The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- HOWTO break Kindle book DRM
- 3D printer for doll faces
- Lori Nix's haunting, sorrowful photographed dioramae
- Threatened library gets its patrons to clear the shelves
- Paranoia and deletion: the wipe man page
- Classroom Superheroes: recognize excellent teachers
- Sarah Palin Breathing Wall of Nightmares
- Make magazine PDFs on sale today-Sunday for $5.99
- The classroom blog: This is how you do it, science style!
- Museum of Sex exhibition about sex and comic books
- Workshop: teaching kids to steal cars
- Sarah Palin Breathing REVERSED and SLOWED DOWN
- Canadian regulator smacks Rogers for Net Neutrality failures
- Video of a walk in Maple Creek Park
- Sarah Palin: Breath Libel
- New Yorker cartoons redone with literal captions
- Just look at this list of Boing Boing post titles
- Snow day photo gallery: Your photos!
- On the maddening subtleties of localizing software
- Foli: There Is No Movement Without Rhythm
- Streaking gentleman hits unexpected obstacle
- Real-life superhero Phoenix Jones gets a broken nose
- Revolution in Tunisia: photo gallery
- Tunisia: Amid massive protests, prime minister takes power while president flees
- DIY gastric bypass kit on Amazon
- Neature Walk
- H1N1 could provide the tools to fight lots of different flu viruses
- Photos of Japan's exuberant overhead wires
- SF in SF this Saturday: Rudy Rucker and Diana Paxson
- Watching a technically unskilled person use a computer
| Posted: 15 Jan 2011 12:12 AM PST Most of the Kindle owners I know love their gadgets, but I always wonder how they'll feel about them if they decide to switch devices and can't bring their books -- dozens? hundreds? thousands? -- with them because of Amazon's use of DRM. To Amazon's credit, they now offer some DRM free books and have allowed me (at least) to include text with my titles telling you that I don't expect you to abide by their long, crazy EULA and instead only ask that you respect the copyright law of the country where you bought the book. In this video, Too Smart Guys show you how to remove the DRM from your Kindle books using Python and Windows. The method looks pretty foolproof, too. Think of it as an insurance policy for your precious books. How to Remove DRM from Your Kindle Ebooks
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| Posted: 15 Jan 2011 12:05 AM PST |
| Lori Nix's haunting, sorrowful photographed dioramae Posted: 15 Jan 2011 12:03 AM PST  Artist Lori Nix makes and photographs beautiful, sorrowful dioramae depicting post-apocalyptic landscapes, fantastic lands, and deadzones. She's very prolific and very, very good. In my newest body of work "The City" I have imagined a city of our future, where something either natural or as the result of mankind, has emptied the city of it's human inhabitants. Art museums, Broadway theaters, laundromats and bars no longer function. The walls are deteriorating, the ceilings are falling in, the structures barely stand, yet Mother Nature is slowly taking them over. These spaces are filled with flora, fauna and insects, reclaiming what was theirs before man's encroachment. I am afraid of what the future holds if we do not change our ways regarding the climate, but at the same time I am fascinated by what a changing world can bring.Lori Nix (via Craft)
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| Threatened library gets its patrons to clear the shelves Posted: 14 Jan 2011 11:57 PM PST The library in Stony Stratford near Milton Keynes, England, urged its patrons to check out every book on the shelves as a way of proving to the local council that its collection and facilities provide a vital service to the community. Stony Stratford is one of many towns across the UK that are facing severe library closures as the Tory-LibDem coalition government recklessly slashes its transfer payments to local governments (while breaking their promise to rein in enormous bonuses at the banks, even the ones that are owned by the taxpayer). Library clears its shelves in protest at closure threat (Thanks, BannedLibrary, via Submitterator!) |
| Paranoia and deletion: the wipe man page Posted: 14 Jan 2011 08:44 AM PST  Today I decided I wanted to really securely delete some files off my hard-drive; a quick search revealed that the GNU/Linux wipe command was just the thing. Before running it, I had a quick look at its man page and discovered something much more interesting than mere dry documentation: rather, the wipe manual is a paranoid masterpiece on the possible snitchware lurking inside your hard-drive and the special problems of being really sure you've deleted your data: I hereby speculate that harddisks can use the spare remapping area to secretly make copies of your data. Rising totalitarianism makes this almost a certitude. It is quite straightforward to implement some simple filtering schemes that would copy potentially interesting data. Better, a harddisk can probably detect that a given file is being wiped, and silently make a copy of it, while wiping the original as instructed.wipe(1) (Image: Hard Drive 016, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jon_a_ross's photostream)
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| Classroom Superheroes: recognize excellent teachers Posted: 14 Jan 2011 08:35 AM PST Classroom Superheroes allows you to nominate the teachers you love for recognition; having been raised by teachers, I have a keen appreciation for how much overtime and personal money teachers pour into their classrooms, but with the current climate of cutbacks, teachers are being asked to do even more, for more kids, with less. Classroom Superheroes (Thanks, Khart25, via Submitterator!)
