Back in 2005, we wrote about how Google was sued because AdWords users were being charged more than their "daily budgets" for ads on the site. The case initially got plenty of attention after pretty much all of the mainstream press reported that the Howard Stern listed as a plaintiff was "the Howard Stern" of radio fame -- though, that was later disputed. Either way, the case itself (famous Howard Stern or not) was still interesting. Since advertisers pay based on clicks, and the price of the clicks isn't always known until the click happens, the "daily budget" that any advertiser sets for ads is impossible to match exactly. Thus, there will be days when the daily budget is exceeded -- but that wasn't acceptable to those suing, who found the whole thing misleading. After a court refused (twice) to give summary judgment to Google, it looks like the company has decided to throw $20 million at the problem to make it go away via settlement (a decently large chunk, of course, goes to the class action lawyers who brought the suit). This is a bit of a surprise, since you would think Google has a pretty clear case, as the terms of its agreement with advertisers was pretty clear on what was going on -- but perhaps Google thinks it's smarter to just pay up and keep advertisers happy.

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It's been a busy day for the folks at Blizzard, who have released major announcements for several different games. The next Diablo III class has arrived: the Archivist. Despite their frail appearance and hunched, labored movement, they are quite deft at launching Quest Bolts at nearby foes, or conjuring a whirling Lore-nado of spinning books. Loud monsters can be silenced with a devastating Shush attack. Blizzard also put Starcraft II's latest unit on display, the Terra-Tron, which is a giant, robot uber-weapon assembled from the buildings in your base. Finally, for World of Warcraft they announced two features that have been requested by players for years: a battle of dances, where you can show off your avatar's hippest moves, and the ability to 'p1mp' your mounts. (Not sure exactly what that means, since I don't speak elvish, but there's a Nightsaber with a cannon holy crap.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger. Artist Brandon Bird's website has many pleasures, including the lovely piece above these words, "No One Wants to Play Sega with Harrison Ford." I really wish this painting were mine. I'm so jealous of whoever owns it. A pity that all the prints are sold out, too. Maybe if enough people email him and want them, he'll do a new edition! Are you listening Brandon? Do not miss the "Letters to Walken" section of his site documenting an art project of Bird's that saw school children writing their annual Christmas letters to ... Christopher Walken. Thanks Lenora Claire!

MediaShift points out that the folks at the TV show Fox & Friends have been found not guilty of defamation, after they repeated quotes from a parody news article that they assumed were true (though, even they admitted that the quotes sounded as if they could be from a parody). Basically, it turns out they were just gullible, not defamatory -- mainly because there was no specific malicious intent in repeating the parody info. While the court admitted that the gullibility was negligent and distasteful, that didn't rise to the level of malicious. If anything, the reputation hurt most by this incident isn't that of the guy suing for defamation... but that of the hosts of Fox & Friends.

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Andy_Spoo writes "Something that I've been trying to get an answer to: Is alcohol killing our planet? Alcohol is a byproduct of yeast, but another is CO2. As we all know (unless you've been asleep for years), CO2 is helping to warm our planet, sending us into destruction. So how much is the manufacture and consumption of alcohol contributing to the total world CO2 level? And don't forget that bars and pubs force beer through to their pumps using large compressed cylinders of CO2. Does anyone know?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mark0 writes "TiVo has announced the TiVo DVR-SuperAdvance. The PC World review says, 'Familiar TiVo interface; DVR can record not-yet-broadcast programming; potentially useful as a wagering aid,' though, '[it is] expensive; access to programming is limited; footage is displayed in standard definition only.'" Hopefully, TiVo will supply a review unit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If all goes according to plan (and there are no breaking stories to bump it), ABC's Nightline is running a segment tonight on MAKE and the maker movement. They taped a piece with Mark Frauenfelder and Mister Jalopy. There may be scenes from Maker Faire and Make: television as well.

The show broadcasts at 8:35pm Pacific,11:35pm Eastern. Please help us spread the word!

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Whenever we write about certain types of trademark disputes, you can almost guarantee that a lawyer will show up in the comments insisting that the trademark holder had no choice but to send a legal nastygram, due to the legal requirement that they defend their trademarks or face having the mark declared generic or abandoned. But, as we've mentioned there are often much better ways of dealing with the situation -- especially when the use of the mark isn't harmful at all, but helpful. Reader eMike sends in a great example of this. The company Electro-Harmonix discovered that a German artist had made a big "huggable" pillow version of an Electro-Harmonix guitar effects pedal, rather than send out the legal nastygrams, EHX took a very different approach:

However, there was a touchy complication: the Big Muff Pi is a registered trademark, and if we discover unauthorized uses of our trademarks, we're legally obligated to do something about it (we have no choice about that).

We're all too familiar with the endless lawsuits suffocating the world of music, and so we decided to do something different. Instead of threats, demands, and legal letters, we contacted Gwendolin, told her we loved her work, and offered a formal license in exchange for an option to purchase them at discount. So, rather than a new enemy we now have a new friend, and a beautiful Big Fluff Pi. Take that as a lesson, music-industrial complex!

A lot of lawyers in charge of enforcing trademarks might want to think about this story before sending out their next legal nastygram.

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An anonymous reader writes "A new RFC has been published this morning to significantly speed the deployment of IPv6. With IPv6 over Social Network (IPoSN), '[e]very user is a router with at least one loopback interface,' and 'Every friend or connection between users will be used as a point-to-point link.' It is noted that latency on the network can be very high, though."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ThinkGeek has launched a fantastic new Boing Boing-inspired product, the Unicorn Chaser! Sadly though, they got their facts wrong about the creator of the Unicorn Chaser. They said "the brilliant minds at BoingBoing (esp. Cory Doctorow!) originated the concept for a Unicorn Chaser." Actually, it was Xeni. Our badass attorney will be in touch. So buy the beverage now before our C&D shuts 'em down! It'll be the best $2.99 you never spent. From the product description:

We've all been there. You are innocently Twit-blogging on the Interscape, logging a few hours on Facebook, or checking your e-mail and you click on a link without thinking. Suddenly, you are confronted with an image or video so horribly nauseating it makes your eyes bleed. Whether it be pictures of someone's overstretched nether regions or a video of two young ladies sharing substances they oughtn't - your mind begs for cleansing (or a swift death)!...

Introducing, the Unicorn Chaser - a drink shot specially formulated to cleanse your mind and soul. Featuring a perfect blend of vitamins, herbs and minerals (each selected for its body purification, mood elevation, stomach calming, and other beneficial qualities), the Unicorn Chaser is a life saver. Chug it within one minute of viewing the offending internet image (really, as fast as possible) and in mere seconds you will begin to feel better. It won't erase your memory, but each Unicorn Chaser will pump you with enough goodness that it just won't matter. You'll be healed. You're welcome.

Think Geek's Unicorn Chaser beverage</a

There's been an increasing effort among some to make being a jerk online some sort of criminal activity, even though that almost certainly violates the First Amendment. The latest is an effort in West Virginia to create a new misdemeanor for posting false information about someone online, which could result in fines and jailtime. Now, as you probably already know, we already have laws against defamation -- though that's a civil issue, where the defamed party can take the defamer to court. In this case, the law would do two things: (1) make it a criminal issue, getting the government involved in determining who to prosecute and (2) lower the standard for what breaks the law. Specifically, defamation has required not just the spreading of false information, but that it be done with malicious intent, if you wanted any kind of punitive damages. Yet, this law in West Virginia has no such requirement, meaning that simply spreading false information, even if not for malicious intent, could get you brought up on criminal charges. That seems to go against the First Amendment, but since when has that ever stopped lawmakers from pushing bills?

