The plot of Y: The Last Man is a pretty straightforward apocalyptic tale: one day, every man on earth drops dead, blood gushing from their noses and mouths, leaving no one behind but women, and one man, and one male monkey (his pet -- a helper monkey he's been training). The setup rapidly progresses into a gripping, funny, sad and lovely tale of the post-apocalyptic world.

Book five seems to be firmly on the downhill side toward a conclusion, something we don't get nearly often enough in the world of funnybooks. The art is tremendous, too -- there's a page 60 showing a teenage girl storming away from Thanksgiving dinner that is possibly the most expressive bit of comic book art I've ever seen. Book 5 Link, Book 4 Link, Book 3 Link, Book 2 Link, Book 1 Link

Update: Javier sez, "The first issue of 'Y: The Last Man' is available as a PDF file from the DC Comics website."

I just lost two hours of my life to this game! I never played Incredible Machine, but this reminds me a lot of my favorite 8-bit and Apple ][+ games: Lemmings, Burger Time, Super Mario Bros -- with a dash of Myst-grade problem-solving thrown in. Highly recommended -- check out the cross-platform demos. Link (Thanks, Ryan!)

His eye was caught by unusual 'rectangular shadows' nearby. Curious, he analysed the image further, and concluded that the lines must represent a buried structure of human origin. Eventually, he traced out what looked like the inner courtyards of a villa.

Mori, who describes the finding on his blog, Quellí Della Bassa, contacted archaeologists, including experts at the National Archaeological Museum of Parma. They confirmed the find. At first it was thought to be a Bronze Age village, but an inspection of the site turned up ceramic pieces that indicated it was a Roman villa.

He's posted a really sweet video of one of these 3D-modelled knots rotating around and around. This is really hypnotic geometry. Link to Wikipedia Knots Entry (Thanks, Ben!)

Simon Willison has hacked together a terrific Greasemonkey script called americanmemoryfixer.user.js that fixes the user-interface's worst sins:

* Changes the colour scheme to black-on-white, and the typeface to Verdana.
* Removes all table borders.
* Adds headings to some pages, and fixes various title tags.
* Sets the default gallery view to be a set of thumbnails, rather than a list of names.
* Displays a large image (as opposed to a thumbnail) when you view a photograph.

Alex, Samme and Joey settle on a venti, nonfat, sugar-free, vanilla, caramel macchiato with 240 calories and one gram of fat. It's relatively healthy compared with some of the milkshake-like options here. But it's also clear that the kids can't help seizing their chance for more of a good thing. They're entitled to just a "tall," the Starbuckian euphemism for a small. But they can upgrade their snack to a bigger size by spending shaka beads that they've earned at camp. Those are tokens that counselors hand out to say "Right on!" to a camper who has done extra chores or just shown a good attitude on a particular grueling hike. Alex, Joey and Samme all decide to take the supersize upgrade.

The kids relish their carefully selected coffee treats in civilization. Joey scribbles the calorie and fat information of her drink, on the back of her hand, so she won't forget to write it down in her journal back at camp. But I can't help noticing that their very fit counselor, the blond, outdoorsy Elsemore, who says her diet at home isn't that different from what the campers eat at camp, has ordered the most sensible thing of all: a 120-calorie, nonfat latte. She's not trying to lose weight; this is just how she eats. And it's healthier behavior than that of the teens who are devoting their summer break to slimming down but can't resist supersizing, given the chance.

Update: Miika sez, "The mod was actually done by a Finnish guy called Nev@lehma. Those pictures on the site you linked to originally from here.

