The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Bizzare Driving School Mural
- Phonevision: on-demand movies for $1!
- Hammer as "cure" for constipation?
- Apple's new Final Cut Studio is out (short version: I am impressed).
- 2009 Gathering Of The Juggalos Infomercial
- Keni Lee Burgess plays ""Judge Harsh Blues" on cigar box guitar
- Living things glow with visible light
- Dead Goat Polo Arcade Game
- Ellie Frazetta, R.I.P.
- Tom Hanks trash can
- Professor Solomon's Flying Saucer Travel Tips
- Trompe-l'œil video projection on building facade
- Fluorescent microscopy using a cellphone and lenses
- Baseball pitching and batting robots
- Sex Education for the mentally handicapped
- Recently on Offworld: Left 4 Dead again, Catan on iPhone, One Man Rock Band
- Artist Heidi Cody and her grocery store mascot mutiny
- Ask Google to guarantee privacy for the future of reading
- Homemade AT-AT loft bed
- Ronald Raydon Stories
| Posted: 24 Jul 2009 11:38 PM PDT Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap. Normally, the sign for a driving school isn't the sort of thing that haunts your mind, drawing you deeper and deeper into its depths, trying to puzzle out a narrative from its teasingly specific set of clues. A muffler shop, maybe, but not a driving school. Except this one, on Venice Blvd. in Los Angeles. I'm not sure of the name, or really anything about the driving school, except that they have a wonderfully bizzare mural:  So let's look at what we have here: two figures in a car that resembles a Goggomobil Dart, license plate reading "K.D.S.", which I think must stand for Ksomething Driving School. The passenger, based on his careful rendering, is likely the owner of the school, and is pointing a solid-looking hand forward. The other hand clutches a burning torch, the property of Lady Liberty, taking time off from her wretched refuse welcoming duties to come down to LA and learn how to drive. The pair of Asian entrepeneur and colossal bronze woman are speeding down on what appears to be a giant French flag that curves in from beyond the horizon. The beach is to one side, both Hollywood and the World Trade Center (?) recede behind them, and on the ochre highway next to them, Uncle Sam waves a hapless wave from a convertible, vainly trying to keep up. The treatment of the car's headlights also suggest a possible mechanical Sentience. Hot damn. That's a mural. |
| Phonevision: on-demand movies for $1! Posted: 24 Jul 2009 09:59 PM PDT An ambitious effort to arrange a financially happy marriage between TV and Hollywood, Phonevision gives TV set owners a chance to order movies by telephone, at $1 each. Once the order is placed, a simple gadget attached to the TV set and connected to the home telephone unscrambles the movie on the TV screen. Hollywood collects its profit and the set owner is charged on his telephone bill. Last fall Hollywood released for the Chicago test more than 90 films made during the past three or four years.The above was from Time magazine, January 8, 1951. Radio: Phonevision |
| Hammer as "cure" for constipation? Posted: 24 Jul 2009 06:01 PM PDT Viorel Firoiu, 48, of Romania claims that it was constipation that lead him to get two hammerheads stuck in his rectum. (Sure that was the reason.) Doctors had to surgically remove the two items. From Austrian Times: "Heavy metal cure for constipation" Previously:
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| Apple's new Final Cut Studio is out (short version: I am impressed). Posted: 24 Jul 2009 03:19 PM PDT  Bottom line: normally I wouldn't be so jazzed about an application update, but as someone who's spent the better part of the last two years working on web video production, this struck me and other web video grunts in the room as "workflow-changing" (some said "life-changing!") and a nice big leap forward. One of the editor/producer/shooters in the room said he could see these improvements shaving "a total of three months" off of every work-year, in saved man-hours. That's one way to look at it, and another, from a somewhat more workaholic person in the room: "We'll be able to get so much more video produced." A quick recap of significant feature changes, after the jump. On Thursday, July 24, Apple announced the release of Final Cut Studio 3 which includes the following components: Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, Soundtrack Pro 3, Color 1.5 and Compressor 3.5. Here's what I found most significant during the