theodp writes "Embrace. Extend. Patent. On Tuesday, Microsoft was granted U.S. Patent No.7,571,169 for its 'invention' of the Word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML. Presumably developers are protected by Microsoft's 'covenant not to sue', so the biggest question raised by this patent is: How in the world was it granted in light of the 40-year history of document markup languages? Next thing you know, the USPTO will give Microsoft a patent for Providing Emergency Data in XML format. Oops, too late."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We covered Doug Fine's radical off-the-grid lifestyle experiment last year on Boing Boing TV -- embed above. He is the author of Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living, and he's still going strong out there on the Funky Butte Ranch. When he's not out in the fields turning the compost heap or feeding chickens, he's working on his next book, which I'm looking forward to reading. Doug has a thought-provoking piece out in this Sunday's Washington Post Outlook section, here's a preview:

I have a fiancee and a son to provide for, so I decided to take a hard look at our prospects for survival if our consumer safety nets went away. For now, my green lifestyle choices at my remote 41-acre outpost in the American Southwest are optional. You know, growing lettuce instead of buying Chilean. Using organic cotton diapers instead of buying Pampers. But what if one morning in, say, 2049, I wake up to milk my goats and find out that supplies are no longer streaming in from China and California? What would I do if both box stores and crunchy food co-ops suddenly were no more? In other words, I'm examining my place in a hypothetical post-oil, post-consumer society 40 years in the future.

Now, I'm not rooting for such a thing. Slave labor, forest depletion, climate change and global resource wars aside, globalization has a lot going for it. I love that I can email a musician in Mauritania and ask to download his latest album. And anyway, lots of people still see globalization as the economic model for the foreseeable future. But when I was covering the former Soviet Union as a journalist in the 1990s, every single person I met told me that they'd thought pigs would fly before the Politburo crumbled.

On My Ranch, Ready for the Great American Meltdown (Washington Post)

Spotted on the tumblog of photographer Clayton Cubitt, a collection of more than 700 black and white photographs taken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the early 20th century.

Clayton says, "Click on this archive link, and then click to submit on the search button at the archive site without entering any search terms, and it should return 73 pages of amazing."

There are so many powerful portraits in this collection, like the one above. I've been reading a lot about the current, ongoing violence in the Congo (here is one recent story about sexual atrocities committed against men). Clicking through this archive, I found myself thinking about the legacy of violence and colonialism, and how one generation of brutalities begets another. There are many images here that document horrible acts committed more than a century ago, such as the cutting off of hands of rubber plantation workers who failed to meet their quotas, or whipping people to death with hippo-skin chicottes.

Image at the top of this post: Herbert Lang, 'SENSE, A MANGBETU CHIEF. PORTRAIT 3/4 VIEW. PLASTER CAST OF FACE TAKEN' Belgian Congo 1909-1915.

MojoKid writes "Sony recently announced two new eBook readers and has set its sights on tapping into Amazon's Kindle market share. The Sony Reader Pocket Edition and the Reader Touch Edition will come out at the end of the month and will reportedly cost less or the same as the older, more established Kindle. The Pocket Edition has a five-inch display, comes in several colors ("including navy blue, rose and silver") and fits, as one might expect, in a jacket pocket or a purse. It can store about 350 "standard eBooks" and can last about two weeks on a single charge, Sony claims. The Touch Edition is a bit larger, with a six-inch display that, as you'd expect, can be controlled via a touch interface."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

People ask why not compromise and make it slightly more complicated for the user to gain a convenience for the developer. I say NFW. I fight for every inch of simplicity. Because every time you compromise you lose people. Add it all up and winning often means you fought for every inch.

This speech by Al Pacino from Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday may be corny and simplistic, but it works.

From Ice-Tea Man (thanks, Steve Woolf)

As noted here recently, London's National Portrait Gallery is involved in a legal tiff concerning whether the photos it put online of public domain portraits are public domain themselves. The Gallery insists they are not, and wants to prevent others from using them. However, jump across to this side of the pond and compare that response to what the Smithsonian is now saying, concerning its plan to get content more freely available and shared:

Content Usage: Establish a pan-Institutional policy for sharing and using the Smithsonian's digital content, with particular focus on Copyright and Public Domain policies that encourage the appropriate re-use and sharing of Smithsonian resources.

That sounds a lot better, and more in-tune with the mission of such a museum. To be fair, a few years back, the Smithsonian had its own troubles claiming copyright over public domain images, so perhaps it just takes a bit of time for these things to sink in.

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Via Mister Jalopy and Dinosaurs and Robots (by way of Lenore Edman's Twitter feed) comes this amazing bike project to create a cargo bike that actually comes apart so you can take the front assembly and basket into the store. Ingenious. And the build is well documented.

Grocery Getter Contest Submission

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krou writes "The New York Times reports on newly released court documents that show how pharmaceutical company Wyeth paid a medical communications firm to use ghost writers in drafting and publishing 26 papers between 1998 and 2005 backing the usage of hormone replacement therapy in women. The articles appeared in 18 journals, such as The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and The International Journal of Cardiology. The papers 'emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones to protect against maladies like aging skin, heart disease and dementia,' and the apparent 'medical consensus benefited Wyeth ... as sales of its hormone drugs, called Premarin and Prempro, soared to nearly $2 billion in 2001.' The apparent consensus crumbled after a federal study in 2002 'found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of invasive breast cancer, heart disease and stroke.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The 59-year old director died in Manhattan of a heart attack. He brought us such iconic eighties films as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink. IMDB, Wikipedia, Slashfilm, TMZ, Variety. Above, a montage of scenes from his films, created by a fan to the tune of the Who's "Baba O'Riley." (via Bonnie Burton)

Got a couple of interesting calls this morning on the development of rssCloud. The idea is picking up steam. I'm liking it. For a lot of these things this is the second or third time I'm implementing them. That gives a certain confidence that you know how to do it, and know what the pitfalls are, and what challenges are coming down the pike.

One question comes up a lot -- how do you manage the global namespace in a loosely-coupled 140-character message network.

Twitter handles it simply, they have a server at twitter.com and when you give it a username it knows what data it applies to. It doesn't expose the internals. That's different from the Internet's domain name system, that turns a name like google.com, yahoo.com or us.gov into numbered addresses like 74.125.67.100, 209.131.36.159 and 209.251.180.18.

So in a loosely-coupled world how will this work?

1. We want to map names like jason, guy and carol to URLs like random.com/guy.xml etc, etc.

2. Probably the way it'll work is there will be a central server run by a foundation that does exactly this mapping and nothing more. It's an identity server. You sign up for a username and password and store one bit of data, the URL of your feed of 140-character messages.

3. Another possibility is to borrow the architecture of DNS, and make it a registrar problem. Sign up with Godaddy or Network Solutions or Gandi and create a domain. Now the challenge is to have that name point to a URL instead of a dotted ID. I'll leave that up to the DNS gurus to decide if it's possible or too egregious a hack.

4. Yet another possibility is to let twitter.com handle the bootstrap. Conveniently they have space for a URL in each user's profile. If you've got an aggregator and the user says they want to subscribe to someone named pearl, look on Twitter for such a user, get the URL from their profile, read it, and if it's an RSS file with a cloud element, you're home. If not, it's an error.

After the Jammie Thomas ruling, the RIAA kept its typical gloating to a minimum, recognizing the PR disaster that the nearly $2 million judgment presented for its already widely disliked members. A few mistakes slipped through, but for the most part, the RIAA kept pretty quiet hoping that Thomas would settle rather than appeal (that didn't work). However, with the Joel Tenenbaum ruling, it appears the RIAA is going in a slightly different direction, posting a snarky blog post about Joel supposedly under the guise of "facts." Now, I've been clear that I think Tenenbaum never should have gone to trial and should have settled a while back. As more facts became clear in his case, it made little sense for him to fight against the RIAA. He broke the law and admitted it. You're not going to get very far fighting in court on that front. I think he's a bad test case (and had terrible legal representation).

So I can see where some of the opening comments from the RIAA's Cara Duckworth come from (basically trying to tear down Joel). But, for the life of me, I can't figure out what good the post does for the RIAA. It's a rather typical tone-deaf pronouncement from a group that's been about as tone deaf as it could possibly be to consumer desire for over a decade. To the people who already support Joel, it comes across as yet another attack. To people who already support the RIAA, it adds nothing new. To people in the middle... it just looks mean to attack this guy. Yes, Joel broke the law. But he was fined $675,000 for 30 songs (and, yes, the RIAA tries to point out that he downloaded/shared much more, but if that's their point, they should have sued him for that as well). Plenty of people see that punishment as totally out of line with any sense of reality. There's a tremendous amount of evidence that file sharing has not been a problem for the music industry -- it was a failure of the labels, often at the urging of the RIAA itself, to embrace new technologies and new business models.

