An anonymous reader submits "A NY Times story yesterday talked about a new fad sweeping the underground: guerrilla drive-ins. Essentially, someone sets up a DVD player, LCD projector, and wireless transmitter next to any blank wall (preferably on someone else's property - to make it more fun), and people come to watch movies. As you would expect, the movie studios aren't too thrilled." The idea that this is a notable fad reminds of when the residents of Doonesbury's Walden jokingly informed intrepid reporter Roland Burton Hedley, Jr. ("Rollie") about imaginary trends in the college drug scene. On the other hand, anything that knocks down the price of projectors is fine with me!

Classical Computer Science Texts

An anonymous reader writes "A few days ago, Slashdot mentioned that JibJab was threatened by a copyright lawsuit. Well, it looks like JibJab decided to sue first with the help of the EFF. Lots more info here." (Here's the Bloomberg News article.)

region free hacks for dvd drives

A message from White House West

Cats cats cats...

The Peace Corps is looking for some Web developers and designers (Volunteer or pass the word along.)

"Bondage-chICK" is a young, disturbed girl (she's a "cutter" who cuts herself to feel better), who stumbled across a free developers' journal service offered by perl.org and started using it for her personal diary. No problem, except that the developers who stumbled across her journal assumed that she was a perl bot ("If this is autogenerated, you need to tweak it so that the doubled+transposed letter mistake doesn't happen so often, and introduce some more naturalistic errors. If it's not autogenerated, you're really sad and about 18 months behind the curve.") or a gag. Of course, the whole thing might be a hoax. Or not.

Link

(via Waxy)

Rosalind Franklin's story is one of many great and unsung women scientists' stories recounted in the brilliant, Eisner-nominated comic book Dignifying Science, which features the work of Jen Sorensen, Anne Timmons, Ramona Fradon, Marie Severin and others, and the stories of scientists like Marie Curie, Emmy Noether, Lise Meitner, Barbara McClintock, Birute Galdikas, and Hedy Lamarr.

Link

For the thousands of producers and technicians who are bringing the Democratic National Convention to the world, the event has not lost its suspense.

Cellpop is a humorous look at the dark side of the music industry. It follows the lives of the people who make the hit music we listen to. Each day a new episode is delivered straight to your phone. Website doesn't say though whether they send out a video clip or just plain text messaging.

Fleeting Experience, Mirrored in Your Eyes

The system can automatically recover wide-angle views of what people are looking at, including panoramic details to the left, right and even slightly behind them. It can also calculate where people are gazing - for instance, at a single smiling face in a crowd.

The detailed wide-angle information recovered by the new system is possible because the image reflected by the cornea is broader than that captured on the retina. The retinal field of view is considerably less than a hemisphere - 160 degrees horizontally and 130 degrees vertically. But the corneal image is roughly about a hemisphere or more, permitting objects to the side and behind the person to be seen so long as the person is not looking away from the camera at an extreme angle.

The crucial algorithm in the system automatically computes the relative position and orientation of the cornea in relation to the camera, using the elliptical shape of the limbus, or border, between the cornea and the white of the eye. "The shape of the limbus tells you where the eye is in the three-dimensional scene and which direction the eyeball is pointing," Dr. Nayar said. The wide-angle image can then be created from this information.

rfdump: rfid decoding software

UI Patterns and Techniques: Introduction

they thought the posts were autogenerated by a Perl module  

The 25 most difficult questions

Fight night! Mike Tyson vs Danny Williams! Friday, July 30th at 9:00PM et / 6:00PM pt on Showtime pay per view. Be sure to check out some of the video clips and past highlights.

you'd think Fark would be the #1 result  

I want to tread carefully here, because of my considerable respect for the people involved in the project and my appreciation for the service they provide, but I am really irritated with Technorati right now, and it's gotten to the point where it needs to be public.

My frustration goes beyond the perennial downtime issues their many users are familiar with. As willing as I have been to forgive the frequent outages in the past, chalking them up to the inevitable growing pains of an undercapitalized startup, I'm beginning to see them as something symptomatic of a broader problem.