* WaPo: "As crews rush to restore basic telephone and Internet services to areas ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, some executives, academics and analysts are urging a more ambitious approach: Make New Orleans and the surrounding areas super-connected communities, with advanced services that surpass what is available anywhere in the country, if not the world." Link

* A video for the K-otix remix George Bush Don't Like Black People" is here: Link

* "Internet access through RadioShack Corporation's nearly 5,000 company stores nationwide is being offered free of charge to victims of Hurricane Katrina." Link

* Prometheus Radio is asking folks to call their congresscritters to ask that they cosponsor HR 3731, which supports low power FM radio. Congressional phone numbers and FCC comment input site (until Sep. 21) here, along with info about Radio Katrina: Link

* Declan McCullagh's Politech list has followups on previous posts there about Red Cross seeking tech aid: Link

* Salon: "The White House has devoted a lot of time and effort to blaming state and local officials for the flawed response to Hurricane Katrina, but others on the right have found a different target: environmentalists." Link

* "The federal official with the power to mobilize a massive federal response to Hurricane Katrina was Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, not the former FEMA chief who was relieved of his duties and resigned earlier this week, federal documents reviewed by Knight Ridder show." Link

* Ned Sublette writes,

Ira Glass's [NPR-syndicated program] "This American Life" had a New Orleans episode last week, called "After the Flood," with a follow-up this week. He interviews a very articulate woman who was in the convention center. It's devastating. He interviews one of the paramedics who witnessed the Gretna police turning back evacuees on the Crescent City connection and another witness to the confrontation. A high school girl from the Lafitte projects responds to Bill O'Reilly, saying, "I didn't have no idea that it was a crime to be poor and the punishment was death... you know what it's like not to have water?" A fourth interviewee talks about being an evacuee in Baton Rouge, and a fifth segment is a visit to a displaced persons' FEMA mobile home park in florida, where people have been living for a year. There is a second program, to be aired this weekend, following up on astrodome evacuees. Downloadable (broadband, it's an hour) from: thislife.org

* And, again, quoting Ned:

There was a struggle this week, perhaps over contract terms, between FEMA and Kenyon International, the firm to which body handling in Louisiana has been outsourced, which culminated in an exasperated Gov. Blanco's hiring of Kenyon directly by the state of Louisiana. Link. Kenyon is wholly owned by SCI, a company that is not new to scandal, whose head is a political supporter of -- guess who. Link.

* Here is the American Association of Museums' exhaustive list of historic sites, gardens, zoos, and museums in the affected area, and what happened (or didn't) to them. Link

* Bush to rename rebuilt French Quarter "Freedom" Quarter: Link.

* National Archives footage of the 1927 Mississippi River flood which displaced half a million people and led to a greater federal role in disaster relief. Then, as now, images of displaced persons reflect disparities along racial and economic lines. Link to archive.org footage.

* Snip from MSNBC's Brian Williams, on the night of George Bush's presidential address about Katrina:

I am duty-bound to report the talk of the New Orleans warehouse district last night: there was rejoicing (well, there would have been without the curfew, but the few people I saw on the streets were excited) when the power came back on for blocks on end. Kevin Tibbles was positively jubilant on the live update edition of Nightly News that we fed to the West Coast. The mini-mart, long ago cleaned out by looters, was nonetheless bathed in light, including the empty, roped-off gas pumps. The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through. And yet last night, no more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out. The entire area was plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. It's enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it... jump to certain conclusions.

* Following up on a previous Boing Boing post: here's an NBC article, "Katrina floods wipe out years of research," examining what happened to the lab animals and disease samples around NOLA.

(thanks, Vidiot, Jake Appelbaum, John Parres, Ned Sublette, Genie Ogden, Mr. Spocko, AKB, Frank Wales, Stephen Berg)

I don't know if you've noticed, but our story about Pat Robertson blaming Katrina on Ellen Degeneres hosting the Emmys has gotten totally out of control. Check out Technorati for the over 100 blogs linking to DatelineHollywood.com in the last few days and you'll see virtually all of them are to that [parody] article with most of them believing it. And you should see some of the emails we've been getting (most mad at Robertson, some trying to "correct" our facts, and just a few getting the joke). It's the craziest thing on the Internet I've been involved in.

Nothing says "life is sacred" like an 18-wheeler rollin' down the highway, plastered with ginormous technicolor photos of aborted fetuses. Yee-haw! That's choice. Boing Boing reader lilly Cat says,

This anti-choice/abortion group produces semi trucks with VERY graphic, ten-foot-high images of dead fetuses on the sides. I live in Tallahassee, Florida, which is not a large city, and saw one of these trucks driving down the road this morning. I was appalled. Children see these images and I believe they are way too graphic for children to understand.

