ruphus13 writes "Two of the technical leads and core committers of the Lucene Project have launched Lucid Imagination, a venture backed company now offering commercial versions of Lucene and SOLR in the hopes of making it the defacto choice of search technologies used by companies within their products. 'The Lucene search library ranks amongst the top 5 Apache projects, installed at over 4,000 global companies. Although OStatic is primarily Drupal-based, our site's search is based on Lucene. According to Lucid Imagination officials, the Solr search server, which transforms the Lucene search library into a ready-to-use search platform for building applications, is the fastest growing Lucene sub-project...Lucid's business model is roughly comparable to Red Hat's very successful model, in that it centers on support and services for free, open source software.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ruphus13 writes "Two of the technical leads and core committers of the Lucene Project have launched Lucid Imagination, a venture backed company now offering commercial versions of Lucene and SOLR in the hopes of making it the defacto choice of search technologies used by companies within their products. 'The Lucene search library ranks amongst the top 5 Apache projects, installed at over 4,000 global companies. Although OStatic is primarily Drupal-based, our site's search is based on Lucene. According to Lucid Imagination officials, the Solr search server, which transforms the Lucene search library into a ready-to-use search platform for building applications, is the fastest growing Lucene sub-project...Lucid's business model is roughly comparable to Red Hat's very successful model, in that it centers on support and services for free, open source software.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

And here's another bit of "transparency" that's just as lacking in the new administration as the last. For months, those of us concerned about backroom deals on intellectual property treaties bypassing an open legislative process have been demanding more sunlight on negotiations around ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. To date, the various folks negotiating the agreement -- which includes both entertainment industry representatives and government trade representatives from around the world -- have been averse to any sort of transparency, using the rather weak excuse that such treaties are always negotiated in secret. Amusingly, they even recently held a secret meeting where they promised to be more transparent. That's comforting.

In order to push this transparency issue forward, plenty of folks have been filing freedom of information requests to get documents related to the agreement and the negotiations. Up in Canada, these requests have revealed that the government may have publicly lied or misled people about its negotiations in ACTA. In the US, though, things are even more ridiculous. Apparently the US Trade Representative is refusing to release most of the documents requested under the FOIA claiming (I kid you not) that to release such documents could "implicate national security or expose the USTR's deliberative processes."

But, of course, the USTR had no problem at all sharing all this info with entertainment industry lobbyists. In the few documents that were released, it turns out that the USTR met privately with representatives of various "anti-piracy" lobbying groups multiple times in 2008 -- without bothering to consult with the folks who these laws would actually impact. In other words, they're getting one side of the story. Even worse, those lobbyists have been called out, repeatedly -- by the US government, no less -- for outright fabrications concerning the impact of piracy and counterfeiting. So why is the USTR only relying on them for determining how this trade agreement will work? And why is there no effort to make these negotiations more public so that all stakeholders have a say?

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No, it's not just a cute lil' change purse - Arlie and Jared's sewn-circuit softsynth combines crafty and noisy in a unnassuming portable package with a snap switch and conductive fabric.

In the Maker Shed:

Lilypad E-Sewing Kit

Don't forget - this week we have a 10% off sale this week in the maker shed, use code "2009OX" at the time of checkout - Happy Chinese New Year!

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No, it's not just a cute lil' change purse - Arlie and Jared's sewn-circuit softsynth combines crafty and noisy in a unnassuming portable package with a snap switch and conductive fabric.

In the Maker Shed:

Lilypad E-Sewing Kit

Don't forget - this week we have a 10% off sale this week in the maker shed, use code "2009OX" at the time of checkout - Happy Chinese New Year!

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From the makers of Exploded Phone comes the iSteam Phone, a t-shirt depicting an exploded view illustration that asks the musical question: What would the iPhone have looked like if Leonardo had invented it in the 15th century?

iSteam Phone [via Boing Boing Gadgets]

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Pandanapper writes to tell us Yahoo is reporting that if you find yourself watching an ad on a video screen in a public venue, the ad may be watching you as well. "Small cameras can now be embedded in the screen or hidden around it, tracking who looks at the screen and for how long. The makers of the tracking systems say the software can determine the viewer's gender, approximate age range and, in some cases, ethnicity -- and can change the ads accordingly. That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier in January, the EFF and Public Citizen called attention to a local Fox affiliate using a DMCA takedown notice to remove a video that was used by an activist group, Progress Illinois, to comment on the broadcast. It was almost certainly fair use, but thanks to the way the DMCA works, even with a counternotice, YouTube is required to keep the video down for at least 10 business days. Considering that it was being used for commentary on current events, the fact that Fox is able to keep the content down for 10 business days should be seen as a problem. Anyway, as (former Fox lawyer) Ben Sheffner notes, Fox appears not to have filed a lawsuit in those 10 days, and thus, YouTube has restored Progress Illinois' account. Of course, as Sheffner also points out, Fox could still sue Progress Illinois at a later date, despite its failure to do so during the counternotice response window. Again, the whole scenario is problematic. Fox gets to take this video down at a time when it's most useful for commentary purposes, and then retains the right to sue at a later date without ever having to make a case for why the takedown was legitimate. It seems like there should be clarity that, if a company that issues a takedown does not sue following a counternotice, it should be seen as approval that the video is not infringing.

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I did a double-take when Collin sent me the link to this Flickr image of a Mini Maker's Notebook. What the...? It's one of our pal's Kent Barnes' "5 Minute Hacks." He made a Maker's Notebook paper book cover for a pocket-size Moleskine. Maybe if we ask real nice, he'll let us post the PDF so you can Maker-fy your own mini notebooks.

Maker'skine

From the Maker Shed:

You can get a gen-u-ine Maker's Notebook in the Maker Shed. And remember: All this week get 10% off your order in the Maker Shed, use code "2009OX" at the time of checkout - Happy Chinese New Year! (This sale ends midnight, Jan 31st!)

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An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Blizzard has added another victory in their campaign against World of Warcraft bots. A federal judge has ruled that not only did the Glider bot break the EULA, it can be classified as a circumvention device under the DMCA. "As we've noted before, Blizzard's legal arguments, which Judge David G. Campbell largely accepted, could have far-reaching and troubling implications for the software industry. Donnelly is not the most sympathetic defendant, and some users may cheer the demise of a software vendor that helps users break the rules of Blizzard's wildly popular role playing game. But the sweeping language of Judge Campbell's decision, combined with his equally troubling decision last summer, creates a lot of new uncertainty for software vendors seeking to enter software markets dominated by entrenched incumbents and achieve interoperability with legacy platforms."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Illinois was one of the early ones in a long list of states that tried and failed to set up anti-video game laws. It was (I think) either the second or third such law to then be thrown out as unconstitutional. Since then, nine or ten more states have all tried and failed to implement similar laws. However, it looks like one legislator in Illinois hasn't been paying much attention. He's trying to add some more clauses to the law, more than three years after it was rejected as unconstitutional. Of course, if he was looking to amend it in a way that fixed the unconstitutional part, you might understand it. But, he's not. He's just adding more restrictions to a law that has been deemed unenforceable. Another great moment in politics.

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mytrip writes to tell us that Mark Gorton of LimeWire fame is translating his knowledge from moving bits to moving people. Taking profits earned from his software business, Gorton is applying them to projects aimed at making urban transportation safer, faster, and more sustainable. "That's not the only connection between open-source software and Gorton's vision for livable cities. The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he's lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people's needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens. Gorton's open-source model would have a positive impact on urban planning by opening up the process to a wider audience, says Thomas K. Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, an organization that deals with urban planning issues in the New York metropolitan area."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We just received the news that Rocky Mountain PBS will premiere Make: television this weekend on Sunday, February 1st at 11:30 am!

