NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The entire transcript of the RIAA's 'perfect storm', its first and only trial, which resulted in a $222,000 verdict in a case involving 24 MP3's having a retail value of $23.76, is now available online. After over a year of trying, we have finally obtained the transcript of the Duluth, Minnesota, jury trial which took place October 2, 2007, to October 4, 2007, in Capitol Records v. Thomas. Its 643 pages represent a treasure trove for (a) lawyers representing defendants in other RIAA cases, (b) technologists anxious to see how a MediaSentry investigator and the RIAA's expert witness combined to convince the jurors that the RIAA had proved its case, and (c) anybody interested in finding out about such things as the early-morning October 4th argument in which the RIAA lawyer convinced the judge to make the mistake which forced him to eventually vacate the jury's verdict, and the testimony of SONY BMG's Jennifer Pariser in which she 'misspoke' according to the RIAA's Cary Sherman when she testified under oath that making a copy from one's CD to one's computer is 'stealing'. The transcript was a gift from the 'Joel Fights Back Against RIAA' team defending SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, in Boston, Massachusetts. I have the transcript in 3 segments: October 2nd (278 pages(PDF), October 3rd (263 pages)(PDF), and October 4th (100 pages)(PDF)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of my first builds for the MAKE blog was the mint tin fume extractor. I was hoping someone would make a version and post it on the web, and it finally happened. Thanks for the link Phil, and a big Thank You to Shawn for posting a video of your mint tin fume extractor.

More about a Reader built fume extractor from the MAKE blog

Did you ever make a project from the MAKE blog? If so, send us a link so we can share it with our readers. Thanks!

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Make a Mint tin fume extractor

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phorm writes "While filtering for spam on email and other related mediums seems to be fairly productive, there is a growing issue with spam on forums, message-boards, blogs, and other such sites. In many cases, sites use prevention methods such as captchas or question-answer values to try and restrict input to human-only visitors. However, even with such safeguards — and especially with most forms of captcha being cracked fairly often these days — it seems that spammers are becoming an increasing nuisance in this regard. While searching for plugins or extensions to spamassassin etc I have had little luck finding anything not tied into the email framework. Google searches for PHP-based spam filtering tends to come up with mostly commercial and/or more email-related filters. Does anyone know of a good system for filtering spam in general messages? Preferably such a system would be FOSS, and something with a daemon component (accessible by port or socket) to offer quick response-times."

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Here are some of my favorite posts from the CRAFT blog this week:

• Exhibition of Embroidery at the Bard Graduate Center in NYC
  
• The Online Museum of Fabric Brain Art
  
• Giant Knitwear Furnishings
• Balsamic Chocolate Truffles Recipe
  

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Pranav writes "Using semiconductor lasers, scientists from Takushoku University, Saitama University, and NTT Corporation achieved random number rates of up to 1.7 gigabits per second, which is about 10 times higher than the second-best rate, produced using a physical phenomenon. Future work may center on devising laser schemes that can achieving rates as high as 10 Gbps."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chad sends this on how John Sweeney survived the recent bad patch of weather in the Northeast by using his hybrid car to power many devices in his house.

During an ice storm last week Sweeney, of Harvard, Mass., powered his house by hooking it up to his Toyota Prius. The Prius, a hybrid vehicle, starts the gasoline-burning mode of its engine every 30 minutes to recharge the battery with an internal generator. In turn, Sweeney ran his refrigerator and freezer, wood stove fan, lights and television off the car's battery.

So if you have a hybrid, do you need a generator? People have talked about hydrogen fuel cell cars being used in a similar manner to power houses, but does it come in a full size version yet? How do you use your hybrid or electric car for uses other than getting groceries? Are you still waiting for your mass produced plug in hybrid electric vehicle? How about a street legal battery electric vehicle? What are you doing to release yourself and others from the carbon bonds of foreign oil?

Join the discussion in the comments and add photos and video to the Make Flickr pool!

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There's still time to start making or just watch this week's Weekend Project: Pole's Eye View. You can view the video here, grab the PDF here and subscribe in iTunes to get all our Weekend Projects and PDFs delivered each week.

