Awesome Chinese gadget spam

By Xeni Jardin at 9:30 pm Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

From time to time, a sublimely surreal piece of unwanted email from grammatically-impaired strangers lands in my in-box. For instance:

Glad to know your company on internet, I would like to introduce our novel products the TPS series Taxi's Safeguard System and the CQ-1 series Super Safety Suitcase to you.

1. TPS series Taxi's Safeguard System: Anti-Theft, Anti-Robbery and Anti-Violence with 50 KV Electric Shocking. The TPS series Taxi's Safeguard System is a novel Security Alarm System with electric shock function that can safeguard owner while gangster is robbing. At any time it can warn to the owner any conditions to caution him to raise vigilance. At emergency the owner can remote the system to electrically shock the gangsters. This system has Anti-Theft, Anti-Robbery, Electric Shock, Remote control central door and Intelligent indication functions.

2. CQ-1 series Super Safety Suitcase With whole surface suitcase 30KV Electric-shock. This product can be used for caring and storing cash, confidential documents and valuables. It has the function of remote radio control. Switch on and off, set up and random switch of the functions can be realized through remote radio control. At various complex and urgent situations, the customer can choose the most effective and safe defensive function. It has the functions of "Anti-lossing", "Anti-stealing" and "Anti-robbing." Alarm sound level>85dB. Material of case body: high-grade genuine leatheroid.

We can supply your wants! Any problems,please feel free to contact me.
Best Regards
Mr.Zhaoboo

Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson subscribes to an RSS feed for my in-box, which explains this: Link.

Carnival of Carbs

By Xeni Jardin at 9:00 pm Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

Following up on an earlier BoingBoing post about plans for a "New Wave Ramen Museum" in Japan, our intrepid readers point us to two existing Japanese cultural institutions that celebrate the art of starch.

First: the Shinyokohama Raumen Museum's website offers a wealth of knowledge on the nomenclature of ramenculture. Link. Looks like it would be yummy fun in person. (Thanks, Lloyd Vancil, and michael yee)

And BoingBoing reader Steven C. Brown in Hawaii says, "Regarding the Namco Ramen theme park you posted earlier, Namco already has Namjatown, an indoor amusement park that features gyoza! Link. You can find additional pictures on my site. Link. Aloha!"

Beer bong tragedy has entire city of Perth in shock

By Mark Frauenfelder at 7:07 pm Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

A beer-thirsty Australian gentleman, inpatient with gravity, employed a mechanical contraption to rapidly deliver beer into his gullet using a pump powered by an electric drill. The device proved so effective that the high-pressure jet of beer shooting down his throat ripped a hole in his stomach. Authorities responded by warning people not to use high-pressure machines to drink beer this Christmas. Link

Pierce-nez eyeglasses

By Mark Frauenfelder at 6:19 pm Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

email_name: Shannon sez: I just did an interview with gaming miniatures designer James Sooy about a design project he's just completed, a pair of frameless eyeglasses held in place by a single bridge piercing (as in body piercing)." Link

Homeless man evicted from makeshift hut on working drawbridge

By Xeni Jardin at 5:30 pm Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

Reader Rob D says,

This is a blog entry describing how a homeless man built a shelter on the underside of a working (bascule) drawbridge here in Chicago - complete with electricity & a playstation. The entry has links to other local news sites and their coverage of the incident. As an architect, I am in awe.

Link, and story is also covered in Chicagoist, Link.

Registration for Emerging Tech is open!

