented condiment, like soy sauce only fishy-foul) and human feces as a sort of homemade non-lethal weapon. "Yep, fish sauce and SHIT. Anybody who gets in their way will have that lovely concoction hurled at them." Alex sends an update today:

Our friends in Bangkok have said they're staying indoors and out of the way, as moving around in the city at this stage is pretty pointless, and nobody wants to catch any stray bullets, heaven forbid. Local Bangkokers at this stage seem to just be pretty bloody annoyed that a bunch of country bumpkins have rolled in and stopped them from going about their daily business, at least at this stage.

Today the Red Shirts gathered outside the 11th Infantry Regiment's army base in Bangkok - said to be where PM Abhisit Vejajiva was holding up - he left via helicopter not long after they arrived. Interesting trivia is that the Military's way of dealing with them was playing them I'saan music over loudhailers, and it was also reported that they even addressed the crowd as "brothers and sisters", speaking in I'saan.

What's transpiring is very interesting - the Red Shirts clearly want some
kind of a confrontation, or violence, to prove that the "evil" government
intends to repress and harm them. But so far, the Military and the
government have been on their best behaviour.

The question remains, what will the extreme elements within the red shirts
(who were said to have started the violence in April 09's protests) do
when they realise that the Military is not going to fire the first shot?
Latest reports have the Red Shirts saying that Government Ministers will
have to "Walk across one thousand liters of blood" to get to work at
government house tomorrow - so it remains to be seen what they mean by
that.

Today news that four M-79 grenades were fired into a military batallion
outside the State TV headquarters, and STILL no military crackdown. This
is incredible and unprecedented - the army are quite obviously on their
best behaviour. The Bangkok Post reports that arrests have been made in
connection with the case.

So far, our direct sources in Bangkok seem to be the best source of
information. The Nation and The Bangkok Post (the two main English
Dailies) are respectively suspiciously quiet, and suspiciously biased, so
I'm thinking there's multiple gag orders in play, though I do get some
decent tidbids now and then from my favorite Bangkok blog - 2bangkok.com

The rumour at present is that Thaksin Shinawatra is in Montenegro - both
Germany and the UK have said that they would not accept him, and if he was
recognised in their country, he would be detained. The man is literally on
the run, as it were.

And finally, my personal feeling is that the "mainstream media"
organisation that seems to be offering the absolute best coverage on the
situation so far is - surprise surprise - Al Jazzeera's English service.
Im guessing their primary interest is based on the fact that Thaksin
Shinawatra was a resident of Dubai for the past twelve months or so - in
any case, they are covering the story closely, and it's been on the front
page for over 12 hours.

Also - I watched a video of a Red Shirt speaker ("Arisman") in an
upcountry pep rally ranting against the government last night. I won't
bother posting the link here - it's all in Thai and there's no subtitles,
but in a nutshell, the notable talking points were some bizarre conspiracy
theories about the government involving bio-weapons, and more
interestingly, he was inciting red shirters and saying that if the
government did not give into their demands, that they would "wipe off the
face of Thailand" all the governments "sensitive sites", including Siriraj
hospital. Siriraj hospital is where the ailing King Bhumipol Adulyadej is
and has been treated for many months. Yes, they are "peaceful" protesters,
apparently.

Let's hope that tomorrow is as peaceful as Sunday turned out to be.

An oldie, but relevant : this was me rather tipsily interviewing some people about the Red Vs Yellow situation in Thailand, back in May last year. FYI, this guy is a TYPICAL "Red Shirter" - lower class, menial laborer - lovely guy. I often joke with friends that if they just instituted a minimum wage in Bangkok, this entire political mess would go away overnight. But sadly, it's true.

And another video: First Civilian victim of a "Red Shirt" Protestor. FYI the cameraman is
shouting "POLICE! POLICE!", and when the Police enter they shout "STOP,
STOP NOW PLEASE, STOP!"

Video of Red Shirt operatives handing out money to protesters. It should be noted that a) The guy handing out the money has a literal WAD of 1000 Baht notes (1000 THB = roughly AU$33 - enough to eat in Bangkok for over a month) and b) The guy on the loudhailer appears to be shouting in either Lao, or Isan - two dialects not native to Bangkok - probably due to the large number of "up country" people who have been bussed in for the protests.

Another Ladyada soon-to-be classic - connecting a parallel LCD to an Arduino, this one covers character LCDs.

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So, just last week we noted that Netflix had gotten itself into a bit of hot water for its Netflix prize contest, which used real user data -- which was supposed to be anonymous. Unfortunately, as with most such data, it wasn't really anonymous, and that's illegal -- especially when it comes to movie rental data. Because of all that, Netflix has also canceled plans for a follow-up prize competition. However, just as that happened, reports were coming out that MySpace has begun selling user data. Among the data up for sale? "User playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes. You would have to imagine that at least some people might not be happy about that.

Now, to be fair, the info you provide MySpace is public -- while the info you provide Netflix is not. However, you could certainly see some people not being particularly thrilled that MySpace is now directly selling that information, and you have to imagine that someone will file a lawsuit before too long over this data.

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How awesome is this drill powered drum roaster? Very awesome.

I never tire of seeing new takes on building your own sample roaster. Keeping the beans moving is the key to an even roast. Tim Eggers decided to use a drill to turn his drum, made from a soup can. He cut and folded vanes into the drum to aid the tumbling. A second soup can drum focuses the heat from his stove-top burner. Genius idea, and look at those lovely beans.

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We mentioned late last year how open source software called Ushahidi — which means 'testimony' in Swahili — developed for election monitoring in Kenya was being used to similar effect in Afghanistan. Now reader Peace Corps Online adds a report from the NY Times that Usahidi's is now becoming a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes. "Ushahidi is used to gather distributed data via SMS, email, or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. The program was developed after violence erupted during Kenya's disputed election in 2007. Ory Okolloh, a prominent Kenyan lawyer and blogger, had gone back to Kenya to vote and observe the election. After receiving threats about her work, she returned to South Africa where she posted her idea of an Internet mapping tool to allow people to report anonymously on violence and other misdeeds. Volunteers built the Ushahidi Web platform over a long weekend, and the site began plotting on a map, using the locations given by informants, user-generated cellphone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes, and deaths. When the Haitian earthquake struck, Ushahidi went into action receiving thousands of messages reporting trapped victims; the same happened following the Chile earthquake. The Washington Post also used Ushahidi during the recent blizzards to build a site to map road blockages and the location of available snowplows and blowers. 'Ushahidi suggests a new paradigm in humanitarian work,' writes Anand Giridharadas. 'The old paradigm was one-to-many: foreign journalists and aid workers jet in, report on a calamity, and dispense aid with whatever data they have. The new paradigm is many-to-many-to-many: victims supply on-the-ground data; a self-organizing mob of global volunteers translates text messages and helps to orchestrate relief; then journalists and aid workers use the data to target the response.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spotted in the MAKE Forums:

Mischka modified this motion-activated greeting toy, making it into a simple sample and loop frog noise machine. There don't seem to an explanation of how it was done, but it looks like a fun project!

More:

• Flashback: Circuit Bending
• How-To: Circuit-bending the VL-Tone
• Circuit bending work station
• MIDI-controlled circuit bending interface
• Cheap and easy patchbay for circuit bending

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Lawrence Lessig tweets, "Jonathan Zittrain is really sick. He has open-sourced his diagnosis." From the blog intro: "Why we're open sourcing this strange case: Because it's a strange case, a "fascinoma" that lies along the long tail of diagnoses rather than anything obvious. Many eyes make all bugs (including bacteria?) shallow."

We've written before about the libel fight that Simon Singh is fighting in the UK, where the British Chiropractic Assocation sued him for libel for saying that some of the things that the BCA claimed chiropractors could do were "bogus." Singh, who has a PhD. and has written numerous books about science, was pointing out that the BCA was making claims that had little scientific evidence to back them up -- hence "bogus." Tragically a court focused on the use of that word, suggesting that Singh meant the BCA had engaged in deliberate dishonesty, rather than just aggressive marketing. Because of the amount of time and resources it is taking him to fight this, Singh is now giving up his column in The Guardian, noting just how damaging a ridiculous libel lawsuit can be on individuals.

