The IPO market had almost entirely dried up already, before we reached financial meltdown in the second half of the year -- and the resulting financial crisis certainly hasn't made the IPO market any brighter. So, we certainly weren't expecting to hear of any internet companies trying to go public... but it seems at least one company thinks that now's the right time for an online porn company to go public. Apparently, Adult FriendFinder has filed to go public. The company, which used to be known as Penthouse Media Group until it bought the startup Adult Friendfinder not so long ago, is hoping to raise a bunch of money. I'd be surprised if this actually went anywhere. While some might claim that porn is always a growth market, it's a highly competitive one, and often seen as a bit sketchy on the business side. Plus, the underwriters are a little known Russian investment bank. On top of all that, it's looking to use the money not for expansion, but mostly to pay off debt. In this economic climate, with the current IPO window slammed pretty tightly shut, does anyone actually expect this one to go anywhere?

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darthcamaro writes "Little penguins all around the world are waiting for Penguin-Master Linus Torvalds to deliver some Glogg inspired Xmas cheer in the form of the new 2.6.28 kernel. Among the innovations in 2.6.28 are ext4 as stable, wireless USB drivers, better KVM support and the GEM graphic memory management technology. 'We now have a proper memory manager for video memory, the GEM [Graphics Execution Manager] memory manager,' Greg Kroah-Hartman said. 'This gives Linux much better graphics performance than it previously had.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Max Impact is the Air Force's nu metal band. The frontman, Master Sergeant Ryan Carson, was a college student majoring in opera before enlisting. He begins each concert with the invocation: "We're going to rock your face off!" From the lyrics to the Max Impact tune "Locked and Loaded":

“Walk in the shade of the clouds at night,"

"Crawling in the dirt, calling an A-10 strike,"

"Dancing in the shadows, lives are on the line,"

"Bombs are gonna fall, just in time.”

Air Force Nu Metal band (Danger Room)

Vietnam has a long history of online censorship and suppression of dissent. Back in 2002, a law was put in place requiring registration with the government before creating a website, and soon after that there were reports of arrests of people for putting "questionable" material online. Given that, it's hardly surprising to find out that the country has now officially banned "subversive" blogs. Of course, I'm sure the definition of subversive is left open to whoever is enforcing the law. But what's really bad about this law, is that it puts the liability on internet service providers -- saying that they'll be held responsible for any subversive blogs that are hosted by them. It's not entirely clear how this will impact foreign blog hosting companies, but it can't be a good thing. Apparently, the Vietnamese government is specifically planning to talk to Yahoo and Google to get them to "cooperate" in "creating the best and healthiest environment for bloggers." There's been plenty of controversy for both Yahoo and Google for how they've dealt with government censorship in China, so the last thing they need is another such controversy.

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minutetraders writes "According to some sources, by next year Cisco Systems will be in the blade server business. ChannelWeb has a story, confirmed by and several sources, that the San Jose, Calif.-based networking behemoth is readying blade servers, code-named California, for a release early next year. A blade server offering would pit Cisco in direct competition against the likes of Dell, HP and IBM, companies it partners with on their respective blade server offerings, for control of the enterprise data center."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I just returned from a YouTube-induced time machine trip back to the cyberdelic 1990s. Somebody posted a 1996 episode of the long-gone TV program "Net Cafe." That evening, the guests included RU Sirius, the late, great St. Jude, and, er, me talking about cyberpunk culture, online writing, and Web zines. Wearing my bOING bOING propeller beanie (not literally), I gave a quick tour of some of my favorite weird and wonderful Web destinations of the day, including bOING bOING founder Carla Sinclair's pioneering Net Chick Clubhouse. St. Jude is featured in part 1. The inimitable RU Sirius is the star of part 2. My segment starts at the end of part 2 and continues into part 3.

The folks at Tellart have made an amazing Augmented Reality (AR) holiday card that you can play around with yourself: you'll need Flash player (version 9), a webcam, and a printer (so you can print out the AR objects).

The project was made using FLARToolkit and Papervision 3D. Check out Tellart's site for more details, including a link to the app where you can print out the objects and run the Flash program right on your own computer.

They've also included source code so you can hack this to your heart's content!

Happy Holidays from Tellart

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bondisthebest writes "IEEE Spectrum reports "Physicists in Switzerland, led by Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva, reported last week in Nature that they have made a solid-state device capable of storing photons for as long as 1 microsecond. The invention will aid in the development of light-based quantum-cryptography networks, which are theoretically impervious to hacking but are currently limited in range to a few dozen kilometers, primarily because of a lack of a suitable way to store the quantum state of photons."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the couple months of existence, Apple's iPhone App Store has received a considerable amount of attention. The successful phone has created an exciting new platform for developers seeking to leverage the advantages of mobile devices. The only problem was, Apple has insisted upon managing the applications in the store - oftentimes without clear guidelines or enforced through NDA.

