The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Copyright complaint kills Peanutweeter
- Lovecraftian Lollipops
- What it's like blogging for AOL
- Biometric daemons: adaptive authentication via electronic pets
- Do you have a problem in your life?
- Why SSDs are worth the money
- Colton Harris-Moore, the "Barefoot Bandit," pleads guilty to 7 federal charges
- Haunted Mansion stretching portrait bookmark
- Keeping up with the pwnses: CNET's spreadsheet of recent hacking attacks
- LulzSec posts a "manifesto"
- The new Palomino Blackwing 602 pencil is a fine tribute to the Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602
- Meet Spongiforma squarepantsii
- What's up with the weather this year?
- Your first Internet moment
- Networks are necessary, but not sufficient, for social upheaval
- Can you guess the identity of this Mystery Volcano?
- Japanese tsunami caused "ripples" in the atmosphere
- I'll stick with tornadoes, thanks
- Free/open annotatable documentary about Burmese dictatorship
- Sewers hold the secrets of the city
- It's National Use-Up-Your-Leftovers-in-a-Jell-O-Salad Week!
- Early coded ad for anal vibrator
- Wikipedia is giving away its old servers
- DIY acrylic watch kit
- Larry Flynt offers Weiner a job
- Vegas Earth-moving theme-park lets patrons operate heavy machinery
- Disembodied floating Dobbsian smoking heads for your compositing pleasure
- Work song of Ghanian postal workers cancelling stamps
- What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower: steampunk choose-your-own-adventure
- Congress of the Animals: Jim Woodring's latest mindbending graphic novel
| Copyright complaint kills Peanutweeter Posted: 18 Jun 2011 02:53 AM PDT  Peanutweeter, the extremely funny and clever best-of-Twitter project that inserted odd tweets into oddly matching Peanuts panels, has been taken down from Tumblr following a DMCA copyright complaint from the Iconix Brand Group, who bought the Peanuts copyrights. Good Grief! Peanutweeter Gets Taken Down Following DMCA Claim |
| Posted: 18 Jun 2011 02:47 AM PDT  Jason, who made the great Chocolate Cthulhu, has a line of Lovecraftian Lollipops that accompany it: In the tradition of the Chocolate Cthulhu Idol and the Giant Cthulhu Chocolate Bar comes our first foray into the world of hard candies.We offer you......Loathsome Lovecraftian Lollipops! Included in this first wave are Cthulhu, a Deep One, Nyarlathotep and the Elder Sign.LOATHSOME LOVECRAFTIAN LOLLIPOPS: WAVE 1 (Thanks, Jason!) |
| What it's like blogging for AOL Posted: 17 Jun 2011 04:29 PM PDT AOL's bloggers are paid about $35k a year, must push out a dozen articles a day, and are trained to "lie." (For example, they'll be sent short clips of TV shows and then review the episode) One of these "content slaves" reports on a life of stress, panic attacks and general unpleasantness. |
| Biometric daemons: adaptive authentication via electronic pets Posted: 17 Jun 2011 04:25 AM PDT The biometric daemon was proposed in a 2008 paper (PDF) by Pam Briggs and Patrick Oliver, and it's a very clever thought-experiment for a user-centered, adaptive authentication system. The idea is that the daemon, a cuddly toy, (the name is inspired by the Philip Pullman Dark Materials novels) knows a bunch of your biometrics (fingerprints, voice, gait, etc), and uses them to verify your identity before logging you into various services (ATMs, online services, mobile phones). The daemon learns about your usage patterns -- where and when you go places, what you do there -- and when you do stuff that appears anomalous, you have to "reassure" it by providing additional biometrics and verification. It essentially moves the stuff that your bank already does (annoyingly cutting off your ATM card if you go on holiday because they assume it's been stolen and taken out of the country) to a device that you control, keeping your data with you. It uses the tendency to anthropomorphizing inanimate objects to give users hints for navigating difficult situations. I can think of several problems with the system: how to recover passwords after your daemon is lost or stolen; what to do when you and your daemon are upset (because you've missed your flight and you need your daemon to log you into your mobile phone so you can call the airlines, but it won't be reassured because you're too tense to properly authenticate), and so on -- but it's an incredibly neat, clever idea, and one that's got me thinking. Biometric Daemons: Authentication via electronic pets (PDF) (Thanks, Pam!) |
| Do you have a problem in your life? Posted: 17 Jun 2011 02:03 PM PDT |
| Posted: 17 Jun 2011 03:37 AM PDT Here's a great, sweary presentation from Artur Bergman about the joy of using SSDs in your laptop and data-center, and how it's totally, absolutely worth the expense of replacing spinning drives with solid-state drives. I've been solid-state for more than a year, and I totally, absolutely agree. |
| Colton Harris-Moore, the "Barefoot Bandit," pleads guilty to 7 federal charges Posted: 17 Jun 2011 01:34 PM PDT  Colton Harris-Moore, the 20-year-old, 6-foot-5 criminal whose hijinks in multiple countries led to internet fame and the "Barefoot Bandit" name, today pleaded guilty to seven criminal charges. Appearing in U.S. District Court in Seattle, the lanky, 6-foot-5 Camano Island man entered guilty pleas to each of the federal charges. Under a plea agreement with federal prosecutors, Harris-Moore, 20, also agreed to forfeit any proceeds earned from the sale of his story. Heh. And what poetry it would be if everyone who wanted to see the movie just stole it online! More, including court documents, at the Seattle Times.
