Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Rob has spotted this handsomely crafted NES-themed Duck Hunt lamp -- now that's a conversation piece! Link, Discuss on Boing Boing Gadgets

Boing Boing tv's embedded robo-combat reporter Xeni Jardin witnesses warfare inside Robogames and Combots at Bay Area Maker Faire 2008, where robots battle until death -- or at least 'til one competitor busts a sprocket.

Next, BB-gun wielding battleships go BOOM!, with the Western Warship Combat Club. Participants painstakingly re-create historic battleships on small scale, and outfit each warboat with actual artillery. He who sinks last wins. The cameraman took a pellet or two in the pants, but the goofy safety goggles kept all eyes intact.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

If you dig the robots, you may enjoy the upcoming Robogames. The world's largest robot show takes place Fri, June 13th through Sun, June 15 in San Francisco. Link to tickets.

Instructables has just posted its latest installment in its collection of HOWTOs inspired by my new novel Little Brother, a young adult book about hacker kids who use technology to win back their civil liberties from the Department of Homeland Security.

This week, it's instructions for building a simple device that will let you spot hidden "pinhole" video cameras:

With one hand, hold up the toilet paper tube to your eye. With your other hand, hold up the flashlight at about eye level and point it away from you. With one eye, look through the tube and scan the room. If there are any small points of light bouncing back, inspect it further. It might be a camera.

Link, Link to feed of Little Brother Instructables

Glenn sez,

I was just alerted that the House of Reps has passed HR 4279, with the lovely name, PRO-IP (Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008). Like the doublespeak PATRIOT Act and Peacekeeper missiles, PRO-IP puts local law enforcement in a position to demand the forfeiture in criminal proceedings of stuff used to violate copyright. Which means that instead of the RIAA simply trying to collect fines, they can also incite local authorities to collect all the computers and related gear that was used to pirate.

This isn't a judgment on my part as to whether piracy is good or bad (I think copyright deserves to be protected through reasonable methods), but I am always horrified when civil enforcement morphs into criminal enforcement. Conservatives and liberals should be up in arms alike that local prosecutors and/or police could intervene as they desire in essentially a private affair arranged by the RIAA, and permanently seize thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in private property in addition to any civil penalties.

If this bill is passed in its present form by the Senate and signed, that means there's no more pro forma RIAA lawsuit payoffs, because if you wind up settling with the RIAA, you could still lose all your stuff in addition to any fee you paid them.

This is particularly irksome in light of the MSN Music shutdown, about which the EFF has written a strong and powerful letter. It is increasingly likely a normal person could have purchased music legally from an online site, burned it to an ordinary audio CD, and in the right set of circumstances be branded a pirate because the original "granting" authority no longer exists to prove that the consumer was a legitimate purchasers.

The more the law is constructed to sweep in folks who are absolutely observant of it, the more we need broader protections.

PDF Link (Thanks, Glenn!)

As part of Manchester's Futuresonic 2008 conference, you can have your old CDs and DVDs "overwritten" with a vintage record cutter and converted to a 45RPM record:

Take part in a social music sharing event with a difference - in CD-Recycled 45rpm Aleks Kolkowski uses his vintage record cutter to 'overwrite' existing data and cut grooves on CDs/DVDs so they can be played on a turntable. Bring unwanted CDs/DVDs and a sound file and receive a recycled disc in return.

Link (via Gizmodo)

WillS sez, "The Get Out Clause, an unsigned Manchester band who could not afford a camera crew for their video, 'performed' in front of a load of CCTV cameras, requested the footage from the camera operators under the Freedom of Information Act Data Protection Act and then stitched the results together for their music video." Link (Thanks, WillS!)

Alex from WorldChanging sez, "We weren't satisfied with the bogus "green" graduation gifts being hawked out there, so we decided to create the ultimate one. For a gift of $6,000, we'll offset the climate emissions of your favorite high school grad's whole childhood, giving them a carbon clean slate. It's only $7,500 for a college graduate. Expensive? No, discounted. The point is our impacts are much to big to change with some hemp sandals or a solar backpack, and it's time to get real." Link (Thanks, Alex!)

