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- A better way to get rid of Kindle DRM
- Angry, badly written game review reinterpreted with animation and dramatic reading
- Hobo vocab
- 90-second version of A Wrinkle in Time
- Sony asks court to put genie back in bottle
- Miss America 2011: "Wikileaks was actually based on espionage."
- Major NYT piece on Stuxnet worm: Israel-US operation to stunt Iran nuke program?
- A decade of Wikipedia: lesser-known miracles
- Former Weather Underground radical on Tucson shootings, political violence
- Tucson shooting suspect Jared Loughner scared a motel clerk
- The frontier is everywhere: a fan-remix video homage to NASA + Carl Sagan
- Orbital cocktail ring
- Zoolander 2 script readied
- iamamiwhoami
- The Perfect Writer's Laptop
- Report: Belarusian mobile operators gave police list of demonstrators
| A better way to get rid of Kindle DRM Posted: 16 Jan 2011 04:03 AM PST Jacobsor sez, "This post provides a 'how to' guide for a simple way to remove DRM from Kindle, Nook and other ebook files using the open-source Calibre application in conjunction with some third-party plugins. I tried it on my Kindle library, and it works great, without needing to muck about manually with Python scripts. The Calibre program also allows you to convert files from one format to another, such as Kindle format (.mobi files) to epub files." This is a followup from yesterday's somewhat more complicated Kindle de-DRM-ifier method. Ebook Formats, DRM and You -- A Guide for the Perplexed (Thanks, Jacobsor, via Submitterator!)
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| Angry, badly written game review reinterpreted with animation and dramatic reading Posted: 16 Jan 2011 04:21 AM PST Here's an animated dramatic reading of "Axman13"'s angry, illiterate review of an RPG called Super PSTW. The reader really brings it to life. i reley dont wan to say this, but i have to now. this game is so esey. i mean, all you do is hit the spacebar. thats it! how is this an RPG anyway? you cant contrail anything but what it says on the screen! what if i didnt want to buy the potion? what apout quests? all you can upgrade is stranth? there is no way you can lose to the boss at the end! this game is crap! its not even an RPG at all! i mean look at it! in what way is this supposed to be an RPG if you can do quests and stuff? all you do is press one butten the entier time! explain to me! the athore coments al totol lies! is it supposed to be stick dudes? i dont even know how this damn game got the daily 3rd prize, or a rating of 4.26! pepole think this review is worthles. go ahead! say it! i dont care! im just trying to make a point here! blam this piece of crap!!!!Dot Dot Dot (via JWZ) |
| Posted: 16 Jan 2011 03:33 AM PST |
| 90-second version of A Wrinkle in Time Posted: 16 Jan 2011 03:55 AM PST The Newbery is the most prestigious prize in children's literature; "90-Second Newbery" is a competition to abridge a wonderful kids' book into a 90-second video. Here's the entry for Madeline L'Engle's classic "A Wrinkle in Time." Great work! "A Wrinkle In Time" In 90 Seconds (Thanks, Spocko, via Submitterator!) |
| Sony asks court to put genie back in bottle Posted: 16 Jan 2011 03:11 AM PST Sony's Playstation 3, finally jailbroken in recent weeks, may now run homebrew software and pirated games. Its response? Asking a court to order the removal of information already republished by thousands of websites. [Wired: Threat Level] |
| Miss America 2011: "Wikileaks was actually based on espionage." Posted: 15 Jan 2011 10:53 PM PST  (Image: Reuters) Miss Nebraska, Teresa Scanlan, became champion of the 2011 Miss America pageant tonight. She has deep thoughts on foreign policy and radical transparency. She won after strutting in a black bikini and a white evening gown, playing "White Water Chopped Sticks" on piano and telling the audience that when it comes to the website Wikileaks, security should come before public access to government information. But I bet she could locate South Africa and The Iraq and the Asian Countries on a map. Anyway, I demand video and a remix, STAT. Miss Nebraska wins 2011 Miss America pageant (boston.com) |
| Major NYT piece on Stuxnet worm: Israel-US operation to stunt Iran nuke program? Posted: 15 Jan 2011 06:14 PM PST A major piece in the New York Times just now published: "Operations at Israel's Dimona complex are among the strongest clues that the Stuxnet computer worm was an American-Israeli project to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program." |
| A decade of Wikipedia: lesser-known miracles Posted: 15 Jan 2011 03:11 PM PST  Image: a few of the remixable design elements, via Wikimedia CommonsIt's no secret that I love Wikipedia, which I consider one of the grandest and most radical social experiments of our time, and the very best example of what the free culture movement offers for the world's future. I even love Wikipedia critics. There's nothing I love more than to improve an article after some whiny-baby complains about its quality with a copypasta example. For instance, novelist Jonathan Lethem was bagging on "the infinite regress of Wikepedia [sic] tinkering-unto-mediocrity" the other day. Too bad The Atlantic has no way for readers to fix that typo in the way I updated the article on Blake Edwards' cult classic The Party, which was the object of Lethem's scorn. He seems to miss the point that an encyclopedia article, even one about a screwball comedy, is supposed to be dry, factual, and not especially screwball. Just the facts, ma'am. I also love that his snapshot of the page is no longer that relevant. In the past I have discussed Wikibumps (like the spike of a million readers who checked out the Salvia article in the week after the Miley Cyrus bong video) and the Click to Jesus game, where you see how few links it takes to get from a random Wikipedia article to the Jesus article. Here are a couple of other good reasons to love Wikipedia and its sister projects which you may not have seen: • Best of Wikipedia Tumblr page • Commons Picture of the Year contest winners I hope you'll swing by, learn some things, maybe improve something (they even have a secure server option). There is still plenty to do, and it will never be completed. At the very least, just marvel at the possibilities for the future of free culture embodied in the project. What are some of your favorite things about it? Please share in the comments. |