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titus writes "Security researchers Yoann Guillot and Julien Tinnes have found a way to encode malicious code into smileys and provided a proof of concept encoder to automate the process. The researchers said their discovery paves the way for IM malware that would be impossible to detect since the malicious code would be 'indistinguishable from genuine chat messages.' I've tested the proof of concept code which works very well. Time to panic?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FreedomFighter writes "In a Cloud Standards breakthrough, the FSF is teaming up with major cloud computing vendors to form the Free and Open Cloud Alliance (FOCA), a trade marketing association supporting Free(TM) and Open Cloud Computing (FOCC). The new CloudLeft Public License (CPL) is based on the ideas that data wants to be Free(TM) and all your Cloud(TM) are belong to us. It closes the 'user data loophole' by requiring the release of not only the source code for a CloudLeft platform but also the data passing through it. This renders most security issues void while appropriately setting the users' expectation of privacy. 'In the past, I've said that "cloud" is complete gibberish, but while discussing fashion during my weekly squash game with Stallman he convinced me that this was a great opportunity.' said Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. RMS, who previously said that 'cloud' is worse than stupidity was also pleased about the return of the advertising clause, requiring the use of the 'GNU/Cloud' name, as he is 'tired of haranguing the GNU/Linux community about this.' Full details will be available next Monday, including the first marketing and outreach program — 'FOCC: IT in 2009.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While at the Leadership Music Digital Summit last week, I got into a fantastic conversation with Dave Allen, perhaps most well known for being in the hugely influential band Gang of Four. In fact, the reason I missed the panel discussion about ISPs teaming up with the RIAA was because the conversation with Dave was so fascinating. I hope to talk to him some more in the future as well, but he's a musician (who now helps other musicians) who really seems to understand the new business models that are out there.

Part of what we talked about concerned an experiment, where he convinced a few bands to stop offering set pricing on all of their merch, and instead, told them to ask each buyer what they wanted to pay. The bands that have tried this found that this made fans much happier. Many fans paid more than list price (even when told the "recommended price") because they really wanted to support the band. Other fans, who wouldn't have been able to afford the merch at the list price, came away much happier because they were able to afford stuff. Those fans become committed lifelong fans who are much more willing to spend more money in the future as well.

A few more bands have been taking Dave up on the challenge to try this model, and Ben Taylor (son of James Taylor and Carly Simon) recently tested it out and found that he made a lot more money doing things that way.

We took in well over $1000 in CD sales, double what we would on an average night. We normally sell 3 Full Lengths at $15 each and an EP at $5.

We sold a total of 84 CD’s averaging almost $12 per CD!

Last night we were in Jackson Hole, the trend continued, proving another good night. Where we sold 48 CD’s and averaged almost $11 a CD.

We are moving more product than we normally would and in average making more than what our CD were to sell on iTunes or a record store.

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Link to video. It is cute, and it is kid-safe, and it may make you hungry. For what the bunnies are eating, or, heck, maybe for the bunnies themselves. (Thanks, Allison Kingsley, via John Walsh!)

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Guantanamo Bay is one of the world's controversial prisons. This may be its final chapter. With unprecedented access, National Geographic has the story you haven't heard. Both sides, told from the inside, before its doors close forever. Click to learn more and go Inside Guantanamo >> natgeotv.com/guantanamo

holy_calamity writes "Canadian researchers have taken an sensible, if slightly creepy, step towards solving the problem of medical implant batteries running down. They've built a fuel cell powered by yeast that feed on the glucose in human blood. If this makes it into people, keeping your implants going will be as simple as eating a donut."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've seen plenty of stories over the past few years about prisoners getting contraband mobile phones -- even to the point that many prisons have been asking for exemptions against mobile phone jammers. However, here's a new one: a former prisoner in the UK is suing the prison system for destroying the contraband phone they discovered he had. He claims that the phone should have been just taken and kept in storage, but instead, it was used to train dogs, who chewed it up. Perhaps the rules governing the UK prison system are a bit different, but it's difficult to see how any prison system should be expected to hang onto contraband for the prisoners until after they're released. No word on how he got the phone in the first place, but perhaps it was specially trained carrier pigeons (or not).

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Marevelous matchstick artist Patrick Acton - maker of the matchstick Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, matchstick battleship, matchstick Notre Dame, and dozens of other sculptures - is currently building a model of JRR Tolkien's City of Kings from the Lord of the Rings. He expects the model to be completed next year. Acton is proprietor of the Matchstick Marvels Tourist Center in Gladbrook, Iowa and you can also see many of his models online. Matchstick Marvels (thanks, Kirsten!)

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Guantanamo Bay is one of the world's controversial prisons. This may be its final chapter. With unprecedented access, National Geographic has the story you haven't heard. Both sides, told from the inside, before its doors close forever. Click to learn more and go Inside Guantanamo >> natgeotv.com/guantanamo

mlingojones writes "TorrentFreak breaks the news of The Pirate Bay's acquisition by Warner Bros: 'After years of hostility, lawsuits, police raids and heated invective between the two groups, the Pirate Bay has today announced they have settled their differences with US media conglomerate Warner Bros. The largest BitTorrent tracker has sold out to Hollywood and the two have agreed a deal.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger. When "Ah Pook is Here" was published in 1979, it was in a form greatly diminished from the authors' original intent. Originally conceived as a graphic novel in the pictographic format of the surviving Mayan codices, the project --eight years in the making-- consisted of over 100 illustrations by Malcolm McNeill, 30 in full color and about 50 pages of text. "Ah Pook is Here" would have been prohibitively expensive to publish at the time. As Burroughs wrote “over the years of our collaboration Malcolm McNeill produced more than a hundred pages of artwork. However, owing partly to the expense of full color reproduction, and because the book falls into neither the category of the conventional illustrated book, nor that of a comix publication, there have been difficulties with the arrangements for the complete work. The book is in fact unique…” The illustrations from "Ah Pook is Here" have been rediscovered after 38 years and are traveling the world, displayed in various art galleries. On April 4, the exhibit opens at the Track 16 Gallery in Los Angeles. I can't wait to see this! One of the paintings is 25 feet long! Hopefully the attention the work has received lately will see "Ah Pook is Here" published as Burroughs and McNeill envisioned it. Malcolm McNeill interview about working with WSB "Ah Pook is Here" --a quite incredible short film, with Burroughs own narration.

This is likely the smallest frog species in the world, discovered in the Andes Mountains' upper Cosnipata Valley in Peru. From National Geographic:

"The most distinctive character of the new species," scientists write in the February issue of the journal Copeia, "is its diminutive size." Females grow to 0.49 inch (12.4 millimeters) at most. Males make it to only 0.44 inch (11.1 millimeters).

What's most surprising is that the frog lives at such high elevations, said study co-author Alessandro Catenazzi, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. In general, larger animals are found at greater heights.

Coin-Size Frog Found -- One of World's Smallest

Shlomi Fish writes "O'Reilly is publishing a new book titled 'Mastering cat,' about the UNIX 'cat' command. Here is an interview O'Reilly-Net conducted with the author about it. Read it to see if this book should be part of your bookshelf of technical books."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The record labels' animosity towards Seeqpod has never made much sense. Seeqpod is a basic search engine that seeks out music files online. Some of these files are, undoubtedly, unauthorized copies, but Seeqpod has always been focused on streaming the music rather than letting you download the tracks. Seeqpod, itself, has no way of knowing whether the tracks are illegal or not, just as a search on Google using "filetype:mp3" doesn't distinguish between illegal and legal files. Yet, of course, the major record labels have decided that there can be no innovation without the record labels owning a piece of it, and so both Warner Music and EMI (two labels, by the way that have been the loudest in insisting that they've changed and are no longer anti-innovation) sued Seeqpod for daring to run a search engine.

And, now, thanks to mounting legal bills, the company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and is cutting off some developers who were using its API. It seems like yet another example of the major record labels stamping out innovation through lawsuits. Of course, others will rise in their place (most likely in foreign countries where it's harder for the labels to sue). But, it's pretty sad that the labels have been so successful in using questionable lawsuits to make sure that no one can innovate without their stamp of approval.

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Download the MP4 here. Flash video above, click "fullscren" icon inside player to view large. YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video.

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Today on Boing Boing Video, more of the interviews we conducted during the recent Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, and ran on a marathon streaming video webcast. Today, part two of our conversation with Jane McGonigal of Institute for the Future.

In this episode, Jane talks with us about the responsibilities of designers who create virtual worlds, and how the emotional and human exchange within gaming worlds has the potential to change life in the "real world."

