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| Recently at Boing Boing Gadgets Posted: 22 Apr 2009 11:43 PM PDT  • Cute, pink puffy speakers -- for those who speak Chinese • A day with the email-only Peek Pronto • Star Wars cupcakes that look a little chewy • Glowing Swarovski crystals in mesh sacks make awe$ome lamps • A rig that lets you hang your guitar in the closet (where it belongs) An hour with Griffin's TuneFlex AUX • Summer to do: build a tiny house, finally • Did you know you can now stream Nova on PBS.com? • Earth Day alert: "Wasting money on a gadget I don't need just doesn't seem smart." • LEDs that make your home glow like a Virgin-Atlantic cabin. |
| UAE royal caught torturing man on video Posted: 23 Apr 2009 03:20 AM PDT A video showing a member of the United Arab Emirates' royal family torturing a man with whips, electrocution and a nail-spiked board has been released. The Minister of the Interior (one of the torturer's brothers) reviewed the recording and concluded "all rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly by the Police Department." ABC News Exclusive: Torture Tape Implicates UAE Royal Sheikh (via Digg) |
| Christian fundamentalists hijack Singaporean feminist group Posted: 23 Apr 2009 01:36 AM PDT AWARE, a 25-year-old Singaporean women's right organization, recently found itself in turmoil after a coup orchestrated by conservative fundamentalist Christians who signed up in large numbers just before the annual general meeting, then elected a new executive that immediately purged the organization of all its traditional leadership down to the subcommittee chairs. AWARE held its annual general meeting (AGM) on 28 March 2009. There were over 100 people present. Of them, about 80 had only joined the organisation between January and March, one to three months before the meeting. Nine out of 12 executive committee (EXCO) places, including four Office Bearer positions, went to newcomers, who were voted in by wide majorities. There are wide-ranging suspicions that this "leadership grab" has been orchestrated by a well-organised group who do not share AWARE's values and who are seeking to use the name and the resources of a well-respected institution to further their own agenda. These concerns have been expressed not only by onlookers, but by older members of Aware...WHAT HAPPENED (via IZ Reloaded) |
| Pirate Bay judge had conflict of interest: mistrial? Posted: 23 Apr 2009 01:16 AM PDT According to Swedish National Radio, the judge in the Pirate Bay trial is a board member for a copyright industry lobbying group, and this conflict of interest may result in a mistrial. The Swedish article has been translated into English on Freeform 101 by a Dane, and is a little rough: There are different types of ____ ('jäv', translation help needed). The most obvious case is if a judge is related to one of the inflicted parties. This is not the case here. But the concept of _____ ('delikatessjäv', translation help needed) exists, and that means that you as a judge must not have any reason to be deemed partial.The Pirate Bay trial invalid? Rättegången kan tas om (Thanks, ChristianVillum and Zacqary!) Previously:
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| Posted: 22 Apr 2009 10:41 PM PDT Mark sez, Book Army (Thanks, Mark!) |
| Joe Biden promises a blank check to the entertainment cartel Posted: 22 Apr 2009 10:39 PM PDT VP Joe Biden stood up in front of a bunch of Hollywood execs and promised to appoint a copyright czar, and furthermore, that this would be the "right" person to protect their interests. I would have voted Dem in the last election, if I got a vote, but make no mistakes: the Dems are the party of stupid copyright laws. From Hollywood Howard Berman on down, they've got a terrible track record on technology and copyright policy. "It's pure theft, stolen from the artists and quite frankly from the American people as consequence of loss of jobs and as a consequence of loss of income," Biden said, according to a White House pool report.Biden promises 'right person' as new U.S. copyright czar (Thanks, Timothy!) |
| Posted: 22 Apr 2009 10:35 PM PDT Warren Ellis has written a new series of GI Joe cartoons, reimagining the infra-dumb 80s toy-sales vehicle as a serious war comic. Adult Swim has the original episodes, but they're blocked outside of the US, so if you're in the UK like me, you can watch 'em on YouTube. GI Joe Resolute (YouTube) GI Joe Resolute (Adult Swim) (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) |
| Stylish packaging for beloved lowbrow media Posted: 22 Apr 2009 10:29 PM PDT  Jason Kottke's got a good, link-dense post about several efforts to re-imagine media packaging -- video game boxes that look like Penguin covers, notional Nintendo DS tie-in games for movies -- basically, making stylish boxes for the lowbrow stuff we all love. |
| Denver Area Maker Meetup Thursday 4/23 Posted: 22 Apr 2009 08:54 PM PDT  John Maushammer writes on the Make Blog: Ever since the first TechShop opened in the San Francisco bay area, I've been dying for one in Downtown Denver. Well, my dreams have been answered - Club Workshop is a well-equipped public access workshop, where you can craft your projects using their machine tools, rapid prototyping machine, laser engraver/cutter, woodworking tools, and welding equipment. Naturally, they also offer classes so you can learn how to use these tools. |
