James-NSC writes "My employer is changing its policy towards employee use of social networks. I've been asked to give a 40-minute presentation to the entire company, with attendance mandatory, on the security and privacy concerns relating to social networking. While I was putting it together, I ended up with some miscellaneous information that pertains to security/privacy in general, for example: the emerging ATM skimming (mainly for our European employees), a reminder that email is not private, malware/drive-by in popular search results, etc. Since these topics don't directly relate to the subject I've been asked to address, I've ended up with a section titled 'While I have you...' I'm going to have the mandatory attention of every employee and I thought it would be a great opportunity to give advice on security/privacy issues across the board. As it's an opportunity that one seldom gets, I certainly want to utilize it fullly. If you had the attention of an entire company with employees in the US, UK, Asia, and Australia, what security / privacy advice would you give?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well, here's a story that's got a bunch of different points worth highlighting. Back in July, Ben Goldacre wrote up an excellent article on the libel lawsuit against Simon Singh by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA), highlighting how a bunch of bloggers, rather than reporters, were doing much of the work exposing the BCA's questionable tactics. Why weren't those intrepid "only we can do investigative reporting" journalists taking on the issue? This week, the NY Times has an article by Olivia Judson explaining why: they're scared to death of being sued ,as well, thanks to draconian UK libel laws.

The background is that Singh, a well respected PhD. in physics, who has written a bunch of top selling "popular science" books, wrote an article for the Guardian, where he complained about some of the claims made by the BCA concerning what chiropractic care could help cure, noting that there was little (if any) evidence to support some of their claims. In response, the BCA has sued, and to date, the case has not gone well. It's already tough, because the UK laws greatly favor those who claim defamation (which is why there are worries about defamation tourism claims being made in the UK). Singh has had to spend quite a lot of money defending himself, and an early court ruling focused on the use of the word "bogus," which Singh clearly meant in the colloquial way, as meaning his opinion that there was no evidence in support of the claims. However, the court interpreted it to mean a factual statement accusing the BCA of deliberate dishonesty.

The case is still ongoing, but Judson highlights that many reporters are feeling the chilling effects, and are purposely avoiding certain scientific stories, for fear that their writing will lead them to a similar lawsuit. Both Judson and Goldacre note what a dangerous situation this is for basic scientific criticism, whereby it's a part of the process to question evidence and conclusions. In fact, it's good for everyone, because it leads to a more detailed exploration of the actual facts to come to a reasonable conclusion. But throwing libel law into the middle of that certainly has pretty massive chilling effects.

Except... for a bunch of bloggers who are more upset about those chilling effects than they are afraid of a libel charge. Goldacre covers how this group of "amateurs" have not only been picking apart (in great detail) certain claims by the BCA, they've also been able to pressure chiropractors to change some of their claims and start defending themselves on these issues. On top of that, they're helping to shine a lot more light on the whole situation, effectively using the "Streisand Effect" to call attention to the idea that the BCA is working to stifle criticism.

The whole story is quite fascinating for all of these reasons. There is a real problem with UK libel laws that needs to be dealt with. The chilling effects on reporting and scientific criticism -- especially in cases where people's health may actually be at stake -- are rather sickening. But, it's also illustrative of how an interested group of "amateurs" can certainly band together and take on a project, even in places where reporters fear to tread.

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CNet reports on a new money battle brewing between those who generate music and those who profit from selling it on the Net. "Songwriters, composers, and music publishers are making preparations to one day collect performance fees from Apple and other e-tailers for not just traditional music downloads but for downloads of films and TV shows as well. Those downloads contain music after all. These groups even want compensation for iTunes' 30-second song samples. ... Apparently, the music industry can't obtain the fees through negotiations. They have begun lobbying Congress to pass legislation that would require anyone who sells a download to pay a performance fee..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ty over at ThinkGeek hipped us to their latest custom product, which is a T-shirt with a Lego-compatible baseplate attached to the front so you can build stuff on it--murals, spaceships, chunky boobs, whatever floats your boat.

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Last time we wrote about Paltalk, it was an article talking about how the company had put together a decent business charging for the use of its chatting software. Apparently that business model wasn't decent enough, because the company has gone into all out patent lawsuit war. A bunch of folks have sent in various versions of the story, but basically, Paltalk has sued a bunch of the big name multiplayer online gaming companies, Activision-Blizzard, Sony, NCSoft, Turbine and Jagex. The back story is that the company bought some patents a few years back (anyone know which patents? -- a quick search doesn't turn up much) from another company. It claims that the patents cover "technologies for sharing data among many connected computers so that all users see the same digital environment." Initially, it sued Microsoft, and spent years fighting that case, until Microsoft figured it was cheaper to settle earlier this year, and handed over an undisclosed amount of cash. With that new bankroll, Paltalk has launched this new suit. While it likes to claim that the Microsoft settlement validates the patent, all it really does is show that Microsoft realized it was cheaper to settle than to fight. It would be rather useful to know which patents these are, specifically, because virtual worlds that let multiple people see the same thing have a pretty long history.

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darthcamaro writes "A lot of people in the US have not seen a use case for the use of IPv6 yet, since we've got plenty of IPv4 addresses. But what happens when the entire electrical grid gets smart? The so-called Smart Grid will need a networking transport mechanism that will connect potentially hundreds of millions of people and devices. Networking giant Cisco sees IP (internet protocol) as the right transport and IPv6 as the logical choice for addressing. 'Pv6 is an interesting discussion and one that occupies a lot of bandwidth at Cisco,' Marie Hattar, Cisco's vice president of network systems and security solutions marketing said. 'Some people say that for smaller deployments, we could get away with IPv4, but the smart grid has a number of parts.. The point is that if you're looking to build this [smart grid] out, why not build it out on the scalable protocol from the get-go?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Our pals at GAMA-GO created this unusual spatula in the shape of a guitar. I wish all my kitchen utensils were this random. It's available in red or black for $9.50.
Flipper Guitar Spatula

Tim Schwartz made clever use of an old indicator dial with his piece Paris, 2007. He is using an embedded system to monitor realtime search patterns, in order to determine which Paris is more popular. The meter is constantly updated to show the latest results. It sounds like a pretty fun project to attempt. Anyone know how to get a realtime feed of people's search patterns? [via core77]

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dr. fuzz writes "The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has ruled in favor of John Law tracking you with secret GPS devices in Massachusetts provided a warrant is obtained. You've been warned. To the dissenters' credit, Justice Ralph Gants is quoted with 'Our constitutional analysis should focus on the privacy interest at risk from contemporaneous GPS monitoring, not simply the property interest.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I was honored that BB pal Doug Rushkoff invited me onto his excellent radio show on WFMU, "The Media Squat." We had a great time talking about synthetic biology, futurism, and the notion that "everything is programmable," from the micro to the macro-scale, from our minds and bodies to our cities and ecosystems. At Institute for the Future, we're exploring that idea of looking at the world through a "computational" lens. Doug and I wrapped up our hour with a quick tangent on Bigfoot, belief, and the wonder of the world. It was a lot of fun and I hope you enjoy it too! Archive of Doug Rushkoff's Media Squat radio show

We recently wrote about how Kevin Smith was connecting with fans in a variety of ways, and after doing so, some of "his people" (see? I got this movie business lingo down) contacted us to see if we wanted to give away some copies of his new book, Shootin' the Sh*t with Kevin Smith: The Best of SMODCAST. So, we said sure, because we're told by people all the time that Techdirt readers "just want stuff for free." These aren't signed books or anything -- we tried, and apparently we're not cool enough and the signed ones are a reason to buy, so if you want that, pay up, cheapskate. But, hey, these books are still free. What are you complaining about?

Anyway... I've put together some trivia questions, which shouldn't be that hard to answer if you listen to Smodcast regularly (or if you're a creative Googler). Alternatively, write up a comment about something having to do with Kevin Smith or his movies, and make it funny, cool or original (preferably all three). Anyway, we've got five books. There are three trivia questions. The first person to answer any one of the trivia questions correctly gets a book (if you know the answer to more than one question, don't be that guy -- we know you're awesome; just let someone else get it). Then we'll take the two best Kevin Smith stories and award the books to them. If, by Monday night, no one's been able to figure out the answers to trivia questions (and, who knows, maybe I'll give hints), then for every unanswered trivia question, we'll pick another "Kevin Smith story" writer. Oh yeah, make sure you include a working email in the email box so we can contact you and work out the details. If we can't reach you or you don't respond to our emails in time, the free book goes on to the next winner... That's about the deal. This is intended to be fun, so don't go nuts over it. Silent Bob wouldn't approve.