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| Sarah Palin Breathing Wall of Nightmares Posted: 14 Jan 2011 06:10 PM PST |
| Make magazine PDFs on sale today-Sunday for $5.99 Posted: 14 Jan 2011 06:13 PM PST  Today only, all 24 volumes of MAKE are for sale in ebook format for $5.99 each. Ebooks from oreilly.com are DRM-free. You get free lifetime access, and free updates. Offer good Friday-Sunday. Use discount code DDMAK in the shopping cart. |
| The classroom blog: This is how you do it, science style! Posted: 14 Jan 2011 05:59 PM PST  Last fall, whilst I was in London at the Natural History Museum, I was lucky enough to spend some time with a group of high school students who had travel all the way from the northeastern United States. They were totally engaging, and completely enthralled with the prospect of taking in the museum exhibits and learning some biodiversity science. They were, in a word, awesome! Why the enthusiasm? Well, I suspect a lot of it had to do with the fact that they had to write pieces for their classroom blog. This (as in using blogs in a classroom setting) seems like a brilliant idea. And the science blog run by these students with their teacher, Miss Stacy Baker, is definitely one of the best out there. In many ways, the blog format offers students and teachers a great platform where they can broach topics, share ideas, practice their writing, and even interact with experts in the field. In particular, I love how there is this degree of "relevancy" in assignments structured this way. In other words, no longer is the student's homework something to be discarded and forgotten once graded - now the work is actually a piece of writing that exists in the public realm. In fact, the work that these students produce has lead to some pretty amazing opportunities (a good example being some of the students being selected to blog for Nature) Best of all, as you can see from the video below, even the students think it's cool: |
| Museum of Sex exhibition about sex and comic books Posted: 14 Jan 2011 05:27 PM PST  Here's my buddy Craig Yoe standing in front of a giant reproduction of Wally Wood's "Disney Memorial Orgy" poster at New York City's Museum of Sex , which was originally published in Paul Krasner's The Realist in 1967. Craig is the curator of an exhibit there called "Comics Stripped." From the show's description: As Tom of Finland famously said, "If I don't have an erection when I'm doing a drawing, I know it's no good." Whether produced as an individual work of art or mass produced, comics are a reflection of society and sexual fantasy where every sexual act that can be performed or imagined can exist. Craig is also the editor of two books about comics and sex: Clean Cartoonists' Dirty Drawings, and Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster. Museum of Sex exhibit: "Comics Stripped" |
| Workshop: teaching kids to steal cars Posted: 14 Jan 2011 04:20 PM PST  Last weekend I took my daughter Jane and her friend Anna to a workshop in Los Angeles to teach them how to break into cars, get out of a lock car trunk, and hotwire a car. The workshop was part of Machine Project's "Good People Doing Bad Things" curriculum and was conducted by Tom Jennings (the creator of FidoNet, the founder of one of the first Internet service providers, and the founder and publisher of the fanzine Homocore) and Jason Torchinsky (an artist, author, and Boing Boing guest blogger). Tom and Jason started out by explaining how the latching mechanism of a car door works.
Tom made a model of a car door latch out of cardboard paperclips and rubber bands.
Then we all went downstairs and outside to where Mark Allen's (Director of Machine Project) locked car was parked.
Tom and Jason showed the kids the tools of the trade for getting into a locked car: a putty knife, a coat hanger, and a pair of pliers.
