This week on CRAFT we saw:

this Eraser Ring Tutorial,

Maybod Morvarid: Traditional Iranian Porcelain,

Ideas for Traveling with Kids,

Jo Hamilton's Crochet Portraits,

and this Simple Houseplant Wicking System.

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Wired has a feature on noctilucent clouds, once seen only at high latitudes but increasingly visible now lower down the globe. The clouds result from ice crystals at altitudes of 50 miles, higher than five 9s of the atmosphere. What water ice is doing up there, in a region 100 million times drier than the Sahara desert, is only one of the mysteries associated with the clouds. They are a recent phenomenon: the first scientific description of noctilucent clouds was penned in 1885. For a time it was believed that the clouds were an effect resulting from the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano two years before. Since 2002, the clouds have been sighted — and photographed — as far south as Oregon, Colorado, and Utah. Some scientists believe that human-caused climate change is playing a role, but others doubt this. Two satellites are in orbit to study the clouds; NASA's AIM generated this day-by-day movie of clouds in the vicinity of the North Pole during 2008.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scrameustache writes "Researcher working on a rare type of aortic abnormality found that the DNA from diseased tissue did not match the DNA from the blood of the same patients So far it's unclear whether these differences in the blood and aortic tissue are the consequence of RNA editing, which changes the messenger RNA but not the gene, or DNA editing, which involves differences in the gene itself. Based on the evidence so far, the researchers believe the differences resulted from developmental rather than somatic DNA alterations. 'Traditionally when we have looked for genetic risk factors for, say, heart disease, we have assumed that the blood will tell us what's happening in the tissue,' lead author Bruce Gottlieb said in a statement. 'It now seems this is simply not the case.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I don't think I've ever written about Craigslist here.

Probably because I don't spend much time thinking about it, or worrying about it. But I know that some people do, for example Terry Gross, the host of NPR's Fresh Air. It comes up when people talk about the Internet destroying things that matter, like the classified ads in newspapers. At one point in an interview with Wired editor Chris Anderson she asks, in a bewildered way, what happened. She was saying it was a shame that Craigslist comes along and does what the newspapers were doing, for a fraction of the cost, employing a small fraction of the people who used to support the classified ads in newspapers.

I'm not surprised, and if you think about it, it's very predictable. It's called productivity, and it's what new technology is supposed to do. We used to employ 20 percent of the workforce in agriculture, now it's just 2 percent. That's because of technology. You may say it's bad, but there's also less hunger in the US now than there was then. And there probably are far more classified ads today, now that they're mostly free, than there were when they cost money.

It's productivity. It basically a good thing. And as long as we invest in progress it's inevitable.

Here's an MP3 of the segment quoted above.

jollyreaper writes "Technology moves quickly and what was conventional wisdom last year can be folly this year. But the one thing that's remained constant is hard drives are far too large to backup via conventional means. Tape is expensive and can be unreliable, though it certainly has its proponents. DVD's are just too small. There are prosumer devices like the Drobo, but it's still just a giant box of hard drives, basically RAID. And as we've all had drilled into our heads 'RAID is not backup.' When last this topic came up on Slashdot, the consensus was that hard drives were the best way to backup hard drives. Backup your internal HDD to an external one, and if your data is really important, have two externals and swap one off-site once a week. Is there any better advice these days?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

_Sharp'r_ writes "In Honduras, according to breaking Catalan newspaper reports (translations available, USA Today mention), authorities have seized 45 computers containing certified election results for a constitutional election that never happened. The election had been scheduled for June 28, but on that day the president, Manuel Zelaya, was ousted. The 'certified' and detailed electronic records of the non-existent election show Zelaya's side having won overwhelmingly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a screen shot to contemplate.

There are two 140-character messages. Each illustrates features of the new shipwreck I hope to sink, to create a new coral reef for Twitter-like systems to grow on and around.

The first three items in each message are fairly obvious:

<description> holds the 140-character text.

<pubDate> is the timestamp, when the message was created.

<guid> is the identifier for the message, so a reader can tell if they've seen it before.