Trivia questions (remember, just answer one):

1. When Clerks was first shown at Cannes, what famous rocker did Scott Mosier have to go wake up on that rocker's yacht one morning?
2. Kevin's got some dogs (three, I believe). One has a habit of interrupting SModcast with barks, and recently traveled to NY to bark on a special east coast SMod. Name the dog...
3. Smith recently got to meet the father of one of his heroes, who he's suggested there should be a new religion around. Who did he meet?

Again, if you're the first to get any of those right, you get a book. If you get more than one right, you still get just one book, but whoever is quick and copies your second answer in the next comment gets the next book. If you don't know any of these... start listening to SModcasts, or write a cool story that involves Kevin or (more likely) his movies. Update: Wow, you guys are fast. All three trivia questions answered. But, now we're still open for stories: talk about Kevin or how he influenced your life in some way and a book could be yours...

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Dr. Mark Csele is a professor at Niagara College. Just found this page covering some of his past Halloween displays. In his own words:

Our 2008 display, pictured here, featured a skeleton in an electric chair. When a kid approaches the porch the system triggers and the skeleton rises out of the chair accompanied by fog, a strobe light, and loud sounds of an electrical arc. The front window featured a rear-projection video of a large tesla coil operating with large arcs streaming everywhere to complete the 'mad scientist' appearance....The electric chair has a light rope for the "wires" connecting the skeleton to the chair. Upon triggering fog is released by a fog machine behind the chair, illuminated by eerie green light and a strobe light.

Nice work, doc! Have you seen our 2009 Make: Halloween Contest? (Hint hint.)

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carluva writes "Google is teaming up with On Demand Books to offer paperback versions of its collection of over 2 million public domain books. The books will be able to be printed using ODB's Espresso Book Machine, which is already in use at several book stores and libraries and can print and bind a complete, paperback copy of a 300-page book in less than 5 minutes. Google and ODB each get $1 in royalties per book sold (Google has pledged to donate its proceeds to charities and nonprofit organizations). See also ODB's PDF press release."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It looks like another "big name" band is recognizing the power of free. The Smashing Pumpkins have announced that its latest album will be released entirely free:

Each song will be made available absolutely for free, to anyone anywhere. There will be no strings attached. Free will mean free, which means you won't have to sign up for anything, give an email address, or jump through a hoop. You will be able to go and take the song or songs as you wish, as many times as you wish.

And quite an album it will be: the band is working on releasing 44 songs. The idea is to release a song at a time starting around Halloween (the band is just starting to record them now) until all 44 songs are released. But, the band is also offering up a "reason to buy" as well:

We will however sell highly limited edition EP's (of 4 songs each times 11), and details of how those EP's will be made available are still being worked out. Because the songs themselves will be free, the EP's will be more like collectors items for the discerning fan who will want the art itself, along with the highest possible audio quality available. The EP's will be more like mini-box sets rather than your normal cd single. We may also offer other variations for sale, say for example a digital single with a demo version of a song. The commitment that is most important is the one I'm making to you: that the music of 'Teargarden by Kaleidyscope' will be available for free to everyone. All 44 songs: free for ALL.

When the entire album is finished, it will be compiled into a deluxe box set which will also be made available for sale. Those who have bought the EP's need not worry, as the box set will not be a recompilation of the limited edition pieces.

Sounds cool to me. Give away the music for free, connect with those fans, and then give them a reason to actually purchase something physical and scarce that's much cooler than just the music. Great to see another "big name" figuring all this out as well. And, before people say that the band can afford to do this because it's already huge and well known, most of the artists we discuss doing this sort of thing are small artists, who do it to establish themselves to get attention. Claiming that this only works for one type of artist is an increasingly naive statement. Smart musicians of all sizes are recognizing all of the opportunities that using the music as a free promotion presents.

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With Austin's Game Developers Conference fully underway, Offworld's got updates on a few of the Indie Games Summit sessions nearest and dearest to its heart, with my own 'New Indie Hotness' show and tell (above), where I ran live demos of seven of the best up and coming indies you need to play (with the help of a special guest star), and a look behind the smash success of Colin Northway's Flash construction kit Fantastic Contraption. Elsewhere we saw Namco tease a screenshot of its upcoming iPhone version of Keita Takahashi's PS3 game Noby Noby Boy, LucasArts revealed the gorgeously illustrated dream world in its new Lemmings-esque downloadable Lucidity, From Software showed off its upcoming PS3 exclusive 3D Dot Game Heroes -- an 8-bit Zelda inspired adventure pixel-popped into glorious 3D, and Metanet (behind Flash hit ninja sim N) announced Office Yeti, their Skool Daze meets Rampage workplace game. Finally, former Spore tech lead Chris Hecker announced he'd be going indie with Spy Party, his "asymmetric multiplayer espionage game about subtle behavior and deception", we watched the winner of the Super Mario artificial intelligence contest, art/game/culture shop Attract Mode opened its doors, and for our LA readers: indie musician Chris Schlarb will be performing live versions of his tracks for the upcoming Night Game tonight at the Slow Sound Festival. And our 'one shot's: Iggy Pop rocks Lego, the Alien origins of Machinarium, Super Mario's Twin Towers, and 3D Tetris of the Magic Eye kind.

Canada is apparently a hive of foreign spies and Ottawa is "crawling with them," according to an Ottawa Citizen article about a new book, titled Nest of Spies. The book was written by an investigative journalist and a former intelligence officer with the RCMP Security Service and Canadian Security Intelligence Service. If the article is any indication, this book is just laden with intrigue and scandal. For example, it claims that 1970s/1980s Russian hockey star Vladislav Tretiak was also a spy "talent scout," recruiting new secret agents for the Soviet Union. From the Ottawa Citizen:

Led by the Chinese but including intelligence officers from at least 20 nations including allies, the book says, the infiltrators are stealing an estimated $20 billion to $30 billion annually worth of cutting-edge research in products and technologies, other scientific, business and military know-how and political secrets. Others, it says, are infiltrating ethnic communities, suppressing criticism of homeland governments, recruiting industrial spies, stoking political violence among the diaspora and operating front companies and political lobbies aimed at manipulating government policies.

Proportionately, it estimates more spies operate here than in the U.S...

"The great Tretiak was quite a celebrity in his day, and not only among hockey fans. CSIS was also an avid Tretiak-watcher. A number of good sources inside the organization have told us that Tretiak was 'ticketed' at the time. That means that he was believed to be a 'co- opted' individual, somebody who has been recruited as an informer and was being paid or recompensed in some way. There were hundreds of these back then, especially among Soviet citizens like himself who had received job offers from outside the homeland." But, the book continues, "there was also a hypothesis that he was more than a simple informer." In Friday's interview, Juneau- Katsuya said one of three CSIS sources believes Tretiak worked as a "talent-spotter" for the Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR, successor to the KGB.

"The spies who love us" (Ottawa Citizen, thanks Chris Arkenberg!)

Buy "Nest of Spies: The Startling Truth About Foreign Agents at Work Within Canada's Borders" (Amazon)

LIFEembedDrawImage2('72402593','260');

Yesterday was the 101st anniversary of GM's founding. Ben Cosgrove of LIFE says, "in light of the super-efficient but very same-y, dull designs of so many of today's vehicles, I put together a look back at those decades when cars had real personality, real spark, real curves. There's a lot to be said for a fender that makes one's heart race faster, or a bumper that can make a person blush ...

Above: "Fiat's streamlined, one-cylinder Volugrafo got 100 miles per gallon, 1947."

LIFE photo gallery of old cars

Professor Hiroyuki Shinoda and his colleagues at Tokyo University are making headway in haptic holography, 3D projections you can actually feel. I first experienced something like this probably 15 years ago at the late holography pioneer Steve Benton's laboratory at MIT's Media Lab. Back then, the hologram was grainy and grayscale and the physical feedback came from a handheld Phantom stylus that provided some sensation of touching a real object. Based on this demonstration, it appears that the technology has come a long way. From Reuters:

By using ultrasonic waves, the scientists have developed software that creates pressure when a user's hand "touches" a hologram that is projected.

In order to track a user's hand, the researchers use control sticks from Nintendo's popular Wii gaming system that are mounted above the hologram display area.

The technology has so far been tested with relatively simple objects, although the researchers have more practical plans, including virtual switches at hospitals, for example, and other places where contamination by touch is an issue.

"Japan scientists create 3-D images you can touch" (Reuters, thanks Bob Pescovitz!)

Touchable Holography (University of Tokyo)

This JeeNode wireless communication platform looks like a fun and cost effective way to get into experimenting with RF communication. By combining an Arduino-compatible processor (ATmega238) with a low-cost HopeRF radio module, they were able to make a tiny, fairly well featured kit with wireless capability. They are offering them for sale as a kit, or, since it is an open source hardware design, you can just download the PCB layout and roll your own. I can think of lots of applications (remote candle lighter, interactive cat toy) that aren't worth a full xBee-based solution, where it would be handy to have a development board like this that I could just drop in and use.