|
| Haunted Mansion stretching portrait bookmark Posted: 17 Jun 2011 01:18 PM PDT  Here's a papercraft Haunted Mansion stretching portrait bookmark to print, fold, assemble and enjoy. Disney Printable: Haunted Mansion Portrait Chamber Bookmark (via Super Punch) |
| Keeping up with the pwnses: CNET's spreadsheet of recent hacking attacks Posted: 17 Jun 2011 01:36 PM PDT  Elinor Mills at CNET has posted a chronological chart that documents recently publicized hacking events: By our count, there have been more than 40 computer attacks, network intrusions, or data breaches in the last few months. And they seem to be a daily occurrence.The chart shows which hackers and groups are identified as being behind each attack, and the methods and motives believed to be involved. As you skim through, remember that the date on which a given hack is made public isn't necessarily the date that target was breached: sometimes, a breach occurs long before the target or the attacker tells the world about it. Mills adds that CNET will to update the chart as time goes on, and they're soliciting updates. Here's a link to the article, and here's a direct link to the spreadsheet. |
| Posted: 17 Jun 2011 01:17 PM PDT @LulzSec commemorates their own thousandth tweet by posting a manifesto of sorts. The message, such as it is, seems to be less "we're in it for the lulz" and more "we are doing this to draw attention to the poor state of internet security." But have fun making sense of it. |
| The new Palomino Blackwing 602 pencil is a fine tribute to the Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 Posted: 17 Jun 2011 12:26 PM PDT  I started writing about the Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 pencil in December of 2002. A lot of people love this pencil, not only for its soft lead, but for its unique eraser and ferrule, its metallic dark gray finish, and for its motto: "Half the pressure, twice the speed." At $.50 each the pencil was quite expensive compared to other pencils. It was discontinued in 1998, and by 2002 the price had jumped to $20 per pencil on eBay. And because the pencil is no longer in production, a cult has formed around it. There is even a blog called the Blackwing Pages: Celebrating the Genuine 602. Last year, a company called California Cedar Products bought the rights to the Blackwing trademark and manufactured a pencil called the Palomino Blackwing. It was met with mixed reviews. I tried the pencil and found the lead to be much softer than the original Blackwing -- it required frequent re-sharpening. Also, the finish was a semi-gloss black that didn't look anything like the metallic charcoal gray of the original. I kind of liked it, but it was quite unlike the original. Earlier this week, California Cedar Products introduced the Palomino Blackwing 602, which comes much closer to replicating the look and feel of the Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602. The owner of the company sent me a dozen to try out. I have an original 602, which I was able to use to compare with the Palomino 602. The lead is harder than the first Palomino Blackwing. I can't tell the difference between it and the Eberhard Faber Blackwing's lead. The finish is mighty close to the original, too. The Palomino Blackwing 602 is my new pencil of choice. I also have the pencil sharpener that Clive Thompson demonstrated for me at TED2011, which I will use to keep my 602s pointy. Palomino Blackwing 602: $20 for a dozen More photos and links after the jump.
