MIT researcher Alex (Sandy) Pentland used tiny devices called "sociometers" to collect thousands of hours of data about the unconscious speech patterns that can influence the outcome of conversations. For example, the way you talk in an interview -- even if neither you or the interviewer are remotely aware of your tone -- may have a tremendous impact on what the employer thinks of you. We all know this of course, but Pentland has actually studied it scientifically. The value of the sociometers isn't in producing a verbal record of a conversation but rather quantifiable information about more subtle cues like tone and physical activity. Apparently, Pentland was able to use the data, not the words themselves, to accurately predict how a conversation about, say, a date or an investment pitch, would play out. He calls these cues "honest signals," and has just written a new book about the idea, titled Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World. From the MIT News Office:

The features he found that are highly predictive of outcomes, he says, "match the literature in biology about signaling in animals." In fact, Pentland suggests, the non-linguistic channels of communication that are measured by the sociometers may have started among our ancestors long before the evolution of language itself, forming a deeper, more primal way of understanding intentions, coordinating activities and establishing power relationships within the group.

"Half of our decision-making seems to be predicted by this unconscious channel," says Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences. "That's exactly the channel that you see in apes" as they coordinate their activities without the use of language... The data gathered from the devices can be used not only to predict the outcomes of specific interactions between people, but even the relative productivity of different teams within a company. "This information is not in the organizational charts," Pentland says. "This human side is missing from all traditional measures" of how groups of people work together.

Honest Signals (Amazon), "Tuning in to unconscious communication" (MIT)

Big news for makers out there today, the FCC OK'ed the use of white spaces to deliver broadband - this might mean a whole new class of devices soon, just as Wi-Fi took off we'll likely see even more wireless devices flourish along with super-fast broadband speeds...

The Federal Communications Commission voted Tuesday to open up unused, unlicensed portions of the television airwaves known as "white spaces" to deliver wireless broadband service.

The vote is a big victory for public interest groups and technology companies such as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. that say white spaces could be used to bring broadband to rural America and other underserved parts of the country.

"White spaces are the blank pages on which we which we will write our broadband future," said Jonathan Adelstein, one of two Democrats on the five-member commission. Adelstein added that white spaces could represent a "third channel" to reach consumers beyond the telephone and cable networks that represent the primary competition in today's broadband market.

The vote came over the objections of the nation's big TV broadcasters, which argue that using the fallow spectrum to deliver wireless Internet access could disrupt their over-the-air signals. Manufacturers and users of wireless microphones — including sports leagues, church leaders and performers of all stripes — have also raised concerns about interference.

The next step for the main opponent, the National Association of Broadcasters, could be a lawsuit to stop the FCC plan from taking effect. NAB had no immediate comment.

Four commissioners voted to approve the plan with one commissioner — Republican Deborah Tate — dissenting in part. Among her concerns, Tate raised questions about how potential interference problems would be handled.

Last month, a technical report by FCC engineers concluded that interference could be eliminated with the use of wireless transmitter devices that rely on spectrum-sensing and "geolocation" technologies to detect nearby broadcast signals.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Telecommunications | Digg this!

After GAMA-GO's Greg Long and I finished raving about the fine poster illustrations of Fleet Street Scandal, Greg turned me on to amazing Oakland designer Jason Munn. His Small Stakes studio creates book covers, magazine graphics, and rock posters like those above for Beck, Modest Mouse, The Decemberists, Death Cab for Cutie, and others. Jason Munn/The Small Stakes

Linux Blog recommends an interview up on the O'Reilly site with Greg Kroah-Hartman, long-time Linux kernel hacker and the current Linux kernel maintainer for the USB driver core. He updates the free Linux driver program announced almost two years ago, which has really caught traction now with more than 300 developers volunteering. The interviewer begins by asking about Kroah-Hartman's claim that the Linux kernel now supports more devices than any other operating system ever has. "[One factor is] the ease of writing drivers; Linux drivers are at normally one-third smaller than Windows drivers or other operating system drivers. We have all the examples there, so it's trivial to write a new one if you have new hardware, usually because you can copy the code and go. We maintain them... forever, so the old ones don't disappear and we run on every single processor out there. I mean Linux is 80% of the world's top 500 super computers right now and we're also the number one embedded operating system today. We've got both sides of the market because it's — yeah it's pretty amazing. I don't know why, but we're doing something right."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pat Regan built a 1/10 scale working replica of the Nautilus from the film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. And spear guns. And a diving suit. And a diving helmet. Jason Weisberger has more over at Dethroner. Vulcania Submarine

We've pointed out many times in the past that the various Torrent tracker sites out there that the entertainment industry is suing are not particularly different than Google. All of them are search engines and can find unauthorized music for you. Some entertainment industry defenders get upset by this argument pointing out that Google's search isn't just designed for such files, but that's rather meaningless. A bunch of folks have been submitting a story from about a month ago (which is probably getting attention now because it made it to Digg's front page) about how easy it is to find MP3s on Google with some basic querying. This isn't new, and I doubt many people really needed this article to understand how to do this, but it does highlight the same point. If Google is equally as effective as various torrent trackers in finding unauthorized content, why aren't the entertainment industry giants suing Google for the same thing?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

The 1601216th dorkbot-nyc meeting will take place at 7pm on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at Location One in SoHo.

The meeting is free and open to the public. Please bring snacks to share.

We're always looking for (and playing) more dorkbot theme songs! Bring or email one and we'll play it at the meeting.

Featuring the polarized and kerogenic:

Michael Mandel: MajorMiner -- Automatically describing music In order to computationally describe music, objective and specific descriptions of the sound must be collected to serve as training data. MajorMiner is a web-based game that makes collecting tags describing 10-second clips of songs fun. When enough instances of a tag have been identified by players (between 20 and 40), we can train a machine learner to automatically identify it in a large database of music. We have trained automatic taggers ("autotaggers") for instruments like saxophone, guitar, and trumpet, descriptions like soft, repetitive, and male, and genres like hip-hop, dance, and rock. I will demonstrate the game itself, discuss the collected data, and demonstrate clip retrieval and "semantic music similarity" using these automatically generated tags. You can check out the game and the autotags at:
http://majorminer.org

Alison Lewis: Fashion and Craft Tech for the Masses
Alison lewis, the founder and producer of Switch, a Guru for Verizon FiOS' TV Show MyHome2.0, and a electronic specialist at a museum fabrication house will be talking about her new book Switch Craft: Battery Powered Crafts to Make and Sew co-authored with Fang-yu Lin. Switch Craft is a book of 20 DIY technologically infused and inspired projects that mix sewing, soldering, electronic techniques. It is the first book whose goal is to reach a mainstream craft audience and show them the joy of working with electricity without compromising aesthetics or style. Alison will be talking about the book, its projects, and about its strategy for making technology accessible and relatable to a mass female audience.
http://www.iheartswitch.com

Luke DuBois: Hindsight Is Always 20/20
'Hindsight is Always 20/20' is a piece based on an analysis of presidential rhetoric. Constructed as sets of lightboxes and prints, the project has travelled to the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, and a show in New York City. I'd like to talk about the piece and share some of the experiences I've had showing it in the past few months. http://www.lukedubois.com
http://hindsightisalways2020.net

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Events | Digg this!

theodp writes "The USPTO has granted IBM a patent for utilizing naming conventions to assign gender-based avatars for instant messaging. A user named Teri, IBM explains, would be given a girl avatar, while a user named Terry would be provided with a boy avatar. The three IBM 'inventors' were stymied by users named Pat, who as a result will be assigned a 'generic, genderless human figure image as his or her avatar.' Way to honor that significant-technical-content patent pledge, Big Blue!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here are some voice recordings that have been tweaked almost beyond recognition, placed side-by-side with the unaltered recordings. The tweaked recordings are almost impossible to make out (though if you listen to them over and over, you can figure out what they are saying) but after you listen to the unaltered recordings, the tweaked recordings are very easy to understand.