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inject_hotmail.com writes "I found this promising news over on Michael Geist's website: In an amazing display of wisdom and understanding, British Columbia (Canada) court of appeals (in a split decision) decided that it is not libelous to link to defamatory content. The judge stated that 'there is, in my view, no substantial difference between providing a web address and a mere hyperlink. Whether the hyperlink is a web address, as is often the case, or a more specific reference, both require a decision on the part of the reader to access another website, and both require the reader to take a distinct action, in the one case typing in a web address and in the other case clicking on the hyperlink. In other words, there is a barrier between the accessed article and the hyperlinked site that must be bridged, not by the publisher, but by the reader. The essence of following a hyperlink is to leave the website one was at to enter a different and independent website.' The case was brought about by B.C. businessman Wayne Crookes, who claimed that p2pnet had damaged his character by linking to websites with which he did not agree. n.b. Presumedly, the website with the actual content in question is outside of the purview of the Canadian courts; however, p2pnet is not."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BB's secret software hacker Dean Putney spotted this neat "blind" juggling robot. Dean writes:

This machine bounces a ball without any sensory input. The surface it is bouncing the ball with is slightly curved, so that if the ball doesn't hit in the center it will be bounced at an angle and correct for the horizontal motion. The machine actually has no idea where the ball is though, since its feedback control system is purely mechanical. It's surprisingly robust, allowing the machine to be moved under the ball, swung on a pendulum and it works with several different balls, as shown in these videos.

Blind Juggling Robot

It's been really stunning to see just how little dignity groups like ASCAP and BMI have in trying to suck every last penny out of any kind of musical usage, without ever once considering the damage they're actually doing to songwriters. It's as if the folks who run these groups have no concept of the actual impact of their crazy demands. In just the last few months, we've seen them try to squeeze more money out of music video games -- apparently not comprehending how much those games help promote musicians and sell more product. Then there was the fancy trick, where they claimed that websites that embedded music videos from YouTube had to pay even though they were already getting paid by YouTube directly. They just wanted to get paid twice. And remember back in the summer when they claimed that the ringtone playing on your phone required a public performance license on top of the royalties already paid? They have no shame.

So, I guess it should come as no surprise at all to find out that their latest target is the 30 second previews that you hear on iTunes or Amazon.com. Yes, they're claiming that those 30 second previews should count as a public performance, and they want to get paid. Now. And they're asking Congress to make it happen -- because, as we've been learning recently, if you're inept at running an actual business, just go to the federal gov't and ask them to bail you out.

Rick Carnes, the head of the Songwriters Guild of America -- and who, we've been reliably informed, is a big fan of this site (that's sarcasm) after our previous articles debunking some of his more absurd claims -- explains the situation:

"Yesterday, I received a check for 2 cents. I'm not kidding. People think we're making a fortune off the Web, but it's a tiny amount. We need multiple revenue streams or this isn't going to work."

Talk about entitlement culture. Because Rick Carnes is unable to structure a smart business model, and thus makes pennies, everyone else needs to just cough up and pay? Yeah... that's reasonable. How about rather than trying to squeeze every penny out of everyone else (and then funnel it to the top artists instead of the smaller artists, anyway), you spend some time actually understanding basic business models -- such as ones where you convince someone that something's worth paying for, rather than just demanding Congress give you a cut of everything, in a way that harms the very musicians you claim to represent?

And, of course, as the article above notes, it's a flat-out lie that songwriters aren't getting paid for a lot of this stuff:

"These guys are afraid that the business model is shifting away from public performances to a model of private performances," [David] Potter [from the Digital Media Association (DiMA)] said. "This is a turf battle. They are saying, 'The songwriters aren't getting paid.' Baloney. Songwriters are getting paid. They're paid sync rights and (mechanical) rights. They aren't getting paid for the public performance in a download because there is no public performance in a download."

This is a pure money grab by people who don't want to come up with a business model demanding free cash from those who did come up with a better business model. They're blaming everyone else for their own unwillingness to adapt.

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Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest-blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

The most creative guy I knew in high school was this kid Ba Blackstock. He drew hilarious cartoons, directed theatrical adaptations of Dan Clowes comics and made crazy short movies.

Later, he spent years of his life making this cartoon. He went old-school, penciling by hand over a light board (he's entirely self-taught). Then he inked and colored it and added 3D stuff digitally. Of course, he nearly lost his mind in the process.

The resulting cartoon speaks for itself.

NOTE: this is just one chapter. I recommend watching the whole 14 minute thing (link.)

Maker Shed is offering the Chumby, a cool programmable Internet media player, in kit form.

At this year's Maker Faire, the Maker Shed offered a unique product, a Chumby in kit form. Created expressly for Maker Shed by Chumby, the kit contains everything needed to build your own Chumby, or alternatively, hack it into into any form of your own choosing. The price for the kit was $99. We sold out almost immediately.

Through a special arrangement with our pals at Chumby, the Shed recently managed to order another batch of Chumby Kits. Last week, the Shed sent out a mailing to a select group of loyal customers, again offering the kit. And again, the positive response was swift. They sold a bunch, but they still have some left, so there's still time if you want to pick one up. This is a great opportunity to get the guts of a versatile Internet appliance, on the cheap, that you can use for all sorts of experimentation, custom projects, and cool casemods. They're still $99 and you can get yours here (there's a limit of 3 per customer).

Note: These kits are still being produced at Chumby, so this is a pre-order. The Shed expects to have them by the end of the month.

Chumby guts -- so delicious!

Gabriela from the Sunlight Foundation sez,

Today is the 220th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution. In 1789, it was made available to the American people by the most modern technology of the day. We should do no less today, and provide the Constitution (along with commentary) in XML.

To celebrate the 220th anniversary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the Sunlight Foundation is calling on the Government Printing Office to publish the legal treatise The Constitution Annotated online in XML format as it is updated. (The Constitution Annotated has been written by the Library of Congress for nearly 100 years, and contains analysis of nearly 8,000 U.S. Supreme Court cases.)

Over the decades, GPO has published print versions of this extraordinary resource every two years, with limited electronic versions available from 1992 edition onward. Although the Library of Congress has drafted the Constitution Annotated in XML for a number of years, that data is no longer present when it is published online by GPO. Releasing the treatise in XML would allow for the easy sharing of information between different kinds of computers, applications, and organizations, and provide a roadmap to the underlying data.

In addition to asking for The Constitution Annotated to be published online in XML, Sunlight is also asking that as the data is updated and made available to congressional staff, it also be made available to the general public. 220 Years Later, It's Time to Publish the Constitution Annotated Online in XML (Thanks, Gabriela!)

Jeremie Zimmermann sez, "Organizations from all around Europe share their concern of seeing Net Neutrality being sacrificed during the conciliation procedure of the directives of the EU Telecoms Package. They sent this letter to the Members of the European Parliament, urging them to take decisive action in order to guarantee a free, open and innovative Internet, and to safeguard the fundamental freedoms of European citizens.

"Everyone can take action by calling the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who were supportive of citizens' fundamental rights and freedoms in the past and ask them to do all they can to participate in the conciliation committee of the Telecoms Package."

We Must Protect Net Neutrality in Europe! - Open letter to the European Parliament

Seth Roberts made a list of 11 observations while shopping at a Wal-Mart in China. Here are the first four.

1. They sell live turtles.
2. A whole display case is devoted to sea cucumbers.
3. Like any upscale American or Beijing supermarket, they have a sushi case. The prices are half what they’d be in America, but the pieces of fish are much thinner.
4. They cut up meat in front of you. A whole pig was being butchered on a table. A roast duck was being sliced for packaging.

(Here's a slideshow about Wal-Marts in China)

Beijing Wal-Mart

Law Enforcement Targets does a handsome line of shooting range zombie targets, including several in inexplicable Nazi uniforms. Good practice, I suppose, for the forthcoming Nazi zombie uprising.

Law Enforcement Targets: Zombie Targets (via Geekologie)

Victoria police are looking for a gentleman who matches this composite sketch in connection with a knife attack. (Via Arbroath)

Ask MAKE is a weekly column where we answer reader questions, like yours. Write them in to mattm@makezine.comor drop us a line on Twitter. We can't wait to tackle your conundrums!

A few weeks ago, we looked at why dimmer switches cause incandescent light bulbs to buzz. We subsequently received a number of questions about why flourescent bulbs vibrate, such as this comment by snarkyFish:

It might be nice to have another one of these that explains why fluorescent lights / ballasts hum and buzz as well. I imagine it's a very similar explanation, but a much more complicated fix.

