Here are some of my favorites from Craftzine this week:

Over-the-Socket Toothbrush Holder

Alice Wrist Warmers

Iconic Characters Reborn as Lego Sculptures

Knit Your Own Team Logo Scarf

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

Matt_dk writes "The US firm Space Adventures said on Friday it will be able to send two space tourists into orbit at once from 2012 onwards, on Soyuz spacecraft. 'We have been working on this project for a number of years,' said Sergey Kostenko, the head of the company's office in Russia. Each Soyuz will carry two tourists and a professional astronaut. One of the tourists will have to pass a year-and-a-half training course as a flight engineer. Space Adventures has been authorized by the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos to select and contract candidates for space tourist trips." Meanwhile, the AP has a look back at the delays and disappointments in the commercial spaceflight industry since Burt Rutan captured the Ansari X Prize 5 years ago — no space company has yet announced a date for commercial availability.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog celebrating the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.

For those who aren't familiar with The Books, check out my post from Friday where I shared some clips from their music.

I was lucky enough to have a quick phone chat with Nick Zammuto, one-half of The Books. The other half, Paul de Jong, was at the doctor's office at the time. Paul, as Nick puts it, is the "consummate collector" of the samples the band uses. In fact, all the archaic audio and video footage The Books have been collecting are archived and cataloged. "There's a lot of research that goes into what we do," Nick remarks as I try to quickly scribble his words down. At this point, my voice recorder died and my handy notepad dictated the rest of the conversation, albeit selectively.

Some Boing Boing readers were wondering about the new album, so let's get that out of the way first. The last LP came out in 2005 and we have only heard one beautiful cover of Cello Song by Nick Drake since. I asked him why it's been taking so long. "Children," Nick says, well aware that it's been a while, "I have a three year old and Paul has a daughter that's two." In the four years, Nick has edited and scored a documentary entitled, Biosphere 2, and has built a house with his wife in south Vermont. "But we're now in a place where we're comfortable to start again." Nick resides in New England now while Paul is in Albany, NY. They meet up once a week and see where everything is headed. Nick was a little vague on when we can expect the album. "Maybe Late Winter or early Spring 2010." They have left their old German label Tomlab and are now shopping for a new home.

What makes The Books a unique band is their ability to seamlessly integrate samples with intricate compositions that somehow end up flowing pleasantly. Here is the first track from their first album "Thought for Food", fittingly titled, "Enjoy Your Worries You May never Have them again."



"As we travel we go around thrift stores and Salvation Armys. We pick up a lot tapes before they end up in a landfill. They are all going to be gone soon." Digging up random archived videos and showcasing them to the world isn't really anything new. There are countless sites dedicated to highlighting this kind of stuff. But what separates The Books is the sincerity they approach the material. Case in point - in their live rendition of "That Right Aint Shit" a video plays with the founding members of the Mormon church taking their hats off and putting them back on. Before they start playing Nick says, "Hats off to them, and hats off to you" (start the video at 1 minute)



"I'm fully aware of the meta element with our music. We're recycling culture that would otherwise be lost. You know, you get so immersed in life and if you step back and see it for what it is, you'll see there is a lot to love and a lot to question."



In a world of cynical sites like Everything is Terrible and TV Carnage ripping apart and de-contextualizing videos found in thrift stores and libraries all around the world, The Books have uniquely crafted their mundane collection to stand for something more open ended and sincere. I asked him if he had seen anything uniquely Muslim as they went through all their footage. "We did find a tape of the Muslim Mr. Rogers." I couldn't believe it, and flooded the line with laughter. "Yeah, he was teaching kids how to wash their feet. But sadly, we lost the tape in the mail." To be honest, a part of me cringes when artists/musicians carelessly appropriate pieces of the Muslim experience, but I have faith in The Books. "We are very careful with how we use the material. Everything points to a more gentle approach." Let's hope they find that video tape.

