Back in 1970, Life magazine profiled the pioneering Rodman family, who installed a teletype terminal connected to a mainframe in their home, to explore the whacky far-future possibilities of "home computing." We got our teletype in 1977 and by that point, we had Eliza and a few other nice bits of ready-made software, but the main attraction was still doing silly things in BASIC.

When he got the computer for his home, Dr. Rodman had no idea his family would become so involved with it. His original project, which he is still working on, was to write a program for diagnosing lung ailments through test readings. Because a successful program will mean instant written diagnoses and also teach interns, Temple University agreed to pay for it.

Because he was a novice at programming, Dr. Rodman required uninterrupted access to a computer. The service he purchases hooks his terminal, a standard Teletype, through his telephone to a large computer 90 miles away in Teaneck, N.J. When the central unit is dialed, it responds with an audio pitch. An electronic device connected to the Teletype translates the computer’s messages to print.

The computer costs $110 a month terminal rental, plus $7.50 to $11 an hour. Once a program is stored, the cost is negligible. “Eat,” for example, costs the Rodmans about 10c for a weekly run-through. The computer, of course, does the bookkeeping for the bill.

Link

RCA unveiled the 53 Lb backpack TV transmitter in 1951 -- man, they sure knew how to make a box look sexy and futuristic back then! Link

Matthew sez, "A while ago iIruined a batch of cupcakes by adding too much baking soda. Rather than throwing them out, I made them dance (a waltz to be specific). Over the course of a weekend, I made a stop motion film of the awful tasting baked goods moving across my table." Link (Thanks, Matthew!)

Peacay sez, "Professor Erik Ringmar (Taiwan) explains his modus operandi for making public documents that have been usurped by private document delivery services free for all:"

What I do is hack into restricted websites, download the documents I'm interested in, and then use my favourite open-source paint program to remove the copyright statements from each page. Next I assemble the pages into one single pdf file and upload it to the Internet Archive, where it will become universally available to both researchers and citizens.

Link (Thanks, Peacay!)

Yesterday my two daughters and I were cleaning out our storage shed and I came across a box of Sharpie pens. We took the lid off one of the pens and gave it a sniff, because we like the way Sharpies smell.

Today, my wife showed me an article about an 8-year-old Colorado boy who is unlucky enough to attend a school run by morons. When he took a sniff of a Sharpie in class, the principal suspended him.

A teacher sent him to the principal when she noticed him smelling the marker and his clothing.

"It smelled good," [Eathan] Harris said. "They told me that's wrong."

Eathan shyly shook his head "no" when a reporter asked if he knew about "huffing."

[Principal Chris] Benisch stands by his decision to suspend Harris, saying it sends a clear message about substance abuse.

"This is really, really, seriously dangerous," Benisch said.

In his letter suspending the child, Benisch wrote that smelling the marker fumes could cause the boy to "become intoxicated."

A toxicologist with the Rocky Mountain Poison Control Center says that claim is nearly impossible.

I agree the the principal sent a "clear message." The message is that this poor decision and his refusal to acknowledge it makes him unfit to be principal of a school. Link

IO9's located an 1893 advertisement for a laptop (typewriter)!

Measuring 12 inches long by 6-1/2 inches wide by 2 inches deep, and weighing a mere 3 pounds, the World typewriter was roughly the same size as many of today's laptop computers. Instead of a keyboard, however, the World used a dial; users chose a character with the right hand, then used the left to operate a lever that pressed it into the paper. Yet another lever was used to make spaces between words. Even so, the World typewriter was said to be

Link

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Readers may remember a previous Boing Boing post Did the US gov't sell exclusive access to its legislative history to Thomson West? Well, the answer is now a definitive yes, that data has been sold down the river and is out to sea.

Public.Resource.Org sent in a FOIA request to GAO on this topic seeking access to the scanned data. Today's letter answering our FOIA request spells out the bad news. Turns out the GAO doesn't even get the data, they simply are given an account on Thomson's service. The rest of the government doesn't get access to this data, and the public is invited to stop by the GAO headquarters and pay 20 cents per page to copy paper.

This is one of those deals where the public domain got sold off ... GAO gets a bit of convenience by having their stuff scanned for them, but they gave up way more than they got in the deal, and the public (including government workers and public interest groups who need to consult this data) lost big-time.