demo: * Exporting the finished product is much easier. You no longer have to output from FCP, then open and output again in Compressor before uploading to YouTube, Vimeo, or whatever web video hosting service you use (in Boing Boing Video's case, Episodic). A new "share" option within FCP includes pre-set export options for YouTube, Mobile Me, and iPods and iPhones, and you can easily add your own pre-sets from Compressor. You can even publish right to the web from FCP now. And... * This is huge! While you're exporting, you can KEEP ON EDITING. Editors: say goodbye to those excuses for long smoking breaks during export. * This is huge, too! iChat Theater support. So, let's say you've finished editing a rough cut of an episode, and you need to preview that with your supervising producer on the other side of the country, to get notes. Fire up iChat, and send your FCP video to iChat Theater, and you'll be able to watch the video with your two-way, person-to-person video chat inset in a small window in the lower right. I'm not sure what the limit on participant number is, but theoretically, you should be able to do this with up to 4 people iChatting in, if memory serves (and you have enough bandwidth). * New versions of Apple's "ProRes" codec are offered, including one intended for higher-res digital motion picture output, and two at the lower end of the spectrum which could be particularly helpful for folks editing for broadcast or web on MacBook pros. * You can color-code markers now. This is neat, and helpful if lots of different editors are touching a given project and you want to keep track of everyone's individual edits. * There's a new floating, resizable timecode window. So if you're the editor, and you need to have a preview session with a client or producer or whatever, they can easily see the timecode progress while you preview a rough cut together. * Multi-touch gesture support, which is nice if you're editing on a late-model MBP. * The feature that elicited the most "OMGs" in the room was a new dialogue level matching option. Allows you to quickly, automatically, intelligently match levels on separate snippets of dialogue, without increasing the levels of noise or non-dialogue sound sources. You can save levels and use them as standards in future projects. This saves a TON of time on a frequent issue that crops up for low-budget web productions that can't afford to hire sound guys for every field shoot. This was a big deal for a lot of us. * Cool new visual editing interface for fine-tuning audio. * Helpful new improvements to the time-stretching abilities in Soundtrack Pro. MOTION, COLOR, DVD STUDIO, COMPRESSOR * We don't use these tools as heavily every day on Boing Boing Video as we do the aforementioned Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack Pro. But the bullet points from these demos that struck me as significant: powerful, less-intimidating 3D tools in Motion that allow you to create motion, shadow, and light effects; the ability to dump text files and create credit and title sequences more easily (I hate the old text editor!). And DVD Compressor now allows you to author blu-ray equivalent discs using the standard red-laser burners that come standard issue, and cheap standard 99-cent-per-blank-disc DVDs. Compressor includes a number of iterative improvements, but the thing I was most excited about was not having to actually open this damned app every day anymore. More on all the features at Apple's Final Cut Studio website. |
| 2009 Gathering Of The Juggalos Infomercial Posted: 24 Jul 2009 12:39 PM PDT Irwin Chusid called this promo video for fans of Insane Clown Posse and other bands of its ilk, "14 minutes of the world's worst fonts." |
| Keni Lee Burgess plays ""Judge Harsh Blues" on cigar box guitar Posted: 24 Jul 2009 11:51 AM PDT Keni Lee Burgess plays Furry Lewis' "Judge Harsh Blues" on his 3-string cigar box guitar. |
| Living things glow with visible light Posted: 24 Jul 2009 12:44 PM PDT  Japanese scientist have shown how the human body glows with visible light. The quantity of light emitted is 1000 times too dim for our eyes to see, but the researchers imaged the glow with special cameras. The light is tied to metabolism, suggesting that measuring it could have medical applications, says Tohoku Institute of Technology scientist Masaki Kobayashi. Meanwhile, New Age aura-seers everywhere scream with "vindication." From LiveScience: In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals."Strange! Humans Glow in Visible Light" (Thanks, Marina Gorbis!) |