Phil says, "These are scans of all of the recipes in my mom's recipe collection." Link (Thanks, Digitaler Lumpensammler)

Update: Laura Lemay sez, "you can also just buy a bunch of Power Strip Liberators (5 for about $8-10) and accomplish the same thing to retrofit your existing power strips. Not as cool, though."

A wooden replica of the royal barge Jubilant, draped with black fabric and plumes, headed the flotilla, rowed by oarsmen dressed in historical costumes. It carried a miniature coffin, containing a version of the letter sent back to Britain with news of Nelson's historic victory on Oct. 21, 1805, off Cape Trafalgar, a low headland in southwest Spain, when Nelson defeated Napoleon Bonaparte's forces....

His state funeral was the largest ever in Britain, with a mile-and-a-half-long (two-and-a-half-kilometer-long) procession following his coffin in London. Today, his statue atop a column in London's Trafalgar Square remains one of the city's most famous landmarks.

He was flabbergasted by how archaic screw design was. On rare occasions when a new screw length or width was needed, an engineer would consult a 300-page manual dating from 1936 that explains the relationships between certain heights and pitches of threads and the lengths and widths of the resulting screws. "They would go do math for a couple of days and come back with an answer,"LeVey says--to how the grooved dies should look, how much pressure should be applied to the blank, and what the diameter of the blank should be.

LeVey had a handful of interns spend three months putting the mummified math of the old screw guide into software. Meanwhile, he grabbed an old thread-rolling machine out of a nearby factory and wired it to operate very slowly to let him observe exactly what was happening. Using three-dimensional solid-modeling software, LeVey gleaned a finer understanding of how the metal moved when it was squished. Possibilities opened up. LeVey could design intricate dies that, on a computer at least, could wrap screws with a helix of shaped threads.

To make dies capable of pressing tiny, intricate patterns onto the threads, LeVey had to borrow a technology often used to create injection molds for detailed plastic parts. The pattern of the die is milled into a soft, graphitelike carbon. The carbon is placed next to the steel die form, and very high voltage is sent between the carbon and the steel, creating a powerful arc of heat, which vaporizes the steel in the desired pattern. "No one had bothered to take advantage of all of this new technology available to us and apply it to this very old product," LeVey says.

By 2003 LeVey and ITW finally had a product. The company, under its Tapcon brand, began marketing large-diameter concrete screws with tiny, arrowhead-shape chisels wrapped around the screw, to cut into concrete like sharks' teeth. Builders previously had to insert adhesive into predrilled holes to get screws to hold when they attached wood framing to concrete foundations; now they can just use LeVey's breakthrough.

Last week, reports surfaced that TiVo had enabled a restriction that allows broadcasters to delete shows from your hard-drive after a set period. TiVo claimed that the programs that came with this flag set were the result of "noise," which accidentally triggered the restriction (something experts dispute). TiVo says that the restriction is only meant to be applied to pay-per-view and other premium material.

However, yesterday Aaron Hurley discovered that this restriction was being applied to a documentary on Turner Classic Movies -- the kind of filler that is hard to credit as "premium" programming.

Perhaps there's more of that pesky "noise" creeping into the TiVo signals. Link (Thanks, Aaron!)

Update: Brian points out Indiana University's Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection, an amateur photography collection from 1938-1969, as an excellent companion to these.

Update: Alex sez, "I'd like to recommend just as highly a collection of Edward Curtis photos also housed at the LOC, an extensive set of ethnographic potraits, stark and beautiful, captured in another time. Although these aren't in color, the collection is just as stunning, and I would encourage your readers to spend a few minutes looking back through them. They remind me of the many months I spent poring over The Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Reports (a congressionally mandated compilation of studies covering various Native American tribes, spanning nearly five decades) as a student, reading in books what I could never see in person."