Most naive listeners hear this as a set of simultaneous whistles, or science fiction sounds. However, for listeners that have previously heard this sound: Listening to the sine-wave speech sound again produces a very different percept of a fully intelligible spoken sentence. This dramatic change in perception is an example of "perceptual insight" or pop-out. We have argued that this form of pop-out is an example of a top-down perceptual process produced by higher-level knowledge and expectations concerning sounds that can potentially be heard as speech.

Here's one example: Sine Wave Speech | Clear Speech

It's almost, but not quite, as weird as the McCollough Effect optical illusion that lasts 24 hours or longer.

More here: Clear Speech

(Via Mind Hacks)

As we continue to evolve and grow our business, we've been looking to hire an experienced sales exec to focus on selling the Insight Community. We've been interviewing a variety of candidates, but wanted to alert the wider Techdirt community, as we know that readers here are most likely to understand what we're trying to achieve. If you're an experienced sales exec and believe in what we're doing here, feel free to contact us. Alternatively, if you know of any good candidates, please feel free to send them the job description.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Jim animates tiny scenes/objects using turntable + camera -

In March 2007 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London we hosted an evening of animation related events which I took as an opportunity to make some more examples of my Phonographantasmascope, an extension of the Zoetrope principle.

It is all live action and works by using the shutter speed of the camera rather than the rather irritating stroboscope methods other 3D Zoetropes use.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

Since McCain is certain he will win by a landslide today, surely he won't mind a little harmless fun with the infamous Reuter's tongue photo taken during one of the debates. WFMU held a photoshop contest and here are the mirthful results. McCain tongue Photoshop contest results

When Obama wins tonight, celebrate with some pie. If possible, sweet potato pie, but in a pinch any pie will do.



All diets are officially suspended for the night.

Homegrown Evolution says:

To those frustrated with national or even local politics, I say just get out there and do something. In the words of London's guerrilla gardener and author Richard Reynolds, "The point at which I became a guerrilla gardener is when I realized that I would get a lot more accomplished by just getting out there and doing it than phoning up the council and complaining about the landscape all around me." So skip those endless returns and watch a mini-doc of one of Reynold's actions.

Mini-documentary of London's guerrilla gardener and author Richard Reynolds

Advantageous is a script that lets you search the iTunes store and then buy the MP3s on Amazon.

Browse through the iTunes Store, just as usual. Or use iTunes Genius feature to find new music.

When you find something you want, click on Get MP3 from Amazon in the iTunes Script Menu.

Advantageous mp3 takes you to the artist's or album's Amazon MP3 site. You can buy the music DRM-free and in better quality.

Advantageous

SomeoneGotMyNick writes "Someone more nostalgic than I am, and with a lot of time on their hands, had created a scripting language based on Commodore BASIC for Mac OS X. They recently finished a version that works on Windows and Linux. You can pass the text of a BASIC program as a parameter to the program. I found it odd that it took 1.8 MB of source code to compile to an interpreter that used to fit in 8K of ROM space. If this ever becomes popular, perhaps we'll see Obfuscated CBM BASIC contests." In a simliar vein, in the comments someone points out what is essentially an open source AmigaOS Classic.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Devon of NYC Resistor made this nifty ambient device that shows who is winning at a glance.

I recently updated my arduino ambient orb to use some boards I got cut at a boardhouse in Colorado, and handed off a few of the finished products off to various friends of mine. Well, my good friend John Erickson tossed together an awesome script for the election returns tonight. The orb starts off dark, and the script periodically checks the election results. As the results come in, the orb will gradually get brighter and brighter blue or red based on who is pulling in the EVs.

I grabbed his script and a spare board I had with me at the office, and used a plastic cup to whip up a quick electoral ‘orb.'

The Elect-o-meter (Via Makezine)

Check out this astounding papercraft from Haruki Nakamura [via EMS Labs]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Paper Crafts | Digg this!

Back in August we announced that, via the Insight Community, Dell was sponsoring a series of cases to create a crowdsourced whitepaper about the challenges, from a business and IT perspective, concerning the rise of so-called digital nomads. If you've been a member of the Insight Community, you've no doubt seen the cases. The best results from those cases have been running on a special blog on DigitalNomads.com, creating some really fascinating content. If you haven't been reading it, here's just a small sampling of some of the great posts we've seen:

• Tackling Three Key Issues In Balancing Work And Life by Zack Miller
• The CIA Model for Digital Nomads by Stephen Foskett
• Given Unfettered Liberty, Mobile Workers Will Excel by Matt Jansen
• The Five P's of the Digital Nomad Ethos by David Mould
• Mobility, Usability, and Disability by Michael Kramer
• Understanding The Difference Between Working Together And Interacting by Eric Samson
• How To Find Community As A Digital Nomad by Nate Westheimer
• Discovering The OFF Switch by Servaas Schrama

These are just a few of the examples of the content generated within the Insight Community and then used on the Digital Nomads blog. However, beyond just creating that content, the idea was to take it even further. This content has created a great compendium of knowledge -- building blocks -- for how to get the best out of being, managing or maintaining digital nomads. So, from that core content, we've begun crafting the world's first crowdsourced white paper.

We've been taking much of the early content, and have started to craft articles around it, and then place them in a wiki, to allow anyone to continue contributing and editing the product. The first of those articles, on What It Means To Be A Digital Nomad is now available, so please jump in and add your thoughts. We're also still running more cases on the topic to generate more content, and will be publishing more wiki articles for the whitepaper over the coming weeks. Once we feel the articles are somewhat stable, we'll try to put together a more finished version that can be downloaded as well. Thanks to everyone for participating and we look forward to doing similar projects in the future. If you're interested in sponsoring a similar endeavor, feel free to find out more and sign up to sponsor a case.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Guitar effects manufacturer Line 6 collaborated with Freescale semiconductor to develop a Windows-based programming interface for their modular digital effects pedals. They've just released the software along with a writable hardware module as the ToneCore DSP development kit.

This could be a great and relatively affordable way to experiment with DSP for those interested. The included code examples are written in assembly language and C programming is possibly using Freescale’s software tools. [Thanks, Jan]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this!

kaiser423 writes "I'm looking to integrate some highly critical solutions into what would essentially be a remote, moving datacenter. No operators will be allowed at the site, and we may be able to have a high-speed INMARSAT data link. As a backup, we're planning to have multiple redundant low-speed Iridium data links. Essentially, we're looking to be able to power up/down and reboot some computers, and be able to start/stop some programs. We're willing to write the terminal interfaces necessary for our programs, and possibly do the remote desktop thing with some of our 3rd-party programs. But what is out there that would give us this type of access, work robustly over a high-latency, low-bandwidth stream, and would be tolerant to intermittent network outages? Please hold the pick 2 of the 3 jokes, I know they're contradictory goals; I'm looking for a compromise here! These boxes would regrettably nearly all be running Windows (with some VxWorks). Does anyone out there remember those days, and have any solutions that they preferred?" Read on for a few more details of this reader's requirements.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeff Simmermon says:

I've just posted a video of myself telling the story behind my band Royal Quiet Deluxe -- the chicken/human combo you posted on Boing Boing a few months ago.

This link also takes you to a newly released track, featuring me on the typewriter, my friend Tim on guitar, the chickens on toy pianos/vocals, and the sounds of a Virginia summertime mixed with a PSA about Exotic Newcastle Disease in Southern California. Direct link to that track here.

