The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- IHOP ad from 1969 will melt your brain
- LibDem candidates come out against anti-web-locker proposal
- Mario amigurumi
- Europeans: finally a chance to ask your reps to oppose ACTA
- Free ebooks correlated with increased print-book sales
- Ubisoft's notorious "uncrackable" unfair game DRM falls in less than 24h
- Online communities with Teresa Nielsen Hayden and John Scalzi
- Windows users need to security-patch every five days
- Now that's an American car!
- Goodnight Forest Moon: nerdgasmic kids' book parody
- Twitter's ten-billion-and-one-th tweet
- Thomas Dolby and ETHEL: Music for the morning after
- America's flagship headed for the scrapyard?
- Twitter: The Criterion Collection
- Fast, Excellent Document Scanner: Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500M
- Mötorhead + Larry David = LärryDavHead t-shirt
- Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)
- Proto-hiphop documentary "Style Wars" needs your help
- The physics behind flying sharks who can destroy airplanes
- Video: Japanese people singing Weezer
- Accused ATM-skimmer swallows USB drive in custody, doctors remove from his gut
- YouTube introduces automatic captioning for all videos
- 90 Types of Bitches
- Mexico City and Argentina: two fabulous places to get gay-married now
- Report: Texas apartment won't rent to "curry people,"and 40% of Americans have anti-Muslim bias
- Jose Carcavilla's fun cartoon characters in real photos
- Roundtable discussion on Rushkoff's Digital Nation documentary
- Great hardware, shame about everything else. Guess who!
- Rush Limbaugh in Gitmo gig-poster
- Alcoholic chimp sent to rehab by Russian zoo
| IHOP ad from 1969 will melt your brain Posted: 05 Mar 2010 04:22 AM PST Oscar sez, "Pancakes never looked so weird. Is it the balloons without context? Is it the mood music from the Moog soundtrack? Is it the chipmunkesque singers or the voice-of-God-narration that makes this late sixties IHOP commercial look as if it was made from visitors from a distant land? Apparently the sixties were not only good for hippies and rockstars but also for ad creatives, too. Don't waffle on this one, pass the syrup, click and enjoy..." Jesus Christ on a jetpack, what the hell is this? Creepy 1969 Commercial For IHOP   |
| LibDem candidates come out against anti-web-locker proposal Posted: 04 Mar 2010 11:34 PM PST 25 potential Parliamentary candidates from the UK Liberal Democrats have signed an open letter opposing the LibDem Lords' web-censorship proposal to allow courts to ban web-lockers. (Thanks, Mark!)   |
| Posted: 04 Mar 2010 10:33 PM PST  Janama crocheted this adorable Mario amigurumi -- sweet! It's a Mario !! (Thanks, Janama!) Previously:   |
| Europeans: finally a chance to ask your reps to oppose ACTA Posted: 04 Mar 2010 10:27 PM PST European MEPs from Greece, the Czech Republic and Germany have submitted a declaration opposing ACTA, the secret copyright treaty that is the first piece of global Internet law to be negotiated in private, without participation from poor countries, the public, or the press. Now they have 90 days to get their fellow MEPs to sign onto it, and if they make it, the opposition will be formally adopted by the European Parliament. If you're a European, please write to your MEP (contact info here) and ask for their support for the "Written declaration on the lack of a transparent process and potentially objectionable content concerning the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) from - Zuzana Roithova (CZ, EPP), Stavros Lambrinidis (GR, S&D), Alexander Alvaro (DE, ALDE) and Françoise Castex (FR, S&D)." Help the European Parliament oppose ACTA (Thanks, Ricardo!) Previously:
  |
| Free ebooks correlated with increased print-book sales Posted: 04 Mar 2010 10:21 PM PST A new study from two academics at BYU tracking the sales of printed books following free ebook releases found that generally, a free ebook release is correlated with increased sales. Interestingly, the exception is for a group of ebooks that were released for a week and then withdrawn -- part of Tor.com's launch strategy, and a success in getting large number of people signed up to the site. Very nice to see some crunchy data in the mix. New study shows some correlation between free ebooks and higher print sales The Short-Term Influence of Free Digital Versions of Books on Print Sales (Thanks, John!) Previously:
  |
