The Internet Pinball Machine Database — also known as the IPD or IPDB — is a comprehensive, searchable listing of virtually every pinball machine ever made.  It is an ad free, popup free, registration free resource

Home gym for an absent Lego cowboy? The latest Design Awards, this time around from Business 2.0. Are we fatigued with this sort of thing yet? Also, Honorable Mentions.

Eric in SF posted a photo:

Cory Doctorow: Has the music industry really experienced a downturn? Nielsen ratings say no -- this article explains it all, but Jas_MHz ably summarizes:

RIAA based lost sales on "Units Shipped" NOT cd sold to customer.
RIAA lost sales = record stores hold less stock.
Nielsen ratings based on actual sales = sales are up.
=> RIAA deliberaately misleading everyone and courts.
2=> File Swapping has led to increase in sales.
&=> "Lower Sales" only top 100. Add in non RIAA, non "chart" music sales, long tail sales.
Lies, Damns Lies, Statitics & Supreme Perjury.

Link (Thanks, Jas_MHz!)

Barrybar posted a photo:

In school playground. I stepped back to tke this wide shot when someone had gone to recover the basketball. Note the guy reading.

How Robert Rodriguez, the one-man digital army behind El Mariachi and Spy Kids, brought an 'unfilmable' cult comic to the big screen. By Brian Ashcraft from Wired magazine.

oh yes folks, just what you’ve always wanted. the foxblocker is a little piece of metal that screws into your coaxial cable on the back of your television (or cable box) and will block out the news channel, FOX News. this is a very interesting concept because in theory, you could start to daisy chain these together and filter out whichever stations you wanted. i think it’d be fun to see these made into “nickelodeon blockers” or something to that effect. whatever will make your little brother cry.

it’s available now for $8.95 from the official website. thanks to off the hook for informing me.

paulcam posted a photo:

the new Tokyo Chanel headquarters features a "feature wall" integrated into a curtain facade, with 700,000 embedded LED lights that can shift into 60 colors across the spectrum, show film images or "simulate tweed". the LED technology appears transparent, allowing the office worker a clear & unobstructed view of the world during the day.
[via archpaper.com|chanel-ginza.com]

An early draft of an RDF ontology for tagging systems.

If this takes off, the world will be ready for my bacon grease additive to weight watchers products. --MM

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Schindler,

As Terri Schiavo's parents, please accept this humble donation of $500 in support of your battle to keep your beautiful daughter alive. Our thoughts, prayers, and pocketbooks are with you in your time of need, and may God bless you in your support of the sanctity of Life.

Check here if you would like to opt-out of any mass-mailings and direct marketing plans.

href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/politics/29donate.html">List of Schiavo Donors Will Be Sold by Direct-Marketing Firm, the New York Times, March 29, 2005

(Thanks to Jeff.)

What If They Built A Muni Wi-Fi Network And No One Came?

Nice to see someone point out that just because we can do it doesn't mean we should. And this reminds me of another dodgy assumption: that technology can or will create a commons. I've done my fair share of consulting work that very quickly demonstrated that no collaborative technology can work where there is no collective will.

The Supreme Court showdown in the Grokster case between old-fashioned entertainment and new-fangled technology found the justices responsive to the software maker.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

real-time, abstract, colorful & childlike visual renderings of websites. the online application alters the most prominent images on the page & turns it into an abstracted reproduction of the original, while the text & links are transformed into happy faces, so that it "neutralizes the Web by wiping out content, unifying all pages into one creation." [goodworld.ws]

Gallery of punk flyers.

Via linkfilter.

Remember when you were a kid and wrapped your mom's birthday present in the funny papers because you didn't know about wrapping paper? Oh wait, was that just her last birthday... Hmmmm. Well, the sentiment of reuse is great...

Mapwrap wrapping paper is made from real reclaimed New York City Subway or topographical Maps. --MM

Shows a very detailed view near a definable focus, and a simplified, but structurally correct view of the graph further away. From AT&T, makers of graphviz.

"The Feynman-Tufte Principle: a visual display of data should be simple enough to fit on the side of a van."

MSNBC.com has launched a special earthquake eyewitness weblog written by readers that bolsters its coverage of the massive quake that struck Indonesia today with on-the-ground reports. They also have an entire section of their site for citizen journalism.

