With the recent announcement of OLPC's shift in focus, many are criticizing the nonprofit's attempt to design what could be seen as unrealistic hardware at an impossible price point. "The OLPC project has become an unrealistic hardware 'dream' and lost its focus on education, wrote blogger Wayan Vota on OLPC News, which has followed the OLPC since its inception. The project comes up with unrealistic hardware designs and price points that destroy its purpose even more, he wrote. 'Excuse me if I get mad at the XO-3 hype. I'm angry at the energy devoted to fantasy XO hardware instead of OLPC educational reality. I miss the original OLPC Mission, where children, not computers, controlled our dreams,' Vota wrote."

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st1d writes to tell us that Wikileaks has put out a call for help. However, instead of just asking for money, they have also suggested technical and legal avenues for support. In the site's short life, Wikileaks has been at the center of many breaking scandals and investigations. "Wikileaks is currently overloaded by readers. This is a regular difficulty that can only be resolved by deploying additional resources. If you support our mission, you can help us by integrating new hardware into our project infrastructure or developing software for the project. Become patron of a WikiLeaks server or other parts of our technology, adding more pillars to the stability and balance of the WikiLeaks platform. Servers come trouble-free and legally fortified, software is uniquely challenging. If you can provide rackspace, power and an uplink, or a dedicated server or storage space, for at least 12 months, or software development work for WikiLeaks, please write to wl-supporters@sunshinepress.org."

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Azureflare writes "The first device using a Pixel Qi screen has been confirmed. It is produced by Notion Ink, and it appears they took a few design tips from Apple by sticking with a design that has tapered edges. This tablet should give Apple a run for their money, especially considering the recently confirmed rumor of an Apple tablet. 'The Notion Ink smartpad measures 6.3 x 9.8 x 0.6 inches and weighs 1.7lbs; as well as the tri-band (850/1900/2100) UMTS/HSDPA, WiFi b/g and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR it also squeezes in A-GPS, a digital compass, accelerometer and proximity, ambient light and water sensors. Connectivity includes USB, HDMI, a 3.5mm headphone jack and a microphone input, and there’s also a 3-megapixel auto-focus camera with video recording support. Onboard storage is either 16GB or 32GB of SSD, and there's an SD slot for augmenting that.'" Update: 12/25 21:44 GMT by SS : Removed erroneous reference to Nokia.

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(Watch on YouTube, Dotsub, or download MP4)

On the eve of the Third Reich, a young woman of Jewish descent married an Aryan man. The Nazis would later classify that as a "privileged marriage," which saved her life while millions died. Her name is Elizabeth Pschorr, and today on Boing Boing Video, we present her story in her own words, with rare archival family photo and film taken as early as the 1930s.

A little backstory on how this episode came to be: Ms. Pschorr's grandson, Jason McHugh, has worked with us since the early days of BBTV as a field producer and cameraman. One day when we were on a shoot together, he told me about his grandma, and an autobiographical book she was writing. I asked if we could visit her and record some of her story, and this episode unfolded over the next two years. Jason scanned old photos, love letters, and copied black and white film reels tucked away in boxes at his grandma's home.

After the jump, more of those photos, and Jason (who's enjoying the holidays today with his grandmother) shares his thoughts about his family's story, and about the making of the video you'll see above.

Jason McHugh writes:

My Grandmother, Elizabeth Pschorr, is a major inspiration to me, and to the rest of our family and friends. At age 98, she is still quite on her game physically, mentally and spiritually. Elizabeth lives alone with her small dog Charlie, and has been recently appealing to the DMV to keep her driver's license for another renewal. This week, we are enjoying a traditional German Christmas celebration at her house complete with a candle-lit tree full of tinsel and silver bulbs, rhyming Christmas cards, a table full of presents and a four-course dinner feast!

Of course, as you can see in this video (and in her book, A Privileged Marriage), she is in fact Jewish and so am I. This was a surprise to me, until I read my grandmother's book and discovered she didn't know know she was Jewish either until Hitler came to power. Her parents were wealthy non-practicing Jews, who embraced the German tradition of Christmas in an elaborate way, and we are lucky enough to be able to continue that tradition with Elizabeth to this day.