| Throbbing Gristle and Derek Jarman Posted: 22 Apr 2009 08:51 PM PDT Last night in Los Angeles, Throbbing Gristle performed a live soundtrack accompaniment to Derek Jarman's film In The Shadow of the Sun. Boing Boing Video, Richard Metzger, and friends were at the show. By all accounts, it was a provocative, challenging, and mindbending experience. Watch this space for a full multimedia report soon. Meanwhile, above is "TG: Psychic Rally In Heaven," a short film Jarman made for Throbbing Gristle in 1981. Best viewed at high quality, in a darkened room, with headphones. |
| Frozen movie of cops vs. clowns in hospital shootout Posted: 22 Apr 2009 08:30 PM PDT Jim Leftwich says on Twitter: Amazing video short by Stink Digital: "Carousel" It's a frozen moment of cops vs. clowns in a hospital shootout. |
| Bronze sculpture by Tim Biskup Posted: 22 Apr 2009 04:29 PM PDT  Tim Biskup is issuing a new bronze sculpture of his popular Pollard character. There are only 44 in the edition.Bronze "Pollard" Sculpture Previously: |
| HOWTO Waterboard a Detainee: Analysis Posted: 22 Apr 2009 03:01 PM PDT waterboarding.org tells Boing Boing, The recent White House release of Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos removes speculation by providing the first authoritative description of the waterboarding procedure used by CIA interrogators.OLC Memos Define Official Waterboarding Procedure (waterboarding.org). This is part one of a multiple-part series, and this first installment covers basic facts: what it actually is, how they actually did it. Part two will be an analysis of their legal opinion on how the OLC's documented procedure avoids the legal definition of torture.
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| Posted: 22 Apr 2009 03:01 PM PDT  My friend Sharon Hall sent me some screeners of a new cop show on ABC called The Unusuals. She thought I'd enjoy them, and she was right. I don't watch many police shows, but The Unusuals' offbeat characters appealed to me. A new episode airs tonight. You can also watch the previous episodes for free at the link. |
| The Butt Race, a 1965 stop-motion movie Posted: 22 Apr 2009 03:20 PM PDT "Stop action 8mm film Butt Race made with neighborhood kids in 1965 when director was age 14." (Thanks, HC!) Previously:
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| Trailer for The Garden, opens in theaters April 24, 2009 Posted: 22 Apr 2009 02:24 PM PDT Here's the trailer for The Garden, which opens in theaters this Friday. The Garden is an engaging and powerful look at the famous political and social battle over the largest community garden in the US (located in South Central Los Angeles). A follow-up to Kennedy’s award-winning documentary OT: Our Town, the film shows how the politics of power and greed (backroom deals, land developing, green politics, money) tragically intersect with working class families who rely on this communal garden for their livelihood. Equal parts The Wire and Harlan County USA, The Garden exposes the fault lines in American society and raises crucial and challenging questions about liberty, equality, and justice for the poorest and most vulnerable among us. Kenneth Turan of the LA Times said: “It’s tempting to call The Garden a story of innocence and experience, of evil corrupting paradise, but that would be doing a disservice to the fascinating complexities of a classic Los Angeles conflict and an excellent documentary that does them full justice.” |
| Amusing Shanghai beauty products Posted: 22 Apr 2009 02:13 PM PDT  Mike Holdsworth says: "My friends Kim and Tina are traveling to Shanghai at the moment and the following gift pack awaited them." |
| iPhone Hacks: Pushing the iPhone and iPod touch Beyond Their Limits Posted: 22 Apr 2009 01:37 PM PDT  Brian Jepson was the editor of the new book iPhone Hacks: Pushing the iPhone and iPod touch Beyond Their Limits. He says: "It shows you how to do some of the usual hacks like jailbreaking, but it also goes completely off the rails in Chapter 12 and shows you how to get the iPhone talking to Arduino and also gets into wiring some sensors up to the iPhone. I think it could be one of the freakiest books I've worked on. With iPhone Hacks, you can make your iPhone do all you'd expect of a smartphone -- and more. Learn tips and techniques to unleash little-known features, find and create innovative applications for both the iPhone and iPod touch, and unshackle these devices to run everything from network utilities to video game emulators. This book will teach you how to:iPhone Hacks: Pushing the iPhone and iPod touch Beyond Their Limits |
| Nazi-bred super cows will save the dung beetles! Posted: 22 Apr 2009 01:40 PM PDT  Steven Morris of The Guardian reports on a herd cows in Devon that were bred by a pair of brothers who wanted to recreate the aurochs, "an extinct European wild ox" that "features as an important beast in Teutonic mythology." Derek Gow believes Heck cattle - which, he says, "look prehistoric" - could one day have an important conservation role, taking the place of aurochs in the environment. "They would be ideal for a reintroduction programme in Britain because they don't need human attention."Nazi-bred super cows roam farm in Devon |