This makes it possible for the messages to be edited after publication, a common feature requests from writers using Twitter.

After that come optional elements.

<category> works like tags in apps like Flickr or YouTube. You specify them in a dialog, blanks separate them, you can create tags with blanks by putting them inside quotes.

<link> is used to point to web pages. No need to shorten the URLs because they don't take up space in the 140 characters.

<enclosure> is how you attach media objects to messages. Again, no need to shorten the URLs. And since the clients know the media type, they can show a preview, or embed a player.

These all use well-understood elements of RSS 2.0. Nothing new needed to be invented.

Not long after Firefox 3.5.1 was released to address a security issue, a new exploit has been found and a proof of concept has been posted. "The vulnerability is a remote stack-based buffer-overflow, triggered by sending an overly long string of Unicode data to the document.write method. If exploited, the resulting overflow could lead to code execution, or if the exploit attempts fail, a denial-of-service scenario." It's recommended that Firefox users disable Javascript until the issue is patched, though addons like NoScript should do the trick as well (unless a site on your whitelist becomes compromised).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's amazing how much discussion these test posts get over on FriendFeed.

I have to do them because my app needs something new to ping about to see if the apps that are subscribed to this get the updates, in real-time of course, via RSS.

Last week, I reviewed the Full Cast Audio adaptation of Kathe Koja's wonderful YA novel "Kissing the Bee", and Full Cast were good enough to send me another of Kathe's books in audio form, the 2003 Buddha Boy. Buddha Boy is the story of Justin, a kid at a pricey, clique-riddled high-school who just goes along to get along -- until he meets Jinsen. Jinsen, a transfer student, is an otherworldly, shaven-headed, maddeningly calm and artistically gifted student whose bizarre behavior (trolling the lunch-room with a begging bowl) and strange appearance make him into a magnet for the school bullies.

As the story goes on, Justin has to come to grips with his complicity in the savage and cruel bullying that Jinsen is faced with, the complicity of the bystander who does nothing, even as his friend Jinsen shows him an entirely new way to deal with bullies: to simply refuse to join the narrative they're recruiting you for. This strategy is not without its consequences, but it is also so shocking and new that it forces Justin to reexamine his life from top to bottom, from his academic passions to his spirituality.

As with Kissing the Bee, the Full Cast Audio adaptation of Buddha Boy is skillfully acted and edited, bringing out nuances in the story with a cast of talented actors, including some very gifted young people in the principle roles. The story twists and turns, and never quite goes where you think it will -- and like all of Koja's YA novels, it contains an elegant and simple emotional truth at its core that will have you vowing to be a better person by the time it's done.

Buddha Boy (CD)

Buddha Boy (paperback)

When I was a kid, my neighbor Mr. Benson, was apparently on the receiving end of a bit of mailbox mischief. At some point, he got fed up. He made himself a new mailbox out of pipe, crafted a door, made a neat little platform for the mail to sit on and mounted the whole affair onto an I-beam, probably set several feet into the ground in a hefty pad of concrete. As far as I know, his new mailbox was never touched again. Fast forward a bit, and the kids of the old neighborhood now have mailboxes of their own to protect.

When he made his mail fortress, it was brightly painted in blue and yellow, a nice stainless knob still gives the user an easy way to open on the custom hinge. Decades later, his Vandal-B-Gone mailbox still stands, though it needs a bit of sand blasting and paint.

On a bike ride from my aunt's house the other day, I saw several examples of similar constructions designed to thwart the casual ne'er-do-well hanging out the passenger side window of a night time batting practice run. But these were nothing like Mr. Benson's bombproof box.

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Sage Tyrtle and the QN Podcast team created a full-cast radio drama based on my apocalyptic, award-winning, Creative Commons licensed short story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth. I had no idea they were working on it until they told me they'd completed it -- it blew me out of the water. What a fantastic piece of work -- and what a great surprise!

