Frosty Piss writes "Police in Finland have made an arrest for car theft based on a DNA sample taken from the blood found inside a mosquito. 'A police patrol carried out an inspection of the car and they noticed a mosquito that had sucked blood. It was sent to the laboratory for testing, which showed the blood belonged to a man who was in the police registers,' a police officer told reporters. The suspect, who has been interrogated, has insisted he did not steal the car, saying he had hitchhiked and was given a lift by a man driving the car. I'm wondering if the suspect should have denied any association with the car at all. After all, who knows where that mosquito had been?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The stupendously talented artist Mitch O'Connell emailed me this online greeting that was "glitterized" by Colleen Fry. Thank you, Mitch, and a Merry Christmas to all!

I wrote for an essay for Good magazine's blog about the rebirth of amateur science. Here's an except:

For 72 years, Scientific American ran its popular “Amateur Scientist” column, which debuted in 1928. Projects included constructing an electron accelerator, making amino acids, photographing air currents, measuring the metabolic rate of small animals, extracting antibiotics from soil, culturing aquatic insects, tracking satellites, constructing an atom smasher, extracting the growth substances from a cantaloupe, conducting maze experiments with cockroaches, making an electrocardiogram of a water flea, constructing a Foucalt pendulum, and experimenting with geotropism. Who knew you could have so much fun at the kitchen table?

Good: The Return of Amateur Science

narramissic writes "The three MIT students who were sued earlier this year by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority for planning to show at Defcon how they had had reverse engineered the magnetic stripe tickets and smartcards said Monday that they are now working to make the Boston transit system more secure. 'I'm really glad to have it behind me. I think this is really what should have happened from the start,' said Zack Anderson, one of the students sued by the MBTA."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

COOP and Ruth's new Boing Boing t-shirts featuring COOP's awesome artwork are now shipping! I can't wait until my order arrives. There were only 69 available and Ruth tells me they are selling quickly.
Long-sleeved Boing Boing t-shirt

Over the years, we've posted about vaporized alcohol delivery systems that enable users to "inhale" their booze. Well, Kaden Harris, the incredible eccentric genius who creates antiques from a parallel universe, has constructed his own "alcohol without liquid" device. Of course, Kaden's machine, named Mr. Mister, is far more enticing than the commercial versions. From Kaden's project page:

The tech is pretty simple: It's an industrial strength ultrasonic mist generator in a sealed chamber, with a 3 outlet manifold so you and two friends can get traditionally festive in a new and exciting way.

It does wot it sez on the package.

With considerable efficiency when used with resin/ethyl alcohol solutions.

Kaden Harris's Mr. Mister

Karen Templer from Readerville blog says,

Eight years ago, we did something that, at the time, was considered frivolous by many - we started reviewing book covers, under the heading of Most Coveted Covers. I've always found it strange that book designers aren't more acclaimed (Chip Kidd notwithstanding) given how important their work is to the industry, and I wanted to name names and call attention to great work. Anyway, this week's marks the 200th installment. It's pretty groovy to scroll back through them all, and amazing that even the oldest ones among them still look good!

Most Coveted Covers: Readerville Journal.

Image: detail of the cover for Salmonella Men on Planet Porno: Stories by Yasutaka Tsutsui. Also mentioned in the Readerville roundup, one of my personal favorites: David Carr's amazing The Night of the Gun.

Sepideh Saremi, an Iranian-American blogger who runs Parsarts (and works at DECA, with whom we partnered to launch BBtv) shares word of a new series of blogger arrests inside Iran. The only really solid coverage I was seeing was in Farsi, so I asked her to please translate for Boing Boing. Here it is:

Iranian Blogger Arrests

The Amirkabir Newsletter, a Persian-language site written by students at Tehran's Amirkabir University of Technology, reports that Iranian blogger Omid Reza Mirsyafi has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison for "insulting authorities" and writing "propaganda" against the Islamic Republic.

Mirsyafi's sentence is the most recent episode in an long history of crackdowns on bloggers in Iran. Last month, Hossein Derakhshan, who is often called the "godfather" of Iranian blogging, was arrested on charges of spying for Israel. In recent years, Derakhshan's political views - which had turned increasingly pro-Islamic Republic - have made him a controversial figure in the Iranian blogosphere, but a number of Iranian bloggers today released a joint statement condemning Derakhshan's detention.

Snip from Iranian.com post on Derakshan's detention:

"Unfortunately, in recent years, numerous websites and blogs have been routinely blocked by the authorities, and some bloggers have been harassed or detained. Derakhshan's detention is but the latest episode in this ongoing saga and is being viewed as an attempt to silence and intimidate the blogging community as a whole.

Derakhshan's own position regarding a number of prisoners of conscience in Iran has been a source of contention among the blogging community and has caused many to distance themselves from him. This, however, doesn't change the fact that the freedom of expression is sacred for all not just the ones with whom we agree. We therefore categorically condemn the circumstances surrounding Derakhshan's arrest and detention and demand his immediate release."

(via Global Voices)

Here's your holiday snowglobe, people. You're welcome.

