But sometimes Merlin goes low-tech, as he did with his amazing post from last September on the "Hipster PDA" -- a bunch of index cards held together with a binder clip. Now he's extending the Hipster PDA with tips and tricks he's derived since then. It's great stuff -- Craig of Craigslist carries around old business cards in his shirt-pocket with notes to himself in tiny writing on the back of them. Hipster PDA is like that on steroids.

The Hipster PDA (Parietal Disgorgement Aid) is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports optional categories and “beaming,” and is configurable to an unlimited number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into your hip pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain. Let’s make one together.

"On Wednesday, we learned a Navy ship had come into the bay but the jetty was damaged and so with help from other locals I carried her and the baby on to a dinghy and took her out to the big ship at sea," (Roy said.)

Reaching Port Blair after a 7-hour journey Roy's wife was rushed to the local hospital where doctors immediately cleaned up her uterus and gave her some medicines.

"It was the doctors who suggested we name the boy Tsunami and we also liked the name and decided to call him that. After all it is a name everyone will instantly notice and remember."

Like the combination of several Richard Pryor plots (rewritten by William Gibson?) this escapee hangs out in an abandoned Circuit City... during which time he played hoops with a mini-basketball net and watched Spider-Man 2 on a DVD player. He also routed water from an adjacent Toys "R" Us and even installed a smoke detector.

Gizmodo: So would it be fair to say your idea with Spaces will be more hands-off? Since you're kind of giving the power of the individual to publish, you don't really care what they say?

Gates: No. There's always a tricky issue when you get into stolen material or pornography. The laws for online publishing the same as for print-based publishing, where if you're hosting certain types of things and somebody notifies you about that...

Gizmodo: So since it's sitting on your servers you want to be more careful of it.

Gates: No, there are rules about... if you get notified that it's stolen materials or pornography or things like that. Our policies are just related to what the laws are. The idea of the open empowerment—that's why we've always loved the PC. And there are many examples over the last several decades where the power of the PC to let people publish and communicate has made a huge difference in terms of people trying to control information flow. And that's why the PC is such a fantastic development.

Technorati's developer contest winners have been announced! Winners included GovTrack, a site that tracks bills in congress and congresscritters, and what bloggers are saying about them, whitelabel.org, which transforms the BBC's news site to include links to wikipedia and bloggers links, PersonalDemocracy.com, which tracks what bloggers are saying about members of the US house and senate, and many more.

As two prominent Washington journalists struggle to avoid jail time over their refusal to disclose confidential sources, one of the biggest obstacles the reporters face is America's fastgrowing army of citizen Web loggers, or bloggers.

It’s not that the town criers of the online world are campaigning to send Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time Magazine to prison. Rather, it’s the bloggers' very existence that undercuts the journalists' legal defense.

On Wednesday, lawyers for Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper are scheduled to appear before a federal appeals court in the capital to argue that reporters should have a legal privilege not to testify about their sources under most circumstances. A federal prosecutor investigating whether the White House leaked the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, has asked the pair to appear before a grand jury to answer questions.They have refused.

The crux of the reporters' contention is that the public would be less well informed if journalists could not promise their sources confidentiality. However, the proliferation of blogs and bloggers could represent the Achilles' heel in this approach. If Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper are entitled to claim special treatment in the courts, so too could hundreds of thousands of Americans who use the Internet to post comments about their views on current events.

It is standard operating procedure for students of art to learn by example by sketching masterpieces in an art museum. A budding artist in Durham found that the time honored tradition was challenged while seeking inspiration at the Matisse, Picasso and the School of Paris: Masterpieces from the Baltimore Museum of Art exhibit in Raleigh.

Over the weekend at the North Carolina Museum of Art there were works by Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Degas and some Illanas. Julia Illana is a second grader who was visiting the popular exhibit there with her parents and was sketching the paintings in her notebook. "I love to draw in my notebook," Illana said.

Her sketch of Picasso's Woman with Bangs, which came out pretty good, and Matisse's Large Reclining Nude got the promising artist into trouble with museum security. A museum guard told Julia's parents that sketching was prohibited because the great masterpieces are copyright protected, a concept that young Julia did not understand until her mother explained the term.

According to a new analysis by The Economist magazine, the global stock is worth more than $700bn (£370bn), more than all the US dollar bills in circulation, and streets ahead of Britain's £42bn of notes and coins...

A close look at the rules can expose unbeatable deals. A civil engineer from California, David Phillips, became known as the "pudding guy" after calculating that an offer of frequent flyer miles with food at his local supermarket yielded a remarkable return. He spent $3,000 on 12,000 Healthy Choice chocolate desserts and earned $25,000 worth of free flights, enough to pay for travel for the rest of his life.

A classical sociobiological just-so story posits that this kind of individual variation on the lark/owl continuum had an adaptive function, namely to ensure that at every time of night at least one member of the tribe was awake. Thus some stood guard early in the night, others late in the night, listening to the sounds of the jungle (or savannah, or whatever) while the midnight break is thought to have been used for copulating with whomever also happens to be awake at the time - this was before the social invention of sexual monogamy...

Pretending that sleep-need does not exist is also institutionalized. I am not talking just about night-shifts and rotating shifts (those will kill you), night flights, being available for communication 24/7, stores open 24/7, etc - those are part of a modern society, will not go away, and we just need to learn how to adjust. I am talking about the building standards. With a huge proportion of the population working at night, why do windows have no blinds? Some old manors do, but new buildings do not. Never. Some have fake blinds, just for show, screwed into the outside walls on the sides of windows, yet cannot be closed. There are no built-in black curtains, or roll-down wooden blinds. It is difficult to find such curtains in stores if one wants to install one. What is going on? I have never seen, heard, read about, or experienced another country in the world in which sleep is not sacred, and blinds are not an essential part of a house.

I see some striking parallels between the way this society treats sleep and the way it treats sex. Both are sinful activities, associated with one of the Seven Deadly Sins (Sloth and Lust). Both are associated with the most powerful biological needs. Both are supposed to be a taboo topic. Both are supposed to be done in private, at night, with a pretense that it is never actually happening. Education in sleep hygiene and sex hygiene are both slighted, one way or another (the former passively, the latter actively opposed). Both are thought to interfere with one's productivity - ah, the good old Protestant work ethic! Why are Avarice and Greed not treated the same way? Raking in money by selling mega-burgers is just fine, and a decent topic of conversation, even a point of pride. Why are we still allowing Puritan Calvinist way of thinking, coupled with capitalist creed, to still guide the way we live our lives, or even think about life. Sleeping, whether with someone or alone, is a basic human need, thus a basic human right. Neither really detracts from the workplace productivity - au contraire: well rested and well satisfied people are happy, energetic, enthusiastic and productive. It is sleep repressed people, along with the dour sex repressed people, who are the problem, making everyone nervous. How much longer are we going to hide under the covers?

A good few years back, I was involved in a radio drama series for children - a 'Cartoon for Radio' called Ashley's Worlds. I've made the whole thing available as a bittorrent file.

If you're not sure what a bittorrent is, you should read the Wikipedia entry on the topic.

So - what do you need to know about Ashley's Worlds? It was originally established to entertain my son, Jake. He was a fair bit younger then - but he still enjoys the series now.

All the characters are cats - and, well... it'll make itself clear as it goes along.

The real Ashley was my cat, who sadly passed away last year.

Cast:
Craig Parker - Ashley
Carl Bland - Bishop
David Weatherley - Tobias
Belinda Todd - Tabitha
Merv Smith - The Strange Old Cat

I've registered Ashley's Worlds under a Creative Commons Licence so that people can be encouraged to listen to it without fear that they'll be breaking copyright by listening.

The license agreement on DirectRevenue's website states that those who have been inflicted with it "agree that you will not initiate, permit, authorize or assist any third party or application to remove the Software from your computer, or disrupt its operation or the operation of any other user." DirectRevenue's EULA also claims the right to reinstall itself if any third party software removes it. (Among the myriad spyware-related lawsuits going on, by the way, DirectRevenue is being sued by fellow adware vendor Avenue Media over the DirectRevenue software's penchant for deleting other spyware from users' systems.)