And rather than recognize that, it now wants to smack around a guy they may have just sentenced to a life in poverty? That'll win over supporters...

I can't believe it needs to be said again, but you DON'T win customers by suing the biggest fans of your product. You DON'T win customers by doing everything you can to hold back innovation unless its under your terms. You DON'T win customers by exacting a massive pound of flesh and overvaluing your contribution over everyone else's.

As for the specifics of the RIAA's "facts" they get a bunch wrong. For example:

FACT: As much as he wants to make this into one, this is not a crusade against the RIAA or the laws that protect creators. This is not about us. It's about Joel Tenenbaum and his egregious illegal behavior which robs artists and music creators of the right to be paid for their work, and robs record companies of the ability to invest in new artists and bring new music to the public.

That's not a "fact." That's very much an opinion, and the second part of it is flat-out wrong. It's not a fact, it's a lie. Tenenbaum's actions robbed no one. No one has a "right to be paid for their work." You have a right to try to convince people to buy, and the RIAA and its labels FAILED in convincing Tenenbaum to do that. But that's the market at work. Today for lunch I may pick the deli rather than the pizza shop next door. Based on the RIAA's logic here, I have just "robbed" the pizza place of its "right to be paid" for its work. There is no right to be paid. Only a right to try to convince people to buy. As for "robbing the ability to invest," again, please explain how people choosing not to buy your product is the fault of the people not buying? If you simply put in place business models that work (which we point to all the time, showing artists who embrace file sharing and make more money because of it), there would be plenty of money to "invest in new artists."

And, of course, the woe-is-us routine is bogus as well. As we've seen in two recent studies (the latter from the music industry itself), the music ecosystem is thriving. More money is going into music and music-related goods than ever before. It's just that less and less of it is filtering through the RIAA's labels who (oops!) have a nasty history of not actually paying their artists money they owe them. The idea that not giving money to the RIAA somehow means less music will be brought to the public is laughable. It's not a fact, it's pure propaganda. Thanks to these same new technologies that the RIAA has tried to kill off, it's easier than ever for bands to create, promote and distribute music. And because of that, there's more new music out there than ever before.

Hey, let's agree on the fact that Joel broke the law and it was silly for him to go through with this lawsuit. Done and done. But don't spew a line of pure bull that this was ever about investing in artists.

FACT: Mr. Tenenbaum has put forth the defense that "his generation" has grown up learning that file-sharing isn't wrong. This is a bogus argument. I'm a member of Tenenbaum's generation. I was taught I shouldn't take what doesn't belong to me without permission.

Funny, then, can you explain all the lawsuits that artists have filed against major record labels asking where the money owed to them has gone? Why is it the RIAA's biggest name members seem to have no problem "taking what doesn't belong to them without permission"? And can you explain why the RIAA has been fighting for a new tax on radio stations? Isn't that just "taking what doesn't belong to you" as well? The RIAA has no problem taking what doesn't belong to them (though, usually it works hard behind the scenes to get politicians to pass laws to give it the appearance of legality).

FACT: The best anti-piracy strategy is a thriving legal marketplace that gives music fans a wide variety of innovative options where they can get their favorite music in affordable, hassle-free ways.

Which is why your members, under your legal direction and strategic input have sued a significant number of those services and tried to make the MP3 player itself illegal? Uh-huh.

Because there are some people like Mr. Tenenbaum who believe music should be free, we've had to enforce our rights to protect all those hard-working individuals who create the music.

There's a bit of a problematic logic train here... Because someone doesn't want to buy from us, we have to sue, to get money for the people we work so hard to not give money to. Hmm. Can Cara Duckworth and the RIAA share with us some details on how the "settlement fees" from all the folks threatened by the RIAA has been distributed to artists? The RIAA has no requirement to enforce its rights. As we've seen time and time again, artists who purposely chose not to enforce those rights, but to instead provide something of real value to consumers have found that they can make more money than they ever got from an RIAA member. There's no such thing as that you "had to enforce" your rights. Instead, you could have innovated. You chose not to.

FACT: We do not want to be in court. We'd rather be investing in new artists and bringing great music to the public's collective ears.

If we're dealing in "facts" here, we should get one straight. If a plaintiff doesn't want to be in court, then he or she doesn't sue. It's that simple. Making this out like the RIAA was somehow forced to go to court is ridiculous. Edgar Bronfman Jr. announced nearly a decade ago that he was sending an army of lawyers to sue file sharers. You made the conscious decision to declare war on your best customers. You weren't forced into it at all.

But artists, musicians, music companies, and all the working-class folks who rely on the legitimate sale of music to make a living deserve to be paid for their work.

There we are with the "deserve to be paid." Hell, I "deserve to be paid" for my work too. But, the world doesn't work that way. Deserving to be paid for your work and a nickel gets you five damn cents. You earn money by offering something in the marketplace that people want to buy. You didn't do that. You failed at business 101 and you started suing people because of it.

FACT: We remain willing to settle this case, but Tenenbaum is so far insisting on filing more motions and appeals in order to continue to pursue his misguided mission to get music for free.

You could drop the case. You've already declared (somewhat misleadingly) that you were giving up this strategy of suing music fans. Why continue to tarnish the RIAA's reputation by bankrupting a kid for listening to music?

Nobody can argue that people don't deserve to be paid for their hard work. But through all his illegal actions, Tenenbaum has argued exactly that.

Indeed. No one is likely to argue that people don't deserve to be paid for their hard work, but out here in the real world, deserving to be paid is meaningless. Cara, since I spent so much time correcting your errors, half-truths and misdirections, I feel that I deserve to be paid for this hard work I have done for you. Based on your logic, I should see a check in the mail from you shortly, yes? Clearly, if you don't pay up, we can only assume that you are arguing that I don't deserve to be paid for my hard work. So which is it?

No matter how clearly Tenenbaum broke the law, it doesn't change the only real fact: the RIAA has failed to embrace new business models when they appear, has attacked and held back new technologies and innovations at nearly every opportunity until dragged kicking-and-screaming into the new era (which it still refuses to fully embrace), and has created a PR nightmare for itself that isn't helped by lying to the public in the name of a bunch of bogus "FACTS."

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Here's Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi doing a live pitch of his proposed George Liquor Program to folks at Comic Con.

He says the inspiration for one episode came from his father, who grew up during the Depression and was always careful with his money after that. His father, said John, would buy cans without labels from the supermarket, which sold them for five or tens cents a can. Whatever happened to be in the can is what the family would eat.

Here's part 2.

Here's are a lot of photos and illustrations of John and George Liquor.

ashraya writes "My father (not too computer literate) has a desktop and a laptop both running Windows in his network back in Hyderabad, India. I set up a Linksys router for him to use with his broadband service. For some reason, he reset the config on the Linksys, and connected it up without wireless security, and also with the default admin password for some time. As you would expect, both of the Windows computers got 'slow', and the desktop stopped connecting to the internet completely for some reason. As I logged in remotely to 'fix' things, I noticed on the Linksys' log that the laptop was making seemingly random connections to high-numbered ports on various IPs. I did a nslookup on the IPs to see that they were all either in Canada or US, with Comcast and other ISP addresses. Is that a sign that the computers were in a botnet? Are the other hosts part of the botnet too? (I have since rebuilt the Windows hosts, and this connections are not happening now. I have also secured the Linksys.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(This spring, the Hoefer family had their own MAKEcation event, the "Great Chair Challenge")

Gareth Branwyn, Senior editor at MAKE says:

We're excited about the MAKEcation events we're running on Make: Online through the end of the month. Phil Torrone came up with the idea of the MAKEcation last summer, when gas prices were crazy and people were staying home, their "Staycations" becoming fodder for the evening news' econopocalypse coping stories. Phil figured, if people were staying home, they might as well do something productive with their time -- get the family together to learn new things and make stuff. Thus, the MAKEcation was born.

We started off this year's MAKEcations with the Teach Your Family to Solder Challenge. We posted a bunch of pieces with soldering tutorials, tool suggestions, tips for newbies, and ideas for projects. This week, we've added the Cooler Hacking Challenge -- mod any type of portable beverage cooler any crazy way you like and send us the pics/video. These events will run through the end of the month and we'll be adding another, a special family vs. family challenge, next week. We have Camp Counselors, too. Dave Hrynkiw, of Solarbotics, is our soldering counselor, and our latest author to join the site, Matt Mets, is the Cooler Hacking counselor. They're around to answer technical questions, chime in with their expertise, and to help us in choosing our favorite MAKEcation projects.