Episode 1 premieres this weekend and see the schedule for upcoming episodes.

Remember you can always watch Make: television online at makezine.tv. New episodes and the PDFs for the Maker Workshop are posted each week.

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Scott Beale of Laughing Squid pointed to two fantastic episodes of "Look Around You," a BBC Comedy from 2002 that parodies public science education videos.

All hail Discordia! (Via Forgetomori)

Modusoperandi, responding to markmarkmark in the Attenborough's response to creationists' hate mail thread, said:

markmarkmark "Jesus is my rabbi and all that is best in me is him and every mistake is my own."

One Night a man had a dream. He dreamed he was walking along the beach with the Lord. Across the sky flashed scenes from his life. For each scene, he noticed two sets of footprints in the sand; one belonged to him and the other to the Lord.

When the last scene of his life flashed before him, he looked back at the footprints in the sand. He noticed that many times along the path of his life there was only one set of footprints. He also noticed that it happened at the very lowest and saddest times in his life.

This really bothered him, and he questioned the Lord about it: "Lord, you said that once I decided to follow you you'd walk with me all the way, but I have noticed that during the most troublesome times in my life, there is only one set of footprints. I don't understand why when I needed you most you would leave me."

The Lord replied, "My precious, precious child, I love you and would never leave you. Also, you're being intermittently stalked by the Invisible Man."

Good one. Front page.

Global Game Jam is under way. Live stream above more about the event here and in this previous Boing Boing blog post. Boing Boing Video, Boing Boing Gadgets, and Offworld will be popping up in various cities, give us a shout in the comments if you'd like to give us a shout-out from your location, and send us a video! We'll reach out with upload info.

(Thanks, Ustream, Jolon Bankey, and Global Game Jam Costa Rica crew!)

Urchin writes to tell us that physicists working in a new field called "phononics" claim that waste heat from a processor could actually be used to add to its power. "Crunching data coded using photons - photonic computing - is one example, and in 2007 researchers built the first workable optical transistor. But now the idea of computing using heat flow is gaining popularity among applied physicists. Heat travels through solid materials by means of phonons - ripples of vibration passing through a series of atoms. Those ripples can be used to send and store data in digital form: one temperature is read as 0 or "off" while a second, higher temperature is interpreted as 1 or "on". Provided that the thermal memory is well insulated, it can keep its temperature - and data - intact for a long time."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Most readers here probably know the story of Allofmp3.com -- a Russian website that signed a licensing deal with a Russian music licensing group ROMS. The site was immensely popular because (a) it sold un-DRM'd files (back before that was common) and (b) sold music incredibly cheaply. The recording industry should have taken this as a lesson in how to create a super popular online music store -- but instead it freaked out, and nearly created an international diplomatic incident in threatening Russia with economic sanctions unless it shut the site down. The problem was that since it had the ROMS license, it was legal in Russia. In fact, Allofmp3.com even tried to pay the record labels some money -- which they refused. The record labels, of course, insisted that the ROMS license wasn't sufficient, but no Russian court ever agreed. Eventually the site was shut down, though it lives on at MP3Sparks. However, it's lost a lot of steam because the site has been blocked from accepting most common forms of payment.

Law Professor Michael Scott points us to the news of what appears to be a similar offering in Italy -- except that, in this case, the operators of the site have been sent to jail. The only news that I can find on this is from the IFPI site -- which is obviously a bit biased, but it does look like the owners of the site did get a license from the Italian Authors' Society (SIAE), which they believed was sufficient. A lower court agreed, but the appeals court has sided with the record labels.

But here's the kicker: the operators of the site have now been sent to jail for criminal copyright infringement. Already I have problems with most criminal copyright infringement cases -- because, by any reasonable standard, copyright is a civil dispute -- it's an issue between two businesses. In this case, it's even more egregious because it seems clear that the site wasn't just some random guy selling MP3s he had no right to, but had clearly tried to obtain the correct licenses. However, these days, when to do just about anything with music you need to get numerous different licenses (Peter Jenner, back at MidemNet, claimed that you needed 33 different permissions to do pretty much anything with music in Europe, though others disagreed), it seems fairly ridiculous to throw someone in jail for not being able to figure out every single party that has to sign off on something -- especially when you were lead to believe that you had what you needed via the Authors' Society.

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Linoleum asphalt mosaics, also called Toynbee Tiles, are artworks permanently embedded in pavement. In this video I'll show you how to construct your own from inexpensive materials. You can get real linoleum (don't use vinyl flooring) for this project by ordering free samples online. By cutting out a mosaic design in the linoleum and sandwiching it between layers of paper, wood glue, and asphalt crack filler, you can affix the mosaic very permanently to an asphalt surface, such as your driveway. You may choose to use a heat gun to make the linoleum easier to cut, or even a laser cutter. The earliest examples of these tiles were found in the 70s and 80s on streets in Philadelphia, all bearing the same (or very similar) message: "Toynbee idea / in Kubrick's 2001 / resurrect dead / on planet Jupiter." They are speculated to have been created by the same person until they began to gain a following. There's an active message board on the topic which shares sightings and other information. If you make one, please share your pictures in the CRAFT Flickr pool!

Subscribe to the CRAFT Podcast in iTunes, or download the mov, mp4, or iPhone/Android video.

Thanks to my pal Matt Mechtley for his help on this one. In this video I used this cc-licensed photo by Flickr user mojunk. The music is "Regurgitation Pumping Station" from the World of Goo soundtrack by Kyle Gabler; used with permission.

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suraj.sun writes to tell us that in preparation for nearly a quarter of a million people descending on Tampa for the Super Bowl, the Tampa authorities are deploying new tech for security communications and response. All of the incidents and communications will be plotted and tracked on a new implementation of Microsoft's Surface. Hopefully it wont have to reboot after every new incident report. "The Microsoft Surface device will display a Microsoft Virtual Earth map of the entire region tracking events, incidents, resources and tasks in real-time using its unique large display, multi-user, multi-touch and interactive capabilities, also allowing it to communicate with remote devices and PCs. With a quick hand-gesture, the map can zoom in and display a 3D image of the city, including detailed views of buildings and streets and real time resource tracking."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Aptly named Instructables user dirtydiaperchanger made this X-country ski stroller with relatively inexpensive materials. I hope my brother is reading, since he's got a little one up in Maine where there's five feet of snow.

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Davis Freeberg writes "As if the prospect of having the big telcos looking over your shoulder wasn't bad enough, we're already seeing reports of Comcast targeting innocent customers in DRM stings.

After receiving a takedown notice from Comcast's DRM squad, John Aprigliano had to spend an hour dealing with them, in order to prove his innocence. Apparently, Comcast wasn't able to tell that one of his old modems was really being used by someone else. Lucky for him, he's a network engineer and knew the right questions to ask, but sooner or later someone will end up losing their internet access over this kind of screw up. If Comcast wants to be the top P2P cop, shouldn't they be able to accurately identify between copyright infringers and their customers. So far they aren't off to a very good start."

Doesn't that make you feel comfortable now that Comcast has indicated its willingness to cut off internet access for file sharers? Once again, it would be great if we could implement a reverse three strikes policy, where three false accusations by the entertainment industry or an ISP leads to them losing their internet access.