The only good news out of this is that the lawsuit against Singh has brought about two important forms of backlash:

1. A large group of concerned citizens online have actively been debunking claims from the BCA, and getting official investigations started of any chiropractor that makes bogus (yes, bogus) claims about what chiropractors can cure.
2. Singh's case has become a focal point in a new, much-needed, effort in the UK to reform libel laws in that country -- where existing laws effectively put the burden on the accused to prove that they didn't libel the other party.

It's awful to see Singh have to go through all of this, but hopefully his sacrifices will mean others won't have to face the same issue down the road.

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Vik from the RepRap blog created these printable ball-chain gears, and uploaded STLs and SCADs to Thingiverse.

I have finally managed to print tiny little ball-chain gears that work with 3.3mm and 3.5mm diameter ball-chain and still fit on the NEMA17's 5mm output shaft. The trick is to print the gears in two pieces.

As you can see in the photograph, I print two 4mm thick sections of gear and put them on the shaft with an M5 washer sandwiched in between. Make sure the teeth are lined up on both gears. This gives a channel to guide the ball-chain down the centre of the gear, and grips the sides of the balls adequately. As the gears age, it will also stop the balls grinding their way too far through the PLA, though I must admit that my experience with ball-chain Z axis gears suggests this will not be a major issue.

The gears themselves are designed to be "spiky", but the vaguearities of the printing and rendering process lop the spikes off and leave enough by accident to produce a functioning gear!

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conner_bw writes "XML co-founder Tim Bray has taken the job of 'Developer Advocate' at Google. Don't other companies call that position 'Evangelist?' Because he sure doesn't mince words against the iPhone in his first sermon: 'It's a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord's pleasure and fear his anger.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michel Gondry spoke at SXSW to a packed house; it was fantastic to see one of my favorite directors speak about his creative process. During the talk, he mentioned a project he did where fans could buy portraits of themselves, sketched by Gondry himself, for only $20. He did about 1,000 of these portraits before he ended the deal, saying that while some portraits took only 2 minutes, he started getting fancier and fancier as time progressed, and eventually he didn't think that was a good business to continue it. When he said that, a collective, sad sigh was felt across the conference room, since I'm sure I was not the only one in the room who wanted a hand-drawn Michel Gondry portrait -- and if $20 wasn't the right price to make sense, business-wise, surely there was an appropriate price point that would make sense (and, in looking at his site, it appears that he raised the price to $99.95 with a copy of his DVD). Now, while it is true that Gondry is a famous movie director, surely a few hundred dollars for minutes of work is enough to get him interested, especially when he considers that this portrait further serves to endear him more to his most passionate fans, who are incredibly appreciative that he would ever even think to offer such a deal:

It's amazing enough that Michel has the time to draw thousands of portraits a week amidst his incredibly busy schedule and his "Green Hornet" workload. Hopefully this commitment will urge other filmmakers to devote similar generosity towards their fanbases...

So, contrary to what Gondry thought, his portrait offer most certainly made good business sense and was a great example of an RtB deal, since it was soaked in his charmingly quirky artistic personality. Then again, perhaps another example of Gondry's unique understanding of the business world is with this strange notice that he sent out to the purchasers of the portraits, sometimes well after they had purchased the image, telling them they could not resell the image ever.

"By placing your sketch order, you hereby acknowledge... that the sketch is for your personal use only and you shall not have the right to sell the sketch for any commercial purpose whatsoever."

To ask this of his truest fans (especially after they have commissioned a sketch) is not only most likely unenforceable legally (case law here is still a bit messy, but courts have said that you can't just give up your right of first sale based on one side's declaration), it also serves to sour the goodwill and affection that Gondry's true fans have bestowed upon him. Now, that's bad business.

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This animation, done by NYC's Tronic Studio, for AXA, a French insurance company, is faux stop-motion, faux papercraft, all 3D Studio Max.

Tronic Studio

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MikeChino sends in this excerpt from Inhabitat: "China already has the most advanced and extensive high-speed rail lines in the world, and soon that network will be connected all the way to Europe and the UK. With initial negotiations and surveys already complete, China is now making plans to connect its HSR line through 17 other countries in Asia and Eastern Europe in order to connect to the existing infrastructure in the EU. Additional rail lines will also be built into South East Asia as well as Russia, in what will likely become the largest infrastructure project in history." They hope to get it done within 10 years, with China providing the financing in exchange for raw materials, in some cases.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Like Gabe at Videogum, I haven't enjoyed the new HBO "Funny or Die Presents" series. At all. But this 16-minute (!) short film by Tim and Eric is amazing. It includes RC-controlled model helicopters, violence, creepy, angst, and pizza. I'm surprised and pleased that HBO is allowing this to be freely embedded. Also: If Mama Noodles is real, I am ordering a large pie tonight.

(via Eric Wareheim)

MAKE Flickr pool member Joel Miller (jmillerid) is planning some LED lighting for his house and has been evaluating Luxeon Rebel LEDs. He etched these boards to experiment with different colors, their heat values, etc.

Luxeon Rebels are designed to dissipate heat through a large "no connection" solder pad directly under the chip. There are specific guidelines for the design of the PCB to draw this heat away from the LED which include a multitude of plated vias to increase the copper surface area. I'm unable to create plated vias in my homemade boards, so my intent is to mount the board to an aluminum plate, using an aluminum machine screw to draw the heat through the hole in the middle of the board.

LED lighting, part 1

More:

Circuit Skills: Circuit Board Etching, sponsored by Jameco

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By now you've probably heard of the latest internet fad, Chatroulette, which has been pretty much covered to death in the media (though, not us, until now). If, by some amazing chance, you've missed out on this, the best summary would probably be Jon Stewart's amusing take on it: <td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Tech-Talch - Chatroulette

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

However, the reason we're mentioning it here is that Mathew Ingram alerts us to the news that a band going by the rather catchy name of Holy Fuck has decided to leak its new album via Chatroulette. Of course, since Chatroulette is totally random, there's no way to actually find it, except by accident -- meaning you're not going to find it, and as the reporter at the link above discovered, you have a pretty high likelihood of running into something that might disgust you. Still, an amusing marketing gimmick all around.

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Image courtesy June's Tech Files.

I use this tool all the time, but rarely have I ever heard any two people refer to it by the same name. "Wire cutters" is what I called them growing up, but since then I have heard "diagonal cutters," "diagonal pliers," "diags," "side cutters," "side cutting pliers," "snips," "snippers," "dog-nips," the easily-misinterpreted "strippers," and the downright offensive "nips" and "dikes" (which apparently upsets Dutch people for some reason). So I'm starting a collection. Have I missed anything? What do you call them?

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Bethesda Softworks took advantage of the recent Game Developers Conference to take the wraps off a new game called Hunted: The Demon's Forge that they're partnering with development studio inXile to create. It's planned for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3, though no release window has been set. It's a third-person action game with a swords & sorcery setting, and it features two heroes as they fight their way through monster-filled dungeons. The game is designed such that two users can play together online (no split-screen), each controlling one of the heroes. ShackNews summed it up thus: "From what I saw, Hunted rolled up ideas from a number of different games to create its modern reinterpretation of the dungeon crawl. There was the raw action appeal of wading through waves of goblins, spiders, and related denizens. The skill system and weapon upgrades bring in the character development side from a role playing game. And the co-op design with its warrior and archer dynamic introduces the reward of playing together like an MMO."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Beware the Ides of March! I was itching to say that. Ahem. Here is a collection of MAKE magazine articles related to DIY movie making. Note that most back issues of MAKE are available for purchase in the Maker Shed. Don't miss any future articles ... subscribe!

MAKE Volume 01
$14 Video Camera Stabilizer - Make this ultra-low-cost video camera stabilizer and see how much better your video shots turn out.
Flexible Gooseneck Camera Mount - Put a camera or camcorder pretty much anywhere with this flexible camera mount built from a cheap desk lamp.

MAKE Volume 02
15-Mile-High Club - Art Vanden Berg's computer-controlled model glider took images from 79,000 feet.
Stop Motion Animation, the Easy Way - With iStopMotion, making Gumby is less pokey.
Webcam Telescope - Video from still camera zoom.
No More Cue Cards - Make a teleprompter with a laptop, a sheet of glass, and some scrap wood.

MAKE Volume 03
Mailbox Movie - Make a movie that's shot in many locations around the world without leaving your house.