Fuck Snow Globe, Designed by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese. Sixth edition of 50, signed and numbered. $150 each, less if you're a member of the New Museum. (Via Trend de la Crème, Thanks, Susannah Breslin)

The Cake Wrecks blog celebrates the moments "when professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong." If you can't read the icing on the cake on the right, it depicts, er, a "fireplace." Cake Wrecks (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)

Over at Boing Boing Offorld, Brandon has presented the Offworld 20: 2008's Best Indie and Overlooked game titles. What you won't find in this list are Fallout 3, Grand Theft Auto 4, Spore, or any of the other usual suspects. (I was delighted that Minotaur China Shop made the cut! Also on the list, Crosswords/2Across, ROTOHEX, N+, Rolando, and plenty more... From Offworld, where you should weigh in with your picks too:

Covering every current platform (PC/Mac/Linux, PSP, PS3, Xbox 360, DS, iPhone, N-gage), the 20 isn't just a list of independently made and under-appreciated games, it's a list of the games that celebrate what makes Offworld Offworld: the beautiful and the bizarre, and the games trying to push the medium forward and give us something we've never seen before, in whatever incremental way.

In it you'll find time-manipulators, slacker assassins, satellite viewed superheroes, vector vegetation, bubble blowers and balls of tar, techno invaders and spirits of the wind, and, refreshingly, not one single space marine.

The Offworld 20: 2008's Best Indie and Overlooked Games

MojoKid writes "Shortly after Intel released their new Core i7 processors about a month ago, Dell announced a new update to the XPS 730 with Core i7 tech under the hood. The new Dell XPS 730x is first and foremost a technology update but the chassis has also been buffed up a bit. The Intel Core 2 processor and NVIDIA 790i Ultra SLI chipset powering the original XPS 730 line have been swapped with the new Core i7 processor and an Intel X58 Express chipset based motherboard. The XPS 730x retains the original 730's ability to support both Crossfire and SLI multi-GPU graphics. Like all XPS 700 series machines since the XPS 710, the XPS 730x is available with optional factory overclocking and a H2C edition featuring a two-stage liquid cooling system. And yes, it rips through Crysis quite nicely and puts up rather impressive benchmark numbers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at Fancast.com, I'm posting a number of reviews and "appreciations" of films, trailers, and television episodes you can watch at this site for free (In previous BB posts, I've explained the site, and why I'm blogging there). Here's a snip from my latest contribution, about full-length features and trailers there featuring the fabulous Pam Grier.

COFFY: BLACK. STACKED. AND PACKED WITH FURY.” So begins the funky baritone voiceover in the trailer for Coffy, a blaxploitation classic starring Pam Grier as a sexy anti-drug vigilante. The 1973 film is one of the true greats of the genre, written and directed by Jack Hill. Foxy Brown (1974) also a Hill creation, and also starring Grier, was another important work from this period. You can watch trailers for both on Fancast.

Foxy and Coffy were two of the first “soul cinema” flicks to feature a female protagonist. Previous works of the genre generally presented women as accessories of male success, whose purpose was to support their man, whether for good or evil intent. Grier was unstoppably hot, but also vengeful, righteous, and well-armed. She spent about as much time on screen seducing men as she did shooting them.

These two films are also are notable because they presented drug dealers and men who managed prostitution rings as bad guys. Previous films of the genre presented pushers and pimps as noble characters making the best of the hard lot they’re dealt the ghetto. In “Foxy” and “Coffy,” however, they are not outcasts who deserve empathy, but villains who exploit the vulnerable — and must therefore be killed by Grier.

Full post here:
Action/Adventure: Blaxploitation Trailers and Movies on Fancast (link includes discussion thread over there, thanks!)

More to read and watch: “JACK HILL: The Exploitation and Blaxploitation Master, Film by Film” offers an extensive filmography of Hill’s works. And if you’d like to watch the films in entirety, I recommend picking up “Fox in a Box,” a DVD collection that also includes Grier in “Sheba, Baby.”

Hello there, I am Benjamin J Heckendorn, video game modder, author and part-time karaoke aficionado. You may have seen my site before located at www.benheck.com.

I have been asked by MAKE to blog about some of the best PC mods I have seen, and so over the next few weeks I shall take you all on an amazing journey as we look at them. Please keep in mind that these may not be the best ever, or technically superior, but they're the ones I find interesting.

Let's begin with today's pick, shall we?

Today's pic is the Porsche SLI Machine Wheel PC (full name apparently). I came across this one on the web and was immediately struck by how cool it is. I'll explain in detail after the break.

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depression era holiday ads
happy hanukkah from brooklyn
communist christmas
befriend a geek
a charlie brown ad agency

previously on web zen:
winter zen 2008 part 1

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

Robert Popper, who also happens to be the author of the superbly funny 2008 relase The Timewaster Letters, shares the seasonal Tarvuist greeting above. A hearty "Tarvu men-hatty noonah!" to you all, and best wishes for December 25 festivities. Praise Tarvu!

Lucas123 writes "A researcher who built a car slightly larger than a strand of DNA won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for experimental nanotechnology. James Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice Univ. built a car only 4 nanometers in width in order to demonstrate that nanovehicles could be controlled enough to deliver payloads to build larger objects, such as memory chips and, someday, even buildings, like a self-assembling machine. Tour and a team of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers constructed a car with chassis, working suspension, wheels and a motor. 'You shine light on it and the motor spins in one direction and pushes the car like a paddle wheel on the surface,' Tour said. The team also built a truck that can carry a payload."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hack a stock NERF chaingun it into a high-rate-of-fire beast. This viral video for an energy drink is a terrific how-to video to introduce your non-Maker friends and relatives to toy modification. They admit that this is dangerous and will probably damage the motor -- they are pushing four times the voltage than it was designed for.

