Monday, May 20, 2013

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

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Sponsored Content Pretty Fucking Awesome
Nicky Da B "Go Loko": music video, dir. Clayton Cubitt (NSFW, Seizure Warning)
How to get cinematic video from a point-and-shoot camera
Pixel art from obscure video games
UK spooks' candid opinions of the Assange affair revealed
Cory's Sense About Science lecture
Eurovision 2013: An American in London
Hacker News, "a community for Ex-Redditors"
Indie games made with Unity
Yahoo buys Tumblr
Rare, amazing original prospectus for Disneyland
The Twelve-Fingered Boy - mesmerizing YA horror novel
ORGCon 2013 - the UK's only digital rights conference, this year with John Perry Barlow and Tim Wu!
What the Mounties pirate

 

Sponsored Content Pretty Fucking Awesome

By Advertiser on May 20, 2013 12:53 pm

ADVERTISEMENT NEW YORK—Media consumers across the United States are reporting this week that sponsored content—articles and videos paid for by advertisers and distributed by print and digital publications—is easily the coolest fucking published material anyone could ever read or watch. "I love, love, fucking love sponsored content," said news and entertainment reader Erica Olson, adding ...
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Nicky Da B "Go Loko": music video, dir. Clayton Cubitt (NSFW, Seizure Warning)

By Xeni Jardin on May 20, 2013 12:31 pm

Clayton Cubitt directed this new music video for New Orleans Bounce artist Nicky Da B. He writes, It's with great pride that I debut "Go Loko," the insanely fun new music video I directed for Nicky Da B. Prepare yourself for machine-gun New Orleans Bounce, twerking latex-clad bunnies, intergalactic booty constellations that would make Carl ...
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How to get cinematic video from a point-and-shoot camera

By Rob Beschizza on May 20, 2013 12:29 pm

The first step, unfortunately, is that you have to have Sony's remarkable but rather expensive RX100, whose larger sensor makes much of the difference. Fortunately, the rest is all menu settings to get a flat image profile and 25fps. Guides from Run, Gun and Shoot and from EOSHD have the technical goods, but you'll need ...
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Pixel art from obscure video games

By Rob Beschizza on May 20, 2013 12:14 pm

Obscure Video Games collects splendid character art and workmanship from weird, unsuccessful or foreign-only titles of the 8- and 16-bit eras.
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UK spooks' candid opinions of the Assange affair revealed

By Cory Doctorow on May 20, 2013 12:00 pm

Julian Assange has presented a set of freedom-of-information liberated messages from GCHQ, the UK spy headquarters, concerning his own case. According to Assange, the messages reveal that UK spies believed that the Swedish rape inquiry against him was a "fit up" aimed at punishing him for his involvement in Wikileaks (many believe that the Swedish ...
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Cory's Sense About Science lecture

By Cory Doctorow on May 20, 2013 11:20 am

I gave the annual Sense About Science lecture last week in London, and The Guardian recorded and podcasted it (MP3). It's based on the Waffle Iron Connected to a Fax Machine talk I gave at Re:publica in Berlin the week before.
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Eurovision 2013: An American in London

By Leigh Alexander on May 20, 2013 10:43 am

It's Sunday morning in London, where I'm living as of less than a week ago. I've got a hangover and kitchen cleanup duty, and on top of that, I'm out £10. An actual live baby fox entered our house last night. Last night was Eurovision. I've had my first Eurovision party as an embedded foreigner. ...
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Hacker News, "a community for Ex-Redditors"

By Rob Beschizza on May 20, 2013 10:32 am

TechCrunch's Leena Rao reports on Hacker News, the code demo that quickly became a major aggregator. Now enjoying 1.6m page views a day, its success was due in part to minimalism ("he wanted Hacker News to look like your list of processes in a terminal window"), well-made moderation features, and the arrival of technically-minded Redditors ...
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Indie games made with Unity

By Rob Beschizza on May 20, 2013 10:18 am

Make Games! published a huge list of indie titles, many of them free or trivially inexpensive, made using the wildly popular game-making software Unity—I know what I'll be doing next weekend! If you're feeling inspired, Make Games!' getting started page links to essential articles and Unity alternatives for developers of any skill level.
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Yahoo buys Tumblr

By Rob Beschizza on May 20, 2013 09:53 am

Yahoo announced today that it is buying blogging site Tumblr for $1.1bn, mostly in cash. In the posting, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made clear that the cooler, younger company would not be smothered by her firm's notorious corporate culture, under which many other purchases have withered and died. I'm delighted to announce that we've reached ...
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Rare, amazing original prospectus for Disneyland

By Cory Doctorow on May 20, 2013 09:36 am

Dan from the Journal of Ride Theory passed me a copy of the original prospectus for Disneyland -- a rare and wonderful document I've never seen or even heard of before. I'm delighted to bring it to you today. Dan explains: I like it because I get the sense it's an edited transcript of Walt ...
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The Twelve-Fingered Boy - mesmerizing YA horror novel

By Cory Doctorow on May 20, 2013 09:02 am

The Twelve-Fingered Boy is John Hornor Jacobs's debut young adult novel and it's amazing. It's a horror novel about Shreve, a kid from a tough background who is stuck in juvie and makes the most of it by running a black-market candy dealership; and his new roommate Jack, a quiet kid with twelve fingers and ...
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ORGCon 2013 - the UK's only digital rights conference, this year with John Perry Barlow and Tim Wu!

By Cory Doctorow on May 20, 2013 08:43 am

Jim from the Open Rights Group writes in with the announcement for this year's ORGCon, a brilliant UK digital rights event: Legends of digital rights, Tim Wu and John Perry Barlow, will be leading Open Rights Group's 3rd national conference on June 8th. Join us for ORGCon2013 at the Institute of Engineering and Technology, Savoy ...
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What the Mounties pirate

By Cory Doctorow on May 19, 2013 01:03 pm

Travis sez, "The Pirate Party of Canada has uncovered that IP addresses from within the RCMP and Industry Canada are used to download copyrighted material. The point here isn't that they are downloading, it's that because all we have are IP addresses we don't know who is actually doing the downloading."
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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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