Just figured something out.

People confuse passion with anger.

When I get excited I speak loudly and fast.

I'm not angry I'm happy!

stefanparvu14 writes "Physicists in Switzerland and California have developed a new type of camera capable of imaging quantum correlations between pairs of photons. The details are presented in the current issue of the open-access publication New Journal of Physics. Unlike a conventional camera with a CCD imager, this camera is composed of Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) pixels implemented on a high-performance CMOS chip. One of the authors has provided more background for the non-physicist. Apparently, it could be used to verify the existence of Bose-Einstein condensates that are now starting to be produced in new ways."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shaun Friedle created an impressive piece of Javascript which can automatically defeat CAPTCHAs used by the Megaupload file hosting service. While their CAPTCHAs are particularly weak, it's an impressive Javascript feat that breaks into some new territory, namely Javascript-based optical character recognition. John Resig posted a breakdown of how the software works. Here's the quick summary:

1. The HTML 5 Canvas getImageData API is used to get at the pixel data from the Captcha image. Canvas gives you the ability to embed an image into a canvas (from which you can later extract the pixel data back out again).
2. The script includes an implementation of a neural network, written in pure JavaScript.
3. The pixel data, extracted from the image using Canvas, is fed into the neural network in an attempt to divine the exact characters being used - in a sort of crude form of Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Shaun designed the software as a Greasemonkey script that will break CAPTCHAs for Megaupload and automatically trigger a download. The code is designed specifically for this CAPTCHA style, but there's no reason why the getImageData trick combined with a alternate OCR implementation couldn't be used to solve for other systems. This is pretty fascinating stuff.

Is there a better (more convenient, harder to cheat) way to prove humanness? What else could you make in Javascript using OCR, neural nets, or per-pixel image processing?

Megaupload Auto-fill CAPTCHA
MuCaptcha Online Demo
OCR and Neural Nets in JavaScript - John Resig

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An anonymous reader writes "A group of powerful Wikipedia insiders are pushing for FlaggedRevisions which will require a 'trusted user' to approve of edits before they go live on the online encyclopedia. There is also opposition but with support of founder Jimbo Wales it is likely to go through. The German version has tried the system, leading to three-week delays between edit and publication. The English wiki with its higher number of anonymous editors per trusted user is expected to suffer longer queues if FlaggedRevisions is implemented on all articles. This comes just a few days after Britannica announced that readers will be allowed to suggest edits and have them reviewed within 20 minutes. Will we see the day when Britannica can be edited almost instantly while editing Wikipedia requires fighting bureaucracy, patience and the right contacts?" Note that, according to the quote from Jimmy Wales in the linked article, this system would only be used "on a subset of articles, the boundaries of which can be adjusted over time to manage the backlog."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bluetoothkiwi documents his LEGO Mindstorms Swimming Pool Insect Terminator (SPIT) - it's a great example of the process of problem-solving.

Swimming Pool Insect Terminator (SPIT) is a special self powered autonamous floating robot that locates and destroys small clusters of bugs that float on the top of swimming pools. We used LEGO MINDSTORMS to build this. LEGO TECHNIC wheels are used as floats. The only non TECHNIC part that was used in this project is a can of inspect spray. The robot uses the light sensor to detect the presence of insect cluster while the Ultrasonic sensor is used to avoid bumping into the side of the pool by telling the steering motor to turn. When the Light sensor detects a cluster of bugs it tells a motor to push the button on a can of Insect spray. Another motor is used to power the SPIT forward. The project was a success and we learned a lot from it - though there are still a lot of room for improvements.

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Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Steven Johnson is the author of six books, most recently The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth Of America, for which he is currently on book tour. He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

I have the distinct honor of editing this year's edition of Best Of Technology Writing, which has in past years featured many BoingBoing regulars. We're putting together the final submissions, and while we have a great supply of magazine writing to choose from, the blogosphere pile seems a little thin to me. So I thought it might be a nice end-of-year exercise for all of us to think back on the blog posts from 2008 that most intrigued and inspired us. Slightly longer posts will be more likely to make it into the collection, but who knows -- perhaps there's a particularly momentous tweet that deserves a place in the 2009 book. Obviously, posts that originated here at BoingBoing will have a special place in my heart. So feel free to share amongst yourselves in the threads below: what was the most memorable blog post you read last year? Surely, some of you remember last year...?