Wytold (I call him "witty") Rybczynski has posted a biting criticism of the new MoMA on Slate.

With the market for ringtones encompassing everything from rap to porn, it was only a matter of time before church-sanctioned religious tones got into the mix. St. Petri Church in Hamburg, Germany, is funding repairs to its organ through the sale of ringtones based on hymns. Let’s see; if Christian podcasts are called “Godcasts,” what are religious ringtones called? Ringhymns? Holytones?  (We assume the Satanic ones are Hell’s Bells, of course.)

[Thanks, Mark]

Ben Gutierrez writes "Paul Graham has posted a new essay on the Return of the Mac which begins with: 'All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs.' Tim O'Reilly said some similar things in Watching Alpha Geeks. From the article: "My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get."

Tomas posted a photo:

"Violent Death" in finnish

You loved him in The Surreal Life and maybe you loved him in his other, uh, roles; if so, the Hedgehog wants you to know about RJ Mobile, his new Johnny-come-lately (ahem) version of Wicked Wireless. But instead of Jenna Jameson’s “moantones” you’ll get the assuredly very different “groantones”, and personally recommended £1.5 clips of him and his friends, uh, hard at work. We are so not even going to touch this one.

Sorry for depriving you all of your Easter weekend reblog-fix. I'm guessing this site gets fewer readers on Saturday nights or holidays, but the ones who do show up need it more.

dingadingdang posted a photo:

Mark Cuban explains why he will underwrite the defense of file-sharing in the upcoming showdown at the U. S. Supreme Court: … It doesn't matter that the RIAA has been wrong about innovations and the perceived threat to their industry, every single time. It just matters that they can spend more then everyone else on lawyers. Thats not the way it should be. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and others came to me and asked if I would finance the legal effort against MGM. I said yes. I would provide them the money they need. This isn't the big content companies against the technology companies. This is the big content companies, against me, Mark Cuban, and my little content company. It's about our ability to use future innovations to compete, versus their ability to use the courts to shut down our ability to compete. It's that simple. [p2pnet.net]

• Supreme Showdown for P2P's Future. The entertainment industry goes head-to-head against file-sharing services at the Supreme Court this week. Some fear the Grokster case could have a devastating effect on development of new technologies. By Katie Dean. [Wired News]

Via Cinema Minima

Been waiting to watch this one play out for a month - can't wait to read the opinions. --MM

they're making very smart moves, and they're wooing the geek crowd back  

They had me at "Hello" --MM

"Anna Koszur, the brand consulting director of DDB Corporate Profiles, assembled groups of foreigners to free-associate about Poland. Their responses included gray, cold, vodka, poor, white, unsmiling, friendly, sad, boring, hard-living, fast-driving, hard-working, car-stealing, argumentative, creative, chauvinistic, chaotic, conservative, romantic, sentimental, anti-Semitic, Catholic, Walesa, Solidarity, Auschwitz, Chopin."

*sigh* --MM

Alain Bublex' Awareness Box is a camera that does not record images, focussing exclusively on the act of taking pictures. It is an object made to heighten one awareness and attention, a new type of electronic product -developed in collaboration with Siemens- that helps one observe better. ... The Awareness Box allows you to capture an image once in presence of the subject, but without recording it, as each image taken erases the precedent one.

Via Pasta & Vinegar.

GIFs of many constellations --MM

Rent A German:



Quote: "rentagerman.de offers a wide range of Germans for your personal and social needs. You can select the German of your choice for an exclusive lifetime experience: Imagine to appear with your German at parties, family events, or just hang out with them at the local shopping center. No matter, which occasion you choose, you can surely impress your environment by presenting an original German. If you are german or know a German, who wants to participate in the rentagerman network, please don´t hesitate to add your German to our site. On success, you will get 40% of the rental fee! So, enjoy our Human resources and make the rentagerman community grow fast!"
Link

If you’re still buying your Peeps at the store you are so getting ripped off. We know that Easter Sunday is getting a little long in the tooth for most of you reading this (or has maybe already concluded), but it’s probably not too late to run out and buy Wham-o’s Marshmallow Peeps Marshmallow Maker (apparently the importance of marshmallows here cannot be understated), a DIY Peeps kit that comes with everything you need to pump out enough of those little yellow and pink dye vectors to give you a week-long sugar headache.