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(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

Here's another histogram which may seem a little grim but, I think, is worth contemplating. Suppose someone was born in the year 2004. If the factors which determined mortality in that year remain the same throughout the rest of that person's life, what percentage of his or her contemporaries will still be alive at various points in the future?

You can see that about half the people born in 2004 are expected to disappear by age 80, and from that point on, the number diminishes very rapidly. If you hope to live beyond 80, and you would like to depend on contemporaries for companionship, this may be a problem.

The good news is that the situation has improved. When a similar projection was made in the 1950s for people born in 1949, only 1 person in 5 was expected to live to be 80. We can feel happy that people today are surviving more tenaciously than anyone expected half a century ago.

How will our current prediction turn out fifty years from now? Presumably the answer depends on our priorities. If lives are worth saving, perhaps it will make sense to fund more research into the aging process.

jmizrahi writes "I've recently started working in experimental physics. Quite a few programs are used in the lab for assorted purposes — Labview, Igor, Inventor, Eagle, to name just a few. They are all proprietary. This seems to be standard practice, which surprised me. Does anybody know of any open source software intended for scientific research? Does anybody work in a lab that makes an effort to use open source software?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I blog about Mikey and Wendy's projects very frequently because they're doing so many cool things. One of the most impressive is their papercrete dome, which is now documented in this Instructable:

When my girlfriend (Wendy Tremayne) and I arrived in southern New Mexico one of the first things we did was look around for a local building material. Clay would need to be excavated and hauled in, straw bale was already expensive and not local, manufactured building materials like rastra were a little too off the shelf for us. We ended up settling on what we had locally available and that was/is paper. It is common for small remote towns to not have much in the way of recycling. Our town was collecting paper, but more often than not would just dump it in the landfill after collection. They were happy to help us load our truck up with their newspaper which was mostly a nuisance to them. We later found a source of rebar being made from old cars within a 100 miles of our place.

Since we would have a lot of batteries and solar PV equipment that needed a good home we decided to do our first structure as a battery room for our solar equipment. Domes are inherently strong and energy efficient structures. This is how we started building a battery dome from paper.

Great, inspiring work, y'all!

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Here's a report from KRON in San Francisco about The San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle's forays into online news in 1981. (Thanks, Mark!)

It's almost getting silly to post these examples, but it's yet another reminder of how much damage DRM can do to legitimate customers. The latest victims? Purchasers of the PC version of Gears of War. Paul Brinker points us to the news that due to a digital certificate expiring, PC players of the game have discovered that it no longer works. The only solution? Set your PC clock back to a date prior to January 29th, 2009. Once again, it's a scenario where the DRM did nothing, at all, to stop piracy -- but did plenty to annoy legitimate customers.

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Shaun Inman is making games. In 8-bit style. We like this. #

Shaun Inman is making games. In 8-bit style. We like this. #

Shaun Inman is making games. In 8-bit style. We like this. #

theodp writes "At the World Economic Forum, Michael Dell's pitch to help Russia with its computers got the cold-as-Siberia shoulder from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. 'We don't need help,' shot back Putin. 'We are not invalids. We don't have limited mental capacity' (video — rant starts at 1:24). 'Our programmers are some of the best in the world,' Putin continued. 'No one would contest that here — not even our Indian colleagues.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

I have always enjoyed drawing charts and graphs as a means to enhance my understanding the world.

The histogram above addresses the most fundamental fact of human life: Sooner or later, it ends. To me, all other issues are trivial by comparison.

I made this chart using data from the National Institutes of Health. You can find your age group on the bottom scale, then check your average remaining life expectancy on the left scale. Naturally this number declines relentlessly as you get older.

The good news is that the longer you live, the longer you are likely to live. Thus, at birth in the United States, under conditions that prevail today, you can expect to live for a little more than 75 years. But at age 75, on average you still have another 10 years left. How can this be? Because some of the people who were born around the same time as yourself have already died by the time you’re 75, leaving only a subset who were less susceptible to disease (or accidents).

The bad news is that despite all our advances in medicine, sanitation, and other relevant factors, the chart still tapers off around age 100. Average lifespan has increased, but maximum lifespan has not changed significantly.

One reason may be that research to prolong maximum lifespan receives minuscule funding, especially compared with popular endeavors such as cancer research. Many people seem to feel that extending maximum lifespan would be “wrong” (even at a time of rapidly declining birth rates in many nations) or “unnatural” (even though our average life expectancy used to be around 40, and has improved through totally unnatural means such as antibiotics).

As you may infer from the quotation marks, I disagree. Of course, I realize that these are controversial issues.

One of the most effective special-interest groups seeking funding for longevity research is www.methuselahfoundation.org .

Where were you 25 years ago? My brother and I solved it by taking a hammer to it, then reassembling (shh). #

GalaticGrub writes "Technology Review has an article about a startup that wants to build a business out of crowd-sourcing the developing world. The company, called txteagle, seems to be interested mainly in using local knowledge to translate information into less common languages. The Finnish cell-phone company Nokia is a partner in the project, and CEO Nathan Eagle says that it provides a good example of a Western company that could benefit from txteagle workers. Eagle explains that Nokia is interested in 'software localization,' or translating its software for specific regions of a country. 'In Kenya, there are over 60 unique, fundamentally different languages,' he says. 'You're lucky to get a phone with a Swahili interface, but even that might be somebody's third language. Nokia would love to have phones for everyone's mother tongues, but it has no idea how to translate words like "address book" into all of these languages.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot points us to a story of a lie detector manufacturer, Nemesysco, who apparently was so upset with a report from some Swedish researchers in a technology journal, that they threatened legal action against the journal and the researchers, claiming that they would sue for defamation if the article wasn't taken down. Since the basic point of the journal article was that the lie detecting technology that Nemesysco was betting on simply could not work, you can understand why they might be upset about it. But calling it defamation is highly questionable.

If the information presented in the article was wrong why not just counter it and point out why it's wrong? Threatening defamation lawsuits and trying to shut up the researchers just makes it look like Nemesysco has something to hide. And, indeed, true to the Stresisand Effect, the article reports that the researchers have received a lot more attention for their research since the threats were issued: "It was hardly their intention. But since the article was withdrawn, I have received lots of mail and requests for copies of the article. The article would not have been read to this extent if the company had simply ignored it in silence." Who knows whether or not Nemesysco's lie detector works, but its common sense detector is apparently on the fritz.

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Just Posted: Our full review of the Pentax K2000 (or K-m to the Europeans amongst us). Pentax's latest baby DSLR enters the ring with much of the K200D's capability slimmed down into an even smaller, lighter, more use-friendly format. But the flyweight end of the DSLR market is home to some plucky competitors, so can the K2000 do enough to fight its corner? Read our 35 page review to find out.

A series from Jetpack Media. There's a new episode every Tuesday and Thursday. (Thanks, Eric Spiegelman)

meme breaks
first 50 digits of pi
create digital music
progress bars
pretty loaded
minesweeper: the movie
mac vs. pc
sniper twins

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Julie188 writes "Microsoft blogger Mitchell Ashley, who has been using Windows 7 full-time, predicts that Windows 7 will fail to lure XP users away from their beloved, aging operating system — after all, Windows 7 is little more than what Vista should have been, when it shipped two years ago. But eventually old PCs must be replaced and then we'll see corporations, desperate to get out of the expense of managing Windows machines, get wise. Instead of buying new Windows 7 PCs, they could deliver virtualized XP desktops to a worker's own PC and/or mobile device. Ashley believes that Citrix's Project Independence has the right idea."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2009 has only just begun and we have already featured 5 builds from the Maker Shed. It's been a lot of fun, but now we need your help. Is there anything from the Maker Shed that you would like to see us build? Maybe there is a kit that you just aren't sure how it works, or what it sounds like? Let us know, we would love some input from our readers. Leave your suggestions in the comments below. I can't promise I can build them all, but I'll try. Thanks!

