A big thanks to our outgoing guestblogger, Russ Kick of The Memory Hole, who filled the right-hand column with no shortage of interesting things during his visit. Mr. Kick is now off to write his next book, 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know, Vol. 2 due for release in November.

Our next guestbar resident, Christopher Coppola, has completed eight feature motion pictures. The latest of these is Creature of the Sunny Side-Up Trailer Park (a.k.a. Bloodhead), which had its world premiere during the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival. The film stars screen legends Frank Gorshin and Shirley Jones, and television icons Lynda Carter and Bernie Kopell. His other film credits include the Trimark Pictures release Deadfall (1993) starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Biehn, and James Coburn; Gunfighter (1998) starring Martin Sheen, Robert Carradine, and Clu Gulager; Palmer's Pick-Up: An American Roadshow Odyssey (1999) starring Robert Carradine and Rosanna Arquette; Dracula's Widow (1989) which he produced for De Laurentiis Entertainment Group; G-Men From Hell (2000) starring William Forsythe, Tate Donovan, and Gary Busey; Bel-Air (2000) starring Charles Fleischer and Barbara Bain; and Clockmaker (1998), a children's fantasy film shot on location in Romania for Kuschner-Locke.

Christopher is co-founder and spokesperson for Ars Nova XXI, the mother company of PlasterCITY Productions (an independent feature and television production company that concentrates on HD digital format) and PlasterCITY Digital Post (a post-production facility that specializes in editing and onlining for feature films, television, shorts, commercials, and music videos.)

Welcome, Christopher!

Welcome to the new and improved Boing Boing, now with sponsors! Seriously, there's nothing wrong with your set. The only real difference you'll find on the page, besides a cleaner design, is the addition of those small ad boxes on the sides. We've decided to accept a limited amount of advertising so that we can cover our costs and dedicate more cycles to what we love -- finding and posting things that we find interesting, curious, and, of course, wonderful. What does this evolutionary step mean for you, dear reader? Nothing, except more of what you've come to expect from Boing Boing, brain candy for happy mutants since 1988. A warm round of thanks to our sponsors, and to you for your continued support! And a very special thanks to BoingBoing pal Anil Dash for the expert code massage.

- Mark, Cory, Xeni, David, and John

Social network service Tribe.net (I visit regularly, because some BoingBoing readers created a nifty BoingBoing tribe) just launched a feature that allows users to automatically publish aspects of their network experience to blogs or websites. MT, Blogger, TypePad are supported. Examples of the sorts of things one might "Tribecast" include lists of friends, special interest "tribes" one belongs to, or bulletin board listings.

This strikes me as an interesting new use of social nets, but also a potentially frightening one. It's bad enough that some folks are bold enough to belong to tribes like Vegan Oral Sex Enthusiasts Who Own Semiautomatic Weapons And Aren't Wearing any Underwear, but now such excessive displays of intimate information will be really, really public. Yikes. Link

IM and phone reports of a moderate earthquake in San Diego large enough to scare the crap out of people, but no damage reports. Link. Update: Looks like a 5.2. And here are some reactions from San Diego bloggers

Interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor about a visual response by 25 artists in Baghdad to the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. At left, a sculpture by Abdel-Karim Khalil depicting a hooded detainee. Snip from CSM story:

[Iraqi Union of Artists deputy chairman Qasim Alsabti] created a life-size figure of a woman wrapped in a bloodstained white shroud. It symbolizes the rape of women detainees in Abu Ghraib, says Alsabti, who heard of allegations of women prisoners being raped at Abu Ghraib five months before the scandal broke. "There was a letter circulating in Fallujah from a woman inside Abu Ghraib," he says. "She was begging the resistance to bomb Abu Ghraib and bring down the walls on their heads so that their suffering would end. I felt like screaming when I heard this. I wanted to draw the attention of the American people."

[F]or many Iraqis, including artists like Alsabti, Abu Ghraib has become synonymous with what they see as the injustices of the occupation. "It's like an adviser from Saddam Hussei's regime has come back to Iraq and is now advising the Americans," he says.

Link. Incidentally, survivors of Pinochet in Chile know a thing or two about torture: Link

Carlo says:

"The BBC's doing these shockwave replays of goals and stuff from the European football championships. It's pretty nifty. I recommend choosing the Sweden-Bulgaria game, then the 57th minute goal by Larsson, then the ball-cam."

Link

Designer Karim Rashid's DJ Kreemy turntable table is perfect for otherworldly ambient sessions. Rashid: "(The table) is organic like sound, omnidirectional like sound, and that emphasizes the 'volumous' beats that irradiate from the two turntables." All I know is that it would match my 1967 Fender Rhodes "Student Model" piano perfectly. Link (Thanks, DF Tram!)

Today on the National Public Radio program "Day to Day," I speak with Cameron Clapp. In September 2001, he lost both legs and his right arm in a train accident.

