Somevelvetmorning made a beautiful Dalek dress and uploaded her work-in-progress photos to Imgur. Perhaps they can serve as a guide to your own dalekwear efforts. Also: matching hat!

Dalek Dress (via Wil Wheaton)

If the previous ATM skimmer posts didn't scare the pants off you, this one from San Fernando Valley, which Brian Krebs reports on, might. It has a near-undetectable pinhole camera for recording timestamped footage of your PIN entry, and apart from that indicator, the only way to spot it is to yank hard on the front of the ATM before you start using it.

A few tips about ATM skimmers and skimming scams. It’s difficult — once you’re aware of how sophisticated some of these skimmers can be — to avoid being paranoid around ATMs; friends and family often tease me for stopping to tug at ATMs that I pass on the street, even when I have no intention of withdrawing money from the machines.

Still, it’s good and healthy to be somewhat paranoid while at an ATM. Make sure nobody is “shoulder surfing” you to watch you enter your PIN. A simple precaution defeats shoulder surfing and many other types of video-based PIN stealing mechanism: Cover the PIN pad with your hand or another object when you enter your PIN.

Skimtacular: All-in-One ATM Skimmer

Just look at it. By Shay Aaron, 26, a miniaturist based in Tel Aviv. Many more photos of his work in his Flickr stream. I could squeeeeee at them all day!

(booooooom + flavorwire + thisiscolossal.com, thanks @lisahendrix).

On EnglishRussia (and apparently ganked from a possibly defunct LiveJournal -- It looks like LJ had an outage earlier today), a wonderful detailed HOWTO for making the tiniest, most adorable kitchen knife you ever did see.

A kitchen knife may become an end in any argument… This knife is made on a scale of 1 to 12 from flat stained steel sheet 1.5 mm thick. Other elements are made of plastic and the clinchers are from aluminium wire 0.6 mm in diameter.The needed tools: a vise, 2 files, 3 broach files, abrasive paper of two types, a drill fixed on a vertical support – 1 set, a drill bit 0.6 mm, a piece of thick felt for polishing the handle, an extra wooden bar.

How To Make a Tiny Kitchen Knife (via @jwomack)

Maura, a Missouri high-school student, has a long history of making awesome prom-dresses (there was the goth one, the one made out of Doritos bags, and the one made of pull-tabs). This year, she topped her own impressive achievements with a beautiful dress made of cardboard. She's featured on the "Everything Dresses" site.

The top of the dress is middle part of corrugated cardboard that was peeled apart. If you have ever looked at a cardboard box it is 3 layers, an outer shell on each side with a wavy part in the middle. The wavy part is the top! Maura then spray painted the pieces and painted glitter on top. Everything is glued together with wood glue and hot glue. And no prom dress would be complete without a corset back! The bottom of the dress proved to be the challenge on this project as it was made of paper bags, and then spray painted, with a zipper in the back.

Cardboard Prom Dress

“House-Arrest Amber,” Featured Dancer at Whispers. Photo: Mark Ebner.

Veteran muckraker Mark Ebner of "Hollywood, Interrupted" has a knack for producing beautiful writing from ugly subjects. Scientology, pit bull fighting, celebrity scandals, scam artists... you name it, he's investigated it.

Now, Ebner travels to a town several hundred miles north of Deadwood, South Dakota. In a state wracked by joblessness, this little enclave is home to a new gold rush: Fracking.

Read the rest

Earlier today, David posted that "Urban Outfitters is under fire from the Anti-Defamation League for selling a t-shirt with a patch the ADL says is similar to the "yellow badge" that Jews were ordered to sew on their clothing in Nazi Germany-occupied areas during World War II."

Coincidentally, my 14-year-old daughter bought a different t-shirt from Urban Outfitters on Sunday. This one had a fancy skull on it. When we took a closer look at it, we saw that the eyes were ringed with Stars of David. We returned it and she bought a cute tie-dye top instead!

Charlie Stross has posted a long essay making the case for ebook publishers going DRM-free. It's a good, comprehensive look. I'll be writing something more on this subject later this week, too.

1. The rapid current pace of change in the electronic publishing sector is driven by the consumer electronics and internet industry. It's impossible to make long term publishing plans (3-10 years) without understanding these other industries and the priorities of their players. It is important to note that the CE industry relies on selling consumers new gadgets every 1-3 years. And it is through their gadgets that readers experience the books we sell them. Where is the CE industry taking us?

2. Dropping DRM across all of Macmillans products will not have immediate, global, positive effects on revenue in the same way that introducing the agency model did ...

3. However, relaxing the requirement for DRM across some of Macmillans brands will have very positive public relations consequences among certain customer demographics, notably genre readers who buy large numbers of books (and who, while a minority in absolute numbers, are a disproportionate source of support for the midlist).

4. Longer term, removing the requirement for DRM will lower the barrier to entry in ebook retail, allowing smaller retailers (such as Powells) to compete effectively with the current major incumbents. This will encourage diversity in the retail sector, force the current incumbents to interoperate with other supply sources (or face an exodus of consumers), and undermine the tendency towards oligopoly. This will, in the long term, undermine the leverage the large vendors currently have in negotiating discount terms with publishers while improving the state of midlist sales.

More on DRM and ebooks

Johan Peitz's "Super Mario Summary" re-creates all the levels of the original game, condensing each level to its essence with a single screen:

A Super Mario Summary is my entry to the 23rd Ludum Dare 48 hour game development challenge. I tried to recreate every level in the original Super Mario Brothers game, but on a single screen each. The result is a puzzle platformer where you need to combine reflexes, timing, and clever thinking to succeed. To get the highest rating on a level, you need to take all coins and hit the top of the flag pole. Good luck!

A SUPER MARIO SUMMARY (via Waxy)

40 students. 6 weeks. 5500 dominos. One awesome mural of Cesar Chavez.

NBC San Diego reports:

Students and staff from O'Farrell Community School started this mural using blueprints, and then they glued them to vinyl tiles. They dedicated this 10-foot mural to farm labor leader Cesar Chavez. "About two months ago, we decided to do something for the community and what better thing to do than dedicate this to Cesar Chavez. We started telling the kids about it, letting them know what he did, his legacy and how he brought people together for a good cause," says O'Farell's Spanish instructor Jose Islas.

Pizza Hut Middle East is pushing the envelope of edibility with their "royal" Crown Crust Pizza, which is a kind of hub-and-spoke bread-thing with cheeseburgers or chicken-cheeseburgers studded around a central, pizza-like wheel. A pair of suitably horrific TV ads round out the chimeric, what-hath-man-wrought motif.

Crown Crust Pizzas Add Cheeseburger & Chicken Fillet Gems to Crust (via Geekologie)

At today's Institute for the Future conference, Code for America's Jen Pahlka reminded me that I may have let my Internet Membership lapse. Fortunately, there is a mint-in-box Internet Membership Kit (1995) on eBay for just $120. I'd say that's a very fair price for "everything you need to cruise the Information Superhighway!"