I hate tape recorders and tape recorders hate me. On at least a half-dozen occasions, I've tried to tape an interview for a story I was working on only to discover the recorder didn't capture the conversation. Half the time it's been my fault (not hooking up the cables between the phone and the recorder properly) and half the time the recorder just didn't do its job, as far as I can tell. It's embarrassing when that happens!

A few weeks ago, I discovered Audio Recorder, a freeware program for OS X that records audio input as MP3 files. The interface couldn't be simpler. I've used it three times so far and the results have been flawless. I use it with the $25 RadioShack Wireless Phone Recording Controller, which is also great. I play back the interviews in iTunes and transcribe them in BBEdit. Man, I'm set. Link

I enjoyed reading about the lost art of safecracking in this illustrated lecture by Tim Hunkin.

The nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman, became very interested in combination locks while working on the atomic bomb in Los Alomos during the second world war. Los Alamos was in the middle of the desert, so there wasn’t much to do when he wasn’t working, and safe cracking became a sort of hobby. As the project was all top secret, every office had combination locks on its filing cabinets. Feynman first discovered, playing with the locks on his own filing cabinet, that the numbers did not have to be that precise, each one could be up to two digits either side of the true number and the lock would still open. This enormously reduced the number of possible combinations (from 1,000,000 down to 8,000). With practice he found he could try 400 different combinations in half an hour, so trying every single combination it would take on average 4 hours to open the lock. A modern version of this, advertised on the internet, is a motorised German device that turns the dial, trying every combination in turn, for use by locksmiths trying to get into a safe whoes combination has been lost.

Link (Via Sensible Erection)

Using his special robot-voice, BoingBoing reader Michael Buckbee says:

The latest Phillip Torrone Engadget Podcast mentions a freeware app I wrote: FeedSpeaker. It will save any RSS feed off to a MP3 file. He describes it like a robot, I describe it like Stephen Hawking, so it probably sounds like a Stephen Hawking robot. After testing it on the BoingBoing RSS feed, I've determined that if robots ever take over the earth, they'll eventually be defeated in an attempt to pronounce 'Xeni'.

Link to BoingBoing MP3 (3MB)

BoingBoing reader Nick Mamatas says, "I've been getting a little sick of all the dumb religious pareidolia being put up on eBay (e.g., that cheese sandwich, the "ghost" in the cane etc.) , so I started an auction of my own...a piece of Advent candy that looks like a tiny chocolate Cthulhu."
Link

These websites could sure come in handy during the holiday travel season. This java-based web app (Link) allows you to observe the movement of flights and air traffic patterns in the Bay Area, surrounding SFO airport. Watch animated simulations of flight tracks taken from actual radar data, with about a 10 minute lag time. The site also includes links to other airports such as LAX and JFK. Here are sites for more airports: Link. (Thanks, Markus, and Matt)

It was only a matter of time (and pixels) before the more explicit version of that marionette sex scene from Team America made it online. As you may recall from earlier BoingBoing posts, the simulated, stringy, smutty bits were severed so that the film could receive an "R" rating from the MPAA. I saw the, ahem, uncut fullscreen original at a Paramount press preview earlier this year, and can vouch for the salad-tossing authenticity of this wmv clip. Too bad there's no sound. I believe another still-more-hardcore edition was created with a puppet golden shower sequence... AFAIK that hasn't leaked (heh) online yet. Link, and previous BB posts: Team America preview, and TA tech backstory in Wired Magazine.

BoingBoing reader Dan Washburn is a journalist based in Shanghai, China. He hauled a bunch of gadgets on a four-month, solo trip through China. "Well, the trip is finally finished," says Dan, "And now I have reviewed all of the gadgets." Link to "The Trip: Gadgets get graded," and Link to the main page for Dan's trip journal.

Short, to-the-point messages for use on the freeway as needed. Link (Thanks, Sean. Also spotted at Autoblog, LA Voice).

See also these STFU cards you can hand to strangers who are talking too loudly in their cellphones about stuff you don't want to hear. Link to SHHHH! Society for Handheld Hushing printable cards (PDF)(thanks, Russell)

Make way for VoIP videophones, or a whole lotta hype over nothing? Time will tell. Vonage today announced a partnership with video communication technologies maker Viseon to create just a VoIP video chat device for release in 2005. A beta is scheduled for debut at CES in January. Image: Viseon's current videophone, which retails for about $500. The Vonage-ified version is expected to look similar. Link to Vonage press release, and link to Forbes story.