Dave Vondle from IDEO wrote in to tell us about a cool project they are working on with Bug Labs. From their introductory post:

We're thrilled to be working with Bug Labs to make this great product even better. We are also prototyping a new, open way of working that we hope will combine the expertise of Bug Labs engineers, IDEO designers, and the BUG community throughout the design process.

This is a quick project with a focused objective: re-envision the interaction with the BUGbase, specifically the display and buttons. We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about the current BUGbase interface and your ideas for making it better. How are you using your BUGbase interface? How do you wish you could use it? In return for your feedback, we'll be regularly posting updates on our progress, as well as the end results. We, of course, welcome your thoughts at any point.

They've got a few concepts up (one of them is shown in the video at the top of this post), and have gotten some good feedback. BUG+IDEO Deep Dive Exploration : BUGbase UI

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

• Happy Ox New Year
  
• Hello Kitty Death Cake
  
• Knitted Font
  
• HOW TO - Smashed Chickpea Salad
  

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An Australian family who traveled to the US to visit a dying relative were accused of attempting to illegally immigrate by US Customs and Border Patrol officials, who caged them, detained them, starved them overnight, and then sent them back on the next flight to Australia. The US consulate's only comment? "We reserve the right to refuse entry to visitors to the United States."

A reminder to the US CBP: what you do to foreigners, their governments are apt to do to Americans. When you treat foreigners this way, you put Americans who go abroad in harm's way.

Over the next 24 hours, officers questioned the Thornleigh taxi driver and his aged-care worker wife, patted them down and searched their luggage before sending them to a detention centre in a caged van. They were then taken to a hotel with other detainees at 2.30am to sleep with armed guards by their bedside before being woken at 4.30am and put on a flight back to Sydney...

"They treated us like terrorists," Mr Rabbi said. "We are Australian citizens. Why did they have to keep us in a detention centre? Why did they have to lock up my kids?"

Mr Rabbi says that when he explained he was in the US to visit his father, the officers threatened him.

Despite producing the family's $6400 return tickets, dated February 5, he says the officers accused him of attempting to illegally stay in the US...

The family, tired and hungry after their 18-hour flight from Sydney to Los Angeles via Melbourne, were given minimal food and drink during their time at the airport.

"We were given no food, apart from a few biscuits," Mr Rabbi said.

Mercy dash family denied entry to US (Thanks, JK!)

witherstaff writes "House Democrats have proposed $6 billion in Internet investmentsas part of a sweeping economic stimulus bill that the full House is expected to vote on next week. The $6 billion is considered a down payment on efforts Obama will make in this area over the next several years. Of course let's not forget the $200 billion broadband scandal that the large telecommunication companies have been paid but never delivered on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

James Cho writes "Through a decade of painstaking reverse engineering, trucker John Coster-Mullen built the first accurate replica of the Hiroshima bomb. His work yielded a new history of the first nukes, 'Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man,' with historian Robert Norris saying, 'Nothing else in the Manhattan Project literature comes close.' Philip Morrison, one of the physicists who helped invent the bomb, deemed it 'a remarkable job.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The three FriendsOfDave channels on Twitter, Identi.ca and FriendFeed now have a few podcast feeds. Several of them update on Sundays. Here's the full list of the sources we follow:

.

I highly recommend this feed, there aren't too many updates and all the writers are interesting people who travel the world intellectually, creatively and physically (a few are in Davos this week in Switzerland).

Over 400 people are following on Twitter.

Also the Wired feed on Twitter is powered by F-O-D software.

The New York Times Magazine is running a story about the rise in political activism in Egypt through sites like Facebook, which allow citizens to gather and share ideas in ways they otherwise aren't allowed. A state-of-emergency law has been active in Egypt since 1981, which, among other things, "allows the government to ban political organizations and makes it illegal for more than five people to gather without a license from the government." As affordable internet access has spread throughout the country, the government is having a much harder time keeping wraps on the ideas of dissidents. Blocking access to the sites isn't a good solution for the government, because many non-dissidents use it for mundane communications. As Harvard's Ethan Zuckerman puts it, "...doing so would alert a large group of people who they can't afford to radicalize."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Flickr user 'xddorox' has a nice and simple DIY hard saddlebag for your bike. It's a great use for an old plastic jar, and makes a fairly watertight enclose. Just remember to take your stuff with you since it doesn't have a lock.