| Posted: 24 Jul 2009 01:52 PM PDT Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.  Some of you may have seen the amazing Soviet Arcade Machines Museum; this is up that same socialist alley: I started out trying to import a Polski Fiat from Poland, and somehow ended up with this: an old, beaten Ulak-Tartysh video game. Ulak-Tartysh, for those of you not familiar with carcass-based sports, is essentially polo played with the headless body of a dead goat. It's popular in Central Asia, and especially in Kyrgyzstan, which is where this fascinating game hails from. This one appears to have been built in 1983, at some state-run electronics factory in the city of Mailuu-Suu. The coin slots say "15 Kopeks," but I think at that time all the USSR satellite states used that denomination. I'm a big fan of 8-bit era games, and this sample from behind the Iron Curtain is especially fascinating. It's based on what appears to be a KR1858VM1 chip, which was a copy of the Z80. Most of the other chips are TTL logic ones, with very little large-scale integration. The video seems to be about 148x116 (?) with what I think are 8 colors. The graphics have that really satisfying gigantic-pixel look, but I think are pretty nicely rendered, considering.  I got it here as a strange sort of compensation when a warehouse owner in Poland was unable to ship the Fiat like we had agreed; apparently, this machine was just sitting, forgotten, in a corner of the warehouse. To restore it, I cleaned up the case, and replaced the power supply system with a cobbled-together 110V unit, from the 220V it originally had. I've made repairs, and had to replace the screen/CRT, but beyond that it's as I got it. I left the case in its battered state, but the marquee cleaned up surprisingly well. I'm not sure of what all the words mean, but via an online Kyrgz dictionary, it seems the TAPT button means "grab" or something similar, and I think it says "GOOD!" (pronounced "Djackshi?) when you get a goal.  It was on display at the last i am 8 bit art show here in LA, and it proved itself to be a playable, if not too exciting, game. MyTarpit posted a bit more about it here, and, more excitingly, there should be a BoingBoingVideo segment featuring it on its way soon. |
| Posted: 24 Jul 2009 11:20 AM PDT  Sad news: Ellie Frazetta, the wife, muse, and model for Frank Frazetta, recently passed away. The following comment at Golden Age Comic Book Stories is amazing: On Saturday the 18th, me, my wife and my mother-in-law were in East Stroudsburg, PA, on vacation from San Diego, CA for the purpose of visiting the Frazetta Museum. When we got there, we met another couple also there for that purpose, who broke the terrible news to us. While standing there talking, Frank Frazetta himself came out of his house, and insisted on showing us the museum, while waving away our condolences. However, he could not find the key, so he then invited us into his home! We were in Frazetta's livingroom/studio, talking to The Master, and to his son, for more than an hour or so. It is a very good thing to know that someone who's been your hero for all your life is truly a gracious, down to earth, humble and generous person in real life. Our hearts, thoughts and prayers go out to him, his family and friends. Thanks also to you for the posting of so much of his work, and this post in particular, of his beloved and beautiful wife, Ellie.Ellie Frazetta, R.I.P. Previously: |
| Posted: 24 Jul 2009 11:08 AM PDT |
| Professor Solomon's Flying Saucer Travel Tips Posted: 24 Jul 2009 10:24 AM PDT "Amateur" Professor Solomon, a "findologist" and author of the fantastic book How To Find Lost Objects, has a new free e-booklet available and it's a hoot. Unless, of course, you take it seriously, in which case it might be incredibly useful. "Flying Saucer Travel Tips: How To Optimize Your Ride In A UFO" is 27 pages, illustrated, and available as a PDF from the delightful Professor's site. Also free: "Can I Smoke Aboard A Flying Saucer? Questions and Answers about UFOs." From Flying Saucer Travel Tips: Flying Saucer Travel Tips |
| Trompe-l'œil video projection on building facade Posted: 24 Jul 2009 10:15 AM PDT Urban Screen's mesmerizing building facade video: "How it would be, if a house was dreaming." (Via Dangerous Minds) |