Interesting piece in the NYT about inventor Clifford Ross, and an analog camera he developed which is capable of capturing astounding detail from great distances.

[The camera was] unusual enough to capture the attention of serious scientists, including the kinds who work for the government, experimenting with nuclear fusion, space travel and spy systems. What grabbed them were photographs Mr. Ross took that allowed them to see with astonishing clarity a tiny footpath on the top of a Colorado mountain seven miles from the camera.

Yesterday and today, Mr. Ross is talking gigapixels, art and the essence of visual comprehension with a dozen scientists, at a meeting at New York University. This summit, closed to the public, was organized by Mr. Ross and his new scientific pals at the government's Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, which specializes in matters pertaining to nuclear weapons and threats to national security.

"We're good at making big computers," said Carl Diegert, lead computational and imaging scientist at Sandia. But, Mr. Diegert said, when scientists look at pictures of the space shuttle, for example, they may not see things as clearly as they might. "We're trying to find how the human emotional part comes into play in finding a crack in the space shuttle. Clifford has figured out how to catch all this information at a moment in time."

Link to story. Image: A photo of Mount Sopris in Colorado, taken by Clifford Ross with his camera invention. (thanks, Susannah)

BoingBoing reader Ted says,

The mountain pic, while impressive, is not unalerted - it has been photoshopped. From a 5/2004 AP story, "Because the camera uses film meant for aerial shots, its negatives must be chemically treated to reduce their unusually high degree of contrast. That leaves sharp details but muddy colors. So after digitally scanning the negative, Ross and his assistants must manipulate the image using Adobe Systems Inc.'s Photoshop software to return the mountain's colors to their initial vibrancy."

Link

Yan Feng says,

Possibly triggered by the New Scientist article The 'blog' revolution sweeps across China, suggesting that blogger is called as Bo Ke in China, and a post on Boing Boing, which referenced the article, there is a big tide of voice saying I am not Bo Ke. (See bookmarks at del.icio.us and a collection of ImnotBoKe icons at flickr).

Link. Hey, how about just calling them "Bloggers in China?"

Mobile phone makers Nokia created some free plugins for Cubase that allow musicians to simulate the sound of their music being played on (or through) any one of Nokia's cellphones.

"Is this interesting? Probably not, but I just like the idea of being able to make my recordings sound exactly like they are coming out of a mobile phone." To test the thing out, I used a MIDI file of Radiohead's 'Paranoid Android'. Click to hear a N-Gage take on the intro, a Nokia 3200 doing the first choral bit, a Nokia 6650 doing the exciting bit in the middle and a Nokia 6100 rather mangling the spazz-out bit at the end.

Link

For twelve years, marine biologists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have tracked a lone whale whose song is at a completely different frequency from any other whale. This particular baleen whale calls at 52 hertz while whales usually sing at frequencies in the 15-20 hertz range. The whale doesn't follow normal migration patterns either. Link

Following up on this previous Boingboing post, reader Avi Solomon says, "Looks like the entire Nmap episode from the geek-themed porn DVD "HaXXXor 1" is available for download. Happy Compiling :)" For those readers who do not spend twelve or more hours a day behind a computer, here's some background from the site hosting the clips:

Nmap was demonstrated in the Matrix Reloaded. Nmap trivia buffs may also know that Nmap source code was displayed in the 2000 movie Battle Royale ( [Screen1] [Screen2] [Trivia]). Lesser known is that it was featured in a 3rd movie after these two appearances. Nmap made the leap from Science Fiction to "hacker pr0n" with the release of HaXXXor Volume 1: No Longer Floppy. In a seven-minute chapter, the lovely E-Lita walks us through downloading, compiling, and executing Nmap while keeping our attention by methodically removing her clothing :). You can buy the DVD (cover image) for $10 at conferences such as Defcon or from the HaXXXor Girls web site. It contains other chapters such as "Naked Dumpster Diving" and "Young Love (Of Government Encryption)".

Link, and more background on nmap here: Link.

British Telecom is advising resellers that some broadband service problems reported by end users during the holiday season may be due to radio frequency interference caused by poorly-engineered blinking Christmas lights.

"We are asking Service Providers to talk with their End Users where loss of synchronisation is reported over the Christmas period to determine whether they or their immediate neighbours have a set of these lights, and if so to ask them to set them to steady state which should overcome the loss of service."
-- BTWholesale briefing

Link to UK broadband user group post. (thanks, Cristiano)