Fred sez,

I've just completed building the 2.0 version of Committee Caller for my master's thesis. It's called Cause Caller and it is a virtual phone bank web app powered by a Semantic Media Wiki.

I came up with the idea of automating call queues for phone banks while trying to organize one for myself, it was a total hassle to find everyone’s phone number on a particular committee, so I built CommitteeCaller last semester.  Over the last couple of months I’ve worked with several local causes to develop the idea into a generalized activist tool that is my thesis — Cause Caller. The result is a fully extendable, platform that drives a “live” VoIP application that hopefully takes a lot of the hassle out of phone banking.

Right now Cause Caller is a bit of a blank slate — while I have almost all of America’s federal politicians (Congressional representatives, Senators, etc.) in the database,  I am really interested in building state level politicians into it. Causes also need to be added as right now there are only two: the demo cause and SolarOne’s I Heart PV Cause. This is where you can help — if you are or you know any activists looking to organize phone banks, please forward this to them! I’m going to be presenting this project for my thesis at ITP on Friday, May 9th at 12:20pm, so I’ll be incorporating feedback I receive over the next week into the “results” section of my presentation.

Have fun getting in touch with democracy!

Link (Thanks, Fred!)

Matt Mason, author of The Pirate's Dilemma, sez, "I thought you'd be into this 3-D printed scale model of Cinderella’s Castle I received in the mail today. A few weeks back I was speaking at the Disney Imagineering HQ in California, where 3-D printing is used to develop new designs. They made one of these for Bob Iger, one for Steve jobs, and had this one at HQ, which they very kindly sent me as a thank you, after finding out about my obsession with all things 3-D printed. It’s the most detailed thing I’ve seen come out of a prototyping machine yet, this picture doesn’t do justice to the perfect brickwork, spires and columns, nor can you see the corridors that run through the model. It’s pretty nuts. Apparently it took 11 hours to print." Link (Thanks, Matt!)

See also:
Pirate's Dilemma author's speech: "To get rich off pirates, copy them"
Pirate's Dilemma slideshow video -- pirates will save the world

Mary sez, "While looking for something else entirely, I stumbled upon this eBay auction for an Antique Steam Pulley Driven Workshop with Lights. Good heavens. It’s got a lathe, jig saw, drill… It’s like a steampunk Shopsmith, but it’s real." Link (Thanks, Mary!)

Today on BoingBoing Gadgets, we tickled the dragon's tail, destroyed the evidence, then wrote it up on the world's smallest Mac. We learned that wherever Cory goes, the iPhone follows; that you can't kick a robot when it's down; and that magnetic shelves are the perfect place to store crap gadgets. Baffled by a 60-drive USB duplicator, we pondered how to measure its power consumption.

From the Malabar front came news of a robot spider droid army, just in time to take care of re-awaked elder god, AirJelly. John played with a pinhole panorama and min-maxed his weight loss, while Rob fawned over a neodymium magnet puzzle and a pet porthole.

Finally, it dawned on us: Apple Store Geniuses are douches.

Devin sez, "I believe this was the navigation system for several old English bombers (Victor, Vulcan, and Valiant). Very wire-y and cool. Many, many plugs and things all over the place." Link (Thanks, Devin!)

Watchismo's feature today covers the illustrious history of early LED watches, whose origins are stylish as only artifacts from a lost era can be.

With the recent release of the $350,000 Opus 8 and the de Grisogono Meccanico dG with their mechanically mimicked LED digits, I wanted to also share this video and photos from the collection of UK LED collector, Lloyd "Theledwatch". He was recently featured on Antiques Roadshow (see video above) where he shared some of the best examples of early 1970s digital light emitting diode watches like the Pulsar Hamilton P1, Girard Perregaux Casquette, Omega Time Computer and my one-of-a-kind favorites by the Royal designer Andrew Grima.