We're giving away $100 Maker Shed certificates to our three favorite entries in all three challenges, plus books and Maker's Notebooks to the top 15 contestants who submit MAKEcation pictures and videos. Adafruit industries will also be awarding their soldering merit badges.

Let's take a Summer MAKEcation! | Teach your family to solder| MAKEcation Cooler Hacking Challenge

Errol Morris' multi-part essays for the New York Times are always amazing, and this one, "Seven Lies About Lying" is no exception. Part 1 has an interview with Ricky Jay, the magician, ukulele-player, actor, and historian of sideshows and swindles.

ERROL MORRIS: And it can’t be accidental. You can accidentally deceive somebody, but you can’t accidentally lie to somebody. If you’re lying to somebody, you have to know you’re doing it.

RICKY JAY: I’ve written about verbal deception, for example, the P.T. Barnum sign – “TO THE EGRESS” — to make someone believe something that was other than what was intended. Even though there was nothing wrong with it — it’s deceptive. [The sign is intended make people believe that they are about to visit some exotic animal, rather than heading to the exit.] I wrote an article about verbal deception in “Jay’s Journal” on the Bonassus.

The Bonassus was presented in 1821 as this extraordinarily exotic creature. I’ll read just the opening: “The Bonassus, according to contemporary handbills, has been captured as a six-week-old cub deep in the interiors of America …” —blah, blah, blah… “It was presented to a populous eager for amusement and edification” — this was in London — “whose appetite for curiosities both animal and human was insatiable.” The attraction said, “A newly discovered animal, comprising the head and eye of an elephant, the horns of an antelope, a long black beard, the hind parts of a lion, the foreparts of a bison, cloven-footed, has a flowing mane from shoulder to fetlock joint and chews the cud.” And underneath the line, “ ‘Take him for all in all, we ne’er shall look upon his like again.’ — Shakespeare.”

And I say,

“Using every conceivable method of prevarication, the playbills of the day unabashedly conceal the true identity of the newly discovered Bonassus, this new genus” — that’s a quote — “of the African Kingdom had never before been seen in Europe. He was none other than the American Buffalo. As for never seeing his like again, in 1821 the buffalo was the most numerous hoof-footed quadruped on the face of the earth.”

Errol Morris: Seven Lies About Lying (Part 1)

Harry writes "For every blockbuster of the mouse world (such as Microsoft and Logitech's big sellers) there have been countless mice that flopped, or never made it to market. Mice shaped like pyramids; mice shaped like Mickey; mice that doubled as numeric keypads or phones. Even one that sat on your steering wheel. I've rounded up some evocative patent drawings on twenty notable examples."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The folks at Ideo Labs celebrated the awesome hair of their intern, Alex, by modding a Diana plastic camera so that it adds his hair to whomever is photographed. They gave it to him as a going-away present.

Modding a Toy Camera to an "Alex Cam" [Thanks, Dave!]

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Introducing the Rubix Cubewich. It contains cubes of pastrami, kielbasa, pork fat, salami, and two types of cheddar. What? No bacon? Found on the appropriately named Insanewiches site.

The Rubix Cubewich

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The annual Outside Lands Music and Arts festival is coming up August 28-30. Many who planned to attend were bummed to hear that the Beastie Boys, Sunday night's headlining act, had to cancel due to health problems with Adam "MCA" Yauch (read: Yauch Recovering at Home after Cancer Surgery). I'm on a conference call right now with Jack Black and Kyle Gass and a bunch of bewildered journalists, and the replacement act is now official: Tenacious D! (Wikipedia).

I wish more of the conference calls I have to sit through included Jack Black. The guy really knows how to liven up a party line full of reporters. Also lots of fart jokes.

Liveblogging notes after the jump.

* 12:20pm - Jack Black is berating his musical and LOLs partner for calling in on a cellphone speakerphone in a windy location. "Are you in a wind tunnel, dude?" (...) "We're literally phoning it in, this is awesome!"
* 12:30pm - OK, now the guys are promising to live-twitter throughout the entire performance, and to blog their setlist. Also, something about Skype grenades and Twitter costumes.
* 1236pm - Jack Black loves Taqueria La Cumbre in San Francisco, and specifically, carnitas burritos gordos.
*1238pm - Black says they've just recorded a "bomb-ass sci fi doomsday rock song called DETH STARR," which may or may not be debuted at the fest.
* 12:40pm - Black is discussing the quantum physics of creating a rip in the space-butt continuum.
* 12:44pm - Black and Gass are looking forward to seeing Silversun Pickups, Ween, and Modest Mouse at the fest, among others. Much excitement also about rumors of Dave Grohl's new supergroup, which is not scheduled to appear.
* 1245pm - "Bring some yogurt raita people, because our shit's so hot you're gonna get burned."

I tend not to agree with Microsoft patent boss Horacio Gutierrez on very much when it comes to patents or Microsoft's patent strategy over the past few years. But I have to admit I'm fascinated by his plan to take the lessons of the book Moneyball and try to apply them to patents. Apparently, he's got a team of folks in Redmond, trying to put together data and stats the help judge the value of a patent. I'd be surprised if anything really accurate comes out of it (there are just too many variables and wildcards), but it is an intriguing idea. I wonder if he'll patent it...

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snydeq writes "Guidelines from the American Law Institute that seek to hold vendors liable for 'knowingly' shipping buggy software could have dramatic impact on the open source community, as vague language around a 'free software' exemption could put open source developers at litigation risk. Meant to protect open source developers, the 'free software' exemption does not take into account the myriad ways in which vendors receive revenue from software products, according to a joint letter drafted by Microsoft and the Linux Foundation. As such, the guidelines — which, although not binding, are likely to prove influential on future lawsuits, according to attorneys on both sides of the issue — call into question the notion of liability in the open source community, where any number of coders may be responsible for any given defect."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bill Gurstelle is a Contributing Editor for MAKE magazine. His most recent book is entitled Absinthe & Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously. You can follow Bill on his danger-quest at twitter.com/wmgurst. He is a guest Make: Online author for the month of August.

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What in the world is obtainium? It may sound like a mixture of osmium, barium, and titanium, but it's not. It's the stuff you will need to obtain - parts, chemicals, and equipment - to make cool stuff. Obtainium comes from many places. Sometimes you find it, sometimes you buy it.

If you need a general, commonly-used part for a general project, most people will use a full-line retailer like McMaster or Small Parts, Inc. If you need a more specialized part, for say, a robot or a solar energy project, it's easy enough to find specialty retailers online.

But what if you don't know exactly what you're looking for? Or, you simply want ideas?

Then go to the local science surplus store. Surplus stores are places of great inspiration. A walk up and down the aisles of a good one will spark any number of great project ideas. Today, I visited my local favorite, Ax-Man Surplus, in St. Paul, MN to obtain a few key project parts. But it's hard to stay on task, what with all the potential project material surrounding me.

Look at all this stuff I didn't even know I needed!

I summoned enough self-control to take a pass on the gas masks.

This is pretty interesting, but I didn't buy it. Now I think I should have.

But look at this, a whopping nice rheostat that could be useful for that arc light project I've been working on. With luck, I can get rid of the salt water resistor tank I've been using. Pretty cheap, too.

There are scientific surplus stores everywhere. I found this list online and it seems like somebody is updating it, at least occasionally. If you've a store you really like, please comment and let other readers know.

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Here is Ray Charles doing a fantastic cover of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire." It's from The Johnny Cash Show, a variety show that aired from 1969 to 1971. Other guests included Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, and Louis Armstrong. "The Best of the Johnny Cash Show" is available as a two-disc DVD. (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)

Yesterday, Mister Jalopy reported a swarm of bees under the seat of one of his bikes for sale at Coco's Variety in Los Angeles. Upon hearing the news, neighbor Amy Seidenwurm headed over to the store, donned her bee suit, and bravely herded the bees to a cardboard box, transferring them to "greener pastures where the flowers are dripping with nectar and hives are clean and commodious."

2 Wheels, 2000 Bees

This sounds like a Twilight Zone episode: The village of Kodinki in India is home to more than 200 sets of twins, and the number is increasing. The village's population is only 15,000 people. From Reuters:

"Based on scientific facts, we feel something in the environment is causing this. It could be something in the water," said a local doctor, M.K. Sribiju.

