Crowdfunding has fascinated me since 2009, when Kickstarter, Sellaband, Indiegogo, and others were starting to pick up steam in allowing hundreds to thousands of individuals to contribute relatively small amounts to fund artists and groups recording albums, building products, and making films.

Even after thousands of projects had been funded and completed, it was common to read articles or blog posts stating that crowdfunding was a flash-in-the-pan and a fad. People would become tired of backing efforts, the argument went, and stop contributing. Donor fatigue is a real problem with any fundraising, whether for non-profits or commercial outfits. But it occurs when you pass the hat with the same group of people. What's evolved with crowdfunding is that every project has a unique audience, although some lucky projects break out through word of mouth and mainstream coverage to reach a much broader range of potential supporters.

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Photo: Scott Snider

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Photo: Diorama Sky (cc)

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The science geekiest show on broadcast television was once Futurama, an animated series co-created by The Simpsons' Matt Groening and David X. Cohen, a Simpsons writer and showrunner. The show has competition now from programs as varied as broadcast's Big Bang Theory, cable's Mythbusters and Eureka, and Felicia Day's Web network "Geek & Sundry."

But, good news, everyone! Futurama is back for another season, starting with two new episodes on June 20 on Comedy Central, where it premiered the last two seasons as well. Thirteen episodes will air on Thursdays at 10 p.m. (9 p.m. Central). It's possible the final episode in this season...will be its last! Or...will it?

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Do you love nameless, creeping horrors in the deep? Unnaturally! Do you love fonts? Of course, you do. Thomas Phinney, a veteran type designer, is attempting an unholy union of the two by resurrecting the moldering corpse of three typefaces: Columbus, Columbus Initials, and American Italic. Columbus was used for all the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, in which Phinney played a hand (severed?), designing clues for "Masks of Nyarlathotep."

Back the project on Kickstarter for Phinney to create Cristoforo, modern renditions of these three fonts. Pledges at all but the lowest level come with licenses to use the fonts. Phinney's original work is terrific, and I have no doubt that he'll bring a sensitive hand to re-creating these classic faces.

Stereotypes abound of the political cartoonists found in so-called alternative papers: the weeklies full of escort ads in the back and snarky commentary in the front. Matt Bors, on the surface, seems to embody the characteristics.

He's scruffy, doesn't own a suit, and lives in Portland. He expresses withering contempt at politicians, mainstream media, and what he views as hypocrisy. He's never made more than $15,000 a year from his cartoons, and supplements that income with illustration, freelance editorial jobs, and, possibly, blood plasma—at least he did in college; he has the scar to prove it.

The 28-year-old Bors was thus a bit surprised this year, and occasionally nonplussed, when he won the Herblock Prize for "excellence in editorial cartooning," was a finalist (with Oregonian newspaper staffer Jack Ohman) for the Pulitzer Prize, and received a Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi Award.

Jesus Christ, Matt, when did you fucking sell out?

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Courtesy of Richard Thompson

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The foundation of Web security rests on the notion that two very large prime numbers, numbers divisible only by themselves and 1, once multiplied together are irreducibly difficult to tease back apart. Researchers have discovered, in some cases, that a lack of entropy—a lack of disorder in the selection of prime numbers—means by analogy that most buildings on the Web would stand in spite of gale winds and magnitude 10 earthquakes, while others can be pushed over with a finger or a breath. The weakness affects as many as 4 in 1,000 publicly available secured Web servers, but it appears in practice that few to no popular Web sites are at risk.

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Mathias Nitzsche had a nifty idea: using Wi-Fi network names to create a connection between the network's owner and those who spot it in their wireless networks list. His aptly named wifis.org site lets you pick a handle and advertise it through your network name, as in wifis.org/glennocschmidt. This creates an account for you on the site, and makes a Web form available at that address that sends email to your Google or Facebook email, whichever you used to create the registration. The visitor never sees your email address. (Nitzsche avoids having his own registration database, which removes some overhead and security risk associated with retaining passwords.)

I contacted Mathias to ask about privacy and security issues, as one might be concerned about email addresses being stored and the association of a Wi-Fi network name with such. He said (and his FAQ notes) that he doesn't reveal information to third parties. While he's based in Germany, his data and application is hosted in the Google App Engine in the United States.

