Peter writes in the comments about Blender. He and his mates did an independent study to learn Blender, an open source software platform for 3D design and animation. The results of their work is a clever short film titled The Night of the Living Dead Pixels. Their video animation was awarded best short film at the 2007 Suzanne Awards for creating with Blender.

Via emai, Peter says of the project:

We (myself, Jere Virta and Jussi Saarelma) are currently fourth-year 3D animation students at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences in Vantaa, Finland. As part of our degrees we are required to do five months of internship.
About two years ago, towards the end of our second year, we were approached by our lecturer Kristian Simolin (who I by the way happen to know follows the Make blog...), asking whether we wanted to spend the summer months with access to the school computer labs, teach ourselves Blender, create some sort of animation to prove we'd done so, and have it count towards our required internship. The three of us had collaborated on some animation projects before, and found out that we worked well together, so we jumped at the chance.

A really great aspect of their project is that they hit it from so many different angles. Sure, they learned some new fangled software, but they also created documentation of their process. They blogged about the making of the video, telling of their successes and setbacks, they created a website, they posted their work online. When students go through these great efforts to tell the story of their project's creation, not only do they learn the skills of the project, but they also provide a path into the ideas for the students and teachers who follow them. Their YouTube account has many little segments of their work showing the evolution of the project.

Peter again:

For our animation we wanted something combining our love for videogames, zombie flicks and offbeat/poor humour. Arriving at a concept we all could agree on was pretty easy.

At that point we had previous experience with using 3ds max, and for this kind of work we found that Blender had no problems standing up to it. It's lightweight (loads in seconds, and even runs off a USB thumbdrive if you want), full of features (even has its own integrated video editor and compositor, in addition to the 3D tools), and once you get past the initial hurdle (which really isn't as steep as some people would have you believe) the user interface lets you work very efficiently. We found the user community great for support, and the fact that you can get more or less directly in touch with the developers to ask about possible bugs and the like is pretty amazing

From their blog:

Jussi, Peter and Jere, three 3D Animation students at Laurea Polytechnic, Vantaa, Finland are doing the internship of their dreams over the summer: Learn the free 3D software Blender, produce a short animation and keep a blog about what spending the summer in a school computer lab feels like.

Peter suggested the forums as a good place to get help on learning Blender.

More from Peter:

In addition to learning to use Blender we learned a lot about project management and the importance of proper planning, mostly through making every possible mistake. :) Originally the script for our animation was much longer, but once we realized how much more time everything was taking compared to what we'd expected, we had to scale back. Night of the Living Dead Pixels is what we had after about three months of work, though. An extra nice touch was when we got an early version of it off to the Blender Conference in Amsterdam, where we won the Best Short Film category at their "Suzanne Awards" festival.

We've since used Blender for other 3D work, both in- and outside of school. At the moment the three of us are working with a Finnish TV channel to produce a series of channel idents, using Blender as our main tool.

What independent projects have you done in school? How is learning independently from and with your classmates a great or troubling way to work in school? How has social media positively impacted your school and learning and teaching? Do your teachers read MAKE? Do your students read MAKE? What can you use Blender for? What do you learn during your vacations? How hard is it to use it as a 3D design tool for digital fabrication? Do you have a great project to show off? Join us in the comments and contribute your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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An anonymous reader writes "Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram feels that he has put together at least the initial version of a computer that actually answers factual questions, a la Star Trek's ship computers. His version will be found on their Web-based application, Wolfram Alpha. What does this mean? Well, instead of returning links to pages that may (or may not) contain the answer to your questions, Wolfram will respond with the actual answer. Just imagine typing in 'How many bones are in the human body?' and getting the answer." Right now, though the search entry field is in place, Alpha is not yet generally available -- only "to a few select individuals."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

• Rubber Cuckoo Clocks
  
• How-To: Lengthen Kids' Pants
  
• How-To: Planting Asparagus Crowns
  
• CRAFT Recipe: Ranch Dressing
  

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eirikso writes with an interesting story from Norway; the state broadcaster there has decided to put up some of its content on BitTorrent. "The tracker is based on the same OpenTracker software that the Pirate Bay has been using for the last couple of years. By using BitTorrent we can reach our audience with full quality, unencrypted media files. Experience from our early tests show that if we're the best provider of our own content we also gain control of it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At long last, our pals at Monochrom have released the next installment in their free, mad retro-sov-kitsch game Soviet Unterzoegersdorf (and I'm a character in it, along with Jello Biafra!).