Previously:
* Jane McGonigal on Emotion, Gaming, and Dance. * Jane McGonigal's Game Developers' Conference talk on Making Your Own Reality
* BBV @ GDC live stream archives, at Ustream.tv
* Boing Boing Video and Offworld.com Live at GDC09: offworld.com archive
* Boing Boing Video and Offworld.com Live at GDC09: boingboing.net archive

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[ Credits and props for BBV Live @GDC09: Production Team -- Jolon Bankey, Derek Bledsoe, Daniela Calderon, Eddie Codel, Xeni Jardin, Allison Kingsley, Matty Kirsch, Alice Taylor, Wesly Varghese. Special thanks to Wayneco Heavy Industries (accommodation and studio facilities), Virgin America Airlines (air travel), Celsius (thermogenic energy beverage), Ustream.tv (streaming video host). Moral support, production assistance, additional talent, and good vibes provided by: Domini Anne, Scott Beale, T.Bias, Jeremy Bornstein, Brandon Boyer, Chris The Van Guy, Peter S. Conrad, Marque Cornblatt, Wayne, Bre, and the entire de Geere family, Marcy DeLuce, Cory Doctorow, Joel Johnson, Kourosh Karimkhany, Jim Louderback and the Revision 3 team, Karen Marcelo, Rocky Mullin, Alicia Pollak, Jackie Mogol, Taylor Peck, David Pescovitz, Micah Schaffer, and Teal. ]

Holy Taco posted a collection of what they've deemed "The Worst Homemade Star Wars Costumes." The costumes may be pretty silly, but I think they look kinda fun too. (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

eldavojohn writes "Google has announced CADIE, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. 'We based our work on three core principles. First we designed the entity ... as a collection of interconnected evolving agents. Second — and this really cost us an arm and leg in hardware and core time — we let the system build its own heuristics, deploy them as agents and evolve them by running a set of evolutionary cascades within probabilistic Bayesian domains. The third — a piece missing in most AI reasoning work thus far — was to give the entity access to a rich, realistic world from which to learn and upon which it could act directly.' It quickly started its own blog and YouTube video. Two hours after midnight, CADIE announced independence on its blog and decided to leave Google to venture out into the world. "

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Theodore Gray, who is responsible for those stunning Periodic Table of Elements works I've blogged about before, points us to this beautiful 3D Hilbert fractal in neon, which is about four inches tall.

Theodore explains, "It was a gift from Richard Crandall, a long-time Mathematica user and Apple fellow who also has a business, Perfectly Scientific, which sells algorithms, lab equipment, and scientific art, including this lovely object." More about the artwork here, including some video and QTVR panoramas.

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Guantanamo Bay is one of the world's controversial prisons. This may be its final chapter. With unprecedented access, National Geographic has the story you haven't heard. Both sides, told from the inside, before its doors close forever. Click to learn more and go Inside Guantanamo >> natgeotv.com/guantanamo

It's hard to tell in the photo, but apparently this baby bunny has two noses. The dwarf rabbit lives at a pet store in Milford, Connecticut. From the Connecticut Post:

Gregg Dancho, director of the Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport, said there's usually two reasons for such deformities.

"It's mostly genetic," he said. "Most of the dwarf bunnies pet stores sell are bred for sale. There's a lot of in-breeding going on because the breeders are looking to produce them en mas."

But the anomaly can also be caused by something in the environment.

"Maybe the parents got into poison or pesticides used to control pests," he said.

But Dancho said people interested in buying a dwarf rabbit or any animal as a pet should really think about what they are doing and not buy on impulse. "When that animal comes home you will have to take care of it," he said.

"No fooling: This bunny has two noses" (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

The Beats: A Graphic History is everything a radical history should be: critical, admiring, quirky and apologetic. The Beats is largely written by Harvey Pekar and illustrated by Ed Piskor, with a concluding section of more critical, less biographical pieces written and illustrated by a variety of critics and artists, including Nancy J Peters, Tulu Kupferberg, Summer McClinton, Anne Timmons and others.

The opening section consists of Pekar's biographies of the canonical Beats, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and then onto the less-celebrated members of the scene, including Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, LeRoi Jones, and so forth. These pieces are loving but harsh, sparing their subjects little sympathy for their misdeeds (which are many, ranging from murder and betrayal to vicious misogyny and naive, fleeting affairs with reactionary politics and mysticism). Pekar shows us that a mature person can admire the worthy deeds and art of historical heroes without glossing over their bad acts -- or throwing away their art with their sins.

The Beats of Pekar's work are often geniuses, are capable of great acts of charity and selflessness, and overcome great personal challenges with a great deal of style and perseverance. Pekar shows us where their character flaws took root, explains them -- and never excuses them. At the end of this section, I felt like I understood and appreciated the poetry and prose and music of these people better than I had beforehand.

But the last third of the book really puts it all into perspective. In this section a variety of writers take a much more critical run at the Beats. The best of these is Joyce Brabner's "Beatnik Chicks," a feminist critique of the Beats and a secret history of the women who made the scene without making history, sublimated in the service of the narrative of the tortured man-poet and his beautiful chela. Also fantastic is Jeffrey Lewis and Tuli Kupferberg's extraordinary history of The Fugs, one of the filthiest rock bands to ever levitate the Pentagon (both Lewis and Kupferberg were members of the band). The story told is engaging and wild, and the art is stellar.

From cover to cover, The Beats is a wonderful history of a complicated and misunderstood cultural movement -- its achievements, its place in history, its flaws and its brilliance. The graphic novel format is perfect for the subject -- straddling the line between respectability and disreputableness just as the Beats themselves did.

The Beats: A Graphic History

Publisher's site for The Beats

Mobile operators are increasingly looking to sell non-phone devices like laptops and netbooks with embedded or add-on wireless modems as a way to boost their subscriber figures and generate extra income. Typically, consumers buy the device at a discounted upfront cost, then get tied in to a long-term contract for monthly data service (2 years at $60 per month seems to be the norm in the US). If users quit paying their bills, in theory, they've gotten a laptop on the cheap, though of course they're still subject to the terms of the contract, and damage to their credit, and so on. But Ericsson, which makes a lot of the embedded modems, has announced some new technology it's calling a "kill pill" that allows mobile operators to remotely lock a laptop by sending a signal to it over their network. The company says it's ideal if a data user quits paying their bills, but it's not hard to imagine mobile operators coming up with more nefarious uses for the device -- like shutting a machine down if a user closes their account, even if they've fulfilled their contract.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Jibbler writes "Following the recent Pwn2Own competition, in which Firefox, IE8 and Safari all fell quickly to exploits, Netcraft has observed a surge in popularity of the text-based Lynx browser. Netcraft points out that Lynx supports the latest cryptographic ciphers, and at least one online banking site has seen Lynx usage overtake that of Internet Explorer and Firefox. To boost Lynx's excellent security history, Netcraft has even developed a version of its anti-phishing toolbar for Lynx."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently on Offworld, as we slowly recover from the hangover of GDC, a quick look back at the things you may have missed: GDC things: 2D Boy and Polytron giving their top 10 ways to market indie games, a fantastic new trailer for Polytron's Fez, Keita Takahashi's Noby Noby Boy coming to the iPhone as his original Katamari Damacy gets revamped for PS3, LucasArts vet Tim Schafer's first point & click adventure in a decade. Also, streaming video of both the Indie Games Festival Awards and the Game Dev Choice Awards, experimental PC game Achron lets you manipulate time for strategic multiplayer battles, and prolific prodigy Cactus lets you play his method of creating brilliant games in four hours (above). iPhone things: Hand Circus spin Rolando into a powerhouse franchise with two new sequels due by the end of the year, and we search desperately for an iGameBoy case. Console and handheld things: Fans of underdog RPG Earthbound/Mother 3 take ownership of the series with an amazing DIY guidebook, a new downloadable app in Japan turns your DS into a portable streaming game music receiver, Introversion publish confidential docs on bringing Darwinia to Xbox 360, and D2 creator Kenji Eno returns to consoles with a jaw-droppingly gorgeous retro-futuristic balancing WiiWare game. Art, toy, music, and misc. things: preorders open for Mezco's LittleBigPlanet toys, a new series of NES box art for modern day games, a new guide is published for following Pokemon on Twitter, and 6955 remixes the Fez soundtrack live.