All this week get 10% off you order in the Maker Shed, use code "2009OX" at the time of checkout - Happy Chinese New Year!

Here is what we have made so far in 2009:

How-to Tuesday: Maker's Notebook

How-to Tuesday: Valentines LED display

How-to Tuesday: Getting started with the 3pi

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In the Maker Shed: Plug-in Bread-Board Power Supply

In the Maker Shed: Mignonette Game Kit

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An anonymous reader writes "A hybrid fission-fusion process has been developed that can be used in some traditional fission reactors to process radioactive waste and reduce the amount of waste produced by 99%. This process uses magnetic bottle techniques developed from fusion research. This seems like the first viable solution to the radioactive waste problem of traditional nuclear reactors. This could be a big breakthrough in the search for environmentally friendly energy sources. Lots of work remains to take the concept to an engineering prototype and then to a production reactor."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While some of the complaining in the press about President Obama's lack of transparency is overblown, you would think that the new administration could at least live up to the rather simple promises it made days ago on transparency. On inauguration day, the administration promised, among other things:

We will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

That's great! If only it actually happened. Jim Harper points out that Obama signed the "Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009" into law just a day after Congress sent it to him. This is a "non-emergency" law. The Whitehouse did put it on the website for review, but not for five days. And, it's especially troubling since there actually is a fair amount of controversy over the law. No matter whether you support it or not, the administration made a great promise that we support: putting it up on the website for five days to allow public review and comment, before the President signs it. And they didn't live up to that.

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Tufts University has a really good book available online about the physics of music and musical instruments. It's a nice balance between theory, examples, and hands-on projects.

The Physics of Music and Musical Instruments covers the physics of waves, sound, music, and musical instruments at a level designed for high school physics. However, it is also a resource for those teaching or learning waves and sound from the middle school through college, at the mathematical or conceptual level.

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...something extraordinary happened at the end of 2000. My partner, Pat, was a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. She did well enough to enable me to take six months off my freelance design business to work on new fonts. During that break, I created Coquette, Anonymous, and Mostra.

#

overThruster writes "Inventor Ted Ciamillo and marine biologist Frank Fish (yes, that's his real name) are at work on a human-powered sub designed to cross the Atlantic. What's interesting is the highly efficient propulsion system which uses a 'tail' modeled after CAT scans of a dolphin's. From the article: 'Ciamillo and Fish say they knew they were onto something when the first prototype Lunocet, a piece of sculpted foam sandwiched between two pieces of carbon fiber, essentially swam by itself. When they released it at the bottom of a test pool, its buoyancy combined with its cambered shape generated a forward thrust that made it scoot across the tank.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tour the elegant and hypnotic motorized wave sculptures, created by visionary maker Reuben Margolin. In the Maker Workshop John Park upcycles a discarded shopping cart into a stylish easy chair, and Mister Jalopy details the unsung wonders of his 1950 Studebaker. The Maker Channel features a treadmill bike, an obedient, robotic foot stool, a homemade foundry (built by two 14 year old wizards), and an ultra-high-temperature heat ray that can melt brass!

The HD version is available at Blip by selecting the .MOV from the "play episode as:", Subscribe in iTunes or download the m4v here.

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Reuben Margolin, a Bay Area visionary and longtime maker, creates totally singular techno-kinetic wave sculptures. Using everything from wood to cardboard to found and salvaged objects, Reuben's artwork is diverse, with sculptures ranging from tiny to looming, motorized to hand-cranked. Focusing on natural elements like a discrete water droplet or a powerful ocean eddy, his work is elegant and hypnotic. Also, learn how ocean waves can power our future. Learn more about Reuben at reubenmargolin.com

Get the m4v, subscribe in iTunes., or watch on YouTube or Blip.

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Kick back with John Park as he demonstrates how to upcycle a no-longer-usable shopping cart into an easy chair. This Make: magazine-based project offers an introductory look at how to cut, bend, and shape metal using metal cutters, saws, vice grips, and other tools common to home workshops. John also attempts a "deluxe" version of this project that employs motors and switches to transform it into a "go-kart chair." View the clip to see his mixed results.

Check out the details for making this project!

Get the m4v or subscribe in iTunes.. Or watch on YouTube or Blip

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Check out the PDF for detailed instructions for building your own shopping cart chair.

Take a look at the Maker Workshop segment with John Park.

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In this 'Hidden Treasures' segment, Mister Jalopy waxes philosophic about the the unsung wonders of his old 1950's Studebaker, emphasizing how old-school design and build techniques can inspire and teach today's new generation of makers.

Get the m4v or subscribe in iTunes.. Or watch on YouTube or Blip.

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Make: television presents:

Treadmill Bike - Brent Curry crosses a two-wheeled bike with a treadmill to allow the 'rider' to produce a double-whammy of a workout.

RoboStool - Steve Norris's remote-controlled robotic foot stool comes to him wherever he wishes to sit.

Foundry - 14 year olds Oliver Ramin and A.J. Brackovitc make their own foundry for molding aluminum swords.

[Trouble Maker] Death Ray - Richard Whitney uses sunlight and the Fresnel lens from a rear projection television set to melt a steel security lock.

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An anonymous reader writes "Mount Redoubt, or Redoubt Volcano, is an active stratovolcano in the largely volcanic Aleutian Range of Alaska. The once quiet volcano has begun to roar once again. It's last eruption was in 1989 and geologists suggest that the next one is upon us. Alaskans who lived through the earlier eruption are stocking up on breathing masks and goggles. Starting on Friday, January 23 2009, the level of seismic activity increased markedly, and on Sunday AVO raised the Aviation Color Code to ORANGE and the Volcano Alert Level to WATCH. On the basis of all available monitoring data AVO regards that an eruption similar to or smaller than the one that occurred in 1989-90 is the most probable outcome. We expect such an eruption to occur within days to weeks." From the AP article: "Alaska's volcanoes are not like Hawaii's. 'Most of them don't put out the red river of lava,' said the observatory's John Power. Instead, they typically explode and shoot ash 30,000 to 50,000 feet high — more than nine miles — into the jet stream. 'It's a very abrasive kind of rock fragment,' Power said. The particulate has jagged edges and has been used as an industrial abrasive. 'They use this to polish all kinds of metals,' he said." The server for the Alaska Volcano Observatory appears to be overloaded and is unresponsive.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Mount Redoubt, or Redoubt Volcano, is an active stratovolcano in the largely volcanic Aleutian Range of Alaska. The once quiet volcano has begun to roar once again. It's last eruption was in 1989 and geologists suggest that the next one is upon us. Alaskans who lived through the earlier eruption are stocking up on breathing masks and goggles. Starting on Friday, January 23 2009, the level of seismic activity increased markedly, and on Sunday AVO raised the Aviation Color Code to ORANGE and the Volcano Alert Level to WATCH. On the basis of all available monitoring data AVO regards that an eruption similar to or smaller than the one that occurred in 1989-90 is the most probable outcome. We expect such an eruption to occur within days to weeks." From the AP article: "Alaska's volcanoes are not like Hawaii's. 'Most of them don't put out the red river of lava,' said the observatory's John Power. Instead, they typically explode and shoot ash 30,000 to 50,000 feet high — more than nine miles — into the jet stream. 'It's a very abrasive kind of rock fragment,' Power said. The particulate has jagged edges and has been used as an industrial abrasive. 'They use this to polish all kinds of metals,' he said." The server for the Alaska Volcano Observatory appears to be overloaded and is unresponsive.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently, New Zealand passed a copyright law similar to ones being pushed elsewhere by the entertainment industry, that would require accused file sharers to be cut off from their internet connection, based on the accusation alone. This seems to go against any concept of due process, and even musicians (who this law was supposed to help) came out against it loudly. Unfortunately, the politicians who put the law in place clearly had their minds already made up, and are refusing to change the law, which will go into effect in just a few weeks. Apparently, they want to see how it works in action, before making a decision on whether to change it -- which I'm sure will be quite comforting to those who lose their internet access without any proof or conviction of unauthorized file sharing.