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth

MP3 Link

Steve Silberman sez, "An 'enterprising and creative' 17-year-old with Asperger syndrome convinced British aviation officials that he was launching a new airline. Posing as a visionary global entrepreneur -- his email .sig files read 'American Global Group, 35 Countries, 22 Languages, One Team' -- he used phony websites and human engineering to arrange meetings with airport directors and book a local appearance for the 300-person US cast of 'High School Musical.' "

Tait, who said he was in his twenties, even flew to Jersey to attend a 1½-hour long meeting with the director of its airport. Their talks were considered promising enough for a further meeting to be arranged, which was due to be held next week.

Other air industry bosses found themselves dealing by telephone or e-mail with Tait's fellow executives, David Rich and Anita Dash, who proposed to launch a cut-price Channel Islands-based airline servicing most of Europe...

"Some of the things he said were the sort of things that were indicative that there might have been some substance to his claims," said Coupar. "If they were real then there would have been opportunities for us to expand our business and that's not the sort of thing we are going to ignore."

Tait also made approaches, with varying levels of success, to other airlines, including Titan Airways and Aer Arann.

When he made contact with Jersey airport, his patter was convincing enough to effect a 90-minute face-to-face meeting with Julian Green, the airport's director, who said last night: "Jersey airport can confirm it has had discussions with Adam Tait over recent weeks about an ambitious network of services between Jersey, the UK and Europe.

Teenager wings it with a fake airline (Thanks, Steve!)

BuzzSkyline writes "The same folks who brought us the tsunami invisibility cloak last year have now come up with an earthquake invisibility cloak. They show that a platform made of just the right configuration of elastic rings could make a structure invisible to earthquakes by effectively steering a quake around the structure. It doesn't work well for compression waves, but the researchers claim it could hide buildings from the slower-moving, more destructive shear earthquake waves. The research is due to be published soon in the journal Physical Review Letters."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "Discover Magazine reports that although medical simulations have been around for a long time, medical schools like Imperial College London are starting to use virtual hospitals in Second Life so students can learn their way around an O.R. before they enter the real thing. The students can also test their knowledge in the Virtual Respiratory Ward by interviewing patient avatars, ordering tests, diagnosing problems, and recommending treatment. 'The real innovation in SL clinical simulations is that they bring people together in a clinical space — you are standing next to an avatar who is a real patient, and the doctor avatar to your right is a resident at Massachusetts General Hospital and the nurse to your left is at the University of Pennsylvania hospital,' says John Lester, the Education and Healthcare Market Developer at Linden Labs. The most significant benefit of SL training may be the cost. Real-life training facilities require thousands, and sometimes millions of dollars to build and maintain, while SL simulation rooms can be created for minimal costs, and accessed from anywhere in the world for the price of an internet connection. SL can also expose students to situations that a standard academic program can't duplicate: 'You can take risks that aren't safe in the real world and teach more complex subjects in three dimensions,' says Colleen Lin. 'When you're resuscitating a dummy in real life, it looks like a dummy. But you can program an avatar to look like it's choking or having a heart attack, and it looks more real to the student responsible for resuscitating it.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

suraj.sun sends in this excerpt from CNet: "One of the most recognizable brands in the history of illegal downloading is due to officially resurface, perhaps as early as next week, sources close to the company told CNET News. Only this time the name Kazaa will be part of a legal music service. Altnet and parent company Brilliant Digital Entertainment attached the Kazaa brand to a subscription service that will offer songs and ringtones from all four of the major recording companies. For the past few months, a beta version has been available. The company tried recently to ratchet up expectations with a series of vague, and what some considered misguided, press releases. The site will open with over 1 million tracks." The NYTimes has a related story about how the music industry is trying to convert casual pirates by offering more convenient new services.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

JohnMoD writes With the advent of forge.mil, etc. the military seems to be getting on board with free and open source software. A working group meeting is going to be held at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, August 12-13, 2009. There's a pretty good lineup of speakers including a Marine from the Iraq-Marine Expeditionary Forces, who was on the ground and saw the agility open source gave to him and his soldiers. A number of OSS projects are going to be meeting there: Delta 3D, OpenCPI, FalconView, OSSIM, Red Hat, etc. Looks like there will be some good discussions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