By Cory Doctorow at 3:58 pm Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

Registration is open for the next O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference, March 14-17 in San Diego. I'm doing a new talk called, All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites, about sanity in the spam-wars, but that's just for starters. Check out the partial program grid (which I'm very proud to have had a hand in, as a conference committee member):

• Raffi "Tivo Hacks" Krikorian and NYU's Tom Igoe doing a double-header tutorial on hardware hacking called Net Objects
• Damian Stolarz explaining how to Hack Sci-Fi Features Into Your Car in a half-day session covering "the basic workings of the automotive electric, audio, and diagnostic systems" and "radio head-ends, touch screen input devices, remote controls, and in car x86-based hardware and software all in the context of a working automobile"
• My cow-orkers Wendy "Chilling Effect" Seltzer and Jason "Patent Busting" Schulz on Endangered Devices and How We Can Save Them -- a tour of all the cool crap you can buy today, which might be illegal tomorrow
• My pervy cow-orker Annalee "Techsploitation" Newitz's talk on How Sex Laws Incite Technological Change which covers "how sex laws have enlarged the demand for technologies that provide anonymous, instant, mobile gratification while also stoking content-providers' desires for soft/hardware that can control access and quickly identify users by age and geographical location."
• The wildest researchers at BBC Radio: Tom "Plasticbag" Coates, Matt "Brain Hacks" Webb, Matt "No Nickname" Biddulph and Paul "Also No Nickname" Hammond talking on Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software in which they explain some deeply cool, deeply weird shit they're doing with the BBC's radio service
• Matt "Metafilter" Haughey on Remixing Culture with RDF: Running a Semantic Web Search in the Wild in which the Creative Commons's secret search sauce will be unveiled and dissected
• Tom "The British Don't Really Have Nicknames" Loosemore explains TheyWorkForYou.com, the best political advocacy site I've ever seen, in Forgiveness, Not Permission: Retro-fitting the Semantic Web onto British Democracy
• Natalie "Feral Robots" Jermijenko -- my choice for real-world cyberpunk heroine -- takes us beyond her genius feral robot dogs with Social Robotics, Scmocial Robotics: Feral Robotics and Some Other Quacking, Shaking, Bubbling (what would the opposite of feral be?) Robots: "Feral robots are roving packs of adapted open source robots that are released to investigate contaminated urban sites. Feral robots begin as domestic commercially available robotic dog toys."
• Danny "NTK" O'Brien and Merlin "5ives" Mann will jointly present their Life Hacks Live work -- a book-length version of Danny's amazing hacker life-skills Life Hacks project, with "a whistle-stop tour through an amazing year in this exploding field: tracking apps that merge the geek's command-line power with GUI ease-of-use; the expansion of RSS and wiki techniques into frontline organizing apps; the spread of search and script automation onto the desktop; how plain text files are the new rock and roll."
• Finally, Lee "Jhai" Felsenstein, who pretty much invented the PC, will present on Tech That Helps the World, talking on the bicycle-charged ruggedized meshing WiFi networks he's sending to Laos. I mean, seriously: LAOS.

Save up to $300 if you reg before Jan 31! Link (Thanks, Rael!)

Hooray For Santy Claus! MP3

By Mark Frauenfelder at 3:50 pm Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

Senor Tonto from Italy has created a great Christmas Gift for your downloading pleasure: "a downloadable x-mas single with a cover of 'Hooray For Santy Claus!,' the theme song from the 1964 silly sci-fi movie Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, played with a bunch of old analog synth keyboards, a banjo, a kazoo, a glockenspiel and even a Texas Instruments Speak & Spell.

"There's also a downloadable cover for the single with art (an homage to Jack Cole's pin-up art) by italian cartoonist Davide Toffolo." Link

Blockbuster competes with Netflix by dropping late fees -UPDATED

By Cory Doctorow at 3:42 pm Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

Isaac sez,

In an effort to fight upstart content distributors like Netflix, Blockbuster Inc. is planning to eliminate late fees on games and movies as of January 1.

Blockbuster apparently makes as much as $300 million annually on late fees; they think they'll make up for this lost income with increased volume.

Don't know what this will mean to the future of Blockbuster, but I do know that it's just another sign that we're catching up to the future every day, and the way we think about media, content, and ownership is changing rapidly.

Link (Thanks, Isaac!)