Link to the Scribd group with the full paper trail on this issue, Link to the today's letter (Thanks, Carl!)

Second Life investor Mitch Kapor has a new project in his lab: creating hands-free, 3D navigation for Second Life using a 3D camera that tracks your body geometry, allowing you to fly around in-world in much the same way you'd ride a Segway, by leaning back and forth. Link (Thanks, Mitch!)

Bonnie sez, "When Star Wars artist Chris Trevas told us his girlfriend and foodie blogger Julie Foxworthy baked him a one-of-a-kind Yoda birthday cake, I was super-impressed! So I asked Julie how she went about making this edible tribute so fans can put their oven to work making more Jedi Master confections!"

I then rolled out the green fondant into a big disc (about 12 inches and a 1/4″ thick). I carefully rolled the fondant back onto the rolling pin, so that I could pick it up and roll it gently on top of the cake. Once it was centered on top of the cake, I began to smooth it down. I smoothed down the top and bottom, but left the sides draped over and formed them into the ears. Once the ears were formed and the rest of the fondant was smoothed onto the cake, I trimmed off the excess fondant at the bottom of the cake.

Then I molded the eyes, nose, and mouth by just eyeing it. I had printed out some photos of Yoda from the web, and used this as a reference when forming the rest of the pieces of fondant for the face.

After the eyes, nose and mouth were finished, I applied them to the top of the cake using a royal icing mixture (just water and powdered sugar). And that’s it! Yoda was done!

Link (Thanks, Bonnie!)

The Urwerk UR-202 watch uses a pair of tiny spinning air-turbines to wind itself:

The UR-202’s twin turbines are coupled with the winding rotor. According to the position of the selector lever, the turbines act as shock absorbers.

In normal activity they cushion sharp movements of the rotor. This reduces wear and increases the lifespan of the movement. While the selector position is continuously variable, the three principal positions are: normal activity, where the turbines spin freely; vigorous activity, where the air pressure generated by the turbines reduces the winding rate by approximately 35%; and extreme activity, where the turbines and rotor are fully blocked.

Link

This clever lad has arrayed a long row of bottles partially filled with liquid so that they play the theme from Super Mario Bros. when they are tapped in order; then he affixed a tapper to a remote-control car and drove it down the row, making for an unforgettable musical experience! Link (Thanks, Kyle!)

Alex sez, "At Worldchanging, we just did a post on how high a percentage of their monthly budgets many families are now paying for their cars, and why many "expensive" close-in neighborhoods are actually affordable when you factor in the gas pump. The centerpiece is a great new mapping ap from the center for neighborhood technologies that shows the interplay between the two in great clarity."

One factor that often doesn’t get considered in discussions of Seattle’s rising prices is transportation costs. It makes sense that if you have to “drive until you qualify,” as one common justification of living in the suburbs puts it, the cost of that driving ought to be considered as part of the cost of living far outside the city. Generally, though, it isn’t—allowing pro-suburban, anti-regulation, anti-density pundits and politicians to claim that Seattle’s housing prices are “out of control” and that the suburbs are the only “affordable” alternative.

According to CNT’s analysis of the Seattle region, the most affordable parts of our region are actually inside city limits—once transportation costs are factored in.

Link, Link to mapping app (Thanks, Alex!

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel's blogged about Wired Threat Level blog pranking the CIA by exploiting a cross-site scripting vulnerability in the Agency's website:

Threat Level utilized a relatively benign vulnerability in the CIA.gov web site to insert one of their stories into the URL, giving the appearance that the content is hosted by the agency's site. Their choice of story to inject into the CIA.gov web site is priceless, too: "U.S. Has Launched a Cyber Security 'Manhattan Project,' Homeland Security Chief Claims"

I have such a grin right now.

Link, Discuss on Boing Boing Gadgets

Lunch In a Box's tip for dividing the contents of a freezer-bag into individual portions is great, right up there with the soup-in-ice-cube-trays hack. This is the perfect compromise between freezing everything in tiny individual bags or having to hack individual frozen hunks off some foodberg at the back of the freezer.

Enter my Japanese-language freezing books. A standard tip for freezing ground foods or thick sauces in small portions is to first put the food into a large freezer bag and press it out as flat as possible, eliminating air pockets. (Making it thin speeds up defrost time due to the increased surface area, and pressing out excess air guards against freezer burn.) Use a long chopstick or ruler to create divisions within the food, forming individual portions. This way when you freeze the entire bag, you’ll be able to quickly break off just as much as you want to use, no more.

