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User-agent: *The country's new robots.txt file
Disallow: /cgi-bin
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I'm glad I did.
Not because the Lincoln-Douglas debates live up to the myth (they don't -- and probably nothing could) but because of all the flaws and human foibles they disclose about these two towering orators out of America's past.
The recordings are performed by David Strathairn (Good Night and Good Luck, The Bourne Ultimatum) and Richard Dreyfuss (American Graffiti, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, etc). Strathairn sounds pretty much what you'd expect Lincoln to sound like: folksy, a little unpolished, humble, but sharp. Dreyfuss plays Douglas for a goad, nasal and grandstanding (and judging from the text, this isn't a bad guess at how he must have sounded).
(For those of you unfamiliar with the debates: Abraham Lincoln stood as the first-even Republican candidate for the senate, running against Judge Stephen A Douglas, an incumbent from Illinois; they conducted seven debates across the state, focusing on the question of slavery.)
The debates start out with Lincoln on the back foot. Douglas has his number, exactly the right combination of insinuation and accusation to get Lincoln frothing and shouting and interrupting, a spectacle that goes on until Lincoln is literally dragged off the stage by his buddies, who audibly mutter warnings about alienating the crowd (stenographers from the Chicago papers got every word).
But as the debates wear on, Lincoln manages to get his temper under control and to resist Douglas's provocations, and once he does that, he reveals himself as a swift thinker-on-his-feet, rebutting Douglas smoothly and lucidly, bounding out of his seat when his time starts with absolutely unbeatable logic (he's also funny and sometimes rude, as when he wonders aloud if Douglas has gone insane, or tells a hilarious joke about a fisherman's wife whose drowned husband is dredged up filled with eels) ("Take the eels out and set him again.")
Douglas, by contrast, is so relentlessly, stodgily on-message that it becomes a chore to listen to him, as he repeats his points again and again (and again and again), sometimes word for word. Douglas was the senior politician (Lincoln having only served a single senate term at this point), and he relies on his seniority more than his wit to carry the day, running off the same phrases until they lose all meaning and power.
What was surprising to me was how much of the debate hinged on what had been said previously, and where. Lincoln wants to prove that something was said in Congress, but he has to fetch up some gigantic, leatherbound book by stagecoach to the next city in order to prove it. They debate newspaper accounts, times and dates, items from the federal register -- if Google had existed at the time, the debates probably could have been dropped from 16 hours to about three.
There's also an enormous amount of attention lavished on what the framers of the constitution meant by "All men are created equal" (specifically, whether black men were part of "all men"). In this regard, the slavery question under debate sounds an awful lot like other constitutional debates, niggling over the meaning and sense of the foundational document of the Republic. But the majority of modern constitutional debate I've been privy to treats the constitution as sacred because it's the rules of the game, the thing you need to agree to in order to be an American. By contrast, Douglas and Lincoln argue about the framers' intent because the framers were infallible geniuses, and if they intended slavery for the union, then slavery it should be. This scriptural debate is almost talmudic in character.
The debate progresses by inches (largely thanks to Douglas's stubborn refusal to stop repeating himself), but as it rises and falls, both of the men lose the veneer of civility and resort to the kinds of smears that we're apt to shake our heads at in modern debate, the kind of thing of which we say, "Oh, to have the Lincoln-Douglas Debates and their substantive civility!"
But Lincoln and Douglas accuse each other of being liars, oath-breakers, conspirators, and say that their respective views are indications of insanity. And the audience hoots and hollers and cheers them on (thousands of people standing for three hours while Lincoln and Douglas go at it hammer and tongs in the August heat -- it's no wonder that they were glad of a little prurient fire).
Douglas's main objection to Lincoln is that he is a radical who wants to end slavery immediately. He claims that all of Lincoln's reasonable middle-ground talk is just code for a revolutionary agenda that he is sure to unleash on the nation, bringing it to the brink of collapse through violent upheaval. In this accusation, it's hard to fault him. (There's plenty else to fault him for -- for one thing, he's clearly working to bring slavery to the whole country, and he's a racist even by the low standards of 1858).