The paint job is awesome -- brushing on the highlights reminds me of a real-world version of how I used to paint 3D guns when I worked in the video game industry.

My favorite mod is the three-digit LED round counter. Hats off guys! Great job.

Mana Energy NERF How-To via Boing Boing Gadgets

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If you're still looking for a great last-minute gift, how about a subscription to MAKE or a gift certificate for the Maker Shed? Better yet, how about a customized version of the gift card or gift certificate? I took one of the gift cards and the DIY Design Electronics Kit and made a sort of still life--the 556 timer fit perfectly into the IC drawn on the gift card.

I got to thinking it might be fun to actually hook all this stuff up so that it works, as you can see below. I think I'm going to need some smaller clips if this is to be freestanding!

MAKE Gift Subscription
Maker Shed Gift Certificate
Downloadable MAKE Cards

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stoolpigeon writes "John Scalzi, the author of Hugo Award-nominated science fiction novel Old Man's War, has built what started as a story serialized in his blog into a series of full novels and short stories. The latest installment in the OMW universe, Zoe's Tale, is quite a departure from the previous three books. It is the first of Scalzi's sci-fi novels written intentionally as young adult fiction. In a move that I am sure will continue to fuel Scalzi/Heinlein comparisons, Zoe is a precocious young woman thrust into a world of adventure and danger. In just three years Scalzi has built an impressive resume as an author of fiction, and Zoe's Tale will be no small part of what looks to be an influential and outstanding career." Keep reading for the rest of JR's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For your holiday chipmusic listening pleasure, Doctor Octoroc has released "8-Bit Jesus." The digital download is free. Brandon has the details, and the discussion, over at Boing Boing Offworld!
"Octoroc releases the full 8-bit Jesus"

No, it's not a joke. Researchers at the University of Bari, Italy, studied how MDMA (ecstasy) and loud music impact the sexual activity of rats. They report their results in the scientific journal European Reiew for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences. According to their experiments, MDMA impaired the rats' sexual behavior while loud music seemed to increase the number of rats getting it on. From the paper abstract:

However, combined treatment of MDMA and music stimulation did not fully restore normal sexual behavior as the animals reaching ejaculation still showed a marked reduction of copulatory efficiency. These findings demonstrate that the systemic administration of a single low dose of MDMA, alone or in combination with loud music, which is commonly present in certain environments such as rave parties, notably impairs copulatory activity of male rats.

"Effects on rat sexual behaviour of acute MDMA (ecstasy) alone or in combination with loud music"

Faldo writes "There's a three part interview with a computer security expert on BanThisURL that goes into the flaws in the Aussie net filtering scheme. In addition to SSH tunnels and proxies, more worrying problems like trojaning the boxes to set up man in the middle attacks (which the interviewee has done in his lab), cross site scripting and the Australian blacklist leaking are all discussed. Worrying and relevant, especially since Thailand's blacklist has just been leaked."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My son and I put together this blinking LED Christmas tree kit, and then hung little MAKE gift subscription and MAKE gift certificate ornaments from it. It was a lot of fun -- he got to learn about anode vs. cathode sides of the LEDs as he fit them into place for soldering.

The gift cards and gift subscriptions make wonderful last-second gifts for all you procrastinators out there! You can print out the assets yourself, available here and here.

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Via Ecofriend:

Old and broken down auto parts are nothing more than trash for some, but for people like Armando Ramírez they are no less than treasure. The artist transforms these objects into sleek, black and silver chess sets. The horses, pawns and everything that you see on a chess set. To complete the chessboaround objects are rolled into a specially crafted die machine that transforms them. Armando uses everything from screws and bearings to a car's electrical system.

We've got a massive DIY chess roundup here, and you can even make a chess board double as secret-agent storage.

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Joanna at Morbid Anatomy found a beautiful photo gallery of animals preserved in formalin.

Fortean artist/prankster Jeffrey Vallance created a Santa Claus Family Tree tracing the genealogy of "wild people." Climb the curious branches over at Cryptomundo. Santa's Family Tree

(This post is a followup item to "Ukrainian Teen Serial Killer Gang Document Their Crimes on Cellphone Video.")

On Friday, a friend shared an item with me about a gang of teenage serial killers in the Ukraine who killed their victims basically by torturing them to death -- they documented the crimes on cellphone video, and showed up to their victims funerals. Social networking websites and "shock" websites each played a role in the story, and why my friend suggested it for the blog. While the death video was part of the story, it wasn't the entire story, and it wasn't necessary to link directly to it -- or watch it myself -- to share what was relevant to Boing Boing about the story. So I did neither, and warned readers of that fact in the blog post. I'll repeat: There was no direct link to the "shock video" from BB at any time.

About 300 comments on that entry later, I thought it might be helpful to post a note from my friend. A number of commenters reacted to the post in a way I did not expect.

Part of why I shared this is because my friend lost a loved one to murder.

That friend's interest in this story now wasn't motivated by prurience -- mine wasn't either. My friend's email continues after the jump, and I post it here not as some kind of vain validation for an editorial decision, but because I thought it was beautiful and moving.

How I encountered the story, or "Why it's not about the shock value"
- Anonymous

I am the submitter. Yesterday I was flipping around Encyclopedia Dramatica, gathering what I considered acceptable lulz from among the more horrifying articles there. Some things there are funny, some make me furious and some are just gross.

