Just launched: a website promising live virtual coverage of this weekend's Grand Challenge race, in which robotic vehicles will race accross the California desert.

Live Tracking will show relative positions of the Challenge entrants, and requires a 7 MB download each time you use your browser to view the tracking. The Status Board provides a 30 second update of the status of each Challenge team. The Image Gallery will contain the most recent images from the Challenge, updated nightly through March 14.

Link

Yoz Grahame has remixed my novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom with a bunch of really whacky and wildly imaginative perl scripts:

* Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (CAPIPA Remix) - in which the original has its words reordered alphabetically, using PIPA's new cousin, CAPIPA, which retains capitalisation.
"Beautiful," BEAUTY beauty, became. BECAME because because because because because because -- because because because because because because because because because because because because because because become become become become become become become bed bed bed. bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed, bed bed bedroom bedroom bedroom-bedroom beds bedside bedside bedside.

* Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (Sausages & Mash Remix) - in which the original has all words beginning with the letters S and M replaced with "Sausage" and "Mash" respectively, in accordance with the classic children's game.
He chuckled. "No sausage, not mash. I'm into the kind of mash sausage that you only come across on-world."

* Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (More And Bloodier Wars Remix) - in which the original is run through Babelfish several times, from English to French to German and back to English again.
I never thought that I would live, in order to arise, where the maintenance would decide A-Movin ' Dan at the person in possession of a favour light up to the death of the heat of the universe.

Link

This Kleptones (now, that's a band-name) have released a mash-up of the Flaming Lips's "Are You a Hypnotist", Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" and Public Enemy's "By the Time I Get to Arizona" kicks ass. 4.7 MP3 Link (via Scott Bateman, thanks Dan!)

More Kleptones mashups here -- thanks, Boogah!

Surplus corpses donated to Tulane Med School were sold to the Army to be blown up in land-mine tests. Guess it's a less ignoble end than being the cadaver at the alumni dinner or the arm left hanging from the toll-booth. Link

CNN reports on the growing "problem" of people catching glimpses of dirty DVDs screening in other people's cars, and then getting angry because their snoopy peeking through someone else's car-window has exposed them to pr0n. So now, a bunch of lawmakers are trying to figure out if it should be illegal to watch skin movies in your car. Of course. Link

If there are any Boing Boing readers who know anyone highly placed at Yahoo Groups, could you please ask her or him to email me? My YGroups account is royally screwed up and there appears to be no way to un-screw it. Pretty please?

Beautiful gallery of hand-drawn typography at Disneyland. Link (via Pirotcar)

Dan Gillmor has posted the Preface and Chapter One from Making the News, his forthcoming book about journalism in the Internet age. Gillmor is the best writer and thinker on this subject that I know, and his willingness to open source not just the book, but also his writing of it, is extraordinarily brave and visionary.

If Tom Paine showed the power of personal journalism, so did the muckrakers at the end of the 19th Century. They, more than most newspapers of the era, performed the public service function of journalism: exposing the anticompetitive predations of the robber barons and cruel conditions in workplaces, among a variety of outrages. Lincoln Steffens ("The Shame of the Cities"), Ida Tarbell ("History of the Standard Oil Company"), Jacob Ris ("How the Other Half Lives") and Upton Sinclair ("The Jungle") were among the daring journalists and novelists who shone daylight into some dark corners of society, and set a standard for the investigative journalists of the new century.

Personal journalism didn't die with the muckrakers. Throughout the 20th Century, the world has been blessed with individuals who found ways to work outside the mainstream of the moment. One of my journalistic heroes is I.F. Stone, whose weekly, and later bi-weekly, newsletter was required reading for a generation of Washington insiders.

Sputnik has shipped the next generation of its Linux-based, open source managed WiFi AP. At $185, it's the cheapest managed AP on the market, with some of the coolest features (though in most contexts I think I'd just advise shopping for el-cheapo no-name APs for $30 per and connecting them to a $50 a month DSL and making your money back in extra lattes, rather than paying for a managed solution).

The Sputnik AP 160 utilizes a customizeable captive portal that requires end-users to authenticate with their username and password before they can access the wireless network.

Additional wireless and wired devices connected through the AP 160’s built-in four-port router are also authenticated and managed by Sputnik Control Center. Simply plug third-party APs into the back of the Sputnik AP 160; end-users who associate with those APs are authenticated and tracked. The same principle applies to end-users who connect directly to the LAN ports.

Link (via Sifry)

It's Wednesday, which means the new funnybooks are out. I'm using The Beguiling as my interim comix shop while working on the next novel in Toronto, and tonight, they had a very nice surprise for me: a perfect bound omnibus edition of two of Warren Ellis's short-series stories: Mek and Reload.

Reload's a great action story, a lot of fun, but it's Mek that's the real standout here. Mek is like Asimov's Robots stories told by Hunter S Thompson after overdosing on Ralph Ellison: a caustic and corrosive story about body-modders who get the machinery the fetishize implanted in their flesh, and the discrimination they face as a result. (Also noteworthy: this is, as far as I know, the only comic to mention the EFF in dialogue). Link

As part of an ongoing series presented by Wired Magazine, Lawrence Lessig will speak at the 92nd street Y in Manhattan on March 23rd. The talk is titled "Free Culture: Creativity and Its Enemies." .
Link (thanks, Lauren!)