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Tech Ticker writes "The Indian Government last year announced the development of a cheap $10 laptop, but was later rectified as $100 laptop. Now the government has announced that HRD minister Arjun Singh will unveil the prototype of a Rs. 500 ($10) computer. The computer is developed by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai. No specifications were revealed but DNA, a daily newspaper, has mentioned that it will be small and portable, will feature Wi-Fi, LAN, and expandable memory, and will operate on 2 watts of power."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

?Here's a how-to on building the "Auriga", a portable electronic sensor box and cave surveying instrument with an electronic compass and serial output that can be cataloged using a computer or PDA. This particular build uses an old Palm PDA to collect the data. Check out the link below for parts list and details on how to build this device.

How to build an electronic cave surveying instrument

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Santiago Morahan's cardboard furniture is a cheap and easy solution for the multitudes of cardboard boxes that most people have hanging around their homes. The artist has stacked them up, cut a hole in the middle, and fire-proofed the cardboard so that the heat of the lamp doesn't burn down the house. The result looks like a lost set piece from Bladerunner and will definitely make your neighbors envious.

via InHabitat

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Michael Geist has the latest example of what appears to be a company abusing the DMCA takedown process to try to quiet the speech of someone they didn't like who was criticizing them. In this case, Canada Post sent a takedown notice to YouTube for a video from union members making fun of Canada Post's CEO. The video was a parody song, sung to a Dr. Seuss tune, with lyrics making fun of the CEO. Since the song was clearly not covered by any Canada Post copyright, a DMCA takedown would break the law, which requires any takedown be from the copyright holder. Canada Post tried to claim that the infringement was actually an altered photo of the CEO briefly shown in the film -- but that's a pretty clear fair use, and, as Geist notes, recent US court rulings say that fair use should be taken into account before sending a takedown.

This seems like a pretty clear case of abusing the takedown process to try to silence critics. But it's made even more interesting that it involves two Canadian organizations... but is using US law. That's because the video was hosted at YouTube, in the US. It certainly does raise, once again, questions concerning jurisdiction on the internet -- and how laws apply across borders.

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tsamsoniw writes "Singapore-based Atlantis Resources Corporation, which brings to the table tidal-turbine technology, is partnering with Scotland-based datacenter developer Internet Villages International) to construct a tidal-powered 150MW 'Blue Datacenter,' InfoWorld reports. If all goes to plan, the facility will eventually be powered entirely by clean energy produced by tidal-current turbines in the Pentland Firth, the stretch of water between the far north Scottish mainland and Orkney. The firth's currents could generate 700 megawatts of electricity by 2020." And reader Mike writes "Here's something to raise a glass to: recently the Rothes consortium of whiskey and scotch distillers announced that they have partnered with Helius Energy to install a power plant fueled entirely by whiskey by-products. The completed plant will use biomass cogeneration to convert draff and pot ale from the distillery into 7.2 MW of electricity — enough to power 9,000 homes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With Arizona getting rid of its speed cameras, after realizing they did nothing to make the roads safer (and may, in fact, have done the opposite), now it's time to move on to red light cameras, which have a pretty troubling history themselves. The latest, as pointed out by Jeff Nolan, is that Denver has failed to enforce the contract it had concerning red light cameras. Specifically, part of the deal was that the contractor running the cameras would deliver data on whether or not the cameras were effective (including a potential refund of money if they were not). However, the contractor, Redflex Traffic Systems, apparently simply hasn't delivered the data. Actually, to be clear, they haven't delivered any data. It's not just that some data has been left out, but that none has been delivered.

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January is almost over, and you know what that means? Our Chinese New Year promotion in the Maker Shed is almost over too! You might want to pick up the new Arduino Duemilanove and get 10% off. Better yet, use the coupon code "2009OX" at checkout and you will receive 10% off your entire order. Happy New Year!

New Arduino Duemilanove available in 10 different colors in Maker Shed

All this week get 10% off you order in the Maker Shed, use code "2009OX" at the time of checkout - Happy Chinese New Year!

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Wowsers writes "First the tech illiterates in the UK government want to extend broadband internet connections to every home, whether it makes sense or not, then at the same time they propose a £20 per year (approx $29US) broadband tax which they claim will pay the record and film industries for their failed business models. Coincidence the two proposals are linked? And why should people be forced to pay for the failed film and music industries?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The modern gymnasium is very much a 19th- century creation, no matter how much the fitness freak is kitted out with bad hair, retro headbands, and spandex, or contemporary embedded LCD interfaces and computer-generated body plans. Gyms harken back to a world of classical mechanical physics, plugged into equations of work and energy.

To the strains of Olivia Newton-John's aerobics anthem, the puritan work ethic is transformed into a sweatshop for the body beautiful. The slick machines, treadmills, and cross trainers merely serve to disguise antique apparatuses more at home in a world of steam engines, and to stifle enquiry into thermodynamics and economy.

Then there's artisan Manuel de Arriba Ares. Under the sign of his "eco-gym," Gimnasio Ecológico Lumen, Arriba has turned the demon of entropy on its head. Making use of the very waste and byproducts of the modern entropic economy, Arriba has created a truly practical monument in the form of a supremely low-tech gymnasium. Its fitness machines, created with a good deal of physical effort over three years from raw and junked materials such as wood, rope, and rubber, directly mirror both the design and functionality of those found within its wasteful counterpart.

Located in the small town of Valdespino de Somoza in the north of Spain, Arriba offers free access for all to this functional work of Art Brut, a wonderful Heath Robinsonesque assemblage constructed from remnants of strollers, boats, bicycles, and automobiles salvaged from neighboring dumps.

Helpful signs, painted on the tarnished white remnants of refrigerators, instruct the would-be eco-gymnast on exercises and operation of the intricate machinery, reflecting Arriba's knowledge and experience over many years as a physical education teacher.

Lumen is a "gymnasium that was born of the nature, (and which) will return to her," Arriba philosophizes. The cycle of waste, embodied by so many aspects of the smogged-out city gym, is closed.

From the column Made on Earth - MAKE 12, page 17 - Martin Howse.

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The NY Times has an interesting article looking at the concept of endowed newspapers, with the idea being that, if you could build an endowment for a newspaper, such that it doesn't need to focus on a business model, it would get us past this whole "newspapers are failing" issue. The idea is that they would be set up like universities, as 501(c)(3) nonprofits, and with a large enough endowment, they wouldn't have to worry about business models anymore. As the article notes, a newspaper like the NY Times could survive on a $5 billion endowment -- which really isn't that much money. Of course, this isn't a new idea at all, and has been talked about for over a century, with plenty of critics pointing out why it would never work all that well.

