This weekend at Boing Boing Gadgets, we saw a paranoid Android app that tells you if you're in a sketchy neighborhood, the inexplicable iOrange clonephone, and a a bubble wrap calendar for those wishing to de-stress. Joel spotted the Retriever, a motorbike that tows; a kickable show cabinet; and Ethan Ham's robotic slide whistle. He introduced us to Baconnaise. John found a pretty I-Ching watch; another overpriced MAME coffee table; and the all-black Japanese edition of Dell's Mini Inspiron/ He posted Destructoid's funny review of Saints Row 2. Rob saw a digital palette; heard a Sprint CEO smacktalking the Android operating system; read Laptop Mag's opinion of the ultra-thin Eee S101; reviewed McDonalds'new Angus third-pounder sandwich; and prepared himself for Cube. We also looked at the amazing new "Pony" eBook reader; an unsettling tennis ball towel holder; a mobile OS built on Palm's old bones; and wondered why Neil Gaiman couldn't get a G1. Here's the deal on ninja movies: if it doesn't have Sho, it better be Ninja Terminator.

StupendousMan writes "One of the two big cameras aboard the Hubble Space Telescope is the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, or WFPC2 for short. As the most recent HST status report indicates, the camera was recently powered up again and sent commands to take some test images. Today (Sunday, Oct 26), I received E-mail from a colleague at STScI indicating that the calibration images were 'nominal.' That's NASA-speak for 'fine and dandy.' The E-mail goes on to say 'The data look nominal, indicating that Hubble optical imaging capabilities are in fine shape. (We can expect more glorious Hubble images in the near future.) ... Science with WFPC2 has resumed, and plans are underway to restore ACS/SBC to service this coming week.' Let's hope that the other big instrument, the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), also comes back to life successfully. We should find out in just a week or so."

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After Joe Wurzelbacher of Ohio gained fame as "Joe the Plumber" in the course of the current presidential campaign, it seems that he's drawn more than idle curiosity from people with access to what should probably be confidential information. An anonymous reader writes with a story from The Columbus Dispatch that "government insiders accessed Joe the Plumber's records soon after the McCain-Obama debate. 'Public records requested by The Dispatch disclose that information on Wurzelbacher's driver's license or his sport-utility vehicle was pulled from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles database three times shortly after the debate. Information on Wurzelbacher was accessed by accounts assigned to the office of Ohio Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers, the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency and the Toledo Police Department.' Welcome to 1984."

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YouTube has a cool new feature that allows linking to any part in a video... here's an example (click the link below).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U4WHjibvcE#t=1m18s

Just put #t= and follow the format: m for minutes and s for seconds.

Hand for makers who want to link directly to portions of a video of their projects or for building direct links to "process" / skill building portions of a long video. This also working in the comments of a video. I did try and make it part of the embed code, but nothing happened, ah well.

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Here are some of my favorite posts from the CRAFT blog this week:

• Horrifying Houseplant Costumes Tutorial
• HOW TO: Nature Printing With Simple Supplies
• Card Catalog Coffee Table
• HOW TO - Make Your Own Tofu
• HOW TO - Frosted Animal Cookies

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Roland Piquepaille writes "According to the semiconductor industry, maskless nanolithography is a flexible nanofabrication technique which suffers from low throughput. But now, engineers at the University of California at Berkeley have developed a new approach that involves 'flying' an array of plasmonic lenses just 20 nanometers above a rotating surface, it is possible to increase throughput by several orders of magnitude. The 'flying head' they've created looks like the stylus on the arm of an old-fashioned LP turntable. With this technique, the researchers were able to create line patterns only 80 nanometers wide at speeds up to 12 meters per second. The lead researcher said that by using 'this plasmonic nanolithography, we will be able to make current microprocessors more than 10 times smaller, but far more powerful' and that 'it could lead to ultra-high density disks that can hold 10 to 100 times more data than today's disks.'"

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There's still time to start making or just watch this week's Weekend Project: Cylon Jack O' Lantern. You can view the video here, grab the PDF here and subscribe in iTunes to get all our Weekend Projects and PDFs delivered each week.

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thefickler writes "The newest version of OpenOffice, version 3.0, has set a download record in its first week of availability. Most surprising is the fact that over 80% of downloads were from Windows users. As one commentator noted, when it comes to a choice between almost identical software (e.g. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice), price is the determining factor."

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and

Still don't have a costume? Even ordered a copy of the MAKE Halloween issue from the shop? Well why not go as what six million other people are going as this Halloween? Heath Ledger's version of "The Joker". Okay all Halloween snobbery aside at least check out these videos and go as a really really good version of it. Anything they missed on the look MAKERS? Comment away. Or let's see a version of this when he was the Nurse...

