A really great photograph, via Boston.com. Does anyone have photog credit info? Link to original photo series, a collection of portraits of our president-elect (who, as the shot demonstrates, sometimes reads the Wall Street Journal). Here's the info on this photograph:

US Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama shares a fist bump with Ethan Gibbs, the five year-old son of campaign communication director Robert Gibbs, upon disembarking from his campaign plane at Dulles airport in Chantilly, Virgina, on October 22, 2008. (EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images) #

(via @SdGeek)

In January of this year, on what amounted to a whim, I created an online project called Letters from Johns. To be perfectly honest, I can't even recall exactly why I did it, but I've been writing about the sex industry for years, and I suppose I was curious about why men pay for sex. Rather than hearing someone else's version of their stories, I was interested in collecting their stories. So, I put out a call on my blog for exactly that, and that's exactly what I got.

Every so often, another letter from a john would show up in my email box. They were state investigators, lonely, single guys, married men, enlisted, world travelers, virgins, and thrill-seekers. When Spitzergate hit, I got more letters than ever. (I wrote about the project here.) Eventually, though, the call girl and john coverage slowed. These days, I get fewer letters than I used to.

Last night, I got a new letter from a john. It was more sad than most, although many of the letters are somewhat sad. More often than not, the emails are testimonies to loneliness, and the lengths people, men, in particular, will go to be anywhere but alone. This letter, though, was particularly sad, and my guess is it came from a Boing Boing reader. Seeing as I hadn't gotten any letters in a while, and this one rolled in the night I started guestblogging, it's likely he came across the project from here.

Of course, I don't bring this up to out him. He's a John Doe, and all letters remain anonymous. Sometimes, though, there's a tendency to see stories like his, or those of the others, as belonging to lives that are nothing like ours, to "Other-ize" them, when, in fact, the themes of these letters -- the desire to transcend one's internal abyss -- are not so unlike the stories of most who have experiences that require them to find out what's hidden in their darkest places.

"I Wanted To Kill Myself."

Hope you'll join us in SF if you're in town tonight. Details here, and more here. Thanks Scott Beale! For Web 2.0 conference participants who are attending the dinner/auction at the Palace Hotel tonight: we'll be up late with the Drinkup, so just cmon by when Web 2 wraps up.

Do people with Asperger Syndrome understand intentional actions in a different way than people without Asperger Syndrome? Edouard Machery, a philosopher of psychology and an experimental philosopher in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, says they do:

Consider the following probes:

The Free-Cup Case
Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering, the cashier told him that if he bought a Mega-Sized Smoothie he would get it in a special commemorative cup. Joe replied, ‘I don't care about a commemorative cup, I just want the biggest smoothie you have.' Sure enough, Joe received the Mega-Sized Smoothie in a commemorative cup. Did Joe intentionally obtain the commemorative cup?

The Extra-Dollar Case
Joe was feeling quite dehydrated, so he stopped by the local smoothie shop to buy the largest sized drink available. Before ordering, the cashier told him that the Mega-Sized Smoothies were now one dollar more than they used to be. Joe replied, ‘I don't care if I have to pay one dollar more, I just want the biggest smoothie you have.' Sure enough, Joe received the Mega-Sized Smoothie and paid one dollar more for it. Did Joe intentionally pay one dollar more?

You surely think that paying an extra dollar was intentional, while getting the commemorative cup was not. So do most people (Machery, 2008).

But Tiziana Zalla and I have found that if you had Asperger Syndrome, a mild form of autism, your judgments would be very different: You would judge that paying an extra-dollar was not intentional, just like getting the commemorative cup (Zalla and Machery ms).

Intentional action and Asperger Syndrome

A new video, "S.U.S. (Save UR Soul)," directed by (a very pregnant) M.I.A. and featuring Blaqstarr mashup/covering Tom Waits' "Way Down In The Hole," which various artists have covered as the theme song for HBO's "The Wire," with M.I.A. crooning about her laptop. On the video's lo-fi look, from the YouTube credits: "cheapest video ever made , i spent $9.95 on it."

On Myspace, M.I.A. blogs:

Me and Blaqstarr found the image at the end from a Joy Division video and thought about the election and thats how people want you to see the world , black/ white , good/ evil, jesus/devil for you the words are Obama vs Mc Cain for me its terror vs genocide simple maths so we put it on at the end to show how far we've gone and how far we've come, i have to start staying at home more because i dont think i can fit through my front door anymore but i want this to do the traveling for me.

dooling writes "A paper detailing the sequencing of the first human cancer genome will be published in the 6 November 2008 issue of Nature. This is not only the first cancer genome published, it is the first female genome as well. You can read the paper's abstract, DNA sequencing of a cytogenetically normal acute myeloid leukaemia genome, or the story in Science News. This issue of Nature also has articles on the sequencing of the first African and Asian genomes. The sequencing in all three articles was done using the Illumina Genome Analyzer, one of the massively parallel, next-generation genome sequencing platforms."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft certainly recognizes the fact that most startups these days are automatically gravitating to a LAMP infrastructure (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). So, now it seems to be trying out a new program to lure startups by offering them free software for a few years and combining it with additional services that they hope will appeal to startups. It's an interesting approach, though, in the long run, it still seems like they may have the equation backwards. While they are giving some stuff away free initially, the ultimate goal is to lock companies into paying for infinite goods like software, rather than scarcities like services.

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A slow day at the office … the final frontier?

For the Star Trek fan in every office, you too can build this NCC-1701 Enterprise from junk in your desk drawer. Easy to assemble. Impress your friends. Makes a great gift or holiday ornament.

- Build the Starship Enterprise from useless office supplies

More:

Make a Starship Enterprise out of paperclips

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I am loving this strange medical-themed footwear. Created by student designer Gwendolyn Huskens, the set of six sick shoes aim to "reveal the taboos associated with physical deformities." Couture for the clubfooted? Reminds me of Romain Slocombe's medical fetishism, "Crash," and stumbling supermodels. More images at designboom. Photo credit: René Van Der Hulst.

chronopunk writes "Normally when you think of firmware updates for a router you would expect security updates and bug fixes. Would you ever expect the company that makes the product to try and sell you a subscription for security software using its firmware as a salesperson? I recently ran into this myself when trying to troubleshoot my router. I noticed when trying to go to Google that my router was hijacking DNS and sent me to a website trying to sell me a software subscription. After upgrading your D-link DIR-655 router to the latest firmware you'll see that D-link does this, and calls the hijacking a 'feature.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dunezone writes "As the election ends news is coming out from both campaigns on what happened behind closed doors. During the summer the Obama campaign had their systems hacked, but so did McCain — and not by each other but a third party. '... both the FBI and the Secret Service came to the campaign with an ominous warning: "You have a problem way bigger than what you understand," an agent told Obama's team. "You have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system." The following day, Obama campaign chief David Plouffe heard from White House chief of staff Josh Bolten, to the same effect: "You have a real problem ... and you have to deal with it." The Feds told Obama's aides in late August that the McCain campaign's computer system had been similarly compromised.'" Also from the article: " Officials at the FBI and the White House told the Obama campaign that they believed a foreign entity or organization sought to gather information on the evolution of both camps' policy positions--information that might be useful in negotiations with a future administration."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NY Times: "California voters have adopted a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, The Associated Press reported Wednesday, joining voters in two other states who went to the polls Tuesday to overturn such unions."

I voted against Prop 8.

