Cory Doctorow: An IHOP restaurant has been forced to abandon its practice of requiring diners to surrender their drivers licenses before ordering. They'd instituted the no-anonymous-pancakes policy to prevent dine-and-dash, but as with all security measures, what made one party more secure made another less secure. In requiring all diners at the pancake house to produce ID, IHOP opened their customers up to identity theft.

Russo said a security guard at the restaurant had "at least 40" licenses in hand when he arrived to eat.

"Identity theft is rampant. I wouldn't want to give my license, with my address or Social Security number to anyone that I'm not familiar with," Russo said. "I'm going just for breakfast."

Link (via Schneier)

Broadcasts Game as He Plays

A PLAY-BY-PLAY account of a basketball game, broadcast by one of the actual players during the contest, recently went on the air at Cleveland, Ohio. For the radio stunt, the player-announcer carried a short-wave transmitter that required no trailing wires, and the central radio studio picked up and rebroadcast his exciting description of his own plays and those of his team mates and opponents. The picture shows him in action.

Tags: Communications

Brazilian artist Alexandre Orion turned a São Paulo transport tunnel into a kind of graphic charnel house, lined with skulls.
He created the images, the project's website explains, "by selectively scraping off layers of black soot deposited on those walls in the short life of this orifice of modernity."
And what a lovely orifice it is...

Specifically, Orion scraped, cleaned, and rubbed down through soot "until reaching the natural color of the walls" – inevitably leading me to wonder what other worlds, of figures and images and narrative sequences, might exist in some future graphic tense beneath layers of urban pollution...? And could one prepare for the accumulation of soot by attaching stencils to the walls of tunnels – only to remove those in five years, revealing imagery?
Interestingly, the rough geological equivalent of this procedure can be found throughout the American Southwest, in the form of various "newspaper rocks"
– where layers of desert varnish have been scraped away to reveal natural rock pigmentation, thus allowing the production of representational art.

In any case, the descriptive text on Orion's website seems to go downhill fairly quickly – we're soon scraping soot off the walls of repression and peeling away consciousness itself, and we're meant to be very, very angry while doing so – but the funny thing is, because voluntarily scrubbing sections of a public underpass isn't actually illegal in São Paulo – and would seem, in fact, to be a sign of refined citizenship – try as they might, Brazil's patient and well-organized police force couldn't charge Orion with anything.

Instead, the fire crews showed up and washed it down with hoses.

(Via Paul Schmelzer's Eyeteeth, which quotes a nice recap of Orion's project).

This from journalism.co.uk:

BBC News 24 has launched a news programme based entirely on user-generated material.

Your News, which began a pilot run on Saturday, will feature stories, features and video proving most popular with viewers on TV and the internet.

Originally from PJNet Today, ReBlogged by yatta on Nov 28, 2006 at 12:21 PM

Now a series of sea-lion attacks on people in recent months has led experts to warn that the animals are not as cute and cuddly as they appear.

Students use Google online document sharing to brainstorm climate solutions…

The National Science Teachers Association rejects 50,000 copies of An Inconvenient Truth, and Exxon the suspect…

Are you a Winter cyclist? Here’s ten essential tips to keep your tips from freezing off…

PET Castles: pioneering tropical construction from discarded soda bottles…

“Eco-Freaks,” a new book by John Berlau, exposes environmentalists for the shysters they are…

If you don't preserve nature by switching off your computer, who will?

The Publicis Counseil did an incredible ad campaign for EDF. Incredible submission, i can't get over the photography or the message... view all four ads in full below (click to view larger).

--> to more images

(Want more visual goodness? See NOTCOT.com + NOTCOT.org)

What really happens when your spacesuit fails?

"Step-by-step instructions on how to build simple radios using common household goods. This is part of a larger section on building simple radios, but this page was particularly interesting (like how to make a capacitor out of tin foil and wax paper)

The tangle of cables and plugs needed to recharge today's electronic gadgets could soon be a thing of the past.

Filed under: Culture, Online, Polls

Shawn Handyside of Staccato Comic contributed a strip for VG Cats and came out as the winner of this week's webcomic wrapup. Personally, we think it was the Zelda II reference that struck a chord in everyone's hearts ... no? Oh well.