Glyn sez, "Mazz has been posting knitting patterns to help other people re-create characters from the cult series using only two sticks and ball of wool. Impressive? The BBC, producers of the series, didn't think so. They sent Mazz a letter, which states:"

We note that you are supplying DR WHO items, and using trade marks and copyright owned by BBC. You have not been given permission to use the DR WHO brand and we ask that you remove from your site any designs connected with DR WHO. Please reply acknowledging receipt of this email, and confirm that you will remove the DR WHO items as requested."

Link (Thanks, Glyn!)

You know how all the record labels have been dropping their requirements for DRM on their music, opening up more and more venues for DRM-free music? Well, according to David Hughes, head of RIAA technology, that's just a temporary condition. From now on, we're going to increasingly rent our music with subscription services that will use DRM to take it away from us if we stop subscribing. Hughes says that that's the only possible way to run a subscription service -- but of course, Magnatunes has a DRM-free subscription service, and I still have all those issues of Asimov's they sent me when I had a subscription, even though I let the subscription lapse.

The RIAA believes in "intellectual property," which is a fancy way of saying: they believe that they get to own property, and you have to rent it. The bits on your hard-drive belong to them, and that means you have to install DRM that lets them control your PC so that you don't do bad things with their bits. In the information age, "property" is the exclusive preserve of giant companies that can afford to register copyrights and sue to defend them, while the rest of us get to sharecrop all our embodiments of their property, from furniture to t-shirts to music to games to cars to PCs.

Hughes believes that per-track purchases are going the way of the dodo in favor of these other models, and that's why DRM will have a resurgence. "I think there is going to be a shift," he said. "I think there will be a movement towards subscription services and they will eventually mean the return of DRM." Hughes did acknowledge that users would rather live in a world where DRM stayed out of their way by saying that as long as they get to use files how they want, users don't care about DRM.

The problem with DRM is that users can't use the files how they want, which is why they do care. And we're miles away from the kind of magical solution solution envisioned by the Hughes that would create the perfect, unnoticeable DRM scheme. Others on the panel realize this. Digimarc Corp. director of business development Rajan Samtani pointed out that there are too many ways for the "kids" to get around DRM and that it's time to "throw in the towel."

Link

This video, made in 2003, was produced to promote Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975 by Patrick Rosencrantz. The video has interviews with Gilbert Shelton, R. Crumb, Rick Griffin, Spain Rodriguez, Robert Williams and Justin Green. (I reviewed the hardback edition in 2003 for the LA Weekly) Fantagraphics has just released a revised and expanded paperback edition. Link

Mike Fontanelli wrote a great introduction to cartoon great and unrepentant hippy hater Al Capp and his Dick Tracy parody, Fearless Fosdick. The post includes the first 20 pages (scanned in high res) of the first Fearless Fosdick story, "The Poisoned Bean Case."

"The Poisoned Bean Case" is, simply put, one of Capp's masterpieces. It seems to be a special favorite with fans too, both for its astronomical body count and its sheer outrageousness. Believe it or not, this blood-drenched parody ran in family newspapers in the fifties, in Eisenhower's America, on Sundays, no less!

In the following brilliantly demented pages, no one is spared Capp's merciless needle. From the venality of the justice system to the crookedness of the media; from the corruption of big business to the fickleness and stupidity of a complacent populace. The diabolical plot, which concerns product tampering, presages the 1982 Tylenol case by some 30 years.

As a cautionary note to readers encountering this story for the first time: you are hereby warned. It's impossible not to get swept up in the maelstrom of fury that's about to be unleashed. "The Poisoned Bean Case" doesn't so much unfold, as simply detonate! For comics fans who like their irony dark, raw and relentless- we proudly present Al Capp at or near the peak of his powers...

Link

New research shows that the electromagnetic signals emanating from mobile phones can alter your brainwaves. Indeed, the latest studies suggest that mobile phone transmissions can even affect behavior. In one study, scientists from the Swinburne University of Technology monitored the brainwaves of folks with Nokia phones, er, strapped to their heads. They noticed that the cell phone transmissions boosted alpha waves. In a separate experiment, researchers from the Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre observed that sleep-deprived subjects with phones on their heads showed a dampening of delta waves that are markers of sleep. For hours after the phones were turned off, the test subjects exhibited difficulty falling asleep. From Scientific American:

Although this research shows that cell phone transmissions can affect a person's brainwaves with persistent effects on behavior, (Loughborough University's James) Horne does not feel there is any need for concern that cell phones are damaging. The arousal effects the researchers measured are equivalent to about half a cup of coffee, and many other factors in a person's surroundings will affect a night's sleep as much or more than cell phone transmissions.

