Bunnie Huang is building a laptop Samuel L. Jackson drops F-bomb on Saturday Night Live Disneyland Haunted Mansion in gingerbread Google's daily Transparency Report data-dump includes all DMCA requests The Onion: "Fuck Everything, Nation Reports" Disneynature's Chimpanzee Sciencey Christmas from Digital Science Loud Bicycle: Car horn for your bike Against Security: a sociologist looks at security theater How to make a VW Westy ornament Needs comma Bunnie Huang is building a laptop
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 16, 2012 01:38 am Virtuoso hardware hacker Bunnie Huang is building an open hardware laptop. Want. We started the design in June, and last week I got my first prototype motherboards, hot off the SMT line. It's booting linux, and I'm currently grinding through the validation of all the sub-components. I thought I'd share the design progress with my ...
Read in browser Samuel L. Jackson drops F-bomb on Saturday Night Live
By Xeni Jardin on Dec 16, 2012 12:43 am During a christmas special skit on NBC's "SNL" tonight,
Samuel L. Jackson said the word "Fuck" in what looked like an unplanned goof during a skit with Kenan Thompson.
Read in browser Disneyland Haunted Mansion in gingerbread
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 15, 2012 11:00 pm Ray writes, "Some very talented gingerbread architects were able to convert Ray Keim's New Orleans Paper Model Kit into templates that they used to design and build a gingerbread version of Disneyland's haunted mansion. I thought it was brilliant!" New Orleans Square Gingerbread! (Thanks, Ray!)
Read in browser Google's daily Transparency Report data-dump includes all DMCA requests
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 15, 2012 09:04 pm Fred von Lohmann, Legal Director at Google, has published a blog-post explaining the company's new practice of publishing data and reports on the number of takedown requests they get. It's all about helping policy makers understand whether the censorship provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are doing their job: Starting today, anyone interested in ...
Read in browser The Onion: "Fuck Everything, Nation Reports"
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 15, 2012 08:59 pm As is usually the case in times of unthinkable horror, The Onion just fucking nails it: Despairing sources confirmed that the gunman, armed with a semiautomatic assault rifle—a fucking combat rifle, Jesus—walked into a classroom full of goddamned children where his mother was a teacher and, good God, if this is what the world is ...
Read in browser Disneynature's Chimpanzee
By Jason Weisberger on Dec 15, 2012 04:57 pm Disneynature's
Chimpanzee is a great way to spend some down-time with your kid.
Read in browser Sciencey Christmas from Digital Science
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 15, 2012 04:55 pm The folks at Digital Science made a great, cute Christmas video -- I love the grand finale and the exploding pud! Digital Science Video
Read in browser Loud Bicycle: Car horn for your bike
By Mark Frauenfelder on Dec 15, 2012 03:07 pm An outstanding Kickstarter project - a bike horn that is as loud as a car horn! Cycling in traffic can be frightening and dangerous. The Loud Bicycle horn prevents accidents by alerting motorists with a familiar sound. The safety benefits of the horn give more people the confidence to travel by bike. How does it ...
Read in browser Against Security: a sociologist looks at security theater
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 15, 2012 02:51 pm Judging by Bruce Schneier's review of Against Security: How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger, a new book by Harvey Molotch, this is a must-read: The common thread in Against Security is that effective security comes less from the top down and more from the bottom up. Molotch's subtitle ...
Read in browser How to make a VW Westy ornament
By Jason Weisberger on Dec 15, 2012 01:59 pm Nevin offers templates, tips and tricks for making your own pop-top VW Westy christmas tree ornaments!
Read in browser Needs comma
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 15, 2012 01:47 pm 
Read in browser Meet SparkTruck, an “educational build-mobile” for the twenty-first century.
Dreamed up by a group of Stanford d.school students and funded through Kickstarter, SparkTruck is a mobile maker space currently traveling across the United States. At schools and summer camps and libraries around the country, the SparkTruck team offers workshops to help kids “find their inner maker” as they design and build projects like stamps, stop-motion animation clips, and “vibrobots.”
[video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmRKXqDwieY&feature=plcp]
This might seem all shiny and new. And it is—but only in part. What’s so striking (and exciting) about SparkTruck is the way it combines old and new. It does so in the tools it gets kids using, which range from pipe cleaners to laser cutters. It does so in its educational approach, which combines cutting-edge (get it?) STEM and design pedagogy with the fundamentals of an old-school shop class. And it does so in its method, which combines the iconic, century-old technology of the bookmobile with the hot new form of the maker space.
In doing so, SparkTruck joins a growing number of libraries which are combining time-tested principles (like equal access to information) with new technologies (like 3-D printers), putting in maker spaces and media production labs alongside bookshelves and meeting rooms. As I’ve argued over on bookmobility.org, these combinations make sense because reading and making actually have a lot in common. They’re both creative processes that take existing materials and combine them in new ways. Getting people engaged in those kinds of processes—through imaginative thinking, contemplation, hands-on problem-solving, and collaborative learning—is what both maker spaces and libraries are all about.
Taking that commitment on the road with scissors and hammers and 3-D printers and a great big bookmobile-like truck, SparkTruck serves as a laboratory for new approaches, as well as a reminder that trying new things doesn’t have to (and probably shouldn’t!) necessarily mean tossing old ones out.
After all, what would those vibrobots be without classically crafty pipe cleaners and tongue depressors? And what would a library be without the creative, participatory, straight-up awesome experience of reading?
SparkTruck schedule [sparktruck.org]
How to arrange a visit from SparkTruck [sparktruck.org]
SparkTruck YouTube channel [youtube.com]
Signature: --Derek Attig, bookmobility.org
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