Elizabeth was inspired to pick up the pen and take a journey into her past while we were on a family trip in Hawaii back in the late seventies. For her, it was a chance to understand who she really was, and then be spiritually reborn again into her present self after having shut a part of herself off for a long time. For the rest of our family and friends, it has been a chance to understand the dramatic changes and wartime insanity she survived, and absorb a detailed account of our family history and German-American history.

A big part of this story, beyond the wartime survival and immigration, is about love. This is the part of the story that my Grandmother is still grappling with: love, and everything that comes with it. She really enjoys philosophical discussions about various aspects of love and has found great inspiration from her favorite philosopher Erich Fromm's book The Art of Loving.

This will be the first time that any of the archival family footage has been seen by the public, besides her 90th birthday, where we played the raw footage with a photo retrospective. Since then, her major PR campaign for A Privileged Marriage has been doing book readings at local book stores and libraries in Northern California.

The debut of this piece on Boing Boing will certainly be the biggest audience she been able to share her story with to date. It also marks the launch of Elizabeth's film career. She has recently been studying screenwriting books in hopes of adapting her story for the screen as well as encouraging me to get Stephen Spielberg on board for the project!

More online: Elizabeth Pschorr Website | Amazon link for A Privileged Marriage

---

(Images from the archives of Elizabeth Pschorr)

itwbennett writes "In a blog entry Wednesday, a Twitter official wrote that the company has acquired Mixer Labs, maker of GeoAPI, a service that helps developers build geolocation-aware applications for Twitter. 'Software using the service will allow Twitter users to tag the location where a message was written,' Agam Shah writes in an article on ITworld. 'Twitter did not immediately respond to comment on how much it paid for Mixer Labs.'"

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Techdirt pointed out that not long ago John Byrne, ex-editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek.com and now CEO of newly founded C-Change Media, decided to tackle the problem of why publications seem to be so vehemently opposed to Google being a part of their business process. While there aren't any earth-shattering revelations it is a great succinct description of the problem. "I received several solid answers from followers of this blog, including Frymaster who immediately took sides in the ongoing war between Traditional Media and Google. Wrote Frymaster: 'I reject out-of-hand the assertion that Google is profiting from others' content. Rather, I say that Google profits from connecting users to content. It is a service that most web publishers appreciate greatly. Google, unlike any other search engine ever, goes to great pains to deliver the least-skewed results possible. Google is constantly on the hunt for people who game their system. That's why they succeed.There is a direct connection between Google's user-centric, community-oriented approach and their financial success.'"

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All the rumors of an Apple tablet PC seem to be culminating in a flurry of rumors suggesting we may see one as soon as next month. Sources inside Apple are saying that Jobs is finally "happy" with the device after being involved in every detail of bringing the tablet into the light of day. As a side result of these rumors it seems that Apple stockholders are also getting a bit of Christmas cheer with a significant bump in stock price.

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Jason von Nieda put together this awesomely dramatic vacuum tube clock built around a Russian IV-18 nixie tube. He sites Adafruit's Ice Tube Clock for inspiration and credits John Pfeiffer for the enclosure design.

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Santa Claus must use advanced technologies to pull off his annual feat. Thankfully, NewScientist has the exclusive about the what and the how. "He relies on some impressive gadgets: miniature flying robots, advanced satellites, highly sensitive surveillance devices, memory-erasing milk, self-assembling toys, and a warp-drive-powered sleigh that's capable of bending and twisting space-time to such an extent that it slips Santa and his reindeer out of the observable universe. In 1949, Kurt Gödel published one of the first mathematical descriptions of how it could work. In his version, the universe has paths called closed time-like curves that might allow you to jump in a ship, fly for a while, and end up right back where you started in space and time."

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Robin and Chuck Nudd are at it again with their festive dragon. Chuck built the beaste out of junk steel a few winters ago, and Robin dresses him in seasonal finery, which is updated just about every month.

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Make a glass of LED ice cubes for conversation or decoration.
To download The LED Ice Cubes video click here and subscribe in iTunes.
Subscribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects
you can do over the weekend.