| Ubisoft's notorious "uncrackable" unfair game DRM falls in less than 24h Posted: 04 Mar 2010 10:11 PM PST  Games maker Ubisoft drew global ire when it announced that all its new titles, starting with Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin's Creed 2, would henceforth be crippled with a DRM that would kick you off the game and wipe out your play if your Internet connection dropped for even a moment. From soldiers on forward-fire bases to people who just don't want to have to be online to play a single-player game, gamers all over the world treated Ubisoft's announcement as a declaration of war on the rights of game-buyers to enjoy their property in legitimate ways. Now comes the news that Ubisoft's DRM was broken less than 24 hours after release, which isn't such a surprise, really. After all, these are gamers: Ubisoft set them a challenge. Solving challenges is what gamers do. And the bragging rights are monster. Ubisoft's New DRM Cracked in Under 24-Hours - Updated! (via /.)ßßß ° Û 1. Unpack release Û Û ± Û 2. Mount image or burn it Û Û Û Û 3. Install Û Û Û Û 4. Copy the content from the SKIDROW folder on the DVD to your Û Û Û Û installation directory and overwrite Û Û Û Û 5. Play the game Û Û Previously:
  |
| Online communities with Teresa Nielsen Hayden and John Scalzi Posted: 04 Mar 2010 10:02 PM PST Teresa Nielsen Hayden and John Scalzi have a tremendous, wide-ranging interview on online community management on the American Society of Association Executives's website: Scalzi: You have the people in charge setting the tone and saying, "This is the way it's going to be," and then you have other people from within the community policing that tone because they value what they get there. There are so many places on the web [where] you can't have a conversation that when you find one where you can, you want to hug it to your chest and defend it. I find that [when] I'm off having a life away from the computer and somebody starts being completely idiotic or that the regulars know I won't like, they'll alert me.How Two Experts Build Strong Web Communities   |
| Windows users need to security-patch every five days Posted: 04 Mar 2010 09:55 PM PST Running Windows and have at apps from least 22 vendors installed? Be prepared to install a security update every five days, or live in danger of losing control over your OS, bank details, webcam, and contents of your fridge (the median number of apps on users' PCs in this study is 66). Of course, the study comes from a company that makes a tool to make it easier to install security updates, so there is that. And they give it away for free, and Brian Krebs, who knows from security, likes it. Yep, There's a Patch for That Previously:   |
| Posted: 04 Mar 2010 09:49 PM PST    |
| Goodnight Forest Moon: nerdgasmic kids' book parody Posted: 04 Mar 2010 09:47 PM PST  Noah Dziobecki's Goodnight Forest Moon is an absolutely nerdgasmic downloadable book to print and assemble at home that combines Star Wars and Goodnight Moon in a way that it utterly delightful. (via Super Punch)   |
| Twitter's ten-billion-and-one-th tweet Posted: 04 Mar 2010 09:51 PM PST A BB commenter just pointed out that Twitter's ten billionth tweet, a milestone hit earlier tonight, was not a public tweet. However, the ten-billion-and-one-th tweet was, and it is hilarious. She may be related to @loudbot or @jennyholzer.   |
| Thomas Dolby and ETHEL: Music for the morning after Posted: 04 Mar 2010 07:27 PM PST  Face it, music friends: plenty of times you come home from a club or theater convinced you've seen an amazing performance. The morning after, as evidence of the concert leaks onto the Interwebs, you are disappointed to learn that what you see and hear doesn't match what you experienced in the moment. It doesn't mean the moment was any less transcendent; it just means that the transcendence didn't last. That makes it even more welcome that rare time when the morning after is as great as the night before. People go to TED for many reasons: the quality of the content, the quality of the networking, the ability to say "I went to TED." (Mark has written about some of this year's standouts, among them talks by Bill Gates and Temple Grandin.) I go, in part, for the music. For many years, Thomas Dolby has been the conference's music director, booking an eclectic, surprising, yet entirely appropriate cast and also leading a house band (a new one every year) to kick off each of the conference's dozen or so sessions. This year Dolby chose the rogue string quartet ETHEL as his accompanists, and they were standouts through the event, playing a wide variety of covers (including Led Zeppelin, New Order, Tracy Chapman, and The Verve), backing other performers (David Byrne, Andrew Bird, Jake Shimabukuro), and showing up in at least one club and one hotel lobby for semiplanned jams. I've already written about what ETHEL's performances at TED made me feel and think about