And Lincoln? Well, when it comes to race, he's kind of a jerk, though perhaps not compared to many of his contemporaries. He repeatedly affirms that he does not want to end slavery abruptly, but over a gradual process lasting a century or so, fairly compensating slave "owners" for the loss of their "property." And while he speaks of slavery as a great evil, he nevertheless promises that he does not want to give black people citizenship, the vote, or the power to sit on juries or intermarry. He avers that black people are racially inferior, "incapable of self-government," but that they are nevertheless entitled to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." This isn't Lincoln the liberator as we know him -- and while many of his contemporaries were worse, there were plenty of comrades in his cause with the courage to speak of true equality.
One thing you can say about Lincoln, though: he was a fast learner. Over the seven debates, he gets snappier, more controlled, sharper, while Douglas degenerates into Cheney-esque sour muttering. By the end of things, Lincoln feels like a winner (and despite this, he lost the election!) (but won the next one).
BBC America is selling the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a DRM-free MP3 download through Zipidee for $30. This 18 hours is a crash course in rhetoric, politics and history, and I say it's cheap at the price.
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (DRM-free MP3 download)
Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 on Wikipedia, Lincoln-Douglas debates text on Google Books,
(Image: Lincoln debating douglas.jpg, public domain image from Wikimedia
From the MAKE: Flickr pool
Another laser project from Flickr member Phozon, this time packing the diode, power, and switch in a minty package - Another lunchtime LASER project
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Breathing into your cupped hand and then sniffing is an ineffective way to check for bad breath. The Kiss-O-Meter might work better. Brownlee has more over at Boing Boing Gadgets.
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Steve Davee, whose Maker's Notebook hacks we've covered before, sent us a progress video. Here, he shows the LED binary indexing cover he introduced in the Maker Faire video, and a second project, to put a membrane keypad and LEDs in a cover that will eventually hook up to a microcontroller and will respond to various environmental variables, button presses, etc. He also teases a third Notebook that's been hacked by one of his students (he's a grade school teacher).
More:
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Not your ordinary laser printer -
A few years back a good friend of my said to me "I have this great idea, lets mount a paint ball gun on an X,Y turret and make a huge inkjet printer!" After a little research we found that it had already been done... (and the time that it has taken me to get this published the MythBusters have done it as well, search youtube)The project is currently still in progess after a servo failed during calibration - work so far is still quite sweet. LaserProject Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Imaging | Digg this!Eventually we setteled on a servo driven mirror to aim laser light at photo paper to create a "Laser Printer"
ETech 2009We live in two worlds: one filled with abundance and the other with constraints. The abundant world has access to the Internet and other educational tools, to the latest advances in medicine and, up until recently, access to "plenty" of energy. The constrained world has to make do with what's available. With limited food, water, fuel, medicine, the people and their ideas are often the cheapest part of the equation.
What technologies cross the divide? How do the two worlds interact and cross-pollinate? On the surface, they wouldn't seem to overlap but, on deeper examination, inhabitants of both worlds learn from each other constantly.
Nataly Dawn sings "The Big Idea." As sientalo says: "Recording a video in someone else’s backyard without their permission = WIN"
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In order to investigate the effectiveness of non-traditional heatsinks on the TO-220 component package, Warren tested out several approaches with pennies and even a paperclip.
In a recent thread on Head-Fi, someone asked how well a paperclip would work for heat-sinking a TO-220 part. Much speculation ensued (much of it from your humble author), including opinions that a penny might work better, and then the argument moved on to exactly how to use the penny and so on. I eventually decided that experimentation was called for, which lead to this article.Perhaps surpisingly, the paperclip proved mightier than a single pennny. Read the detailed results of further testing - DIY Heat Sinks [via Hacked Gadgets] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!
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Threadless is also offering an "all over" printed t-shirt featuring the Faesthetic #10 cover art by Mike Perry and Jim Stoten. Faesthetic (faesthetic.com), Faesthetic Number 10 tee shirt (theselectseries.com)Gluekit, Panayiotis Terzis, Pedro Lourenço, The Artist's Guide, Think Faest with Playlab by Forest, MOMO, Craig Atkinson, Skullphone, Anke Weckmann, Zeke S. Clough, Colin henderson, Maxwell Loren Holyoke-Hirsch, MWM, Tan Nuyen, Daniel Hipolito, Dan Zvereff, Philip Tseng, Nanami Cowdroy, Jon Contino, Sandy Carson, Mitch Beige Brown, Lorin Brown, Julia Heglund, Dave Z Franzese, Wotto, David Creighton-Pester, Toby Neilan, Mike Marsicano, Susan Coady, Aaron Hogg, Nicholas Gazin, Robin Footitt, Samantha Hahn, Jemma Hostetler, & Adam White.
