Kligat writes "Scientists have found two asteroid belts around the star Epsilon Eridani, the ninth closest star to our solar system. Epsilon Eridani also possesses an icy outer ring similar in composition to our Kuiper Belt, but with 100 times more material, and a Jovian mass planet near the edge of the innermost belt. Researchers believe that two other planets must orbit the 850 million year old star near the other two belts. Terrestrial planets are possible, but not yet indicated."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While there have been plenty of news stories about how the various political campaigns in the US have been using the internet to get out the vote, Newsweek has a fascinating story about how Japanese election law pretty much bans all use of the internet in campaigning. Once a political campaign is announced, that candidate can't update his website or blog. The only loophole is podcasts (the law doesn't cover audio), but that's hardly enough to make much of a dent. As the article notes, this has helped keep younger, more technically savvy politicians from succeeding when they run for office -- and that's part of the reason why older politicians are perfectly happy with the system the way it exists. It sounds like some are pushing for change, while others are actively defying the ban, but it's apparently quite a different online atmosphere during election season in Japan than elsewhere.

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The best part of Hendrik Hertzberg's excellent New Yorker commentary about McCain and Palin's failed attempt to convince people that Obama is a socialist is the final paragraph containing this boast from Gov. Sarah Palin:

The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

Like, Socialism

alphadogg writes "A assistant professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is sounding a warning that companies, the government and researchers need to come up with a plan for preserving our increasingly digitized data in light of shifting document management and other software platforms (think WordPerfect and floppy disks). Jerome P. McDonough, who teaches at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says there exists about 369 exabytes worth of data, and that includes some pretty hard to replace stuff, including tax files, email and photos. Open standards could play a key role in any preservation effort, he says. 'If we can't keep today's information alive for future generations, we will lose a lot of our culture,' McDonough said. Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It must be a seriously contentious election if even the pumpkins are becoming politically charged. Jonah shared some political pumpkins with you last week , and here are a few more:

• Mccain's, Obama's, and the nice, neutral "vote" logos
• Barack O Lantern: complete with blue LEDs
• A zombie McCain!

Note: neither I nor Make Magazine have an opinion on whether McCain or Obama are actually Living Dead. I simply like the pumpkin design...

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While I was pointing out all of the reasons why the DMCA needs to be re-examined from scratch, Wired has put up an article detailing the one single positive aspect of the DMCA: the safe harbor provisions that protect service providers from liability for copyright infringement done by users. However, I think Wired, and the various people quoted in the article, give way too much credit to the DMCA for a variety of reasons. In fact, Wired goes way too far in claiming that the DMCA "saved" the web and allowed it to become what it is today, suggesting (incorrectly) that things like blogs and YouTube wouldn't be successes without the DMCA.

First, the claim by an MPAA representative that without the DMCA movie studios wouldn't have moved to DVDs is, at best, stretching the truth. While some studios would have been nervous, it wouldn't have taken long for some studios to more aggressively experiment with DVDs, and early success would have made studios unwilling to hold back. Besides, it's not as if the DMCA has actually done anything to protect DVDs. DVD ripping software is widely available.

As for the safe harbor provisions, there's plenty of reason to believe that we would have reached the same legal situation even without the DMCA's safe harbors. Two years prior to the DMCA, the CDA was passed, and while pretty much all of that law was thrown out as unconstitutional, the bit that remained was the famous section 230, which provides a very similar safe harbor for non-copyright issues. It's not difficult to believe that in the absence of a DMCA, section 230 would have been expanded to cover copyright. And, even if section 230 wasn't extended explicitly, one would hope that the courts would have established the exact same precedent by noting how ridiculous it is to blame a service provider for the actions of its users. The fact that we even need safe harbor provisions is ridiculous. It should be common sense that liability should be placed on the actual party to do the action, rather than any service provider that was used in the process.

Finally, Wired talks up the whole notice-and-takedown process, which has been a tremendous burden for many sites. While Wired does highlight how the notice-and-takedown process has been regularly abused, it still gives too much credit to the whole system. If Congress really had to have a formal takedown process, it makes perfect sense to have a notice-and-notice system, where the accused infringer would have a chance to respond to the charges before the content is taken down (innocent until proven guilty, blah blah blah).

So, yes, the safe harbors provided by the DMCA are a good thing -- but to extrapolate from that and a few other questionable points that the DMCA is responsible for the rise of things like blogging and YouTube is hard to square with reality. It's quite likely that things wouldn't be all that different in the absence of the DMCA -- except we'd have a lot fewer abuses of it.

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Transcript snip:

Palin: Obama...Barack Obama has an ideological commitment to higher taxes. The lessons I believe we have taught our kids would start to erode. Those lessons about work ethic, hard work being rewarded and productivity being rewarded...

Female yelling off-camera, in audience:
And he's a ni***r!

Palin: And...and......lessons about, um, the virtues of freedom and independence while being generous and compassionate with others.

From Wonkette, via Daily Kos. (Thanks, Richard Metzger).

CWmike writes "Just a day after downplaying the vulnerability that caused it to issue an out-of-cycle patch last week, Microsoft warned customers late yesterday that exploit code had gone public and was being used in additional attacks. 'We've identified the public availability of exploit code that now shows code execution for the vulnerability addressed by MS08-067,' said Mike Reavey, operations manager of Microsoft's Security Response Center, in a post to the MSRC blog. 'This exploit code has been shown to result in remote code execution on Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I don't imagine this is much of a surprise?

Cool painting tools, from the Lee Valley Tools Catalog, spotted on Dinosaurs and Robots. The pyramids are for raising up objects that you're painting.

Handy Painting Tools from Lee Valley

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Ian Lamont writes "The Personal Genome Project has released the data sets and descriptions of traits, ethnic background and other information of the first ten volunteers, which include the project director and nine other people with backgrounds in genetics, medicine, and biotechnology. While the human genome was first sequenced at the beginning of this decade, what's special about this project is these 10 participants are having their names, genome, and other personal data gleaned from questionnaires shared openly on the Web, where interested researchers can freely access them. One of the ultimate aims of the project is to create a public database of 100,000 volunteers that researchers and other parties can use to determine what traits, diseases or other characteristics are associated with specific genetic markers. When asked why volunteers are requested to attach their names to the Web records, the project director said the data could be used by researchers in other fields outside of genetics, including forensic science and historical research. While this project opens the door for some interesting and potentially life-saving research, there may also be difficulties or problems for people whose records are posted on the Web. Would you participate? Would you share your name, along with your genome, disease history, and traits? Why or why not?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we worshipped the Pantone Rubik's cube and welcomed guest reviewer Alan Graham of Treehugger, who took a look at a new home music system from Sonos.

John found a rainbow keyboard, a review of Guitar Hero: World Tour, and the rumored motherboard for the rumored Mac Mini II. He thought the Gameboy theme for iPhone was fantastic, and 3-inch figurine speakers, too.

He liked liquid bookmarks, saw an icky transparent mouse with an insect in it, depressurized his head with the Ear Pressure Equalizer, and pronounced the final death for VCR.

Rob offered more on Lutec's inelegant perpetual motion machine, listened to unpleasant feedback music, and liked the look of UltraPin virtual pinball. He didn't think much of Blu-ray firmware upgrade nonsense or the stylings of Dell's new Optiplexes. Nor did he drop his cellphone down the toilet and get his arm stuck trying to fish it out.

Joel had an exclusive on Windows 7 screenshots that lasted about 40 seconds. Finally, there was a sinister science poster and the footage rotoscoped for Jordan Mechner's original Prince of Persia.

Boing Boing Gadgets

Today the tech/business press was filled with stories about how Google has settled the lawsuits from authors and publishers over its book scanning project. Google is paying $125 million, and will be changing some of how its book search system works. Authors and publishers will allow books to go online, but it locks Google in to a specific business model that might not be the most reasonable and, most importantly, it does not answer the legal question concerning the overall legality of book scanning. Pretty much any way you look at it, Google caved here -- and this is unfortunate for a variety of reasons.

Two years ago, there was a story in the NY Times about how Google's legal department saw all of these lawsuits against the company as a way to stand up on principle and make better law. Specifically, the company positioned itself as being willing to fight certain lawsuits on principle in order to get precedent setting rulings on the books in support of openness, fair use, safe harbors and many other important issues. The company suggested that, rather than settle, it would fight these lawsuits knowing that it alone, with its big war chest of money, could fight some of these battles that tiny startups could never afford.