Link (via Neatorama)

Watchismo's got some exclusive photos of the DeWitt Concept No. 1, a €400,000 watch that's like a cross between an AT-AT walker and a steampunk war-zeppelin control-center.

Selling for 400,000 Euros at the OnlyWatch auction before it had been shown to anyone, the DeWitt Concept No.1 was a beast to behold last week at Baselworld. Devoloped with French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte, this gothic pirate spaceship of a watch is taking the steampunk oeuvre to new heights with its expanding riveted case, flying tourbillon, five barrels and a 21 day power reserve.

Link

rob conger
ryan bown
jen stark
michael a. salter
jennifer vanderpool
tracey snelling
jennifer dalton
cosimo cavallaro
kent rogowski
yosoh
derek stroup
mike libby
theo jansen

previously on web zen:
group show 2005
group show 2004
group show 2003

Link, Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Image: "Tim Berners-Lee, The World Wide Web (The Internet) 2008," a portrait of the web pioneer in woven acrylic yarn on quarter-inch mesh, by artist Rob Conger. This work is available for sale on the internet, appropriately enough, for $2,000.

Satellite provider OnSat recently shut off internet service to the Navajo nation, leaving the entire reservation without access vital to education, government, and other services. OnSat claims it did so because the federal government failed to pay about $2 million it owed, which OnSat in turn pays to a subcontractor for satellite time. Snip:

The Universal Service Administration Co., which administers the E-rate program, is withholding the funding because of a tribal audit that showed OnSat may have double-billed the tribe. The audit also raised questions about how the tribe requested bids for the Internet contract.

Tribal officials say it could be a couple of weeks before service is restored to chapter houses across the 27,000 square-mile reservation. They've been meeting with other Internet service providers to explore their options. Utah-based OnSat, meanwhile, has offered to reconnect the affected chapter houses, if they pay out of their own pockets.

Link to Forbes story. Related items: AP, Gallup Independent, Valleywag.

Image: "Navajo Girl," by Wolfgang Staudt

Last week, my friend Dan Pink sent me a copy of his latest book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need, a cool manga style graphic novel that offers wise career advice for young people. He's created a fun "trailer" for the book, too. Here it is.

Continuing in our week-long review of popular BBtv episodes (while the crew takes some well-deserved time off!), we revisit Mauvais Rôle ("Bad Role"), a short animated film about a computer game character who gets fed up with playing the same lame villain roles all the time -- and takes matters into his own (clawed) hands.

His quest leads him to new and increasingly more ridiculous casting calls, each one weirder than the last. And they lead him somewhere he never thought he'd end up...

Mauvais Rôle was produced by a team of students at ESRA Sup' Infograph, in France. Authors: Alan Barbier, Camille Campion, Dorian Février, Frédéric Fourier, Frédéric Lafay, Min Ma, Jean Francois Macé, Emmanuel Repérant, Jérémie Rosseau and Olivier Sicot. Full credits here, and the project's website is here.

Link to Boing Boing tv post, with downoadable video and discussion.

Link to video and photos on artist Danilo Pascuali's fine arts blog. In some, the figure is clutching a rosary or crucifix. (thanks, Reverse Cowgirl!)

Susannah Breslin has a an interesting post up today about an interview on Adult Video News, the trade magazine of the adult video industry, with Ira Isaacs, the adult video creator and distributor named in a federal obscenity indictment last July:

And perhaps most interestingly, Isaacs and his lawyer, he says, intend to pursue an unprecedented legal defense. The 2 Girls 1 Cup defense, that is.

Isaacs explains:

"'What it is, is, there's videos all over the internet of millions of people watching this [Two Girls, One Cup] video, and it's a shock video, and people record their reactions...' '[T]he idea is, millions of people are watching this video about girls shitting in each other's mouths, vomiting in each other's mouths, and they are not, I think, obviously looking for prurient interest to masturbate. People are trying to shock themselves, because in today's world, everything is shock on TV... People need a lot to be shocked these days... What I've done is, I think, really shocked people, and I think that's why the federal government is on this case.'"

