Joshua Fouts, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, says,

Two very interesting things happened today that you might be interested in -- both unfolded/ing rapidly. While the two are not directly linked, they are illustrative of an evolving use of the social networking world in interesting and dynamic ways.

1. Since Saturday people in Second Life have been protesting the attacks in the Gaza strip. About 30 people per day, mostly based in Egypt but using Second Life as their voice. We took some photos: Dozens Gather in Second Life to Protest Gaza Attacks.

2. Now here's what I think is really interesting. Just today the Israeli Consulate in NY launched two Twitter accounts and tomorrow (December 30) they'll be hosting a Twitter press conference to respond to questions people might have about Gaza. Summary here: Israeli Consulate to host Twitter Press Conference on Gaza.

The thing that's interesting to me is that this is such a fantastic risk and so ungovernmentlike that it's fun to watch. We'll be participating for sure.

Related BB post: Global Voices' coverage of Gaza Strip Bombings (and how to keep the coverage alive)

Hi Boingers!

We’re excited to be doing this and are honored to be included with such esteemed bloggers, both the regulars and the guests! We’ll be posting on a diversity of topics, with less sex and hip culture, and more kids’ books, dub music, skulls, jellyfish, and working toward sustainable living (or at least raising chickens and growing lettuce). Bruce is a political blog junkie and techno-gadget geek, while Shawn leans toward crafty blogs and irreverent humor, so be prepared for something like The Huffington Post meets Postcards From Yo Momma and Cool Tools paired with Design Sponge.

To start things off, we’d like to share the best Christmas present we’ve seen this year. Our friends Dave and Jen Sims got stuck in Thailand for an extra week after Thanksgiving due to the protests that closed the Bangkok airport. They finally made it home and just got these T-shirts as a gift:

The background image is a real photo of the protesters who took over the airport in Bangkok. You can read more about their experience here and here. Did you get any special gifts or see any that struck your fancy? Tell us about them in the Comments.

(Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart are guest bloggers)

Today on Offworld, we recapped all the holiday stories we missed late last week, including a number of developments on the iPhone: the appearance of match-3/RPG PuzzleQuest, Jason Rohrer's momento mori art-game Passage, Flashbang's excellent dino-catcher Raptor Copter, and the surprise announcement that Hudson will be bringing Kloonigames' Crayon Physics Deluxe to the App Store. We also took another look at LittleBigPlanet's brilliant Metal Gear Solid level pack, read advice on making machine-mediated user-generated content more prevalent in games, and about the 2008 game that finally did drunk right after years of /drinks. Finally, and most wonderfully, we read about the technical ins-and-outs of Twit 4 Dead, the automated twitter bots bravely tweeting their struggle against the horde.

Multi-instrumentalist Fredrik Larsson, 23, plays an incredible acoustic cover of Legend of Zelda's Wind Waker theme. Check the video at Boing Boing Offworld. Wind Waker Unplugged

coondoggie writes to tell us that the FBI has issued another cracking challenge for a new cipher on their site. Tens of thousands responded to a similar challenge last year. In addition to the challenge the FBI is also offering a few primers on the subject. There are a number of sites offering cipher challenges, just funny to see the FBI encouraging

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is how my kids eat. (Via Bits & Pieces)

Fractalius is a trippy image filter for Photoshop. Windows only. The Fabulous Fractalius Pool on Flickr has many more examples.

(via Forgetomori)

In a story that will surprise, um, well, none of you, Broadband Reports points us to an Ars Technica piece with an MPAA representative claiming "Hey, us too!" on a plan involving ISPs kicking file sharers off for accusations of file sharing. This, of course, follows the widespread reports about the RIAA's supposed agreements with ISPs (though not all ISPs are happy with the plan). While the RIAA got lots of press for it, the MPAA seems to have a better handle on the PR spin of such a program -- calling it a "graduated response" rather than a "three strikes" policy. By "graduated" they basically mean "scold, scold, lose your internet connection." I guess that's graduated.

Of course, none of the big questions about such a program are addressed by the MPAA (or the RIAA, for that matter), but it's almost comically endearing to see the MPAA claim that this is a "win/win/win" program -- where consumers are considered "winners" because they're not getting sued. In all honestly, this is a lose/lose/lose strategy. The MPAA would lose because it would make it that much more difficult for the industry to wake up and embrace newer and better business models. ISPs would lose by having to spend time and resources supporting the entertainment industry's quixotic fight to stop file sharing. Consumers would lose because it would effectively remove a great and inexpensive way of both watching and distributing more movies. Hell, even the lawyers would lose because they'd have fewer lawsuits to file. Who actually wins? Beats me.

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There has definitely been a resurgence of old games being made new again through various methods. Unfortunately, any time you reinvent an old classic you risk of either alienating the original audience or not making it appealing enough for the a new audience. "Capcom has been at the forefront of the recent remake boom, re-imagining a number of their classic titles as downloadable games. Bionic Commando, for example, was given a high-definition 2.5D makeover, and a rockin' remixed soundtrack with Bionic Commando: Rearmed. Capcom also re-released a new version of Street Fighter II on the way, with the lengthy new title Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. Interestingly, both games are coming out near new entries in their respective franchises: Street Fighter IV and Bionic Commando. But the question remains, how do you decided what games will still appeal to the current gaming audience? " What games can be counted amongst the success stories, and which can be chalked up as utter failures?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Flash embed above, downloadable MP4 link here.)

Continuing in our retrospective of favorite Boing Boing tv episodes, we revisit the fun we had checking out TechShop, an open-access public workshop that's kind of like a health club with heavy machinery and sparks instead of treadmills. Tinkerers, inventors, and hackers pay a membership fee, and in turn receive access to professionally-maintained gear, workshops, mentors, and a community of like-minded makers.

Currently there is only one site in Silicon Valley, and it opened in 2006. But founder Jim Newton (a lifetime maker, veteran BattleBots builder and former MythBuster) plans to open a number of locations around the US -- and eventually, the rest of the world.

John Todd, who you'll meet in this episode, wrote this article about the membership-based machine and fabrication shop in a recent edition of Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools zine. Snip:

I've been a member since before TechShop really even started, back when it was just some guys passing out flyers trying to gauge interest. For $100 a month, members can use any tool in the shop on which they've received training. MUCH cheaper than buying your own gear. The list of equipment is pretty extensive, too, and new items are arriving frequently (like a new hot-wire foam cutter).

John shares an additional note with BBtv about the company's business model:

TechShop is unusual in the way it's funded - community members are the financial backers. To date, TechShop has been funded by taking loans from members and repaying them at a nominal rate. Typically backers contribute $25k and up, and are then paid back over several years. There is an "A" round being raised now to fund the nationwide expansion, and the first funding source again is going to be the community instead of focusing on traditional VC sources. It's an unusual way to keep members excited about what they do at TechShop, and to keep them focused on making the whole experience better. Jim Newton (CEO) and Mark Hatch (COO) are looking for additional interested people who want to become members and funders - contact TechShop for details.

Do watch the second half of this episode. We take a joyride in a three-wheeled electric car, while wearing ridiculously inappropriate shoes. That's the little vehicle, above, with me (helpless passenger) and the guy who invented it (driver, going way too fast for comfort). It was a total blast, and all lulz aside, this guy's invention is pretty badass.

Chelsie Gosk says: I thought you might be interested in Ariel Levy’s review of the new edition of The Joy of Sex as well as the piece’s accompanying slide show (illustrations from the 1972 edition, the new edition, and Our Bodies, Ourselves) and podcast."

[Joy of Sex author Alex] Comfort had a tendency to focus single-mindedly on a given notion or project at the expense of any kind of balance: while he was a student at Highgate School, in London, he became convinced that he could concoct a superior version of gunpowder. He blew off much of his left hand. By the time he was finished with his experiments, his thumb was the only remaining digit. Later in his life, when he was practicing medicine, he said that he found this claw he’d created “very useful for performing uterine inversions.” After he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, his enthusiasms led him to accumulate six degrees, including a doctorate in biochemistry.