MAKE Volume 04
How to Make a Film, Without Money, While Being Bombed - Shooting a documentary in Belgrade is risky business.
Film Jockey - Julie Meitz uses old film projectors to create collages of light and color.
VJing 101 - Performing live video combines the visual power of filmmaking with the spontaneity of jazz.

MAKE Volume 05
It Came From My Garage! - Model kit makers bring B-movie monsters to your home.
iSight Tripod Mount - Point your webcam anywhere you want.

MAKE Volume 06
The Eye Aquatic - An underwater ROV with live video images.
Video Podcasting - Producing TV shows on the cheap.

MAKE Volume 07
How to How-To - Use a head-mounted video camera to produce instructions for making things.
A Sublime Machine - Mike Wilder makes Lego robots for time-lapse 3D videos of carnivorous plants.
Rocket-Launched Camcorder - Launch a hacked single-use camcorder in a model rocket.
How to Drink Beer on C-SPAN - Put yourself into somebody else's video.
TV-to-Synth Interface - Triggering sound from video images.

MAKE Volume 08
How Not to Make a How-To Video - Ignore these handy rules and your instructional video will turn out great!
Van TV - Big sights and sounds hit the streets.

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Le Whif, makers of inhalable chocolate, have now launched a coffee inhaler. David Edwards, a Harvard professor of biomedical engineering, and Parisian chef Thierry Marx developed the breathable coffee and chocolate. From the NY Post:

The coffee hits consist of powder inside lipstick-like containers that are pulled open, inserted in the mouth and inhaled.

The sticks are sold individually for $3 or in boxes of three for $8 -- and each stick delivers 100 milligrams of caffeine, the equivalent of a cup of espresso.

A whiffer can get up to nine hits from an individual stick, depending on how hard they inhale.

"Coffee good to the last puff"

superapecommando writes "Copyright holders have given up legal efforts to force Norwegian ISP Telenor to block filesharing site The Pirate Bay, one of the parties to the case said. The copyright holders, led by Norway's performing rights society TONO and by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry Norway (IFPI Norge), have lost two rounds in the Norwegian court system, and have now decided against appealing the case to Norway's supreme court."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is becoming all too common. We recently wrote about the lawyer who sued a publisher over a negative review of her book. Apparently, this sort of thing is becoming more common. The producer of an independent movie called Iron Cross, Joshua Newton, is suing Variety for posting a negative review of his movie after he bought a huge advertising spread from the magazine. In trying to defend the lawsuit, Newton lays out how Variety courted him over a huge advertising deal, suggesting the magazine would help find the film a distributor and also get it into consideration for the Oscars. Of course, nothing in that meant that the magazine's reviews should be compromised. Newton's argument isn't exactly going to win him much support:

I'm not suing them over a bad review. The problem we had was the timing. Robert Koehler, the critic, could have put it on his own website. If he'd have written it for TheWrap it would have just been one of those things. The problem was that Variety should have waited until the campaign was over. They completely destroyed the campaign that they sold us.

Basically, he seems to be suggesting that because he bought hundreds of thousands of ads from Variety, the magazine isn't allowed to post an honest review of the flick. Fascinating.

Newton, by the way, goes on to suggest that the business side at Variety knows it made a mistake, and that the recent firings of Variety's in-house movie critics is to more easily "control" movie reviews, so that Variety doesn't run reviews that trash movies that have paid lots of money to advertise with Variety. If true, of course, that would basically destroy whatever credibility Variety has left. Even so, though, suing over a bad movie review -- just because you bought ads in the magazine -- doesn't make much sense.

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Hello! I'm Meara O'Reilly. My thing is auditory perception. I've been exploring this through making instruments, heirloom science demonstrations, auditory illusions, and singing.

I write and build things for Make and Craftzine.com. I was in the band Feathers, and have played a lot in Brightblack Morning Light and with Michael Hurley, but now I do my singing alone, sometimes with a chladni plate. Right now I'm trying to make a glass vocoder and I live with the people from Encyclopedia Pictura, at our experimental woodland creative dojo.

These next couple of weeks, I'm going to write about new musical instruments and technologies, auditory perception, and inspirational approaches to farming and land management. I'll also profile some incredibly unique musicians and composers that maybe you haven't heard yet. Thanks to Mark for inviting me here, I'm really excited to be a part!

(Photo: Aubrey Trinnaman)

Headline: "Apple iPad orders drop sharply." Actual story: "as submitted by volunteers at Investor Village ... based on 120 orders." The science, of course, is far more interesting than attention-seeking headlines spun from it.

Reggie Watts in F_CK SH_T STACK (LOOSEWORLD x Waverly Films. More about Reggie Watts here. (via Glen E. Friedman)

An anonymous reader writes "The domain COM was installed as one of the first set of top-level domains when the Domain Name System was first implemented for use on the Internet in January 1985. The internet celebrates a landmark event on the 15th of March — the 25th anniversary of the day the first .com name was registered. Of the 250 million websites, there are over 80 million active .com sites. In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts entered the history books with an internet address ending in .com (however, on 27 August 2009, it was sold to XF.com Investments). That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon. Here is a list of the 100 oldest still-existing registered .com domains."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're excited to announce that the 2010 Ann Arbor Mini Maker Faire will be on Saturday, June 5, 2010. Last year's event was a huge success, and we are looking forward to seeing what will happen this year! Check out their website for more details, and to sign up to exhibit at the Faire. See you there!

Note that this event is different then Maker Faire Detroit, which will be happening at the end of July.

Organizers of the Ann Arbor "Mini" Maker Faire have issued a Call for Makers for the June 5, 2010 event to be held at the Washtenaw Farm Council Grounds (aka "Saline Fairgrounds"). The Faire features exhibits and activities in robots, green tech, science, radio, rocketry, unusual tools/techniques, fixing and/or taking things apart, and other areas, all with an emphasis on "do it yourself." Last year's Faire drew over 1,200 people to engage in activities such as learning to solder and silk screening t-shirts, and saw exhibits some of which were featured in Make Magazine. Organizers are tripling the space and hope to have at least twice as many exhibits for 2010.

The Faire is free to exhibitors and visitors alike, and is funded by sponsors and the organizers. It is a local version of the major Maker Faires in the Bay area, and, new this year, at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit and in New York City.

Exhibitors can find additional information and an online application form at http://www.a2makerfaire.com. Application deadline is May 5, 2010.

The mission of the Ann Arbor Mini Maker Faire is to present interesting or unique exhibits, individuals, and demonstrations in DIY science, technology, engineering, and art that excite, motivate, and educate. The emphasis should be on cool things, skills, and knowledge. As a shorthand, the exhibits should be the kind of thing you'd see in Make Magazine.

Ann Arbor Mini Maker Faire
Saturday, June 5, 2010, 10am - 5pm
Washtenaw Farm Council Fairgrounds
(a.k.a. Saline Fairgrounds)
5055 Ann Arbor Saline Road
Ann Arbor, MI 48103

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Spain continues to be one of the few countries out there that seems to not have its judges lose their critical thinking abilities the second anyone mentions the word "piracy." We've pointed out a few times in the past that Spanish courts have ruled that file sharing is legal and it looks like they've done so again. Infophage was the first of a few to send in an article about the latest ruling, which again found that just linking to infringing material is not copyright infringement. The judge apparently went further, though, also noting that using P2P file sharing systems does not appear to violate copyright law in Spain, as long as the user isn't doing so for monetary profit.

Of course, this isn't over by a long shot. Late last year, entertainment industry lobbyists got Spanish politicians to propose new copyright laws that would (of course) ratchet up copyright to make it more like it is in other countries (i.e., more draconian). And, as we recently noted, a bunch of Spanish record labels have sued the gov't for not doing enough to stop file sharing. But, hopefully, this country that has explicitly rejected three strikes laws will stick to its guns and recognize that perhaps the court rulings make sense -- and that the first response to an industry unwilling to adapt to a technologically-changed market isn't to change the laws, but to ask those companies to start adapting.