My thoughts on marriage are -- if you have kids you probably should be married, but if you don't who cares what you call your relationship. That's between you and your partner. You want to call it marriage, no problem as far as I'm concerned. I'm a libertarian in that regard. Stay focused on the big stuff and what happens between two consenting adults is none of my business.

And I think married heteros generally are assholes about this. If their marriages are so weak that they need to make it exclusive then maybe they ought to take a look inward instead of focusing their fear on people they don't know or understand (which is what their opposition to gay marriage really is saying, imho).

On the other hand... (And I'm going to catch hell for this.)

I have a friend who I didn't know was gay until he told me he was married and I thought that meant he had a wife (the female kind), but it turns out it was another guy. Truthfully -- I found this shocking, and a bit uncomfortable, and being a Californian, I said "I find this shocking and it makes me a bit uncomfortable" and my friend, also being Californian said he understood, which I'm sure he did.

I remember in 1980, the first time I went to Jamaica to visit my uncle. I was on the beach by myself and I realized I was the only white person. I freaked (not visibly of course) -- not wholly unlike the reaction I had to my friend's gay marriage, above. I remember why I was scared, but I don't understand it. Where I grew up, in NYC, we thought it was dangerous to be alone among so many blacks. I'm sure we were over-reacting, but it seemed real. Here it is not too much later, and the change we're talking about is inside me. Slowly, I've come to see black people differently. Very differently.

The obvious point -- eventually the shock will dissipate, and there will be a time when people don't understand why something like Prop 8 would pass. Transitions like this take time. There's no other way. But this change is coming, for sure.

The eyeSequencer creates ambient music from the unique pattern of the human iris -

Every now and then you see some particullary beautiful eyes … some of them inspired me to use images of eyes to create musical material. I wrote a little framework/application in Processing to help me analyse the image. “Scanners” circulate in the eye and analyse RGB and brightness values. These values are used to create OSC Messages, which then are send to SuperCollider. SuperCollider would be a great way to produce the sound, but for this example i decided to use SC3 to send MIDI events to Ableton Live, to two instances of the Alphakanal Automat Synthesizer.

- eyeSequencer [via Califaudio]

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On 7/26/04, at the blogger's breakfast at the DNC, this weird guy who people said great things about came to talk to us. His name was Barack Obama. Here's the whole post:

Barack Obama, who's running for the Senate in Illinois, spoke briefly at the Blogger's Breakfast. He's an up and coming star of the Democratic Party, according to David Weinberger, he'll be President in 12 years.

Dr Dave was off by 8 years.

Bonus: Here's a teeny picture of Obama that day.

Lots of websites let users upload their own image or avatar. Most people use photos of themselves, but others like to toss up an interesting photo or artwork. And, of course, online some of that artwork may be covered by copyright. But, still, it seems a bit harsh for an artist to send a guy a bill for $500 after discovering that his artwork was being used as an avatar on an online poker site. This seems doubly stupid. First of all, no one is going to pay $500 for artwork to use as an avatar. They'll just switch to something else. And then fewer people will see the artwork and question who created it. So, basically, all this does is stop someone from freely promoting the artist's artwork, while also pissing off someone who had clearly been a fan. How does that make sense?

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An anonymous reader writes "Core Security Technologies issued an advisory disclosing a vulnerability that could affect millions using Adobe's Reader PDF file viewing software. Engineers from CoreLabs determined that Adobe Reader could be exploited to gain access to vulnerable systems via the use of a specially crafted PDF file with malicious JavaScript content. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability requires that users open a maliciously crafted PDF file, thereby allowing attackers to gain access to vulnerable systems and assume the privileges of a user running Acrobat Reader."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(photo by Bre Pettis)

Upcoming classes @ Brooklyn's NYCResistor cover some very awesome topics -

Software Programming PHP 001: Getting Started - Nov 8 PHP 101: Variables, Functions, & More - Nov 15 Processing 101: Hello Pixel - Nov 22

Hardware Programming
Arduino Programming 102: If Funky, Get Loopy - Nov 9
Arduino Programming 103: Sensory Overload - Nov 16

Arduino and Processing - Nov 12
Processing + Arduino - Dec 13

Wireless Wearables - Dec 14

General Electronics
Joule Thievery - Nov 15
Electricity .01 - Nov 16

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So the other day I messaged another admin from the console using the regular old 'write' command (as I've been doing for over 10 years). To my surprise he didn't know how to respond back to me (he had to call me on the phone) and had never even known you could do that. That got me thinking that there's probably lots of things like that, and likely things I've never heard of. What sorts of things do you take for granted as a natural part of Unix that other people are surprised at?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artists Moira Hahn, Tessar Lo, and Bill Blair have a show of new work opening this Friday at Seattle's Roq La Rue Gallery. Seen above is Lo's "Knowledge" (mixed media on paper, 27.5" x 36"). It drives me wild. From the show description:

Born in Indonesia and raised in Canada, Tessar Lo (Los Angeles) brings a very eastern influenced style into his work. Lo has been influenced by artists such as Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara and by japanese ukiyo-e printers and other traditional asian techniques. He juxtaposes these traditional influences with current pop culture and music to create his own unique view of the world around him. His is known for his emotionally evocative paintings of young people with giant totemistic animal guardians, most notably tigers. Rather than one note narratives, there is always an ambiguity in each scene, and the viewer never really has a clear sense of who is actually guarding who. The symbolic, majestic creatures are as vulnerable, and as able to achieve a painful sort of transcendence, as we are.

Hahn, Lo, Blair preview

With various companies trying to rush to put in place better business models thanks to the financial crash, Farhad Manjoo over at Slate has written an article suggesting that various free online services just start charging. Much of the article is based on the beliefs of the guys who run 37Signals, the online software company, who are strong believers in charging a reasonable price for simple software. To some extent, they're correct, but in many ways, it's exactly the wrong message.

For example, Manjoo suggests that Facebook should just start charging users who have over 200 friends something like $5/month. His admits that there will be revolts and anger, but some percentage will pay, and that will create a nice revenue stream. Manjoo is a smart guy, and I usually agree with him on stuff, but on this, he's way off. The problem is that this analysis is a static one, not taking into account what happens next. And, when it comes to social networks like Facebook, we know exactly what happens next. That's because a few years back, when Friendster was the biggest social network on the planet (during another "down" time in the economy), there were rumors that it was going to start charging, and those rumors fueled the growth of MySpace. I still remember getting Friendster messages over and over again, telling people to sign up with MySpace because Friendster was about to start charging.

Sure, Facebook might be able to retain some users who would pay, but many others would flock to the next big thing, which would remain free... and Facebook would look something like Friendster today. Perhaps it would be making money, but most of the users will have moved on to something else.

So while it's important to come up with real business models that bring in actual revenue, you can't do so by charging for things that no one expects to pay for (or that they've been trained not to pay for). Instead, you have to focus on real scarcities, not artificial ones, or your business model is going to go nowhere. Saying that you should "charge" is nothing revolutionary. But it's misleading. The real trick is in understanding what to charge for -- which is what we've been discussing here for years. It's too bad Manjoo didn't explore that angle, because that's where the really interesting business models of tomorrow will be found.

