The letter reads:

Dear Myles -

I am sorry it took me so very long to respond to your letter. I really like your idea. If we had guns that shot chocolate, not only would our country be safer, it would be happier. People love chocolate.

You are a good boy,

Joe Biden

7-year-old boy gets handwritten letter from Biden

If you're still thinking about Daft Punk after yesterday's excitement around Random Access Memories, you might appreciate this masterful New Orleans brass band cover EP of a few of their classics. Their Kickstarter to cover Get Lucky is also fully funded with four hours left!

BRASSFT PUNK Thanks, SQ!

Last week, Cory posted about Disunion, the guillotine simulator for the Oculus Rift headset. This weekend, I got a chance to "play" the virtual reality game—which amounted to getting my head virtually chopped off.

Though this is a far cry from the Oculus Rift's peaceful "Tuscan villa" demo, the experience is just as immersive. Your entire vision is filled with the in-game world, and the headset itself is unobtrusive, like wearing a large pair of ski goggles. After a few minutes, you lose track of the real physical space you're in. So much so, in fact, that the slight inconsistencies between the game and your head movements can make you seasick.

But it's a pretty good start on experiencing things you can't in real life—death being the ultimate example.

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Over in the /r/homebrewing subreddit, user hatchetthrower has recreated one of my favorite fictional brews: Bendërbrāu, a homebrewed beer from Futurama made entirely inside Bender the robot's chassis. The recipe for the clone is pretty dead on: it's a steam beer as suggested by the label in the show, uses space-aged sounding Zythos hops (Galaxy was out of stock), and Rush 2112 yeast because Rush is one of Fry's favorite bands.

Check out the rest of the discussion on Reddit, as well as this Bender fermenter build for ultrafans.

One unique and special treat in working as Boing Boing's web developer has been to see how truly prolific writers do their work. Not only are they all hugely practiced at writing, but they've each developed a process and a format for creating or curating content that enables them to write more and quickly. I've spent the last couple years trying to cheat a bit at collecting large volumes of curated content by putting as much of the work as possible onto computers.

My main experiment with rapid blogging is the animated GIF section of my media blog. I love animated GIFs, and I'd picked up a habit of saving my favorites to a folder on my desktop. A year and a half ago I moved that folder to my Dropbox's Public folder, which syncs all the files out to the cloud and lets anyone view them in their browser. Then I set up an IFTTT action to slurp new files into the blog. And then I forgot about it and went about my business.

With basically no added effort I've posted over three thousand GIFs to my blog. It averages six new posts a day, sometimes I'll post thirty at a time when I find a bunch of good ones. IFTTT can connect to lots of other services, so I've set it to push out GIFs to my Tumblr as well. It's a great treat to scroll back through hundreds of fun images I've saved, and I often find myself pleasantly surprised by what I've posted.

This method of curating things gives some neat advantages over other sharing services. When you set up the rules for posting and IFTTT or another automated system does the legwork, you create limitations to what you can post in the process. It forces an editorial voice: now I know I'm going to only post GIFs by saving them to that folder, so all I have to worry about is whether they fit the collective whole. Applying this process to other content types proves to be very successful: a friend and I have collected nearly an album a day on our shared music blog for nine months through some really simple custom scripts to ease the process. I never run short of excellent tunes now that we've collected it so quickly.

Building large collections of content, even if it's focused at dumb GIFs or indie music albums, is easier than ever. Spend some time thinking about the parts of the process you can automate for your collections and start enjoying them more.

A video, "What most schools don't teach," circled the Internet this week, particularly among my developer friends. In it, a stream of famous figures in the software world make a compelling case for why you–everyone–should learn how to program. As a software developer and lover of code, I was excited to see such a great job of showing good reasons to support coding education.

Halfway through, however, someone says "jobs".

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I found out yesterday that George Hotz, the hacker most known for unlocking the original iPhone and hacking the PS3, is now studying at my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. CMU has a bash.org clone for saving ridiculous quotes in IRC and around the computer science campus, and geohot already has some great ones in there.

amwatson: George, you have to start working on the assignment! If you don't, you won't have time to run on the supercomputer!
geohot: Don't worry. I have my own supercomputer!
amwatson: ...You have your own 256-core machine?
geohot: Yeah! Well, I have a botnet...

<geohot> I'm permitted to own Sony products. I'm just not permitted to touch them inappropriately.

< Tony0> I like geohot's method of forcing himself to suck less with vim
< Tony0> apparently he rebound the arrow keys to backspace.
< gwillen> I,I vim is properly appreciated in the original Klingon

Oh, geohot! More great quotes at cmubash.org. Thanks, Dannel!

This dime rolls for a little more than 58 minutes at 3.4 miles an hour. It traveled a little over five miles in that time. Check out 38:30 when the experimenter sticks his head in frame and stick around for the analysis at the end.

Coin rolling on treadmill via burritojustice

The world's largest collection of microcars from the Microcar Museum in Madison, Georgia is on the auction block today and tomorrow. Put together by a single collector– Bruce Weiner, a former executive at Dubble Bubble –the collection of rare cars and memorabilia is being split up mostly because the fun part for him was collecting them, not storing them. Most of the good cars like this 1947 Rovin D2 are expected to sell between $20,000 and $40,000.

World’s largest microcar museum to close, head to auction | Hemmings Blog Thanks, Tony!

Khan Academy has a short series of videos featuring LeBron James asking science and statistics questions, with his "good friend Sal" answering them. They cover stuff like the odds of LeBron making three free throws versus one three pointer and what muscles you use when you shoot a basket. They're an engaging introduction to Khan Academy's videos.

4chan's worksafe GIF board– a treasure trove of excellent content before it hits the social media tracts –has a great thread of space GIFs up now. I've selected a few of the best here.

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Jonason and Jesse—two incredibly dedicated and talented maniacs—have created a shot-for-shot live action recreation of Toy Story. They've kept the toys' voices and some of the soundtrack, but Andy and the family are played by real people and all the sets and toys are real. Wowowow!

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