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The Register, citing this Playboy article, reports that a Nevada man named Dennis Montgomery was able in 2003 to connive his way into a position of respectability at the CIA on the basis of his company's claimed ability, using software, to "detect and decrypt 'barcodes' in broadcasts by Al Jazeera, the Qatari news station." Montgomery was CTO of Reno-based eTreppid Technologies, which produced bucketloads of data purported to represent "geographic coordinates and flight numbers" hidden in these broadcasts. All of which, it seems, was hokum, finally debunked in cooperation with a branch of the French intelligence service — but not, says the article, before the fabricated information, chalked up to "credible sources," was used as justification to ground some international flights, and even evacuate New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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An anonymous reader writes "In one of the ( Do the developers actually use their own software?) decisions in the Linux Desktop World , back in 2004 Gnome switched to the 'Spatial' view by default with their Nautilus file manager opening a new window with each new folder viewed. Many derided the decision as poor design or as being different for the sake of being different. Well, after five long years the Gnome powers that be have decided to switch back to browser mode."

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alphadogg contributes this snippet from Network World: "If you get busted for drunk driving in Montgomery County, Texas, this holiday season, your neighbors may hear about it on Twitter. That's because the local district attorney's office has decided to publish the names of those charged with driving while intoxicated between Christmas and New Year's Eve. County Vehicular Crimes Prosecutor Warren Diepraam came up with the idea as a way of discouraging residents from getting behind the wheel while drunk. 'It's not a magic bullet that's going to end DWIs, but it's something to make people think twice before they get behind the wheel of a car and drive while they're intoxicated,' he said."

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Who's excited about Santa? It won't be long now before some imposing stranger with gin blossoms, in a garish flaming-red suit, who's been spying on your children all year, sneaks into your house to wolf down milk and cookies and feed your produce to his coterie of flying woodland creatures. I know I'm stoked!

But, seriously. We wanted to take this opportunity to wish each and every one of you a very happy, fun-filled, and hands-on holiday. (And if you manage to steal some time away from the festivities to make something, tell us about it, and share pics in the MAKE Flickr pool.)

I have a friend who uses the word "gift," like "awesome" or "cool," whenever she's seriously impressed or moved by something. When I think about what we do here at MAKE and CRAFT, the people we get to collaborate with directly, the wider maker community, and everyone who makes what we do possible (not to mention infinitely enjoyable and inspiring), I can't think of a more perfect exclamation, and one that's entirely appropriate to the day:

GIFT!

Above image of John Park's Mystery Box.

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jensend writes "The 1.7 branch of Cygwin, the Unix-like environment for Windows, has reached stable status after about 3 1/2 years of effort. Among many other changes, this release drops support for Windows 9x. Since the NT API and NT-based versions of Windows are more capable and somewhat less of a mismatch with POSIX (for instance, they include a security model), this has allowed for code path simplifications, better performance (particularly noticeable with pipe I/O), better security, and better POSIX compatibility."

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Do-it-yourself Bed-bug Detector @ Science News...

After trying some 50 arrangements of household objects, researchers have come up with a new low-cost, homemade bed-bug detector. To lure the bugs out of hiding, Wan-Tien Tsai of Rutgers University in New Brunswick put dry ice into an insulated, one-third-gallon jug, the kind available at sports or camping stores. Adding 2.5 pounds of dry ice pellets and not quite closing the pour hole allowed carbon dioxide to leak out at a bug-teasing rate for some 11 hours at room temperature, she said. She stood the jug in a plastic cat food dish with a piece of paper taped on the outside of the dish as a bug up to the rim. The bowl’s steep, slippery inside, with an added dusting of talcum powder, kept bugs from crawling out again. In tests in real apartments, the homemade setup detected bed bugs as well, or better, than did two brands of professional exterminating equipment, Tsai said December 16 at the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America.

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G Thompson sends in this absolutely wonderful read by law professor Ben Challis, a former punk musician, explaining the mental back-and-forth he went through after discovering that some of his band's old music is available online -- specifically discovering that some sites are selling unauthorized copies of it. He reacts naturally at first -- which is to get upset -- but then as he thinks about it some more, he begins to recognize that this isn't all that productive. Eventually he seems to come all the way around to realizing that this actually is really good market research for him.