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Roland Piquepaille writes "Scientific American reports that Xcel Energy, a Minneapolis-based utility company, has started to test a new technology to store wind energy in batteries. The company is currently trying it in a 1,100 megawatt facility of wind turbines in Southern Minnesota. The company started this effort because 'the wind doesn't always blow and, even worse, it often blows strongest when people aren't using much electricity, like late at night.' It has received a $1 million grant from Minnesota's Renewable Development Fund and the energy plant should be operational (PDF) in the first quarter of 2009. If this project is successful, the utility expects to deploy many more energy plants before 2020 to avoid more polluting energy sources."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tristan and Libby, sharing their cheese-making knowledge (photo via Mikey).

I was lucky enough to get a lesson in cheesemaking from Tristan and Libby, authors of the Whittled Down blog. A gallon of milk and a few other ingredients makes a pound of cheese, and you can go from milk to mozzarella in a couple of days. Check out their cheese-making posts here, and learn much more at at their highly-recommended favorite cheesiest of sites: Fankhauser's Cheese Page.

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Christmas Tree Fire Safety Video from NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). (via Esthr Dysn!)

Wired is running an article raising the question of how a US economic stimulus plan could best help broadband adoption and the internet in general. We discussed President-elect Obama's statements about his plan, which would include investments in such areas, but Wired asks how we can avoid the equivalent of the New Deal's "ditches to nowhere" without more data about where the money would actually make a difference. Quoting: "... the problem is that no one knows the best way to make the internet more resilient, accessible and secure, since there's no just no public data. The ISP and backbone internet providers don't tell anyone anything. For instance, the government doesn't know how many people actually have broadband or what they pay for it. ... In September, the FCC found that its data collection on internet broadband was incomplete and thus ruled that AT&T, Qwest and Verizon could stop filing some reports — because the requirements did not extend to cable companies, too."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is a really nice passive multitouch input by Randall Jones. It was designed to be an inexpensive, and extremely expressive, musical interface. I really like the simplicity, and it only cost about $50 to build. [Thanks Dan]

Physical modeling synthesis has proven to be a successful method of synthesizing realistic sounds, but providing expressive controls for performance remains a major challenge. This thesis presents a new approach to playing physical models, based on multidimensional signals. Its focus is on the long-term research question, "How can we make a computer-mediated instrument with control intimacy equal to the most expressive acoustic instruments?"

More about the Multitouch Prototype 2

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This is for a Make: television project Tod Kurt and I built -- a Wii nunchuck / Arduino "flight recorder" (more about the project to come). We used Tod's Epilog laser cutter to cut out a rectangle from the top of a Pelican case, so that I could mount a serial LCD panel there.
This turned out much neater than my Dremel cut version. The best part is the thick bed of evil yellow smoke that curls forth when you open the lid. I'm pretty sure this smoke is good for you, so I inhaled of it deeply.

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I spotted this on eBay, a 1962 chemistry set from SEARS.

And here's another from the 1950s, The Gilbert Experimental Lab. Love the packaging...

"Today's adventures in science will create tomorrow's America".

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The other A. N. Other writes "It seems that Microsoft couldn't keep the lid on Windows 7 beta 1 until the new year. By now, several news outlets have their hands on the beta 1 code and have posted screenshots and information about this build. ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 column says: 'This beta is of excellent quality. This is the kind of code that you could roll out and live with. Even the pre-betas were solid, but finally this beta feels like it's "done." This beta exceeds the quality of any other Microsoft OS beta that I've handled.' ITWire points out that this copy has landed on various torrent sites, and while it appears to be genuine, there are no guarantees. Neowin has a post confirming that it's the real thing, and saying Microsoft will be announcing the build's official availability at CES in January."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

altjira writes "Matt Blaze analyzes the implications of a recent Newsweek story on the Bush administration's use of the NSA for domestic spying on communications, and questions whether the lower legal threshold for the collection of communications metadata is giving away too much to the government: 'As electronic communication pervades more of our daily lives, transaction records — metadata — can reveal quite a bit about us, indeed often much more than a few out-of-context conversations might. Aggregated into databases with other people's records (or perhaps everyone's records) and analyzed by powerful software, metadata by itself can paint a remarkably detailed picture of connections, relationships, and other patterns that could never be recovered simply from listening to the conversations themselves.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Randall Stross has just published a sobering article in The New York Times about how the four major US wireless carriers don't want anyone to know the actual cost structure of text message services to avoid public outrage over the doubling of a-la-carte per-message fees over the last three years. The truth is that text messages are 'stowaways' inside the control channel — bandwidth that is there whether it is used for texting or not — and 160 bytes per message is a tiny amount of data to store-and-forward over tower-to-tower landlines. In essence it costs carriers practically nothing to transmit even trillions of text messages. When text usage goes up, the carriers don't even have to install new infrastructure as long as it is proportional to voice usage. This makes me dream of the day when there is real competition in the wireless industry, not this gang-of-four oligopoly."

