Boing Boing » Dean Putney

Joe Biden's response to 7yo's "if guns shot chocolate bullets" letter: best thing ever

Dean Putney — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:11:38 +0000

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

BRASSFT PUNK: Brass band covers of Daft Punk classics

Dean Putney — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:24:04 +0000

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!

Review: Disunion, the VR guillotine simulator

Dean Putney — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:00:42 +0000

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.

Because the Oculus is so new, setup took a while. As my friend, Phill, worked on the hardware, I realized that the pizza I was eating was my last meal before my virtual death. Preparing to play out an execution was exhilarating, and it made me think a lot about how I wanted to die and how I'd like to kill Phill. We set up a space for the chopping block, and planned to use an iPad to simulate the blade since Phill didn't trust me enough to use the back of a kitchen knife.

Setup was excruciating and took a long time to get right, but finally we got down to business. The game is short: He put on the headset and I pushed him onto the chopping block. You start the game already in the guillotine, so I played a little rough to make sure it felt like an execution. The sound of the blade dropping came quickly and I lopped off his virtual head, chopping at his real neck with the edge of the iPad.

Being executed myself was a little less exciting. The virtual world is very simplistic: a sunny day in a French town square, with a motionless announcer calling out for your death to the crowd. You barely have time to look around before the blade comes down and your head rolls into the basket. My head actually missed the basket, which was surprisingly disappointing but maybe realistic. Your death isn't final, either: you can still look around after you've been decapitated, which probably ought to be replaced by a fade to black in a newer version.

Disunion demands the right executioner to set the mood in advance of your death. The ritual was a major part of the fun, the virtual world itself less so. An execution party with canvas bags for the condemned, perhaps, and a devoted guillotine operator would really make it. Phill was shy with the iPad blade too, bumping my neck rather than getting in a good chop.

Hopefully someone will make similar games for drowning, hanging, seppuku and burning at the stake. Dying was fun, and I recommend you give it a try.

Disunion, for Oculus Rift

In one month the SFMOMA closes for three years for renovation

Dean Putney — Thu, 02 May 2013 16:16:07 +0000

If you're in the Bay Area and like modern art, now's the time. On June 2nd, the SFMOMA closes to begin a three year long renovation. There will be some exhibits at other museums through them, but the main building will be under construction.

Brew your own Bendërbrāu

Dean Putney — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:56:34 +0000

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.

Automate collecting wonderful things

Dean Putney — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 16:54:53 +0000

Sponsored by For information about Rackspace, go to Rackspace.com/open.

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.

What schools should really teach

Dean Putney — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 14:30:26 +0000

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".

It immediately cuts to over-the-top offices and handsome employees relaxing on chaise longues in the sun, and it sucks. This turns the discussion from "programming is an amazing, accessible thing everyone should want to do" to "programming is a trade like being a mechanic," important only "in the right context, for some people". These comments come from the people who seem as though they would support this type of education.

Taking the idea that you should know how to make a computer do your will, then framing it as something intended merely for a job, does a massive disservice to the discipline. It bogs down the conversation with ideas of what, specifically, is worth teaching, or the products that students will make, instead of the concepts and fundamentals that can be applied anywhere in life. Listen instead to Gabe Newell at the very end: Even the most basic understanding of programming makes you a wizard. It is the most direct conduit between knowledge and power.

Understanding computers and programming enables you to talk to people around the world, conjure fantastic images from nothingness with a few well-placed keystrokes. You can pull just the things you're most interested in from an endless torrent of wonderful new things people create constantly or scry deep into the past. You can make your own art or stories or tools faster and easier than you could before, and share them with everyone you know and millions you don't and change all their lives as well as your own. You can do things no one has ever done before on a daily basis. Why everyone isn't clamoring to access all this I'll never know.

So don't learn about coding or software because it'll get you a nice job in an office full of toys and free food, or because you have some vague notion of wanting to play with robots. You can do those things, too. But understanding how to make computers do what you want is far more than that. It's the freedom to turn what you know into anything you want.

Geohot says the darndest things

Dean Putney — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:34:17 +0000

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...

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!

Bring in the cats.com

Dean Putney — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 23:51:36 +0000

Sometimes you just need a fountain of cats set to rap music. HEY GRIFF, BRING IN THE CATS.

Coin rolls on treadmill for an hour

Dean Putney — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 20:22:47 +0000

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

Largest collection of microcars up for auction today

Dean Putney — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 16:18:39 +0000

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!

LeBron asks Khan Academy

Dean Putney — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 21:11:15 +0000

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.

How to clip your fingernails in space

Dean Putney — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 17:23:16 +0000

I found this video in Reddit's Learn Useless Talents section. In my reality this won't be useless for long!