So it seemed to me that this poses something of a quandary for Microsoft. After all, the software EULA as we know it today is basically a Microsoft invention, and no other company has been as big a supporter of UCITA and other legal efforts to make sneakwrap licenses completely binding. So Microsoft isn't going to want to go around violating any other company's EULA, not even those of companies of whom they might not completely approve

According to engineer Samuel M. Goldwasser, who maintains an extensive Web site about lasers called Sam's Laser FAQ, if you were to look directly into a laser-pointer beam from a mile away, it would appear as bright as a 100-watt bulb seen at a distance of less than 100 feet. Most people would find such a bright light very uncomfortable and would instinctively blink and/or turn away.

Furthermore, users pollute controlled vocabularies, either because they misapply the words, or stretch them to uses the designers never imagined, or because the designers say "Oh, let's throw in an 'Other' category, as a fail-safe" which then balloons so far out of control that most of what gets filed gets filed in the junk drawer. Usenet blew up in exactly this fashion, where the 7 top-level controlled categories were extended to include an 8th, the 'alt.' hierarchy, which exploded and came to dwarf the entire, sanctioned corpus of groups.

The cost of finding your way through 60K photos tagged 'summer', when you can use other latent characteristics like 'who posted it?' and 'when did they post it?', is nothing compared to the cost of trying to design a controlled vocabulary and then force users to apply it evenly and universally.

This is something the 'well-designed metadata' crowd has never understood -- just because it's better to have well-designed metadata along one axis does not mean that it is better along all axes, and the axis of cost, in particular, will trump any other advantage as it grows larger. And the cost of tagging large systems rigorously is crippling, so fantasies of using controlled metadata in environments like Flickr are really fantasies of users suddenly deciding to become disciples of information architecture.

Over Thanksgiving, on Day Five Without Zyos, the message boards of the online world were abuzz with rumors. Zyos has quit. Zyos is playing under a different name. Zyos is dead. Five pages of this, growing more fevered as it went, until one of Zyos' handlers, one of the people in the business of "building Zyos' brand," logged on.

"Guys," he said. "Zyos is fine. He's just on vacation."

Anyway, ADM of Thousand Robots has a page about tasting the soda. He wasn't a big fan.

I tried the Strawberry (Fresa) variety...at room temperature, which is inadvisable. It doesn't taste precisely like anything I've had before. The closest analogue I can come up with is Ruby Red grapefruit juice, but blander and less sour and simultaneouly -- at first -- less sweet. But then once the aftertaste wallops you with the sugar, you'll feel a bit like you've just strained a shot of thinly flavored water through a cup of sugar right into your mouth. Boing juice doesn't taste like strawberries. Or maybe it just tastes like old strawberries that have been sitting next to a pile of rotten bananas for a few weeks at a Mexican juice factory.

Juergen sez: "Every year on August 15th, Yakuza, Right Wing Groups and War Veterans gather at the controversal Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo to commemorate the end of the war and to worship the war dead. The Yasukuni Shrine has a special significance, because Japanese believe that once a soldier has been enshrined at Yasukuni he becomes a kami, or national deity. The kami at Yasukuni are thought to look over the nation and protect it just as they did when they died fighting for it. During World War II, soldiers believed the highest honor they could receive was death followed by enshrinement at Yasukuni. Soldiers had a saying "see you at Yasukuni", which meant they knew they were going to die, but they would meet again in death. Yasukuni Shrine is currently the home to the souls of more than 2.5 million Japanese war dead including fourteen convicted Class A war criminals. Link

If you read my column in Ithaca, and are a fan, here's some bad news: The publisher wants to drop it after getting complaints about a line I wrote -- "Sex isn't special." Here it is in the context of the column (entire text of the column here):

Where you go wrong is thinking sex is special. It isn’t. Monkeys have it, and not because somebody gave them flowers and expensive jewelry. But consider this: while your girlfriend was the antithesis of selective about the men she slept with (apparently, not only sowing her wild oats, but a soybean crop equivalent to that of mainland China’s), she appears quite picky about the man she relationships with.

Now, I have no problem with people writing in to say I'm wrong or immoral. In fact, I welcome dissent. Papers should, too. Instead, daily newspapers tend to bend over the moment three old ladies (or some church group) complains. I work very hard to tell the truth and present data-based answers in my column instead of taking the easy way out: simply rubberstamping the status quo. Sadly, many papers would rather foster docile readers than spirited discussion.

If you live in Ithaca (ONLY if you live in Ithaca and read me -- this has to be an honest reflection of reader opinion), and if you like my column and want to continue to see it in the paper, please call the publisher: Jim Fogler, President/Publisher (607) 274-9252 jfogler@ithaca.gannett.com

Since its original description in 1866 by the Neurologist S. Mitchell, the phantom limb phenomena have attracted many scholars across a broad spectrum of fields. The phenomena describe the condition found in many amputees in which sensation of the removed limb persists. As such, it has served as a metaphor for many ideas in other fields beyond the scope of neurobiology and neuropsychology including philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, anthropology, literature, film and art. The purpose of this conference is three fold. First, it brings to the public’s attention this fascinating and significant medical problem. Second, it not only looks objectively at the way that these phenomena have stimulated interest across such a wide variety of fields but also shows how successful it is as a inter-disciplinary signifier; an issue important for both art and science initiatives.

"Via PVR Blog, I see that Videora, a BitTorrent RSS reader, has launched. Om noted it here. So why do we care? Well, I've long theorized that video over IP will come from the bottom up, as opposed to the top down, much as it has with blogs, and with music before that. This feels right along those lines."

When showed a 10,000 won ($10) bank note, it said: “That’s a 10,000 bank note that people would like to have.”

When asked about its name, it said: “I am sorry. I don’t have a name yet. Please give me one.”

Then it waved its hands, saying: “I will see you again next time when I will have become wiser.”

* Engineering disasters

* Eyeing new ion beams

* Assembling nanomachines

* NASA's comet fly-by

* Major interstates routes have a one or two digit number associated with them. North-south routes have odd numbers (I-5) while east-west roads have even numbers (I-10).

* Connecting interstate routes or beltway loops around urban areas have 3 digit numbers (the 101).

* To prevent duplication within a state, a progression of prefixes is used for the three-digit numbers. For example, if I-80 runs through three cities in a state, circumferential routes around these cities would be numbered as I-280, I-480, and I-680.

* There’s no set standard on exit numbering, but states generally use one of two systems: 1. Milepost numbering. The southern or western-most point on a given interstate begins the odometer at 0. If an exit is 6.5 miles from that point, it’s exit #6 and so forth.

2. Consecutive numbering. Again, starting at the western or southern-most point, each exit is given a number, starting with 1. When they have to shoehorn more exits in, they become #6A, #6B, etc…

Update: Gary sez, "While I do only dabble in legal torrents and am a big fan of the LegalTorrents site, i'm not really affiliated with them. Maybe you could change it to 'Prodigem's Gary Lerhaupt'"

They put these "home taping is killing music" graphics on everything from stickers to the sleeves of LPs you bought in the shops. Home taping didn't kill nothin' (turned out to be no more deadly than P2P!).

The media geniuses at Downhill Battle have produced a great tee that recycles the HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC slogan and gilds the lily with this tagline: AND IT'S FUN. I laughed till it hurt. Link (via Preshrunk)

"We corresponded between 1974 and 1981. For sale are all the letters he wrote me between 1974 and 1975, when I was writing a U.S. master's thesis about books he'd published a decade earlier, at a time when only the French accorded him critical respect and his first language editions had lapsed out of print: Originals of over 60 individual letters, 186 pages (all those he signed on the right side of the page).

The letters are about Valis and V.A.L.I.S. (because that's what he was writing then); they are also a linear chronology of his "long inner trip" in his own words (the drawing is what a dream instructed him to draw); they are also about Ubik and UBIK (because that's what I was writing about); they say what he wanted them to say."

"Two of the music shows (Antique Phonograph Music Program) and Thomas Edison's Attic consist of DJs hand-cranking old turntables to play cylinders and records dating from the 1880s to the 1920s and should hopefully fall under public domain while the third "Advanced D & D with Donna Summer" (aka Jason Forrest) plays breakcore and random CD-Rs from all over the place.