Don't forget to microwave them --MM

qatsi has a review of Nicholas Crane's book Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet. We've seen examples of Mr. Crane's work before: Profile of Tube Map's Creator; TV Series About Maps; Triangulation Pillars. (Via and cross-posted to Here Be...

namelessdread

intriguing ambient architectural display that emits information via abstract light patterns. the wall recognizes specific people in its vicinity & emits well-chosen & non-distracting 'light codes' to provoke information awareness & social interaction in public space. others consider it as 'an atmospheric decorative element & can enjoy its aesthetic quality'. [fraunhofer.de]

Skype was created as a no-cost long-distance phone service. It does that very well. What it also allows you to do, if you're just a little technically-minded and have a homebrew gene or two, is to record your Skype phone conversation, with the other perso

teslatug writes "IBM has released a preliminary alpha version of its History Flow Visualization Application that shows how collaboratively created documents evolve. The tool is written in Java and it's available for download along with plugins for MoinMoin and MediaWiki. They have some interesting screenshots of the Wikipedia articles on abortion, Brazil, and love."

Rija posted a photo:

"Mefeedia has inconspicuously turned into Flickr for video, at least in terms of tag usage. Several of us that use Mefeedia are putting out a call for people to add videos with the tag "gates", in honor of Christo and Jean Claude's Central Park exhibit."

Bits On Wheels is a Mac-only Bittorrent client. It's freeware (but not open source or public domain) and it looks like this:

It has the usual Bittorrent features, and runs a little faster than my other client, Azureus.

The neat thing that sets it apart is the 3D swarm view, shown above. Bittorrent works by enabling participants to self-organize into a swarm: a group of machines group-hosting a particular file at a given time. ... The 3D swarm view shows yourself in the center. Hosts you are connected to lie around the periphery: although a Bittorrent swarm can be a complex graph, the swarm view is self-centered.

It's okay to reblog your own stuff, right? --MM

Antonio in Ion's Blog points to an impressive picture in El Mundo that demonstrates better than any discourse the growing trend to snap pictures with a camera phone instead of a traditional camera at major events. Here during a procession in Sevilla (Spain)

Shepherd posted a reply:

When shooting film, I was always told to shoot for the ambient light, stopping down about a third of a stop. If I remember correctly this was 200 speed film shooting at 4 seconds. I took a full roll and then selected the strikes I liked the best. I bracketed exposures just to be sure. I haven't tried with a digital camera yet. This was in Florida over the Crystal River Nuclear Power Plant.

Wood.e is essentially electrified wood. Furniture made of Wood.e, with an electrical current of 12V, permits one to easily plug in different applications (plug and play). Wood.e is a built-up composite comprised by plywood and two integrated conducting layers. These layers allow for unprecedented possibilities for sound, light, and motion to be combined seamlessly with wood furniture.

Each week Tom Whitwell of Music Thing highlights the best of the new music gear that’s coming out, as well as noteworthy vintage equipment:

It’s a handmade, battery powered, vintage analog synth that fits in your pocket and costs just €50 ($64). The Cracklebox was designed in the late ‘60s by Michel Waisvisz, a Dutch artist who grow up playing with his father’s shortware radios. He’d touch their circuit boards to make weird noises. Inevitably, he became the kind of experimental musician who talks about “fueling culture into cosmic dimensions.” The cracklebox is essentially a half-working oscillator where the conductivity of your fingers completes the circuit to make whooping, bleeping, semi-random noises. The STEIM foundation sold 4,000 Crackleboxes in the mid seventies. Inspired by the original Cracklebox becoming a collectors item, and lots of interest from glitch musicians and laptop techno people, they produced another 1,000 in 2004, which are still available today.

I can't even look at the results of these contests anymore because they're often so bad and non-web.

Ambient sound recordings easily downloaded

yasuhisa posted a photo:

Mapping Hacks, forthcoming from O'Reilly, isn't just a book of tips on everything from using mapping sites to using a GPS to building your own maps (see the table of contents), it's also a blog. I must confess to being...

Here comes the geospatial web --MM

Also, I have a couple contributions --Fruminator

Join the Hunt

Played online and in the streets, BAFTA-nominated Blast Theory challenge you to a game of cat and mouse around a virtual map of Cambridge. Log on using the public terminals situated in the Junction's new café bar or play online at canyouseemenow and be dropped in at a random location from where you must avoid capture by the Blast Theory 'runners'.