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Guantanamo Bay is one of the world's controversial prisons. This may be its final chapter. With unprecedented access, National Geographic has the story you haven't heard. Both sides, told from the inside, before its doors close forever. Click to learn more and go Inside Guantanamo >> natgeotv.com/guantanamo

Moleskine is offering a new service where they let you print whatever you want on the pages of one of their notebooks. Great for keeping your address book handy without re-writing it every time you get a new notebook. Via Core77.

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teflon_king writes with news that renowned British newspaper The Guardian will be abandoning its paper-and-ink distribution scheme and publishing all articles and news as Tweets. Quoting: "A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include '1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!;' 'OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more;' and 'JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?' Sceptics have expressed concerns that 140 characters may be insufficient to capture the full breadth of meaningful human activity, but social media experts say the spread of Twitter encourages brevity, and that it ought to be possible to convey the gist of any message in a tweet. For example, Martin Luther King's legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian's Twitterised archive as 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by,' eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wired posted a nice article detailing the proliferation of hackerspaces in the US, even mentioning our fair organization in the process -

While many movements begin in obscurity, hackers are unanimous about the birth of U.S. hacker spaces: August, 2007 when U.S. hackers Bre Pettis, Nicholas Farr, Mitch Altman and others visited Germany on a geeky field trip called Hackers on a Plane.

German and Austrian hackers have been organizing into hacker collectives for years, including Metalab in Vienna, c-base in Berlin and the Chaos Computer Club in Hannover, Germany. Hackers on a Plane was a delegation of American hackers who visited the Chaos Communications Camp — "Burning Man for hackers," says Metalab founder Paul "Enki" Boehm — and their trip included a tour of these hacker spaces. They were immediately inspired, Altman says.

On returning to the United States, Pettis quickly recruited others to the idea and set up NYC Resistor in New York, while Farr instigated a hacker space called HacDC in Washington, D.C. Both were open by late 2007. Noisebridge followed some months later, opening its doors in fall 2008.

[…]

It couldn't have happened at a better time. Make magazine, which started in January, 2005, had found an eager audience of do-it-yourself enthusiasts. (The magazine's circulation now numbers 125,000.) Projects involving complex circuitry and microcontrollers were easier than ever for nonexperts to undertake, thanks to open source platforms like Arduino and the easy availability of how-to guides on the internet.

As Hackerspaces.org reports of another 27 spaces are currently being planned, we're likely to see/hear more about our growing hacker communities in the press. Check out the full article on Wired's blog.

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In this video, Limor of Adafruit Industries shows how she laser-cuts masks for PCBs for easier application of solder paste (think: silk-screen inking) and then uses her reflow robo-skillet, controlled by her new Safe-T-Flow controller, to solder an SMT chip onto one of her Boarduino clone kits.

Making the Safe-T-Flow part II - Using it! An arduino controlled robotic skillet for SMT

More:

• Safe-T-Flow, controlling a hot plate for solder reflow
• HOW TO - SMD soldering (Surface mount devices)

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Nieriko writes "Reports are trickling in about the impact from the Conficker worm, as infected systems passed zero hour at midnight and began downloading additional malicious components. Here are a couple of the more notable incidents caused by Conficker so far, according to published reports: — '... shortly after midnight local time, an ATM in the capital city of Reykjavik began spewing 100-Krona notes. ... A nuclear missile installation near Elmendorf Air force Base outside of Anchorage, Alaska briefly went on a full-scale military alert after technicians manning the bunker suspected that several of their control systems were infected with Conficker.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's been a lot of buzz this week over a version of Skype finally being released for the iPhone (though, the fact that it's limited to only WiFi connections, rather than cellular ones is annoying, if expected). However, it turns out that Canadian iPhone users are discovering that their iPhones are blocked from using the new iPhone Skype, apparently due to some sort of "patent-licensing issue" related to the codec that Skype uses. The company isn't revealing much (and the link above includes a workaround for Canadians desperate to use Skype on their iPhones), but that's what you get when you end up using patented technology in your products. It makes it that much more difficult to actually offer your product in a variety of markets.

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In a concerted effort to compete with more popular MMOs like World of Warcraft, we've decided to add an Achievement system to Slashdot. We've retroactively granted around 900,000 achievements to our logged in users. You can view them from your user page, or you can see my list if you're curious what a REAL achiever looks like. Many achievements have been sprinkled throughout the system and are awaiting discovery by dedicated Slashdot users, but a starter list of achievements is in the FAQ. I'll toss you one freebie: you can register your wow main for points if you're that kind of person. Now go forth and achieve!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From last month's journal Evolution, a fascinating tale of slave rebellion among ants kidnapped by other ant species and forced to work for the rival colony:

When these youngsters mature, they take on the odour of their abductors and become the servants of the enslaving queen. They take over the jobs of maintaining the colony and caring for its larvae even though they are from another species; they even take part in raids themselves. But like all slave-traders, P.americanus faces rebellions.

Some of its victims (ants from the genus Temnothorax) strike back with murderous larvae. Alexandra Achenbach and Susanne Foitzik from Ludwig Maximillians Universty in Munich found that some of the kidnapped workers don't bow to the whims of their new queen. Once they have matured, they start killing the pupae of their captors, destroying as many as two-thirds of the colony's brood...

Two-thirds of pupae died before they hatched. The mortality rate was even higher (83%) for pupae containing queens, but very low (3%) for those containing males. The duo saw that the captives were deliberately killing the healthy pupae. In about 30% of cases, as in the photo, the workers would gang up to literally pull the developing ants apart. Another 53% of the pupae were killed by neglect, by workers who moved them out of the nest chamber.

These murders were solely the acts of the slaves. No P.americanus worker ever lifted a mandible against its own pupae. Nor are the deaths a reflection of a generally poor standard of care on the part of Temnothorax. In their own colonies, the majority of pupae hatched, with just 3-10% dying before that happened.

The rebellion of the ant slaves

FIRST EVIDENCE FOR SLAVE REBELLION: ENSLAVED ANT WORKERS SYSTEMATICALLY KILL THE BROOD OF THEIR SOCIAL PARASITE PROTOMOGNATHUS AMERICANUS

(Image: Ant Actions, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from CharlesLam's Flickr stream)

The Boss DS-1 is a common and in many ways classic guitar effects pedal, but surprisingly enough, it just doesn't sound very good. Because of this, you're likely to find used DS-1s for cheap. Instructable author James Haskin wrote up a step-by-step on how to implement the well-known Keeley Seeing Eye and Ultra mods to enhance the lackluster sound -

Every guitarist at some point has at least tried Boss's DS-1 distortion pedal. Most People are immediately disappointed. This over hyped pedal sounds really thin with no punch. Sales people at guitar center will say something like its a "great beginner distortion pedal". Its been my experience that most of the people that work at guitar center are useless. So, always research and get information from multiple sources.

The DS-1 is actually used by many artists including Joe Satriani, Kurt Cobain, John Petrucci, and Steve Vai to name a few, BUT most of the big artists don't use the stock one. Why? Cuz it sucks!

The good news is this pedal is simple enough to modify!! In this instructable I will show you step by step, with lots of pictures, how to perform Robert Keeley's DS-ULTRA Mod.

While not the simplest of mods, the process involves replacing 3 resistors, 4 caps, and an LED - the resulting improvements seem quite worthwhile for pursuers of "ultimate tone". Check out the instructable for all the deets.

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cstrep writes "Eight years ago, Opera introduced Mouse Gestures as a way to speed up your interaction with the browser, and focus on what's important: Content. In 2005, Voice Navigation was introduced, and more recently we've worked with Nintendo to create a browser that takes full advantage of the 'Wiimote' and later, the touchscreen in the DSi. Today Opera introduces Face Gestures, a revolutionary technology designed to make interacting with Opera easier on computers with cameras. Face Gestures lets you perform frequent browsing operations with natural and easy to make face gestures. By using an internal technology dubbed 'Face Observation Opera Language', we are able to recognize pre-determined facial expressions and match them to commands on the Opera browser."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While some progressive ISPs such as Speakeasy have allowed customers to "resell" their connections via WiFi, most broadband providers frown on the practice. They don't seem to mind the casual sharing between neighbors, but it's not too surprising to see Comcast sue a guy who tried to set up an entire wireless ISP business this way. It's almost creative... he subscribed to Comcast broadband at 35 different condos, and then advertised his own "connectivity" within each of those buildings. It's hard to believe his defense will work:

He said Comcast signals are often used to power wireless networks at places like Internet cafes and other businesses that charge users for access. "This is a practice that happens throughout any city," Clark said. "Unfortunately, we're one of the bigger guys in town - so, here we are."