While it remains to be seen how the 2 Girls 1 Cup defense will play out in court, Isaacs is right about one thing. In the 21st century, adult videos may be more hardcore than ever before, but so is the American public's taste for it.

Link to post. Image: Sergey Kovalenko.

Previously on BB:
* Feds hand eight-count obscenity charge to porn producer
(about a related but different case, a more recent obscenity case involving porn producer John Stagliano).

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets Rob sipped a new variety of Bawls that is root beer-flavored; we spied a concept ring that heats up once a year to remind you of anniversaries; gave the Sony VAIO TZ subnotebook a review, crapware and all; found a long-term review of the SPOT Satellite Messenger emergency beacon; admonished you about the tiny treasures found in our Flickr groups; uncovered a plastic helmet for baseball caps; questioned HP's hazy connection between its new workstations and DreamWorks; pondered some glow-in-the-dark wallpaper; tried to help Rob boost his Wi-Fi while he thought about taxes; considered how long it might take for a company selling Hackintoshes to get crushed under Apple's heel (apparently, not long, as their site is kaput); bowed our head and accepted our fate as servents of a tabletop kaiju miniatures game; discovered the diminutive son of a nose hair trimmer and a pepper mill; found an easy way for you to waste fifty large on skewered junker cars; pined for a motorized, remote-control paintball turret for our very own; looked at Jeff Atwood's numbers on extending laptop battery life (no DVDs, soldier!); simultaneously lusted after the new Sharp/Willcom D4 UMPC while wondering which engineer from Psion was sacrificed on a windy, Japanese mountaintop; discovered that sticking a tube of radium in your eye isn't as harmful as it may at first seem; and noticed that Hasbro has finally seen the light and will be issuing an updated, action-figure-scale version of that old favorite, the big ol' Millenium Falcon. Then some deals and retro links (including insect/bunny men hybrids?)

Scott Beale has some lovely portraits and quick video snippets from this year's Yuri's Night festivities in the Bay Area. I'm sad I missed this event! Link to photo and video roundup on Laughing Squid.

Above, Aaron Muszalski in his most fetching sputnik chapeau.

Previously: Spacemen Branded Me With Yuri Gagarin's Head.

Torley sez, "My esteemed colleague, Joshua Linden, had the audacity and ingenuity to get Second Life streaming to an Apple ][+, and while masochistic due to slow-loading, it's pretty awesome to watch and listen to him explain how he did it. Sheer geeky awesomeness. Link (Thanks, Torley!)

Radley Balko says:

My Reason feature on the wrongful imprisonment of an entire family is now available online.

It's the long, sordid story of an the Colomb family in Louisiana, wrongly convicted on federal drug conspiracy charges.

The family was eventually released after several federal prisoners came forwarded alleging a massive perjury and information sharing network in the federal prison system.

Problem is, many of the same jailhouse snitches who lied in the Colomb case are still being used in other federal cases.

And nothing has been done about the underlying incentive structure that gives rise to these problems in the first place.

The Colombs live on a mostly black street in a mostly white section of this mostly segregated town of 4,700 in Acadia Parish—the heart of Cajun country. James Colomb spent the bulk of his career working in an oil field, then was injured. The family’s sole source of income now is his disability check. Ann Colomb—“Miss Ann” to those who know her—is a homemaker.

It was from this unlikely setting, the United States alleged, that Ann Colomb and three of her four sons ran one of the largest crack cocaine operations in Louisiana. Over the course of a decade, prosecutors said, the Colombs bought $15 million in illicit drugs with a street value of more than $70 million. Judging solely from the indictments, the government’s case seemed formidable: a trail of police reports throughout the 1990s accusing the Colomb boys of possessing or selling drugs; a 2001 raid on the Colomb home that turned up 72 grams of crack, a Titan .25-caliber pistol, and a rifle; and more than 30 prison informants who were prepared to testify that they had sold crack to one or more members of the Colomb family. In 2006 a jury in Lafayette, Louisiana, convicted the African-American family on federal drug conspiracy charges. Ann and her sons served almost four months in a federal prison while awaiting their sentences, which would likely have ranged from 10 years to life.

But in the ensuing months, the government’s case unraveled, exposing some unsettling truths about the way jailhouse informants are used in America’s courtrooms. In December 2006, all charges against the family were dismissed. The federal judge who presided over the trial was so upset about what happened in his courtroom that he has since taken the rare step of speaking out about it publicly.