(Article continues: 578 words to come.)

e-mail client with subtle visual cues for facial expression and typing speed [via] 

AOL has many protections on the IM's that your bot sends. Here is an outline of them.

A Microsoft intern has dinner at Bill Gates' house

Nick Irelan writes "The home of the world's richest man was a 'temporary security zone' when he held a party for members of the National Governors Association. Bill's guests included Newt Gingrich, Tommy Thompson, and Leon Panetta. Gates also put in $150,000 for the governors' meeting held the next day. News.com covered this story very well." If your invitation to Gates' place got "lost in the mail", you can read about a Microsoft intern who got to have dinner with the big cheese.

Microsoft has outlined the novel technologies that it hopes will help the company grow in the near future.

On Gizmodo, this stunning image an an ancient, room-sized hard drive being serviced by a guy in a clean-room bunny-suit. The best part is that this thing and a million of its brothers put together probably had a lower capacity than the USB memory built into the pen I last last month.

Link

Activists say the Justice Department must look into why Sunshine State officials failed to securely back up 2002 election data from e-voting machines after it is revealed that logs were lost. Jacob Ogles reports from Orlando, Florida.

The Manchurian Candidate remake plays perfectly on our paranoia about modern politics -- that it's controlled by venal corporate overlords. Plus, it highlights Jonathan Demme's knack for building suspense. Jason Silverman reviews the film.

jabberjaw writes "Nature is reporting that researchers at the University of California San Diego have created a synthetic prion which, when injected into mice will bring about symptoms similar to those displayed by cattle suffering from bovine spongiform encephalopathy, aka mad cow disease. The researchers first crafted healthy prion proteins using bacteria. They then shook these proteins until they resembled the tangled structure of an unhealthy prion. Afterwords, these prions were injected into the brains of mice who fell ill two years later. Perhaps someone who is more familiar with this field of research would care to fill us in on the details as the article was rather light."

Few objects in recent memory have been so fetishized as the cell phone, which we should finally all agree to call a mobile phone - but old habits die hard, as generic Kleenex and Xeroxes remind us. As testimony, we've got snazzy faceplates and a range of supposedly unique ringtones (the use of which is embarrassingly similar to customizing your car horn). Whether 'cell' or 'mobile,' however, these ubiquitous little devices are rapidly changing the very concept of 'phone,' especially with the recent addition of built-in digital cameras, which is among the concerns to be highlighted in a smart new show, 'Cell-outs and Phonies,' at the L.A. Center for Digital Art - a punning title that may be particularly appropriate in Los Angeles. The show's premise that these gadgets have inspired a 'revolution in photography and digital filmmaking' is insightful and timely, but the suggestion that their 'accessibility is eliminating the boundaries between amateur and professional' is questionable. Yet, this is certainly the kind of show which will form the critical basis of research to come, when, in future, these objects will have the nostalgic charm of retro klunkiness. - Michael Freeman

http://www.lacda.com/exhibits/august.html

Patterns in Unstructured Data: Discovery, Aggregation, and Visualization

Plans for introducing ID cards in the UK are poorly thought out and vital details are still unclear, say MPs.

Laughing really hard is soooo much fun!

I do it often while watching The Daily Show and reading The Onion.

Missing an episode of The Daily Show is like getting tucked into bed by a monster. Not reading The Onion is like getting shot in the shoulder.

Daily Show clip-click on the first video please:

Onion excerpts:

Comic Book Ads

Paul Ford explains how Google's understanding of the value of relationships allowed them to take over the world [in 2009]....

Fabio's back.

it's only fair, there's a million blogs about fake news in the Times

RFDUMP.ORG

Three reasons to be happy we live in Los Angeles (and they all have to do with three upcoming shows at MOCA this fall). 1. Robert Smithson show opening on September 12. You knew this one was coming especially...

how's this? firefox: safer, faster internet browsing and search for free

Today, at OSCON in Portland, Dale Dougherty and I announced a new O'Reilly magazine called Make. It'll be a quarterly, full-color magazine filled with fun projects and hardware hacks involving technology. (Dale is the editor and publisher, and I'm the editor-in-chief. Thanks to BB's own John Battelle for getting me involved!)