| Fluorescent microscopy using a cellphone and lenses Posted: 24 Jul 2009 10:07 AM PDT   UC Berkeley researchers have built a cell phone microscope capable of imaging malaria parasites, tuberculosis bacteria, and other bugs. The CellScope consists of compact microscope lenses attached to the phone's camera. Most impressive is the device's ability to do fluorescent microscopy. The researchers showed that the TB bacteria could be automatically counted using image analysis software."UC Berkeley researchers bring fluorescent imaging to mobile phones for low-cost screening in the field" |
| Baseball pitching and batting robots Posted: 24 Jul 2009 09:53 AM PDT Pink Tentacle posted this video of a robotic baseball pitcher and batter. The robot pitcher consists of a high-speed, three-fingered hand (developed by professor Masatoshi Ishikawa and his team from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology) mounted on a mechanical arm (developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). With superb control of nimble fingers that can open and close at a rate of up to 10 times per second, the robot can release the ball with perfect timing. Precise coordination between the fingers, hand and arm allow the robot pitcher to hit the strike zone 90% of the time.Video: Robot baseball |
| Sex Education for the mentally handicapped Posted: 24 Jul 2009 09:54 AM PDT Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine. My friend Skip, who runs the AV Geeks sections at Archive.org, has collected a ton of vintage educational films. The ABC of Sex Education for Trainables is a thoughtful, fascinating look at how social workers in the 1970s taught the mentally handicapped about sex. Skip's DVD collections--focused on everything from venereal disease to ecology to nutrition and propaganda--are very much worth your while. |
| Recently on Offworld: Left 4 Dead again, Catan on iPhone, One Man Rock Band Posted: 24 Jul 2009 08:43 AM PDT  Recently on Offworld we saw a bit more news trickle out of the ongoing Comic-Con, most notably new media and information on Left 4 Dead 2, with a gallery of new screenshots, on-the-floor video of its bayou-terror in action, and a new boss monster, whose get-up serves as a strict warning to everyone: when you dress yourself in the morning, please take note that this outfit could possibly be the one in which you spend eternity as a reanimated corpse. (Note: new star Rochelle understands this, as she shows up in style donning the electroclash Depeche Mode T-shirt above.) We also saw newly revealed features coming to Q-Games' decidedly old-school inspired PixelJunk Shooter, and a demonstration of its fluid- and thermo-dynamics, and discovered that -- finally! -- an official version of gold star board game Settlers of Catan is being developed for the iPhone. Finally, we saw Plants Vs. Zombies confirmed for the Xbox 360, Katamari Damacy's King of All Cosmos bringing his aloof and royally pluralized inanity to Twitter (and with it, a fantastic repurpose-able desktop background), and watched what happens when you try to play all four instruments at once as a One Man Rock Band. And our 'one shot's for the day: gorgeously illustrated Mario deaths, and retro-future Pac-Man/Space Invaders in automotive form. |
| Artist Heidi Cody and her grocery store mascot mutiny Posted: 24 Jul 2009 02:05 PM PDT Artist Heidi Cody makes all kinds of crazy work using corporate mascots and scenes of nature as portrayed on grocery store packaging. With collaborator Pete Beeman, she currently has this large kinetic sculpture (below) showing at the LAB Gallery in New York (47th & Lexington) through July 31. In Ad Nauseam, I wrote about how her work illustrates the extent to which consumer culture has become our natural environment. We can identify corporate logos by the tiniest fragment, but can barely name a single plant or tree native to our neighborhoods. |
| Ask Google to guarantee privacy for the future of reading Posted: 23 Jul 2009 10:35 PM PDT Hugh from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, I have some misgivings about the Google Book Search settlement, mostly to do with the fact that a settlement means that Google won't litigate the fair use question of whether making a copy of a work in order to create a search engine infringes copyright. Those misgivings don't trump my delight at the idea of guaranteeing public access to all these books, and the restoration of orphan books to public hands. But the issue of privacy is much more grave. I want Google to create a binding, written agreement to hold readers' information private, so that the future of reading doesn't include the possibility of warrantless spying on your book-reading activity. For complex legal reasons, it's unlikely that anyone will ever be in a position to give Google a settlement permitting this again, so this is it. The status quo Google sets will be the one that we end up living with for the foreseeable future. |