Update: Mike sez, "you rent a movie, you have a certain grace period within which you have to return the movie (or game). if you step over that grace period they charge you full price for the thing (minus the original rental fee). you can contest the charge, and if they take it back they'll charge you a $1.25 'restocking fee.' Restocking fees are usually put in place by electronic retailers to deter returns on big ticket items that are not defective. If you buy something and then return it, the company has to deal with more costs to handle the return. But Blockbuster's entire business is based on returns! It doesn't sell movies, it rents them to you with the expectation of getting it back. Their business model hasn't changed any. it's just a way to extort more money out of us consumers."

Dry, deadly quicksand

By Mark Frauenfelder at 3:20 pm Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

Mark Hurst sez: "The NYTimes reported today on Dutch researchers whose research suggests that quicksand may indeed exist *without* water. This 'dry quicksand' is so lethal that dropping a weighted ping pong ball on the surface is enough to make the ball disappear almost instantly. See the video material on this site." Link

Long's Drugs uses a no-longer-secret code to indicate wholesale price on tags - UPDATED

By Cory Doctorow at 11:53 am Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

Long's Drugs uses a simple letter/number code to indicate on its price tags the wholesale cost for each item on sale. The code has been cracked and now you can find out exactly how much Long's makes on your purchases!

So, for example, if a candy bar has a retail price of 0.44, it might have a cost code of HL, indicating that Longs Drugs pays 0.25 for it.

The Longs Drugs Price code appears in the middle of many of their on-shelf pricetags. It is two, three or four letters.

Here, the ANT stands for 308, meaning that the Longs Store paid $3.08 for the M&Ms, and will make 91 on the retail sale.

Link (via Waxy)

Update: Jack sez, "It might also be interesting to note that Walgreens uses a similar system, except with the word BRUSHCLEAN B1 R2 U3 S4 H5 C6 L7 E8 A9 N0"

Beatles Xmas albums from the 60s downloads - UPDATED

By Cory Doctorow at 11:32 am Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

At long last, the Beatles' rare Xmas albums as downloads. Moblog Kid sez, "If you were fortunate enough to have been a member of the official Beatles fan club between 1963 and 1969, then you likely have heard one or more of these records. The Beatles recorded them and sent them out to their adoring fans every year, finally collecting them all on one album for the 1970 edition. Now rare and quite pricey to obtain, these seldom heard recordings offer a rare glimpse of the fabs at their funniest." Link (Thanks, Moblog Kid!)

Update: David sez, "It sounds like someone ripped the Beatles Xmas records from vinyl. Their effort is appreciated, but the records have actually been bootlegged from the original tapes, and you can get a bit torrent of them in lossless format. It includes an outtake from 1964. There is also another outtake that's come out more recently that's circulating among hard-core collectors. Happy Christmas!"

Update #2:Ella sez, "This site requires registration and is *not* accepting any new registrations, so if anyone, like me, clicked the link and didn't already have an account from before, they're SOL and had better just go for the crappy recordings."

Update #3: Stuart sez, "Try bugmenot for user name/password. I did. Got in."

Update #4: Torrent Link 1 (Thanks, Ermordung!); Torrent Link 2 (Thanks, Demonoid!)

MPAA's new legal assault on BitTorrent, eDonkey, DirectConnect

By Xeni Jardin at 10:40 am Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

Following up on yesterday's BoingBoing scoop:

On today's edition of NPR's "Day to Day", I speak with host Alex Chadwick about today's announcements by the MPAA of new legal actions against P2P networks including BitTorrent, eDonkey, and DirectConnect.

Link to archived audio for this program, Link to NPR Day to Day home.

I also filed a report on the MPAA's new legal assault for today's Wired News:

In the United States and the United Kingdom, the Motion Picture Association of America, the main lobbying arm of American film studios, filed civil lawsuits today against more than 100 operators of BitTorrent tracker servers which point to locations where downloadable files can be found. The MPAA also targeted operators of servers for the eDonkey and DirectConnect networks. The group's actions include criminal complaints and cease and desist orders issued to ISPs on 4 continents. Acting in cooperation with the MPAA, French law enforcement authorities took related action yesterday, and actions by authorities in Finland and the Netherlands followed today.

