The Latest from Boing Boing

Posted: 16 Nov 2007 03:48 AM CST

I've just switched to a monospace font called Droid Sans Mono, a free, Apache-licensed face. I do all my work -- novel writing, blogging, article- and short-story writing, email composition -- in a text editor (currently using Gedit, a free and open editor) using a monospace face. Droid shows up very nicely indeed, at a large variety of sizes. I've been using it all morning and I've already switched my monospace preferences to it system-wide. Link (via Joshua's Delicious)

Can't see the video? Click here

Food company's annual report needs to be baked before reading

Posted: 16 Nov 2007 03:43 AM CST

This annual report (for a Croatian food company) ships wrapped in foil, and needs to be baked in an oven in order to make the thermal-reactive ink illustrations show up.

Croatian creative agency Bruketa & Zinić have designed an annual report for food company Podravka that has to be baked in an oven before it can be read.
Called Well Done, the report features blank pages printed with thermo-reactive ink that, after being wrapped in foil and cooked for 25 minutes, reveal text and images.

Link (via Kottke)

Last DC power in NYC to shut down

Posted: 16 Nov 2007 03:38 AM CST

Con Edison is shutting down the last direct current power in Manhattan, currently serving 10 East 40th Street, near midtown. Thomas Edison was a DC maniac and a fanatical opponent of Tesla's alternating current (he used to shock livestock to death with AC power, just to prove how bad it was -- he eventually worked his way up to an elephant!).

Despite the clear advantage of alternating current — it can be transmitted long distances far more economically than direct current — direct current has taken decades to faze out of Manhattan because the early backbone of New York's electricity grid was built by Mr. Edison's company, which had a running head start in the first decade before Mr. Tesla and Mr. Westinghouse demonstrated the potential of alternating current with the Niagara Falls power project. (Among the customers of Thomas Edison's Pearl Street power plant on that first day was The New York Times, which observed that to turn on its lights in the building, "no matches were needed.")
But direct current clearly became uneconomical, as the short distances that it could be transmitted would have required a power station every mile or less, according to Joe Cunningham, an engineering historian. Thus alternating current in New York began in the outskirts — Queens, Bronx, Upper Manhattan and the suburbs.

Link (via Kottke)

(Image credit: IMG_5766 (Edison from the National Portrait Gallery), a CC-BY photo from dbking's Flickr stream)

History of photoshopping from 1860 to present day

Posted: 16 Nov 2007 03:31 AM CST

Dartmouth's Hany Farid ("working with federal law enforcement agencies on digital forensics, to the digital reconstruction of Ancient Egyptian tombs") has a great pictorial history of photo-tampering, beginning with this shot of Lincoln's head superimposed on Calhoun's body, going all the way up to the insertion of British Culture Secretary James Purnell into a group photo (he missed the shooting because he was late) in a newspaper in September, 2007.

circa 1860: This nearly iconic portrait of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is a composite of Lincoln's head and the Southern politician John Calhoun's body. Putting the date of this image into context, note that the first permanent photographic image was created in 1826 and the Eastman Dry Plate Company (later to become Eastman Kodak) was created in 1881.

Link (via Kottke)

Indie film producer thanks pirates for downloading his movie

Posted: 16 Nov 2007 03:26 AM CST

Eric D. Wilkinson, producer of the independent film "Jerome Bixby's The Man From Earth," has written a letter to the editor of Releaselog, a site that reviews leaked movies available on P2P networks. He hasn't written to complain, mind -- he wrote in to say how much promotional value the piracy of his movie on P2P has generated, and how that's turning into real sales for him.

I am sending you this email after realizing that our website has had nearly 23,000 hits in the last 12 days, much of it coming from your website. In addition, our trailer, both on the www.manfromearth.com site and other sites like YouTube, MySpace and AOL has been watched nearly 20,000 times AND what's most impressive is our ranking on IMDb went from being the 11,235th most popular movie, to the 5th most popular movie in 2 weeks (we are also the #1 independent film on IMDb & the #1 science fiction film on IMDb). How did this all happen? Two words: Torrent / File Sharing sites (well, four words and a slash).

Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

BBtv: John Hodgman's Mole Men / Cavalcade of Hobos

Posted: 15 Nov 2007 10:51 PM CST

Xeni barges in to a hotel room where the great John Hodgman is writing his next book (not on a PC, oddly). The book comes out in 2008, and will include never before known knowledge about mysterious MOLE MEN. Then, we enjoy a cavalcade of hobos drawn by Ape Lad -- these are but a few of the 700 hobos named in Hodgman's last book, Areas of My Expertise.

Link to blog post with video and comment forum.

HOWTO make a stove-top tin-can popcorn popper

Posted: 16 Nov 2007 01:33 AM CST

A few minutes' work with a pair of scissors and some sandpaper can turn a tin-can into a stove-top (or candle-lantern- top) popcorn maker. Link (Thanks, Sylvio!)

Can't see the video? Click here

HOWTO force a padlock with a tin-can shim

Posted: 16 Nov 2007 02:35 AM CST

This short video illustrates a simple procedure for forcing open standard padlocks with a shim snipped out of a tin can. The technique is old, but this is a good, lucid explanation of it. Kids have been doing this for years, but schools and gyms still recommend these broken locks -- and the manufacturers keep making them, which is practically criminal negligence. Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

XKCD creator in Wired; reappearance of blog-goggles in today's strip

Posted: 16 Nov 2007 01:20 AM CST

XKCD is my favorite geeky webcomic, and today there's a great profile of the comic and its creator, Randall Munroe, in Wired. Coincidentally, I make an appearance (in my persona as a hot-air- balloon- borne be-goggled, caped blogger) in today's strip (a fact that approximately 200 Boing Boing readers have written in to mention -- a partial list of the first several appears below!).

On that day, nearly a thousand xkcd fans from as far away as England and Canada converged on the park, bearing tape measures and Rubik's cubes. At the assigned minute, Munroe emerged and spoke.
"Maybe wanting something does make it real," he said as his fans cheered and fought duels with foam swords. The comic that spurred the gathering was enlarged and hung from a fence, and fans took turns contributing to a new last panel, where dreams can come true.
"I had someone write in and say that he'd been hanging out with this girl for a while, and then one day she just kissed him out of the blue," Munroe said. "Since then, they've been together. She told him later that she'd done it because she'd read a comic that suggested you take more chances. I think everyone needs to just relax a little bit. People do meet people."

Link to Wired profile of Randall Munroe, Link to today's strip, Link to photo of me in blog-goggs (Thanks, Zan, Brent, Macca, JK, Paul and Michael!)

Periodic table of comic book elements

Posted: 16 Nov 2007 12:58 AM CST

The University of Kentucky's Periodic Table of Comic Books provides a cross-reference to mentions of various elements in a wide variety of funnybooks. Show here, the entry for Calcium (on the site, each thumbnail is clickable and expands to a scan of the entire page). Link (Thanks, Shake Day!)

Saakashvili regime in Georgia using sonic blasters on civilians?

Posted: 15 Nov 2007 11:16 PM CST

Remember those sonic blasters I blogged about here on BoingBoing (and reported on NPR) a while back? Noah Shachtman at Wired reports that the Saakashvili regime in Georgia is using them to crush protestors.

This English-language footage from Russia Today shows riot police rolling through the streets of Tblisi in pickup trucks, small dishes in hand. A high frequency pulse follows. "Georgian police used an acoustic gun -- it's a non-lethal weapon that disorients people for a period of time," says one "special weapons expert."

Link 1, Link 2.

High definition images of the Earth from the moon

Posted: 15 Nov 2007 11:05 PM CST

Here are more stunning high-definition images from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's lunar explorer Kaguya. From the description of this beautiful shot:

This still image was cut out from a moving image (tele shot) taken by the HDTV onboard the KAGUYA at 12:07 p.m. on November 7, 2007 (Japan Standard Time, JST,) then sent to the JAXA Usuda Deep Space Center. In the image, the Moon's surface is near the South Pole, and we can see the Australian Continent (center left) and the Asian Continent (lower right) on the Earth. (In this image, the upper side of the Earth is the Southern Hemisphere, thus the Australian Continent looks upside-down.)

Link (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)

Previously on BB:
• High-definition video of the moon Link

Can't see the video? Click here

Robber armed with staple gun

Posted: 15 Nov 2007 10:21 PM CST

Gerald A. Rocchi, 32, was arrested on Tuesday for robbing an Ashland, Kentucky ice cream shop at stapler-point. He ran off with $175 but witnesses pointed police in his direction. A search of Rocchi's home turned up cash, a ski mask, and the chrome-plated stapler. From the Associated Press:

Ashland Police Capt. Don Petrella said he didn't know if Rocchi planned to shoot staples at the shop's employees or use it as a blunt instrument if he didn't get the cash...