Link

This week's installment of The Command Line podcast is a recording from a panel on Secure Computing Environments with Vernor Vinge, held last weekend at Penguicon, the free software/science fiction convention in Novi Troy, MI. The panel's really fascinating and far-ranging, covering the nitty-gritty of how trusted computing is -- and might be -- implemented, to the policy, surveillance, and activist possibilities opened up by a universally available secure computing platform. Link

Today on BoingBoing gadgets, we poured ourself one from the firehose, studied from the codex of lilliputian laptops and, still thirsty, drank some vitamin water, which, in defiance of physics, mixes just fine with snake oil. Rob set about building a MAME machine inside the joystick, while John asked if anyone cared about MP3s killing off the LP. As for me, I relaxed under a fake skylight.. We wondered at yet another tiny computer; burned effigies of a disgraced tech CEO; looked at the future of prosthetic fingers; sniffed at some tasteless telephones; learned to play Beer Pong; and checked out the modern take on cheap, obnoxious electronic doorbells. Tonight, we'll be relaxing in the world's first LED spa before destroying worlds with new DARPA superweapons—all from the safety of electric unicycle-back. And, finally, a strange cigarette helps us off to the land of nod.

Instructables have just published their latest installment in their series of HOWTOs inspired by my forthcoming novel Little Brother, a young adult book about kids who use technology to wrest liberty from the Department of Homeland Security. This week, it's HOWTO block or kill an RFID chip.

-The easiest way to kill an RFID, and be sure that it is dead, is to throw it in the microwave for 5 seconds. Doing this will literally melt the chip and antenna making it impossible for the chip to ever be read again. Unfortunately this method has a certain fire risk associated with it. Killing an RFID chip this way will also leave visible evidence that it has been tampered with, making it an unsuitable method for killing the RFID tag in passports. Doing this to a credit card will probably also screw with the magnetic strip on the back making it un-swipeable.

-The second, slightly more convert and less damaging, way to kill an RFID tag is by piercing the chip with a knife or other sharp object. This can only be done if you know exactly where the chip is located within the tag. This method also leaves visible evidence of intentional damage done to the chip, so it is unsuitable for passports.

-The third method is cutting the antenna very close to the chip. By doing this the chip will have no way of receiving electricity, or transmitting its signal back to the reader. This technique also leaves minimal signs of damage, so it would probably not be a good idea to use this on a passport.

-The last (and most covert) method for destroying a RFID tag is to hit it with a hammer. Just pick up any ordinary hammer and give the chip a few swift hard whacks. This will destroy the chip, and leave no evidence that the tag has been tampered with. This method is suitable for destroying the tags in passports, because there will be no proof that you intentionally destroyed the chip.

Link, Link to RSS feed for Little Brother Instructables

See also: HOWTO Screen-print a tee

Liliputing has done a fantastic roundup of the existing and forthcoming micro-notebooks, the Eee and its successors and competitors. There's a lot of interest in these things in my household -- we're all sick of shlepping around shoulder-tearing laptops and the idea of a 2.5 Lb, sold-state submicro tablet is pretty attractive all 'round, especially if it goes for a couple hundred bucks. Link (via Gizmodo)

The Red Ferret's had a little experiment with a dual-SIM conversion kit for GSM phones -- pop it into one of the many compatible handsets and you can flip back and forth between two different carriers. I have a British and a US SIM that I switch between, depending on which continent I'm on, so this could be pretty handy.

The only thing I’ve noticed so far is that the offline mode doesn’t seem to be really offline with this thing in, because my battery now runs down a lot faster in offline mode than it used to. It’s no biggie, I’ll just switch the phone off or take out the twin SIM on flights, but it’s something to watch out for. It may just be a peculiarity of my setup, of course.

The other thing that’s not really clear from the site is the compatibility of handsets. The site has a long list of compatible handsets on it, which includes a lot of standard 3G and other phones, but even though the Nokia 6110 Navigator I upgraded wasn’t on the list, it still worked fine. So maybe it’s a matter of taking a gamble if your handset is not listed? Oh and remember you’ll need a phone with a back cover which bends enough, or has enough room to cope with the extra SIM.

Link

In December 1938, Popular Science featured this fantastic, gigantic 12-ton "landing strip in a box" for converting cow-pastures to airstrips.