More about DIY Hard Saddle bag for your bike [Bike Hacks]

More:
<img src="http://blog.makezine.com/MAKE_PT1411.jpg" height="588" width="588" border="0" hspace="4" vspace="4" alt="Make Pt1411
Retro family bike

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Gang, today is the last day to enter "The SPEAK VISUAL contest at the NVIDIA Modification Station with MAKE" - You can check out all the entries here or the slideshow above... It's really easy, finish up your mod, add your photos (tagged with modificationstation) or just enter some digital designs... Rules & more here.

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The CultCase has a great article rounding up 20 great ways to reuse egg cartons. I really like the toy camera, cat beds, and Volkswagen Truck. What's you favorite one? Better yet, do you have another use for a used egg carton? If so, share your idea in the comments. Thanks!

More about 20 great ways to reuse egg cartons [Neatorama]

More:

DIY: Egg Carton Pendant Light

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Iain writes "I'm a teacher at a British 'City Academy' (ages 11-19) that is going to move into a new building next year. Management is deciding now on the IT that the students will use in the new building, as everything will be built from scratch. Currently, the school has one ICT suite per department, each containing about 25-30 PCs. My issue with this model is that it means these suites are only rarely used for a bit of googling or typing up assignments, not as interactive teaching tools. The head likes the idea of moving to a thin client solution, with the same one room per department plan, as he see the cost benefits. However, I have seen tablet PCs used to great effect, with every single classroom having 20-30 units which the students use as 'electronic workbooks,' for want of a better phrase. This allows every lesson to fully utilize IT (multimedia resources, Internet access, instant handout and retrieval of learning resources, etc.) and all work to be stored centrally. My question is: In your opinion, what is the best way for a school to use IT (traditional computer lab, OLPCs, etc.) and what hardware is out there to best serve that purpose? Fat clients for IT/Media lessons and thin client for the rest? Thin client tablets? Giving each student a laptop to take home? Although, obviously, cost is an issue, we have a significant budget, so it should not be the only consideration."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Iain writes "I'm a teacher at a British 'City Academy' (ages 11-19) that is going to move into a new building next year. Management is deciding now on the IT that the students will use in the new building, as everything will be built from scratch. Currently, the school has one ICT suite per department, each containing about 25-30 PCs. My issue with this model is that it means these suites are only rarely used for a bit of googling or typing up assignments, not as interactive teaching tools. The head likes the idea of moving to a thin client solution, with the same one room per department plan, as he see the cost benefits. However, I have seen tablet PCs used to great effect, with every single classroom having 20-30 units which the students use as 'electronic workbooks,' for want of a better phrase. This allows every lesson to fully utilize IT (multimedia resources, Internet access, instant handout and retrieval of learning resources, etc.) and all work to be stored centrally. My question is: In your opinion, what is the best way for a school to use IT (traditional computer lab, OLPCs, etc.) and what hardware is out there to best serve that purpose? Fat clients for IT/Media lessons and thin client for the rest? Thin client tablets? Giving each student a laptop to take home? Although, obviously, cost is an issue, we have a significant budget, so it should not be the only consideration."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "Indian police arrested two employees from the affiliate of PricewaterhouseCoopers who audited Satyam Computer Services, the IT outsourcing giant at the center of the nation's largest fraud inquiry. The move comes after Satyam founder Ramalinga Raju said he had fabricated $1 billion of assets and confessed to making up more than 10,000 employees to siphon money from the software company. State Farm Insurance has severed its ties with Satyam, citing uncertainty about the company's future as 'the only factor responsible for the termination of the contract,' which will reportedly affect at least 400 on-site Satyam employees. Other customers, including GE, are standing by Satyam, one of the top recipients of H-1B and L visas (so much for those $500 Fraud Prevention and Detection fees!)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

internationalflights tips news that Barack Obama, in his first weekly address as President, has mentioned plans to set up a website for tracking "how and where we spend taxpayer dollars." Details about the website, Recovery.gov, are available within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (PDF). The website "shall provide data on relevant economic, financial, grant, and contract information in user-friendly visual presentations to enhance public awareness of the use funds made available in this Act," and will also "provide a means for the public to give feedback on the performance of contracts awarded for purposes of carrying out this Act." The site itself currently contains a placeholder until the passage of the Act.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Marilyn points us to Hospitalis in Riga, Latvia, a hospital themed restaurant where, "the food is served in syringes, flasks and operating-room dishes, and customers can be tied up in straight jackets." The waitresses all wear fetish-nurse outfits and Milla-Jovavich-in-Fifth-Element red wigs:

The food is served in flasks and operating-room’s dishes and isn’t that cheap (7 and more lats per meal), but this is a bizarre experience that is worth breaking the bank. Besides, the place is owned by local doctors, but unfortunately, the president of Latvia, who is also a doctor, declined his appearance at the opening once he realized how weird this place actually is.