The review appears in the January 5, 2009 edition of The New Yorker.

A bunch of folks have sent in the story that Charles Nesson of Harvard, who is challenging the constitutionality of the RIAA's lawsuits against file sharers, has filed a motion asking that the trial be broadcast live over the internet, amusingly using the RIAA's own words to support his request. From the beginning, the RIAA has always insisted that its lawsuits were part of a broad "educational campaign" to teach people about the evils of file sharing. Nesson notes that, if this is true, the RIAA should obviously have no objection to such a trial being broadcast online. Somehow, it seems likely that there will be an objection.

Given that the RIAA has supposedly given up its legal strategy -- while still moving forward with existing cases -- is anyone taking bets on how long it will be until the RIAA actively tries to back out of the Tenenbaum lawsuit altogether? This case is pretty much the last thing the RIAA actually wants to go to court -- whether broadcast or not. Even if it wins the case in the end, this lawsuit is going to involve a lot of dirty laundry airing that the RIAA probably doesn't want out there.

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ThinSkin writes "ExtremeTech has written an article on the best keyboards in every category, such as gaming keyboards (macro and hybrid), media center keyboards, keyboard gamepads, and so forth. Of course, the big companies like Microsoft and Logitech dominate these lists, while smaller companies like Razer, Ideazon, and others play an important role as well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jake made this funky-cool workshop phone by uncasing a classic Bell System wallphone and refinishing and remounting the parts. As he points out, if you do a phone like this, you'd likely want to cover the terminal block for safety purposes.

Workshop Telephone

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Tara the Hobo Stripper is a van-living, traveling striptease dancer and self-taught herbal medicine guru who's recently settled into a remote cabin in her native home of Alaska.

Even if Tara weren't expert in so many trades, it would be hard to put down her diary:

It's winter. I'm reading a lot. I'm drawing and figuring out how to make recycled sock monkeys. I keep an eternal pot of tea (a sort of infusion, really) on the stove with a big jelly straining bag as the tea bag. It's ginger oatstraw right now, and I drink it with honey.

Another pot on the stove is a perpetual snow melter. A full pot of snow makes two inches of water in the bottom of the pot. Yesterday I balanced one of the candles on top of a water bucket, which, piled on top of other water buckets, made the light just right for sitting in this chair and reading. Then I got a phone sex call and decided to make dinner and forgot about the candle until my water bucket caught on fire!

Now I have a water bucket with a hole in it and a dead candle that probably would have lasted another week if I'd blown it out and let it re-harden before it burned all the way through.

Other essential HoboStripper writings:

(Almost) everything you need to know about living in a van.

The Stripper Audition

The Joy of Nettles, One and Two

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)

We promised there'd be more games and contests, so here we are again. We're planning to run at least one a week. Naturally, your ideas and suggestions are welcome.

Here's this week's challenge: Everybody and their brother are doing year-end wrap-ups this week. Strike back! Write your own!

To be more specific: Summarize 2008. If you want, you can narrow it down and summarize the year in Boing Boing, weather, science fiction, weird science, plain science, international relations, bicycles, finance, real estate, disasters other than finance or real estate, cool gadgets, presidential campaigns, sandwiches (yours), sandwiches (eaten by others), violence, oxygen, polar bears in the news, weird sex, or whatever else you find meaningful, as long as it's a summary of 2008.

Format: Plain prose is fine. Compression is good. Formalism is very good. Chronological sequence is required, though it may be implicit.

You aren't required to use plain prose. As usual, poetry is an option; but so are obfuscated code, footnotes for an imaginary text, captions for the imaginary text's imaginary illustrations, crossword puzzle clues, lists of unanswered phone messages, copyeditors' queries, or entries from your cat's Live Journal. Just keep it coherent, and make sure the format and handling illuminates your summary of 2008.

Bear in mind that if you want to use flowcharts, rebuses, lolcats, XKCD cartoons, charts, photos, or sheet music, you'll have to stash the images elsewhere and link to them, because we're not set up to handle images in comment threads. That goes double for audio files, machinima, and flash games.

The length of your entry should not exceed your readers' patience. Entries will be judged by professionally impatient readers.

The normal moderation guidelines apply.

Hanging out in the thread, discussing the entries, and applauding good performances is virtuous, can be a lot of fun, and is a great way to get to know your fellow commenters.

Prize: To be announced shortly. Something good.

Things just keep getting worse for Diebold's e-voting subsidiary, that was laughably renamed Premier Election Solutions to avoid all of the baggage associated with the Diebold name. It seems that the state of Maryland is suing the company and demanding $8.5 million to cover the money the state had to pay to fix its faulty e-voting machines. You may recall that Maryland has been at the forefront in fighting Diebold/Premier over its machines. Back in 2006, following some rather damning info and significant problems, Maryland's governor wanted to get rid of all of Diebold's machines.

Diebold did its usual thing, responding to different problems, insisting there was no real problem and if there were, that it would all be fixed in time for the election in November of that year. Of course, Diebold didn't actually do much to help -- so the state of Maryland took matters into their own hands to try to fix the flaws in the machines, and now wants Diebold/Premier to pay for the costs of having done so. In rather typical fashion, Diebold/Premier has put out its usual response to pretty much any criticism: claiming it has no clue what anyone is talking about, saying that it is "puzzled by the timing and vagueness" of the lawsuit, while also saying it is: "inaccurate and unfounded." The company also says its about events that occurred "five or more years ago" (apparently, they weren't paying attention in 2006) and that "Maryland just completed one of the smoothest elections in the state's history," though the company fails to note that's more in spite of Diebold/Premier than because of it.

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Joey Anuff let me know about this entertaining short video from 1970 about "Captain George" Henderson, proprietor of Canada's first comic book store in Toronto. (I was expecting to see a 10-year-old Cory browsing the racks, but no such luck.)

George Henderson lived, ate and breathed comics - years before it would be popular to do so. A lifelong fan of superhero comics, old adventure strips and science fiction, in the 1960s he parlayed a dead-end writing career into a success. George Henderson lived, ate and breathed comics - years before it would be popular to do so. A lifelong fan of superhero comics, old adventure strips and science fiction, in the 1960s he parlayed a dead-end writing career into a successful life as a bookseller and retailer. Established in downtown Toronto in 1967, Memory Lane Books became a mecca for generations of comic fans and is considered Canada's first comic book store. In this clip from 1970, Captain George discusses his then young store and the emergent hobby of comic collecting.

Adds Joey, "Captain George also did a radio interview with the CBC two years later."

UPDATE:

Another awesome CBC video about comic book collecting, this one from 1979. I love the shirtless Frazetta enthusiast!

Ian Tree, an IT consultant from the Netherlands, has started a campaign to convince IBM to open source the code for Notes/Domino. Hoping for results similar to the push for Sun to open source Solaris which finally saw success in 2005, Tree makes the simple point that it wont happen until someone asks. "By being an open source product, Tree is also hoping that Domino becomes something schools use to teach groupware and application development concepts, which is the holy grail for future market adoption. This is how various Unixes, relational databases, Linux, and a raft of other products eventually became commercialized. While the idea of open sourcing any proprietary program is appealing, in as much as it sets a program free to live beyond the commitment (or lack thereof) of its originator, it is hard to see why open Notes/Domino would have any more impact than OpenSolaris."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're happy to introduce our new guest bloggers to Boing Boing: Shawn Connally and Bruce Stewart! They've been described as a "geek couple tag team" by our friend Gareth Branwyn. Shawn is the managing editor for both MAKE and CRAFT magazines, while Bruce blogs occasionally for GeekDad, is the editor of the Coverleaf blog and the Bright Hub Mac Channel, and does editing and consulting work for several internet companies. They work in unison on raising two boys, two cats and four chickens under some redwood trees in Northern California.