It may not be surprising, but it's safe to say those days are long gone. We've been seeing it time and time again, from Google's decision to pay off entertainment companies not to sue YouTube to the decision to pay off the Associated Press for including its headlines in Google News. Perhaps one of the biggest legal battles, however, was over Google's book scanning project. Google took it upon itself to scan numerous books and make the results searchable online. The company put significant restrictions in place, such that it's almost impossible for someone to do a search and read the entire book that way. You can only see a few consecutive pages. You can't print. However, you can search and find new and interesting books that you might want to buy. I know I've bought dozens of books this way.

Not surprisingly, authors and publishers sued Google over this, and went around claiming how awful it was -- even though it was really not all that different than creating a much better card catalog for books. The purpose was to help people find more books that were useful, rather than to break any sort of copyright. And, in fact, studies showed that books that showed up in Google's search improved sales. In other words, it should have been a win-win situation all around. But, like so many content providers, authors and publishers falsely overvalue the content and undervalue services that make that content more valuable.

However, more important that was the simple principle of the whole thing. Last year the New Yorker ran a fantastic article explaining how having authors and publishers quibble over copyright issues while preventing the widespread archiving and sharing of information may turn out to be one of the most ridiculous arguments ever, while our culture get locked up and fades away.

So, it's quite upsetting to see Google cave on this. The settlement does not establish any sort of precedent on the legality of creating such an index of books, and, if anything pushes things in the other direction, saying that authors and publishers now have the right to determine what innovations there can be when it comes to archiving and indexing works of content. Unfortunately, this was really inevitable. As was the case with Google caving on YouTube and the Associated Press, it becomes a situation where Google realizes it can throw a little cash at the problem to make it go away -- while also creating a large barrier to entry for any more innovative startup. From a short-term business perspective this might make sense, but from a long-term business perspective (and wider cultural perspective) it's terrible.

It will only encourage more lawsuits against Google for trying to innovate, as more and more people hope that Google will settle and throw some cash their way. Furthermore, it greatly diminishes the incentives for making books more useful, and that's damaging to our cultural heritage. While it was always silly to believe that Google ever really operated on a higher principled stance, rather than a short-term business focus, this settlement is tremendously disappointing.

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Modd3d has created a MIDI driven Halloween centerpiece of awesomeness -

I ripped the brains out of one of those cheap Gemmy skulls with the moving mouth and glowy eyes and installed a Midify board. It was a fairly easy project and I now have full control over the mouth and eyes. Now I just have to work on its musical taste.

Personally, I think the skull's musical selection is spot-on. [via Synthtopia]

More:
Add MIDI to your TV dinner

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Boston judge who has consolidated all of the RIAA's Massachusetts cases into a single case over which she has been presiding for the past 5 years delivered something of a rebuke to the RIAA's lawyers, we have learned. At a conference this past June, the transcript of which (PDF) has just been released, Judge Nancy Gertner said to them that they 'have an ethical obligation to fully understand that they are fighting people without lawyers... to understand that the formalities of this are basically bankrupting people, and it's terribly critical that you stop it ...' She also acknowledged that 'there is a huge imbalance in these cases. The record companies are represented by large law firms with substantial resources,' while it is futile for self-represented defendants to resist. The judge did not seem to acknowledge any responsibility on her part, however, for having created the 'imbalance,' and also stated that the law is 'overwhelmingly on the side of the record companies,' even though she seems to recognize that for the past 5 years she has been hearing only one side of the legal story."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More good ideas for ways to use/bend/repurpose the atari punk console circuit -

Remade a Atari Punk Console a friend of mine gave me and put it into an old toy keyboard that I accidentally broke during a circuit bending frenzy this summer.

Especially good if you have some leftovers from a "circuit bending frenzy". Keyboards certainly don't have to be 'in-tune' to be fun!

More:
Atari Punk Console schematics

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An anonymous reader writes "API Lead at Twitter, Alex Payne, writes today that the Internet was "built wrong," and continues to be accepted as an inferior system, due to a software engineering philosophy called Worse Is Better. "We now know, for example, that IPv4 won't scale to the projected size of the future Internet. We know too that near-universal deployment of technologies with inadequate security and trust models, like SMTP, can mean millions if not billions lost to electronic crime, defensive measures, and reduced productivity," says Payne, who calls for a "content-centric approach to networking." Payne doesn't mention, however, that his own system, Twitter, was built wrong and is consistently down."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of my favorite things about Maker Faire is watching people make things. There are so many things to see and so many distractions - it's really cool to slow down and watch folks really focusing on the thing they're doing. Here's a little round-up of makers, both kids and grownups, making masks, metal-working, playing with LEGO, running virtual mazes, playing pong - lots more!

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Over at the MightyOhm, Jeff has been working on building a streaming WiFi radio system (built around a Asus WL-520GU router):

I have been wanting to build a streaming radio for some time. I frequently work in my garage, where I occasionally use my Macbook to play music through a small amplifier and bookshelf speakers. The problem is that my laptop is not always set up in the garage, and greasy fingers are not a good thing to have around a white laptop, period. I could simply buy an internet radio, but I couldn't stomach the $150-$300 price tag on most players for such a luxury.

So I decided to build one instead.

I started the design process by drafting an outline of desired features, and then breaking them down into wants and needs, while trying to keep the project scope under control.

Here's Part 1 of the project.
And Part 2.

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You may recall the story of Wayne Crookes, a Canadian businessman who is active in the Green Party in Canada. In 2007, he sued Google, Yahoo, Myspace, Wikipedia and some other sites, claiming that all were liable for content that he found defamatory. It's somewhat interesting to try to follow the trail of what the actual libel is -- as many of the lawsuits for libel are focused on stories about (you guessed it) him filing for libel lawsuits (which certainly appears to be true, rather than libelous). With at least some of those lawsuits, the Canadian Supreme Court tossed them out, though over jurisdiction issues, rather than on the merits of the case.

In one case, Crookes sued the website P2PNet for just linking to the material that Crookes found libelous. It seemed like a huge stretch to say that merely linking to content (even if you grant that it was libelous) is also libel. And, the good news is that a court has now agreed. It has sided with Jon Newton, the operator of P2PNet in noting that simply linking to libelous material is not, in itself, libelous. The ruling does note that if the link text had been libelous, that might be a different story -- but just linking to the text as part of a discussion about the lawsuits is hardly libelous. This is definitely a huge win for free speech in Canada -- though, Canada could take a big step forward in updating its defamation laws to make it clear that the liability for libel should be on those who actually were libelous, rather than those who host it or point to it.

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Matt_dk writes "NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has observed a new category of minerals spread across large regions of Mars. This discovery suggests that liquid water remained on the planet's surface a billion years later than scientists believed, and it played an important role in shaping the planet's surface and possibly hosting life."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A lot of folks who weren't in the Austin, TX area last week for Maker Faire Austin 2008 wanted some of the deals we had at the Maker Shed Store, so - for the rest of the week we're going to have a post each day with some of the specials. Here are 5 of the most popular products from the store along with some discounts!

Enter in MAKER to get 10% off any of these kits (or anything in the Maker Shed right now) if you spend more than $80 enter in FAIRE after and get free shipping on orders over $80.00 (Post discount of course), either of these codes will work independently from another as well as together.

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DIY Electronics kit. Harness the power of the electron! Create games, toys, and contraptions with these fundamental components. Follow the easy instructions to make a light detector, LED flasher, noisemaker and more! Once you master the basics, you'll be ready to create your own! Everything you need to get started is right in the box, including switches, buttons, diodes, capacitors. transistors and regulators. Learn the amazing concepts of resistance, capacitance, voltage and current with the step-by-step project manual. Soon, you will be the electronics wizard! Great introduction to electronics for all ages.

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Animated Ghost kit. Grab this cool kit for Halloween. Sound activated, the ghost flashes his little red LED eyes, vibrates and makes scary sounds!
Easy and fun to build. Hack it!

• Ghost responds to sudden noises
• Adjustable sensitivity
• Battery operation: 2xAAA battery (not included)
• Soldering Required
• Dimensions: 137x68x50mm

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MintyBoost 2.0 kit. Build your own MintyBoost: a small & simple (but very powerful and very MAKE-like) USB charger for your iPod (or other mp3 player), camera, cell phone, and any other gadget you can plug into a USB port to charge.

• The charger circuitry and 2 AA batteries fit into an Altoids gum tin, and will run your iPod for hours, 2.5x more than you'd get from a 9V USB charger! You can use rechargable batteries too.
• Tested with iPod nano/mini/photo/video/shuffle, Blackberry, iPaq, LuxPro Tangent, Rio Carbon, Samsung T809 and more.
• Uses 2 AA batteries (not included), more than doubles your iPod 4G/5G battery life!
• Some soldering is necessary, but even if you've never soldered before it should be pretty easy.
• Batteries and tin not included. If you live in an area that doesn't have Altoids gum, you can buy a tin (including the gum) from us.