Hospirestaurant - Hospital Themed Restaurant in Latvia (Thanks, Marilyn!

Ever had this experience?

You think you know someone, you have them typecast as this type or that, and boom out of nowhere they do or say something that makes you wonder.

What do you do then?

There's no right answer to this question, but I think the answer reveals something about the person who answers it. Are you curious, forgiving, flexible, creative, imaginative, sympathetic? Actually I guess there is a right answer.

Yesterday I wrote on Twitter something pretty heavy, but I had just gotten off the phone with a very loving friend, and decided to confront something head-on that's been lurking in the shadows. I keep hoping it'll go away, but it never does.

There's this idea out there that I'm rude and angry and do things to deliberately hurt people. Nothing, I mean nothing, could be further from the truth.

This is what I mean by confronting it head-on.

In order to be a successful communicator, which I am -- you have to have a high degree of empathy. You have to be able to jump out of your own body and into the body of the reader, and imagine what it's like to read the words. The writer already knows what he or she is trying to communicate. The only way to judge writing, and thereby improve it, is to learn from people who are confused by it, who draw the wrong conclusion. You don't assume that they failed, quite the opposite, you try to learn how you failed. And then you incorporate that learning into your process.

The same is true for software design, for getting adoption for ideas like blogging and podcasting, and developer relations -- pushing for RSS, OPML, XML-RPC and SOAP. It's all about communication (at its most mundane) and about empathy. Without empathy, none of this could happen.

Now for their own reasons, there have always been people who try to stand in the way. You can't get something new done without that happening. This is a lesson I never wanted to learn, but I've had to. It started pretty early in my career, but not at the beginning. When I was a grad student, working on my first outliner, everyone at UW was very supportive. They didn't necessarily understand what I was doing (one prof introduced me as the guy who does great error messages) but they thought it was good that I was trying to create new stuff.

The roadblocks first showed up when I shipped my first commercial product. And the second, and so on. In the market, people are always trying to make you stumble. It's called competition. I don't do it much anymore, but I used to do it, a lot. I didn't care if my competitors didn't like me. That's part of the whole thing.

But at UserLand I stopped being so competitive, I think that's part of the problem UserLand had, and why it failed. I was more into the open source philosophy like Rodney King, why can't we all just get along. People thought I was a hypocrite, even though I wasn't competing, I guess people thought I was. Maybe that's the only model they have for human behavior.

So yes, I am one of the most hated people on the Internet, but I honestly don't believe what people hate is me, I believe they hate what people have told them to hate.

And I'm beginning a campaign, a relentless one, to reverse that.

chiguy writes "There's been another break-in at Monster.com. It's surprising that there are still unencrypted passwords stored in database despite the previous hack, as is the decision to not email users — presumably so that no one will make a fuss. From PC World: 'Monster.com user IDs and passwords were stolen, along with names, e-mail addresses, birth dates, gender, ethnicity, and in some cases, users' states of residence. The information does not include Social Security numbers, which Monster.com said it doesn't collect, or resumes. Monster.com posted the warning about the breach on Friday morning and does not plan to send e-mails to users about the issue, said Nikki Richardson, a Monster.com spokeswoman. The SANS Internet Storm Center also posted a note about the break-in on Friday.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twitter forces you to write concisely, and that makes for crisper, more direct, easier to read copy.

I was reminded of this when reading a piece written by Dan Santow at Edelman PR, who offers a list of phrases that can be replaced by single words without loss of meaning.