The two met in the college dorms and quickly bonded over marijuana and mathematical analysis. In 1993, Bruce introduced the internet to Shawn over beers in a bowling alley in Marin County. A year later she was working on O’Reilly’s Global Network Navigator, the first commercial website and web portal. Shawn has worked on several other O’Reilly projects, including a weekly online magazine called Web Review and the websites perl.com and xml.com. She’s written for several magazines and newspapers, including the SF Bay Guardian, the Industry Standard, the Marin Independent Journal, and a Vanity Fair equivalent in Singapore. She’s written about everything from yacht racing to T-shirt quilts and communication satellite linking and load balancing. She's also covered three Olympics on the web. From 1991 to 1993, two very fun years, she wrote theater and concert reviews in the Bay Area.

In 1995, Bruce left his job as Director of Telecommunications at the University of San Francisco to write online. His first article was about the hidden Netscape Easter eggs his then 1-year-old son found when slamming on the keyboard. Later, Bruce also found gainful employment at O’Reilly Media, where he served as the editorial director for the O’Reilly Network.

The couple lived in New Zealand during part of 1999 and 2000 and wrote a series of articles for Ziff Davis about living in the first country to hit the new millennium. (There was a very major party.) They’ve been collaborating on articles since the mid-1990s and hope to still be co-authoring stories in the mid-2050s.

Welcome, Shawn and Bruce!

Matt Cutts started a thread on FriendFeed about TechMeme. He's noticed something that almost everyone who is a regular clicker on TechMeme has noticed. There's really not much tech news there these days. It tends to find the fights between bloggers it favors and focuses on them to the exclusion of news a news junkie like myself would find more useful and interesting.

Whether it's an "algorithm" deciding or humans (who they now admit play a role) doesn't matter. Whether it was always intended to be this way doesn't matter. What matters to me is that there's news out there that I'm not getting. And as a self-described "media hacker" and news junkie, I want to do something about it.

1. And as a list-maker, I want to make a list.

2. If you are unhappy with TechMeme and are looking for a way to express it, you can always opt-out by making a simple addition to your robots.txt file. If other people are willing to do this, I am willing to go along. It's one way to remove all doubt about whether your items will show up there, once you've made this change, they won't -- as long as the block remains in the robots.txt file. It would be a way to get people complaining about TM to put up or shut up. "If you're so unhappy, why don't you opt-out?"

3. Technically it would be easy to set up a news oriented "river" site that pushed stories out that are bona fide tech news. It would require a team of at most 100 bloggers to watch their aggregators a few hours a week and forward stories to the river. The hard part isn't the software, of course, it's first finding enough people to work, and then arguing with the people who say it's too "elite" -- somehow finding a balance seems like the hard thing to do. Having it be wide-open is a guarantee of it being spam-filled. Just read one of the many rants about tech PR people to get an idea of how quickly that approach would get out of control.

4. What else?

Back in August, we noted just how silly it was that 20th Century Fox was suing Warner Bros. Studios over the movie The Watchmen. Fox had purchased the rights to make a movie out of the graphic novel decades ago, but decided not to make the movie. After the project bounced around at a few different studios, Warner took it on, and the movie is considered one of the most anticipated blockbusters of 2009. Yet, in a somewhat surprising move (since he'd originally said a trial would be needed next year), a judge has ruled that Fox does, indeed, own a copyright interest in the movie. This almost certainly means that Warner will come to some form of a settlement pretty quickly, so as not to delay or hinder the movie in any manner. In effect, that means that Fox is about to get a pretty big pay day for doing absolutely nothing on a movie that it didn't want to make. That seems to go against everything copyright is supposed to stand for.

Now, obviously, it's pretty stunning that Warner would make this movie without its lawyers being sure that Warner owned all the rights to the film, but as we wrote in the original post, it seems rather silly to sell movie "rights" in the first place. There are plenty of mechanisms to make sure that the original creator of a story can get paid when his or her story is adapted that don't require copyright -- and allowing multiple parties to try to make a film out of a single story should lead to better overall film making. Fox didn't want to make this movie, so Warner stepped up and made a movie that many are expecting to be fantastic. Why should Fox be rewarded for its own failure to make a movie?

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Lisa Rein twittered about Archive.org's new Timothy Leary video archive. It currently has over 80 videos.

The above screenshot is from a documentary called Growing Up In America: Breathing Together, Revolution of the Electric Family, from 1986, which has interviews with Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Fred Hampton, Deborah Johnson, John Sinclair, and Timothy Leary.

Timothy Leary Archive: Videos

Linux.com (who shares a corporate overlord with Slashdot) has an interesting look at what going proprietary can mean for your overall effectiveness. Using Firefox extension "Interclue" as the object lesson, the piece looks at both the engineering and social difficulties surrounding the project. "Even more significantly, the efforts to commercialize only detract from the software itself. The basic idea behind Interclue would make for a handy Web utility, but seems too slight to build a business around. The effort to do so only leads to complications that do nothing to enhance the basic utility, and to pleas for donations that can only annoy. The result is that, if your position on free software doesn't lead you to avoid Interclue, the efforts to monetize it almost certainly will."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fun t-shirt by Washington DC artist Chris Bishop. They're $19 including shipping and handling.
Barack Obama Riding A Unicorn (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

I'm still very impressed with the service and the team.

1. They've implemented the client side of the thumbnail code I inserted into my AFP pictures site, so now when I post one of those pictures to Twitter, they read the HTML source, find the link to the thumbnail and display that inline. Twitter only displays the URL. The user must click on the link to see the picture.

Here's the A-B comparison: Twitter vs Tweetree. One less step to find out whether it's a picture, movie or song, no delay, no context shift. To me, he difference is as striking as the difference between a command-line-based and graphic operating systems. Is it really simpler to make the user do work the computer could do for the user?

2. In the comments on my post here, and their blog post, came news of a more sophisticated dynamic web service specified by Flickr and supported by Hulu for including previews of their content in sites like Tweetree. This was very forward-looking of them, and we're going to try to make use of it. Everyone in this space already has glue for YouTube, but that's not good enough. There are many other video sites out there, including Scoble's -- who volunteered to go first with this, whose videos should be part of this new kind of blogging, but for whom a one-off just isn't practical.

3. Also in the comments, an observation that the HTML <link> element is flexible enough to do what we want, and there may be problems with including namespaced elements in HTML. I'm not convinced anything would break if we continued with the current approach, but so far the only ones implementing this format, as far as I know, are scripting.com and tweetree.com, so it's still possible to change.

4. I've made a number of feature requests of the Tweetree team in the last 24 hours, and they've responded very well, even implementing some of the easy quick-hits. Most important, they now have an item-level permalink, so I can demonstrate the difference between a tweet as viewed through Twitter and through Tweetree. (See #1 above.)

5. My main focus is on the inline media features, not the threading. I think the service is being confused with tools whose purpose is to impose conversation on Twitter -- I don't think Twitter is about conversation, I see it as a publishing environment, like blogging. I'm going to encourage them to shift the emphasis to graphics, video, audio and other media types, and building out from there. There's lots of fertile ground there that isn't being well tended by their competitors, lots of opportunity, imho.

Boy, this has been a blast.

Thanks so much for entertaining my stories and opinions over the past couple of weeks. It's such a thrill to get this much instant feedback that I'm having a hard time taking the needle out of my arm.

I've made so many new friends. Thanks especially to Mark Frauenfelder, for grace and endurance as my line editor. And all my love to my partner, Jon Bailiff, for enhancing and abetting my single-minded determination to post, post, post without concern for any other daily affairs!

What's new for me this year? In addition to The Erotic Treasury, I just released my first Kindle ebooks. If you're curious how to enjoy ebooks, or make one, as an author, you'd probably enjoy my "Kindle-Krazy" how-to.