| Posted: 24 Jul 2009 05:29 AM PDT This video documents the creation of a fabulous homemade Star Wars AT-AT walker loft bed, built by a father for his son. It's made from everyday, easy-to-source materials and includes a hide-hole loft (in the AT-AT's body) with trap-door access. This fills me with feelings of fatherly inadequacy and makes me start plotting something equally elaborate for Poesy once she's big enough to enjoy a trap door. Star Wars Imperial Walker Loft Bed (Thanks, Stagueve! Previously: |
| Posted: 24 Jul 2009 10:47 AM PDT Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap. On my way to my neighborhood auto parts store one morning, I saw a diminutive, shabby, bearded man standing by the side of the road with an armload of papers. As I approached, I saw a sign: "$1 Stories." Excited, I fished a dollar out from my pants somewhere and handed it to him out the window; I think he fanned out his stack of stories to let me pick, but he may have just handed me one at random. I can't really remember, and it doesn't matter, since so far everything I've read of his has been great in its own odd way.  UPDATE! I've reduced the posted story to just an excerpt; I was going back and forth about it, but enough well-meaning killjoys in the comments pointed out that as a copyrighted story, there were issues in posting it all online, especially since the donation I suggested went to the homeless shelter as opposed to the author directly, who is still unreachable. I'll keep trying to find him, and if I can hunt him down and get his ok, I'll put the whole thing back up, and possibly some more. Still, I encourage everyone to read the excerpt and donate to the LA Midnight mission, and I promise to reflect on what a monster I am. Thanks! I've only seen him out there a few times, and each time I make sure to buy a story. The stories all have hand-illustrated covers, and appear to be written on an old typewriter and Xeroxed. The selection of stories is usually a bit weighted to the science-fiction side, with a good helping of mystery and adventure. He has at least one recurring character, Joe Cotton, of his Joe Cotton mysteries. The author, Ronald Raydon, is a homeless man, and the only contact information included on the stories is an address for the Midnight Mission shelter in downtown Los Angeles. I've tried to hunt him down, but so far without luck. I'd like more people to know about his charming, funny, bizarre stories, but I'd like him to get paid for his work, just like he would if you happen to be lucky enough to find him on an LA street. So here's what I'm going to do: I've scanned and put up one of his stories on Flickr, A Crime in Time: Wise Guys Steal a Time Machine! (which is as good as it sounds; the main character is Paul Klee, which I think should give some clue about what sort of man Ronald Raydon is). What I'd ask is that if you read the story, please donate $1 to the Los Angeles Midnight Mission, since that's the only known address I have for Ronald Raydon. If I can get ahold of him more directly, I'll set up a PayPal account just for him, but until then, I think this could work out well. If anyone out there knows Ronald Raydon, or knows how to find him, please let me know, as I'd love to be able to get him his story-profits directly. Enjoy! |
Dr Cristina Bontescu, spokeswoman for the local hospital where he turned up at the emergency unit, said: "He was a bit drunk and said he had been eating cherries that had left him badly constipated. He said he had a few drinks to dull the pain and then came up with the idea of poking a hammerhead up his backside in the hope of sorting out the constipation. "But the hammerhead got stuck and then he came up with the idea of using a second hammerhead in order to try and get out the first - but then he lost the second one as well."
5. The Space People can help you develop your psychic powers. If you're serious about it, and willing to make the effort, you can learn ESP, clairvoyance, or spoon-bending. Just let them know you're interested. * 
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