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Mike writes "A draft US Army intelligence report has identified the popular micro-blogging service Twitter as a potential terrorist tool. A chapter titled 'Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter' notes that Twitter members reported the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than news outlets and activists at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used it to provide information on police movements. 'Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,' the report said. The report goes on to say, 'Terrorists could theoretically use Twitter social networking in the US as an operation tool.' Just wait until the Army finds out about chat rooms and email!"

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jeevesbond writes "PHP finally is finally getting support for namespaces. However, after a couple hours of conversation, the developers picked '\' as the separator, instead of the more popular '::'. Fredrik Holmström points out some problems with this approach. The criteria for selection were ease of typing and parsing, how hard it was to make a typo, IDE compatibility, and the number of characters."

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vigmeister writes "I hopped on the netbook bandwagon early this year in a rather odd fashion by picking up an outdated portable tablet (Fujitsu P1510) which just about matches the latest, greatest netbooks for their performance and portability features, while nipping them by managing to give me a better battery life. I've been happy using XP Tablet on this machine until recently, when I started thinking that by optimizing the OS for targeted use, I may be able to squeeze more out of the device. So, my questions are: What OS would you recommend for a netbook/outdated laptop? Usage is typically light — web surfing (with multimedia), email, word processing, spreadsheet and reading PDFs. Also, what OS would you recommend for a ultraportable tablet? Usage is similar to a netbook; there's a little more document editing going on, and good handwriting recognition and note-taking software would be great." Read on for further details about vigmeister's question.

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If you're still looking for Halloween costume inspiration, you might find it here. I think "Wow" sums it up nicely.

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The New York Times is running a story about Johnny Chung Lee, a hardware hacker made famous for his projects which modified the Nintendo Wiimote to do things like positional head tracking and multi-touch display control. The article focuses on the suggestion that Lee's use of YouTube to demonstrate his innovations has done a better job of communicating his ideas than more traditional methods could. Quoting: "He might have published a paper that only a few dozen specialists would have read. A talk at a conference would have brought a slightly larger audience. In either case, it would have taken months for his ideas to reach others. Small wonder, then, that he maintains that posting to YouTube has been an essential part of his success as an inventor. 'Sharing an idea the right way is just as important as doing the work itself,' he says. 'If you create something but nobody knows, it's as if it never happened.'"

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halll7 writes with an update to the proposed Australian national firewall we discussed recently. According to the BBC, "The official watchdog, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), has been conducting laboratory tests of six filtering products, and the government plans a live trial soon. ... After its recent trials, ACMA reported significant improvements on earlier studies. The network degradation on one product was less than 2%, although two products were in excess of 75%." Now, Ars Technica reports that "an Australian newspaper has uncovered documents showing that the government minister responsible for the program has ignored performance and accuracy problems with the filters, then tried to suppress criticism of the plan by private citizens." The EFF has a great deal to say in opposition of these plans.

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An anonymous reader writes "You can find six new online sources of info about hot topics in modern physics at the 'What We Research' outreach page of Perimeter Institute. The info includes text, graphics and online presentations dealing with Cosmology, Superstring Theory, Quantum Gravity, Quantum Foundations, Quantum Information and Particle Physics. The resource section at the bottom of each page recommends a wealth of interesting online lectures by some famous scientists. PI is an independent, nonprofit scientific research and outreach organization."

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LiveJournaller Penwiper337 set to explore the "librarian side of steampunk" by turning a stack of old crummy hardcover books into a beautiful purse:

I had my eye on some attractively bound Reader's Digest Condensed Books (I have no pity for them) that were in the local library book sale, but wanted a little more space than one book could give me. So I made a box-type purse out of three.

I started by cutting out the attractive endpapers for future use, then coated the text block edges with thinned-down school glue (using wax paper to keep them separate from the covers). Use plenty of weights on the books while they dry or they will warp! I then hollowed out the text blocks, as well as the bottom cover of the top book, both covers of the middle book, and the top cover of the bottom book. I gave the interiors of the text blocks several cots of thinned down glue, then glued them to their respective covers with school glue (leaving the top cover unglued to act as the lid of the purse. E6000 glue was used to glue the stacked books together into a solid block.

Book purse (via Craft)

I'm about to go off-blog until November 17* (I'm off on my honeymoon!) but I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that Bruce Schneier will be doing mathematically oriented election coverage on the Making Light blog on election night. If it wasn't for the fact that I'll (literally) be on a tropical island with nothing higher-tech than a scuba-regulator to hand on that night, I'd be all over it.

Dissect the exit polls, debate statistics, ridicule pundits, advance theories, and—hopefully—repeatedly celebrate. So wherever you are, alone in front of the computer, at a party in front of a television, or at one of the zillions of parties around the country, spend the night here as well.