You are right, they do buzz for a similar reason, which is the mechanical components being vibrated by electromagnetic waves. In this case, however, it is probably not the bulb itself that buzzes, but the ballast.

Fluorescent bulbs are made up of a glass tube that is filled with a low-pressure inert gas and a small amount of mercury, have a phosphor coating on the inside, and have an electrode on each end. When a large enough voltage is applied across the electrodes, the gas begins to conduct, which allows an electric current to flow from one electrode to the other. This current causes collisions between gas molecules and the mercury, which creates UV energy that is then converted to visible light by the phosphor coating on the tube.

This is all well and good, however as the gas heats up, it's resistance goes down, which means that it becomes a better conductor and subsequently draws even more current. If this were left unchecked, the bulb would quickly heat up and self destruct, so a ballast is placed in series with the bulb to limit the current draw. There are a number of different kinds of ballast design, but the simplest one is to just use an inductor. An inductor will certainly limit the rate at which current can travel to the light, however it does so by absorbing magnetic fields into it's core. This absorption, which causes magnetostriction, is probably the source of your hum- it literally causes the inductor to expand and contract at twice the AC frequency, which creates an audible sound wave (at 120Hz in the US or 100Hz in most of Europe).

I don't think there is a safe way to fix this besides getting a new ballast. Newer ballasts use an electronic controller instead of an inductor for the ballast, so they shouldn't be susceptible to the same buzzing problem. Making your own is certainly a possibility, but as with any high-voltage project, you better know what you are doing first.

Any other tips for how to fix a buzzing fluorescent light? Let us know in the comments!

[CC licensed photo by adotjdotsmith]

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Harry writes "Haiku, an open-source recreation of legendary 1990s operating system BeOS, was released in alpha form this week. The news made me happy and led me to check in on the status of other once-prominent OSes--CP/M, OS/2, OS/2, AmigaOS, and more. Remarkably, none of them are truly defunct: In one form or another, they or their descendants are still available, being used by real people to accomplish useful tasks. Has there ever been a major OS that simply went away, period?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sandia National Labs and Boston Dynamics made this cute little jumping robot.

An overall goal of the robots is to decrease the number of casu alties in combat. To that end, the hopping robots will provide enhanced situational awareness for shaping the outcome of the immediate local combat situation, Salton said. Their compact, lightweight design makes them portable, and their semiautonomous capability greatly reduces the workload burden of the operator.

In addition to providing military assistance, the hopping capabilities of the robots could be used in law enforcement, homeland security, search and rescue applications in challenging terrain and in planetary exploration, [Jon Salton, Sandia program manager] said.

Sandia hopping robots to bolster troop capabilities

Toy photographer Brian McCarty shot this dreamy image of the Moon Wanderers, resin figures that are hand-cast and painted by Russian artist Sergey Safonov. Here's what Brian said of the photo shoot:

I fell in love with the characters, instantly imagining a scene of floating figures under a paper moon. To achieve the shot, I mounted the toys on metal rods and drove them deep into the soft mud of Two Ocean Lake inside Grand Teton National Park. The camera was placed on a semi-submerged tripod, and a very long exposure made the water seem glassy, except for the rippled reflection of strobe light off a paper moon suspended in the background.

Moon Wanderers

Recently, we noted that a bunch of big name musicians had come out against Peter Mandelson's sudden decision that it was ok to kick music fans off the internet for file sharing, despite earlier promises that such a proposal was off the table. Having these musicians speak out against such a "three strikes" plan looked really bad for the various collections societies and industry groups that want such a plan -- leading some to publicly complain that these musicians were doing something "destructive" in standing up for consumer rights (how dare they!).

There were rumors that following this little dustup, that the UK music industry would drop its support for three strikes. Instead, Feargal Sharkey, the head of the UK Music lobbying group, has come out with a totally meaningless statement that basically says that the industry supports the government's plan and there's nothing to see here in terms of a rift in the views of the UK music industry.

That's not very believable. More and more musicians have realized that a proposal to kick people off the internet does nothing to promote better business models and does a lot to create significantly more ill will with fans. The only people who seem to be supporting it are those who are looking to protect old business models, and seem to think that kicking people offline will magically bring back paying customers. Sharkey has claimed in the past that the industry needs to stop fighting against music fans. Too bad he's aligning himself with a plan that is entirely about fighting music fans.

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Covered is a blog that posts comic book covers redrawn by different cartoonists. The results are fascinating. Covered

SpaceGhost writes "The Houston Chronicle has a story on a Grad student at the University of Houston who has designed a cardboard case for a computer. This is not a new concept, but this one is meant to be used in manufacture. The idea is that it will be faster and easier to produce (no fasteners for example) and dramatically easier to recycle."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Peter Maltzan is building a passive solar straw-bale house, and has been at it since October of 2008. He's done a great job of documenting the construction process, which is now nearly complete, in photographs. Highly recommended if you want to get a feel for how it all goes together. Thanks to MAKE subscriber Pete Marchetto for suggesting the link.

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Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest-blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

I've been enjoying cartoonist Peter Bagge's contributions to Reason Magazine for years now, which I've always read on their website. But now Fantagraphics has collected them into a great-looking trade paperback! Here's a PDF of a free chapter (link).

Fans of Bagge's from his HATE days are sometimes turned off by the politics of his Reason comics. I'm not. I think Bagge has been doing really interesting work, mixing field journalism with humor and opinion in an entirely novel way.

As an essayist Bagge is never preachy, and he often points out the shortcomings of his fellow libertarians (his account of meeting Ron Paul is particularly funny). He explores more than he rants, and when he does let loose, he's got a healthy sense of self-satire.

These comics will piss you off, and that's good. (Amazon link)

Cartoonist Lucy Knisley shares her recipe for chai tea syrup. Looks like fun, and the illustration is lots of fun. (Here's her pickle recipe, too.)

Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that scientists are mapping the gravitational corridors created from the complex interplay of attractive forces between planets and moons that can be used to cut the cost of journeys in space. 'Basically the idea is there are low energy pathways winding between planets and moons that would slash the amount of fuel needed to explore the solar system,' says Professor Shane Ross from Virginia Tech. 'These are free-fall pathways in space around and between gravitational bodies. Instead of falling down, like you do on Earth, you fall along these tubes.' The pathways connect Lagrange points where gravitational forces balance out. Depicted by computer graphics, the pathways look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies and snake between them. 'If you're in a parking orbit round the Earth, and one of them intersects your trajectory, you just need enough fuel to change your velocity and now you're on a new trajectory that is free,' says Ross. 'You could travel between the moons of Jupiter essentially for free. All you need is a little bit of fuel to do course corrections.' The Genesis spacecraft used gravitational pathways that allowed the amount of fuel carried by the probe to be cut 10-fold, but the trade off is time. While it would take a few months to get around the Jovian moon system using gravitational currents (PDF), attempting to get a free ride from Earth to Mars on the currents might take thousands of years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DocVM writes "A Nova Scotia farmer is opposing the construction of a microwave tower for fear it will eventually mutate his organic garlic crop. Lenny Levine, who has been planting and harvesting garlic by hand on his Annapolis Valley land since the 1970s, is afraid his organic crop could be irradiated if EastLink builds a microwave tower for wireless high-speed internet access a few hundred meters from his farm."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "The first known use of a recorded laugh track is said to be in 1950, when the producers of the Hank McCune Show added canned laughter after the show's taping. Almost 60 years later, IBM says it deserves a patent for 'inventing' adding canned laughter to conference calls. 'A pre-selected stored sound (e.g., an interjection such as a laugh) may be generated if there is a period of silence on one of the telephone lines that exceeds a threshold,' explains Big Blue in its just-published patent application for Enlivening Conference Calls to Make Conference Calls More Interesting for Participants. Eureka!"

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If you're in the SF Bay area, don't miss the segment on Maker Faire tonight at 7pm on CBS 5's Eye on the Bay!

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I'm a bit late posting this, but BB pal/guestblogger/kindred mutant Richard Metzger has penned (pixelled?) what I believe to be the definitive review on the recently-released Beatles remasters. Before you read, a caveat:

I'm an unashamed audiophile. I do not listen to MP3s on my computer, I listen to music on a proper "hi fidelity stereo" (one that I bought used, so no charges of elitism, please) with good speakers.

