tech@vedella

Who can resist the 150 tempting recipes described in The Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook, by Emily Ansara Baines?

The great Al Jaffee went on stage recently at Joe's Pub in NYC for a live version of his classic "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions," which have appeared in MAD for decades. Al is 91-years-old but more lucid than many people one-quarter his age. He's also very funny and owns a cool-looking multi-pocketed vest, In [...]

Avi sez, "Warren Seely tore apart his first tractor engine when he was six. When he was about 12, he started making farm equipment out of LEGOs. Warren's LEGO equipment works just like the real thing -- only smaller." (Thanks, Avi!)

My friend Bob Knetgzer is an amazingly talented toy designer. (He writes the Toy Inventor's Notebook column in every issue of MAKE, too!) He says: I run into a lot of 20-somethings that fondly remember the TYCO Doctor Dreadful toy line from when it was first out in 1995-97 when they were little. I have [...]

This piece was originally published on a now-defunct website for general audiences. It now lives on here in vaguely inappropriate perpetuity My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, most likely bought at Dixons in Worthing, England, circa 1986. But that's not the one I'd like to talk about, because it was defective and went [...]

James Losey from the New America Foundation sez, "Sascha Meinrath and I have a new article arguing that bills like the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP amount collectively punishment, something that Americans have a history of rebelling against:" The United States of America was forged in resistance to collective reprisals—the punishment of many [...]

This ATM skimmer was retrieved from a Chase ATM in West Hills, CA, and it appears to have been 3D printed. It is very sophisticated, with "true geek factor." On the bottom of the fake card acceptance slot is a tiny hole for a built-in spy camera that is connected to a battery. The spy [...]

This fairly straightforward HOWTO teaches you to build a tiny terrarium inside a clear glass Christmas tree bauble. If you love terrariums as much as we do, why not trim your holiday tree with a some of them? With just a few materials and some fresh plants, you can create ornaments featuring these glass-enclosed garden [...]

ADVERTISEMENT Note: The 2012 Chevy Volt offers an EPA-estimated 35 miles on a single charge based on 94 MPGe [electric] and 35 city, 40 MPG highway [gas]. Actual range varies with conditions. The Chevy Volt* is unique among electric cars because it runs on two sources of energy. You have an electric source – a [...]

Right now, I'm reading a book about why catastrophic technological failures happen and what, if anything, we can actually do about them. It's called Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow, a Yale sociologist. I've not finished this book yet, but I've gotten far enough into it that I think I get Perrow's basic thesis. (People with [...]

State Rep. Scott Holcomb, D-Atlanta, has filed a bill requiring mandatory drug-testing for members of the Georgia legislature; it's in response to a Georgia Republican bill that would drug-test parents who apply for federal financial assistance. (via Reddit)

Sound It Out #9 -- Imperial Teen: "Runaway" It's been nearly five years since Imperial Teen's last record and I have missed them terribly. The band started in San Francisco in 1996 and have managed to put out consistently sassy and exuberant records every few years or so. All of the members appear to have [...]

Karen sez, "Instructables user lvl_joe has built the ultimate Fire-Breathing Animatronic Pony from a FurReal Butterscotch play pony." For Maker Faire Detroit 2011, I displayed a hack I made to a FurReal Friends Butterscotch Pony. My fellow LVL1 Hackers and I had taken control of the motor control system of the toy and added a [...]

Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil may have been the greatest American swindler of all time. The Yellow Kid operated in the gold age of the American con, from the late 19th century up to WWII, and became a legend in his own time, immortalized in such books as The Big Con (the sociological study of con [...]

Neil sez, "A cool video from VICE Magazine about how musicians in South Africa used taxi drivers to make their own form of Kwaito House music popular in Johannesburg and around the world." And because the new Kwaito artists couldn’t get any airplay on the local radio stations, they decided to take their music to [...]

Clay sez, "Stuart Ritchie, a psychology doctoral student in Edinburgh, worked with two colleagues to try to replicate the results of a famous recent experiment, claiming people could predict in advance whether they were about to be shown erotic images. When the three failed to find any such evidence for ESP they sent their results [...]

Short paragraphs? I can write those! Sign me up! Do I need to grow a mustache? 'Cause I've got the glasses. How to Make Money Writing Short Paragraphs

Cory, this is your fault. Previously.

Mike from Mother Jones sez, "For our upcoming "dark money" print package, we chartified the known galaxy of outside political spending groups by their size. As you can see, we ended up with red giants and blue dwarfs." If Citizens United was the Big Bang of a new era of money in politics, here's the [...]

Noting that "there is little empirical research into the role that technology plays in human trafficking," danah boyd announces a purse of $150,000 in Microsoft money to study the question. Your primer: boyd's excellent Human Trafficking and Technology: A framework for understanding the role of technology in the commercial sexual exploitation of children in the [...]