Make will have 5-minute tips you can use to improve your gadgets, networks, and computers, as well as much longer projects that might take several days (or weeks) to complete. The first issue is coming out in January. If you're interested, visit the web site and sign up for the newsletter. I'll also be running the Make blog on that page. I hope that a lot of BB readers become Make contributors, too. Please send me your ideas for hacks, tips, tricks, workarounds, neat things to build, useful tools, etc. Link

UI Patterns and Techniques: Introduction

Skin Bag
Material: synthetic human skin
Colour: available in all shades of human skin colour
Tatoo personalisation: name, sentence, logo

LONDON (Reuters) - When he walks down the street trying out his nifty invention, Nicholas Roope looks just a little bit crazy.

Tubesville is a custom amp shop in NYC that builds whimsical bespoke amplifiers like this Victrola-oid iPod amp.

Link

(via Gizmodo)

A decision issued yesterday by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals says Alabama doesn't have to lift its silly, arcane 1998 law banning the sale of sex toys. The Constitution does not include a right to sexual privacy, the panel of three judges ruled. Many Americans would disagree, including this one. To paraphrase Andrew Orlowski's brilliant quip about the INDUCE Act, under this law one could stroll down Alabama's southern streets selling semiautomatic rifles and dildos, and be arrested for the dildos.

"In this case, the American Civil Liberties Union ('ACLU') invites us to add a new right to the current catalogue of fundamental rights under the Constitution: a right to sexual privacy. It further asks us to declare Alabama's statute prohibiting the sale of 'sex toys' to be an impermissible burden on this right. Alabama responds that the statute exercises a time-honored use of state police power -- restricting the sale of sex. We are compelled to agree with Alabama and must decline the ACLU's invitation. (...)

"Alabama's Anti-Obscenity Enforcement Act prohibits, among other things, the commercial distribution of 'any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs for any thing of pecuniary value.'"

Update: Fleshbot has just issued this fatwa playful tease to readers who oppose the Alabama ban:

three $50 gift certificates from Eros Boutique to the three readers who come up with the best sex-toy related protest items, either by way of a vibemod prototype or Photoshopped creation. Confederate Flag Ticklers? Birmingham Ben-Wa Balls? Crimson Tide Cock Rings? Send your ideas and photos here.

You can have our Hello Kitty vibes and Cup-'o-Pussys when you pry them from our cold, dead hands, Alabama governor Bob Riley.

The second day of the Preventing the Internet Meltdown conference focused on a number of wedge issues that could alter the existing architecture of the Internet. Impending regulations about Voice-over IP (VOIP) and the new momentum behind surveillance initiatives related to Homeland security have a number of Internet experts seriously concerned about the net's future. "I have significant nightmares about where this VOIP issue is going to take us," said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People For Internet Responsibility. The afternoon's other panelists -- Scott Bradner, Ed Felten, John Morris, and Peter Neumann -- no longer question that regulations will alter and complicate the existing packet-routing procedures of web traffic. The main focus of discussion focused on how serious those complications will be and to what extent they will thwart innovation.

Latent Semantic Indexing

Or, kind of a Critical Mass in reverse: intense flows of NYPD units remaking the streetscape in a ballet of terror and "counterterror." We've seen one of these, or at least sat by stunned into muteness as an enraged convoy of ESU trucks and plain-vanilla patrol cars whipped past. It's, well, terrifying.

(Article continues: 76 words to come.)

Readymade for the geek crowd, edited by Frauenfelder [via] 

How Many Words-Per-Minute Do You Read?