I'm your friendly neighborhood sewing columnist at Craft magazine, and you'll be seeing my Valentine embroidery tips on the newsstands any day now. I'd love to take another sewing workshop with Sandra Betzina this winter, and of course I'll continue to worship at the feet of my fiber-arts guru, Jill Sanders.

Blogging this year should be fun. Obama may have his controversial Inauguration, but I'll be holding my own Sexual State of the Union address!

It's been intriguing for me to see the Twilight explosion this season- how remarkable that the bestselling book of the year was directed toward female adolescent longings. The movie screenings were audience pandemonium, even in my own little town of Santa Cruz. It's kismet, but I just turned in an illustrated erotic-lit anthology to Chronicle Books, coming out next fall, called The Quiver- which is decidedly more Baudelairean than Twilight, but filled with the same gothic perversions that intoxicate American literature at the moment.

Of course I'll be continuing my weekly audio show, In Bed W/Susie Bright, at Audible. This week, I'm sharing a story from Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler on The Peril of the Jealous Husband. Please enjoy some free samples!- and here's the cheapest way to subscribe once you become hooked.

Then there's the memoir. Now that I am officially old and in the way (51 this year) I'm completing a memoir for Seal Press, which will be published in 2010.

 If any of you have tips on how to run a daily blog and write a memoir at the same time while raising a family- send your advice to my address. Seriously, though, I'd love to hear from you anytime, especially if you have questions or suggestions about the memoir-writing adventure.

See you around... and I'll always be at BoingBoing, faithful reader that I am, sipping coffee in the Comments.

Photo: Susie and her darling, "practically-perfect-in-every-way" daughter, Aretha.

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)

Note from Mark: Thanks, Susie for your wonderful, enlightening, and entertaining guest blog entries. We are looking forward to have you join us again very soon!

Inflating toy balloons with gas from the city mains - Modern Mechanix, June 1930.

GAS from the city mains can be used to inflate toy balloons with the simple inflating device shown in the drawing above. Gas as it comes out of the ordinary jet has only a pressure of a couple of pounds behind it, which is quite insufficient for inflating purposes.

Secure an air-tight tin can and fit it with petcocks as indicated in the drawing. Exhaust the can of air by filling it with water, closing the top petcock to prevent air from rushing in when the drain is opened. Now turn on the gas and the water in the can will slowly trickle out, forced by the gas pressure. When the can is full of gas, attach the balloon to the top petcock and then turn on the water supply from the mains. The water will increase the gas pressure to 40 pounds. The water, therefore, must be turned on slowly so that the balloon will not burst from excess pressure.

To fix the shroud lines around the balloon, which are necessary to support the basket, take a board and fix two brads in it, spaced apart to a distance equal to one-sixth the circumference of the balloon when inflated. Blow the balloon up gently with your lips until it is rounded out to the desired size. A third brad is driven into the board above the other two, and this distance equals half the circumference of the balloon. The bottoms of the shroud lines are left long for attaching to the basket.

A paper drinking cup is used for the basket. When the balloon is inflated and its neck tied with silk thread to prevent the gas escaping, fill the basket with half an inch of water and take out a teaspoonful at a time until the balloon rises. When cast loose it will stay low enough in the air so you can observe it for a long time. Before filling with gas, it is best to dip the balloon in talcum powder to prevent scratches from pricking the rubber and puncturing it.

In inflating the balloon, the neck is attached to the petcock through the shroud lines, as illustrated in the drawing. Be sure that the shroud lines are hung evenly so that the lily cup basket is directly under the center of the balloon. This insures an even, steady ascent.

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Nice snowman paper toy to make...

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Using a chip that's sort of an Arduino times 4, the Reprap team has a new prototype motherboard. Via hackaday:

When the RepRap team found themselves pushing the limits of the Arduino, they started looking for alternatives. They found it in the ATMega644P. It has four times the memory and four times the RAM compared to the ATMega168 used in the standard Arduino. It also has 32 I/O pins... this board has onboard connectors for all of the RepRap's motors... The goal is to eventually have a board that can run the RepRap without a host computer if necessary; it will manufacture designs directly from the flash card.

More here on the RepRap blog.

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You did it -- you survived another "holiday with the family."

Your (parent, sibling, soon-to-be-ex) is batshit crazy.  No satiric holiday movie comes close to the horrors you've witnessed. The Griswolds have nothing on your clan.

And then... you have the late, great Kris Kovick. Kris was a cartoonist, activist, author of "What I Love About Lesbian Politics Is Arguing with People I Agree With"- and a singular performing storyteller.

Her home-for-the-holidays classic recording is called Hair Pillow:

"Each person in my family is a different religion. It's like Belfast meets Beirut. There are Jews, Serbs, Catholics, red-neck Christian snake handlers, quietists, and noise-makers of all beliefs. My sister was recently married and her people were Portuguese. We were Serbian-Texans- guess how many guns I have? It made for great potluck, but very careful politics."

You can hear all of Hair Pillow at InsideStories, a site devoted to San Francisco oral history, including audio walking tours of Harvey Milk's San Francisco, and the Presidio Pet Cemetery.

Kris was one of the first cartoonists I met when I first got involved with queer-underground-journalism in my early twenties. But she reminded me we'd been introduced on a previous occasion. When I was 14 years old, she and my dad... were both dating the same woman. My father, in his great liberal fashion, calmly introduced me to both of them. I remember being fascinated by Kris because of a silver band she wore on her wedding finger dating from the days of her first great love. On the inside, engraved in perfect Edwardian script, was one word: "Bitch."

Alison Bechdel, Eisner-award-winning author of Fun Home, has some great cartoon memories of Kris. "Kris scared the living shit out of me. She kissed her dog on the mouth and had a dildo in a harness hanging from a doorknob in the living room. I was planning to rent a car to drive to Santa Barbara, but she insisted I drive her vintage 1956 pick-up."

The end of Kris's life came too soon (age 50) and was marked by the fact that she and her mother were both dying of breast cancer at the same time, not knowing who was going to go first. How is that funny? Well, Kris may have created the original Hospice Stand-up.

At one point in their terminal saga, Kris was the more able-bodied of the two and her mother was exhausted with living, helplessly tied up in tubes at the hospital:

Listen:

Thanks to InsideStories producer Paul VanDeCarr, Alison Bechdel, Luke Browne, and Ray Hellmann for helping me put together this homage.

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)

I bought this lovely painting by Cherri Wood as a holiday gift for my wife. It's titled "Not to Separate" (watercolor and ink collaged on rice paper). I learned about Wood through Thinkspace Gallery's exhibition in the Gen Art Vanguard New Contemporary Art Fair at Art Basel earlier this month in Miami, Florida. I like Wood's style a great deal and look forward to watching her develop. You can see her work on Flickr and at her LiveJournal.

Is it too late for potato latkes? Can I have some more?

It's never too late for latkes. You can eat potato pancakes all year round!

Is there a perfect recipe?

Yes.

Potato pancakes inspire controversy because of family traditions... everyone longs for their childhood memory. My recipe may not bring your great-grandmother to life, but I dare say you'll look upon me as a favorite aunt.


It takes forever to grate all those potatoes and cry over the onions- I want to devour my latkes, pain-free, NOW!

Immediate gratification is all about using the right tools. Use a 7-cup Cuisinart with the "grater attachment" to cut up the pototoes and onions, presto!

My latkes always turn out limp and bland; what am I doing wrong?

The key to tasty latkes is to get the water out of the potatoes before you fry them in hot oil. But  potatoes don't like to give up their water.

The miracle answer to a labor-intensive problem is an old-fashioned potato ricer. Don't ask me what else you do with this thing: I only know it as a latke-enabler!