Apple was in the practice of individually deciding which applications to allow and which to ban, regardless of customer demand. The most curious and paternalistic of Apple's App Store policies was the ban on applications of "limited utility." As a result, developers weren't sure if their hard work would be deemed useful enough to warrant acceptance into the store. Yet, like so many centrally planned economies in the past, this policy failed and Apple began letting in silly applications. However, what may be silly to Apple's gatekeepers may actually prove to be valuable to consumers. Such is the case with a suite of applications that simply produce fart sounds. Dozen exist, and one developer of a fart application is reportedly making nearly $10,000 per day with his crass software. That is the beauty of free markets - consumers and producers can better decide what is valuable than any individual person or firm. The distributed intelligence and preferences are far more capable than Apple's gatekeepers.

Kevin Donovan is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Kevin Donovan and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Kevin C. Tofel writes "After watching the netbook industry explode from nothing to 14 million sales in year, the time is right for Cease & Desist letters. Psion, a UK computer company that years ago sold a small sub-notebook called a netBook, is starting to protect the term. At least one netbook enthusiast site received a C&D for using the 'netbook' term and others are sure to follow. The site was given three months to stop using the term. Ironically, it isn't the enthusiast sites that coined the popular term. In the spring of 2008, Intel dubbed these devices netbooks to help define a market for their low-powered Intel Atom CPU."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Usually we don't see these types of stories until March Madness time, but the NY Times is writing about how much productivity is "lost" due to trying to keep up with the "data stream." Apparently research firm Basex has come out with a gimmicky calculator to determine how much productivity is likely lost, and put out a silly, borderline ridiculous press release noting that Intel claims it worked with the research firm to determine that the impact on productivity because of information overload was "up to eight hours a week." Seriously? Productivity is measured not in hours, but output. If productivity were just about hours, we'd be looking for ways to get people to work more hours. But, most people recognize that there are diminishing returns to making people work too much -- and they have time off to charge their batteries.

If you're going to measure productivity this way, we could just as easily say that we're putting out a study showing that sleeping costs a company approximately eight hours a day in lost worker productivity! Something must be done! While I have no doubt that information overload can be a cost to productivity, it's not going to be measured in hours. If I "waste" 20 hours a week dealing with information overload, but I'm able to extract information that makes me three times as productive, the rest of the week, then that's a good trade-off. Do people actually pay companies for this sort of research?

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Arcades are dead. And rightfully so: American arcades never bothered to change with the times (despite a brief dalliance with the public spectacle of games like Dance Dance Revolution). Not so in Japan, where arcades continue to evolve in surprising ways, in the stereotypical "bigger, crazier" Japanese method, as well as the more pedestrian. Case in point: Yuka Nakajima, queen of "Crane Games", those funny claw machines that are commonly ignored in department store vestibules in the States but big business in Japan. Nakajima is so adept at "UFO Catchers" (the Japanese moniker for all claw machines) that she has an entire room filled with the stuffed bears she has won and is the star of video tutorials included in the games themselves. I learned about Nakajima in the new book Arcade Mania: The Turbo-charged World of Japan's Game Centers by Brian "The Sweetest Man in Games Journalism" Ashcraft and Jean "Pretty Sweet Himself" Snow. Ash is a pal, so I was a bit worried when I first got my copy; how interesting could a book about arcades be? Turns out I had nothing to fret about. There's a whole new set of human experience happening inside Japan's game centers and it's just as varied and weird and surprising as you could hope it would be. I too often have an expectation, a caricature, in mind about Japan and its culture that occludes my perception of the people living and playing there. That's natural, of course, and perhaps even welcome: it makes a reading a book that supplants many of my preconceptions so effectively even more exciting. Arcade Mania: The Turbo-charged World of Japan's Game Centers [Amazon]

Talk about a mash-up.

The legendary  James Thurber wrote the parody,  "A Visit from Saint Nicholas in the Ernest Hemingway Manner" for the Christmas Eve edition of The New Yorker magazine in 1927. The poem's inventor,  Clement C. Moore, will never be the same.

It is my great pleasure to read it aloud:

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)

Before Christmas this year, there seems to be plenty of neat holiday themed stuff with good parts about to go unsold. Anything with an overt holiday theme will be marked down the day after Christmas, so it is possible to think ahead and provision yourself for some maker fun for the months and years ahead. Of course this could apply to Halloween Easter or any other over commercialized holiday.