Todd Wiley writes to us:
We're starting up a co-op hacker space in Lexington, KY. Were going to have a brief planning meeting this Thursday, 7PM, at Common Grounds (343 East High Street). I hope other area makers will come out and pitch in. I'll likely be keeping information flowing on twitter.com/xtoddx.Common Grounds Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this!
As the title suggests, s3fs is a FUSE-based file system for Amazon S3. What this means is that you can mount an S3 bucket and use it just like a standard disk—a crazy-huge distributed disk that you can mount from any machine.
s3fs supports mode (e.g., chmod), mtime (e.g, touch) and uid/gid (chown). s3fs stores the values in x-amz-meta custom meta headers and uses x-amz-copy-source to efficiently change them....
If enabled via "use_cache" option, s3fs automatically maintains a local cache of files in the folder specified by use_cache. Whenever s3fs needs to read or write a file on s3 it first downloads the entire file locally to the folder specified by use_cache and operates on it. When fuse release() is called, s3fs will re-upload the file to s3 if it has been changed. s3fs uses md5 checksums to minimize downloads from s3.
The folder specified by use_cache is just a local cache. It can be deleted at any time. s3fs re-builds it on demand.
While this will technically function as a cvsroot or mysql store, it's probably a bad idea to use it this way, as writes mean copying the whole file across the network, making that use particularly error prone and inefficient.
More interesting is using this as a simple way to manage web files that you are delivering over S3 via HTTP. Most content management systems can be configured with an alternate path for file uploads, and you could basically cloud-enable all of your asset storage without rewriting a line of code.
This could also serve as a network drive for less frequently updated data, such as your desktop's mp3 or photo folders, or a backup drive for nightly rsyncs.
s3fs - FUSE-based file system backed by Amazon S3
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An internet prankster tells Boing Boing:
Early this morning in San Francisco, Bush Street was changed to Obama Street along its entire length, from Presidio to Battery. If you link to this, please link to the "obamastreetsign" tag as there will probably be many other photos of the changed signs. (Or perhaps wait for an official statement from whoever is responsible.)flickr link for evidence/images. Snapshot cropped above courtesy Tim Pratt.
All of the train lines converged on Union Square at the end of the mission, which means that within a short stretch of time 1,200 pantless people passed through the station’s exit turnstiles.No Pants 2k9 at Improv Everywhere
It was about 30 degrees out and still snowing when we made it to Union Square, but everyone was having too much fun to put their pants back on. Many participants hung out in the cold for over an hour, laughing with friends new and old.
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Lotje says:
Back in 2006, AOL accidentally published a ton of personal search histories online. Our new Minimovie "I Love Alaska" is the audio-visualization of the Internet search queries of a lonely Texan housewife, put together by 2 Dutch artists Sander Plug and Lernert Engelberts (the same guys who made the melting bunny carnage).
ConsciousFlesh useless projects is a site for (mainly) retro-tech projects such as nixie tube clocks, Tesla coils, Jacob's ladders, tabletop ballista, and steampunk casemods. Seen above are a Jacob's ladder, a wood- and brass-cased thumbdrive, a wooden computer casemod with a vacuum tube power indicator, a USB switch with a nixie selection indicator, and a brass gyroscope built around a motor from a laser printer. Lots of other projects on the site too.
ConsciousFlesh useless projects [via Steampunk Workshop]
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Reference Library has compiled a small gallery of amateur portraits of President Obama. This one looks like a morph between Obama and Danforth Quayle.
