Obama's regressive record makes Nixon look like Che The steampunk creations of Will Rockwell The Dude and the Zen Master Novo takes tiny GoPro sports cam to the cinema Cat-tail buttplug Shedding light on the Black Death Alpine - "Gasoline" (free MP3) Thatcher dead Today, we save the Internet (again): fix the CFAA! Clever, 130sqft Paris apartment ISPs and creepy ad company injecting traffic into secure Web sessions Lessig's TED talk on fighting corruption in politics with campaign finance reform Great "do not disturb" status message Wikileaks opens Public Library of US Diplomacy (PLUSD), searchable repository of 1970s US diplomatic and intel documents Mozilla announces agnostic, safe payment system for the Web What porn do they watch in the Vatican? Time: XKCD's slo-mo time-lapse comic Walk 1.4 mi. in London, take photos of 140+ CCTVs Why men - and everyone - should speak out about misogyny in gaming ExxonMobil, FAA, Arkansas cops establish flight restriction zone, threaten reporters who try to document Mayflower, AR spill "Free Pussy Riot" lingerie commercial Lethal weapons from duty-free stores French spies demand removal of a Wikipedia entry, threaten random Wikipedia admin in France when they don't get their way Obama's regressive record makes Nixon look like Che
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 08, 2013 12:06 pm Redditor Federal Reservations has made a handy post enumerating all the regressive, authoritarian, corporatist policies enacted by the Obama administration in its one-and-a-bit terms. You know, for someone the right wing press likes to call a socialist, Obama sure makes Richard Nixon look like Che Guevara. And what's more, this is only a partial list, ...
Read in browser The steampunk creations of Will Rockwell
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 08, 2013 11:53 am John Biggs interviews steampunk designer Will Rockwell: "He began his career as a TV producer but he always loved to tinker with metals, leather, and wood – the three components of good steampunk." [TechCrunch Makers]
Read in browser The Dude and the Zen Master
By Jason Weisberger on Apr 08, 2013 11:52 am Did the rug really tie the room together? Was Donny out of his element?
Read in browser Novo takes tiny GoPro sports cam to the cinema
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 08, 2013 11:38 am The GoPro Hero 3 is a matchbox-sized, battery-powered HD camera that goes anywhere, capturing everything from adrenaline-fueled sporting escapades to underwater adventures. The Angenieux 15-40mm is a $45,000 cine lens that makes everything look wildly beautiful. Now, assuming you don't mind a 6x crop factor and a $295-a-day rental fee, you may have them together!
Read in browser Cat-tail buttplug
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 08, 2013 11:19 am "The Emma", as it is named, is a softly-furred one-inch buttplug designed "for the most comfortable fit". It comes in white, black and leopard-print, and is yours for $30. Animal Cat Tail Butt / Anal Plug "EMMA" [Amazon]
Read in browser Shedding light on the Black Death
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Apr 08, 2013 11:02 am Seven hundred years ago, millions of Europeans were wiped out by a disease we still don't entirely understand. The Black Death might seem like a pretty open-and-shut case at this point: It was caused by plague-bearing fleas that hitched rides on the rats that infested a grim and grimy medieval world. The End. But that ...
Read in browser Alpine - "Gasoline" (free MP3)
By Amy Seidenwurm on Apr 08, 2013 10:32 am Sound it Out # 46: Alpine - "Gasoline" (MP3) Here's a lovely, dreamy little pop gem to make any spring day even brighter. The band is called Alpine, and formerly called themselves Swiss, even though they are from Australia. Go figure. Their excellent debut album A is for Alpine comes out in the US (and ...
Read in browser Thatcher dead
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 08, 2013 09:59 am Reuters: "Britain's only woman prime minister, the unyielding, outspoken Thatcher led the Conservatives to three election victories, governing from 1979 to 1990, the longest continuous period in office by a British premier since the early 19th century."
Read in browser Today, we save the Internet (again): fix the CFAA!
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 08, 2013 08:49 am Read this if you want to stay out of jail. When my friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide in January, he'd been the subject of a DoJ press-release stating that the Federal prosecutors who had indicted him were planning on imprisoning him for 25 years for violating the terms of service of a site that hosted ...
Read in browser Clever, 130sqft Paris apartment
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 08, 2013 08:13 am Inthralld showcases a 130 square-foot apartment in Paris, where a set of insanely clever design decisions allows for a full apartment's worth of amenities to be jammed into a teeny weeny space. I love the drawers in the steps, but of course I really love the hiding bed/sofa. Basically, I want to live in a ...
