“Handcrafted with love by BYU design students and faculty, for the 5th Typophile Film Festival. A visual typographic feast about the five senses, and how they contribute to and enhance our creativity.” That fried ampersand looks mighty tasty.

itwbennett writes "Exploding iPhones may be a thing of the past. Researchers at Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute have developed a new polymer, STOBA (that's self-terminated oligomers with hyper-branched architecture to you and me), that is added to the cathode material inside a lithium-ion battery to keep them from overheating. 'Fires or explosions in these batteries are caused by short circuits,' said Wu Hung-chun, a researcher at ITRI, explaining that even minor mishandling such as dropping the handset could result in damage causing a short circuit. 'The technology is ready for lithium-ion batteries used in electronic devices, mobile phones, laptops,' said Wu. And ITRI has started testing STOBA on electric car batteries."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

itwbennett writes "Exploding iPhones may be a thing of the past. Researchers at Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute have developed a new polymer, STOBA (that's self-terminated oligomers with hyper-branched architecture to you and me), that is added to the cathode material inside a lithium-ion battery to keep them from overheating. 'Fires or explosions in these batteries are caused by short circuits,' said Wu Hung-chun, a researcher at ITRI, explaining that even minor mishandling such as dropping the handset could result in damage causing a short circuit. 'The technology is ready for lithium-ion batteries used in electronic devices, mobile phones, laptops,' said Wu. And ITRI has started testing STOBA on electric car batteries."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you ski or snowboard regularly, you've probably come across a Warren Miller Entertainment film at some point in your life. The films, which come out each year just as ski season is about to start, are fun films showing people involved in some extreme skiing activities. Over the years I've probably gone to three or four of them. The name for WME comes from (surprise surprise) filmmaker Warren Miller, who started making such movies about 60 years ago. Warren Miller sold WME a while back, and while he was still involved with the films for a while hasn't had much to do with them in a few years now. However, producers of another ski movie called Refresh, Level 1 Productions, used Mr. Miller in their recent film, and that convinced WME to break out the lawyers. Zack Stecher lets us know that WME is suing Level 1, claiming that it's violating WME's trademark on the name Warren Miller by having him appear in their film and by mentioning the fact that he appears in the film. Except... that's entirely accurate. Warren Miller does appear in Refresh and it would be quite a ridiculous finding under trademark law to find that he can't use his own name in any film. Luckily, the initial ruling from the court seems to recognize this. A judge refused to grant an injunction preventing the showing of Refresh:

Krieger wrote in her decision, "the Defendant apparently secured Mr. Miller's agreement to appear in 'Refresh,' and should be entitled to identify him to the public and advise the public that Mr. Miller does, in fact, appear in the film.

"According to the Complaint, every instance in which the Defendant used the 'WARREN MILLER' mark involved either Mr. Miller personally identifying himself or the Defendants making reference to Mr. Miller as a participant in the film," Krieger added. "These uses of Mr. Miller's name are entirely consonant with the public's interest in being able to truthfully identify a specific person."

There may be a separate issue concerning a contractual relationship between Warren Miller and Warren Miller Entertainment, but WME does not appear to be suing Warren Miller directly, so that issue is unrelated to this particular lawsuit.

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If you ski or snowboard regularly, you've probably come across a Warren Miller Entertainment film at some point in your life. The films, which come out each year just as ski season is about to start, are fun films showing people involved in some extreme skiing activities. Over the years I've probably gone to three or four of them. The name for WME comes from (surprise surprise) filmmaker Warren Miller, who started making such movies about 60 years ago. Warren Miller sold WME a while back, and while he was still involved with the films for a while hasn't had much to do with them in a few years now. However, producers of another ski movie called Refresh, Level 1 Productions, used Mr. Miller in their recent film, and that convinced WME to break out the lawyers. Zack Stecher lets us know that WME is suing Level 1, claiming that it's violating WME's trademark on the name Warren Miller by having him appear in their film and by mentioning the fact that he appears in the film. Except... that's entirely accurate. Warren Miller does appear in Refresh and it would be quite a ridiculous finding under trademark law to find that he can't use his own name in any film. Luckily, the initial ruling from the court seems to recognize this. A judge refused to grant an injunction preventing the showing of Refresh:

Krieger wrote in her decision, "the Defendant apparently secured Mr. Miller's agreement to appear in 'Refresh,' and should be entitled to identify him to the public and advise the public that Mr. Miller does, in fact, appear in the film.

"According to the Complaint, every instance in which the Defendant used the 'WARREN MILLER' mark involved either Mr. Miller personally identifying himself or the Defendants making reference to Mr. Miller as a participant in the film," Krieger added. "These uses of Mr. Miller's name are entirely consonant with the public's interest in being able to truthfully identify a specific person."

There may be a separate issue concerning a contractual relationship between Warren Miller and Warren Miller Entertainment, but WME does not appear to be suing Warren Miller directly, so that issue is unrelated to this particular lawsuit.

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Jeremy Keith cleverly uses the atribute selector, abbr[title='and'] for enabling the best available ampersand with no added markup or class.

One year ago Sunday, we learned of the sad death of MAKE Contributor and GEEK Technique blogger Mark Hoekstra. Only 34 years old, Mark had a heart attack while riding his bike. The maker/hardware hacking world misses him and the fun stuff he used to put up on his site.

To mark the first anniversary of his passing, a special Mark Hoekstra award has been set up in his honor. Here's the description, posted to GEEK Technique:

To celebrate Mark's life and his passion for the GEEK in us all the PechaKucha Foundation and the PechaKucha Groningen team are launching the annual 'Mark Hoekstra PechaKucha Award' today, one year after he passed away, to find the person with the most GEEK technique! This award seeks to celebrate projects, ideas that express 'GEEK technique' to make the world a better, simpler and funnier place. We will be looking for PechaKucha presentations that are pro-social, pro-environment and pro-city and embody Mark's love for the geek. Explore Mark's amazing blog for inspiration! Full details of the award, judging system and how to upload your presentations will be announced in January when the website for the award is launched. We are working with several wonderful sponsors to bring this project to fruition. If you would like to support the project in any way please feel free to contact us: info@pecha-kucha.org

What a cool and touching way of honoring Mark. We hope some of our MAKE readers will submit a project.

More:
Sad news.. Mark Hoekstra of Geektechniques has passed away
More projects from Mark Hoekstra

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“… a collection of Home screens of some of the best and brightest developers, designers and tech writers.” Nice way of discovering new (but useful) iPhone apps.

No, not the blog software, but rather a collection of open source fonts where “you’ll find only the most well-made, free & open-source, @font-face ready fonts”. League Gothic and Chunk look particularly excellent.

I just built this nifty little tea timer from a recycled toaster. I wish I had thought of the idea myself, but this is a rebuild of an article from MAKE, Volume 04 by Johnathan Nightingale.

I pulled apart an ugly $3 thrift store toaster and was pleasantly surprised by how nice it looked on the inside. Next, I snipped the connections to the heating element -- all I needed to work was the capacitor-timed electro-magnet. This magnet is part of a catch that holds the popper in place when pushed down. The timer is a trickle-charged capacitor that steals power from the magnet, allowing the spring to throw the arm back up after the 1 to 3 minute brew-time selected on the dial.

Once I'd grafted on a wood arm to hold the teabag I took it for a test drive. It worked great, but ejected the bag from the mug with such force that I got sprayed with hot tea. No fun! I goofed around with a few different dampening techniques until it dawned on me that this thing was designed to eject two pieces of toast. So, I weighed two slices of bread and then cut two equivalent pieces of plywood to put in the slots. Bingo, no more boiling droplets to the face! It's a fun, whimsical project that makes me feel a bit like Wallace when my wife asks for some tea.