Update: Kirby points out that the Cushman collection sports 15 pics of Disneyland taken on March 26, 1959.

Copyright law has received much attention in Finnish press for the past three days.

The new Finnish copyright law is in its final stage in parliament. What started over 10 years ago in WIPO has led to an evil law and citizens are protesting it. Members of parliament are reportedly receiving over 600 e-mail a day about the new law and its flaws.

Citizens sending mail are terrorists
The ex-minister of culture, Kaarina Dromberg (who was responsible for the first version of the law) has been making statements that the members of parliament are victims of e-mail terrorism. The current minister of culture (ex-miss Finland Tanja Karpela) has said that there are certain forces behind the e-mail flood. She is right. The e-mails were send by worried normal citizens. The ones that elected parliament. The ones that have enjoyed freedoms of consuming copyrighted material. The citizens that are affected deeply by the new law that takes those rights away.

Every year I recommend the gigantic kitsch fest to even my most jaded and snooty friends - and they love it too!!! And if you think the fair is beneath your station in life- think again – really! I’m here to tell you it’s is Southern California’s BEST KEPT SECRET.  

The grand scale pop-culture gadget, garden and barnyard showcase is set in a treasure trove of vintage architecture, public art, neon signs, landscaping and unique permanent attractions from the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. While Disneyland celebrates its 50th year the Los Angeles County Fair continues in Pomona where it began 83 years ago in 1922.  Pomona, by the way, is the city named for the Roman Goddess of Fruit – how perfect is that!  

Among the endless wonderland of mesmerizing things to see there is this week’s slide of the Sunset Drive-in Movie Theater in THE MINIATURE GARDEN RAILROAD, LOS ANGELES COUNTY FAIR, POMONA, 1952. The Sunset Drive-in is Southern California’s oldest and most charming outdoor movie theater. The screen is a television, the cars are promotional models. The show still starts at dawn every year during the fair.

The garage sale purveyor said that it was some sort of obscure director's award. Maybe a cinematographer's award. The garage sale matron really had no idea and was just making stuff up. She believed her own bullshit, as they often do. I blame the early rising, lack of coffee and excessive sun exposure. Since I garage sale every week, I don't lose my shit when I have a garage sale. I am carved of wood. Practically an Olympian of garage sales.

Photographer Justin Lundgren says:

A few weeks prior to Hurricane Katrina, I completed this photo project with the intent of displaying the images in a New Orleans gallery. Clearly that's not going to happen any time soon. When I evacuated my now-flooded house, these photos were among the few possessions that I saved. I look at the images now and realize with some despair what's been lost.

New Orleans has been my adopted home for a total of ten years, and for the most part it's been a love affair that has enriched my life enormously. While the city has always had its share of problems, the good has always outweighed the bad, the cultural richness and celebratory feel of the place has always been its strongpoint. Now that the city has been reshaped by this disaster, I wonder what I'll be returning to in the coming weeks. I worry that the quirkiness of its people and that the physical charm of the landscape will be irreparably harmed. I look at these images now and feel privileged to have been witness to the glory that was New Orleans. Hopefully, a reverse diaspora will occur over the next few months to reinvigorate this beloved and beleaguered town.

These images will be for sale in various formats once I have a chance to get home and assess the condition of my printer.

Boing Boing friend Jonno D'addario, a blogger who was displaced from his NOLA home by Katrina, pointed us to this collection of images and said:

If anyone wonders why I can't wait to get back home and start rebuilding my life in New Orleans, now they know.

(Thanks, Jonno)

It'll now be subject to DNA testing here and in the United States.

Veteran Nessie-hunter Dr Bob Rines is a pioneer of radar and sonar, at 83 this could be his last expedition...but also his most successful.

Using underwater robots, the team has scooped up material that may finally prove the existence of large animals deep in the loch.