| The making of Moray McLaren's "We Got Time" video Posted: 22 Apr 2009 12:43 PM PDT David Wilson posted a neat video that explains how he built a bunch of modified praxinoscopes (kind of like a zoetrope) to make Moray McLaren's "We Got Time" video. The making of Moray McLaren's "We Got Time" video (Thanks, Joseph Francis!) |
| EU votes tomorrow on copyright term extension: act now! Posted: 22 Apr 2009 12:40 PM PDT It's down to the wire for copyright term extension in Europe: the EuroParl votes tomorrow morning on whether sound recordings are going to get extra decades of copyright. This, after all the actual economic and policy experts have weighed in to say that this won't generate any substantial income for artists (but will put hundreds of millions of euros into the pockets of a few giant record companies), and will doom huge swaths of European musical history to obscurity because no one will be able to figure out who it belongs to, so no one will be able to re-issue it. Term extension has been a failure around the world. In the US, it's created a disastrous mountain of "orphan works" -- more than 98% of the works in copyright, according to findings from the Supreme Court's hearing of Eldred v Ashcraft -- that can't be brought back to life and will likely disappear before they enter the public domain. Make no mistake: most artists will receive as little as &Euro;0.50 from this measure, and the major labels that screwed them will get millions. And the public will pay those millions for music that, by all rights, should now be free after having had its full 50 years in copyright. Some of the particular problems are:Europeans: it is never too late to act. Get in touch with your MEP before the vote and let them know you support a sound copyright policy for Europe. Act now for Sound Copyright: instructions for contacting your MEP European Parliament Votes on Copyright Term Extension Tomorrow (Thanks, Rufus!) Previously:
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| Entertainment industry's greedy lobbying is their undoing Posted: 22 Apr 2009 12:11 PM PDT Here's my latest column for Internet Evolution: "Big Entertainment Wants to Party Like It's 1996" explains how the entertainment industry's greedy, naked lobbying tactics will be their undoing, since these victories end up backfiring because they arouse such public ire. It's not that these companies can't get their laws on the agenda, and not that they can't cook the process to make it run favorably for themselves. For example, when Canada was considering its own version of the WCT, the entertainment giants saw to it that the parliamentarians in charge of the process only talked to multinational entertainment giants, without conducting any kind of embarrassing public consultation. They wouldn't even talk to the Canadian record companies -- just the multinationals.Big Entertainment Wants to Party Like It's 1996 |
| Musicians around the world play "Stand By Me" Posted: 22 Apr 2009 12:00 PM PDT The Playing For Change project made this film of buskers around the world playing "Stand By Me" (it's part of a project that raises funds to build schools). I found the performances here is very touching -- beautiful editing. Playing For Change: Song Around the World "Stand By Me" (Thanks, Dalvenjah!) |
| Panoramic photo of a ghosts street in Detroit Posted: 22 Apr 2009 11:53 AM PDT  Above is a small piece of an amazing panoramic photo of a street of abandoned houses in Detroit. Last week I read in the morning paper about a street here where 60 out of 66 homes were vacant or abandoned on a single block. The reporter called it a "ghost street." Yesterday I found myself in the area. Other than an errant sofa, the street was completely empty, almost peaceful. I took a photo of every house on the north side of one block and then stitched them together. If you were to compare the current international housing crisis to a black hole sucking the equity out of our homes, this one-way street near the northern border of Detroit might just be the singularity: the point where the density of the problem defies anyone's ability to comprehend it. These homes started emptying in 2006.(Via The Agitator) |
| Frog eats Christmas light, gets illuminated Posted: 22 Apr 2009 11:54 AM PDT  James Snyder took this striking photo of a frog that ate a small light bulb. It was featured in National Geographic's "Daily Dozen." This is a Cuban tree frog on a tree in my backyard in southern Florida. How and why he ate this light is a mystery. It should be noted that at the time I was taking this photo, I thought this frog was dead having cooked himself from the inside. I’m happy to say I was wrong. After a few shots he adjusted his position. So after I was finished shooting him, I pulled the light out of his mouth and he was fine. Actually, I might be crazy but I don’t think he was very happy when I took his light away. (Via bangocibumbumpuluj) |