Put a handful of the sopping potato gratings in the ricer's mouth. Press the handles together, and all the water is expressed through the sieve side- in one second! You don't even have to use two hands. You leverage one arm of the ricer against the other by propping it over the sink-top and pressing down. You only do it once- there's no other effort required.

Any other must-have tools? 

Yes, a cast iron skillet. Cast iron is the most precise and uniform conductor of heat, and when you fire up your frying oil, you want that "almost smoking" level of hotness in your pan, unwavering. That's what gives you the satisfying crunch!

Can I use flour, or some other gluten instead of matzo meal for my binding agent?

No! The matzo gives the texture you crave.

Can I make a lower-calorie, lower-fat latke that tastes just as yummy?

The fiber content of potatoes are good for you. You could increase that with by combining other gratings of even higher-fiber candidates, like sweet potatoes, zucchini, carrots- a different kick, but equally tasty. Remember, squeeze the water out of all of them!

There is no getting around the oil/butter/fry part, not if you want the "eyes-rolling-back-in-your-head" satisfaction. There is only one corner you can cut without detection: Use egg whites, lose the yolks- or at least cut down the yolks by half.

The secret to staying slim while you dance the latke fantastic is strategic fiber consciousness and portion control. Move away from the stove and serve yourself a couple of pancakes on a small plate with a huge helping of applesauce. Before you dig in, treat yourself to a fantastic butter lettuce salad with balsamic vinegar, or maybe a sweet tangerine. Afterward, turn up the Eartha Kitt really loud, to dance and sing your heart out!

(Susie Bright is a guest blogger)

Dick Tracy LG is bringing the wrist phone to CES this year. Rob has the details over at Boing Boing Gadgets.
"LG's wrist-phone coming to CES"

Warner Music's dispute with YouTube, where Warner Music suddenly claims that YouTube needs to pay more has been pretty silly from the outset. We pointed out that Warner has almost no leverage here. Warner Music needs YouTube a hell of a lot more than Google needs Warner Music to allow its content on YouTube. As if to drive that point home, some Warner Music artists are up in arms over the latest moves. Amanda Palmer, an artist signed to Warner subsidiary Roadrunner, is not at all happy about where things stand:

in other words, roadrunner is a subsidiary of warner and i'm stuck in hell with madonna and the other poor bastards, because warner wants more money. even worse, warner has almost no bargaining power...they're not even in the top ten of labels who have huge artists with material streaming on youtube. they're just starving for cash right now and they're doing anything they can think of to come up with cash. it's abSURD. they are looking for money in a totally backwards way.

money that, i should point out, i would NEVER see as an artist. if they got their way and youtube decided to give them a larger revenue share of the videos, it's very unlikely it would ever make its way into the artists' bank accounts....

did i mention that being on a major label is starting to seem like.....not such a grand idea?

You can bet that there are many more musicians feeling similarly right now -- and it's only going to make it more difficult for Warner Music (or any of its subsidiaries) to sign new artists or to retain the ones (like Amanda) who feel screwed over by the latest move -- all of which Warner will surely claim were done in order to "protect the interests of the artists."

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Yellow is the new black, according to Pantone. Specifically, the color company forecasts that the shade Mimosa is the hot color for 2009. This I learned from The City Sage, my new favorite style blog.
Pantone: Mimosa (annesage.com)

Japanese artist Ryo Sehata makes large sculptures from sellotape. Scientific American has a video interview with Sehata.
Sticky tape creations

In a refreshing break from all the doom and gloom, Amazon.com is calling this holiday season their best ever. Reporting a 44 percent rise the in number of items sold, they are refusing to provide actual dollar amounts, so it is still a very subjective measurement. "Amazon customers ordered more than 6.3 million items on Dec. 15, compared with roughly 5.4 million on its peak day last year, the company said. It shipped more than 5.6 million products on its best day, a 44 percent rise over 2007, when it shipped about 3.9 million on its busiest day. The company did not provide dollar figures and wouldn't say whether the average value of orders had changed, and the jumps it reported Friday are in line with increases Amazon has seen since it started releasing the figures in 2002."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today's mod pick of the day celebrates a single artist - Jeffrey Stephenson. His PC mods are generally made from wood and other retro materials and look quite awesome.

Let's take a look at some of the ones I found the most intriguing, shall we?

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While I'm not so sure about getting myself a MAKE: tattoo, I was willing to put my beloved 12" PowerBook under the laser when Tod offered. We etched a MAKE: logo and a graphic of an espresso portafilter on there. Anyone else want to share their laser etched laptop tattoos? Or, better yet, does anyone have a MAKE: tattoo under their own skin?

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Well, this is one effect of the housing meltdown I didn't see coming -- a resurgence of hardcore sk8 culture. Skaters in Southern California are repurposing dried-out pools in the backyards of abandoned, foreclosed homes, cleaning them out and transforming them into illicit skate parks. Let a thousand reverse ollies bloom. Snip from New York Times article by Jesse McKinley and Malia Wollan:

In these boom times for skaters, [a 27-year old Fresno skateboarder whose alias is Josh] Peacock travels with a gas-powered pump, five-gallon buckets, shovels and a push broom, risking trespassing charges in the pursuit of emptying forlorn pools and turning them into de facto skate parks.

“We can just hit them back to back,” said Mr. Peacock, who preferred to give his skateboarding name because of the illegality of his activities.

Skaters are coming to places like Fresno from as far as Germany and Australia. Mr. Peacock said his floor and couch were covered by sleeping bags of visiting skateboarders each weekend.

Some skateboarders use realty tracking sites like realquest.com and realtor.com to find foreclosed houses with pools, while others trawl through satellite images from Google Earth. On the Web site skateandannoy.com, where skaters trade tips about how to find and drain abandoned pools, one poster wrote about the current economic malaise. “God bless Greenspan,” the post read, “patron saint of pool skatin’.”

Skaters Jump In as Foreclosures Drain the Pool (NYT, Photo: Jim Wilson)

Over at i09, Annalee Newitz blogs about Lewis Casey, a Saskatchewan college student who built a home chemistry lab and was arrested by police who thought he was brewing meth. A few days later, the police realized that the chemistry major wasn't manufacturing drugs but kept him in the clink anyway because the lab could allegedly be used for making bombs. From i09:

On December 24, Casey was finally released into his parents' custody, pending a trial to determine whether he was building what police called "improvised explosive devices." Yesterday Casey's lawyer told local journalists:

My client is a very intelligent young man . . . he's very keen in chemistry, a very curious young person and very capable, very knowledgeable in the area and he was always curious with regard to chemistry, chemical compounds, chemical reactions, that kind of thing. So from my client's point of view, it's completely innocent insofar as he had no intention of creating any explosives or explosive devices. As people probably know, anything in your house can constitute or be used in chemical or explosive devices, including sugar and cleaning compounds, Mr. Clean, bleach, detergents, all those sorts of things.

"Teen with Home Chemistry Lab Arrested for Meth, Bombs"

I'm really intrigued by this sculpture by James Angus called "Bicycles." It's as if the two bikes are being viewed in not-quite-working 3D vision. The construction just incredible. Via VVORK.

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Science fiction pioneer Ray Bradbury, author of the Martian Chronicles, wrote the foreword to the recent special "space" issue of National Geographic. Bradbury wrote about Mars ('natch). From his essay:

In 1976 I was invited to stay overnight at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, waiting for news to come back from the Viking 1 lander, which was going to touch down on Mars and take photographs.

It was incredibly exciting to be there, surrounded by engineers, waiting for the first pictures. There was a tall gentleman standing next to me, who I thought looked familiar. At last I realized it was none other than Wernher von Braun, the man who had fled Germany for America to become the co-inventor of the rocket that took us to the moon and that was now taking us to the planets.

Early in the morning the photographs began to arrive. I could hardly believe I was seeing the surface of Mars! At 9:00 a.m., ABC television put me on the air to get my reaction.