Iphtashu Fitz writes "Lukas Grunwald, a senior consultant with DN-Systems Enterprise Solutions GmbH, is warning retailers that the RFID technology that they are quickly adopting can easily be hacked with the appropriate tools. Grunwald has written a program called RFDump which lets you read and display all metadata within an RFID tag and also modify the user data using a text or hex editor. He wrote this program to demonstrate how consumers can protect themselves by wiping out RFID data after purchasing a product but he acknowledges that it would be trivial to abuse this behavior. What, you might ask, can you do if you hack an RFID tag? Well as the technology is adopted more widely a thief could conceivably mark down the price of an expensive piece of jewelry before paying for it at an automated checkout counter, underage hackers could purchase alcohol or adult movies, and pranksters could simply reprogram the inventory of an entire store by just walking up and down the isles. 'The people who will be using this (shopkeepers) don't know much about technology,' Grunwald warned."

Yesterday, I met Douglas Krone the CEO of Dynamism. (I forgot my phone at home so couldn't take his picture.) Dynamism is an awesome company that takes all of the coolest gadgets from around the world, localizes them into English and sells them on the Internet. They provide support for these devices. Most high-end gadget geeks that I know have at one time or another purchased stuff from Dynamism.

Anyway, we talked a lot about gadgets, blogs and Creative Commons. I got him to agree that it would make sense to put a Creative Commons license on his site so that people could use pictures of products and clips of his text to review products. I think that his stuff is PERFECT for blogs.

I ordered one of the low-end, but very popular iducks. ;-)

Comment - TrackBack

My friend Roger Wood is a genius clockmaker who builds clocks into assemblage sculptures made from found objects, antiques, rust, and vacuum tubes. He publishes an irregular newsletter showcasing his latest creations, such as this one, which is similar to one that I bought from him before I moved to London, which was the first piece of decor I put up in my new flat after moving in. Every place I've lived since I left Toronto has had a Roger clock in it, and it wouldn't feel like home without one.

Link

The cable industry has started to reap the benefits from its spending and building binge started in the 1990's.

Great Hackers

Companies are launching fake blogs: some actually look like blogs but pretend to be genuine ones and hide their marketing intention. Others claim they are blogs when they are just gross imitations.

Heinz is launching its first ad campaign for baked beans in ten years this week.

The campaign revolves around a 'Superbean' character who will have his own blog on a specially created microsite.

I agree with Jeremy Wagstaff who writes: "the blog itself is a travesty of the genre. It's viewable only in pop-up mode, which I suspect will not work with many browsers. There's some Flash in there (a bean bouncing around a can), and frames to make the material itself virtually unreadable. The blog entries all carry the same date (today) as far as I can see, and are along these lines:

OK, listen, there's something I've gotta share. I'm worried about your salt intake. Hey, the government's worried about your salt intake, you're worried about your salt intake! So what do we do? We cut back on the salt baby. I mean, we ain't gonna tamper with the taste, don't get me wrong. But since 2001 I've reduced my salt content by 30%."



Three days ago, Michael O'Connor Clarke found out that a new game called Halo for Xbox tried to create a fake site and weblog which would have ultimately been used to promote the game upon launch.

Rick E. Burner draw the parallel with a similar hoax back in March. This one was supposedly written by a beta tester of the ESPN NFL computer game, from Sega. The tester was supposedly so disturbed by how violent the game is that he started experiencing blackouts during which he tackles his colleagues at work, trashes his own apartment, etc. The conspiratorial tone, footage from surveillance cameras, unauthorized interviews with product managers, hacked rejected clips from TV ads for the product, etc made the success of the blog which blog ended when the game was launched.

Check out this videoblog tool. Wow.

Welcome to vBlog Central

This guy Sean Gilligan created it. This is a conversation I had with his friend.

"vBlog Central is an alpha-stage project by my friend Sean Gilligan (cc'd above). He has built a tool that provides a drag-and-drop interface for video blogging. Basically, you drag an MPEG or JPEG file onto his Java destop app, provde a text entry, and the tool uploads the file and text and creates an entry in your blog. The tool and back end system does not provide video editing, but it does provide compression and encoding into formats that make any video viewable on via QuickTime, Windows, and Real players."

A Very Rare Atari 2000 prototype is for sale on EBAY. You will probably never see another one of these for sale ever again.

Among the goodies you'll find on Birmingham, UK-based artist Kate Pemberton's site are "an extensive casio watch camera diary," and a series of embroidered versions of canned short text message (one of them is shown here). I hope she posts the other 24 online -- they're great.