The Books Official SIte

Listen to The Books on Lala

neutrino38 writes "This is an alert for all developers using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. At the beginning of January, Microsoft issued a security fix for Visual Studio 2005 forcing the use of new dynamic libraries (DLLs) by all applications compiled with this IDE. Basically, applications compiled with Visual Studio 2005 will not work anymore on an ordinary (non-dev) PC unless the newer DLLs are installed. And we found out that this is true on fully updated PCs. I just posted some details and some suggested fixes." Read below for some more background on Microsoft's so-called "side by side assemblies."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader points us to a forum posting with the inevitable followup to NVIDIA's crippling of PhysX for users of any other display adapter. "Windows 7 allows two display drivers to be used at once — like in Windows XP. Therefore, it is possible to use an NVIDIA card for PhysX and ATI card for graphics rendering. Sadly, since the release of 186 graphics drivers, NVIDIA has decided to block this feature anytime a Non-NVIDIA GPU is present in the system. In addition, for some incomprehensible reasons, the latest version of PhysX System Software also prevents PPU cards from working if a Non-NVIDIA GPU is present. ... A forum member by the name of GenL has released an experimental beta patch [that] intercepts disable-PhysX-if-Radeon-is-present-code. So far, according to user comments the patch delivers successful results." The forum post has a link to the patch for Windows 7.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cyrus writes "DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano plans to hire 1,000 security experts over the next three years. 'Department officials could not say precisely how many cyberexperts now work at DHS and its various component agencies such as the Secret Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Napolitano said she doubts it will be necessary to fill all 1,000 of the authorized positions, but she is focused on making DHS a "world-class cyberorganization."'" Cringely points out, "There aren't one thousand civilian cybersecurity experts in the entire friggin' world!!!!," except he uses all caps and bold.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

langelgjm writes "An article from yesterday's New York Times asks the question: will books be Napsterized? So far, piracy of books has not reached the degree of music or movie piracy, in part due to the lack of good equipment on which to read and enjoy pirated books. The article points to the growing adoption of e-book readers as the publishing industry's newest nemesis. With ever-cheaper ways to conveniently use pirated books, authors and publishers may be facing serious changes ahead. This is something I wrote about three months ago in my journal, where I called the Kindle DX an 'iPod for books.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

666 is a Nigerian film (in 4 episodes) by Nollywood producer Pastor Kenneth Okonkwo. Judging from the trailer above and a "review" in VICE, it's destined to be a psychotronic classic. The VICE writer promised to post the full flick to YouTube. He'd better hurry -- the devil makes work for idle hands. From VICE:

In the first scene of 666, the devil sends two assassins up to earth to kidnap a pregnant woman. They cut her belly open in a tunnel and steal the baby, whom they baptize in the service of Satan. Throughout the movie, Satan terrorizes the people of Nigeria despite the efforts of Pastor Okonkwo (yes, he also stars in the film). Okonkwo often sends lightning bolts down to hell by the power of extreme prayer.

In part two of the quartet, the kidnapped child returns to earth and causes all manner of problems. He seduces a woman in her late 20s by flashing lasers out of his eyes; he goes on a bar crawl and possesses a woman who then kills a priest. Then, when a gang of Christians capture him and attempt to ritually stab him to death, he uses his powers to brand each of their foreheads with a lovely 666.

"Nollywood Omen" (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

They ain't cheap, but Cydwoq's hand-made-in-Los-Angeles shoes are heart-thumpingly handsome. Comfortable, too, if the couple pairs I've bought over the years are any indication. I've just worn out a pair after five years, and I've taken advantage of the occasion to order a new set. My wife loves the pair I bought for her for our wedding, too.