|
| Meet Spongiforma squarepantsii Posted: 17 Jun 2011 12:21 PM PDT  Meet Spongiforma squarepantsii, a recently identified species of mushroom whimsically named after a certain Porifera who lives in a pineapple under the sea. Submitterated by lakelady |
| What's up with the weather this year? Posted: 17 Jun 2011 12:07 PM PDT You aren't imagining it. 2011 really has been a particularly weird and wild year for weather—one of the most extreme years on record, according to NOAA. For obvious reasons, it's too early to say whether this is a fluke, or part of a trend. But it should have you concerned. Even if all of the damage this year ends up being explained by other causes, the extremes we're experiencing are similar to what's predicted in climate change models. So, even if 2011's weird weather isn't itself 100% the result of climate change, it could still be giving us an unpleasant preview. (Via Mariette DiChristina) |
| Posted: 17 Jun 2011 12:01 PM PDT  Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic called my attention to On the Network, a new project by Derek Powazek that's aimed at collecting "First Time on the Internet" stories. It's not exactly what you think. Powazek isn't specifically looking to hear about the first time you ever got online. Instead, he wants the first time you ever "got" the online world ... what it was for, why it mattered, how the world had totally changed. Personally, my moment was pretty late in the game. My family's first computer was the one I got right before I went to college in 1999. Prior to that, my only experience with the Internet had been a few rounds of awkward fumbling at various central Kansas libraries. (Some of the fumbling was more awkward than others. My first time on the Internet—at all—involved being led through several locked doors to a dark, windowless room in a disused part of the Abilene Public Library and abandoned there by a librarian who knew nothing at all about the Internet except that she disapproved of it. This would have been around 1995 or 1996. All I remember about that episode is reading a book while I waited for Netscape to load and then not being sure what do once I was online.) I used email, ICQ and message boards, and Napster my freshman and sophomore years of college, but I didn't have any revelatory moments until at least 2001. That was after I started working for my school's student newspaper, and it was really the point where the Internet began to be a part of my daily life. I don't remember the context, but I do remember one of my professors talking about how to track down sources using phone books, calling newspapers in other towns, digging into old back issues of magazines and journals at the library. He was describing a days-long process, just to get started. Just to find the people you wanted to interview. And I realized that his experience didn't describe my experience. Finding sources still took time, but I found them online in hours, not days, and I went to the right people directly, rather than through intermediaries making recommendations. This technology was changing the way journalism was done. That was when I realized that the Internet was powerful. And that I'd been harnessing that power and treating it as an important piece of my life without even realizing that's what I'd done. Somehow, I'd gone from the old paradigm to the new one and not noticed the switch. It wasn't a big revelation, but it was enough to make me realize that the world wasn't ever going to be the same. More importantly, I couldn't continue to think of the Internet as something incidental to my life. For one thing, it was already more than that. And if I didn't embrace that fact, I was going to get stuck operating in a new world by old rules. You'll likely leave some comments on this post, but if you want to participate in "On the Network" itself you should either call (415) 483-5628 and leave a message, or record yourself as an MP3 and email it to otnshow@gmail.com. Image: Laser Hello World, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from micahdowty's photostream |
| Networks are necessary, but not sufficient, for social upheaval Posted: 17 Jun 2011 03:26 AM PDT My latest Guardian column, "Networks are not always revolutionary," argues that networks are necessary, but not sufficient, for many disruptive commercial, cultural and social phenomena, and that this character has led many people to either overstate or dismiss the role and potential of networked technology in current events: "For most artists," as the famous Tim O'Reilly aphorism has it "the problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity." To me, this is inarguably true and self-evident - the staying power of this nugget has more to do with its admirable brevity and clarity than its novelty.Networks are not always revolutionary |
| Can you guess the identity of this Mystery Volcano? Posted: 17 Jun 2011 10:51 AM PDT  I'm loving Big Think blogger Erik Klemetti's regular contest, Mystery Volcano Photo, where he presents readers with a gorgeous photo of an unnamed volcano and leaves them to guess its name and location. Mainly, I'm just blown away by comments full of very clever, volcano-loving people who seem to be able to identify mountains the way most of us can identify our friends and family. This is the most recent post. Look familiar to any of you? |