• Arduino ISP Shield

• Business card caliper

• Super-simple camera clamp mount

• Ammo box fireworks controller

• IC wallet from chess-case

• Giant-sized VU meters

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MBCook writes "A Danish conservation expert named Rene Larson has finished a 5-year study of the infamous Vinland Map and declared it genuine. 'All the tests that we have done over the past five years — on the materials and other aspects — do not show any signs of forgery,' he said at the press conference. He and his team studied the ink, the paper, and even insect damage. They believe that the ink, which was discovered in 1972 to contain titanium dioxide and thus supposedly to be too new for the map to be genuine, was contaminated when sand was used to dry the ink."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I love a good mystery. So does Wired Geekdad blogger and friend of MAKE, John Baichtal. In his words:

A couple of months ago, I happened to catch the TED Talk given by Star Trek director J. J. Abrams concerning his love of mystery. The centerpiece of the talk was a simple cardboard box secured with packing tape and decorated with a giant question mark on one side. This box contains an assortment of magic tricks Abrams purchased from the Lou Tannen Magic Store as a kid, but for some reason, he's never opened it. For Abrams, the love of the mysterious unknown exceeds any value the magic tricks could provide.

We were tweeting about how much we both loved this idea, so I decided to build a wooden mystery box for John, using the laser cutter I have on loan from Epilog. The devil inside me needed to make a compelling object filled with things that will never be seen.

I began by drafting the shapes in CorelDRAW, and adding images to etch into each face.

I ran the wood through twice: first a low-wattage etching pass, then a high-wattage, cutting pass.

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In this old Apokalips webcomic, the convergence of captchas, robots, and tragic dodgy tattoos.

Prove You're Human (via A Whole Lotta Nothing)

Howard Rheingold sez, "I spoke about 21st century literacies at the Reboot Britain event in London, July, 2009. (About 40 minutes)"

21st Century Literacies (Thanks, Howard!)

The British Home Office want to keep a huge DNA database of people who've been acquitted of crimes (or arrested and then released with charges dropped), saying that "innocent people who have been arrested are as likely to commit crimes in the future as guilty people." In support of this "controversial assertion" they cite a piece of research that Guardian science columnist Ben Goldacre calls "possibly the most unclear and badly presented piece of research I have ever seen."

On page 30 they explain their methods, haphazardly, scattered about in the text. They describe some people "sampled on 1st June 2004, 1st June 2005 and 1st June 2006". These dates are never mentioned again. I have no idea what their plan was there. They then leap to talking about Table 2. This contains data on people each from a "sample" in 1996, 1995, and 1994, followed up for 30 months, 42 months, and 54 months respectively. Are these anything to do with the people from 2004, 2005, and 2006? I have no idea.

In fact I have no idea what "sample" means, perhaps that was the date they were first arrested. I don't know why they were only followed up for 30, 42, and 54 months, instead of all the way to 2009. Crucially I also don't know what the numbers in the table mean, because they don't explain this properly. I think it is the number of people, from the original group, who have subsequently been arrested again.

Anyway. Then they start to discuss the results from this table. They say that these figures show that arrested non-convicted people are the same as convicted people. There are no statistics conducted on these figures, so there is absolutely no indication of how wide the error margins are, and whether these are chance findings. To give you a hint about the impact of noise on their data, more people are subsequently re-arrested over the 42 month period than over the 54 month period, which seems surprising, given that the people in the 54 month group had a much longer period of time over which to get arrested.

Is this a joke?

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, New York's Laurence Miller Gallery is hosting an exhibition of Burk Uzzle's magnificent photographs of the event. The iconic images can also be seen online. From the gallery site:

Burk Uzzle shot the festival from the vantage point of a participant. In one particularly telling photograph, a sea of humanity as dense as a carpet of wildflowers in a meadow spills over a hillside; in another, a young hippie couple standing in a tender embrace under a grandmother’s quilt became the icon of a generation. Rather than document the music, Uzzle chose to focus on details of living, existence, and enjoyment over that three day period. In so doing, he captured the spirit of the festival and ultimately an era.

