Locksmith makes key from X-ray

By David Pescovitz at 3:00 pm Saturday, Jun 25 • Comments • Share

Last week, Arthur Richardson of Denver, Nebraska was teasing his buddy Andrew Allen by putting the key to Allen's new 1977 Chevy truck into his mouth. The joke ended as soon as Richardson accidentally swallowed it. After being unable to vomit the key, even with the aid of Milk of Magnesia, Richardson visited a physician. The hospital took an X-ray and apparently told him he'd have to wait a few days for the key to emerge from the other end. So the two took the X-ray to John Somers of Al's Lock and Key. From The North Platte Telgraph:

Somers said the X-ray was unlike anything he had ever seen. The key was clearly outlined in the picture, located just to the right of the spine.

"I've seen all kinds of things. This is the most bizarre," Somers said Thursday afternoon as he held up the X-ray to the light.

"It's a perfect silhouette."

Using the image, Somers made two new keys in just a few minutes, based on the visible notches in the original key and the type of keys used for the vehicle.

Allen grinned as he fit the first key in the ignition and started up the pick-up truck.

"I can drive my truck," he said, gleefully.

Link

Brian McCarty's art toy photography

By David Pescovitz at 11:10 am Saturday, Jun 25 • Comments • Share

I love Brian McCarty's photography of art toys transported into real-life settings. Some of his more whimsical shots remind me of Gina Garan's photos of Blythe while others are magnificently creepy like Frances Glessner's crime-scene dollhouse work. A McCarty photo graces the cover of the first issue of new art/culture mag Hi Fructose and he's interviewed inside. Link (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

Napoleon-era island for £150k

By Cory Doctorow at 10:46 am Saturday, Jun 25 • Comments • Share

This Napoleon-era island fort off the British coast is for sale at a modest £150k, though it's not a super-practical place to live, if it had broadband and decent postal service for Amazon shipments, it'd be pretty well-suited to my needs.

The 19th Century fort - complete with a couple of cannons - dates back from the time of Napoleon, when it was initially built as a defence for the river Haven.

But it has nowhere to sleep at present, and the new owner will have to sort out sewage, water and power.

Link (via Fark)

Update: Some more photos of the fort here and here (Thanks, Lazarhat and Jesse!)

Atari joystick USB hub mod

By Cory Doctorow at 10:40 am Saturday, Jun 25 • Comments • Share

Brendan hacked a USB hub into this old Atari joystick, and now he's got a stylish "hubstick" on his desk. Link (Thanks, Brendan!)

Eco-hipster bunny game

By Cory Doctorow at 3:02 am Saturday, Jun 25 • Comments • Share

Honda's latest ad is a fun, eco Flash game where you play a hipster bunny rabbit bent on improving a Teletubby- esque countryside by eliminating trash. The sound-effects and art are triffic, and the message is, as Alice at Wonderland notes, a lot smarter than would be imparted by yet another motorcycle-racing game. Link (via Wonderland)

Update: Douglas sez:

So, I was wondering just what the heck motivated Honda to do this wonderfully surreal game, and did some digging. I learned that:

1) Those are actually ear protectors the bunny is wearing (from having to deal with nasty old diesel engines), not headphones, as some people have posted. This explains why they are burned up in the BBQ at the end of the game. (I initially thought perhaps he was giving up recorded music on some sort of principle.)

2) It's part of a Honda campaign for a new, improved type of diesel engine. There's an ad that goes with it featuring Garrison Keillor, which is every bit as surreal as the game (and with better production values).

3) The theme of the game and the lyrics of the recurring song (hate something/change something) comes from the backstory Honda is promoting about how their chief engineer hated diesel engines, and refused to consider using them unless they could be vastly improved.

Alarm clock with bacon-cooking aroma module

By Cory Doctorow at 2:47 am Saturday, Jun 25 • Comments • Share

The Wake n' Bacon is a prototype for an alarm clock that wakes you to the smell of cooking bacon. It accomplishes this by means of a computer-controlled homemade EasyBake lightbulb oven, into which you load a slice of bacon in a pan every night before bed. Twenty minutes before your alarm goes off, the oven begins slow-cooking the pork-product. Great idea, but there are two critical flaws: it's probably not sanitary to leave bacon sitting at room-temp overnight; and now that I use my mobile phone for an alarm clock, this kind of thing is too bulky to consider as a practical add-on for my wake-up system. Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

NYT endorses Bugmenot

By Cory Doctorow at 2:43 am Saturday, Jun 25 • Comments • Share

The New York Times, whose odious reg system requires you to personally identify yourself in order to simply read the news, publishes an endorsement of Bugmenot, an excellent service that circumvents registration for websites like nytimes.com.

STOP BUGGING ME If newspaper marketers think they are receiving reliable user information via those annoying site registrations, they should run their Web addresses through bugmenot.com, which offers quick user names and passwords to people who click on a link only to be confronted by a mandatory registration page. Some examples of usernames: thisisannoying; iwantnews; thisisjustsilly; whydoyoudothis. DAN MITCHELL

Link (Thanks, Bugmenotter!)

Katamari Damacy fans in costume

By Cory Doctorow at 2:32 am Saturday, Jun 25 • Comments • Share

This gallery, entitled "Private Photoshoot of Liddo and Sarah's Katamari Fantasy Night," features two Katamari Damacy (stupendous, mind-bending console game) fans having a little KD cosplay session dressed up as little princes and prancing around. Fantastic. Link (via Waxy)

Illegal space-race through Los Angeles, June 25

By Cory Doctorow at 2:00 am Saturday, Jun 25 • Comments • Share

Monochrom, the crazy Austrian net-artists, continue their tear through the West Coast. They're holding an "illegal space race" through Los Angeles:

LA is big. Big enough for an "illegal space race". We will place the planets true to scale (sun, 4 meters in diameter, Pluto, one centimeter in diameter, about 20 miles away) throughout the LA cityscape. Then we will conduct a car race. The team that makes it through 'LA space' fastest wins the interplanetary trophy. In conclusion, of course, the speeds of the cars will be calculated, for example, how much faster than light they were. Patrick Dondl of Caltech will be on hand as astrophysical guest commentator to comment on the events.

