Friday, December 11, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Cinch Seat: handsome flat-pack portable booster chair

Posted: 11 Dec 2009 03:37 AM PST

Inventor Adam Kay sent me one of his flat-pack "Cinch Seat" kids' booster chairs to play with. The Cinch Seat comes as four pieces of composite wood-board with a white, hard-wearing eggshell veneer, laser-cut so that all four pieces can be quickly slotted together to form a secure and very pretty booster-chair. A set of nylon straps threaded through the seat board keep the kid safe and also securely affix the seat to a regular chair. It's very quick to assemble and disassemble the seat, and the extremely clever design lets the chair sit at one of two different heights, depending on how you put it together. It's altogether one of the handsomest and cleverest baby-gadgets I've tried.

That said, I have a few caveats. At £57.50, I think it's pricey, especially given the use-case for this as a portable chair you can keep in the car or under the stroller for those times you're out and about at a restaurant or relative's place. I can see paying a small premium to have a really beautiful piece of furniture for home use, but I don't see shelling out to ensure that my kid's chair doesn't clash with the restaurant's decor for the hour we're having lunch there. The composite wood is extremely sturdy and lovely besides, but it's heavy, especially relative to equally hard-wearing (and much cheaper) plastics. Again, the weight isn't a big deal if this is meant to be a permanent home seat, but as a portable seat, every gram counts. Finally, the first-time assembly, during which all the straps have to be threaded through various slots on the seat, is fiddly and confusing. You only have to do this once, but at nearly £60, I'd expect the thing to come ready for use.

Conceptually, the Cinch Seat is fantastic, and I love the idea of making kids' furniture and gadgets out of simple materials with an eye for good design. If price is no object, the Cinch Seat is a great idea -- if I were running an upscale restaurant, I'd certainly consider buying a couple of them.

Cinch Seat (Thanks, Adam!)

Update: Adam adds, "I know it's expensive for a portable booster so I'm happy for you to offer a discount to your readers if anyone orders one before christmas day. I'll reduce it to £50. They just have to let me know they saw it on your site."

Previously:


Video from Mad Max campout weekend

Posted: 11 Dec 2009 02:05 AM PST

Last month, I blogged about a group of Mad Max superfan cosplayers who hied themselves out to the desert in a variety of amazing vehicles (including a flying one-person chopper!) and costumes and spent the weekend playing at apocalypse. The event's organizer, DJ Wolfie, has put together a (mildly NSFW) video of highlights from the weekend.

Road Warrior Weekend Dj Wolfie

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Just look at this awesome EU banana curvature regulation.

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 02:05 AM PST

Just look at it.

Commission Regulation (EC) No 2257/94 of 16 September 1994 laying down quality standards for bananas (as amended)

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Nanoscale snowman

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 11:36 PM PST

Simon sez, "David Cox at the UK National Physical Laboratory has created this snowman, which is ~20µm high."

The snowman was made from two tin beads used to calibrate electron microscope astigmatism. The eyes and smile were milled using a focused ion beam, and the nose, which is under 1 µm wide (or 0.001 mm), is ion beam deposited platinum.

A nanomanipulation system was used to assemble the parts 'by hand' and platinum deposition was used to weld all elements together. The snowman is mounted on a silicon cantilever from an atomic force microscope whose sharp tip 'feels' surfaces creating topographic surveys at almost atomic scales.

Christmas 2009 : Educate + Explore : National Physical Laboratory (Thanks, Simon!)
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Organizations: sign onto letter opposing secret copyright treaty!

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 10:25 PM PST

French activist Jérémie Zimmerman sez,
A worldwide coalition of Non-Governmental Organizations, consumers unions and online service providers associations publish an open letter to the European institutions regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) currently under negotiation. They call on the European Parliament and the EU negotiators to oppose any provision into the multilateral agreement that would undermine the fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens in Europe and across the world.

By December 17th, 2009, European negotiators will submit their position regarding the proposal put forward by the U.S Trade Representative for the Internet chapter of the ACTA. It is now time for the European Union to firmly oppose the dangerous measures secretly being negotiated. They cover not only "three strikes" schemes, but also include Internet service providers liability that would result in Internet filtering, and dispositions undermining interoperability and usability of digitial music and films.

The first signatories of the open letter include: Consumers International (world federation of 220 consumer groups in 115 countries), EDRi (27 European civil rights and privacy NGOs), the Free Software Foundation v(FSF), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), ASIC (French trade association for web2.0 companies), and civil liberties organizations from all around Europe (9 Member States so far...). The letter is open for signature by other organizations.

ACTA: A Global Threat to Freedoms (Open Letter) (Thanks, Jérémie!)
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Steampunk pewter coat-buttons cast from old watches

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 10:23 PM PST

eBay seller Treasure Cast makes pewter coat-buttons cast from the guts of old mechanical watches, a lovely idea.

SteamPunk Buttons - FIVE Steampunk Watch Buttons 1066 (Thanks, Liz!)

Goldman Sachs bankers aren't going armed after all

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 10:18 PM PST

A couple weeks ago, I blogged a Bloomberg column by Alice Schroeder that alleged that Goldman Sachs bankers were buying handguns to protect themselves from peasant uprisings. The Wall Street Journal has investigated the claim, and they think it's bogus:
New York police spokesman Paul J. Browne says that their records show only four Goldman employees have applied for gun permits in recent years -- and the last application was made in 2003. That application, by the firm's head of security for a "carry permit", was granted. The only other employee granted a NYPD carry permit" is a building security guard. It was issued prior to 2003, said a police spokesman. Those applying for a permit must list their employer.