but today I got to experience the performances again, because today TED made unedited videos of last month's event available to people who attended. Turns out it wasn't just being there that made Dolby and ETHEL sound so stirring: they still sound fantastic. I know these are raw recordings, but they sound clear through my computer's speakers, perhaps because I'm not as surprised by their repertoire. But because the performances are clearer sonically, I get to hear wrinkles I missed in the big hall, so I guess I still am surprised. Under normal circumstances I'd expect people to laugh at me if I told them that the best hard rock and synthpop band I heard this year was a string quartet, but it's the truth. Now I have proof. I hope the whole world gets to see and hear how great Thomas Dolby and ETHEL are as soon as possible. (photo by cyanocorax)  |
| America's flagship headed for the scrapyard? Posted: 04 Mar 2010 07:42 PM PST  The SS United States is the fastest, sleekest ocean liner ever built, a giant gem of midcentury design and engineering, and in the brief time it spent on the high seas before the great liners were finally supplanted by jet flight, it truly became what its admirers now call it: "America's flagship." In its glory days it seemed hard to believe it would ever end like this: Moored permanently in a berth on the Philadelphia side of the Delaware River, cold and empty. That's where it's been for a long 14 years while a succession of owners have tried to figure out what to do with it. There's been talk of turning it into a casino, or a luxury dockside hotel; there's been talk of refitting it and sending it back out on the seas. But the clock is running down, and now it looks like the end may be approaching: The current owners, Genting Hong Kong, have begun to seriously solicit bids from scrappers. The SS United States Conservancy has mounted a last-ditch effort to raise public awareness about the dire straits in which this beautiful ship now finds itself. Take a look at the trailer for "SS United States: Lady In Waiting," a documentary produced by SSUSC board member Mark Perry, and if you're moved to help, contact the Conservancy. |
| Twitter: The Criterion Collection Posted: 04 Mar 2010 05:04 PM PST First: as I publish this post, Twitter's about to hit the 10 billion tweet milestone. @poeks & @sween asked friends to film their favorite tweets, and this video is what resulted. They explain: (via Matt Haughey)   |
| Fast, Excellent Document Scanner: Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500M Posted: 04 Mar 2010 04:27 PM PST I reviewed the Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500M scanner overt at Credit.com. I absolutely love it. Read review on CreditBloggers | Buy ScanSnap 1500M on Amazon   |
| Mötorhead + Larry David = LärryDavHead t-shirt Posted: 04 Mar 2010 04:38 PM PST |
| Posted: 04 Mar 2010 04:34 PM PST As digital sampling becomes more and more pervasive as a recording technique, the belief that anything is possible in a studio nowadays is also on the rise. But in 1981 "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash and the Wheels of Steel" took the cut-and-paste-sound approach used covertly on many records today (when they're not abusing Auto-Tune) and the scavenging of other songs as its very subject. The number asks: How smart can you steal? How slick can you mix? This technical apex of one of rap's leading disc-spinners is tremendously influential; many of today's dance-music and rock productions are unimaginable without it. Flash started as a South Bronx dance-hall disc jockey whose trademark was taking his favorite rock and rap songs and repeating their hottest elements for heightened effect. Although credited to the full vocal group he supported, "Wheels of Steel" was a solo shot by Flash designed to show off the wizardry that knocked 'em out live. After a stuttering intro, Flash lets Blondie's "Rapture," Chic's "Good Times," and Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust," as well as snippets from earlier Flash/Five singles glide in and slam out of the unwavering beat. These songs of different tempos all fit without being forced. Spoken sections, boasts, and song apexes are finely woven into an amazingly seamless whole. Before the serrated-edged righteousness of "The Message" and "White Lines (Don't Don't Do It)" turned attention to rapper and writer Melle Mel, the group was a showcase for Flash. This is why.   |