Second place went to Penny Arcade and third place was a tie between newcomer xkcd and old hat Fanboys Online. Thanks to everyone who voted, and be sure to let us know of any game-related webcomics you stumble upon this week!

Continue reading Readers pick best webcomic: Staccato cameo

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Zimbabwe's military has said the country's cellphone operators are threatening national security by using independent connections to the outside world, reports the Mail&Guardian Online.

"Zimbabwe Defence Forces director for communications, Colonel Livingstone Chineka said the three cellphone firms should route international calls through the state-owned fixed-line operator TelOne, and not use their own gateways, in order to make it easier to monitor international traffic.

There was no immediate comment from the three operators."

Reuters - Cosmetic surgery is altering not just how people look but how they feel by changing perceptions of middle age, a study showed Monday.

Many are aware that the creative activities and conceptual shifts of todays contemporary artists, are not easy to define as art in the traditional sense. Especially when much of the cross-cultural, relational contexts, canons and definitions of art are re-shaped by these two individuals, Kate Rich & Kayle Brandon. Who seem to effortlessly break through paradigms like there is no tomorrow.

read more

Code Performer (Live Artist?) - Dare I say the Damien Hirst of SL?

Welcome to my tribute to the wonderful robots in film!

Filed under: Culture, Nintendo Wii

Like so many others this past Thursday, I used Thanksgiving to introduce Wii into the hands of family members. Then my mom introduced her backhand into my 8 year-old cousin's head. BOOM!

Admittedly, I wasn't around to supervise witness the scene, but quickly responded to the explosion of sound. A gasp. A yelp. A thud -- batteries and cover striking the floor. The strap held; and I snatched up the Wiimote, still dangling from my mother's wrist.

After applying an ice pack to my cousin's smarting head, mom recounted the incident: As she stepped into a backhand return, my cousin excitedly bounced forward anticipating the ball, her head just at the height of mom's strike. The collision was enough to snap off the prongs that hold the top of the battery cover, sending the cover and batteries flying, scattering across the hardwood. Thankfully, no long-term damage to report (unless you count mom's abrupt retirement from Wii Sports).

It seems Nintendo has anticipated such misadventure, offering replacement battery covers (currently on back order) for purchase on its online store. Note to self: Mom owes me $1, plus shipping.

See also:
A Wii Thanksgiving test on the family
A Wii Thanksgiving test on the family: Part 2

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Scientists say the global energy crisis can be solved by using the desert sun

Vanity postage. This pretty-easy-to-use website will generate official US postage stamps featuring a photo or illustration of your choosing (works well with iPhoto for instance). When the service was first introduced two years ago it was abused by clever pranksters -- my favorite hack was a Unabomber postage stamp. The Post Office shut the program down. The service is available again but I don't know what the actual image limits are (vs. their stated policy). We made some silly faces and they made stamps from them. I've seen them used for wedding/party invitations. You can also put business logos on them, or other non-political messages. The cost is more than twice that of regular stamps (less if you buy them in bulk). A 20-stamp sheet of these makes a nice personal, utilitarian gift.

-- KK

Photostamps
20 stamps, 39 cents
$18
Available from Stamps.com

Two other sites offer a similar service for the same price. They offer mild design differences in the bar coded postage area.
PictureItPostage
Zazzle

For Canadian Postage:
Canada Post Picture Postage

All three of the following English-speaking countries offer a photo stamp on a sheet next to a postage stamp:
For U.K. Postage:
Royal Mail Smilers
For Australian Postage:
Australia Post Personalised Stamps
For New Zealand Postage:
New Zealand Personalised Stamps

Stuart Tanner Architects say that "The sustainable capability of our architecture is an integral component of any design that we undertake and the impact of a particular project is considered as a combination of factors, such as scale, influence over its site and greater context, in additon to its passive heating and cooling ability. We view contemporary architecture as the pivotal ingredient to a rich environmental culture and a vitally important aspect of a future sustainable society." At TreeHugger we get a lot of flak every time we show a second home in the country, but that fact is that they are the incubators of innovation, the outlet for sophisticated clients to enable innovative young architects to try new things. In Tasmania, Stuart has built a home on Pirate's Bay that barely touches the ground, "a suspended cantilever that ...is a platform from which to observe the grandeur of Pirates Bay, and pay homage to the eucalypt forest that fringes the site." ::Stuart Tanner via ::Mocoloco

Cory Doctorow: Flickr user Meanest Indian has a lovely gallery of Indian mudflaps depicting stars of Bollywood movies. So much cooler than the US zaftig silhouette. Link (Thanks, Avi!)