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Diet Coke and Mentos kit. Recreate the Internet sensation in your own backyard! Fresh from their performance at the 2008 Maker Faires, the guys at EepyBird have hand crafted replica PVC nozzles just like the ones they use themselves. Each kit contains a variety of nozzle cuts to give you the coolest, highest shooting geysers. We'll even throw in a pack of Mentos to get you started (Diet Coke not included). Check out EepyBird videos here. Thanks again for another great show guys!

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Arduino Starter kit. Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It's an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board. Arduino is open source! We've put together our own Arduino Starter Kit, tossed in our bestselling Making Things Talk book, wrapped it up in some cool packaging so you can get started quickly without having to do a lot of shopping first.

• 1x Arduino Diecimila
• 1x Mini Breadboard
• 1x 3 ft. USB Cable
• 10x 1K Resistors
• 2x 10k Resistors
• 3x Red LEDs
• 2x Green LEDs
• 1X Superbright Blue LED
• 1x Momentary Tactile Switch
• 2x Interlink Force Sensing Resistors
• 1x Protoshield Kit (unassembled)
• Making Things Talk by Tom Igoe
• 24" each of Red, Blue & Black AWG jumper wire
• 9V Battery Case w/DC Plug (some assembly required)
• Yes, even a 9V battery

Remember - enter in MAKER to get 10% off any of these kits, if you spend more than $80 enter in FAIRE after and get free shipping on orders over $80.00 (Post discount of course), either of these codes will work independently from another as well as together.

If these kits don't float your boat stop back on Weds around the same time for more!

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For this weekend's Steam Powered: The California Steampunk Convention, the band Abney Park and Airship Ventures have teamed up to offer dirigible rides to conference-goers (for $785 a ticket). Airship Ventures just brought one of their Zeppelin NTs over from Germany and it will be moored at Moffett Field. MAKE contributor Todd Lappin was lucky enough to get a ride on the ship and posted a flight report on Telstar Logistics:

Operated by a startup called Airship Ventures, the Zeppelin NT will be based out of Moffett Field, Calfornia -- a fitting home, as Moffett was built by the US Navy during the 1920s to serve as a base for military dirigibles.

The new Zeppelins are filled with the inert helium instead of highly flammable hydrogen, they're only about one-quarter the size of the old giants, and they're equipped with modern technology and avionics. Power is delivered by three Lycoming engines that put out around 200 horsepower each, and the airship frame is constructed from a combination of of aluminum and carbon fiber.

Flight Report: Aloft in a Zeppelin Airship
Up Ship! (Airship Ventures' blog, with a travelogue of their transatlantic and cross-country trip)

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I just bought a new MacBook Pro. I like it. I was stunned at how bright the LED screen is. Then I realized it was only at half brightness. I don't mind the lack of a button under the trackpad. I pretend there's still a button under the trackpad. I rest my thumb where the button used to be. I'm OK with that, and it works for me.

I'm impressed with the precision of the casing. I picture dudes in white lab coats with metal instruments in their hands when I look at the tiny micro speaker holes. I don't remember picturing dudes in white lab coats before (OK maybe with the 1st gen iPhone). I'm surprised that it's not all that much thinner or lighter than the previous model though.

I like that, when lifting up the lid, the entire machine doesn't lift off the desk or try and skate away. I like that there's no latch, but miss an audible click that confirms it's fully closed. I like that all the inputs are on one side now. I don't like that it's the opposite side that I've configured my desk for.

I love the glass screen. I'll still need to plug into a non-glossy screen for any real color work. I've been OK with that. I think the speakers are louder than the previous model. I doubt my hearing has improved over the last few days, but if it has, then the speaker volume remains the same as the previous model. I'd be OK with that.

I was shocked how small the box it comes in is. I'm happy that Apple is considering packaging waste now. This reduced packaging lowers the "unboxing excitement" by approximately 4%. I'm OK with that.

I like this new MacBook Pro.

snydeq writes "Microsoft followed up its Windows Azure unveiling to announce that it will deliver lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote through the browser, a la Google Apps. Surprisingly, Office Web applications will run in Firefox and Safari, not just Internet Explorer. Far less shocking: You won't get Office Web apps free and clear as you do Google apps. The apps are meant to be an extension to locally installed instances of the next version of Microsoft Office, the same way Outlook Web Access provides access to mail without the fat Outlook client."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I have to admit that when I first heard about the whole Redbox concept of renting DVDs from a kiosk I was skeptical, but that was mainly because previous experiments had all been quite expensive with very limited selection. However, in actually offering super cheap prices ($1 rentals), I've been hearing from many Techdirt readers who swear that Redbox is fantastic and, at such a cheap price, often easier than downloading the movie.

So, wouldn't you know it? Hollywood is trying to block Redbox from doing business.

The company has filed a lawsuit against Universal Studios for trying to coerce the company into signing a ridiculous, business-destroying agreement -- and threatening to try to stop others from supplying Redbox movies if the company didn't agree. Specifically, Universal wanted Redbox to agree to:

• wait 45 days after a DVD's release date before renting it;
• pay a royalty of 40% of gross rental revenues;
• promise that prices never dip below $0.99 per night; and
• destroy all previously rented DVDs rather than offering them for purchase for $7, as Redbox currently does.

In other words, Universal Studios is basically trying to kill off Redbox, a company that has innovated in its business model, and, in doing so, effectively trying to circumvent the first sale doctrine by controlling how a copyrighted product can be resold. Universal threatened that if Redbox did not agree to these business-destroying clauses, it would stop supplying movies to any distributor who supplies Redbox. Effectively, that would mean that those distributors would stop supplying Redbox, rather than lose Universal as a supplier. This is, quite clearly, a case of corporate bullying. It's also yet another example of how the movie studios want to stop any innovation in the industry that doesn't come directly from the studios.

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A Cow writes "The Tribler BitTorrent client, a project run by researchers from several European universities and Harvard, is the first to incorporate decentralized search capabilities. With Tribler, users can now find .torrent files that are hosted among other peers, instead of on a centralized site such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova. The Tribler developers have found a way to make their client work, without having to rely on BitTorrent sites. Although others have tried to come up with similar solutions, such as the Cubit plugin for Vuze, Tribler is the first to understand that with decentralized BitTorrent search, there also has to be a way to moderate these decentralized torrents in order to avoid a flood of spam."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Baron Bob sells this set of Horrified B-Movie Victims. The set features nine victims ( 2.5" - 3" tall) in "an array of horrified poses.. shock, awe, fear, and of course the female slipping in high heels." The set sells for $14.95 but the green bear doesn't seem to be included. Horrified B-Movie Victims

Elfdoll is a South Korean firm that sells resin-based ball-jointed dolls (BJD) with hyperreal features. THese "blank" dolls are popular among collectors who mod them in fantastic ways with hair, outfits, and swapped body parts. Elfdoll recently opened a showroom in Los Angeles that has become a hub of BJD hackers in Southern California. The Los Angeles Weekly's Liz Ohanesian explores the BJD scene through some incredibly strange photos. From the LA Weekly (photos by Jackie Canchola):

“We think that we are not a doll company, we are artists,” says Elfdoll Foreign Trade Manager Yeounjoo Lim, best known to her customers and friends as Ms. Cholong...

Ms. Cholong’s job is part curator, part community organizer and part salesperson, bringing together BJD enthusiasts for events where purchasing the handmade objects is only part of the fun. At the showroom’s October 25 party, hobbyists arrived with arms filled with pieces from their own collections reconfigured to fit Halloween images of comic book heroes, steampunks, fairies, Japanese-styled Lolitas and goth boys in drag...

“Other companies, when they market the dolls, they actually create characters for them,” says Chris Holz of Melbourne, Australia, a collector who happened to arrive in Los Angeles just in time for this event. “The Elfdolls don’t have a background. They’ve got a name, but that’s tantamount to just identifying the doll. When people buy them, it’s whatever they want.”

Elfdoll: Don't Call It A Toy Company

Gordon Charlton uses the feedback of two walkie-talkies to make beautiful interesting music. Rob B has more info and a video over at BB Gadgets.
Unpleasant feedback music with walkie-talkies

As an experiment, Steve Vigneau recently squirted more than almost two dozen expired toothpaste tubes into a bowl and stirred up the goop. He then brushed his teeth. Vigneau documented his experiment with some colorful photographs. 23 Tubes 1 Bowl (via Laughing Squid)

My task for the morning is to vote!

It's kind of hard to find the instructions on the web, so I hope to provide a trail others can follow through Google.

Here's a list of county elections offices in California. I'm in the very first county on the list, Alameda and the guy you gotta find is Dave Macdonald the registrar of voters. Right there on the calendar on the front page is today's event, Early Voting.