Looking at the things that will go discounted later in the week, there are a few filters for considering the items. Green things will help you reduce your energy consumption for the holidays in the future. Hackable things will provide you with an object that can be hacked into holiday dressings with a decidedly different naughty/nice ratio. Items with good components can be separated that has nice systems which can be and useful for other projects.

Green:
LED Christmas lights are worth looking out for. Lights are generally rated in watts. Higher wattage means higher electricity use, so getting low wattage lights will reduce your cost of ownership over the lifetime of the item. Looking for the Energy Star logo will help you find lower power consumption devices in general. If you have really old and big Christmas lights, then they certainly use more electricity than newer series wired lights. If you can get your hands on some new LED lights after the holiday, then you could save some of next year's holiday money. How about gifting your family and friends some replacement lights so they can trash the old power sucking illuminations?

Hackable
This could apply to displays or just about anything that people consider to be gifties. If it has a program directing its operation, then you could do something with it. After Halloween, I picked up a environmentally responsive skeleton. At the store, I saw a device that was selling for about $6 usd, and it had a speaker, a wobble motor, a sensor activated programmed chip. This device could in turn be used to do other things. After some study, I figured out that the action is triggered by a photocell when the light is reduced. That means that any resistive based sensor could activate the circuit, which is currently set to run a motor, blink two red LED's and play an audio file through a speaker. At the very least, my six bucks gave me a decent experience of analyzing the function of the circuit. It took a while to find and figure out the sensor aspect of the circuit, but it was a neat challenge.

Essentially, with a hackable device, you want to be looking for components that you can understand and repurpose. Can the system be circuit bent? Could you change the function? Could you drive it with some other programmable system like Arduino, basic stamp, lego RCX, Android, iPhone or PIC microcontroller?

Good components
Look for motors, lights, speakers, anything that if you wanted to buy, you would have to go to a special store, or a catalog. You probably won't find much that can be programmed, but maybe you can find some stuff that has a couple of sensors. The more sensors the better. Switches or resistive based sensors are probably what you will find.

This season, I am seeing lots more LED flashlights and for the first time, solar powered lanterns. The ones I saw were about $8 usd and had an LED that is powered by rechargeable batteries fueled with a solar cell. It seemed like a good deal, but will be better after the holiday. Solar panels used to be really expensive. Now they are part of really cheap stuff. Change out the 600 mAh batteries with something legit, and maybe you have a good solar charger. How about a fake tree with dozens of rgb color shifting LEDs? It had a speaker system and played music. No clue how much it cost, but if it was cheap enough, it would be fun to play with it. If you can see the components, count them up, and maybe even try to build a price list for buying each of the parts. Don't forget to include shipping. If the thing is busted, even better. You might get it real cheap, especially if the people working at the store just see it as old, damaged merch and hard to move.

So what goodies can you find in the closeout bins of post holiday cheer? How can recessionary junk make you smile and happy to experiment? What could you do with a decent collection of LEDs from a string of lights? How much electricity can you save by junking your old lights and getting new ones? How much electricity does your holiday display gobble up? Could you have an entirely solar or wind powered holiday setup? Join the conversation in the comments, and of course, add your photos and video to the Make Flickr pool.

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I guess Christmas Eve is the day to announce the Blogger of the Year. It's only the second time I've done it, and I did it last year on this day, and it seems like a good day to do it. That's what being a real blogger is like. It's like just feeling like doing something and then doing it.

I hope that makes sense.

Anyway...

In my teaser I said that this year's BOTY is a smoker, but when I told him he was the guy, he said he stopped smoking four years ago. That's very good. More blogging for the rest of us.

So who is it?

Well, it's Jay Rosen.

Now I'll tell you why.

Jay is one of those guys who has spent 20 or 30 years really studying something, really understanding it. He developed a theory about his subject of study, but instead of stopping there, Jay is always learning, asking questions, considering whether his understanding of the world actually reflects what's happening. And he does all this out in the open, on a blog, and most recently, very deliberately and systematically, on Twitter.

This is the future of news.

That's what Jay studies, but as it always is, you teach what you most need to learn, so Jay's study of news, ironically (or maybe not so ironically) is a demonstration of how news will work in the future. We will still need domain experts, people who spend 20 or 30 years studying something, learning and challenging their assumptions -- so that when something happens in their field of study we have someone with a historic perspective who can tell us What It All Means.

Of course we can't get by with just one person in each domain, we need many. And that's where people like Jay are so valuable -- they don't just have their own theories, they also tell you about theories other people have, and he points you to them.

Does this sound familiar?

12/12/05: "People come back to places that send them away."

That's what blogging, when it applies to serious study, is all about. And Jay is the best example I can think of, so that's why I chose him as my Blogger of the Year for 2008.

