tech@vedella

Sound it Out #8: Kathryn Calder: "Turn a Light On" An instant gloomy-day classic, Kathryn Calder’s “Turn a Light On” is lush and lovely with enchanting, layered vocals and a child-like tone. The pedal steel guitar makes your heart hurt in the very best way. Kathryn Calder is in the unenviable position of being Neko [...]

Amy Seidenwurm says: Isac Walter has a massive collection of t-shirts, most of them music-related. He puts one on every day, takes a picture of his torso, and posts a story about the shirt on MinorThread.com. We're on day 143 right now and Isac doesn't seem to be running out of "material." He's looking for [...]

The good folks at Titan Books have released a beautiful facsimile edition of Andrew Loomis' highly-sought-after instructional drawing book, Drawing the Head and Hands. Earlier this year Titan released Loomis' Figure Drawing For All It's Worth, which I reviewed here. Before Titan began publishing facsimile editions of Loomis's book, used copies would sell for $100 [...]

An award-winning Chase vice-president has gone public with accusations that his bank deliberately tricked naive borrowers into taking out high-commission loans they could never pay back (his team wrote $2B in loans during the subprime bubble), putting the lie to the narrative that subprime was about greedy borrowers taking money they knew they shouldn't: One [...]

In The Cult of Lego, my co-author Joe Meno and I devote a whole chapter to art, both works created with bricks as well as art using more traditional media featuring Lego as the subject matter. Despite the success of museum exhibitions such as Nathan Sawaya's nationally-touring "Art of the Brick", inevitably some people claim [...]

Submitterator is back and better than ever! We learned a lot from our original public submission system (basically a reader-generated blog), and I've made a few key changes to help you get your cool stuff to the right people at Boing Boing, and make it easier for everyone else to enjoy your submissions too: We [...]

I love Thumbtack Press, because they make excellent art prints, offer high quality framing of the prints they sell, and pay their artists a very good commission. I've been offering my work at Thumbtack Press for years, and couldn't be more pleased with their service and product quality. Today, they introduced my latest print, Flower, [...]

"Teaching science without evolution is like teaching sentence structure without the alphabet." That's a quote from Carin Bondar, one of the awesome scientists interviewed in this video about why evolution needs to be taught in public schools. You'll note that all the scientists in the video happen to be female. That's because it's kind of [...]

Daring Fireball's front page currently offers a great roundup of stories about Carrier IQ, makers of spyware installed on smartphones by carriers.

The culture of groping runs deep at the TSA: Nilda C. Marugame, a TSA agent from Hawaii, claims that she faced sanctions from her superiors when she reported a sexual assault by co-worker who had generated similar complaints from two other women at the job-site. She says she was intimidated into signing an official retraction [...]

Hand-carved collage master Winston Smith, best known for his iconic logo and album art for the Dead Kennedys, is holding a special studio show and art sale December 9 at Grant's Tomb in San Francisco. Winston says he'll have new and classic original art to "suit any budget." I've been a huge fan of Winston's [...]

The life story of Enos, the second primate to orbit Earth, is extremely depressing. In fact, it's significantly more depressing than the life story of Yuri Gagarin, the first primate to orbit Earth. Which is saying something.

In several crash tests, the battery on a Chevy Volt began to heat up or burst into flame. The battery problems happened a few days or weeks after the impact and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating. (One potential factor: NHTSA testers didn't drain the batteries of juice after the crash, which is [...]

(images: Chris Scott/Flickr) In September, Cory posted about the exquisite paper sculptures that an anonymous artist was leaving as gifts in Edinburgh's libraries and museums, along with notes of support for those "special places." Several more sculptures have now turned up, bringing the total to ten and, according to the mystery artist, the end of [...]

Photoshop Disasters presents a gallery of bizarrely-photoshopped images that made it into print or online. Thought-controlled Air Mouse? Cracks are beginning to appear in the Corner Cubby campaign as child actor complains of interdimensional leakage. Reading is a great way to get ahead. The models for Beachmall are so stunningly beautiful that they have watermarked [...]

Many congratulations to author Kathe Koja on winning the Gaylactic Spectrum award (a prize given to queer-friendly science fiction and fantasy) for her stellar novel Under the Poppy.

Server farms generate so much heat that they have to run air conditioning year round. That requires energy, which costs money and tends to mean burning more fossil fuels. Meanwhile, in winter, a lot of houses are cold. The people who live there have to turn on the heat, which costs money and tends to [...]

A snake charmer in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh was angry that the government did not grant him a plot of land to keep his reptiles. So he went into the state's tax office and released a slew of snakes, including poisonous cobras. From The Telegraph: Workers stood on chairs and shook table [...]

It's stuff like this that makes me love archaeology. Turns out, we can trace the concept of math homework back to at least 2300 B.C.E., in ancient Mesopotamia. In the early 20th century, German researchers found several clay tablets at the site of Šuruppak. (Today, that's basically the Iraqi city of Tell Fara.) Some of [...]

A musician called Melchior Rietveldt was commissioned by the Dutch copyright-lobbying group BREIN to compose an anthem for an "anti-piracy" video. According to Rietveldt, BREIN licensed his work for a single use. However, the film industry has gone on to use the music in those crappy anti-piracy ads they run at the start of DVDs [...]