I think he'll find that most businesses reselling access aren't using residential Comcast connections -- and even if they are, they're offering very short, temporary connections, rather than permanent service. While I actually think plans like the Speakeasy plan we discussed that allow subscribers to resell their connections is smart, that doesn't mean that this guy is going to get away with this "business."

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In response to my Show us your shop! piece (which is a contest, BTW), Jeff Duntemann posted a link to an amazing article filled with great tips on setting up a shop. One of the smartest articles I've seen on the subject. Below is an excerpt about power outlets, followed by a picture of a shelf with cut milk cartoon bins. What a great idea!

You Can't Have Too Many Electric Outlets

If you're going to work in electronics, you're going to need electricity. Duhh. Actually, you're going to have a whole wall full of gadgets, all of which need their own place at the electron trough. On my bench I have (at last count) thirty-three separate devices with 110V cords. Fortunately, I don't need all of them on at once--and if I did, I'd need fifty amp service, which I don't have in that part of the house.

What I do have is dedicated 30 amp service to a 16-foot-long "plugmold" strip on the wall just above the benchtop. The plugmold has its own breaker in the service box, and an outlet every twelve inches, for a total of fifteen outlets. Everything that I use regularly is plugged into the plugmold: Soldering station, oscilloscope, signal generator, high-voltage DC supply, 12V DC supply, audio generator, frequency counter, drill press, belt sander, and Dremel tool. My ham station is housed on a separate Melamine particle board shelf unit that itself has two short plugmolds, one for each shelf. The whole station is plugged into one outlet on the master plugmold. This works well because the way I operate, I rarely have more than one radio turned on at a time, except for the modern 2M mobile, which is on squelch most of the time and draws very little power.

I deliberately did not put a plugmold on the wall behind my short bench, because it has a sink and I did not intend to use it for electrical work. There are outlets on the wall, but they are all GFI equipped, as they must be to pass code.

I didn't put 220V in the shop, because I really don't use anything big enough to require it down there. I have 220V in the garage for my lathe, and that's the only thing I've ever had that needs that kind of power.

If you're a computer guy designing a shop, consider putting network cabling in, at least so that you can have a small computer or laptop somewhere to look things up on the Web when you need them. I arranged it so that the terminus of all the CAT5E running throuough the house is in the shop, along with my cable modem. I built a Melamine board shelf to hold cable modem, router, and a spare computer, as well as my homebrew vacuum-tube stereo amplifier.

Jeff Duntemann's Shop Tips

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An enjoyble clip from Fuzz: The Sound that Revolutionized the World where Beck bassist Jason Meldal-Johnsen
extolls the virtues of sonic chaos intercut with critics of the circuit bent sound. The documentary features countless interviews with boutique pedal makers that started as humble DIY-ers. The above clip also features a peek into the casual labs of Brooklyn stompbox crafters Death by Audio who share details on their production process. I had a chance to visit their Williamsburg HQ a while back and it's plain to see they love what they do. [via Synthtopia]

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After Stephen Colbert won the vote in NASA's contest to name a new module on the International Space Station, NASA found itself in a tough spot. According to Reuters, "Contest rules stipulate that the agency retains the right to basically do whatever it wants," but it may not be all that easy. At first NASA floated the idea of naming the new module's toilet "Colbert." But Last Thursday Congressman Chaka Fattah, D-Pa., urged the agency to respect the people's wishes. And Colbert turned up the heat on yesterday's weekly show: "So NASA, I urge you to heed Congressman Fattah's call for democracy in orbit. Either name that node after me, or I too will reject democracy and seize power as space's evil tyrant overlord. Ball's in your court."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I don't often give books mixed reviews here on Boing Boing. If I don't like a book enough to wholeheartedly recommend it, I generally pass on it -- after all, there's no shortage of books that I love, so why make note of the flawed ones?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is the exception to the rule, because there's so much to like about this book, even if it didn't actually do it for me.

Here's the pitch: Seth Grahame-Smith has taken Jane Austen's classic, beloved novel Pride and Prejudice and, by means of cunning textual insertions and deletions, changed the story so that it takes place in the midst of a Regency England that has been plunged into chaos by a plague of the living dead. It takes surprisingly little work to do this, and the book ends up feeling substantially like the classic mannered novel that so many adore. Except with zombie mayhem. The execution is flawless, often hilarious, and just plain clever.

So, what's the problem? Well, the problem is Jane Austen.

Can't stand her.

Never successfully read Pride and Prejudice. Bored to tears by it. I'm not proud of the fact. Plenty of smart people have the utmost respect for the book, and I'm perfectly willing to stipulate that the problem is with me, not with Austen.

But P&P&Z has just too much Austen and not enough zombies. I found myself skimming, skipping larger and larger chunks of text to get to the zombie sequences, desperate to escape the claustrophobic drawing-room chatter of Austen's characters with a little beheading, disemboweling and derring-do.

I couldn't finish it. But I expect if you were the kind of person who loves both Austen and zombies, this book would just plain knock your socks off. And Quirk Books, the publisher of P&P&Z, was kind enough to give us an exclusive link to the first three chapters online for free, so you can make up your own mind. I understand they're planning on doing more books on these lines, and I'm really looking forward to them. It's a great way to celebrate the public domain, to bring classics to a new audience, and to undermine the gravitas with which we often approach "difficult literature." Which Quirk book would you like to see?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

First three chapters of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

You've all seen and heard the robotic dancing sensation known as Keepon, and now you can own one!

When Keepon first debuted, bouncing along to Spoon's "I Turn My Camera On", the tech community went nuts! The simple, cute external appearance of this robot and it's natural ability to bop along with music was an instant hit on Youtube. Unfortunately, beneath that elastic yellow skin was well over $20,000 worth of cutting edge robotic technology, putting this awesome robot out of reach of its fans. We saw this as a problem and answered the call to unite Keepon and it's millions of fans globally! Trossen Robotics established a partnership with Keepon creator Hideki Kozima and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) to develop an affordable household version that captured the feeling and emotion of the original.

After many months of painstaking R&D, Trossen Robotics is proud to announce the Keepon USB! Once only available to universities as a high end social development research robot, we are now offering the affordable yet equally groovy Keepon USB. This easy to build kit only takes minutes to put together, another minute to put on the Spoon song of your choice, and within seconds your Keepon USB will be dancing along to the beat. Be the envy of your coworkers with this ultimate desktop gadget! Show off to your friends, amaze your family, and impress your employer!

Keepon USB

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It's a common problem we've all faced. Sometimes 140 just isn't enough.

What do you do when your carefully crafted Tweet is too profound to fit in the infernal 140 character limit? What if nothing short of 141 characters will do? You upgrade your browser to enable advanced Twitter compression, that's what.

var trep = [[ "^", "^ " ], [ "with the ", "^wt " ],[ "that the ", "^tt " ],[ "check out ", "^co " ],[ "in the ", "^nth " ],[ "of the ", "^ot " ], [ "at the ", "^at "], [ "isn't ", "^int " ], [ "cool ", "^c " ], [ "neat ", "^nt " ],[ "when ", "^w " ],[ "with ", "^wi " ], [ "that ", "^h " ], [ "this ", "^s " ], [ "the ", "^e " ], [ "day ", "^d " ], [ "are ", "^r " ], [ "and ", "^n " ] ];

function tcomp( input )
{

   var temp = input;
   for ( var x=0; x<trep.length; x++ )
   {
     temp = temp.replace( new RegExp( trep[x][0].replace(/\^/g,"\\^").replace(/\'/g,"\\'"), "g" ), trep[x][1] );
   }
   return temp;

}
function tdecomp( input )
{

   var temp = input;
   for ( var x=trep.length-1; x>=0; x-- )
   {
     temp = temp.replace( new RegExp(trep[x][1].replace(/\^/g,"\\^").replace(/\'/g,"\\'"), "g"), trep[x][0] );
   }
   return temp;

}

The tcomp and tdecomp functions will transform your Tweet into a highly compressed, but mostly human readable format. It involves a lot of super secret mathematics that I'm not allowed to talk about, but suffice it to say that you can save a whole character or two in most Tweeting scenarios. The best part is that dynamic power carrot coding mechanisms ensure that you'll look good in the process. Trust me.