Two Goldman employees have residential permits, allowing them to have guns in their homes. The last of these permits was issued in 2001, Browne said. One of the permits was issued to a trader and the other was given to a graphic designer.

"We haven't seen a surge of applications of any kind for Goldman Sachs employees," said Browne.

Are Goldman Sachs Bankers Really Carrying Guns? (Thanks, Waldo!)

Blackwater and the CIA: "brotherly" love

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 08:12 PM PST

An epic bromance. "It became a very brotherly relationship. There was a feeling that Blackwater eventually became an extension of the agency." —Former top CIA officer, on revelations that the private security firm now known as "Xe" had deeper ties to America's spy agency than previously known. Services included clandestine raids and secret transport of detainees.

Walt Disney's grandson busted for gun possession

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 07:23 PM PST

More spawn behaving badly! Walt Disney's grandson busted for gun possession. You can't own guns in California if you are a felon, and reports say he is a felon (though no reports have specified what flavor).

Frazetta's son busted for trying to steal his father's art

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 06:27 PM PST

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Police report that Alfonso Frank Frazetta (above) was caught red handed stealing 90 of his famous father's paintings. They said he and an accomplice had broken into the Frank Frazetta museum in rural Pennsylvania and were loading the paintings, worth $20 million, into a trailer.

Alfonso, 52, told the police his father had instructed him to "enter the museum by any means necessary to move all the paintings to a storage facility." But Frazetta, who is 81 and was in Florida at the time of the alleged theft said he did not give his son permission to remove the paintings from the museum. (Thanks, Antinous!)

Previously:


Alphabet updated with new letters

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 04:00 PM PST

Very young kid is a great ukulele player

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 03:12 PM PST


He barely knows how to talk yet, but he's already a better ukulele player than I'll ever be. (Thanks, Gabe!)

Medical marijuana restaurant opens in Denver

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 02:45 PM PST

A medical marijuana dispensary in Denver is taking a fun new approach to distributing pot — it's marketing itself as a restaurant. Called Ganja Gourmet, it has a full menu of international dishes — lasagna, pizza, paella, jambalaya — made with medical marijuana. The waiters are all dressed in tie-dye and they offer free rides home to people who are too high to drive after their meals.

Rick Warren does the right thing

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 01:26 PM PST

Rick Warren has officially come out against the proposed laws in Uganda that would make homosexuality a crime, punishable by death in some cases. In an open letter to the pastors of Uganda (with whom Warren has a great deal of influence from his missionary work) the American mega-pastor says,

As an American pastor, it is not my role to interfere with the politics of other nations, but it IS my role to speak out on moral issues ... the potential law is unjust, extreme and un-Christian toward homosexuals, requiring the death penalty in some cases. If I am reading the proposed bill correctly, this law would also imprison anyone convicted of homosexual practice ... I urge you, the pastors of Uganda, to speak out against the proposed law.

Obviously, Warren holds (and reiterates in the letter) beliefs about sex and about queer men and women with which I thoroughly disagree. But I want to thank him for doing the right thing here, for putting his influence and power to use to save the lives of innocent people. Hopefully, Warren's letter will make a difference.

Rick Warren: Letter to the Pastors of Uganda

Previously:


Sustainability on ice

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 12:48 PM PST

Want to make your diet more sustainable? Buy your fish frozen, not fresh. Researchers studied the ecological impact of salmon and found that, "the questions of organic versus conventional and wild versus farmed matter less than whether the fish is frozen or fresh. In many cases, fresh salmon has about twice the environmental impact as frozen salmon." (Via New York Times)

Sneak peek at Audrey Kawasaki's upcoming Hajimari show

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 12:24 PM PST

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Artist Audrey Kawasaki posted a bunch of photos of her in-progress paintings, which will be unveiled at her Hajimari solo show at Jonathan Levine Gallery in NY this coming Saturday.

Sneak peek at Audrey Kawasaki's upcoming Hajimari show


Previously:

Ukrainian student killed by exploding chewing gum

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 11:44 AM PST

A 25-year-old chemistry student died when he chewed chemically treated gum that exploded and blew off part of his face.

Are you ready for the TSA to ban chewing gum?

"A loud pop was heard from the student's room," the ukranews.com portal said, citing an aide to the city's police chief. "When his relatives entered the room they saw that the lower part of the young man's face had been blown off."

A forensic examination established that the chewing gum was covered with an unidentified chemical substance, thought to be some type of explosive material.

Police questioning revealed that the student had a bizarre habit of chewing gum after dunking it into citric acid. On his table, police found both citric acid packets and a similar-looking unidentified substance, believed to be some kind of explosive material.

Ukrainian student killed by exploding chewing gum (Via Arbroath)

Eurovision 1971: Woman Freezes Mid-Applause

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 12:24 PM PST

Rhythmic Truth to Power: RIP Luis "Terror" Días, 1952-2009

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 11:22 AM PST

(Boing Boing guestblogger Ned Sublette is a writer, historian, photographer, and singer-songwriter based in New York. His latest book: The Year Before The Flood.)