"The station would very much like to offer all of it's content for podcasting but like other people, we're a bit concerned about the legal ramifications. In any case, we're very excited to be offering our content in a way that allows listeners to hear our programs when and where they want to. hope you guys like it." Link

"'When we released Owen into the enclosure, he lumbered to the tortoise which has a dark gray color similar to grown up hippos,' Sabine Baer, rehabilitation and ecosystems manager at the park, told Reuters."

Update: Boing Boing reader Ryan Schroeder says, "I had to have a Creative Commies shirt, so I threw that graphic up on Cafe Press. Figured others might want one as well. IMPORTANT: All prices are set to the base level, I'm not making a cent here. Cafepress is getting all of our money. If the people demand it I'll boost the prices by a buck or two and donate everything to the EFF." Link to Creative Commies t-shirts.

And reader Ken Mickles says, "Similar to Ryan Schroeder, I had to have a Creative Commons t-shirt for myself. But conveniently for me, I own a screen printing company. So if anyone else wants one, I put up a quick Paypal form and I'm selling them for $5 plus shipping. That's a fair bit cheaper than CafePress, and they should be way higher quality." Link.

I'd like to thank everyone who wrote to me about this. We got rid of the messages boards on Boing Boing over a year ago, and I'd kind of forgotten how nice and generous 99.9% of Boing Boing's readers are! It's inspiring and uplifting to get email from so many exellent people.

I thought you'd be interested to read the advice I've received about this so far. There are lots of ideas, but the four most common ones are:

1. Get a lawyer.

2. Get a cashier's check and pay the fine with it (sending it by certified mail).

3. Contact the officer who issued the ticket and ask him what the status of the ticket is.

4. Contest the ticket, because it is invalid with a date on it.

Our next steps: we are going to call a lawyer friend who has dealt with ticket problems before, and we are calling AAA, which apparently has a department that helps people deal with traffic tickets.

Here's one thing that might help (click on thumbnail for enlargement). When my wife went down to the court to attempt pay the ticket yesterday, the clerk gave her this "Proof of Appearance" statement. Hopefully, it'll convince the judge that we tried to take care of the matter.

Here is the email I've received so far. Link

UPDATE: We ended up WINNING! Here's the thrilling conclusion.

The comics industry has been creaking and threatening collapse for as long as I've been reading funnybooks. One thing that's always frustrated me is the incomprehensible lag between the monthly books and the bound collections: if you wander into a bookstore and discover issues 1-5 of Y: The Last Man or Issues 1-5 of Fables (both stone brilliant; run, don't walk) and fall in love, why you can go on to pick up the subsequent collections, three or four books each in all. Now, say you've read up to issue 20 of Fables and you don't want to wait for the next collection to come out: you want to take the plunge and become a regular, monthly comics reader. You go down to your local comics store and say, "Please sell me issues 21 through the current issue of Fables, and put the current ish aside for me every month: I'm hooked!"

What usually happens is the comics person will say, "Sorry, we've got issue 25, which is the current one, and number 24, but that's it -- the older ones are out of print." In other words, you got on the Fables boat too late and you're not going to be able to catch up with the book in comics form without buying issues from collectors or off of eBay.

So here's a gedankenexperiment for ya: what if the DC and Marvel put all their funnybooks on the Web two months after they were shipped to the stores? My guess is that the kind of comics reader who downloads issues so that he won't be "running the risk of damaging" the hard-copy will continue to buy as many comics as ever.

But if you believe the comics industry, it's going broke selling to just the people who put their comics in mylar bags and stack them in hermetic vaults. Funnybooks need to attract a civilian audience who will dip their toes in from time to time, buy the occassional collection, read one or two books a month: it needs a LOT of those people.

The bound collections are a great way to hook new readers. They're retailed in regular book-stores, so they're visible to the kind of person who never goes into a Graphic Novelle Emporium. All that's missing is a way to turn collection readers into monthly-plus-collection readers. The Web could be that way. Scott McCloud has written some brilliant stuff about what a comic that's designed for the Web should look like, but here's the whole other way to use the Web to advance the comics biz: give old issues away to bridge the gap between customer acquisition and customer retention.

Here's at least one comics dealer who sees free downloads of comics driving his business:

This is a message from Derithian who for some reason newsarama wont let him post it......maybe I just need to restart but I'm to busy right now RUNNING A COMIC SHOP!

I am going to come out and say it; I am a member of the z-cult. Not only that I'm a forum mod. To say anything different would put what I say in a different light. I found the Cult about a month after it started. I hadn't read a comic in more than 5 years and hated it all. Comic books were for kids and stupid. Then I downloaded because someone told me I had to read something. So I read it. A month later I opened my own shop.

Not only did I open my own shop, I sell comics to foreign members of z-cult from my shop who are interested in buying books but aren't in areas where you can buy them. Interesting isn't it. You can say all you want that downloading hurts the industry when I have personally because of the cult put tens of thousands of dollars back into the industry. Not to mention I started my own comic development studio to publish local writers online.

When the whistlers listened to Silbo sentences, regions in the left side of their brain were activated, including areas linked to language production and comprehension, along with a region in the right hemisphere thought to be associated with linguistic processing....

The Silbo, which is thought to have been brought to the island by Berbers from North Africa, condenses Spanish into two vowels and four consonants.

Whistled languages are also used in Greece, Turkey, China and Mexico, according to (researcher David) Corina.

The researchers were intrigued to find that SM totally avoided looking at people's eyes. She discerned her information simply from looking around the nose and mouth.

This was generally enough for her to identify emotions such as happiness or anger, where features such as a smile, or bared teeth, are important.

But wide eyes are a particularly important component of a fearful expression. Because SM was only looking at the nose and mouth, she did not notice the eyes and concluded that the person was feeling neutral.

"First you have to look at the eyes, and then the brain has to make use of that information to figure out it's fear," explains (researcher Ralph) Adolphs.

Single Made with just one shot of espresso. This is the normal amount for all Tall-sized drinks except Mocha Valencias and Americanos.

Double Made with two shots. This is the normal amount for all Grande- and hot Venti-sized drinks except Mocha Valencias and Americanos. Also the normal amount for Tall-sized Mocha Valencias and Americanos.

Triple Made with three shots. This is the normal amount for Grande- and Venti-sized Mocha Valencias and Americanos. Also the normal amount for most iced Venti-sized drinks.

Quad Made with four shots. Hope you weren't planning on sleeping anytime soon.

Ristretto This is so rarely requested that even many baristas don't recognize it. A normal shot of espresso takes about twenty seconds to pull; a ristretto shot is stopped at fifteen seconds, making a slightly smaller, less bold shot.

Update: More propaganda here.

"Apple has turned an open and interactive standard into an artifice that prevents consumers from using the portable hard drive digital music player of their choice," the lawsuit states...

"Apple has unlawfully bundled, tied, and/or leveraged its monopoly in the market for the sale of legal online digital music recordings to thwart competition in the separate market for portable hard drive digital music players, and vice-versa," the lawsuit said.

Mr Slattery called himself an iTunes customer who "was also forced to purchase an Apple iPod" if he wanted to take his music with him to listen to.

"He said if I didn't turn the camera over to him, he would have me arrested" and ban him from the store, Roy said.

Attorney Mary R. Craig, who represents The Herald-Mail, said Roy "certainly was well within his rights" to take pictures.

The store can set limits, such as on taking pictures inside, but the expectation of privacy probably is less outside, she said.

She said Roy probably didn't violate anyone's privacy, especially the naked man's.

Alice Neff Lucan, an attorney who represents the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association, said Wal-Mart "emphatically" had no right to demand Roy's camera.

"He didn't violate any of Wal-Mart's rights and he didn't violate the streaker's rights," she said. "He just took a picture of what was in the public's view."

I think of distributed journalism as somewhat analogous to any project or problem that can be broken up into little pieces, where lots of people can work in parallel on small parts of the bigger question and collectively -- and relatively quickly -- bring to bear lots of individual knowledge and/or energy to the matter. Some open-source software projects work this way. The important thing is the parallel activity by large numbers of people, in service of something that would be difficult if not impossible for any one or small group of them to do alone, at least in a timely way.