"The significance of the research," he explained, is that although the cell phone power is low, "electromagnetic radiation can nevertheless have an effect on mental behavior when transmitting at the proper frequency." He finds this fact especially remarkable when considering that everyone is surrounded by electromagnetic clutter radiating from all kinds of electronic devices in our modern world. Cell phones in talk mode seem to be particularly well-tuned to frequencies that affect brainwave activity. "The results show sensitivity to low-level radiation to a subtle degree. These findings open the door by a crack for more research to follow. One only wonders if with different doses, durations, or other devices, would there be greater effects?"

Link

Cabinet Magazine posted a great feature on the secret history of Cybex-like exercise machines. Apparently, the first "gym" filled with mechanical fitness contraptions was built by Swedish physician Gustav Zander in the late 19th century. The article was written by Carolyn de la Pena, author of The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American. From Cabinet:

(Zander's) mechanical horse was an early version of the Stairmaster, a contraption for cardiovascular fitness designed to imitate a "natural" activity. His stomach-punching apparatus evokes contemporary "ab-crunching" machines. What makes Zander so important, for anyone trying to trace the Cybex family tree, is what happened when his machines, created in a European cultural context, immigrated to the US in the early twentieth century. They are prototypes of the workout equipment now ubiquitous in American life...

His machines offered, Zander explained to an American audience, "a preventative against the evils engendered by a sedentary life and the seclusion of the office." In fact, Zander claimed, there was no treatment quite so appropriate for these emerging white-collar men (and their wives) as his mechanized system. While doctors' pills and potions might be easier to procure and quicker to ingest, the "increased well-being and capacity for work" gained by those who used his machines, he argued, was "rich compensation for the time bestowed on them."

Link

The Sky Factory deals in fake skylights and windows. Their SkyCeilings and Luminous Virtual Windows are photos of the outside that fit into standard ceiling or window grid systems. Fluorescent and LED backlighting is also available. It's like having a piece of Vegas in your own home! Seen here is a backlit Luminous SkyCeiling installed in a medical procedure room.
Link

Previously on BB Gadgets:
• Sky Factory SkyCeilings Link

Beyond The Beat Generation is a fantastic Internet radio station that plays obscure 60s rock, from mod to acid rock to merseybeat to psychedelia. The reason I like the station so much is that I've never heard of most of the groups on the playlists. From the "What is this all about" page:

Vernon Joynson Ruined My Life - Jeffrey Lewis

By the time I was about 19 years old I was well obsessed with 60s rock, and I thought I had totally mined the depths of it for cool psychedelic stuff just because I had Syd Barrett's solo albums, the first 13th Floor Elevators album, some Moby Grape and some Love. I even had a radio show at my college which I advertised as being "obscure psychedelic 60s music" although at the time "obscure" meant to me that I'd play Jefferson Airplane songs which were never on regular radio, etc. When I went to London for the first time, doing a study-abroad semester in Ealing in spring of 1996, I spent a lot of time hanging out in the TVU school library - just for fun I typed "psychedelic" into the library search computer and a book called "The Acid Trip: A Complete Guide to Psychedelic Music" written by one Vernon Joynston, came up. Excited at my luck, I located it on the shelves and took it home.

Have you ever had an experience that was so life changing and mind blowing you can't even remember it? I honestly have no recollection at all of what my first thoughts were when I started flipping through this book, a beautiful hardcover 136-page volume, packed with over 200 album cover reproductions, many in full color, and descriptions/comments on all the albums. All I know is that my paltry little world of music knowlege, that I thought was so extensive, was completely exploded - I had no idea WHATSOEVER that there existed a VAST realm of rare and insane albums that were long out of print, were known by nearly no one, and were seemingly beautiful and strange beyond anything I had hoped really existed. I took that book out of the library over and over again, and (after nervously researching the possible penalties for theft, thoughtful wus that I am) I eventually just never returned it and smuggled it back to the States with me when I returned home that May.

Link (Thanks, Ty Nowotny!)