/////// SOVIET UNTERZOEGERSDORF
//////
///// SECTOR II
////
/// The Adventure Game
//
/

An adventure marches on!

Soviet Unterzoegersdorf (pronounced «oon-taa-tsee-gars-doorf») is the last existing client republic of the USSR. The soviet enclave maintains no diplomatic relationship with the surrounding so-called "Republic of Austria" or with the capitalist fortress "European Union". The downfall of the people's motherland -- the Soviet Union -- in the early 1990s had a devastating effect on the country’s intra-economic situation. External reactionary forces threatened the last remaining proletarian paradise. Party secretary Wladislav Gomulka has been kidnapped and is being held in US-Oberzoegersdorf. We must save comrade Gomulka! Because communism isn't an opinion. It's a promise.

Special Non Player Guest Characters: Jello Biafra, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Emmanuel Goldstein, Mitch Altman, Bre Pettis, David 'DaddyD' Dempsey, Kyle Machulis, MC Frontalot, Eddie Codel, Irina Slutsky, Christian 'plomlompom' Heller, Jason Scott Sadofsky, Hans Bernhard, Robert Stachel (maschek) -- and many more.

Voice Acting by: Jevgeni Beliaikin, Sergey Teterin, Mikhail A. Crest, Daria Prawda, Bre Pettis -- and many more.

Soundtrack features: The Fat Man/George Alistair Sanger, Q-Burns Abstract Message, Zoe Keating, Neil Landstrumm, Jonathan Mann aka GameJew, Blockwerk, The Extra Action Marching Band, The Lazy, antivolk - Torsun feat. classless Kulla, Jan Klesse & Felix Knoke (left), Savant Trigger, Rioteer, MC Orgelmueller, Magic Jordan, Schaua, Horace, The Vladivostoks, Limpopo, Eric Skiff, Prometheus X, Kertal (feat. sunsetfactory), Bolschewistische Kurkapelle Schwarz-Rot, Farmer's Market, Attention, Cosmonauts!, Woodn Earf, Trishes, Krach the Robot, Prosperity Denied, Arteom Denissov, Dan Oberbauer aka DJ Chronos, LFO DEMON -- and more.

Operating systems: Available for Windows, Linux and OSX! And many thanks to the fabulous comrades at CodeWeavers (http://www.codeweavers.com) for Linux/OSX versions. And also bloshevik geetings to the folks at Silver Server (http://www.sil.at) for bandwith sponsoring.

Soviet Unterzoegersdorf / Sector 2: Proletarian Download

Eirikso from NRK, the Norwegian public broadcast, writes to tell us that they've set up their own BitTorrent tracker, adding, "The tracker is based on the same OpenTracker software that the Pirate Bay has been using for the last couple of years. By using BitTorrent we can reach our audience with full quality, unencrypted media files. Experience from our early tests show that if we're the best provider of our own content we also gain control of it."

The first show we’re putting on our new tracker is a very popular television series about people living in remote places in Norway. It features fascinating people and spectacular scenery. We have provided all the Norwegian subtitle files and if people want to fansub any of the episodes we’re more than happy to let you do that. Please let us know in the comments and we’ll link to your translations.

We are providing full quality video files with no DRM. The biggest problem regarding this project is to clear all the rights we need to be able to distribute content in such an open system. NRK is a big content producer, but record labels, actors, external production companies and format rights owners usually have contracts that prevent us from distributing our content freely in the internet. We are in constant negotiations over these issues. And it seems like it should be possible to find a solution where NRK gets the rights it needs and the rights holders get the compensation they want.

