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Nerdy birdhouses Rejected Star Wars toy ideas Rumblefish claims to own copyright to ambient birdsong on YouTube Gweek 041: Under the Moons of Mars Wikileaks releases "Global Intelligence Files" -- 5MM emails from private spook outfit Stratfor HOWTO bake a Death Star cake Chocopornoholic cook book comes to America Danish band claims collecting society prevented them from playing anti-ACTA gig The Everything is a Remix theory of creativity Understanding the scale of the ripoff in the Robosigning Settlement Border Town design jam The neuroscience of magic Author discovers that Amazon can reprice his indie Kindle books however they want and cut his royalties, at will SKS, world's largest microfinance service, drives debtors to suicide Teen survivors of American religious brainwashing camps speak Nerdy birdhouses
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 27, 2012 12:48 pm Etsy seller NirdHaus (AKA Ben Mayer) sells nerdy birdhouses and Christmas ornaments based on classic video-game and movie designs. NirdHaus is a safe place where crafts and general geekery unite to form an amalgam of excellence. All pieces are hand-painted by me, Ben Mayer, and are infused with a healthy dose of unashamed love. From ...
Read in browser Rejected Star Wars toy ideas
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 27, 2012 11:45 am Action Figure Insider's Jason Geyer has published a second gallery of rejected toy-ideas he and his co-workers pitched to tie in with the launch of Star Wars: Phantom Menace (the first gallery came out four years ago!). There's some stuff here that's just plain weird, but plenty that is rather cool. Like the last blog, ...
Read in browser Rumblefish claims to own copyright to ambient birdsong on YouTube
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 27, 2012 11:00 am Rumblefish, a company notorious for sending copyright takedown notices to YouTube alleging copyright violations in videos' soundtracks, demanded removal of a video whose audio consists entirely of ambient birdsong recorded during a walk in the woods. When the video's creator objected, Rumblefish repeated its accusation, and Google added the notation "These content owners have reviewed ...
Read in browser Gweek 041: Under the Moons of Mars
By Mark Frauenfelder on Feb 27, 2012 10:00 am Gweek is a weekly podcast where the editors and friends of Boing Boing talk about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff. My co-hosts on episode 41 are Dean Putney, Boing Boing's coding and development wizard, and Michael Pusateri, a lifelong tinkerer and former television ...
Read in browser Wikileaks releases "Global Intelligence Files" -- 5MM emails from private spook outfit Stratfor
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 27, 2012 10:00 am Today, Wikileaks releases its "Global Intelligence Files," a trove of more than 5,000,000 emails from Stratfor, a Texas based "global intelligence" company. The dump includes emails detailing Stratfor's work with the US government on discrediting Wikileaks itself, as well as a lot of extremely dirty geopolitical laundry. "[Is it] possible for us to get some ...
Read in browser HOWTO bake a Death Star cake
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 27, 2012 09:23 am This beautiful Death Star cake is surprisingly straightforward to bake: two semi-spherical cakes are baked in steel bowls, then joined with sugar dowels, then iced and decorated with ganache polygons. This Death Star Cake was such fun to make that you just won't know when to stop! It is made of Dark Chocolate Mud Cake ...
Read in browser Chocopornoholic cook book comes to America
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 27, 2012 09:00 am Americans rejoice! Chocolatier Paul A Young's chocopornoholic recipe book Adventures with Chocolate is out in the USA, in mouth watering goodness. I reviewed the book in 2009 when it was released in 2009, and for those who've missed it, I've included it below. Paul was good enough to supply some images from the book for ...
Read in browser Danish band claims collecting society prevented them from playing anti-ACTA gig
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 27, 2012 05:18 am The Danish band Qu'est-ce Que fuck? claims that they were prevented from playing an anti-ACTA gig by KODA, a Danish rights-management society. They claim that KODA deliberately put a number of bureaucratic hurdles in their path, with the final straw being a demand that the band be paid 4,000 Kroner for their appearance (which was ...
Read in browser The Everything is a Remix theory of creativity
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 26, 2012 09:00 pm Kirby Ferguson, creator of the absolutely outstanding Everything is a Remix series, explains his theory of creative inspiration, remix, and cultural commons, citing some of history's best-loved "individual" creators and explaining how what they did was a remix, an extension and a part of the work that came before them. 2011/08 Kirby Ferguson (Thanks, Avi!)
Read in browser Understanding the scale of the ripoff in the Robosigning Settlement
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 26, 2012 08:20 pm Barry Ritholtz sez, "The Washington Post has been kind enough to allow me to vent about what is wrong with Wall Street and Washington DC. Today's episode: Robosigning Bank Settlement." Before the settlement, we learned that nearly every aspect of the robosigned documents was false. None of the details were ever reviewed. The signatures attesting ...
Read in browser Border Town design jam
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 26, 2012 07:18 pm Madeline Ashby (whom you'll remember from such Boing Boing features as Surfaces - a short story for a thesis on border security sez, "This is an invitation to join a 2-day design jam in Toronto, focused on user experience problems common to international border crossings. I'll be there Friday to give a talk, but what ...
Read in browser The neuroscience of magic
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 26, 2012 06:16 pm Writing in Smithsonian magazine, magician Teller describes the neuroscience that underpins magical illusions, using admirably clear language to describe some of the weirdest ways that our brains can be made to fool us. 1. Exploit pattern recognition. I magically produce four silver dollars, one at a time, with the back of my hand toward you. ...
Read in browser Author discovers that Amazon can reprice his indie Kindle books however they want and cut his royalties, at will
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 26, 2012 05:14 pm Veteran author Jim C Hines offered some of his titles independently direct through Amazon's Kindle store. He discovered that Amazon reserves the right to arbitrarily reprice his books -- slashing the cover price of a $2.99 title to $0.99 -- and pay royalties on the lower price. Hines points out that when his traditional publisher ...
Read in browser SKS, world's largest microfinance service, drives debtors to suicide
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 26, 2012 02:58 pm The Associated Press has obtained portions of a suppressed independent investigation into the role that debt collectors working for microfinance giant SKS played in the suicides of desperately poor borrowers in the Indian province of Andhra Pradesh. SKS made global headlines when it received backing from a US venture capital firm, the Boston-based Sandstone Capital, ...
Read in browser Teen survivors of American religious brainwashing camps speak
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 26, 2012 01:51 pm On the off-chance that your blood is in need of boiling on this fine Sunday, I present a Reddit discussion started by a teen survivor of a religious brainwashing school that practiced "education" techniques (aimed at instilling religious belief) that included protracted solitary confinement, starvation, and physical punishment. The comments from fellow survivors only make ...
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