Petrella said the chrome finish on the stapler could have made it look like a gun "if someone didn't get a good look at it."

Link

Previously on BB:
• Ashland, KY robber disguised face with duct tape Link

Gold-farming empire linked to dot-com child abuse scandal

Posted: 15 Nov 2007 03:13 PM CST

RADAR magazine has an article about Marc Collins-Rector (mugshot below from the Florida sex-offender registry) and Brock Pierce, founders of the dot-bomb online TV network DEN.

The co-author of the piece, John Gorenfeld says:

Mention DEN, the Digital Entertainment Network, and dot-com historians will know you're talking about the ugliest of the bubble implosions. A forerunner to YouTube, it was brought down by the pedophile appetites of founder Marc Collins-Rector, who had promised to build "the last network," burying TV forever. Its three founders lived in a VC-funded mansion in L.A. where boys -- promised stardom in Web clips -- [filed lawsuits claiming to have been] raped after decadent parties.
What happened after the three founders -- including Disney child star Brock Pierce -- fled the FBI by heading for Spain? An investigative report by Radar Magazine catches up with Marc Collins-Rector, who is walking rakishly free in London...and his protege Brock Pierce, whose giant company IGE -- which buys and sells cash in "World Of Warcraft" and other games -- is winning rave write-ups in Fortune and other magazines. In our long investigation, we discovered strong evidence that Collins-Rector -- who is hiding his money from child abuse victims -- may have helped fund IGE.
Plus you can now watch their hilarious/twisted flagship Web show, "Chad's World," a pedophile fantasy based on the founders' own lives.

Excerpt:

As the lawsuits against the company mounted in early 2000, DEN—in which Pierce held nearly one million shares and Collins-Rector still owned a majority stake—began to hemorrhage money. The planned IPO, which was postponed after the first abuse allegations surfaced, was permanently shelved. A crumbling Nasdaq didn't help the situation. By May 2000, the start-up was bankrupt. Before long, its headquarters were gutted, the expensive computer equipment and office chairs sold off for a fraction of their original cost. Around Hollywood, rumors flew that Collins-Rector, Shackley, and Pierce were about to be arrested on embezzlement and sexual offenses. Before any charges were filed, though, the three men disappeared.
They didn't turn up again until May 2002, when a tip to Interpol led authorities to raid their luxury villa in Marbella, on the Spanish Riviera—an area British tabloids have dubbed the Costa del Crime due to its high population of English-speaking fugitives. Among the items recovered from the residence were guns, machetes, a trove of jewels, and child pornography. Pierce and Shackley were held for about a month by Spanish police and then released.
The prosecution of Collins-Rector also proved difficult. He remained in a Spanish jail for almost two years, fighting extradition, before finally being brought to the United States, where he pled guilty to eight charges of child enticement, a comparably minor offense. He was soon out of prison—receiving credit for the time he'd served in Spain. Since most of his alleged crimes took place at the mansion in Encino, it was up to L.A. County prosecutors to make any further charges stick, but the DA never took steps to do so. (The L.A. County district attorney's office refused to comment about the status of any DEN investigation.) The victims sought justice in the civil courts, however, winning a total of $4.5 million in summary judgments. Except for a small side agreement with Pierce, the award has yet to be paid, lawyers say.

(Here's a totally not safe for work parody video about the three founders of DEN on Fucked Company)

Link

Josh Foer on memory

Posted: 15 Nov 2007 02:58 PM CST

The cover story of this month's National Geographic is a curious, provocative, and thoughtful feature about the weirdness of human memory. I was delighted to see that it was written by Joshua Foer, who is well known for his work if not his name, as the secretary/blogger of the Athanasius Kircher Society. Foer, a winner of the World US Memory Championship himself, is currently writing a book about the art and science of memory, due out in 2009. I can't wait! From his National Geographic article, titled "Remember This":

There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as "AJ," who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11. There is an 85-year-old man, a retired lab technician called "EP," who remembers only his most recent thought. She might have the best memory in the world. He could very well have the worst.