There are others who perfectly exemplify this principle. I'm thinking of Doc Searls when it comes to fires in Santa Barbara. When I hear there's a fire down there, I know where to go. Doc takes it very seriously, and I'm not kidding about that. I don't have a special interest in Santa Barbara, but I do have an interest in examples of the way news will work in the future.

And there's Paul Krugman at the NY Times. I'm very pleased to honor a blogger at the Times, to show that it doesn't matter where you hang your hat -- real blogging can happen anywhere at any time. The thing that makes Krugman such a fantastic example is the same thing I like about Jay's blogging and Doc's -- he sends where you need to go to find out what you need. It's the same principle of the web, applied over and over again. When it works, it works because they trust you to come back after sending you away.

Next year's BOTY, knock wood, praise Murphy, etc -- will share this quality, with these fine people and NakedJen. When they write it's not a business model, it's their passion for knowledge, both of self and the rest of existence.

Phil Sp. writes "Government Attic, those fine investigative pack rats, have outdone themselves this time. Just posted: a declassified NSA document entitled A History of Communications Security, Volumes I and II: The David G. Boak Lectures [PDF] from 1973 and 1981. This is an absolutely fascinating look into how the NSA viewed (views?) communications security and touches on all sorts of topics, including public key crypto, economics, DES, tamper-resistance, etc. It was seemingly from a collection of lectures to new employees. The first 85 pages are heavily redacted but the remaining 80 or so are largely intact. It even concludes with a cryptogram puzzle for the reader!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paging Dr. Tyler Duren... a new untapped unlimited fuel source has been found...

Liposuctioning unwanted blubber out of pampered Los Angelenos may not seem like a dream job, but it has its perks. Free fuel is one of them. For a time, Beverly Hills doctor Craig Alan Bittner turned the fat he removed from patients into biodiesel that fueled his Ford SUV and his girlfriend's Lincoln Navigator. Love handles can power a car? Frighteningly, yes. Fat--whether animal or vegetable--contains triglycerides that can be extracted and turned into diesel. Poultry companies such as Tyson are looking into powering their trucks on chicken schmaltz, and biofuel start-ups such as Nova Biosource are mixing beef tallow and pig lard with more palatable sources such as soybean oil. Mike Shook of Agri Process Innovations, a builder of biodiesel plants, says this year's batch of U.S. biodiesel was likely more than half animal-derived since the price of soybeans soared.

But it's not legal...

Using fat to fuel cars might be environmentally friendly, but it's definitely illegal in California to use human medical waste to power vehicles, and Bittner is being investigated by the state's public health department.

More:

MAKE - Volume 03, Making Biodiesel
The best way to learn how to make your own backyard biodiesel is to start with a one-liter batch. It's easy to make a small batch that will work in any diesel engine. You won't need any special equipment--an old juice bottle will serve as the "reactor" vessel--and on such a small scale, you can quickly refine your technique and perform further experiments. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this!

(Flash video embed above, MP4 download is here.)

This week, the Boing Boing tv crew is taking a week off, and we've been revisiting some of the episodes that mean the most to us over the past year.

For me, for many reasons, the three episodes we produced from a K'iche Maya pueblo in the Guatemalan highlands were the most personally important. I'll embed one above.

It's about taking a traditional sweat bath, which is something they might well be doing today there during the holidays, provided there's enough water -- that only comes every few days.

Here are all three:

(1) BBtv WORLD: Through the eyes of the pueblo.
(2) BBtv WORLD: Migration, and a Mayan Sweat Bath.
(3) BBtv WORLD: El Molinero.

And other episodes of "BBtv WORLD" about Guatemala are here. But I also wanted to take this opportunity to share something else that means a lot to me. Last night, I scanned some of the hand-drawn Christmas cards from participants in an international non-profit I work with there, and uploaded them to Flickr. These were private cards, sent from folks in the pueblo to project participants in the US (in other words, they weren't for sale or anything, they were just heartfelt communication from one person to another).

I'm sharing some of them here with permission. They're beautiful and very meaningful to me.

Some of the cards refer to the old Mayan gods (for instance, references to "Ajaw", or "Tzaq'ol and Bit'ol", primordial entities who were present at the creation of all things), other cards refer to to Christianity. Some were created by children, others by adults, and the one with the Mayan house and the big Christmas tree and the volcano, thumbnail above? That man is considered the best painter and illustrator in the town. Every one of the cards, all in a stack next to me on my desk here right now, every one reflects soul, kindness, and hope.