In addition to this we look into new providers. Pump Audio, Magnatune and other companies with easier licensing systems are interesting sources.

The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation is promoting the free and opensource Miro software as their preferred BitTorrent client. It is user friendly and contains everything you need to both download and play the high quality video files.

Now that's public service broadcasting!

Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation sets up its own bittorrent tracker (Thanks, Eirikso!)

Harry writes "Sunday is the final day of business for Circuit City, the once-dominant national consumer electronics chain done in by the rise of Best Buy, the crummy economy, and multiple failings of its own. I paid a final visit of respect to my local store, and found that they'd gotten rid of just about all the unopened electronics products, and were therefore selling off stuff like broken computers and the toilet-paper dispenser from the restroom. Whether or not you were ever a fan, it was a sad scene." NPR has a segment on the end of the Circuit City era as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few weeks ago, I checked out a Noise Night at Willoughby and Baltic. Scheduled for the second and fourth Thursday of the month, it's a really fun time. I read an article in MAKE, Volume 04 on circuit bending, but I'd never gotten around to trying it.

Back in college, I took a few classes in electronic music. My evening with circuit bending had a lot of the experimental feel of those pre-MIDI days of music. The experimental nature of the evening and the music reminded me a lot of Laurie Anderson's United States Live 5 LP album that I unearthed recently from my record collection.

We started the evening by having people show some of the projects that they'd done and explain them as they played. After a while, it was time to crack into the toys and make our own creations.

Jimmie had some toy saxophones, which seemed to be calling out for audio input and output jacks, among other things. We also tried out photo cells and potentiometers on the various devices. I had made a recent search through piles of stuff, and had brought some old computer speakers, a small keyboard, and Jimmie's favorite, a hand held workout toy. It called out instructions to the exercisers and allowed for the user to change the tempo and instruments of the music.

A while ago, I got a small keyboard that had to be about 20 years old. It took five batteries and had a ROM chip that allowed it to play four songs. I opened it up, and started poking around with probe wires to see what I could get it to do. One of the ideas with circuit bending is to just see what you can get the circuit to do by jumping various points with wires, your fingers, photocells and potentiometers. Once you see where the locations are that will give interesting results, then you can construct some kind of interface system to take advantage of the new possibilities in the toy, keyboard, or other device.

Once I had found a bunch of neat locations, I soldered wires to the points and ran them to the outside of the case of the keyboard. By the end of the evening, I had about eight wires hanging out of the keyboard, that when touched with fingers will bring out various weirdness in the music. I sealed it back up with the original screws, leaving all the factory-built functions in place, threw it in my bag, and have been playing it off and on for a few days. It is much more fun to play than it was before being bent.

My evening at Willoughby and Baltic was well spent. The people were nice, curious, and patient in explaining what they'd done and what could be done. I got to hear some amazing sounds, met some neat people, and tried my hand at a new creative artform. While we were there, we talked about some of the history of electronic music, techniques of circuit bending, and performing with bent instruments. Everybody was receptive to the ideas of the others in the room, and we all got a chance to learn and do. The keyboard that I modified has provided me, some of my students, and my daughter quite a bit of enjoyment and wonderment. Right now, the wires are routed out of the case, and I'm considering what kind of breakout box to add so that it's a bit easier to operate.

You might check out some photos of the evening, or watch some videos.

Have you bent an instrument? What are your favorite techniques? 'What are some clever materials that can be used? Are there essential tools for bending circuits? Are there some good online resources that you like to turn to for technical or aesthetic guidance on your circuit bending projects? If you also go to an event listed on Make: Online, please let us know what happened! Add to the conversation in the comments, and contribute your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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There's still time to start making or just watch this week's Weekend Project: 5-Minute Foam Factory. You can view the video here, or subscribe in iTunes to get all our Weekend Projects and PDFs delivered each week.