"My memory flows like a movie—nonstop and uncontrollable," says AJ. She remembers that at 12:34 p.m. on Sunday, August 3, 1986, a young man she had a crush on called her on the telephone. She remembers what happened on Murphy Brown on December 12, 1988. And she remembers that on March 28, 1992, she had lunch with her father at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She remembers world events and trips to the grocery store, the weather and her emotions. Virtually every day is there. She's not easily stumped...

EP has two types of amnesia—anterograde, which means he can't form new memories, and retrograde, which means he can't remember old memories either, at least not since 1960. His childhood, his service in the merchant marine, World War II—all that is perfectly vivid. But as far as he knows, gas costs less than a dollar a gallon, and the moon landing never happened.

AJ and EP are extremes on the spectrum of human memory. And their cases say more than any brain scan about the extent to which our memories make us who we are. Though the rest of us are somewhere between those two poles of remembering everything and nothing, we've all experienced some small taste of the promise of AJ and dreaded the fate of EP. Those three pounds or so of wrinkled flesh balanced atop our spines can retain the most trivial details about childhood experiences for a lifetime but often can't hold on to even the most important telephone number for just two minutes. Memory is strange like that.

Link

Plane hijacking electronic game from 1982

Posted: 15 Nov 2007 02:31 PM CST

Ludology has a photo and description of an LCD game from 1982 called Airport Panic.

The player had two missions: boarding the plane while avoiding the bombs of the hijacker. And then, according to the English manual, "shoot at the hijacker and rescue the stewardess and the passengers."

Link

Terror police in UK taser man in coma

Posted: 15 Nov 2007 02:21 PM CST

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) in England is investigating an incident involving police who tasered a man in a coma because he was unresponsive.

Mr Gaubert said he was on his way to meet friends when he suffered a hypoglycaemic fit on the bus which left him slumped on his seat clutching his rucksack.
Armed police were called to the bus depot in Headingley and when he failed to respond to their challenges he was shot with the Taser.
He said as this was happening, another officer was pointing a real gun at his head.
He was restrained and eventually came round in the police van.
He said it was only then that the officers realised it was a medical emergency, despite him wearing a medical tag round his neck to warn of his condition, and took him to hospital.

Link

Video of man tasered to death

Posted: 15 Nov 2007 01:15 PM CST

Here's a video of the distraught non-Engish speaking man from Poland who died from being tasered at the Vancouver Airport. He can be seen throwing a chair and trying break other things. When security arrives, he calms down and doesn't appear to be acting in a threatening manner. It's hard to tell though, because the video was taken through a pane of glass with glare.

Be warned, the man writhes on the ground and screams for a long time before he dies. It's disturbing.

Picture 2-98 From an October 26 post on Boing Boing:

Akezys says: "Recently police at the Vancouver airport were attempting to question a recent immigrant that could not speak English. They tasered him after 24 seconds of speaking with him. The man had spent 10 hours stuck in the airport with no-one helping him."

Link (Thanks, James!)

Can't see the video? Click here

Daily Show writer explains writers' strike -- if digital content isn't worth anything, how come Viacom is suing YouTube for $1 billion?

Posted: 16 Nov 2007 03:58 AM CST

In this youtube, Daily Show writer Jason Rothman delivers an hilarious monologue about the Writers' Guild strike against the studios, who claim that they can't compensate writers for digital media because no one knows how much this stuff is worth. The clip delivers a Daily Show-style montage of coverage from the $1 billion+ Viacom lawsuit against YouTube, including clips of Viacom's CEO talking about how digital content is worth tons of money and getting paid is the name of the game. The clip includes a nice guest appearance from Daily Show correspondents, too. Link (Thanks, Mariana!)

How to stop restaurant tip fraud

Posted: 15 Nov 2007 11:11 AM CST

If you pay your restaurant bills with with a credit card, there's a small chance a crooked waiter will jack up the tip by scribbling the amount you added. If you don't go over your receipts and compare them to your credit card statement each month, you'll never know if you've been a victim of this form of fraud.

I know for a fact this has happened to me at least once. I had a meal at Mexicali Concina Cantina in Studio City, CA. I paid with a credit card and left a cash tip. When I got my credit card statement, I happened to have the receipt handy, and I discovered that I had been overcharged by exactly ten dollars. I called my credit card company, and they reversed the charge.