Eavesdrop on your pursuers' conversations and swap tactics with other players as Blast Theory (as real actors positioned on the real streets of Cambridge) hunt down your virtual presence with the aid of handheld computers and GPS technology. FREE to play. April 1st-3rd 2-5pm; April 6th-8th April 4-7pm at The Junction, Cambridge.

Artists' Workshop: April 6th 1-4pm; £5/£4 concessions

The player is a key feature in all Blast Theory's work. This afternoon workshop will look at how the audience engages directly with an artwork, in dialogue with other 'players' and the artists.

Using the player as a focus, participants will respond creatively to site/space, game structure and forms of media/communication technologies to inform and stimulate their own media and performance practice. Finally all participants are welcome behind the scenes at 4pm to look at the hardware, software and performance preparation of 'Can You See Me Now?' Blast Theory's award-winning interactive game, presented by the Junction.

Suitable for artists looking to expand their understanding on new performance technologies, participants should come prepared to move, draw and talk.

To book a place call the Junction box office on 01223 511511 or visit in person at The Junction, 2 Clifton Way, Cambridge, CB1 7GX. [via DAN]

This story looks at the "fab lab".So nicknamed by it's inventor,Dr Neil Gershenfeld,the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Centre for Bits and Atoms.The "fab lab" is a "collection of commercially available machines that can be used "to make just about anything with features bigger than those of a computer chip".The article says that "the fab lab's purpose is to endow inventors—particularly those in poor countries who lack a formal education and the resources to implement their ideas—with a set of tools that can translate back-of-the-envelope designs into working prototypes.And it works.In Pabal,an Indian village with a population of 5,000,a dairy farmer's income is tied to the fat content of his cow's milk.Students at the nearby Vigyan Ashram science school are using a fab lab to build a sensor that will give Pabal's farmers a precise measure of that fat content.In Takoradi,Ghana,people have used the labs to produce a cassava grinder,jewellery,car parts,agricultural tools and communication equipment such as radio antennas.Solar-powered items to harness the relentless local sunlight are in the works.In Norway,Sami animal herders—who are among Europe's last nomads—are using fab labs to make radio collars and wireless networks to track their charges.And in Boston (admittedly not part of the developing world, but conveniently near MIT),the residents of a mixed-income housing complex are using one of Dr Gershenfeld's labs to create a wireless communication network."
Fabulous fabrications

As I write this, Banksy is doing an interview with NPR's All Things Considered. (One of our favorite shows) A stream of the interview will be posted on the web tonight.

You can check it out later tonight (after 10:30pm ET) here.

NEXT FFF SCREENING! Friday March 25 at 8pm Galapagos Art Space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. --MM

I'm asking one of the regular readers of this site to become the idlewords.com macropatron by contributing a very large sum of money to enable me to quit my job and become a professional blogger.

Minnesota teen Jeff Wiese, who shot up his family, his school and himself for a total of 10 deaths, was a flash animator in his spare time. His page on Newgrounds.com gives some data on him, and the pull-down menu will take you to two of his shorts, predictably grim in tone and eerily foreshadowing of his rampage. Who wants to bet this spells the end of flash on the web as an open, unrestricted avenue of expression, at least for minors?...

huh? --MM

Wired surveys the social networking service scene, focusing on economic viability and integration with other functions.

What they have in common is the pursuit of a business model that will allow them to translate other peoples' social networks into profits for themselves.

"Graphic Junkies is a site maintained by an active law enforcement officer in the state of Georgia. I work in the South West Atlanta area. All of the photographs on this site were taken by me while on duty."

I didn't even have time to blog my lazyweb request for the idea, and Alan Taylor's already built it. His del.icio.us comments bookmarklet shows you notes that people have made on any page that you're visiting. I'd love to see it as a Firefox sidebar, too, perhaps one that follows the page you're on and constantly updates.

All of this, of course, just enhances my belief that Alan's the best person working with connecting user-facing web services today. Between the Etech presentation on Web Services Mash-Up and Ben's work on remixing blogs with his CPAN modules that we released as part of the Power Tools set, I'm getting excited about connecting things together again.