"All the world over the cause of twins is mainly because of drugs. Everywhere in the Western world, people are exposed to fertility drugs, their food habits, they consume more dairy products. Everywhere the age of marriage is increasing. There are late marriages predisposed to occurrence of twins," he said.

However in Kodinji, most marriages are between people aged 18 to 20 years old.

"All the factors leading to the occurrence of twinning world wide, we cannot see it here. There is something unknown that is causing this phenomenon," he said.

The locals also believe it has to do with the water. Kodinji is surrounded by water in the fields and during the monsoon season it becomes inaccessible from heavy rains.

"Doctors baffled by Indian village of over 200 sets of twins"

Toe, The writes "Apple has submitted a patent application for technologies which would detect device-abuse by consumers. The intent presumably being to aid in determining the validity of warranty claims. 'Consumer abuse events' would be recorded by liquid and thermal sensors detecting extreme environmental exposures, a shock sensor detecting drops or other impacts, and a continuity sensor to detect jailbreaking or other tampering. The article also notes that liquid submersion detectors are already deployed in MacBook Pros, iPhones and iPods. It does seem reasonable that a corporation would wish to protect itself from fraudulent warranty claims; however the idea of sensors inside your portable devices detecting what you do with them might raise eyebrows even beyond the tinfoil-hat community."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Flaming End, by Ryan Heshka)

The theme for the upcoming BLAB! art show is "21st-Century Apocalypse."

Copro Gallery and Monte Beauchamp proudly present "THE BLAB! SHOW," the fifth Group Art Exhibition featuring original paintings and illustrations from the forthcoming issue of BLAB! magazine - Monte Beauchamp's periodic anthology of sequential and comic art, illustration, painting, and printmaking.

Artists include: JOE SORREN, ALEX GROSS, MARK RYDEN, SHAG, JEFF SOTO, RYAN HESHKA, FEMKE HEIMSTRA, GARY BASEMAN, GEORGANNE DEEN, KRIS KUKSI, GARY TAXALI, ANDY KEHOE, TRAVIS LAMPE, JEAN-PIERRE ROY, SPAIN, XNO, JOHN POUND, FRED STONEHOUSE, MARC BURCKHARDT, DAVIS SANDLIN, KATHLEEN LOLLY, ANDREW BRANDOU, CALEF BROWN, SOFIA ARNOLD, MARK TODD. DHOLBACHIE-YOKO, KEVIN SCALZO, LARRY DAY, MARK GARRO, MICHAEL NOLAND, ANDREA DEZSO AND TERESA JAMES.

BLAB! Show: 21st-Century Apocalypse

There's no reason why bands who are signed to a major label can't take many of the lessons and business models we've talked about here and make good use of them as well. In the past, for example, we've been impressed by what the band Chester French has done, where it had celebrated a fan who was burning copies of their music and giving it out to people (and had created a video showing others how to do it too). In fact, we came close to having Chester French be a part of our Techdirt Music Club, but there were some logistical issues that were too tricky to work out in the time available. The NY Times now has an article on what the band has been doing to connect with fans as well, and it shows a band that is doing everything it can to better connect with fans in any way possible. They're using all sorts of online tools, and the two band members actively communicate with all sorts of fans. They also know that "free" is a part of the business model:

"We gave away an album for free," Wallach said, "and that was the single largest driver of new fans that we've done." They honestly believe giving away copies of their CDs gets them heard by others who'll go out and buy a copy.

But here's the thing that's not mentioned in the article. Chester French is signed to a major record label. In this case, Interscope, a subsidiary of Universal Music which has started going down a smarter path lately -- and that's definitely seen here. For some reason, people seem to think that we "hate" the major record labels, but that's not true at all. We just wish they'd stop fighting fans and making life worse for musicians. That's why it's great to see a major label like Universal supporting Chester French, and allowing them to do stuff like giving away free music and cheering on fans who burn copies of their CD.

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CrappyTaxidermy.com is what its title suggests, but not entirely. The blog features a mix of badly-executed mounts and also just curious stuffed critters. Those shoes at above left are, er, something else. Crappy Taxidermy (via Morbid Anatomy)

(Download / Watch on YouTube)

Boing Boing Video teamed up with Theo Gray and Popsci.com to produce this video that demonstrates how you can mold steel with electrochemical machining, using a soft, cheap piece of tin -- without any physical contact. Theo is the author of the book Mad Science, in which many other experiments like this are featured. Theo says:

I remember seeing a demonstration of a seemingly magic process at an engineering open house decades ago, in which a soft metal bit carved detailed shapes into far harder metals. It's called electrochemical machining (ECM), and it's so simple in principle that you can do it at home with a drill press, a battery charger and a pump for a garden fountain.

ECM is basically electroplating in reverse. In electroplating, you start with a solution of dissolved metal ions and run an electric current through the liquid between a positive electrode and the object you want to plate (the negative side). The ions deposit themselves as solid metal onto the surface of the object.

Read the whole HOWTO over at popsci.com: Carve Steel with Saltwater, Electricity and a Tin Earring

Image below: "The tin peace-sign earring acts as an electrode, etching away the metal in the hardened steel washer [left]. The imperfect results are due to the difficulty of manually maintaining an exact thousandths-of-an-inch distance between the two. Commercial electrochemically machined pieces, like this microturbine for a water pump, use sophisticated electronics to monitor the current flow and carve precise pieces [right]. (Courtesy ECM Technologies BV/ ECM Productions BV; Mike Walker)

eldavojohn writes "Two blog posts from AMD are causing a stir in the GPU community. AMD has created and released the industry's first OpenCL which allows developers to code against AMD's graphics API (normally only used for their GPUs) and run it on any x86 CPU. Now, as a developer, you can divide the workload between the two as you see fit instead of having to commit to either GPU or CPU. Ars has more details."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman raves about this fun new Bigfoot watch, aptly called the Sasqwatch. It comes in a variety of colors, but I prefer the realistic "bark" or "charcoal" models over, say, pink. They're $49.99 each.
Sasqwatch

Spotted via Andrew Baron's tweetstream, this fascinating -- no, really! -- snopes article on why Van Halen had that line in their concert rider about ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN M&Ms EVER.

Punch line: the true reason behind this had to do with technology, engineering, and safety issues. But I can kind of hear David Lee Roth delivering the lines in his over-the-top screamy-voice when I read his quotes. Actually, I can hear David Lee Roth's voice when I read the rider.

Snopes.com: Van Halen Brown M&Ms. The actual 1982 rider was first published online at smokinggun.com in 2008.

Video below: "Jamie's Cryin," from David Lee Roth's bluegrass cover album of VH hits, remixed by a fan in a homebrew video with (why not?) a Popeye cartoon. You can buy the record here if you are so inclined: Strummin' With The Devil: Bluegrass Tribute to Van Halen.

Update: JKD says,

Also, a recent episode of "This American Life" also had a segment on the brown M&M clause, and the general dynamics of touring and contracts, with John Flansburgh from TMBG:

In this month's Wired UK, Warren Ellis waxes apocalyptopoetic about tiny transportation systems as a thing of future beauty:

Designing a transport hub for the loading and traffic flow of pharma capsules built to deliver drugs directly into the heart of cancer tumours, using carbon fullerenes and working on the nanoscale, where communication between building and vehicle will have to be conducted via coded protein transfer because you’re below the limit at which radio waves can be transmitted or received.

I’d call it an intron depot, after the book by Masamune Shirow. But an intron, science assures me, is a chunk of DNA within a gene that doesn’t code into protein, so maybe that wouldn’t fit so well. But that could well be a real problem to solve – design me an intron depot so I can manage the traffic flow of nanoscopic drug delivery cars. I’m trying to imagine the nature of the computing required to oversee artificial traffic within the human body, when we can’t yet control traffic in Birmingham.

I almost wish the scene would be like the Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces in the 60s film Fantastic Voyage. America’s finest scientists and soldiers being driven around a weird, vast Brutalist underground base in electric golf carts, working to reduce submarines to microscopic size in great disco-floored scientific halls. But that’s a problem of the future: the future isn’t big any more. The future’s small.

"The future isn't big anymore. The future is small" (wired.co.uk, via @warrenellis)

The Latvian government is apparently pissed off about Brits heading there for wild stag parties and allegedly stirring up trouble. For example, Nils Usakovs, mayor of the Latvian capitalof Riga, isn't keen on tourists urinating on the city's central monument. It's odd to me that some of the government officials are so open with their anti-British sentiments.

Usakovs said some British visitors were guilty of misbehaving: "Let's not be politically correct - unfortunately, this is their speciality."

He also said if the city had more regular tourists the badly behaving British visitors "would not be as noticeable"...

