Reading from Homeland —

This week on my podcast, I've posted a reading (MP3) from Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother, which will be published on February 5 -- that's one week from tomorrow! — Cory •

2600 radio tribute to Aaron Swartz —

Emmanuel Goldstein from 2600 magazine sez, "We've gotten such a strong response to this and wanted to make sure anyone who knew Aaron - or who simply knew OF him - got a chance to hear the hour-long tribute from Wednesday's 'Off The Hook' radio program in New York, a show he was a guest on only a few months ago. We played an excerpt of that, along with part of an incredible interview with Aaron at age 14 that underlines what a remarkable person he was. We also delved into the issue of depression in our community with excerpts from the 'Geeks and Depression' panel at HOPE Number Nine, and we had a roundtable discussion on what we can do better and where people at risk can turn. It's part of a continuing conversation that we need to have in every conceivable forum. — Cory •

Over at our sponsor Intel's My Life Scoop site, I wrote about several modern tube amps to warm up your digital music.

In the ongoing analog vs. digital debate, there are myriad measurements involving frequency response, distortion levels, and dynamic range that both sides cite to “prove” that the other is misinformed, unscientific, or just plain wrong. One path to consider is playing your digital tunes through an analog stereo, ranging from a headphone-to-RCA cable to a high-end digital-to-analog converter. Some might say that’s the best of both worlds; others would say you’d be better off with an AM radio. Ultimately though, it’s all about personal perception. So with that in mind, here are several products for bridging the gap between your digital music and your analog ears. The irony of running lousy and lossy mp3s through high-quality tube amps isn’t lost on me. But at least the enchanting glow of the vacuum tubes will distract you.

"Digital Music Meet Analog Stereo"

Stefan Riepl’s vacuum tube photo from Wikimedia Commons

Check out this amazing reel of Paul Frees trying out different narration choices for the Disneyland Haunted Mansion. It comes from the excellent (and out of print) Haunted Mansion Original Soundtrack, which I am a proud owner of. Neener.

The Genius of Paul Frees

What's entropy? —

I sat down with the fascinating crew at the Titanium Physicists podcast to serve as their special physics-ignoramus guest in an episode about entropy (MP3) — Cory •

Boing Boing is committed to bringing you your annual portion of Lord Buckley's inspirational beat poetry. Earlier this month, I posted his version of "A Christmas Carol". Now, here's "The Nazz," Lord Buckley's indispensible biography of Jesus Christ. This is all the Christmas cheer anyone needs. With this alone, we could rebuild civilization from rubble.

Lord Buckley - The Nazz (Thanks, Iain!)

See also: Dig Infinity!, a biography of Lord Buckley

Instructables user Amandaghassaei has posted a HOWTO for making a 3D printed record that plays on a regular turntable. Her method converts any digital audio file to grooves ready to print. It's a bit fuzzy, but still rather exciting! I'm waiting for the way when taking a snapshot of a vinyl disc can be the first step toward deriving its audio content, converting that back to a shapefile, and printing out a high-fidelity duplicate.

In this Instructable, I'll demonstrate how I developed a workflow that can convert any audio file, of virtually any format, into a 3D model of a record. This is far too complex a task to perform with traditional drafting-style CAD techniques, so I wrote an program to do this conversion automatically. It works by importing raw audio data, performing some calculations to generate the geometry of a record, and eventually exporting this geometry straight to the STL file format (used by all 3D printers). Most of the heavy lifting is done by Processing, an open source environment that's often used for coding interactive graphics applications. To get Processing to export to STL, I used the ModelBuilder Library written by Marius Watz (if you are into Arduino/Processing and 3D printing I highly recommend checking this out, it works great).

I've uploaded some of my complete record models to the 123D gallery as well as the Pirate Bay. Check Step 6 for a complete listing of what's there and what I plan on posting. Alternatively, you can go to Step 7 to download my code and learn how to make your own printable records from any audio file you like.

3D Printed Record

In which my daughter shows that she's a million times the podcaster her old man ever was.

BBC Radio 4's great math and science show "The Infinite Monkey Cage" did a great (and very funny) episode on crypto and Bletchley Park, with Robin Ince, Brian Cox, Dave Gorman, Simon Singh and Dr Sue Black.

Secret Science

MP3

(via Schneier)

Tony Smith from the StarShipSofa science fiction podcast sez, "Spider Robinson will share the sofa for a confidential live online talk full of anecdotes and insights about science fiction, the publishing industry, and his lifelong journey as a reader, writer, and voice of the genre. Don't think of this as a lecture; think of it as a cosy chat with an old friend, one who just happens to be a shining star of contemporary science fiction and who knows all the juicy, meaningful stories you can't find in 'how to' books. See the genre as you've never seen it before, through the eyes of a gifted and generous storyteller and professional. There's room on the sofa for you. Join StarShipSofa as it welcomes Spider Robinson for this one-time-only live event!"

How To Write Science Fiction with... Spider Robinson (Thanks, Tony!)

Samuel sez, "ACMEScience.com is the home of many math and science podcasts, including the mathematical story series Relatively Prime. It has been run for the past four years in the spare time between jobs, and with cheap or second-hand equipment. Now ACMEScience wants to change its lot and turn itself into a full-time operation for the next year, and it plans to do this through its new Kickstarter project. If the project is funded it would mean new episodes of Relatively Prime, as well as at least one episode a week of the interview shows ACMEScience News Now and Strongly Connected Components."

I'm a great fan of Relatively Prime -- they're the ones who did the great piece on Chinook, the champion checkers-playing computer.

I did an interview with The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy, which they've published in both text and MP3 form. We talked about Pirate Cinema, Rapture of the Nerds, the Humble Ebook Bundle, the future of publishing, the Disney/Star Wars merger, and lots more:

Wired: Do you ever get letters from kids who have been inspired by your books to become hacker anarchists?

Doctorow: Yeah, all the time — at least to become hackers, and political activists. My first young-adult novel Little Brother had an afterword with a bibliography for kids who want to get involved in learning how security works, learning how computers work, learning how to program them, learning how to take them apart, learning how to solve their problems with technology as well as with politics. And the number of kids who have written to me and said that they became programmers after reading that, I couldn’t even count them. I’ve had similar responses to my second young-adult novel, For the Win, and I’ve also heard from kids who’ve read Pirate Cinema. In fact, we published an editorial by one of them on Boing Boing — an anonymous reader who makes her own movies out of Japanese anime, and who talked about what drives her and how the book resonated with her.

With Pirate Cinema, Cory Doctorow Grows His Young Hacker Army