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Hugh Pickens writes "At the peak of a magnetic storm, the number of highly energetic 'killer electrons' strong enough to damage electronics and human tissue can increase by a factor of more than ten times, posing a danger to spacecraft, satellites, and astronauts. Killer electrons can penetrate satellite shielding, so if electrical discharges take place in vital components, a satellite can be damaged or even rendered inoperable. For many years, the mechanism by which killer electrons are produced has remained poorly understood, in spite of physicists' attempts at solving this puzzle. Now the ESA reports that data shows the increase in the creation of a substantial number of killer electrons is due to a two-step process. First, the initial acceleration is due to the strong shock-related magnetic field compression. Immediately after the impact of the interplanetary shock wave, Earth's magnetic field lines began wobbling at ultra low frequencies. In turn, these ULF waves effectively accelerate the seed electrons (provided by the first step) to become killer electrons. 'These new findings help us to improve the models predicting the radiation environment in which satellites and astronauts operate. With solar activity now ramping up, we expect more of these shocks to impact our magnetosphere over the months and years to come,' says Philippe Escoubet, ESA's Cluster mission manager."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sean Bonner made this coffee-themed t-shirt (the line is a Big Lebowski reference). Boing Boing reader Paul Martin suggests an alternate version explaining how things work In Soviet Russia, shown after the jump...

In the video above, the guy the internet knows now as "Mr Trololo," whose real name is Eduard Khil, is interviewed by Russian journalists in Saint-Petersburg while he watches and comments on a number of fan-videos created by his internet admirers. Watch the video.

Among the funnier remixes of the original clip is "Trololo guy without Autotune," from College Humor.

(via Ethan Zuckerman, thanks weaponx)

If Twitter wants to be a force for good they should stick to small things they have high leverage over, not fancy "big picture" things that any other rich person could do.

Bill Gates made this mistake. Instead of cutting off the air supply of his competitors and landing his company in antitrust hell, he could have been a Force For Good by welcoming competition as a way to keep his company tough and on their toes and responsive to customers. It would have been good for business and made him a force for good.

Instead, he's giving money for education and health care, obvious good things, but places where his money is no better than anyone else's. Had he chosen perhaps to make a little less money 20 years ago the world would have been a better place today, not some day in the future.

For Twitter, doing good would mean decentralizing, not making every tweet flow through their servers. This makes the network weak, slow and fragile. To add bells and whistles to an already-flawed architecture is irresponsible and definintely not something a Force For Good would do.

People wonder if they'd still be a force if they decentralize. Of course they would. They'd be even bigger than before. On the web, people return to places that send them away. We could trust them because we'd have a choice. People don't trust entities that force themselves on you. Look at how hated Microsoft became and how Google is going the same way. Twitter's future is in their hands. They could either trust us to come back or force the issue. If they use force, eventually Twitter will break.

I use twitter.com when I could use any of dozens of clients. In the same way, in a decentralized loosely-coupled space, most people would use Twitter, as long as it remains reliable. And they would have an incentive to be the most reliable. Today we have no choice.

If they're worried about Google eating their lunch, or Microsoft, forget it. Look at the Buzz rollout for a clue. Google is too messed up by strategy taxes to be an effective competitor. Facebook might be a problem, but Twitter decentralizing would apply pressure for Facebook to decentralize. Look at all the upside there. Not just for Twitter shareholders, but for the web.

Try really being good, not just saying you're going to be good.

Finally one comment on the little popup cards. They break Twitter, as far as I'm concerned. Because of the 140-character limit, I have to be able to easily see the last few tweets for anyone I'm reading. And they need to read my tweet stream too. Try to get there (using Firefox/Mac at least). It requires a bunch of clicks to get the attention of the software. To replicate this paradigm on other sites makes me wonder if they're doing any real user testing at Twitter, Inc.

PS: Please get rid of URL-shorteners. They make the web more fragile.

Math-play with your food

By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics

Making things with your food is an age-old pastime. Here are two mathematical constructions made from crackers.

This illustrates the Pythagorean Theorem for a 5-12-13 right triangle. The number of crackers in the two small squares (25+144) equals the number of crackers in the square on the hypotenuse (169).

With triangular crackers, this 3-4-5 right triangle illustrates a more general idea. The number of crackers in the two small triangles (9+16) equals the number of crackers in the large triangle (25).

Here is an introduction to the Pythagorean Theorem, with two simple proofs, and here is a detailed explanation of why this generalization works.

More:

• Math Monday: Mathematical art in the lava
• Math Monday: Balloon polyhedra
• Math Monday: Sierpinski tetrahedron
• Math Monday: Skewer hyperboloid
• Math Monday: Morton Bradley sculpture
• Math Monday: Tetraxis puzzle
• Math Monday: Giant burr puzzles
• Math Monday: Fractal polyhedra clusters
• Math Monday: Giant SOMA puzzle
• Math Monday: Tie your bagel in a knot!
• Math Monday: Playing card constructions
• Introducing "Math Monday"

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You've got nine days left to file comments for Victoria Espinel, the Obama administration's new copyright enforcement czar, and her department's inquiry on how the US should best enforce copyrights. Given that the president himself has spoken out in favor of the secret and sinister Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (AKA ACTA -- a punishing copyright treaty that seeks to expand the American DMCA and push it around the world), and that he plans to bring it down by executive order, without an act of Congress, this is especially urgent.

The good folks at Public Knowledge have worked up a tool to help you file comments, along with a good, easy-to-follow briefing on issues that Ms Espinel needs to hear about.

The Joint Strategic Plan should carefully examine the basis for claims of losses due to infringement, and measure credible accounts of those losses against all of the consequences of proposed enforcement measures, good and bad.

Measures like cutting off Internet access in response to alleged copyright infringement can do more harm than good. Internet connections are not merely entertainment or luxuries; they provide vital communication links, often including basic phone service. This is even more clearly unfair in cases where users are falsely or mistakenly accused.

Internet service providers should not be required or asked to violate users' privacy in the name of copyright enforcement beyond the scope of the law. Efforts to require or recommend that ISPs inspect users' communications should not be part of the Joint Strategic Plan.

Alert: Tell the Government to Support Balanced Copyright! (Thanks, Sherwin!)

The debate over the Digital Economy Bill in the UK (the attempt to ratchet up copyright law to repay favors to an entertainment industry that is slow to adapt) has taken an odd twist. Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing has the details of a leaked memo from the BPI (pdf) to a bunch of recording industry execs and lobbyists, that details the state of the bill and the ongoing strategy for getting it approved. There are a few items worth noting:

1. The BPI seems to think that the UK intelligence community is now the biggest threat to stopping the bill. Seriously. Apparently, UK spies are afraid that passing this bill will drive a very large number of people to switch to using encrypted internet tools, making it that much more difficult to spy on them. This may be an accurate concern, but it's surprising to hear that the intelligence community is now considered the biggest hurdle to getting the bill passed. Apparently, the BPI is fairly unconcerned with consumer rights groups. The BPI seems so paranoid about the intelligence community, that it actually suggests in the memo that the British spying agency MI5 may have paid for a recent survey released by the ISP Talk Talk, saying that 71% of those 18-34 years old would continue to file share, using "undetectable means."
   
   The memo also mocks the fact that this particular bill now has the Open Rights Group on the same side of an issue as MI5 -- when the two are normally somewhat diametrically opposed.
   
   
2. While the BPI sounds fairly confident that the bill will get through, it recognizes that it could get stalled if enough Members of Parliament start asking questions about the speed with which the bill is being pushed through:

   As for the House of Commons -- which will be sent the Bill next week -- there is a strange sense of detachment. MPs with whom we spoke back in Autum are already resigned to the fact that they will have minimum input into the provisions from this point on, given the lack of time for detailed scrutiny. One leading backbencher has told us that there is "little point in meeting, since the Bill will be determined at wash-up". That said, John Whittingdale -- an inveterate "timing sceptic" (i.e. he's for the Bill but doesn't think it will get through in time) has said this week that he still thinks it could be lost if enough MPs protest at not having the opportunity to scrutinise it. Whilst true in constitutional theory terms, the hard politics of the situation makes it seem unlikely. And inveterate opponents like Derek Wyatt and Tom Watson continue to blog and tweet with critical comments, but there is not the sense of a groundswell of massive opposition to the Bill.

   In other words: if you live in the UK, now is the time to start speaking up and contacting your elected officials, as well as letting others know that a bill to greatly take away your rights is about to be pushed through the House of Commons, unless you speak up now.
   