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In his book The Future of Money, Lietaer points out - as the government did yesterday - that in situations like ours everything grinds to a halt for want of money. But he also explains that there is no reason why this money should take the form of sterling or be issued by the banks. Money consists only of "an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange". The medium of exchange could be anything, as long as everyone who uses it trusts that everyone else will recognise its value. During the Great Depression, businesses in the United States issued rabbit tails, seashells and wooden discs as currency, as well as all manner of papers and metal tokens. In 1971, Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, kick-started the economy of the city and solved two major social problems by issuing currency in the form of bus tokens. People earned them by picking and sorting litter: thus cleaning the streets and acquiring the means to commute to work. Schemes like this helped Curitiba become one of the most prosperous cities in Brazil.If the state can't save us, we need a licence to print our own money
In 2007, I received a travel grant to visit various medical and anatomy museums in Europe. In particular, I was interested in those museums with extensive teratology — the study of "monsters" — collections. During late January and early February 2008, I traveled to England, France and Holland drawing from and photographing (with permission of the curators of each institution) interesting specimens and objects.European anatomy museums (Thanks, Imogene!)
England reveals that the whom and and in the thousand 1006 hundred and was last illusion Hall William Law will little wilderness blinking wilderness in the room is being 00z7J no longer a linked to the little were illusion he Moorhouse will growa long school illusion of the 00z7J in the North t of functional is those motion world is the gross endorsement for all the rebel will is the whom the present will only for what a shows the I and in a genre while the was England in usual with a 0200 an are so is 100 and close problems longer what all the more of the Sir's 31 and no row was will not the war against the little for the o to lose their than the moreover one little of it is the at at 0 0 drinking had England and the little is all the below the loan England with the of the under whose appeal those of 2 it was the 2/room day care England 102 00z7J a 001 hundred and mainly acknowledgingcan and get a wall revealed in the visible illusion reserves in the those 00z7J will lose the than in the in the winning the will be e room through the those who the those warrant it will not a 0 loss in a 001 loss the block the Englan children are less you are listening the room in the day it will is a 0 loan the roof of a long 0 am and the 2007 00 in the was will those and conclusions were more possible that they will those 0clusion of all have a 2000 and are from a 0 am and resources are the in a and about the and the so 0100 for a 0 00z7J the 0 00z7J 0This is what most political speeches and church sermons sound like to me.
Obama Inauguration Speech via speech-to-text application
Sometimes, a review of even the easy things can be helpful. Like building a fire, for example.
Here's the actual bow-based method pictured, and another overall guide here.
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Mass Quantities of Code t-shirtLong known as a home of innovation, Silicon Valley is now known for something else: spreading the use of mass quantities of code. Code, also known as "zeros 'n ones" or "lines," is fast becoming a full-blown epidemic, even small towns.
Today is a big day for our nation, as we listened to the inaugural address, the call for makers, scientists, engineers and roll-up-your-sleeve values came across loud and clear... Politics aside, here's to the the next 4 years everyone, let's make it great, together.
In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.
For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act - not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this!
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Canon and Nikon have released firmware updates for the 40D, D3 and D700 DSLRS. All three updates correct rare errors and make minor changes to camera behavior. The 40D is updated to firmware v1.1.1. The Nikon D3 moves to v2.01 and the D700 to V1.01. Full details of all the issues resolved are made on the relevant company's websites. Click here for direct links to the downloads. Comments Off [link]
From Obama's Inaguration speech:
"...the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things..."
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This week I am going to be making the Open Heart kit by Jimmie Rodgers. It's a great open source kit that uses a technique called Charliplexing for lighting up the LEDs. Why? Charlieplexing allows you to control each LED's state individually. All you need to do is create a simple program and upload it to the Arduino and you have a really cool animated LED display. Don't worry about how to generate the code, Jimmie has made a great Flash interface that does all the coding for you. All you have to do is cut/copy/paste to the Arduino IDE and the LEDs will start running the animation.
The Open Heart is an LED matrix of individually addressable LEDs. It can be used to create a broach or bag light with highly customizable animations. It can be configured so that you can temporarily attach it to fabrics with headers that you simply push through, or you can configure it to be sewn into a project using conductive fabric for a more permanent setup. I have also created a simple flash programmer that you can design animations with, and it will generate the Arduino code for you. That way you just copy, paste, upload, and enjoy.
You can pick up your own Open Heart kit in the Maker SHED. You can get your Arduino there too!