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Tone Generation is a twelve-part audio documentary on the global history of electronic music until the 1970s. I just started listening to the podcast and it's absolutely fascinating. Ian Helliwell created the program earlier this year for England's Resonance FM. It was produced by sound designer Simon James who also did the otherworldly audio for Ken Hollings's Welcome To Mars series. Tone Generation's structure was inspired by Helliwell's analogue music history chart, also a terrific resource. From The Tone Generation project page:

The Tone Generation is Ian's continuing radio series exploring electronic music; a personal selection drawn from his records and cds, looking at different themes or composers in the era of analogue tape and early synthesizer technology. Within the limitations of his collection and the half hour time slot, the programmes will hopefully act as a useful and enlightening overview of electronic music as it developed in many different countries, and will be of special interest to enthusiasts and students studying the history of analogue electronics, from the formative days up to the 1970s.

The Tone Generation podcast (Odeo), The Tone Generation MP3 downloads (SimonSound), The Tone Generation project page (Ian Helliwell's site)

newt writes "The Australian Government is planning to conduct live trials of as-yet-unspecified censorship technology. But as every geek already knows, these systems can't possibly work in the presence of VPNs and proxy servers. PC Authority clues the punters in." Maybe the ISPs secretly like encouraging SSH tunneling — and making everyone pay for the extra bandwidth used. Not really; Australia's major ISPs, as mentioned a few days ago, think it's a bad idea.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This intensely beautiful photo, credited E. Leslie, accompanies a Science News article about how climate change has been negatively impacting the population of Norway lemmings. From Science News:

Norway lemmings, Lemmus lemmus, are about half the size of a guinea pig and live in nests beneath the snow during the winter months. When the snowpack is light and fluffy, warmth from the ground melts small spaces under the snow that the lemmings use to forage for sedges, grasses and mosses without being exposed to predators. But in recent years, warmer winter temperatures have rendered the snow less fluffy. That, in turn, has made the snow more likely to melt and refreeze at ground level, coating the ground with ice and making life more difficult for lemmings.

Climate Change Stifling Lemmings

This delightfully crazy bugger built a mini-sub 1/10th replica of Captain Nemo's Nautilus from Disney's film version of Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, along with replicas of diving suits and undersea rifles from the film.

Disney Nautilus homebuilt submarine [via Boing Boing]

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Khashishi writes "The LA times and the Associated Press report that the FCC v. Fox Television Stations case is being heard in the Supreme Court. The FCC policy would impose a heavy fine on use of 'indecent' words on broadcast television, which Fox and others are claiming is a violation of free speech. The case was appealed after being ruled in Fox's favor in a federal appeals court in New York. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Antonin Scalia support the FCC policy of censorship." Here's a transcript (PDF) of the oral arguments.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well, apparently even the greatly scaled back version of their ad partnership wasn't enough to appease a Justice Department intent on suing Google for antitrust no matter what the real issues are. Google had previously threatened to kill the deal if the Justice Department didn't ease up on its position, so it really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that Google has now dropped out of the deal entirely.

The government is still insisting that it would have represented a monopoly, as around 90% of the "relevant market" would have been managed by one company. First of all, they were only looking at the search ad market, which is hardly the relevant market. Advertising budgets pay for much more than search ads, and if search ads really became more expensive, it would only open up opportunities for alternative means of advertising. Besides, there was still little to no indication that any such deal would increase advertising fees. Given Google's auction based system, and the fact that this would increase inventory, there's plenty of reason to believe it would actually decrease advertising costs.

In the end, killing off this deal may represent a pretty big blow to Yahoo's chances of moving forward as an independent concern. The company was very much relying on the Google deal to stabilize its financial condition. Without that, Yahoo is in trouble -- meaning there's probably a good chance that Microsoft takes another look at acquiring the company for much, much less than before. That means, Yahoo as we know it, disappears. Considering the Justice Department wanted more competition rather than less, it's unfortunate that it's misguided decision is effectively killing off one of the competitors.

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Tiny horse joyfully runs free, evading all attempts to capture it.

[The Etsy Steam Team at the Steampunk Con (from left to right, by username: lilibat, PinkPeacock, nullalux, 19Moons, Choklit, OrpheusAlchemy, IndustrialFairytale, FaradayBags, and figments. Photo by Andrew/shoutingboy).]

I finally met members of the Etsy Steam Team at last week's Steampunk Convention. As you may or may not know, Etsy (think: Amazon meets eBay at a craft's fair) allows sellers to organize themselves into "teams" based on similar interests or product lines (to network, share promotion, skills, etc.). Obviously, the Steam Team is gathered around their mutual interest in making and selling steampunk and Victorian-inspired art and crafts. At the con, they offered everything from watchwork and church key jewelry to surreal antique assemblage, clockwork bugs, potion bottles and other alchemical chotsky. It was a wonderful and talented group of artists and crafters that I was happy to meet and with whom I hope to stay in touch.

More:

• Steampunk conference report, part II
• "Maker" is what I do, "steampunk" describes the style

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Paper engineer Haruki Nakamura created this amazing heart of gears. The video really gets cranking around :50. Gear's heart (via Drawn!)

Whiteboard Pong! via NOTCOT.

Take a regular Whiteboard, regular Whiteboard markers and play PONG irregularly. What you are seeing is a real live demonstration of our physics based engine responding to it’s real life surroundings, the computer sees and recognises the black shapes on the whiteboard and the virtual ball behaves accordingly.

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rsiles writes "When security professionals are dealing with huge amounts of information (and who isn't nowadays?), correlation and filtering is not the easiest path (and sometimes enough) to discern what is going on. The in-depth analysis of security data and logs is a time-consuming exercise, and security visualization (SecViz) extensively helps to focus on the relevant data and reduces the amount of work required to reach to the same conclusions. It is mandatory to add the tools and techniques associated to SecViz to your arsenal, as they are basically taking advantage of the capabilities we have as humans to visualize (and at the same time analyze) data. A clear example is the insider threat and related incidents, where tons of data sources are available. The best sentence (unfortunately it is not an image ;) that describes SecViz comes from the author: 'A picture is worth a thousand log entries.'" Read on for the rest of rsiles's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New research suggests the lefties are more likely to be inhibited and anxious. Psychologist Lynn Wright and her colleagues at the University of Abertay Dundee ran behavioral tests on more than 100 people to see if they agreed with statements like “I worry about making mistakes, "“Criticism or scolding hurts me quite a bit," and “I often act on the spur of the moment." The answers of left-handed subjects revealed more reticence than righties. From New Scientist:

In left-handers the right half of the brain is dominant, and it is this side that seems to control negative aspects of emotion. In right-handers the left brain dominates...

However, (Swansea University behavioral neuroscientist Philip Corr, who was not involved in the study,) says handedness is not so much a predictor of personality as a great way to understand how emotions are handled in our brains. “Although we may have a predisposition to an inhibition, that may encourage us during adulthood or childhood to develop coping strategies,” he says. “It could act as a blessing.”

Wright, a lefty, agrees. “They [left-handers] like to colour-code things, they like to write lists, it’s almost a way to alleviate their stress,” she says..

"Left-handed people are more inhibited"

Image by Telstar Logistics

Slapping a baby into your Illegal Soapbox Derby car:

• Makes the baby the luckiest kid in the world (or, is he crying?)


• Will come back to haunt you when aforementioned baby reaches driving age


• And probably lessens your chances of getting arrested

Here's a good account of what conspired. An excerpt:

Well, turns out there's a reason why it's called the *Illegal* Soapbox Derby.

