Faux company "Geniecorp" makes creepy, icky, biogenetically-engineered household appliances for happy mutant homes of the future. "Lick-n-Span," "Alarm Cock," and "Lhasa Mopso" are but a few. Link to the online shopping mall, full of funny, handsomely-designed Flash animations -- it's all a clever promotional tease for this self-published book. (Thanks, Howard)

Bart Nagel was the visionary photographer/designer behind the cyberdelic aesthetic of Mondo 2000, the "magazine-of-record" for early 1990s cyberculture. If you don't know Mondo, you should. Bart is now auctioning off part of his own Mondo 2000 collection, including 17 issues of the magazine, issues of High Frontiers and Reality Hackers (RU Sirius's pre-Mondo 'zine), the essential Mondo 2000 User's Guide to the New Edge, a rare unworn Mondo t-shirt, and assorted other ephemera. "Mondo 2000: How fast are you? How dense?" Link

Pixelblocks are Lego-like colored plastic blocks. The cool thing about them is that you can use them like pixels, to add images and patterns to the surfaces of your creations. Link (Thanks, Kevin!)

Bitter Waitress has a database of names and locations of restaurant patrons who left lousy tips, along with comments.

Where it happened: Franklin, TN

Total bill / Tip amount / Percentage: $75.76 / $4.24 / 5%

What happened: Barely squeezing into their chairs, they immediately whip out their two free appetizer coupons and proceed to order the largest appetizers possible. They then order the largest portions on the menu, request numerous favors and have me box up the last little scraps that they can't cram down their gullets into 6 separate containers. Then with a patronizing tone they tell me that I can keep the change.

Link (Thanks, Darren!)

CNN reports on the recently-announced invention of self-cleaning nano-coated fabric that's a leap beyond stain-resistant Dockers. The materials scientists at Hong Kong Polytechnic University coated cotton with nanoparticles of titanium dioxide. When subjected to ultraviolet light, the titanium dioxide produces an oxidizing agent that can break down dirt and other organic substances. According to researcher Walid A. Daoud, several companies have already come knocking.

"(The fabric will be useful for) military people, or travelers, people who go hiking, who don't have a lot of water and time to wash their clothes," he said. "This is a very good idea because then if the clothes get dirty, the dirt can be decomposed by the fabric itself. So after a few days in the sunshine, or even indoor light, the dirt will disappear."

As both BioED Online and CNN point out, the technology was prophesized in the 1951 film The Man in the White Suit starring Alec Guinness. Link

The FCC has a new and somewhat baroque regulation that legalizes plugging aftermarket antennae into your WiFi access-points. In a long post on WiFiNetNews, Glenn Fleishman takes apart the new regulation and explains in admirably.

The FCC rule doesn’t suddenly make all antennas legal for all systems. Instead, they have chosen a clever middle ground. For new devices—or, presumably for recertification of old devices—manufacturers will be allowed to test the system with high-gain antennas of each major type, like omni, patch, yagi, and so forth. Once the device is certified, the manufacturer can release the characteristics of the antennas they tested for both their in-band and out-of-band signal patterns and strengths. (Out-of-band transmissions are the inevitable but not intentional frequencies that are broadcast on at typically very low levels due to harmonics and other technical radio issues.)

Link (Thanks, Glenn!)

Avant-odd composer Ergo Phizmiz has posted MP3s of his album covering Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat in its entirety. The release features Phizmiz on: "Banjo, Bass Guitar, Ruler, Music Box, Violin, Toy Piano, Electric Guitar, Accordion, Squeezebox, Euphonium, Ukulele, Kazoo, Xylophone, Pixiphone, Uumskither, Mbira, Pod, Delay, Turntable, Percussion." Earlier this year, he released the instant plunderphonic classic "Ergo Phizmiz & his Orchestra plays Aphex Twin."

"The music of Ergo Phizmiz combines sampling and electronics with acoustic instrumentation, plundering the history of popular and classical culture into a Dadaist assault on the senses. Equally at home in the three-minute pop-song as in long, drawn out sound-collages, the sound of Phizmiz comes somewhere between cartoon-music, experimental classical, pop, Gamelan and hip-hop."

Link (Via Metafilter)

Ernest Miller writes:

Yesterday, Marybeth Peters, the head of the US Copyright Office, testified before the Senate regarding the INDUCE Act. Her testimony was even more radical than the RIAA's. Not only did she (inappropriately) explain what outcome the Appeals Court in the Grokster case should reach and argue (wrongly) that the INDUCE Act wouldn't have a chilling effect on innovation, she actually said she thought the INDUCE Act was not enough. The Register of Copyrights argued that the Betamax decision, which made VCRs legal, should be overturned by Congress. Wow.