Cydwoq

Reuters has a report about research being done on the in-game economies of MMOs like EverQuest II and World of Warcraft to better understand much larger economic situations in the real world. The games are used as case studies where researchers can do controlled experiments that they couldn't necessarily attempt if real money or goods were involved. "After studying 314 million transactions within the fantasy world of Norrath in EverQuest II, including trading in-game goods like armor, shields, leather, herbs and food, the researchers were able to calculate the GDP of one of the game servers (the back-end computer that hosts thousands of players in one world). As more people opened accounts and flocked to Norrath, spending money on new items, researchers saw inflation spike more than 50 percent in five months. 'We have seen that kind of volatility during times of war and in developing nations in the real world,' said [Dmitri Williams, assistant professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication]. 'Our own economy has turned out to be less stable than we'd all assumed.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is a fun little MIDI interface based on an Arduino. It converts the x/y movement into a MIDI signal. There is a promise of more details soon. In the mean time, check out this tutorial about creating MIDI output signals from an Arduino.

This is a gesture controlled MIDI controller I designed and built. It has a tilt sensor which affects to MIDI parameters it is sending out but also the color of the ball. I built several stereotypes to get it work the way I preffered. The pictures are from third generation. I am currently putting together fourth generation with better LEDs.

In the Maker Shed:


Arduino Mini Board, fully assembled

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

Here's a portable office built into an oversized repro of a vintage steamer trunk -- it's a movable workspace you can take on the QEII or sail off with on a zeppelin.

Crafted by antiques dealer and furniture maker Timothy Oulton of London, our oversized steamer trunk armoire is configured as an ingeniously designed secretary.

* Reproduction antique steamer trunk
* Handmade of distressed vintage cigar leather over a solid wood frame
* Aniline-dyed leather has an antiqued, vintage look
* Accented with over 3,000 hand-hammered brass nailheads
* Features a pull-down desktop and multiple drawers, cubbies, wire management and bookshelves
* Lined in leather-edged canvas
* Stands on wheels for mobility and closes for storage and privacy

Mayfair Steamer Secretary Trunk Vintage Cigar Leather (Thanks, Charlie!)

Robert sez, "I found this scrap metal homebuilt steampunk chubby R2D2 in Tokyo's Nakano Broadway. Pretty good welding!"

Steam Punk R2D2 (Thanks, Robert!)

Mechanist.tm writes "I recently purchased a NAS from a well-known online computer component shop. I have purchased several items from the website and have never had much trouble before. That was until I realized what I had bought was a terrible NAS. All the reviews on the site from users seemed very good. After a little research, it became clear that the product in question was indeed terrible. After finding the product pretty much useless for its intended purpose, I proceeded to write a review for it on the website to inform other would-be buyers. After about a week, I noticed that the review never made it up there, so I wrote another one just in case. After several attempts to leave a negative review for the product, I realized that the website was screening reviews and only posting the ones that made the products look good. All the reviews on the website are positive; I've only found one at less than 3 out of 5 stars. Is this legal? Ethically speaking, it's wrong, and it's intentionally misleading to the customer. Is there a good place to report behavior like this? How common is this among online retailers who provide user reviews?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

krou writes "A Canadian study currently under peer review apparently suggests that individuals given seasonal flu shots are twice as likely to get swine flu. The 'perplexing' study has thrown influenza health plans into disarray, with Quebec, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Nova Scotia all suspending seasonal flu shots for anyone under 65 years of age. The study appears to be confined to Canada; the US, Britain, and Australia have not reported the same problem, so some are suggesting that the research has 'study bias.' However, the research appears to be 'solid' according to Dr. Ethan Rubinstein, head of adult infectious diseases at the University of Manitoba. 'There are a large number of authors, all of them excellent and credible researchers. And the sample size is very large — 12 or 13 million people taken from the central reporting systems in three provinces.''

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This trick actually came in really handy the last time reckless teenagers accidentally killed a member of my family. It takes several months for the pumpkin to grow into the shape of the victim's face, but, that's actually sort of useful because it gives you time to cool down and figure out if you really want to go through with the whole vengeance-from-beyond-the-grave thing or not. If you decide against it, you can always use your hellpumpkin as the world's creepiest Jack-o'-lantern, which is what I ended up doing. It worked out great, at least until those same reckless teenagers kicked it into a pile of goo on my front porch. That's irony for you! So now I'm growing another one...

