tech@vedella

Greg sez, "Last week I started reading Widdershins by Oliver Onions [Ed: a public domain text in the Gutenberg Archive]. The first story stuck in my head and I did an illustration for it. It turned out pretty good so I thought it would be cool to do one illustration for each of the nine stories in the book. I just finished the third illustration and I am curious as to whether other people think I am adding or detracting from the stories. 1. The Beckoning Fair One 2. Phantas 3. Rooum" Picture Gallery - 2009 - Greg Elmensdorp (Thanks, Greg!)...

This "future of news" news report from 1981 invites us to imagine sitting down with our morning cup of coffee and getting the news from our computers (it only takes two hours to transmit the day's paper, at $5/hour on the dialup network). This is pretty much the epitome of what's wrong with corporate futurism: it assumes that things will change in a way that enhances the corporation's ability to get the job done (which, of course, it does), but without changing things in ways that enhance the world's ability to clobber the corporation's bottom line. Other examples: * The Internet will enable us to deliver pay-on-demand movies to our viewers' homes (but it won't let them get those movies without paying for them) * The Internet will enable us to save money on our long-distance trunks (but it won't let callers bypass the tariff-based telephone system altogether) * The Internet will enable the police to coordinate international investigations (but it won't let criminals coordinate their activities to evade the police) Add your own to the comment thread, below: entirely notional, valueless prizes will be awarded for especially juicy examples! How the Future of Online News Looked in 1981 (via Futurismic) Update: Mark did this back in January (I was away that weekend!), but I still want to hear your answers!...

Here's a series of photos showing the interior of an old Russian napalm-testing where the intense heat has melted the bricks into gooey stalactites. Eerie and gorgeous. Абизьяна чичичи аплавляла кирпичи. Форт Зверев. (Thanks, MarkM and @gall!)...

Information Week's Internet Evolution's just published my latest article, "Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform, or Destroy Your Favorite Medium" -- a noodle on the factors that led to the demise of newspapers, the transformation of music, and the potential destruction of big budget movies and mass-market publishing (and what can be done about the last one): Big-budget movies (BBMs) require a lot of capital and rely on studios controlling the rate and nature of distribution of the finished product. If you're going to recoup your $300 million box-office turd, you need to move a hell of a lot of DVDs, TV licenses, foreign exhibition, Happy Meal toys, and assorted "secondary" revenues. Let's be realistic here: Nothing anyone does is going to make it harder to get movies when you want them, where you want them, and at whatever price you feel you should pay for them (including free). And the harder you crack down on Internet movie-downloading, the more attractive you make buying pirate DVDs from criminals on the street -- a virtually zero-risk transaction that directly displaces DVD purchases. What's more, no one has yet successfully crowdsourced a movie that looks and feels like a BBM. There are lots of fabulous 9-minute YouTube Inc. videos, and plenty of lovely and promising machinima flicks, but no one's yet built the kind of purely escapist, high-production-value feature that we flock to the cinema to see every summer. Now, maybe film studios can do what Magnolia Pictures is doing -- distributing day-and-date releases to satellite, pay-per-view, cinema, DVD, and foreign film outlets -- and recapture a lot of the money that is squirting between the fingers of the tightly clenched release-window fist. But if it's not enough, commercially motivated BBMs might simply die. Note that movies as a genre won't vanish. There's plenty to love about 9-minute YouTubes and the quirky features that come out of indie production houses. There's never been a time when more moving pictures were being produced and viewed than today. Many of these things are economic propositions, and many are not -- they're a lot more like stage shows than they are like films. They cost less to produce, they reach smaller, more targetted audiences, and they represent an admirable diversity of voice and point of view. But they're not Big, Culturally Relevant Media in the way that a real classic BBM can be. Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform, or Destroy Your Favorite Medium...

A Nigerian scammer is accused of posing as the central bank of Ethiopia and bilking Citibank out of $27,000,000: To carry out the elaborate scheme, prosecutors in New York said on Friday, the man, identified as Paul Gabriel Amos, 37, a Nigerian citizen who lived in Singapore, worked with others to create official-looking documents that instructed Citibank to wire the money in two dozen transactions to accounts that Mr. Amos and the others controlled around the world. The money came from a Citibank account in New York held by the National Bank of Ethiopia, that country’s central bank. Prosecutors said the conspirators, contacted by Citibank to verify the transactions, posed as Ethiopian bank officials and approved the transfers. Nigerian Accused in Scheme to Swindle Citibank (via Making Light)...