| Proto-hiphop documentary "Style Wars" needs your help Posted: 04 Mar 2010 03:50 PM PST Jesse Thorn says, I don't know if you've ever seen Style Wars, but it's the definitive documentary about early hip-hop. It focuses on graf writing, but also covers music and dance from the perspective of New York City in the first years of the 1980s. It won the Grand Prize for Documentary at Sundance, and is an amazing document of the roots of one of the most important cultural movements in American history (also one of my favorite films of all time). The director, Tony Silver, was a family friend (he died a couple years ago). His partner Lisa and the other folks behind the film are trying to raise money to do a full restoration of the original print. The website, at stylewars.com, is pretty incredible in and of itself - they're all really committed to sharing this history. Anyway, folks can contribute right on the front page of stylewars.com.    |
| The physics behind flying sharks who can destroy airplanes Posted: 04 Mar 2010 03:45 PM PST First, we take it for granted that, with the possible exceptions of Chinatown, Top Hat, and the upcoming A-Team movie (see David's preview) Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus is the greatest movie of all time. I've written about it in Brief notes on taste and entertainment: A shark, an octopus, Celine Dion, and Batman. Second, we consider the greatest scene ever in the greatest movie of all time. Yes, you've seen it already and don't forget that the key line of dialogue is NSFW, but it's worth another 68 seconds of your time: Third, we need to be scientists about this. Could a shark (a) grow large enough to destroy a plane, and (b) generate enough power to fly in the air and reach that plane? Fortunately, the Interweb has someone who can explain all that for us. The greatest infographic of all time, one that both Edward Tufte and Nancy Duarte would have killed to create, is after the jump. You're welcome. (awesome infographic by Stephen Taubman, who also has answered some important questions regarding Aliens vs. Predator.)   |
| Video: Japanese people singing Weezer Posted: 04 Mar 2010 03:37 PM PST From Joe Sabia — the videographer who made Tupac in Kazakhstan and this morning's Thankful Oscars video — comes this wonderful rendition of Weezer's Can't Stop Partying featuring random people from Tokyo, Kyoto, and Hiroshima. Sabia took a trip to Japan in November, and over the course of six days, showed the below note to folks he met on the street. "It basically says hey, how are you, I'm doing a project and I'd really like for you to repeat what I say in English," he tells me. "A United Airlines stewardess translated it for me just before I got off the plane." Sabia hopes to do this in all the countries he visits from now on, although he doesn't yet know where he's going next. |
| Accused ATM-skimmer swallows USB drive in custody, doctors remove from his gut Posted: 04 Mar 2010 03:44 PM PST Smoking Gun reports that a NYC man accused of participating in an ATM-skimming ring was raided by feds, and in an unusual attempt to destroy evidence, grabbed a flash drive and swallowed it whole while in the custody of Secret Service agents: Mr. Necula is currently being held without bail at a jail in Queens, New York. Here are the court documents.
Previously:   |
| YouTube introduces automatic captioning for all videos Posted: 04 Mar 2010 03:09 PM PST Big news for video creators/uploaders who use YouTube (including us at Boing Boing Video): Today, YouTube launched automatic captioning for all videos, using Google's speech recognition service. Until now, automated captioning was offered only to a handful of education partners, as a test phase. I'm very excited about what the rollout means for the deaf, and for possible translation applications.   |
| Posted: 04 Mar 2010 09:01 PM PST (Sorta NSFW, for strong language and sexual content.) Jeff Simmermon says, My friend's cousin found this list on the floor of the third-grade classroom in a DC charter school. The title is "Types of Bitches." It's a taxonomy of 90 different "types of bitches," in hilarious detail. She scanned it and sent it along. I've put it up on a Flickr set here. To me, it reads like a rap song. It's got this *flow* to it. Because there are so many Types of Bitches—yes, just a dime shy of a hundred—this informative chart actually goes on for several pages. You can view all of the Types of Bitches here. Three classifications I found particularly interesting are "uncreative bitches," "Geekin' bitches," and "white bitches that think Black people are poor." (andiamnotlying.com) Update: Huh, apparently this is like a photocopied, grade-school version of a chain email. Here's a message board post suggesting that the same list circulated in another urban school in 2009. |