The review is detailed, and lovingly exhaustive. Here's a core slice:

Whether or not you opt for the Beatles Mono box or the stereo versions, a few things are not in dispute: They've managed to bring McCartney's bass out in a manner never before revealed. His bass patterns were far more intricate than we've ever been able to hear before and there is a noticeable fullness in the mid-range that was lacking on the 1987 versions. His prodigious musical genius seems even more dazzling when seen in this new light. Ringo's drums, uniformly throughout all the records, sound as crisp as can be: you don't just hear his drums, you hear the sound of the stick hitting the drum and how hard it is being hit. Nuanced is the word I keep using to describe them to friends and it's the right one. The layered backing vocals, hand claps, tambourines, all the exotic instrumentation, orchestrations and tape manipulations have a wide-screen presence as never before. The group sounds "friskier" throughout. When the piano keys are pounded, you can tell how hard they were being pounded. The Beatles remasters--continuously--reveal things we've never heard before until now.

YOU NEVER GIVE ME YOUR MONEY: METZGER ON THE BEATLES REMASTERS (Dangerous Minds)

Amazon Link to purchase the remastered recordings.

A powerful and beautiful photo-essay by Matt Mendelson about a powerful and beautiful young woman from my home town named Lindsay Ess, a fashion major at Virginia Commonwealth University. Same school, even the same building where I spent a lot of time as a kid, growing up -- so the story *really* felt familiar and personal to me, even though I do not know her, and cannot imagine what it feels like to endure what she's prevailed through.

The story begins at a student runway showing, where Linsday is looking on:

Lindsay, it should be noted, has no hands to clap and no feet on which to get up. She had them back in the summer of 2007, when she was tall and thin and had just graduated from VCU with a fashion merchandising degree. Then, to use her words, a blur. When she entered Henrico Doctors' Hospital that summer, the procedure to remove a small piece of inflamed intestine, a nagging complication of her Crohn's disease, was supposed to go routinely. But supposed to go routinely rarely turns out well, and there hasn't been a routine day in Lindsay's life ever since. Not since the leak, not since the sepsis, not since the organ failures, the brain seizures, and not since the coma. Definitely not the coma. Not since one day in August turned to October and then drifted on towards Christmas. Certainly not since the quadruple amputations, the cruel coda to having been so close to death all those months and then surviving. Oh, honey, you know what they're going to do, right? the nurse said. There's no routine to being bathed and fed and dressed like a child mere months after you've graduated college, and no routine to learning how to walk again at the age of twenty-five. No routine in continuing a long-distance relationship with someone who admits to having originally been smitten by your looks, or to being with your mother almost every waking hour. There's no routine for taking a fistful of pills a day--the Pentasa, the Entocort EC, the Lexapro, the Keppra, the Urosidol, the Spiranolactone, the Zolpidem, the Lyrica, not to mention the occasional shot of actual alcohol. There's no routine, no manual, for wishing you were whole again, so that just one morning of your life you could actually wake up and make it to the bathroom on your own, even if the arms and legs you now covet so are made of acrylic and not skin and bone and muscle. And, perhaps most of all, no routine for the long, slow realization that those acrylic arms and legs might not, in the end, be the answer to anything. If you're Lindsay Ess, routine pretty much stopped on August 3, 2007.

The Lessons of Lindsay (story) Sports Shooter Q & A: with Matt Mendelsohn (chat with the photographer).

(Sports Shooter, via @Glennf)

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest-blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

The Guardian has a chilling report on how fundamentalist murderers are using the Internet to locate, entrap, and brutally murder dozens of gay Iraqi men:

Sitting on the floor, wearing traditional Islamic clothes and holding an old notebook, Abu Hamizi, 22, spends at least six hours a day searching internet chatrooms linked to gay websites. He is not looking for new friends, but for victims.

"It is the easiest way to find those people who are destroying Islam and who want to dirty the reputation we took centuries to build up," he said. When he finds them, Hamizi arranges for them to be attacked and sometimes killed.

(link)

Thanks, Phillip

coomaria noted an unsurprising story about how courts are having problems with jurors Googling during cases. As anyone who has ever been called for jury duty knows, you aren't allowed to get outside information about the case you are hearing, but apparently the iPhone makes it far too easy to ignore this advice. A lawyer is trying to get jurors to sign a form explicitly stating they won't "use 'personal electronic and media devices' to research or communicate about the case." Of course, I'm not exactly sure why a juror should need to sign something for your iPhone but not a newspaper.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

For the first assignment of his Intro to Physical Computing class, Greg rigged up a couple of conductive matchbox cars to act as a switch - lighting their moment of impact. Read more over at Ideas for Dozens.

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A German hacker named Ray has printed a working handcuff key, to the Dutch national pattern, on his RepRap. You can download the .STL file here. Not that we encourage that sort of thing. <SUBLIMINAL>Do it do it do it do it.</SUBLIMINAL> [via Boing Boing]

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bluescarni writes 'A side-by-side analysis of GNOME's and KDE's quarterly reports sheds some light (and dispels some myths) on the nature and the quantity of the funds of the two projects.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In our recent post about some old rockers complaining about music video games being no substitute for actually playing instruments (not that anyone claimed it was), one of our commenters, Comboman, made a rather amusing point concerning complaints against video games:

Video game critics claim violent games will make kids want to imitate the game and do real violent acts. Now they're complaining that music games will make kids NOT want to imitate the game and do real music?

To be fair, it's a different group of people complaining this time, but it is rather amusing.

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

Windell of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories shares some thoughts from his investigation into the electrical properties of LED throwies. Particularly interesting are his results when using a red LED -

Lithium coin cells aren't designed to source nearly that much power-- and aren't lithium batteries a fire hazard? And why does my LED-- rated for 25 mA continuous current survive this? I've certainly seen enough LEDs destroyed by overcurrent, and this one was over 25 mA for ten minutes solid. But, and perhaps against my better judgement, I do believe that this actually *is* safe in practice. With all of the throwies and similar things out there -- don't forget the keychain flashlights -- they just don't seem to be exploding or catching on fire. (Breaking, falling apart, running out of photons, yes-- but those modes of failure are usually not as dangerous.)

Head over to EMSL for more observations and a working solution.

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TimmyC writes "This story may interest the Slashdot folk, many of whom use the reCAPTCHA anti-spam service. Well, reCAPTCHA is now owned by Google. Apparently, what attracted Google to ReCAPTCHA is that the company has linked its core authentication service with efforts to digitize print books and periodicals. The search giant has a massive (and controversial) effort underway in that area for its Google Books and Google News Archive services. Every time people solve a CAPTCHA from the company, they are also, as a byproduct, helping to turn scanned words into plain text that can be indexed and made searchable by search engines. Interesting times indeed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

davecl writes "The Planck Satellite has released its first images. These are from the 'First Look Survey' and show a strip of the sky scanned at a range of radio and submillimetre wavelengths. The results are already better than what was seen by the previous microwave background satellite, WMAP. More details and images available in English and French. The Planck Mission Blog contains more details of the project and continuing coverage. I maintain the mission blog but even I am impressed with these first images!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pete's lawn sprinkler was covering too much unnecessary ground (pavement) so he designed a method for regulating the water supply based on the sprinkler's position -

I'm using a similar setup to the rudder control on my model airplane. The cable gets pulled in and out as the sprinkler turns (kind of like a rudder). The cable then turns another servo horn attached to the potentiometer inside that black box. From my arduino board, I send the pot VCC/GND and a third conductor to sense the position of the pot. (three conductors total = why not use extra mic cable I had lying around my garage). After a little averaging on my ADC I was able to get a pretty smooth reading of the position. The servo horn and cable apparatus is a pain to setup, so I'm excited to just hot-glue a compass or gyro to the top of my sprinkler for the next setup!

[via Sparkfun] Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this!

Google will probably protest that the patent they filed on reading lists was defensive. But it's a bad patent, based on an "invention" that was already out there, being discussed openly on Scripting News at least a year before they filed it. If you can subscribe to a feed, why not subscribe to a collection of feeds? And when an item is removed, you no longer are subscribed to it, and when one is added, you are now subscribed to it.

Google should explain to the RSS community how they supposedly invented this and what their process was. If it turns out that we had prior art, they should tear up the patent and apologize from trying to hijack something that doesn't belong to them.

I worry about big companies doing awful things because they do them. It's dangerous to have Google control so much of the RSS infrastructure, from Feedburner to Google Reader to Blogger. They could easily pass information between those systems without sharing the information publicly. They could, right now, deliver features to users that competitors would be locked out of. All this built on ideas, formats, protocols and know-how that were contributed by others without any limits on how they could be used. And now this patent.

Wikileaks is hosting a copy of the "1,841,177 post codes together with precise geographic coordinates and other information" for the UK.

One odd thing about Britain is that databases produced at public expense -- maps of the country, lists of postal codes, transcripts of Parliamentary debate and so on -- do not belong to the public. In order to use this data, you have to pay gigantic licensing fees to the government, who accordingly threaten to sue people who use them without permission.