Royal Quiet Deluxe, Chicken Band: Now the Story is Told on Video

Dedicated to our soon-to-be-ex-President, George W. Bush.

Devon at NYCR writes -

I recently updated my arduino ambient orb to use some boards I got cut at a boardhouse in Colorado, and handed off a few of the finished products off to various friends of mine. Well, my good friend John Erickson tossed together an awesome script for the election returns tonight. The orb starts off dark, and the script periodically checks the election results. As the results come in, the orb will gradually get brighter and brighter blue or red based on who is pulling in the EVs.

I grabbed his script and a spare board I had with me at the office, and used a plastic cup to whip up a quick electoral ‘orb’:

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this!

We've discussed repeatedly how the press has freaked people out over the greatly overhyped threats of online risks to children. And, not surprisingly, those stories have had an impact. Adam Thierer points us to a Larry Magid column where he's discussing a recent survey that shows many parents are more worried about online threats to their kids than they are about the threat of drunk driving or drugs. Magid points out how silly this is, and how low the real risk is to kids surfing the internet. He's the latest mainstream press columnist to realize how much the mainstream press has overplayed this threat for years. It's just too bad that it's taken this long for everyone to realize the threat online isn't nearly as big as it has been made out to be.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

MAKE is doing posts at DELL's Digtal Nomad site as part of an advertising campaign, the latest is my prep work for working from the voting line today...

I’m sure I’m not the only one that will still need to get work done and might end up in line to vote on Tuesday. I’ve pretty much prepared voting on Tuesday like I prepare for going on a 2 day there-and-back business trip while on some massive deadlines. It’s the busiest time of the year for us at MAKE & CRAFT so I need to get a lot of work done *and* vote in this election. Come with me as we explore the over or under-preparedness that will be my day…

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

An anonymous reader writes "Diebold Inc. and its subsidiary, Premier Election Solutions, is using Ghostscript in its electronic election systems even though Diebold and PES 'have not been granted a license to modify, copy, or distribute any of Artifex's copyrighted works,' Artifex claims in court papers filed late last month in US District Court for Northern California. The gs-devel list first brought up the possible GPL violation a year ago."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an election sticker for ya, by Ian Wolterstorff, via John Walsh and los del Bush League. Here's a related video for ya.

Elektroschock writes "An EU document on the Anti-Counterfeiting Treaty was leaked. The main purpose of the trade agreement is to impose the European enforcement measures for IPR infringements on the US and emerging economies, widen the enforcement measures to include criminal sanctions for patent infringements, and introduce internet content filtering measures. Civil society groups such as the FFII criticize the ACTA process because negotiation documents are not made publicly available by the governments. The EU document ('fact sheet') from the EU Trade Commissioner explicitly mentions: 'Internet distribution and information technology — e.g. mechanisms available in EU E-commerce Directive of 2000, such as a definition of the responsibility of internet service providers regarding IP infringing content.'" And an anonymous reader adds Michael Geist's push for more transparency around ACTA negotiations in Canada.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Premier League, the UK based football (or soccer, for those of us on this side of the Atlantic) league has a long history of misunderstanding the internet, and often that seems to involve having its lawyers lash out at the wrong people. First, back in 2005, the league blamed broadband providers for allowing fans to stream games live online, rather than recognizing that fans streaming such games showed a real demand for such a service. Then, in 2007, the league sued YouTube for hosting some clips of Premier League matches. This was boneheaded for a variety of reasons. First, YouTube was not the guilty party if it was copyright infringement. The liable party would be whoever uploaded the clips. Second, given YouTube's limits, people could only post relative short clips of games, which, if anything might help attract more fans to the matches.

The latest is that the Premier League is suing Justin.tv, the popular online service that helps people "lifecast," allowing them to broadcast a live streaming video from their computer camera. The Premier League noted that some Justin.tv lifecasters happened to point their cameras at a Premier League game on television, which the league considers to be infringement. Of course, the lawsuit is (yet again) mistargeted. Even if this is infringement, it's not Justin.tv's liability, but whoever the lifecaster is who pointed his or her camera at the screen.

Either way, this raises some more interesting questions about lifecasting. Specifically, pretty much anyone lifecasting their regular day is probably guilty of many, many copyright violations based on current interpretation of copyright law. If you hear a song, that's infringement. If you walk past a TV, that's infringement. Hell, reading a book could be infringement too according to some. Just the fact that you're letting someone else see what you see is basically infringement, which, when you think about it, highlights just how ridiculous copyright laws are these days. So when will start to see lawsuits against lifecasters?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Fluffeh alerts us to a report of a fungus that naturally produces diesel fuel, or something very close to it. "A fungus that lives inside trees in the Patagonian rain forest naturally makes a mix of hydrocarbons that bears a striking resemblance to diesel, biologists announced today. And the fungus can grow on cellulose, a major component of tree trunks, blades of grass and stalks that is the most abundant carbon-based plant material on Earth.... [T]the paper's authors admit that the technique is far from any sort of industrial production. 'This report presents no information on the cost-effectiveness or other details to make G. roseum an alternative fuel source,' they write." NPR has an interview with the fungus's discoverer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today on Boing Boing tv we reprise our ongoing SPAMasterpiece Theater series featuring author, PC, and minor television personality John Hodgman. His new book, MORE INFORMATION THAN YOU REQUIRE was released just a couple of weeks ago.

Hodgman himself describes this series as the dramatization of "true tale[s] of romance, adventure, infamy, and low-cost prescription drugs, all culled from the reams of actual, unsolicited emails, received here by us and people like you -- what we call SPAM."

Today's installment: V1V4 M3X1CO., in which we explore supply chain management solicitations with the help of luchadores, mariachis, beautiful black-n-white señoritas from the silver screen of our abuelitos, and GIANT NARCO-KITTEHS WITH UZIS.

A note from our musical director: The adaptation of Jean-Joseph Mouret's "Rondeau: Fanfare" (1735) which opens today's episode was remixed in flagrante 8-bit by Hamhocks Buttermilk Johnson.

---

Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with instructions on how to subscribe to our daily video podcast, and here is the direct MP4 download link.

---

Also: a special and hearty thanks to the talented and generous Ehrich Blackhound (previously boinged here) for creating our new, typographically-correct opening slates for this parody series.

Previous SPAMasterpiece Theater episodes on Boing Boing tv:
* SPAMasterpiece Theater, Vol. I
* SPAMasterpiece Theater, Vol. II
* SPAMasterpiece Theater, Vol III

And more Hodgman on Boing Boing tv:
* More Information Than You Require. This is not a book trailer, part 2.
* More Information Than You Require. This is not a book trailer.
* More Information Than You Require.

Here's the first paragraph from the always-wonderful and surprise-filled Harper's Weekly email newsletter.

Democrats were outvoting Republicans in all nine states that track the party affiliations of early voters, indicating a likely election victory for Barack Obama. "It's gonna get nasty," Obama told a crowd in Missouri. Republicans claimed that Democrats were coercing dementia patients to cast absentee ballots, and fliers posted in black neighborhoods of Philadelphia falsely warned that voters with unpaid parking tickets would be arrested at the polls. It was reported that Obama's half-aunt Zeitun Onyango lives in a Boston housing project and is an illegal immigrant--a detail likely leaked by the Bush Administration against the procedures of the Department of Homeland Security. Evidence emerged that during the Senate Ethics Committee investigation of the Keating Five scandal in 1990, John McCain allegedly committed perjury and illegally leaked details to the press that made himself seem innocent and his colleagues seem guilty--actions that had they been exposed at the time, could have resulted in McCain's expulsion from the Senate. Novelist John Updike endorsed Obama. "I am so much for Obama," said the author of "Terrorist," "it would be hard for me to cook up a character who was for McCain." Dick Cheney endorsed McCain, and two white-supremacist skinheads were arrested in Tennessee for plotting to kill 88 people, behead 14 African Americans, and assassinate Barack Obama while wearing white tuxedos and top hats. Author Erica Jong told an Italian interviewer, "If Obama loses, it will spark the second American Civil War. Blood will run in the streets, believe me. And it's not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets." Madelyn Dunham, Obama's 86-year-old grandmother, died of cancer, and a man leaped to his death from the Spaghetti Bowl, in El Paso, Texas, leaving behind a note that read, "Obama take care of my family."