Jiimmie has a great set of instructions available on his website. One of the great things about this open source kit is the ability to hack and mod it how you like. Let's get started making my version of the Open Heart.
What you need:
The Open Heart kit comes with everything you need except for an Arduino to control the LEDs. The kit was designed for use with any Arduino compatible board, but any micro-controller with the right programming can control the LEDs.
Step 1: Build the Open Heart
Start by adding all the resistors. There are (6) resistors that need to be soldered to the PCB. There is plenty of space to add them all at once.
I first met Arthur C. Clarke in the 1950s, on the occasion of his first cross-Atlantic visit to New York City By then Arthur had established himself as a first-rate science-fiction writer and he did what sf writers do in a strange city: He looked for other sf writers to talk to.The Way the Future Blogs: Frederik Pohl (via Making LightHe found them in the rather amorphously shaped group that called itself the Hydra Club, where I was one of the nine heads that had been its founders. We became friends. We stayed that way for all of the half century that remained of Arthur’s life. We met when chance arranged it — at a film festival in Rio de Janeiro, at an occasional scientific meeting, at assorted “cons” — sf-speak for science-fiction gatherings — in many places at many times.
In the early days Arthur spent a lot of time visiting New York, usually staying at the Chelsea Hotel on West 23d Street, and when possible I would join him for dinner or a drink — that was all expense-account money and happily paid for by my publisher, because I was an editor in those days and eager to publish as much Clarke as I could get my hands on. But by the turn of the millennium our friendship had reduced itself to a desultory correspondence and the odd phone conversation. I had given up editing to concentrate on my own writing. What Arthur had given up was ever leaving his island home in Sri Lanka, where I had never been. (Although I visited a number of other countries, Sri Lanka wasn’t one of them.)
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This installation by Magdalena Kohler and Hanna Wiesener called "Gelsomina" records your voice and knits the waveforms of the sound on a knitting machine controlled by 24 servos. I just got an electronic knitting machine and I can't wait to dig in and hack together a computer connection for just this sort of project. Via Bre Pettis.
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Meagan sent us a link to her Big Box of ADHD project. I think it would be a super way to help kids (and grownups) organize their brains and ideas.
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"The economic effects of file sharing short- and long term are strongly positive" [Interesting approach here: They give the well-being of people also economic value...]
"With regards to the music business we can say that downloaded recordings are not necessarily a lost sale"
"Lot's of people download for free to learn about new music and eventually buy when they like it"
"The calculations of the industry [about the losses caused by illegal downloads] are not necessarily correct because they are based on a lot of assumptions and contain a lot of uncertainties because underlying data is not known with any accuracy"
(So far we were still only on page 3)
"Downloading goes hand in hand with buying"
"Among downloaders of music and movies, the percentage of buyers is as high as among non-downloaders and with games the percentage of buyers is even higher"
"People that download music visit concerts more often and buy more merchandise"
"The practice of file sharing implicates that the producers [their definition is a bit vague here] need to change their business model"
"That is why innovation of the business model is now of the utmost urgency"
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This site shows some really nice enclosures that were built to house a basic sensor board. The housings include one made from an old Sea Salt tube, Squeeze Bottle, video mailer box, cardboard poster tube, and a Canary (shown above).
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Who said patch bays were just for analog gear? ... well someone at some point did, I think. Mike's styling MIDI controller sports a re-reoutable panel full pots and photocells fed through a MidiTron board -
The controls on the instrument include 20 assignable potentiometers (knobs), 5 assignable photocells (at varying resistance), and a patch-bay allowing the user to decide which knobs or photocells are linked to which pin outs on the MidiTron (you can basically choose which knob (or light sensor) controls what function in your software, allowing you to change control over software parameters physically, without going into code.A fresh approach to popular software controller interfaces and aesthetics. - MIDI controller
[via NYCResistor]
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Devin created a digital version of the classic ondes Martenot electronic instrument using a USB Gametrak controller -
Like the Ondes, I wanted the controller to give continuous and fluid pitch adjustments, a deep volume control, and offer a range of timbres.Definitely an interesting project should you find one of the controllers for cheap - The Ondestrak Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Instructables | Digg this!All of the materials needed for this project are a Gametrak video game controller, a copy of the programming environment Max/MSP (found at Cycling '74), and a few sundry pieces available at any hardware store.