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.

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

reporter writes "According to a startling report just covered by the New York Times, 'senior staff members of the United Nations nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable atom bomb.' In 2007, American intelligence erroneously concluded that Tehran in 2003 stopped further research into designing a nuclear bomb. This conclusion was contradicted by German, French, and Israeli intelligence. Recently, London also concluded that the American assessment is incorrect. So, here we are. The Iranians have the knowledge to build a nuclear bomb and have been working relentlessly to perfect its design. Tehran is apparently able to create the components (e.g. enriched uranium) that can be assembled into such a weapon. Meanwhile, Jerusalem is communicating with the Kremlin about a list of Russian scientists it believes are assisting Iran's efforts to develop the bomb."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

adeelarshad82 writes "Windows Vista lost market share last month for the first time in almost two years, a sign that users are already abandoning the oft-ridiculed operating system in favor of the new Windows 7. According to Web metrics firm Net Applications, Vista dropped 0.2 percentage points during September to end the month at an 18.6% slice of the operating system pie. Windows 7, meanwhile, gained 0.3 percentage points, its biggest one-month gain since Microsoft began handing out the new OS to the public in January 2009. Windows 7 powered an estimated 1.5% of all computers that connected to the Internet last month, also a record."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gorgeous underwater photo exhibit...

Name a truly great British film and chances are it was made at Pinewood Studios, the most cinematic landmark Old Blighty has. Its reputation has resonated worldwide thanks to the biggest names in cinema filling its spaces and next month you will be able to get an insight into the craft and guile that goes on in there, when the Movieum of London in the city’s Southbank showcases underwater photographs from movies such as Casino Royale, The Da Vinci Code and Elizabeth: The Golden Age, as well as television features and music videos.

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

At Maker Faire Rhode Island, I saw Christina waiting near the AS220 Fab Lab for her son Forest. She was holding some of the replacement parts that he had made for his MakerBot. We talked a bit about what making means to her and Forest. They're already looking forward to Maker Faire 2010.

MAKE subscribers, watch your mailboxes for Volume 20: Kids, which should be arriving very soon.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Faire | Digg this!

alphadogg quotes from a Network World piece reporting on ICANN's study of the prevalence of proxy services that shield registrants' personal information from WHOIS queries. "Approximately 15% to 25% of domain names have been registered in a manner that limits the amount of personal information available to the public... according to the preliminary results of a report from ICANN... Domain owners who want to limit the amount of personal information available to the public generally use a privacy [proxy] service. ... [Proxy services] register domain names on behalf of registrants. The main objective of ICANN's study — which was based on a random sample of 2,400 domain names registered under .com, .net, .org, .biz, and .info — is to establish baseline information to inform the ICANN community on how common privacy and proxy services are." Spammers and other miscreants abuse the ability to register domains by proxy, in order to avoid being found; but ordinary users have a legitimate interest in keeping their personal information out of the hands of those same bad actors. What's the right balance?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Documentary film-maker Kirby Dick ("This Film is Not Yet Rated") has just released his latest doc, "Outrage," about anti-gay politicians who are secretly gay. These are the twisted lawmakers who campaign against gay rights in public, but who are, in fact, gay (and who generally enjoy the rights they're publicly against, thanks to their power and privilege).

An official selection of the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, OUTRAGE investigates the hidden lives of some of the country's most powerful policymakers - from now-retired Idaho Senator Larry Craig, to former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevy - and examines how these and other politicians have inflicted damage on millions of Americans by opposing gay rights. Equally disturbing, the film explores the mainstream media's complicity in keeping those secrets, despite the growing efforts to "out" them by gay rights organizations and bloggers.