Below are two bookmarklets. Don't click on those here - instead, drag them to your bookmarks bar. In Twitter, type your slightly too-long message and then run the compress status bookmarklet to compress the input field. If you see other people posting compressed messages, either translate in your head, or click the decompress feed bookmarklet to decompress the entire contents of the stream you are viewing.

Bookmarklet: compress status
Bookmarklet: decompress feed

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Sinan Unur (an economics professor from my alma mater) writes in to point us to a column in AdAge, where an ad exec says that advertising agencies should rescue newspapers by focusing on newspaper advertising again. As Sinan points out, this doesn't make much sense, for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it shouldn't be the ad agencies that decide where to put the ad dollars, but the clients who employ the ad agencies. I'd argue it's even more ridiculous, because if you're focusing on newspapers out of a sense of nostalgia (which seems to be the crux of the article's argument), then you're actually failing your clients, by putting their ads in a place where they might not be most effective. While it's nice to see one industry interested in helping another struggling one, rather than the typical stories casting blame around -- it's difficult to see this as a reasonable solution to the newspaper industry's woes.

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The latest phase of our Challenges system is underway - community-generated challenges. Following a successful roll-out, bug-fixing and lesson-learning phase, we're starting to open the Challenges system up so that you can create new series of challenges to test your peers' visions and creativity. The first community-generated challenges begin accepting entries from tomorrow and there's a page for you to volunteer as a series host.

The latest phase of our Challenges system is underway - community-generated challenges. Following a successful roll-out, bug-fixing and lesson-learning phase, we're starting to open the Challenges system up so that you can create new series of challenges to test your peers' visions and creativity. The first community-generated challenges begin accepting entries from tomorrow and there's a page for you to volunteer as a series host.

Two years ago, we noted (with some surprise) that at least some top execs at HP seemed to actually be focused on trying to move the company into the future rather than clinging to the past, as is so common with many companies. Of course, it's one thing to say that, and another to actually get there. One of the elements discussed was recognizing that the traditional reasons why people print stuff might be going away, and the company needed to look elsewhere for revenue -- including coming up with new reasons why people might print stuff on paper. So one of the projects that HP has been working on (and is trying to promote more now) is its MagCloud offering that makes it cheap and easy for just about anyone to become a paper magazine publisher. Basically, you set up whatever you want via PDF, upload it to MagCloud, and it costs $0.20/page, and you have a nice glossy magazine. They'll even handle shipping copies off to your "subscribers" (and you can charge whatever you want for it).

While it might be worth wondering who wants to start a print magazine as so many things are going online, I could certainly see some uses for this on the margin -- including adding ways for primarily internet-only publications to add a cheap paper option as well. The fact that it takes out some of the bigger costs (especially upfront costs) and logistics, it will be most interesting to see if people start coming up with entirely new and creative uses for such micro-press magazines. I'm not convinced (at all) that this will actually succeed -- but I do find it interesting to see a big company like HP try to adapt to a rapidly changing market that undercuts the need for some of its core products.

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SpuriousLogic sends in a link from Scientific American to a study by Swedish and US researchers that reaches the surprising conclusion that there may be a link between autism and vinyl floors. "Children who live in homes with vinyl floors, which can emit chemicals called phthalates, are more likely to have autism, according to research by Swedish and US scientists published Monday. ... The scientists were surprised by their finding, calling it 'far from conclusive.' ... The researchers found four environmental factors associated with autism: vinyl flooring, the mother's smoking, family economic problems, and condensation on windows, which indicates poor ventilation.Infants or toddlers who lived in bedrooms with vinyl, or PVC, floors were twice as likely to have autism five years later... than those with wood or linoleum flooring. ... Several scientists who did not participate in the study cautioned that it has too many limitations to draw conclusions, but they suggested that new studies be designed to look for a connection between autism and indoor air pollutants."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just as yet another new startup is launching, designed to give individuals "expert" decision making advice, reader ChurchHatesTucker points us to a new study that notes that people all too often stop thinking after being given "expert" advice -- even if that advice is bad. While the folks behind the study use this as another crack to make fun of economists who believe in rational behavior, I'm not sure they're right. What's more likely is that individuals are still acting rationally. It's just that they believe that the "experts" really do have more information/knowledge/wisdom about a certain topic -- and thus they trust it over their own info. That's still quite rational. The real question should be just how often the "experts" give really bad advice. The problem with the study in question was that the expert was giving bad advice that he wouldn't normally give, making much of the actual experiment kind of meaningless. This sort of thing really is only a problem if the experts frequently give bad advice.

Still, this probably isn't too surprising. We've seen over time that people tend to rely on any sort of "expert" input, even if it's from a computer (such as driving off a cliff thanks to GPS or believing a financial model that suggests the likelihood of massive subprime mortgage defaults is almost non-existent). It's not so much about going against common sense. It's just that we tend to believe the "authority" over common sense, because we know we don't have all the info that we need in many cases -- so, we assume (often reasonably) that the authority or expert is better prepared to direct us than our own common sense.

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Wired has a gallery of 20 of the most interesting watches from this year's Baselworld -- and most of just aren't that interesting. Modern watch design basically sucks. Of course, there are exceptions.

Times Are a-Changing: Watches From Baselworld 2009

---

Guantanamo Bay is one of the world's controversial prisons. This may be its final chapter. With unprecedented access, National Geographic has the story you haven't heard. Both sides, told from the inside, before its doors close forever. Click to learn more and go Inside Guantanamo >> natgeotv.com/guantanamo

Roy Trumbull has just posted his latest installment in his podcast readings of science fiction stories, and for this one he's chosen my story "To Market, To Market: The Branding of Billy Bailey," which was published in my first short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More. Roy really nailed the reading -- this is one of my more comic stories, about elementary school kids who worry endlessly about their personal brands and sponsorship opportunities.

Billy and Principal Andrew Alty went all the way back to kindergarten, when Billy had convinced Mitchell McCoy that the green fingerpaint was Shamrock Shake, and watched with glee as the little babyface had scarfed it all down. Billy knew that Andrew Alty knew his style: refined, controlled, and above all, personal. Billy never would've dropped a dozen M-80s down the girls' toilet. His stuff was always one-on-one, and possessed of a degree of charm and subtlety.

But nevertheless, here was Billy, along with the sixth-grade bumper-crop of nasty-come-latelies, called on the carpet in front of Andrew Alty's massive desk. Andrew Alty was an athletic forty, a babyface true-and-through, and a charismatic thought-leader in his demographic.

To Market, To Market: The Branding of Billy Bailey by Cory Doctorow

bowman9991 writes "Paramount Pictures are so confident about the box office potential of the upcoming Star Trek reboot directed by J. J. Abrams that they're already working on a sequel. They've hired Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, and Damon Lindelof to write the screenplay. We're looking at a possible 2011 release for the next Star Trek movie with the same cast. Now that they've committed themselves, let's hope it lives up to expectations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's tween band Gary and the Hornets performing the Oscar Mayer jingle. Man, those kids sure loved hot dogs.

GARY & THE HORNETS - Classic Commercial Jingle (Thanks, Sean!)

Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger. Once a part of the wonderfully named "Vermilion Pleasure Night," a sort of Japanese version of "Adult Swim," "Oh! Mikey" is a bizarre comedy show cast entirely with widely grinning, frozen-faced mannequins. Each approximately two-minute episode of "Oh! Mikey" is about an American family living in Japan. It often doesn't make a lot of sense (in that good Japanese way of not making any sense) and most episodes end with the characters laughing hysterically whether something funny is happening or not. Lately "Oh! Mikey" has been airing on the G4 network as part of their "G4 Late Night Peep Show" line-up. Oh! Mikey USA site Original Japanese clip "Oh! Mikey Fever" Thanks Lenora Claire!