| Japanese tsunami caused "ripples" in the atmosphere Posted: 17 Jun 2011 10:45 AM PDT  This photo is the first picture taken of "airglow ripples," the impacts of an ocean tsunami reflected in the sky. No, really. Scientists have long known that powerful tsunamis can affect atmospheric particles. This is just the first time the phenomenon has been photographically documented. In this image, you can see the ripples in the sky over Hawaii. The red line marks the tsunami wave moving across the ocean surface. What's going on here? Alexandra Witze of Science News explains:
Via Frank Swain |
| I'll stick with tornadoes, thanks Posted: 17 Jun 2011 10:26 AM PDT |
| Free/open annotatable documentary about Burmese dictatorship Posted: 17 Jun 2011 10:22 AM PDT Brett sez, "French producers snuck into Burma and made an undercover documentary, "Happy World: Burma, the dictatorship of the absurd," about the bizarre regime. Awesome access, and the web documentary uses Popcorn.js to provide contextual links. Open Creative Commons licensing allows anyone to share, download and embed the experience. Interesting that it was also produced not with broadcasters but with a newspaper. Very cool 'censurator' animates your twitter feed with brownshirts from the dictatorship." Happy World: Burma, the dictatorship of the absurd (Thanks, Brett!) |
| Sewers hold the secrets of the city Posted: 17 Jun 2011 10:23 AM PDT  Your toilet knows what you did last summer. Apparently, one way to estimate drug-use rates in a city is to tap into its sewers. The city of Oslo did this with what's called a Passive Sampler—filters that continuously collect samples of chemicals in the environment. After several weeks, old filters are replaced with new ones and the collection membranes are taken to a lab and analyzed with mass spectrometry. The same system has been used to look for pollution near oil derricks. But it can be configured to check for other substances, too. For instance, in Oslo, levels of the drug ecstasy spiked in the city's sewer water, increasing 10 fold, during the two weeks when Norwegian teenagers celebrate high school graduation. Image: Toilet.CapitolHill.SE.WDC.22sep05, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from perspective's photostream |
| It's National Use-Up-Your-Leftovers-in-a-Jell-O-Salad Week! Posted: 17 Jun 2011 10:19 AM PDT  What will you put in your Jell-O Leftovers Salad? Jell-O Leftovers Salad -- For the hungry insinkerator (Via Ape Lad) |
| Early coded ad for anal vibrator Posted: 17 Jun 2011 03:26 AM PDT  This 1943 Amazing Stories ad for an anally inserted vibrator "to treat prostatitis" is the male equivalent of those coded ads for phallic "neck massagers" that ran around the same time and later, gracing the pages of the Sears Catalog and others. |
| Wikipedia is giving away its old servers Posted: 17 Jun 2011 08:59 AM PDT Wikimedia, the foundation that oversees Wikipedia and related projects, is upgrading a lot of its servers, and cycling out some of the old hardware. But rather than selling it or throwing it away, they're donating it to other, worthy projects -- maybe even yours. Server Decommission Donations (via DVICE) |
| Posted: 17 Jun 2011 08:46 AM PDT  A new addition to Make:'s MakerShed is the $35 Solder:Time kit that lets you build a really beautiful and homely acrylic maker-watch. Solder:Time is an easy to solder real time watch kit with a unique laser cut acrylic casing. Four individual acrylic parts are cut to fit the internal PCB, battery and switch perfectly. Includes a velcro wrist band. After soldering the Solder:Time, the watch is built by stacking the acrylic parts with the PCB and holding it together with the included screws. Solder:Time is a true conversation starter that looks great and is completely functional.New! Solder:Time Watch Kit (via Make) |
| Larry Flynt offers Weiner a job Posted: 17 Jun 2011 07:46 AM PDT Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler, has offered Rep Anthony Weiner a job in his Internet group: "Again, I cannot emphasize enough the genuineness of this offer. We are a serious corporation which, as you know, has been heavily involved in the political environment of this country for over thirty-five years. Our key missions have consistently included the crucial fight of battling hypocrisy within the federal and state governments. Flynt Management Group, LLC and Hustler Magazine have been dedicated to decades of serious political commentary. Just as we do not undertake insincere political crusades, we do not make insincere job offers." |
| Vegas Earth-moving theme-park lets patrons operate heavy machinery Posted: 17 Jun 2011 07:40 AM PDT "Dig This" is a new Las Vegas heavy construction theme-park that gives you the chance to run enormous earth-moving machines. You have to be at least 14 to get behind the controls. Sounds like enormous fun, but with so many Las Vegas mortgages under water, it seems like they might get more bang for buck out of letting punters run wrecking balls and bulldozers on abandoned subprime property than digging the same dirt over and over again. .Dig This Heavy-Duty Playground Opens in Las Vegas (Engineering News Record) (via Super Punch) |
