Steve Smith's top 5 magazine vodcasts "you have to see" Some great ones in the list (I like The Onion & Cooks Illustrated) - MAKE is in the list too!

Digital Media Editor Steve Smith returns to the iTunes library this week in search of video counterparts to last week’s list of must-hear magazine podcasts. As this month’s Consumer Electronics Show demonstrated (see Steve’s commentary here), every gadget imaginable will be ready to receive all of that costly digital video publishers now pour online. What is worth watching on the big screen on your connected TV or even on the SUV’s drop-down LCD screen?

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Bubba writes "I just discovered this blog: Frozen Cache. It describes a concept for preventing cold boot attacks by saving the encryption key in the CPU cache. It is claimed that by disabling the CPU cache the key will remain in cache and won't be written to memory. The blog says they're working on a proof-of-concept implementation for Linux. Could this really turn out to be a working solution?"

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Michael Pyne sends in an article published at Reason Online 13 years ago, dismantling the entrenched myth that the Dvorak keyboard layout is a superior technology to QWERTY. The odd thing is that this 13-year-old article recaps research (refereed and published in a respected economics journal) 19 years ago. While we have discussed Dvorak many times over the years, I don't believe we have dug into this convincing-sounding refutation of the Dvorak mythology. The article is in the context of arguing against the conventional wisdom of "first mover advantage" — that the first product to market gains a large entrenchment benefit, such as VHS vs. Beta, MS-DOS vs. anything, etc. It's very much a pro-markets piece.

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Mike Vilensky of New York Magazine thinks we are laying off "staffers." I didn't even know we had "staffers." In any case we didn't lay anybody off. Newspapers AND Blogs Feel the Pinch

UPDATE: They corrected the error. Thanks, NY Mag!

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

• HOW TO - Blade Runner Origami Unicorn
  
• Shocking Chastity Belt
  
• Yarn Phone Book Art Installation
  
• HOW TO - Mutoscope
  

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Technology Review has a writeup on the latest advance in the lab towards an invisibility cloak made of metamaterials, described this week in Science. We've been following this technology since the beginning. The breakthrough is software that lets researchers design materials that are both low-loss and wideband. "The cloak that the researchers built works with wavelengths of light ranging from about 1 to 18 gigahertz--a swath as broad as the visible spectrum. No one has yet made a cloaking device that works in the visible spectrum, and those metamaterials that have been fabricated tend to work only with narrow bands of light. But a cloak that made an object invisible to light of only one color would not be of much use. Similarly, a cloaking device can't afford to be lossy: if it lets just a little bit of light reflect off the object it's supposed to cloak, it's no longer effective. The cloak that Smith built is very low loss, successfully rerouting almost all the light that hits it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

suraj.sun recommends a CNet post giving details of a still little-known energy technology: the ground source heat pump or geo-exchange system. This is distinct from so-called geothermal energy, which taps the heat in the earth to provide energy. Geo-exchange is suitable in scale for small industry — the article describes one commercial re-development of an old mill into apartment and commercial space that put in a geo-exchange at about half the cost of traditional fossil fuel-based alternatives. Even some individual homeowners are opting for this green method of heating and cooling, at a premium in price of about 50 percent (but costs are very much per-project, largely because drilling is involved). "Rather than use underground heat, geothermal heat pumps attached to buildings capitalize on the steady temperature of the ground or deep water wells. In effect, they treat the Earth like a giant energy savings bank, depositing or withdrawing heat depending on the time of year. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I think it's true of all literature, media and sex -- that it's not what you say that creates the attraction, it's what you don't say. Or don't show. Or don't know.

The imagination may be the most pleasurable or pleasure-seeking organ in the human body.

A naked woman isn't necessarily as sexy as one wearing clothes, something many visitors to a nude beach are surprised to discover. It's not a turn-on to see the naked bodies, full disclosure isn't sexy. It's the path, how you got there that creates the excitement.

It's something we discovered in the early days of podcasting, something that was known to our parents' generation, that listening to radio programs activates the imagination in ways that television and movies never can. It's almost physiological. The human brain can't help itself, it must fill in unknown detail. So if you tell a story with words and no pictures, the imagination takes over and tells the rest of the story.