Cory Doctorow:
Check out these amazing replica Altair 8800 kit, composed all new (or new-old stock) parts, with the original instructions for assembly. The Altair 8800 was the microcomputer ancestor of the PC -- the computer that inspired the PC revolution. It was -- to some approximation -- the first useful computer that you could build and run in your home workshop. Regrettably, these kits are only sold on eBay, making them a pain to acquire, but the idea is just fantastic, and it sounds like the build-quality is terrific. Link (via Make)

Cory Doctorow: I just finished Steven Johnson's excellent new book "The Ghost Map," a popular science book about the London cholera epidemic of 1854, and the extraordinary new science that emerged from its punishing violence.

In 1854, London was a city with millions of residents and no sewage system. It was the first time a city had grown so big, and while it had a rudimentary idea of a public health system, this system was based on the "miasma" theory of disease: that illness was the result of smelling bad smells. So it was that London was drowning in its own shit, and so it was that thousands of Londoners were in the business of harvesting, cleaning, moving, exploring and scavenging in shit. Johnson quotes journals and accounts of the day describing unimaginable filth, residents dipping buckets into open, running sewers, then letting the "water" separate out of the excrement, skimming it off and drinking it.

Cholera epidemics are the inevitable outcome of such a situation. One such outbreak took Soho -- a poor, overcrowded neighborhood -- by storm, killing one in ten in the space of a week. In that week, two very different men (a cleric and a scientist) who were both local to Soho pounded the streets, working to extinguish the disease's flames. They struggled against the miasma-obsessed public health administration (whose idea of sanitation was to order all the basement cesspools emptied into the Thames, London's main source of drinking water).

The cleric, Reverend Henry Whitehead, had intimate knowledge of Soho's streets and families, and the scientist, Dr John Snow, had a history of challenging establishment superstitions with empirical research. Together they worked on a map that showed the disease's course through London, and ran the cholera back to the well where it originated. The combination of data-visualization and local knowledge revealed the microbial nature of cholera, years before anyone managed to connect the actual bug with the disease.

Johnson's got a gift for telling human stories in science -- and a healthy respect for cities, humanity's most complicated and magnificent inventions. He's characterized this as the story of the world's largest organism -- the city -- locked in struggle with one of the world's smallest -- a bacterium. That's as good a strapline as any -- it's a dramatic story of a key evolutionary moment in our history, a moment when we could have destroyed ourselves or brought ourselves to the future. Link

See also:
Steven Johnson's new book The Ghost Map
Steven Johnson's fave books about plagues
Steven Johnson launches outside.in
BoingBoingBoing podcast 006: Steven Johnson

Update: Jeff sez, "John Snow published a book on his investigation into the cholera epidemic. His account is a pretty interesting read."

A Linkin Park "fan" hacked singer Chester Bennington's cellphone records from her workplace at Sandia Labs, and nabbed his bill, numbers he'd called, and images he'd transmitted. Clever Devon Townsend is awaiting charges, meanwhile her attorney, Ray Twohig, says "This is the Internet version of a groupie hiding in Mick Jagger's dressing room. We're in a different age, and fans have more skills than they used to."

Fan hacks�Linkin singer cell data, threatens wife - CNN.com

I suppose the term DIY is being applied rather loosely here since generally speaking the following is a survey of old art making trends that have both nostalgia and craft value as opposed to being inherently Do-It-Yourself, but I think the term will suffice. Here are a few of the more obvious discontinued trends I've noticed recently



LiteBrite Art

As far as I know, artist Steve DeFrank is best known for this kind of work, though I recall there being an awful lot of it more of it than around than the few bits I was able to find at Cool Hunting, which seems impossible given the fact that the Internet is basically run by the nerdocracy.* I suppose for artists who reveal in the glory of limitations, the medium of back lit plastic plastic nobs would be a great challenge to take up, but it is hard to imagine how anyone could get beyond its inherent LiteBriteness. Of course, the challenge of art making is always transcending and/or subverting the medium in some way, so in theory this is a method of art making that has greatly gone unmined.