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You know I like Tweetree, I gushed about it yesterday. The main thing I like is that it gives you a graphic view of things you link to from Twitter messages. So in addition to seeing a URL, you also see a visual image of the thing it points to. This is especially nice when pointing to a Flickr picture. But what about other photo storage systems? Will Tweetree have to implement special support for each of them? And what if I create a new app, how long will I wait for them to support it. Probably not very long now, because they're hungry, but what about when they're rich and famous? Maybe they'll think that supporting the big apps is all they have to do.

Anticipating this, and wanting to make it easier for everyone, and making innovation by small unknown developers possible, let's get started with a bootstrap for new photo apps to say to Tweetree and comparable services: "Here's a nice thumbnail image you can use to represent the picture on this page."

HTML provides a simple mechanism for just this -- the <link> element. I've added one to this page, as follows:

<link rel="thumbnail" type="image/jpeg" href="http://static.flickrfan.org/afp/thumbnails/2008/12/28/trpar2329681.jpg" width="150" height="87">

You can see this by viewing source on the page.

Now when I link to this page in a Twitter post, and Tweetree sees it, they can, instead of displaying the full picture, which in this case it is hard to find (and if they find it, it's HUGE way too big to display inline), they can show the thumb, and link to the page with the full image on it. Much more managable.

Now let's see if the Tweetree guys play. I've been trying to get the Twitter guys, and then the FriendFeed guys to work with me, but so far no luck. But I think these guys may be more willing to do a bootstrap.

BTW, Scoble says he wants to do the same thing for videos. Makes perfect sense. Everyone can play the bootstrap game. Scoble get your web guy to add a link element in each of your web pages that contains a video like the one I've added, except the type should be video/mpeg or video/quicktime or somesuch.

I love bootstraps cause they yield open web ecosystems when they work. Let's see if we can get one to work.

PS: December is historically a very good month for bootstraps on scripting.com. Here's the archive page for 12/27/97. Look at the first item. That's the beginning of RSS.

unassimilatible writes "Michael Meeks, who works full time developing OpenOffice, writes in his blog that the project is 'profoundly sick.' 'In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition — we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began: 24, this contrasts negatively with Linux's recent low of 160+. Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ColdWetDog writes "The New York Times reports that the soon-to-be-disbanded Bush / Cheney White House threatens to overload the National Archives with close to 100 Terabytes of data. This includes the Barney Cam and even 'formats not previously dealt with.' By way of comparison, the Clinton White House dumped less than a single terabyte into the archives. Of course, Mr. Cheney, always the Good Citizen, tried to help out when he 'asserted this month in a court case that he had absolute discretion to decide which of his records are official and which are personal, and thus do not have to be transferred to the archives.' Glad to see that somebody over there is trying to clean up the cruft for posterity."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cousteau and the undersea world. Cameron and Titanic. And now, Joe Reinhardt and Mike Fields and the depths of Lake Moraine in upstate New York. Every summer, Reinhardt and brother-in-law Fields tackle a new DIY project at the family's lakeside camp. In 2005, the pair built their own underwater ROV (remote observation vehicle) with two video cameras feeding live images to a shipboard laptop - all for about 100 bucks Making things is second nature for Reinhardt. 24, a computer tech in digital imaging. This time, he got to indulge his underwater fascination:"I always wanted to be a marine biologist," says Reinhardt. "I love the water, and ships, and watching Discovery Channel with the real ROVs exploring the Titanic." Reinhardt and Fields built their homebrew ROV's frame out of PVC pipe, and its transparent camera housing out of scrap quarter-inch-thick acrylic tube from the local plastics supply (milled to watertight tolerances on a friend's lathe). They joined the two with simple but strong carpenter's ratchet clamps, The B&W video camera was $29 from Harbor Freight, complete with infrared LEOs for night vision. power supply, and 80 feet of RJll cable.