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"Singer/songwriter/guitarist, musical anthropologist, and one of rock and roll's pioneering forces in the Dominican Republic, Luis Días, passed away from a heart attack and other health-related complications on the morning of Dec. 8th, in Santo Domingo."

That's from an obit at Kiko Jones's blog, written by someone who knew Luis Días and felt what he was about.

I borrowed the photo from writer-photographer Eliseo Cardona's fine music blog Blue Monk, which also has an appreciation of Luis's life and work.

In the Santo Domingo daily paper 7 Días, Alfonso Torres writes a eulogy (in Spanish):

Nadie como él desafió la muerte, la noche terrorífica del último cuarto del siglo 20 dominicano, con su lírica estremecedora, su irreverencia, sus acordes exóticos tan lejanos y tan cercanos de nuestra cultura popular.

Which I crudely translate to (though I have to repunctuate):

Nobody could defy death—the terrorific night of the last quarter of the 20th century in the Dominican Republic - like him, with his shake-you-up lyrics, his irreverence, his exotic chords so far away from and so close to our popular culture.

Luis Días was a folklorist, albeit an unorthodox one, and a Dionysian theorist of his own musical culture. He and his generation had to find a creative cultural response to a national history that still lives in a direct way the consequences of 16th-century Spanish conquest, the 18th-century Haitian Revolution, and 20th-century US clientism. (In 1965, when Días was a teenager, US President Lyndon B. Johnson invaded the country with tens of thousands of troops and blockaded it with the US Navy to keep the Dominican government right-wing so that it wouldn't become "another Cuba.")

Días not only spoke truth to power, he spoke Dominican truth to Dominican power. To understand his importance fully, you have to know something about the insults endured by Dominican music.

Rafael Trujillo, who from 1930 until he was assassinated on May 30, 1961 was "the dictatingest dictator who ever dictated" (Junot Díaz's Pulitzer-winning words), unsubtly imposed on the country a musical monoculture of one strain of Dominican music that he favored, along with a murderously racist anti-Haitian ideology that demonized the republic's hardest-laboring class, to say nothing of his near-total disinterest in educating children. Moreover, because Trujillo's brother owned the radio broadcasting industry and didn't want competition from records, there was almost no recording of Dominican music for thirty years—three decades of music, wiped out of history. (This story is told in Deborah Pacini Hernández's Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music.) So the fact that Luis Días was a student and connoisseur of the diverse unrecorded, under-researched musics of his land — a precious, neglected cultural legacy — was a case of speaking rhythmic truth to power.

After Trujillo was assassinated, the music called bachata began to be heard. Días was at the head of a new songwriting movement that valorized this romantic but realist guitar-driven music of the Dominican underclass. He was at the cutting edge of a brilliant Dominican artistic generation in the years preceding the megasuccess of Juan Luis Guerra (who titled one of his albums Areíto, something Días had done eight years before; areíto was the indigenous form of music of the Taínos). His rock band, Transporte Urbano (urban transport), is often credited as the beginning of a Dominican rock movement. His megahit, "El Carnaval," first recorded with his great interpreter Sonia Silvestre, became a street-and-stadium anthem in 1985 as sung by Fernando Villalona; with its simple, impossibly catchy refrain of "Baila en las calles de noche, baila en las calles de día," it's a carnival perennial 25 years later.

His Dominican colleagues, including Silvestre, Guerra, Sergio Vargas, and Víctor Víctor, remember him (in Spanish) at hoy.com.do

Luis Días was the kind of person about whom everyone has a story. My friend Henry Mena is a songwriting Dominican rocker in New York and leader of the band La Ruta, which in summer 2009 played a short set of Días's Transporte Urbano classics as a birthday present to him at New York's Quisqueya on the Hudson Festival. Henry recalled a hang with Luis:

"One afternoon I dropped in on Luis at his and then-wife Laura's apartment in Manhattan's Stuyvesant Town. He confessed not having more than $5 on him but, regardless, asked me to accompany him to get a six-pack and spend the afternoon listening to Soundgarden. As we made our way back to his place form the corner bodega, he noticed the mail had arrived and with it, a check for a few hundred bucks: airplay royalties from "Carnaval (Baila en la Calle)".


Sweet!


"But the best part came a few hours later: between beers, 'Superunknown,' and tales from his days working with Dominican record producer/music biz impresario Cholo Brenes—'I've got a smash for you, Cholo. A hit. Send the messenger with the money, so I can send you back the cassette,' and then after hanging up with Brenes, he'd proceed to hurriedly write the promised winning song, heh heh. Invariably, Brenes would excitedly call back a short time later: 'Damn, Luis! What a song!' heh heh—ASCAP called asking if he'd stop by or would he prefer they mail him a royalty check for $2,000+ he'd earned from 'Si He de Morir,' which Luis had contributed to Marc Anthony's debut salsa album.'Man, you're my lucky charm!' he said to me. And so, we rushed uptown to get that loot."


I said to Henry, what makes this story perfect is the listening-to-Soundgarden part. He answered, "The man loved his rock and roll, Ned."

[PHOTO: Eliseo Cardona]

Previously:


EFF/XKCD shirt

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 11:04 AM PST

It's not easy being (a) Green (Revolutionary)

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 10:04 AM PST

Kermit the Frog joins Minnesota Public Radio's "In the Loop" to sing a song in support of Iran's Green Revolution protests, which have had a resurgence over the last couple of days.