   
3. Finally, among the "upcoming" activities, the memo mentions that on Wednesday the 18th, there will be a release of a report from TERA on "The importance of saving jobs in the EU's Creative Industries." We see these types of reports all the time, and they're usually poorly thought out and poorly argued, assuming, incorrectly, that a loss of jobs in one part of an industry might not be made up elsewhere, and rarely (if ever) paying attention to the fact that artificially propping up one part of the industry has massive negative consequences for other areas in the economy. So let's see what this report says. But assuming you start seeing press reports about this later this week, make sure to read through them with a critical eye.

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J.D. Roth of the excellent personal finance blog, Get Rich Slowly, read an advance copy of my forthcoming book, Made By Hand, and wrote a great post on the rewards of spending more time making things. He starts off his essay with an homage to his late father, who was a very handy guy. J.D.'s father built an electricity generating wind turbine, a sailboat, a telescope, his own accounting software, an electric sprinkler system for his (failed) nursery business, a line of wheat grinders and food dryers, and more.

When Kris and I decided in 1993 that we wanted to start our own vegetable garden from seed, my father helped me build a small greenhouse. We didn’t use any blueprints; he was the blueprints. One long Saturday, we bought lumber and nails and plastic sheeting, and he stood around watching me, telling me what lengths to trim the two-by-fours and at what angles. He didn’t sketch anything out on paper — he just told me what to do and I did it. That greenhouse is still standing.

But all of these things barely scratch the surface. These are just the things I remember, and mainly his successes. My father did more: He wrote poetry (mostly bad poetry), played guitar, drew funny pictures, spent a couple of summers raising 40+ acres of wheat, flew airplanes, sailed boats, and more. When he contracted the cancer that eventually killed him, he bought a microscope so that he could draw his own blood and look at his dwindling supply of white blood cells.

Made by Hand: In Praise of Amateurs

CWmike writes "Nokia asked a federal judge last week to toss out Apple's antitrust claims, saying the iPhone maker indulged in 'legal alchemy' when it tried to divert attention from its infringement of Nokia's intellectual property. The filing was the latest salvo in a battle that began in October 2009 when handset maker Nokia sued Apple, saying the iPhone infringed on 10 of its patents, and that Apple was trying 'to get a free ride on the back of Nokia's innovation.' Apple countered in December with a lawsuit of its own that not only claimed Nokia infringed 13 of its patents, but that Nokia also violated antitrust law by legally attacking Apple after it declined to pay what it called 'exorbitant royalties' and refused to give Nokia access to iPhone patents. 'These non-patent counterclaims are designed to divert attention away from free-riding off of Nokia's intellectual property, a practice Apple evidently believes should only be of paramount concern when it is the alleged victim,' Nokia charged in the motion. Apple is on a legal roll, having also recently sued the maker of Google's Nexus One, HTC, for patent infringement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Another "keeper" -- this week Jay is on the phone from SXSW and I'm in the studio at NYU.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot10Mar15.mp3

Topics include: Jake Tapper, problems with WordPress, Thursday evening meetup, Dave pre-orders an iPad, Jessica Roy, general mayhem.

A study in Australia found that more than half of stories in mainstream newspapers were fed to them by PR entities: "Many journalists and editors were defensive ... Most refused to respond, others who initially granted an interview then asked for their comments to be withdrawn out of fear they'd be reprimanded, or worse, fired." [Crikey via The Awl]

Filmmaker and crafter Holly Klein combined her talents to produce this short, Maggie and Mildred. All of the set pieces and characters were cross stitched by hand, then scanned into a computer and animated. [via fem!n*Ally]

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An anonymous reader writes with this quote from 1Up: "Trouble is brewing in Rapture. The recently released Sinclair Solutions multiplayer pack for BioShock 2 is facing upset players over the revelation that the content is already on the disc, and the $5 premium is an unlock code. It started when users on the 2K Forums noticed that the content is incredibly small: 24KB on the PC, 103KB on the PlayStation 3, and 108KB on the Xbox 360. 2K Games responded with a post explaining that the decision was made in order to keep the player base intact, without splitting it between the haves and have-nots."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joseph Casias has sinus cancer and an inoperable brain tumor and takes medical marijuana, which is legal in Michigan. He was fired from the Michigan Walmart where he had been working for the last five years after he failed a drug screening test there.

At his doctor's recommendation, Casias says he legally uses medical marijuana to ease his pain.

"It helps tremendously," he says. "I only use it to stop the pain. To make me feel more comfortable and active as a person."

During his five years at WalMart, Casias says he went to work every day, determined to be the best.

"I gave them everything," he says. "110 percent every day. Anything they asked me to do I did. More than they asked me to do. 12 to 14 hours a day."

But last November, Casias sprained his knee at work. Marijuana was detected in his system during the routine drug screening that follows all workplace injuries. Casias showed WalMart managers his state medical marijuana card, but he was fired anyway.

Walmart fires medical marijuana patient for using medical marijuana (Thanks, Jason!)

Behold Larriva's wind-up tribute to the great Carl Sagan, "It is cast in rock hard, Durham's Water Putty and is hand painted in acrylics. The hair is wool and the metal parts are from a wind-up toy."

It is sold out on etsy, but you can purchase Larriva's Hopgoblin wind-up toy if you wish.

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Seringhaus, a Yale Law School student, writes in the NY Times, 'To Stop Crime, Share Your Genes.' In order to prevent discrimination when it comes to collecting DNA samples from criminals (and even people who are simply arrested), he proposes that the government collect a DNA profile from everybody, perhaps at birth (yes, you heard that right)." Regarding the obvious issue of genetic privacy, Seringhaus makes this argument: "Your sensitive genetic information would be safe. A DNA profile distills a person’s complex genomic information down to a set of 26 numerical values, each characterizing the length of a certain repeated sequence of 'junk' DNA that differs from person to person. Although these genetic differences are biologically meaningless — they don’t correlate with any observable characteristics — tabulating the number of repeats creates a unique identifier, a DNA 'fingerprint.' The genetic privacy risk from such profiling is virtually nil, because these records include none of the health and biological data present in one’s genome as a whole."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday I took a Sunday Scroll over at the North American Handmade Bicycle show site, drooling over the bikes pictured with their enthusiastic creators. With categories like "best fillet brazing" and "best carbon fiber," it's clearly a maker's kind of tradeshow.

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Perhaps you missed Boing Boing's interview on Friday with South African rap-rave zef gangsters Die Antwoord? And the news that the recently-minted internet stars shook hands (and pinched cheeks) with Interscope Records, tapped District 9 helmer Neill Blomkamp to direct their next music video, they'll likely be performing at Coachella, and they're developing a movie?

Read the Boing Boing Die Antwoord interview here.

After that, they went off to meet David Lynch. The band says,

Ninja called David 'Dad'. David said "You turned out alright son." David also said, "I was a bit worried about you for a while there, but you turned out alright." Ninja said "I'm a lucky duck." David said, "You're a good guy."

Image: A photo shot last night in New York City by Clayton James Cubitt. "Yo-Landi jumps on bed while Ninja tries to nap."

Every few months or so we hear about proposals in Canada to extend Canada's blank media tax (they prefer "levy") to MP3 players, such as iPods. The Canadian Private Copying Collective has tried to do this multiple times and had the courts strike it down multiple times. These levies make little sense. They massively increase the price of certain products (studies have seen 90% of the cost of blank CDs going to the levy) and, despite claims to the contrary, the money collected really doesn't help many musicians. Hell, even the recording industry isn't a huge fan of the idea, because it's afraid such a levy will get people thinking that file sharing any music is now "legal."

So, it's a bit of a surprise to see that Canadian Member of Parliament, Charlie Angus, who's generally considered one of the sharper folks on copyright issues, is now putting forth legislation for a Canadian "you must be a criminal" tax on MP3 players. The article suggests that it won't get very far, and Angus doesn't seem to be explaining why he's putting this forward, but it is odd. The idea of such a tax is incredibly unpopular with Canadians, and you would think that Angus, of all people, would recognize that.

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Above, Boing Boing debuts the new video from David Byrne with Santigold, "Please Don't," from Here Lies Love, a musical biography of sorts about Imelda Marcos. David Byrne explains,

We did a photo session for a magazine the other day, and I told the interviewer that on this song, by the time you get to the chorus, she owns it -- she's turned it into a Santigold song. Perfect.