It's a pretty bizarre idea. After all, none of these programmes are remotely self-sustaining -- the license fees cover just a tiny fraction of the overall money used to pay for their ongoing upkeep. Imagine if this was how private enterprise worked: an entrepreneur (the government) decides to map all of Britain, so she approaches an investor (the public) for £50,000,000 to cover the expenses. Having spent all 50 mil, she then approaches a second investor (license fee payers) for an extra £5,000,000 for additional operating capital. In the real world, the investors would likely end up split like this:

Initial investor: 60%
Entrepreneur: 35%
Second round investor: 5%

And why not? The initial investor assumed all the risk, while the second round investors merely threw a little money into a proven business.

But in the British scenario, the split looks like this:

Entrepreneur: 51%
Second round investor: 49%
Initial investor: 0%

That is, the entrepreneur (the government) gets total control over the product (maps of Britain, post-code databases, etc). The second round investor (a licensee) gets to commercially exploit the product, subject to oversight from the government.

But the initial investor (the public), gets nothing. If they want, they can become second-round investors and buy licenses from the government. Or they can buy or use products made by the second round investors (the licensees).

This isn't capitalism, nor is it socialism. It's a kind of corporatism in which the risk -- the money spent speculatively mapping Britain, arguing in Parliament, drawing up postal code boundaries -- is entirely assumed by the public, but the reward -- access and profit-taking -- are entirely given to the private sector.

(Many thanks to Paula LeDieu from the British Film Institute for this analysis)

So now we've got the postal code database online and that means that any second, someone from government is going to start threatening lawsuits, telling the people who paid to create it that they don't have the right to own it, build on it and improve it.

UK government database of all 1,841,177 post codes together with precise geographic coordinates and other information, 8 Jul 2009

An anonymous reader writes 'A mathematical equation that counts habitats suitable for alien life could complement the Drake equation, which estimates the probability of finding intelligent alien beings elsewhere in the galaxy. That equation, developed in 1960 by US astronomer Frank Drake, estimates the probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere in our galaxy by considering the number of stars with planets that could support life. The new equation, under development by planetary scientists at the Open University in Milton Keynes, England, aims to develop a single index for habitability based on the presence of energy, solvents such as water, raw materials like carbon, and whether or not there are benign environmental conditions.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes 'A mathematical equation that counts habitats suitable for alien life could complement the Drake equation, which estimates the probability of finding intelligent alien beings elsewhere in the galaxy. That equation, developed in 1960 by U.S. astronomer Frank Drake, estimates the probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere in our galaxy by considering the number of stars with planets that could support life. The new equation, under developed by planetary scientists at the Open University in Milton Keynes, England, aims to develop a single index for habitability based on the presence of energy, solvents such as water, raw materials like carbon and whether or no there are benign environmental conditions.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rick Geary's Trotsky: A Graphic Biography summarizes and illustrates some of the great biographies of Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky (notably the Isaac Deutscher bios, which my father, a lifelong Trotskyist, speaks highly of).

Trotsky was an amazing figure: brilliant and fiery, an impassioned rhetorician and propagandist, who fought fiercely with Lenin on ideological grounds -- but eventually reconciled -- and was purged (and then assassinated) by Stalin after Lenin's death. The unlikely story of how Trotsky -- the son of a wealthy landowner -- became a revolutionary fighter and general is improbable, exciting, and thought-provoking, and Geary's comic-book retelling does it great justice.

From his theory of "permanent revolution" (the idea that the Soviet Union could only sustain its revolution by bringing on revolutions in every other country) to his doomed affair with Frida Kahlo, Trotsky's genius, hubris, frailty and strength are well covered in this volume.

(Actually, my dad takes some issue with this, "Geary's facile description (which, by the way, echoes the Stalinist perception of Trotsky's theory) really misses the point: Yes, the theory did have something to do with the extension of the revolution abroad, but that was merely an aspect of it. Trotsky's theory, influenced by Parvus, was that the historically distinct stages of social evolution (barbarism, feudalism, mercantile capitalism, capitalism) was not so distinct any more. In the age of capitalist expansion (primitive accumulation), capitalism was penetrating social systems of previous historical stages and combining with them. Russia, characterized as a form of feudalism, had by the time of the rolling in of the 20th century been penetrated by some very large scale capitalist enterprises by foreign investors. So, here was a society in which serfdom had only been recently abolished, still with an absolute monarch, overwhelmingly peasant and illiterate, but also experiencing the growth of a nascent industrial proletariat as a result of foreign capital. Trotsky's view was that the historical tasks normally assigned to the bourgeois forces emerging within the bosom of feudalism could not be accomplished by the Russian bourgeoisie. They were too weak, already bypassed by foreign capitalists, and therefore unwilling to carry out the democratic reforms appropriate to the normal development of capitalism. So, Trotsky said, the new revolutionary forces would have to do double duty, carry out a bourgeois revolution and a socialist one.")

(That said, Dad adds, "I did enjoy reading his graphic bio")

The only thing really missing from this is Trotsky's own words. He was an incredible and inspiring writer, and his autobiography, My Life (written while exiled in Turkey) is an excellent companion to this introductory text.

Trotsky: A Graphic Biography

EMI has been involved in a lawsuit with MP3Tunes for a while now. The whole lawsuit seems weird, since MP3Tunes is about creating a storage locker for the songs you already have. But one of the points that MP3Tunes made in response to EMI's claims is that EMI was lying in saying that it has never authorized MP3s to be available online. Yet, MP3Tunes had found plenty of promotional tracks that EMI had clearly put online, and it was wondering why others were allowed to link to them, but EMI claimed it was infringement for MP3Tunes to point to those same songs. In presenting this point in court, MP3Tunes has been looking for more evidence of authorized EMI mp3s, and Michael Robertson has announced the "You Lie EMI" bookmarklet (found via Hypebot), that lets anyone help MP3Tunes find more authorized EMI mp3s. Basically, as you surf around, if you come across authorized songs that are available, you can click the bookmarklet, and it checks to see if the artists is an EMI artist, and then lets you submit the details. Whatever happens with the lawsuit itself, it's cool to see someone crowdsourcing data for their defense.

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If you have a game, but no ball, and the closest sporting goods store is miles away, what are you going to do? Make one, of course! Check out this video to learn how to make a soccer ball out using plastic bags and other readily available items.

[via afrigadget]

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Jerry James Stone writes "NASA and University of Utah chemists are developing advanced tech for testing the drinkability of water. The process just began a six month run aboard the International Space Station. Water will be sampled either from the Space Station's or Shuttle's galley using a syringe. It is then forced through a chemically-imbued membrane which changes color based on toxicity. The process itself will take about two-minutes. It checks drinking water for iodine and silver which are to used kill unwanted microbes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the Free Range Kids blog, a remarkable story from a YA author who was invited to address a fourth grade class:

I was setting up a phone call with a 4th-grade teacher and her class -- they live a good thousand miles across the country from me. I let her know that I have Skype, so nobody needs incur any long-distance charges. Her response via e-mail just now: "Is there a way to Skype with us being able to see you, but you not being able to see us? Due to confidentiality and other school district guidelines, I am hoping this is a possibility."

Truly, I am speechless. I'm just glad this won't be an in-person school visit, because it would be really awkward wearing a blindfold all day, lest I actually lay eyes on these kids.

Can You Please Come Talk to My Class...But Not Look at Anyone?

Toby Slater, impresario for London's fabulous White Mischief steampunk nights, sez, "Dressed in neo-Victorian finery and draped in accessories handmade from watch parts, the Clockwork Quartet is formed around instruments such as a Steamdrone, Stroh violin and bass banjo and staffed by musicians who by day work as everything from two luthiers, a jeweller and a sculptor to a doctor of zoology.

"The collective will be transforming London's Horse Hospital into a Victorian music hall between 15th and 17th October. Their music - each song of which tells a different story painting a portrait of a troubled character - is free to download but fans will be able to purchase an extravagant illustrated book as well, of course, as delights from the band's official in-house chocolatier."

We recommend: The Clockwork Quartet (Thanks, Toby!)

Kim sez, "I recently came across a videotape of several hours of TV footage from 1996. I scanned some of the more interesting commercials, including a bizarre dystopian ad for Packard Bell computers, Sony Mini Disc Walkman, Internet World Magazine, AOL and networkMCI. It's interesting how most of those products and services are no longer with us."

Commercials from 1996 (Thanks, Kim)

Panasonic has posted firmware updates for its DMC-GH1 and DMC-G1 Micro Four-Thirds cameras. Both updates improve autofocus performance in low contrast conditions and the stability of auto exposure (AE) for the recently released Panasonic Leica 45mm F2.8 Macro lens. The GH1 firmware v1.2 also decreases the AF operation sound of the 20mm F1.7 pancake lens for quieter video recording.