Paint by Numbers

I’d like to say that the rise of paint by numbers can be seen to parallel that of hard edged, tapey paintings that were so popular in 2001, but the timelines don’t actually match. Canadian conceptual artist Mary Scott made paint-by-numbers works by applying acrylic with a syringe as early as 1981 (the above image is not a paint by number but the best I could find). At the time, the practice was viewed as one that expanded the field of painting, though if done today would probably just seem trite. You can no longer make an ironic paint by number...which is clearly a huge loss to the art making community.

AstroTurf and Flocking



This is a material more than method of art making, but a couple years ago it was nearly impossible to walk into a gallery without viewing some lawn green flocked armature, or AstroTurf with some plastic-something-or-other sitting on top of it. As a lover of the rich valor feel that flocking gives to any object, I actually wouldn’t mind seeing a little more of this material. This is decidedly different than my views on AstroTurf, which I'm not that interested in, unless your name is Matthew Ronay, (who is, as we speak, probably trying to figure out how to make synthetic cum out of MDF fibers to accompany the material.) I don’t have any good reasons for my dislike of AstroTurf, other than the usual, "I’ve seen enough of this material to last me a lifetime", sort of sentiment.

*Nerdocracy: A term coined by Christopher Weingarten, senior editor of Paper Thin Walls

Filed under: Hacks, Nintendo Wii, Video, Peripherals

After seeing the popular, though dubious, candle video on YouTube over the weekend, we had to verify the veracity of the video's claims; luckily, a candelabra was conveniently on hand. Thrill! As we control the fairy cursor and boomerang in Zelda: Twilight Princess without the aid of the Wii's sensor bar! Marvel! As we blow out the candles and have the Wii request that we "point the Wii Remote at the screen." If you've got a projection screen, but lack the skillz (and/or motivation) to construct the DIY-erless sensor bar, grab a couple tealights to get your game on. It really works!

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Woah. Easy there tiger panda!

Watch mom's defensive hunchback and check out her "talk to the hand" that she does with her right hind paw.

Recommended viewing style: Over and over and over again. It's the only way to ensure "getting it".

Thanks to Sally/Sal Pal/Petal Pop for the link!

Cory Doctorow:
Marilyn sez, "Ordinary Bahrainis are using Google Earth to spy on the many gargantuan palaces, yachts,former national parks and waterfront properties (90% of the country) owned by the royal family and their cronies, while the rest of the country lives in squalor."

Mahmood al-Yousif, a businessman whose political chat and blog site Mahmood’s Den is among Bahrain’s most popular, says that in the tense run-up to the polls, few Bahrainis have not surfed over the contours of their kingdom, comparing vast royal palaces, marinas and golf courses with crowded Shia villages nearby, where unemployment is rife and services meagre.

For those with insufficient bandwidth to access Google Earth, a PDF file with dozens of downloaded images of royal estates has been circulated anonymously by e-mail. Mr Yousif, among others, initially encouraged web users to post images on photo-sharing websites.

“Some of the palaces take up more space than three or four villages nearby and block access to the sea for fishermen. People knew this already. But they never saw it. All they saw were the surrounding walls,” said Mr Yousif, who is seen in Bahrain as the grandfather of its blogging community.

Link, Link to PDF closeups of Bahrain's palaces, Mahmoud's Den coverage (Thanks, Marilyn)

Yes, Web2.0 is frequently snakeoil, but when did anybody say it was about distributed computing??

In a letter published in Sunday's New York Times, Yoko Ono has urged people to mark the day of her husband John Lennon's death, Dec. 8, by honouring those who have suffered through violence or war.

Cory Doctorow: Australia's new copyright law may result search engines blocking access to the country. PM John Howard sold Australia's copyright law out as part of the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, through which Australia agreed to change its copyright laws to surpass America's own disastrous system.

The new law will create punishing potential liability for search engines who do not secure permission for indexing, cacheing and and searching every website in their database. In order to protect themselves from liability, search engine operators would have to contact every single web-author who ever lived.

Critics say Australian copyright laws do not take into account how information is gathered and presented on the Internet.