New Science Scout badges

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 09:08 AM PST


David Ng from the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique sez, "Just a heads up that we have some new science scout badges up, including a number that revolve around programming geekiness, one that focuses on science-y art, and a badge all about science dystopias (with sage advice from an expert in the area no less)."

Increasing the N! (Thanks, David!)

Previously:


The Miracle of Decay

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 09:05 AM PST

Gizmodo's Joel Johnson, "back on active nerdy," reviews the NatureMill Pro XE Composter. It represents the "miracle of decay at home," he writes, and works very well.

The Year Before The Flood: Chapter One excerpt (text and audio)

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 08:50 AM PST

(Boing Boing guestblogger Ned Sublette is a writer, historian, photographer, and singer-songwriter based in New York. Embedded audio in this post: Ned reads an excerpt from chapter one of his latest book, The Year Before The Flood, live at Joe's Pub in New York City. After the jump, the full text of that chapter, republished in entirety here on Boing Boing.)

TYBTF_cover.jpg

New Orleans is a subjective town that demands a point of view. Depending on where you're coming from, you have a different vision of the city. So I felt it was necessary to tell people where I was coming from, so to speak, before I could tell my story of New Orleans.

I'm not from New Orleans, but I lived in Louisiana until I was nine years old--in Natchitoches, Louisiana, which is 282 miles northwest of New Orleans and four years older, the first town the French founded in what later became the Louisiana Purchase. That was back in the bad old days, the 1950s. In August 1960 (just before the desegregation battle erupted in New Orleans) we moved away, to El Paso. I never lived in Louisiana again, until 2004, when I was fifty-three. Returning to Louisiana all those years later, I was a kind of insider / outsider. As I tried to learn the ropes of living in New Orleans, all kinds of long-buried fragmentary memories came surging forward. Like, I already knew what it meant for a deliveryman to leave a package "under the house," because the houses are raised up off the ground. And no one had to explain to me about southern racism, because I went to a segregated school.

The main body of The Year Before The Flood is Part Two, which tells the story of our year in New Orleans. But there's a shorter Part One, a childhood memoir that explains what I was bringing to my New Orleans experience. Here's an excerpt from the first chapter of the book, which is called "Jump Jim Crow." If you want to listen along while you read, here's a clip of me reading it at Joe's Pub on November 20.

THE YEAR BEFORE THE FLOOD: CHAPTER ONE
(MP4 audio link)


Even in slavery days, "white" and "black" children might have personal contact, but in the South of my childhood we were kept as separate as humanly possible. We literally didn't know each other. I lived until I was nine in an approximately half-black town without ever having any social contact with a black kid. I don't mean I didn't have any as close friends. I mean I never had a single conversation with an African American child. As people say when they talk about those days, that was just the way it was. I can remember having it explained to me that no, their color didn't rub off when they touched things.


The polite way of describing southern society in those days is to say that it was segregated. But it is also fair, if less polite, to say that it was a white supremacist society. The program of the Ku Klux Klan had been implemented. African Americans were overtly, legally, literally second-class citizens.


When Mrs. Harrison asked us if we knew why our school would always remain all white, I hazarded a guess. "Because the Negroes have schools of their own?"


"Yes, they do," she replied, "and they're just as good as ours!"


Bullshit, they were just as good as ours.


She probably believed it. A lot of white people lived in fantasyland. But the push to integrate schools didn't come because black people loved being around white people so much that they wanted to come hang out with them. It was because if there were two separate school systems, the black one would get less of every resource. In 1950, "colored" 1 schools in Shreveport had no electricity, and the students used outhouses.


Which is not to say that no educating took place; African Americans who came up in that system remember heroic teachers. Jerome Smith, born in New Orleans in 1939, told me: "We had the worst books that you can imagine, but we had such dedicated educators that it gave us a kind of readiness... We didn't recognize that [at the time], but in the years that followed, we had a foundation." Not everyone was so lucky, and the deck was stacked against African American children getting an education. Overcrowding was the norm for their schools; the Macarty school in New Orleans's Ninth Ward had 2,536 children in a building designed for 1,200. No wonder Fats Domino dropped out of that school in the fourth grade.


No, Mrs. Harrison explained, the reason Northwestern Elementary would always remain white was that the nuns who deeded it to the state had included that as one of the conditions.


Well, that settled it. The deal had been cut long before we were born.


Our white-forever school was a lovely place. Located on the campus of Northwestern State College, where my dad taught, it had expansive, handsome grounds, with a long, sloping hill that led down toward Lake Chaplin, and big airy classrooms with a piano in every one.


We were raised with the southern ideal of the innocent, indolent child. With its pretensions to aristocracy and perhaps a French aversion to exercise, Louisiana was never big on making kids do calisthenics, so for physical education we played Drop the Handkerchief and singing games. I was what was later called hyperactive--I always had a rhythm, or a rhyme, or a song going on--and visibly bored. The class seemed to work on the alphabet all through the first grade.