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hyades1 writes "Gizmodo reports that Verizon is sending out notification letters infested with virtually-indecipherable legalese. In their sneaky, underhanded way, they're informing you that you have 45 days to opt out of their plan to share your personal data with 'affiliates, agents and parent companies.' That data can include, but isn't limited to, 'services purchased (including specific calls you make and receive), billing info, technical info and location info.' If you view your statement on-line, you won't even get the letter. You'll have to access your account and view your messages. However, Read Write Web says the link provided there, called the 'Customer Proprietary Network Information Notice,' was listed as 'not available.' No doubt Verizon would like to reassure you that everyone they're going to hand your personal data over to will have your best interests at heart."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's a good idea to check in with Jay on where journalism is at every once in a while, which is what I did with him this morning. I'm going to try to do these more regularly with people who are on the Friends Of Dave channel, like Jay.

We start off talking about curmudgeons, then on to rebooting journalism, Meet The Press, the broken government, and everything related. Jay is really smart, spends a lot of time thinking about things I really care about. I thought the interview came out great. Hope you all listen. 40 minutes.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rosen09Mar08.mp3

Jay is a professor of journalism at NYU and was my choice as Blogger of the Year for 2008.

Update: Two articles mentioned in the interview.

A follow-up: It might make sense for Jay to offer one or two paragraph critiques of various bits of journalism. For example this story on TechCrunch is interesting, but it might be more believable if we knew who the author was talking to, or why the source wouldn't go on the record.

Singularity Hub writes "For decades our options for interacting with the digital world have been limited to keyboards, mice, and joysticks. Now with a new generation of exciting new interfaces in the pipeline our interaction with the digital world will be forever changed. Singularity Hub looks at some amazing demonstrations, mostly videos, that showcase new ways of interacting with the digital world." Along similar lines, reader shakuni points out a facial expression-driven user interface reported on News.com for operating, say, an iPhone, explaining "This device is tiny and fits into the ear and measures movements inside the ear due to changes in facial expression and then uses that as input triggers. So [tongue out] starts or stops your iPod Touch; [Wink] rewinds to the last song; and [smile] replays the same song."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Indie rock/alt.country artist Neko Case gave MAKE a shout-out during a recent CBC Radio 3 Sessions podcast. She was on the show promoting her new record, Middle Cyclone. Host Tariq Hussain asks her about the unusual instrumentation used on the title track. Turns out, they used "programmable" music boxes, the little paper-tape music machines where you can stamp the rolls yourself to compose your own music. They used 15 of these machines. She goes on to tell people you can get the boxes from the MAKE magazine website. I think what she's referring to is this item that Phillip posted a ways back.

CBC Radio 3 Sessions - Neko Case

More:

• DIY music box kit
• Mobius music strip plays on ... and on ...

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Richard Rothwell writes with news that Jack Straw, Britain's Justice Secretary, has made public plans to drop provisions from the Coroners and Justice Bill which would have allowed the government to take information gathered for one purpose and use it for any other purpose. "A spokesman for Mr Straw said the 'strength of feeling' against the plans had persuaded him to rethink. The proposals will be dropped entirely from the Coroners and Justice Bill, and a new attempt will be made to reach a consensus on introducing a scaled-back version at an unspecified stage in the future." After defending the government's intentions, Straw bowed to pressure from a variety of groups and individuals who presented objections to the bill.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan has a new interest in home brewing. He suggests the video series from Drunk Rhino. Thanks to resources like their Tips section, Home Brew doesn't have to become Lost Knowledge.

Are you into home brew? Where are the best resources for information? Where do you get your supplies? Have you made a wort chiller. What are your greatest successes? Any tales of homebrew tragedy? Join the conversation in the comments and add your photos and video the MAKE Flickr pool.

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On Saturday the Federal Communications Commission the Orange County Sheriff's department raided a pirate radio station called "Street Heat" that ran ads for gangs and provided information on where to get drugs and prostitutes.