That said, even if the idea has some merit, what bothers me about the NY Times piece is that it seems to fall back on the assumption that journalism equals newspapers. It starts off with the Jefferson quote: "were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter" and proceeds to point out that we may be heading towards the former. Of course, that's not accurate. What Jefferson really meant was not "newspapers" but journalism. He used the term newspapers because that was the only outlet for journalists of the time. However, these days, that's no longer true. There are many different media types where journalists exist -- from newspapers to radio to television to the internet. So, the crisis in newspapers is not a crisis in journalism, and acting as if it is distorts the debate.

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carlmenezes writes "It seems that the DRM on the PC version of Gears of War came with a built-in shut-off date; the digital certificate for the game was only good until January 28, 2009. Now, the game fails to work unless you adjust your system's clock. What is Epic's response? 'We're working on it.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

carlmenezes writes "It seems that the DRM on the PC version of Gears of War came with a built-in shut-off date; the digital certificate for the game was only good until January 28, 2009. Now, the game fails to work unless you adjust your system's clock. What is Epic's response? 'We're working on it.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Charles Platt is a guest blogger

Earlier today I wondered what the actual text is of H.R.1, the bill to authorize an $819 billion "stimulus package." Newspapers don't generally go into this kind of detail, perhaps fearing that it would bore their readers, so I visited the very usefulOpen Congress site to find out. As I read the bill, two things caught my eye.

The first should have been obvious: The money will be mostly distributed among existing federal agencies. To spend huge sums of money, the government simply has to channel it through the system that already exists to allocate and track it. Unfortunately, some of these agencies are not widely known for timely and efficient behavior.

The second lesson is a corollary of the first and could be described as "no agency left behind." Naturally when you suddenly have more than $800 billion floating around, everyone wants a piece of it. Thus we find that very substantial sums are being allocated for purposes such as assisting local law enforcement (the war on drugs, no doubt), housing soldiers, and (of course) increasing homeland security.

Here are some random items that I copied and pasted. For more details, check the link above.

Law Enforcement
$3 billion for state and local law enforcement assistance.
$1 billion for community policing services.

Department of Defense
$4.5 billion to modernize and repair Army barracks and other defense facilities.

General Services Administration
$6 billion for construction and repair of federal buildings.
$1 billion for immigration facilities at ports of entry.

Homeland Security
$250 million for salaries and construction at ports of entry.
$500 million for purchase and installation of explosive detection systems.
$150 million for alteration or removal of obstructive bridges.

The last item is amusing in a grim way. I thought this bill was largely intended to restore "crumbling infrastructure" but apparently $150 million will be spent partly on tearing it down.

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

EFF filed a really well-done brief today in support of Professor Nesson and Harvard's Berkman Center and their quest to provide a live webcast of the defense they providing to students against the RIAA.

Public.Resource.Org and the Internet Archive have offered to host the video. We've previous worked with the provider here, Courtroom View Network, to put the Nifong disbarment trial on-line (link). All that video is hi-res with no restrictions on re-use.

Media Access Project, Free Press, and the California First Amendment Coalition, and even attorney Ben Sheffner have joined this call to open up the court proceedings.

EFF does such great work ... we're really proud to support their excellent brief.

EFF Leads Call of Support for Live Webcast of RIAA Hearing (Thanks, Carl!

Previously:

• Legendary Harvard law prof fights constitutionality of RIAA ...
• Law prof wants to webcast RIAA lawsuit - Boing Boing

Avi sez, "Nassim Nicholas Taleb, gadfly author of The Black Swan, gives his 10 rules for surviving an unpredictable world with dignity."

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom (Thanks, Avi!)

British science fiction writer Paul McAuley spotted this instant corner shop created by plunking a storage container down on a tiny bit of front garden and flinging wide the doors. Instant architecture indeed -- a sign of the times, and more to come no doubt.

Instant Architecture (via Futurismic)

Bruce Sterling's lead editorial in SEED Magazine's feature on the 21st century enumerates the disastrous contradictions and changes in the shifting global mindset, and scathingly demands that we fix them. This is inflaming, heady stuff:

7. Science. To be a creationist president is not a problem. A suicide cult is the most effective political actor in the world today. Clearly the millions of people embracing fundamentalism like to make up their own facts.

Standards of scientific proof and evidence no longer compel political and social allegiance. This is not a return to the bedrock of faith?—?it's an algorithm for ontological anarchy. By attacking empiricism, the world is discarding all of the good reasons to believe that anything is real.

If science is discredited, why should mere politics have any intellectual rigor? Just cobble together a crazy-quilt mix-and-match ideology, like Venezuelan Bolivarism or Russia's peculiar mix of spies, oil, and Orthodoxy. Go from the gut?—?all tactics, no strategy?—?making up the state of the world as you go along! Stampede wildly from one panic crisis to the next. Believe whatever is whispered. Hide and conceal whatever you can. Spy on the phone calls, emails, and web browsing of those who might actually know something.

If that leads you to a miserable end-state, huddling with the children in a fall-out shelter clutching silver bullion, then you can congratulate yourself as the vanguard of civilization.

2009 Will Be a Year of Panic

Glyn sez, "The UK Government today published it Digital Britain interim report and not surprisingly, are proving controversial. The Open Rights Group have already stated:

We are looking at the report in detail, but we are extremely concerned that the voice of consumers and citizens is being marginalised.

We are concerned that there is no suggestion that consumers and citizens should be represented on the proposed copyright 'Rights Agency'. Without our voices, such an agency could easily be dominated by industry's concerns at the expense of civil rights. Consumer would be very likely to get a bad deal.

"We are concerned at the government's proposals for technical 'solutions' for rights enforcement - technical 'solutions' to social issues tend to be expensive and fail."

"One by one digital music providers like iTunes and Amazon are moving away from DRM, and trusting their customers. This is a much better example for industry and government to follow."

"We also intend to look closely at proposals for recording and reporting alleged rights infringers. While we welcome the proposal to ask the courts before taking action, we are concerned at the potential for further erosion of privacy online."

"Part of the Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham speech showed a clear lack of understanding that alleged behaviour does not equals unlawful:

"We will only maintain our creative strength if we find new ways of paying for and sustaining creative content in the online age. We therefore explore the potential for a new rights agency to be established and following a consultation on how to tackle unlawful file sharing we propose to legislate to require internet service providers to notify alleged significant infringers that their conduct is unlawful."

"The main recommendations that Boing Boing readers will be interested in are:

ACTION 11 By the time the final Digital Britain report is published the Government will have explored with interested parties the potential for a Rights Agency to bring industry together to agree how to provide incentives for legal use of copyright material; work together to prevent unlawful use by consumers which infringes civil copyright law; and enable technical copyright-support solutions that work for both consumers and content creators. The Government also welcomes other suggestions on how these objectives should be achieved.

ACTION 12 Before the full Digital Britain Report is published we will explore with both distributors and rights-holders their willingness to fund, through a modest and proportionate contribution, such a new approach to civil enforcement of copyright within the legal frameworks applying to electronic commerce, copyright, data protection and privacy to facilitate and co-ordinate an industry response to this challenge. It will be important to ensure that this approach covers the need for innovative legitimate services to meet consumer demand, and education and information activity to educate consumers in fair and appropriate uses of copyrighted material as well as enforcement and prevention work.