I realized you never see these phrases in Twitter-talk because there's no space for flowery prose with only 140 characters to express an idea.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for the pointer.

thefickler writes "According to Microsoft's quarterly filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Zune platform experienced a revenue drop of 54 percent, or $100 million. This compares to relatively healthy sales of the iPod, which were up 3 percent in the same period (though revenue did drop by 16 percent). Obviously, with the recent job cuts at Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices Division, pundits are wondering how soon until the Zune also gets the chop. As one pundit wrote: 'Microsoft, by now, should be realizing that it's never going to be as "cool" as Apple, so why waste its time with the Zune where it has no competitive advantage?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an update on an earlier post we did here about the "Beacon" installation currently on display until February 20th at the LightWave festival in Dublin, Ireland. "Beacon" is a kinetic light installation that tracks visitors movements through the space. The project was built with existing industrial products, custom hardware to control the motorized lights, and thermal imaging cameras to track visitors moving between them on the floor. The tracking was implemented with a bespoke control system to coordinate an interactive experience for visitors. Check out the video above to see it in action.

Beacon Installation

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Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: Star Wars mashed up with fine art. Love this Gigervader!

Star Wars Ren 2

Greg Walton, who is Editor of The Infowar Monitor, says:

Kyrgyzstan is under a massive denial of service attack.

Last week IWMP received a phone call from a colleague in Central Asia. Apparently, Kyrgyzstan is under a massive denial of service attack. Three of four ISPs have been taken down, and their upstream providers in Russia, and Kazakhstan are refusing to pass traffic because of the scale of the attacks. At this stage, the motivation appears to be political, and follows several political/mass media websites which have been blocked in the past two weeks by Kyrgyz authorities. The suspicion is that the current DOS attacks are commercial -- commissioned and similar to those we reported back in 2005.

Link to report.

theodp writes "MAD Magazine is about to put out its 500th issue, but starting with its April publication, the mag is cutting down to only four issues per year. The feedback we've gotten from readers,' quipped Editor John Ficarra, 'is that only every third issue of MAD is funny, so we've decided to just publish those.' MAD Kids and MAD Classics are ceasing publication entirely. Keep up the what-me-worry game face, Alfred!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you're driving through the rural town of Panama, N. Y., and forgot to wear a watch, you're in luck. Engineer John Miktuk used scrap LEDs and a GPS to assemble a giant clock on the side of his garage.

The timekeeper began as a sign of self-appreciation. Miktuk had a bunch of red LEDs and resistors laying around, scraps from the auto industry, so he drilled holes through the galvanized steel cladding of his four-car garage, plugged them with the lights, built the necessary circuits, and flipped the switch to reveal his surname in glowing letters along a 30-foot wall facing the road.

When it dawned on him that he had plenty of room and materials to add another line of text, Miktuk decided to display something more useful: the time. He circuited together another round of LED-resistor series and connected these to a microcontroller, programmed to ferry information from a GPS unit to the LEDs.

Miktuk mounted a GPS unit 20 feet above the ground and linked it to the microcontroller via a long serial cable. The cable transmits the GPS unit's time and location (calculated from a satellite signal) down the line to the microcontroller, which then directs the appropriate LEDs to turn on. The chip's software even calculates local time from the GPS unit's UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) reading and corrects for daylight saving.

Now anyone with an inkling can build their own LED-GPS clock. In July, Miktuk released "GPS Time on YOUR Garage," a kit for sale on his website for around $300. Although the garage clock is plugged into his home utilities, Miktuk estimates that the entire array (now shining bright green) costs him just $25 a year to power -- and it's been running for four years and ticking.

When asked what motivated him to build the clock, he says, "Nothing compares to the sense of accomplishment when a DIY project is finished and working. Except the thrill of the next one. And the next one ..."

oldvan.com

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 7, page 25 - Megan Mansell Williams.

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downundarob writes "Senator Nick Minchin , the Australian Shadow Minister for broadband, communications and the digital economy, has written (or more likely a staffer has written) this interesting article on the Australian Federal Government's continued zeal to enforce ISP-level filtering in Australia. In the article he posits that 'Underlying the Rudd Government's plan to screen the internet is an offensive message: that parents cannot be trusted to mind their children online.' Meanwhile, we wait for filtering trials to start, trials that have been delayed and which have next-to-no support among the industry. Telstra BigPond — Australia's largest ISP — has refused to take part, comparing internet filtering to 'like trying to boil the ocean.' The third largest, iiNet, is prepared to participate to highlight flaws."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rick Lieder, the talented sf/f artist whose backyard nature photographs have stunned me for years, has released a new book of photos of small birds on the wing, shot in his own backyard in south Michigan. Rick doesn't use fancy fast film or other high-tech treats -- instead, he just uses patience and care to capture these remarkable images. I just got a copy from Rick (I'm at a science fiction convention outside of Detroit) and discovered a lovely bonus: a short introduction by Kathe Koja, the fantastic writer, who is married to Rick.