| Disembodied floating Dobbsian smoking heads for your compositing pleasure Posted: 17 Jun 2011 06:55 AM PDT  Phil from Phil Are Go has done the world the excellent service of trimming out the smoking, disembodied floating Dobbsian heads from this old Kaywoodie Pipes ad, and and making them available as hi-rez PNGs. |
| Work song of Ghanian postal workers cancelling stamps Posted: 17 Jun 2011 06:40 AM PDT  This old WFMU clip from 2005 features the beautiful "work-song" of Ghanian postal workers from the University of Ghana cancelling stamps, banging out infectious rhythm and melody. Work Song From Postal Employees in Ghana (MP3) (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) |
| What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower: steampunk choose-your-own-adventure Posted: 17 Jun 2011 06:49 AM PDT  Maggie Killjoy's steampunk choose-your-own-adventure ("Adventure-of-Your-Own-Choosing") novel What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower is a delight. Killjoy is founder of the fabulous Steampunk Magazine, and she's brought her pitch-perfect steampunk sensibility to the CYOA genre with this rousing story of a dissolute dandy who discovers goblins fomenting rebellion in his clock-tower and makes common cause with them against the horrible, cheerful, sadistic gnomes who have enslaved goblins to their brutal clockmaking practices for generations. There are many different ways the story can proceed, of course, but if you make your way through to the end, you'll discover that Killjoy's not just spinning a shaggy-dog story -- there's a surprising amount of heart and adventure to be had if you're bold enough to choose the path of heroism. Descend into the depths of the undercity and embroil yourself in the political struggling of colonialist gnomes and indigenous goblins. Fly in air balloons, drink mysterious and pleasant cocktails, smoke opium with the dregs of gnomish society. Or dream and speak of liberation for all the races. Fall in love and abscond into the caverns. It's up to you, because this is an adventure of your own choosing.What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower (Buy at AK Press) |
| Congress of the Animals: Jim Woodring's latest mindbending graphic novel Posted: 17 Jun 2011 09:05 AM PDT  There is no one remotely like Jim Woodring. I admire dozens of living cartoonists, but Jim's wordless comic book stories -- about a happy go lucky cat named Frank who inhabits a phantasmagorical universe of polymorphic creatures and psychedelic architecture -- are some of the most mindbending books I've ever read. (No wonder Jim was awarded the 2001 Seattle Stranger Genius Award.) Jim's latest work is Congress of the Animals, his second graphic novel, and the first to feature Frank. Woodring describes it as a "dense, rich fable of torture, exaltation and amnesia." The universe that Frank inhabits is called The Unifactor (something I didn't know until I read the dust jacket of the book). Woodring describes The Unifactor as a "closed system of moral algebra," that is "in control of everything that happens to the characters that abide there, and that however extreme the experiences they undergo may be, in the end nothing really changes. That goes treble for Frank himself, who is kept in a state of total ineducability by the unseen forces which control that haunted realm. And so the question arises: what would happen if Frank were to leave The Unifactor?" What we learn is that the world beyond The Unifactor is, if you can believe it, even more bizarre. The atrocious humanoids that Frank encounters in a sculpture garden of distended viscera are the stuff of nightmares. But not everything in the world is as horrific as these creatures who appear to have nefarious plans for Frank. In this new world, Frank encounters and befriends a funhouse mirror doppelgänger of himself proves to be a valuable ally in Frank's attempts to return home to his faithful pets, Pupshaw and Pushpaw, who helplessly wait for his return. Is there a lesson to be learned from Congress of the Animals? What is the meaning behind it, and Woodring's other books? That's the question I'm unable to answer. His comics affect the part of my brain that can think and feel, but cannot verbalize. His comics change me, but I can't say why or how. |
The site's creator, T. Jason Agnello, said he doesn't plan to fight the takedown. 
Most systems (but possibly not all) have the following specifications:
The 10-employee park has five pieces of machinery, including a pair of Caterpillar D5 track-type bulldozers and three Caterpillar 315CL hydraulic excavators. Dig This sells three-hour packages that consist of a 30-minute safety and operation orientation followed by two hours of maneuvering either a bulldozer or excavator.
| You are subscribed to email updates from Boing Boing To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment