The Latest from Boing Boing

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• Pristine, mothballed steam engine needs rescuing
• Fighting spam with captured botnet hosts
• Travel by train: "pillows that approach normal size"
• Wicks Looper
• The darkened hollow
• Disney-logoed DDT-impregnated wallpaper for the kids' room (1947)
• Illuminated 15th c. Manuscript - full of hidden demons
• Superman - The 1948 Serial
• "I will probably be found dead in the woods"
• music for/by the birds
• Welcome, guestblogger Jessamyn West!
• Secret copyright treaty: how we got here, what you can do
• Overflowing urinal cascade

Pristine, mothballed steam engine needs rescuing Posted: 25 Jan 2010 04:15 AM PST Jake van Slatt sez, "Last week I got an opportunity to tour a New England furniture manufacturer's abandoned building. It was a fascinating morning and I took some photos I'm quite pleased with. But I was also shown a steam engine that lies at the core of this facility, one that was mothballed in pristine condition and desperately needs saving now that the building is coming down around it." Skinner UnaFlow Steam Engine Needs a New Home (Thanks, Jake!) Previously: Jake von Slatt's Victorian RV -- video tour - Boing Boing Profile of steampunk maker Jake von Slatt - Boing Boing Steampunk wedding cake Boing Boing Paper steam engine - Boing Boing Difference Engine unboxed at Silicon Valley Computer Museum Steampunk for engineers in IEEE Spectrum - Boing Boing HOWTO Make a steampunk MP3 player - Boing Boing

Fighting spam with captured botnet hosts Posted: 25 Jan 2010 04:10 AM PST Clever spamfighters are allowing botnets to infect one isolated computer, then analyzing the spams it sends to figure out the template used to generate its messages. This template is then propagated to spam-filters: "This is an interesting approach which really differs by using the bots themselves as the oracles for producing the filters," says Michael O'Reirdan, chairman of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, a coalition of technology companies. But he adds that botnets have grown so large that even a 1-minute delay in cracking the template would be "long enough for a very substantial spam campaign". Funny: this was a sub-plot in True Names, the Hugo-nominated novella that Benjamin Rosenbaum and I published last year. To beat spam, turn its own weapons against it (Image: File:Zombie-process.png png, Wikimedia) Previously: Have botnet prices crashed? - Boing Boing Awesomely bad spam - Boing Boing Dream Captcha for spam-free sleep - Boing Boing Paintings inspired by spam subject-lines - Boing Boing Hank Paulson's bailout 419 letter - Boing Boing Boing Boing: The Strange World of Blogspot Spam Blogs Flarf: highfalutin word for spam/wordjunque poetry - Boing Boing

Travel by train: "pillows that approach normal size" Posted: 25 Jan 2010 02:00 AM PST A slightly ambivalent ode to Amtrak. If you like American trains, you should try those in Europe and Japan!

Wicks Looper Posted: 25 Jan 2010 01:16 AM PST Rarebeats' Wicks Looper is a box. The box makes noises. The noises are strange. The wicks looper has 3 main controls; The sound control adjusts the frequency of the tone in the first half of the dial and the level of noise in the second half of the dial, giving two distinct sounds. The second control is Tempo, which controls how fast the loop is played. Write the loop at a slow tempo then speed it up for a great effect. The third control is the write button, when pressed it writes a sound to memory which is then replayed next time the loop is run. With the sound control knob adjusted anticlockwise, you can add a rest to the loop by pressing the Write button. Also consider the SwoofTronic and StrobeTronic, which react to light rather than programmatic manipulation--but otherwise get on with the noble business of making strange noises. Wicks Looper [Rarebeats' Etsy Store]

The darkened hollow Posted: 24 Jan 2010 11:15 PM PST Photo: Andrew Ferguson

Disney-logoed DDT-impregnated wallpaper for the kids' room (1947) Posted: 24 Jan 2010 09:49 PM PST Does your 1947 tenement apartment suffer from the kind of disease-bearing insects that thrive in filth? Why not protect your children from this infectious influence by wallpapering every surface with DDT-impregnated wall-paper? It's hygienic and stylish! Available with Disney trademarks! Protect your children! Previously: EPA's most-wanted fugitives - Boing Boing Air New Zealand plane passengers "fumigated alive" - Boing Boing Wallpaper designed by Mark Mothersbaugh - Boing Boing Atomic age wallpaper - Boing Boing Wallpaper from Disney World's Polynesian resort - Boing Boing Wallpapered furniture Boing Boing Warped custom wallpaper - Boing Boing

