tech@vedella

Kotaku's Stephen Totilo interviews Tim Sweeney, creator of the tech behind the Unreal series, Gears of War, and Infinity Blade: "He's a tinkerer, a man who believes he was born five years too late to become an auto mechanic ..."

UK conservative MP Aidan Burley has apologised for any offense given by his attendance at a stag party in France where some attendees dressed up like members of the SS, chanted "Himmler Himmler Himmler" and "Eichmann Eichmann Eichmann," taunted French waiters by asking (in thick German accents) where in the Third Reich they hailed from, [...]

This cube made of gears is a great example of some of the really brilliant stuff coming out of the 3D printing scene; it's a phenomenon on Thingiverse, where the method for turning any solid shape into a geared wonderment has been generalized into a formula that can be applied to your 3D model-file. Cube [...]

HP refused to service Chris's busted, warranty-covered Elitebook, because a small quantity of cat hair in the fan and on the board constituted a "biological hazard." He seemed to relent later, and he pretty much agreed with me, so he talked to his supervisor (to make an appeal). Then he gets back on the phone [...]

Yesterday, I blogged about the tribute raised to Megaupload by several famous recording artists, who objected to their labels' campaign against the service. Overnight, Universal Music filed a series of fraudulent copyright complaints against the song, prompting YouTube to repeatedly remove it, and to threaten to terminate the Megaupload YouTube account for incurring multiple piracy [...]

There's never been a better time to donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading organization fighting to keep the world's Internet free and open. Never a better time because there's never been more threats facing the free Internet, from SOPA to illegal domain seizures to warrantless shutdown of Wikileaks. And never a better time [...]

There I Fixed It has an historical overview of the "bookwheel," a sixteenth-century book-desk combined with a water-wheel, which lets you easily rotate several books into your field of vision. But imagine yourself back then attempting a research project. You want to learn about a topic from multiple sources and cross-reference each one. A desk [...]

Ah, civilization! (Via Mitch O'Connell)

I've blogged old radium-based health product ads before, but this one is a bit of a cake-stealer: the Revigator, sold in the 1920s, was a uranium-infused crock that you filled with drinking water so that it could be made radioactive prior to imbibing. The glazed ceramic jar had a porous lining that incorporated uranium ore. [...]

"An obsession with brewing protocol is generally the mark of an amateur -- that pitiable person who makes a simple thing complicated in the futile hope of feeling kinship with the professionals. Nevertheless, if you are making coffee you might as well make it well." -- by Kelefa Sanneh, writing for The New Yorker on [...]

Video Link, via Mike Monteiro.

Kummerspeck Literally, "grief bacon." A German word meaning weight put on through emotional overeating. (via Reddit)

Drunkenmaster sez, "MegaUpload is one of the main sites frequently vilified by the RIAA and MPAA as a rogue site dedicated to destroying their business models. But top music stars including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg and Kanye West disagree and are giving the site their full support in a brand new song. [...]

Andy Baio looks at youngsters' persistent misapprehensions about copyright law, which is stricter than many realize. Exhibit A: a popular YouTube of Pulp Fiction scenes, remixed in chronological order, posted with the disclaimer "No copyright infringement. I only put this up as a project." Under current copyright law, nearly every cover song on YouTube is [...]

Five years ago, I

This 1932 douche ad does some Astaire-grade hoofing around the idea that "your vagina smells bad and you should be ashamed of it," dancing right up to the phrase without ever uttering it. It's a perfect satanic miracle of gendered body-shaming. Zonite

The Museo de los Soldaditos de Plomo in Valencia, Spain holds the world's largest collection of toy soldiers and miniature figures. There are more than 85,000 of them on display in intricate dioramas and displays, and more than an million more in storage. Smithsonian's Derek Workman paid a visit and took beautiful photos inside. (Above, [...]

Law and Order was shooting an episode about Occupy Wall Street, and the production team built a perfect replica of Zucotti Park, as it was before the brutal eviction of the protesters by NYPD. So members of the original Occupy camp went and occupied it. As of about 1:00 a.m., the police had begun to [...]

William Patry is no copyright radical. He's the author of some of the major reference texts on copyright, books that most copyright lawyers would have on their bookcases, books like Patry on Copyright. But Patry -- once copyright counsel to the US House of Representatives and policy planning advisor to the US Register of Copyrights [...]

A construction project in Lancanshire, northern England has uncovered a 17th century cottage that archeologists think was the home of one of the Pendle witches who in 1612 were famously tried for murdering ten people with "witchcraft." One of the accused was found innocent and ten were executed by hanging. According to the BBC News, [...]