Last year the country's then interior minister, Mareks Seglins, complained about "English pigs" and said they were a "dirty, hoggish people" after a British tourist was sentenced to five days in prison after being caught urinating on the war memorial.

Earlier this year South Wales Police sent two officers to Riga to advise on how to deal with hen and stag parties from Britain.

"Latvian warning for British stags" (Thanks, Antinous!)

German chemical giant BASF pioneered the technology to colorize the traditionally blah-colored world of manufactured wood products like medium-density fiberboard (MDF). Besides requiring no or little finishing, through-color MDF will not betray scrapes or scratches like painted material. It has been available in Europe for awhile now, but only relatively recently in the US through Packard Forest Products.

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Rob Hyndman alerts us to a column from an entertainment industry lawyer, explaining his job in "errors and omissions clearance procedures." Basically, the job is watching movies to make sure nothing gets on the screen that doesn't have permission:

Every single character's name in the script must be checked to ensure there isn't someone out there with that exact name who may think they are being portrayed without their permission. All the proposed signage for stores, institutions and other locations must be researched to ensure the names and logos are not subject to copyright or trademark restrictions. If the characters and locations are real, permission must be granted and consents signed. Only certain phone and license plate numbers may be used.

Once the script is written and production begins, all props on set must be checked to ensure no copyright or trademark infringement exists. Fictional cereal being eaten in the fictional restaurant by the fictional family must be cleared before the box can be put on the table.

A rough version of the finished production is then reviewed to ensure nothing was missed and no golden arches appear in the background of the outdoor shot at an intersection in a busy downtown location.

What a stupendous waste of time, money and resources. But it shows what a ridiculous society we've created, where intellectual property law means that you can't have a McDonald's appear anywhere in the background in a movie. I'm sure that's exactly what our founding fathers were concerned about when they put in place the constitutional clause about "promoting the progress."

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destinyland writes "Can we imprint the circuitry of the human brain onto a silicon chip? It requires a computational capacity of 36.8 petaflops — a thousand trillion floating point operations per second — but a team of European scientists has already simulated 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections. And their brain-chip is scaleable, with plans to create a superchip mimicking 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses. Unfortunately, the human brain has 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses Just remember Ray Kurzweil's argument: once a machine can achieve a human level of intelligence — it can also exceed it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chris Ahearn, President of Media at Thomson Reuters, has an opinion piece out today which amounts to a response to recent hysterical, illogical, and counterproductive acts on the part of Associated Press management with regard to content-sharing online (and "journalism piracy").

To start, yes the global economy is fairly grim and the cyclical aspects of our business are biting extremely hard in the face of the structural changes. But the Internet isn't killing the news business any more than TV killed radio or radio killed the newspaper. Incumbent business leaders in news haven't been keeping up. Many leaders continue to help push the business into the ditch by wasting "resources" (management speak for talented people) on recycling commodity news. Reader habits are changing and vertically curated views need to be meshed with horizontal read-around ones.

Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies - they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works.

A better approach is to have a general agreement among community members to treat others' content, business and ideas with the same respect you would want them to treat yours. If you are doing something that you would object to if others did it to you - stop. If you don't want search engines linking to you, insert code to ban them.

Why I believe in the Link Economy (reuters.com). We have a linking policy here at Boing Boing, by the way.

Robots serving ramen...

At the "Fua-men" (pronounced FOO-ah-men) ramen noodle shop in the central Japanese city of Nagoya, two robotic arms busily serve their hungry customers, doling out nearly 80 bowls of noodles on a busy day.

"The benefits of using robots as ramen chefs include the accuracy of timing in boiling noodles, precise movements in adding toppings and consistency in the taste and temperature of the soup," said Kenji Nagaya, president of local robot manufacturer Aisei.

Nagoya's robot factory opened the noodle shop less than a month ago to showcase the latest robotic technology.

The noodle shop, which sells a regular noodle bowl with a pork broth-based soup for the equivalent of 7 dollars, is yet to make a profit, partly due to the large investment in the research and development of the robotic arms.

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BB pal Gareth Branwyn says:

I'm absolutely... er... "over the moon" about the new SomaFM Mission Control channel. They've taken the Apollo radio feeds and mixed them on top of space/ambient/electronic music. It's fucking brilliant! It's become the soundtrack to my late night work sessions. Some of this stuff has seriously popped my circuits. Geek ambient!

Mission Control: Celebrating NASA and Space Explorers everywhere

Recently on Offworld, our Ragdoll Metaphysics columnist Jim Rossignol takes us through an illustrated history of one of videogames' best mechanical conceits: the jetpack. From The Stamper Brothers' original JetPac, to Exile, to Tribes, Jetpack Brontosaurus (above) and beyond, he looks at how the 'pack has let us "explore strange new worlds where the sky is not the limit, and where the vertical axis is as just as essential as the horizons that lay all around us." Elsewhere we marveled at the intricate rusted ironworks designs in the latest video of Amanita's upcoming adventure game Machinarium, saw Minotaur China Shop (and Jetpack Brontosaurus, coincidentally) creators Flashbang poke gentle fun at Braid creator Jon Blow, and found a wonderful series of T-shirts based on the glitched-out boot-up sequences of arcade games. And for our 'one shot's of the day, two more fantastic pieces from artists appearing in the upcoming Autumn Society games/art gallery show: Zelda's Link aims for the eye, and the Swarovski crystal-studded queen Tetrisina.

Blarkon writes "Slashdotters are aware of and often use Adblock Plus," and notes that "if newspapers wanted to hit the online content industry hard right now, they would be running non-stop information about how to obtain and use Adblock Plus.' That a scorched-earth approach to blocking Internet advertising through AdBlock Plus might collapse free online competitors by starving them of revenue. If more people are aware of Adblock plus, it will be more tempting for other browser manufacturers to include similar ad blocking functionality. Might Rupert Murdoch's apparent 'traffic killing' move to paywall content be a desperate gamble to avoid the impact of a future crash in the ad-supported online business model caused by everyone's browser including something like Adblock Plus?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ancientwood, Ltd., is a US company that imports 50,000-year-old Kauri logs that have been preserved for millennia in peat bogs under New Zealand's northern island. Besides its value as a conversation piece, ancient Kauri is mined, rather than logged, and no live trees are killed in the process. Kauri trees (Agathis spp.) thrive in New Zealand to this day, but supposedly the preserved ancient specimens have unique properties all their own, including a very rare form of iridescence called "whitebait."

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123di.com has announced Version 6.0 of Vincent Bockaert's 'The 123 of digital imaging Interactive Learning Suite'. 123di is an interactive learning application for Windows and Mac that includes user controllable animations and simulations. It aims to cover all aspects of the digital imaging workflow, including photography techniques, in three selectable user levels. Editing techniques are centered around Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2, Elements 7, CS4, and Camera Raw. Reduced-price upgrades are available for existing users.

123di has announced the latest version of its DVD-based interactive learning suite. 'The 123 of digital imaging Interactive Learning Suite - Version 6.0' is available for both Mac and Windows-based systems and is broken down into sections tailored to different levels of user experience. It aims to offer a complete guide to digital imaging from exposure and composition through to post processing and printing your images. Both Standard and Extended editions are available, covering a wide range of popular software titles with reduced-price upgrades available for existing users.

Apple's continued arbitrariness in banning iPhone apps continues in weird and somewhat incomprehensible ways. The latest getting attention (and sent in by a lot of people) is that a dictionary app called Ninjawords was forced to block out the definitions of certain words in order to get approval to be in the App Store. Even though the app itself has a 17+ rating, apparently Apple came back with a list of "objectionable" words in the dictionary which had to be removed. Never mind the fact that anyone could just go to a website with the very same device and look up those same words... Oh, and of course other dictionaries available at the App Store seem to have those same words. The article also points out that Wal-Mart -- notorious for refusing to sell "objectionable" material sells dictionaries with these sorts of words included. The whole thing is bizarre, and again makes you wonder what Apple is accomplishing with its app review process, other than pissing people off.

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The elusive Precision dropped a submission in my lap about a DDoS taking down Twitter running on CNet. It's been down for several hours, no doubt wreaking havoc on the latest hawtness in social networking. Won't someone please think of the tweeters? Word is that both Facebook & LiveJournal have been having problems this AM as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instructables user 5VOLTSGC shares with us his project for a bicycle dog walker. It keeps the dog at a distance from the wheels and pedals, and has a breakaway pin to prevent doggie-induced falls, should your pup decide to stop when you're riding down a hill.