| Former Weather Underground radical on Tucson shootings, political violence Posted: 15 Jan 2011 12:09 PM PST "I doubt that Loughner, sitting in a Tucson jail (...) cares much about who won the 2010 midterms or who will win the presidency in 2012. I doubt that a man who seems so confused and desperate cares much about ideology. Sarah Palin and her cross-hairs map deserve nothing but ignominy, but the suspect probably didn't worry that liberals would blame conservatives for the shooting or that conservatives would take umbrage at every media accusation. If he's a political actor, he probably doesn't know it." —Mark Rudd, one of the founders of the militant Weather Underground. |
| Tucson shooting suspect Jared Loughner scared a motel clerk Posted: 15 Jan 2011 04:54 PM PST Among the details gleaned by the FBI so far from surveillance footage and interviews, in a story about Tucson shooting suspect Jared Lee Loughner's last night before the rampage: "After checking into the Motel 6, Loughner went to a nearby Walgreens to retrieve the film he had developed. The photos showed Loughner wearing a red G-string and holding a gun near his buttocks." |
| The frontier is everywhere: a fan-remix video homage to NASA + Carl Sagan Posted: 15 Jan 2011 11:59 AM PST [Video Link] Is space awesome? Yes, explains the voice of Carl Sagan in this video produced as a sort of homage to NASA *by a fan* — this is not an official NASA video. Remixer/director/NASA fanboy Reid Gower, the Random Internet Gentleman behind this video provides full credits for sources and inspirations here, and explains, I got frustrated with NASA and made this video. NASA is the most fascinating, adventurous, epic institution ever devised by human beings, and their media sucks. Seriously. None of their brilliant scientists appear to know how to connect with the social media crowd, which is now more important than ever. In fact, NASA is an institution whose funding directly depends on how the public views them. Mr. Gower's YouTube channel is here. (thanks, Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides!) |
| Posted: 15 Jan 2011 10:27 AM PST  I'm exceedingly fond of Etsy seller Kustomkitsch's "orbital cocktail ring," which features a tailfinned rocket zooming around a pockmarked asteroid. |
| Posted: 15 Jan 2011 08:01 AM PST Ben Stiller has confirmed that Zoolander 2 is going to be made. The next step is securing Will Ferrell: "Mugatu is an integral part of the Zoolander story." [Huffington Post] |
| Posted: 15 Jan 2011 07:47 AM PST JWZ recaps iamamiwhoami, an online project combining Gibson-esque 'found footage' and awesome Scanglo-style electronica: At the beginning of the year, these weird, short, high-production-value videos began appearing on Youtube with no explanation of what they were or who made them, straight out of Pattern Recognition. They featured a heavily distorted woman licking trees and doing other bizarre things in the woods with music that sounded like The Knife or Fever Ray. Cult following ensued. The videos got longer, revealing more of the singer and the songs. ... The best, weirdest thing that the internets have brought us in yearsThe embed above will take you through it from the beginning. Here's a shortcut to my favorite track for uncivilized savages. You can also buy the music on Amazon  and iTunes. In praise of iamamiwhoami [JWZ] |
| Posted: 15 Jan 2011 07:15 AM PST The newly tinified MacBook Air gets more high praise, from the perspective of a writer on the hoof: "After fifteen years I've finally found the perfect writer's machine in the new 11.6-inch MacBook Air. It fuses together both the best software and hardware of which a writer could ever dream, while boasting all of the slender and effortless portability of a composition journal." |
| Report: Belarusian mobile operators gave police list of demonstrators Posted: 15 Jan 2011 12:20 AM PST According to this unsourced report, the Belarusian mobile operators have cooperated with the country's secret police to provide a list of everyone who was in the vicinity of an anti-government demonstration; the spooks are now calling in everyone on the list to interview them about their involvement in political dissidence. I'd love to see a better-sourced version of this article, but it's technically possible for the operators to have logged every phone near a given tower at a given time. This is one area where I really agree with Evgeny Morozov, who has written extensively about the risks that technology use poses to demonstrators: at present, mobile phones are not fit for purpose. Mobiles are too closed, the mobile operators too vulnerable to be considered safe enough for use against powerful hostile states. Unless your mobile-driven protest ends with the collapse of the state, it's all too likely that you and your friends will face dire reprisals. It's one of the reasons I'm so anxious to see more free/open phone operating systems, which open up possibilities for IMEI spoofing, anonymizing tunnels through proxies, etc. But until there's widespread adoption of open handsets, your phone is eminently capable of finking you out. Mobile operators rat out all demonstrators (Thanks, Svabodu!)
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