There are six of these videos that have been completed for this project. Most, like this one, use news and archival footage to, well, show that every word of the song is true! Most of the lyrics on this one are lifted gently from interviews and quotations -- the "please don't" chorus especially. At some point as first lady, Imelda began to feel that she could help Philippine interests by charming world leaders into seeing things her way. "Handbag diplomacy" she called it -- as she liked to imply that to solve a problem, she could bypass President Marcos and just grab a handbag and hop on a plane with some of her assistants. It sometimes worked! There was, for example, an Islamic-backed insurgency rising in the south of the Philippine archipelago, and she thought that a leader in that part of the world, Qaddafi in this case, might help pull the plug on that support if he saw things her way. Apparently he did -- the funding stopped and the insurrection lost momentum, and she later described him as a pushover, a mama's boy.

David Byrne: Here Lies Love, and you can purchase the music and book set here. The album is available in multiple formats (MP3, FLAC, Apple Lossless, and CD/DVD).

(thumbnail: portrait of David Byrne by Clayton James Cubitt)

Trailrunner7 writes "Robert Hansen, a security researcher and CEO of SecTheory, has been gleaning intelligence from professional attackers in recent months, having a series of off-the-record conversations with spammers and malicious hackers in an effort to gain insight into their tactics, mindset and motivation. 'He's not the type to hack randomly, he's only interested in targeted attacks with big payouts. Well, the more I thought about it the more I thought that this is a very solvable problem for bad guys. There are already other types of bad guys who do things like spam, steal credentials and DDoS. For that to work they need a botnet with thousands or millions of machines. The chances of a million machine botnet having compromised at least one machine within a target of interest is relatively high.' Hansen's solution to the hacker's problem provides a glimpse into a business model we might see in the not-too-distant future. It's an evolutionary version of the botnet-for-hire or malware-as-a-service model that's taken off in recent years. In Hansen's model, an attacker looking to infiltrate a specific network would not spend weeks throwing resources against machines in that network, looking for a weak spot and potentially raising the suspicion of the company's security team. Instead, he would contact a botmaster and give him a laundry list of the machines or IP addresses he's interested in compromising. If the botmaster already has his hooks into the network, the customer could then buy access directly into the network rather than spending his own time and resources trying to get in."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Leica has released a firmware update for its M9 digital rangefinder. Version 1.116 brings in a host of improvements including enchanced magenta color shift correction for listed wide-angle lenses and a new, ISO setting-related, vignetting correction. The firmware is available for immediate download for registered M9 users.

Two galvanized nails set in a plug of plaster-of-Paris. That's it. The Cheap Vegetable Gardener, who created the sensor for an automated grow box project, explains:

Technically a gypsum block measures soil water tension. When the gypsum block is dry it is not possible for electricity to pass between the probes, essentially making the probe an insulator with infinite resistance. As water is added to the problem more electrons can pass between the probes effectively reducing the amount of resistance between the problem to the point when it is fully saturated where the probe has virtually zero resistance. By using this range of values you can determine the amount of water than exists in your soil.

[via Hack a Day]

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The good people at NASA dropped a lightweight helicopter from 35 feet to watch it crash. This was the same helicopter that was dropped in December for crash testing. The first time, the helicopter suffered minimal damage due to a new "expandable honeycomb cushion" that absorbs the impact. This time, the helicopter was not outfitted with the cushion. The result was more like what you might expect. From NASA:

"Three, two, one, release," said the technician on the loudspeaker at the Landing and Impact Research Facility. With that countdown the helicopter smacked hard into the concrete. Its skid gear collapsed, its windscreen cracked open and its occupants lurched forward violently, suffering potentially spine-crushing injuries according to internal data recorders. The crash test was all in the name of research to try to make helicopters safer.

"The goal of any research program that has an element of impact dynamics is to develop an understanding of the crash response of the vehicle," said Karen Jackson, an aerospace engineer who oversaw the test. "Once we understand that response we can look at ways to improve the crash performance..."

Researchers say the "g" forces the MD-500 experienced more than tripled those recorded in the previous test. But that doesn't mean the research is over. Engineers have gigabytes of data to analyze to confirm exactly what impact the new honeycomb cushion technology might have for helicopters in the future.

"Chopper Crash Test a Smash Hit"

If you ever read terms of use pages for websites, you know that they are mostly boilerplate. Unfortunately whatever template all these businesses seem to be sharing makes some ridiculous assertions, perhaps the worst of which is a provision against hyperlinking to the site without written permission.

Of course, to anyone who understands the internet at all, that term is clearly unenforceable. But these standardized terms show up all over the place, so I had always assumed that it was a bit of vestigial legal jargon, and that most businesses weren't even aware of it. UK blogger Malcolm Coles discovered otherwise when he obeyed the terms on the Royal Mail website and requested written permission to link to a page. This initiated a bureaucratic farce that lasted for four months with no resolution.

To get your licence posted to you:

• You have to write a letter to find out the right web address for the application form.
• The letter back gives you a web address
• The web address tells you to email.
• When you email they don't reply.
• But they do give you the option to, er, write in again.

That's right: the post office in the UK wants you to send them a letter and an email before you link to their website — and even then they never get around to giving you permission. Oh, and the page Coles wanted to link to? It was Royal Mail's business start-up services, which he was trying to promote for free.

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If I were a lawyer, I would be a Space Lawyer, as long as that could be printed on my business card. During the next academic year, Sunderland University students can sign up for a course module devoted legal questions surrounding space exploration, tourism, safety, and off-world commercial ventures. From The Guardian (NASA image):

Topics already arising in the field include gaps in health and safety for potential space tourists, and damage to satellites from other objects orbiting the Earth. Looking further ahead, some lawyers have raised questions about land titles on the moon or other planets.

Chris Newman, one of the lecturers who will be teaching the module, said: "It is a growing area which has relevance across commercial, company, property, environmental, intellectual property and IT practice sectors. We think that our qualification will offer valuable knowledge in a fascinating area."

The syllabus is likely to draw on earlier attempts to extend legislation into uncharted areas, such as the arguments between nations over huge sections of Antarctica.

"Space law course to tackle final frontier"

Norrie May-Welby, 48, of Australia, is reportedly the first person to have "sex not specified" on hir Recognised Details Certificate, equivalent to a birth certificate. More than wenty years ago, May-Welby became "first chemically then physically castrated," but then decided to become completely androgynous. You can read May-Welby's fascinating story on hir blog, "I who may well be...":

For many people, one of the benefits of growing old is becoming more comfortable with yourself and not suffering so much from a relentless comparison with some usually gendered standard of beauty or strength or whatever.

For me, that has meant accepting myself as I am, and rejecting the idea of fitting other people's gender stereotypes, or even the idea that I have to identify as a man or as a woman.

Those concepts, man or woman, just don't fit me, they are not my actual reality, and, if applied to me, they are fiction. At 48 years of age, I'm less inclined to just humour other people's delusions about gender and try and conform to one of their expected options.

If I need to show identity documents, I certainly don't want details that are false, for this will only cause trouble when officials realise I don't match my documents.

"My journey to getting a 'sex not specified' legal document"

waderoush writes "E Ink, which makes the monochrome electrophoretic screens used in the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Reader line, and other e-readers, is gearing up to supply manufacturers with the first color versions of its displays by early next year, according to an Xconomy interview with T.H. Peng, a vice president with Taiwan's Prime View International, which bought E Ink last year. Peng argues that E Ink has nothing to fear from the e-book apps on the Apple iPad and other devices with color LCDs, which, in his view, produce more eye strain and aren't as suitable for digital reading. Nonetheless, the company says its first color screens in 2011 will have newspaper-quality color, followed within a couple of years by improved versions that can handle magazine-style content."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Vacuum Tube Radio Kit allows you to put together a real, functional, vacuum-tube radio! And it looks so sharp, once you've built it you're going to want to show it off. Includes instructions in Japanese, but we've got English instructions right here under the "How To" tab. MAKE is proud to be the exclusive distributor in North America for these brilliant kits, part of Gakken's Sophisticated Science Kit for Adults series.

Kit includes:

• Pin straightener for the vacuum tubes


• Testing microphone so you can make sure everything is hooked up correctly to produce sounds


• Rubber feet on the fiber board to minimize "howling"


• Variable condenser to allow for finer tuning


• Re-creation of 60-year-old circuits


• More powerful transformer for better volume and sound quality


• Runs on five 9V batteries and one C battery (not included)


• Tubes are 100% functional NOS tubes

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In this two-year-old classified Army Counterintelligence Center report (hosted on wikileaks.org, where else?), American spooks set out to destroy Wikileaks by intimidating its sources. They cite as justification for this the fact that Wikileaks has outed American embarrassments and crimes including "US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay."