To subscribe to Harper's Weekly, send an email to join-harpers-weekly@pluto.sparklist.com.

Here's a gallery of great old ads from comic books. The companies that advertised their shoddy, misrepresented products to gullible children should be commended for teaching the youth of America that there were people out there ready to lie to them in order to get their hard earned, paper route dollars.

The new "Testimonials" section containing "stories of sadness sung by the stung" looks promising. Here's one:

A neighbor and I sent away for the "Monster Ghost".

"Make him obey your commands even when you are secretly hiding as far as 100 feet away"

"A real terror, giant sized---" which, when it arrived, turned out to be...

A white balloon
A white garbage bag
Two glow in the dark circles
A string.

SUPERMARKETING: ADS FROM THE COMIC BOOKS

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Man's account of ordering a live monkey from comic book ad
• Funny/Creepy old comic book ad
• Small gallery of old comic book ads

Our great guestblogger John Hodgman is out there fondling touchscreens today, and he asked me to post this final BB guest blog post on his behalf. Thank you so much, Mr. Hodgman -- it's been an honor and a pleasure having you here on the blog these past two weeks. Video: FAREWELL BOING BOING.

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 is that most unusual thing, a compact digital camera that has really caught the imagination of photographers. Moving away from the quirky 16:9 sensor of its predecessors, (the LX1 and LX2), this latest offering matches a bright 24-60mm equivalent zoom to a conventionally-proportioned 11 megapixel sensor. Just to keep things interesting, the sensor is then cropped in three different ways to provide a consistent diagonal angle-of-view in three different aspect ratios. So what did we make of the LX3, competitor or curio?

Gwaihir the Windlord writes "A university in Western Australia has started beta testing a tool that's described as 'a random breath test' to scan computers for illicit images. According to this article it's a clean bootable Linux environment. Since it doesn't write to the hard drive, the evidence is acceptable in court, at least in Australia. They're also working on versions to search for financial documents in fraud squad cases, or to search for terrorist keywords. Other than skimming off the dumb ones, does anyone really expect this to make a difference?" The article offers no details on what means the software uses to identify suspicious files.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the oldies but goodies department, Mother Earth News has an article on how to make a junked water heater into a fancy wood-burning stove. And yes, successfully completing this project does make your hair grow back:)

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this!

I'm very happy to welcome a longtime friend of Boing Boing, and a personal pal, to the Boing Boing guest blog -- writer and blogger Susannah Breslin. She'll be joining us here for the next couple of weeks, reprising her long-ago role as a guestblogger in Boing Boing's old guestblog, circa, what was that, 2004? Remember the little column on the far right hand corner? Anyway. She's back, she's wonderful, the photo above isn't her but it expresses her inner writerly glamoury angstiness, and here's her bio:

Susannah has written for Details, Newsweek, Harper's Bazaar, Radar, Salon, Variety, Slate, Wired News, The New York Post, The LA Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Vancouver Sun, The San Francisco Examiner Magazine, Playboy.com, Nerve, Arena (UK), and Max (France). She has appeared on CNN, FOX News, Playboy TV, "Politically Incorrect," and the UK's Channel 4. She is the author of a short story collection: You're a Bad Man, Aren't You? She is at work on a novel, based on her experiences in Porn Valley. She is represented by Endeavor. She is 6'2".

We've seen video game execs freaking out about the second-hand sales market, and apparently that may be expanding to other arenas. The Register has an unnamed source (so make of that what you will) claiming that Motorola is asking people to sign contracts on a new phone that ban the buyer from reselling the phone to anyone, other than back to the manufacturer. Of course, this is an economically dumb argument. The resale market helps add value to the primary market, and allows the company to charge more for its product initially. As Mathew Ingram points out, some are suggesting that this move would violate the first sale doctrine, though that could depend on a variety of factors. I would imagine that the terms could establish the situation as a "lease" of the phone rather than a purchase, but that might be difficult to get the courts to accept. Also, my understanding of first sale doctrine was that it only applied to intellectual property -- not physical goods, so I'm not sure it would really apply here. Either way, it would seem to be dumb, whether or not it's legal. If you want to decrease interest in your product, adding such a clause seems like a reasonable way to do so.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

For more than a decade, industrial music pioneer Genesis P-Orridge, of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and his wife Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge were in the midst of an extreme experiment to merge their identities into a single "pandrogynous" being. They went as far as getting multiple cosmetic surgeries to look more similar. Then tragically, almost exactly a year ago, Lady Jaye suddenly died of heart failure. The pandrogyny project continues though, and hearing Gen talk about it in this video interview is quite moving. Looking Like Your Love in the United States (Thanks, Gary Chong via Richard Metzger!)

Previously on BB:
• Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge of Psychic TV, RIP

Wear this fine t-shirt to advertise your addiction to Chew-Z and Can-D, the fictional (?) hallucinogens featured in Philip K. Dick's novels The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Chew-Z: "God promises eternal life. We can deliver it." Dave Gill has the ordering details over at Total Dick-Head. Chew-Z and Can-D t-shirts

stiller writes "British scientists from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have developed an experimental set-up in which a $20 magnet is used to deflect solar-wind-like radiation." Reader Dersaidin points out a slightly more enthusiastic article at Universe Today which emphasizes the possibilities of systems based on this phenomenon to protect astronauts during solar storms, writing "It's a good start. Hopefully, later versions will be able to protect spaceships from energy weapons. A beam from the LHC can melt a 500kg block of copper. Shields, check. Energy weapons, check. Now we just need a viable interstellar drive, and an energy source to power it all."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wow, this is a pretty intense iPhone sculpture via Giz.

The assignment was "to create a pedestal to hold our 'precious object,'" Buckner tells Mac|Life. "As everyone around me would have guessed, I chose my iPhone. Our pedestal had to be mostly made out of wood, and relate to our precious object."

Given the amazing detail Buckner carved into each app icon on his pedestal, which is made entirely of wood except for bits of plexiglass to support each app icon "leaf," his devotion to his iPhone goes beyond mere affection.

Buckner says his iPhone holder doesn't just sit there, unmoving. "The icons all connect to one main rod, which spins inside the main arm."

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

miller60 writes "News sites and political blogs are expecting extraordinary traffic tonight as Americans track results of the Presidential election, and are scaling their infrastructure to meet the challenge. Yahoo anticipates its Election Night traffic may be three times the volume seen in 2004, when it had 80 million page views on Election Day and 142 million more visits the following day. Hosting companies say customers have been ordering extra servers and load balancing services, while content delivery networks are also expecting a busy night. Will traffic approach record levels? Akamai's Net Usage Index, which tracks traffic to its customer news sites, is one metric to watch."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This fellow in Blaine WA spent 20 years making a bomb shelter under his house (which is now for sale...)