June 25, 2 PM @ Machine Project

Link

Traditional publishing and CC licensing go hand-in-hand

By Cory Doctorow at 1:55 am Saturday, Jun 25 • Comments • Share

The Book Standard has a great article on the use of Creative Commons licenses for electronic distribution of commercial print books, and the growing schism between the kinds of publishers and authors who complain about Google and Amazon's services for searching the whole text of books and the kinds of publishers and writers who celebrate it.

"I don't want to condone piracy," says Hayden of Tor Books. "But in general I find it not so much appalling as encouraging. We're the genre that the readers care enough about to be this obsessive about. I want to do something with this, not fight against it."

Doctorow agrees. "Think about the care that goes into pirating a book!" he says. "That person has not done that because he hates the author and wishes to do the author harm, but because he loves the work and loves the author. Calling that person a thief is about the most suicidal thing you can do." And, as Stross points out, "the availability of a free e-book actually undercuts the profitability of pirate paper or electronic editions."

Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, the leading publisher of computer books in America, says his company certainly does encounter piracy, the more so since their work attracts the most technically savvy people in the world. The books of theirs that sell the best are the books that are most often pirated (and the most shoplifted, incidentally), but this doesn't stop those books from selling well. "I'm sure there are people who pass around the links and use the pirate links," says O'Reilly. "But in our experience they're not the people who are likely to buy the books anyway."

Link

Dear PeerImpact: Your DRM cost you my business

By Cory Doctorow at 1:48 am Saturday, Jun 25 • Comments • Share

Ryan was about to sign up for PeerImpact, a P2P service that distributes authorized, royalty-paid music, when he discovered that the company wraps all its media in restrictive DRM. Instead of sending them some money, he sent them an email explaining why he wouldn't use their service:

I'm all for buying music, making sure the artists are compensated and the major labels get their cubic meters of money to continue suing their customers. What I (and everyone else O know) will not stand for is a product that uses a protection scheme that ruins the experience. If the service used standard compliant MP3 files, I'd have signed up and filled my 2 gigs of storage on my handheld, yes it's a windows mobile device, it has mobile media player 10 that can handle the crippled files you hare selling. The fact is while my device can use your DRM, I won't. Simple as that.

Thanks for the attempt, man you guys almost have the ideal business model, once you support a non crippled file format, Holy smokes, you guys will be huge.

Link (Thanks, Ryan!)

Overview of indy content distribution services

By Cory Doctorow at 1:46 am Saturday, Jun 25 • Comments • Share

Jeff from CommonBits -- a BitTorrent distribution service for indy media -- has published a good overview of all the services out there for distributing rich, massy indy video, audio and other files, like Broadcast Machine, We Media, and many others.

CommonBits and Broadcast Machine are both excellent platforms for delivering the coming wave of citizen media content. And there are others.

Prodigem offers a BitTorrent hosting service that allows people to sell their content. OurMedia and Archive.org offer a similar hosting service without BitTorrent but neither service has a particular community focus e.g. politics or music. Al Gore’s new company Current.TV is also making an effort to involve citizen media producers albeit more commercial.

The community aspect of these sites is important. CommonTunes was created to support the online music community and CommonFlix to support video sharing. OurMedia has a lot of community features as well.

Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

HOWTO cast a silver bullet

By Cory Doctorow at 1:42 am Saturday, Jun 25 • Comments • Share

Noting that casting one's own ammo is becoming a dying art, and that this might mean the extinction of silver bullets, this article describes the process required for casting your own werewolf-slayers:

To create the mold, I first had to construct a bit. I used a lathe to turn a steel rod into a bulletlike shape, then used a milling machine to cut away a quarter-circle wedge of the rod, leaving a sharp cutting edge. Basically I had built a router bit shaped like a bullet. (I've fabricated bits like this freehand with a file; which works fine, it just takes longer. Much longer.) After using the bit to machine the graphite bullet mold, I used an electrically heated graphite crucible to pour in 0.999 fine liquid silver at about 2,000*F, which is 230*F above its melting point. The mold must be preheated with a blowtorch to keep the silver from solidifying before it fills the whole cavity. One of the benefits of using graphite is that it keeps the silver from oxidizing, so bullets come out bright and shiny.

Link

Live video from gamespace

By Cory Doctorow at 1:38 am Saturday, Jun 25 • Comments • Share

Ernest sez, "Second Life has launched a live video stream from their virtual world that you can watch on their homepage. Click on the television set labeled 'live video' for a random look into the world of Second Life ... also be prepared for loud music that cannot, apparently, be turned off. Very, very cool. I WANT MY SECOND LIFE TV!" Link (Thanks, Ernest!)

All of Ibsen coming to the Internet

By Cory Doctorow at 1:36 am Saturday, Jun 25 • Comments • Share

Forteller sez, "A project led a professor at the University of Oslo (UiO) is working on publishing all the works of Henrik Ibsen, perhaps Norway's most famous author/playwright/poet, for free on the internet. His most famous works include Peer Gynt, A Doll's House, Brand and The Wild Duck.

"All his notes, manuscripts, speeches, letter, and all his published works are included in the project which is supposed to be finished in 2008, it will also be added a lot of comments to his works. Before they are published on the net, it will all be printed. The printed version of the Ibsen compilation will fill up 31 books! The texts will be coded by the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative to make it easy to search through." Link (Thanks, Forteller)