Habitot Children's Museum in Berkeley, California is making an unusually generous offer to the families of homeless kids. They are providing them with the opportunity to celebrate their child's birthday at their facility for free. Their free birthday party offer includes all the standards: decor, pizza, juice, cake, and even goodie bags for the guests. Plus, they gift the birthday child something special.

Now, I'm not sure the age limit for the eligible children but, according to their site, the museum serves infants, toddlers and preschoolers.

Want to learn more? Email the museum's Family Programs Manager at familyprograms@habitot.org. Also, if you have the means, please consider donating to Habitot so they can keep the magic going.

photo by Yoshika Mcalister Read the rest

Privacytools.io showcases web platforms, utilities and services that center on maintaining online user privacy. Anonymous browsing, decentralized social media, note-taking applications, even router firmware. There's a downloadable tool to help secure Windows 10, the "privacy nightmare" of operating systems.

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." – Edward Snowden

Mozilla's send.firefox.com lets you send an encrypted file privately to anyone else, providing an automatically-expiring link.

Jacob Kastrenakes:

It supports files up to 1GB, and after uploading something, it’ll give you a link to send to someone else. That link will expire once they’ve downloaded it or once 24 hours have passed. So someone else’s procrastination is really your biggest limitation here. Files are also encrypted as they’re uploaded, and Mozilla says it “does not have the ability to access the content of your encrypted file.”

People's Pantry Cincy in Cincinnati, Ohio commissioned artists to convert old newspaper boxes into miniature food pantries for neighborhood residents to donate or take food items.

“As a dietitian, I’ve always believed that no one should go hungry,” project designer Lisa Andrews said. “We have an abundance of food, yet so many people are suffering from food insecurity, especially in Cincinnati.”

From the Cincinnati Business Courier:

The organization is requesting non-perishable food items and toiletries that donors place in any of the boxes. Project goals are to reduce hunger, increase access to food and toiletries and encourage communities to “nourish their neighborhood.”

"Neighborhood mini-food pantries take bite out of hunger in Cincinnati" (Thanks, Charles Pescovitz!)

Read the rest

The first short film from Neill Blomkamp, starring Sigourney Weaver, is online free of charge. Amazing to see such a big director work so forcefully outside the system. I hope it does well!

Want to get involved or support this project? We've made film assets for Rakka available on Steam and will be adding more later. Join the discussion and support this experiment on Steam or our official web page: www.oatsstudios.com

Babylon 5, even during its original run, was never particularly easy to watch when it first aired. The changing TV landscape of the time, as well as the failure of B5's original network PTEN and subsequent re-emergence on the TNT network, meant that timeslots and airdates shifted several times during the show's original five-year run.

Show creator Joe Michael Sraczynski's "B5 books" site is reporting that Go90.com now has the entire show available to stream for free for the first time, along with several other recent series.

I've always believed that B5 represented one of the better Sci-Fi "space opera" TV shows in history, and one that many people were never able to watch during its run on television. The story and effects hold up extremely well for a show that recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Now's your chance to see it in its entirety, for free, on your own terms.

Unfortunately, the site is US-only. Read the rest

Manygolf is similar to Desert Golfing, in that it presents a random two-dimensional course and simple controls to angle and power shots. But it's also multiplayer, which means there's always someone annoying you by proving an "impossible" shot is anything but. There's no nonsense: as soon as the page loads you're assigned a name and thrown into the slowclap-worthy action.

The creator, Thomas Boyt, has an official Twitter account for the game at @manygolf; he's published the source code and his dev notes.

manygolf is a massively multiplayer golf game. everyone plays together, simultaneously, in the same session. Whoever wins the round in the fewest number of strokes wins. in the event of a tie, the player who scores the fastest wins.

EDIT: Updated the pic now it's nice and busy! Read the rest

The British Library has posted over a million copyright free images taken from books prior to 1900 on Flickr. That means if you need decorations of virtually any type for a website or book, you’ll find more than you can imagine among these visual riches. Just click through!

[Via Digital Arts Online] Read the rest

MAME, the arcade emulator originally created by Nicola Salmoria 19 years ago, is now comprised entirely of free and open-source software. It's taken a lot of wrangling, reports MAMEDev.org, due to the large number of contributors and interlinked components.

After 19 years, MAME is now available under an OSI-compliant and FSF-approved license! Many thanks to all of the contributors who helped this to go as smoothly as possible!

We have spent the last 10 months trying to contact all people that contributed to MAME as developers and external contributors and get information about desired license. We had limited choice to 3 that people already had dual-license MAME code with.

As a result, a great majority of files (over 90% including core files) are available under the 3-Clause BSD License but project as a whole is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPL-2.0+), since it contains code made available under multiple GPL-compatible licenses.

I still remember building a MAME cabinet, someone asking "which game is that?" and having the pleasure of saying "all of them."

Correction: Nicola Salmoria's name was originally misspelled "Salmora." Read the rest

The Institute for Global Environmental Strategies has released a free PDF anthology of images of earth's protected wonders, like development right up to the edge of New Zealand’s Mount Egmont National Park. Read the rest

In case you missed it, Wilco is offering its ninth album Star Wars free on iTunes and Amazon for a limited time. Read the rest

Every year, Tor.com anthologizes some of the best short fiction from its website in a free ebook, and it's always one of the best sf anthologies of the year -- this is no exception! Read the rest

Dustin Senos offers his favorite sites for better, weirder free-use photos than the usual sources. Read the rest

Free on Craigslist DC: a partially completed (and rather well-done) Tardis pinata.

FREE: homemade TARDIS pull-string pinata. My 6 year-old daughter wanted a Dr. Who birthday and as nobody in the US sells Dr. Who pinatas I made this one. Unfortunately I ran out of time so the door panels and windows are only on 2 sides and didn't get around to putting any of the signs on it but you are free to finish it as much or as little as you like.

TARDIS pull-string pinata (Tyson's/Falls Church) Read the rest

Performed by Kimiko Ishizaka on a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial in Berlin's Teldex Studio, there's already plenty to love about a new cut of Bach's Goldberg Variations. But this one is also the first fan-funded, open source, and completely free recording of it.

"Every part of it is free for you to use, share, and copy," said Robert Douglass, who launched the successful Kickstarter project behind Werner Schweer's new version of the classic score and its production.

Schweer's modernized and digitized score was itself created with free and open source software from MuseScore.com.

The producers said their goal was to be "precise to Bach’s instruction, yet full of personality and character".

"To help make this recording truly timeless, we need your help. Share it. Give it away. Introduce others to its beauty, and explain to them why you love it," Douglass wrote. "Make yourself responsible for converting another person to being a Bach fan."

The production's website is at opengoldbergvariations.org. Five double CDs of the recording will be given away to listeners who sign up for a promotion. There's also a facebook page for the project and a twitter account to follow.

Wisconsin Public Radio also developed a website to accompany its broadcast of the Open Goldberg Variations, opengoldberg.wpr.org, which will display the score in real-time so listeners can "see" the music there as it plays: "a first-ever event, proving bleeding edge technologies," says Douglass.

Download Page [Open Goldberg Variations]

Open Goldberg Variations [Soundcloud (enbeddable)] Sheet Music [Musescore] Read the rest