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TechnologyResource writes "Going across the border will be a more 'interesting' experience since Customs and Border Protection will now be checking laptops, digital cameras, cell phones and any other electronics on your person or in your vehicle. It's not a new authority, according to Angelica De Cima, Office of Public Affairs Liaison 'They've always had the right to inspect your person, vehicle, baggage, anything on you. Nothing has changed from before,' De Cima said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechnologyResource writes "Going across the border will be a more 'interesting' experience since Customs and Border Protection will now be checking laptops, digital cameras, cell phones and any other electronics on your person or in your vehicle. It's not a new authority, according to Angelica De Cima, Office of Public Affairs Liaison 'They've always had the right to inspect your person, vehicle, baggage, anything on you. Nothing has changed from before,' De Cima said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Guerby alerts us to the news that a French Appeals Court found that education tech company Edu4 violated the GPL by distributing a version of VNC without offering up the source code (and removing the GPL copyright notice). As the announcement notes, one interesting factor here was that it was filed by Edu4's customer, an education group, not the copyright holder. While it's nice to see a legal win for open source software, this does raise some questions. My guess is that the rationale is that this isn't a copyright case, but a licensing case. Thus the education group, AFPA, can actually be a party to the lawsuit. Still, it does raise questions over who has the right to make sure the GPL is enforced.

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I'm proud to announce the opening of Open Source Embroidery, an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art on October 2. It's a great show with lots of crafts intersecting technology, including my LilyPad Embroidery piece. The show has traveled all the way from Sweden and looks truly fabulous. You can check out pictures of what the exhibition looked like at the Bildmuseet in Umeå, or stop by in person when the show opens in SF; I highly recommend it!

Open Source Embroidery

October 2, 2009 through January 24, 2010
Museum of Craft and Folk Art
51 Yerba Buena Lane
San Francisco, CA 94103
(@ Mission between Third & Fourth)

More:

LilyPad Arduino Embroidery

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Matt_dk writes "Images of recent impact craters taken by the HiRISE Camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed sub-surface water ice halfway between the north pole and the equator on Mars. While the Phoenix lander imaged subsurface ice where the top layer of soil had been disturbed at the landing site near the north pole, these new images — taken in quick succession, detecting how the ice sublimated away — are the first to show evidence of water ice at much lower latitudes. Surprisingly, the white ice may be made from 99 percent pure water."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He currently resides in Harlem, New York.

Is anyone here following We Love You So? A blog Spike Jonze and Co. set up giving us a  nice glimpse into all the little insights and influences that helped bring Where The Wild Things Are to life. The photo above is from their Where the Wild Things Ought To Be Contest, a cute photoshop competition that has some really clever entries. 

Ch ch check it out- http://weloveyouso.com

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He currently resides in Harlem, New York.

 

A dramatic reading of tweets. The guy reading Lohan is the best. Who do you think should be read next?  (thanks James, No You First)

"Handcrafted with love by BYU design students and faculty, for the 5th Typophile Film Festival. A visual typographic feast about the five senses, and how they contribute to and enhance our creativity." That fried ampersand looks mighty tasty. #

I've never used Giottos Rocket Blaster. I just like the way it looks.

From Cool Tools:

This rubber rocket doesn’t provide as much pressure as Dust-Off. But it does exhale a forceful-enough blast for dusting photo/electronic gear, and standing upright on its base sidelines as playful desk dressing/stress-relief toy. I squeeze the oblong bladder (the rocket’s body) and a burst of air entering through a hole at the bottom exits the narrow hard plastic red nozzle.

The LA Philharmonic has a brand new Guitar Hero-inspired conducting game that lets you pretend to be music director Gustavo Dudamel. It's available on iPhone and on the Web.

Bravo Gustavo

Jeremy Keith cleverly uses the atribute selector, abbr[title='and'] for enabling the best available ampersand with no added markup or class. #

"... a collection of Home screens of some of the best and brightest developers, designers and tech writers." Nice way of discovering new (but useful) iPhone apps. #

No, not the blog software, but rather a collection of open source fonts where "you'll find only the most well-made, free & open-source, @font-face ready fonts". League Gothic and Chunk look particularly excellent. #

An anonymous reader writes "MessageLabs unveiled a list of the top US spammed states, with surprising results — the spam capital of the US is Idaho, with 93.8 percent of spam, far exceeding the global spam rate for September 2009 of 86.4 percent. Idaho has jumped 43 spots since 2008 when it was ranked the 44th most spammed state. The difference can be attributed to the resilient and aggressive botnet market as well as a higher volume of global spam that has ensued since the beginning of the credit crisis toward the end of 2008."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So, we keep seeing more of what the promised "transparency" of the Obama administration means in real terms. Despite campaigning against warrantless wiretapping, the administration has come out with new rules for how it will use the "state secrets" privilege that amount to "no, really, we'll only use it when we need to... just trust us" and continued to insist that evidence over warrantless wiretapping should be tossed out for state secrets reasons. And it's left up to a former comedian, now politician to remind the Justice Department of the Fourth Amendment? The "just trust us, we won't abuse the system" justification isn't particularly comforting, especially when that clause is being used to cover up what is almost certainly illegal activity by the federal government.

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Vu Van Thang built this wonderfully detailed robot from trash, in order to win a Vietnamese robotics competition. It's specs are quite impressive for being built of scavenged parts. Using it's 11 motors, it can move its hands, arms and fingers independently. Nice 'bot!

[via boing boing]

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darthcamaro writes "No surprise but Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth has come out swinging in favor of the Linux desktop. Speaking at Linuxcon yesterday he detailed the things that he thinks Linux requires in order to win the desktop wars. Those include: co-ordinated software releases, better quality and design,some user experience testing and oh yeah, a dose of 'shut the f*uck up' too.During his keynote, he extended an invitation to any open source application to submit their software for testing by user-experience experts. The sessions would be recorded for posterity, and the developer would not be able to interact with the user. "'If the developer is in the room, they have to say nothing. It's the shut the f--- up protocol,' Shuttleworth said. 'You sit and watch someone struggle with the software that you've so lovingly produced.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Congress has been working on a federal "shield" law that that allows journalists to protect their sources. This is an important concept, and many states already have local laws on that front. Unfortunately, as the Senate was working on its version of the bill, it's apparently decided that the law should only apply to professional journalists who make their living that way. If you happen to just write a blog post that exposes some sort of wrong, you'll have no shield protections. Or if you write for a participatory media site and blow a whistle, again, you'll have no shield protection for your sources. While not all that surprising (do you really think our Senators understand the value of participatory journalism), it's still disappointing.

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R.U. Sirius interviewed Randa Milliron, CEO of Interorbital Systems, "a 'rocket and spacecraft manufacturing company' that locates itself at the Mojave Airport and Spaceport in Mojave, California. They recently announced that they were offering to send people's personal satellites into low-earth orbit on a NEPTUNE 30 rocket for the low low low cost of $8,000."

The 8k Personal Satellite (and Other Space Adventures)

I have to say that of all the improbable phrases I've run across blogging, "post-apocalyptic pneumatic werewolf" may well be the the weirdest. Which only makes this haunted house prop by Terra of HalloweenForum.com (her tagline: "Terror of the Cul de Sac") just that much more, well, wicked, than it already is.

(Sorry.)

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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Jeff VanderMeer sez,

What Is Last Drink Bird Head? That's the catalyst editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer provided to over 80 writers in creating this unique anthology, with all proceeds going to ProLiteracy.org. All each writer got was an email with "Last Drink Bird Head" in the subject line and the directions "Who or what is Last Drink Bird Head? Under 500 words." Like any surrealist writing game, it either sparked a response or it didn't.

The result? Last Drink Bird Head is a blues musician, a performance artist, a type of alcohol, a town in Texas, and even a song sung by girl scouts in Antarctica. Contributors include Peter Straub, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Brian Evenson, Henry Kaiser, Gene Wolfe, Hal Duncan, Jeffrey Ford, Rikki Ducornet, Holly Phillips, Stephen R. Donaldson, K.J. Bishop, Michael Swanwick, Ellen Kushner, Daniel Abraham, Jay Lake, Liz Williams, Tanith Lee, Sarah Monette, Conrad Williams, and Marly Youmans.

Famed designer John Coulthart did the interior, which features bobbing bird heads in the corners of the pages, so that the antho is also a flipbook.