Add in the the momentum I've been seeing around TypeKey, the buzz and fuss around AJAX, and the increasing amount of requests I'm getting for info on the AtomAPI, and it feels like we'll be seeing a lot of cool new stuff coming together in the next few weeks and months. I can't wait.

Reuters - A tussle has broken out in Japan's tradition-bound sumo world over the right to wear pants in the ring.

Information Esthetics (i.e.), a recently formed not-for-profit organization, has organized a lecture series, to "help expose the beauty experts see in their databases, better engaging their whole minds in interpretation; to help inspire art that’s not just decorated with data but makes the data readable, satisfying viewers’ minds as much as their eyes and hearts." the lectures will take place Thursday evenings in the Chelsea Art Museum in Manhattan. I wish I could be there. [informationesthetics.org]

Robert Bringhurst on March 31st! --MM

hodler posted a photo:

wacky doodler posted a photo:

"[Blogging while writing a book is] like trying to compose a new melody in your head while standing in the middle of a full-throated choral group."

There's something I need to learn about reblogging during the client work process --MM

Register today to attend Signal or Noise II: Creative Revolution? on April 8. While DJS and musicians spin their works and machinima creators demo film segments, conference panelists and participants will discuss how digital technologies are enabling new forms of creativity by a broader group of people.  Cultural, business, legal and ethical implications of new genres and new forms of authorship will all be covered.

Join panelists for dinner and discussion after the conference -- sign up for Food for Thought, a Berkman tradition. 

Signal or Noise 2K5 is hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, and the Harvard Committee on Sports and Entertainment Law.

It was always pretty clear to me that Oakland was Brooklyn, West Coast style. Of course Brooklyn's got twice the population (800,000 compared to only 400,000) and an earlier founding date (1646 as Breuckelen compared to 1852 for Oaktown), but did you know that Oakland used to be actually called Brooklyn? If you need further proof, see the list below: Brooklyn (L)/Oakland(R) East River/East Bay Prospect Park/Lake Merrit Best Pizza/Best Burritos Exiled Manhattanites raise prices/Exiled San Franciscans raise prices The Commodre (sadly defunct)/Grand Lake and the Parkway (still kicking) highest lesbian concentration in NYC/highest lesbian concentration in the country Park...

Oddly, no mention of Otherworld :D --MM

Microprocessor platform for building electronic installation art

Fabric with embedded LED lights

New Scientist has an article about people using GPS devices to create their own maps. According to the article the rationale - it least in Europe - is the price of otherwise available maps. To save a couple of pennies (Euro) the people behind the trend spend hour upon hour traversing the local network of streets to produce the homemade maps.

I have to admit that I am among the apparently few who haven't become addicted to flick, so perhaps I have a problem when it comes innovative ways of spending time, but the mapping activity ranks among the most foolish things I have heard recently. Perhaps a few Scotsmen would go (walk) this far to save money, but still...

That was at least my immediate reaction until my eyes caught up with the fact that the article featured IFTF describing the trend as the beginning of a geospatial web. With the IFTF "endorsement" I felt I had to give the idea a second chance.

It didn't make much more sense on second thought either, there has to be simpler ways to put the local coffee bar on a map, but then movies such as "Sliding Doors", "Short cuts" and "Magnolia" came to my mind. Imagine if we all gave up some of our right to privacy and produced and shared dynamical private maps. Not just maps of the local neighbourhood, but maps containing information about when we had been where. Pretty straightforward. It would no longer be left to Hollywood to speculate in what would have happened, if I had taken another route to the office this morning - or if I had been 10 minutes late. On the map sharing server (Mapr?) some pattern recognition routine would allow me to see, who I would have met in that case. It would even be possible to perform match making among persons travelling in my foot steps but at different times. People I may otherwise never have met would suddenly leave anonymity. As in the movies our lifes would begin to converge.

In this case I think that I would buy myself a GPS, opening the door to a fascinating kind of parallel worlds. But my map of London would still be the one I can get free of charge at the airport.

I don't have the NewScientist subscription necessary to read The new pioneers of map making, but here are some comments from IFTF's Peter Dreyer, and some seemingly related issues come up in Honey, I Geotagged the Kids by Douglas Rushkoff.

...

He describes the locative media community as :

...