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xp65 writes "Today NASA released information regarding its intention to invest $50 million in commercial crew concepts. This new program, known as the Commercial Crew Development or 'CCDev,' represents a new milestone in the development of an orbital commercial human spaceflight sector. By maturing 'the design and development of commercial crew spaceflight concepts and associated enabling technologies and capabilities,' the program will allow several companies to move a few steps forward towards the ultimate goal of full demonstration of commercial human spaceflight to orbit."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brand New fills in the gaps of the comparison chart. But still, the variations for Coca-Cola are subtle compared to Pepsi's (who should revert to either the 1940 or 1973 version). #

Sony has announced the Party-shot personal photographer, an automated photo-taking cradle. The device uses the DSC-WX1 and DSC-TX1's face- and smile detection functions to detect photo opportunities in social environments. The Party-shot sits on a table or tripod and tilts and pans to locate and follow potential subjects. It will also recompose its shots based on the rule-of-thirds.

Update: We've just posted an update to our in-depth review of the Olympus E-P1 'Digital Pen', adding lens tests for the 14-42mm and 17mm pancake kit lenses. Find out if Olympus's first two Micro Four Thirds lenses can match the E-P1's sensor - and maintain the standards set by its existing Four Thirds optics - check out our updated review after the link...

Sony has announced the Party-shot personal photographer, an automated photo-taking cradle. The device uses the DSC-WX1 and DSC-TX1's face- and smile detection functions to detect photo opportunities in social environments. The Party-shot sits on a table or tripod and tilts and pans to locate and follow potential subjects. It will also recompose its shots based on the rule-of-thirds.

Update: We've just posted an update to our in-depth review of the Olympus E-P1 'Digital Pen', adding lens tests for the 14-42mm and 17mm pancake kit lenses. Find out if Olympus's first two Micro Four Thirds lenses can match the E-P1's sensor - and maintain the standards set by its existing Four Thirds optics - check out our updated review after the link...

We haven't heard too much from Circuit Girl, aka geek superheroine Jeri Ellsworth, in awhile. We've been waiting for some new clips from FMCG to show up on YouTube. In the above new segments, Jeri experiments with creating conductive glass using stannous chloride and heat, and with dying rubber parts with Rit dye to get them the color you want for your project.

Fat Man and Circuit Girl

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bdcny7927 writes "Just as Bing is gaining popularity, some disturbingly pro-Microsoft and anti-Apple search results are rearing their ugly heads. Case in point: a search on Bing for the phrase, 'Why is Windows so expensive?' returned this as the top link: 'Why are Macs so expensive.' That's right. You're not hallucinating."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rupert Murdoch continues to shift his position on the value of "free content" but he seems to be going in the wrong direction, and not giving anyone much confidence that he knows what he's doing. You may recall that right before he completed buying the Wall Street Journal, he claimed that the WSJ would be better off going entirely free:

"We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having 1 million [subscribers], having at least 10 million to 15 million in every corner of the earth.... Will you lose $50 million to $100 million in revenue? I don't think so. If the site is good, you'll get much more."

That was just under two years ago, and his reasoning is actually quite sensible. However, after he took it over, there was apparently some back-and-forth and the Journal convinced Rupert to keep it behind a (somewhat porous) paywall. Of course, as many note, the WSJ is able to charge because of the reputation of its content (far above most other publications) and the fact that it's reporting financial info, where the direct value can be quite high to many readers.

Still, it was a bit of a surprise earlier this year when he started complaining about free content, saying:

"People reading news for free on the web, that's got to change."

And then he complained about Yahoo/Google "stealing" (he later changed it to "taking") content. Of course, that's not true. Both Yahoo and Google either link to content or have license deals. There is no "taking" of anything.

Either way, given those statements, perhaps it's no surprise at all that Murdoch is now planning to put paywalls across all his online news properties in the relatively near future. Apparently the plan will be based on the WSJ model, meaning that some stories were be available for free, but there will be severe limits. Given how many old school newspaper guys have talked about putting up a paywall, this isn't much of a surprise (though, it is still odd given his comments from two years ago).

That said, if newspapers are going to charge for online content, then let's see them go and charge. I think it will fail (miserably), but let's see him try to prove us wrong. Here's why I think it will fail:

1. Those other sites don't have the qualities that make some people willing to pay for the WSJ. The quality isn't as good and the direct monetary benefit is not nearly as clear.
2. Most of those other sites have much clearer (free) competition.
3. Nowhere at all does Murdoch talk about actually giving people a reason to buy. All he's saying is that if they put up a paywall, people will pay. Sure, a few might, but it's a small number, and doing so will stagnate any sort of growth, piss off advertisers, and allow competitors to take a giant leap forward -- all in one shot.

But... if he wants to charge and thinks that these points are incorrect, we're eager to see how Murdoch gets around these issues. In the meantime, if you work for a publication that competes with a Murdoch news site, start revving up a marketing/promotional campaign about how you don't charge, and see how much market share you can build. Unless, of course, Rafat Ali is correct in his thinking, suggesting that this is all a big bluff to get others to put up a paywall. I don't believe it though... because if I'm a competitor the fact that Murdoch is going paywall, gives me even more reasons not to do so.

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… errr, crisp flat bread to be specific. Macumbista shares this video troubleshooting a very noisy knäckebröd from a 3 day Sound Sculpture workshop @ Neon Gallery, Sweden. Seems surprisingly sturdy for an edible, no?

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Mobile developer Steve Bull needed to do some signal testing to pass the certification process for an app he was writing, so he improvised this Hoffman box using pots and pans found in his kitchen. A Hoffman box is a Faraday cage without the opposing electrical field or ground.

Hoffman Box - DIY in the kitchen

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The cloud keeps right on rollin along!

I love this piece by Rex Hammock on rebooting his Twitter follow list. It's great for a bunch of reasons. 1. Rex is a smart user. 2. He was inspired in part by Jay Rosen, who said in our July 27 podcast that he treats his subscription list as a resource for others who want to find people to follow in his field of expertise. 3. Rex relied on the rssCloud tool released earlier this week.

Developers -- it's our job is to listen to smart users like Jay and Rex, and then give them the tools to create the revolution. We are at best enablers. I do mean best. When we see ourselves as the show, we miss the point. The users are what's happening.

I started a mail list for developers working on rssCloud. Moderated at first to keep out the trolling and the spamming.

Now, that's not to say that developers can't be users too. The best ones are, and man that is powerful because there can be really good communication betw the user and the developer if they're in the same body. A good example -- Matt Mullenweg had the idea to import his Twitter subscription list into Google Reader and it worked. However, all the subscriptions were imported at the top level, meaning he had a clean-up to do.

So I added a feature to the app, if you add "&folder=1" to the end of the URL it creates an extra level in the OPML, designed for import into Google Reader (and probably other RSS aggregators as well). Example:

http://tw.opml.org/get?user=jkottke&folder=1

1. Save the list to your desktop.

2. In Google Reader, click on Settings (in the upper-right corner of the window), then Import/Export.

3. Click the Browse button and choose the file you saved above.

4. Click the Upload button.

5. When you return to the Google Reader main page, you'll see a new top-level section for your Twitter subscriptions.

Now you can follow Twitter folk in Google Reader. Heh.

FourthAge writes "Federal agents at the Defcon 17 conference were shocked to discover that they had been caught in the sights of an RFID reader connected to a web camera. The reader sniffed data from RFID-enabled ID cards and other documents carried by attendees in pockets and backpacks. The 'security enhancing' RFID chips are now found in passports, official documents and ID cards. 'For $30 to $50, the common, average person can put [a portable RFID-reading kit] together,' said security expert Brian Marcus, one of the people behind the RFID webcam project. 'This is why we're so adamant about making people aware this is very dangerous.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Flickr member Jeremy Pavleck modded a Belkin CushTop Notebook Stand by adding 2 LED PC fans + DC jack & switch - more pics in the project's photo set.

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adeelarshad82 writes "Google developers are always working on and updating Chrome in three channels — Stable, Beta, and Developer — in increasing positions on the bleeding-edge scale. Today the company thought changes to the Beta channel warranted a post on the main Google Blog. The advances range from the superficial addition of themes for customizing the browser's window borders to even faster speed under the hood to internal support for HTML 5 tags such as <video> and 'web workers,' which allows the browser to divvy processing work among sub-threads."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Federal court rulings, since they're produced by the federal government are public domain materials, but a few months ago, when I was writing about a court filing, I wondered if the same applied to briefs filed by private parties with the court. As with so many things, I sent a quick email to Eric Goldman to get his take on it. He pointed out that, technically, the brief probably was covered by copyright, but there could be a strong public interest/fair use claim in being able to post it online. However, it was not entirely clear. I guess it should come as no surprise that this is now becoming a specific legal issue itself. Michael Scott points us to a story about a lawyer claiming that legal publishing services LexisNexis and Westlaw, which both publish legal filings and rulings, were violating his copyright on a brief he had filed, in redistributing it (for profit).