LAST DRINK BIRD HEAD FOR CHARITY: Party, Pre-Orders, Awards, and More (Thanks, Jeff!)

dreemteem writes "After 8 years of success, the USB 2.0 standard has begun its long journey into obsolescence. Dutch storage company Freecom has announced the first mainstream storage product based on 'SuperSpeed' USB 3.0. Buyers will be interested to hear that the new external Hard Drive XS 3.0 doesn't cost the earth at £99 (approx $160) for a 1TB drive, even though that excludes the £22.99 for a desktop PCI-bus controller necessary to make it work at its intended throughput. Laptop users can pair it with a £25.99 plug-in PC Card to achieve the same effect."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rob Hyndman points us to two Canadian law professors, Michael Trebilcock and Edward Iacobucci, insisting that patents are "the mother of invention" in an article that mostly spends its time trying to defend the silly injunction (already put on hold) barring Microsoft from selling Word or Office, because it supposedly violates a patent, 5,787,449, on XML editing of a word processed document. There are all sorts of problems with the column, kicking off with Hyndman's question as to how law professors should be considered experts on innovation...

But, let's dig further into the details.

Patents are essential to the modern system of innovation. Once produced, information can be transmitted at zero cost. In the absence of patent protection, would-be inventors become vulnerable to competition that would drive the value of their discovery to zero, leaving them with no compensation for the costs of producing that information in the first place.

This is the usual story. And it sounds good. But there's no factual evidence to support it. That's because it ignores reality. Yes, information can be transmitted at zero cost, but that does not mean that implementation is assured, or that the market stands still. Besides, I'm curious as to the claim "vulnerable to competition," as if competition is a bad thing. Most people recognize that competition drives innovation -- and yet, these law professors are suggesting the exact opposite. That you need less competition to drive innovation.

Furthermore, they are wrong in claiming that in the absence of patent protection "the value of their discovery" is driven to "zero, leaving them with no compensation." They say this as if the compensation is for the idea, rather than the implementation. That is simply wrong. No one compensates you directly for an idea. If you have a good idea, you need to bring a product to market and sell it. If someone else copies that idea, you still have a large first mover advantage and you understand the market better. On top of that, you should be ahead of the curve in terms of improving on the concept for the next iteration. That's competition. It doesn't mean the value of the idea is zero or that there's no compensation. Claiming such makes no sense.

Again, beyond common sense, the historical evidence suggests that these law professors are simply wrong. Countries with no or weak patent protection have seen tremendous innovation over time. And it's because it's competition that's the mother of innovation, not a lack of competition. For well over two hundred years, economists have recognized that monopolies that remove competition are bad for innovation. These lawyers are insisting that the opposite is true, and present no proof.

Microsoft objects that the injunction ordered by the trial judge goes too far. (It has been put on hold until after the appeal, which is to begin Wednesday.) But injunctions are almost always ordered to prevent continuing infringement, and for good reason. To simply order money damages for future infringement would be to force i4i to license out its technology at a court-imposed price.

This is misleading. While it is true that in the past injunctions were the norm, since the US Supreme Court's MercExchange ruling more than three years ago, courts recognize that injunctions often do not make sense. The reason they don't make sense is because they require stopping the sale of an entire product (or lines of products) due to a single infringing feature. That makes no sense, and the courts have recognized this. I'm not sure why these law professors do not.

Just as there are good reasons not to compel citizens to sell or rent out their homes at prices set by judges, there are very good reasons in general to avoid compulsory licensing of intellectual property. Court determinations of the value of intellectual property are necessarily somewhat conjectural, yet damages awards require courts to act, in effect, as price regulators. By contrast, injunctions do not prevent a licensing deal from being done, but rather cede to the owner of the property the authority to set a price. Just as giving homeowners the right to decide whether to sell or rent out their houses does not destroy the housing market, in terrorem arguments about the death of Word under this injunction are without merit.

Again, this is quite misleading. It implies that an injunction leads to the natural market setting the price for licensing, but nothing could be further from the truth. If someone is pointing a gun at your head and negotiating over how much you have to pay to stay alive, that's not exactly a fair and open economic transaction that both parties enter into under their own free will. Claiming that this is somehow a more accurate market is pure folly.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has vociferously argued that despite the trial judge's careful vetting of the evidence, i4i did not establish at trial a firm basis for its damages claim for past infringement. This claim about the speculative nature of past damages sits uncomfortably with Microsoft's opposition to injunctions. Given the complexity of measuring supply and demand for a unique product, it must be true that there is some empirical uncertainty about the precise level of past damages. But if patents are to have value, this uncertainty is unavoidable: A damages award is the only available remedy for infringement that has already taken place.

Again, I have to admit confusion over these claims, which seem to have no basis in reality. It is not "the patent" that has value. It is the product. For sale in the market. And it's the consumer who values it. The fact is that many more people seemed to value a complete package of Microsoft Word. They were not buying it because of i4i's silly and questionable patent. They were buying it because Microsoft Word is a useful product. The difference in sales for Microsoft Word if it had not included XML editing would likely be negligible at best. There is no evidence of damages. If i4i and these lawyers are claiming that the "damages" are i4i's inability to sell its own product, again, that is difficult to square with reality. Competition happens all the time, and it's as good thing. i4i's inability to come up with a product or marketing plan that people wanted is its problem, not Microsoft's.

Also, the lawyers, in claiming that there was "careful vetting of the evidence," conveniently leave out that this was done in East Texas, which has a long history of vetting in favor of patent holders. Don't ask me, ask the bull that TiVo bought.

Protecting i4i's patent protects incentives to invent and the competitive process. In this case, the trial judge wisely offered such protection, while recognizing the court's own institutional limitations, by ordering damages for past infringement and injunctions going forward. While the decision was not a good one for Microsoft, it was clearly in the best interests of society.

Really? So, completely banning the sale of an entire office suite offering because one tiny, rarely used, feature might infringe on some random other company's products is "in the best interests of society"? That seems wholly without support. That would mean making every user of Microsoft's office suite suffer, for the benefit of a small 30 person company that developed a rather obvious concept. How is that possibly in the best interests of society?

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Stephen sez, "In re-reading the Hobbit, I realized that the opening chapters made it sound like Thorin was running a con. From there, I wondered what Thorin's pitch would look like if it were a modern con, which resulted in me writing a Nigerian 419 fraud letter for the Hobbit."

Dear MR BAGGINS, Fellow Conspirator,

I am Thorin Oakenshield, descendant of Thrain the Old and grandson of Thror who was King under the Mountain. I am writing you to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices for rescuing our treasure from the dragon Smaug.

During the reign of Thror our kingdom was a prosperous one. Kings used to send for our smiths, and reward even the least skillful most richly. Fathers would beg us to take their sons as apprentices, and pay us handsomely, especially in food-supplies, which we never bothered to grow or find for ourselves. Altogether those were good days for us, and the poorest of us had money to spend and to lend, and leisure to make beautiful things just for the fun of it, not to speak of the most marvellous and magical toys, the like of which is not to be found in the world now-a-days.

Hobbit 419

What a cute video about roasting, grinding, and siphon-brewing coffee. Style points for the Gershon Kingsley soundtrack, and it's not even Friday! [via BoingBoing]

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I really like the way George's brain machine spectacles turned out! (More pics here.) He built them using Mitch Altman's Brain Machine Kit, available from Maker Shed.

Susan Olsen, who played Cindy ("the youngest one in curls") will be signing copies of her new book, Love to Love You Bradys: The Bizarre Story of The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, at the Santa Monica Public Library on September 26 at 1pm.

Derek Thomas of the LA Weekly calls The Brady Bunch Variety Hour "one of most hallucinogenically bad variety shows to have ever aired on television."

Susan Olsen ... tells all in Love to Love You Bradys: The Bizarre Story of The Brady Bunch Variety Hour — including how Maureen McCormick was constantly coked up and why Robert Reed was totally okay with dressing up as Carmen Miranda.

Susan Olsen booksigning in Santa Monica

lcreech writes with an excerpt from the Daily Mail's description of a new Segway-style one-person vehicle being shown off by Honda: "The vehicle looks like a very modern unicycle and to ride it you simply lean your weight in the direction you want to go, whether that's forward, backwards or even sideways. It maintains its own balance travelling up to 3.7MPH. Not very fast."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bionic Eye is a $0.99 augmented reality app for the iPhone to help you find fast "food" chain restaurants.