This hack shows how to lengthen your camera's flash cord by building your own with a CAT5 cable and some spare jacks. This was tested with both 5 feet and 50 feet extensions and it worked flawlessly to trigger the flash. Much cheaper than shelling out the cash for new cable.
via DIY Photography
Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we asked if Mike Arrington was the next Steve Jobs; helped you Change Back with our handy de-Appling guide, found benchmarks of the new OQO 2+, and wondered whether trying to rescue a Polaroid film factory was worth it.
John saw a lovely scrabble-tile computer keyboard, a robot horror show, and what can only be described as a steampunk Vader mask.
Joel spotted a wooden Vespa scooter, an SUV with machine guns, a beautiful motorcycle, and a Lego Delorean.
Mitch Altman completed his world tour of hackerspaces: read the whole series!
Rob completed his tour of the Circuit City liquidation sales and played with the new Tamagotchi Music Star.
There was a space invaders piggy bank, abandoned Soviet light houses, and "Oddage," a bizarre iPhone game.
Shortly after our previous President took office I wrote: "Now I'm not a Republican, far from it, most of the things Republicans stand for are things I'm against. But there's something satisfying about the Bush Presidency, and for a time I couldn't put my finger on exactly what it is. Now I think I get it. If this guy could be president, anyone could. He bumbles along twisting around his mouth when he speaks, with his Texas accent that I don't believe. I imagine him on the scene of The West Wing, reading his lines, and sipping his coffee saying "Oh this is really good coffee, thanks." He gets his cues from Dick Cheney, but he could just as easily get them from a TV series director. Smile here. Say something nice about America. Good job Dubya. Excellent."
"Click and Glue" is an autonomous installation that "locks itself into a corner" using a complex system of mechanical actions. The piece consists of a floating balloon equipped with a hot glue gun, nylon threads, electro-magnets, and an enclosure built with steel walls. The Balloon bounces between the walls puling a nylon thread behind itself, when it hits a wall, it sticks to the wall with magnets and uses the glue guns to anchor the thread down. The result is a nylon web woven with the threads filling the space. Check out the link below for some videos of the piece in action.
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From the MAKE: Flickr pool
Matt's long unfulfilled dream of an explosive audio player has finally been realized with help of a hacksaw, 1GB mp3 player and a inactive(pretty sure) hand grenade -
Final form of the mp3 grenade... playing music albeit with a busted ground on the 1/8th inch.. .easy fix... will finish that up... electrical tape into place... and then seal up with jb weld for epic win. Sansa 1 GB internal loaded with Kompressor mp3s purchased legally off amazon mp3s. This is the worlds most utterly badass mp3 player. So badass in fact that you can't use it as you might die a horrible painful death. Fear the newest weapon in the war of music piracy! ARRRRR!Ahhh … I'm quite certain Mr. Kompressor would be very proud. Hope Matt didn't have plans for listening to this thing on the train/sidewalk/gym/anywhere public. - Shots of the mp3 grenade! on Flickr and more of the story on NYCResistor Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this!
This video shows Joseph Melnyk "playing around" with a 256 button Monome. If you are unfamiliar with the open source Monome project check out Monome.org. There isn't much more about this amazing 256 button Monome, but you can read more about Joseph on his website. If you though that video was cool, check out this one where he uses a smaller Monome to do some live sampling. Amazing!
Uses a modified version of brian crabtree's mlr patch, on the monome 256. basically just playing around, getting used to how fun it is to use this new beauty of mine :)
More:
Open-source grid controller - The Monome
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(Flash video embed above, MP4 download is here.)
One year ago, Pesco blogged about a cool new "socialist-realist" style poster created by street artist Shepard Fairey for the Barack Obama presidential campaign (shown at left). Fast forward to today, January 20, 2009: the day Obama will be sworn in as President of the United States.
Sean Bonner and I visited Shepard's art gallery in LA some weeks ago with Boing Boing's video team to talk with Shepard about how this image came to be. We also wanted to know what the past year has been like for the artist most of us here on the blog previously knew as "The Andre The Giant Has a Posse Guy."