The front page randomly featured the article on the Ukranian teen serial killers, who I had not heard of, so I clicked on it. My life has been affected by murder of a loved one, and recently a sick internet "fan" detailed a lengthy fantasy of my rape and torture on their webpage, which left me feeling bad all week.

Because of these things, I was drawn to look at a story about killers even though I knew it would make me feel bad.

Filtering out the ED-style mockery of the root information, I was left surprised to read about a current teen serial killing spree of this magnitude that I had not seen mentioned in US news.

Google News had virtually nothing on it. Google Search led to lots of shock and horror sites. I decided against watching the video and actually held my hand up to block some images from view as I read some posts about the story. It was staggeringly horrible, even just to read about.

Nonetheless, it struck me as interesting that a gruesome story like this, which the US media usually covers in gory detail, was getting little media attention here, but was sort of telling itself via cellphone video and social media like forums and blogs.

The combination of "international story going untold in the US" and "criminals use cellphone cams and social networking alongside heinous crimes" made me think of Boing Boing, as a place where news breaks concerning human rights, international stories and technology. I was thinking that with great articles on steampunk teapots and unicorns, Boing Boing had also recently covered the riots in Greece and other human rights issues abroad.

I wish I had written this up when I originally sent the story in, but to be honest, I never expected so many people to immediately boil the whole thing down to a twice-removed link to the murder video. It was about the information and the story, to me. The murder video is two sites away, linked down on the bottom third of another site I linked containing the transcript.

There's no way I can imagine anyone reading the initial story, then the linked transcript, and then clicking on that video link and expecting anything other than horror. I submitted the story, and I didn't even watch it because I knew from the transcript that it would be beyond my limits.

I apologize for not starting the whole thing off with more clarity, but at heart I just wanted to present a striking story about violence, technology and information.

It was important for me to let everyone know that this story was not submitted out of a desire to revel in the video. It deeply affected me, as I'm sure it has you all. If anyone clicked, read, scrolled and clicked again to watch the video mentioned in the story, you're braver or more foolhardy than I.

I don't think she needs to apologize. Anonymous, thank you for sharing this with me, and with the world.

Previously: Ukrainian Teen Serial Killer Gang Document Their Crimes on Cellphone Video

National Dollar in San Francisco apparently sells less than everything.

narramissic writes "The National Security Agency has patented a technique for figuring out whether someone is messing with your network by measuring the amount of time it takes to send different types of data and sounding an alert if something takes too long. 'The neat thing about this particular patent is that they look at the differences between the network layers,' said Tadayoshi Kohno, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Washington. But IOActive security researcher Dan Kaminsky wasn't so impressed: 'Think of it as — if your network gets a little slower, maybe a bad guy has physically inserted a device that is intercepting and retransmitting packets. Sure, that's possible. Or perhaps you're routing through a slower path for one of a billion reasons.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE: television is right around the corner! Check out the countdown clock on the MAKE: blog page. January 3rd online - hitting Public Television shortly after!

In this week's smashing video post, Walter Kitundu and Luigi Anzivino rig a baseball bat to a camera that captures flash photos at the exact moment the bat strikes a piece of fruit. View the clip above, get the M4V and/or subscribe in iTunes.

Luigi and Walter have their plans on flickr.

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I've noticed that Mike Arrington tends to use Posterous for pictures he posts while traveling, pics of his dog Laguna, random stuff. I wondered why he used it instead of Flickr, which is what I generally use for pictures and small movies, and today he wrote a review and explained -- it's because it takes absolutely nothing to set up. You just send an email to post\@posterouscom add an enclosure if you like, and it automatically creates a blog if it doesn't know you (you're identified by your email address) and then creates a post to hold the enclosure and text. This is the way we like our software, easy to get started with, and with instant rewards. Good work!

I tried it out, enclosing a copy of the MP4 video of Singin In The Rain from 1929, with a bit of text scarfed from scripting.com, sent as an email to Posterous, and sure enough a moment later, it sends back a pointer to a blog with a long weird name, and I click on the link, and there's the text and the movie.

After that I went back and read the email, it said they were happy to meet me, and I could sign up for an account and my Posterous blog would then have a nicer name. Seemed like a good deal. It suggested \"dave\" -- but it turned out to already have been taken. I then tried "d" -- that was too short, then "dw" which it approved, and now I've got yet another presence on the www.

Now come the questions.

1. Does it have an API? If not, then it's fairly useless as a blogging tool. It should, at a minimum support the MetaWeblog API, so that tools written for WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and all the blogging tools I''ve written (Radio, Manila, lots of one-offs) are compatible. It should also support the weblogs.com ping protocol, which will let it integrate with virtually every service of the "live web" (and as far as I know they do support it).