Police said 20-year-old Balthazard Senat's pirate radio station had illegally tapped into 91.3 FM. DJs behind the microphone had their own rules and regulations as they broadcasted from a bedroom at a home on 30th Street off South Orange Blossom Trail.

The radio station's "Street Heat" broadcast could be heard anywhere in Orange County. Police said Senat had been cursing and using derogatory language on the air for about three months.

Slatterz writes "Cisco has inked a deal with NASA to build a new global system for tracking climate change. Dubbed 'Planetary Skin,' the network platform will connect a number of sensor and recording units throughout the planet in an effort to gather data for monitoring and tracking changes to the global climate. The company plans to begin building the system next year with a program called 'Rainforest Skin' which will track both climate change and deforestation in rainforest environments. Eventually, the company plans to take the system throughout the planet and create a global network of data-collecting systems for the project. A podcast and a video explain the project in further detail."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week we announced a lot of new bundles available in the Maker Shed. My personal favorite is the Welcome to MAKE bundle. It's a great way to get started with MAKE Magazine. The bundle includes a (1) year subscription to MAKE magazine, a copy of The Best of MAKE and your own Maker's Notebook.

In the Maker Shed: No soldering required bundle

In the Maker Shed: Editor's Choice electronics bundle

In the Maker Shed: Welcome to MAKE bundle

In the Maker Shed: The Ballistic Bundle

Although not everything going on in the Maker Shed was about a bundle.

In the Maker Shed: Doomsday Sound Kit

In the Maker Shed: SolarSpeeder 2.0 Kit

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flip-flop writes "The RAND Corporation has just released a lengthy report titled "Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism" which attempts to link all three. The authors suggest that organized crime might be financing itself in part through movie piracy (PDF) — and in three out of 14 of their international case studies, they claim that profits from piracy end up with suspected terrorist organizations. But now for the interesting part! Quote from the preface: 'The study was made possible by a grant from the Motion Picture Association (MPA).' Ah, what a surprise..." The RAND Corporation has made a video summary of the report as well. TorrentFreak has an article disputing some of the report's claims, focusing criticism on RAND's interchangeable use of the terms "piracy" and "counterfeiting" — the report deals with the physical distribution of DVDs, making only brief mention of digital downloads. The MPAA and others have barked up this tree before.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thanks Lass!

Have you tried CraftRobo? Could you do something similar to this by hand? How would you do the design work to make gears and other mechanisms? What software would you use? Add your ideas to the comments, and contribute your photos and video to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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David Gerard writes "iPhone development sounds closed-shop but simple — apply to be a developer, put application on the App Store, you and Apple make money. Except Apple can't keep up with the request load — whereas getting a developer contract used to take a couple of days, it's now taking months. Some early developers' contracts are expiring with no notice of renewal options. And Apple has no idea what's going on or the state of things. If you want to maintain a completely closed system, it helps if you can actually keep up with it." Reader h11:6 points out news of a recent study which suggests that "Android's open source nature will give it a boost over Apple's iPhone," and thus take the lead in sales as soon as three years from now. It will be interesting to see how they deal with the flood of proposed apps as their popularity rises.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

thefickler writes "Gone are the days when governments could easily hide top secret bases. These days it's a weekend pastime to see who can find top secret facilities using Google Earth. Now it's the UK government's turn to be outraged after a secret facility was revealed by a British tabloid. The facility is said to be located in Faslane on the River Clyde in Scotland. This nuclear base was previously blurred out by the request of the British Government. However, with the latest update provided via Google Earth, many of the blurred out locations were accidentally revealed." Update: 3/08 at 14:24 by SS: Multiple readers have pointed out that the issue here is not the location of the base — it's simply that details of buildings and objects within the base (such as the location of a pair of nuclear submarines) are accidentally visible after the UK government specifically requested they be blurred out.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the It Takes a Village blog, an account of Zimbabwean artist Dexter Nyamainashe, whose twisted-wire junk-sculpture automata are fabulous, political and controversial:

Dexter Nyamainashe of Chiweshe, Zimbabwe is aged 41 and six years ago he started combining various art pieces he made to create what he describes as a "Global Village of Peace". He uses scrap material to make little figures, minature homes and scenes which come alive when he rotates a piece of wire behind the art piece. The minatures move, they cook, they wash laundry, they play, they smoke a joint, they look for cattle etc... The animals fly, they run, they eat and they kill...