The Underground Fortress is an 8th wonder of the world! It is an unbelievable feat of engineering. The Fortress goes a total of 45 feet under the house! That is below sea level! The fortress has over 1600 sq. ft. of living area, plus hundreds of more square feet of passages and secrets rooms. It was all hand dug over a 20 year period, and all the walls were constructed with a small electric hand cement mixer. There are 3 ft concrete walls, using 5-bag cement (20% denser than regular cement). Not only are the walls thick and dense, but the finishing work is amazing quality. These walls keep it a constant 60F degrees year round. It is so well insulated that even one small space heater can heat all 1600+ sqft of fortress space in a few hours. The fortress has amazingly fresh air in it with an incredible air ventilation system that pulls air outside and brings fresh air in, leaving no moldy or musty smell that you commonly smell in basements. Because of the walls and systems, there are very few bugs/spiders down in the fortress and we have never seen any signs of rodents. The fortress also has 4 sump pumps that keep the ground water from being an issue. The sump pumps are on float valves that make them come on automatically when they fill up with water. 3 of the pumps are for ground water and the other one is for sewage of the bathroom/kitchenette area. The fortress is also fully wired with electrical/phone/plumbing/drains. It also has many secret doors, and a 1-ton blast door at the entrance and a 3-ton motorized door to seal you in and close the fortress to the outside world. There are at least 5 ways to get in/out of the fortress back into the house!

The fortress comes with almost everything needed to still be a fully functional “bomb shelter”, it comes with everything needed to survive almost any situation. Everything having to do with the survival gear is being left behind for the new owner. All these items are worth in the many thousands of $$$. After you experience this underground fortress, you will be awe struck with amazement, there is no other home like this anywhere on Earth! The producers of the History Channel show Secret passages of the Cold War, claimed that this was the best civilian made bomb shelter in all of North America! You still will not believe it once you see it. Page one & page two.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Made On Earth | Digg this!

'Emergency Stool' by d.e. Sellers via NOTCOT.

Laser cut panel of Baltic Birch plywood that can be displayed as a wall covering or broken apart with a mallet and assembled into a stool or side table by following the laser etched graphic providing international assembly instructions.

More: HOW TO - MAKE:sushi. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

Following on our earlier story demonstrating the calibration errors on ES&S e-voting machines in West Virginia, comes this report that notes the calibration controls are not protected and accessible to anyone. In other words, a pollworker or even a voter could modify the calibration to make it more difficult to vote for a particular candidate. While the overall risk may be minimal (voters would still see whether the correct candidate was highlighted), it could significantly impact voters' confidence with the accuracy of these machines and the sanctity of the election. It's still rather amazing how many stories we see on a near daily basis concerning how badly these machines are built.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

KentuckyFC writes "Steganography is the art of hiding a message in such a way that only the sender and receiver realize it is there. (By contrast, cryptography disguises the content of a message but makes no attempt to hide it.) The central problem for steganographers is how much data can be hidden without being detected. But the complexity of this problem has meant it has been largely ignored. Now two computer scientists (one working for Google) have made a major theoretical breakthrough by tackling the problem in the same way that the electrical engineer Claude Shannon calculated the capacity of an ordinary communications channel in the 1940s. In Shannon's theory, a transmission is considered successful if the decoder properly determines which message the encoder has sent. In the stego-channel, a transmission is successful if the decoder properly determines the sent message without anybody else detecting its presence (abstract). Studying a stego-channel in this way leads to some counter-intuitive results: for example, in certain circumstances, doubling the number of algorithms looking for hidden data can increase the capacity of the steganographic channel"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's part two of my interview with Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of Mythbusters.

PS: So where are you going to be in 10 years, with fleeting fame?

AS: I have no idea.

PS: Do you have things you want to do? Do you have time to even think about it?

AS: I want to teach. Absolutely, I look forward to teaching; I taught for a couple of years at the Academy of Art College, I taught advanced model-making and problem- solving for the industrial design department. I would love to do more of that. I'd also love to work in pure research. Which is effectively what we get to do. Don't get me wrong - there's likely going to be more television in our future, but if I was never again on television after Mythbusters, I wouldn't necessarily miss it, there's plenty of things to try out there. We've worked with some amazing groups and some amazing companies - I could see a very happy future doing pure research with a nice little hand-picked team of people, prototyping various concepts and trying out different things.

JH: Fortunately, the success of the show has allowed us such freedom, and respect within Discovery and the production company that hires us, that they'll basically pay for us to do whatever the hell we want, because they've found that if we're having a good time, if we're enjoying ourselves, it tends to make for good TV. That's a great thing. The show will, over time, evolve one way or another, it may even become something that's not really at all like Mythbusters, but this kind of general curiosity we have about the world at large and the way we like to playfully explore it is something that's kind of timeless. We could continue doing that quite happily in one incarnation or another for a long time.

AS: If there's one thing that typifies being freelance, it's always wondering what's next, always thinking about what's next. It is a constant and ongoing conversation between us as partners, to the degree that what we will do, we will do together; we're not going to kill the goose that has laid this terrific egg for us. At the same time, we're both thinking, what do I really want to do? Maybe I could try that. We were talking a couple of months ago, we both had decided at some point, once I'm done with Mythbusters, I think I'd like to get my pilot's license, and Jamie was like, me too. (laughs) Fly some planes. It could go anywhere, and that what's next, what's next, what's next - when you're freelancing and one industry you've been working in dries up, then you start moving into other things, like Jamie did with M5 when commercial work in San Francisco got light, and he started moving into prototyping and other fields. It holds the same here. Mythbusters has been an incredible experience, and I have no idea what what form this body of knowledge I've developed will take, but we could end up miles from here.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Interviews | Digg this!

We made it. It's election day. Tomorrow we'll know. So for today's election discussion story, I'm throwing it wide open: let's discuss the election itself. Who are your picks and why. And also what about your actual experience voting today? Did Diebold eat your vote or did everything go off without flaw?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two years ago, around this time, we wrote a post entitled This Holiday Season, All I Want Is A Package That Opens Easily, noting how annoying some consumer packaging is. We were especially critical of the so-called "blister packs" or plastic clamshell packaging that is a source of not just frustration, but injuries to many as they struggle to open them. Apparently, Amazon has finally decided it's time to do something about this and has announced a new initiative for "frustration-free packaging." As Jeff Nolan notes, this is an example of a company recognizing that what's good for customers is good for the company.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

YA_Python_dev writes "The Xiph.Org Foundation announced Monday the release of Theora 1.0. Theora is a free/open source video codec with a small CPU footprint that offers easy portability and requires no patent royalties. Upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera will play natively Ogg/Theora videos with the new HTML5 element <video src="file.ogv"></video>, and ffmpeg2theora offers an easy way to create content. Theora developers are already working on a 1.1 encoder that offers better quality/bitrate ratio, while producing streams backward-compatible with the current decoder." Adds reader logfish: "Since its bit-stream freeze in June of 2004 there have been numerous speed-ups and bug-fixes. Although Nokia claimed it to be proprietary almost a year ago, nothing has been proven. So now it's time to help it take over the internet, and finally push for video sites filled with Theora encoded vlogs, blurts and idle nonsense."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This evolving mouse by Jose E. Rivera is a hybrid between a normal computer mouse and dragonfly-like creature with a seperated shell. Interesting way to transform this ubiquitous technological object into a natural artefect.

José E. Rivera's Videos via Next Nature

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

This amazing buddhist temple was built by Thai monks using discarded glass bottles -

Fifty years ago the Heineken Beer company looked at reshaping its beer bottle to be useful as a building block. It never happened, so Buddhist monks from Thailand's Sisaket province took matters into their own hands and collected a million bottles to build the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple.

- Buddhist Temple Built from Beer Bottles

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

ptorrone writes "Inventor Mitch Altman explains why he open-sourced his TV-B-Gone kit, the original stealth keychain fob for defeating TVs in public places. The title of the article is 'Patent-B-Gone' and perhaps the most interesting fact is that Mitch's brother is a patent attorney, but he still decided to release an open source hardware version of the TV-B-Gone, with pretty impressive results."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Great round up of election day "mash ups" from Jason at hackszine....