Have you ever been shocked to find out what a favorite radio talk show host looks like, how different it was from who you imagined him or her to be? That's the effect.

In this way, the remake of Battlestar Galactica has been one of the most smashing successes of television scifi. Every time they fill in a blank, they reveal five unknowns to take its place, and your mind takes off wondering who or what is behind the next set of doors.

But now the series is in its final run of episodes, and last night was the first installment of that run, and now we know a lot of what we didn't know before. The characters are all depressed, as we are -- because the fun is over? What could possibly be next.

Heather Havrilesky, writing in Salon, says it's always like this. We remember the first Star Wars in 1977 (I sure do, I saw it at a packed theater on Capitol Square in Madison in the middle of a raging snow storm with a half-dozen room mates). "There's an evil guy and a princess (a princess!) and robots and planets with three suns. Suddenly, the whole world feels like it belongs to you!" Three years later I'm in Sunnyvale, watching the next installment with business associate, but it's just not the same. The magic isn't there.

Maybe the same with Battlestar Galactica. But only maybe. We don't know how this is going to turn out.

Now maybe I'm seeing the wisdom of the finale of The Sopranos. Maybe I don't want resolution of everything, maybe the series should end on the Mother Of All Cliff Hangers, the greatest imaginable, and one that never gets resolved.

We've already got a tease of what that might be, but there's still nine episodes to go, and I plan to watch each with the hope to not know everything, and to be delighted by the mystery.

On Fresh Air, Ed Ward talks about the wonderful Beatles-esque, pre-Big Star music that came out of Ardent Studios in Memphis in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some of the songs he talks about are available on the 2-CD anthology, Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story.

NPR's short history of Ardent Studios in Memphis

GameDaily recently spoke with Jason Holtman, director of business development and legal affairs for Valve, about online sales and piracy. Holtman took a surprising stance on the latter, effectively taking responsibility for at least a portion of pirated games. Quoting: "'There's a big business feeling that there's piracy,' he says. But the truth is: 'Pirates are underserved customers. When you think about it that way, you think, "Oh my gosh, I can do some interesting things and make some interesting money off of it." We take all of our games day-and-date to Russia,' Holtman says of Valve. 'The reason people pirated things in Russia,' he explains, 'is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television — they say "Man, I want to play that game so bad," but the publishers respond "you can play that game in six months...maybe." We found that our piracy rates dropped off significantly,' Holtman says." Attitudes like this seem to be prevalent at Valve; last month we talked about founder Gabe Newell's comments that "most DRM strategies are just dumb."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Environmental Graffiti has a roundup of amazing light phenomena photos, with nice pithy explanations of the science. Via Mr.Reid

The collision of electronically charged particles in the earth's upper atmosphere often creates magnificent light displays over the polar regions. The colour depends on the elemental content of the particles - most auroras appear green or red due to oxygen, however nitrogen sometimes creates a deep blue or violet appearance. This particular display is the famous Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights, named after the Roman goddess of dawn, Aurora, and the ancient Greek for the northern wind, Boreas.

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Two-for today - stainless steel teeth from yesterday's tomorrow...


Stainless choppers, Mechanix Illustrated - Apr, 1957.

Makes own false teeth of out stainless steel, Popular Science - Oct, 1937

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An anonymous reader writes "Robot innovation continued its relentless advances during 2008. SingularityHub has a showcase of the best robot videos of the past year. These robot videos are really amazing, and they show just how far we have come in the field of robotics in recent years." The videos include toy robots, robot musicians (which we've discussed in the past), modular robots that work together to move around, robots doing synchronized martial arts, the BigDog robot that can walk on almost any type of terrain, and robot soccer. We've also recently talked about a couple of robots that will bring you beer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HOW TO - Bronzing baby’s shoes Mechanix Illustrated, 1949 -

IT is said that the electroplating of baby shoes was conceived when a Scotchman saw a suit of armor during a visit to his ancestral home. Nowadays the “metalizing” of baby’s first shoes is reaching an astonishing popularity, based mostly on the permanence given such articles when they are protected against time with a coating of metal. Copper is the metal most commonly used, and it is enduring enough in itself, but for further protection and attractiveness the encasement of copper may be plated over with gold, silver or nickel. The electroplated shoes are stiff and rigid and may be displayed mounted or unmounted as permanent keepsakes.

Almost all kinds of baby shoes may be plated, including those with soft soles, creepers, and even knitted “shoes.”

Does any maker out there still do this? Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

Death Metal Maniac tips an Ars Technica piece suggesting that the media's coverage of Vista's flaws portrayed the operating system as worse than it was, and, if early reports on Windows 7 are any indication, positive hype will create the opposite reaction this time around. Quoting: "... the problem is exaggeration; ... bloggers and journalists alike use their personal experiences to prove their point in their writing. The blame doesn't solely lie with us, as Vista was by no means perfect, but we did manage to amplify the problems beyond reason. And if the beta is anything to go by, Windows 7 is going to fly. This is, by far, the best beta operating system the software giant has ever released. The media has locked on to this, and is using exaggeration already, before Windows 7 is even ready for prime time." Apparently a decent beta can succeed where $300 million and Jerry Seinfeld failed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Death Metal Maniac tips an Ars Technica piece suggesting that the media's coverage of Vista's flaws portrayed the operating system as worse than it was, and, if early reports on Windows 7 are any indication, positive hype will create the opposite reaction this time around. Quoting: "... the problem is exaggeration; ... bloggers and journalists alike use their personal experiences to prove their point in their writing. The blame doesn't solely lie with us, as Vista was by no means perfect, but we did manage to amplify the problems beyond reason. And if the beta is anything to go by, Windows 7 is going to fly. This is, by far, the best beta operating system the software giant has ever released. The media has locked on to this, and is using exaggeration already, before Windows 7 is even ready for prime time." Apparently a decent beta can succeed where $300 million and Jerry Seinfeld failed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jonah Bomber writes with this excerpt from Information Week: "In addition to Google's announcements about the elimination of 100 recruiting positions and the shutdown of offices in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden, the company said it would close Dodgeball, Google Catalog Search, Google Mashup Editor, Google Notebook, and Jaiku. It also said it's discontinuing the ability to upload videos to Google Video. ... Jaiku, however, will live on as an open source project. Gundotra said that Google engineers have been porting the microblogging service to Google App Engine and that when the migration is completed, the company plans to make the code available under the Apache license."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "You may recall that the RIAA walked away last week from one of their 'discovery' cases seeking the identities of 'John Does' who attended Rhode Island College. We have just learned that they walked away from another one, BMG Music v. Does 1-14, in Greensboro, North Carolina. 2 of the 14 John Does had settled, but the other 12 — who hung tough — will never be identified to the RIAA lawyers and will not have to pay any 'settlement.' This adds fuel to the debate over whether the RIAA has finally seen the light or is still sneaking around in the dark."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "You may recall that the RIAA walked away last week from one of their 'discovery' cases seeking the identities of 'John Does' who attended Rhode Island College. We have just learned that they walked away from another one, BMG Music v. Does 1-14, in Greensboro, North Carolina. 2 of the 14 John Does had settled, but the other 12 — who hung tough — will never be identified to the RIAA lawyers and will not have to pay any 'settlement.' This adds fuel to the debate over whether the RIAA has finally seen the light or is still sneaking around in the dark."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

StupidPeopleTrick writes "After the executive order signed in 2006, states are making strides with privacy breach notification but are struggling with enacting privacy laws and finding funding. With looming deadlines to move to e-records and e-prescribing, where will the money and the privacy standards come from?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Return to DIY ethic erodes service businesses" @ NYTimes.com...

A few months ago, as her family’s income fell, Laura French Spada, a real estate agent in Glen Rock, N.J., began dyeing her hair at home and washing the family cars herself. Her husband, Mark, started learning how to do electrical repairs.

Susan Todoroff, a personal trainer in Ann Arbor, Mich., has begun brewing espressos at home and cutting her hair and cleaning her house herself. And Tamar A. Zaidenweber, a health care market researcher in Astoria, Queens, is spending more time walking her dog instead of taking it to day care each week.

All of these consumers could praise themselves for their newfound frugality in the midst of an economic downturn. But every step they take toward self-reliance — each shrub they prune themselves, each cupcake they bake from scratch — hurts the people and small businesses that have long provided these services professionally.

I think once folks start doing more things for themselves we'll see more money going in to the economy, not less.... Here's some evidence...

Even as Americans cut back on restaurant dining, pet care services, professional hair and nail services, house cleaners and landscapers, companies producing some of the do-it-yourself products are seeing higher sales.

According to Information Resources Inc., a market research firm in Chicago, sales of products used in home manicures, home cooking and home medical treatments, among others, have experienced healthy growth in the last year. Dollar sales of cold-allergy-sinus tablets, for example, increased 17.2 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, according to Sageworks, a company that tracks sales at privately held businesses, revenue at physicians’ offices fell by 0.06 percent.

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Here's a torrent of Make: television episode 02 @ LegalTorrents.

Make: television episode 02 - Maker Cris Benton takes spectacular aerial photographs by rigging remote-controlled cameras to high flying kites. In the Maker Workshop John Park builds a Burrito Blaster, which can propel a burrito 50 yards, and Mister Jalopy shows off his giant iPod. The Maker Channel features vegetable flutes, cool remote control robots, printer that makes designs on a cafe latte, and a stealthy technique to park anywhere for free!

Make: television is the first TV show in history to launch on public television, iTunes, blip.tv, vimeo, YouTube & direct (full) HD downloads - each week when the episodes come out we'll post all the ways to get them.

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MPR: DIY invention show gets public television premiere...

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St. Paul, Minn. — A new TV show produced here in Minnesota premieres on public TV stations across the country this weekend.

MAKE:television highlights creative do-it-yourself projects that tinkers can do at home. However, one look at the show and thoughts of This Old House or Martha Stewart will quickly dissipate.

MAKE:television is the broadcast version of Make Magazine. It teaches people how to "hack" everyday objects, re-making them into useful -- and not-so-useful -- devices. Twin Cities Public Television produces the program, which premiers at 5pm Saturday in the Twin Cities.

John Park is the face of MAKE:television. He hosts the program's "workshop" segments and he joined Tom Crann in the studio along with Casimir Sienkiewicz, a St. Paul "maker" who's featured on the show.

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Catching up on some Make: television news (we're adding these to our news section here too)... Justin Barber @ Geek Squad has a great write up from the premiere...

"When I was a kid, we only had Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, and Erector Sets to indulge our fantasy of putting tinkering dreams to reality, so watching bits of Make Television episodes last night made me envious for the new generation of kids. Then I woke up and realized no one was stopping me from building these projects myself."

Geek Squad attempts to ‘Make:’ impression...

...Robert Stephens, founder and chief inspector of Geek Squad, came up with the TV sponsorship concept two years ago with the interest in creating programming around technology and science in a contemporary fashion.... “When you make science and technology interesting, you spark innovation,” said Stephens. “Geek Squad’s support of ‘Make:’ is our way of encouraging people to play, discover and create.”

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coondoggie sends along a NetworkWorld piece that begins, "The government... wants to motivate you to get rid of your clunker of a car for the good of the country (and the moribund car industry). A 'Cash for Clunkers' measure introduced this week by three US Senators, two Democrats and a Republican, would set up a national voucher program to encourage drivers to voluntarily trade in their older, less fuel-efficient car, truck, or SUV for a car that gets better gas mileage. Should the bill pass, the program would pay out a credit of $2,500 to $4,500 for drivers who turn in fuel-inefficient vehicles to be scrapped and purchase a more fuel-efficient vehicle."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Using a standard webcam and some Americium 241 from a fire detector, Jared Bouck created a PC interface for visualizing alpha radiation.

The basic idea behind this project is using the built in CCD in a USB web camera as a medium for alpha radiation to interact with. The result is a visual presentation of pops and streaks of light as the partials interact with individual pixels of the CCD. While this has a very nice effect and makes for a fantastic "screen saver", there are more practical and important possibilities with this project.

One of the applications I have envisioned for this project is a cheap and easy genuine random number generator. True random numbers in computing are nearly impossible, and successful solutions are very expensive systems based on radioactive decay or atmospheric measurements, for example. Using a small / relatively safe radioactive source and a high res CCD or CMOS sensor and assigning a value to each pixel and perhaps mixing in an algorithm or two with an inexpensive practical PCI card that is capable of generating genuine random numbers.

I dig the idea of this being used as a true random number generator. On this note, Jared mentions that you could use this in Linux with video_entropyd to add entropy data to the kernel's random number generator.

Alpha Radiation Visualizer
video_entropyd

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Kazushi Kobayashi's Chubu 01 is a robot from an alternate 1957 where robots are the primary mode of transportation. Build-it-yourself model kits are for sale in Harajuku's TOKYO CULTUART gallery at 28.000 Yen a pop ($350 or so).

????????????? ????????????? ???????? (Thanks, Francesco!)

Steampunk keyboard maker Datamancer has switched it up with this fabulous keyboard capped with Scrabble keys:

This keyboard was commissioned by a couple of friends of mine from back east (NJ) who are avid Scrabble players. Most of the keys are made from real Scrabble tiles that were all hand-beveled (truly an exercise in patience/masochism!) and built onto a USB, clicky, mechanical-switch keyboard. This keyboard was going into a Mac environment so I decided to use brushed aluminum for the casing and round all of the corners to keep with the sleek, simple Macintosh styling. Near the end of the build, I decided that the keyboard looked a little too minimalist so I added some silver hardware and a seam to put a slightly industrialized twist on the design.

The Scrabble Keyboard (via Make)

grunaura writes "South Korean researchers have devised a way to create graphene sheets one centimeter square using a hydrocarbon vapor on heated nickel. It's touted as being more efficient than the current process where graphene sheets are pressed, and there is evidence that 'the quality of graphene grown by chemical vapour deposition is as high as mechanically cleaved graphene.' Graphene is relatively new, but not to Slashdot. This round of news highlighting the technology focuses on the bendable nature of graphene sheets, as opposed to the memory applications or capacitive properties discussed here previously. These films are the closest we have come to superconductors at room temperature."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scrabble keyboard via Giz. Datamancer writes -

This keyboard was commissioned by a couple of friends of mine from back east (NJ) who are avid Scrabble players. Most of the keys are made from real Scrabble tiles that were all hand-beveled (truly an exercise in patience/masochism!) and built onto a USB, clicky, mechanical-switch keyboard. This keyboard was going into a Mac environment so I decided to use brushed aluminum for the casing and round all of the corners to keep with the sleek, simple Macintosh styling. Near the end of the build, I decided that the keyboard looked a little too minimalist so I added some silver hardware and a seam to put a slightly industrialized twist on the design.

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danboid writes "I'm an IT technician at a large school near Manchester, England. We currently have two separate networks (one for pupils, one for staff) each with its own Windows Server 2003 Active Directory box handling authentication and storing users' files. We're planning on restructuring the network soon and we'd like to be able to replace the two aging AD servers with a single, more powerful Linux server running an open source OpenLDAP implementation. The main contenders for this purpose seem to be Fedora Directory Server, OpenDS, and Apache Directory Server; but I've been unable to find meaningful comparisons among the three. I'd like to hear which solution Slashdot readers recommend. What is your experience with ease of implementation / maintenance? Any stories of similar (un)successful migrations? Any other tips for an organization wanting to drop AD for a FOSS equivalent?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hackaday has a great how-to on getting your newly designed printed circuit boards ready for manufacturing. They do a great job covering all the steps including the initial design, creating gerber files, verifying the files, and sending them out for production. This is a must read for anyone interested in manufacturing their own printed circuit boards.

there are several ways to turn an eagle design into an actual printed circuit board (pcb). we'll show you how to save eagle designs as industry-standard gerber files that are accepted by any pcb manufacturer. you can use the gerbers to order a single prototype, or a full panel.

More about How-to: Prepare eagle files for manufacturing

More:

How-to: Get 30 robot kits to market

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jeevesbond writes "Back in October of 2007 we discussed a bug that would dramatically shorten the life of laptops using Ubuntu. Ubuntu users will be glad to know that a fix has finally been released for Ubuntu versions 9.04, 8.10 and 8.04 (LTS). However, as this fix is not yet in the update repositories, anyone wishing to test it should follow these instructions for enabling the 'proposed' repository. Report your results on the original bug report. Happy testing!"

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