The moment we walked into the space, Shepard had picked up a call on his cellphone, was staring intently into space, and uttering a lot of thoughtful "mm-hmmms." When he hung up the phone, he turned to us and smiled. I asked who he'd been on the phone with, and he explained the call was from Obama's staff, telling him for the first time that an adaptation of this same poster would be used as the official inauguration poster.
Inauguration day has come, and with it, the beginning of a new era in America. I don't know what this era will bring. I don't know what kind of president Obama will be. But I hope we achieve what Shepard's poster said: progress.
(Special thanks to Q-Burns Abstract Message for graciously allowing us to use his music in these videos, including a remix of "Angel Soup" by Cold Hands, on Blunted Funk Records.)
This video goes over a few different DIY portable stove configurations. The maker gives enough detail about each stove so you can easily make one for yourself. The performance specs of these little stoves is fairly impressive.
Found on YouTube
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(Flash embed above, MP4 download is here.)
Boing Boing pal Sean Bonner of Metroblogging and decades of internet troublemaking fame is in DC for the presidential inauguration, serving as our roving correspondent. He shot this impressionistic report of cool art, kitschy ephemera, and other wacky public displays of Obamamania. Included in this Boing Boing video episode: a peek inside Yosi Sergant's amazing Manifest Hope art show, including an amazing wire sculpture of Obama by Michael Murry. Also, a street installation in DC's Adams Morgan area, which invites passers-by to tell the president what they hope he'll do once he's sworn into office today.
Below, click to view some of Sean's phonecam snapshots from the inauguration-eve party at the Manifest Hope show. Oh also? Apparently Barack Obama is your new bicycle after all.
Below, another piece from the Manifest Hope Show. "The Hopeful Hearts Club," a Sergeant Peppers/Beatles inspired piece by Michael Cuffe.
Here is another great drawing tutorial. This time it explains advanced isometric illustration techniques. Creating isometric drawings, especially exploded views, can be the thing that makes your project stand out from the rest.
In the last tutorial I covered how to make an isomeric grid and build simple blocky shapes on it. In this tutorial I'm going to talk about another method of creating isometric shapes that doesn't require a grid and is much more useful if your objects are complex or curvy.
More about How-to: Advanced isometric illustrations [Drawn!]
More:
How-to: Orthographic projections and basic isometrics
That was the assessment Thursday by Eric Holder, President-elect Barack Obama's choice for attorney general, who made the statement during his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. A court challenge questioning the legality of the legislation is pending in U.S. District Court in San Francisco -- where the judge in the case wanted to know what the Obama administration's position was.Obama to Defend Telco Spy Immunity"The duty of the Justice Department is to defend statutes that have been passed by Congress," Holder told Sen. Orin Hatch (R-Utah), who asked whether the Obama administration would continue the legal fight to uphold the legislation that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is seeking to overturn.
"Unless there are compelling reasons, I don't think we would reverse course," Holder added.
Previously:
* EFF sues Cheney, Bush, and the NSA to stop illegal wiretapping
* EFF sues to overturn telcom immunity
* House passes wiretap telcom immunity bill
* New Obama poster: Illegal Wiretaps We Can Believe In
* Obama's support for the FISA "compromise"
* Senate votes to immunize telecoms over domestic spying
Since I have actually built exactly 1 PC case mod in my life I figured I should show it during this series. It was built in early 2004 when I needed a portable computer to do the looping for my independent film but was too cheap to buy a laptop.
Check out more pics and a description of the guts after the break!
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Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
Slaves Reunion: 1916
(Thanks, Baron von Aaron!)
Some Strangeness in the Proportion: The Exquisite Beauties of Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe isn't for everyone. He's too heady a draught for that. He may not be for you. But there are secrets to appreciating Poe, and I shall let you in on one of the most important ones: read him aloud.Read the poems aloud. Read the stories aloud. Feel the way the words work in your mouth, the way the syllables bounce and roll and drive and repeat, or almost repeat. Poe's poems would be beautiful if you spoke no English (indeed, a poem like "Ulalume" remains opaque even if you do understand English -- it implies a host of meanings, but does not provide any solutions). Lines which, when read on paper, seem overwrought or needlessly repetitive or even mawkish, when spoken aloud reshape and reconfigure.