2. I reviewed their RSS feed for my site, and it's pretty good! They don't fuss around with multiple versions of the feed, and their RSS is mostly plain vanilla, i.e. really simple, the kind that every RSS processor will understand. Now a few things they could do to simplify even more.

a. They declare three namespaces at the top of the feed, but only use one. The other two should be removed.

b. There's no version number on the <rss> element. Since they use namespaces, it must be 2.0, because RSS didn't get namespace support until 2.0. Dan MacTough notes that the version element is there, in the midst of the unused namespace declarations. My bad! :-(

c. It does no harm to use a CDATA on the <description> element, but it isn't necessary since all the characters are properly encoded.

d. I don't like that the permalink is encoded in the <description>. Unfortunately this has become common practice in RSS, but the information is already in the <guid> element, which is good. They're presumably replicating it because some reader doesn't display the permalink from the <guid>. I say deal with the problem where it's located, get the reader to display the permalink. Because of this extraneousness, in software that behaves well, the permalink will be displayed twice, unnecessarily. Yuck!

e. Same with the link to the comments. RSS 2.0 has a <comments> element. I wish people would use it.

f. Finally, they use Yahoo's Media RSS namespace to convey the information about the MP4 movie I enclosed. I guess some software they want to work with isn't looking for the base <enclosure> element that was designed for exactly this use. In cases like this, I support both, because it should be possible to write a podcatcher or, in this case, a movie-catcher, that conformed to the original spec and knew nothing about Media RSS, which came later and is an optional extension. The way Posterous has coded it, such a catcher app will completely miss the movie. This is the way breakage creeps into a community, and breakage is, of course, bad.

But on the whole, they did a very nice job, otherwise I wouldn't bother with the feedback.

Josh Bearman posted some photos of poodles groomed almost beyond recognition.

From Pink Tentacle, this video of "a bioluminescent deep-sea siphonophore — an eerily fantastic creature that appears to be a single, large organism, but which is actually a colony of numerous individual jellyfish-like animals that behave and function together as a single entity."

Stephen Birch writes "Following closely behind the mid-November 2.06 release of VirtualBox, Sun Microsystems has released version 2.1. This has a number of new features, but one of the most interesting is the ability to run a 64-bit VM inside a 32-bit host. Another useful feature is integrated host-based networking; no more fiddling around with network bridges. Sun is really giving VMWare a run for their money."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stephen Birch writes "Following closely behind the mid-November 2.06 release of VirtualBox, Sun Microsystems has released version 2.1. This has a number of new features, but one of the most interesting is the ability to run a 64-bit VM inside a 32-bit host. Another useful feature is integrated host-based networking; no more fiddling around with network bridges. Sun is really giving VMWare a run for their money."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Get your Christmas decorating done instantly, while having a blast, with the Instructables Christmas Cannon. You've been Christmas'd!

Christmas Cannon

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I'm giving a friend some Shapelock for Christmas this year - it's such cool stuff, I can't wait to see what she does with it! I realized that by traditional standards, that's kind of an odd present, and it made me wonder what other people have given or gotten as gifts. I asked some Makers about their most memorable gifts and they shared these stories.

Adam Savage (Mythbusters) "The weirdest thing I've ever gotten was a pair of Mythbusters Sock Monkeys."

Mitch Altman (inventor of the Brain Machine and TV-B-Gone)

"I live in a one-room studio apartment, so I have to be very selective what I bring into my small space. My mom was the kind of person who needed to give presents to be happy, and not wanting to squeeze me out, she would give me small items she picked up on her travels from around the world, some of which I kept, others of which I'd give away, in turn. I thought the most interesting items for a mom to give her son... was an opium pipe from Morocco (intricately carved and crafted, made from brass and wood), and a drug scale from Thailand (made of tree bark, full of details of various Budhist iconography). I still have these in my little room. One of the items I gave away was a loin covering from Nigeria that didn't smell too good."

Robert Thompson (author of Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments)

"I'll have to think about that one. I usually only give and receive normal gifts, like the time I gave Barbara a set of metric sockets for our anniversary.

Paul Jones (my friend and tech advisor on the chem book) was supposed to bring me back a present the last time he was in Hawaii, and it would probably have made your oddest list. He was out there on a grant capturing sea slugs, which he needed for his work on photochemistry. (Did you know that some animals, including these sea slugs, do photosynthesis just like plants? I didn't.) At any rate, he forgot to bring home a sea slug for me. Either that, or he thought I was kidding."

Kaden Harris (author of Eccentric Cubicle)

"Just before Christmas In 1998, I met Kaia 'The Sourceress' Howe, at a time when the ebbs and flows of our respective lives were emphatically pegged on 'ebb'. The holiday season was spent licking our wounds, hunkered down in her flat surrounded by her densely packed collection of amazing 'stuff', which runs the gamut from a grass skirt from the movie 'South Pacific' to carb rebuild kits for a 65 Dodge Dart. She'd just moved house, and there were a *lot* of settling in details still pending, so I spent much of my time doing my whole 'improvisaional fabrication' thing, bodging together furnishings, storage and interior design stuff from whatever I could lay my hands on. It was a surreally intense and emotional period for both of us, and 'Making' was our in-house therapy/ lessons for life learning lab.

Truly, truly life changing.

At some point Kai asked me what I was going to do with my life... I kinda mumbled something and went back to sanding down skidwood. She said " I think you need to be an artist".

Best. Gift. Ever."

Lenore Edman (Evil Mad Scientist and Peggy)

"We were once given a rubber chicken, but I had always wanted a rubber chicken, so perhaps that wasn't such an odd gift. I hung it by its
feet from the cookbook shelf, which seemed like a good place for it.
However, it was a really terrible (though brand-name) rubber chicken, and after having had it for a while, I realized that I don't need a rubber chicken any more. Do you know anyone who needs an awful rubber chicken?

