tech@vedella

I have a weird relationship with coffee-table books. In general, I kind of think of them as clutter—like a particularly heavy and ungainly pile of junk mail that you can't just throw away. They're books to flip through and never really read again. For the rest of eternity, they just sit there, getting in your [...]

The iPad 2 has a weird vulnerability: its PIN-based security can be bypassed by hooking up a "smart cover"

San Francisco's Custom Made Theatre Company is mounting a sweet, low-budget production of Little Brother, and they're looking to raise the funds for a high-quality video projector, which the playwright, Josh Costello, says "would make a huge difference."

Maciej Ceglowski's "The Social Graph is Neither" is a scathing, spot-on critique of the deceptive and seductive simplicity of "social graphs" which purport to represent human interaction and relations through mathematical modelling. As with many "semantic web" projects, social networks can only achieve any kind of usable scale and coherence by simplifying the relationships they [...]

The next installment of the always-awesome SF-in-SF reading series features two exceptional writers: Kim Stanley Robinson and Ceclia Holland (check out previous mentions of Robinson here). It's on Sat, Nov 12, doors open at 6PM, event starts at 7, and, as always, the authors will be interviewed by the estimable Terry Bisson. Free, suggested donation [...]

GeekStuff4U's bullet ice-molds produce ten rounds at a time. I've had pretty mixed results from two-part ice-molds (and it's not clear from the illustrations how the two halves of this mold fit together and how you fill them), but the finished product shot is pretty sweet. The $47 price-tag is awfully steep, however. Bullet Ice [...]

"Songs For The Jewish-American Jet Set: The Tikva Records Story 1950-1973" is a new compilation celebrating the indie Jewish record label that raged in the latter half of the last century. Tikva had an eclectic roster, cranking out everything from Israeli folk and klezmer to cantorial singing, Catskills comedy, political spoken word, and 60s rock [...]

As the fight over the warrantless placing of GPS trackers on suspects' cars continues, Americans continue to discover hidden GPS trackers. Wired's looked at these before, and today they've got the story of "Greg," a young man in San Jose, California, who found not one, but two warrantless trackers on his SUV. The 25-year-old resident [...]

"The world's first commercial electronic video game, Computer Space, was released in 1971. The world's first electronic stock market, the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ), opened in 1971. The world's first scholarly journal devoted to the study of autism and autism spectrum disorders in children, The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, [...]

Thomas Doyle (previously) has a show at LeBasse Projects in Culver City; the gallery of miniature dioramae is mouth-wateringly apocalyptically magical. Preview: Thomas Doyle – “Surface to Air” @ LeBasse Projects

"You don’t have to beat someone to inflict pain and suffering; the psychological torture of prolonged solitary confinement leaves no marks, but its effects are severe and long-lasting." From a New York Times op-ed by Sarah Shourd, one of the three American hikers jailed by Iran. Bradley Manning, the young man the US believes gave [...]

Dayton's Wall is an underwater geologic formation named for Paul Dayton, a marine ecologist who studies the lives and interactions between seafloor-dwelling organisms. Located in Antarctica, in an area of the Ross Sea between McMurdo Station and Cape Armitage, Dayton's Wall is a great place to spot creatures that live on the rocky Antarctic seafloor. [...]

If you visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, you just might be participating in the type of patriotic and entertaining activity that CREATES JOBS FOR AMERICANS. If you follow RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER, you're probably just wasting time.

The band Radiohead today announced that their video performance of The King Of Limbs will now be made available to buy on DVD and BluRay. In case you didn't see it, the programme is a live studio performance of The King of Limbs. There are also performances of The Daily Mail and Staircase, which haven't [...]

Spencer Ackerman at Wired: "The FBI wasn’t just wrong in teaching its agents that average Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers, Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress Tuesday. That bigoted Bureau training undermined the government’s efforts to stop the next terror attack."

What are the odds that you, as an individual, exist? Pretty good, you'd guess, since you're sitting right here reading this. But, in an abstract sense, the chances that you exist are really rather slim. In fact, once you see the full infographic, put together by futurist and designer Sofya Yampolsky of Visual.ly, I'm sure [...]

What are the odds that you, as an individual, exist? Pretty good, you'd guess, since you're sitting right here reading this. But, in an abstract sense, the chances that you exist are really rather slim. In fact, once you see the full infographic, put together by futurist and designer Sofya Yampolsky, I'm sure you'll be [...]

I've been wondering when the first great radio documentary about Occupy Wall Street would come out, and when I was driving around in LA yesterday doing errands, I tuned into it by accident on KCRW. Longtime public radio producer, reporter, documentarian and host Alex Chadwick, with whom I worked at the NPR program "Day to [...]

This amazing shot was taken in Norway by Ole Christian Salomonsen. It's one of the many photos featured in National Geographic's upcoming photo book, Visions of Earth. You can check out a video preview of some of the other photos on YouTube.

Shapeways user Tedparsec has created a wide assortment of 3D printed, colorized Settlers of Catan tiles that you can have printed and shipped to you in a wide variety of materials. He's also got a good line on handcrafted, 3D printed RPG miniatures. tedparsec's designs (via Wonderland)