VatiLeaks is pretty much what it sounds like: leaks from the Vatican, which culminated in, "Your Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI," a blockbusting book from journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, who cites a Vatican source called "Maria" for leaking sensitive letters address to Benedict XVI. Now police have arrested a man whom the press identifies as the Pope's butler, who is accused of being VatiLeaks's Maria. From the NYT:
An on-again-off-again scandal that the Italian press has called VatiLeaks burst into the open on Friday with the arrest by Vatican gendarmes of a man, identified in news reports as Paolo Gabriele, the pope’s butler, who the Vatican said was in possession of confidential documents and was suspected of leaking private letters, some of which were addressed to Pope Benedict XVI.
Andy Baio and Andy McMillan have announced XOXO, a SXSW-like "disruptive creativity" conference in Portland. They're pre-selling the tickets on Kickstarter, and if they don't sell enough, they're not going to do it. They've made and shot through their targets already -- don't worry!
We'd confirmed most of the entire lineup by Monday, including the founders and CEOs of Etsy, Kickstarter, Metafilter, 4chan, Canvas, Simple, VHX.tv and The Atavist, and the creators of World of Goo, MakerBot, Indie Game: The Movie, Star Wars Uncut, Diesel Sweeties and Black Apple. And Julia Nunes! (This is as close to WaxyCon as you're ever going to get.)
Andy and I debated back and forth about whether the project was ready to announce, and both of us were nervous. It's a unique project for Kickstarter, and we didn't know if we'd provided enough detail to convince people that we're working on something really exciting. We'd run all the numbers, and to do everything we wanted without cutting corners or selling out, the tickets would cost around $400. Was that price too high? What if only business and marketing types sign up? Is the festival too long, too short, too far to travel?
So many doubts, so many fears. We were betting it all — pre-selling every single ticket with a $125,000 goal. And we were serious: if it came up short, we'd walk away. Months of planning would be wasted, but at least we wouldn't have lost our shirts.
The baroness had declared the property on the register of ministerial interests, and it had been cleared by the Cabinet Office and HM Revenue and Customs. But she failed to inform the register of Lords' interests that she was letting the property, after she moved to a new home closer to the House of Lords. ... Conservative party sources have described the incident as a 'cock up' which has been remedied.
Sure, there's that old chestnut about mistaking stupidity for malice. But it would take a lot of stupid to not notice how much you make from property that you rent out. What is malice but self-aware stupidity? — Rob
Today's Kitten of the Day is Helen, named for Helen Keller because she's had troubles with her eyes. Helen moved in last Sunday! Helen would rather that I not send email.
Revellers attend the Wave and Goth festival in Leipzig, on May 25, 2012. The annual festival, known in Germany as Wave-Gotik Treffen, features up to 150 bands and musicians playing Gothic rock and other styles of the "dark wave" music subculture attracting a regular audience of up to 20000, according to organizers. The festival runs through May 28.
Why did I see so many binders (presumably filled with paper) on the desks of the engineers at NASA's Mission control yesterday when they were docking SpaceX's Dragon module to the Space Station?
In contrast, the SpaceX folks had (almost) none at there mission control center. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that the government agency is so riddled with bureaucracy that everything must be followed "by the book" so to speak. But this seems simple minded to me.
NTK was once the greatest weekly tech newsletter in the universe -- snarky and funny and informative and just great. It's been dead for a good long while now, and this being the fifteenth anniversary of its founding, it's time for a revival. Danny O'Brien, one of the NTK originators, has announced a retro NTK mailing list: "So, for the next ten years or so, if you subscribe to this newsletter, you’ll get a weekly copy of the NTK that came out fifteen years ago, totally unchanged. It’s like that thing where you get a copy of the Times’ front page for your birthday, except every week is your birthday! Or our birthday. Or something. The name, Anno NTK, comes from Simon Wistow. If it was your idea to do this, tell me!"