My parents, being teachers, had taught me to read and do arithmetic at home, so I was considered a gifted child when I started school. This was surely, presumed my biologist parents, the result of good genes, though I think it was more the amount of attention and care they gave me. It was the era of IQ tests, and I was given batteries of them. When I was seven, in some kind of educational experiment that my parents must have had a hand in promoting, I was placed five grades ahead of my level, into a seventh-grade class, for two weeks. I found I could handle the academics pretty well, not because I was a genius but because they weren't that tough. Socially, however, I wasn't prepared to be in a roomful of seventh-graders all day.


That was the year Attack of the 50 Foot Woman came out--where is this kind of inspiration today, when our cinema needs it?--and I felt myself surrounded by fifty-foot women. There's nothing as mysterious to a seven-year-old boy as a passel of twelve-year-old girls. To further heighten the eroticism of the experience, they had portable transistor radios, and could summon up rock 'n' roll at recess. I could read better than they could, but so what? They had something else going on.


One of my enduring memories of Natchitoches dates from that surreal stint among the giants and giantesses of the seventh grade. The social studies class was instructed to break up into groups and write, and act out, scenes that were to dramatize . . .
A slave auction.


They had us play slave auction in social studies class.


I'm not sure what the purpose of that exercise was. But what it demonstrated for me was that some people lived between the piety of knowing that slavery was bad and the desire of living it once again. It proved something I already knew, even at that age: the white South loved to reminisce about slavery days.


Since I wasn't a bona fide seventh-grader, I was an auditor for this event, not a participant. No one interpreted the slave roles. No one would have wanted to. The slaves were imaginary. One kid, playing the role of an auctioneer, read haltingly from the script he had laboriously written himself:


"I. Don't. Like. To. Break. Up. These. Families," he read.


"But. What. Can. I. Do?


"It's. My. Job."

(c) 2009 Ned Sublette

Auction of psychedelic posters by Joe McHugh

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 08:23 AM PST

wereallmad.jpg joeth.jpg Eleven signed East Totem West posters by psychedelic artist Joe McHugh from the late 1960s are up for auction on eBay as a set. His famed "White Rabbit" poster (detail shown inset) is included. This image was the cover for the book "The White Rabbit and Other Delights." The book documented the East Totem West "hippie business" McHugh founded which produced many iconic, psychoactively-inspired works of poster art during its brief existence. As BB reader scifijazznik says in the comments, the posters make you "wanna take the elevator to the 13th floor (which is eight miles high) and have [your] 19th nervous breakdown while writing the 23rd strawberry letter, which is basically 10,000 words in a cardbord box, man." In closing: duuuuude.

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Stupid DRM, abusive EULAs, hopeless ecommerce: why I'm not even going to try to sell my short story collection audiobook downloads

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 07:20 AM PST

In my latest Publishers Weekly column, I explain why I'm not even going to try to sell downloads of the audiobook of the my forthcoming experimental short story collection, With a Little Help: Apple won't carry it without DRM; Audible won't carry it without an abusive EULA; and all the major digital delivery systems are crufty and needlessly complicated.
For my next book, Makers, we tried again. This time Audible agreed to carry the title without DRM. Hooray! Except now there was a new problem: Apple refused to allow DRM-free audiobooks in the Apple Store--yes, the same Apple that claims to hate DRM. Okay, we thought, we'll just sell direct through Audible, at least it's a relatively painless download process, right? Not quite. It turns out that buying an audiobook from Audible requires a long end-user license agreement (EULA) that bars users from moving their Audible books to any unauthorized device or converting them to other formats. Instead of DRM, they accomplish the lock-in with a contract.

I came up with what I thought was an elegant solution: a benediction to the audio file: "Random House Audio and Cory Doctorow, the copyright holders to this recording, grant you permission to use this book in any way consistent with your nation's copyright laws." This is a good EULA, I thought, as it stands up for every word of copyright law. Random House was game, too. Audible wasn't. So we decided not to sell through Audible, which I was intensely bummed about, because I really like Audible. They have great selection, good prices, and they're kicking ass with audiobooks.

With a Little Help: Can You Hear Me Now?
Previously:


Livescribe Pulse Smartpen: It's a Keeper

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 09:16 AM PST

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So here's a classic dilemma for me: I need to do an interview with somebody for a story I'm writing. It has to be in-person. It's in a place where lugging around my laptop and typing while the the person speaks isn't particularly feasible. And I won't have time post-interview/pre-deadline to go through a recording and transcribe the necessary notes 'n' quotes.

And here's a solution: Livescribe's Pulse Smartpen, a nifty piece of technology that can record audio every bit as well as my old voice recorder, while simultaneously making a digital copy of my handwritten notes and linking both notes and audio into a seamless whole.

I saw the Pulse for the first time last May at Maker Faire and promptly spent several months dithering about whether or not it was going to break my heart. I bought one last month, to help me keep track of research and interviews for a book I'm writing, and I'm happy to report that the Pulse lives up to my expectations. Granted, it's expensive and not particularly useful for everybody. But if you do a lot of note-taking (writers, journalists, college students, researchers... I'm looking at you), I think it's worth the investment. Here's why...