The interviewer said, "Mr. Bradbury, how do you feel about this landing? Where are the Martian cities and where are all the living beings?"

"Don't be a fool," I said. "WE are the Martians! We're going to be here for the next million years. At long last, WE ARE MARTIANS!"

That was the end of the interview.

Ray Bradbury's "My Mars"

Global Voices Executive Director Ivan Sigal says,

We've been covering the latest Gaza crisis from the perspective of bloggers and citizen journalists for the past few days. Blogger coverage has been highlighting both sides of the Israel/Gaza conflict. It's captured here on a Special Coverage page.

We're' also focusing in on application use by Israeli and Arab bloggers, where we find it. This post for instance, is about ongoing discussion on twitter.

Additionally, Global Voices has recently started a donations drive, including a tax exemption option for US citizens. Global Voices Managing Director Georgia Popplewell explains the donations logic here:

Donations will help sustain the efforts of our authors and translators who work around the clock to bring you updates from conflict areas, natural disasters, and from the frontline of battles for freedom of expression.

Even a small contribution will help pay for server expenses, monthly fees for editors, and a small team of staff.

Additional funding will help us keep actively translating our content into more than 15 languages, and add new languages to the mix, ensuring that individuals and media professionals around the world have access to the diverse voices coming from citizen media at a time when coverage of international news is under serious threat.

(Disclaimer: I am a member of the advisory board of Global Voices.)

Articles in Rolling Stone and The Sunday Times this month introduce us to real life superheroes, basically vigilantes in spandex with names like Terrifica, Mr. Invisible, Master Legend, and The Ace. From Rolling Stone:

Although Master Legend was one of the first to call himself a Real Life Superhero, in recent years a growing network of similarly homespun caped crusaders has emerged across the country. Some were inspired by 9/11. If malevolent individuals can threaten the world, the argument goes, why can't other individuals step up to save it? "What is Osama bin Laden if not a supervillain, off in his cave, scheming to destroy us?" asks Green Scorpion, a masked avenger in Arizona. True to comic-book tradition, each superhero has his own aesthetic. Green Scorpion's name is derived from his desert home, from which he recently issued a proclamation to "the criminals of Arizona and beyond," warning that to continue illegal activities is to risk the "Sting of the Green Scorpion!"

From The Sunday Times:

In recent weeks, prompted by heady buzz words such as “active citizenry” during the Barack Obama campaign, the pace of enrolment has speeded up. Up to 20 new “Reals”, as they call themselves, have materialised in the past month.

The Real rules are simple. They must stand for unambiguous and unsponsored good. They must create their own Spandex and rubber costumes without infringing Marvel or DC Comics copyrights, but match them with exotic names – Green Scorpion in Arizona, Terrifica in New York, Mr Xtreme in San Diego and Mr Silent in Indianapolis.

They must shun guns or knives to avoid being arrested as vigilantes, even if their nemeses may be armed. Their best weapon is not muscle but the internet – an essential tool in their war on crime is a homepage stating the message of doom for super-villains.

"The Legend of Master Legend" (RollingStone.com), "Amateur crimefighters are surging in the US" (TimesOnline.co.uk, thanks COOP!)

The UK sure does have one impressively clueless culture secretary in Andy Burnham. We first came across him nearly a year ago, when he was suggesting that it should be ISPs' responsibility to deal with file sharing by monitoring usage and cutting off users who file share. Then, just a few weeks ago, he made an incredibly poorly thought out speech, where he pushed for copyright extension on performance rights, not for any good reason -- but because of some odd "moral" compunction to take content away from the public and give it to the record labels. For this he was roundly criticized by those who actually understand the topic.

But, of course, it appears he can't stop there. His latest move is to suggest that all websites should be rated and ISPs should be responsible for blocking access to inappropriate content, "for the children" of course. Burnham seems to think that the proliferation of information online is a bad thing:

"If you look back at the people who created the internet, they talked very deliberately about creating a space that governments couldn't reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now.... There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it."

Because, that's just what the world needs: more government censorship determining what is and what is not "appropriate" online. This is the typical mistake made by politicians who think the internet is a content platform, and not a communications platform. If he's going to censor the internet for such content, will he also make it illegal to say bad things over the phone?

To make it even more ridiculous, he wants to take the UK's libel laws -- already some of the most draconian around -- and make them even worse. He wants it to be easier than ever to sue for defamatory speech, apparently not noticing how many bogus defamation lawsuits are brought by those who are merely upset at being criticized, rather than defamed. Making it easier only encourages more bogus lawsuits.

Would it really be that out of line to suggest that a culture secretary actually understand the internet before trying to regulate it?

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museumpeace writes "InfoWorld executive editor Galen Gruman has brainstormed five different scenarios for Microsoft in the coming decade and solicits the reader's vote on which is more likely. Does it tank? Does it go open source? Does it out-Google Google? Does Ballmer really fill Gates' shoes?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE contributor Bill Bumgarner posted this gorgeous lighting hack that uses some IKEA stainless-steel cutlery caddies to solve a home lighting problem:

When we lived in New York City, we had these awesome cable lights with hand blown glass pendants and, in the middle in the picture left, an awesome little beaded center piece lamp over our living room table.

One goal of the remodel was to make sure that we had a place for the pendants to finally hang again after being in boxes for the past decade.

The glass pendants are hung above the bar between kitchen and living room and the bead shade was hung over the kitchen table.

But the shade was too small to hang by itself. Thus, we needed additional fixtures.

At first, I soldered a couple of stiff copper wires to the bottom of some 12v MR16 compact fluorescent lamps. Plenty of light, but obviously not terribly pleasant to look at a couple of random bare bulbs hanging about.

I have always been enamored by the cheese grater light fixtures in That 70s Show.

As we were heading to IKEA for other reasons, we decided to poke about the kitchen accessories area to see if anything Light Fixture-esque struck our fancy...

IKEA Lighting Hack

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Craft reader Adrienne tipped us off to this cool motorized yarn winder on Robot Party - if you don't have a small child around to turn the crank on the ball winder, you might want to automate it.

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dstates writes "AT&T left users across several Midwestern states without cellular phone service yesterday. The outage apparently resulted from a power failure at a Michigan switching center and spread to affect level3 Internet communications. The powerful windstorm also left 400,000 users without electricity. Interestingly, except for a few reports in Chicago and Indianapolis papers, AT&T has managed to keep this out of the mainstream media. Widespread communication failures also followed Hurricane Ike in Texas earlier this year. With the increasing trend for users to drop landlines and rely only on cell phones, this is becoming an emergency preparedness issue." Yes this included me. Still does. At least my office still has power — maybe we'll just camp here tonight. :)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As a bit of a non-Christmas gift, it appears that a patent holder, using the infamous Niro Scavone law firm (to whom the name "Patent Troll" was first applied) has sued Google, Apple and Microsoft over a patent that the patent holder appears to believe covers any sort of thumbnail image that shows some of the actual file. You can read the full patent for a system and method for iconic software environment management and then ponder what is allowed to pass as a legitimate patent these days. The patent was first filed in 2001, but the priority date appears to be 1998. Either way, you'd be hard pressed to find anything in the patent that wouldn't have been considered a natural progression in 1998 (or well before that). Nothing like ending the year with yet another ridiculous patent lawsuit.

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Recently at Boing Boing Gadgets, we looked forward to Sony's not-a-netbook, wondered at Apple's love of farts, and enjoyed Unboxing Day. John spotted lightsaber nunchaku and an armadillo breadbox. How about a fantastic Rubik's Cube lamp, a 1962 Sears brand chemistry set, and space-age origami? Don't forget your Infinity Man sunglasses! Rob saw a beautiful star atlas, a dubious plastic snow-shoveling contraption, and a cute robot puppy. He wants an Exilim phone from Casio, a bizarre folding keyboard from Nokia, and a wooden Wall-E. Walmart finally started selling iPhones, but they are not transparent iPhones and they are not hacked iphones. Israel spotted itself 1.22 computers per person, 25 percent more than any other country. Reed Savory reviewed LiquidTV, and the shambling virtual corpse of John Lennon shilled the OLPC. Mat Brady and Jesus Diaz invented the iPhone Pro. Lawyers! Psion, owner of the trademark "Netbook," is after companies using it to market their own products. A company patented thumbnail preview icons and is suing everyone. Finally, the proof: text messaging costs carriers effectively nothing, and they are gouging us.

This morning on the NPR shuffle podcast, they included a segment about Penny Arcade. Seems only fair since NPR did Achewood a few months ago. If they just get XKCD on there, then the universe can rest.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This morning on the NPR shuffle podcast, they included a segment about Penny Arcade. Seems only fair since NPR did Achewood a few months ago. If they just get XKCD on there, then the universe can rest.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HOW TO - Build a "net gun" Crispyjones writes -

I will show you how to build a net gun out of materials available at any big box home improvement store. This net gun is capable of firing a 90 square foot net 15 to 25 feet using 80-100 psi of compressed air. The net is reusable, assuming your prey doesn't destroy or run off with it. The launcher section is modular and can be removed in case you want to modify it or use a different design. You could thread on some 1" PVC pipe and have a Christmas Cannon.

The net gun is similar to many pneumatic launchers, but instead of launching a single projectile, it launches four tractors that pull the net through the air. The tractors are based on the fact that the neck of a standard soda bottle fits very well over the outside of 1/2" PVC pipe.

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This wireless MIDI guitar by Hojun Song from Studio HHJJJ in Seoul, Korea is a pretty nice build that uses a PIC16F87A microcontroller, battery, 3-axis accelerometer, FSR sensor, and others connecting to Ableton Live to create some noise. Check out the video to see it in action.

Wireless MIDI Guitar Photos of Build

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BenFenner writes "Two out of the three Virginia judges involved with Dwight Whorley's case say cartoon images depicting sex acts with children are considered child pornography in the United States. Judge Paul V. Niemeyer noted the PROTECT Act of 2003, clearly states that 'it is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exists.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Certainly there are lots of electronics and kits that have entered Makers' lives lately. Some people already know how to solder, but many people are just getting started. Amy posted a comment voicing her frustration at learning the seemingly guild like skill of soldering.

Below are my notes to Amy, which seemed like it would be handy information to others as well.

It can be done, this soldering thing.

Here are a few things that I try to keep in mind.
Workspace
Setting up on a reusable board or thick cardboard (not the corrugated kind) is good, because cleanup will be easy, and you won't run the risk of messing up the table.

Soldering iron
A decent iron is nice, but a cheap one can do. Turn off the cheap irons when not in use, because the tip seems to dissolve if left on. You don't need to spend lots of money on a fine expensive tool if you are just figuring it out. You can learn how to do it on a cheap or borrowed iron, then when and if you can recognize the difference and value, then spend the money or talk somebody into gifting you a good one. Lots of people like the temperature controlled ones from Weller.

Keep the tip clean. A wet sponge works, but I like steel wool better. Wipe the tip periodically. The sponge will cool the tip when you want it to be hot.

A soldering iron stand is good, but at least keep the business end of the iron from burning a hole through the board and onto the table.

Solder
Thin, lead free solder is good. Try to stay away from the lead based stuff. See the earlier comment about metals and the badness they cause.

Safety glasses
Most people only get one set of eyes. Replacements are difficult to have installed. You are better off to take care of the pair or one you have, than to get them repaired later. Wear your safety glasses while doing dangerous stuff.

Recognize the components:
Pretty much all electronic components have markings on them. Mostly they are done in small white print, but resistors are indicated with color bands. Look at the parts list, and search the markings on any components you are not familiar with. If you put a single diode or LED in backwards, that could be the problem that makes your circuit not work. Check and double check. Search for the things you have, and look at pictures of them. Check the documentation that comes with any kit you have for notes about what the components look like and how to handle them.

Looking at the pdf for the kit Amy mentioned, there are a few things that could slip you up. LEDs, transistors and capacitors are all polarized in this circuit. Make sure they are all in the right orientation. The transistor might be exotic, here is a page that has datasheets for it. l According to this page, you could use a 2N3904 to replace the BC547. The 3904 is a pretty common transistor, you should be able to harvest one out some junk device like a radio or toy.

Resistors are not polarized, but the color bands are completely essential to get right. Resistors regulate the flow of the current in the circuit. Electricity will always follow the path of least resistance. If you have a high value resistor in a place that calls for a low value one, electricity will not flow where it should. You can read them by looking at the colors. There are lots of great resistor color code calculators. Here is one that looks good, but there are many more online.

Multimeter
Resistance is measured in Ohms, often symbolized by an upside horseshoe, greek symbol for omega. If you can get your hands on a meter, you can set it for Ohms, and check your color band calculations against the numbers the meter will show. A multimeter is also handy to be able to check continuity and voltage. See this page for some info on how to use a multimeter.

Technique:
You are heating up the parts, not the solder. When the parts are hot enough, the solder will flow onto them. Touch the iron to the junction between the board and the component, let it heat up, then touch the solder to either the board or the component. Dumping it onto the tip will melt the solder, but often results in a cold solder joint.

Less is better in soldering
You should have the very least amount of solder needed to hold the component to the board. If you have blobby solder joints, you will likely have trouble with bad connections called cold solder joints.

Practice soldering
Sometimes it is a good idea to practice on junk. You can try soldering a wire onto a coin, US pennies work pretty good for that, they are mostly zinc with a bit of copper. Lots of other countries have other alloys, often with lots of aluminum in them, so I don't know about that. Aluminum wicks the heat too fast, so it probably wouldn't work.

You can also break apart an old radio or other device, cut some wires, get some parts and just solder some stuff together. After a bit you get the hang of it.

If you use the search box on any of the Maker Media sites and put in the word soldering, there are loads of resources that should help you get started.
You can watch the Make Weekend projects podcast on soldering, which is great.
Make Volume 1 had a primer on soldering.
Check out the post about a photo gallery of soldering basics.
Check out this great project for building your own fume extratctor.

There is lots of great information on soldering at Instructables.

This is not some mystical skill that people get handed to them from the tinkering gods. You learn it by doing it. You do it because you want to make something. You keep doing it because you want to make more interesting things. Learning this is just a process of getting some skills, and improving them by using them. Eventually, you can get to the point of designing your own circuits, but you can do lots of great things by following the path established by others. There are a small handful of tools that you can use with soldering and electronics. This kit has pretty much everything you need to get started.

Good luck, keep at it, and by all means, let us know about your progress.

You may have other tips for people who are new to electronics, kits and soldering. Please contribute your techniques and ideas in the comments. If you have photos and video, add them to the Make Flickr pool.

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David of Boing Boing points out this beast of an effect built by Chris Carter of the pioneering industrial group Throbbing Gristle. Originally built from a Practical Electronics article which can now be found in PDF form courstesy of Cloned Analog Gear - quite sweet … errr savory! - Chris Carter's original GRISTLEIZER

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I've been considering buying myself a "netbook" recently -- the mini-notebook computers that have become quite popular in the last year or so. As was recently discussed, such mini-notebooks have been around for years, but have finally figured out how to hit that right sweetspot that makes them worth buying in large numbers. I'd been following the various products on the market to try to figure out which one to get, but I realized recently that I had no idea where the whole "netbook" classification had come from. The Asus EeePC got plenty of attention when it launched about a year ago, and then there were plenty of follow up machines -- and somewhere along the line they all got lumped into the "netbook" category.

There's one company that isn't pleased at all: Psion.