From Cult of Mac:

Designed for the iPhone 3GS, Bionic Eye is an augmented reality app that overlays information about nearby points of interest over the iPhone’s camera. Hold the camera up to the building in front of you, and thanks the iPhone’s GPS and compass, the screen is overlaid with little virtual signs that say what’s inside. It also includes virtual signposts showing the way to the nearest subway station or Starbucks coffee shop.

Bionic Eye iPhone App Points the Way To the Nearest Hooters

griffjon writes "The new hardware release (you can read about the upgrade here) also comes with a dual-boot option. Start rejoicing now; it's not XP or Sugar (the native, education-centric OS) — it's Sugar or Gnome. And of course there are other homebrew distributions like Xtra Ordinary, built off of Debian."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've seen all sorts of ridiculous claims about the supposed "costs" of copyright infringement. In almost every case, these claims break down under even the slightest scrutiny. Yet, throwing around big numbers tends to get press coverage, and apparently the photography industry has finally jumped onto the trend. Rose M. Welch points out that the CEO of a stock photo site is claiming that infringement costs the industry $10 billion per year. Now, that's quite impressive, considering the entire current stock photo industry is only $2 billion. And, while the reporter expresses some skepticism towards the number, the overall article is still deferential to the idea that $10 billion might not be that far off, and thus, obviously, there's a huge problem. Wouldn't it be nice if reporters actually explored where such numbers come from and why they're totally ridiculous? Does anyone actually think that most of the people who use such photos without authorization would pay for them otherwise? Does anyone actually think the vast majority of those uses are "losses?" Then why report them as such? Why not focus on the real issue: that the market has changed and photographers (and stock photo sites) need to learn to adapt.

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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!

Carl writes in with a good question:

I make cool projects (I think so anyway), and I would really like them to be on Make. What do I need to do?

We occasionally receive really cool projects that we would like to publish, however they just don't have quite enough information for us to figure them out. So, here are some tips about documenting your projects in a way that makes them accessible.

The first step is to document your project during your build. The final product is what most people will see, however the build process can be equally interesting. I learn a lot from looking at the tools and techniques others use to construct their projects, and suspect many other makers do as well. Take some photos, comment some code, record some sound- whatever is appropriate for your project. For extra points, making a timelapse of your construction can be really fun to watch. The important thing is to keep the documenting process simple so that you don't get bogged down with it and forget to finish your project.

Once you have all of your cool documentation, you probably want to put it on the web somewhere. A great way to go is with Instructables, which is a site dedicated to hosting DIY projects. Another option is to use a more traditional blogging site. My favorite is WordPress, however Blogger is also a good alternative. If you have constructed your own website, that is great too, just make sure that each project has its own page. This is important, because it creates a permanent link to your project, making it possible for us to link to.

If you have taken video of your project, then by all means upload it to a free video hosting service. This allows us to embed your video in a post, which will greatly increase the chance that people will watch it. Again, there are a number of free services that you can use; Youtube and Vimeo are popular options.

The final step is to submit it to us! We have a nice tip line, try it out and don't be afraid to promote yourself!

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Everybody needs a robot eye on their sleeve to look out for invisible monsters.

“Miruko,” a wearable eyeball-shaped robot with a built-in camera and wi-fi capabilities, is designed to augment human perception by sensing and reacting to objects that cannot be seen with the naked eye.

In this video, Miruko’s creators demonstrate how the robotic eyeball can be used as an interface for a virtual monster-hunting game played in a real-world environment.

Worn on the player’s sleeve, Miruko’s roving eye scans the surroundings in search of virtual monsters that are invisible to the naked human eye. When a virtual monster is spotted, the mechanical eyeball rolls around in its socket and fixes its gaze on the monster’s location. By following Miruko’s line of sight, the player is able to locate the virtual monster and “capture” it via his or her iPhone camera.

Miruko: Wearable eyeball robot interface

Rophuine writes "Google has launched a product called SideWiki. It takes the form of a plug-in to Firefox and Internet Explorer which allows users to mark up the web by adding comments which can be seen by anyone else running SideWiki." Google's version joins a long line of attempts to impose a layer of comments on the Web, including Microsoft's Smart Tags and Third Voice.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apologies to Jason Morrison for stealing his macro for the title, there, but I just wasn't going to be able to live with myself if I went with one of the obvious "computer virus" gags. Because these are viruses, you know. Made from old computer parts. By sculptor Forrest McCluer. [via Neatorama]

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Okay, I don't have much of a comment on this one either way, other than that I found it to be quite an amusing topic for study, and thought some of you might appreciate it as well -- for the humor factor. Via Paul Kedrosky comes the news of an NBER research paper that found that people tend to die right after getting paid. Well, sorta:

Many studies find that households increase their consumption after the receipt of expected income payments, a result inconsistent with the life-cycle/permanent income hypothesis. Consumption can increase adverse health events, such as traffic accidents, heart attacks and strokes. In this paper, we examine the short-term mortality consequences of income receipt. We find that mortality increases following the arrival of monthly Social Security payments, regular wage payments for military personnel, the 2001 tax rebates, and Alaska Permanent Fund dividend payments. The increase in short-run mortality is large, potentially eliminating some of the protective benefits of additional income.

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After watching Microsoft and Sony drop the prices on the Xbox 360 and the PS3, Nintendo has decided to jump in with a price cut as well. Starting September 27th, the Wii will cost $199 in North America, a $50 drop from the previous price. Japan will be getting a slightly smaller price cut, but Europe seems to be left out of this change. Nintendo is hoping this reduction and the release of New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Wii Fit Plus in the coming months will boost slipping sales rates.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the hassles of my MakerBot is having to raise and lower the z-stage (the up-down platform holding the plastic extruder) by tugging on the rubber belt. Tug, tug, tug, just to get the extruder into the right position for beginning a print. Zaggo in the Thingiverse made a printable crank to solve this pesky annoyance.

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ifchairscouldtalk writes "A Phase III 'RV 144' study in Thailand succeeded in reducing HIV infection rate in trial with 31.2% effectiveness. The study was conducted by the Thailand Ministry of Public Health and used strains of HIV common in Thailand. It is not clear whether the vaccine, which combines AIDSVAX with Aventis Pasteur ALVAC-HIV canarypox vector, known as 'vCP1521,' would work against other strains in the United States, Africa or elsewhere. Strangely, the vaccine had no effect on levels of HIV in the blood of those who did become infected, providing 'one of the most important and intriguing findings' of the trial, according to Dr Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is one of the trial's sponsors."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just Posted: Our preview sample gallery from the Canon PowerShot G11. It's the first time in the G-series' history that the nominal resolution has decreased on a new model. We've got hold of a production version of Canon's latest flagship compact camera and so you can see for yourself what impact this move has had on the image output. As usual we've made sure to include a variety of light situations and ISO-settings.

David Levine points us to an analysis by Kevin Smith (not the movie maker) at Duke University of a recent report from the World Economic Forum, placing the US as 19th in how strong our intellectual property laws are. This report caused the US Chamber of Commerce to say it's evidence that the US needs stronger IP laws. Yet, Smith points out how silly this analysis is. First, being 19th out of 133 is already pretty damn near the top of the list. Second, the way the WEF ranked the strength of IP systems was based entirely on "executive perceptions" of IP laws in certain countries -- hardly a definitive measure. But, most important, the report shows nothing of the actual impact on innovation. So, Smith did a quick back-of-the-envelope look, and noticed something interesting:

I started with this list of countries based on economic growth (the growth rate of the Gross Domestic Product) using data from the CIA World Fact Book. The US is 67th in GDP growth rate, and I made a list of ten countries from the G-20 group of nations with higher growth rates than that of the US and compared that list of ten countries to the rankings of perceived strength of IP protection. All ten of these countries, it turns out, are perceived to have weaker IP protection than the US. To choose an obvious example, China has the fastest economic growth rate of any of the G-20 economies, but is ranked far below the US -- at 61st -- on the list of strong IP protectors.

It is easy to lie with statistics, of course, but this simple comparison suggests that weaker IP protections might actually correlate with economic growth....