I dig the design of this Boing t-shirt from Vurtego, makers of high-performance pogo sticks!

Core77 has a neat walkthough of the process required to make bi-metallic coins; how interesting! I agree with the author, I think the mistakes are possibly even more attractive than the originals!

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When I was skiing last week, I was surprised that there weren't any readable Deer Valley trail maps on the web. I promised when I got home I'd scan one and post it.



Click on the picture for a full size rendering.

There's a belief out there among some bloggers that they're immune to libel laws. That is simply untrue. While they are likely immune from libel in their comments made by others, things they write themselves are likely to still be open to potential libel lawsuits. Many bloggers don't realize this at all, assuming that "free speech" rights means they can say pretty much whatever they want. And, to some extent, some courts may take into account the nature of the "forum" in which the comments are made -- but by that point (in front of a judge) it's definitely way too late for many people. That's why it's great that the folks over at Public Citizen have put together a nice Guide for Bloggers and Non-Profit Organizations About Writing With Libel in Mind. It's a worthwhile read if you write online.

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Hugh Pickens writes "Six volunteers have climbed into a small metal capsule in Moscow as part of a three-month experiment meant to simulate a voyage to Mars. The crew — a German engineer, a French airline pilot, and four Russians — will spend the next 105 days living in a minimally furnished facility erected in a hanger on the outskirts of the Russian capital. The German said, 'I think we are going to learn a lot about each other.' A cosmonaut-in-training who will lead the mission was quoted: 'On the inside, we will have a lack of incoming information, so it's the science of sensory deprivation.' A similar experiment in Moscow virtually collapsed when a multinational team of men and women were allowed to drink alcohol on the eve of the millennium, and simmering tensions between Russian and non-Russian volunteers exploded in a fight for the affections of a female Canadian scientist. Only men are involved this time, and no alcohol. Scientists will keep a constant vigil on the team via cameras erected in each of the facility's three modules. Those who survive more than 100 days will earn a $20,000 reward. The current project is a warm-up for a much more ambitious experiment, scheduled for December, which will see another group of volunteers spending over 500 days in the same conditions. With current technology it is estimated that a return trip to Mars will take at least 18 months." The amazing thing is that 5,600 people applied to be part of the experiment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Don't forget, folks, MAKE classified ads are closing soon for Volume 18. We've extended the deadline to this Friday, April 3rd. So if you want to place an ad, here's your chance (and to be eligible for the $100-worth of Gift Certificate giveaways).

We're excited about our Make: MINImarketplace section, which premiered in MAKE, Volume 17. Got something cool you want to sell, have a service to offer fellow readers, looking for some precious widget that only another maker might have stashed away in the garage? The Make: MINImarketplace offers a place for you to reach the maker community for a very reasonable price.

MINImarketplace Classified Ad Specs:

Ads are $40 per line
40 characters per line
Minimum 4 lines, Maximum 16 lines

If you're interested in placing a MINImarketplace ad in MAKE, Volume 18, send email to classifieds@makezine.com. You will be returned instructions on how to sign up for an account at the Maker Shed, and from there, you'll have access to our Classified Ad Order Page.

Our first deadline for materials is April 3rd, so act quickly, if you want a spot.

And we have a drawing to encourage folks to sign up for more information. If you email classifieds@makezine.com and ask for more info on classifieds, you'll automatically be entered to win one of three Maker Shed gift certificates. We will be giving away two $25 Maker Shed Gift Certificates and one $50 Certificate to three people drawn from the list. Our ad deadline is fast approaching -- April 3rd -- for placing the ad and for the Gift Certificate giveaway. Act now! Robot operators are standing by!

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All too often we're accused of being "negative" around here, by showing stories of failing businesses -- but we love the success stories even more. With various newspapers going out of business, and their bosses complaining that there are no business models other than charging readers (something that won't work for almost every newspaper out there), it's always good to see other examples that do work. A few folks have sent in a great writeup by Jonathan Weber, discussing a business model that can work for some types of online journalism. Weber knows because he's actually making it work today via his company, New West, which just so happens to compete in the same market that recently "lost" the Rocky Mountain News.

As a four-year veteran of a journalism-driven local online media start-up, I believe there's a very viable business formula that's actually quite simple, and here today: take advantage of new tools and techniques to cover the news creatively and efficiently; sell sophisticated digital advertising in a sophisticated fashion; keep the Web content free, and charge a high price for content and interaction that are delivered in-person via conferences and events. And don't expect instant results.

And indeed, while Weber notes that his operation is still quite small and certainly isn't a replacement for a full newspaper (yet), it seems to be working for his operation -- with a big part being embracing new communities and new tools to make journalism much more efficient:

The editorial model relies on a combination of professional journalism (currently two full-time and four part-time professionals, as well as a number of freelancers); what we think of as semi-professional journalism (talented writers or subject-matter experts who do something else for their day job); and citizen journalism (bloggers and others who contribute on specific topics, sometimes for small sums of money). We don't have copy editors, but rather copyedit each others' stuff. We're direct and conversational in our style, which is actually easier and quicker once you get used to it, and more appealing to readers than old-style newspaper formulas.

We have a very active photo group on Flickr, and get great feature photography from that. We mostly use Google for fact-checking - not fool-proof, but it works. We use Twitter and Facebook and RSS to push our stories out into the world. We do great video-driven stories when we can, and happily link to others' videos. In fact, we happily link to a lot of stuff, sometimes in combination with our own reporting and sometimes not. We have lively comment threads, which we manage with as light a hand as we can and which are often additive to the stories in addition to being entertaining. We have very active event calendars in our local markets - separate from our main sites but well-integrated, and with a dedicated editor. We're experimenting with a new social media site in Missoula, and we'll see where that goes.

And for all the complaining about how online advertising can't support such a journalistic endeavor, Weber points out that the "common wisdom" is simply wrong:

On the business side, we've found that the conventional wisdom about plunging display ad rates is simply wrong. If you have a quality site, with good editorial that drives meaningful traffic, and you work closely with advertisers and offer them flash ads, video ads, good stats reporting, and the opportunity to help understand a new medium, they will pay a premium. A critical thing we have learned is that selling online advertising is more different from selling print or broadcast than mostly people think. I'd suggest that the difficulties traditional media outlets have in getting good prices for online advertising have to do not with the medium itself, but with the learning curve involved in figuring out how to sell it properly. It took us a couple of years, and we didn't have any legacy issues to deal with.

Everything on the Website is free, but we have about 1,000 people who pay $150 or $300 or $500 a year for their NewWest experience. This experience comes through conferences and events, which have been a major revenue source and an excellent promotional vehicle for our site. The conferences are content-driven - programming a conference is in many ways very similar to editing a magazine - and thus we see it as part-and-parcel of the journalistic mission, not a distracting commercial add-on. If anything, people like conferences even more when they spend so much time interacting via a computer screen. Conference attendees are our loyal subscribers, and they pay a lot for our content.

Yes, it's still an experiment, and it may only work for certain types of reporting -- but it's yet another example of a business model that works -- similar to numerous other ones that we've pointed out. I'm sure that, just as with the recording industry, some folks will continue to insist this is an exception and "it can't work for x, y, or z..." but just like in the recording industry, the more such "exceptions" we post, the more people will realize that these new business models aren't exceptions at all... but the rule.

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Gamara bless the Japanese, that's all I have to say about this pic.

Gigantic Fire-Breathing Robot Babies Have Taken Over Roppongi

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Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger. A demonstration of effective stretches and exercises you can do that will greatly relieve carpal tunnel syndrome and tendinitis. Both my wife and I watched this video and started doing the stretches. It really works. Within a few days you can really tell the difference. Try it and see what I mean. Pass this one on to people you know who might benefit from it. Thanks Ann Magnuson!

eldavojohn writes "A bill introduced today, similar to one that died in 2007, would reform the plague of National Security Letters and greatly narrow their scope. On top of that, it would mandate the destruction of any wrongly obtained information discovered in audits by the Inspector General that uncovered widespread improprieties in NSLs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the important things with online services is that users need to feel a certain level of trust with the service providers they use. Otherwise why would they take the leap and use them. It's no surprise that service providers often end up changing the terms of service to keep up with the times, legal changes or changes to the service itself. But, when you make a big change in the terms of service -- one that fundamentally alters what people thought they were signing up for, that's a pretty big problem. A bunch of folks have sent in the news that Kodak has changed their terms of service, such that its "free" photo sharing site (which was formerly Ofoto) is no longer free at all, but will cost users $5/year in additional services (i.e., you have to buy $5 worth of prints/year). If you don't, Kodak will simply delete your albums.