To really appreciate them, click on "all sizes" and look at the larger size. The one I received personally read, "Feliz Navidad, y Paz a Todas Las Naciones Del Mundo." I know the woman who drew it, and she's survived so much.

On behalf of the Boing Boing tv team, and my colleagues in the nonprofit that works in that village, I extend that greeting to each of you who reads this blog post today. Friends we know, and friends we do not.

Flickr set: Christmas cards from a K'iche Maya Village in Guatemala

Keita Takahashi, creator of Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy, drew a special holiday greeting for Boing Boing Offworld readers. Detail above. Here is the whole thing: "Happy Holidays from Offworld (feat. Keita Takahashi)"

Elsa Zaldívar just won a Rolex award for her work turning loofahs, a sponge-like cucumber that I thought grew underwater but apparently doesn't, and recycled plastic into a sustainable building material:

You can read more on the awards page here. I eagerly await the promised how-to video; any readers able to find her specific recipes or more details about the project would be greatly appreciated!

(via Worldchanging)

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Hogwash McFly writes "My boss gave me one of those USB-powered red LED scrolling displays as a Christmas gift, and while cycling the usual 'I read your emails' and 'ID10T Error' messages will be entertaining for a day or two, I was wondering if it could be put to more constructive uses. The configuration file is plaintext and supports different scroll speeds, flashing, bitmaps, and WAV sounds. The font is defined as 5x5 pixels per character, also stored in plaintext as 5 hex values, one for each vertical line of pixels. A dynamically generated message could prove useful in my day-to-day work on the helpdesk, but are there any interesting uses beyond network notifications and news feeds?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Vaughan, aka PC Konk the clown, was made to strip down to his underwear at Birmingham Airport, England when his costume set off the metal detectors. He was booked to do an in-air charity show for disadvantaged children. Apparently, PC Konk was good humored about it. From The Guardian:

A piece of metal on his costume set off the security alarm, prompting security guards to confiscate his plastic handcuffs and order him to strip down to his shorts and T-shirt.

Staff also demanded he put the liquid for his plastic bubble-blowing saxophone into a clear sealed plastic bag.

"I'd made sure I'd bought plastic handcuffs and a plastic whistle but I hadn't realised that the costume had a metal band – I thought it was plastic," said Mr Vaughan, from Shard End, Birmingham.

Clown strip-searched before children's charity flight

This week, oddity auction scout Michael-Anne Rauback has been on the hunt for unusual vintage chairs, not to buy but just to... appreciate. She shared with me her three favorite finds, starting with this gorgeous Pedro Friedeberg Hand & Foot Chair from the 1960s. I'll post the others over the next two days. Pedro Friedeberg Hand & Foot Chair

Musicians and human rights group Reprieve launched a "silent protest" against the use of music for torture and interrogation. For example, the playlists at places like Guantanamo Bay and other US military prisons/bases has included such hot platters as Deicide's "Fuck Your God" and the theme song from Barney The Purple Dinosaur. Musicians like Trent Reznor want to stop the insanity. From Danger Room:

Chloe Davis, a researcher for Reprieve, told Danger Room the Zero dB campaign was planning to work with prominent musicians to lobby the incoming administration.

"It is really important that we seize the chance to alert Obama to this practice," she said. "... I think there will be people on the other side trying to catch Obama’s attention, saying we need to be tough. We’re trying to counter that message."

Rockers To Press Obama on Music Torture

Ky Michaelson, better known as The Rocketman, is one of the world's leading rocket powered vehicle builders. He was featured in MAKE, Volume 05, and says he got his start using a Gilbert chemistry set at the age of 12. This JATO rocket powered sled is meant to take the strain out of the uphill journey, but I have to wonder what it's like to fire it off during a downhill run.

Super sled ride

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Here's a project I did this Christmas. It's the "Gift of Robot Invasion" LED Christmas Tree Ornament from The Best of Instructables, Volume 1. The bot is made out of copper plumbing parts, scrap circuit board, dead transistors for hands, the bottom of a beer can (for the bot's satellite dish) and paper clips. The circuit is a solar cell, rechargeable batteries (made into a backpack on the bot's back), a flashing LED, a resistor, diode, and a 3904 transistor. This little guy hangs around soaking up the sun's rays all day, and then when the sun goes down, he surreptitiously blinks messages back to his robot overlords in some galaxy far, far away.

My evil little bot is also sending another not-so-subtle message, as he waves the flag of the Maker Shed Gift Certificate. Your gift recipient can use this gift certificate to help fund his/her own robot invasion. And ultimately, isn't that what the holidays are all about?

The original Instructable can be found here.

Find more roboty goodness here:

Holiday Gift Guide: Robots!