Dexter says he has had a difficult time promoting his art locally for the following reasons:

a) The local city council has called his art nonsense and refused to give him a license to operate. He has been chased away and even arrested for "illegal" vending.
b) Locals are spooked by his "Global Village". He says some people think it might be related to witchcraft so he has to explain to them by demonstrating how it works.
c) He used to work with the local art gallery but their commission was too high leaving him with very little.
d) He managed to gain the support of a local shop owner who tells the city council that Dexter is part of their own store display. This means he can display his work free of charge, avoid police harassment and avoid costly flea market charges.

Meet Dexter Nyamainashe - A Truly Gifted Artist (via Afrigadget)

The inestimable Duncan Davidson, photographer laureate of the O'Reilly tech conferences, has distilled his experiences watching thousands of speakers on thousands of stages into a pithy, useful article about how to be a better speaker. I know I need help with the last one (try not to look bored on panels -- basically, my "I'm thinking hard about this" face is pretty close to my "I'm not paying attention" face).

If you find yourself walking _backwards_, you are probably pacing very vigourously. Stop. Breathe. There were a couple of speakers that were pacing so hard they didn’t even bother to turn around. They just reversed direction and backpedaled. That’s a sure sign you just are feeling like you have to move too much. This can also be dangerous. Stages have edges. You don’t want to go off the edge of one.

If you don't make eye contact with your audience, you make it that much harder for the to connect to your message. You want your audience to connect with what you are saying, right? Then make them feel like you are addressing them. Obviously, there are many people in the audience and you can’t look at all of them at once. The good news is that you don’t have to. If you pick a few people in various places of the audience and lock eye contact with them, everyone else around them will feel that. It works. If it helps, you can lock eyes with friendly people that you know in the audience. Don’t have any friends out there? You can make some talking to a few people before you go up on stage. Then, when you make eye contact with them, you are making eye contact with the audience and connecting with them.

Dear Speakers

You've probably seen a number of light-following robotics projects. Making a light detector is one of the first projects a new Arduino maker embarks on. What better way to use a light detector than to aim a solar panel at the sun? Instructables user bwitmer shows us how.

For a class project (PV Design, Appalachian State, Dr. Dennis Scanlin) I decided to try making a low cost PV (photovoltaic) tracker. Being able to follow the sun's path through the sky can raise your solar panel system's output considerably (30-50%), but the argon filled ones can be a bit pricey, and seem to be a bit unsteady in wind. I looked at several different designs, looked at what materials I could find, and this is how I did it.

He's using an inexpensive purchased LED tracking unit, but if you're comfortable making your own, that part should be fairly straightforward. What's cool is the simple design of the hardware. The project uses a couple of bike wheels and a linear actuator to enable the movement of the panel. It looks to be relatively low-maintenance, and the bike wheels are easy to come by and should support quite a bit of weight.

Solar PV tracker

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

• More Tinkerbots [above, bottom-left]

• Interactive table glows with conversation [above, top-right]

• Painfully-cute papercraft [above, top-left]

• Mobius music strip plays on ... and on ... [above, bottom-right]

• Hot reflow action!

• Experiments in stereolithography

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SmugJerk writes "Authorities are continuing to apply pressure on Sweden's filesharing community amid the trial of several principals of The Pirate Bay filesharing site. Today they seized a fileserver containing about 65 terabytes of files, corresponding to around 16,000 full-length movies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some street artist in NYC is using tile-mosaics to turn the street-level water hookups into a giant Super Mario reenactment!