When we arrived at Bernal Speedway in San Francisco to take in the 2008 running of the Illegal Soapbox Derby, some unpleasantness ensued between the racers and several representatives of the San Francisco Police Department. It seems the Parks Department had received a pre-race complaint from someone in the Bernal Heights Temperance and Abstinence League, and the cops were under orders to put the kibosh on the event. (According to the police, San Francisco Supervisor Tom Ammiano had attempted to intervene on behalf of the Soapbox Derby, but to no avail -- Ammiano was overruled by the bureaucrats at the Parks Department. Thanks for trying, Tom!)

Major buzzkill.

After some futile and frustrating attempts at negotiation, the crowd dispersed peacefully and relocated (no less peacefully) to an another gravity-rich location elsewhere in the city.

Here's some more pictures of the illegal rolling (baby-friendly?) mayhem:

I know San Francisco's particularly suitable terrain for an event like this, but I also know people in other cities enjoy sending infants spiraling down hills. What are your other favorite DIY races?

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It was just a matter of time... Physical keyboard for iPhone via CG.



It gets better, the same maker seems to have a self-propelled iPhone "robot"...

With an Arduino... trifecta of COOL OVERLOAD in play.

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One of the things to understand when we talk about various business model innovations that companies can use, is the idea that successful implementation of these business models doesn't mean merely copying what someone else did, but continuing to come up with new ideas and new innovations. One of the common retorts to this, often found in our comments, is that if everyone's doing x then it loses all value. But, of course, that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what we're advocating. The whole point is that everyone doesn't do x, but they keep innovating and doing different things. And, for those who claim that there really are only so many things you can do, I'll point you to the words of economist Paul Romer:

Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding: possibilities do not merely add up; they multiply.

Or, even better, I'll just point you to the example of Trent Reznor, who, despite being quite far ahead of the pack on many attempted business models, doesn't seem to want to rest on his laurels. Instead, he just keeps innovating. We've covered many of the business model innovations made by Trent Reznor over the last few years (and I'm actually preparing a presentation on the topic for a music industry conference next year -- which I'll be talking about more in the future). His latest is to embrace the iPhone game Tapulous, which is sort of a rather simplified iPhone version of any "push a button to the beat" music game, a la Guitar Hero or Rock Band today (or Dance Dance Revolution in the past).

Now, the easy (boring) thing to do would have been to just create a Nine Inch Nails version of the game, which is now available. You can now play Tapulous to various songs from NiN's recent albums (whose releases we've discussed previously). However, much more interesting is tying the game even further to the band, such that those who score a certain level of points can submit the score back to Tapulous, and get entered into a contest to win floor tickets to see NiN perform or, for one lucky winner, a Les Paul guitar signed by Trent Reznor.

Despite the fact that many would say that Reznor has done much more innovating than many other musicians these days, the important thing to note is that he keeps on trying new stuff -- and each time gets more attention and wins over more fans with his actions. And the folks who complain that no new business model will work because everyone will be doing it? They're not getting much attention at all.

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Benjamin Duranske writes "Jonathan Lee Riches, an inmate in South Carolina famous for filing long, handwritten, rambling screeds against celebrities, politicians, and even buildings, has filed a third-party motion in Federal Court in Arizona in the MDY v. Blizzard botting case claiming that Blizzard's World of Warcraft 'caused Riches mind to live in a virtual universe, where Riches explored the landscape committing identity theft and fighting cybermonster rival hacker gangs. Riches was addicted to video games and lost touch with reality because of defendants. This caused Riches to commit fraud to buy defendants video games. Riches chose World of Warcraft over working a legit job, Riches mind became a living video game.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A follow up our previous post (now with PDF)... Pete writes -

The FCC is deregulating "white-spaces", which are the unused bits of the TV spectrum. This is important to us Makers, since RF circuits for the TV spectrum are easy to find and modify for cheap (just tear apart an old TV, VCR, or cable modulator for transmitters or receivers), and amplifiers for this band are also cheap and easy to find and make. I'll hopefully be able to post a tutorial soon on extracting and modifying RF circuits for this band.

Stay tuned to MAKE, we'll building a lot of new projects around this and covering it all throughly - it's just like when makers starting hacking around with Wi-Fi!

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Online betting outfit Paddy Power is offering 4-1 odds that God exists. So far, folks have wagered $5000 on the question. Interest has increased resulting from an atheist ad campaign on London buses with the slogan: "There's probably no God." From The Telegraph:

A spokesman for Paddy Power said that confirmation of God's existence would have to be verified by scientists and given by an independent authority before any payouts were made, however.

He added: "The atheists' planned advertising campaign seems to have renewed the debate in pubs and around office water-coolers as to whether there is a God and we've seen some of that being transferred into bets.

"However we advise anyone still not sure of God's existence to maybe hedge their bets for now, just in case."

"Paddy Power offers odds of 4-1 that God exists"

Stefan Savage, a UC San Diego computer science professor, has developed software that can clone house keys from photos.

House keys can be cloned from photos taken on normal mobile phones, and even from shots taken over distances of hundreds of feet.

The images are scanned by a digital imaging programme that copies the exact contours of a key to create working duplicates, no matter the angle or distance at which the photos were taken.

Although the software has been developed by university researchers who have pledged not to release the code, they warned that it would not be difficult for technology-savvy criminal gangs to make similar applications.

Quick -- somebody tell these Flickr users to hide their keychain photos!

Software can clone keys from single photo

Android Proxy App - Use your Android G1 for net access via Lifehacker.

I missed out on getting the iPhone app that does this before it was pulled from the store, bummer - but this is good news for g1 users!

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The end of TV: Boxee + Apple TV + Hulu, a review of Boxee @ Tux Geek...

People want to do much more with their iPhone then Steve Job allows. So they jailbreak it. The same goes for the Apple TV. While it is a great and relatively cheap media center, it has restrictions, just like the iPhone. Wouldn’t it be nice to play xvid videos, stream shows from Hulu, listen to LastFm, Twitter the name of the movie you are currently watching or see what music your friends are listening to on your big screen TV connected to an Apple TV? Well, you can do that with Boxee!

Boxee is an open source media center, with social networking features, currently in an invite-only alpha stage. It is a fork of XBMC, a media center initially designed for the Xbox, but then ported to run on all major platforms. Boxee runs on Linux, Mac, and soon Windows. You can put it on your AppleTV with a grandma-simple “hack“, with no adverse effects.
What does it do?

As other media center software, Boxee allows you to browse and play media files (movies, music, photos) from local hard-disks or DVD drive and can stream music and videos from the internet or other computers in the network (SMB/SAMBA shares). It supports 1080p HD and it reads virtually any type of media, except DRM files.

Boxee scans your default media folders and downloads the related meta-data and artwork for your music and video files. Unfortunately, it doesn’t import your iTunes or iPhoto libraries - a big loss for Mac users.

When playing a song you can choose to see the lyrics (especially useful for a karaoke night) or display information about the band or artist.

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m0rphin3 writes "Japanese scientists have cloned mice whose bodies were frozen for as long as 16 years and said on Monday it may be possible to use the technique to resurrect mammoths and other extinct species. Could we finally see Jurassic Park become a reality, or perhaps use this for colonizing other galaxies?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When she was announced as a candidate I was virtually alone in believing the choice wouldn't age well. When I turned out to be correct, I didn't want to gloat, because the election wasn't over, and there was no way to be absolutely sure. Now we are.

I don't think she killed the McCain candidacy, but had the economy not soured, I think she would have brought him down. It was such a bonehead decision, it was all the proof anyone needed that a McCain presidency would be as filled with disaster as the Bush presidency. Obama was absolutely right in saying that voting for McCain was signing up for another four years of Republican lunacy.