This is not surprising, and has been supported by plenty of studies in the past. Eric Schiff's famous look at how the Netherlands and Switzerland had massive growth rates during a time without patents (or with very weak ones) is instructive here, but there are numerous other studies as well. It's quite clear that stronger patent law does not mean greater innovation or economic growth... and yet why would the US Chamber of Commerce falsely interpret the study that way? The most basic theory? Patents have never been about innovation or economic growth. They've always been about protecting incumbents against competition. Guess who are members of the US Chamber of Commerce? Yup... the incumbent business owners...

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Aman Ali, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the co-author of 30 Mosques, a Ramadan adventure taking him to a different mosque in New York City every day for a month. For the month of Ramadan, my friend Bassam and I gave you guys an insight into how Muslims across the United States observe Ramadan with our project 30 Mosques in 30 Days. But Iranian-American Jason Rezaian gives an interesting and critical look at Muslims observing Ramadan in five predominantly Muslim countries. Rezaian talks about how local cultures can sometimes twist Islam's religious practices. Take his Dubai story for example:

Dubai tends toward gluttony every month of the year, but during Ramadan, things are even more over the top, with nearly every eating establishment offering an Iftar fast-breaking gut-buster at sundown. It's Dubai doing what it does best: using its limited resources for its own commercial advantage. Even American fast-food outlets in Dubai offer Ramadan Value Meals, usually adding a dessert to the already calorie-packed meal deal. At the Dubai Mall, McDonald's was the only major international food chain that didn't have a special offer, just a banner that read: "Ramadan Kareem"--"Happy Ramadan."

Slate: My Ramadan World Tour

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Early tests with Google's Chrome Frame found IE8 runs 9.6 times faster than usual. The testers ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite." The other question is what is the performance hit of using the frame plug-in instead of running the browser natively.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two armed thieves entered the Musée Magritte in Brussels at 10am this morning and made off with surrealist René Magritte's Olympia, valued at £3 million. One of the thieves rang the bell and asked to be let in. When he entered he pulled a gun and ordered the woman who answered the door to let his accomplice in.

A policeman said: “There were three museum workers inside at the time and two Japanese tourists. All five of them were ordered out the back and told to keep quiet by the man with the gun.

“In the museum the other person stole the painting and they both made good their escape. They seemed to know which painting they wanted to steal - they took the whole painting off the wall, including the frame.”

What usually happens to stolen paintings? Do the thieves hold them for ransom, do they sell them to private collectors who have secret museums in the homes, or what?

Armed thieves steal Magritte painting in daylight raid

This awful figurine from the SAW movies is actually a pretty cool 30 second sample/playback module that's easy to hack. You can buy them here for $2 a pop at allelectronics.com. It's almost worth the $2 just for the AAA batteries that come with it.

Add audio IN and OUT jacks, a pitch control and a loop switch using the schematic shown below.

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Barence writes "Intel has stunned visitors at IDF by showing off the world's first four-screen laptop. The oddly-named 'Tangent Bay' has three miniature touchscreens set horizontally into the case below the main, full-sized panel. It is a fully functional prototype: delegates were able to scroll photos around the touchscreens by swiping with a finger. The idea smacked a little too much of the ill-fated Vista SideShow." Seems strange that they would put the screens above the keyboard. I think embedding an iPhone type touchscreen in place of the trackpad would be a far more useful thing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wacom has refreshed its Bamboo line of interactive tablets to include multi-touch and gesture-based control. First up are the Bamboo for office users and Bamboo Fun aimed at photographers and artists. They use either a pen or a multi-touch option that allows finger gestures to zoom, flip and rotate documents and images. There is also a less-expensive touch-only model called the Bamboo Touch. Beyond these three core products Wacom has also launched regional models including Pen-only models.

Mackenzie Cowell is one of the founders of DIYbio.org. He is featured in the most recent of our ongoing series of video interviews with notable makers, sponsored by Dow chemical, over at elementsofhumanity.com. Mac is a big advocate, not just of the fledgling discipline of synthetic biology (or "biological engineering," as it's coming to be known), but of the idea that amateurs, hobbyists, and so-called "citizen scientists" have a meaningful role to play in its development. Check it out.

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The city of Corona, CA is apparently looking to change the way it deals with redlight camera violations in an effort to avoid having to cough up some of the money it gains from redlight fines to the state and the county. They claim that this is to lower the fines that those caught by the cameras have to pay, and are positioning it as such, but it seems that residents aren't buying it. Beyond trying to evade California laws on redlight camera violations, it actually means the city would get more cash from such violations, and has some other nefarious effects. As Jeff Nolan notes, it's also of questionable constitutionality:

The problem here is that Corona is shredding the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the right to a trial by jury. By reclassifying a moving violation (a traffic offense governed by the vehicle code) to an administrative violation (governed by the appropriately named government code) Corona is doing something really nefarious. In order to appeal an administrative citation you have to admit guilt, pay the full fine, and then apply for a hearing in front of an administrative official, not a judge in a court. The city could simply deny all hearings for administrative violations or schedule them far out in advance knowing full well that they have your money, which you had to pay before you could appeal.

The original article also notes that the majority of such fines are not on people running redlights directly, but people doing rolling stops before doing a right turn on red -- an action that very rarely leads to an accident. But it sure does dump lots of money in city coffers.

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viralMeme writes "An appeals court in Paris has upheld the ruling from a lower court, which found that the French firm Edu4 had violated the GNU General Public License (GPL). The plaintiff was the French Organisation Association francaise pour la Formation Professionnelle des Adultes (AFPA), an umbrella organization for adult education." The basic charge was the removal of copyrights and such from VNC source code, and not distributing it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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

When I was a kid I was often reprimanded and sometimes even kicked out of class for drawing comics in school. Now, research has shown that comics are a great way to turbo-charge literacy in reluctant readers (especially in boys), and comics are suddenly being welcomed into classrooms all over the world.

With this in mind, my partners at Bitstrips and I have developed Bitstrips for Schools, an educational comic-making service. We piloted it last spring in a handful of Ontario classrooms, and the kids went crazy for it, creating almost 3000 comic strips in six weeks time (see video). Their creativity has astounded me, as have the incredibly cool and dedicated teachers I've had the chance to work with (link).

Bitstrips for Schools has since been licensed by the Ontario Ministry of Education, which means that 2 million kids now have at their fingertips the tools to make their own comics.

We also just introduced a "self-serve" option that lets teachers outside of Ontario buy cheap one-classroom licenses.

So yes, in interests of full disclosure, this is a plug for a website I have an interest in. But it's also a website I'm super proud to be a part of!

Bitstrips for Schools.

Mark writes "The release of Google Chrome Frame, a new open source plugin that injects Chrome's renderer and JavaScript engine into Microsoft's browser, earlier this week had many web developers happily dancing long through the night. Finally, someone had found a way to get Internet Explorer users up to speed on the Web. Microsoft, on the other hand, is warning IE users that it does not recommend installing the plugin. What does the company have against the plugin? It makes Internet Explorer less secure. 'With Internet Explorer 8, we made significant advancements and updates to make the browser safer for our customers,' a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. 'Given the security issues with plugins in general and Google Chrome in particular, Google Chrome Frame running as a plugin has doubled the attack area for malware and malicious scripts. This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you've ever tried to watch a movie on your phone in bed then you'll definitely appreciate this free-standing phone stand hack from Andrew over at Recombu. There's never been an easier way to get your lazy on. Enjoy.

[via recombu]

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CWmike writes "Intel is working on a new optical interconnect that could possibly link mobile devices to displays and storage up to 100 meters away. The optical interconnect technology, Light Peak, could communicate data between systems and devices associated with PCs at speeds of up to 10Gbits/sec., said David Perlmutter, vice president and general manager of Intel's mobility group. The technology uses light to speed up data transmission between mobile devices and connected devices like storage, networking and audio devices, the company said. The technology could help transfer a full-length Blu-ray movie in less than 30 seconds, says a post on Intel's site. Light Peak can run multiple protocols simultaneously over a single cable, enabling mobile devices to perform tasks over multiple connected devices at the same time. "Optical technology also allows for smaller connectors and longer, thinner, and more flexible cables than currently possible," according to the Intel entry. It could also lead to thinner and fewer connectors on mobile devices, Perlmutter said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In my last post about Lily Allen's hypocrisy in uploading tons of songs without authorization, while saying it's good to cut off internet access for regular uploaders, one of the commenters made a good point: we should use this as a teaching moment, to try to show Ms. Allen why her position is wrong, rather than focusing on calling her a hypocrite. And, indeed, that would be great, but it seems like a difficult lesson for some -- including Ms. Allen -- to grasp. Her response to my post seems to come up with a variety of excuses, none of which actually touch on the actual point:

i made those mixtapes 5 years ago, i didn't have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry back then...