Instructables user Thatkidwithayoyo has a fine formula for making a corsage out of the universal medium of exchange, duct tape: I didn't want to buy in to the wasteful "buy, wear for a few hours, throw away" corsage culture, so I decided to make a more economical, longer lasting, and greener alternative. This instructable will teach you how to make duct tape flowers and then use those flowers to make a corsage. The flowers and corsage will last forever and are waterproof, recyclable, hypo-allergenic, and just plain cool! They are also cheaper than a normal corsage and don't require a trip to the florist. How to Make a Duct Tape Corsage and Flowers (via Craft) Previously:Magnetic duct-tape - Boing Boing Duct tape saved Apollo 17 moonbuggy, while on the moon. - Boing Boing Robber disguised face with duct tape - Boing Boing Using tape to repair plane wing -- video - Boing Boing Duct tape festival in Ohio - Boing Boing Camouflage Duct Tape - Boing Boing Clear duct tape - Boing Boing HOWTO make duct tape roses - Boing Boing Duct-tape band-aids - Boing Boing...

Over on Boing Boing Offworld, our Brandon's found Jumpman, a hypnotically nostalgic and mesmerizingly fun retro-game. The creator, Runhello, sez, "The thought was to kind of take all the things that have become possible in games in the last 29 years-- physics, 45 degree angles, a z axis-- and bring the new technology into an early-80s-style platformer while at the same time changing the platformer's basic nature as little as possible. The hope is to try to make you believe that every 2600-era platformer would have looked like this if only you'd pulled the camera back about 4 feet." Gimme Indie Game: Runhello's Jumpman Discuss this on Boing Boing Offworld...

In November 2007, Reason magazine's Radley Balko published a long investigative story on Steven Hayne, a doctor who for the last 20 years has done the vast majority of Mississippi's forensic autopsies. Critics say Hayne and his sidekick, "bite mark expert" Michael West, cornered the market by doing ungodly numbers of autopsies, and by telling prosecutors what they wanted to hear -- possibly putting innocent people in prison in the process. Three months after the article ran, two men in Mississippi -- Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks -- were released from prison after DNA testing exonerated them for raping and killing the daughters of their girlfriends. Both convicted in the early 1990s, the two collectively served more than 30 years in prison. Tests pointed to a third man, who confessed to both crimes. Brooks and Brewer were both convicted based primarily on testimony from West and Hayne, who claimed to have found bite marks on the little girls that could only come from the accused. Balko has now found another case from about the same time with remarkably similar facts. Only this time, there's an incredible, damning video of Hayne and West's "examination." Jimmie Duncan was accused of raping and killing his girlfriend's daughter, 23-month old Haley Oliveaux. Prosecutors brought her body to Hayne, who claimed to have seen bite marks no other doctor noticed. He then called in West, who did the exam depcited in the video. In the video, West takes a dental mold of Jimmie Duncan's teeth and pushes it into or scrapes it across Haley Oliveaux's body some 50 times.Other forensic experts say the video shows not only medical malpractice, but criminal evidence tampering. West and Hayne have testified in thousands of cases in Mississippi and Louisiana. Jimmie Duncan was convicted of capital murder for the rape and murder of Haley Oliveaux. He is still on death row in Louisiana. STRONG WARNING: The article contains extremely disturbing photos and a video excerpt of the "bite mark exam" on Haley Oliveaux. Article w/ video and photos | Original feature on Hayne | Archive of Blako's investigation of Hayne and West...

Rob Cockerham of Cockeyed.com made a contraption that launches hot soap suds into the cold air. The Quest to Create Hot Air Soap Bubbles Previously:Rob Cockerham hacks the "Gold Kit" - Boing Boing How Much is Inside? -- thread count - Boing Boing Rob Cockerham writes article critical of Cash4Gold, gets offered ... Dwight Shrute bobblehead costume - Boing Boing Nails of the Crucifixion on eBay - Boing Boing Interesting traffic citation scam - Boing Boing Photo of "prostate cancer cookies" - Boing Boing Guy gets credit card using torn up application - Boing Boing Military applications for "Silly String" - Boing Boing Flying penis disrupts Russian meeting - Boing Boing...