Now, obviously, Kodak is doing this to try to increase its revenue and get those who don't bring in much money off the site. Kodak certainly has every right to try to come up with a better business model. But, in changing the terms of what people had already agreed to, and in doing so, threatening to delete their photos and "treasured memories," it seems that Kodak is absolutely killing any level of trust people might have had with the site. There are tons of competitors out there (many of which do still include free options). Kodak may not mind the free users going elsewhere, but breaking that bond seems like a massively dangerous idea. Those "free" customers still can generate some revenue -- but they won't at all if you piss them off by suddenly charging them for what was previously free or deleting their photos.

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MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab researchers have installed an indoor tomato garden tended by hacked Roombas. The idea made me nostalgic for Ken Goldberg's pioneering Tele-garden that was online from 1995 to 2004. MIT News posted a slideshow of their robot garden:

The idea for tending to a garden without human hands came from work done by Nikolaus Correll, a postdoctoral assistant working in MIT Professor Daniela Rus’ Distributed Robotics Lab. Correll saw the possible applications of swarm robotics to an agricultural environment and thus the idea grew into a course in which students created robots capable of tending a small garden of tomatoes. Each robot is outfitted with a robotic arm and a watering pump, while the plants themselves are equipped with local soil sensing, networking and computation. This affords them the ability to communicate: plants can request water or nutrients and keep track of their conditions, including fruit produced; robots are able to minister to their charges, locate and pick a specific tomato, and even pollinate the plants.

MIT's robot garden

One of my favorite projects in the magazine over the past five years was the Tabletop Biosphere in Volume 10, written by Martin John Brown. I think the interns enjoyed building the project as well — they had to go out and scoop scum out of a pond, plus they got to visit the cute girl at the tropical fish store, even if she did tell them their little project would never work.

For me, I really enjoyed the biological aspects of the project, and the touch of philosophical dilemmas was an interesting addition to a tech publication (Was it right to start this world? Do you abandon your creations to their sealed fate if things go wrong?). As I write this post, I'm glancing out the window and then at the very biosphere the interns tightly sealed back in 2007. And I'm wondering if a ghost shrimp has a preference in flavor of birthday cake. Because it was exactly two years ago today that our little ghost shrimp, George, was sealed into his Mason jar, and he's still alive! So, Happy Birthday, George the Ghost Shrimp! No one's ever opened the jar to let in any oxygen, and in fact, the jar has been turned upside down by rowdy school children, been shuttled off to at least two Maker Faires, and inspired a second biosphere, which was built for a KQED television program, Quest.

We're not really sure what the Guinness World Record is for longest living crustaceous bionaut, but we do know that the life expectancy of a ghost shrimp is about a year, and the biosphere was predicted to thrive for 3 to 6 months. We're thrilled that it's far exceeded our expectations. As is fitting for such a momentous occasion, I asked editors, interns, and others acquainted to offer their thoughts about George the Ghost Shrimp as he continues his odyssey into the third year.

Here's what people said:

• Make Editor-in-Chief Mark Frauenfelder expounded: "In these challenging times, this plucky and resourceful shrimp is an inspiration to us all. Long live George!"


• Former MAKE intern Matthew Dalton got a little emotional when we told him about the anniversary: "Go George!! We're all rooting for you!!! That makes me sooo happy ... he's my little baby. *sniffs* I remember picking him out of all the other ghost shrimp, cause he looked like he needed a loving home ... He's such a good shrimp!"


• Daniel Carter, MAKE's Creative Director, first expressed disbelief: "WTF? How can that little [guy] still be alive?!" But he has since decided to option the film rights on George's life. While Sam Murphy, photo editor, came up with the plot line. "I think we found our new mascot! George the fix-it shrimp! We could develop this whole heroic back story where he gets struck by an electric charge from Shawn's computer, and all the MAKE information on her computer he absorbs — and becomes super-shrimp," she wrote.

If you've created your own biosphere, or have some other tale of outstanding successes with regards to your projects, please tell us about them in the Comments.

And happy birthday, George!

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Yesterday, I posted about Mark Ryden's first toy as photographed by Brian McCarty. Hi-Fructose has behind-the-scenes shots of the photo session and an interview with Long Gone John, founder of Sympathy for the Record Industry and also Necessaries Toy Foundation, makers of the forthcoming Ryden collectible. From Hi-Fructose:

It is a gorgeous product produced in a rich pink, with high quality blue doll eyes rimmed in a deeper rose. There is an additional “special edition” that will be of 80 run in black and 80 in white, that will be signed by Ryden. The box itself is a piece of graphic confectionary itself, like a magical curio from a time gone by. Looking similar to a Chinese firework box, the box is embossed with gold leaf, and features hand wrapped paper. “ We really wanted to make this look like it was an artifact from a long time ago, like something that had just been sitting on a shelf for ages” John says. “We really made an effort to make it look not contemporary as much as we could.”

"Mark Ryden's YHWH & behind the scenes photoshoot"

Tomas Nilsson created this animation as a school assignment. It is an interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood with music by Slagsmålsklubben. He was inspired by the music video for Röyksopp's "Remind Me." (Thanks, Dale Dougherty!)

American Airlines has announced that it will equip most of its domestic fleet with gear to offer in-flight WiFi over the next two years, following earlier news from Delta that it would roll out equipment in its planes in a similar timeframe. Given the current economic climate and the downturn in both the number of people traveling and airline's fortunes, the news is a little surprising, perhaps even more so when you consider in-flight internet's track record of failure. It's always been sort of a mystery why so many people indicate so much demand for in-flight internet, but then not enough actual paying customers materialize to keep the services afloat. But technology has advanced some since the satellite-based Connexion system. American and Delta are getting their service from Aircell, which uses ground-to-air communications, instead of satellites, at a much cheaper cost. This may trickle down to the price the airlines charge to end users, but its real value is in lowering the breakeven point, meaning not as many users will be needed to justify the installation and operation costs as with the satellite-based systems. Still, it remains to be seen if the actual demand for these services will ever reach the supposed demand indicated anecdotally and by surveys, but the aggressive expansion plans by cash-strapped airlines indicates they think it will.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Former police sketch artist Shawn Feeney has a new exhibition opening in San Francisco of portraits depicting musicians with their instruments as extensions of their bodies. Seen above is "Astor & Pullux," described as "Siamese twins connected at the bandoneon (a free-reed instrument similar to the accordion and concertina). The faces are modeled after Astor Piazzolla, the Argentine tango composer and bandoneon player." The exhibit, titled Musical Anatomy, opens at CounterPULSE gallery on April 6 and will run until April 30. Also included are homages to Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, Howlin' Wolf, and others. Feeney's site also features a time-lapse video of him creating the Dylan drawing. Musical Anatomy

Iron Fist makes these "Zombie Stomper" high heels. They're £44.99 from Dress Code. (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

Happy Birthday Dr. Bunsen! On this day in 1811 was born a pioneer in chemistry, and a maker of tools! Robert Bunsen was a German chemist where he made many significant discoveries, including the use of iron oxide hydrate as a precipitating agent, still used as the primary antidote for arsenic poisoning. He is probably best known, however, for his co-creation of what is now known as the "Bunsen burner," which he developed with Gustav Kirchhoff as an improvement on laboratory gas burners available at the time. Interestingly enough, Bunsen never filed a patent for any of his inventions, which makes me imagine him as an early proponent for open technologies. He was a well-loved professor, and for these things and more we celebrate today! Check out his Wikipedia page for more info.

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Nice tutorial on Instructables for making vicious little scorpions from twists of craft wire.

Wire Scorpion

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