The flood of immigrants in the antebellum era—Irish and Germans added to the mix—contributed to a freewheeling, raucous blend of culture, language, religion, and cuisine that gave New Orleans renown as “the city that care forgot.” By 1840, both blacks and whites began pouring into the streets every year to celebrate Mardi Gras. Wealthy white landowners took their mulatto mistresses to mixed-race “quadroon balls” (for people of one-quarter black ancestry) or “octaroon balls” (for those one-eighth black), adding to the city’s reputation for glamour, tolerance, elegance, and wickedness. Life in the swamp remained hazardous: Another hurricane flooded the city in 1849, and mosquitoes caused 23 separate outbreaks of yellow fever, with an 1853 epidemic killing 8,000 people. But New Orleanians partied on, with even funerals having a festive, musical air. One observer said that residents possessed “a love of life that borders on defiance.”

-Modeling the Sound of Music with virtual instruments

-Scoping Out the Nanoworld with a superlens

-Weathering Atmospheric Flow for improved forecasting

The satellites are tiny--they weigh a kilogram and generally measure about 10 centimeters on each side--but they cost far less than conventional commercial satellites. A CubeSat unit costs roughly $40,000 to build and only $40,000 to launch. As part of the program, Cal Poly takes care of the bureaucratic and logistical hurdles.

By contrast, a conventional satellite can run between $150 million and $250 million to build and $100 million to launch.

"I kind of look at this as the Apple II. The ordinary person can get something into space," said Bob Twiggs, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford and one of the principals behind CubeSat. "We don't know what the ultimate use is, but look what happened to the Internet."

Last year, we took a letter from 20 webcasters opposing this to WIPO. They temporarily abandoned webcasting then, but now there are sneaky moves afoot to get it back on the table.

The Consumer Project on Technology is petitioning the Library of Congress and US Patent and Trademark Office to go back to WIPO and tell them to abandon this bizarre proposal to confer ownership of information to the person whose sole contribution to it is converting it to packets and sending it down the wire.

CPTech renews its request that the USPTO or the Library of Congress (LOC) invite formal public comment on the proposal to create a new International Treaty obligation establishing a novel intellectual property regime for webcasting, through the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

The treaty language proposed for a "webcasting"right would create a new layer of property rights, lasting at least 50 years, for materials that are transmitted by web servers over the Internet and other networks. Unlike copyright, the new webcaster right is not based upon a creative contribution. Any material, including material in the public domain, or licensed for public dissemination under a creative commons type license, would be burdened with this new layer of rights, which accompany any "public transmission" of any combination or representations of sounds and or images.[ft 1]

There are no formalities for the new rights. They will automatic increase the transaction costs associating with redistributing or reusing information distributed from web pages...

One has to ask, how can Yahoo and a handful of companies succeed in pushing a global treaty on webcasting when almost no countries have even enacted such laws? As far as we know, only Finland has attempted to create something like the webcasting right. The United States has certainly not enacted such a law, and it is highly unlikely the US Congress would ever do so. This is because many in the US Congress actually understand the benefits of freedom, and the dangers of excessive government regulation of the Internet.

Reader comment: Johnny says: "This fish was mentioned on a wonderful This American Life episode (Real Media only unfortunately) and the interviewee, Carl Zimmer has great book that also mentions it along with lots of other creepy parasites."

NOTE: the discount is taken after you proceed to check out. It's highlighted on the page with the third bullet (NOTE: Your full discount appears in your cart when you CHECK OUT).
Link

Facial recognition systems match key features on the holder's face and work best when the face has a neutral expression with the mouth closed.

"A broad smile, however nice it may be, is therefore unacceptable," the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

It looks like Germany's not alone in demanding unsmiling passport photos. The UK [1] and Canada [2] have nixed the smile, and according to a Boing Boing story from last year, so has the US [3].