The Best of MAKE is back in stock! If you're just catching on to the MAKE phenomenon and wonder what you've missed, this book contains the best DIY projects from the magazine's first ten volumes -- a surefire collection of fun and challenging activities going back to MAKE's launch in early 2005.

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Over the summer, we wrote about the bizarre and protracted legal dispute concerning whether or not eBay actually had the rights to the core technology in Skype. Skype's founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, claim that they retained the right to the core technology in a separate company called Joltid, and that they terminated eBay's license to that technology. There's a legal battle already underway about that, but apparently that's not enough, as Joltid has now filed a separate copyright infringement lawsuit against eBay and the list of investors who recently bought out a big chunk of Skype from eBay. The thing that still amazes me is that pretty much everyone realized right away that it made no sense for eBay to buy Skype. That was a bad idea from the very beginning. But finding out that the purchase price didn't even include the core technology, and that Joltid had the ability to revoke the license, makes the purchase almost monumentally bad.

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An anonymous reader writes "Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick disclosed that their forthcoming, unnamed MMOG will have 'a little more broad appeal' than its market-leading MMO World of Warcraft. This is adding to speculation that the game might be free to play, since such games now take more in digital revenue than any other genre. In his GDC Austin keynote today, Sony Online Entertainment president Jon Smedley said, 'As a company, we knew we had to evolve ... to expand [our] audience ... and to get a much wider female audience.' The article notes that SOE hasn't abandoned hardcore MMOs, but his talk focused on Free Realms, SOE's free-to-play MMO that has grown to 5 million users in 5 months. Marketed to kids, 51% of Free Realms gamers are under 13, with around 75% under 18, who pose a challenge to attract and retain. Since they only play for about 20 minutes per session and aren't focused on the mechanics of the game, SOE can get away with changes that are unfair to some players, as shown by a recent, oddly-handled item nerf in Free Realms."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Panasonic has released a firmware update for its Lumix G Vario 45-200mm F4.0-5.6 OIS Micro Four Thirds lens. Version 1.1 enhances several aspects of the lens's operation, including continuous autofocus while shooting stills, and autofocus and image stabilization performance in movie mode.

Panasonic has released a firmware update for its Lumix G Vario 45-200mm F4.0-5.6 OIS Micro Four Thirds lens. Version 1.1 enhances several aspects of the lens's operation, including continuous autofocus while shooting stills, and autofocus and image stabilization performance in movie mode.

Dave Carter writes in to share some recent research that he was involved in, examining how well different promotions strategies worked for 99 different independent musicians in Australia. All the typical caveats apply -- including that this was just limited to Australian artists, and plenty more research needs to be done to show a causal relationship -- but the initial results certainly support the view that many of us have been espousing: that bands who really connect with their fans get a real boost in actual revenue. And, really connecting means actually doing some work -- not just tossing up a MySpace page. Some summaries of the findings:

• The highest proportional returns to artists corresponded with the use of multiple inter-linked sites, including a dedicated website or blog as well the use of mailing lists and the provision of free content. Of the artists studied, few had developed this type of integrated or strategic web presence and many of the artists studied could be making more effective use of the tools available to them.
• When viewed in isolation, the use of popular web services such as Myspace, Facebook and YouTube to promote an artists music did not correspond to a dramatic increase in artist earnings. In fact, as a whole, users of Myspace or Triple J's popular Unearthed website actually received proportionally lower returns than the median. However higher levels of fan or audience engagement -- for example in the form of Blog coverage, YouTube views, Facebook fans or Myspace friends -- tended to correspond to proportionally higher artist earnings inclusive of services whose users tended receive lower returns overall.
• Finally, the level to which higher earnings corresponded to online activity appears relative to artists off-line profile. That is, artists who perform and tour regularly, receive radio airplay and off-line press and media coverage tend to receive significantly higher returns and appear more likely to benefit from online promotional activities.

Most of this should be pretty obvious -- the more you connect with fans, and the more you do to get heard, the better off you're likely to be -- but it's amazing that so many musicians still don't bother with putting in the necessary effort.

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Instructables user nevdull writes:

Ever wanted to be "logged in" to your AVR microcontroller? Ever thought it would be cool to "cat" a register to see its contents? Have you always wanted a way to power up and power down individual peripheral sub-systems of your AVR or Arduino in *real time* ? Me, too, so I wrote the AVR Shell, a UNIX-like shell.

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krapper writes "The Obama administration has unveiled a government 'app store' designed to push the federal bureaucracy into the era of cloud computing. The change means some federal employees will begin using services like YouTube, Gmail and WordPress, which store data on private internet servers instead of on those paid for with public money. The process will start small but will ramp up quickly, Vivek Kundra, the US chief information officer, said in a blog post on Tuesday. 'Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology,' Kundra writes in the post on WhiteHouse.gov. 'We are dedicated to addressing these barriers and to improving the way government leverages new technology.' The app store is designed for federal employees doing official government business and is not intended for use by the public."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

krapper writes "The Obama administration has unveiled a government 'app store' designed to push the federal bureaucracy into the era of cloud computing. The change means some federal employees will begin using services like YouTube, Gmail and WordPress, which store data on private internet servers instead of on those paid for with public money. The process will start small but will ramp up quickly, Vivek Kundra, the US chief information officer, said in a blog post on Tuesday. 'Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology,' Kundra writes in the post on WhiteHouse.gov. 'We are dedicated to addressing these barriers and to improving the way government leverages new technology.' The app store is designed for federal employees doing official government business and is not intended for use by the public.."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary died today. She was 72.
Mary Travers NYT Obituary

Latest Gadgetfreak (beam break sensor)...

Typical pitching machines make it hard for a batter to prepare a proper swing. To improve his performance at bat, Nathan Loden created this pitch alert system by attaching an IR LED and sensor to the ball feed mechanism. When the next ball up is blocking the sensor, the signal is fed into a circuit that switches on a bank of high-intensity, flashing LEDs. The batter has plenty of time to set his swing unless, of course, he is distracted by the fascinating light display. So go have a slugfest!

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Pentax's K-x offers an awful lot of K-7 features in what is essentially the same body as the K2000 (K-m). In fact, its high specification and low price are most reminiscent of the much-loved K200D, which could make this a welcome addition to the upper-entry-level market. We were able to borrow a pre-production model so that we could look beyond the various color options to see just what this latest little Pentax offers.

Pentax has announced an upper-entry level DSLR, the K-x. Based on the K2000 (K-m) body, the K-x adds a number of features including a 12.4 Mp CMOS sensor, 11-point autofocus, Live View and HD video mode. It will be available in a choice of colors - black, white, and limited editions of red and navy - from October 2009 at a price of $649.95 with the 18-55mm DA-L kit lens. To accompany the K-x Pentax has also released a budget 'L' version of its 55-300mm F4-5.8 telephoto zoom lens.

As we keep hearing from newspaper execs (and sometimes, reporters) insisting that paywalls or micropayments are the solution to what ails the industry, we keep asking why people will pay. The whole reason why newspapers used to work as a business model was that they collected a community around news. But, these days, there are much better communities out there. The newspapers haven't kept up. And, when it comes to news, people want to participate. They're not passive. That might mean contributing to the news or commenting on the news, but just as likely it means sharing and spreading the news, as well. But nearly every proposal from newspapers looks to limit that ability, which only makes it less valuable to the very community the newspapers need, driving them elsewhere. We've been saying for years that newspapers need to focus on enabling communities, but that still seems to be the last thing on most of their minds.

For example, this rather depressing discussion of research presented at the Future of Journalism conference concerning participatory media suggests that many in the newspaper business view the whole "participation" thing as a pain to be dealt with. Very few look for ways to better enable the community -- most seem focused on how to prevent the community from doing something bad, or looking for other ways to somehow limit the community.

And then you have situations like this:

Finding newsworthy material in contributions from the public is a challenge. In his study about Dutch newspapers and UGC presented at the conference, Piet Bakker found that there was little news contained in comments on stories.

From the point of view of the traditional journalist, the amount of news in comments was minimal. Instead, comments were seen as a way to attract more visitors and increase loyalty, but these benefits were counterbalanced by problems with abusive comments, a lack of contributions, and the cost of moderation.

They're viewing the entire thing backwards. First, they're complaining that there's "little news contained in comments." But who said there was supposed to be? It's the basic difference between reporting and a discussion. But the newspaper folks are so focused on having to be "reporters" that they're missing the fact their community wants to have a discussion around the news. Instead, it's seen as a bad thing that it's "not news." Furthermore, rather than being seen as a way to enable the community, comments are reduced to a way to attract more visitors. If you're just looking to attract more visitors, there are all sorts of things you can do. If you want to enable the community, it takes a different mindset.