Next, Tom and Jason showed the kids how the trunk of the car could be opened if you happen to get locked inside. Today's cars have a plastic red tag you can pull to open the trunk, but on an older car there is no such tag.
Instead, all you have to do is pull on the cable leading from the latch release in the front of the car to the latch of the trunk. This was the kids' favorite part of the workshop, and they repeated the process several times.
Finally, Tom and Jason demonstrated how to hotwire a car, starting it without a key.
They didn't let the kids do this, because of the low voltage shock they might get. And in fact, Tom gave himself a couple of shocks during the demonstration, much to the delight of the kids. My daughter Jane has been talking about the workshop for days. She told me she wished that her regular school was more like this. It makes me want to move to the Bay Area and enroll her in Brightworks, a hands-on K-12 school that my friend Gever Tulley is cofounding. My friend John Park brought along his seven-year-old son Ronan and he wrote about the workshop at Make: Online. |
| Sarah Palin Breathing REVERSED and SLOWED DOWN Posted: 14 Jan 2011 06:06 PM PST The brilliant Wreck and Salvage produced a bizarre and unsettling compilation of Sarah Palin's breaths in her recent "Blood Libel" speech. Intrigued, I played the breaths in reverse to see if any secret messages to her supporters might be revealed. I caught a "hhhuuuuthp huue hhhhiii" and also an "ia ia!" but did you catch the bit at the beginning where she actually speaks? I believe she says "McCartney, very much sad. F*** GIBBS, AIGHT?" Chilling. IMPORTANT UPDATE: Joe Sabia has slowed Palin's breathing to 30% of its normal rate. BEHOLD: The Sarah Palin Wall of Nightmares towers before you. |
| Canadian regulator smacks Rogers for Net Neutrality failures Posted: 14 Jan 2011 08:27 AM PST Michael Geist sez, "The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission concerns with telcoms company Rogers and its response to net neutrality complaints escalated this week when the Commission sent a letter to the company advising that it has received a growing number of complaints and that its public disclosures have not been compliant with CRTC Internet traffic management policy requirements. The case began last fall when the CRTC received a complaint over changes to Rogers' practices that affected downstream P2P traffic." Staff consider that in order to comply with TRP 2009-657, the discussion in the page titled Legal Disclaimer and the detailed discussion available on the network management policy web page should indicate that there are circumstances whereby the Rogers ITMP will also affect download speeds available to subscribers. Further, the detailed discussion on the network management policy page should clearly indicate which download applications might be affected in these circumstances and to what degree (i.e., the impact on download speeds should be indicated).CRTC Says Rogers Not Complying With Net Neutrality Disclosure Requirements |
| Video of a walk in Maple Creek Park Posted: 14 Jan 2011 03:30 PM PST A Boing Boing reader claims the Frank L. Sharp's video about Maple Creek Park is much better than the Neature Walk video. I agree! Don't miss good-natured Frank's other videos. |
| Posted: 14 Jan 2011 03:02 PM PST |
| New Yorker cartoons redone with literal captions Posted: 14 Jan 2011 02:12 PM PST  The Monkeys You Ordered takes New Yorker cartoons and changes the captions to match the scene. The joke is that there is no joke. And it's actually pretty funny. Thanks wastrel! |
| Just look at this list of Boing Boing post titles Posted: 14 Jan 2011 02:13 PM PST  Frank Chimero makes fun of some of our most cheesy post titles. Merlin Mann elaborates: Boing Boing is "auguring the deliberate perversion of [our] talent in the service of gavaging a profitable but pathologically undemanding audience." Oh my God, not gavaging! But we're not without our defenders. Speaking of which, if The Awl is not on your daily reading list, you're just not on the Internet yet. It's true that much here links daily to cultural ephemera, often dozens of times a day. But I'd like to make sure you read some of the awesome original features, blog posts, stories and galleries that we've published lately, including work by some very talented writers. Evidently, these are easy to miss! Yakuza 3 played, reviewed and fact-checked, by the Yakuza. I'm particularly proud of Maggie's item on Gliese581g, which went up in this form while others were still blogging the breaking news: Potentially habitable exoplanet discovered. Shame it doesn't exist, lol. These and more are at our features page. We've also produced hundreds of original video episodes (YouTube channel). |
| Snow day photo gallery: Your photos! Posted: 14 Jan 2011 01:39 PM PST  Photograph by David Noah - full size Once again you, faithful reader, have demolished our expectations. After our call for photos of the snow storm yesterday, we received about a hundred (maybe more!) really great photos from around the country. As promised, here's a selection of the best ones, but really, they were all great. You can see the other snow photos here. I tried to pick photos with high resolutions for the gallery, so it's worthwhile to click on the full size links! Thanks again to all of you who submitted photos to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool!