The point is that, thanks to today's technology, it's quite easy for people to infringe while doing what they think is a good and reasonable thing. Lily, you created these mixtapes to promote both your own music and the music of others you liked. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But it's infringing. Think of all the other people who are just like you 5 years ago. They don't have knowledge of the workings of the music industry, and they're trying to promote themselves or share music they like. But, based on the laws that you, yourself now support, the Lily of 5 years ago might not have an internet connection. Even though the "infringement" you did was for entirely innocent reasons. How is that fair or just?

The point (and this was the same point we tried to make with our original post about copying a Techdirt post) is that incidental infringement is almost impossible to avoid. Everyone infringes in some way or another in the course of a day. One paper found that people infringe many times over in the course of a single day. Everyone does. And while your infringements are a bit more... um... blatant than most, it highlights the problem of having such a draconian action against file sharers. Cutting them off the internet for something that everyone is doing all the time seems quite problematic, doesn't it?

So, a quick question for you, Lily: Is "well I uploaded those songs before I knew how the music industry worked" a reasonable defense to prevent Lord Mandelson from taking away your internet access or the internet access of anyone else?

As your article clearly states , lilyallenmusic.co.uk is an EMI run website, which is exactly why i don't acknowledge it (i think theres a link to it on my myspace(which i do run), thats purely because, my record contract states i cant sell my merchandise online anywhere else on the net . i don't post on there, i dont even look at it. the record company run it.

Fair enough, but really the fact that it's a major label owned site was a separate issue (having to do with EMI's claims in its lawsuit against MP3Tunes). It still doesn't change the fact that you created these mixtapes, and used them to advance your career. And now you are claiming that the very same tactics should not be allowed for others?

In your original post pushing back on the Featured Artists Coalition, you complained about how they were all big stars, and how their plan would hurt the up-and-coming artist. And yet, when you yourself were an up-and-coming artist, you used free music distribution to your own advantage. Now you're not only looking to take that option away from up-and-coming artists, you're looking to kick them entirely offline for a period of time. It seems like that's a much bigger "harm" to up-and-coming artists than people sharing their music and promoting them for free.

But just like you mocked the FAC artists for having an unfair advantage for being big, you seem to be in the same position. You want to take away tools from up-and-coming artists that you yourself used.

Anyway the snippets of songs you hear on those mixtapes are about 30 seconds to 1 minute in length, in traditional mixtape style, it is infringement, correct, but it's not my site, it's EMI's. i am not a hypocrite, i don't illegally download music, and i still think unauthorised file sharing is wrong.

But you were the one who created the mixtapes, correct? You were the one who infringed and uploaded them and offered them to the world. That they're now on a site controlled by EMI is quite besides the point.

If you truly believe that regular uploaders should have their internet access taken away, why not make an example of yourself? Why not take away your own internet access for a year to prove the point? Or do you not think the laws you want to apply to everyone else should apply to you?

Again, the whole point here is that what you did was entirely natural and made plenty of sense. Lots of people do it today. They do it because they love music. There's nothing wrong with that, and you know it (or, apparently, knew it at one point in the past). And, there are many ways to take advantage of that fact. Just as 50 Cent does. Just as you did. Going to war with the fans who made you who you are today, in part because of your own infringing behavior, just doesn't make any sense. You keep saying that file sharing harms artists, but it existed five years ago as well, and didn't harm you. It helped you. So why would you want to take that away from everyone else?

Update: Wow. In the half an hour or so that I took to write this post, Lily erased the blog post where she responded (I've got a screenshot if anyone wants to see it), and just added a note to Twitter, saying that she's shut down the entire blog due to too much abuse. Lily, it's not abuse if we're just asking you to rethink your positions that appear to not be particularly well thought out.

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The electric chair is an old haunted-house standby, but YouTuber kenpilot's version is really outstanding. Excelsior!

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and you could be chosen as a winner.

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Glyn sez, "In 2005, Boing Boing reported on the arrest of a London geek for the 'crime' of carrying a 'bulky' backpack (e.g., a laptop bag), wearing an 'unseasonably warm' coat (it was one of the coldest July days on record), and 'avoiding the police' (he was looking at an SMS on his phone when he went through the turnstiles and so didn't make eye-contact with the officers there). [Ed: his house was subsequently raided, his data and computers confiscated and examined] After four years the police have finally admited they should never have arrested him in the first place."

I would like to apologise on behalf of the Metropolitan Police Service for the circumstances that arose on 28 July 2005 including your unlawful arrest, detention and search of your home. I appreciate this has had a deep and traumatic impact on your lives and I hope that the settlement in this case can bring some closure to this.

I shall ensure that the officers concerned are made aware of the impact of the events of that day and also the details of the settlement in this case.

Yours sincerely

[signature of Chief Superintendent Wayne Chance]

Borough Commander
Southwark

Innocent in London - 'Suspicious behaviour on the tube' (Thanks, Glyn!)

My friend Thomas Edwards, who was the founder of Dorkbot DC, and is now involved in Dorkbot SoCal, told me that he'd gotten a MAKE Controller Kit v2 to work with some of his networked physical computing projects. I asked him if he'd like to write a no-holes-barred review of the kit. Here's what he had to say. - Gareth Branwyn

I've programmed a lot of microcontrollers in my day: PICs, BASIC Stamps, Comfile CUBLOCs, and of course, Arduinos. But recently I've been working on networked physical computing projects that require Ethernet, motor drivers, and servo drivers. Rather than try to stack up a bunch of Arduino shields, I decided to take the plunge and try the MAKE Controller v2, which integrates all those capabilities.

What is the MAKE Controller Kit?
The MAKE Controller Board ($60 separate) is built on the Atmel AT91SAM7X256 microcontroller. This chip incorporates the ARM7TDMI ARM Thumb Processor, which has a 32-bit RISC architecture and a 16-bit instruction set. The chip has 256 Kbytes of internal high-speed flash memory for programs and 64 Kbytes of static RAM. It packs a lot of power.

In order to do anything interesting with the MAKE Controller Board, it needs a power supply and other support circuitry, so the board must be plugged into a support board. One support option is the Interface Board ($32.50, or $85 with MAKE Controller Board), which provides 35 digital input/outputs, 2 serial ports, TWI, CAN, SPI, Ethernet, and USB interfaces.,The other option is the Application Board ($52). The MAKE Controller Kit ($120 altogether) from Making Things is a combination of MAKE Controller Board and the MAKE Application Board.

The Application Board is about 3-¼" long by 4" wide, and when combined with the Controller Board, comes to about 5/8" tall. There are six screw holes for mounting.

Ins and Outs
The MAKE Controller Kit has eight analog inputs with 10 bits of resolution. The Kit can read input voltages from 0-3.3V, but is protected from damage if higher voltages are applied to the analog inputs.

The Kit also has eight high-current (1A) digital outputs. These are driven from two SN754410NE quad H-driver chips, and can be configured to drive eight individual digital outputs, drive four DC motors in forward or reverse using the H-drivers, control two stepper motors, or a combination of these options. These digital outputs can also be controlled with pulse-width modulation (PWM), for controlling DC motor speed, for example. There are four PWM signal generators available on the board, each one driving two of the digital outputs.

The analog in and digital outs utilize screw-down terminal connectors. You need to get a small (jeweler-size) screwdriver to effectively use these, but they're very convenient compared with having to solder header pins on wires to connect to an Arduino.

The Kit also has four connections to drive standard servos. Jumpers allow the V+ voltages for the digital and servo outputs to come either from the regulated 5V supply, or from an external DC power supply, if you need more current or a different V+ voltage.