Aside from the politics, opinions, and issues involved in this election, I've been really interested in how the current state of web technology, survey data, online conversation and public information would be merging together into web applications and utilities for the growing digital electorate.

From finding a voting location, to enabling countrywide real-time political conversation (by people, not pundits), to monitoring live election results, and even reporting quality of service measurements at poll stations, below are my favorite examples of the web working hard to improve the democratic process.

Where And How To Vote

Google is providing what is essentially a voting howto map that will help you with directions to your voting location as well as information about your state's election regulations. After you type in your address, you'll be shown the location of your voting precinct, as well as useful links to registration information for your state. Many states allow "day of" voter registration, so if you haven't already registered and you'd like to vote, it's worth checking out.

Map of 2008 Voting Locations and Instructions

Tweet Your Vote

It's simple. We voters are using Twitter and other texting tools to report on how the vote is really going during this election, and we're urging everyone to use the common word (or "hashtag" in Twitter lingo) of #votereport as they do so. If that happens, we'll all be able watch on maps and graphs how the election is going across the country.

To participate, you'll want to Tweet details on your voting experience, including your location, wait time, quality of experience, and any problems that you ran into. Useful hashtags include: #[zip code], #wait:[minutes], #good or #bad, and #machine or $reg (for machine or registration problems). For example:

#votereport things are #good in #55404 with #wait:30

This will let local volunteer monitors know that things are functioning well in the 55404 area code and that the wait time at the polls is only 30 minutes. More information is available at the Twitter Vote Report web site, and in the video above, including ways to report serious issues as well as reporting status by phone.

Twitter Vote Report

Monitor Poll and Survey Data

You can monitor trend estimates for the presidential, senate, and house elections on pollster.com. The map data provides a working estimate of the election outcomes by calculating regression trendlines based on available survey data.

In most cases, the numbers are not an "average" but rather regression based trendlines. The specific methodology depends on the number of polls available.

• If we have at least 8 public polls, we fit a trend line to the dots represented by each poll using a "Loess" iterative locally weighted least squares regression.
• If we have between 4 and 7 polls, we fit a linear regression trend line (a straight line) to best fit the points.
• If we have 3 polls or fewer, we calculate a simple average of the available surveys.

Clicking on a state will give you more information about the poll data, as well as the computed trendline that forms the basis of the predicted outcome.

Pollster 2008 Election Polls

Tweet Your Opinions

Twitter is running a special Election 2008 filter that lets you track opinions and conversations about the presidential election through the lens of users' Tweets. Basically, any time you use the word Obama, McCain, Palin or Biden in a tweet, it will show up in the live monitor. The site uses AJAX requests to pull in successive batches of updates and display the messages in almost real-time. You can filter by a particular candidate, or just watch the whole passionate conversation roll by, assuming you can read fast enough.

Twitter Election 2008 Stream

View Live Election Results

Google is also providing live election results in a map gadget. As precincts begin sending in data, the map above should change to reflect the current reports. You can embed this in your own page by following the link below. The gadget allows you to customize the embed code to track either the presidential, house, or senate election.

2008 Election Results Gadget

Send Us Your Favorite Election Hack

Do you know of any voting mashup hacks or tools that I've missed? Please add them to the comments!

(Keep in mind that we want to hear about your favorite election tech, but please reserve any political discussion for a more appropriate site.)

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Online | Digg this!

Jimmie P. Rodgers explains his Creepy Cave Crab light/noise synths -

I made these for the Willoughby and Baltic Halloween show at the Charles River Museum of Industry. They use a single Hex Schmitt trigger inverter IC to generate the sound, and two RGB color change LED to generate the lights. I then encased them in friendly plastic, and painted them with silver paint.

- Check out the schematic on his site

Jimmie is also the designer of a new kit available in our Maker Shed -

The Open Heart Kit, an easy-to-animate LED display for use with Arduino

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

This "FetchBot" was built from an old computer scanner and will keep your dog endlessly amused, ideally without the need for you to be there. Unfortunately, as this video shows, the dog wasn't really clear about how to reload the bot, thus causing its owner some grief.

via Hacked Gadgets

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Robotics | Digg this!

Strannik converted 2 big ol' fire extinguisher tanks into a pair of cylinder speakers. I bet they sound pretty hot! … ahem.
A ton of build pics available in the original forum post

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this!

This umbrella stand by Beligan designer Vandenhecke Mélanie would be a pretty easy weekend project. Simply attach half of a metal frame to the bottom of a planter. When you come in from the rain, deposit your umbrella on the stand and its drips will water your plants.

via Design Spotter

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

I'm on the record as being opposed to Google's decision to cave in to authors and publishers with its book scanning project. Many people I normally agree with have taken the other side, claiming that Google's agreement keeps the company out of court and creates a win-win solution. However, I still think, over the long term, this agreement is quite problematic -- and we're already seeing it at the margins. For example, Harvard has now dropped out of the scanning program, noting that it teamed up with Google because the program was going to make the library content freely and widely available. Yet, the settlement will impose charges and will greatly limit the usefulness of the library's collection. From Harvard's standpoint, this goes against what the library stands for.

I would argue that it goes directly against what Google used to stand for as well. Rather than making the world's information accessible and findable, this move is an attempt to lock up the world's information in Google's proprietary format, so that Google can charge people for it. It sets in place a forced business model that actually diminishes the potential usefulness and value of books, and sets a bad precedent for just about everyone else. It's still difficult to see any positives from this deal. It's good to see Harvard stand up for what's right, rather than giving in.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

I know Halloween is over, but this hack can control a lot more than just a spooky prop in your yard. You can usually pick these motion-detecting lights up for a bargain at the local home goods store. Just be careful, this is a high voltage hack!

Yard-light motion sensors are a cheap and easy way to add some automation to your haunt. Just hook up power to the sensor, hook the output to an outlet, and you can control anything that runs on 120VAC. But what if you want to control something else? It turns out it's pretty easy to modify these motion sensors so the output just acts like a normal switch or button.

More about Motion sensor hacks

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

David Gerard writes "Version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License is out (FAQ). This license is little-used, except on the #8 site in the world: Wikipedia. And this version includes special provisions to re-license wiki-based content from GFDL to the much simpler Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 3.0, as requested by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia plans to hold a public consultation process to decide whether and how to migrate to CC-BY-SA. The discussion is already running hot and heavy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Who knew you could make such cool looking furniture out of gas pipes? OK, a lot of you knew, but this is a really nice example of plumbing based furniture. It looks like something that would cost thousands in a boutique.

DIY: Pipe furniture

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Furniture | Digg this!

Eric posted up a cool Python script that he's plugging in to his lighting system to turn the colors red/blue depending on who is winning... via Hackaday.

My election party tomorrow will feature DMX controlled RGB LED lighting. The color of the house should reflect the electoral balance. The color will start purple, and drift toward either red or blue, depending on who’s winning...

In order to do this, it was necessary to obtain live election results. Presented for your use is a simple python urllib2 scraper which will fetch live results from CNN.com. Return value is ((dpopular, delectoral), (rpopular, relectoral)). Furthermore, when CNN calls the race, the get method throws an ElectionWon exception. This code is in the public domain. The data, however, actually costs around $4000 if you buy it directly from exit-poll.net, the clearinghouse for aggregated exit poll data. Yikes!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Online | Digg this!

Although this robot is still under development, it is able to stand on it's own. The maker has posted several videos and the source code so you can get started on making your own.

The system features a kalman filter to acquire data from the IMU and a PID controller to control the motors. The robot is actually able to stand by itself indefinitely, but it's not completely stable, either because of my software or because of the motors that have a little "loosiness" (a couple of degrees of "free" rotation). I'm still working on it

More about making a Self-balancing robot powered by an Arduino

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this!