But I'm not sure whether the US really has banned the smile. The State Department's website says "the subject may be either smiling or not" [4], and, in a brochure from 1998 that's still online, "encourages photographs where the applicant is relaxed and smiling." [5]

At least in the case of the UK, the unsmiling finger was pointed at the International Civil Aviation Organisation -- but the ICAO, in its guide to Biometric Data Interchange Formats, doesn't ban the smile, it taxonomizes it. [6, PDF]

Crossing the street to enter the UN building yesterday, I passed Abdoulaye Wade, the president of Senegal. Honestly, I would never have recognised him if it weren't for the clapping and shouting supporters who had lined up near the sidewalk barricades hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

Later, I nearly bumped into President Lula of Brazil as he got off an escalator on the 2nd floor of the UN building and entered an elevator. I know I probably should have accosted him for an interview, but he was very busy and had about nine equally busy men surrounding him. Que pena. But how fun to be sharing hallways with all these world leaders.

Favorite BoingBoing Links (March 2003)

• Snow Crystal Photographs [link]
• A Collection of Ice Photography [link]
• File Compression: New Tool for Life Detection? [link]
• If Imagineers opened a furniture store [link]
• Top Ten Digital Photography Tips [link]
• The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (to fiction what IMDB is to movies) [link]
• Military Laptop That's Dishwasher Safe [link]
• How Trackback Works [link]
• Chemistry Comes Alive! [link]
• Dog Bites AIBO [link]
• Michael Larsen, Game Show Legend [link]
• Notes on Reading an Electronic Book [link]
• The Periodic Table of Haiku [link]
• Bar Code Art [link]
• Rubik's Cube Art [link]
• String Art [link]
• Pencil Carving Gallery [link]
• Nanoscale padlock [link]
• Starting Fire With an Ice Lens [link]
• Fly with Implanted Webserver [link]
• Cool Bullet Pictures [link]
• George Orwell's Works Online [link]

Just as tough, reliable, and go anywhere as a HUMMER, this laptop is the perfect addition to your HUMMER lifestyle! Featuring the latest in mobile technology, it's ergonomically styled, and passes the military standard 810F test for operating temperature and vibration.

"It's not something that's been done lightly and to chop a finger off, it's a bit drastic," Blackwell conceded to national broadcaster ABC.

"But I love my footy and love playing sport and if that's going to help me to succeed at this level then it's something you've just got to do," he added.

“Even with onboard exercise, astronauts face the risk of losing muscle mass and function because their muscles are not bearing enough weight, or load,” said Dr. Vincent J. Caiozzo, investigator on NSBRI’s Muscle Alterations and Atrophy Team. “For exploration, it is important to find ways to increase load-bearing activity so astronauts can maintain strength...”

With long-term initiatives like the International Space Station and the proposed lunar and Mars missions, the rate of muscle loss in some areas might rise to 25 percent unless measures are taken to confront atrophy. The loss of muscle strength during an extended mission could pose dramatic problems in the event of an emergency situation upon landing.

Foley first heard the tale of a white giraffe in 1993, when he began working in Tanzania’s Tarangire National Park, where he conducts long-term research on the park’s savanna elephant populations...

"Despite intensive searching, I never saw the giraffe," recalls Foley. "And by 1994, the sightings stopped coming in, so I assumed it had died, either at the hand of man or beast. I never stopped looking though..."

On a scientific note, Foley doubts that this white giraffe is the same one that others reported seeing in 1993, and is probably not a pure albino animal, but a leucistic animal, which means the animal is lighter than normal.

TiVo's official story is that this capability is part of the terms of their deal with Macrovision, which provides technology for restricting copying and use. However, they say that the Macrovision deal requires that this signal never gets applied except to pay-per-view and premium cable programs.

TiVo says that the two programs that got this flag received it as the result of a transmission error -- noise that was "misinterpreted as a copy protection signal."

On O'Reilly Radar, Marc Hedlund expresses disbelief at this explanation:

Aren't we talking about reception of a single bit of data (flag on or off) -- is that really so hard to receive through that noisy analog signal? Doesn't it seem a lot more likely that some overzealous scheduler clicked a "protect content" checkbox without realizing the storm it would cause?

Charitably, an operating system vendor's rep suggested that TiVo might not be lying: rather, he said that perhaps they've just done an "incredibly bad" implementation of Macrovision. Link

Update: Aw crap! It's a forgery! OTOH, how cool is it that there are Disneyland Haunted Mansion Uniform Forgers preying on the unsuspecting in interwebland? (Thanks, Ricky!)