The external supply for the servos is separate from the external V+ "main power supply" for the board. So, for example, you might want to drive your servos with an external 6V supply, but provide your digital outputs with 12V from the main board power to drive a DC motor. To add flexibility, each bank of four digital outputs has its own 5V/V+ jumper. Obviously, Making Things has been thinking deeply about real-world uses of this board.

The Kit has both mini USB and Ethernet interfaces. The USB connection can also power the Kit (although with a limited amount of output DC current). Other data interfaces include a hardware serial port and a Two-Wire Interface (TWI, aka I2C) bus. Four status LEDs are found on the Application Board, and a single status LED is located on the Controller Board.

The Kit can be powered with an external DC supply with voltage in a range of 5V to 24V. I ran it with a 12V supply and did not find any "hot spots" on the board (unlike my experience with the Arduino).

It should be noted that v2 of the Application Board has changed significantly from v1. No longer present is the 8-position DIP switch and trimpot, and the JTAG (used for on-chip debugging) and CAN bus connectors on the v1 Application Board are now just solder pads, available if you want to add connectors to them.

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Michael Skoler, over at Nieman Reports, has such an amazingly good essay on how the traditional news business lost its audience, I'm having trouble deciding which parts to quote. The whole thing is great, and is a must read. The basic thesis, though, is one you'll hear a lot around these parts. As the newspaper folks lash out at everyone, the real problem has been their own inability to adapt and change. They were built on a model where they were the sole place for a community to gather, but that community now has other options, and the news media has not kept up. Here's one snippet:

The truth is the Internet didn't steal the audience. We lost it. Today fewer people are systematically reading our papers and tuning into our news programs for a simple reason--many people don't feel we serve them anymore. We are, literally, out of touch.

Today, people expect to share information, not be fed it. They expect to be listened to when they have knowledge and raise questions. They want news that connects with their lives and interests. They want control over their information. And they want connection--they give their trust to those they engage with--people who talk with them, listen and maintain a relationship.

Trust is key. Many younger people don't look for news anymore because it comes to them. They simply assume their network of friends--those they trust--will tell them when something interesting or important happens and send them whatever their friends deem to be trustworthy sources, from articles, blogs, podcasts, Twitter feeds, or videos.

Mainstream media are low on the trust scale for many and have been slow to reach out in a genuine way to engage people. Many news organizations think interaction is giving people buttons to push on Web sites or creating a walled space where people can "comment" on the news or post their own "iReports."

People aren't fooled by false interaction if they see that news staff don't read the comments or citizen reports, respond and pursue the best ideas and knowledge of the audience to improve their own reporting. Journalists can't make reporting more relevant to the public until we stop assuming that we know what people want and start listening to the audience.

Again, don't just read this snippet, read the whole thing. It goes on to talk about how other community sites have built trust, and have done it by really involving the community and empowering them. Anyone in the news business who doesn't understand this shouldn't be working in the news business much longer.

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Toe, The writes "Gizmodo details the Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) (based on the P-791), a spyship from US Army's Space and Missile Defense Command capable of hovering at 20,000 feet. Planned for deployment in Afghanistan, the ship can float for three weeks and carry well over a ton of payload, apparently surveillance equipment. The video on Gizmodo of the P-791 shows that these ships are a hybrid not only of both buoyancy and propulsive lift, but also of both awe and hilarity."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Toe, The writes "Gizmodo details the Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) (based on the P-791), a spyship from U.S Army's Space and Missile Defense Command capable of hovering at 20,000 feet. Planned for deployment in Afghanistan, the ship can float for three weeks and carry well over a ton of payload, apparently surveillance equipment. The video on Gizmodo of the P-791 shows that these ships are a hybrid not only of both buoyancy and propulsive lift, but also of both awe and hilarity."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've never needed corrective eyewear of any kind (though, I sense I may finally be reaching the point where I need to explore such things), and I have to admit that I've always been a bit squeamish about the concept of putting contact lenses in my eyes. But with some engineers working on ways to build a virtual display system into a contact lens, so you can overlay what you see with additional information, it may become way too tempting not to use contact lenses at some point. Forget computer screens... you could just do all your computing with your eyes closed (or open). Suddenly, the whole concept of augmented reality becomes a lot bigger than just some silly app on your iPhone. It sounds like the prototypes are still pretty early stage, but this is one "science fiction" type idea that seems like it may actually have a chance of becoming real at some point.

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Nethemas the Great writes "Information has leaked ahead of the scheduled NASA press conference tomorrow that we have found unambiguous evidence for water on the moon. From the article, 'Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called "unambiguous evidence" of water across the surface of the moon.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lily Allen's anti-piracy rant has made her notorious among copyfighters, who have subjected her site and her words to close scrutiny, discovering that Allen's website is chock-a-block with infringing scans of newspaper articles, infringing mix-tapes (even the rant she posted was lifted from Techdirt). Her all-caps responses ("I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS THAT I WASNT TRYING TO PASS OF THOSE WORDS AS MY OWN , HERE IS A LINK TO THE WEBSIITE I ACQUIRED THE PIECE FROM.") are the kind of nutty, defensive shouty words that chum the water online.

It's tempting to count coup here and write Allen off as a hypocrite, but there's a more important story here. Allen just hasn't thought this through. Copyright is problematic for everyone: musicians, fans, bloggers. The absence of clear affirmative rights to make personal copies, to share with your friends, to copy for the purposes of discussion and commentary (as opposed to the fuzzy and difficult-to-interpret fair use guidelines, which have been further confused by the entertainment industry's bold attempts to convince us all that they don't matter and can't be relied upon) means that we're all in a state of constant infringement.

A law that no one understands and no one abides by is no law at all. Parts of copyright -- the right to regulate how commercial licenses with industrial entities work -- are really important to me and to all working artists. But if we continue to try to expand copyright to cover everything, every interaction that involves a copy (which is every interaction these days), then the broad consensus that copyright is nonsense will continue to grow, and we'll lose the good stuff as well as the ridiculous stuff.

For the record, I am a small-time Lily Allen fan, and I bought her latest CD after hearing it for free, when a friend emailed me some tracks. If Ms Allen would prefer, I can stop buying and listening to her music, given that I discovered it through "piracy."

Also, this is not the only infringement on her blog. While she's trying to point out how much damage 'pirates' do to the music industry she blatantly infringed the copyrights of a number of newspapers by posting scanned articles.

To make things even more absurd Techdirt discovered that Lily is pirating music herself by offering some unauthorized mixtapes (tape 1 and tape 2) on her website LilyAllenMusic.com. The tracklist of one of the mixtapes reveals a list of no less than 19 unauthorized tracks. This means the RIAA can easily sue her for millions.

Lily Allen Pirates Music, Is Clueless About Copyright

David "Everything is Miscellaneous/Small Pieces Loosely Joined" Weinberger sez, "I've started a series of video interviews with FCC Broadband Strategy folks (and others) about the process and its progress. The first is with Blair Levin, director of the initiative. He explains the value of broadband; confirms that broadband means access to the open, neutral network; defends the impartiality of the initiative's process; and talks about the causes of the U.S.'s low ranking when it comes to broadband access, prices, and speeds."

He's also posted interviews with Sascha Meinrath on mesh networking, and Clay Shirky on why freedom ought to be a part of the infrastructure.

Broadband Strategy Week (Thanks, David!)

Nelson C sez, "Daryl Cunningham (a student mental health nurse based in London) is working on a comic book called Psychiatric Tales, due out in early 2010. On his LJ he posts a chapter on schizophrenia."

Schizophrenia (Thanks, Nelson!)

Mike Thompson's "Blood Lamp" is a single-use lantern that draws its energy from a drop of your blood, making you consider the cost of energy in a uniquely personal way.

For the lamp to work one breaks the top off, dissolves the tablet, and uses their own blood to power a simple light. By creating a lamp that can only be used once, the user must consider when light is needed the most, forcing them to rethink how wasteful they are with energy, and how precious it is.

Blood Lamp (via Cribcandy)

Sneakey is a project from Benjamin Laxton, Kai Wang, and Stefan Savage at the UCSD vision lab that has shown that it is possible to duplicate keys from photos taken at a distance and/or an angle. They've published a paper and are offering to release their code if there is "sufficient interest."