The Masons have had a tough couple of days.

The bombers yesterday blew themselves up at the entrance of the lodge after opening fire on some 40 people in the private dining hall. One person was killed and five others were hurt

Link (Thanks, Gary!)

Harvard is waiving tuition for students from families with less than $40,000 in income.

"Too often, outstanding students from families of modest means do not believe that college is an option for them, much less an Ivy League university," Summers said at the recent meeting of the American Council on Education in Miami, according to a transcript published by Harvard. "Our doors have long been open to talented students regardless of financial need, but many students simply do not know or believe this. We are determined to change both the perception and the reality."

Link (Thanks, Nick!)

Update: Princeton's been at this for ages. (Thanks, Drew!)

BoingBoing reader Roland Piquepaille says:

There is a new cop patrolling the streets of Hong Kong and teaching children how to prevent crime. But it's a robot, named Robotcop III, designed and built in Hong Kong, tells us Channel Newsasia. Robotcop III can walk, dance, move in any direction, display videos and answer questions asked in Cantonese and English. The previous versions of Robotcops, introduced in 1988 and 1995, were imported from the U.S. and taught 800,000 school children how to fight crime. The promoters of Robotcop III hope it will do even better. More details and references are available in this overview including a photo of Robotcop III patrolling on Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) campus.

Link

The Bush campaign is running ads attacking Kerry for being a flip-flopper. Here's a few Bush flip-flops from dailykos.com.

Bush is against campaign finance reform; then he's for it.

Bush is against a Homeland Security Department; then he's for it.

Bush is against a 9/11 commission; then he's for it.

Bush is against an Iraq WMD investigation; then he's for it.

Bush is against nation building; then he's for it.

Bush is against deficits; then he's for them.

Bush is for free trade; then he's for tariffs on steel; then he's against them again.

Bush is against the U.S. taking a role in the Israeli Palestinian conflict; then he pushes for a "road map" and a Palestinian State.

Bush is for states right to decide on gay marriage, then he is for changing the constitution.

Bush first says he'll provide money for first responders (fire, police, emergency), then he doesn't.

Bush first says that 'help is on the way' to the military ... then he cuts benefits

Bush-"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. Bush-"I don't know where he is. I have no idea and I really don't care.

Bush claims to be in favor of the environment and then secretly starts drilling on Padre Island.

Bush talks about helping education and increases mandates while cutting funding.

Bush first says the U.S. won't negotiate with North Korea. Now he will

Bush goes to Bob Jones University. Then say's he shouldn't have.

Bush said he would demand a U.N. Security Council vote on whether to sanction military action against Iraq. Later Bush announced he would not call for a vote

Bush said the "mission accomplished" banner was put up by the sailors.  Bush later admits it was his advance team.

Bush was for fingerprinting and photographing Mexicans who enter the US. Bush after meeting with Pres. Fox, he's against it.

<Link

An infosec company is launching an idiotic revenge tool that launches DDoS attacks and blackholes hosts that are believed to be involved in DDoSing their customers, justifying it with a bunch of high-flown hooie about "rules of engagement for information warfare." Nevermind the likelihood that the "attackers" in these situations are almost certainly compromised PCs, hijacked into participating, and the necessity of collateral damage to nearby machines when DDoSing or blacklisting a host. Link

This is a wonderful list of faces employed in incidental typography in the Disney parks, including links to freeware versions of many of the fonts.

# Albertus - Animal Kingdom (entrance area signage), Norway
# Algerian - MK monorail station, Main Street, Haunted Mansion Fastpass, etc.
# Americana - Main Street, Liberty Square
# Anna - Tomorrowland logo/signage, Studios, etc.
# Antique Olive - Soarin'

Link (Thanks, Mark!)

The New York Times reports that on Monday night, a ritual inside Patchogue, NY's Southside Masonic Lodge No. 493 ended with the accidental killing of a new initiate. Another member shot him in the face. The shooter was carrying two guns, one with blanks and one with live ammo, and grabbed the wrong one during the ritual. Link

Fleshbot notes that the pr0n-themed weblog penned by AVN's Frank Meyer and launched by Variety is closing down with far less fanfare than surrounded its launch. Link

A USC roboticist has built a robot for "printing" houses that can extrude cement or adobe and shape it using trowel-manipulators to a CAD-represented spec.

The key to the technology is a computer-guided nozzle that deposits a line of wet concrete, like toothpaste being squeezed onto a table. Two trowels attached to the nozzle then move to shape the deposit. The robot repeats its journey many times to raise the height and builds hollow walls before returning to fill them.

Engineer Behrokh Khoshnevis, at the University of Southern California, has been perfecting his "contour crafter" for more than a year. "The goal is to be able to completely construct a one-story, 2000-square foot home on site, in one day and without using human hands," he says.