The governments of China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Thailand, Zimbabwe, and several other countries have blocked access to Wikileaks.org-type Web sites, claimed they have the right to investigate and prosecute Wikileaks.org and associated whistleblowers, or insisted they remove false, sensitive, or classified government information, propaganda, or malicious content from the Internet. The governments of China, Israel, and Russia claim the right to remove objectionable content from, block access to, and investigate crimes related to the posting of documents or comments to Web sites such as Wikileaks.org. The governments of these countries most likely have the technical skills to take such action should they choose to do so

Wikileaks.org uses trust as a center of gravity by assuring insiders, leakers, and whistleblowers who pass information to Wikileaks.org personnel or who post information to the Web site that they will remain anonymous. The identification, exposure, or termination of employment of or legal actions against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others from using Wikileaks.org to make such information public.

Wikileaks.org - An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, Or Terrorist Groups?

Pew pew pew! NSFW (bewbs), but awesomeschlock. (thanks, Tara McGinley!)

An anonymous reader writes "This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN), 32-page US counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks (PDF). 'The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out.' It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses 'trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers,' the report recommends 'The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site.' [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective]. As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that 'Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the Wikileaks.org website.' The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks — US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brian Stelter of the New York Times reports on the International Amateur Scanning League, consisting of volunteers who are copying the 3,000 DVDs at the National Archives and Records Administration. The videos will be uploaded to the net for all to enjoy.

Dust off a disc. Maybe it's video of a Bob Hope Christmas show, or maybe it's the Apollo 11 moon landing. Insert a blank disc. Duplicate.

It sounds monotonous because it is. But every time Liz Pruszko presses the start button on a DVD machine, she knows she is helping to unlock the thousands of videos tucked away in the National Archives.

"It just seems like such a shame to not have this content out there," Ms. Pruszko said.

When she says "out there," she is talking about the Web, where it might seem that every conceivable video clip of federal importance is already stored, just waiting to be searched for. That is far from true. But she is nudging the government in that direction.

Ms. Pruszko is a volunteer for the International Amateur Scanning League, an invention of the longtime public information advocate Carl Malamud. The league plans to upload the archives' collection of 3,000 DVDs in what Mr. Malamud calls an "experiment in crowd-sourced digitization."

International Amateur Scanning League makes obscure DVDs available online (Thanks, Steve Silberman!)

Weather Underground member Bill Ayers (the guy Palin and McCain were referring to when they said Obama "pals around with terrorists") has re-written his book, To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, as a graphic novel. It will be published in May. It's called To Teach: The Journey, in Comics and is illustrated by Ryan Alexander-Tanner.

Brian Heater says, "In April Ayers will be appear at the MoCCA Fest in New York to discuss activism in comics on a panel with Peter Kuper, Tom Hart, Josh Neufeld, and Ward Suttton. I will be moderating. In preparation for the panel, I spoke with Ayers over the weekend. He was on his way back from a political rally in Detroit."

In a sense, you’re structuring the classroom as a laboratory of sorts.

I think of the classroom as a laboratory for discovery and surprise, absolutely. And I think every classroom should be like that, whether it’s a geography classroom in high school or a physics classroom in college, or a kindergarten, it ought to be structured as a laboratory for discovery and surprise. And you can add other metaphors to that. You can say it also ought to be a performance space. It ought to be a place you can come to tell your story. It ought to be an artist studio. It ought to be a museum. But notice, all of the metaphors that you and I are coming up with aren’t it ought to be a factory [laughs]—it can be a workshop, but not a factory.

The Daily Cross Hatch -- Interview: Bill Ayers Pt. 1 [of 4]

While we'd already written about the judge's ruling in the Lenz vs. Universal lawsuit concerning a bogus DMCA takedown and whether or not damages could be awarded, there was one bit of the ruling which Eugene Volokh recently highlighted, which seems worth mentioning, if only for the amusement factor. Apparently, part of determining whether or not there was actual harm done to Lenz was looking at some email communications, including one where a friend used an emoticon:

Universal ... argues [as a defense to Lenz's lawsuit] that there are triable issues of fact as to whether Lenz has "prosecuted in good faith the assertion that she has been damaged" by Universal's alleged violation of [the DMCA]. This argument is based on four separate contentions.... [The fourth is] that an email exchange between Lenz and one of her friends shows that Lenz does not believe that she was injured substantially and irreparably by the takedown notice. In the exchange, Lenz responds to her friend's comment that the friend "love[s] how [Lenz has] been injured 'substantially and irreparably' ;-)" by writing "I have ;-)." The (";-)") symbol, according to Lenz, is a "winky" emoticon which signifies something along the lines of "just kidding."

At her deposition, Lenz testified that she believed her friend's use of the emoticon "was kind of a reference back to [the] lawyerese" of the "substantially and irreparbly harmed" language and that her use of the emoticon was "a reply to the wink that [her friend] used." Lenz maintains that the fact that she "believes that lawyers sometimes use stilted language is not evidence of bad faith." ...

While it's fascinating to see Universal using a friend's use of an emoticon to try to prove its point, it does seem like things could get a bit dicey when we have judges trying to interpret things like emoticons.

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This giant green bag is made out of repurposed helmet bags that were used in battle. You can buy one for $60 on the designer's web site.

itwbennett writes "Dr. Markus Jakobsson, Principal Scientist at PARC, explains how it is possible to guarantee the detection of malware, including zero-day attacks and rootkits and even malware that infected a device before the detection program was installed. The solution comes down to this, says Jakobsson: 'Any program — good or bad — that wants to be active in RAM has no choice but to take up some space in RAM. At least one byte.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan says: "Here'e the new video for Losers' debut single 'Flush,' featuring work by me, animated by Tom Werber. Took a few months on a miniscule budget but here it is."

Tom Werber animates Dan Hillier's art for new Losers video

Last week on CRAFT we saw:

How-To: Baby Care Bear Costume

Flaky Cheddar and Ham Biscuits

In the Kitchen with Jarod: Make a Mother of Vinegar

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Our own indescribably awesome Becky Stern makes these sweet black-and-yellow crime scene tape scarves to order:

This machine-knitted scarf looks like police tape and features the text "Police line do not cross" along the length. It's double sided! Designed by my close friend Michelle Kempner, the hand-knit pattern and scarf was featured in CRAFT, Volume 04. Knit from high-quality yellow and black 100% cotton yarn, the scarf measures 7 feet long and 3.5 inches wide. Your scarf is made to order, so please allow six weeks for me to lovingly make yours on my computerized knitting machine. The photo of me above was taken by Matt Mechtley.

You may recall Becky's Atomic Emission Spectrum scarves from a few weeks back. They're both available now in Becky's Makers Market store.

More:
How-To: Knit Caution Tape

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Nieriko writes "The Planet is holding competitions to speed-assemble rack-mounted servers. It's like watching latter-day Marines field-strip and assemble their weapons. There is a video on youtube about this incredible contest. Looks pretty challenging."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, we noted that France was considering a plan to tax Google to pay record labels. It looks like the UK has come up with a similarly bad plan for the newspaper industry, with a commission suggesting a tax on Google and other news aggregators, to help prop up newspapers. There doesn't seem to be much greater rationale, other than that old news publications are struggling and Google seems to be doing great, so why not tax them? The argument, of course, makes little sense. It's basically saying let's put a tax on the successful and give that money to the companies squandering it. Talk about a way to give the exact wrong message to companies, while making the economy that much more inefficient.

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I dig this Cadillac Dystopic Lamp by Instructables user PopEye42, which does something I've been meaning to try myself for a long time--using cut 1L Perrier bottles as lampshades. I also like that the dimmer switch has a hose valve handle on it.