Dr Rimmer says Internet search engines could be crippled by the proposed copyright changes, which protect libraries, archives and research institutions but leave commercial entities like Google out in the cold.

He says this will affect the ability of search engines to engage in digitisation projects like book search, provide images, index news stories and archive web content.

"Given the amount of litigation that Google has been involved in the last year, I think they've got very genuine fears that they could be subject to copyright actions in Australia," he said.

He says rather than adopting the narrow "fair use" definitions contained in the legislation, Australia should adopt a US-style open-ended fair-use defence to ensure a flow of and access to information.

Link, Link (Thanks, Dan!)

Update: Mark Pesce has a great op-ed about this in today's Melbourne Age.

Cory Doctorow:
Make Magazine has a special Make-branded "warranty-voider" Leatherman tool, along with a copy of the Maker's Bill of Rights:

* Meaningful and specific parts lists shall be included.
* Cases shall be easy to open.
* Batteries should be replaceable.
* Special tools are allowed only for darn good reasons.
* Profiting by selling expensive special tools is wrong and not making special tools available is even worse.
* Torx is OK; tamperproof is rarely OK.
* Components, not entire sub-assemblies, shall be replaceable.
* Consumables, like fuses and filters, shall be easy to access.
* Circuit boards shall be commented.
* Power from USB is good; power from proprietary power adapters is bad.
* Standard connecters shall have pinouts defined.
* If it snaps shut, it shall snap open.
* Screws better than glues.
* Docs and drivers shall have permalinks and shall reside for all perpetuity at archive.org.
* Ease of repair shall be a design ideal, not an afterthought.
* Metric or standard, not both.
* Schematics shall be included.

Link

Update: Fred sez, "there's a couple of things that struck me about the device after I read the manifesto and looked at the Flickr set:"

Warranty Voider violations of The Maker's Bill Of Rights

1. No parts list.
2. Case is sealed by rivets -- cannot be opened for repair.
3. Need a drill to remove rivets and a riveter to replace them (i.e. 'special tools required').
4. Can't get at components to replace them, thus entire assembly must be replaced, and proprietary parts are not available individually to the end user.
5. Ease of repair not a consideration.
6. No schematics included.

"Now, while I carry a Leatherman to perform occasional light repairs on my unreliable 1976 Triumph Bonneville, the Leatherman has missing tips and chipped tools from misuse over the years. I've always been annoyed that I can't perform maintenance on my maintenance tool."

Update 2: Phil sez, "the Make Warranty Voider has a 25 year warranty from Leatherman - they'll pretty much repair them no matter what."

Filed under: Storage

24-year-old Sainul Abideen thinks he's come up with an alternative to CDs and other data storage options that'll allow for greater storage capacities and be cheaper and biodegradable to boot, using a fancy printing technique he's devised to cram loads of data onto a plain old sheet of paper. The trick is to first convert the data into a so-called "Rainbow Format," which is made up of various geometric shapes that can be densely printed onto a sheet of paper; that can then be read by a computer or other device using a Rainbow Card Reader. From the sound of it, the system appears to be somewhat similar to QR Codes and other newfangled bar code-type technologies currently in use in parts of the world other than here, but Abideen's "Rainbow Versitile Disc" can apparently store far more amounts of data than those -- between 90 and 450GB, according to The Arab News. Demonstrations of the technology, however, seem to have only shown much smaller amounts of data being Rainbowfied, including a 45 second video clip and 432 pages of "foolscrap" being stored on a four-inch square piece of paper. Still pretty darn impressive if you ask us, and it sure looks a heckuva lot better hanging on a wall than a CD.

[Via The Register]

 

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

This digital pog design, by Jeff Sisson, is one of my favorites, so I enlarged it.

jkottke : The NY Times Book Review's 100 notable books of 2006 - The NY Times Book Review's 100 notable books of 2006. Making the list are several kottke.org notable books: The Ghost Map, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Consider the Lobster, and The Blind Side.

(Thanks, Lucia!)

Wooster mourns the passing of Andrea Cecilia Bernal, aka ACB who lost her struggle with cancer last Sunday, November 19, 2006 at precisely 9:10 AM. She was buried the following day in the Valparaiso region of Chile in a place called "el Parque del Mar".

Andrea was only 25 years old.