I wrote an article for PC.com on my idiotic blunder of signing up with freecreditreport.com. In short, don't go there. If you want a truly free credit report use annualcreditreport.com, not freecreditreport.com. I clicked on the large bright orange button that said "Get your Free Credit Report & Score!" and was presented with a form. I filled it out. I hesitated for a second when the site asked for my credit card number, which it stated was "required to establish your account," but the site assured me that my "credit card will not be charged during the free trial period." Having done this before (or so I thought), I went ahead and entered the information. A shopping cart receipt indicated that the total was $0.00. I got my credit report, looked it over, and forgot about it. A week later I was looking at my checking account register online and I noticed a $14.95 charge from a company called CIC*Triple Advantage. I didn't recall buying anything from a company with that name, so I entered "CIC*Triple Advantage" into Google. The search results made my eyes bug out of my head. This was the name of the billing entity for freecreditreport.com. The thousands of search results were full of words like "deceptive practices," "scam," "ripoff," "unauthorized billing!" and "beware!" In fact, all the top results were either from people complaining that they'd been conned into signing up for a $14.95 monthly credit monitoring service without their permission, or they were about how to cancel the service. When is a free credit report not a free credit report? When it's from freecreditreport.com...

The Materials Research Society holds "Science as Art" competitions at their big meetings. Researchers enter unusual and striking images of their nanoscale lab creations. The Society have a slew of the entries posted to their Web site for use as screensavers or desktop wallpaper. Discover's Aaron Rowe grabbed some of them to create a slideshow quiz. For example: This tiny rose (above) was made by mixing an exotic element with hydrazoic acid. That element was discovered in Germany, is a soft and silvery metal with a low melting point, and was used to lubricate the bearings of aircraft during World War II. What is it? "World's Smallest Puzzles" (Discover), Download MRS Desktop Images (Materials Research Society)...

Eric Wilhelm of Instructables informs us, "Some of the Instructables and Squid Labs crowd are putting on an art show tonight (2/20/09). The Joydick will be in there." The SF Media Labs event, titled "40% Off," takes place at the ABCO Art Space, 3135 Filbert Street, in West Oakland. From the event description: 40% Off is an artistic response to the new economy. Recently laid off? Lost 40% of your wealth? Benefits clipped? Come see recent works from the newly jobless. Pontificate on the value of art, and how it is affected by the market, or just come to enjoy the space and beer." SF Media Labs (sfmedialabs.com), "An Art Show for the New Economy" (Instructables) Previously:Joydick Atari game controller - Boing Boing...

Effunia created this 3.5-inch tall critter named Basil the Miniature Mushroom. She also has an Etsy shop where you can buy her creations....

A (semi) naked, 9-month-old baby plays a synthesizer. Nuff said. synthtube.com (thanks, Alex Ringis)...

I am moving to Eugene, Oregon, because I am in love with a girl. I'm also in love with my dog Porter who, as an English Bulldog, has a not-impossible chance of dying in the cargo hold a jet (even one heated and pressurized; bullies have breathing issues). So I'm gonna lash him in to the passenger seat of a rented minivan, test out my new awkwardly large Pioneer GPS unit, and bop across the country from Brooklyn listening to my first audiobook ever. (Ender's Game, which I've never read. I know.) Along the way, I'll be doing the things one does when hauling ass on the interstates—gulping coffee, then slathering umeboshi plum paste on my teeth to try to counteract the acidity; asking truckers where to find the best chicken-fried steak with cream gravy, America's perfect food; falling asleep in the mountains to die in flames at the bottom of a ravine, my organs shimmering on my outsides like a grotesque Nudie Cohn suit—and I'll be recording them all on the video machines. I have to cut through Kansas City to drop off an old Kustom amp that my buddy Jason had to leave when he moved back home. And I hope to be rolling into Oregon by the weekend. But along the way, I've got a little time to sightsee and visit. What should I see? Want to meet up?...