This year for his birthday, Windell received a duck call. It is exceedingly authentic, with a camouflage neck cord, instructions for use with several types of ducks, and dual functionality (both reed and whistle). It is quite useful for playing along with Monochrom's latest collection, which has one piece with a wonderful part for duck call.

Chris once received a box full of flying screaming monkeys for his birthday. Although they were the hit of the party, this is not a gift that I recommend to anyone. Naturally, most of them were regifted to someone who was thrilled to receive a bag full of flying screaming monkeys until his toddler developed a flying screaming dislike of them."

Gareth Branwyn (MAKE blogger and editor, The Best of Instructables)

"I have a history of giving people odd and unusual gifts. I used to get most of my presents from American Science & Surplus (sciplus.com). One year, I gave everyone Poo Pets. These were *handmade* statues of various critters (rabbits, turtles, "stool" pigeons) pressed out of manure. You put them in your garden and they slowly dissolved, fertilizing as they wasted away. Wrapped, the presents had a very... earthy odor, which somehow appealed to me. Another year, I gave Butterfly Gardens. These were a box with butterfly larvae and food in them (actually you had to send in a coupon for the larvae). You watched the larvae turn to chrysids and then into butterflies. You then let the butterflies go free. Another year, everybody got bags of rocks -- geodes, actually. You wacked them with a hammer to reveal the crystalline structures inside. Some of them had no crystals, or not-so-great crystals, some revealed spectacular little crystal worlds, so there was chance involved. One year, I did most of my shopping from the Archie McPhee catalog (mcphee.com). That was fun. I bought all sorts of goofy bug-decorated pocket protectors, wind-up tin robots, and other Pee Wee Herman-worthy fare. For myself, I bought a gallon jar of plastic and rubber trinkets and charms, thousands of pieces. I used it in mail art, in a "bagazine" edition of my zine, Going Gaga, to decorate presents, as shut-up toys for visiting kids, etc. I still have about 3/4 of a gallon of this stuff in the plastic jug in my bedroom closet."

Marc de Vinck (MAKE blogger, Fun with the Arduino Starter Kit)

"I made this silver & wood ring (and ring-box) for my girlfriend back in college. It's all made by hand, even the tubing for the hinge is hand-drawn down from flat sheet stock. I guess she liked it since we have been married for over 10 years now!"

Becky Stern (MAKE/CRAFT blogger, Twitchie Scorpion)

"The strangest gift I've given is a handmade catnip fetus toy. I crochet or felt the body, stuff it with poly-fill or wool, and hide a bit of catnip in the center. Cats love them! Very popular with the hipsters."

---

What are yours? Post them up in the comments!

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Kevin 7Kbps writes "Censorship Minister Stephen Conroy announced today that the Australian Internet Filters will be extended to block peer-to-peer traffic, saying, 'Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial.' This dashes hopes that Conroy's Labor party had realised filtering could be politically costly at the next election and were about to back down. The filters were supposed to begin live trials on Christmas Eve, but two ISPs who volunteered have still not been contacted by Conroy's office, who advised, 'The department is still evaluating applications that were put forward for participation in that pilot.' Three days hardly seems enough time to reconfigure a national network."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barence writes "Mozilla CEO John Lilly has admitted the Firefox maker's relationship with Google has become "more complicated" since the company launched its own browser. Mozilla is dependent on Google for the vast majority of its revenue and has previously worked closely with the search king's engineers on the development of Firefox. But that relationship appears to have cooled since Google released Chrome in the summer. "We have a fine and reasonable relationship, but I'd be lying if I said that things weren't more complicated than they used to be.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michelle @ CRAFT writes:

Renee of The Domestic Scientist made this Space Invaders cross-stitched guitar strap for her husband... his guitar is next for modding.

8-bit game graphics make great cross-stitch pattern because they have a very similar resolution. Keep that in mind for creating unique cross-stitch patterns for your crafty friends and family!

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Ian Lamont writes "DefectiveByDesign.org is waging a battle against DRM with a 35-day campaign targeting various hardware and software products from Microsoft, Nintendo, and others. On day 11 it blasted iTunes for continuing to use DRM-encumbered music, games, TV shows, movies, audiobooks, and apps with DRM, while competitors are selling music without restrictions. DefectiveByDesign calls on readers to include 'iTunes gift cards and purchases in your boycott of all Apple products' to 'help drive change.' However, there's a big problem with this call to arms: most people simply don't care about iTunes DRM. Quoting: 'The average user is more than willing to pay more money for hobbled music because of user interface, ease of use, and marketing. ... Apple regularly features exclusive live sets from popular artists, while Amazon treats its digital media sales as one more commodity being sold.' What's your take on the DRM schemes used by Apple and other companies? Is a boycott called for, and can it be effective?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This iPhone app lets you run the ARToolKit v.4.4 on the device at 10fps with realtime tracking and more features to come! Check out the video to see it in action, pretty limitless things you will be able to do with this like augmented reality mapping onto physical landscapes as you walk down the street.

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From the MAKE: Flickr pool

Brian shares his design for a simple sound-based memory game using a Picaxe microcontroller -

What it does
MemSounds is a sound based memory game played in rounds. In the first round it plays one of 4 different sounds at random. Each sound represents a different switch in the device. After the sound is played you get a turn to copy the original sound by pressing a switch. If you get the sound right, MemSounds will play two sounds in the next round and so on. The limit is about 100 rounds.