I need to go to the same place I did jury duty earlier this year, 1225 Fallon St. Easy to get to via BART, just get out at the Lake Merritt station.

I'm going to walk to the station, bringing an iPod, some podcasts, a bottle of water and an energy bar. As a reward I'm going to treat myself to lunch at Oakland City Center before heading home on the BART. So I get my daily exercise, do my civic duty (like paying taxes an act of patriotism imho, Gov Palin) and have a tasty lunch as a reward.

Barence writes "Microsoft has released the first pre-beta code of Windows 7, and PC Pro has a series of in-depth, hands-on examinations of all the new features. The revamped user interface has clearly gleaned more than a little inspiration from the Mac OS X Dock, but it goes further than the Apple concept with 'jumplists,' new gadgets and an updated system tray. The much-vaunted multi-touch controls were there to play with, and it seemed to work well. Networking has been given the full treatment, with new features HomeGroup and Libraries. Windows 7 debuts a new feature called Device Stage that has the potential to be unbelievably handy ... or a complete disaster. Finally, several new features could make PCs easier to manage and secure for IT departments, such as BitLocker To Go and Branch Cache." All in all, these features together lead some people to the conclusion that Windows 7 will "suck less than Vista" — that last link from reader ThinSkin, who also points to a related sampling of screenshots from the current iteration of Windows 7.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barence writes "Microsoft has released the first pre-beta code of Windows 7, and PC Pro has a series of in-depth, hands-on examinations of all the new features. The revamped user interface has clearly gleaned more than a little inspiration from the Mac OS X Dock, but it goes further than the Apple concept with 'jumplists,' new gadgets and an updated system tray. The much-vaunted multi-touch controls were there to play with, and it seemd to work well. Networking has been given the full treatment, with new features HomeGroup and Libraries. Windows 7 debuts a new feature called Device Stage that has the potential to be unbelievably handy ... or a complete disaster. Finally, several new features could make PCs easier to manage and secure for IT departments, such as BitLocker To Go and Branch Cache." All in all, these features together lead some people to the conclusion that Windows 7 will "suck less than Vista" — that last link from reader ThinSkin, who also points to a related sampling of screenshots from the current iteration of Windows 7.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boing Boing pal Todd Lappin took a preview ride in the Airship Ventures craft that will be debuting on Halloween in the Bay Area (see previous BB post about that). Here's a snip from Todd's account:

Operated by a startup called Airship Ventures, the Zeppelin NT will be based out of Moffett Field, Calfornia -- a fitting home, as Moffett was built by the US Navy during the 1920s to serve as a base for military dirigibles.

The new Zeppelins are filled with the inert helium instead of highly flammable hydrogen, they're only about one-quarter the size of than the old giants, and they're equipped with modern technology and avionics. Power is delivered by three Lycoming engines that put out around 200 horsepower each, and the airship frame is constructed from a combination of of aluminum and carbon fiber.

Boarding an airship is not at all like boarding a conventional aircraft, because an airship doesn't sit still; it tends to bob and sway as the wind blows the big balloon around. As a result, climbing on board the Zeppelin is a bit like stepping from a stable dock onto a boat that's rocking on a gentle sea.

Flight Report: Aloft in a Zeppelin Airship (Telstar Logistics)

Previously: Historic Halloween Steampunk Airship Ride With Victorian Rockers Abney Park

Anil Dash has a thoughtful essay up today. Snip:

Sarah Palin has been unsurprising in her criticisms of Barack Obama's credentials and policies, fulfilling the traditional role of the vice presidential candidate being the most aggressive and pointed rhetorical attacker in a campaign. But a closer look at her deliberate use of vernacular and language reveals that she has gone far beyond any other candidate in vice presidential history in the dangerous and irresponsible implications of her attacks. She has phrased her attacks on Obama in a way that avoids accountability to the press while specifically addressing the subset of her audience who are most likely to advocate extreme actions against Obama.

I don't usually write about politics here; I leave the ugliness to those who seem to revel in it. But I think a lot about language, usually in a more lighthearted context like talking about yo mama jokes or lolcats. What's striking to me this election season, though, is that Sarah Palin has chosen to abuse her command of language so obviously without suffering any serious criticism for it thus far.

The crux of the issue is simple:

(1) Sarah Palin has unequivocally associated Barack Obama with the idea of terrorism and specifically with "terrorists".

(2) Republican President George Bush has defined in our National Security Strategy, and the Republican Party's platform affirms, that we may identify and strike at terrorists before they have committed any defined acts of aggression against American citizens.

(3) George Bush has made clear, by stating before a joint session of Congress that "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

(4) Palin has used deliberate choice of language to avoid these connections being highlighted by the media, while increasing the likelihood that the target audience for her message will be incited by her statements.

Through these arguments, it becomes clear that Sarah Palin's assertions are designed not to prove that Obama is unqualified for the office of the Presidency of the United States. Rather, she appears to be attempting to convince a substantial portion of her supporters that Obama supports terrorism against the United States and thus should be, at the very least, incarcerated as an enemy combatant (which we are doing to American citizens already) or at worst, assassinated for supporting terror. She has done this knowing full well that she can retain plausible deniability thanks to the ambiguity of her statements as they'll be interpreted by the media, by her detractors, and by her more reasonable supporters.

What Sarah Palin is Saying (dashes.com)

Aaron Huey takes gorgeous photos for National Geographic Adventure, the New Yorker, Smishsonian, and the New York Times. He recently hitchiked across Siberia on a National Geographic Expedition Council Grant. Huey's site is filled with stunning images, including a photo essay documenting the Afghanistan drug war (see above). Aaron Huey

The great writers' guide to DIY - Features, Books - The Independent via RW.

In his book Kafka's Soup, Mark Crick parodied literary giants by imagining how their their best-known characters would cook. Now, in Sartre's Sink, he's got them tackling home improvements...

Hanging wallpaper with Ernest Hemingway
Tools: Pasting brush, Wallpaper brush, Decorator's scissors, Pasting table, Plumb line
Materials: Wallpaper, Wallpaper paste

The old man had worked for two days and two nights to strip away the old wallpaper and now on the morning of the third day the time to hang the new paper had come and he was tired. His palms were blistered from long hours scraping away the old paper and the blisters had begun to weep. The old man felt the pain in his hands as he looked again at the bare walls of the room. "Room, thou art big. But I will finish this trabajo that I have begun," he said. "Or I will die trying."

For too long DIY books have suffered the neglect of the literary Establishment. Finally, here in one volume, are the essential DIY tips of the world's greatest writers. Dostoyevsky tells of a young man employed by an elderly lady to retile her bathroom; Caesar puts up a shelf for his rebellious tribe of adolescenti; the existentialist hero of the Sartre pastiche is both disgusted and nauseated to discover in a blocked sink the revelation of his own condition. We also learn how to repair a dripping tap under Conrad's eyes, replace a window pane with a voyeuristic Milan Kundera, and hang wallpaper under the watchful eye of Mark Twain. Other handy hints include how to: replace a roof tile; remedy a squeaking floor board; remove a carpet stain and bleed a radiator, by writers, including Bronte, Shakespeare, Duras, Salinger and Paul Auster. As in "Kafka's Soup", each piece is illustrated by a famous artist, including da Vinci, Hokusai and Rembrandt.

For too long DIY books have suffered the neglect of the literary Establishment. Finally, here in one volume, are the essential DIY tips of the world's greatest writers. Dostoyevsky tells of a young man employed by an elderly lady to retile her bathroom; Caesar puts up a shelf for his rebellious tribe of adolescenti; the existentialist hero of the Sartre pastiche is both disgusted and nauseated to discover in a blocked sink the revelation of his own condition. We also learn how to repair a dripping tap under Conrad's eyes, replace a window pane with a voyeuristic Milan Kundera, and hang wallpaper under the watchful eye of Mark Twain. Other handy hints include how to: replace a roof tile; remedy a squeaking floor board; remove a carpet stain and bleed a radiator, by writers, including Bronte, Shakespeare, Duras, Salinger and Paul Auster. As in "Kafka's Soup", each piece is illustrated by a famous artist, including da Vinci, Hokusai and Rembrandt.

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And you thought your gardening conditions were unfriendly? This guy has successfully created raised beds to grow a garden in Iraq.

I particularly like the wick design: the buried bottles have parachute cord running to holes poked in the sides. Filled with water, they slowly feed moisture into the soil throughout the day.

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Today only - get CrossOver (usually $70) for free - runs Win apps on Mac and Linux... Saw this all over the place today, downloading now...