Seen On The Steets Of New York (via Wonderland)

John Reed writes a long and compassionate piece about Detroit in the Financial Times, suggesting that it has many lessons to learn for America as many other industries fail and the cities built around them have to figure out how to survive. Refreshingly, he puts some effort into puncturing the myth of the greedy auto-worker as the author of Detroit's destruction.

I was at Confusion, a science fiction convention in the Detroit area recently, and I got to thinking that Detroit may be the most science fictional city in the world -- if sf is about the way that technology changes society (and vice-versa), then Detroit, the first New World, world-class city built around a high-tech industry that collapsed, is about as science fictional as it gets.

Detroit may be the archetypal down-and-out rust-belt city, but to call it “dying” masks a more complex reality. Greater Detroit still has three to four million residents, a world-class university next door in Ann Arbor and the bone structure of a great city, as a car-industry consultant with the ear of a poet put it over lunch one day. Why, then, the relentless focus on its failings? Nearly everyone you meet is either weary or angry at seeing their home town made the butt of jokes on late-night television and the subject of anguished political commentary. But no one denies that the region’s property market is abysmal, its finances a mess and its industrial base shrinking at an alarming rate.

Instead, Michiganders, despite being self-deprecating to a fault, make a point their countrymen won’t want to hear: Detroit is no longer the nation’s worst-case scenario, but on its leading edge, the proverbial canary in the coal mine. “It’s like the rest of the country is getting to where Detroit has been,” said Peter De Lorenzo, who writes the acerbic and very funny Autoextremist.com blog. That means that smug mock-horror is no longer the appropriate reaction to the frozen corpse. Instead, get ready for a shock of recognition...

Moreover, many Michiganders – whose parents had been able to send them to college thanks to the middle-class salaries of assembly-line work – felt the Republicans had made United Auto Workers members into hate figures on a par with the “welfare queens” conjured up by Reagan-era Republicans. National newspaper and television reports mostly followed rightwing Washington’s cartoonishly simple version of what ails the American auto industry. “Labour is totally under attack,” said Mike Smith, director of the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University. “And who is it under attack from? The supposedly leftwing media.”

Smith, a former mechanic and self-described “working stiff” turned librarian, is clearly an interested party, but he may have a point. In January, Ford followed GM and Chrysler in eliminating one of the UAW’s most jealously guarded perks, the “jobs bank”, which allows workers whose services are not needed to receive pay by doing course work, community service or – in some cases – just showing up and watching TV. I duly recorded this in a story for this newspaper, and found myself silently cheering the move, one of the conditions of the bail-out. Then I tuned into the news on Detroit’s local Channel 4 station, and listened to an auto-worker pointing out that many people at his shuttered plant were paying their grocery bills and mortgages from their jobs bank money, and did not know how they would replace the income.

The travails of Detroit (via Beyond the Beyond)

(Image: Detroit Disgrace, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Extremeezine's Flickr stream, courtesy http://passionatephoto.com/

An anonymous reader writes "The UK government, backed by a bunch of charities that raise funds for research into cancer, heart disease and diabetes, has launched an advertising campaign that links the 'inactive' or passive gaming lifestyle with death and illness. It's part of a bigger 'Change4Life' campaign that has also linked playing games with making children obese. The new ads show a young child playing a PlayStation game, with the caption 'Risk an early DEATH, just do nothing.' To say this has annoyed the UK games industry would be a grave understatement. Trade association ELSPA has already called an urgent meeting with authorities to have the ads pulled, and trade magazine MCV has complained to the country's Advertising Standards Authority as well. As MCV Associate Editor Tim Ingham says in an impassioned opinion piece, 'Change4Life's advertising campaign makes a mockery of everything the industry has achieved in the last decade.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