- MemSounds The sound-based memory game

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An anonymous reader sends us to GM-volt.com, an electric vehicle enthusiast blog, for the news that last week EEStor was granted a US patent for their electric-energy storage unit, of which no one outside the company (no one who is talking, anyway) has seen so much as a working prototype. We've discussed the company on a number of occasions. The patent (PDF) is a highly information-rich document that offers remarkable insight into the device. EEStor notes "the present invention provides a unique lightweight electric-energy storage unit that has the capability to store ultrahigh amounts of energy." "The core ingredient is an aluminum coated barium titanate powder immersed in a polyethylene terephthalate plastic matrix. The EESU is composed of 31,353 of these components arranged in parallel. It is said to have a total capacitance of 30.693 F and can hold 52.220 kWh of energy. The device is said to have a weight of 281.56 pound including the box and all hardware. Unlike lithium-ion cells, the technology is said not to degrade with cycling and thus has a functionally unlimited lifetime. It is mentioned the device cannot explode when being charge or impacted and is thus safe for vehicles."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The future of travel... Wesley writes-

For years I've assumed that one of mankind's greatest fantasies has been to develop a practical, personal jetpack. But if the covers of Popular Science serve as any measure for this sort of thing, then it seems that for the past few decades man's been dreaming less about rocketing through the sky than he has about riding in some kind of giant wheel.

The revelation struck me as I was skimming Google's new archive of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines for interesting cover art. As I quickly realized, the magazines' covers featured some crazy new vehicle every few years eschewing the apparently pesky and cumbersome multiwheel concept in favor of one enormous gyre.

Of course, once I noticed the pattern, I had to go back and scan all the issues methodically to see just how many variations have appeared over the generations.

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About a year ago my town started moving seriously towards Single Stream Recycling and Pay as You Throw for trash. These were initiated as a way of giving people an incentive to recycle instead of tossing everything in the trash. The trash was a pretty big part of the budget for waste removal in the town. One of the first steps in this process was to institute the recycling initiative. Instead of separating all of their plastic, glass, metal, cardboard and paper, people could just toss it all into one recycling bin and then bring it to the newly dubbed Recycling Center, which people still call the dump.

Getting rid of trash and other refuse is all related to the commodities markets. Somebody has to be willing to pay for your stuff, or you will. As a result, tossing trash into the pit was costing the town about $90 usd a ton to get rid of it. Then a town employee would drive a truck with the trash to a relatively nearby town where the trash would be fed into an incinerator and burned to generate heat, turning a turbine and in turn generating electricity.

As the world economy slows down, it seems that the commodities market is falling off. This appears likely to affect the ability for organizations and municipalities to get rid of their recyclable materials cheaply.

Recycling at the time was a hot commodity, where the equation worked a bit differently. Instead of the town paying to get rid of the recycling, a vendor would drive their own trucks and use their own bins, even providing a compactor to collect our recycling at no charge for the town. Free recycling and transport vs $90 a ton plus shipping for trash. This provided an opportunity for people to control their personal costs while also controlling the costs of operating the facility for the town.

As part of the community education process, we organized a Transfer Station Field Trip for members of the Transfer Station Advisory Board, some town employees and a reporter for the local paper. We drove the route that our recycling goes, from Duxbury to Andover, through the City of Boston.

When we arrived at the recycling plant in Andover, MA, we got to see how our recycling is sorted. It was a fascinating collection of machines with conveyor belts, vibrations and magnets all calibrated to separate the various parts of the waste stream so they could be packed up and shipped to a vendor for further processing and then sold back to us.

What do you think of recycling? What are some of the best resources for Recycling, Reuse and Reduction of waste? Does recycling work? Does it do the job, or is it a stopgap measure? What can towns and cities do when the market for recycling craters? How else can you reduce the waste leaving your life? does your school recycle any or all of its' paper? What is your best Dump Score? Have you built, maintained or otherwise used equipment that is designed to sort things by their physical qualities? When you throw something away, where does it go? Add your comments below and please contribute photos and videos to the make Flickr pool.

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I had a chance to check out the Cosmic Hand Dance Actualization Machine by Nicholas Rubin at the ITP Winter Show 2008. It's a really interesting interactive display that uses a unique domed display. Check out the link for a lot more information about this amazing interactive artwork. Thanks Nicholas!

The Hand Dance actualization machine consists of a frosted hemisphere with an array of infrared distance sensors mounted along the rim and underside. It controls a Processing sketch of shimmering, psychedelic imagery that is projected onto the surface from underneath. The IR sensors allow the user to move their hands spatially within the volume to control specific aspects of the animation.

More about making the The RV10000: Cosmic hand dance actualization machine [ITP page]

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Peace Corps Online writes "The NYTimes ran a story this week about a group of scientists who have built a neonatal incubator out of automobile parts, including a pair of headlights as a heat source, a car door alarm to signal emergencies, and an auto air filter and fan to provide climate control. The creators of the car-parts incubator say that an incubator found in any neonatal intensive care unit in the US could cost around $40,000, but the incubator they have developed can be built for less than $1,000. One expert says as many as 1.8 million infants might be spared every year if they could spend just a week in the units, which help babies who are born early or at low birth weights regulate their body temperature until their organs fully develop. Experts say in developing countries where infant mortality is most common, high-tech machines donated by richer nations often conk out when the electricity fizzles or is restricted to conserve power. 'The future medical technologists in the developing world,' says Robert Malkin, director of Engineering World Health, 'are the current car mechanics, HVAC repairmen, bicycle shop repairmen. There is no other good source of technology-savvy individuals to take up the future of medical device repair and maintenance.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gorgeous snow art in Seattle via Wooster Collective.