Now I hear people saying something equally wrong about Palin -- that she has a shot at leading the Republican Party in 2012. It isn't going to happen. That's not how American politics works.

We don't give losers a second chance in this country. (Yes, of course there are exceptions, but she isn't one of them, read on.)

Kerry thought he could run for President in 2008 after losing in a squeaker in 2004. It took a month or so before he realized that the Republicans would throw the exact same book at him they developed four years earlier, and while it wasn't fair then, it did work and it would work again.

Same with Palin. What little we really know about her is more than we wanted to know. When she shows up, if she's dumb enough to show up, as a candidate for President in 2010 or 2011, all we'll think of is the Katie Couric interview, and Charlie this and Charlie that, thanks but no thanks to the bridge to nowhere, the hypocrisy of a hockey mom who loves expensive clothes, and the pit bull with lipstick mavericky maverick reformer who fired a commissioner who wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law.

Palin is no longer a candidate, she's a punchline.

Cleaning up some loose ends.

Obama won Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, two states that were on McCain's slim path to a win. Once those were decided, it was over. I felt the networks could have called the election then, but they didn't.

When Obama won Ohio, it was even more certain. In order to win McCain would have had to win California, Oregon and Washington, and that structurally just couldn't happen. I told my friends who were gathered around the TV, in my opinion, it was over. I twittered it. If McCain were to win at this point, it would be the biggest bit of history in 100 years, including 9/11, the use of the atom bomb, World War II itself, the Mets winning the World Series in 1969. You get the idea. Things of that nature are so improbable they just don't happen.

Missouri went to McCain by the slimmest margin, thereby losing its bellwether status. It no longer always goes with the winner. Even the Boston Red Sox had to eventually beat out the Yankees for the championship.

I've read that Obama doesn't have a mandate, but I don't know what planet you have to come from to draw that conclusion. He has the strongest mandate in so many ways, it's likely he doesn't want that much mandate, and will disappoint in some or many ways. Can he really get us out of Iraq quickly enough to please all who want a quick exit? The public works projects that are going to be needed to keep us out of a depression give us a chance to fix the problems we so desperately want to fix, energy, health care, education, infrastructure. Those are the four biggies.

North Carolina still isn't decided, and I understand that Georgia wasn't decided until very late. Our guy almost won that state too. The whole Red State thing is now questionable. Yes there are still some, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, the Dakotas. But the south with all its newly energized African-American voters and the midwest are now all in play. A new political reality is shaping up, beyond the last four elections -- and that's the stuff of mandates.

We can bail out the auto industry, but in return they have to use the public money to underwrite new products that get the mileage that European cars get. If you've ever been to a European capital you know how oversized American cars are. There, in a nutshell, is the problem with Detroit -- it's really a problem with America. That's one reason we use so much energy. We can make some huge cuts there without having to invent anything, just copy the Europeans.

The good thing about Obama is that, armed with a mandate, he will know what to do with it.

Now the next question is -- what comes next?

Probably some writing. But not yet. My to-do list is very long. I need to get my car serviced. Pay some bills and call some friends. After that, I don't know. Hey at least there's one thing that isn't on my list -- I get to stay in the USA.

I wonder what our election looks like to people outside the U.S.

Curious -- there was so much angst, now that Obama is our President-elect, what changed -- what comes next for you?

Garimelda writes "Scientists have discovered what they believe is an eight-armed creature which colonized a large section of the world's oceans over 300 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Garimelda writes "Scientists have discovered what they believe is an eight-armed creature, which colonized a large section of the world's oceans over 300 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I know that many folks disagree with my view that Google's decision to settle with book authors and publishers was a huge long term strategic mistake, but it appears others are beginning to recognize the issues. Already, we've seen Harvard bail out on the deal, since it seems to work at cross purposes to Harvard's mission, but more importantly, others are realizing the implicit statement behind Google's caving: information is not free, and those who have information should line up to Google and demand to get paid. In fact, as found on Romenesko, some are wondering when newspaper and magazine execs will realize what the book scanning deal means, and start demanding the same sort of deal from Google. I would suggest it goes even further than that. If Google is setting up a pool to pay authors, and if that leads to them doing a similar thing for newspapers and magazines, why not other websites as well? Google has now set a precedent of being willing to pay in order to display works in its index, and that's going to backfire badly.

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Ingrid Goldbloom Bloch’s fascination with alterna-art materials began as a little girl when she’d follow her dad around hardware stores inspecting bins of nuts and bolts...Over the years, the Needham self-taught artist and mother of two has found ways to combine hardware with traditional art materials such as beads and yarn for one-of-a-kind teapots, urns, and lingerie.

Read it now!  CRAFT - Volume 9

Under Armor by Katie Kurtz in Handmade - Ingrid Goldbloom Bloch creates bustiers, garters, and underpants from recycled soda cans and hardware. Page 16 - CRAFT 09. To get CRAFT, subscribe today or purchase single volumes. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

Internetting every thing, everywhere, all the time @ CNN...

It's called "The Internet of Things" -- at least for now. It refers to an imminent world where physical objects and beings, as well as virtual data and environments, all live and interact with each other in the same space and time. In short, everything is interconnected.

"If we can imagine it, there's a good chance it can be programmed," wrote Vint Cerf, the original Internet evangelist, on the official Google blog.

"The Internet of the future will be suffused with software, information, data archives, and populated with devices, appliances, and people who are interacting with and through this rich fabric."

At the nodes of this all-encompassing web of objects is RFID (Radio Frequency Identity) technology, which allows things to be "read" by an NFC (Near Field Communication) scanner, bar-code-style, as well as to store information about themselves and their relationship with their environment, over time.

The reason why RFID is often called next-generation bar code is that the technology is more accurate, scanners can read more objects with less directional contact, and smaller chips can contain a larger quantity of information.

Bruce Sterling, one of the pioneers of cyberpunk literature in the 1980s and an active sci-fi guru, neologized the term "spime" in 2004 to refer to any object that can define itself in terms of both space and time, i.e. using GPS to locate itself and RFID to trace its own history.

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Yes, I know it's Wednesday! Consider this post my Special Post-Election Edition of How-to Tuesdays!

This week I made a USB7 6 Digit LED Display Kit from the Maker Shed. It's a really cool electronics kit that can be controlled from your computer via USB. I decided to modify it a little so it's easier to read while it sits on my desk. Nothing too fancy, but I think you'll like it.

The USB7 expands most computers with a USB connected 6-digit seven-segment display. Supporting letters, numbers, and a range of punctuation, the USB7 benefits any project requiring highly visible information. Using common a USB cable for both communication and power, the USB7 requires no special or bulky cables and with a simple virtual-serial port protocol, sending regular ASCII characters is all that's required to control the USB7s full output capacity. Based on the AVR-CDC project, the USB7 is supported by Windows XP, Windows 2000, OS X, and many Linux variants.

What you need:

• USB7 6 Digit LED Display Kit - Available in the Maker Shed
• Wire - A few feet of 22G wire (pick a cool color)

Tools you need:

• Soldering Iron
• Rosin core solder
• Arms of Assistance - Make you own
• Fume extractor - Make your own

Step 1: Take inventory

Spread out all the parts and take a look through the instructions. It's always a good idea to check out all the steps prior to starting.

Step 2: Add a lot of resistors

I started by adding all the 68?, 1.5K?, 10K?, 82K? and 1K? resistors. Be careful not to mix them up. The board is labeled, so it makes this step really easy.

