Building covered in old clothes

By at 2:58 pm Monday, Apr 30 • Comments • Share

Cory Doctorow

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The Guardian's Deborah Orr is probably right that the Marks and Spencer "shwopping" initiative is "an ugly word for a dubious enterprise", but I am rather taken with this promotion for the program. M&S is encouraging shoppers to "shwop" -- swap their old clothes for discount vouchers when they buy new clothes at M&S, with the old clothes going to charity -- and to promote the affair, they covered this large Truman Brewery warehouse building off Brick Lane with used clothes, to great effect.

Shwop

Occupy Dagobah

By at 10:02 am Monday, Apr 23 • Comments • Share

Cory Doctorow

Jun 1, Sydney Vivid
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Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom		Context (essays)
With a Little Help (short stories)
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Makers (adult novel)


A little bit of Star Wars-meets-Occupy street art, snapped near my flat in Hackney, London.

Occupy Wall St The 99% We Are, Yoda stencil, Great Eastern Street, Hackney, London.jpg

Inadvertent art-photos of the Soviet-era Czech secret police

By at 6:30 pm Sunday, Apr 22 • Comments • Share

Cory Doctorow

Jun 1, Sydney Vivid
Jul 14, London EFF Speakeasy
Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom		Context (essays)
With a Little Help (short stories)
For the Win (YA novel)
Makers (adult novel)


In 2010, Vice Magazine commemorated the publication of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes' "Prague Through the Lens of the Secret Police" with a set of photos taken by the Soviet-era Czech secret police. As noted, these photos, shot blindly with hidden cameras, are actually pretty good art-photography.

They were spying full-time on average citizens, hoping to catch them in a situation that could lead to a swift arrest and a lengthy incarceration in some dank, hidden cell. With their cameras secreted in a suitcase or under a coat, the agents had no idea what was being captured while they were taking these pictures. Their negatives, in which one finds brilliant snatches of street life from a time that few outsiders were able to see, are full of unexpected gems. Total art from a bunch of Communist lackeys and thugs. Who would have thunk it?

State-Sponsored Voyeurism (via How to Be a Retronaut)

Shredding company's awesome logo

By at 9:26 am Thursday, Apr 5 • Comments • Share

Cory Doctorow

Jun 1, Sydney Vivid
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Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom		Context (essays)
With a Little Help (short stories)
For the Win (YA novel)
Makers (adult novel)


Snapped yesterday near my flat in east London, this Irish shredding company's logo on the back of their truck. Talk about "does what it says on the tin!"

Awesome logo on hard-drive-shredding service's lorry, Brunswick Place, Hackney, London, UK

Anonymous set of photos labelled "Pics from a Chinese gangsters phone" show torture, cars, puppies, piles of money

By at 10:17 pm Saturday, Mar 24 • Comments • Share

Cory Doctorow

Jun 1, Sydney Vivid
Jul 14, London EFF Speakeasy
Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom		Context (essays)
With a Little Help (short stories)
For the Win (YA novel)
Makers (adult novel)


An unattributed, anonymous set of images on Imgur purports to be an album of photos recovered from a "Chinese gangsters phone." They show a heavily tattooed man lounging with enormous piles of money, hanging out with a series of luxury cars, and participating in the torture of an unnamed man. They also show a pile of luxury goods, and the man hanging out with a cute dog. ABC's Karson Yiu notes that one of the man's cars has a Beijing number plate, another a number plate from Tianjin, and that the recurrence of "8888" in the plates is an indicator of status within the system, as "All 8 license plates are usually reserved for the especially privileged whether by power, fortune or connections."

Viral Pics Show Chinese ‘Gangsta’ Fondling Porsches, Puppies and Purse (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Just look at this mutant triple banana.

By at 9:04 pm Wednesday, Mar 21 • Comments • Share

Cory Doctorow

Jun 1, Sydney Vivid
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Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom		Context (essays)
With a Little Help (short stories)
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Just look at it.

I see your double banana, and raise you another banana... I introduce MUTANT TRIPLE BANANA! (i.imgur.com)

X-rays of flowers

By at 8:12 am Tuesday, Mar 20 • Comments • Share  

Cory Doctorow

Jun 1, Sydney Vivid
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Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom		Context (essays)
With a Little Help (short stories)
For the Win (YA novel)
Makers (adult novel)


Avi sez, "Brendan Fitzpatrick has made a beautiful series of x-ray photographs of flowers." And he's selling prints!

Floral X-rays (Thanks, Avi!)

Sax-playing gorilla at your party

By at 4:15 pm Saturday, Mar 3 • Comments • Share

Cory Doctorow

Jun 1, Sydney Vivid
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Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom		Context (essays)
With a Little Help (short stories)
For the Win (YA novel)
Makers (adult novel)


There's little provenance for this photo and the distinctive service offered therein (just a note that it was "donated" by Andrew Wightman), but it appears to date back some while. I don't suppose musical gorillas are still on offer in this hurly-burly modern age.

My kind of party. Donated from Illustrator extraodinaire and friend of the waves Andrew Wightman.