The legal fiasco was partly attributable to familiar themes of racism and overly aggressive prosecution. ButAnn and James Colomb the Colomb story is mostly about the war on drugs. It shows how the absurd incentives created by the unaccountable use of shady drug informants by police and prosecutors can quickly make innocent people look very guilty.

Link

Dave and his wife spent last weekend in Varanasi, the holy Hindu city, and discovered that it was chock-a-block with Invaders, the tile-based Space Invader graffiti/street art icons: "These were all over Varanasi: paintings on the ghats, mosaics in the passageways. With twisting alleys, crumbling stone structures, and wandering Sadhus coming at us from every direction, Varanasi feels like it hasn’t changed in two hundred years. Which made these paintings and mosaics all the more incongruous." Link (Thanks, Dave!)

Here is a delightful short video of a cat playing a Theremin.
Link

Six Maasai warriors ran in the London Marathon today. 24-year-old Isaya Maasai, is their chief, and you can read his diary at the Guardian website.

The horses that go around were amazing and we couldn't believe how fast. We rode a real horse for the first time too. It is amazing that people can talk to them, tell them where to go and they do it.

I miss meat and blood very much. Not vegetables because they are food for a woman. There is milk here but blood is better because it gives energy. English tea with sugar is good and we tried Coco Pops, but the nicest food is croissants.

Link (via Arbroath)

Short article about the popular group of effeminate Mexican pro wrestlers known as "Exotics."

In a hot-pink Mohawk haircut and leotard to match, Maximo pirouettes before taking down his muscle-bound enemies with a swift kick to the groin.

Mexican professional wrestling's latest sensation then delivers a crowning blow - a kiss on the lips of his macho opponent - to the delight of a roaring crowd.

Known casually as "gay" wrestlers, Exotics have been around since the 1970s but are experiencing a wrestling revival.

Link

Two stories about evil infants crossed my desk this weekend, one from 1951, the other from 2008.
First, this old one: a scan of a comic book story from 1951 about a killer baby.

Next, a satire about a lascivious newborn, from Rogier van Bakel, who says: "We've recently seen a six-year-old turned over to the police for having playfully slapped a classmate on the behind. A four-year-old was punished for sexual harassment two years ago after he allegedly pressed his face into the pre-school teacher's décolletage during a hug. Where does it end? I wrote a little Onionesque fantasy about that here:

CLOVIS, NM — Just hours after being born, an allegedly sex-obsessed infant was taken into custody on charges of harassment.

A maternity nurse present at the birth of Ryan Sambora, the son of Gabriel and Mindy Sambora of Kingfisher Lane, called police after she determined the child had "enjoyed his time in the birth canal a little too much." The hospital worker, Valerie Shales, a six-year veteran of Gouldsborough Family Health Centers, said the woman was clearly in discomfort, even agony, while the son seemed "unwilling to dislodge himself from the mother's vagina."

"He cried in protest as soon as we got him out," Shales explained the ordeal. "He just seemed really determined not to leave Mindy's genitals in peace." Shales said she was obligated to notify the police by the hospital's zero-tolerance sexual-harassment policies.

Continue reading...

Local Hero bookstore in Ojai, CA employs the honor system for selling newspapers to early risers who need their papers before the store opens.

I'm interested in hearing about other honor payment systems you've come across, and how well they work.

Join us tomorrow at 8PM Eastern as we hold a live discussion with author, teacher, and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff in the #boingboing IRC channel, to talk about some of the work he's doing to move his studies in a "'new' direction," to focus less on the tech/media sphere and towards the nature of money and corporatism — and whether that's a new direction at all! (He's already started discussing this with other like-minded people on his new discussion board, Corporatized.net.)

Also, I just realized tomorrow is tax day. Fitting!

I'll be moderating the interview — I'm really looking forward to asking some questions I had about his fantastic comic series Testament — but I hope to incorporate your questions for most of the discussion. If you can't be on IRC for the talk, feel free to leave questions for Doug in the comments of this post. If you are following in real-time, you can also send me questions via private messages in IRC. If you can't make the talk live, we'll be posting a transcript.

Boing Boing IRC: Bringing You 1996's Web Technologies Today!

More information about connecting to Boing Boing IRC via a dedicated client. There is also a Java chat applet with which you can connect.