Give or take a few days, it was fifteen years ago that I hit send on the first official issue of NTK. I was hiding out at a start-up called Virgin Internet, trying to work out how to bring Usenet to the masses, or something. I added people to the mailing list by hand, but stuck “-l” at the end of the subscribe email address to make it sound like it was a proper listserv. I still hear people say “listserv”, occasionally, and it sounds like they’re saying “thee” or “gadzooks” or something.
People usually say at this point that it doesn’t seem like maxint years ago, but, to be honest, it does. It feels exactly fifteen years ago. What’s weird for me is that the three years before NTK came out feels even longer. 1994-1997 involved me going from being on the dole, to appearing in a one man show in the west end, doing TV, working at Wired, joining a startup. That, and the Internet went from being this funny little squeaky gopher thing to having internet addresses on adverts. On adverts! Which, incidentally, we all smugly knew would go away soon, because advertising was lying and the Internet was going to make lying impossible. Or something.
On Deviant Art, BAwesome-BAcon has crafted a pork-product pony to die for: "I have recently taken my love of My Little Pony and combined it with my love of bacon. The result, something that is borderline awesome with a hint of crazy and a smidget of cute."
Isaac wanted to propose to his girlfriend, so he enlisted over 60 friends to stage a Busby Berkeley street-show lip-dub extravaganza ambush. What follows is five minutes of heart-stoppingly sweet and romantic wedding proposal. I mean: Z. O. M. F.G.
On Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012, I told my girlfriend to meet me at my parent's house for dinner. When she arrived I had stationed my brother to sit her in the back of an open Honda CRV and give her some headphones. He "wanted to play her a song"...
What she got instead was the world's first Live Lip-Dub Proposal.
Confectioner Alexandre Dubosc made this Tim Burton themed zoetrope cake, which animates to display iconic imagery from many of Burton's best-loved films. There's even a sneaky Jack Skellington up top.
Chris writes, "The Anthromod Mk2 hand is a robotic hand where everything, apart from the tendons, are 3D printed. Unlike other printed hands the Mk2 requires minimal assembly, and is also available from the online 3D printers Shapeways. This is an ongoing project and later designs will plan to add greater functionality such as sensing. I'm also planning to start an Indiegogo campaign to help finance the next model."
The underlying hand is printed as a single, assembled piece with all mechanisms in place.
An enterprising young fellow named Eric Simons secretly lived at AOL headquarter for two months. He was given a badge while working a short stint at AOL's Imagine K12 incubator event for young education entrepreneurs. He really enjoyed his visit, so he just stayed, and his badge kept working. He used the company showers and gym, slept on the company sofas, and worked on his business plan until he was finally busted by a security guard. Having since secured $50K for his startup, ClassConnect, he has found rental accommodation. Daniel Terdiman wrote for CNet:
Having spent several months legitimately working in the building, often quite late, Simons had noticed that although there were security guards with nightly rounds, there were at least three couches that seemed outside those patrols. Plus, they looked fairly comfortable. He claimed them.
This was his routine: He'd work until midnight or later, and then fall asleep around 2 a.m. on one of the couches. At 7 a.m. -- and no later than 8 a.m. so he'd be safely out of his field bed before anyone else arrived -- he'd wake up, go down to the gym for a workout and a shower, and then go back upstairs and scarf a breakfast of cereal and water or Coke. Then he'd work all day, finally waiting until everyone else in the building had gone home before returning to one of his three favored couches.
"I got a really good work ethic," he said, "and I got in shape, since I had to work out every morning."
But the real point was that he was spending next to nothing. The first month, he spent just $30, mainly on the occasional trip to McDonald's or for "random food expenditures when I got sick of eating ramen and cereal. I could have not spent a dollar, but I was going crazy."
Then, of course, there was Thanksgiving. That Thursday, to splurge, he grabbed dinner at a local Boston Market.
Having spent several months legitimately working in the building, often quite late, Simons had noticed that although there were security guards with nightly rounds, there were at least three couches that seemed outside those patrols. Plus, they looked fairly comfortable. He claimed them.