CodeWeavers' mission is to make Linux and Mac OS X fully Windows compatible operating systems. We do this through the power of Wine, which powers all of our CrossOver products. The CrossOver products make it possible to run Windows programs on Mac OS X and Linux without needing a copy or license for Windows itself. Wine is an open-source reimplementation of the Win32 API for Unix-based operating systems. Wine allows Windows applications to be run without a Windows operating system license. CodeWeavers is the largest corporate sponsor of the Wine Project, and contributes all of its work to free Wine.

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One of Prince's more absurd moments of fan abuse came when he threatened various fansites for hosting photos of him and including images of album covers on their sites. Yes, these were fansites, promoting Prince and his music... and Prince threatened them. It appears that musician Bryan Adams is now doing the same, hiring WebSheriff (one of the companies that tries to track down file sharing) to bully and threaten Bryan Adams' fansites for daring to help promote Adams. Now, I know what you're thinking: Bryan Adams has fansites? But, beyond that, it does seem like WebSheriff is going beyond legal boundaries in its threats. Its big complaint seems to be that some of these sites link to unauthorized versions of Adams' music. But linking isn't illegal in most places, so it's difficult to see what sort of legal leg they have to stand on. If I ran a fansite helping to promote a musician for free, and then started receiving legal threats over it, my instincts would be to simply stop helping promote that musician's work for free -- and let the musician know that if they wanted me to continue promoting his work, he should pay up.

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Researchers have found evidence of psychoactive drug use in the hair of ancient mummies found in Chile's Azapa Valley. The scientists detected harmine, an ingredient used in the psychedelic brew ayahuasca, in hairs from an adult and baby who lived between 800 and 1200 years ago. From National Geographic:

"These individuals probably ingested harmine in therapeutic or medicinal practices, some maybe related to pregnancy and childbirth," said study co-author Juan Pablo Ogalde, a chemical archaeologist at the University of Tarapacá in Arica, Chile.

"However, it is possible also that consumption of harmine was involved in religious rituals, said Ogalde, whose research appeared online October 14 in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

X-rays showed that the adult male—who was buried with items of social prestige such as panpipes, a four-pointed hat, and a snuffing tray—had damage near the nose, perhaps from sniffing.

As for the baby, Ogalde speculated that the mother had consumed the drug and passed it on to her offspring during pregnancy or breast-feeding.

"The fact this mind-altering substance was found even with a one-year-old shows how much a part of their life it was," said archaeologist Alexei Vranich of the University of California, Los Angeles, who did not participate in the study.

Drugs Found In Hair of Ancient Andean Mummies

Rebecca McKinnon has a piece up about the "Global Network Initiative," which launches this week.

That's the corporate code of conduct on free speech and privacy I've been talking about in generalities for quite some time. By midnight Tuesday U.S. East Coast time, the full set of documents and list of initial signatories will be made publicly available at globalnetworkinitiative.org.

On that website you'll be able to read the full text of the Principles on free expression and privacy. A group of companies, human rights organizations, socially responsible investment funds, academics, and free speech groups spent the last two-plus years reaching agreement on what should go into that document. There will also be a Governance Charter and a set of Implementation Guidelines giving more detail on how companies should adhere to the core principles. There will be an FAQ, list of participants, and contact people for the organizations that have joined the Global Network Initiative so far. The hope is that many more companies, NGOs, investment funds, and academic institutions around the world will join in the coming months.

The initial plan was to release the news so that the first news reports about the initiative would come out closer to the website's unveiling at 12:01am Wednesday EDT or 12:01pm HKT. But the story leaked early and the San Francisco Chronicle reported it on Monday without any comment from the participants who had all agreed not to talk until the official launch. Since then, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, WSJ China Blog, the AP, AFP and others have reported the story with remarks from some of the participants. We can expect more coverage in the next 24 hours.

A few people have called me asking "does this thing have any teeth" or "is this thing more than just a figleaf for companies to get congress off their backs?"

Organizations like Human Rights Watch, Human Rights in China, Human Rights First, and the Committee to Protect Journalists would not be putting their reputations behind this thing if they didn't think it was meaningful.

Link to her piece on rconversation.blogs.com.

BB pal Tim Walker from The Ministry of Unkown Science and the Grilled Cheese Invitational shares a cool election-themed music remix with us:

One of our brethern of the MOUS, Tano Sokolow, did an amazing remix/mash-up of Barack Obama's Yes We Can with Lee Dorsey's Yes We Can Can song. It's totally fucking amazing and brings tears to my jaded eyes! Listen for yourself and see!

Direct MP3 Link, web page with the music all up in it.

Tano Sokolow, who brewed up the remix, says:

Start your election night victory party off right with this track I put together. The original artist is Lee Dorsey, and I encourage you to go buy his music, it's wonderful stuff. The track Yes We Can was written by Alain Toussaint.

ISP Review UK writes "The latest annual Wireless Security Survey from RSA has revealed that London is still the world's wireless network (Wi-Fi) capital, with a total of 12,276 access points detected, exceeding the number found in New York City by more than 3,000. However, the French capital of Paris broke all the records with a 543% year-over-year increase in the number of wireless access points, which compares with London's 72% (down from 160% last year) and New York City's 45% (down from 49%). The survey also examined how many of the wireless access points detected were secured with some form of encryption (hotspots excluded). In New York City, 97% of corporate access points had encryption in place (76% last year). In Paris, 94% of corporate access points were encrypted — although in London, 20% of all business access points continue to be completely unprotected."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

3D scanner using a webcam and laser pointer.

More:

HOW TO - $10 XY Laser scanner.

Make - Volume 14 - Homebrew 3D Scanner.

If you use/make these, post up your favorites in the comments.

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It's Tuesday again! This week I am making a scary pumpkin. Nothing gory or disgusting, just something that will scare the kiddies and hopefully score me some candy. How? Well, I am glad you asked. I rummaged through my parts bins and came up with an idea. What if I connected a horn to an Arduino and let out a nice blast when someone came around trick-or-treating. Hopefully they are so scared they drop their bag-o-candy and run away, leaving me with plenty of treats.

Note: It's a joke people! No, I am not taking candy from kids (other than my own). Have fun, and be nice!

What you need:

• Aduino - Available in the Maker SHED
• ProtoShield - Available in the Maker SHED
• Wire
• Pumpkin - Real, plastic or foam
• 12 battery
• Car horn - $7 at local car shop or junkyard
• Buttons and/or switches
• LEDs - Any color, but I like orange
• Heat shrink tubing

Tools you need:

• Soldering Iron
• Pliers
• Pumpkin cutting/carving supplies
• Glue gun

Step 1: Cut up the pumpkin

You can use a real pumpkin, but I picked this one up for $5 at a local craft store. Using a real one is fine, but photographing it over a few days can get messy so I decided to use a foam version.

The foam pumpkins are really easy to carve. So far it looks like a classic, smiling, jack-o-lantern. The kids will never suspect anything.

Step 2: Add the nose button

I had an arcade game button, so I used it for the nose, and a old doorbell button I used to trigger the horn. You can use any button that you have in your scrap bin.

Solder some wires to the "nose button" so you can assemble the electronics outside the pumpkin. Attach one wire to the ground of the Arduino and the other wire to pin (7). Also, you need an additional wire with a 10K resistor to ground. (See step 3 for a simple diagram) Speaking of Halloween, that is some scary soldering! Yuck.

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How globes are made - via Kottke.

The Chicago History Museum's "Mapping Chicago: The Past and the Possible" exhibition also looks at Replogle Globes, Inc., which has been turning maps into globes in Chicago for over 77 years. Replogle is the world's largest globe manufacturer. With their help, you can discover how globes are made.

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ThousandStars writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft has been making a concerted effort to promote Windows in Africa, pushing Windows over Linux in very poor countries that haven't been locked into a single operating system. From the article: 'To that end, it has established a presence in 13 countries, donated Windows for thousands of school computers, and funded programs for entrepreneurs and the young. It also has used aggressive business tactics, some aimed at its biggest threat in the region: Linux ...'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of my big complaints with the law making process is that there's no built-in process to make sure a law actually does what it's intended to do. Thanks to the law of unintended consequences, quite frequently, laws do plenty of other stuff, but do little to accomplish their stated purpose. Since politicians just want to pass laws so they can tell voters about the laws they passed, there's no real review process. So, as long as a Congress member can claim "I helped build houses/protect children/save jobs/etc.," because of a law that is called the Build Houses Act/Protect Kids Act/Save Jobs Act, they're happy -- even if the law did nothing to actually build houses, protect kids or save jobs.