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An anonymous reader writes "T-Mobile's G1 phone, the first commercially available Android based phone, has been rooted. The exploit is extremely simple to execute, just requiring you to run telnetd from a terminal on the phone, and then connecting to the phone via telnet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm always curious about the science of food. I found this really great article about avocado mayonnaise; it sounds really yummy, and gives a little insight into the nature of emulsions. If you want to know more, here's a Wikipedia article about emulsions.

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sunderbear noted that EAs Command & Conquer 3 shipped missing the last digit of the CD Key. He writes "EA's brightest minds have put their synapses into overdrive in order to whip up a comical work-around. 'There is currently a work-around that may allow you to bypass this issue. Since you have the first 19 characters of the code already, you can basically try guessing the last character,' said a note on EA's customer support site. Yes, they're serious. 'To do this, simply enter your existing code, and then for the last character, try the letters A-Z, and then the numbers 0-9. You should eventually get the right combination, and be able to play the game.'" It appears that the helpful hint has been purged.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sunderbear noted that EAs Command & Conquer 3 shipped missing the last digit of the CD Key. He writes "EA's brightest minds have put their synapses into overdrive in order to whip up a comical work-around. 'There is currently a work-around that may allow you to bypass this issue. Since you have the first 19 characters of the code already, you can basically try guessing the last character,' said a note on EA's customer support site. Yes, they're serious. 'To do this, simply enter your existing code, and then for the last character, try the letters A-Z, and then the numbers 0-9. You should eventually get the right combination, and be able to play the game.'" It appears that the helpful hint has been purged.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've often wondered why various governments haven't mandated open source e-voting systems. After all, if a free and democratic election is supposed involve true transparency into the voting process, it's hard to see how proprietary software can be allowed. However, the big e-voting companies have been staunch supporters of keeping their solutions proprietary. Except... it may turn out that Premier Election Solutions (which was better known as Diebold until it changed its name to get away from the mocking laughter) is actually using some open source software... and not abiding by the license. Artifex Software is suing Premier for apparently using its GPL'd software and not adhering to the GPL terms. Of course, we should note that Diebold (er... Premier) has suggested in the past that it might eventually open source its own product, so maybe a little legal nudge will push it over the edge.

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bmcage writes "The ESA unveiled the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle, a real re-entry vehicle. Although it will not be reused, it has a better geometry than NASA's Orion or the Russian Soyuz, giving better lift, and control. This is not done by the addition of useless wings, but by using two brakes. Finally a departure from the Apollo design that is actually better?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bmcage writes "The ESA unveiled the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle, a real re-entry vehicle. Although it will not be reused, it has a better geometry than NASA's Orion or the Russian Soyuz, giving better lift, and control. This is not done by the addition of useless wings, but by using two brakes. Finally a departure from the Apollo design that is actually better?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This simple mod shows how to add RCA audio and video outputs to an older Famicom (HVC-001) model in order to improve the video quality and to ensure that the channels that the system outputs on will match those of your TV.

Famicom AV Mod

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Paul Slocum's “Pi House Generator” creates an evolving soundtrack of house music which goes on forever(almost) -

The software progressively calculates the sequence of digits in pi, starting at 3.14 and progressing towards infinity. As the program calculates the digits, it feeds the results into an algorithmic music generator containing my structural criteria for house music. The resulting piece of house music is infinitely long and static and never repeats itself.

The number of processor cycles required to calculate pi increase with the number of digits it is calculated to. After months or years of playing the song, any fixed computer hardware will be unable to calculate the digits fast enough for the song to play continuously.

Listen to a sample of the math-dance dream in action here - Paul Slocum is an artist and musician …

More:

Big box o' techno

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VoIPing the iPod Touch. How makers gave you the feature that Apple held back. From the column Maker By Erica Sadun...

Read it in MAKE!  MAKE - Volume 15

Read this article in MAKE: 15: Music, Page 46. To get MAKE, subscribe or purchase single volumes. MAKE: Digital Edition subscribers—read this article now in your digital edition!

I'm trying out our digital edition widgety like embed on the site, try it out and let me know how it goes makers...

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Last night around 11pm all the major networks announced that Senator Barack Obama had won the election. Soon after Senator McCain conceded. There were no crazy partisan court hearings, just a simple election. This is your chance to talk about it and what it means for the future of our nation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Simon writes in about his SV Chronometer – a GPS based, interactive master clock-

This is a little blog post about a device I built to provide me with an accurate time reference I can use to synchronise all the timepieces in my house. It used a GPS module and a PIC 16F628 microcontroller with a small two line LCD screen to display the time (UTC and local). Everything is housed in a art deco style casing with eye pieces to peer into the inner workings of the device. A crank handle on the side must be turned to cause the display to light up in a flickering manner similar to and old mutoscope machine.

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Mingyu Jeung's "Math powered" light-

Everything we create is designed to respond instantly to our whims but what if our world were set up like the game Myst. You couldn’t do anything without solving a convoluted, yet simple puzzle first. Thats the idea behind this math based lamp by designer Mingyu Jeung. To turn it on, you have to solve a randomly generated math problem. Don’t fret, it’s set on chalkboard for the numerically challenged.

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ISPreview UK writes "UK Music's chief executive, Feargal Sharkey, claims that progress has been made on a deal between the music industry and broadband ISPs to tackle illegal file sharing. The comments came during yesterday's annual Internet Service Providers' Association conference in Eversheds, with an ISPA spokesman confirming that 'some kind of agreement between rightholders and ISPs can be reached,' adding, 'everyone wants to work together to make legal online models work.' The news follows July's crucial Memorandum of Understanding agreement between copyright holders and six of the UK's largest ISPs, which account for roughly 90% of the country's broadband market. The initial agreement approved a principal of sending warning letters to customers who have been accused of downloading illegal music or movies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Pulse Park" is an installation in New York City's Madison Square Park by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano Hemmer that attempts to visualize the collective heartbeats of pedestrians around the park. You "register" at a kiosk by holding a sensor to record your heartbeat which is then translated into light into one of 200 individual lights circling the park. The result, as can be seen in the video, is a collective aura of light pulses that can be seen throughout the local neighborhood.

via NyMag

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I'm happy to announce that the Gakken SX-150 Analog Synthesizer kit is now available in our Maker Shed. This sweet little synth is about the size of a large sandwich but sounds a whole lot more awesome. It sports controls for resonance, attack/decay, cuttoff filter, pitch envelope, has an external control input along with built-in speaker and line out. You can read my impressions/review of the kit here.

These kits will likely be snapped up in a hurry, so get 'em while they're hot (and in stock!) -

This cool little synth kit is easy to put together, requires no soldering and is easy to hack (see links below). There are no English instructions included (book and kit are in Japanese but beautifully done) but the detailed illustrations are more than enough to easily put this kit together. Check out our blog links below to see our review and hacks. Imported from Japan in partnership with Gakken. 4 AA batteries (not included)

SX-150 Analog Synthesizer Kit

The SX-150 is a lot of fun to mod and experiment with. I switched out the pitch control strip on mine and added some buttons, which you can see in action below -

We'll be posting info on more SX-150 mods/hacks/tips as soon as possible, so stay tuned!

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Kate Cusack's zipper jewelry via NOTCOT.

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Fun Instructable on making a LED chandelier.