Of course, not every newspaper person thinks that way. Techdirt reader Shane Richmond, who is the head of technology for the Telegraph, has written up a report for the Nieman Foundation, discussing the various ways that paper is looking to enable the community. As you read through it, it's not about page views or having the community submit stuff for journalists to do the real work on, it's actually all about enabling the community: enabling them to have a voice, enabling them to connect with one another and even enabling them to have an audience. As Richmond notes, there's still a lot more to do, but it looks like the Telegraph is approaching this with the right mindset. It would be great to see more newspapers follow the same path.

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idk07002 writes 'I have been tasked with building an offsite backup server for my university's television station to back up our Final Cut Pro Server and our in-office file server (a Drobo), in case the studio spontaneously combusts. Total capacity between these two systems is ~12TB. Not at all full yet, but we would like the system to have the same capacity so that we can get maximum life out of it. It looks like it would be possible to get rack space somewhere on campus with Gigabit Ethernet and possibly fiber coming into our office. Would a Linux box with rsync work? What is the sweet spot between value and longevity? What solution would you use?'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

idk07002 writes 'I have been tasked with building an offsite backup server for my university's television station to back up our Final Cut Pro Server and our in-office file server (a Drobo), in case the studio spontaneously combusts. Total capacity between these two systems is ~12TB. Not at all full yet, but we would like the system to have the same capacity so that we can get maximum life out of it. It looks like it would be possible to get rack space somewhere on campus with Gigabit Ethernet and possibly fiber coming into our office. Would a Linux box with rsync work? What is the sweet spot between value and longevity? What solution would you use?'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm working on an EC2 image that, when you boot it up, is a River2 installation. Since it's outside any firewall or NAT, it's ready to wire into the realtime feed network. Cloud-enabled feeds connect into Amazon's cloud. It's almost mathematical. I'm lovin it. I think we're getting close to the promised land. Hah.

With our Halloween Contest well under way, I just had to choose a quick and dirty flashback from our Halloween issue, which came out in August of 2007. Bump up the creepiness in a hurry with some thick fog to get the mood set just right. Here's the how-to:

Ultimate Fog Chiller
Build the chiller that won the 2004 HauntCon Chill-Off competition.
By Adam Tourkow

Chilled fog creates an appealingly eerie blanket on the ground. Most homemade fog chillers use a drink cooler and PVC tubing, but that design doesn't keep the fog in the holding area long enough to chill it properly. Our fog chiller is very easy to build and does a great job of cooling the fog.

MATERIALS

¾-size trash can or bigger
18' (approx.) of aluminum duct (dryer hose)
Lots of dry ice or water ice
Water-resistant duct tape
Drill with 4" hole saw or a utility knife

DIRECTIONS

Step 1: Cut 2 holes in the trash can, on opposite sides, with the hole saw or knife. The holes should be sized so that the dryer hose fits snugly into them. The exit hole goes at the bottom, and the hole for the fogger nozzle goes about 2" higher on the other side.

Step 2: The aluminum dryer hose comes in 6' pieces, so attach the 3 sections together using water-resistant duct tape.

Step 3: From the inside of the can, feed one end of the tubing out of the lower (exit) hole, and coil the rest of the hose around the inside of the can. Once you get to the top, feed the tube back down and out
the upper (fogger nozzle) hole.

Step 4: That's it for construction! Now, just fill the trash can with ice, attach the fogger, and let' er rip.

Note: If you've got a powerful fogger, you can cover more area by using a cardboard box with a hole for the output tube and a slit at the bottom for the fog to come out in a wider pattern.

Addendum: (From Adam's site) I have recently been enlightened by other haunters that using a leaf sized garbage bag at the output of the chiller helps keep the fog denser and closer to the ground. Cut a hole on the closed side of the bag, attach that end to the output, and the fog will creep out slower from the large end. Here's a pic of it in action from Count Zero:

About the Author:
Adam Tourkow (ghostsofhalloween.com) lives in Santa Monica, Calif., and is a full-time web developer. He has to borrow his in-laws' house to run his annual haunted house.

For tons more maker-style Halloween fun, you can still pick up a back issue of Make: Halloween over in the Maker Shed.

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It's still not entirely clear what online agreements are actually enforceable and which aren't. We've seen cases go both ways, with a recent ruling even noting that terms that are a hyperlink away, rather than on the agreement page itself, may be enforceable. But the latest case, involving online retailer Overstock went in the other direction. A court found that Overstock's arbitration requirement was unenforceable, because, as "browserwrap," the user was not adequately notified. Eventually, it seems that someone's going to have to make it clear what sorts of online terms are actually enforceable (if any). Until then, we're going to see a lot more lawsuits like this one.

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This Mail-E robot by Totoro Yamada is pretty neat. The robot is based around a papercraft Wall-E robot, and uses some simple stepper motors to move the hands and head. Though mail visualizers are nothing new, I like the idea of having a programmable bot that could perhaps even make different gestures depending on the kind of mail received.

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Here's what I need:

1. A server I can use to manage hosts for a domain that I own that am currently not using. I have many. I will pick one.

2. Ideally I don't even want to run the server myself. Someone from the community of people who read this blog who are interested in distributed realtime message systems and want to play a role in its development. This project will not use a lot of bandwidth or server resources. It's primarily for development. The other users will be geeks like you and me.

3. The server must have a REST interface. I need at least one call. It takes three parameters (that I can think of, there may need to be more). The three parameters are: name of sub-domain (something like george), record name (I'll explain below) and the value. The same call can be used to change the value. Probably should send a string that's a MD5 hash of all the parameters plus my password. Something like that. You can tell me what it should be, but nothing too fancy.

The record name is a DNS record name. Not A or MX maybe TXT. The value is the address of their RSS 2.0 feed. So george.loose.ly would be the name of George Matesky's realtime feed. If you want to follow him, you wouldn't have to use his feed address you'd use george.loose.ly. The client would just do a DNS lookup to find him.

4. If no one is willing to operate the server, then I'll operate it. It must be something that runs on EC2.

5. I need it soon. I want to start developing a prototype. Tomorrow? Friday? Please, no later than Monday. It seems like a fairly easy thing to do.

Anyway that's the idea. Comments welcome of course.

SpuriousLogic writes "After receiving injections of genes that produce color-detecting proteins, two color-blind monkeys have seen red and green for the first time. Except in its extreme forms, color blindness isn't a debilitating condition, but it's a convenient stand-in for other types of blindness that might be treated with gene therapy. The monkey success raises the possibility of reversing those diseases, in a manner that most scientists considered impossible. 'We said it was possible to give an adult monkey with a model of human red-green color blindness the retina of a person with normal color vision. Every single person I talked to said, absolutely not,' said study co-author Jay Neitz, a University of Washington ophthalmologist. 'And almost every unsolved vision defect out there has this component in one way or another, where the ability to translate light into a gene signal is involved.' The full-spectrum supplementation of the squirrel monkeys' sight, described Wednesday in Nature, comes just less than a year after researchers used gene therapy to restore light perception in people afflicted by Leber Congenital Amaurosis, a rare and untreatable form of blindness."

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Jennie sez, "Two Seattle suburbs (of the super affluent persuasion) are monitoring and recording every vehicle that enter their town limits. If you happen to have had a past criminal infraction, you will be followed by police. Creepy and overzealous! By the way, residents of these towns are so community oriented that they also refuse to pay property tax to support their local county library system. But don't worry, they're 'not elitist at all,' according to a local council member."

In Medina, a new sign bears this warning: "You Are Entering a 24 Hour Video Surveillance Area..."

Medina -- a city of 3,100 with an average household income of $222,000 -- had discussed the idea for years as a way to discourage crime, city officials said.

Last year, there were 11 burglaries, Chen said.

"Some people think [that number of burglaries] is tolerable," he said. "But even one crime is intolerable."

Medina City Councilmember Lucius Biglow said crime prevention "outweighs concern over privacy."

"Privacy is considerably less nowadays than it was, say, 50 years ago," he said. "I think most of us are pretty well-documented by the federal government ... simply because of the Internet and credit cards."

Cameras keep track of all cars entering Medina (Thanks, Jennie!)

(Image: MARK HARRISON / THE SEATTLE TIMES)

It's been over a week since Wordpress shipped their plug-in that added rssCloud capability. There are a bunch of feeds out there that are now cloud-enabled, actually a few million.

If you know of any especially interesting ones, news-oriented feeds that are frequently updated -- they could be pro or amateur, bloggers or BigPubs, commercial, academic or open source, left-wing or right, it doesn't matter -- what matters is that they are interesting and that they're real-time.

I'm looking for feeds to include in the default set of the next release of River2 which is coming together now. So if you know of some, either post a link as a comment here or send me an email with a link to the email address in the right margin on scripting.com.