Illuminated 15th c. Manuscript - full of hidden demons Posted: 24 Jan 2010 10:09 PM PST The Morgan Library in New York is currenty exhibiting one of the great masterworks of medieval illumination, the Hours of Catherine of Cleves. All 157 miniatures have also been digitized. From the website This digital facsimile provides reproductions of all 157 miniatures (and facing text pages) from the Hours of Catherine of Cleves. The original one-volume prayer book had been taken apart in the nineteenth century; the leaves were shuffled and then rebound into two confusing volumes. This presentation offers the miniatures in their original, fifteenth-century sequence. The Hours of Catherine of Cleves is the greatest Dutch illuminated manuscript in the world. Its 157 miniatures are by the gifted Master of Catherine of Cleves (active ca. 1435-60), who is named after this book. The Master of Catherine of Cleves is considered the finest and most original illuminator of the medieval northern Netherlands, and this manuscript is his masterpiece. For other illuminated manuscript collections online, see The Pages from the Past, Central Asian Miniature and LUSAMUT Studio's Armenian Miniatures. You can see a few more pages from Books of Hours in this RIT collection to give you some idea of just how impressive this manuscript was. [via MeFi]

Superman - The 1948 Serial Posted: 24 Jan 2010 03:16 PM PST "The Superman serial was a 1948 15-part black-and-white movie serial starring an unaccredited Kirk Alyn (but billed only by his character name, Superman) and Noel Neill as Lois Lane. It is notable as the first live-action appearance of Superman on film and for the longevity of its distribution." All 15 chapters are available at the Internet Archive's open source movies archive. Meanwhile, Superman is still on the list of banned Twitter passwords.

"I will probably be found dead in the woods" Posted: 24 Jan 2010 02:55 PM PST A 2003 BBC story cast doubt on claims that Iraq could deploy WMDs within 45 minutes. UN weapons inspector David Kelly, revealed as the source, died mysteriously shortly thereafter. It seemed that if foul play was involved, it was the extensive public hounding that led to his apparent suicide. By imposing a 70 year gag on evidence relating to his death, however, the British government perhaps reveals more than a state secret could ever hide. [Daily Mail]

music for/by the birds Posted: 24 Jan 2010 12:25 PM PST French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has created "a walk-through aviary for a flock of zebra finches, and furnished them with electric guitars and other instruments" at the Barbican Gallery. Same project, different location. [via MeFi]

Welcome, guestblogger Jessamyn West! Posted: 24 Jan 2010 09:49 AM PST Our next guestblogger is the incomparable activist geek librarian Jessamyn West, who, along with other library-hackers like Jenny Levine are part of a movement to redefine librarianship in the information age. I've been enjoying Jessamyn's projects and thoughts for years and it's a delight to have her here. Here's her official bio: I'm a library technologist working in rural Vermont teaching people on the back end of the digital divide how to use computers. I also help run MetaFilter.com, especially Ask MetaFilter and travel around the world talking about library technology issues. My blog, librarian.net talks a lot about the intersection of libraries, technology and politics. I'm grumpy about the USA PATRIOT Act, threats to open access and bad laws shaping bad culture. I like moss, snowshoeing, old books and the color orange. Not only that, but she co-edited Revolting Librarians Redux, one of the most exciting books I've read in the past ten years. Welcome, Jessamyn!

Secret copyright treaty: how we got here, what you can do Posted: 24 Jan 2010 09:40 AM PST In this episode of the always-excellent Command Line geek podcast, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Danny O'Brien does a great job of explaining what's going on with the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA, a brutal, unprecedented copyright treaty being negotiated behind closed doors), how you can fight it, where it came from and what you can do. It's as good and crunchy an explanation of how modern tech-policy works around the world as you'll get anywhere today. Danny's doing the job I used to do for EFF, and I learned a lot listening to this. Danny O'Brien on ACTA MP3 Podcast feed (Image: Etech05: Danny, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from etech's photostream) Previously: EFF analyzes the legal creepiness of ACTA, the secret copyright ... Interactive timeline of secret copyright treaty Boing Boing Everything you want to know about the scary, secret copyright ... Secret copyright treaty debated in DC: must-see video Boing Boing

Overflowing urinal cascade Posted: 24 Jan 2010 09:43 PM PST I know nothing about this ToiletFall art installation except that it is both great and made of toilets. Update: Now I know more. "American Standard is an installation that featured fifteen functional urinals arranged in a pyramid formation on the wall of the men's washroom in the Alexander Centre studio at Simon Fraser University. Transforming the facility into a public indoor fountain, water overflowed from the uppermost urinal and splashed its way down through the formation creating a deluge of water flooding the sunken floor. Visitors enter the space via tiled stepping stones, providing access directly to the sink and preexisting toilet, leaving the facility fully functional and open to both sexes." Toilet Falls Ensures No Privacy (via Cribcandy) Previously: Cute elephant urinal cleaning robot - Boing Boing Urinal targets and other helpful nudges - Boing Boing Urinal graffiti on a piss-wall - Boing Boing That's not a mouth-shaped urinal, it's a *travesty* - Boing Boing Lawyers attempt to flush Urinal.net again - Boing Boing Piss-controlled urinal-based video games - Boing Boing

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