Also from the Maker Shed:

Best Of Instructables
Price: $29.99

Instructables.com has become one of the most popular magnets for makers and DIY enthusiasts of all stripes. Now, with more than 10,000 projects to choose from, the Instructables staff, editors of MAKE: Magazine, and the Instructables community itself have put together a collection of home, craft, food and technology how-to's from the site. The Best of Instructables Volume 1 includes plenty of clear, full-color photographs, complete step-by-step instructions, and tips, tricks, and new build techniques you won't find anywhere else.

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CRAFT blogger Rachel (Average Jane Crafter) found this cool free font, Molecular Typography, designed by Mithila Shafiq.

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Jenny @ CRAFT writes:

Label-Free posts about the work of textile artist Leah Evans, who creates hand-stitched, map-inspired quilts that encompass a variety of techniques, including reverse appliqué, needle felting, hand-dyeing and embroidery.

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nerdyH writes "Novell's recent openSUSE 11.1 release includes a new end-user license agreement modeled after Fedora's EULA, says Community Manager Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier in this detailed interview. Zonker says distributions should apply the 'open source principle' and standardize trademark agreements and EULA, similar to how the OSI sought to reduce open source license proliferation a few years back. But with Fedora and openSUSE being so different, can one size really fit all? And, will open source licenses ever finally get translated into languages besides English? (Zonker says that translation into 7 languages was done for openSUSE 11.1.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Hybrid Sound" is a large-scale sculpture that doubles as a high-powered speaker system that distorts and causes a large echo effect. Interesting build and check out the project page link for a Quicktime movie of this thing in action.

Hybrid Sound via VVORK

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The Plasticfanpiper lives up to his name demonstrating a homemade 'membrane pipe' apparently built from straws balloons, and plastic valves - must be a pretty sturdy build to stand up to the air pressure.
[Thanks, Stephen!]

A quick search for "membrane bagpipe" turned up this interesting how to -

Looks like fun - but of course the sound created is a bit of an acquired taste ;)

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Bert Simons is an amazing paper sculptor living in the Netherlands. His work is incredible, and there are some details about his technique and portfolio on his site.

One thing that is fascinating is his technique for 3d scanning. His early explorations in 3d modeling were done with a cheapie laser from a saw. After upgrading the laser and camera, he got better results.

He is apparently using Blender to do his computer compilation work of his three dimensional subjects.

There isn't a huge amount of information about this great paper artist, so if you know more, add your comments below.

Have you tried something as bold as digitizing your girlfriend? Do you know of anybody doing stunning work in unusual media? What are your techniques for turning flat pieces of paper into objects in the round? What can you do with Blender? What is the best way to learn Blender? Add your coments, and submit your photos to the Make Flickr pool.

Thanks for the comment Robot Hacker!

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An anonymous reader writes "I would like to know if there are any resources on the Web or elsewhere describing how to configure a Windows PC for an older parent not living in the same household. Assume little computer familiarity or aptitude. Some stuff is obvious, like using only a few large icons for favorite Web sites, or an icon perhaps for composing email and another for checking email. Other considerations are eliminating nuisance messages from Windows update and antivirus/firewall. What works and what doesn't? Can anyone who has worked/volunteered at a senior center offer some insights?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andrew sent us a link to his LEGO ball contraption. It consists of conveyor belts, lifts, and sawtooth mechanisms. He plans on bringing this to one of the Great Ball Contraption events.

Having recently gotten back into Lego, and wanting to build something cool that I could also bring to Lego events, I decided to make a few Great Ball Contraption (GBC) modules. Inspired by the action of the three all put together, this video became a fun project to see how dramatic moving little soccer balls around a circuit could be...

A little more about the LEGO ball contraption

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A recent visitor to TechShop in Menlo Park, CA said that he was amazed by a story he was told on his tour. Initially, there was concern that tools would walk out the door at TechShop. In practice, though, the opposite has proved to be true. Members of this community-based workshop brought tools from home and left them at TechShop for others to use. So TechShop was ending up with more tools than they started with. TechShop co-founder, Jim Newton, confirmed this story:

It is absolutely true. People have a real sense of community with TechShop, and bringing in tools from home is one of the ways that it is manifested. Makers are generally much more socially-responsible than outside folk. I think that's largely what drives the way people care for and contribute to TechShop.

The TechShop experience reminded me of a story on community tool-sharing that I read in our local paper earlier this year. Dustin Zuckerman started The Santa Rosa Tool Library, a lending library for tools. It's a terrific Remake idea. Not everyone can afford to buy each and every tool they need. Many tools are needed for a single project and won't be used much otherwise. Renting is always an option, but it's not cheap. Almost as importantly, storage is a premium for many people and finding space for a collection of tools can be a problem.