Through a combination of archival news footage and exclusive interviews with politicians and members of the media, OUTRAGE probes the psychology of a double lifestyle, the ethics of outing closeted politicians, and the double standards that the media upholds in its coverage of the sex lives of gay public figures. As Barney Frank, perhaps the best-known openly gay member of Congress explains, "There is a right to privacy, but not a right to hypocrisy. It is very important that the people who make the law be subject to the law."

"Outrage" premieres on HBO this week.

OUTRAGE (Thanks, Kirby!)

CCP Games, the developer behind space MMORPG EVE Online, made waves in August when they announced DUST 514, a console MMOFPS which will tie into the EVE universe. Eurogamer is now running a preview of the new MMO, providing more information on how it will work and the way in which it will interact with EVE and its players. Quoting: "... battles take place on dynamic battlefields about 5 kilometers across. Unlike EVE itself, there will be a cap to the number of players per battle — CCP is 'still playing with numbers' (and presumably watching the development of 256-player MAG with interest), but assures us that this will not be less than 64 players. There will be a command structure, with infantry and squadron leaders on each side led by a player-commander on board the hulking Mobile Command Center airship. The commander will effectively be playing a real-time strategy game with living units, and will have an RTS-style view of the battlefield. He'll be dependent on the situational awareness of infantry players to clear the fog of war. He'll also be the target, with the ultimate aim of a battle — after several, varying sub-objectives — being to destroy the opposing side's MCC."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CmdrGravy weighs in with exciting archaeological news, "one of the most important prehistoric finds in decades" according to the article: a miniature Stonehenge a mile from the famous site. "Bluehenge," as the find is being called because of the assumed color of its (now-missing) stones, is believed to have been put up around the time of Stonehenge, 5,000 years ago. "All that remains of the 60-ft.-wide Bluehenge are the holes of 27 giant stones set on a ramped mount. Chips of blue stone found in the holes appear to be identical to the blue stones used in Stonehenge. The four-ton monsters, made of Preseli Spotted Dolerite — a chemically altered igneous rock harder than granite — were mined in the Preseli Mountains in Pembrokeshire and then rolled, dragged, and floated the 200 miles to the site on the banks of the Avon in Wiltshire."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Okay, MichaelLubke is officially my favorite reader ever. In response to my recent post speculating about mechanical gate openers, not only did he run out and snap some photos of a working "Gandy Slide-A-Way" near his ranch, but in response to appreciative comments from our readers he went back and got this video of it in operation. Awesome! Look at it go! Thanks so much Michael!

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

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes to inform us that the day after Red Hat advised SCOTUS that software should not be patentable, the Software Freedom Law Center filed its amicus brief in the Bilski case. "In this closely-watched case, the Supreme Court will decide whether the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was correct in restricting patentable processes to those 'tied to a particular machine or apparatus,' or which 'transform[s] a particular article into a different state or thing,' a conclusion which if fully implemented could bring to an end the widespread patenting of computer programs. ... This case gives the Supreme Court a chance to reaffirm what its past cases have held for more than a century: that no patent law consistent with the US Constitution can permit the monopolization of abstract ideas." Groklaw is running the usual cogent gloss with the full text of the SFLC's brief.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm flying back to NY to be with the family.

At first I thought -- sheez no big deal, I'll do the live podcast with Jay at 4PM at the SF Hilton. Then I called Jay and he said I should get to the airport and head home. I gave it a second or two of thought and realized he's right. This is no time to be talking about rebooting the news. It's time to reboot the family.

An aside, if anyone is at ONA09 and can record the event, it would be great. Of course I was going to do that, but I'll be over Wyoming or Nevada when it happens.

I thought of Bruce Sterling's inspirational talk at the Reboot conference in Copenhagen earlier this year. I'll try to paraphrase what he said. 1. If you could travel lighter you'd be happier. 2. Most people know this and wish they could get rid of stuff. 3. But you won't do it until something huge happens to disrupt your life. A divorce, you lose your job. A parent dies. Yup. Sterling goes on to say that you should make a list of things you'll drop when the disruption comes. I don't have a list.