As you know, unique content is automatically covered by copyright as soon as it's expressed in some permanent form. And considering that most filings are unique works (not boilerplate stuff), there's a pretty strong argument that they should be covered by copyright (and, in theory, a lawyer could register the works, though I would doubt that's common). This isn't necessarily a good thing and doesn't make much real sense -- but it's the sort of bizarre situation you end up in when you automatically put copyright on any form of expression. While some are arguing that since the document has been filed publicly in court, it's now public material and can be reposted, it's not at all clear the law supports that position. Of course, the law probably should make this clear. Allowing copyright on legal filings would create quite a mess. It would seem like there's a very strong public interest/fair use claim on why it should be fair for anyone to redistribute such documents (whether for profit or not), but we may soon find out what a court has to say about that.

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I had a real retro-techno moment seeing this software box from 1986. I remember it well. It's Broderbund's The Toy Shop, a collection of papercraft models you could print out and cut n' fold to create everything from a catapult, to a carousel, to a steam engine (which used a balloon as its power source). Everything worked: cars rolled, catapults shot, zoetropes spun and flickered. Papercraft fanatics Mike and Lacey have put up all of the image files and build instructions for all of the models in the original Toy Shop collection. No C64 needed to access these awesome paper models.

The Toy Shop - 20 Marvelous Mechanical Models that Really Work!

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ericatcw writes "Users hoping that Windows 7's arrival will mean less power drain on their MacBook laptops may be disappointed, writes Computerworld's Eric Lai. Running Windows 7 in Boot Camp caused one CNET reviewer's battery life to fall by more than two-thirds. But virtualization software such as VMware Fusion suffer from the same complaints. Some blame Apple's Boot Camp drivers (the last ones were released in April 2008); others lay the blame at Windows' bloated codebase. With Apple and Microsoft both trying to avoid responsibility for improving the experience, Windows 7's reported improvements in power management will be moot for MacBook users for a while."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Jeff of the Mighty Ohm built this sweet interactive panel of lights, switches, & more for his nephew Harrison's first birthday. What an awesome uncle! This would have been many times cooler than the Fisher-Price steering wheel most of us had as tots - I know my spaceship adventures would have benefitted from a numeric keypad and some LEDs. Read & see more of the project on the Mighty Ohm blog.

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And you thought there were a lot of questionable costumes at Comi-Con. [Warning: scantily clad women on the linked page]

The Worst Homemade Star Wars Costumes [Thanks, Katie W!]

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Scott Westerfeld writes in with the astounding news that his publisher, Simon and Shuster, have agreed to distribute his bestselling novel Uglies as a free, DRM-free PDF. The series has sold more than a million copies, and it's one of my favorite YA series of all time.

Here's my original review of the series:

Uglies is the story of a dystopian world where children are raised by the state and subjected to mandatory cosmetic surgery at 16, wherein they are rendered physically "perfect" on the basis that symmetrical, statistically average people with giant eyes are charismatic, convincing, and are afforded advantages by their peers; in the twisted logic of the Westerfeld's state, imposing this surgery on all creates an egalitarian basis for society. No one is heeded merely because she is beautiful; no idea is disregarded because it originates with someone who is ugly.

The novels tell the story of Tally Youngblood, a 16-year-old small-time rebel who becomes embroiled in a scheme to avoid the surgery, leading to her exile and eventual encounters with outsiders, secret police, and the gradual, sinister unravelling of the dark secret of the compassionate society.

The Uglies books are the perfect parables of adolescent life, where adult-imposed milestones, rituals, and divide-and-rule tactics amp children's natural adolescent insecurities into a full-blown, decade-long psychosis. They're the kind of book I loved reading at 15 or 16: damned fine science fiction and damned fine yarns. Having read the first two, I can barely wait for the third, Specials, due out in May 06.

Uglies Download (Thanks, Scott!)

A bunch of people have been submitting variations on the story that a guy who runs a site called FileSoup has been arrested. FileSoup apparently was a tracker site for a while, but for the past few years has actually just been a forum where people post links -- many of which, one assumes, were for unauthorized content. It's a little unclear what he was arrested for. At times they quizzed him about FileSoup (and didn't seem to fully understand the technology). But on the form they gave him, it said he was arrested for downloading movies (to which he wonders why that's not a civil offense). It'll be worth watching as more details come out, but it's a bit troubling when someone is arrested for running a forum, when the real concern is the actions of the people in the forum, rather than the forum host (admittedly, they may have evidence of direct infringement by him as well, but the questioning seemed to cover the operation of FileSoup itself).

Either way, you do have to wonder what good this does the entertainment industry or anti-piracy organization FACT (who many believe is closely involved in the investigation -- though that has not been confirmed). Frankly, I'd never heard of FileSoup, and having the name in headlines all over is likely to only give it that much more attention. The same thing has happened in the past multiple times, including with sites like The Pirate Bay, which most people had never heard of prior to it being raided by the government. So, as long as the site remains up, more people find out about it. If the site goes down, the users quickly scatter to alternative sites. What has the entertainment industry accomplished? Not much useful.

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The Experimental Robot Platform (ERP) has been a work in progress since June of 2007. Why? Well, it's because the maker will always be making improvements to the design, even if it did win judges choice award at MOBOT 2008. Check out the link for a nice build history, from its initial CAD prototype, to the latest iteration pictured above.

The goal of this robot is to give me a platform that is upgradeable and customizable so that I would not need to build a new robot chassis for each new idea I want to try out. This robot will never be 'finished', as I'm always modifying and improving it.

More about the Experimental Robot Platform (ERP)

In the Maker Shed:

Pololu 3pi Robot

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alphadogg writes with this Network World story, excerpting "A Latvian ISP linked to online criminal activity has been cut off from the Internet, following complaints from Internet security researchers. Real Host, based in Riga, Latvia was thought to control command-and-control servers for infected botnet PCs, and had been linked to phishing sites, Web sites that launched attack code at visitors and were also home to malicious 'rogue' antivirus products, according to a researcher using the pseudonym Jart Armin, who works on the Hostexploit.com Web site. 'This is maybe one of the top European centers of crap,' he said in an e-mail interview. 'It was a cesspool of criminal activity,' said Paul Ferguson, a researcher with Trend Micro."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's my photoset of Hiroshima and the Peace Park museum, today is the 64th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima... I've been there a few times, it's an amazing city, vibrant, modern - and a reminder that we are the only species that we know of that has developed the means to completely wipe itself out, it's a lot to think about.

The United States, in collaboration with the United Kingdom and Canada designed and built the first atomic bombs under what was called the Manhattan Project. The scientific research was directed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The nuclear weapon "Little Boy" was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on Monday, August 6, 1945, followed on August 9 by the detonation of the "Fat Man" nuclear bomb over Nagasaki. These are to date the only attacks with nuclear weapons in the history of warfare.

The paper birds above are for Sadako Sasaki...

Ten years after the bombing, a young Japanese girl called Sadako Sasaki died from leukemia caused by radiation from the blast. Before she died, however, Sadako folded almost a thousand origami paper cranes. Sadako began her project because of a legend that said anyone who folded a thousand paper cranes would be granted a wish. She wished to healthy again so that she could run and play like before, and she pursued her goal with such determination that, although she died of her disease, she succeeded in transforming the paper crane into a symbol of peace for children all over the world. After Sadako's death, children joined together to raise money for a peace park in Hiroshima, and a statue of Sadako holding a crane. Today there is also a small peace park with a statue of Sadako in Seattle, Washington, and children everywhere fold origami paper cranes in her memory and send them to Japan and Seattle threaded on long strings to be draped over the statue. Sadako's story is used to teach children about the consequences of war, and the power of individuals to bring about change.

Also, check out...
Boston.com's photoset.
A review of Dr. Atomic, a opera about building the first nuke.
Hiroshima: Memoir of a Bomb Maker ... "The Gadget"

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We recently wrote about successful taxi cab operators offering free service in Tampa, Florida (pissing off existing cab companies), and it appears that the idea is spreading somewhat. Matt Cruse alerts us to a story in Essex, Vermont, involving a guy offering "pay what you want" taxi rides, and finding that people are always willing to pay a reasonable rate. Now, I'll admit that I'm not a huge fan of "pay what you want" models, which seem more like give it away and pray, rather than having a real business model worked out (which makes me wonder if it's sustainable long term). But, in the meantime, it's certainly yet another example that "free," can be a useful tool as a part of a business model.