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"Pantime" is a clock by James Beattie that uses the Pantone colors to visualize the sun's luminance in the sky over the course of a 12 hour period. Interesting way to visualize time and reminds me a bit of the Last Clock project that uses video feeds to visualize time over the course of a day.

via Swiss Miss

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Percussionist and Metal Sculptor Steve Hubback creates gong instruments in many varied shapes and sizes - often exploring medieval and gothic themes. Check out the gallery pages on his site - Very metal!

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(Note: CNN's video service seems to be up and down at the moment from embedding, if the video does not play visit their site... )

Congrats to Renga Arts in Occidental, CA on some great coverage on CNN, go Joe and Sherry! Sherry heads up our Maker Faire efforts and Joe has been working with us to on a lot of the behind the scenes database work too!

Renga Arts produces and sells functional art made of reclaimed, salvaged, and recycled materials. What do we mean by "functional art?" We'll be the first to acknowledge the functional value of most decorative arts, such as painting, photography, and sculpture. But we strive to offer creatively inspired objects of everyday utility. Needless to say, a wealth of items fit into this category -- birdhouses, furniture, bowls, jewelry, and garden accessories are just a few examples. We represent a growing number of talented and inspired artists and vendors, both local and international, that create clever handmade products for you and your home.

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Mikey writes -

I recently ordered a $37 battery desulfator kit. It looks like a pretty simple device that sends pulses to lead acid batteries to help clean the battery plates. There are many success stories on the net about resuscitating essentially "dead" lead acid batteries. Since we have two electric vehicles and live off grid we have a lot of motivation to take care of our batteries. I've seen kits that sell for hundreds of dollars, but this 555 based kit seems to kick out a lot more juice than the fancy ones with wimpy solar panels.

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Well, at the very least, you have to hand it to Warner Bros. Studios for recognizing that pretending that it didn't have to somehow compete with pirated movies wasn't going to succeed as an overall strategy. The major Hollywood studio has now unveiled plans to offer a variety of movies for download in China priced at a dollar or less. Of course, it's unclear if the movies will have annoying DRM or any other inconvenience as well. Considering that unauthorized movies are already available pretty much anywhere, if Warner makes it difficult or annoying in any way, people are going to just stick with the unauthorized copies that don't create such problems. Still, this is definitely a step in the right direction: realizing that it isn't effective to pretend you can ignore unauthorized copies and still charge high prices.

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Bjoern Schuelke makes these amazing pieces of interactive art. The one pictured above is "Drone #2". [video] Check out the website for a lot more sculptures and even a few pictures inside the Artists studio.

The futuristic appearance of "Drone #2" seems like a requisite from a science fiction film.The autonomous hi-tech construct, consisting of solar cells, heat sensors,propellors, videochips and a TFT monitor is suspended from the ceiling and reacts to the "warmblooded" spectator without him or her being able to directly influence its movement.

The above image is of Drone#4 [video]

Drone #4, Björn Schülke 2005
Autonomous observing system, working diameter 450 cm
materials: fibreglas, alloy, tft-monitor, cameras, loudspeaker, microphone, motors, sensors.

Here is another one of my favoriies, Planet Space Rover. [video]

Planet Space Rover, autonomous observation system. Bjoern Schuelke 2004 build for the garden exhibition-project "Privatgruen II", Kunstraum Fuhrwerkswaage, Cologne. heigth 290 cm, working diameter 300cm materials: fibreglass, wood, alloy, motors, monitor, cameras, sensors, solar cells.

features: solar energy system; propeller powered rotating body; kinetic camera arms; monitor; long wave scanner; sound detector

More about Bjoern Schuelke

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LEGO Kitchen crafts @ Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, I like the Brooklyn Bridge napkin holder...

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This is a nice example of scavenging parts from an inkjet printer to make cool stuff. It uses an Arduino and a Motor Shield to control the DC motor. The web site has a lot more information and the source code to get you started.

More about Using a DC motor as a servo with PID control

In the Maker Shed:


MotorShield for Arduino Kit

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Remember back in the good-ol'-days when people would actually fix their broken electronics? Yeah, me neither. Check out this instructable to learn how to fix an old radio, and maybe save it from going into a landfill.

Back in the day somebody always knew somebody else that could fix minor things on radios and that's what I'm going to cover here. In this instructable I'm going to walk you through the basics of getting an old tube table top radio up and running. Finding a repair shop that can fix old radios can be real tough. If you do find one, the bill may be pretty daunting. This will not cover 100% of all problems but will get most radios that aren't severely damaged back in operating order. This instructable assumes that you have some electronics background, you can read values on parts, and you can solder.

More about How to: Fix a classic American AM tabletop tube radio

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Trip6 writes "Bones found near the wreckage of the plane flown by Steve Fossett when he disappeared last fall have been confirmed to be Fossett's by DNA analysis. The NTSB is still investigating the crash. Fossett may have been searching for a place to break the land speed record, his next quest."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last weekend, I bought a copy of Art Spiegelman's newest book, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! It's one of those book that you have to experience tactilely. It's oversized, hardcover, and brilliantly colored. In theory, it's a reprint of a collection of work from his younger years, but the real gem of the book is the introduction, in which Spiegelman looks back across the years to figure out what turned him into the king of Mauschwitz.

Early works that paved the way to Maus are here, too -- a "Maus" strip and the searing "Prisoner on the Hell Planet" --, but in the book's opening meta-autobiographical artwork, the artist exposes how all the pieces fit together in his personal history and explores the wrenching process beneath the panels. One of the most striking pages features a messy collage of early drafts of "Hell Planet," wherein he recounts his mother's suicide. Looking over the page of his old pages, you see the story come to life.

For something of a sneak peek, Slate has an insightful Breakdowns slideshow: "Making Comics After Mauschwitz."

Yes, We Can. And Yes We Did. What an amazing and historic night. Never have I witnessed so many people, all over the country, expressing such hope, optimism, and pride all at the same moment. If this mood tonight in America is a sign of what's to come, the future might -- in spite of everything -- be better than the last eight years.

What an incredible night to be an American. As I type this in a hotel in San Francisco, I can still hear people screaming and honking car horns out in the streets. I just left a diner with friends, and periodically the joint erupted in spontaneous cheering. Never in my life have I seen anything like this.

Above, flag photo by Siege. Tweeted Warren Ellis: "And that's it. Nice work, America. You got your country back."

Lessig to the FCC. Schneier to Homeland Security. Let the fantasy football cabinet appointment riffing begin.

Here's an open thread. Please discuss.

In related news, Ape Lad says the "H in sunrays" will no longer appear in the Laugh Out Loud Cats.

I don't usually blog about conference stuff I'm doing, but this one's going to be special. I've been looking forward to it for weeks.

Tomorrow at the Web 2.0 Summit, helmed by Tim O'Reilly and BB's own "band manager" John Battelle, I'll be hosting a panel about the future of online video. It's something I've been thinking about, and working on, every single day since we launched Boing Boing tv a year ago.

I am honored to welcome the following esteemed guests on this panel: Timothy Shey (Next New Networks), David Prager (Revision3), Robin Sloan (Current), Greg Goodfried (EQAL), Miles Beckett (EQAL), and Andrew Baron (Rocketboom). I'm really jazzed about the workshop, and the material people are going to share. If you're in town and thinking of coming to Web 2.0, I hope (a) this will convince you to come to the event, and (b) you'll stop by at 1130 for this panel.

The Future of Online Video (Web 2.0 Summit 2008)

Ladyada writes-

I just wrapped up a little step-by-step on turning an FTDI cable into a Parallax Propeller programmer. The instructions can be applied to any FTDI breakout board, might be handy if you have a Propeller but no propplug kicking around.