BitTorrent, eDonkey, and DirectConnect allow millions of internet users to share copies of movies, music, software and games. Because of its particular efficiency in helping users handle very large files -- such as digital copies of feature-length films -- BitTorrent has attracted the enmity of Hollywood. (....)[MPAA antipiracy chief John] Malcolm described the operators of the targeted servers as "Traffic cops connecting those who wish to steal a movie with those who have a copy of it."

"These people are parasites leeching off the creativity of others," said Malcolm. "They generate ad revenues by way of popup ads, banner ads... and they solicit online donations."

Previously, the MPAA has filed hundreds of suits against individual downloaders. The new actions against server operators come just days after the Supreme Court agreed to take up the landmark MGM v. Grokster filesharing case. MPAA representatives denied that the timing of today's news was related.

Link to Wired News story. During the press conference, Mr. Malcolm also referred to BitTorrent tracker server operators as "cogs in the piracy machine."

Update: Petri Lyytinen says,

2039 is reporting about recent bust of finnish BitTorrent network, Finreactor, for distributing copyrighted material worth millions of euros. Allegedly they gathered evidence for court using special backdoor software written by finnish company Hitback Oy, that was lured to 26 illegal products which were downloadable from the network.

Link to Finnish news stories and police reports.

Link to yesterday's BoingBoing post -- New MPAA lawsuits against BitTorrent, eDonkey expected: Link

Moblog.co.uk crash: it's only a flesh wound!

By Xeni Jardin at 9:10 am Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

The servers behind popular mobile blogging community moblog.co.uk experienced a catastrophic failure yesterday that caused loss of user images posted from the 22nd of September through December 13. Sources close to the matter say both hosts and users are seriously bummed out. When the service is back online, new tech measures will be put in place to prevent a repeat. Meanwhile, some members are photoshopping their way out of despair (Image link).

After a night of great angst, Alfie from moblog.co.uk tells BoingBoing,

"I'm going to eat the hugest pizza in the universe when this is over. The site will be back up in the hour.

"It has however prompted us to develop new technical features. Among them -- we've now built in super redundancy so this will be impossible! to occur again. "We've received so may emails saying not to worry and I reckon most people will busily carry on, but as I said, I just feel so damn guilty."

Unlike other popular phonecam blogging services, much of moblog.co.uk's content is offered under Creative Commons license.
The giant plushie monster with laser-emitting eyes believed to be responsible for the server crash could not be reached for comment.

Update, 3pm PT: Alfie says, "We have been up and running for a couple of hours now, and have written an image app for people to be able to add lost images back into their original positions on their moblogs. It's really ace, as it seems most people have kept backups of their images, and are busily putting them back in place. Mat Brown is the code genius who got this done." Looks like the moblog code crew got their victory pizza, too: Link.

Reader Kris Ardent points us to "more info on that mysterious giant plushy monster who caused the Great moblogUK crash of ought-4. Link. Great closeup shots of Domo Kun in action (hiking with his television, hypnotizing you, surfing the creek, yelling at a gopher) here: Link."

Idle hands

By David Pescovitz at 8:57 am Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

Mark Slouka wrote an amazing essay for the November issue of Harper's Magazine called "Quitting The Paint Factory: On the Virtues of Idleness." It's about the beauty of doing nothing, and the fight against those who would deny us one of life's greatest pleasures:

Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, req­uisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idle­ness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had "too much time on our hands." They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, "Quick, look busy."

Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always known: that trouble – the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspir­ing to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: "There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and sav­ing it from all risk of crankiness, than business."

Link (Thanks, Terre and the Birdman!)

Retro game store in Osaka

By Mark Frauenfelder at 8:39 am Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

Todd Lappin points us to this wonderful story about a retro game store in Osaka, Japan.