Supported by his large extended family -- and his identical twin brother Jesse -- Cameron fought against his disability to make an astounding recovery. Not only can the young man swim, run, drive a car, and even play golf again, he recently won four gold medals at the Endeavor Games, a sports competition for amputees. He can do this in part because of advanced prosthetic limb technology called the "C-Leg," short for "computer leg." The device (which Cameron demonstrated at Wired Magazine's NextFest) includes many tiny sensors controlled by a computer chip, and provides much greater mobility and control than conventional hydraulic limbs. Link to archived audio (after 12PM PT), a photo gallery, and more on both Cameron and the high-tech prosthetics he uses.

Doesn't propagate by MMS or carry a payload, but there it is: a wild Bluetooth virus.

EPOC.Cabir is a proof-of-concept worm that replicates on Nokia Series 60 phones. It repeatedly sends itself to the first Bluetooth-enabled device that it can find, regardless of the type of device (ie even a Bluetooth-enabled printer will be attacked if it is within range).

Link (Thanks, Alfie)

Rumor has it that the long-awaited print magazine for Suicide Girls recently died before arrival. But don't cry too hard for the online hipster smutster brand. They've got a delicious new photography book out, and it's already near the top of Amazon's arts and photography bestseller list. A number of BoingBoing readers including Michael McDaniel and Tim Holt write in to point out that Amazon's auto-recommendation system oddly suggests that those fond of the SG tome might also fancy Tortures and Torments of the Christian Martyrs by Reverend Antonio Gallonio. "Better Together" indeed!
Fleshbot has a few sneak peeks of Suicide Girls, and there are more on the publisher's website here. (If you have to even *ask* whether or not it's worksafe...)

OpenTextBook.org is a collaborative project wherein university students (and others) can turn their course notes into a giant, open textbook. You need to know how to use CVS to contribute and edit the book, but there's a daily PDF snapshot of the state of the project, which is looking pretty good! Link (Thanks, Steve!)

Here's a (badly machine-translated) Japanese page telling you how to print, cut and fold a cradle for Sony's Clie PDAs. Link (Thanks, Carlos!)

BoingBoing reader Philip says, "After playing around with the new iTrip mini, the FM broadcasting accessory for the iPod our little minds got working on some ideas. We thought we might be able to make the range of Griffin's iTrip mini a little better if took it apart and exposed the antenna, turns out we could. And then we thought, hey -- we could use a couple iPods to broadcast something we wanted to get out there. Perhaps not 'should' that is, but could. Here's the How To."
Link

On Kevin Kelly's "Cool Tools" ezine, a primer on Bio Diesel -- fuels made from veggie oil. Roll your own renewable fueling station!

I have been running Bio Diesel in my truck for over a year now. Bio Diesel is basically slightly refined vegetable oil that can run in ANY diesel vehicle with little to no modifications. The vegetable oil used can be virgin, but it is generally recycled from fryers at restaurants. Yes, the exhaust smells like whatever was fried in it. The best part of running Bio Diesel is that no wars need to be fought over it: it's entirely domestic, supports US farming, it's totally renewable, and it cuts almost all aspects of a diesel vehicle's emissions by more than 50-75%. (The exception is NOx which is about the same). You get slightly less mileage and power (5% decrease) from petro-diesel, but your exhaust smells a lot better and its actually easier on your engine.

Link

BoingBoing reader Mack says:

Excellent pictures on this site! A USC roboticist has created a robot that can build large structures by extruding semi-liquid material from a pump in inch-thick layers to form a wall or a building, and then return to fill in the hollow wall. This looks like a macro version of 3-D prototyping in that you could essentially set up a machine, fill it with the right goo and programming, switch it on, and have a house in a few hours that was built completely without the intervention of human hands.

Link to National Science Foundation press release, and Link to an overview with more links on Mack's blog.

BoingBoing reader Bas Suverkropp says:

The Field Robot event is kind of a miniature DARPA Grand Challenge, small robots must navigate through a maize field. Join Corn2Bwild, SANDRA, Wiedrobot and many others on june 17th and 18th as 22 teams from the Netherlands, Germany, USA, Hungary, Israel, Gambia, Poland, Nigeria,Ireland and Belgium compete in Wageningen, the Netherlands.

Link

Storage limit for Yahoo's free webmail service just expanded to 100MB in an apparent effort to compete with Google's yet-to-be-publicly-launched Gmail. Link (Thanks, Caines)

BoingBoing friend John Parres says:

JPL's Cassini spacecraft is making it's final approach to Saturn after seven years of whipping around our solar system. This weekend the probe flew by an outer retrograde moon, Phoebe, and based on stunning pictures unspooling today it seems Phoebe is an ice rich body, perhaps even a captured comet! If all goes well on July 1st Cassini will enter into orbit around the ringed planet and provide four years of exploration including the December landing of the 700 pound Huygens probe on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

Link