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From the MAKE: Flickr pool

• Vibrobot sports adjustable nose-pot [above top-left]
• Visible atari punk console ... in progress [above top-right]
• Experiments in breath transmisson [above bottom-left]
• Arduino solenoid drummer [above bottom-right]

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Travis Deyle wrote in about Snackbot, an in-progress human-robot interaction project at Carnegie Mellon:

Back in May 2008 it was announced that CMU professors Sara Kiesler and Jodi Forlizzi (from the HCI Institute) and Paul Rybski (from the Robotics Institute) were awarded $500k in Microsoft's Human-Robot Interaction funding to develop a social, snack-selling robot to traverse Newell-Simon and Wean halls (press release). After seeing a prototype appear on Flickr in July, we've all been waiting patiently to see pictures of the final version. Well, the wait is over -- photos of the new CMU snackbot, conceptual designs, and construction photos are contained below! It appears that the CMU team is progressing nicely.

What impresses me most is that the physical design of the robot manages to express its function so clearly. The posture is helpful, but not servile. The spacing between the eyes and the shape of the mouth is attentive and non-threatening, a combination that seems difficult to achieve in most humanoid robots. It's really a smart design.

Jodi Forlizzi has a few of photos posted to Flickr (shown above), and the team's industrial designers Erik Glaser and Josh Finkle have a number of images of the design process posted on their sites. It's well worth checking out, as you can see a number of concept sketches, as well as a bunch of gratuitous robot guts.

Snackbot! -- A Social, Snack-Fetching Robot
Jodi Forlizzi's Snackbot Photos
Erik Glaser's Snackbot Photos
Josh Finkle's Design Sketches (click Industrial Design -> Snackbot)

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badger.foo writes "We've seen stories about the slow bruteforcers — we've discussed it here — and based on the data, my colleague Egil Möller was the first to suggest that since we know the attempts are coordinated, it is not too far-fetched to assume that the controlling system measures the rates of success for each of the chosen targets and allocates resources accordingly. (The probes of my systems have slowed in the last month.) If Egil's assumption is right, we are seeing the bad guys adapting. And they're avoiding OpenBSD machines." For fans of raw data, here are all the log entries (3MB) that badger.foo has collected since noticing the slow bruteforce attacks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

writes in - Super Electrofluorescent Profanity Machine via Giz.

The Super Electrofluorescent Profanity Machine, or Four Letter Word (for short), is a bit of electronics cobbled together out of vintage Cold War-era Soviet vacuum fluorescent tubes and custom driver circuitry. It was designed and built by me.

The device does two things: the first (mundane but utilitarian) thing that it does is tell you the time. It's an accurate clock whose numbers glow brightly enough to dimly illuminate a dark room, serving as an effective night-light. It probably won't wake you up, unless you can't sleep in the presence of dim green lights.

The second (less mundane and utilitarian) thing that it does is generate random four letter words, which it displays for you at a rate of one per second. Every English word consisting of exactly four letters is possible, and the device is programmed to predispose the generation of words that you can pronounce, as opposed to incomprehensible trash. As the name of the device implies, even the more profane of English words is possible (though not necessarily probable). The effect is strangely hypnotic - the short length of time that this device spent on my desk at work was deliriously unproductive.

The main board has three buttons, one for switching the device between word-mode and time-mode, and two for setting the time. Included is a header to break the buttons out...

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The sensor module for BugBases is out! - The BUGvonHippel. BUGvonHippel is a breakout board module which includes a female USB 2.0 port...

BUGvonHippel -  We've talked about it before, but it's finally here!  Named after Prof. Eric von Hippel at MIT who inspired it's creation, the BUGvonHippel further enables developers to create new and interesting "hardware mashups" by connecting their BUG to a universe of other devices and interfaces.  Bug Labs will be showcasing the BUGvonHippel with several demos at CES, but it's available now in our online store for $79...

The vonHippel module has a female breakout board as well as direct connections to the circuit board for size standard wires.

• Power
• DAC
• ADC
• I2C
• I/O X
• GP I/O
• SPI
• I2S
• SERIAL
• GROUND(x2)

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ICANN posted its proposal for expanding gTLDs late in October, and now the US government has issued its scathing response (PDF, 11 pp.), from the departments of Commerce and Justice. The initial criticism is that John Levine sent a note to a policy mailing list and summarized the concerns raised as ranging from "...insufficient attention to monopoly and consumer protection, to lack of capacity to enforce compliance, to overreach into non-technical areas such as adjudication of morality, to what they'll do with all the extra money since they are a non-profit. Their first concern is that in 2006 the ICANN board said they would commission a study on economic issues in TLD registrations such as whether different TLDs are different markets, substitutability between TLDs, and registry market power, issues which are fairly important in any new TLD process. Here it is two years later, they're rushing to set up the new TLD process, but there's no study. 'ICANN needs to complete this economic study and the results should be considered by the community before new gTLDs are introduced.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's the simplest design I've found for my favorite type of turbine. Check out Otherpower for a discussion on sourcing suitable motors, and see Makezine's plans for the Chispito for a traditional blade design.

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