Tool sharing is not a new concept. The previous news article points out examples in Berkeley of tool lending under the auspices of public libraries. Here's an article on how to start a tool sharing program from Mother Earth News. Tool sharing just makes more and more sense today, whether organized as a community resource, a maker co-op, or an informal neighborhood arrangement where individuals simply let their neighbors know they are willing to share their tools. Perhaps someone will develop a website app for small groups to create an inventory of tools that are available for sharing. (Anyone?)

In a recent discussion of this topic among friends, one person suggested that she found people reluctant to borrow tools, even when they were offered to them. Telling people you were willing to share a tool wasn't enough to make it happen, at least in her experience. Some people may think that borrowing creates a sense of obligation, which makes them uncomfortable. Perhaps makers can help change this mindset, by choosing to value interdependence over independence and recognizing how it fosters a better sense of community.

I'd enjoy learning about your experiences, large-scale or small, at home or work, with tool sharing.

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schlangemann writes "Check out the paper Towards the Simulation of E-commerce by Herbert Schlangemann, which is available in the IEEEXplor database (full article available only to IEEE members). This generated paper has been accepted with review by the 2008 International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSSE). According to the organizers, 'CSSE is one of the important conferences sponsored by IEEE Computer Society, which serves as a forum for scientists and engineers in the latest development of artificial intelligence, grid computing, computer graphics, database technology, and software engineering.' Even better, fake author Herbert Schlangemann has been selected as session chair (PDF) for that conference. (The name Schlangemann was chosen based on the short film Der Schlangemann by Andreas Hansson and Björn Renberg.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm not much of a Christmas music person. For me, Tchaikovsky and Guaraldi are pretty much the only things that don't make me hurl. Maybe because they're both a little melancholy.

I really like the YouTube video from a guy who calls himself "alabamaharpist" (aka Steven Todd Miller) above, doing a cover of "Christmastime is Here," my favorite Guaraldi / Charlie Brown Christmas song. The harp is like the unicorn of musical instruments. It's easy for people to make fun of, because it's so pure and innocent. And like the unicorn, it ends up in a lot of bad, cheesy art, and is the stuff of fantasy cons and filkfests. But so what. I think the harp is totally awesome, and Harpo was my favorite Marx brother by far, and Christmas is about the only time of year I'll let my guard down to admit any of this in public, and by the way shut up.

I love this, too, and I could listen to it all day on loop, at least 'til the soy-nog runs out.

So what's your favorite holiday music? Post some linkage in the comment thread here. Internet videos, internet radio channels (surely Soma FM's multiple holiday channels deserve some props), MP3 blogs, what are you eating fruitcake to? Link-discuss-hohoho.

Marcus wrote in to tell us about his latest ping pong ball electronics project, the Gravitron. In half of a ping pong ball, he's crammed 12 LEDs, an accelerometer, and an ATmega168 for a brain. If you pick it up and tilt it, it will light the highest LED. It's sort of poetic.

If you're as impressed as I am with his efficiency of space, check out Marcus' other ping pong ball experiments on his blog.

Gravitron - Playing around with gravity

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jmcbain writes "The ACM issued a set of recommendations supporting Barack Obama's stated goal of making science and mathematics education a national priority at the K-12 level. The ACM is urging the new administration to include Computer Science as an integral part of the nation's education system. 'The new Administration can play an important role in strengthening middle school education, where action can really make a difference, to introduce these students to computer science,' said ACM CEO John White." Is CS such a basic subject, at the level of science or math, that it makes sense to (try to) teach its principles to every elementary school child?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With Christmas coming up, I wanted to buy something cool and electronic and gadgety, fun and impulsive, under $249 on Amazon. But I couldn't find anything I don't already have. When I was a kid the world was filled with toys I lusted for but couldn't have. Today, I have the opposite problem -- I want to want something, but I already have everything I want.

So I turned to Twitter.

I got back a bunch of suggestions, and promised to blog them, for others who might be inspired to buy themselves a gift, in this the standard gift-giving season. Alas, so far, there's been nothing I wanted enough to buy. There were some that seemed promising, though, and I totally appreciate the thought that went into the suggestions.

ltrosien asks if I have a Slingbox. I do and love it. It's mission-critical. A week ago I watched Meet The Press on an American Airlines flight from NY to SF. When you think of the path the show took to get to me, it's pretty amazing. Downloaded from a satellite via DirecTV, out through the Slingbox to the net, to the Gogo gateway in Dallas (if I remember correctly) then to the proper cell tower and to the airplane and to my laptop, and it all worked -- no fuss no muss. Amazing.