He begins to reason through the arguments, recognizing that he and his (one surviving) bandmate haven't actually put their own music online for sale, and they probably would have put some of it up for free anyway, so maybe having some free music out there isn't that bad. But more importantly, he realizes that this means there's actually both interest and demand in his old band (he even discovers that old copies of the band's single are selling for £35), and he might as well do something about it, rather than worry about what others are doing:

And should I really worry at all? Well clearly at this scale, no, not really. But even so, it does get you thinking and suddenly you see beyond the immediate problems of 'piracy' to the new opportunities that come with the web. First of all, now I know we have fans, I have my new blog (I know you are desperate to know, it is www.theignerents.blogspot.com). I then began to think of what other opportunities there are beyond those that just pander to my ego. Well with the Blog, I will soon have set up a mechanism for collecting fan data -- and databases are king now (I think!). And if we were still a band we could try and get a gig at the annual Rebellion Festival in Blackpool in March, the highlight of the punk calendar in the UK -- and maybe try for a European punk festival or two too! And we could definitely try and sell those last few boxes of CDs I have somewhere -- fans in Japan and Germany seem increasingly keen on Ignerents' collectibles, or I could empty out my cupboards and try and find those last few copies of our first single I have -- at £35 a pop that would pay for quite a few nice winter warmer! And what if I autograph them? Hang on, will the value go down? And maybe some PRS monies will come through - eventually I imagine they will; and hang on, and what about that Glastonbury Festival thingy -- I work there -- I know the main booker! So many possibilities, so little time!

It's a funny old thing the internet: yes it has destroyed a number of traditional business models in the music industry, and maybe "Ignerence was bliss" for me until a few weeks ago -- but the internet has created many many other new and interesting opportunities. The clever bands of the future will be the ones who can seize these opportunities and move quickly and nimbly from technology to technology and embrace and react to ever changing patterns in consumer behaviour.

This is really important. It's totally natural for people to react the way Challis does above when they first see their work copied online. Even though we encourage people to copy our stuff, there are brief moments when I feel the same way when I see it. But then you think logically about it, and you realize that it's up to you to do something positive about it, and use it to your advantage. Flipping out and going negative is a waste of time and does nothing valuable for anyone. But learning from it and realizing that it's actually valuable market research can be quite powerful.

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Someone anonymously submitted a decent writeup by John A. Byrne, the former editor-in-chief at Business Week who recently left (amid the shakeup due to Bloomberg buying the magazine) to start a new media effort called C-Change Media. In this blog post, Byrne argues that the media complaining about Google sending them traffic is biting the hand that feeds them. There's really not much new in the writeup, which runs over the same ground we've covered for a few years now, but it's a nice succinct summary of the situation:

Rupert Murdoch's protestations aside, there is no doubt that Google is driving vast amounts of traffic to websites run by traditional media companies. In recent years, most of BusinessWeek.com's growth came from search optimization and direct traffic. Up until only three years ago, the number one referring domain at BusinessWeek was always a portal until Google's popularity replaced Yahoo Finance and MSN Money as the top referrer. Search--largely Google--now accounts for some 45% of the traffic at BW.com, up from less than 20% in 2006. That simple little box is driving vast amounts of advertising inventory (and therefore revenue) to the site. It's a similar story everywhere else.

In the war between the traditional media brands and Google, the old cliche about biting the hand that feeds you is certainly in play. Some of the complaints from media can be attributed to sour grapes. Many incumbents resent that most efforts to find information on the Web no longer starts with a brand. It starts with Google which is largely brand agnostic. So, in effect, Google has become this massive transaction machine, and as everyone knows, transactions are the antithesis of relationships. If a brand wants a relationship with its audience, Google is getting in the way. It's how Google was able to siphon nearly $22 billion last year in advertising from traditional media. And it's the most obvious proof that media brands have diminished in value. People are more routinely turning to Google to get information, rather than a brand known for its expertise in a given area. They'll google (yes, I'm using Google as a verb) leadership before going to The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, BusinessWeek, or Harvard Business Review. They'll google President Clinton before going to The New York Times, Time, or Newsweek. Why? Because they trust Google to serve up unbiased results; because they want to see what is generally available out there and not tied to a brand, and because most brands no longer wield the power and influence they did years ago.