Horde of space GIFs

Dean Putney — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 23:13:07 +0000

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.

There are a couple hundred more in the full thread. Put your face to the GIF firehose that is my Tumblr.

Live action Toy Story

Dean Putney — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 17:48:28 +0000

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!

The creators' updates and notes on their Facebook page go back nearly two years, and it's pretty fun to watch the sequences in the movie improve as they get better at filming them (they're meticulous, and they've posted their outtakes, which are hilarious). They made this on a tight budget, borrowing lots of props, getting help from friends over summer vacation, and finding a dog on Craigslist to play Sid's dog. The remakers posted several videos trying to reach out to Pixar employees, and even traveled to Pixar's studios and handed out DVD copies trying to get attention to find out who can give them permission to share this before posting the full video on YouTube. Let's hope they get an official blessing for this!

via ABC News, which has a great interview with the creators.

The Golden Key

Dean Putney — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 18:56:21 +0000

George MacDonald's The Golden Key is a classic fairy tale in the truest form. A young boy hears a tale from his great-aunt about a golden key at the foot of the rainbow, and charges into Fairyland to find it where the indescribably beautiful colors end. Find it at the end of this Gutenberg collection of fairy tales or in this Kindle version, it's long enough for three or four story times. [Thanks Phill!]

An Unexpected Twist

Dean Putney — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 13:49:27 +0000

Andy Borowitz tells the harrowing tale of his near-death experience with severe intestinal trouble. A good poop joke should not go unappreciated, and this is a brilliantly told 18-page poop joke. Give it a read on your lunch break.

Census Dotmap: a dot for every person in the United States

Dean Putney — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 21:56:08 +0000

Cartography and data analysis nut Brandon M-Anderson put together this impressive zoomable map of the United States with one dot for each of the 308,450,225 people recorded by the 2010 census: oddities revealed include people living in "abandoned" areas or parks. A Redditor stitched the tiles into a huge image.

Golden eagle snatches kid

Dean Putney — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 18:07:00 +0000

One second this eagle is gliding around above a park, majestic, then moments later it swoops down and tries to grab a toddler. It's just so sudden and unexpected: the bird looks small when it's far away, but oh god nope that's one of those Hobbit-carrying guys and little red monkey hat is off to Mordor.

It may not be real, but damn it's a good fake. There's more info here.

Video Link: Golden eagle snatches kid

Hatch's Fugus are the cutest digital pets ever

Dean Putney — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:36:08 +0000

More than a year ago, my friend Phill showed me an iPhone app he was working on: a revamp of Tamagotchi, an adorable little pet you take care of on your phone. My digital pets normally starve alone in a huge pile of their electronic feces, but Hatch was different. It was detailed and rich, with beautifully done art by David Lanham. I've loved playing with it throughout its development, even when it used to burp in your pocket at inappropriate times.

I've been pestering Phill for months to release it so other people could play it too, and today they're finally announcing that you can adopt one of these squishy little guys in preparation for the app release. Get one of these cuties early!

Hatch: Adopt a Fugu

Beautiful snowflake catching music generator

Dean Putney — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 21:35:41 +0000

A while back, my friend Rich Vreeland, AKA Disasterpeace, made a Flash game called January where you catch snowflakes on your tongue and each plays a soft, pining note. Rich has been busy lately making music for other video games, but he just pushed out a big update to January. The new version trims down on the storyline in favor of a more capable music generator. It has auto-pilot functionality, a selection of keys to choose from, a pentatonic mode, and the ability to save your generated compositions as MIDI files.

Check out the new version of January and the original version.

You have better things to do than buy earbuds

Dean Putney — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:10:28 +0000

Busy people like you and I don't have the time nor the inclination to navigate the sea of earbuds out there, so I turned to Wirecutter to find out what they recommended as the best earbuds. They've got a fine recommendation in the $100 category, and now that I've got a pair of them I can verify that they're great. Here's the executive summary as to why:

• Excellent sound, with a little extra bass.
• Flat cable shows you where twists are so they really never get tangled.
• Controls and microphone work with the iPhone and are unambiguous and easy to click.

One important note not on Wirecutter: get these memory foam tips with them. I tried the rubber inserts and molding my own earplugs (from two materials even!) but they always slip out or don't seal properly in my ear. With these foam tips you'll get a nice seal in your ear to project the sound, and they're practically earplugs on their own so you can't hear anything but the music even when it's quiet.

Velodyne vPulse in-ear headphones and Comply memory foam tips

More thorough review at Wirecutter

Teddy bears with terrifying human teeth

Dean Putney — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 13:00:08 +0000

Mrs. McGettrick's Fuggler Emporium on Etsy specializes in adorable teddy bears... with creepy artificial human teeth. Some of them have little plastic weapons, but all of them share a disturbing "I have seen the void" gaze.