Read in browser ISPs and creepy ad company injecting traffic into secure Web sessions
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 08, 2013 02:11 am A company called RT66 appears to be injecting code into secure Web-sessions, possibly with collusion from ISPs like CMA Communications. No one's sure how they're doing this, neither RT66 or CMA are answering questions, and it's bad news all around.
Read in browser Lessig's TED talk on fighting corruption in politics with campaign finance reform
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 08, 2013 12:46 am Larry Lessig presented at TED his new project, an effort to curb the corrupting influence of money in American politics with a reform to campaign finance.
Read in browser Great "do not disturb" status message
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 07, 2013 11:40 pm An unidentified person -- possibly an art student, based on the title -- has come up with a pretty seriously worded note to other people in the computer lab in order to remain uninterrupted while working on a deadline. Art School gets busy sometimes (via Geeks Are Sexy)
Read in browser Wikileaks opens Public Library of US Diplomacy (PLUSD), searchable repository of 1970s US diplomatic and intel documents
By Xeni Jardin on Apr 07, 2013 11:22 pm "The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer." -- Henry A. Kissinger, US Secretary of State, March 10, 1975. Julian Assange today announced the launch of the Public Library of US Diplomacy, or PLUSD, the publication of more than 1.7 million US diplomatic and intelligence documents from the 1970s. PLUSD includes diplomatic ...
Read in browser Mozilla announces agnostic, safe payment system for the Web
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 07, 2013 11:05 pm The Mozilla Foundation has previewed a new, experimental system for in-app payments that is intended to solve several major problems with existing payment systems available to developers, including the fact that other payment systems are strongly partisan, tilted to one or just a few payment processors. It's a good and useful thing, and an example ...
Read in browser What porn do they watch in the Vatican?
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 07, 2013 09:37 pm TorrentFreak's been looking at the BitTorrent video-downloading from the small pool of downloaders in Vatican City, and they've reported in with the Vatican's favorite pornography: In the interests of science we researched each of the titles (including the curiously named RS77_Episode 01) and discovered that downloaders in the Vatican have one or two unusual 'niche' ...
Read in browser Time: XKCD's slo-mo time-lapse comic
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 07, 2013 09:00 pm On March 25, Randall Munroe ran a strip called Time, an enigmatic, wordless image whose tool-tip was "Wait for it." Ever since, the strip has been updating with subsequent frames, all of them making up a time-lapse animation of a lovely story about a day of sand-castle building at the beach. The XKCD Wikia entry ...
Read in browser Walk 1.4 mi. in London, take photos of 140+ CCTVs
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 07, 2013 08:34 pm James Bridle photographed every CCTV between his home in east London and Dalston Junction, a 1.4mi walk with about 140 cameras. Welcome to London, where we have 11 CCTVs per red blood cells. Every CCTV camera between my house and Dalston Junction (via Super Punch)
Read in browser Why men - and everyone - should speak out about misogyny in gaming
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 07, 2013 06:51 pm Rock Paper Shotgun's John Walker has published an excellent essay called "Misogyny, Sexism, And Why RPS Isn't Shutting Up," making the case for games (and tech) writers of all sexes writing about sexism and misogyny in public, documenting the intimidation that writers experience when they do so, and offering some explanations for the violent, vicious ...
Read in browser ExxonMobil, FAA, Arkansas cops establish flight restriction zone, threaten reporters who try to document Mayflower, AR spill
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 07, 2013 04:44 pm Expect to see a lot fewer images of toxic sludge creeping through small communities, thanks to the hard work of ExxonMobil. The company could have used its prodigious resources to make its oil pipelines more secure, preventing town-destroying leaks like the one that hit Mayflower, Arkansas. But they figured out that it would be cheaper ...
Read in browser "Free Pussy Riot" lingerie commercial
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 07, 2013 02:36 pm Blush, a German lingerie company, created a campaign that either co-opts or honors (or both) Pussy Riot, sending a scantily clad lingerie model in a knit balaclava to walk through -15C weather in Moscow holding a FREE PUSSY RIOT sign.
Read in browser Lethal weapons from duty-free stores
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 07, 2013 01:48 pm Here's a writeup of Evan Booth's Hack the Box conference presentation on making lethal weapons out of items bought in airport duty-free shops. It's pretty ingenious stuff (the video above is from a related presentation at CarolinaCon 2013).
Read in browser French spies demand removal of a Wikipedia entry, threaten random Wikipedia admin in France when they don't get their way
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 07, 2013 01:27 pm The French spy agency Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur inexplicably flipped out about a longstanding Wikipedia entry on a military base (station hertzienne militaire de Pierre sur Haute) filled with public domain, widely known information. They tried to get the Wikimedia Foundation to delete it, but wouldn't explain what, exactly, they objected to in the ...
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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