tech@vedella

"Men of the Stacks" is a beefcake calendar featuring hunky librarians, with proceeds to the It Gets Better project. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Tommy Edison, the blind film critic last featured here demonstrating an "accessible" ATM explains the inaccessible design of US money and the difficulties it presents for people with vision problems.

We just watched Penn & Teller's Magic and Mystery Tour, their 2003 documentary on traditional magic in China, India and Egypt, and really enjoyed it. Penn and Teller resolve to track down performers who are still doing the street magic that inspired western magicians in years gone by -- the Indian Rope Trick, the Egyptian [...]

If you love Japanese ice-spheres in your booze, but don't want to spring for a pricey bespoke machine to accomplish the trick, you can always pick up one of Muji's silicone ice-ball molds, a steal at £7.50.

In this video, a Danish comedian does a convulsively funny routine about the swimming rules posted by Norwegian beaches. The subtitles were done by someone whose English is a little imperfect, but combined with the translator's footnotes and the comedian's affect, it's still pretty goddamned hilarious. (via Making Light)

CA$HCATS.BIZ, via demarko

Sam Gellman's tourist photos from North Korea's Mass Games are wonderful and weird studies in repetition at scale, where all sorts of pomp and spectacle are performed with thousands of identically dressed performers in close-order drill, which echoes the enormous housing blocks and all the other mass-scale motifs of Stalinist bureaucracy. (via Kottke)

The open Android ecosystem keeps on getting more interesting. Austen Dicken, a key developer on the CyanogenMod project, is making great strides in porting VLC Player, the best, most versatile media player in the universe, to run on Android handsets and tablets.

Bunnie Huang blogs his recent Open Hardware Summit talk on the future of open hardware. Bunnie says that open hardware stands to grow from a niche in the global hardware market to an important segment, thanks to phenomena like "heirloom laptops" (and boy, isn't that a provocative coinage!?). Someday, you cannot rely on buying a [...]

Photo: A relative reacts after his arrival at a crime scene where a man was shot dead in Acapulco two days ago. According to local media, unidentified gunmen opened fire on a DVD and music salesman. The next day, the charred and headless remains of five people were found in the same city. And today, [...]

[Video Link]. From the Cartoon Network show MAD (via @evanatwired/@waxpancake).

[Video Link]. (via @antderosa)

Dan Nguyen shot this photo and shared it in the Boing Boing Flickr pool today. Here's a related shot. He explains: Hundreds of pilots from United/Continental showed up in full dress and made a show in support for their union during an ongoing labor dispute. They stood in an area on Broad Street, near Wall [...]

Video Link. "Video games delivered to your door! What more could you ask for!?" (NSFW for repeated use of the word "vagina." Thanks, Jesse Thorn!)

"The Fewer the Better: Number of Goals and Savings Behavior," (PDF) a study from University of Toronto's Rotman School of Business on consumer savings strategies, concludes that it's better to have a single thing that you're saving for, rather than multiple savings goals. Consider two hypothetical individuals, Tom and Jerry, who have both been recently [...]

Here's a neat gallery of Curiosity as Art (Facebook, may prompt for login). Images of the next Mars rover created by space-fans. Shown here, "What if Warhol had painted Curiosity?," Used with permission of the artist, Astro0 from UnmannedSpaceflight.com. (thanks, Stephanie L. Smith)

Here is what authorities are describing as a "football-shaped" bundle of marijuana, confiscated by the Santa Cruz Metro Taskforce in Arizona. Mexican drug traffickers routinely toss packages like this over the 18-30 foot tall fence that separate Nogales, Mexico and Nogales, Arizona in the United States. Honestly, this thing looks more like a super grande [...]

A still-widening outbreak of listeria food poisoning tied to contaminated cantaloupes has killed at least 15, according to state health officials in the US. Dozens more have been sickened, and cases are still coming in.

This video from the BBC's "The Real Hustle" show a re-enactment of what is purportedly a real con whereby a fingersmith pretending to be a tourist approaches a mark with a large-lensed SLR around his neck and asks for directions, brandishing a map. While they pore over the map together -- and under its cover [...]

Here is a video demo for Pet a Kitty, a new iOS app. You pet the virtual cat, and it purrs, stretches, and miaows accordingly. Like a cat cafe for your iPad! It's not out yet, but I'll certainly be downloading it as a slightly creepy but also undeniably cute stress reliever. (via @glennf).