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video. Robots that serve cocktails. That's the premise behind the Roboexotica festival in Vienna, Austria, which unites two things cherished by nerds around the globe -- alcohol and DIY robotics. Eddie Codel and Monochrom's Johannes Grenzfurthner were there, and shot video of the proceedings (and the drinkings, and the fallings, and the weirdness) for us to enjoy. So, enjoy. And do not drive or operate heavy machinery after doing so.Did I mention that this video includes hot milkmaids from the Alps who serve you free booze, and a nude male robot that urinates delicious beer or something? We don't have maker credits for all of the amazing devices shown, but here is the website for Robovox (the big guy who talks), and some of the robots featured were created by students of the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Dept. of Information Design. Monochrom co-curates the festival with shifz.org....

Over at the MAKE blog, Gareth Branwyn writes about this lovely "Box of Clouds" viewer: Digital artist Kim Laughton made this cloud viewer out of an old keychain photo viewer. The backlight of the LCD screen was removed so you have to hold the box up to the light to see the clouds drifting by inside. Box of Clouds...

The logo of the Skull and Bones consists of a skull and crossbones, along with the number 322. According to one theory, 322 symbolises the year the society was founded (1832) and indicates that it is the second chapter of a German secret society, supposedly the Bavarian Illuminati. (Source: Wikipedia) The New York Times reports that Geronimo’s heirs have filed a lawsuit against the Skull and Bones in federal court in Washington. They want the Yale secret society to return Geronimo's skull and other remains, which they say were stolen by George Bush's grandfather, Prescott S. Bush, in 1918. A longstanding tradition among members of Skull and Bones holds that Prescott S. Bush — father of President George Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush — broke into the grave with some classmates during World War I and made off with the skull, two bones, a bridle and some stirrups, all of which were put on display at the group’s clubhouse in New Haven, known as the Tomb. The story gained some validity in 2005, when a historian discovered a letter written in 1918 from one Skull and Bones member to another saying the skull had been taken from a grave at Fort Sill along with several pieces of tack for a horse. Wikipedia entry on Skull & Bones....

www.time-lapse.fr posted a time-lapse video of snails in his yard. He writes: Every evening, after my automatic water system stops, all the snails who where hidden behind flowers go out and go on the grass to make parties, eating and drinking ! Seeing them move at high speed put me in their timeframe, making their movements seem more purposeful. (Via Unique Daily)...

UPDATE: Phil Torrone says, "And it's over - Scholastic and Klutz will credit Evil Mad Scientist's BristleBots." Lenore from Evil Mad Scientist writes, Pat Murphy of Klutz will be sending out a note shortly to let everyone know that Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories will be receiving acknowledgment in the next printing of Invasion of the BristleBots as well as on the Klutz website. This is good news for us, and it seems like Klutz is really learning from this experience about how to work with the maker community. The online response to this situation has been overwhelming and I am glad that such an incredibly vibrant discussion was able to take place. I am truly impressed by and grateful for the support we have received." More at Make Blog. Phil Torrone of MAKE points to a developing story about a DIY project called "bristlebots" developed by the maker-hackers at Evil Mad Scientist laboratories -- a similar character, um, mysteriously popped up later in a children's book published by Klutz / Scholastic. PT has a blog post up with lots of detail about the case, which you should read. A personal note from him: it's not about copyright, trademarks or patents, it's about ethics - klutz saw an original idea in 2007 called "bristlebots" from evil mad scientists and are now claiming they developed the *exact* same project, design and name "bristlebots" all in secret and all in the same year. really. now they are "genuinely surprised". one google search for "bristlebot" has all the prior works and the original post/video from 2007. i'd like folks not to get stuck on the legal arguments - think about what type of company they'd like scholastic and klutz to be. let's help them resolve this in a fair way. here's my suggestion to them... a new statement. "in light of the interest in invasion of the bristlebots and evil mad scientist's project we've added a special note on the next printing of the book and on our web site". it means nothing legally, but it's the ethical thing to do. evil mad scientists (windell and lenore) and pioneers in open source hardware all they usually ask for us credit with their projects. the first instance of "bristlebots" was from them in 2007 - yes, it's a silly toothbrush robot, but that's not the point - klutz and scholastic are jumping in to the world of makers and should at least credit something when it's clear where the idea (and name) came from. I am not a lawyer and all of that, but that's not the point. Shame on you, Scholastic and Klutz. That's a douche move. Here's the video from Toy Fair 2009 - the book includes "BristleBots"... And here's the video from 2007 from Evil Mad Scientists (over 2 million views)....