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An anonymous reader writes with an interesting and impressive demonstration of modern browsers' HTML 5 capabilities. "From the 9elements blog: 'HTML5 is getting a lot of love lately. With the arrival of Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and the new 3.0 beta of Google Chrome, browsers support some great new features including canvas and the new audio/video tags. [...] We've created a little experiment which loads 100 tweets related to HTML 5 and displays them using a javascript-based particle engine.' The site warns "(beware: sophisticated browser needed)"; Firefox 3.5 seems to work fine.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You can clean the inside of your fish tank with some magnets, velcro, and a plastic bottle cap. And to think, when I had fish, I usually just stuck my whole arm in there to clean it! Instructables user TNEN shows us how to fashion this convenient tank scrubber.

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Automatic baudrate converter... Sprites mods writes -

If you want to go hack a microprocessor-based device, the first thing you usually do after cracking the case and identifying all the chips, is look for a serial port. Regardless of the type of device (Linux-based, running WinCE, working on some kind of RTOS, maybe even with no OS at all), the majority of them have a serial port for debugging purposes. Most of these ports have useful info on them even with non-debug firmware, so it's a nice and easy way to learn more on the device.

Finding the serial port can be a bit of a hassle though. After finding the correct pins, you still need to know the baudrate the port works on. This usually means trying out every single rate on the receiving PC until you're lucky. Having a digital oscilloscope can simplify things a little, but even if you have one, it's still no fun to fire it up and try and deduce the baudrate from a trace you manage to capture.

As you may have deduced from the rest of my site, I've hacked my fair share of devices in the past. The procedure for most them included the routine described above to get the correct serial port parameters. After doing this for the umphteenth time, I decided I wanted to automate the process: if I myself could figure out the baudrate using only my PC or a 'scope, there's no reason a microcontroller couldn't be taught the same trick.

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Sensor Fusion: High Speed Robots via jk.

A human being recognizes external environment by using many kinds of sensory information. By integrating these information and making up lack of information for each other, a more reliable and multilateral recognition can be achieved. The purpose of Sensor Fusion Project is to realize new sensing architecture by integrating multi-sensor information and to develop hierarchical and decentralized architecture for recognizing human beings further. As a result, more reliable and multilateral information can be extracted, which can realize high level recognition mechanism.

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Sony's latest TX1 and WX1 compacts are the first to make use of the back-illuminated CMOS technology that the company has developed. Initially announced in June 2008 the technology, dubbed Exmor R, essentially involves exposing what would be the underside of a conventional CMOS chip, meaning that the light doesn't first have to travel past the chip's electronic circuitry to reach its light-sensitive region. The result is a chip with a greater light-sensitive area that the company says is more than twice as sensitive as conventional CMOS sensors.

Sony has announced the Cyber-shot DSC-WX1 and DSC-TX1 digital compacts, the first to use back illuminated CMOS sensors. According to Sony, its 'Exmor R' sensor offers low-light performance with approximately twice the sensitivity of traditional image sensors. The sensor has been incorporated into familiar W and T series bodies. The WX1 features a 5x zoom starting at 24mm equivalent and f/2.4. The TX1 is a touch screen camera with 4x zoom lens (35-140mm equiv.). Like the existing, conventional CMOS-based HX1, both cameras offer HD video recording and a Sweep Panorama mode.

Sony's latest TX1 and WX1 compacts are the first to make use of the back-illuminated CMOS technology that the company has developed. Initially announced in June 2008 the technology, dubbed Exmor R, essentially involves exposing what would be the underside of a conventional CMOS chip, meaning that the light doesn't first have to travel through the chip's electronic circuitry to reach its light-sensitive region. The result is a chip that the company says is more than twice as sensitive as conventional CMOS sensors.

Sony has announced the Cyber-shot DSC-WX1 and DSC-TX1 digital compacts, the first to use back-illuminated CMOS sensors. According to Sony, its 'Exmor R' sensor offers low-light performance with approximately twice the sensitivity of traditional CMOS technology. These latest models incorporate this technology into familiar W and T series bodies: the WX1 features a 5x zoom starting at 24mm equivalent and f/2.4 while the TX1 is a touch screen camera with 4x zoom lens (35-140mm equiv.). Like the existing, conventional CMOS-based HX1, both cameras offer HD video recording and a Sweep Panorama mode.

Looks like Iraq is the latest country to have politicians look to put in place widespread internet censorship rules, and it's upsetting a lot of people there, who see it as an assault on their (only recently granted) right to free expression. Politicians are looking at banning books, as well, claiming they need to stop the dangerous influence some of these books and websites present. It would be interesting to see if there were actually any studies on how effective such things are. I think the folks most likely to be influenced by such things are pretty likely to get around the blocks -- and actually interpret the blocks themselves as more evidence that the blocked content is valid. I doubt bans on such material actually slows its influence. However, it would be interesting if there were actually any research on this topic. Know of any?

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Oracle Goddess writes "In what appears to be a carefully planned suicide, Rupert Murdoch announced that his media giant News Corporation Ltd intends to charge for all its news websites in a bid to lift revenues, as the transition towards online media permanently changes the advertising landscape. 'The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution, but it has not made content free. Accordingly we intend to charge for all our news websites,' Murdoch said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week's flashback is one of my favorite pieces from the pages of MAKE, appearing in Volume 07 in August of 2006. It's not so much a project as a call to action. Gever Tulley, founder of Tinkering School, strongly believes in the power of, well, tinkering, and its positive effects on the minds of children. From their site:

The Tinkering School offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids – ages 7 to 17 – learn how to build things. By providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational.

Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are, of course, encouraged and fertilized.

It's no secret that our society at large encourages raising kids in an overly cautious manner out of fear that they might get hurt, which inevitably hinders their ability to explore, grow, and think outside the box. We at MAKE are all about "Permission to Play" and so we were thrilled to see the warning labels Tulley came up with to replace the traditional safety labels most often seen on children's toys.

Awesome. What alternate labels would you propose?

For more, check out Tulley's talk at TED titled "5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Child Do."

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We've covered how eMusic (which had a fantastic reputation for a while) totally failed in communicating changes to its service, which involved increasing prices and taking away many valued features. The company tried to bury that news along with the fact that Sony Music would now be included, not recognizing that many of its users didn't care, and were pissed off at the way eMusic presented this as a good thing. At least some others may be learning. Ragaboo alerts us that online music site Amie Street is also removing some features (such as the ability to redownload tracks -- just like eMusic has done), but did so by admitting that it sucked and apologizing, but basically saying its hands were tied. They also gave advance warning of the changes. While Ragaboo isn't thrilled about he, notes that he appreciated the honesty from the company. Here's the email that he received:

"In several weeks we're going to be making a change to how Amie Street handles downloads, and we want to be certain you are fully informed in advance about this change. In brief, starting on August 5th we'll only be able to offer a single download of your purchased music unless you've encountered a technical problem.

Although most people only download their music one time, we've noticed that you have done so more than once on occasion. We realize that the ability to re-download files has been important to you, so it's understandable that you might be disappointed to see this no longer available. Unfortunately a number of factors beyond our control, including legal and royalty concerns, have made this impossible going forward.

We're very happy to say, however, that you can continue to stream all of the music you've purchased on Amie Street. That means wherever you have access to the internet, you also have immediate and unrestricted access to stream the entirety of your Amie Street music collection from your Library.

To make sure that downloading music continues to be as easy as possible, we'll be keeping a close eye on the user experience and making updates to the site as needed. The primary voice that directs any such changes will be yours, so if you have suggestions based on your experiences using the site, we'd love to hear from you. Tell us exactly what you like and don't like, and we can make Amie Street even better!

Peace,

The Amie Street Team""

Of course, the fact that both Amie Street and eMusic have removed the ability to redownload tracks over royalty issues makes you wonder what exactly is the issue here. Are record labels really demanding a royalty payment every time people redownload a song?

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Just a quick reminder that we'll be running the webinar on enterprise knowledge management, tomorrow morning at 9am, featuring myself as the moderator. Joel Alleyne, a recognized expert on the subject (and a member of the Insight Community) will be leading the discussion, along with some guests from Sun and Intel (who are sponsoring the webinar). Whether you're deep into knowledge management initiatives, or are even confused as to what "knowledge management" means, there should be something for you. Hope you'll join us.

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