Japan's hidden secret is that when it comes to retro games, Akihabara is not the epicenter of goodness. The true heart of the retro gaming revival in Japan is actually in Osaka's Den Den Town.

Located approximately 10 minutes walk from Namba Station in Osaka's Minami district, Nipponbashi (aka Den Den Town) is home to the Original Super Potato store, as well as its hipper cousin, Retro TV Game Revival. These two stores, located a scant 150 feet apart, represent the absolute pinnacle of Japanese retro game collector shops. It is not uncommon to see extremely rare gaming systems sitting next to a $2000 Gold Cart Shonen Jump Limited Edition Dragon Ball Z 2 and across from 1980s video game soundtracks on vinyl.

Link

Exercise in a pill

By David Pescovitz at 3:44 am Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

A protein called PPAR-delta in the body that regulates other genes involved in the process of breaking down fat could someday be the basis for an "excercise pill." Ronald Evans of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies genetically engineered mice to produce extra PPAR-delta to see if it would affect the rodents' weight. From Scientific American:

When put on a high-fat, high-calorie diet for 13 weeks, the transgenic mice gained only a third of the weight that their unmodified brethren did. What is more, mice on this diet remained resistant to obesity even when they were kept inactive....

Although Evans recognizes the potential for abuse by athletes, he believes that his work has more practical implications in treating metabolic ailments, including obesity and heart disease. Patients with such conditions often cannot exercise because of their weight or other complicating problems. "This work could lead to an exercise pill that gives many of the benefits of training without the need to sweat," Evans predicts.

Link

SFX supply house

By David Pescovitz at 3:31 am Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

Planning a New Year's Eve soiree? In the market for fake fog, simulated snow, confetti cannons, or, my favorite, large sheets of nitrocellulose (flash paper)? Video artist Dr. Maz points us to online shop Theatre Effects, delivering SFX needs right to your door since 1976. The "Fun FAQs & Helpful Hints" section is loaded with great tips on manifesting all kinds of theatrical magic. Link

David Remfry illustrations

By David Pescovitz at 3:18 am Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

My fashion illustrator friend Anne Sanger turned me on to the work of David Remfry, an amazing watercolor artist who recently collaborated with fashion designer Stella McCartney:

Stella McCartney said of the collaboration, ‘The thing about the project with David is, it’s not a fashion illustration, it’s not fashion advertising. It’s so considered, each line. It’s not a modern-day graphics illustration; it’s an old-school drawing. The guy sat here with a pencil and drew a woman.’

Link

Tiny atomic clocks

By David Pescovitz at 3:09 am Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

My latest article for TheFeature.com is about the development of an atomic clock that's the size of a grain of rice:

Most clocks that we check throughout the day are wrong. For example, your wristwatch -- whether it's a Swatch or a Rolex -- probably drifts at least a few seconds each week. Of course, that's probably imperceptible even if you're so overbooked that every second counts. However, wireless technologies are even more tightly scheduled than you are. Indeed, outfitting mobile devices with clocks that are accurate to the quadrillionths of a second could ratchet up cell phone reliability and GPS accuracy while packing more signals into the dwindling radio spectrum.

That's why scientists are developing tiny clocks that are stable to one part in 10 billion, meaning they lose or gain a maximum of just one second every 300 years.

Link

Jungle Boat Cruise movie coming

By Cory Doctorow at 12:24 am Tuesday, Dec 14 • Comments • Share

Hot on the heels of depressing failures like the Country Bear movie and (eugh) the Haunted Mansion movie, as well as the triumph that was Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney is turning yet another park-ride into a movie: this time, it's the Jungle Boat Cruise.

Mandeville's David Hoberman describes Jungle Cruise as "an adventure film with comedic elements, but its core is almost a family version of Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness,' about a group that travels upriver, in search of a significant cure." Josh Goldstein and John Norville (Tin Cup) will write the script.

Link (via The Disney Blog)