Aerial acrobats

Could there be a more perfect 1951 Mechanics Illustrated article than "Helicopters for Everyone," which promised a vehicle thus, "The third model has corrected some of the above mentioned faults. The engine now is slung under the seat directly beneath the center of gravity. This warms the pilot in cold air and improves the machine’s balance. The model at present is being tested. There still remains, however, the sense of insecurity—of riding a flying swivel chair with no visible means of support. Pentecost and his associates are perfectly well aware of this natural reaction and have planned a weatherproof enclosure for the machine."

Helicopters for Everybody (Jan, 1951)

An anonymous reader writes "Apparently it with the release of all of Monty Python's material on YouTube, their sales have blown through the roof on Amazon.com. It is too bad there isn't any proper news article about this, but I think it bodes well for those who champion free content. More importantly, it forces the MPAA's feet into their mouths." Not every performer (or group of performers) has the decades-strong appeal of Monty Python, but this is a great thing to see. The linked article claims that the sales increase in the Python DVDs is 23,000 percent; there are probably some other ways to figure the numbers, but a big increase is easy to see.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rex Hammock: "It's hard to convey to my kids how radically different the Mac was from any consumer-oriented computer that came before."

So here's a list of things, off the top of my head, that made the Mac radically different from any other computer, 25 years ago, from my point of view.

1. Guy Kawasaki. He's going to think I'm stroking him for saying this, but he got me my first look at the Mac, and my first Mac. Up until that point, there had been platform vendors who sought out developers, but they were of a previous generation, and didn't even remotely speak our language. Guy came to us, asked if we would develop for the Mac. Of course we would. We would have begged to, we would have barked like dogs to get a pre-release Mac, but he didn't make us. A proud developer who feels appreciated can make great software. One who has to swallow his pride to get the gig -- not so much.

2. Guy Kawasaki. Now he's really going to think I'm stroking him. Guy not only spoke our language but he spoke Apple's language. When we needed to get things done inside Apple, he managed them on our behalf. Believe me that was necessary, because while a small number of people inside Apple wanted developer support, the company was leaning toward the very big developers, Lotus, Microsoft and Software Publishing. Guy believed in the little guys, like my team, and it turned out he was right and they were wrong. The products that made the Mac were ones no one had heard of: Aldus Pagemaker, Adobe Photoshop, Quark XPress, Filemaker, BBEdit, Macromind Director, 4D, Think C and Pascal. Borland, Ashton-Tate and the other BigCo's, the ones that Apple management courted, with the exception of Microsoft, never shipped anything worthy of the Mac. (Microsoft shipped a number of good products for the Mac: Excel, MSIE/Mac, and eventually Word.)

2a. I almost put Guy here again, so I could say it's like "Location, location, location" -- but I thought that would be too much, even for Guy.

3. A graphic display. Every pixel could be programmed by software. Before this, computers displayed grids of 24 lines with 80 characters each. That was considered a fancy computer! Many of us used computers that displayed 40 characters per line, all upper-case. And we thought they were pretty cooool!!

4. User interface guidelines. At first I thought they were retarded, then I became a believer. There were pros and cons. The pros: Every app interacted with the user the same way. If you learned how the menus worked in one Mac app you knew how they worked in all Mac apps. This is a principle I apply to this day. The cons: They were designed the way word prcessors work. If your app had a different model, as our outliners did, the UI guidelines forced an inconsistent conceptual model on the user. In the end this wasn't as big a problem as I thought it would be.

5. 32-bit linear address space. A very hidden feature, like Guy Kawasaki, users couldn't see this one, but it meant that the Macintosh could grow to support huge graphic apps like Photoshop and Quark without the horrible complexities of memory expansion on IBM-compatibles. I came to believe that this reason alone was the reason the Mac continued to sell through the early-mid 90s. Without this advantage, Apple's famous bozo-osity could have spelled the end.

6. The clipboard. There was a standardized way to move data between apps. I thought this was so important I asked for and got a meeting with Bill Gates in 1985 to urge him to add a clipboard to MS-DOS (it was totally possible). He said they were working on a new operating system that would have one, which turned out to be OS/2. Almost no one used it. The Mac was the first PC to have a clipboard, and the only one for a very long time.