Gillette ups the ante, unveils 5-blade razor
Fusion is market leader's answer to rival Schick's 4-blade Quattro

Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades
By James M. Kilts
CEO and President,
The Gillette Company
February 18, 2004 | Issue 40*07
James M. Kilts
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of shaving in this country. The Gillette Mach3 was the razor to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach3Turbo. That's three blades and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to four blades.

Update: Ryan points out that Mad Magazine nailed this one in 1979.

Update 2: Bruce sez, "Saturday Night Live predicted the Mach-3 razor *in their very first episode* in 1975: 'Triple-Trac: because you'll believe anything.'"

The software is available in versions for both Windows and Linux. According to King Soft, this new release of WPS Office "is an overhaul of 5 million lines of code by 100 engineers over three years", with all the work done in China. The software is available for free for 100 days, after which it will be sold at prices designed not to compete with Microsoft Office, but with pirate versions of Microsoft Office.

Now here's Build Your Own PVR, a site that focuses on building a high-powered, full-featured personal video recorder out of your old PC. Unlike TiVo, the box you build for yourself will be on your side -- not only will it never delete a program without your permission, it can also auto-skip commercials, move video seamlessly to your other PVRs and computers, and provide you with additional useful home-server functionality, such as serving as your firewall or router.

Dug up some inside scoop on the upcoming Hauppauge Wireless MediaMVP (link goes to wired MediaMVP product page).

First: People have noted in the forum that the regular wired MediaMVP has been marked down at Radio Shack. The "wired" regular MediaMVP is not going away, as it is still useful for setups with more than 3 MediaMVP's or if you have poor wifi signal strength/extremely long distances between the "server" PC and the MediaMVP client. So there's no reason to not grab one if you want the wired network version.

Second: The wireless/wifi MediaMVP will be 802.11g.

Third: The Wireless MediaMVP will start to be available mid-October and have a MSRP of $149

Fourth: Can't wait to get my hands on one. I was considering grabbing one of the wired MediaMVP's from Radio Shack and adding a wireless game adapter (basically an ethernet to wifi adapter commonly used to get your Xbox onto a wireless network), but I can wait a month or so for an integrated solution that's been tweaked to be a wireless media extender.

For those that don't know the MediaMVP is a popular small/quiet playback client that streams your content over your network. There are 3rd party "clients" to allow you to interact/stream/watch your content from your GBPVR server or SageTV server. Some people use the MediaMVP as their primary playback device (as opposed to putting the noisey pc in the same room as the TV and using video card TV output); others use the MediaMVP to extend their existing setup to multiple/additional TV's in their house.

Update: Bluerazr sez, "The best software to build your own PVR with (and no DRM!!), imnsho, is Snapstream's Beyond TV. Not only can you record TV shows free and clear to MPEG-2 files, thanks to the broadcast flag being struck down, when they launch Beyond TV 4 in a month or so, they'll have native over the air HDTV/Digital TV support -- once again, free and clear, regular MPEG-2 transport streams. They also have a feature called SmartSkip which detects commercial breaks and lets you skip between them and ShowSqueeze which lets you compress video to different formats including Windows Media and DivX. The program guide is also free (no subscription fees). I highly recommend it (I'm a long time user and beta tester)."

Update 2: Chris sez, "Since there's all this talk about building your own PVR, what better than a video showing you how. BTW, check out all of the other videos available on the site."

Episode 2 - MythTV
For under $500 you can build a computer that will record HDTV, schedule your favorite shows anywhere in the world, allow you to back up and archive your standard or high def content, display your favorite RSS news feeds, and play all your old-school MAME roms. All this without any monthly subscription fee, made possible with MythTV.

In this episode we start with the basics of selecting your capture card. Then, we present what many consider to be the easiest way to install and configure MythTV, knoppMyth. Finally, we end the episode with the configuration and setup of knoppMyth.

The candy maker, called the "panner," adds liquid sugar to the rotating pan.