Distributed journalism isn't new. Professionals have been doing it for a long time. When I was the Vermont stringer for the New York Times, back in the early 1980s, the paper's National Desk would occasionally put the word out to stringers in all 50 states, asking them, for example, to call state government people about some topic or another and send a memo back to New York. The same kind of thing is done all the time by major publications with their own staffers on big stories. One person may write the piece, but a collection of many, many reporters does the legwork.

Find a clean (if you care) shirt that strikes your fancy. I have used shirts with printed pictures or words, anything I thought would look good on my butt. You might not want to use your prized material possession if it's your first time. Figure out if you have enough material for underwear (see item 1 above), and cut out the two main pattern pieces. You can cut the crotch piece out of the same material, or you can use a new fresh T-shirt or whatever. (I keep a few Hanes white undershirts on hand.)

Why is Six Apart buying LiveJournal? Lots of reasons:

* Our companies are more alike than different.
* We both use Perl.
* Together we form super robot that's stronger than the sum of its parts.
* Super robots can fight super companies.
* They respect us, we respect them.
* We have a number of features they don't.
* We have experience with making "inward-facing" community sites, whereas their sites/products tend to be "outward-facing". They want some of that inward-facing action.
* Because we're awesome.

What does this mean for LiveJournal? Nothing earth-shattering. LiveJournal development and support will continue, and will probably even accelerate, as we grow the team. We'll continue to work on speed, reliability, and new features. LiveJournal won't become paid-user-only or anything crazy like that. We're not going to raise prices. We're not going to cancel permanent accounts, etc, etc. And we're not going to spam or sell your information. You own your journals, not us. Really you shouldn't see any negative changes. The most immediate changes will be that we'll start to get prettier... more styles, themes, etc. Six Apart is really good at that and we're not.

Update: And Six Apart announces their side of the story here: Link.

Q: "In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, 'We've got to look at patents, we've got to look at copyrights.' What's driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?

A: "No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.

And this debate will always be there. I'd be the first to say that the patent system can always be tuned--including the U.S. patent system. There are some goals to cap some reform elements. But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we've had the best intellectual-property system--there's no doubt about that in my mind, and when people say they want to be the most competitive economy, they've got to have the incentive system. Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future."

BB reader Matt Bradley said, "Obviously, what we need is a large red flag with a gold copyleft in the upper left, replacing the hammer and sickle."

That sounded like a fine idea, so I whipped up the icon you see here. Enjoy, comrades!

Update: More Creative Commies propaganda here. Link one, Link two.

We just got back from the XM press conference at CES and we got to ask him two questions -- we made them zingers of course: Question one: “What impact do you think Howard Stern going to Sirius is going to have on your business, and how close did you come to signing him?” As you can see from his expression he was really excited about answering this one).

Question two: “Dr. Laura over the past couple of years said that gay people are biological errors. You talked before about decisive programming (i.e. Stern), I wonder what XM’s position is on hate speech was and if you condone it. And why would you associate yourself with her after you said you wouldn’t associate with Howard Stern because of controversy issues. Are you going to lose subscribers, and do you feel gay people are biological errors?”

Winners from last year's competition are online, and include this stunning series of images by Mark Zaleski about people who work with the dead for the Riverside County Sheriff's Department in California. Snip from description for this image: "Pathologists and technicians examine the remains for a woman during an autopsy in the autopsy suite. Each body brought into the Riverside County Sheriff Coroner Bureau is tagged with the individuals identification information."
Link to Zaleski's photos (warning: some are gruesome), Link to another particularly striking series by NPPA winner David Hoegsholt -- portraits of a drug-addicted prostitute in Copenhagen. (Thanks, Susannah, and thanks also to Keith W. Jenkins, Photography Editor for The Washington Post Magazine and Best of Photojournalism on the Web Contest Coordinator.).

With Neal Stephenson's permission, this guy has annotated In the Beginning was the Command line and posted it online for everyone to see. I think this is a great example of how works can evolve and be improved upon. Unfortunately, In the Command Line has not been 'set free', but it's great that the author was able and willing to give permission for this development.

The next day, with her ticket in hand, I entered the url for the website listed on the ticket (lasuperiorcourt.com). I wanted to pay the fine and sign her up for driving school so our car insurance rates wouldn't increase. The website couldn't find the ticket. I tried searching for it both by entering the ticket number and by entering my wife's driver license number. No luck. So I called the phone number on the ticket. The woman who answered said there was no record of the ticket. She said my wife would have to drive to the ticket office on Penfield St, in Chatsworth to take care of it.

So, my wife drove there on January 5th and showed the woman at the counter the ticket. The woman entered the ticket number and nothing came up. She scratched her head for a minute, and then noticed that the police officer forgot to write a date on the ticket. Apparently, that screws everything up.

The woman told my wife what the fine is (about $135), but told her that she could not accept payment for the fine, because the ticket is not in the database. My wife is not allowed to attend driving school, either, because the ticket isn't in the database.

The woman instructed my wife to call the court every day week, to find out if the ticket had been entered into the computer yet. Once it shows up, she is supposed to drive to the ticket office the very next day to take care of it. And once the ticket has been entered, she is going to be hit with a penalty and possibly a warrrant for her arrest, because once the information goes into the computer it'll see that she hasn't paid the fine yet, and it will be flagged as delinquent. My wife will then have to explain the situation to another helpful city employee.

My wife asked the woman how it long will take for the ticket to be entered into the computer system. The woman said she had no idea. My wife asked her if she is going to have to call every day week for the next several years. She shrugged and said "Well, it might take a week, it might take six months, I don't know."

My wife asked again if she could just pay the fine and have it apply to the ticket when it finally does show up. Woman: "Nope."

I'm at a loss for what to do here. If you have a good idea please email me and let me know if you do! UPDATE: We ended up WINNING! Here's a follow-up post, and here's the thrilling conclusion.

And of course, sometimes Wikipedia is better, since, as with the Indian Ocean tsunami example, Britannica simply has no offering. So, at the margin, a casual user who wants free access to a Web site that offers a communally-compiled and non-authoritative overview of a recent event will prefer the Wikipedia to nothing, which is what Britannica offers. In this case, Wikipedia comes out on top, and walking along several of those axes like cost, availability, topicality, and breadth of coverage, Wikipedia has the advantage, and in many cases, that advantage is increasing with time

Now Britannica doesn't want this to be true (god, do they not want this to be true) and so they try to create litmus tests around authoritativeness -- "WARNING: Do not read anything that does not come from an institutional source!" But this is as silly as audiophiles dismissing the MP3 format because it wasn't an improvement in audio quality, missing entirely that the package of "moderate quality+improved cost and distribution" was what made the format great. Considering MP3 as nothing more than a lossy compression scheme missed the bundle of services that it enabled.

If you've got a Mac, that means scoring one of El Gato's new EyeTV 500s, a device that can move digital TV shows form your rabbit ears or your cable wire to your Mac in glorious high-def, as plan-jane MPEGs that you can manipulate, share, rip, mix and burn till the cows come home.

My cow-orker Fred von Lohmann, EFF's Senior Intellectual Property Lawyer, is also a certified hi-fi nut, gearhead, and gadget freak. He scored a review-unit of the EyeTV 500 and wrote up a review of its freedom-enhancing capabilities.

As a demo of those capabilities, EFF is hosting a five minute high-def clip from Fellowship of the Rings (Torrent Link), which occupies a thunderous 500MB of hard-drive (!). The studios argued that the Broadcast Flag was necessary to keep viewers from sharing high-def movies over the Internet -- at 500MB per five minutes, that seems a little far-fetched.

The tiny silver lining here is that if you can get an open, freedom-loving digital television tuner between now and the summer, you'll be able to go on doing practically anything you like with the digital television you receive over the air and with your unencrypted cable signal. If you choose to do this by plugging a DTV tuner into your computer, you'll be able to archive your shows on your hard-drive, manipulate them with your favorite editing software, and email clips to your friends.

The game I am about to pick as my "Game of the Year 2004" is called Ie, Tatemasu! ("let’s build your house!", as they say on the guide book); it’s a fan-made erotic game. And the most basic type, too: a simulation game. For those of you not familiar with the genre, you basically see the character you’re supposed to be talking to, read the dialogue, and sometimes make a choice (between, for example: "go to the pachinko" or "pay a visit to this character"). Sometimes, when, hum, something visual happens that words would be unfit to describe properly, you are shown a still illustration of the scene while the text still runs down the CG. Basically, these games are very, very slow slideshows of pornographic drawings with a lot of text, and very few interactive elements.