7. It didn't look like a computer. This may be the hardest thing to describe, but I remember the first moment I saw a Mac. I was being led into a conference room on Bandley Drive for a demo and on the way to the room I saw a Mac on a table in another room and was struck. It was upright, where most computers were modular and sort of sloped. It was small. Most computers were white, it was beige. But it just looked strange but really interesting. (Kind of like the reactions I get to my netbook these days.) Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, the French entrepreneur who started Acius, says: "It looked like an appliance made for normal people."

I'm leaving room here for other ideas as the come along, if they do. Feel free to add your own in the comments on this post.

There's a weekly address from our new president (you can check that out here) - but I wanted to pull out some of what might be interesting for the makers (and the soon-to-be makers out there). Post up in the comments about what you think individuals can do, what companies can do and what "we" can do as some of these proposals get approved - a reminder, we're not a political site, keep it on topic, constructive and solutions-based, thanks gang. The largest weatherization program in history seems very "DIY" to me, modernizing 75% of federal buildings and two million homes - have you weatherized your home? Oddly enough, I saw that Home Depot's twitter account had this suggestion a few weeks ago...

To accelerate the creation of a clean energy economy, we will double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy like wind, solar, and biofuels over the next three years. We’ll begin to build a new electricity grid that lay down more than 3,000 miles of transmission lines to convey this new energy from coast to coast. We’ll save taxpayers $2 billion a year by making 75% of federal buildings more energy efficient, and save the average working family $350 on their energy bills by weatherizing 2.5 million homes.

Finally, we will rebuild and retrofit America to meet the demands of the 21st century. That means repairing and modernizing thousands of miles of America’s roadways and providing new mass transit options for millions of Americans. It means protecting America by securing 90 major ports and creating a better communications network for local law enforcement and public safety officials in the event of an emergency. And it means expanding broadband access to millions of Americans, so business can compete on a level-playing field, wherever they’re located.

And from the "The American Reinvestment and Recovery Plan – By the Numbers" PDF...

Spurring a Clean Energy Economy

• Doubling renewable energy generating capacity over three years. It took 30 years for our nation to reach its current level of renewable generating capacity – the recovery and reinvestment plan will double that level over the next three years. That increase in capacity is enough to power 6 million American homes.


• Jump-starting the transformation to a bigger, better, smarter grid. The upfront investments and reforms in modernizing our nation’s electricity grid will result in more than 3,000 miles of new or modernized transmission lines and 40 million “Smart Meters” in American homes.


• Weatherizing at least two million homes to save low-income families on average $350 per year and modernizing more than 75% of federal building space, saving taxpayers $2 billion per year in lower federal energy bills. Today, the federal government is the world’s largest consumer of energy. The recovery and reinvestment plan will make an historic investment in upgrading the federal building stock that will save taxpayer dollars and help catalyze a green building industry.


• Launching a Clean Energy Finance Initiative to leverage $100 billion in private sector clean energy investments over three years. The finance authority will provide loan  guarantees and other financial support to help ease credit constraints for renewable energy investors and catalyze new private sector investment over the next three years.

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MAKE subscriber Charles writes in about his electric shopping cart project called the "LOLrioKart". The cart is equipped with "a cache of massive aircraft wet-cell NiCd batteries" and a 15 hp electric motor. The website has a nicely documented build log, which is great for anyone looking into making an electrically driven vehicle. Thanks Charles!

What originally started as a whimsical attempt to strap a set of large nickel cadmium batteries, discovered in a dusty back room, to something - anything - has turned into a full-fledged ambitious engineering project.

More about LOLrioKart: Electric shopping cart racing

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tugfoigel writes "Jizhou Song, a professor in the University of Miami College of Engineering and his collaborators Professor John Rogers, at the University of Illinois and Professor Yonggang Huang, at Northwestern University have developed a new design for stretchable electronics that can be wrapped around complex shapes, without a reduction in electronic function. The new mechanical design strategy is based on semiconductor nanomaterials that can offer high stretchability (e.g., 140%) and large twistability such as corkscrew twists with tight pitch (e.g., 90 degrees in 1 cm). Potential uses for the new design include electronic devices for eye cameras, smart surgical gloves, body parts, airplane wings, back planes for liquid crystal displays and biomedical devises."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.