The Stanford Medical Center is using stereophotography to document gorgeous Italian anatomical waxwork sculptures from the 18th and 19th centuries. Clement Susini (1757-1814) created more than 2,000 of the sculptures to educate medical students. A team from Stanford University Medical Media and Information Technologies (SUMMIT) collaborated with colleagues from the University of Bologna and 3D photographer Bernard Makinson to document the sculptures, currently stored at the Museo delle Cere Anatomiche Luigi Cattaneo. The team has put the first test photos on Flickr as both anaglyphs and "mono" photos. The former are quite spectacular when seen through red-blue glasses. Link to the project page, Link to the anaglyphs, Link to the "mono" photos (Thanks, John Stafford!)

Previously on BB:
• Incredible human dissection photos on Flickr Link

Phil sez, "Dark Roasted Blend has posted a collection of illustrations from early Soviet science fiction, most by Yury Markov. Stunning artistry!" Link

Since last summer, the FBI has been on the lookout for two men who were seen taking a deep interest in a car-ferry in Seattle. The men were believed to be terrorists, plotting to blow up the ferry.

Actually, they were tourists who'd never seen a car ferry and thought it was cool.

Last summer, the FBI launched an international search for two men after crew members and riders on a Washington State Ferry reported their unusual behavior — namely that they were taking pictures below deck, in areas that don't hold much interest for most tourists.

A ferry captain snapped their photo, which was passed along to the FBI.

Turns out the men, both citizens of a European Union nation, were captivated by the car-carrying capacity of local ferries.

"Where these gentlemen live, they don't have vehicle ferries. They were fascinated that a ferry could hold that many cars and wanted to show folks back home," FBI Special Agent Robbie Burroughs said Monday.

Link (via Schneier)

Bugs sez,

Several large UK retail firms are due to launch a database containing details of staff who've been accused of "stealing, forgery, fraud, damaging company property or causing a loss to their employers and suppliers."

This is intended as a closed, privately-run addition to the police background checks already offered by the state-run Criminal Records Bearau.

Crucially, the new database will include details of people who, due to lack of evidence, have never been formally charged. So if someone is fired due to a grudge with their boss or wrongly suspected of an offence, they could end up blacklisted for life with no way to find this out or, if they do find out, no way to appeal.

Link (Thanks, Bugs!)

Make Magazine senior editor Phil Torrone guides us through the wonders of Maker Faire 2008 in San Mateo.

First, we learn about "fuzzy logic," soft electronic circuit components, with Star Simpson -- the 20 year old MIT student arrested for a "fake bomb" at Boston's Logan Airport in 2007 when authorities mistook her interactive LED t-shirt for a terrorist device. Her trial is scheduled for May 23, by the way, so she wasn't able to answer our questions about that ordeal just yet.

Next up, also from MIT -- Ed Baafi introduces us to the fabulous "fab lab," where complex fabrication technologies are made easy.

Then, Phil shows us affordable laser etching to personalize your iPhone or laptop.

Inventor and hacker Mitch Altman demonstrates the "brain machine," a device that stimulates your mind's eye. Mitch also invented TV-B-Gone, a sort of secret kill switch for kills television sets ("the only TV remote you need!").

And Lee Zlotoff, the creator of TV's MacGyver reveals plans for a MacGyver film project.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode, with discussion and downloadable video.

A curator at NY-MOMA had to euthanize a living leather jacket made from human mouse stem-cells -- the art-work had grown out of control and threatened to overflow its containment unit.

One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened...

Ms Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat...That thing was never alive before it was grown.”

Link (via Futurismic)

Using a sphere of ice (as opposed to a cube) in your whiskey-rocks is nice because the round ice melts more slowly than the square stuff (better surface-area/volume ratio). Now a Japanese company has introduced a mold for making a perfect, seamless ice-sphere:

Taisin has introduced a mold that seamlessly creates a perfect sphere, no chipping and shaving required. Simple place a chunk of ice into the metal press and, as it melts, the device will close around the ice forming a ball, which is then released by the flick of a switch.

The Ice Mold, available in 55, 65, 70, and 80mm mold sizes, can make 30-40 ice balls an hour.