Link

Kenwood's new retro-future ads (for personal jetpacks, trips to the moon and home robots) are very clever Gernsbacksploitation media, tapping straight into the future-scarcastic receptors in my brain. Link (via Gizmodo)

Snipped from the latest edition of Kevin Kelly's newsletter "Cool Tools:"

Here, a cure for badly designed web pages. (This is major news since everything is now on the web.) Follow Krug's key heuristic: "Don't make me think." It works. His manual is a model of what it preaches. It is the best, clearest, succinct hands-on guide for amateurs and pros engaged in making the web a useable public space. You don't need a consultant; you need this book. I pray everyone reads and obey. Excerpts:
* When you're creating a site, your job is to get rid of the question marks.
*We don't read pages. We scan them.
*Create a clear visual hierarchy. One of the best ways to make a page easy to grasp in a hurry is to make sure that the appearance of the things on the page -- all of the visual cues -- clearly and accurately portray the relationships between the things on the page.
*Jakob Nielsen and Tom Landauer have shown that testing five users will tend to uncover 85 percent of a site's usability problems, and that there is a serious case of diminishing returns for additional users.

Link to amazon.com listing for Steve Krug's "Dont Make Me Think". For more Krugian wisdom, check out this recent interview: Link

Actforlove is a dating site for activists, complete with a write-your-Congresscritter tool for sending in letters to support Emergency Contraception. I always suspected that one reason for the popularity of the Dean MeetUps was that they were a way of coming out as a liberal in a political climate where lefty love dare not speak its name: with Actforlove, you can be sure that your date won't have a copy of The Fountainhead sitting on the toilet-tank. Link (via Electrolite)

Dan Gillmor has posted a very good, concise analysis of the perils of electric voting in the wake of an Orange County vote where the loss of thousands of ballots was discounted because the race was won by a wide enough margin that the lost votes don't matter -- even though no one knows how many votes were lost.

Look. I'm a fan of installing modern equipment to make elections better. If the machines work right they'll be better than what we had. But these are computers, and computers are flawed devices. Software behaves in unpredictable ways, and rogue programmers or hackers can create havoc.

Meanwhile, as we've seen, the hardworking poll workers can make mistakes. They're human.

What we need is a backup and verification system that combines the best of computers and people but doesn't absolutely rely on programmers and people to get everything right every time. Such as system exists: It's called paper.

A paper printout could be used to recount in close elections, instead of trusting the "garbage in, garbage out" system that invites us not to trust it. It could be used for random checks, as a precaution.

Link

Vincent Gallo is evidently selling the film production package he used to shoot the "outstandingly bad" movie Brown Bunny on eBay. The listing is a characteristically Gallic stream-of-consciousness screed. Current bidding stands at $86,800 for a kit that includes Stanley Kubrick's legendary Barry Lyndon lens. And what Vincent Gallo eBay listing would be complete without gratuitous third-person references to Vincent Gallo, and abundant ad hominem attacks on the likes of filmmakers Spike Jonze, Darren Aronofsky and Wes Anderson? Ambiguous cinematic sex act not included. Link (update: I'll need to start waking up a hell of a lot earlier to scoop Choire Sicha, who covered this on Gawker last Friday -- that's, like, a whole lifetime in blog-years. I'm losing my edge.) Update 2: Boingboing reader and admitted "film dork" chandler says, "i just wanted to point out that the lens in the gallo kits isn't THE famous barry lyndon lens. by THE i mean the Zeiss f0.7 lens used to shoot the candlelight scenes. it's the other lens, the super long zoom lens used for some of the wonderful super-flat shots."

Toggle iPod Battery Status is an AppleScript that switches your iPod battery display to a numeric value between zero and 500. Link (Thanks, Hamish!)

The lickspittles of ICANN have granted a Verisign proposal to allow people to place standing orders for domains, in order to snarf them up the minute they expire.

During ICANN's weeklong meetings in Rome last week, the VeriSign-proposed back-ordering service drew criticism during periods of public comment, according to registrars who attended. To Ric Chambers, managing principal of registrar R. Lee Chambers Co. LLC of Ooltewah, Tenn., a plaintiff in the ICANN lawsuit, the board seemed determined to approve the service regardless of the objections raised in Rome.

"It is hard to reconcile the level of disagreement on the WLS and a vote of the board," Chambers said in a statement. "It suggests that there was more going on here this week than was seen and heard in the public meetings."

Link

Good, comprehensive guide to unlocking mobile phones by Schuyler Earle. Anyone know when I can get a phone-unlocker for OS X? Update: You can always use the Web-based unlocker if you don't mind sending a stranger your IMEI.

The locktype, according to unlockme.co.uk, is usually 2, unless you're on a 3650 or 7650, in which case it's 5. The IMEI is the hardware serial number of your phone, which you can read off the inside label underneath the battery, or retrieve from the phone itself by dialing *#06#. Finally, you'll need the provider code, which is a 5-digit number you can pull from this network provider code list. Unlock code calculators give you seven different codes, at least one of which should unlock the phone when entered with the SIM removed, but you only get five tries, before the phone locks you out. So, you really want to double-check your work before entering would-be unlock codes into the phone.

Link (Thanks, Schulyer!)