They scored a Chinese color "Spy-Cam" for $1 on eBay (plus $35 shipping), and ran its video signal up the audio wire in the RJll cable. After an embarrassing misfire with ballast tanks ("We put 'em on top, so it sank upside down every time"), the explorers improvised a solution ("a big hunk of concrete and a bungee cord") and lowered their ROV to the lake bottom to capture video of sunfish, perch, and muskie sporting in the wild. The rig proved watertight to 40 feet. This summer, they're going deeper: their 2006 model has thrusters for true independent ROV mobility, using watertight 12VDC motors coupled to propellers by super-powerful neodymium magnets. It'll be rated to 200 feel, good enough to dive quarries or wrecks on Lake Erie, Reinhardt says, James Cameron might want to check his rearview mirror.

makezine.com/go/ROV

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 6, page 23 - Keith Hammond.

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reborn writes "Someone's got XBMC running on one of those MIDs. This one is a Compal Jax10. It runs Linux and is powered by an Intel Atom processor clocked at 800Mhz along with Intel's GMA500, which is basically a licensed PowerVR SGX GPU. Except for the better GPU (and its screen and keyboard, of course), it is similarly specced as some of the lower-end netbooks. XBMC would make a great portable media player, given its ability to play media off the network and virtually all file formats, but in the end it depends on the price-point of these MIDs. Here's the video."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Annalee @ io9 pointed me towards a story we'll likely hear again and again until authorities realize that we're never going to encourage the next generation of chemists if we treat every kid with a home chem lab like a criminal... As Annalee said to me in email... "We should be championing this cool kid who created an awesome home lab" - Crimes Of The Future: Teen with Home Chemistry Lab Arrested for Meth, Bombs...

A Canadian college student majoring in chemistry built himself a home lab - and discovered that trying to do science in your own home quickly leads to accusations of drug-making and terrorism.

Lewis Casey, an 18-year-old in Saskatchewan, had built a small chemistry lab in his family's garage near the university where he studies. Then two weeks ago, police arrived at his home with a search warrant and based on a quick survey of his lab determined that it was a meth lab. They pulled Casey out of the shower to interrogate him, and then arrested him.

A few days later, police admitted that Casey's chemistry lab wasn't a meth lab - but they kept him in jail, claiming that he had some of the materials necessary to produce explosives. Friends and neighbors wrote dozens of letters to the court, testifying that Casey was innocent and merely a student who is really enthusiastic about chemistry.

More:
Student held on explosives charge released - Teen mistakenly arrested for meth production allowed home for holidays.

Casey, when you can talk about this - please let us know. Maybe we can hook you up with something from our Chemistry guide.

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's request for permission to appeal from the decision setting aside its $222,000 jury verdict has been denied by District Court Judge Michael J. Davis. In a brief, 6-page decision (PDF) the Judge dismissed the RIAA's arguments that there is a 'substantial ground for a difference of opinion' on the question of law presented, whether the Judge had erred in accepting the RIAA's proposed jury instruction that merely 'making files available' could constitute an infringement of the plaintiffs' distribution rights. He likewise dismissed their argument that granting permission for the appeal would 'materially advance the ultimate termination of the litigation,' since (a) depending on the outcome of the trial, plaintiffs might not wish to appeal from the judgment, and (b) no matter how the appeals court rules on the 'making available' issue, the case will still have to continue in the lower court, since even if the RIAA wins on the 'making available' issue, the Court will still have to address the constitutionality of the large jury verdict, which may result in a new trial." Link To Original Source

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Brad sends this about his son's gift project:

For Christmas this year, Lucas made his grandmom a battery powered amp for her guitar. This was a big project - first time with a soldering iron. Worked out well with only one minor burn. He did 80% of the soldering and drilled all the holes for the pots and LED. He turns 6 in Jan - seemed he should learn one last skill while he was still 5.

Great project! Parts to love: scrounging parts out of otherwise dead or useless devices...teaching new skills to kids...making something that couldn't be bought...online documentation...photos...

What have you made lately? Did it work right the first time? Did you catch some pictures/video/audio of the process? What is your experience teaching kids about electricity, electronics, soldering, programming, hacking? What should people do or not do when they venture out into projects with kids? What workspace, tools or materials would you suggest? Show us your stuff! Add your comments and park your photos and video in the Make Flickr pool.

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