I don't know that I'd call this "extended" -- more like an introduction to the topic with more questions raised than answered. But it's interesting stuff, nevertheless.
Anonymous blogging and commentary, on the other hand, correspond to the virtual world economies describe above. The reputational property this type of activity generates exists only online, associated with virtual identities that generally are not connected to any real-world identities. What enables this division from the real-world reputational economy is anonymity, which permits bloggers—or even blog commenters—to gain online status, often at the expense of others, without risking their own real-world status. And as with the online and virtual world economies, challenging problems arise when the two reputational economies meet, as happens when anonymous posters (members of the virtual-world-style reputational economy) attack nonanonymous online profiles (members of the online reputational economy). From a practical standpoint, it is difficult, though not impossible, to identify anonymous online attackers, making redress rare. But from a more theoretical standpoint, it is difficult to replace, with currency or any other kind of “old” property, the reputational property they have lost.Reputation as Property in Virtual Economies by Joseph Blocher (Thanks, Kyle!)
Explore the Monsters (Thanks, Trask!)
Bluke is really smelly. His B.O. (body odor) is the worst. There is something peculiar about his ears. They smell like food. One smells like cookies and the other smells like pizza. His breath smells like beautiful flowers. And his hair smells like a garbage can. His smell is very crazy!Now do you see why my monster is so weird? If you see a monster it will remind you of my monster. Hopefully this essay made you feel silly. What is your favorite part about my monster? Mine is his cushy, fluffy tummy!
Matt Mets writes:
Mark your calendars! The long-awaited paper making workshop, hosted by talented paper maker Lisa Jacobs, will take place on Saturday, January 24th. Lisa will be instructing us on how to make paper. Bring colored napkins if you have them (they contain lots of dye), and anything flat that you want to incorporate into paper. Some suggestions are pressed flowers, wires, RFID tags and bacon. There is room to accommodate everyone, but RSVP's are appreciated. This meeting will be held outside so to dress appropriately!
Phoenix DIY meeting 10
Saturday, January 24th at 1 PM
Conspire, 901 N 5th St., Phoenix (NE corner of Garfield and 5th St.)
Free!
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Today on Offworld we watched: chiptune artist Leeni and her 8-bit pixel-kabuki video 'Underworld', someone beat Marble Madness in 2:30 with a peculiar flailing-palm technique while another performs feats of Tetris magic, and, while we were hanging around there anyway, played a round of YouTube Street Fighter.
We also saw fantastic Metroid, Zelda and Rock Band DIY jewelry, fantastic Swiss design-inspired remakes of classic game covers and a Left 4 Dead remake of a classic Beatles t-shirt, as well as the Game Boy's Super Mario Land etched on the case of an Eee PC.
Finally, we got word of new iPhone games coming from Rolando and Dr. Awesome publisher ngmoco, as well as a "Lemmings meets The Lost Vikings" superhero iPhone game from indie devs Infinite Ammo, and lost far too much of the day trying an online demo of the sci-fi followup to cult hit Puzzle Quest, Galactrix.
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Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
Ralf Ackermann sent in this suggestion for soldering an alternate connector straight to an SD card for a cheaper way to use SD/MMC cards in an embedded project. Pictured is his ATMega based MIDI recorder/player that uses this design.
This reminded me of another hack by Rob Wentworth. He noticed that the pin spacing on old floppy disk connectors are roughly the same as SD pins.
With just a couple of shims to hold the card in the correct position, you can use this connector almost without modification--to the connector, or the card.
I must admit, I'm a bit out of the loop on this one. Are SD connectors that expensive or hard to come by? If so, what's the best way to use them in your projects without using the legit connector?
Cheaper MMC/SD Adapter
SD/MMC card fits in floppy edge-connector
Portuguese craftsman Carlos Alberto handbuilt this sublime wooden Vespa. I think the classic Vespa is one of the most beautiful designs in history, and this is a truly worthy remake.
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Here's an Instructable on adding a supplemental solar panel to a mobile phone. Doesn't seem like it crazily increases battery life, but certainly can't hurt.
(via Ecofriend)
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