Kate says: "Texting is quick and has [largely] replaced the act of sending a card -- Happy Birthday images for example. If something is stitched by hand by the message sender, there is a lot of emotion attached... someone has stitched feelings there, using up much time and patience. Texting is flippant... however we may be more likely to send texts to people who we may not send cards to! There are other ideas within the work about the role of the female image in technology and the correlation between pixel art and traditional cross-stitch."

Link to Kate's "endfile" geek-art website.

As part of my research on tensions between mobility and stability, I've become particularly interested in ways we attempt to control the movement of people - especially given the well-established Western (and especially American) tradition of associating mobility with freedom.

For example, all over London I saw anti-climbing paint signs. And I've yet to see a city that doesn't have signs prohibiting skating and cycling in certain areas. Even in places where you are allowed to go, not every type of shoe is acceptable.

When signs aren't enough, more potent deterrents include the military's Mobility Denial System: "once applied, the material will degrade or impair the adversary's ability to move." (via) And if you wanted to go even further in that direction, tasers and rubber bullets are used to stop people (usually) without killing them.

Coming at the question from a different direction, I've been thinking about how photographs stabilise the movement (arguably the essence) of parkour and skateboarding. And even how old daguerreotypes were incapable of capturing movement.

But mostly I've been thinking about how settled people have historically reacted to nomads. For example, under the Israeli state the life of the Bedouin has changed dramatically, and the Irish government has long tried to fix the itinerant problem associated with Irish Traveller culture. Mongolian nomads are increasingly moving to the city, but urban infrastructure and policy - as well as nomadic cultural values - are not adapting well to this shift.

The current global migrant labour force also embodies a range of social, political and economic inequalities. In places like South Africa, migrant labour involves unique interplays between urban and rural life. And women from the developing world provide the majority of domestic labour in the industrialised world. All over the world, migrant labourers continue to struggle for the same human rights extended to more settled peoples.

I don't quite know where I'm going with this yet, except to remind myself that the liberating rhetoric of mobile technologies completely avoids the frictions that exist between mobile and settled ways of life. And that means we're glossing over - even hiding - something that has a significant impact on people everywhere.

I don't mind political propaganda, as long as it's entertaining [via] 

Organisations and individuals harming personal liberty and privacy have been named and shamed.

Ravi Hiranand writes "Nintendo has announced the final name of their Nintendo DS handheld, and it will be called... Nintendo DS. The final design of the system is viewable on their official site (screenshot) - looks sleeker and far less chunky, but still a bit awkward. There's also an English-language press release full of waffly language, but the only things you need to know are that there are 120 DS games in development (20 from Nintendo) and that the price, release date and launch lineup will be announced later."

It's been a long time coming but The Los Angeles Times is now available for everyone to read for free! I can now link to them with no shame. Enjoy my friends. UPDATE - there are apparently some problems with...

Offspring is a lovely abstract visualization of the pair bonding process of a theoretical robot colony:

"Each robot is assembled, ages through youth, comes into a reproductive stage, and eventually dies of fatigue. If a robot is lucky enough to find a mate during it's reproductive stage, baby robots may be assembled.

Visually, the Offspring image is a historic graph of robot colony size and distribution. Males of the population are represented by single horizontal lines while Females are shown as double lines. (...) Robots can only mate with robots near them in both space in age. To encourage dissimilar permutations, robots are not allowed to mate with siblings."

BoingBoing reader Skye Ashbrook says, "They even give you the source code to each process. I'd love to take those and build small apps on my system to render really high-res versions to output to nice paper on an IRIS printer or something. They can't handle much traffic so if the link is fUXXored, please please keep trying back -- it is so worth it." Link

Update: BoingBoing reader Prion adds, "I was marveling at the mating robots and had in my mind that the work was similar to the magic found at levitated.net. Looking at the credits in the source code I discovered that flash master j.tarbell was the author, one of the levitated.net contributors. For glorious nonlinear flash animation, visit the site."