Spheres of ice are preferred by serious on the rocks drinkers because the reduced surface size means that the ice melts at a slower pace, keeping your drink

Link (via Make)

A Chinese company is launching an independent GPS service with a secondary, encrypted signal that can be used (presumably) by the military. There's a couple interesting applications for this -- for example, you could spoof the unencrypted GPS and foil guerrillas or enemy fighters while your forces remained correctly geolocated. You could even locally spoof GPS signals to give persistently wrong info about the location of sensitive installations while ensuring that your own people had good location data. Of course, this all goes to pieces if the adversary has a second GPS keyed into a rival system like Galileo or the US system.

In presentations April 23 here at the Toulouse Space Show, these Chinese officials nonetheless said their global Compass/Beidou system would be fully compatible with the U.S. GPS, European Galileo and Russian Glonass global navigation constellations.

Like GPS, Galileo and Glonass, Beidou/Compass would be free of direct user charges but also feature an encrypted signal for authorized users only, presumably including the Chinese military.

Chengqi Ran, vice director of the China Satellite Navigation Project Center, said the secure Beidou/Compass signal would be "a highly reliable signal dedicated to complex situations."

Link (via /.)

The upcoming Paper Wars exhibit in London's Craze Gallery features giant, elaborate materiel and artillery made from paper, scissors and gluesticks.

...[T]his exhibition, organized by PostlerFerguson, takes their paper AK-47 kit (first published in 2007) as a point of departure and asks participants to respond by altering the object. Featured artists include Ben Wilson, El Ultimo Grito, Oscar and Ewan, Pixelgarten, Hiroko Shiratori, Paul Wysocan, BASE23/DC|DE and more.

Link (via Make!)

Andrew sez, "Just when you think plushy creations can't get more weird, here comes a macabre soft toy creator in the UK who recreates roadkill. Currently you can choose from Twitch the Racoon or Grind the Rabbit complete with toe tags, tyre marks and cute giblets spilling from their split innards. Other sick creations are in the pipeline." Link (Thanks, Andrew!)

The New York Times fashion and style section has a nice piece today on the aesthetic influence of steampunk on fashion and art:

Devotees of the culture read Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, as well as more recent speculative fiction by William Gibson, James P. Blaylock and Paul Di Filippo, the author of “The Steampunk Trilogy,” the historical science fiction novellas that lent the culture its name. They watch films like “The City of Lost Children” (with costumes designed by Jean Paul Gaultier), “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “Brazil,” Terry Gilliam’s dystopian fantasy satirizing the modern industrial age; and they listen to melodeons and Gypsy strings mixed with industrial goth.

They build lumbering contraptions like the steampunk treehouse, a rusted-out 40-foot sculpture assembled last year at the Burning Man festival in Nevada and unveiled last month at the Coachella music festival in Southern California. They trawl eBay for saw-tooth cogs and watch parts to dress up their Macs and headsets, then show off their inventions to kindred spirits on the Web.

And, in keeping with the make-it-yourself ethos of punk, they assemble their own fashions, an adventurous pastiche of neo-Victorian, Edwardian and military style accented with sometimes crudely mechanized accouterments like brass goggles and wings made from pulleys, harnesses and clockwork pendants, to say nothing of the odd ray gun dangling at the hip. Steampunk style is corseted, built on a scaffolding of bustles, crinolines and parasols and high-arced sleeves not unlike those favored by the movement’s designer idols: Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen and, yes, even Ralph Lauren.

Link (Thanks to all the dozens of people who suggested this!)

A reader writes, "In preparation for the release of his newest book The Word of God, respected New Wave SF writer Thomas M. Disch (The Brave Little Toaster, Camp Concentration) has revealed himself to be God and is now taking questions from the faithful at his blog."

Dear G_d: Could you clarify the order of Creation? There are two different lists in Genesis, and people have died over interpretation. Please guide your humble flock.

PS: What did you do on the 8th Day?

The Aardvarks came first. Then the others, in alphabetical order. Except some of the really cute ones, like the panda, wheedled their way to the head of the line. And the zebra just stood there feeling this would be his lucky day.

Link

Andrew sez, "IEEE Spectrum reporter Josh Romero did a short video piece about the microfiche-to-MIDI machine that I showed at the Bay Area Maker Faire. The machine converts light from a microfiche machine into MIDI signals, which are then played through an old Casi