This one is Xeni's and my favorite of the many awesome snowman photos we received.
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| On the maddening subtleties of localizing software Posted: 14 Jan 2011 03:57 AM PST Sean M. Burke and Jordan Lachler's "A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen To You" is an extremely entertaining and illuminating look at the subtleties inherent in localizing software for different languages; a program that only produces two kinds of output ("I scanned 12 directories" and "Your query matched 10 files in 4 directories") turns out to generate a maddening combinatorial explosion of cases for translation into a small number of languages. A Localization Horror Story: It Could Happen To You (via O'Reilly Radar) (Image: File:Brueghel-tower-of-babel.jpg, Wikimedia Commons)
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| Foli: There Is No Movement Without Rhythm Posted: 14 Jan 2011 12:38 PM PST Scott Underwood writes: "Foli (the Malinke word for rhythm) is a 11-minute movie by Thomas Roebers and Floris Leeuwenberg showing the rhythmic daily life of Baro, a Malinke village in Guinea. Really well edited, and there are some amazing dance moves at the end. Love the kids, too." |
| Streaking gentleman hits unexpected obstacle Posted: 14 Jan 2011 12:33 PM PST (Via Arbroath) |
| Real-life superhero Phoenix Jones gets a broken nose Posted: 14 Jan 2011 12:27 PM PST |
| Revolution in Tunisia: photo gallery Posted: 14 Jan 2011 12:05 PM PST  (REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra) Rioters burn a policeman's hat during clashes with the police in downtown of the capital Tunis January 14, 2011. Tunisian President Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali declared a state of emergency on Friday and warned that protesters would be shot in an increasingly frantic effort to quell the worst unrest in his two decades in power. Then, he fled the country. More on the fast-moving changes in Tunisia today, and protests in which tens of thousands called for change, at this Boing Boing post. More photos follow, below. But this one, taken after Ben Ali flew out of the country, may really sum it up best.
An unidentified fan in the audience holds a placard saying "Long live Tunisia, Long live Kasserine and Long live liberty" during the handball World Championship Group A match between France and Tunisia in Kristianstad January 14, 2011. Tunisian President Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali stepped aside on Friday after failing to quell the worst anti-government unrest in his two decades in power. (Reuters)
A rioter throws a tear gas canister, from the riot police, towards the riot police during clashes in downtown of the capital Tunis January 14, 2011. (REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra)
Rioters carry rocks during clashes with riot police in downtown of the capital Tunis January 14, 2011. (REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra)
Rioters clash with riot police in downtown of the capital Tunis January 14, 2011. (REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra) |
| Tunisia: Amid massive protests, prime minister takes power while president flees Posted: 14 Jan 2011 11:33 AM PST Fast-moving change today in Tunisia (not that you'd know it from watching American cable TV news—if you're in the US, keep your eye on Twitter, blogs, and more worldly online news organizations instead). • New York Times: "President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia has left the country amid growing chaos in the streets, French diplomats say, and the prime minister went on state television Friday night to say he is in charge." • Here is a YouTube playlist of eyewitness videos from the protests in Tunisia. • The Awl points to this helpful primer on Tunisia in Mother Jones Magazine. • Al Jazeera is all over it. Jillian York's opinion piece at Al Jazeera is worth reading: "Tunisia's taste of internet freedom." • Here is one Arab affairs live-blog of the events, in English, at al-bab.com. • Here's a report at Al-Arabiya. • This Wikileaks-leaked State Department cable became a catalyst in the social upheaval. • Here's a Foreign Policy Magazine piece that puts forth an argument that Wikileaks and social media played important roles. • Responding more or less to those who might describe it as "a Wikileaks revolution," Ethan Zuckerman tweeted earlier, "Think it would be a mistake to give too much credit to Wikileaks [...] this has much more to do with unemployment, poverty, and inequality." • Evgeny Morozov echoes this sentiment in his Foreign Policy opinion piece: "First thoughts on Tunisia and the role of the Internet"