Peter Davidson sez, "A wonderful Berkeley website/gallery featuring some of the fantastic oddities and plans of futurists from the first half of the 20th century about the far-off world of 1980! Included are plans for a helicopter in every garage, a Mag-Lev train between LA and NY that would only be economically feasible if every citizen of those cities used it to commute to the other each and every day, futuristic car designs that never came to pass, hovercraft buses, the shape of trains to come and so on."

Link

(Thanks, Peter!)

Here's a summer day camp worth sweating for: Eyebeam's Digital Day Camp is a month-long digital arts education program for New York City high school students interested in experimenting, learning and creating with new technology tools. The students explore the architecture of the city by studying design tools and game theory, exploring the parallels between urban design and game design, and observing the politics and players involved in urban renewal. The exhibition that opens at Eyebeam, NY, at 6PM tonight, is the culmination of students' creative projects generated with Macromedia's Director MX and a variety of digital editing software. At 8PM, Gamers Night Groove, New York City's only free gaming/music experience, takes to the floor with music by DJ's Bitshifter and Nullsleep, who transform the 8-bit sound bytes of Nintendo Game Boys into infectious electronic beats until midnight. If you re not up for dancing, you can try out Sony's new Sudeki role-play game and Jonah Warren's interactive installation, which lets gamers use their whole body as a controller. The student projects will be on view Tuesday, July 27, through Saturday July 31, from 12-6PM daily. - Ophra Wolf

http://www.eyebeam.org/learning/ddc04/index.html

A Chinese official says women as well as men could be aboard its spacecraft in future missions.

There a small, but well produced mp4 video of Lessig's speech about Free Culture and the Creative Commons that he gave when he was in Helsinki this May.

Thanks to Jyri at Aula for the link and for organizing the event.

UPDATE: The link above seems to be broken. I will try to get the proper link for it as soon as possible.

Comment - TrackBack

Barack Obama, a Democratic Senatorial candidate from Illinois, gave a barn-burner of a speech last night at the DNC, full of fiery sentiment that reminds me of what I loved about the USA when I lived there, and why I stick up for it now that I'm in a part of the world where the America-bashing is often ill-considered and all-condemning:

If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief-I am my brother's keeper, I am my sisters' keeper-that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. "E pluribus unum." Out of many, one.

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America-there's the United States of America.

There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.

There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Link

(via Electrolite)

Update: Here's a Link you can paste into RealPlayer or a Real-compatible app like MPlayer or VLC for video of the speech (Thanks, Quentin!)

nerd tatoos

Thanks to Ron Gilbert's weblog for pointing out a GameDev.net article discussing the topic of "Designing Games for the Wage Slave". The author explains: "We balance on the knife's edge between our glorious time-squandered youth, and the commitments of inevitable middle age... If games can adapt to the needs of the working gamer, they can find a lucrative niche." He goes on suggest practical tips for game developers, including 'Don't Waste My Time' ("Make every moment count. I don't play games to punish myself. I play them to be entertained, rewarded, and challenged"), 'Curiosity Killed The Cat...' ("Constant death was a necessity in the days of video arcades... Now, in the comfort of our lounges or offices, what reason is there to keep dumping us out of the game we bought with our hard earned cash?"), and 'I Need Help' ("Make any necessary information available from within the game.")

help american expats overseas register to vote. pass it on.

smooth wombat writes "CNN has posted a story to their site about electronic votes from Miami-Dade County's first widespread use of touchscreen voting machines that were lost due to a computer crash.: 'The malfunction was made public after the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizen's group, requested all data from the 2002 gubernatorial primary between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride.' Other groups are challenging a state rule preventing counties that use the machines from conducting manual recounts from them." Reader fatwater adds a link to the New York Times' coverage.

Jessamyn runs librarian.net, a blog exploring issues in library science and within American libraries, and is currently one of the select few webloggers covering the Democratic National Convention . In addition to all her daily posts, her access allows her to share photos from within the convention, and all of it is available for reuse under a Creative Commons license.

equipment: a ball and $27k worth of Segways [via] 

game physics