More:

From Hackszine... Robert Quattlebaum undertook the task of creating the new version and teamed up with ladyada to help bring the new kits to the hacker masses. It's built around an 80MHz 32KB Propeller chip, supports NTSC and PAL, and comes prepackaged with a bootloader that allows you to upload new firmware over ethernet instead of requiring you to use a programmer cable. This is an open hardware project, so you can either build it from scratch or purchase a kit from the adafruit store - YBox2 - DIY Networked Set-top Box.

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The election is over, I think everyone was holding their collective breath over the last year or so until it was... Congratulations to our new president and to everyone who cared so deeply about each of their candidates and issues that they got involved, that's what mattered - but the hard work is just about the start, these are challenging times. MAKE & CRAFT are not political and we do not endorse any candidates, issues or parties, everyone is a maker and all of us can start today by making the world around us better a little better. So - makers, as 2008 ends let's all do the things we can to "make" things happen. Ok, back to work!

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At a London fashion show, Manish Arora created this "visible human" outfit with Swarovski crystals; I love bones on clothes! Via BB. Photo by Gareth Cattermole.

More:

Skeleton Cardigan - CRAFT Video Podcast part 1, part 2, pattern

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rugatero writes "The BBC reports that, as of last Saturday, Microsoft is no longer issuing licenses for the 18-year-old Windows 3.x. Many here may well be surprised to learn that anyone still has use for the antiquated software, but it seems to have found a home in a number of embedded systems — including cash registers and the in-flight entertainment systems on some long-haul passenger jets (Virgin and Qantas are cited). Considering Linux's credentials as an embedded OS, this news could very well indicate the possibility of more migrations in the pipeline."

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With the Christian Science Monitor going online only, many newspapers are again re-evaluating their online strategies. When you listen to newspaper execs, you usually hear the same line over and over again: even though online page views are up and paper sales are down, the amount of ad revenue coming from online is still tiny compared to print. That's definitely true, but a large part of the problem is that many newspapers don't really concentrate on online sales -- especially among the best targets: local businesses. Many small businesses advertise online, but because newspapers don't court them, they go elsewhere, such as directly to Google.

The NY Times is writing about how at least some newspapers are realizing that, rather than focusing their sales efforts almost entirely on print ads, they need to start focusing on selling online ads as well. Amazingly, many of these newspapers have almost all of their sales commissions for print ads. In those cases, is it any wonder that they don't get more online ads? In fact, many ad sales folks simply "throw in" some online ads as a bonus to get companies to sign the dotted line for print ads, which is exactly the wrong incentive needed if you're trying to grow the online ad business.

What's really amazing is that newspapers are just now catching on to this. They're only about five years too late. The local businesses, which would have been interested five years ago, have figured out that there are other options for online advertising from Google to "local" sites like Yelp and CitySearch.

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We've had a quick chance to have a look at the new Olympus E-30, so have put together a brief hands-on report. This mid-level DSLR offers many features of the more expensive E-3, with a host of new functions pulled together in slightly smaller format. So what does the E-30 offer to entice the semi-professional shooter into the Four Thirds fold?

Alongside the E-30, Olympus has released the Zuiko Digital 14-54mm 1:2.8-3.5 II lens; successor to the Zuiko Digital 14-54mm 1:2.8-3.5. The new lens has been redesigned to offer compatibility with the 'High-speed imager AF' system included in recent Four Thirds DSLRs. The lens is a 3x zoom, equivalent to 28-108mm on 35mm format.

Olympus has today announced the E-30 digital SLR. The mid-range DSLR features a 12MP Live MOS sensor and 2.7" tilt and swivel LCD. It also incorportates Live View with Contrast AF, Image Stabilization, 5fps continuous shooting and shutter speeds of up to 1/8000th sec. The E-30 also introduces a set of six 'Art Filters', a Multiple Exposure mode and offers a choice of 9 aspect ratios.

Sockatume writes "A coalition of seven UK digital music stores have created a logo for DRM-free, MP3 music. The 'MP3: 100% Compatible' logo allows the stores to emphasize the advantages of the format, namely that MP3 files will run on any device and won't keel over and die as DRM-laden files are wont to. The BPI — the UK equivalent of the RIAA — is backing the scheme, emphasizing that it will also allow users to identify legitimate stores."

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This Saturday is the opening reception of a nifty show of self-illuminated artworks (think video, fire, lights) at the Alwun House in downtown Phoenix. I have a piece in it! If you can't make it to the opening (or don't want to pay to go on opening night where there will be a band and psychedelic juggler), the show will be up until November 21.

Lighthouse @ the Alwun House

Saturday, November 8, 7pm

1204 E. Roosevelt St.

Phoenix, Arizona

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A visible woman in a creation by designer Manish Arora bedecked with Swarovski crystals walks the London runway. Photo credit: Gareth Cattermole. Link.

Ok gang, CNN is doing hologram interviews - things were weird before, but now we're about an hour past that.

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Well, it's election day and apparently the FCC commissioners liked voting so much they took votes on just about everything. Amazingly, it looks like they even made some good decisions. The big one, of course, and the one that will get the most press, is the unanimous vote to free up television "white space" spectrum. While the NAB made a last ditch effort to stop this, the FCC made the right call here. This spectrum can be put to much better use, which can have a huge impact on increasing innovation and wireless technologies. This is a big win. The FCC also approved Sprint and Clearwire's deal to set up a joint venture for their WiMax operations, as well as allowing Verizon to buy Alltel. Both of those deals make sense as well, so it's good to see them approved.

Other than that, the FCC said that it's going to start looking into the pricing policies of cable companies... and Verizon. Who's missing? FCC boss Kevin Martin's best friends over at AT&T. To be honest, while it's quite likely that the cable companies and the telcos (yes, including AT&T) are abusing their oligopoly position, the answer shouldn't be having the FCC act as a watchdog over pricing policies, but for a better system to be set up that encourages real competition. In the meantime, though, can someone explain why AT&T was left out of the bunch?

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Tracie Egan has assembled the mindboggling: "10 CASTRATION SCENES FROM HORROR MOVIES." Probably, you don't want to click on that NSFW link if you have a penis, but since I don't, I found the whole, incredibly graphic lineup to be pretty fascinating, especially the one with the dog. I guess this is the part where I should say something more, but what do you say after that thing with the Rottweiler? Not much, really.

(Image from "Ilsa, She Woolf of the SS.")

sidesh0w was one of a number of readers to alert us to the FCC's unanimous decision approving unlicensed devices to use the white spaces of the spectrum unused by television broadcasters, provided they take certain precautions not to interfere with licensed users. "Denying a tremendous last-minute lobbying effort by broadcasters, the vote on white space devices went ahead as planned today after a several-hour delay at FCC headquarters. When the vote came, though, it was unanimous. For the Democrats on the Commission, the devices are appealing because they offer a potential new avenue for broadband services, while the Republicans are pleased for the same reasons, but love the fact that this is a deregulatory order that focuses on less regulation and more competition."

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If you need a unicorn chaser after that Sarah Palin erotica, I recommend Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's "White Corolla" video, directed by the awesome and awesomely young Julia Pott, and animated by Pott and Robin Bushell.

Be warned, this video is NSFWIAPTOTOAFYO. That is, Not Safe For Work If Animated Pandas Tearing Off Their Own Arms Freak You Out.

(Via Videos.antville.org.)