Instead of complaining about this and threatening to block Google from crawling a site, media companies would do well to step back and more fully understand what they really need to do: rebuild the relationships they have with their readers, viewers, users. To offset the massive transaction machine that Google is, media brands need to focus on restoring relationships with users. That's why "user engagement" is not an idle phrase to throw around but is essential to making a brand successful online. Original content isn't enough. Gee-whiz tech tricks aren't enough. Neither is a fancy design or a search trap gimmick. You need an audience that is deeply and meaningfully engaged in the content of a site, so engaged in fact that many of those users become collaborators, and that requires tremendous amounts of work and editorial involvement with the audience.

Indeed. It's the point we've been trying to make for ages. Newspapers were always in the community building business. They would bring together a community of folks and then sell their attention to advertisers. That was the business. But they thought they were in the news delivery business, and that's confusing them -- leading them to do things that are anti-community and anti-relationship (registration walls, paywalls, etc.) that actually harm the value of the community and limit that. Thus, people are going elsewhere for community -- whether it's other media publications or social network sites -- and newspapers are lashing out at the wrong party: the one who sends them traffic.

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beernutmark writes "Well, it looks like Santa or at least Norad/Google hates Linux. This year, for the first time since its inception, Norad is not making a simple .kml file available for download to track Santa. You must connect to their website with a Windows/Mac browser and use the browser plugin. No full-screen Google Earth to look at the beautiful areas around Santa's path. (Anyone have any open source source kml files for tracking Santa or any idea how we can go about making one for 2010?)"

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Fletch writes "Here's an interesting little article on why Sherlock Holmes remains so popular. Of course it happens to come right before the new movie opens and I am just sure it is pure journalism even though CNN and Warner are owned by the same company. Though I do find it rather odd that they don't mention a small part of the reason why Holmes is still so popular is that he is in the public domain and new and varied stories are created about him daily. Yes, he has always been a widely loved fictional character but there are a great many characters with fan bases. Holmes has stretched his by being used in almost all genres and having been written by some of the most popular authors even today. People like Stephen King and Neil Gaiman have written Holmes short stories and will continue to because of his public domain status. Even TV shows have gotten into the act with House M.D. which is a thinly veiled Holmes knock off. I find it odd that the same companies who decry the public domain are more then happy to use it when it suits them."

Definitely an interesting point from Fletch, but there is some dispute over the state of Sherlock Holmes' copyright status. While the character is in the public domain in some countries, there's still at least one book in the US covered by copyright, The Case Book, and the legal representative of the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle seems to suggest that this means the character itself is protected by copyright until 2023, though that doesn't seem correct to me. My understanding of other characters that have gone into the public domain is that when their first works enter the public domain, the characters themselves enter the public domain -- but only the aspects of their characters originally covered by copyright that were included in those works.

Of course, this is made even more complex because it's still something of an open question as to what, exactly, about a character is covered by copyright. It used to be believed that the characters themselves were not covered by copyright, since it was only the expression, not the "idea" that was covered. But, a variety of court rulings in the US have ruled in favor of the claim that characters themselves can be covered by copyright -- leading to highly questionable legal results like the recent banning of a book using an updated version of Holden Caufield, the protagonist of JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

Not surprisingly, the estate who owns the copyrights tries to present the situation as saying that all uses require a license. But, then again, it's not like they're going to tell you what's in the public domain when it's in their best interest to claim that nothing is. Either way, it appears that the initial claim concerning the public domain isn't quite the case -- and I would bet that the studio that made this latest movie paid for a license to avoid a legal fight. Why they should have to -- especially given the fact that when the content was written there was no way for it still to be protected today under copyright law -- is a separate (but rather important) question.

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The entire team at dpreview would like to wish all our readers a very Happy Holidays (whichever you're observing). As we celebrate our 11th anniversary we're looking forward to another exciting year here at dpreview, with more new features in the pipeline and of course even more of the high quality content that made this site what it is today. Whatever you're doing today, enjoy yourselves and thank you for being a part of dpreview.com!