I'd love to see a variant on this idea, in which an existing network name could be paired with a unique few letter long code that someone would then append to their network. Look up the code, and you'd get the same result. I admit Nitzsche's idea is neater, encoding the URL and the identifier all at once.

This is probably a good time to also mention WTFWiFi.com, the site that is to network names what Damn You, Auto Correct! is to rewritten text messages.

After my first child was born, I found that taking pictures was a problem. The Canon S1 IS I'd purchased was a terrific model, but unwieldy when holding a baby. With kid number 2, the problem became worse. One can only juggle so many children while snapping the shutter. And there's the whole business of being fully in the moment with your kids, instead of constantly looking at them through a lens. I turned to crummy (later better) cameras in phones and little snapshotty digital cameras. I figured that when the kids were big enough to not need to be carried, I could graduate to a full DSLR with lenses.

Something happened along the way, however. I discovered James Duncan Davidson and Greg Koenig's Luma Loop. (I'll explain why it's not linked in a moment.) It was built like an adjustable bandolier with a freely traveling slider. The camera attaches through a detachable string loop at a hook in the camera's frame, just the way you'd add a normal neck or hand strap. When you're connected up, you put the strap over one shoulder and the camera can freely hang at your hip. Reach down to grab it, it slides up, take the shot, and release gently or just drop it.

I've known and liked James since I met him on a MacMania cruise in 2002, when he was still up to his neck in Java development. (James spent a few years at Sun, and was responsible for Tomcat and Ant, which means something if you, too, were up to your neck in Java.) He gave up all that programming glory for photography. He has a terrific eye, and you've likely seen his photographs of speakers at O'Reilly and other conferences. His work goes far beyond that to oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico and the sights of rural Bangalore.

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After killing the TouchPad a near-record 45 days after launch, then discounting it in a clearance sale at as low as $99, HP opted to fire up its production line to make and ship more. A baffling decision, right? The rumor is that a backlog of parts inventory and unhappy suppliers—not informed of the cancellation until the rest of the world knew—make it smarter for HP to assemble more and sell them at a loss.

I tweeted at the time that this was the only case I could recall that a cancelled product by a major electronics manufacturer was taken back on the assembly line for another run. Sure, older models superseded by newer ones have sometimes been brought back into production for short or long periods. But an item that's singing with the choir invisible? A colleague in Australia, Tim McGuire, has a long memory, and a shelf full of back issues of NeXTWorld magazine. He sent me a clip and his permission to share it.

In mid-1993, a few months after CEO Steve Jobs had shuttered the NeXT factory, and was in the process of switching to an all-software company—a path that led to its later acquisition by Apple—the lights were turned back on in its Fremont, Calif., factory. NeXTWorld's rumor columnist, Lt. Sullivan, reported that the U.S. military and another undisclosed customer wanted more machines, and so NeXT was to fire up and spit 1,200 more devices out. (Dear readers, please explain the Lt. Sullivan reference?)

The TouchPad and webOS are unlikely to have the same sort of long-lasting legacy as NeXT. The NeXTSTEP operating system and its use of the Mach microkernel architecture led to a number of decisions that produced Mac OS X, which runs both Macs and iOS devices like the iPhone.

Photo: Rajeev Nair / Ill. Rob Beschizza.

Should we pity a once-popular blog when its time in the sun has come and gone? Not so much. I'm watching the sunset of a moderately high-traffic site I've run for a decade, and that seems the natural course of events. Like the hecatomb of evolution, many blogs rose and then were slaughtered in the crucible of viewer attention (and blogger interest). Those that survive are fitter—or at least live in areas with abundant page views.

A recent glance at my statistics put me in a funk, briefly, until I dashed through Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief, adapted for the fast-paced online age. Denial: The stats must be broken! Anger: This is an awesome site; everyone must be blind! Bargaining: Maybe if I do a redesign? Depression: All that effort, for naught. Acceptance: Hey, what's going on at Reddit?

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Matt Jones's invention of warchalking back in 2002 was a lark. It combined the culturally laden notion of chalk signs made by hoboes with the modern nomadic lifestyle of the digerati. As packs of laptop wielders roamed from place to place, a warchalk indicating an open Wi-Fi network would allow those network grazers to stop a moment, and fill up on protein-rich memes.

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