In a business setting, if a course of action is agreed upon, there are usually regular milestones and checkups, whereby the business reviews whether the decided course of action has actually achieved its goals, or if those goals need to be revisited. A good business plan will often have alternative courses of action (i.e., "plan B, C, D, etc.") written in as well, so that it's easier to adjust should the original not get the job done. But, we almost never see any legislation show up that includes a clause where Congress goes back each year and determines: did this law build houses, protect kids or save jobs? So bad laws stay on the books, doing more harm than good for years, until some politician can push through an entirely new law that insists it will be the one that builds houses, protects kids or saves jobs.

So, with the DMCA hitting its 10 year anniversary today, it's good to see a bunch of folks are taking on the challenge of examining the law and noting all of its many, many faults. The EFF has released an updated version of its report on the unintended consequences of the DMCA, noting that rather than doing anything to actually help encourage the creation of new content (the purpose of copyright law) the DMCA has regularly been used to "stymie consumers, scientists, and small businesses."

Over at Princeton's Freedom To Tinker blog they're going to be running DMCA related posts all week. The first one, by David Robinson, looks at the underhanded way in which the law was first passed. Patent Commissioner Bruce Lehman wrote a whitepaper listing out a bunch of changes that he thought were necessary to improve the patent and copyright system, including much of what became the DMCA. Specifically, he claimed that content creators would never be willing to use the internet if their content wasn't protected and also claimed that an anti-circumvention clause, that banned any effort to circumvent DRM, would effectively deter copying.

Of course, it turns out he was entirely wrong on both accounts, but since there's no provision to go back and check the original assumptions against what actually happened, that doesn't matter.

Robinson highlights something even more disturbing: how the DMCA was shoved through by routing around the legislative process via international treaties -- one of our pet peeves. This is a scam used quite often by Big Content. They start frothing at the mouth about how we need to implement some sort of new draconian copyright laws "in order to comply with international treaties," leaving out the part where they were the ones who basically wrote the international treaties themselves and got unsuspecting trade representatives to approve them.

That's exactly what happened with the DMCA. Following Lehman's initial report, after there was some pushback by companies that recognized how dangerous the DMCA could be, Lehman quickly pushed for an international trade meeting, where a treaty was pushed through that was later used to urge lawmakers to pass the DMCA to "comply" (even though the DMCA went well beyond what the treaty required). This is why we should be quite worried about the similar situation shaping up today with the ACTA treaty. This copyright treaty is being negotiated in secret by both trade representatives and Big Content industry representatives, but no one looking out for the interests of consumers or the rest of society. Rest assured that if it's approved, we'll soon be hearing about the need to pass new laws to comply with ACTA and meet our international obligations.

Instead of doing that, can we take this unfortunate 10 year anniversary to get Congress to go back and look at the original rationale for the DMCA, note that it hasn't done what it was put in place to do, but has instead been widely abused to hurt other businesses and hold back innovative business models and opportunities for economic growth? And then can we repeal, or at least, amend it?

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It's made of meat, all of it... @ The Daneyal Mahmood Gallery....

Meat After Meat Joy brings together the work of contemporary artists who use meat in their work (raw meat, the concept of meat, its symbolism and viscera) in order to investigate the paradoxical relationship meat has to the body. Meat combines flesh, skin, muscle, organs, blood — each with its own relationship to the body, yet meat’s only reference to the body is as a once-upon-a-time living biological thing. By putting these artists together, the exhibition seeks to investigate the uncanny effect meat as a medium is for artist and viewer. This is not a show about meat as spectacle but about meat as signification, precisely because meat does not signify (a body) but its very annihilation

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Ahh another classic is reborn. Check out this cool project where you can make the classic "Head in a Crystal Ball". Of course not only does it move it also talks and floats as well. Here is a description from the original Disney concept:

"Resting inside the crystal ball is the ghoulish disembodied head of Madame Leota, the house's resident medium. Her hair is long and white, uncombed, her face a ghoulish yellow-green, and she looks around the room and moves her entire face in a rather animated way (for a ghost at least!) "

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bfwebster writes "Orin Kerr over at The Volokh Conspiracy (a great legal blog, BTW) reports on a US District Court ruling issued just last week which finds that doing hash calculations on a hard drive is a form of search and thus subject to 4th Amendment limitations. In this particular case, the US District Court suppressed evidence of child pornography on a hard drive because proper warrants were not obtained before imaging the hard drive and calculating MD5 hash values for the individual files on the drive, some of which ended up matching known MD5 hash values for known child pornography image and video files. More details at Kerr's posting." Update: 10/28 16:23 GMT by T : Headline updated to reflect that this is a Federal District Court located in Pennsylvania, rather than a court of the Commonwealth itself.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bfwebster writes "Orin Kerr over at The Volokh Conspiracy (a great legal blog, BTW) reports on a US District Court ruling issued just last week that finds that doing hash calculations on a hard drive is a form of search and thus subject to 4th Amendment limitations. In this particular case, the U.S. District Court suppressed evidence of child pornography on a hard drive because proper warrants were not obtained before imaging the hard drive and calculating MD5 hash values for the individual files on the drive, some of which ended up matching known MD5 hash values for known child pornography image and video files. More details at Kerr's posting."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Emily Barletta's crocheted sculptures via NOTCOT.

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Casper's brother made him this totally sweet bronze sculpture using Styrofoam and a LEGO minifig. Via Brothers Brick

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James Gleick writes "Authors, publishers, and Google are announcing a huge settlement deal today in their lawsuits over the scanning of millions of copyrighted books in library collections. Google has agreed to a huge payout for books that were scanned without permission, but now they'll be allowed to scan the books legitimately. Most important, they'll be able to put millions of books online, including those still in copyright--not just for searching and not just in snippets. There is a groundbreaking new licensing system meant to make the books as widely available as possible while protecting the authors' copyrights and enabling them to share in the revenue. Some will differ, but personally I think this is a wonderful outcome, for readers and for authors alike."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Looks like more folks are talking about making things more than buying things on Twitter... Not sure if it means anything but it's fun to poke around with the Twist site. If you want to follow MAKE we're on there too...

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The inevitable mashup of the LilyPad Arduino and the XBee radio is in its final stages. Soon it will be easier than ever to integrate XBee communication in your wearbale projects. Look for these modules soon at your favorite physical coputing etailer soon.

LilyPad XBee Ready for Manufacture

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zootropole writes "If you are using Firefox 3 (or even Chrome) you should consider taking a look at Mozilla's Minefield. This browser (alpha version yet, but stable) would give a new meaning to 'fast browsing experience.' Some Firefox extensions aren't supported, but riding the fastest javascript engine on the planet definitely worth a try. Minefield's install won't affect your Firefox, so there's no risk trying it. It's fast. Really. And I'm loving it." Reviews popping up around the web are overwhelmingly positive, calling the upcoming browser crazy fast, blisteringly fast, etc.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We have pointed out in the past that people need to realize that any government database of info will be abused. It's almost impossible for it not to be abused. People use it to look up info on ex-girlfriends or friends or relatives. The data is there, and if someone has access to it, it's simply too tempting not to look up some info, no matter what "safety precautions" are in place.

Over on Slashdot there's yet another example of this happening, as apparently three separate people accessed various databases to look up info on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, better known as "Joe the Plumber," right after the third Presidential debate, in which Joe was a central part of the discussion. It's not entirely clear what the nature of those database lookups were, though it wouldn't surprise me if it was just individuals who knew they had access to the government databases, and were just curious and couldn't resist looking. But, what's more interesting is that no one caught this database snooping until the Columbus Dispatch asked for log information.

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This app called "BeatMaker" for the iPhone is one of a huge list of cool new music creation applications that are out for the device. This one doubles as a portable music production center with a drum machine, sampler, and sequencer that usually only exists in desktop applications. Check out the link for the list of all of these cool new ways to bring the funk to your pocket.

iPhone Gems: The Best Music Creation Apps

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These in-guitar effects kits look interesting -

The MODboard concept is simple- Take the best vintage style analog guitar effects, miniaturize them, and mount them on a completely modular circuit board. Add the right output jack, knob setup and switching setup to accomodate your guitar, and you're ready to roll. A few simple solder connections for input and power, then everything plugs in with instantly removable modular connectors.

Offered in tremolo, wah, compressor, delay, chorus, and tube distortion flavors. While the "best vintage style" description is of course very subjective, the concept seems sound[npi]. Glancing down toward ones feet during a dimly lit gig is never fun - moving at least your most important effect's controls onto the instrument body sounds like a smart idea. Any music-makers out there ever used these? Or have any good tips for mounting your own effects 'in-instrument'? - MODboards

Of course, one could always just duct tape a pedal to their axe a la DEVO -

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Sidni writes -

Dr. Aaron Lanterman of Georgia Tech covers the analysis of several modules used in analog modular synthesis as well as digital synthesis techniques. All lectures posted online for free!