Kim Jong-Un got a Gun

By at 1:20 pm Friday, Feb 24 • Comments • Share

xeni jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un aims a rifle at the Sporting Bullet Factory, built in 1996 at the order of the North's late leader Kim Jong-il. The factory produces "sporting bullets" for developing military sports. Its exact location is undisclosed. Undated picture released by the North's KCNA news agency in Pyongyang, on February 23, 2012. Wonder what sort of computers those are, and what they're running? (REUTERS/KCNA)

Ambiguously ironic superfluous grocer's apo'strophe

By at 9:55 pm Wednesday, Feb 22 • Comments • Share

Cory Doctorow

Jun 1, Sydney Vivid
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Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom		Context (essays)
With a Little Help (short stories)
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Alice spotted this coffee cart from the (above average) London coffee chain Apostrophe, which includes a superfluous apostrophe. It's either ironic or too clever by far.

Oh the irony.

RFID blocking at the point-of-sale

By at 7:02 am Saturday, Feb 18 • Comments • Share

Cory Doctorow

Jun 1, Sydney Vivid
Jul 14, London EFF Speakeasy
Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom		Context (essays)
With a Little Help (short stories)
For the Win (YA novel)
Makers (adult novel)


Spotted by the cash-register at London Drugs, a giant discount pharmacy-cum-big-box-store in downtown Vancouver, these cheap RFID-blocking credit-card sleeves.

RFID-blocking wallet, point of sale, London Drugs, Vancouver, BC

Italian Isaac Asimov graffiti

By at 9:17 am Sunday, Jan 22 • Comments • Share

Cory Doctorow

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With a Little Help (short stories)
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Chrisperfer sez, "I randomly came upon this Isaac Asimov graffiti when attending a birthday party in Rome for my 4 year old daughter's friend."

Isaac Asimov

When the sky crashed in Odessa

By at 1:12 pm Thursday, Jan 19 • Comments • Share

Cory Doctorow

Jun 1, Sydney Vivid
Jul 14, London EFF Speakeasy
Jun 18, Dublin Internet Freedom		Context (essays)
With a Little Help (short stories)
For the Win (YA novel)
Makers (adult novel)


This 2009 image captures the scene on a foggy night in Odessa, Ukraine, when a digital billboard crashed and displayed a floating error warning in the night sky.

Windows Error Box Floating in the Air (5 pics) (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Caturday: Alfalfa Haz a Hungry

By at 7:34 am Saturday, Jan 14 • Comments • Share

xeni jardin

Boing Boing partner, Boing Boing Video host and executive producer. Xeni.net, Twitter, Google+. Email: xeni@xeni.net.

Image: Alfalfa, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) image contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr pool by photographer David W. Oliver.

Alaskan town has 176 inches of snow on the ground

By at 8:44 am Friday, Jan 13 • Comments • Share

maggiekb

I do the Twitter, the Google+, and (to a much lesser extent) the Facebook.

Books
• Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.

Upcoming Appearances
• April 2 at Skeptics in the Pub, Boston, Mass.— 7:00 pm at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square. Please RSVP.
•April 4 at MIT: "Shedding Light, Online", a discussion about how blogging and a dynamic audience helped shape my book, Before the Lights Go Out—4:00 pm in Maseeh Hall. Please RSVP.
• April 6 at Carnegie Mellon University: More details to come
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs
• April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—3:30 pm in the Rocky Mountain Innosphere.
• April 19 at The Bakken Museum in Minneapolis: Book Launch Party! Come enjoy snacks, a presentation by me, and some fun with the Bakken's Leyden jar.
• April 21 at Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul: Earth Day Tweetup event with Will Steger and Sean Otto—events run 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
• May 2 at University of California, Berkeley: "Putting the Fun Back in Infrastructure"—6:00 pm, location TBA.
• May 3 at the American Institute of Architects, San Francisco Chapter—Lunchtime lecture, time and location TBA.
• May 3 at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito, Cali.—7:00 pm.
• May 30 in New York City—Panel on local and DIY energy with the New America Foundation
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum
• July 5-8 at CONvergence in Minneapolis, Minn.—exact times and dates TBA

Hey, guys, I figured out where all of Minnesota's winter snow went. It's in Cordova, Alaska.

Since Nov. 1, storms have dropped 176 inches of snow and more than 44 inches of rain on the town, about 150 miles southwest of Anchorage.

Temperatures warmed overnight, and residents awoke to standing water because of stopped-up drains. The rain also made the existing snow heavier.

The warmer temperatures - about 35 degrees midday Wednesday - brought another hazard to the Prince William Sound community of 2,200 people: avalanche danger.

There's one road leading out, and it was closed though it could be opened for emergency vehicles.

"We have the National Guard right now using the standard shovel, and they're getting pretty trashed every day - not the shovels but the Guardsmen themselves," he said.

That's from an AP story in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the whole thing to learn about the intricacies of snow shovel design, and why a standard shovel just ain't enough to deal with 176 inches of snow. Better ones are being airlifted in.

The image above—taken by the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management—gives you an idea of what it's like to dig out of a snow pack like this. I will admit, as much as I realize what a disaster it would be to live in Cordova, Alaska right now, there is a part of me (the part that is approximately 5 years old) that just looks at this photo and thinks, "I will build the most AWESOME fort EVER!"