First off, let's talk money. I always hate it when tech reviews dangle something awesome in front of me and then spring the price tag at the end. This being my first tech review ever, I'm going to take the opportunity to switch things up. The Pulse Pens work with Mac or PC. There's a 2 Gb model for $169 and a 4 Gb version for $199. Both come with a couple of ink cartridges, a USB charger, and a small starter notebook. This is, however, not the end of your financial dealings with Livescribe. Ink cartridges will have to be replaced. Each fine point tip is supposed to last through about 56 pages of writing and replacements are $6 for a 5-pack. You'll also need special paper to use the Pen. A 4-pack of single-subject, college-ruled notebooks is $20, and there are lots of other notebook options, including Moleskin lookalikes. You can, however, also print pages of the stuff, for free, from any PC with a Color LaserJet Printer that is Adobe PostScript compatible and can print at 600dpi or higher.

Now, the fun. That special paper is important because it's covered with tiny dots that create a positioning system for the infrared camera in the Pen. The camera turns on when the Pen's tip is pressed into the paper, and turns off again when the tip is lifted. It's not really recording what you write, so much as it's recording the position of pen tip, on a coordinate plane formed by the dots.

I figured that out when the first Pen I got malfunctioned. Instead of turning off when I lifted the Pen away from the page, the camera would just stay on continuously. What I wrote on the physical page looked normal. But when I uploaded the digitized writing to my computer, I got not clean handwriting, but a crazy scrawl with a line recorded for everywhere the pen moved—whether on the paper or through the air above it. And that was how I learned Livescribe has great customer service. I called their phone line, the lady who answered was able to quickly figure out what was wrong, and she immediately got me a replacement in the mail. There was absolutely no hassle. Good stuff.

The replacement pen works perfectly. What I write on the physical page is recorded and looks great. I can use it without audio to make a digital (i.e., less lose-able) copy of my notes. If I want to record audio and writing at the same time, I use the control "buttons" that are printed at the bottom of every page of the dot paper—I just tap the space printed, "record", and tap "stop" when I'm done. To replay the audio, I tap the pen on the text I've written. I probably don't need to point out how incredibly useful this could be for note-taking during interviews, lectures, or even just keeping better track of your own thoughts and observations while you work. Plus, if you want, you can share your recorded audio and notes either with select friends, or the public, via a "Pencast". Observe:

Livescribe on BoingBoing
brought to you by Livescribe

So yeah, it's pretty sweet. The printed pseudo-buttons also allow you to set and jump between audio bookmarks, jump to a position in a recording, adjust playback speed, Pen volume, and set other Pen controls. There's also a calculator. Yeah. It's printed on the inside cover of the notebooks and you just tap the "keys" with the pen to make it work.

Another neat application: The piano. Choose this setting and the Pen will prompt you to draw eight boxes on the dot paper. Each box then becomes a note in the scale, which you can play by tapping it with the Pen. This is how you amaze your friends and make yourself feel better about not owning a smart phone. In my experience. Speaking of which, the Pen also has an online ap store, where you can pick up free and paid games, reference tools, a unit converter, a Spanish dictionary, and even a tool to teach yourself Hebrew chanting. Seriously. Right now, there's only a handful of applications. But I'm really looking forward to seeing how this grows in the future.

Bottom line: This thing does what it says it does, and does it well. If you're in school, or you have the right sort of job, the Livescribe Pulse Pen could really make your life easier. Someone also mentioned to me on Twitter that the Pen could be useful for people with memory problems, and I think it could work for that as well—provided the memory problems weren't so severe that you couldn't remember how to use the Pen. If none of this applies to you, though, the Pen is really just a nifty toy and probably not worth the cost of ownership. That said, you should still find a friend that does need it and get them to let you play with it a bit. Because it's really, really fun.



Secret copyright treaty meeting coming to New Zealand; activists get ready

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 07:08 AM PST

An upcoming round of negotiations for the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA, the notorious, punishing secret copyright treaty) is schedulef for New Zealand in April 2010. Under the terms of the treaty, New Zealand could be forced into accepting the "three strikes" rule that was defeated after a lengthy parliamentary battle last year ("three strikes" means that if someone you live with gets three unsubstantiated accusations of copyright infringement, you and everyone you live with loses access to the Internet and it becomes a crime for any other ISP to hook you back up again).

The opposition movement that formed in response to the "three strikes" rule is ready to take action on ACTA, to make sure that New Zealand's information policy is made democratically, and not through secret meetings in back rooms. They are organizing their response to the ACTA negotiations next April, and given their amazing mobilization against "three strikes" the last time around, I expect great things. If you're from .nz or live there now, tell your friends and loved ones about this: your family's ability to communicate, earn a living, get an education and participate in civil society could be jeapordized by the decisions the elite plan on making in your country.

And hey, Mexico! There's an ACTA meeting headed your way in January. Got anything planned?

Welcome | acta.net.nz (via Michael Geist)

Previously:


The Boing Boing 20, pt. 1: the best console and handheld games of 2009

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 06:49 AM PST

nobyhouse.jpg Assassin's Creed 2, The Beatles: Rock Band, Borderlands, Brutal Legend, Dragon Age: Origins, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, Left 4 Dead 2, Modern Warfare 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii. There, are we done? For the majority of top 10 of 2009 lists spreading fungally across every site covering games, probably, and they're not at all particularly wrong. But 2009 was about a lot more than that handful that we knew would top their respective Metacritic charts (and retail sales lists) six to nine months before their release date, and -- as I did with last year's Offworld 20 list (with a near-identical intro, I've just re-discovered, woops!) -- this list for Boing Boing will instead focus on the games that left their own strong mark on the year, just, sadly, a mark that in most cases went mostly overlooked. Split into two sections, the first part of the Boing Boing 20 list will focus on console and handheld releases, while next week's will round up the ten best indie and iPhone games, organized alphabetically rather than by any arbitrary ranking, with plenty of room in the comments for your own additions to your top gaming moments of the year. Without further ado, then, the best collection of pre-adolescent royalty, retro revivalism, at least two kinds of rhythm, stretchers, scribblers, and succulents the year had to offer, and one bona-fide blockbuster that managed to rise above the rest (it's the one not listed above, can you guess before you reach the end?):

