tech@vedella

NoiseBridge, the celebrated hackerspace in San Francisco's Mission district, is celebrating its third anniversary tonight with a Hacker Prom. There's a makeout room (featuring Makerbots), pre-spiked punch, and awkward prom photos. You're encouraged to bring a robot date. Oh, this does look fun! The whole event is a fundraiser for NoiseTor, a part of the [...]

Plumb B made this rubber-band-firing, full auto-capable chainsaw/assault rifle out of Lego, inspired by the Lancer Assault Rifle in Gears of War. (via DVICE)

I had a great conversation with Christina Agapakis, a science blogger at Scientific American and a scientist studying synthetic biology. In this episode of Bloggingheads.tv's Science Saturday, you'll find out what Christina learned when she traced her allergies on a phylogenetic tree, why she's currently obsessed with symbiotic bacteria, why I think adults need more [...]

Here's Jon Stewart and the Daily Show crew and some very special guests on the future TV show featuring ruthless NYPD mace-rampager Anthony Bologna. (via Salon)  Occupy Wall Street: “Mace-in-the-face” officer named in 2004 protest ... Another hit from NYPD's “Mace in the Face” cop, DI Anthony ...

Etsy seller Patricaia Rodriguez has created an astounding Hallowe'en prop: an animatronic door inset with an LCD that looks like a window showing a corridor beyond it. An axe-murderer stalks down the hallway, glares menacingly at you, then begins to attack the door with his axe. Each blow of the axe is synchronized with a [...]

Toto, Japan's foremost toilet manufacturer, has made a motorized tricycle that runs on human crap. The saddle is a functional toilet, and if you can muster up enough colonic motility to keep up a steady stream, you could travel the world. Toto makes some damned fine toilets, incidentally -- we went to rather a lot [...]

“What constitutes due process in this case is a due process in war.” The Washington Post reports that a secret Justice Department memorandum authorized the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. The operation involved the CIA, and military assets under CIA control.

Ned Batchelder sums up a series of technique to keep spammers from attacking submission forms with automated bots (it won't work against humans, but even cheap humans are more expensive than bots). Some of these techniques look like they'll continue to work even if they're widely known, while others depend merely on exploiting vulnerabilities in [...]

Maximus Clarke shares photos taken today at Occupy Wall Street.

[Photo by Jim Kiernan] Michael Moore, holding a copy of the announcement that the New York City Transit Workers' Union has voted unanimously to support the #occupywallstreet movement. The Transit Union has 38,000 members. More photos from the protests and from last night's book signing with Michael Moore at the St. Mark's Bookshop (which needs [...]

[Video Link] My friends at Crashspace are opening their doors to the public tonight for a fun event: its members are going to show me things they are working on and we are going to figure out the best way to present them in MAKE. There will be about eight 10-minute presentations. I can't wait [...]

This video, labelled as being recorded "moments after" NYPD DI Anthony Bologna's now-infamous unprovoked mace assault on four women at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration, shows the same office in another mace attack. How many before we can call it a rampage? How many before the NYPD admits that it's wrong and unacceptable?

Reuters reports from the Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi: "Google, Twitter and Facebook are increasingly co-opted for surveillance work as the information they gather proves irresistible to law enforcement agencies, Web experts said this week. Although such companies try to keep their users' information private, their business models depend on exploiting it to sell targeted [...]

The "Occupy Wall Street" protests in New York City are inspiring similar demonstrations in other US cities. Above, in San Francisco on Thursday, protesters scuffle with a Charles Schwab employee at the door during a rally against corruption and fraud by American banking institutions. Are there demonstrations in your area, Boing Boing readers? We're hearing [...]

Gawker's Adrian Chen is liveblogging the afternoon's events at the Occupy Wall Street protest in NYC. Sounds like some of the protest organizers (or an overenthusiastic supporter?) pranked the media about that "Radiohead concert," which is now revealed to have been a hoax—for the lulz? Or for more media attention? There are bigger crowds there [...]

Glenn Greenwald reports on the US assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen in Yemen, who had not been charged with (or convicted of) any crime. Al-Awlaki was "far from any battlefield," and no judge or jury considered any accusations that had been levelled against him, nor did he have the opportunity to face his [...]

An advertisement from the good old days when illustrators were celebrities. See some examples of Jon Whitcomb's work. (Look at that big bowl of chicken broth, too!) Drawn: Hard to believe illustrators once had enough celebrity clout to be advertising spokespeople

[Video Link] Caturday arrived early. That's good, because you'll need extra time to handle all the cute. Madison has previously appeared on Boing Boing, teaching us all how to be sunflowers. (thanks, MaDonna Flowers)

Today's XKCD proposes a strangely optimal strategy for reviewing the hotels you love, provided you don't mind being a jerk. He calls it the "tragedy of you're a dick."

Daniel Krause interviewed me in Booklist about my DIY short story collection, With a Little Help, on the occasion of that book being listed in the Ingram catalog, which'll make it easy for libraries to get copies.