ROLLING swiftly down highways on ten oversize balloon tires, a revolutionary airport-in-miniature for use by passenger air lines and military air forces now provides quick and complete assistance to stranded airplanes. This curious “twelve-ton tool box” is the invention of Kibbey W. Couse, of East Orange, N. J. It is capable of turning any level cow pasture into an airport complete with machine shop, repair parts, floodlights, and radio.

Link

Michael built a Claude Shannon/Marvin Minsky "Ultimate Machine" -- flip a switch and a hand emerges and flips it off.

About 7 years ago I was reading an article on Claude Shannon and came across one of the funniest ideas I had ever heard. Claude, you see, was one of these incredibly brilliant engineers with an obviously great sense of humor. As I understand it, he, along with Marvin Minsky came up with an idea they called the "Ultimate Machine". Basically a plain box with a switch on the top. When you flip the switch, a hand comes out of the box and flips the switch off. Thats it.

Well, after reading the article, and laughing out loud, I decided that I HAD to build one of these boxes.

Link (via Make)

Marilyn sez, "Modern Mechanix photographed the 25 pages of this April 1965 Nat Geo story on the 1964 New York World's Fair. Great photos of the General Motors Futurama exhibit, people riding a Ferris wheel made to look like a gigantic whitewall tire, attentive concertgoers at the New York State's Tent of Tomorrow, which looked all elegant back then, with that gorgeous, huge (130x166 ft) terazzo floor Texaco road map of New York State. (Interestingly, in the U.S. Pavilion a display predicted the world population would hit 7 billion by 2000, but we're still shy of that figure by some 300 million today). But the best part was the Westinghouse Time Capsule: which included 'The Bible, a piece of heat shield from a space craft, a National Geographic Atlas of the World in microfilm, freeze-dried food, a bikini bathing suit, and a popular recording by the Beatles...' Also a transistor radio, a computer memory unit, a heart valve, an electric toothbrush, and a package of birth control pills.

Some 7,000 visitors file through the RCA Pavilion each day to see themselves on color television (below, left) and hear a backstage briefing on the technological magic that splashes rainbows on their living-room screens. On the same site 26 years ago, RCA introduced black-and-white television to the United States. Official color TV center for the Fair, RCA telecasts news announcements, interviews with visiting dignitaries, highlights of other exhibits, and special events—more than 2,000 program hours from April to October. The pavilion also helped reunite families last year by showing lost children on some 200 television sets in buildings throughout the grounds. At the Dupont Pavilion, science joins showmanship (center). Here colorless liquids mixed in flasks shine with intense blue light in a demonstration of chemiluminescence—the same phenomenon that makes fireflies glow. In Dupont’s production, “Wonderful World of Chemistry,” live actors sing, dance, and talk with life-size motion-picture images on movable screens. One scene shows a live performer blowing out candles on a filmed birthday cake and spraying another actor with frosting. Eight different troupes, working simultaneously in two theaters, present the Dupont show 48 times daily.

Link (Thanks, Marilyn)

See also:
18 hours of 64 World's Fair audio!
Bell System film for 1964 World's Fair
Giant road map from 1964 World's Fair

John sez, "A giant mechanism will park your bike for you in an underground facility in a train station in Tokyo. It packs more than 9,000 bikes tight as sardines, and when you swipe your card to pick it up, it will find your bike and spit it out in 23 seconds!" Link (Thanks, John!)

Jake von Slatt sez, "The inexorable march of technology has rendered my 4:3 aspect ratio 19" LCD mod and my pump-less water cooled PC obsolete, so when I saw at 24" wide screen monitor on sale for $299.00 I grabbed it with the intent on making a Victorian All-in-One PC."

I connected the plastic top and bottom together with some lengths fo aluminum angle iron and then give them a coat of Krylon semi-flat black spray paint. When the paint was dry I masked off some of the trim using "FROG Tape" from Inspired Technologies - it works much better then regular painter's masking tape.