Punny Money has a way to help you catch tip fraud without having to compare your receipts to your statements (you do need to save your receipts, though). You use a checksum method. Adjust the pennies in your tip so the last digit to the right of the decimal point equals the sum of the digits to the left of the decimal point of the total bill.

When you get your statement, the fraudulent tips are easy to spot:
200711150904
Link (Via Crypto-Gram)

TSA warns TSA to be on the lookout for anti-terror agents

Posted: 15 Nov 2007 10:25 AM CST

The LA Times has an article about undercover federal agents smuggling bomb materials past TSA airport screeners to test security.

My favorite part is how the TSA warns its screeners to focus on identifying and stopping undercover federal investigators whose job it is to test the TSA's effectiveness:

Release of the GAO report follows a hearing Wednesday in which Hawley vehemently denied that screeners had been tipped off about covert security tests, even as lawmakers brandished an e-mail from TSA headquarters that not only warned employees of testing, but described the methods and appearance of those conducting the probes.
"There was no intent to tip off, there was no cheating," Hawley insisted. He said that the e-mail was sent not to tip off screeners, but because a TSA official thought the tests might really be an Al Qaeda operation.
Democratic lawmakers were openly incredulous. "If you want me to believe that, I find that's a stretch," said Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.).

Link

Bletchley Park's Colossus codebreaker to race modern PC in cracking Nazi codes

Posted: 15 Nov 2007 10:06 AM CST

Tony Sale and a group of British vintage computer enthusiasts is rebuilding Colossus, the gigantic proto-computer that Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park scientists built to crack German codes during WWII. The original Colossus machines were all broken up (into pieces "no bigger than a man's hand"!) after the war for security reasons, but Sale has tracked down the surviving Colossus engineers and is making great strides in completing the machine.

The finished Colossus is to be pitted against a contemporary general-purpose PC in a code-breaking race. The raw fodder for the race is a set of messages encrypted using Nazi ciphers and transmitted by amateur radio enthusiasts in Germany.

It's all in support of a new National Museum of Computing, based at Bletchley. What a cool idea -- I'm now officially planning a day-trip to Bletchley to see the museum.

He had no working machines to look at because, on Churchill's orders, the Colossus machines were dismantled once the war was over. Many parts, mostly the 1500 valves, went back to telephone exchanges and the rest were broken into pieces "no bigger than a man's hand".
Mr Sale has tracked down the few living engineers who worked on the project and plumbed their expertise to guide the rebuilding effort...
The German participants in the code-cracking challenge will transmit three enciphered messages - one hard, one very hard and one ultra hard.
The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones said there was a "busy and business-like" atmosphere at Bletchley as the code cracking attempts got underway.
"We've seen webcam video of the Germans preparing to send the first signals," he said.

Link to BBC Colossus reborn story, Link to BBC crypto race story (via Futurismic)

Can't see the video? Click here

TV search engine tells you when that show is on next

Posted: 15 Nov 2007 09:06 AM CST

LocateTV looks like a pretty good US/UK TV listings search engine -- Lottie sez, "LocateTV is a film and TV search engine that tells you when any show is next on air, on TV, online and on DVD, specific to your region and channels (US and UK). It's slick and simple, with lovely widgets, which you can embed on your blog or post to share the scheduling info with your readers - which remains always dynamically updated and relevant to them." Link (Thanks, Lottie!)

Jack of Fables: Jack of Hearts - comic adventures of the legendary Jack continue

Posted: 11 Nov 2007 02:04 PM CST

I've just finished "Jack of Hearts," the second collection in the "Jack of Fables" comic series, spun out of the larger (and most excellent) Fables books. These are the life stories of "Jack" who was Jack Horner, Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack be Nimble, and all the other Jacks from storybooks. These comprise a kind of picaresque tale of Jack's philandering, selfish, funny life, accompanied by such supporting fables as the Pathetic Fallacy (now going by the name "Gary") and the Queen of Fortune.

In book two, we follow Jack through a series of adventures as a casino baron (the previous volume starred him as a Hollywood exec), as he copes with the mob, heiresses, and ancient mystical cabals (not to mention large, violent pit-bosses).

These are great, lightweight stories, a nice counterpoint to the darker, more brooding main Fables stories. More to the point, a second Fables series means that there's twice as much of this great comic to read. I can't get enough of it. Link, Link to all Fables collections

Boing Boing

Friday, November 16, 2007

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

0 comments:

Blog Archive

About Me