Usually I have a day or more to prepare for a trip, and I usually don't forget anything major. Heck I usually don't forget anything at all. Not this time. I left a bunch of things on the dining room table. And I realizedI left my iPhone in the car about 1/2 hour before the flight was due to start boarding. So I made a dash out to the parking garage, got the phone and went back through security. With plenty of time to spare.

So much for my iPhone divorce.

It still hasn't hit me.

Life still feels pretty normal, even though I'm flying cross country again after returning home two days ago. I got a call from Andrew Baron who lost his father in similar circumstances earlier this year. There's some kind of bond between Andrew and myself. I wonder if his father and my father are hanging out where ever fathers go after they die.

If there is an afterlife, I guess it's timeless. Or time flashes by really fast. In the time it takes us to live a day they live three centuries. So for my dad and Andrew's dad it must be 2300 or something like that. To my father I'm already long-dead. A few days ago he said that soon he'd be pushing up daisies. I told him I'd be there a few days after him. In the virtual sense.

Who knows what comes next. I have a feeling there's a lot of that coming up.

Susan Kitchens and I live parallel lives too. Guess what, her father was born in 1929 too. And he's in hospice, as my father was. And she predicts he won't make it through 2009. There have been other big parallels in our lives.

The person sitting next to me on this flight, a nurse who lost her parents years ago, said it really hits you three months after it happens. Maybe. Right now I'm still standing at the plate with the bat in my hands and the pitch is coming out of the pitcher's hand in super-slow motion and I'm waiting for it to come at me so I can swing. Will I swing and miss, or hit a line drive, or hit it out of the park? Or something we don't even have a word for.

I know this -- when I was a little kid and realized that someday I'd lose a parent, it froze me with fear. Now, decades later it has happened. I'm not frozen at all. I'm in motion. Flying across the country on Virgin America #24.

A Flickr set of photos taken out the window of the flight.

Siker writes "In a world of giants such as Gmail and Rackspace, email service provider FastMail.fm is somehow doing great, with signups above the million mark and reliability above four 9s. Email Service Guide interviews Jeremy Howard, founder of FastMail.fm, to find out how. Also covered are the company's contributions to Open Source software such as Cyrus-IMAP and Thunderbird. Jeremy discusses the future of IMAP, how open protocols help FastMail.fm, and why he thinks SLAs from email providers are a con."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I had two circuit boards nagging me to be etched this morning. Without a photo developing tray, it seemed some modifications in technique were in order. Into the recycling bin I went looking for a smallish, wide mouthed glass jar. Yesterday's sandwich polished off a tasty mango chutney, and the jar was just about right. A little bit of cleaning, and it was ready for business.

The leftover etchant from yesterday's vinyl pcb resist adventure was in a plastic bottle and still had some potency left to it. The tea water was hot on the stove, so it was ready to provide some double boiler action. I poured some hot water into a steel pan, put the ferric chloride into the jar in the pan and dropped in the first board.

With a jar, you can tighten the lid and do more vigorous agitation than in a tray. Between the shaking and the heat, the process is quite a bit faster than when using a room temp bath and a pan. I forgot to check the time, but it was definitely quicker than yesterday. After the first of today's boards was cleared, I dropped in the second at 10 minutes to 11. This one I agitated even more than the first one, and it was easily done by 11. When it was clear, I rinsed off the boards and headed to the soldering iron.

After wiping down the boards with acetone to remove the adhesive from the vinyl sticker, I tinned the traces to get them ready for the chip, which will be soldered onto the PCB smd style.

This technique would be a lot simpler and safer to use with students in your maker classroom than agitating in open trays. Since the chemicals are sealed away inside the jar, there will be much less of a chance of spillage or splashing. Check out the PCB etching article in MAKE, Volume 02 for more ideas and techniques.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!