For mobile computing geeks -- especially those in Europe, the Psion netBook was quite well known for years in the early part of this decade, as offering a pretty decent tiny computer, that (for whatever reason) never was much of a hit in the US. Either way, Psion gave up on the product somewhere along the way, but retains the trademark on the name, and caused a bit of a stir last week by sending out some cease and desist letters about the use of the term, noting (correctly) that it owned the trademark. There was some confusion over reports that some of these letters went to blogs and enthusiast sites, but the lawyers representing Psion were quick to clarify that most of the letters were sent to manufacturers and retailers -- with just a few that went to sites that actively ran advertisements for "netbooks."

Psion is probably in the legal right here -- though, there's a decent chance that they're too late on stopping the netbook name from becoming generic. While Psion claims that it still sells accessories for netBooks, it really doesn't sell the actual netBooks any more, so going the legal route seems a bit pointless. Why not capitalize on the trend by trying to sell products for today's netbooks, while noting that it was the original netbook maker. Rather than trying to keep the term tied to a dead market, why not use the fact that Psion was an early player in the space to help build up its own cred in today's market? The strategy of trying to get the world to use a different name, while legally correct, just seems short-sighted overall.

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oobject has a collection of vintage erector sets...

Before there was Lego, there was the Erector Set. This was an altogether different type of toy that resembled genuine engineering construction with trusses and girders, rather than plastic, primary color pixelated, objects.

Although Erector Sets are sold today, they are re-branded versions of a different toy. The original Gilbert sets were made from 1913 till 1967 and are an iconic toy for gadget aficionados that can be picked up relatively cheaply on Ebay. Here are 10 favorite vintage kits that are currently for sale (eBay).

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palegray.net writes "According to a new article published in Scientific American, the nature of and evolutionary development of animal intelligence is significantly more complicated than many have assumed. In opposition to the widely held view that intelligence is largely linear in nature, in many cases intelligent traits have developed along independent paths. From the article: 'Over the past 30 years, however, research in comparative neuroanatomy clearly has shown that complex brains — and sophisticated cognition — have evolved from simpler brains multiple times independently in separate lineages ...'"

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Here is a great sculpture of Wall-E. The post mentioned in the watermark has been modified to remove the picture of the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/search/groups/?q=wall-e&w=69453349%40N00&m=pool
">Wall-E in wood. The sculpture was apparently manufactured by Morpheus, a cnc shop in the states, from a design by some others in the UK. Not much info on this. The Morpheus site has no portfolio and is entirely run on flash.

How can you use CNC machines to make amazing physical representations of your dreams? Have you seen/made/commissioned something absolutely amazing lately?

From /Film via Reddit.

Join the conversation in the comments, and add your photos and video in the Make Flickr pool.

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There's been plenty of protests against Australia's latest plan to censor the internet, but it appears that the reason the filtering plan has been delayed yet again has little to do with tone deaf government officials suddenly having second thoughts -- but much more to do with the government's own inability to get its censorship act together in time. The whole process has been a bit of a mess from the beginning, so no surprise that the government would screw up its own launch efforts as well.

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Labs beta: As revealed last Thursday (our tenth anniversary) today we are flicking the switch on our latest (and potentially biggest) new site feature. Our Challenges system provides a mechanism by which photographic challenges can be both created and entered by any member of our community. The initial beta has a few limitations (see inside for details). That said we're excited to make this new feature available today and hope you will enjoy testing it, we would actively encourage feedback using the special link available at the bottom of all challenges pages.

New mashup Web site reveals the hole story behind Japan's manhole covers / Ittemia?????????

While not the oddest fetish in Japan by a long way, there are some who travel the length of Japan enticed by the prospect of a compellingly designed manhole. But while even the most ardent manhole cover buffs come up against the problem of too many manholes, not enough time, they now have a powerful ally: a new community Web site called Ittemia Zensen, started in August this year and featuring pictures of manhole covers from various regions of Japan and details on their locations.

Contributors can add photos of manhole covers directly from their mobile phones, along with global positioning system (GPS) data to mark its location on the map. While the site features pictures primarily of manhole covers from the Kanto region, those from other regions are also available, and many manhole covers feature locals sights and scenes, such as lanterns from the Kanto Festival in Akita; "gassho-zukuri" (thatched gable roof) farmhouses of Shirakawa in Gifu Prefecture, and scenes from the port city of Kobe.

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This is a really cheap way to get an L-Bracket for your tripod. Why use one? An L-Bracket keeps your camera centered over the tripod for added stability among other things. It's a great addition to anyone who shoots in the studio.

The cheapest one and honestly the only one, that I could find was the one by Kirk Photo. The thing looks great but its 130 dollars. I couldn't see spending that much on the L-bracket. I mean that's more money than I planned to spend on the head.

More about making an L-Bracket

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MAKE Flickr photo pool member Divine Harvester writes -

Removed lipstick, cleaned out remaining plastic pieces. Mixed up some J-B Weld, squished it down in the body. Took the guts from a thumbdrive and shoved it down into the J-B Weld. Added a little more around the edges, leveled it, cleaned up any smudges or drips. After it all set up, about 24 hours because it was below freezing in our apartment (don't ask). then i painted the top with some nail polish to make it look like some lipstick (kinda).

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ammorris writes "Don't be the laughingstock of your friends when you shout 'Happy New Years' a second too early ... The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service has announced that a leap second will be added on December 31, 2008 at 23h 59m 60s, meaning that this year will be exactly one second longer. The last leap second occurred Dec 31, 2005, they are added due to fluctuations in the rotational speed of the earth. You can read all about leap seconds on Wikipedia."

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The Local Application Control Bus System (LANC) is the protocol used by Sony camcorders (and some other brands as well) that allows external accessories to control the camera remotely. On most cameras, you'll find a LANC port next to your camera's other IO jacks—it's usually a 2.5mm headphone-style jack, or a 5 pin mini-DIN.

If you're an Arduino fan, you can easily create your own custom devices that can interact with your camcorder using the LANC protocol, allowing you to control zoom and record functions from your own programs. Goose wrote about his own project and example Arduino source:

I found source code to do LANC control with the Arduino board. It was written quite well - it worked the first time out. I made a few changes though, specifically changing it from being controlled by a serial port to being controlled by a potentiometer. I plan to build my own zoom controller with it, using an Arduino Mini.

The original code comes from Brady Marks. Make sure to check out the README and other documentation inside the source zip file. Along with the Arduino source, there's a bunch of LANC protocol documentation as well as some collected emails and mailing list discussion on the topic.

Zoomduino - Arduino Zoom Controller
SONY LANC Protocol Details
Brady Marks' Arduino LANC Source

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Blowit writes "With the Christmas holidays just past and opening up your electronic presents may get you all excited, but not for a selected lot of people who got the Mercury 1.5" Digital Photo Frame from Walmart (or other stores). My father-in-law attached the device to his computer and his Trend Micro Anti-virus screamed that a virus is on the device. I scanned the one I have and AVAST did not find any virus ... So I went to Virscan.org to see which vendors found what, and the results are here and here." Update: 12/29 05:44 GMT by T : The joy is even more widespread; MojoKid points out that some larger digital photo frames have been delivered similarly infected this year, specifically Samsung's SPF-85H 8-inch digital photo frame, sold through Amazon among other vendors, which arrived with "W32.Sality.AE worm on the installation disc for Samsung Frame Manager XP Version 1.08, which is needed for using the SPF-85H as a USB monitor." Though Amazon was honest enough to issue an alert, that alert offers no reason to think that only Amazon's stock was affected.

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rs232 writes with a link to a story at The Register which begins: "The executive in charge of the BBC iPlayer has suggested that internet users could be charged £10 per month extra on their broadband bill for higher quality streaming." The article suggests (perhaps optimistically) that "after years of selling consumers pipes, not what they carry, [tiered, site-specific pricing] would be tough to pull off."

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