| Mexico City and Argentina: two fabulous places to get gay-married now Posted: 04 Mar 2010 01:59 PM PST As of today, Mexico City has a new law in effect allowing same-sex weddings. Just yesterday, the second same-sex marriage took place in Argentina.   |
| Report: Texas apartment won't rent to "curry people,"and 40% of Americans have anti-Muslim bias Posted: 04 Mar 2010 01:53 PM PST An apartment complex in Texas is reported to have turned away people presumed to be Muslim or South Asian (or segregated them into different buildings) because they were "curry people." Related: a recent Gallup poll shows 40% of Americans admit to anti-Muslim prejudice. (via CAIR)   |
| Jose Carcavilla's fun cartoon characters in real photos Posted: 04 Mar 2010 01:25 PM PST  Terrific toy photographer Brian McCarty just turned me on to the absolutely delightful photo manipulations of Jose Carcavilla. Jose Carcavilla's Portfolio (Behance Network) Relleno De Mono's (aka Jose Carcavilla's) photostream (Flickr) |
| Roundtable discussion on Rushkoff's Digital Nation documentary Posted: 04 Mar 2010 01:16 PM PST  Last month, our pal Douglas Rushkoff's latest Frontline documentary "Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier" aired on PBS. The entire program is viewable online and there's now the spark of what could be a pretty fiery roundtable discussion happening at the Digital Nation site. At the table are folks who are pros at online debating, even if you don't agree with them: Clay Shirky, Nicholas Carr, RU Sirius, Sherry Turkle, Mark Pesce, RU Sirius, Jimmy Wales, Kevin Kelly, Amy Bruckman, and danah boyd. Here's the kindling: This month, we'll be discussing "the crowd" - particularly the way group activity, creativity, and awareness are both enhanced and exacerbated by our digital networks. We do not need to reach conclusions or even consensus about the impact of technology on our collective fate (or the fate of collectives). We are less concerned with finding definitive answers than asking the right kinds of questions, reframing our interrogations in new and informative ways, learning from one another's perspectives, and seeing how the public participants respond to and inform our conversation.Digital Nation roundtable   |
| Great hardware, shame about everything else. Guess who! Posted: 04 Mar 2010 12:57 PM PST  Photo: Polapix Be sure to catch Gizmodo's series on the decline of Sony. It highlights--among other things--why very good isn't good enough when you have excellent competitors. Its problems are legion. Aside from the well-understood structural and balance-sheet woes, Sony sells countless nearly-identical products with forgettable names, trading on its coolness in lieu of a vision for what customers might want to do with their high-tech toys. Joel Johnson's anchoring feature, How Sony Lost its Way, sums it up, especially his quip about the company's inevitable response to Apple's iPad: "I am sighing preemptively for the beautiful black slate that Sony will release in 2011, then never upgrade again." The best piece, however, is his story about the two brothers who established the company--and the engineer-dominated "silos" that have become such a deadly liability to it.  |
| Rush Limbaugh in Gitmo gig-poster Posted: 04 Mar 2010 11:52 AM PST  Zoltron sez, "A gig poster for last night's Jello Biafra show in San Francisco. 3 color hand pulled screen print by Bay Area poster artist, Zoltron. (Anyone brave enough to hang it on their wall gets an Oxycontin IV and a signed Limbaugh Headshot. :o)"   |
| Alcoholic chimp sent to rehab by Russian zoo Posted: 04 Mar 2010 10:54 AM PST |
The average Microsoft Windows user has software from 22 vendors on her PC, and needs to install a new security update roughly every five days in order to use these programs safely, according to an insightful new study released this week. 
We didn't care how they did it. They could read it. They could act it. They could do it with puppets. Whatever they wanted. The only rules were it had to be a tweet written by someone else and it had to contain the entire tweet and nothing but the tweet. 
From 
[I]n the view of investigators, [Florin] Necula "grabbed Subject Flash Drive 2, which had been on his person at the time of his arrest, and swallowed," Agent Joseph Borger noted in the below February 25 search warrant affidavit. When Necula was unable to pass the item after about four days, doctors--concerned that the drive was not compatible with the suspect's GI tract--concluded he "would be injured if they allowed the flash drive to remain inside of him," reported Borger. Necula eventually agreed to allow doctors at New York Downtown Hospital to remove the item, according to a source familiar with the incident. 
| 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