Prizes will be awarded to the people who best predict the presidential winner in each state and the popular vote margin, the winner of every Senate race, the winner of the 11 governor’s races, and the winner of the close House races. Predictions must be posted by 6:00 PM EST to be eligible.

Watch the election results with Bruce Schneier—at Making Light

* Though I do have some killer book reviews lined up for next week that'll robo-post while I'm gone, and of course my lovely co-editors will still be posting totally awesome stuff here in a merciless torrent of total awesomeness.

petermp writes "A Turkish court has blocked access to the popular blog hosting service Blogger (Blogger.com and Blogspot.com, owned by Google), since Friday, October 24th, 2008. According to BasBasBas.com, a Dutch blogger based in Istanbul, who alerted readers about the issue: 'It is suspected that the reason for this has something to do with Adnan Oktar, by some considered the leading Muslim advocate for creationism, who has in the past managed to get Wordpress, Google Groups, as well as Richard Dawkins' website [banned].'"

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I've been waiting for Amazon or some other large tech company to provide stability for hosting services. So I tried out EC2 this week, and I more or less understand what it does and how it works, and I'm confident that if I decided to go that way, I could make my public web presence work in their environment. But I'm not sure if I should do it.

If it were anyone but Amazon I wouldn't go for it. Buying a service like this isn't like buying a laptop or groceries. You're wholly dependent on the company you're contracting with. If they go out of business at the wrong time it could cost you a lot. Or how they deal with outages could matter a lot. I had an ISP flake out on me in 2000 in the middle of a big onsite meeting followed by a user conference. We lost a few months of forward motion, at least, in the week that our Internet access and hosting (all in the same basket) was down. A couple of years later, Exodus went out of business, and that's where we moved to after the Y2K outage. I always seek reliability and stability, but given the state of the economy you gotta wonder if any of these service providers are going to be around much longer.

If a company like Amazon did VPSes, Virtual Private Servers, I'd go for that right away. It's much more like what I'm using now, two co-located servers, but I hadn't been watching the prices, they're much much cheaper. I'm wasting a fair amount of money going the colo route. But I don't know any of the companies. This is where I could use some help from readers of this blog. If you use a VPS, which one, is there a consensus, one that's considered a no-brainer, that some larger entities depend on? No one wants to be the largest customer of an ISP.

PS: I need Windows VPS, not Linux.

Art forms in nature, all 400 pages on Flickr and as a PDF via Beyond the Beyond... EricGjerde writes -

Kunst-Formen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature), by Ernst Haeckel, 1898. This is a wonderful book, in the public domain, which features all sorts of illustrations of the natural world. If you're doing some research for organic shapes, this book is a nice place to start. I've uploaded a 260MB PDF version of this 400 page document to my website, please feel free to download!

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Some computers are never turned off, or at least rarely see any state less active than "standby," but others (for power savings or other reasons) need rebooting — daily, or even more often. The New York Times is running a short article which says that it's not just a few makers like Asus who are trying to take away some of the pain of waiting for computers, especially laptops, to boot up. While it's always been a minor annoyance to wait while a computer slowly grinds itself to readiness, "the agitation seems more intense than in the pre-Internet days," and manufacturers are actively trying to cut that wait down to a more bearable length. How bearable? A "very good system is one that boots in under 15 seconds," according to a Microsoft blog cited, and an HP source names an 18-month goal of 20-30 seconds.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some computers are never turned off, or at least rarely see any state less active than "standby," but others (for power savings or other reasons) need rebooting — daily, or even more often. The New York Times is running a short article which says that it's not just a few makers like Asus who are trying to take some of the pain of waiting computers, especially laptops, to boot up. While it's always been a minor annoyance to wait while a computer slowly grinds itself to readiness, "the agitation seems more intense than in the pre-Internet days," and manufacturers are actively trying to cut that wait down to a more bearable length. How bearable? A "very good system is one that boots in under 15 seconds," according to a Microsoft blog cited, and an HP source names an 18-month goal of 20-30 seconds.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

secmartin writes "Belgian ISP Scarlet scored an important victory in the first major European test of copyright law. The interim decision forcing them to block transfers of copyrighted materials via P2P has been reversed, because the judge agreed with Scarlet that the measures the Belgian RIAA proposed to implement proved to be ineffective. A final decision is expected next year."

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kpearson writes "Distributed.net's 8-year-old OGR-25 distributed computing project has just proven conclusively that the predicted shortest 25-mark Golomb ruler is optimal. 'The total length of the ruler is 480, with marks at positions: 0 12 29 39 72 91 146 157 160 161 166 191 207 214 258 290 316 354 372 394 396 431 459 467 480. (This ruler may alternatively be expressed in terms of the distance between those positions, which is how dnetc displays them: 12-17-10-33-19-...).' 124,387 people participated in the project and two people found the shortest ruler, one on October 10, 2007 and the other on March 24, 2008."

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