The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI issued a warning to the Transportation Security Administration recently stating that al-Qaida may attempt to use watches with cigarette lighters or Casio watches with built-in altimeters to detonate bombs on board US airliners. Apparently, the altimeters built into some Casio watches can be modified to detonate bombs at certain altitudes. They are apparently favored by cost-conscious terrorists since Casio watches are affordable and easily obtained.

I've created an edition of prints to benefit the Tsunami disaster relief efforts. This edition was printed exclusively for this benefit auction, and I won't be making any more prints in this size of these images. Ever.

The edition consists of two 13x19-inch prints, portraits I made of Thai kickboxers exactly one year ago at Lumpinee Stadium, Bangkok. These are beautiful pigment prints (if I do say so myself), personally printed by me on Hahnemuhle heavy-weight art paper, hand-signed and numbered (1/1).

100% of the proceeds will be donated through eBay's "Giving Works" system to Unicef's Tsunami Relief Fund.

Did you know there's a whole site dedicated to finding interesting stuff via Google? Link, and check out or the "ihackstuff.com" site.

Here is a search that finds Axis webcams..
inurl:"view/index.shtml"

Update: More here.

We're always interested in hearing your suggestions for other design changes to improve legibility and usability. Feel free to email them to us, and put "BB design" in the subject field.

Now however, Doctorow has taken a very different track. His forthcoming novel, 'Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town' (Tor Books / Tom Doherty Associates ; May 1, 2005 ; $24.95) is in the first place coming to town a bit later in the year. The early draft I first read of this novel was nearly three times as long as 'Eastern Standard Tribe'. But the big ch-ch-ch-changes come as Doctorow turns to face the strangeness not of a science fictional future, but instead a fantastically rendered present. Alan, the protagonist of 'Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town', is a middle-aged man who moves into a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. He only barely fits in with the college-roomie types next door, and that's even before the gal who lives there reveals to him that she has wings that grow back even if she cuts 'em off.

Alan is a sensitive guy, and he understands, because, we're told, his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine. This is clearly the type of reproduction that will not be taught in your hygiene classes. So, you know, when one of his brothers, a set of nested Russian nesting dolls, shows up on his doorstep starving because the innermost doll has disappeared, you can imagine that the whole family relationship issue is a bit more complex than usual. Especially since brother Davey, whom Alan and his other siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge.

What's a guy like Alan to do but hook up with a cybergeek who plans to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet access? I've got to admit that under the circumstances set out by Doctorow, that seems like a more than reasonable reaction. Now as to how readers will react to the novel, well, that's a different matter entirely. I'm totally engrossed by this slight shift for Doctorow from the purely technological to the absurd and fantastic. That's because Doctorow writes with the kind of hardheaded humor and logic that makes one suspect this book will be a mind-boggling delight. And perhaps a bit of a revelation for Doctorow's audience, which could really grow to include a swathe of readers who enjoy literary fantasy.

Then I thought of MusicPlasma. The thing I like about it is how intuitive it is - put in the name of a band you like, and you find more that you might like but had never heard of.

Hey, I thought, what if we did that with blogs, and instead of Amazon data, we used Technorati cosmos data, or Feedster data, or Findory, or Bloglines, or some combination of all of that plus more?

Greg sez: "Following the link to Gakken's toy site mentioned in your recent post regarding the phonograph kit, I was excited to see a working model of the bow-shooting boy (hiki douji kara kuri ningyou). Be sure to check out the video.

During a recent trip to Japan, I saw a television show about about these--no, not the toys, the original automatons. (The real one is much larger than this model.) I was amazed at the complexity of that machine. I am even more amazed that they have replicated the function in a tiny model that costs only $100! Link

Well, now it appears that someone else is reacting badly to that same site. Not only did the company (the Marco Beach Ocean Resort) say that Urinal.net couldn't mention their name, they also claimed that their cease & desist letter could not be forwarded or shown to anyone... Link

The devices that most people on earth will carry or wear in coming decades could become platforms for technical and entrepreneurial innovation, foundations for industries that don't exist yet, enablers of social and political change. However, it is far from certain that mobile media will go the route of the PC, where teenage dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and millions of others actively shaped the technology, or the Internet, where search engines were invented in dorm rooms and innovators like Tim Berners-Lee gave away the World Wide Web for free without asking permission or changing any wiring.

Powerful interests recognize the dangers such a world poses for business models that depend on controlling and metering access to content, conduit, or services for a mass market, and they are acting to protect their interests. That's what digital rights management, extension of copyright laws into what formerly had been the public domain, the broadcast flag, spectrum regulation policies that favor archaic technologies and incumbent licensees, trusted computing systems that bake all these rules into monopoly silicon are about.

In the stunt, 18-year-old Wallace, a competitor in extreme sports events around the world, launched off a six-feet high ramp and spun backwards through 360 degrees while simultaneously folding his bike underneath him in a move known to BMX devotees as a ‘tabletop’. At one point, onlookers saw Wallace upside down, travelling at 15mph, with his head 12-feet off the floor.

Czerski, a keen sportswoman and diver herself, said: “I spent a lot of time looking at the physics behind various stunts, trying to understand the limits of what is physically possible to determine how far we could push the parameters with our new creation. I then tested our ideas using a computer simulation to plot a new stunt.”

The stunt draws upon a variety of physics theories including the conservation of angular momentum and Newton's laws of motion.

"There's no identifying marks on it, so I don't know where it came from," said Jeff Galliher, petty officer with the U.S. Coast Guard at Port Canaveral. "It's just a buoy base with a tower coming out of it."

If there is something implausible in the idea that huge stretches of world history have been secretly coordinated from a market town just north of the M25 - well, maybe that's what they want you to think. The local newspaper, the Hertfordshire Mercury, certainly seems convinced: over the past few months it has published several intriguing stories quoting local Templars, who told its reporter of a secret network of tunnels under the town that was still in use by the order. "It reaches beyond well known central Hertford locations," one Templar said, "including the tourist office, the castle, Monsoon, Threshers, the post office, Bayley Hall, and the council offices." Treasures of "immense importance" were hidden there, it was claimed. Was the quest for the Holy Grail finally about to come to an end? More surprisingly still, was it about to come to an end underneath Monsoon on Market Place?

The man who has persuaded the Vatican to consider apologising, Tim Acheson, meets the Guardian in icy morning fog in Hertford, wearing smart pinstriped trousers and a thick winter overcoat. His midnight-blue sports car is parked nearby. "As you might expect," he says, setting the tone for the day, "there are going to be some things that I'm not able to discuss."

Paladin of Souls -- Lois McMaster Bujold (Eos, Oct03)
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom -- Cory Doctorow (Tor, Feb03)
Omega -- Jack McDevitt (Ace, Nov03)
Perfect Circle -- Sean Stewart (Small Beer Press, Jun04)
Conquistador -- S.M. Stirling (Roc, Feb04)
The Knight -- Gene Wolfe (Tor, Jan04)

* The special signed and numbered editions (by George R.R. Martin) of the limited edition A Game of Thrones RPG are still available for pre-order. The order page will be updated soon with a new art preview, as well as a sneak-peak at the Noble d20 character class.

* We are downsizing and consolidating our warehouses. In doing so, we found a few copies of out-of-print products, and have placed them for sale in our Rare Products Store. Supply is extremely limited in some cases, and we will sell items on a first-come-first-serve basis.

* In the Rare Products Store, we also have a few gems never offered before, including the German translation of the Sailor Moon RPG and sealed decks and displays of the Origins-Award winning Sailor Moon CCG, as well as imperfect printings (at great discounts) of BESM d20 and Silver Age Sentinels.

* Also in the Rare Products Store, we are offering 7 lucky individuals the chance to own an exclusive part of the company: one of our personalised convention Team GoO hockey jerseys. Each one must be custom made, so you can choose your own jersey name and number.