A bunch of regular readers of Techdirt have been sending in Robin Harris' analysis that, despite beating HD-DVD in a drawn out standards battle, Blu-ray DVDs don't seem to be gaining much traction. Harris specifically states: "16 months ago I called the HD war for Blu-ray. My bad. Who dreamed they could both lose?" I guess Harris doesn't read Techdirt. Because we predicted such an outcome 3 years ago when the standards battle delayed adoption, and again when Blu-ray launched over two years ago, and again when HD-DVD dropped out earlier this year. It wasn't exactly rocket science to recognize what would happen, if you just compared the standards battle over DVDs to previous standards battles, and looked at the competitive environment and tech horizon, you could see that an extended standards battle would hurt both sides. That said, I'm actually not as pessimistic as Harris about Blu-ray's chances. I think that it will catch on somewhat and become more widely used -- though, not nearly as widely as if the standard had been set three years ago, before online delivery of movies was a viable option.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

PingMag has an interview with folks behind these clever plastic model ring kits from Japan!

A couple of weeks ago we checked out the rooms No.17 fair, just opposite of our office in Yoyogi Stadium, and were happy to discover tons of great fashion items. Have a look at the plastic gem we found! Plaring by the Clunky Design quartet from Shibuya, is a do-it-yourself plastic ring kit. It’s playful, much like futuristic anime accessories and, above all, is so Japanese! (And you can get a kit from us here!) Today, PingMag pieced one together with Plaring’s director Kenta Ochiai and creative director Hironori Sato.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Kits | Digg this!

Tjeerd writes "Because the 'green revolution' is accelerating, I felt it was time to get involved. Last week I started with buying a portable solar energy charger for my mobile phone. But soon I was thinking of also recharging my Asus Eee netbook with a portable solar energy recharger. I found things like the Portable Power Pack, Foldable Solar Chargers, and the Solar Gorilla. The Solar Gorilla looks quite interesting and might be able to recharge my netbook and fits nicely in a rucksack. But I would like some real-life feedback. If you have experience with these or other portable solar devices, what has worked for you?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Watch the election results with Bruce Schneier on Tuesday, November 4, over at Making Light, the blog co-edited by Boing Boing's community manager Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Bruce Schneier explains, “Watching the results come in is fun, but it’s more fun in the right group.” Remember, the tattoos on Bruce Schneier's fists say "Alice" and "Bob". You don't want to make him exchange keys over your face.

Making Light, the blog co-edited by Boing Boing's community manager Teresa Nielsen Hayden, was the first site on the web to publish voting totals from a district that's reported in for the 2008 US presidential elections. TNH explains:

It's a silly distinction, but it's the best we can do with our far-flung staff of reporters. That is to say: our co-blogger Jim Macdonald lives just a few miles from Dixville Notch, NH. It's the home of The Balsams, a surviving grand resort hotel from the 19th C. They've got less than two dozen registered voters up there, and New Hampshire law says that if every registered voter in a town has voted, they can shut down the polls and announce their results.

Every four years, The Balsams starts voting at the stroke of midnight on Election Day. Everyone gets their own voting booth. They finish and count up as quickly as possible, and are always the first district in the country to report in. Jim Macdonald was up there tonight with his laptop, waiting to hit "publish" as soon as they announced their numbers. By the way:

Obama: 15
McCain: 6
Minutes by which Making Light beat CNN: 5

A few links:

The hotel: one, two.

The emphatic "first in the nation" historic marker: one, two.

Old photos of The Balsams. The last time ML did this (with photos).

* NOT EVERYONE wants to be President of the United States.

* LESSIG BEGS Obama supporters to keep up the pressure, not "let this slip by again," and "don’t stop until the clock runs out."

* A VIDEO on how to protect your vote and stop dirty tricks, produced by the Obama campaign (thanks Siege).

* LAUGHING SQUID'S GUIDE to the 2008 US elections online, including information about aforementioned dirty tricks.

* BE VIGILANT. BE ACTIVE. CALL IT IN. Daily Kos with still more on documenting dirty tricks.

* TWITTERVOTEREPORT.COM, according to Micah Sifry: "It's an all-volunteer, non-partisan project to enable people to self-report problems as they vote, and to enable the crowd to point journalists and, most importantly, election monitors to the places where there are problems occurring."

* THE CRAZY ANTI-ARAB racism truly sucks.

* TECHPRESIDENT, a "real electoral map" that attempts to more accurately reflect each state's electoral vote value.

* EVERY ELECTION NEEDS A FAQ. And Nate Tyler, who pointed us to this one, says, "This is an amazing resource from Peter Norvig at Google."

* FIND YOUR POLLING SITE via Google Maps' 2008 US Voter Info service.

Not sure why this has become such a big deal over the last couple of months, but here's our third story about a video game exec freaking out about used video game sales (you can read about the first two stories, if you'd like). In this case, it's the founder of Frontier Developments, David Braben, makers of the game Lost Winds:

"The shops are not giving us a way of distinguishing between pre-owned and new. So the shops are essentially defrauding the industry."

And how is that defrauding the industry? He doesn't seem to explain that part, other than that the industry doesn't like it. However, as we've explained in the past, an active second hand market boosts the initial market, by making buyers feel more comfortable buying the new game, knowing they likely can resell it and recoup some of the expense at a later date. Cutting off the second-hand market actually damages the original market for a product. Apparently, an awful lot of game developer execs have trouble understanding this concept.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Greg Dulli of Afghan Whigs/Twilight Singers/Gutter Twins fame just released a fantastic album, Live At Triple Door, which includes a phenomenal cover of George Harrison's "Isn't It A Pity?" with a coda of Donovan's "Atlantis." After listening to that track (about five times in a row), I sought out the original Donovan tune on YouTube. Lo and behold, here is Donovan doing "Atlantis" backed up by the Smothers Brothers, Peter, Paul, & Mary, and Mort Sahl. This version, too, is amazing.

Wired has an interview with Alan Kay on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the idea of the laptop computer. Kay's vision, which he dubbed the "Dynabook," was for a 2-pound, 1-Mpixel color computing device. "...the Dynabook was never built. But it greatly inspired the devices we now call laptops, although it's taken four decades to slim the tech down to the point where usable computers actually weigh as little as two pounds. To honor his achievements, Mountain View's Computer History Museum on Wednesday will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the legendary Dynabook. [Quoting Kay:] 'The Amazon Kindle is kind of a subset of a Dynabook — too much of a subset. The screen is too small, it is not very capable of dynamics, the keyboard is poor, etc. But it does have several limited service ideas that are good. The next version of a Kindle could be really exciting.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[All pics by Gary Mattingly]

Another highlight of Steam Powered, the Steampunk Convention, was meeting Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, editors of the most excellent Steampunk Anthology. They gave a talk called "Steampunk: Inside and Out." A few highlights:

Jeff shared with us his steampunk equation:

Mad scientist inventor + [invention (steam x airship or metal man divided by baroque stylings) x (pseudo)Victorian setting] + progressive or reactionary politics x adventure plot = steampunk.

Artist John Coulthart even turned the equation into a gorgeous laser-etched Moleskine cover.

Ann, who's also the editor of the venerable Weird Tales magazine, shared Stephen H. Segal's "Five Thoughts On The Popularity Of Steampunk." (Stephen is the editorial and creative director of Weird Tales.) To paraphrase Stephen and Ann via my notes:

1. Steampunk is romance that men can participate in. It's gender neutral. Masculinized romance.

2. It's an aesthetic response to "ergonomic" (sleek, user-friendly) science fiction being culturally mainstreamed. Who wants the secrets of the universe stored on a memory device the size of a grain of sand when you can imagine a colossal brain the size of an art deco skyscraper with input/output delivered on punch cards by scurrying clockwork file clerks?