ACTION 13 Our response to the consultation on peer-to-peer file sharing sets out our intention to legislate, requiring ISPs to notify alleged infringers of rights (subject to reasonable levels of proof from rights- holders) that their conduct is unlawful. We also intend to require ISPs to collect anonymised information on serious repeat infringers (derived from their notification activities), to be made available to rights-holders together with personal details on receipt of a court order. We intend to consult on this approach shortly, setting out our proposals in detail.

digital britain - interim report (Thanks, Glyn!)

There's been a silly, and mostly meaningless, one-upmanship lately in the search engine world, concerning how long the search engines retain log file info on things like the IP address of searchers. Some privacy advocates have claimed that this is a big privacy issue, though the "threat" is significantly overblown. However, it's still interesting to see a Dutch meta-search engine now announce that it's ignoring IP addresses entirely. The site, Ixquick, which has always promoted itself as being privacy friendly, used to dump log files after 48 hours, but is now ditching them completely. That's great, as an option, but it hardly means that others should do the same. It gives ixquick a way to differentiate itself in the market -- and those who really are worried about their IP addresses being watched (and haven't figured out how to use an IP-anonymizing service yet) can go use that search engine. But for those who actually find benefits in sharing some data with their search engine of choice, they should be free to do so.

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An anonymous reader writes "Thailand is ramping up their media wide censorship of anything that remotely offends Thai royalty. In the last three weeks, another 2,300 websites have been blocked. Another ~4,000 are soon expected. And not just websites, but books as well as the Economist have been blocked. And anyone caught publishing such material, including foreigners, will get 3 to 15 years in a Thai prison. You don't want to be in a Thai prison!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's another Make: Books PDF excerpt. This one comes from the Best of Instructables, which is a compilation of some of the most amazing projects from Instructables, the world's biggest show and tell. This excerpt is kind of special to us. In it, former Make intern Jacob McKenzie riffs on a project by Gareth Branwyn, Lead Editor for this book:

Gareth Branwyn's "Mousey the Junkbot," from MAKE Volume 02, is a fun introduction to robotics. So fun, that I've created this expanded documentation of a Mousey build from start to finish, with a few extra tips and tricks you won't find in the magazine project. This how-to is best understood after reading the original article, found on page 100 of Volume 02 (or in The Best of MAKE collection), however it is probably not required.

Mousey is a simple bot that uses two "eyes" to sense light and then turns towards the light it detects. A single large "whisker" is mounted on the front to detect collisions. A collision with a wall will cause the bot to reverse and turn, then take off in another direction. This project is pretty cheap if you have a mouse to use, the other parts can be obtained for less than ten dollars.

Mousey requires several parts that we can conveniently borrow from a donor mouse, its eyes and its whisker. Open up the mouse and locate the components that we'll be harvesting, the momentary switch and the infrared emitters. The emitters are the components in the clear package (Figure C)...

Follow this link for the full excerpt.

Previously:

• Making Things Talk excerpt: distance ranging
  
• Eccentric Cubicle book excerpt: improvisational fabrication
  
• Fashioning Technology book excerpt: Sewing Soft Circuits
  

Buy Best of Instructables in the Maker Shed today! (Use code 2009OX on checkout for a 10% discount for the week of January 26, 2009.)

Instructables.com has become one of the most popular magnets for makers and DIY enthusiasts of all stripes. Now, with more than 10,000 projects to choose from, the Instructables staff, editors of MAKE: Magazine, and the Instructables community itself have put together a collection of technology how-to's from the site. The Best of Instructables Volume 1 includes plenty of clear, full-color photographs, complete step-by-step instructions, and tips, tricks, and new build techniques you won't find anywhere else!

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Give a community the motivation of a $20,000 grand prize, and they can produce a lot of great tutorials. That's just what Instructables and Craftsman did, and they selected one winner and ten finalists whose Instructables are all worth a good read. Several have been featured on MAKE, but not the one on extracting honey! The grand prize winner was how to convert your honda accord to run on trash. Check out the rest of the winners.

More:

Run your car on trash

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Today on Offworld, we didn't see much better than this: 2D Boy co-founder and World of Goo maker Kyle Gabler (right) channeling... Tyra Banks? and giving his top 7 tips for indie devs about to make their first rapidly developed game, in his keynote for the inaugural Global Game Jam. Elsewhere, we heard about a new version of EA and Steven Spielberg's Wii title Boom Blox and prepared for the release of an updated version of iPhone tower defense hit Fieldrunners, and dug through the huge number of winners of JayIsGames' best of 2008 games list. We also danced to all of the things that Left 4 Dead's Francis hates (most of all, Ayn Rand), saw BAFTA announced an award for Pong/Atari head Nolan Bushnell, and saw Ico creator Fumito Ueda look back at the development of PS2 cult classic Shadow of the Colossus. Finally, we saw a brilliant looking new PSP game that will give players 30 seconds at a time to fulfill their RPG quests, and, because I could, watched a fantastic new retro-pixel music video for Offworld favorite band Deerhoof.

The upcoming revision of the Android operating system, code named cupcake, has generated a lot of excitement among users of the first Android-based phone, the T-Mobile G1. Because Google's Android operating system is Open Source, it's possible, but a little difficult, to test cupcake out on a real phone.

Among the many improvements in cupcake is a much faster web browser, due in no small part to the adoption of the SquirrelFish JavaScript engine. The picture above shows the results of running the V8 JavaScript Benchmark Suite on a G1 running the most recent shipping version of Android (top) and an Android Dev Phone 1 (bottom) running the latest build from the Android source code repository. The top one didn't even complete all the benchmarks, and only scored 1.08 and 1.54 on the ones it did complete (vs. 9.36 and 3.09) for the phone running the latest release.

To try this yourself, you'll need an Android Dev Phone 1, a Mac OS X or Linux computer, and a few hours of time. This wouldn't be possible if it weren't for the folks (links below) who documented what you need to do. Here are the steps I took along with some notes you may find helpful:

Set up your computer for Android development

Google has posted instructions for obtaining the Android source code, which also includes information on setting up your computer so that you can compile this source code into an image that you can load on your phone. Don't follow the instructions all the way; stop before you type "make".

Install the Android SDK

There are two development toolchains for Android: the one from the previous step is what you need to compile the Android operating system; the second (the Android SDK) is what you need to create applications that run on Android. You don't need the SDK to compile Android, but you do need one of the utilities included with it, adb, in order to manipulate the files on the phone.

Prepare the Android source code for building on a real device

Back in the first step, you did everything you needed to run Android on an emulator, but that's not as much fun as doing it on the real thing. In this step, you'll modify the Android source code so it's (almost) ready to compile on the HTC Dream, which is the same device that's been rebranded as the T-Mobile G1 and Android Dev Phone 1.

Tweak the Android source code some more

Jean-Baptiste Queru, a Google Engineer, has posted detailed instructions on what you need to do to compile the bleeding-edge version of Android for a real device--note that these directions are subject to change, so keep an eye on the discussions at the Android-Platform Google Group. There's one additional step I found in one of Jean-Baptiste's earlier posts. Before you type "gmake" (Mac OS X) or "make" (Linux), run the following command from inside your mydroid directory to copy over the list of cellular data access points: adb pull /system/etc/apns-conf.xml development/data/etc/apns-conf_sdk.xml

If you're not sure what to do about changes 7699 and 7345, go to their code review pages: Change 7345/Change 7699 and run the "repo" command listed in the "Download" section. This will pull each change into your Android source tree.