Little King's Story [Marvelous, Wii]

Little King's Story was a true left field surprise this year: a game about managing a township unwittingly put under your control, about protecting them and conquering the things they fear, a game about expanding your reign through exploration and field conquests, and a game that managed to do a better job of the mini-micro-management of your troops than even Nintendo's re-released Wii-control Pikmin that must have inspired it.

Its crayon and pastel fantasy surely didn't help curry any favor with the gaming hardcore, which is a shame mostly because it a.) belies the surprisingly challenging and strategic game underneath and 2.) be honest, lends the game an undeniable storybook charm. Truly one of the year's best adventures that too few have played.

Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes [Capy, DS]

Coming in as the year's best 11th-hour surprise, Toronto indie Capy's puzzle/strategy/RPG take on the Might & Magic universe was just covered here on Boing Boing, so I'll reiterate that here:

Like Puzzle Quest -- Infinite Interactive's similarly dangerously time-devouring puzzler -- before it, Clash overlays its fantasy RPG tale with battles that play out via color-matching vertical lines of troops to create, fuse and link attacks launched against your enemies, and doing the same horizontally to put together defensive lines to guard against theirs.

Its ruleset is so intricately devised and delicately balanced that it'd take an article in itself to explain them fully, but for all its richness and complexity, it's a system that takes only minutes of practice to mentally snap together, and all your remaining hours of the day to happily master. If you have any proclivity toward brainy puzzling, do not hesitate to pick this up: it's got all the trappings of being one of the handheld's underdog classics.

Noby Noby Boy [Namco, PS3]

Those that said that Noby Noby Boy -- the Katamari Damacy follow-up from creator Keita Takahashi -- had no point themselves missed the point. While it's true that the design of each individual play session is as lackadaisical and boundless as the BOY himself, its overarching goal is an achievement in itself as gaming's most massive massively-multiplayer undertaking.

Underneath the surface is a story of, ideally, countless BOYs (as of this writing we're just ten players shy of 100,000) all vying to impress the universe's only GIRL by doing the only thing they were put on Earth to do: swallow and stretch their coiled bodies as far as they can. By converting those impressive and hard-earned meters into the love that propels her own body further into the solar system, in real-time, she unlocks the planets she reaches for all the players in the world.

So, yes, there is a goal, and there is an end-game, which we'll only see if and when our PlayStation 3s (or, very soon, iPhones) are still functioning in the time it takes to push her the remaining ponderous distance from Jupiter to Pluto.

Is it a willfully and near-recklessly devised design, particularly for thrusting hugely delayed gratification on a generation of players accustomed to instant/constant feedback and reward? Absolutely, and that's exactly what makes it one of the year's best.

Plants Vs. Zombies [PopCap, PC/Mac]

It would be easy, and cynical -- and more importantly, wrong -- to assume that casual powerhouse PopCap simply rode the crest of tower-defense and zombie-lust that defined much of gaming in 2009. Instead, it appears to have brilliantly anticipated it, having started and been in production nearly two years ahead, and could be instead seen as instrumental in propelling both memes into wider consciousness.

Going viral by nature of its basic premise alone, and then again by Laura Shigihara's perfectly ludicrous music video, it would have been disastrous if the resulting game couldn't fulfill expectations. Thankfully, it did, giving the tower defense genre a much-needed shot in the arm of accessibility without uprooting the core entirely, and the imminent move to iPhone -- letting us finally take the game away from our desktops -- is still one of our most anticipated.

Retro Game Challenge [Namco, DS]

Publisher XSEED had an unenviable task on their hands in bringing Retro Game Challenge to the West: taking a game that's inextricably derived from Japan's best games-related TV show that the rest of the world has never seen (Game Center CX), and is soaked through with references to Famicom nostalgia rather than the U.S.'s own NES nostalgia, and somehow making it relevant to us.

So we'll forgive them in going a half-step too far in shoe-horning in the 80s of Max Headroom and Valley Girl, and for working in 90s era U.S. game magazine references that flew over the heads of all but about ten people outside journalist-circles, because in the end none of that really mattered.

Well, the nostalgia does, because that's precisely what Retro Game Challenge is a game about: that once-every-three-months-a-new-game past of our collective youth, that afterschool poring over cheat codes past, a time when developers were inventing genres as often as games themselves.

Challenge is at heart a collection of remade early-days NES classics that never were, and your task (as goes the title) is to work your way through a series of prescribed challenges in each, whether it be finding hidden warps or defeating RPG bosses, and it manages to perfectly evoke that nostalgia that we thought only emulators could manage to do these days.

The sad news is that even as one of the year's most original and rewarding games -- a game that overtly celebrated the games culture that made up its target audience -- sales don't seem to have been up to snuff for the publisher to consider Westernizing the Japanese sequel, leaving a whole other legacy of first-gen Game Boy and 16-bit era "classics" behind.