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superapecommando writes "Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps hacked into 29 websites affiliated with US espionage networks, Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency reported on Sunday. "The hacked websites acted against Iran's national security under the cover of human rights activities," Fars reported. It did not disclose details of the attacks. The Internet has been used by Iranian opposition groups who contested the results of last year's elections there to organize demonstrations and share information about protests and arrests. The Revolutionary Guards is a military group that was founded after Iran's 1979 revolution. The group includes conventional army, navy, air force, and intelligence units, as well as the Basij paramilitary force and various business units."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Handmade Music event series returns to Brooklyn, NY showcasing a talented collection of sonic experimentalists at Galapagos Art Space. A musical sewing machine, electro-country, the sound of blinking lights, and experimental gestural controllers were all on hand for the event.

In addition to the segments seen above, the night also included a performance by Mouse & the Billionaire which unfortunately I was unable to grab any footage of. In any case, a good time was had by all - stay tuned for details on the next installment in the series.

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Barence writes "Two weeks ago Microsoft started rolling out a Windows update within the European Union, giving every Internet Explorer user the option to switch browsers. As well as the five big names, anyone who scrolls the ballot window to the right will find seven further browsers, none of which is exactly a household name. There's no quality control being offered, either — they're simply the '12 most widely-used web browsers that run on Windows 7,' based on usage share in the European Economic Area. But what are these unknown browsers actually like? To find out, seven PC Pro staff installed a browser each, used it exclusively for a day, and ran a variety of tests. The browser-by-browser verdict on the hidden seven: two are worth a look for specific reasons, the other five are only likely to give an internet novice a horribly outdated idea of what web browsing is like."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With the debates ongoing over where the music industry is heading, it's been amusing to watch the major record labels try to remain relevant. One talking point they've hit on lately is this idea that record labels are the only ones who invest in artists. So, for example, when we point out that multiple studies have shown that more money is being spent on music today -- just that it's going to other providers, rather than the record labels -- we've heard people come back by saying "but only the record labels invest in artists." Perhaps sensing a valuable talking point (and getting sick of claims from many in the industry that the labels have seriously cut back on investing in new artists), the IFPI has put out a report that basically is the major record labels screaming "hey, look, we do invest in new music!"

But, of course, no one really doubted that the major labels still invested in music, but lots of people are questioning how that money is being spent and what sorts of results they're getting from it. But where it gets funny is that the IFPI tries to use this to prove that labels still have a place, because, apparently, no one else could possibly fund musicians:

"Investing in music is the core mission of record companies," says [IFPI] boss John Kennedy. "No other party can lay claim to a comparable role in the music sector. No other party comes close to the levels of investment committed by record companies to developing, nurturing and promoting talent."

To which we would just add a rather important: yet. The labels still seem to think they have some divine right (or, perhaps it's just a gov't granted monopoly -- the two are so easy to confuse) to be at the center of the music industry.

And, of course, the amount invested, by itself, is not nearly as important as the return on investment. It's easy to throw lots of money away (and having been to more than a few big record label events, I can attest to their ability to throw away vast quantities of money in no time flat). But what most folks are focused on is the actual ROI.

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An anonymous reader writes "Forget fingerprints and ID cards, this photo story shows how the latest thing in biometrics is nose scanning! Bath university researchers have claimed that the nose will soon be able to be used as a way of identifying a person. Apparently the 'PhotoFace system captures a 3D image of a person's face by taking several photos lit from different angles to throw shadows on the face and then building a model of facial features. The software determined that there are six main nose shapes: Roman, Greek, Nubian, Hawk, Snub and Turn-up.' Some cool pictures make this worth a click — but what happens if a person breaks their nose?!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Nearly 90 percent of IT workers in the UK have said a laptop in their organization has been reported lost or stolen, new research has found. Sixty-one percent said that this then resulted in a data breach, according to the '2010 Human Factor in Laptop Encryption Study: United Kingdom', a report produced by the Ponemon Institute for Absolute Software."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Having just criminalized video games the government doesn't like, it looks like Hugo Chavez is looking to have Venezuela be the next country to massively censor the internet.

"The Internet cannot be something open where anything is said and done. No, every country has to apply its own rules and norms,"

Of course, it seems that the "rules and norms" that Chavez wants are "no criticizing me."

"We have to act. We are going to ask the attorney general for help, because this is a crime. I have information that this page periodically publishes stories calling for a coup d'etat. That cannot be permitted,"

Notice the problem here. Chavez's real complaint is with an organization calling for a coup -- but his response is to suggest that special laws need to be placed on all internet communications. There's a disconnect there which doesn't make much sense. If you want to make it illegal to support the overthrow of the government, that's one thing -- but that's different than focusing on laws about the internet. The internet is just a communication mechanism.

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FleaPlus writes "On Saturday, SpaceX successfully conducted a launch dress rehearsal and on-pad test firing of their completed Falcon 9 rocket, with the 15-story tall rocket held down to prevent launch (videos). SpaceX is one of several likely competitors (ranging from the upstart Blue Origin to the more experienced Boeing) in NASA's new plans for commercial crew transportation to low-Earth orbit. SpaceX has been cleared by Cape Canaveral for the Falcon 9's first orbital launch next month, carrying a test model of the company's Dragon cargo/crew capsule, although CEO/CTO Elon Musk has cautioned that they're still in the equivalent of 'beta testing' for the first few flights."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Will Insley's ONECITY project envisaged a grid of arcologies stretching across the great plains, each 2.5 miles square. His interests, Insley wrote, have very little do do with planning theories, but instead the 'dark cities' of mythology. From a 1984 NYT story by Vivien Raynor:

It's clear, however, that the city's inhabitants are segregated into day people, wholesome types who study at home with their children by means of electronic devices, and night people. ''Tattered ghosts in phosphorescent clothing,'' [who] ''often carry around personal abstract structures'' that they exchange ''according to mysterious rituals.''

BLDGBLOG points out the curious resemblance of Insley's illustrations to sewing diagrams, "megastructures are produced on massive looms, needles and yawn moving to a hypnotic drone in semi-darkness." But I'm reminded (especially by this one) of proposals for monuments to place over nuclear waste dumps, to serve as warnings for future civilizations or extraterrestrial visitors. Dark Cities [BLDGBLOG] and pics from The Nonist ART: WILL INSLEY'S VISIONS OF A LABYRINTHINE CITY [NYT, 1984]

Bibble Labs has added support for the Canon EOS 550D and Olympus E-PL1 cameras to Bibble 5 Pro. Version 5.0.3 of the Raw processing software is available for immediate download via the Bibble Labs website.

Maker Benjamin Blundell built a DIY iPhone RFID reader and documented the process on his website. [via Slashdot]

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There's been plenty of coverage of Clay Shirky's recent talk at SXSW where, among other things, he discussed the impact of Napster on our culture. As per usual with Shirky, he made a bunch of fantastic points, often presenting a perspective that is unique and makes you think. I just wanted to pick up on one point, however, because I've been hearing the following argument a lot lately: file sharing needs to be "stopped" because this widespread "illegality" is teaching kids to not have respect for the rule of law. Even Larry Lessig has been known to make this point. Yet, Shirky quickly debunks it in his talk:

In the Napster era, some attributed the ascent of pirated digital music to a supposedly criminal-minded nature among American youth. The argument didn't work. "It coincided with the largest fall in the rate of crime in recorded history," Shirky said.

People aren't file sharing because they don't respect the rule of law. They're file sharing because that particular law doesn't make any sense to them. The idea that people jumping on the file sharing bandwagon will start breaking other laws appears to have no empirical backing whatsoever.

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Nick Thatcher's compact coilgun uses a coil of copper wire along the barrel to launch its projectile. It's powered by 15 photoflash capacitors juiced up by 2 AAAs. Of course the power of this gun is very much in question, the super dark video on the site doesn't show a whole lot. It appears, however, to be able to punch through cardboard at a very close range.

Regardless, this is a nicely executed design with a beautiful finished product.

More:

• Camera flash coil gun
• Camera Coil-Gun
• Nifty low-voltage coil gun
• MV CoilMaster Mark1 Coil Gun
• CoilOsapien - Robosapien robot with a coil gun

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eldavojohn writes "The Guardian is reporting on the strained relationship that Scientology is having with the German government and the airing of a pesky documentary on Southwest Broadcasting. Until Nothing Remains, a $2.3 million documentary, is slotted to air on German television at the end of this month. It recounts the true story of Heiner von Rönn and his family's suffering when he tried to leave the Church of Scientology. A Scientology spokesperson called the film false and intolerant and also said they are investigating legal means to stop the film from being aired. More details on the film can be gleaned here."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.