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| DIY gastric bypass kit on Amazon Posted: 14 Jan 2011 10:47 AM PST  Everything you need to perform 3 gastric bypass surgeries (instructions and anesthetic not included). Medline Laparoscopic Gastric Bypass - Laparoscopic Gastric Bypass - Qty of 3: $258.95 (Via Blame it on the Voices) |
| Posted: 14 Jan 2011 10:26 AM PST |
| H1N1 could provide the tools to fight lots of different flu viruses Posted: 14 Jan 2011 09:38 AM PST Here's a fascinating follow up to the H1N1 flu fears from a couple of years ago. At the height of concern, researchers at the University of Chicago, Emory University, and the CDC, began studying the antibodies a human immune system produced when exposed to the H1N1 strain of flu. At the time, they were hoping to create emergency "vaccines", a way to protect health care workers during an epidemic by injecting them with antibodies from people who'd already faced down the virus. What they found is something potentially much more important: Antibodies produced in response to H1N1 seem to defend against many other strains of the flu, as well. Here's what the University of Chicago Medical Center's Science Life blog had to say:
So far, one research team has found this result in mice and petri dishes. That's important to keep in mind. This may not work the same in people. Other researchers could even get different results with the mice. This is not at a point where it's reasonable for people who usually get a flu shot to say, "Oh, I think I had H1N1, I guess I never need to get a flu vaccine ever again." But, if the results hold up, this could be a big deal someday. The ultimate hope: A flu vaccine like other vaccines—one size fits all, no need to get a new jab every year. Via Greg Laden |
| Photos of Japan's exuberant overhead wires Posted: 14 Jan 2011 12:24 AM PST  Photographer Andreas Gefeller's "Japan Series" captures images of the amazing tangles of telephone wires on display in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan, along with other tangles and snarls. Andreas Gefeller - The Japan Series (via Geisha Asobi) |
| SF in SF this Saturday: Rudy Rucker and Diana Paxson Posted: 14 Jan 2011 12:19 AM PST The next installment San Francisco's excellent SF in SF reading series features two decidedly happy mutants: Diana Paxson & Rudy Rucker. It's on this Saturday, January 15 at 6PM, and it's free to attend: The Variety Preview Room Theatre, The Hobart Bldg., 1st Floor -- entrance between Quizno's & Citibank, 582 Market St., at 2nd @ Montgomery, San Francisco. The event will be podcast on Rick Kleffel's Agony Column. |
| Watching a technically unskilled person use a computer Posted: 14 Jan 2011 12:16 AM PST This short animated film adapts Reddit user Neonnoodle's Watching someone use a computer strip, and is an extremely accurate reproduction of the frustration entailed in watching someone who's not technically skilled use a computer. It reminds me of my friend who used to open the browser's default Yahoo homepage, search for Google.com, click the top link (to go to Google) and then enter the actual query. The Scrollwheel (via Neatorama) |
The empty shelves, as the library users want to demonstrate, represent the gaping void in their community if Milton Keynes council gets its way. Stony Stratford, an ancient Buckinghamshire market town famous only for its claim that the two pubs, the Cock and the Bull, are the origin of the phrase "a cock and bull story", was one of the communities incorporated in the new town in 1967. The Liberal Democrat council, made a unitary authority in 1997, now faces budget cuts of £25m and is consulting on closing at least two of 10 outlying branch libraries. 
So, you email your various translators (the boss decides that the languages du jour are Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Italian, so you have one translator for each), asking for translations for "I scanned %g directory." and "I scanned %g directories.". When they reply, you'll put that in the lexicons for gettext to use when it localizes your software, so that when the user is running under the "zh" (Chinese) locale, gettext("I scanned %g directory.") will return the appropriate Chinese text, with a "%g" in there where printf can then interpolate $dir_scan. 
Rioters carry a woman crying during clashes with the police in downtown of the capital Tunis January 14, 2011. (REUTERS/Zohra Bensemr) 
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