Definitely a class that would've greatly increased my interest in math back in school - very cool!
Just take a look at homework assignment #1 -

Moog (east coast) and Buchla (west coat) developed their ideas about voltage controlled synthesizers independently. Moog used a pitch control standof of 1 volt/octave, which works out to 0.08333... volts/semitone (the pitch difference between to adjacent notes on the piano is a semitone; there are twelve semitones per octave). Buchla preferred to use 0.1 volts/semitone, which works out to 1.2 volts/octave.

Hence, if to try to directly drive a Moog oscillator from a Buchla pitch control source, or vice-versa, everything will be horribly out of tune.

a) Design an circuit with a single op amp that will covert pitch control voltages from the Moog standard to the Buchla standard. You may assume that your conversion module is given an input from a voltage source with zero output impedance and is being fed to a module with an infinite input impedance; you also do not need worry about input and output protection (assume nobody will be abusing your module). For this part of the exercise, assume you have perfect "zero-tolerance" resistors.

b) Off-the-shelf resistors never exactly match their listed values. Let's do a "worst case" analysis for the case where your circuit is given a one volt input. If you use 5% resistors, assuming the true resistance is uniformly distributed, what is the highest voltage you might get out? What is the lowest voltage? How many semitones above and below the desired value are these voltages in the Buchla pitch standard?

c) Repeat the above analysis for 1% resistors.

Head over to the site to take the course yourself (well, virtually at least) - Electronics for Music Synthesis

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Just because I'm an writes "The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Kevin Bermeister and Michael Speck have been developing technology to return search results on file sharing programs that point to pay-for content from the copyright holders. The article reports that there are trials planned for Australian ISPs, with interest from elsewhere on the globe."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This project uses a PIC microcontroller with an RS232 interface on one end and the PS/2 keyboard or mouse hookup on the other side. Interesting way to easily get your keyboard or mouse talking serial in order to integrate it into a project and communicate with software.

via Electronics Lab

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Further proof of the music-making possibilities that lie dormant in many of our common electronics.
[via Matrixsynth]

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gzipped_tar writes to tell us that The Codeweavers "Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge" has ended in surprise and free software all day Tuesday (October 28, 2008) at the Codeweavers site. A while back Codeweavers gave President Bush a challenge to meet one of several goals before he left office. One of these goals was to lower gas prices in the Twin Cities below $2.79 a gallon, which has since transpired. "How was I to know that President Bush would take my challenge so seriously? And, give the man credit, I didn't think there was *any* way he could pull it off. But engineering a total market meltdown - wow - that was pure genius. I clearly underestimated the man. I'm ashamed that I goaded him into this and take full responsibility for the collapse of any savings you might have. Please accept our free software as my way of apologizing for the global calamity we now find ourselves embroiled in."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canon has released new firmware for the EOS 50D, taking it to version 1.0.3. The latest version corrects three issues, two of which the company describes as 'rare.' One of the problems addressed is the much-discussed Err99 error message that can prevent the camera taking photos.

There are Halloween decorations, and then there are Halloween decorations! This is one of the creepiest DIY decorations I have seen. It uses a fairly expensive skeleton as a base, but I am sure there are other options.

Read more about DIY: Horrifying Corpse

More:

DIY Halloween contest! This is the BIG ONE!!!!

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After all the controversy, and threats of Congressional action, over actions by companies like Yahoo and Google to appease foreign governments against what many consider basic human rights issues, various internet companies have agreed on a set of "guidelines" for how they deal with human rights issues. While it's nice that they're actually thinking about these issues, the guidelines on the whole are pretty weak and don't bind the companies to do anything. Basically, it just says that the companies will consider the human rights issues in their decision making. If anything, this seems like an attempt to just keep the government from legislating on the issues, and it may not be very successful on that front. The real test will be in seeing how these companies actually act, rather than what sorts of guidelines they've signed.

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LadyAda writes -

Man this makes me so jealous of our Neighbors to the North...A Vancouver cafe/workshop/gallery/gigspace [Solder & Sons] that sells fine tea and electronic musical instruments and modules. Is it as cool as it sounds?

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Matthew Williams sent in his Barduino. It's an Arduino powered bar monkey for your next party. Remember, alcohol and electronics don't mix, but electronics can mix alcohol. [Thanks Matthew]

It was developed using the Ruby Arduino Framework (http://rad.rubyforge.org/) and is driven using a Ruby DSL (domain specific language) so anyone can write simple recipes.

More about the Barduino

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Nikon has today announced a firmware update for the D300, taking it to v1.10. The update improves focus performance in dynamic-area AF mode contrast-detect mode in live view but also looks at a whole range of other issues. Click through for links to more information and the downloads.

Well, yet another teenage hacker who "did the right thing" by reporting a security flaw is being punished for his actions. Although it definitely sounds like the whole story may not be in the clear yet, a 15-year-old New York high school student has been charged with three felonies claiming that he accessed a file containing social security numbers, driver's license numbers, and home addresses of past and present employees ... and then sent an anonymous email to the principal alerting him to the security flaw. "All that was needed to access the information was a district password. School officials have admitted that thousands of students, faculty and employees could have accessed the same file for up to two weeks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well, yet another teenage hacker who "did the right thing" by reporting a security flaw is being punished for his actions. Although it definitely sounds like the whole story may not be in the clear yet, a 15-year-old New York high school student has been charged with three felonies claiming that he accessed a file containing social security numbers, driver's license numbers, and home addresses of past and present employees...and then sent an anonymous email to the principal alerting him to the security flaw. "All that was needed to access the information was a district password. School officials have admitted that thousands of students, faculty and employees could have accessed the same file for up to two weeks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seth is working on a cool project, the AudioTouch - A multi-user, multi-touch musical interface... Here's what you need to get started...

Unibrain Fire-i Color camera $22.20 Swann Wide-angle IR Camera Lens $19.33 50 Osram SFH485 IR LEDs $27.53 4 Breadboards $15.80 Acrylic 24" x 36" $43.91 Wood Frame $18 Sorta Clear 40 Silicone Rubber $45 Rosco Grey Screen $30.87 Projector Mirror $10

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Good to see some vids from Joe @ Prototype This - The Oscilloscope, soldering, multimeter! The also released a full episode "Mind controlled car".

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The KNFB Reader lets users photograph printed material, then reads it back... The possibilities of a 'portable eye' - The Boston Globe.

When Peter Alan Smith pulls out his phone in a crowded Back Bay restaurant, there's no clue that his Nokia is by far the most expensive mobile phone in the entire place. He has about $2,400 in software loaded onto the $600 device.

But then it becomes apparent what's unique about Smith's phone: A flash goes off when he snaps a picture of the menu, and a few seconds later, his phone has translated the page of text into speech, and started reciting the options through his earpiece at a rapid clip.

Smith developed a degenerative eye disease when he was 18, and he is now legally blind. It has been about two decades since he could read a restaurant menu independently. He first heard about the phone on a podcast series called "Blind Cool Tech" and took out a low-interest loan to buy it.

More:

Let There Be Speech. How do you make a $200 computer for blind kids? By Fernando Botelho... MAKE 03 - page 40.

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An anonymous reader writes "Things have been a bit quiet on the virtual world front recently but according to an article in Silicon.com, things are about to change. Apparently it's only now that virtual worlds are really going to become a force to be reckoned with. 'Now experts predict the virtual world phenomenon is entering a second phase in which businesses will become shrewder about their involvement in such environments and look more carefully at the tangible benefits they can realize. Emerging technology specialist at IBM, Robert Smart, is confident virtual worlds will become more important to businesses in the coming years.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There was a ton of press coverage today over Microsoft's not-particularly-surprising announcement of Microsoft Azure, its attempt to get into the cloud computing business, competing with the likes of Amazon, Google's AppEngine and (now) Rackspace, among others. Microsoft entering this space isn't a surprise at all, so it's a bit disappointing to see the sheer lack of details surrounding the announcement. Amazon has succeeded in the space because of two main things: incredibly cheap prices and ridiculous ease-of-use.

Amazon recognized early on that its "cloud computing" efforts were a true utility offering. It needed to be pure plug and play with very low, easy to understand pricing, and absolutely no hassle to get started. It was so easy and such a good deal, many developers couldn't come up with any reason not to use Amazon's web services. While I initially thought Google's AppEngine might provide serious competition for Amazon, today I'm less sure. Google is using AppEngine more as a way to get startups to build their technology to work on Google's tech platform. That's the same thing that Microsoft will clearly be doing with Azure. Yet, for Amazon, it was never about locking developers in to Amazon's platform: it was just about making use of spare computing cycles. The fact that it wasn't so tied to Amazon's core business may actually be a benefit here, in that it lets Amazon be a lot more open and free about how people can use it, keeping it super cheap and easy. Google and Microsoft, on the other hand, get too focused on using their cloud offerings to tie developers to their own tech stack. I agree that someone else could come in and create a cloud computing solution that beats Amazon by being even more open and easier -- I just don't see either Google or Microsoft being that company.