3. It's like goth, but without scaring your parents. Goths take vampires very seriously. Vampires are scary. Steampunks take pocket watches seriously. Nobody is scared of a pocket watch.

4. Bridges sub-genres. There really is no set steampunk style. It's a mash-up of fantasy, horror, adventure, superheroics, speculative fiction, etc. As Jeff said: It's a set of tools, not a coherent movement.

5. It's a technological do-over. Mid-20th century sci-fi was largely Utopian, with an unwavering faith in science and technology. Late 20th century sci-fi got scarier, showing where science and technology could go wrong. We wanted Star Trek, we got Blade Runner. Steampunk lets us go back to a more innocent, enthused time, but with the wisdom of hindsight, and this time, we're not leaving the cowlings on the hardware. We want to be under the hood, we want to get dirty with the future, not just experience it like a World of Tomorrow ride.

One of the other talks I really liked was "Engines of Empire," a panel on Victorian science and technology, with Chris Garcia of the Computer Science Museum, Dan Sawyer, multimedia artist, producer and open source evangelist, and freelance scholar Mike Pershon. Mike's PhD dissertation is on steampunk as an aesthetic. One (of many) interesting things he said concerned the origins of the word "punk," as in junk wood, tinder to start fires, and how that has some utility in describing the "punk" part of "steampunk," as in the making, remaking, hacking aspects of steampunk. And, of course, the word "hacking" itself has origins in woodworking and axe-hewn furniture, so there's a fortuitous connection there.

Steam Powered also featured a Victorian sitting room in the center of the lobby, put together by artist Norm Barringer and some other set designers and artists. The space was filled with the loveliest cabinet of wonders-type pieces, framed Zeppelin plans, and other cool curios, including the throbbing power source in the fireplace seen above. The place reeked of absinthe and antiquity.

Dr. Grordbort himself, Greg Broadmore, of Weta Workshops was there showing off his ray guns and other aetheric oscillators, including the new "Unnatural Selector" ray-blunderbus. Okay, you know how cool you think these things look in pictures? They are MUCH cooler in person! Here's what went on inside my head as I saw them up-close, hefted them in my hands, and marveled at all the attention to detail and quality: "Wow, these are amazing. These are REALLY amazing! Holy crap, these are INSANE! Okay, quick, how can I figure out a way of spending $650 on one of these? I HAVE to have this!" (One caveat: the mini versions of the ray guns are *really* mini, much tinier than I imagined. If you want one of these pieces, save your lunch money and get a REAL ray gun -- or as close as you'll likely ever get).

More:

• "Maker" is what I do, "steampunk" describes the style

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Events | Digg this!

Got an old keyboard and some thumbtacks that need fancying? Consider turning them into keyboard thumbtacks by instructables user noahw.

More:

Enter key doorbell

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Instructables | Digg this!

EA continues its attempts to make a near total mockery of DRM on video games. Its latest move, pointed out to us by Alex, was to misprint the serial numbers found on some versions of Command and Conquer Red Alert 3. Rather than showing the necessary 20 digits, EA only printed 19. To be fair, EA will supply the missing digit if you send in a photo of the first 19, but the company also suggests testing out every letter from A - Z and then every number from 0 - 9 to find the missing digit. While it's true that this is likely to be an effective workaround, it's yet another example showing DRM getting in the way of legitimate buyers, rather than doing anything useful.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

An anonymous reader writes "On the heels of Comcast's decision to implement a 250-GB monthly cap, and Time Warner Cable's exploration of caps and overage fees, DSL Reports notes that AT&T is launching a metered billing trial of their own in Reno, Nevada. According to a filing with the FCC (PDF), AT&T's existing tiers, which range from 768 kbps to 6 Mbps, would see caps ranging from 20 GB to 150 GB per month. Users who exceed those caps would pay an additional $1 per gigabyte, per month."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Interesting photos showing up in Leah Buechley's photostream of reconfigurable circuit components attached with magnets to magnetic and conductive paint! Using a LilyPad Arduino variant, no doubt: paper computing.

More:

• LilyPad Arduino
• LilyPad Arduino XBee mashup ready for prime-time
  

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

We've had IRC for every major event of the 2008 election dating back to the first caucuses and primaries, and through the presidential and vice-presidential debates.

So it seems fitting that we have one final IRC chat for this season, as we share information, points of view, scandals and touching moments of the last day of this election -- hopefully with a happy ending, for as many of us as possible.

irc://irc.freenode.net/#electionDay

See you in the chatroom!

"cheesecake"

With Yahoo and Google in the midst of a vast negotiation with the Justice Department to try to avoid an antitrust lawsuit over their proposed ad deal -- even to the point of Google threatening to back out entirely -- it shouldn't come as a surprise that they're going to propose various modifications to the deal.

The news today is leaking that the two companies are proposing a greatly scaled back version of the deal to see if it passes Justice Department muster. In this case, the deal would be shortened from 10 years to just two, and would limit how much revenue it could represent to Yahoo while also allowing any advertiser to opt out of the deal. We're still waiting for a clear explanation of how this deal will actually negatively impact consumers, but some people still insist it will. For those who believe so, let's ask a simple question: how is this any worse than Yahoo disappearing from the marketplace? Because if the company doesn't do something soon that may be what we're looking at.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

mallumax notes Amazon's new Frustration-Free Packaging initiative. Over several years the retailer hopes to convince many of its suppliers to offer consumer-friendlier packaging. It's starting with just 19 products from Mattel, Fisher-Price, Microsoft, and Transcend. Until this program spreads to more products, better get one of these (ThinkGeek and Slashdot share a corporate overlord). From Amazon's announcement: "The Frustration-Free Package is recyclable and comes without excess packaging materials such as hard plastic clamshell casings, plastic bindings, and wire ties. It's designed to be opened without the use of a box cutter or knife and will protect your product just as well as traditional packaging. Products with Frustration-Free Packaging can frequently be shipped in their own boxes, without an additional shipping box. Amazon works directly with manufacturers to box products in Frustration-Free Packages right off the assembly lines, which reduces the overall amount of packing materials used."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With more and more countries aggressively moving to embrace free and open source software, it appears that Microsoft is using its own money to its advantage, such as with this agreement to hand over $60 million to South Korea to get it to use its software, rather than the alternatives. While it may seem silly when you take a step back and look at the situation, it does show some of the mixed up incentives related to software. Individuals and organizations can simply embrace free software, or Microsoft can pay out $60 million towards various projects now, knowing that it will pressure the South Korean gov't and firms into spending a lot more than that on its software. At some point, people will begin to realize this is just a bad deal. The programs Microsoft invests in make out well, as do some government officials, but everyone else ends up worse off.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

An anonymous reader writes "After protests from several sources, major German news site Spiegel Online has dropped Google Analytics. 'Google gathers so much detailed information about its users that one critic says some state intelligence bureaus look "like child protection services" in comparison,' they say. Spiegel Online no longer uses Google Analytics. 'We want to ensure that data on our users' browsing patterns don't leave our site,' says Wolfgang Büchner, one of Spiegel Online's two chief editors." The article covers a wide swath of German concern over Google's data-collecting and -handling policies, including a local rebellion against Google's Street View survey vehicles that threatens to go national.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Interesting Instructables and comments for the vertical-axis wind turbines that one Faroun is developing. Here's his latest progress, based on 4" PVC pipe for the blades:

Check out 4 more turbine designs by the same user here. Things get a bit wobbly at the end, but much healthy progress with an admirably low cost setup!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this!