I hand painted the trim with a brush and small pot of gold paint which I then proceeded to spill into my lap. The Lady von Slatt has taken to calling me Goldmember.

Next I fabricated the back from perforated aluminum and pop-rivets.

Link (Thanks, Jake!)

The voice-changing Dalek helmet looks like it would be a lot of fun -- hey, hon, let's play stern Dalek and recalcitrant Time Lord! Link (via Gizmodo)

Designer Erik De Nijs's concept design for a pair of jeans with a built-in keyboard are intriguing if impractical -- I'm the kind of guy who often finds himself walking around with a laptop tapping out a few final words before going lids-down. Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

A Danish company called Agroplast has figured out how to turn pig-piss into plastic and into a cigarette "flavor enhancer":

Transforming farm waste into plastic precursors is potentially attractive over other bioplastic ideas because the feedstock effectively has no value. In fact, it has negative value because animal waste must be disposed, which costs money. Some other bioplastic companies make their resins out of corn starch.

Tøttrup claims that the process could, conceivably, result in plastics that cost a third less than conventional plastics made from fossil fuels. That's a big conceivably. Traditionally, bioplastics made of vegetable matter have cost more than fossil fuel plastics. Evaluation of the pricing will have to wait until large volumes of this stuff are made. Agroplast is going into a pilot study now, Tøttrup said.

Link (via Gizmodo)

(Image: URINE: a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike photo from Salvez's Flickr stream)

Do follow our Joel as he traipses through the forest, laden with gadgetry, granola, and gore-tex.

From Popular Science's short-lived "groovy" period, this November, 1970 article on constructing your own 12-sided "Meditator":

The fun, then, in making your personal Meditator, is double: First you create 11 pholages (only the access panel is left bare), then discover the unexpected cross-referencing when you wrap yourself in the assembled panels. Beyond that, you’ll be able to compare responses with your friends. And when you feel you’ve exhausted the potential of a given assembly, it’s easy to paste new pictures over the old.

I think you’ll be surprised by the new perspectives you’ll get toward the world about you, and your own part in it. I’ll soon be taking the Meditator with me (knocked down, it fits into a station wagon or sedan) on a college lecture tour as part of my demonstration of design technique. Teachers who have had an advance look at the - Meditator feel that—with changeable panels—it could be utilized in schools as a teaching environment. [Editor’s note: College groups interested in booking Isaacs to speak should write him in care of Popular Science. ] A breeze to build. When you go to the lumber yard for the 3/8″ plywood, see if they’ll saw the 4-by-8 panels in half for you. Four-foot squares are easier to handle.

Link

Christiaan Postma's "Clock" is a cunning arrangement of hour- and minute-hands on a black background. As the hands swing around, they spell out the name of the present hour.

The starting point with this project was a personal study about form & time. I put together more than 150 individual clockworks and made them work together to become one clock. I show the progress of time by letting the numbers be written in words by the clockworks. Reading clockwise, the time being is visible through a word and readable by the completeness of the word, 12 words from “one” to “twelve”.

Link (via Cribcandy)

I love these light-fixtures made from obsolete CRTs from Technoscrap (whose site, unfortunately, has no way to directly link to them, hence the link to Make). Link

Jonathon Yule's Invdr features a lovely gallery of robots made from various sans-serif fonts. Link (Thanks, Jake!)

Recently on Boing Boing Gadgets we looked at my final list of stuff I'll be taking with me into the woods tomorrow as I attempt to blog powered by the sun alone; a GPS tracking device jammer; an outdoor table with solar device recharger; an almost great plan to offer a free, nationwide internet service from the guv, sans the porn; an air jack for your car that is filled by the exhaust; the Robotron, a vintage Soviet desktop computer; Swashbot, an adorable homemade robot; a concept laptop that looks like a book; the sad, cranky history of the Motorola Razr; Rob's lament that Verizon wants to charge him $420 in fees to get business DSL; the upcoming launch of an Intel Atom-powered Asus Eee subnotebook (hopefully increasing the battery life); Amazon Kindle is back in stock; headphones inside a headband, for sleeping; wine sold in a TetraPak; a man playing a 1973 Buchla Music Easel synth on video; a documentary about how the computer effects in Star Wars were made, circa 197x; Apple's bizarre patent for a virtual online Apple store (which will probably never happen).