Link

Thor (who has the same birthday as me -- happy b-day, Thor!) sez,

We made International news last week when our team found the shipwreck of the rare U-215, a U-Boat that was on a secret mission to mine Boston Harbor when it decided to disobey orders and sink an American liberty ship in July 1942. That action lead to a watery grave for 48 German sailors, and 10 more who went down on the Alexander Macomb.

During the whole dive I was blogging the event from shore, keeping in touch by satellite phone. Unfortunately our website, Shipwreck Central, wasn't ready to go online so I was left to ponder the question of "if a blogger blogs in the woods..."

It's 5:30 AM here in Halifax and I'm back at home having a Wi-Fi beer on the porch. A couple of hours ago we opened up the site for a 'soft launch'. We're pretty happy with it, it's like the IMDB of shipwrecks with a kick-ass map interface, and best of all we've made our audio and video available under a Creative Commons license. I can't wait to hear live from the dive audio mixed in with some downtempo-ambient... it goes quite well from my experience.

Link

The current ish of Popular Science (August 2004) is on stands now, with a great piece on Charlie Stross and me as science fiction writers who are doing good work on the Singularity (alas, the piece isn't online yet, but it's easy to find in shops). I'm really happy with how it came out, but wanted to give out one tiny bit of errata for the record: the article identifies me as a co-founder of boingboing.net -- although I'm a proud co-editor of BB, the founding was done by my pal Mark Frauenfelder and his wife Carla Sinclair. Link

Wayne Mercier is a Vancouver slam poet who has just released his first book of poetry published, and along with it, a CD of him reading his work. He's made the entire audio of the CD available for downloand and remix under a Creative Commons license.

I'm really excited about this, not just because it's a way of getting my stuff out into the world, but because - to my knowledge - this is the first time this has been done in Canadian poetry. Coach House Press releases electronic editions of their author's work but retains copyright. Also the fact that this is audio, and thus open to extensive remixing and incorporation into larger, multimedia projects, is very cool.

Link (Thanks, Wayne!)

Jason Streigel converted his Gundam action figure into a two-port USB hub, and lavishly documented the build process. Link (via Gizmodo)

TiVo's strategy has always been to play nice with the movie studios. While SonicBlue was shipping the Replay with automated commercial skipping and show-sharing, TiVo was adding DRM-based systems for cautiously moving programming around your house and only your house. It worked -- sorta. Replay got sued into oblivion, and TiVo was left standing.

But now that the studios have chased the TiVo competitors out of the market, they're turning on their pet PVR. TiVo wants to deliver a product that will allow you to share your programming among no more than 10 sets -- this isn't the indiscriminate sharing that the Broadcast Flag advocates said they feared: this is heaily DRMed, controlled and modest sharing.

And the Studios and the NFL don't like it. So they're demanding that FCC order TiVo to disable this feature. Link

The latest victim in Gizmodo's "What's in Your Gadget Bag?" feature is Glenn Fleishman, who comes clean about a truly astonishing amount of crap that he lugs around with him in his electronics kit, described with the loving verbosity of a real geek.

The camera used to take this picture is a Canon S1 IS, a 3-megapixel device that has a 10x optical zoom, interchangeable lenses, and uses four AA batteries. Using 2200 milliamphere hour (mAh) batteries recently, I took 500 photos and movies over the course of a month before swapping out another set and recharging. The camera does 640 by 480, 30 frame per second mono-audio video up to the size of the memory card on top of its anti-jitter-motor photos.

Finally, I always carry a 12-foot extension cord with multiple plugs on the end, and the alternative two-prong adapter for my Apple power supply. You never know how many friends you have until you have extra outlets.

Link

Joi Ito (who never got an undergrad degree) is going to do a PhD in Business Management, and his thesis project is a book on "the sharing economy." Link

The Continental Features comics syndicate has announced that it will be dropping Doonesbury because the strip is "too controversial" (lately, Trudeau has been using the strip to criticise the Iraq War and Fox News).

The Continental head said he doesn't know exactly when "Doonesbury" will leave the package; he's currently polling clients to see if they want to replace it with "Agnes," "Get Fuzzy," "Pickles," "Zits," or another comic.

Link (via Joi)

Update: Phil Gyford sez, "Some time ago I knocked up an RSS feed that links to the latest Doonesbury strips (unlike the RSS feed that used to display the actual strips and was told to quit by Ucomics)."

The Movable Type plugin contest judging (which I helped with) has closed, and the grand prize winner has been announced: Congrats to Jay Allen for his mt-blacklist plugin and his choice of an Apple G5 dual 2GHz with 23" Apple Cinema HD Display or a Dell Dimension 3.2 GHz Extreme Edition with two 20.1" 2001FP Dell Ultra Sharp Digital Flat Panel Display and Adobe Creative Suite Premium with GoLive CS. Link (Thanks, Chris!)