Burk Uzzle Woodstock: 40th Anniversary

dgun writes "I recently put together a new PC. When I purchased the motherboard, I noticed that it came with an instant-on OS, a small GNU/Linux distro called Splashtop. I assumed that the OS was on a ROM chip on the motherboard. To my great annoyance, when I tried to boot to this OS, a message said that it was not installed. It turns out that motherboard comes with an install disk for this GNU/Linux OS — that you can only run from Windows, to install Splashtop on the hard drive. First of all, doesn't installing it on the hard drive defeat the point of having an instant-on OS? If I wanted to dual-boot a small GNU/Linux OS, there are plenty that I could choose from. Second, if distributing GPL'ed software by means that completely preclude it from being used without Windows is not a violation of the GPL, should it not be?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wireless keylogger via HaD...

Familiar with the concept of hardware keylogging? A hardware keylogger is a perfect solution for monitoring user activity, at very low risk of disclosure. A hardware keylogger is a purely electronic device, so no access to the operating system is required, no traces are left, and software has no possibility of detecting such a device. However, the hardware keylogger concept inherits one weakness: physical access to the keylogger is required for retrieving captured data. This problem has finally found it's solution: a Wireless Keylogger.

KeeLog has already released one open source PS/2 hardware keylogger design to the public. Now, we are doing it again with the DIY Wireless Keylogger. This design is fully free for private and commercial use...

Next project, how to make a wireless keyboard jammer :)

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theodp writes "As GE readies appliances that communicate with smart meters in the hope of taking advantage of cheaper electricity rates, CNet asks a big question: Are consumers ready for the smart grid? Right now, most utilities only offer a flat rate, not time-of-use pricing, so the example of a drier that reacts to a 'price signal' about peak rates by keeping one's clothes wet until a more affordable time is pretty much a fantasy. And longer-term, a big question is whether consumers will want to deal with the hassle of optimizing household appliance energy usage themselves, or be willing to relinquish monitoring and control to utility companies — with a concomitant loss of privacy. After all, losing one's copy of 1984 is one thing — losing one's lights and refrigerator is another thing altogether."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Citizen! If you bought a copy of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-four," (1984) for your Kindle it was deleted, it appears that the publisher changed its mind about digital versions and Amazon reached in and removed it off your reader, sorry for the inconvenience! So, what to do? Let's assume you're going to go on a nice trip, like Australia, and you really wanted to read 1984 - once you get there you can easily reload your Kindle with a copy of 1984, "little brother" will show you how...

var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gadgets/HOW_TO_Read_George_Orwell_s_1984_on_your_Kindle';

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FleaPlus writes "From studying past solid rocket launch failures, the 45th Space Wing of the US Air Force has concluded that an early abort (up to a minute after launch) of NASA Marshall Flight Center's Ares I rocket would have a ~100% chance of killing all crew (report summary and link), even if the launch escape system were activated. This would be due to the capsule being surrounded until ground impact by a 3-mile-wide cloud of burning solid propellant fragments, which would melt the parachute. NASA management has stated that their computer models predict a safe outcome. The Air Force has also been hesitant to give launch range approval to the predecessor Ares I-X suborbital rocket, since its solid rocket vibrations are violent enough to disable both its steering and self-destruct module, endangering people on the ground."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm preparing a test of a Twitter-like service based on rssCloud, but then realized that I'm within striking distance of something simpler -- re-adding a <cloud> element to Scripting News. It had one for quite a while, we had a server that supported it when Radio 8 shipped in 2002.

So I added it in, and before I could construct a test, some aggregators started registering handlers! In other words, the old network started rebooting. If you don't understand, don't worry about it, but if you do -- man that's spooky.

Anyway, the RSS feed for scripting.com does indeed now have a <cloud> element, and if you happen to have an aggregator that knows what to do with it, please feel free to register a handler. I'll have a lot more to say about this in the coming week, knock wood, Murphy-willing.

BTW, the errors in the log are the result of apps registering receivers who are unable to receive notification because they're behind a firewall or NAT. I obviously have to unsub them when I get that error.