* In our In-Print Store, we are offering substantial discounts on product bundles. It's the perfect way to jump in and try that game you've been wondering about. Bundles are avaible for Big Eyes, Small Mouth, BESM d20, Silver Age Sentinels Tri-Stat, and Silver Age Sentinels d20.

* For the first time ever, we are selling the ULTIMATE GoO Bundle: one copy of every in-print product we have in our catalogue - plus a few surprises - for an amazing 60% off!

* Finally, a special thank you to our more aggressive customers: if your order comes to more than $200, we will include your name in all of our 2005 books under a dedicated "Contributing Supporter" credit.

For example, say you're interested in keeping track of the recent rumor that Six Apart is buying LiveJournal. You would start by going to Technorati and typing in a set of search terms like:

("six apart" OR sixapart) AND (livejournal OR "live journal")

This will give you an instantly updated stream of posts from blogs around the world that are talking about both SixApart and LiveJournal, in a post, using a variety of spellings.

Note the results page, however - Underneath the title of the search, you'll notice a link that says, "Make this a Watchlist". Click on that link, go through the login process (or create an account if it is the first time at Technorati), and you'll get a link to that saved search to put into your favorite RSS reader.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with 21 other groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), and the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), filed a "friend of the court" brief in the Charter case, urging the Eighth Circuit to determine that the same strong protections applied to anonymous speech in other contexts also apply when copyright infringement is claimed but has not yet been proven. In a victory for privacy and anonymity, the Eighth Circuit determined that DMCA subpoenas could not be used to get this information.

Update: Om Malik has more:

Six Apart, the parent company behind hosted blogging service TypePad, and Moveable Type is about to acquire Live Journal, for an undisclosed amount. The deal is a mix of stock and cash, and could be announced sometime later this month, according to those close to the two companies. If the deal goes through, then Six Apart will become one of the largest weblog companies in the world, with nearly 6.5 million users. It also gives the company a very fighting chance against Google’s Blogger and Microsoft’s MSN Spaces.

Link to archived audio for this program, expanded coverage on the NPR website includes pointers to video files and torrents. Link to NPR Day to Day home. This week, listeners in Boston are hearing the show on their local affiliate WBUR for the first time -- so, consider this a shout-out to Boston.

Earlier in the month we took Boing Boing's live stats page down (link). As we noted in our post, we wanted to grok what the program was reporting, and make sure that whatever we posted was clear and understandable.

Well, the stats are back up (link), and you may notice that we've not done much to them. There's a good reason for this - we prefer to post our stats pretty much as reported by AWStats, the log file analysis program we use. We considered filtering those numbers in any number of ways, but always ended up at the same place - statistics are subject to interpretation and judgment, whereas data is data. We prefer to give you the data, and let you do with it what you want.

We did learn a few interesting things about how AWstats works, and we did make one minor tweak to the reporting process. First, of the columns you see, only the first one - "Unique Visitors," and the last two "Hits" and "Bandwidth" can be taken at face value. "Unique Visitors" counts unique IP addresses that are hitting the site, so it's a fairly accurate count of actual humans reading Boing Boing. (If anything, its count is a bit low, as it does not account for sites like AOL which may have one IP address for thousands of unique users.) The "Hits" and "Bandwidth" columns count just about anything that moves on the site, so they are fine measurements of how "busy" the site is. But the other two columns - "Pages" and "Number of Visits" - are more difficult to understand. They are AWStats' best guess as to how many total visits a site gets, as well as how many pages are actually viewed by those visitors. These columns have always disregarded image and video files, but because a lot of our traffic comes from RSS readers, they are certainly inflated by some amount.

But how much? It's anyone's guess. We're working with Feedburner (link), among others, to figure that out, but until we know, we prefer not to hazard one of our own. What we do know is that those middle columns had been inflated by php files recently added to the site by advertisements, so we filtered those out.

We hope that posting these stats will be one small step toward the blogosphere working out the moving target of "standards" for measuring traffic to blogs - Mark Fletcher of Bloglines has done some good preliminary work (link) along those lines. As we learn more, we'll keep you posted.

The term "pimp" was probably intended as a compliment, the court said. But Knievel said, "What good is law in the United States of America if five or six goddamn bimbos are going to rule against it?"

This is both very cool and very scary. Use this search string below with Google, and you will find dozens (hundreds?) of unsecured webcam feeds (most seem to be security cams).

inurl:"ViewerFrame?Mode="

BoingBoing reader Nick adds, "This is a Google search that gives 2000 cams instead of just 800. Pointed out on MeFi."

Update to this post with more webcam Google-hacks: Link

We're having a party in San Francisco on Thursday night (Link), and we recently launched a remix community site that tracks samples across songs uploaded (here's a good example track: Link). We're doing a contest with Wired Magazine to launch it, where the winner of the best Fine Arts Militia/Chuck D remix gets on their next CD!

[James Surowiecki, the author of "The Wisdom of Crowds"] pointed out that there is nothing new about ill-informed rumor-mongering or other forms of oddness. "There were always cranks," he said. "Rumors have always been fundamental about the way people talk, or think, about politics or complicated issues." Instead of a corner bar or a Barcalounger, however, the location for today's speech is an online medium with a potential audience of millions.

But there is another, more important difference, Mr. Surowiecki and others say. Internet discourse can be self-correcting, with near-instant feedback from readers. What was lost in the sniping over the Democratic Underground posting was the fact that the follow-up comments were a sober discussion of what actually causes earthquakes. The first response to the posting asked, "Earthquakes have been happening since the beginning of time ... How would you explain them?"

Further comments explained the movement of tectonic plates and provided links to sites explaining earthquakes and tsunamis from the United States Geological Survey and other authoritative sources.

"Not to make fun, as I'm sure it's not a unique misconception ... but the reality is simple plate tectonics," one participant wrote. "The entire Pacific Ocean is slowly but surely closing in on itself. What happened is that the floor of the Indian Ocean slid over part of the Pacific Ocean, releasing massive tension in the Earth's crust.

"That's it. No mystic injury to the Gaia spirit or anything."

Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb.
A: What, you mean you don't KNOW??????

Link to Ken's latest, and link to background.

The thirteen projects in "Home Hacking Projects for Geeks" are divided into three categories: Home Automation, Home Entertainment Systems, and Security. The book includes projects such as:

-Remotely Monitor Your Pet
-Make Your House Talk
-Remotely Control Your Computer's MP3 player
-Create Time-Shifted FM Radio
-Watch Your House Across the Network
-Build a Home Security System

Sheeting water on a glass surface, like a windshield, causes significant distortion in the light/images passing through the glass because it isn't perfectly smooth.  Rain-X causes the water to bead up so that spaces between the beads give you clear vision of what's ahead.  While this is clearly evident during rainstorms, it is UNBELIEVEABLY DIFFERENT during rainstorms at night.  You can actually SEE!

https://www.pubservice.com/MK/Subnew.aspx?PC=MK&PK=M5ZMNSA

December 22, 2004
=================

Welcome to the third issue of MAKE News, the email newsletter for MAKE, a how-to technology project magazine published by O'Reilly Media.

(Note: If you entered the Build the Perfect PC Sweepstakes, you are receiving this newsletter once because you requested information about MAKE. To continue to receive this newsletter, sign up at make.oreilly.com under the newsletter sign up link.)

Happy Holidays and Subscription Announcement
============================================

I like the holidays for many reasons. One of them is because it gives me a great excuse to buy new gear. My new digital video camera--which I ordered last week so I can record my kids opening their toys on Christmas--is due any day. I'm also looking around for a photograph printer--I'm weighing the advantages and disadvantages of dye sublimation vs. inkjet (dye sub is winning so far). If my money doesn't run out, I'm going to finally upgrade my beloved Sony Cybershot-U digital camera for another camera with a zoom lens. With these three things in my arsenal of digital tools, I'll be all set to capture the upcoming festivities.