Rhythm Heaven [Nintendo, DS]

Rhythm Heaven probably won't be showing up on near as many 2009 lists as it should, not because it's not brilliant -- it is -- but because it took so long for Nintendo to finally bring it to the West that it feels like ancient history (in digital years, obviously) to its core supporters who had imported and impotently raved about it long before.

Heaven's the truest example of a music game that's purely about rhythm, and not just about Simon Says-ing patterns or following bars down your screen to the tune of your dad's favorite classic rock. It's about rhythm as an unbroken line, or (at its best) an unbroken agreement between performers, about teaching and keeping steady tempo.

It's also one of the year's funniest, and desperately deserves some December love, if nothing else than to prove to Nintendo that a game this non-traditional can still find a wide, appreciative audience.

Rock Band: Unplugged [Harmonix/Backbone, PSP]

Though clearly overshadowed by its big console brothers and their new friends The Beatles, Unplugged -- and to a slightly lesser degree the DS version of Lego Rock Band -- were semi-shoutouts to the fans that made developer Harmonix the stadium-supergroup headliners they are today.

Take away its hard rock 'performance' and replace it with looping techno rave-up ambiance and you're right back where the developer began: flipping back and forth through lanes of sound, trying to keep each alive in sequence to make the parts a whole song, just as they pioneered in their PS2 originals Frequency and Amplitude.

You didn't need to know this, and you don't need to care, for Unplugged to work its magic: you just need the willingness to escape into music without the fake plastic mediator in between.

Recent news that Harmonix would no longer be converting its massive library of original recordings for Unplugged DLC stung fractionally harder than the bait and switch of offering only a five-song Lite version as the PSPGo's pack-in, with still no full download available on the PlayStation Network (which has to be down to digital publishing rights for particular bands and not willful neglect, right?), but for those still clinging to Sony's UMD-laden past, this is one of the UMDs most worth clinging to.

Scribblenauts [5TH Cell, DS]

Alongside Plants Vs. Zombies, Scribblenauts was the game that carried itself best throughout the year on a tidal wave of viral acclaim solely for its premise alone. But what a premise that was: it promised to let players conjure essentially any object imaginable -- krakens, keyboard cats, Gods, time-traveling robot-zombie-smashing T-rexes -- to solve puzzles via the furthest-most outer-reaches of our imaginations.

Did it work? Errr... yeah, I mean, mostly: developer 5TH Cell will be (and overtly has been) the first to acknowledge that its very touchy touch-based controls could have used some refinement. But even more surprising (for me, anyway), was in just how limited my own imagination was when it came time to put it to the test.

Need to rescue a cat off a roof, or wave away an angry bee? Much to my disappointment, I found I was just as apt to use, you know, a ladder and a bit of bug repellent, rather than any flights of fantastical fancy.

But its essential magic -- even if that 'magic' was simply the fortitude to sprite-sketch their way through untold reams of dictionary entries -- remained untouched, and it's still a thrill to try and stump the system and learn that they've got you covered.

Shadow Complex [Chair, Xbox 360]

Shadow Complex was the best retro revival this year that had no predecessor of its own. For once, it wasn't lazy to give the game the comparative nod back to Super Metroid: it was unabashedly right there in front of you, in its color coded barriers, in lead character Jason Flemming's tight crawls through narrow passages (here just crouched, rather than rolled into a morph ball), straight down to a 'Justin Bailey' referencing achievement.

And yet even the ones most prone to cry foul -- to call the game out for taking some of Japan's best classic design and running it through a Western mill until its plot and characters were offenders of the worst nameless, faceless, bottom-shelf would-be Tom Clancy degree -- had to admit: fair enough to that, but the game turned out completely wicked.

Harnessing the full power of Epic's Unreal Engine 3 for charmingly/ironically yester-year ends, this was exactly where we thought our 16-bit games were headed at the time: recycled but beloved design with drastically improved fidelity. We were wrong then, of course, but Shadow Complex proved maybe we shouldn't have been.

Uncharted 2 [Naughty Dog, PS3]

My pithy one-liner to encapsulate Naughty Dog's blockbuster adventure? It's the finest rollercoaster of the year that makes you climb off the train and rebuild the engine at the bottom of every hill.

Uncharted 2 easily managed to outshine the rest of the year's big-budget bids and managed to make a true believer even out of me, even if what it did best -- giving you some of the most hyper-vivid, lush and gargantuan ancient ruins and relics any developer has offered to let you explore -- was punctuated by over-technical firefights with your constant trigger-happy pursuers.

That's not to say the shootouts didn't work well on their own -- they are, probably, some of gaming's most realistically modeled, with every unwilling and amateur participant pressed firm against or dancing between cover and skittishly hazarding the occasional shot -- but the frequent breaks to dispatch another round of guards felt at times at odds against the relentlessly cinematic flow of the exploration.

In the end, you pressed through, though -- you had to -- guided by the promise of an even greater cliff-hanging thrill than the one you just narrowly scraped through, and the game never left that promise unfulfilled. Just next time, please, Naughty Dog: less of the shoot-shoot-bang-bang and more of the clamber-climb-marvel-amaze.

If web services were vintage paperbacks

Posted: 10 Dec 2009 08:51 AM PST
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