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mattOzan writes "On the tenth anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [PDF], Wired Magazine posits that the DMCA should be praised for catalyzing the interactive '2.0' web that we enjoy today. While acknowledging the troublesome 'anti-circumvention' provision of the act, they claim that any harm caused by that is far outweighed by the act's "notice-and-takedown" provision and the safe harbor that this provides to intermediary ISPs. Fritz Attaway, policy adviser for the MPAA weighed in saying 'It's not perfect. But it's better than nothing.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

squirrel messenger
unidog
wiggles dog wigs
dancing chicken
owls
daily mail picnic
frog
inner city snail
counting sheep
squeek the squirrel
hamsters in hats
uni the hedgehog

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Dot writes:

I kept trying to think of something fun and different to do for my halloween cocktails this year, and this is what I came up with : Using tapioca pearls for fun cocktails!

Check out her instructable for making these creepy cocktails.

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A year and a half ago, we wrote about a Belgian court requiring an ISP to block all file sharing, and saying that after six months to implement a filtering solution, the ISP would be fined 2,500 euros per day that file sharing still occurred on its network. The court had been convinced by the IFPI that blocking all file sharing was as simple as installing the filtering software from the entertainment industry darling, Audible Magic. Of course, as has been seen over and over again, Audible Magic's "magic bullet" solution isn't particularly good, and certainly does very little to stop file sharing. Apparently, Belgian ISPs have finally been able to convince the judge of that fact, and he's reversed the original ruling, saying that the ISP in question is no longer subject to the fine. Apparently, even the recording industry lawyers had to admit that they misled the court over the efficacy of Audible Magic's filtering software.

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Iddo Genuth writes to tell us that Samsung and Unidym have shown the world's first carbon nanotube-based color e-paper. Interestingly, the new film is electrically conductive while remaining almost completely translucent and only 50 nanometers thick. "The company also mentions that the EPD [electrophoretic displays] has important advantages over conventional flat panel displays. EPDs have very low power consumption and bright light readability, which means that even under bright lights or sunlight, the user would be able to view the display clearly. Furthermore, since the device uses the thin CNT films, applications can include e-paper and displays with thin, flexible substrates. Power consumption is lowered due to the EPD's ability to reflect light and therefore able to preserve text or images on the display without frequently refreshing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Iddo Genuth writes to tell us that Samsung and Unidym have shown the world's first carbon nanotube-based color e-paper. Interestingly, the new film is electrically conductive while remaining almost completely translucent and only 50 nanometers thick. "The company also mentions that the EPD [electrphoretic displays] has important advantages over conventional flat panel displays. EPDs have very low power consumption and bright light readability, which means that even under bright lights or sunlight, the user would be able to view the display clearly. Furthermore, since the device uses the thin CNT films, applications can include e-paper and displays with thin, flexible substrates. Power consumption is lowered due to the EPD's ability to reflect light and therefore able to preserve text or images on the display without frequently refreshing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Charlie Chaplin, you may have met your match. His name is Matt Mets, and he wears a noisy hat:

The inspiration for this project came while on the long road trip to Austin last weekend, and I finally had some time to make it. The prototype is a bit rough, but I think it gets the point across well enough. Walkthrough of the project and schematic after the break.

I started off with a 555 timer VCO circuit that I found at ecelab.com. Next, I hooked up a Sharp GP2D120 infrared distance sensor that I had laying around from another project, and added a cheap level shifter to allow the sensor to control the oscillation frequency of the 555 timer. Once that was basically working, I played around with the potentiometers until I had a range of sounds that seemed reasonable.

Finally, I put the module together with a battery, speaker and (momentary) on switch, and Velcroed each piece to the (except the switch) inside of my hat. I cut a small slit in the side of that, ran the wires for the switch through that, and then stuck the switch under one of the side curls on the outside. This way, you can start playing music by picking up the hat as you normally would, but also catching the switch in the same motion.

Insiders Tip: Don't take this to the airport.

Schematic included!

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It's no secret that the various cable companies have been interested in offering some sort of mobile phone service. A few years ago, the biggest cable companies (Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cox) teamed up with Sprint to offer mobile phone service under their own brands, building on Sprint's experience in allowing others to offer their own branded mobile phone service (known in the business as being a mobile virtual network operator -- or MVNO). Of course, since then, a ton of MVNO efforts have failed (remember ESPN's own mobile phone service?) and the cable companies never actually moved forward with offering service on Sprint's network. There was some thought that the cable companies were still interested in something in the mobile space, and Comcast and Time Warner are a part of Sprint's WiMax offering, but clearly Cox had decided to go its own way by that point.

Even so, it's quite surprising to find out that Cox is entering the mobile phone business for real -- as in building its own network. The company has apparently been acquiring spectrum to serve its market, and negotiating with handset providers. The article is a little unclear, but it sounds like there may still be a roaming agreement with Sprint, since the article claims the phones will work on both Cox's network and Sprint's -- suggesting Cox is working on an EVDO network. However, the company also claims that it's looking at using LTE as its "4G" technology. LTE is the technology chosen by pretty much everyone else in the US but Sprint, which is betting on WiMax.

Cox claims that its mobile service will be highly integrated with the other aspects of its business, including letting people watch TV on their handsets, control their DVRs from the handsets and automatically synchronize phone address books with home computer address books. It's good to see them thinking about real integration between services, because that's still pretty rare, but those services are all going to need to work pretty well together to make it really convincing for most people. Either way, you could see this as the epilogue to the death of MVNOs. While we've already seen that most MVNO plans went nowhere, it's quite a statement when a company is now choosing to build its own damn network rather than just piggybacking on someone else's.

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White supremacist terrorism persists in America: Two neo-nazi skinheads planned to assassinate Barack Obama and shoot or behead dozens of black people, but their plot was thwarted by a federal investigation. Photo below: Daniel Cowart, 20, of Tennessee vamps for a MySpace vanity snapshot with one of the guns seized by ATF agents. His plot partner, also arrested: Paul Schlesselman 18, an Arkansas native. Snip from Eric Lichtblau's piece in the NYT:

The assassination was to be the culmination of a “killing spree” that would also single out children at an unnamed, predominately black school, federal officials said. The men talked of “killing 88 people and beheading 14 African-Americans,” according to the affidavit.

The two men each had “very strong views” about Aryan white power and “skinhead” ideology, the federal officials said, and the numbers 88 and 14 have special significance in the white power movement. The number 88 is shorthand for “Heil Hitler” — H is the eighth letter in the alphabet —and 14 signifies a 14-word mantra among white supremacists: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

Officials said the two men met via the Internet through a mutual friend.

Arrests in Plan to Kill Obama and Black Schoolchildren (New York Times).

Smoking Gun has a copy of the ATF affadavit, which reveals that the fashion-conscious FAIL duo planned to wear white tuxedoes and top hats to the massacre.

Previously on Boing Boing:
Black man dragged to death 200 miles from site of Byrd murder 10 years ago.

snydeq writes "Microsoft today introduced Windows Azure, its operating system for the cloud. The OS serves as the underlying foundation of the Azure Services Platform to help developers build apps that span from the cloud to the datacenter, to PCs, the Web, and phones. Cloud-based developer capabilities are combined with storage, computational, and network infrastructure services, which are hosted on servers within Microsoft's global data center network."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ignoring numerous other court rulings concerning whether or not "making available" is copyright infringement, a judge has rejected a woman's request for a jury trial in her file sharing lawsuit, and ordered her to pay the $7,400 fine already set. This was the case we had just discussed last week, where the woman claimed that the RIAA only had evidence that she had shared six songs, even though she admitted to making 37 songs available. There was already an agreement in place that the fine would be $200/song, so the real question was whether it should be $7,400 or $1,200. The woman argued that, in light of the Jammie Thomas mistrial and other rulings, the RIAA needed to show actual infringement, rather than just that the files were made available. Unfortunately, this judge rejected that argument and ordered her to pay the full $7,400.

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This week:
The Parts Case That Tells You Where Your Resistors Go, The Art of Plastic Food Displays, Musical Staircase (and Secret Hacks), The Anywhere Desktop, Turning Everyday Actions Into Their Value in Batteries, Aeolian Harp - Stringed Instrument Played by Wind, Hatsune Miku Dances via ARToolkit, Gray Water Hand Washing Toilet Hack, Death Star Surface Block Mod, Chatting While Wrapped in Your Own Words.

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