mike1mb suggests an Asus souped up router with built in hard drive, a BitTorrent client, USB port, the kitchen sink and more. Man this one was tempting. It increases the range of your wifi 3 times. Wow. And I love everything that Asus makes. But... It would arrive, I would install it, marvel at the possibilities and then be bored. I can't use any of its capabilities. I already have way more storage than I use. The whole house is covered by two Airport Extreme routers. I have BitTorrent mastered, and it's nice that it works when your computers are turned off, but there are several computers in my house that are always on. Further, the one reviewer on Amazon said the fancy extras didn't really work. It's been out since 2006 and I've never heard of it till today, so that doesn't bode well. So even though it was tempting, I passed.

moneyries says: "Pimp out your game collection. Get Gears of War 2, Left 4 Dead, Dead Space, Call of Duty: World at War, etc. Add Netflix." I only play casual games, no time for all those other games I've never had time for, and I have Netflix, thinking of cancelling it cause I've watched everything I care about. Sighh. When you're bored you're bored, I guess!

CathleenRitt suggests a Take Anyware personal pocket safe. Hmmm, that's interesting.

deepikaur and dberlind suggest a Flip Video camcorder. Okay that's a maybe. I don't have one, but my Canon PowerShot SD1100 takes fine movies and I have it with me all the time. Do I really need another small device for taking movies? I don't think so, but I'm prepared to be talked into it. I've given Flips as presents, and they've always been well-received.

DinkyShop suggests a $5 rechargeable powered USB 4-port hub for a laptop from Woot.

Give the gift of MAKE this year, and spruce up your gift card while you're at it! For example:

Here's a noise-making card/circuit that I built using a 555 timer IC and some other junk parts I had around the house. The robot "talks" by squeezing the leads of one of the capacitors that make his body. Mr. Frauenfelder's head controls the pitch of the squeeling, the on/off of this sound is "controlled" simply by keeping the potentiometer just ever so lightly plugged in to the breadboard underneath the card so that the sound stops when it gets disconnected, allowing the robot to talk. Also, the trunk of the tree is chocolate.

Thanks to my amigos Torlando Hakes and David Stith for making the paper part of the card! They really brought some cute craft to my squeaky squonk.

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DynaSoar writes "NASA has signed two contracts with US commercial space ventures totaling $3.5 billion for resupply of the International Space Station. SpaceX will receive $1.6 billion for 12 flights of SpaceX's planned Dragon spacecraft and their Falcon 9 boosters. $1.9 billion goes to Orbital for eight flights of its Cygnus spacecraft riding its Taurus 2 boosters. Neither of the specified craft has ever flown. However, the proposed vehicles are under construction and based on proven technology, whereas NASA has often contracted with big aerospace companies for services using vehicles not yet even designed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TED2009 (Technology, Entertainment, Design) announced their speaker program. Above is a screen shot of the speakers whose last names begin with the letter M. You can click here then on the tab "Program" for detailed information about all the speakers.

I've attended last two TED events and they've been very inspiring and humbling. I'll be at the upcoming TED in Long Beach, California, too, liveblogging like I did last year and the year before!

adamengst writes "If your bank uses the Extended Validation certificates that require a higher level of identity checking on the certificate authority's part (as at least one Seattle bank does), you may not be able to download transactions using the Mac version of Quicken. Quicken doesn't gracefully ignore extra information in EV certificates as older Web browsers do, but instead throws an error and refuses to download transactions. Intuit says they're working on a fix — but users may have to wait 'a couple of months,' and even then the fix may not be applied to versions before Quicken 2007."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today, I'm off to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with a new generation of children who've never seen the Pacific Ocean like this before.

Someone called MBA one of "10 Things You Have to See Before You're 10" which made me smile- but it's a really a place that invites multiple pilgrimages over a lifetime.

Here are live webcams of their OuterBay exhibit, Kelp Forest, Aviary, Otters, and others. Just remember there's no substitute for petting the head of a manta ray- softer than goofer feathers.

The MBA is a revelation compared the aquariums I visited as a child in the 60s... where you peered into a series of "boxes" with plant and marine life hiding around. With MBA, it's like the sky- or in this case, the ocean- opens up. The anchovies swirl over your head- yes, you read that right. The comb jellies, as seen above, seem to be sending you secret messages. The architects of MBA give as much thought to mind-blowing design as they do to science, and so it's no wonder the whole environment is a psychonaut's delight.

The latest gizmo from MBA:  Seafood Watch for Your Cell Phone

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)

(Image via Travelmuse)

Mother Earth News has an introduction to blacksmithing here. Check it out; via the comments, here's an introduction to building a forge out of a brake disc:

Also check out purgatoryironworks 35+ other videos here!

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