arcticstoat writes with a snippet from bit-tech.com; musician Matthew Applegate "plans on assembling a virtual orchestra of 20 retired relics of computing at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. The choice of venue will even allow Applegate to feature the infamous Colossus Mark 2 computer in the event, which was used for code-breaking in World War II and was recently reconstructed at Bletchley Park in 2007. ... A wide selection of computing fossils be used in Applegate's final musical presentation, which is called 'Obsolete?' This includes the Elliot 803 (a 1960s machine with 4KB of memory), the aforementioned Colossus Mark 2, a Bunsviga adding machine (pictured) and a punch card machine. As well as this, there are also some machines that will look nostalgically familiar to kids who grew up with the home computer generation, including a BBC Micro, an Atari 800XL, a Dragon 32 and an Amstrad CPC464." The article's list of the members of this "orchestra" makes an interesting checklist of computer hardware history.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Josh Kopel, of Dorkbot Seattle, made this lovely ceiling fixture from a colander and a sand strainer he got at RE Store, a used building supply place in Seattle.

[via The Genteel Recessionista]

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Blender is an open source software project that allows users to create three dimensional objects which can then be rendered into animation sequences and more.

From ~kronick

Does your school use Blender? What great things have you designed with Blender? What is the best way to get started learning Blender? Add your ideas to the comments, and contribute your photos and videos to the MAKE Flickr pool.

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Following up on an earlier bit about centralizing and TinyUrl, this is one of those vexing problems that actually has a solution!

Every web app that produces long urls should provide a built-in url-shortening facility. The user interface would be similar to the one in Google Maps they call "Link To This Page." You click on it, and up pops a box containing an address you can use to point to the page. Screen shot.

But look at the size of the url that Google gives you. It should be short. Why not something like: http:\//goog.us/8uj9oj.

In other words, why doesn't Google have a built-in shortnener?

When blogging software gives you a permalink, it should be short. It's okay to make the user ask for one, why clog up the system with shortened urls no one uses.

Another key point, when they give you a shortened url, it should point back to the software that gave it to you, so the shortened link will be exactly as long-lived as the thing it's pointing to. In other words, the URL shortener wouldn't contribute any extra link rot, to use an old term coined (I believe) by Jakob Nielsen.

It's a mistake, in hindsight, for Twitter to give us TinyUrl urls, because the link depends on two companies and two servers. It would be better if it just depended on one, less likely to break.

Now that URL length has become an issue for users, it might be even better for designers to view URLs as part of site design. Look at the address for the page for the Wii at Amazon. Wouldn't it be easier to find if the address were:

http://amazon.com/wii

Try clicking on it -- it actually works!

Why should a user ever see the longer crappy url?

In other words, url-shortening isn't just for Twitter users, it's for everyone. Maybe most people don't look at the urls, but some do, and maybe more would if they made more sense?

Note: This is a repeat of a piece I wrote in November 2007.

Barbara Demick of The LA Times reports on Sun Yaoting, China's last living eunuch (Left, standing with his biographer, Jia Yinghua).

In 1911 when he was eight years old, his father castrated him with a razor in preparation of "an imperial life of riches." It didn't quite work out as his father had hoped.

After the Communists came to power in 1949, Sun and other surviving eunuchs were despised as freakish symbols of the feudal past. He was nearly killed during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, and his siblings were so fearful of persecution that they threw away his bao, or treasure: the severed genitals that eunuchs kept pickled in a jar so they could be buried as complete men.

It was not until the final years of his life that Sun was recognized as a rare living repository of history. A biography based on hours of interviews in the years before his death in 1996 was recently translated into English. The book arrives as a museum dedicated to eunuchs, built around the tomb of a 16th century eunuch, is undergoing a major expansion. It is scheduled to reopen in May.

Progress in the art of twittering comes incrementally. This suggestion is a very small increment but one that would make the job of a frequent linker, such as myself, a little easier.

I would like my URL-shortener to grab the title of the page I'm linking to and insert it into the typing box, before the shortened URL.

Suppose for example I wanted to link to a post Doc's site. From that page, I'd click on the bookmarklet in the toolbar of my browser, it would take me to the shortener page, and this is what I'd see:



Then I click Submit, and off I go. This is a step I do manually now. Better if it were automatic!

Any URL-shortener could do it. The first is likely to get my business.