But there's more! Rob reviewed the D-Link DSM-750 media streamer (not so great); after a crap date, I saw this interactive art piece called "I Want You to Want Me" which prevented me — barely — from writing poetry; someone made bracelets from old camera lenses; Nalgene ditched a (probably) toxic chemical from their bottles; there was a nice discussion about accessibility, web design, and blindness; a Hong Kong company made a media player with a built-in projector; Rob reviewed the Casio Exilim EX-Z80 camera. And lots more, but sheesh.

TC Studio's Knife Hooks are a limited-edition coat-hook that make your home or office look like it's frequented by a dagger-hurling magician. Also: the seller ships to Antarctica. Link (via Gizmodo)

I bought a double-boiler, high-end espresso machine back in February and I'm brewing a pretty badass cuppa these days, but I can't quite perfect the art of making patterns in the latte froth (I'm pretty good at doing a flying spaghetti monster, but that's it).

Enter the latte-froth printer, which produces surprisingly hi-rez art in the top of the machine. Time to clear some more counter-space. Link (via Neatorama)

Decades before Manifold Destiny (the engine-block roadkill cookbook) Modern Mechanix published this guide to cooking with waste-heat from your car-exhaust while camping. Given that this was back in the era of leaded gasoline, I'm sure the car-exhaust imparted a magic flavor to the chow.

MEALS can literally be cooked on the run through the use of the automatic cooker shown in the photo above. The cooker is mounted on the rear bumper of the motor tourist’s car and an extension from the exhaust pipe connected up with it, as shown in the insert. The cooker contains a steam pressure kettle which is heated by the hot exhaust gases. An hour’s drive is quite sufficient to thoroughly cook meats and vegetables. Total weight of the unit is so slight that running qualities of the car remain quite unaffected. Motor tours are much more pleasant when one is assured of a well-prepared meal at the end of the trip.

Link

Here's an ad for a multi-level-marketing scheme for a "high-tech" car headlight, circa 1931. With artwork like this, I'm ready to sign up. I think I just found my next tattoo.

AT LAST! An amazingly queer yet simple invention lifts the curse of night driving from the motoring world. This altogether new discovery called “Perfect-O-Lite,” replaces old glass “bulbs” in your automobile headlights with truly amazing results. Road illumination is instantly doubled yet glare is absolutely banished. Ordinary objects in the road, ruts, animals, obstructions, etc., are made clearly visible at least three times as far. Instead of ordinary “direct” light, this beam is composed entirely of double-reflected or “infused” light. This new kind of light cuts right through the other fellow’s headlights. Even shoots through fog, mist, rain and snow. There is no wiring or installation. No extra upkeep. Banishes the need for glare shields. No wonder concerns like Wallace & Tiernan, N. J., Houston Post-Dispatch, Tex., Columbus, Ohio, Fire Trucks, etc. have already installed Perfect-O-Lite as standard equipment. To prove what this invention will do, the manufacturer now offers a set to every motorist on FREE TEST. Simply mail the coupon promptly for details.

Link

& Design's "Frame hanger" is a huge, leaning cut-out of a silhouette of an artistic scene, intended to be used as a coat-hanger. Link (via Cribcandy)

On the final day of Boing Boing tv's week-long "best of" retrospective, celebrating our first six months of mutant internetelevision...

No one ever envisioned this kind of hands free roaming... Today on BBtv, we explore the age old question of which cell phone brand is the most compatible with your stomach. This phone fricassee takes place at Machine Project, host of the Fry-B-Que social. So, turn your gullet on vibrate, and sharpen your bluetooth. It's time to taste test some telecommunications.

The cookie-dough encrusted treo was delish, but none were so nice as the clamshell Motorola wrapped in bacon.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video. See also this related episode:
* Meat Cloning at Machine Project.