When someone asks me what they should get their technology- loving relatives and friends as a gift for the holidays, I'm not shy about telling them to give a subscription to MAKE. To launch our subscription effort, we have a special offer for readers of this newsletter. Subscribe using this link and you'll get the first volume of MAKE for free.

https://www.pubservice.com//MK/Subnew.aspx?PC=MK&PK=M5ZMNSA

Here's how it works. The annual subscription price for four volumes is $34.95. When you subscribe with this link, you'll get the first issue plus four more quarterly volumes for $34.95. So subscribe for yourself or friends with our very best offer for charter subscribers: five volumes for the cost of four. Be sure you get the premiere volume of MAKE. Subscribe at:

https://www.pubservice.com/MK/Subnew.aspx?PC=MK&PK=M5ZMNSA

The MAKE Meta-Challenge
=======================

I'm looking forward to the ideas for cool projects that readers are going to submit in the coming months. One thing we're working on is a way for people to share their projects with other people on the MAKE website. We'll have some great image- importing and annotation tools. Look for it in late January.

The other thing we're featuring is a "MAKE Challenge" that will appear in every issue of magazine. We'll present readers with a problem (for example, "My neighbor's dog won't stop barking. How can I get it to shut up in a humane, yet effective way?") and ask for solutions to the problem.

To get the "MAKE Challenge" started, I'd like you to email me a technology-related problem you'd like solved. Here's an example of a real-world problem looking for a solution, sent to me by Marc Goodner:

"I have had discussions recently with a number of other camphone enthusiasts who all love them for the poor quality--the artifacts in the images, the unexpected results. The problem is, the images are just too small. An idea came out of these discussions that what would be really cool: a repurposed digicam that has a larger chip but modified to work as a pinhole camera by removing the lens. Is such a thing possible? I don't know. I don't have the skills and neither do any of the guys I know who are interested in this since most of us are software guys. Seems like a good project for MAKE magazine."

Do you have a problem that needs solving? Email me at markf@oreilly.com. If I like it, it might get used as a "MAKE Challenge."

Happy Holidays!

Mark Frauenfelder Editor in Chief Make markf@oreilly.com

MAKE subscriptions now available! Get the first volume free when you become a charter subscriber at:

https://www.pubservice.com/MK/Subnew.aspx?PC=MK&PK=M5ZMNSA

"There are a lot of similarities with the drug war," said David Israelite, chairman of the U.S. Justice Department's Intellectual Property Task Force. "You never really are going to eliminate the problem, but what you hope to do is stop its growth."

Update: Locus has posted an excerpt from their interview with me.

His constraints meant eight months would have different lengths than they do now. March, June, September, and December would each contain 31 days, while the other months would each get 30. To keep the calendar in synchronisation with the seasons, Henry inserted an extra week - which is not part of any month - every five or six years. He named the addition "Newton Week" in honour of his favourite physicist, Isaac Newton.

"If I had my way, everyone would get Newton Week off as a paid vacation and could spend the time doing physics, or other activities of their choice," he says.

Despite this incentive, Henry says he has encountered resistance to his plan - mainly because people would be "stuck" with a birthday that always falls on a Wednesday, for example. Henry, who is among that group, is not moved by the argument. "You have my permission to celebrate your birthday the preceding or following Saturday," he says.

Update: Rick sez, "Here's Dick Henry's own page on calendar reform, and here is the proposed Newton Calendar itself."

A consortium led by Gurgaon-based Aksh Broadband Limited has been selected to implement the Rs 400-crore Andhra Pradesh broadband project, which aims at extending broadband services to each and every village of the state in the next two years.

Well, for two years I've been trying to write a science fiction novel about "ubiquitous computation." However, I'm now so close to my material that, when I went to lecture about it, I got asked to join the faculty of a design school.

It's not like I get tenure, mind you. I'm merely guest-artist for a year, or, as they like to put it at my new alma mater, Art Center College of Design, I'm "Provocateur-in-Residence." But I get a salary, and, more to the point, I get to play in the prototype lab.

I could have said, "No, I've got to finish sci-fi novel number umpteen here," but, gee whiz, if they're asking, why not go? ACCD is one of the world's most-famed design schools, and justly so. I was flattered.

I was in residence for a couple of weeks at Cranbrook School of Design back in the early 90s, and I wrote the outline and proposal for my novel HOLY FIRE there. That turned out to be one of my better books. So, y'know, I'll do it. What the hey.

Now Clay Shirky -- himself an academic -- has written a wonderful and comprehensive rebuttal of the piece, explaining why complaints of "anti-elitism" are misplaced.

Of course librarians, teachers, and academics don't like the Wikipedia. It works without privelege, which is inimical to the way those professions operate.

This is not some easily fixed cosmetic flaw, it is the Wikipedia's driving force. You can see the reactionary core of the academy playing out in the horror around Google digitizing books held at Harvard and the Library of Congress -- the NY Times published a number of letters by people insisting that real scholarship would still only be possible when done in real libraries. The physical book, the hushed tones, the monastic dedication, and (unspoken) the barriers to use, these are all essential characteristics of the academy today.

It's not that it doesn't matter what academics think of the Wikipedia -- it would obviously be better to have as many smart people using it as possible. The problem is that the only thing that would make the academics happy would be to shoehorn it into the kind of filter, then publish model that is broken, and would make the Wikipedia broken as well.

Futurismic's publishing some amazing science fiction and this story doesn't disappoint. It's a great 10 minute read, perfect for the Web.

As always, she examined herself in the mirror, searching for vulnerability. She was rewarded by the usual view: an attractively fit, Slavic cheek-boned thirty-something who could still pass for twenty-something.

"I could lose some weight," she thought. But no, she hadn't really thought that. It was a chip idea. She consciously interfaced with the AI to avoid further confusion. "What the fuck are you talking about? I look great."

"You could lose a few pounds." The voice was a more clinical version of her own. "And your skin could do with some work, too. I can assist."

"No, thank you. Resume normal." She concentrated on getting ready for work, but the ritual had been tainted. Despite herself, she felt larger, flabbier, distinctly less attractive. To compensate, she deliberately dressed sexier than her usual businesslike attire, with shorter skirt and flashier blouse, and forced her hair to have a good day. She refused to submit to moods as a matter of policy.

Another thought tugged at her mind. "You could really use a new outfit." The tone was that of an enthused continental fashion designer.

Q: I hear one of the balls will be reserved for troops who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

A: Yes, the Commander-in-Chief Ball. That is new. It will be about 2,000 servicemen and their guests. And that should be a really fun event for them.

Q: As an alternative way of honoring them, did you or the president ever discuss canceling the nine balls and using the $40 million inaugural budget to purchase better equipment for the troops?

A: I think we felt like we would have a traditional set of events and we would focus on honoring the people who are serving our country right now -- not just the people in the armed forces, but also the community volunteers, the firemen, the policemen, the teachers, the people who serve at, you know, the -- well, it's called the StewPot in Dallas, people who work with the homeless.

Q: How do any of them benefit from the inaugural balls?

A: I'm not sure that they do benefit from them.

Q: Then how, exactly, are you honoring them?

A: Honoring service is what our theme is about.

Rita Carlisle, 53, from Knaphill, Surrey, suffers from a condition called essential tremor.

The stolen remote control gadget sends out pulses to calm the condition and can be switched off so she can rest.

She said: "I'm extremely tired, I'm getting three to four hours' sleep a night, I can't turn the machine off."

Though they admire the tradition of modern wildlife taxidermy, the Rogue Taxidermists are particularly drawn to the early history. "Prior to zoos, prior to museums, prior to galleries, we had these cabinets of wonder, these collections of art, trinkets, oddities," (member Robert) Marbury said. Then, with the rise of natural history museums, "they all sort of broke apart."

Now, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists is hoping to honor that early tradition and celebrate the "showmanship of oddities," as the group's Web site puts it.

Problem -- No effective system of mass, international alert existed in South Asia to quickly warn those in harm's way of the tsunami's approach.

One approach to a solution, created in the span of about 24 hours by an impromtu volunteer geek corps -- A tech system called Alert Retrieval Cache (ARC) which collects, sorts, and routes SMS messages for the puposes of alerts and relay communication. An early warning system based on SMS, short message service.

Rohit Gupta in Mumbai (one of the folks behind DesiMediaBitch, excellent tsunami coverage in recent days) says,

When you need a genius, invent one. We are a genius. Last 24 hours we spent in creating a system of sending and receiving SMS messages through a network of relief people. Here is the page in progress -- Link. These messages you see are SMSes, sent directly from Sri Lanka onto a webpage. ARC was created by Neha Vishwanathan, Rohit Gupta, Taran Rampersad, and Dan Lane.