Backing up and Flashing your Dev Phone

Anton Melser has written up a great guide (which covers most of the above points as well) that explains how you can back up the Android software that shipped with your Dev Phone, and also how you can install the new images that you compiled. There is a shortcut you can use to replace all the fastboot commands: to install all the freshly compiled images at once, and to reboot afterwards, run this from your mydroid directory:
export ANDROID_PRODUCT_OUT=./out/target/product/dream
./out/host/darwin-x86/bin/fastboot -w flashall

(Note that I'm using "darwin-x86" instead of the "linux-x86" shown in Anton's instructions. Like me, Mac OS X users will use "darwin-x86")

And that's it. When your phone finishes rebooting, it will be automatically provisioned on the network; you won't need to go through the out-of-box initial setup. You'll find that most of the interesting applications aren't there (no Maps, no Market, no Gmail), but the Browser and many other core apps are working fine.

It's a complicated procedure to go through, but if you read everything twice before doing it, you should have no problems. And if something doesn't work as you expected, check out (or jump into) the discussion over at the Android-Platform Google Group.

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Big hugs to Forbes for saying I'm one of the 25 nicest people on the web. You guys are the greatest. Love ya all, Dave

I have to admit that I've never quite understood the point of any sort of obscenity laws. Perhaps it's just my inner-libertarian, but why should the government be outlawing what people look at -- especially when it comes to such a subjective standard as "obscenity." Over in the UK, many people are up in arms over a new pornography law that is so broad and so vague that it could outlaw certain Batman comics, among other things. Defenders of the law will say that this is a ridiculous claim and that the law was intended for no such thing, and, in fact, police have said they don't plan to actively enforce the law.

Of course, that should be a sign of why the law is so problematic. Basically, officials are admitting that they're only going to use it in cases where either they can't find something else on someone, or they just want to pile on. It's not a law for any good reason... it's giving prosecutors an extra tool to take someone down. In the end, it looks like this was just another grandstanding law -- allowing some politicians to announce that they were able to help "protect the children" -- with little thought given to the actual details. That's why it includes a carve-out for movies. So, in theory, you could watch a movie with graphic pornography in it -- but then writing a description to someone else about it would be illegal.

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A russian site recently released a program that allows Canon Liveview owners to record video with their digital camera. Not too long after, Nikon hacker Olivier Giroux posted a few tests of his own that do the same with a Nikon D700.

The next day I noticed a wave of news about updated remote-control software by a 3rd party (i.e. not Nikon). That got me thinking... clearly there is an SDK for Nikon cameras. How hard is it to get? I wondered.

Not hard at all. Basic form-filling skills is all you need. Last night I downloaded out the D700 SDK. Minutes later I had built the sample remote program and was pulling my D700's strings over USB. That includes control of the Live View feed.

Good news: it is a viable video source. It's fast enough, and the quality is sufficient.

Bad news: it's a bit too low-quality to be really exciting. It's roughly 30% below 480p resolution. The most unfortunate thing is they create the Live-View image by decimating the sensor data rather than downsampling it - as a result it aliases, moirés and looks terrible in low light.

Olivier hasn't yet released his code, but the Nikon SDK is available for download and you can take a hack at it yourself while you're waiting.

It seems like it shouldn't be too long before there's a more official convergence between digital camera and digital video technology. It's all roughly the same optical technology. Why do we need two separate devices, with all their separate lenses and add-on equipment to record both still and moving images?

D700 Shoots Video
Video with any Liveview EOS Camera

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Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Gareth Branwyn writes on technology, pop and fringe culture. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Maker Media. Recent projects have included co-creating The Maker's Notebook and editing The Best of MAKE and The Best of Instructables collections.

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Annie from Provisions Learning Project writes:

In their continuing efforts to battle the ever growing mounds of garbage polluting our oceans and coastlines, Surfrider Foundation joined forces with Saatchi & Saatchi LA to sponsor the aptly titled Catch of the Day guerrilla ad campaign. Trash was collected from beaches across the US, then sorted, packaged like seafood, and strategically placed around local farmers’ markets. Directly targeting seafood consumers, this creative campaign draws attention to the gross debris littering our oceans and highlights how this pollution affects the consumer directly through the food they eat. Even if you’re not partial to seafood, its hard to miss the message!

It's eco-guilt meets the Barbie Liberation Organization! [Full Disclosure: I am on the Board of Directors of Provisions Learning Project]

eldavojohn writes "It's often assumed that representing data reaches a limit when you get to the point that an atom represents one bit in some form or fashion. But Stanford University researchers have used a quantum hologram model to store the characters 'S' and 'U' by encoding the data at a rate of 35 bits per electron."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Big hugs to all the she-geeks gathering in Mtn View!

With the CAFC's decision on Bilski being appealed to the Supreme Court, it's worth thinking about how the Supreme Court might actually view the question of software and business model patents. While patent system defenders go through all sorts of twists and turns to explain why software should be patentable, Tim Lee has a detailed explanation of why software should not be patentable, based on earlier Supreme Court precedent. It's a great read (though, frankly, Ars Technica's habit of breaking stories like this up into multiple pages, without a single-page option is annoying) that highlights why there's a decent chance that the Supreme Court would uphold the CAFC's ruling on Bilski if it chose to hear it. Of course, you never know until it happens, and while the current court has been good about limiting the more ridiculous aspects of the patent system over the past few years, we shouldn't be surprised by bad rulings anymore. That said, who knows if the Supreme Court will even hear the case -- or if it will prefer to see how things play out based on the Bilski ruling, and wait for an alternate case to come up before addressing the issue of software patents.

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Before:

After:

I haven't tried this, so I hope I'm not being hoodwinked. This article on DIYPhotography shows how to cut out a sort of lens gobo to shape high contrast parts of an out-of-focus photograph.
Bonus points for the first person to build a "MAKE:" bokeh one letter at a time and post the results on the MAKE Flickr pool!
Speaking of which, this example came from the MAKE Flickr pool:

via Digg

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Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, our friend Renzo created this wonderful Reutersvärd-inspired heart. Love is an illusion!

Rob presented The Gadget Tribes of Technology.

John found 3D Star Wars Kites; roasted Gadget Lab's Charlie Sorrel, who has four gadgets to help you quit smoking; beheld The Triceratopter; and found a Wallet made of Tyvek. There were Russian keyboard stones and server log hints of new iPhone firmware.

Joel introduced Outlander, this year's best movie about Vikings led by a space messiah to kill an alien dragon; drank before Chalkboard beer taps; and had sex with a Tenga Egg.
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Photoshop competition winners: "What will this liquidated Circuit City become?"

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

Undeveloped land is still cheaply available in Northern Arizona, for anyone willing to live off the grid. This piece which I own, consisting of nearly 20 acres on top of a knoll, is just 15 minutes from the nearest town yet has unobstructed views extending at least 30 miles in every direction. The picture above was taken looking east; the picture below, slightly later on the same evening, looks west. Northern Arizona often enjoys dramatic sunsets during the monsoon season in late July through early September, when thunderstorms roll in.

Despite the seemingly remote location, I get 4 bars on my cell phone when I'm standing at the top of the knoll, since a cell tower is located within line-of-sight, 10 miles away. I love to visit the undeveloped land but after I finish enjoying the view and the solitude, I find myself faced with a question that is difficult to answer:

“Now what shall I do?”

Maybe I’ll advertise it on eBay.

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)

This brain cactus is another of the plant species found in the botanical gardens in Phoenix, one of the most peaceful environments that I know.

No, it doesn't just cost 5 cents. This tilt sensor earns its name because it's made out of a dime and still really cheap (in a good way).

(via hackaday)

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