| Posted: 22 Apr 2009 12:12 PM PDT Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine. Energy Circle, a sort-of Consumer Reports for cost-effective energy efficient gadgetry, announced a new project today that I find absolutely fascinating. We have been monitoring our home energy use for several months now, using our preferred whole house energy monitor TED, The Energy Detective. With Earth Day 09 as our starting point, we are going to make our electricity use public on EnergyCircle. We have adapted the TED to make it capable of streaming our household's data directly to the Internet. (A somewhat sophisticated hack inspired in part by Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone's Tweet-A-Watt. We'll open source it in the next day or so). What I love most about this, is that the building in question isn't the sort of green industry "House of Tomorrow" thing that bears more resemblance to Epcot Center than to the places you or I live now. By following Energy Circle's data, you'll see how the average American home uses energy, and you'll see the changes in energy use that happen (or don't happen) when the bloggers try out new energy-saving ideas and products. In fact, they're not just posting all this data, they're annotating it. You'll know whether that spike in use is their dryer or their hot water heater. And you'll know what was going on behind-the-scenes to cause a dip in use. But, beyond being a really cool experiment, does this matter? Hell, yeah. What you'll be seeing at Energy Circle is a living example of how consumer awareness of energy use cuts consumer energy use. And that's a big, fat, hairy deal. According to the DOE, electricity use in one average single-family home accounts for more CO2 emissions than two average cars. Studies have found that monitoring home energy use, and giving the people who live there access to that information, can end up cutting use by anywhere between 5-to-15%---and those reductions connect directly back to the amount of CO2 being pumped into the air. Very zippy stuff, indeed. |
| Posted: 22 Apr 2009 11:33 AM PDT  Hannah Perner-Wilson's limpet shells, which contain either an LED or vibrating motor that is activated when you push down on the shell, have no purpose other than to delight the person who happens upon them. Limpet Shell Electronics |
| More from the Your Business Card is Crap! fellow. Posted: 22 Apr 2009 11:28 AM PDT The Mt. Holly Mayor says: "Chris Zubryd, the director/editor of 'The Pitch, Poker & the Public,' the 30 min doc the original Joel Bauer clip was pulled from, sent me a link to the full clip. I haven't been this creeped out since The Men Who Stare at Goats!" This video asks the question "Can you go corporate without losing your soul?” It explores some of the advertising and influence industry's giants through the lens of the greatest persuader of them all; P.T. Barnum. As it turns out he never said, "There is a sucker born every minute". Hear why you think he did, hear how Joan Jett's career was launched by the man [Howard Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History] who launched it, hear from the creator of the Marlboro man and from the greatest pitchman alive today as well as one of the greatest Texas hold'em players to sit at the poker table. These men have been in the business for decades and have learned valuable things about creating perceptions to turn a profit. |
| Greenwald: "Jane Harman: Angry, partisan, civil liberties extremist" Posted: 22 Apr 2009 10:59 AM PDT  Rep. Jane Harman (D-California) thinks warrantless wiretaps are swell. Now she is upset that the government eavesdropped on her private conversations. I guess she must be mad that they used a warrant. From Salon's Glenn Greenwald: So if I understand this correctly -- and I'm pretty sure I do -- when the U.S. Government eavesdropped for years on American citizens with no warrants and in violation of the law, that was "both legal and necessary" as well as "essential to U.S. national security," and it was the "despicable" whistle-blowers (such as Thomas Tamm) who disclosed that crime and the newspapers which reported it who should have been criminally investigated, but not the lawbreaking government officials. But when the U.S. Government legally and with warrants eavesdrops on Jane Harman, that is an outrageous invasion of privacy and a violent assault on her rights as an American citizen, and full-scale investigations must be commenced immediately to get to the bottom of this abuse of power. Behold Jane Harman's overnight transformation from Very Serious Champion of the Lawless Surveillance State to shrill civil liberties extremist.Jane Harman: Angry, partisan, civil liberties extremist |
| Posted: 22 Apr 2009 10:39 AM PDT  Mike Pusateri shows how he made bacon from pork belly. The first step is curing the pork belly with a dry cure of salt, sugar, and pink salt (sodium nitrite). The main purpose of the cure is to prevent any bacterial growth on the meat and draw out some water.Homemade bacon |
A man in a UAE police uniform is seen on the tape tying the victim's arms and legs, and later holding him down as the Sheikh pours salt on the man's wounds and then drives over him with his Mercedes SUV. 
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