Here's a snip from the ARC project workspace:

How can a single SMS can save people's lives? If all the people relevant to that message can receive it, instantaneously. In the following system, the SMS message also contains a way of deciding which recipients are relevant to the message.

Why do we need ARC? The failure of state-owned and hierarchical warning systems to alert us about the South Asia earthquake & tsunami, despite prior information has put into focus issues of forums for information exchange. What we need is to get credible, real time information from the grassroots to save lives.

How does this ARC work? Here's a scenario - Morquendi is a relief worker in Middle Earth, and he runs short of medical supplies, specifically antibiotics. The supplies are needed immediately. He needs to inform someone from his location. He sends out an SMS to ARC ... The Sorter program looks for similar keywords in the cache, as in Morquendi's message. After the program is done sorting, it links this message to all those numbers that are attached to similar attributes as in Morquendi's original message. Then it flashes this message to all these numbers. Real-time, instantaneous. People in the vicinity, and anyone across the world who is awake, or knows Morquendi, receives this message.

"If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie," says Steve Hayden, vice chairman of advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather, which creates blogs for clients. "The negative reaction will be so great that, whatever your intention was, it will be overwhelmed and crushed like a bug. You're fighting with very powerful forces because it's real people's opinions."

Words to live by. Must. Respect. Karmic. Weenie. Snarks aside, David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth produced a really solid, thoughtful piece here, and it's well worth a read. Link to full text of article, for which (as Joi and others have pointed out) Fortune let go of their "paid registration only" policy.

The license for AmmanNet doesn't include news reporting, but the stations founder and owner feels that it has enough municipal issues, cultural, social, and economical and sports programming to satisfy the culturally hungry Jordanian public. "Since the new Audio Visual Law was enacted, all the stations that have been licensed have broadcast only music. We are sure that the public is interested in a more holistic approach to broadcasting in the form of a community radio rather than just entertainment radio."

Kuttab expects the new FM station to be operating by the spring. Established in October 2000 under the auspices of UNESCO and the Greater Amman Municipality, AmmanNet has since grown to become a leading liberal voice, exercising a wider degree of freedom than most Jordanian media operations. Among its programs on the Net is a unique monitoring program of the Parliament and the Municipality, eye on the media, school radio, sportsnet, IT in Arabic, book reviews, legal awareness programs (HAQI) and various cultural and artistic programs.

Shortly after the shock, a great wave was seen from the distance of three or four miles, approaching in the middle of the bay with a smooth outline; but along the shore it tore up cottages and trees, as it swept onwards with irresistible force. At the head of the bay it broke in a fearful line of white breakers, which rushed up to a height of 23 vertical feet above the highest spring-tides. Their force must have been prodigious; for at the Fort a cannon with its carriage, estimated at four tons in weight, was moved 15 feet inwards.

A schooner was left in the midst of the ruins, 200 yards from the beach. The first wave was followed by two others, which in their retreat carried away a vast wreck of floating objects. In one part of the bay, a ship was pitched high and dry on shore, was carried off, again driven on shore, and again carried off. In another part two large vessels anchored near together were whirled about, and their cables were thrice wound round each other: though anchored at a depth of 36 feet, they were for some minutes aground.

The great wave must have travelled slowly, for the inhabitants of Talcahuano had time to run up the hills behind the town; and some sailors pulled out seaward, trusting successfully to their boat riding securely over the swell, if they could reach it before it broke. One old woman with a little boy, four or five years old, ran into a boat, but there was nobody to row it out: the boat was consequently dashed against an anchor and cut in twain; the old woman was drowned, but the child was picked up some hours afterwards clinging to the wreck. Pools of salt-water were still standing amidst the ruins of the houses, and children, making boats with old tables and chairs, appeared as happy as their parents were miserable.

Fan Web sites, from Adam-Brody.com to Absolutely Zooey Deschanel, share certain traits: gushy tributes, copyright-infringing use of paparazzi shots, a whiff of stalker enthusiasm. A new site, cremasterfanatic.com, is unusual for the subject it obsesses over - the Conceptual Art star Matthew Barney - but otherwise it hews to the norm. It borrows pictures of Mr. Barney with his wife, the pop singer Bjork. It summarizes each of his five "Cremaster" films. It even posts tribute poetry:

Pearl filled baths
The pigeons flap
His cremaster relaxes

But Cremaster Fanatic is a fake. Or to put it more kindly, it's a parallel work of art. "I'm pretending to be a fan," said its creator, the New York artist Eric Doeringer, who wrote that haiku himself (as "David Kramer," one of many pseudonyms deployed on the site).

Coca-Cola just released a great Bollywood-inspired ad in Spain, Portugal and Italy (thanks, GG). The ad retraces The Party, The Guru and Russell Peters’ wisecrack that the only thing a desi accent is good for is cutting tension.

In the ad, a desi waiter livens up a dreary Spanish party by bursting into a Bollywood song. Here’s the really cool part: it pays homage to Absolut Vodka’s unforgettable Mulit parody — pink shirt, shiny belt buckle and all. Watch the clip.

• Low-bandwidth version
• More great Bollywood-inspired ads
  

BB reader Fabio Fichera says, "The ad in question isn't that new, a somewhat shorter version has been around for months here in Italy." And reader JJ Merelo writes,

Just a few points about this newsitem. First, it was released last summer and become an instant sensation: the theme has been even featured in the new year's eve TV shows, replayed over and over as a ringtone, and so forth. The party does not really look like a Spanish party, it rather looks like a british party. Believe me, I've been in Spanish parties. And a bit of trivia: it's actually a girl who sings it, it's a kind of 'bollywood aserejé', since it's not really in hindi (or telugu, for that matter), but in mock-indian language, and it was originally done in Argentina. There's also a pointer to the spanish Coca Cola site: Link, and a story by a popular hispano-argentinian blogger: Link.

Link to Michael Verdi's QuickTime movie, and Link to video of last week's ABC News segment. (Thanks, Wonbo!)

The CBS television program 60 Minutes featured a lengthy segment on Google this evening which included astute comment from John Battelle, who moonlights as BoingBoing's Reuben Kincaid when he's not writing books, building empires, and tracking search tech trends here. Snip from the transcript:

"If anybody got a Porsche or a Ferrari right now at Google, they’d probably be drummed out of the company," observes John Battelle, an author and entrepreneur who has been following Silicon Valley companies for 20 years. He says, "Google has a brand image to maintain. And their image is they’re all about innovation and they’re all about the Internet, and they’re all about trust. They’re not about selling out. They’re not about getting rich quick. So you’ve got a culture like that; I think if anyone were to buy, you know, a new Mercedes convertible and drive around with the stereo blaring, and miss work a couple days because they’re rich now, that would not be acceptable behavior at Google.

"But trust me," he adds. "There’s a Mercedes convertible in every one of their heads. There is. And it will…come out. Over time, it will come out."

The reason Bollywood films have such universal appeal is because they’re squeaky-clean. There are no sex scenes, not even kissing. Every time you think someone’s going to do it, they'll burst into song instead. "I'd assume that's really a reflection of our society," Rai says, when asked to explain the films' modesty. "Of course people kiss and of course people have a very healthy love life. This is the land of the Kama Sutra. But nevertheless, in our society you don't really see people around the street corner kissing or being extremely, overtly, physically demonstrative publicly. They do it privately but not publicly."

Link to Google piece with BoingBoing's own John Battelle, and Link to seg on Aishwarya Rai.

Update: BoingBoing reader Manish Vij has this video clip of the first 2:45 of the Aishwarya Rai interview. Link. Anyone got a pointer to video of the Google segment?

And, as always, the people and institutions currently holding the clout don't cede it willingly. Governments are clamping down on us in all kinds of ways. Incumbent business powerhouses are trying to hold back the tide as well, not just to keep their positions but also to thwart new innovation that might threaten them.

These reactionary encroachments and retrenchments are not surprising. They always occur in times of swift change and challenge. In the end, they are almost always unsuccessful, because progress ultimately finds a way around barriers, and because people challenge the reactionaries.

But we need to keep the pressure up, as citizens and people who want the freedom to use these new tools and live in liberty. The stakes are high, and liberty takes work.