The products' descriptions are great as well:

It's been said that I need a hobby. Here it is. The moral of this story? Be careful what you wish for. My house is filled with these creatures now, and my husband has a sadness about it all. He rocks back and forth, eyes seeing some distant, unknown horror, fingers coiled loosely around our old, trusty shotgun, uttering cryptic warnings to all who come near.
SMALL PRINT: Mrs McGettrick's Fugglers are not suitable for small/medium/oral fixated children, as there is a risk that small parts could come loose and present a choking hazard. Colours may vary from the photographs, due to monitor settings, flash, and my inability to use a camera. Mrs McGettrick's Fugglers are made in a house containing a cat. A cat who pulls out her own fur in an attempt at shocking nudity, and who walks like Nosferatu. If you have cat allergies, I might suggest you avoid buying from this shop. Mrs McGettrick's Fugglers are not suitable for people who don't appreciate cuddly toys with uncannily realistic teeth jutting out from their mouths. Mrs McGettrick's Fugglers are not suitable for people who have ever harboured a suspicion that toys can come alive at night.

Mrs McGettrick's Fuggler Emporium via reddit

Finest mechanical bird song of 1890

Dean Putney — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 14:39:26 +0000

This lovely mechanical contraption is designed to mechanically recreate bird song. The video uploader says this was made about 120 years ago in Paris, probably by Blaise Bontems who was known for this type of automaton. It's a fascinating, delicate device!

The Finest Bird Song of 1890

Videos of animals having birthdays

Dean Putney — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 18:45:46 +0000

I'm fascinated by these videos of animals having birthdays, started by this especially surreal video Xeni sent me of a skunk named Peaches celebrating her first birthday. Do the animals understand that it's their birthday? How, precisely, does one celebrate an animal's birthday? Sometimes it's a big party for the owners, but sometimes it's just throwing a cupcake to a pig in a driveway. There seem to be a lot of different animals having different kinds of birthday celebrations memorialized on YouTube, and I've collected a few in this playlist.

It's actually my birthday today, and in lieu of the usual wall posts I've asked my Facebook friends to send me videos of animals having birthdays. If you find any good ones, add them to the comments below!

Animals having birthdays playlist on YouTube

Mentos horse mask basketball commercial

Dean Putney — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 18:50:15 +0000

I desperately want to believe that this horse mask Mentos commercial is actually from a 1992 episode of the Swedish Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as the description says, if only because this is just the kind of baloney that pushes crates of sugar pills. I'd also like to believe that this was made by Mentos's marketing department in a brilliant comeback to the top of the tubed candy industry. However, I think this is actually just some really brilliant independent filmmakers hitting me right in the nostalgia.

Best viewed in 240p.

Mentos Horse Mask Basketball Commercial Thanks Dannel!

Get your own horse mask, because seriously you guys.

Dog dressed as two dogs holding a present

Dean Putney — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 18:18:45 +0000

Dan Wrexham throws down the gauntlet: "If you've seen a better picture than this picture of a dog dressed as two dogs carrying a present, I don't believe you." I can't think of anything better.

UPDATE: François Arias let us know in the comments that he took this photo! He even sent in a better angle of this excellent dog:

Dog dressed as two dogs holding a present on Twitter via @willak via @Mike_FTW

How to eat a corn in 10 seconds

Dean Putney — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 19:59:01 +0000

how to eat a corn in 10 seconds via reddit's "Learn Useless Talents" section

KaomojiApp makes crazy text emoticons easy ＼(☆o◎)／

Dean Putney — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 14:00:10 +0000

KaomojiApp adds a menu item to your Mac with a huge collection of Unicode emoticons that you can easily select and insert in any text area. The free version has a few basic samples in each emotion category, and you can unlock hundreds more for just $3.

Yay! ☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆

KaomojiApp.com

Slippery web designers at Apple hide court ordered apology perpetually below the fold

Dean Putney — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 14:23:27 +0000

Apple was recently ordered by a UK court to publicly display a notice that Samsung did not copy the iPad with their Galaxy tablet to undo the damage they've done by making that accusation. And like a scolded child, they're scuffling their feet and mumbling "sorry" to the ground.

It's no surprise that their apology is at the bottom of the page, or that you need to scroll to see it. What's sneaky about it is that the large image of the iPad on their homepage resizes automatically to force that text to always appear below the fold when you load the page. Apple's webmasters have written in code to figure out how tall your browser window is, then make the site's design just big enough to push the apology out of your view and make you scroll to see it.

apple.co.uk [via Reddit] Thanks, Majd!