The access control provided by a physical lock is based on the assumption that the information content of the corresponding key is private --- that duplication should require either possession of the key or a priori knowledge of how it was cut. However, the ever-increasing capabilities and prevalence of digital imaging technologies present a fundamental challenge to this privacy assumption. Using modest imaging equipment and standard computer vision algorithms, we demonstrate the effectiveness of physical key teleduplication --- extracting a key's complete and precise bitting code at a distance via optical decoding and then cutting precise duplicates. We describe our prototype system, Sneakey, and evaluate its effectiveness, in both laboratory and real-world settings, using the most popular residential key types in the U.S.

Sneakey (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

As part of the ongoing serialization of my forthcoming novel MAKERS, Tor.com has commissioned Idiots' Books to produce 81 CC-licensed, interlocking illustrations, one for each installment. Periodically, Tor is adding these to a little Flash-toy that lets you rotate and realign the images like tiles (each has edge-elements that matches up with the others). They've just put up the 5X5 grid, which I'm finding addictively fun.

Makers Tile Game 5x5

Looking to take a break from tinkering on your latest project this weekend? Here some fine maker events to check out, from the MAKER Events calender. Wish your event was on the list? Add it to the calender!

In the next week:
Gizmodo Gallery
New York, NY
Sept 23 to Sep 27, 2009, (times vary)

Innovations of Yesteryear
Waltham, MA
Saturday, Sep 26, 2009, 10am - 4pm

Working Waterfront Festival
New Bedford, MA
Saturday, Sep 26 and Sunday, Sep 27, 2009, 11am - 7pm

Introduction to Sensors
Toronto, ON
Saturday, Sep 26 and Sunday, Sep 27, 2009, 12pm - 4pm

Circuit Bending Workshop
Milwaukee, WI
Wednesday, Sep 30, 2009, 6:30pm - 9pm

End of Summer BBQ Potluck for Portland Makers
Portland, OR
Saturday, Sep 26, 2009, 3pm +

Red Bull Soapbox Race
Los Angeles, CA
Saturday, Sep 26, 2009, 11am +

Start planning for:
Introduction to Electronics
Brooklyn, NY
Saturday, Oct 3, 2009, 1pm - 4pm

Mobile Art && Code
Pittsburgh, PA
Friday, Nov 6 to Sunday, Nov 8, 2009, all weekend

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I bought a cool domain for a project I'm working on, r2.ly.

It takes Libya forever to approve these things, but they finally have, and I've changed the DNS to ns1.slicehost.com and ns2.slicehost.com (where I now have an account, with DNS control) but I can't tell what's going wrong cause I don't really know how to debug DNS.

I just know that it's not resolving on any of my machines.

Can you tell what the problem is with it?

And if you solve the problem you get to call me stupid in the comments and I won't moderate it out.

Well, this is odd. Amie Street is the well known indie music site that lets people purchase music with a dynamic pricing system -- the music is cheap at first, but as more people buy, the price goes up. It has some neat features to it. So it seemed like a big deal to hear that Sony Music had done a deal with the company to offer its music on the site... except that it's not using the dynamic pricing. Instead, it's pricing the music at $0.69, $0.99 or $1.29, based on popularity. In other words: the exact same pricing as iTunes. So what, exactly, is the benefit of offering the exact same pricing on Amie Street? About the only good thing you can say for this deal is at least it didn't muck up the pricing of everything else, like what happened when Sony Music did did its deal with eMusic. Though... it is worth noting that Amie Street did recently put some additional restrictions on redownloading songs. Perhaps the company tried to separate out the announcements so that no one connected the two things...? If that's the case, why bother signing with Sony Music in the first place. Amie Street offers no benefit to people who want Sony Music. All it seems to do is go against the very point of Amie Street.

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An anonymous reader writes "Data centers and telcos in the Australian cities of Sydney and Brisbane have shut off external ventilation systems, restricted loading dock access and attended false alarms after a major dust storm choked the cities today. The storm is said to be the worst of its type ever recorded in Australia. Macquarie Telecom disengaged automatic deployment of fire-prevention gas from the fire alarm to prevent gas being released on a false alarm. Other major data center operators reported clogged air filters and heat exchangers and said they would be performing cleaning and maintenance operations this week."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Great overview - Making the most of open-source hardware - Electronics Weekly - Gerald Coley, Texas Instruments...

AT A GLANCE

* Open-source hardware offers an advanced start on your design.
* Open-source software complements open-source hardware.
* Open-source hardware prepares your PCB (printed-circuit-board)-fabrication and -assembly houses for high-volume production.
* You may want to share your improvements by making them open-source additions, as well.

Many designers are familiar with open-source software, such as Linux, in which the source code is available to all. However, fewer are familiar with organizations offering open-source hardware. These organizations release free information, including schematics, BOM (bill-of-materials) information, and PCB (printed-circuit-board)-layout data, covering the overall hardware design.

Designers with this information can build or add to a freely available design. In many cases, open-source software supports the original design, providing additional advantages. Some aspects of open-source hardware go beyond the sharing of the design itself.

These aspects can save time and money for not only hardware developers but also PCB designers and fabricators, contract manufacturers, and even software developers.

You can license open-source projects from organizations such as Creative Commons, which offers the Attribution-ShareAlike licensing program. Creative Commons stipulates that a user must attribute the open-source work in the manner that the original designer specifies but not in a way that indicates that the original designer endorses the user's work. Likewise, if users provide that work as open-source hardware, releasing it back to the community for access by others, then they must provide that work under the same Attribution-ShareAlike licensing...

Read the rest in the latest Electronics Weekly or online... Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Open source hardware | Digg this!

There have been plenty of misguided lawsuits against Google, when someone gets upset and realizes that competitors are buying AdWords on their name or other trademarks. But, of course, that shouldn't be a trademark violation (unless the resulting ad is confusing). It's just well-placed marketing. Furthermore, even if it is trademark infringement, it shouldn't be Google's liability, but the party who bought and created the ad. However, the lawsuits still keep coming -- with the latest one being in India. But what makes this one special is that the complaining company seems to be buying those types of ads itself. So while it's complaining that competitors' ads show up on searches for its own name, it had no problem buying ads on competitors' names. Why not just try competing by offering a better service, rather than worrying about how competitors advertise?

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dostert writes "With all of the recent hype of multitouch notebooks, the Apple Tablet, the Microsoft Courier, and the CrunchPad, I've been a bit curious about what happened to the good old pen and slate tablet PCs. I'm a mathematics professor at a small college and have been searching for a good cheap tablet (under $1000) which I can use to lecture, record the lecture notes along with my voice, and post up video lectures for the class. I have seen some suggestions, but many are large scale implementations at state universities, something my small private college clearly cannot afford. All I have been able to find is either tiny netbooks (like the new Asus T91), expensive full featured tablets (like the Dell XT), or multitouch tablets, that really wouldn't allow for the type of precision mathematics needs. I know a Sympodium device would work great, but we really can't afford to put one of those in each room, so something portable would be ideal. All I've been left with is considering an HP tx series. It seems nobody has created a new tablet like this in quite sometime, and HP, Fujitsu, and Dell are just doing incremental updates to their old designs. Does anyone have experience with this?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andy Warhol's famous Marilyn recreated by a team of paintballers!

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How much design goodness can be packed onto a bottle cap? Judge for yourself.

Soda Caps Unused & Cork Lined

Gijs Gieskes hooked up a circuit bent camera to a VU meter to create the VU Cam. I really enjoy the neat look of his homebrew circuit board, and the repeatable-looking results it achieves on the camera. He also includes a schematic, in case you want to try making your own.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

Everyone does it at some point: you send an email to the wrong person. Hopefully the content isn't that bad or important -- but it happens. However, when a Wyoming bank, Rocky Mountain Bank, accidentally sent confidential and sensitive information to the wrong Gmail account, the bank ended up taking Google to court to find out the identity of the individual. The bank had tried emailing the wrong address again, but got no response. Google, naturally, refused to just give up the name of the person without a court order -- so the bank went to court. It also tried to have the case sealed, but the judge has rejected that idea. You can certainly understand the bank's concern here, but it does seem a bit silly to have to bring someone else to court after you screwed up and sent the wrong email.

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