This liquid sugar sticks to each grain of sugar, making a hard candy shell.

This process is repeated more than 100 times over a two week period, increasing the size of the Atomic Fireball to a one inch ball.

I want to see a TV show where the flying camera crane zips around the table where Wil Wheaton, Puff Daddy, Michael Madsen, and Lindsay Lohan play D&D. I would totally watch that.

"Yo, I'm-a gonna get all up in that orc's face with my Magic Missile. Jack you up, orc!" Then then announcers banter, "oh, Magic Missle! A bold choice, he might need that later. Here comes the roll..."

It would be GLORIOUS.

Update: It turns out that Wil Wheaton already pitched this to Comedy Central:

No joke: I helped some guys from Upright Citizen's Brigade pitch this to Comedy Central. We did a live version for them at the Comedy Central Workspace earlier this year.

It was AWESOME, and hilarious, and I got to sit close enough to Paget Brewster to pretend that she was in love with me, but CC didn't pick it up.

There's a tape of it, that should /really/ find its way to the internets.

Update 1(a): Wil sez, " I didn't pitch it (as in, it wasn't my idea). I just helped some guys who had put the thing together, and played in the game during the performance for Comedy Central. I improvised a lot, and I gave up some of the funny, but the original idea wasn't mine. Would you correct that at boingboing, so I don't get credit where credit isn't due?"

Update 2: A reader sez, "Apparently, Vin Deisel is a big nerd who's really into D&D. He wrote the Foreword for that special anniversary Dungeon Guide."

Update 3: Thanks to Jonathan for reminding us of this 2004 post about a non-celebrity community-access D&D TV show.

Five things I'd ask every Supreme Court nominee if I sat on the Senate Judiciary Committee

1. If you knew to an absolute moral certainty that you could capture and consume a live infant without being caught, how many do you suppose you could eat in a weekend?
2. Have you ever been spanked erotically by someone who was not your current legal spouse? Just yes or no, please.
3. Nominee, do you regard these slacks as accentuating my basket in an un-senatorial fashion?
4. Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about...your mother.
5. Kindly rise, and sing the 1979 hit, The Pina Colada Song, also known as Escape.

Robinson is the brilliant author of the Mars trilogy, three epic, life-changing volumes on the terraforming of Mars -- see my review of Red Mars and its sequels Blue Mars and Green Mars. The interview focuses on the eco-disaster in the offing in the USA, and what Robinson's fictional debates about environmental management and re-shaping on Mars and Earth have taught him about disasters like Katrina.

"It seems so easy on Mars, and looks so hard on earth, which is kind of ironic," Robinson agrees. "It's infinitely more difficult when there's already an established ecology. There's no room for error. And also, alas, there are some mistakes that we simply don't have the power to correct."

Such as?

"Reducing the acidity of the ocean. That's a problem I've become more aware of since I finished book two - it will definitely feature in the third volume. Much of the carbon dioxide we're putting into the atmosphere actually ends up in the ocean, increasing its acidity and making it harder for the little creatures to live. They represent the bottom of the food chain and we're at the top of it. Scientists have looked at whether we could de-acidify the oceans after the fact, and the answer is flatly no ...

"But there are things we can do. The kind of terraforming projects we may well have to contemplate in the future are huge, but they're not outside civilisation's industrial ability."

Update: Eric sez, "KSR goes into much greater depth on the topic in his top-5 'Amazon Short' titled 'Imagining Abrupt Climate Change: Terraforming Earth,' which I found well worth the 49 cents it cost to have access to the text anywhere in the world I could access Amazon.com."

Reader comment: Dan Diemer says: "Update the 5th graders doing Devo with this mirror, the original is down."

Reader comment:Gary says: the mirror is hard to get at from firefox/linux. here's a torrent.

1. You can't enter the blog directly. You must enter through the main page.

2. You have to wait a long time for the main screen to load up its Flash garbage.

3. You have to wait another eternity for the "blog" to load.

4. The text window for the blog content is the size of a postage stamp.

5. There's only one entry in the text window.

6. The navigation is as confusing as the zero-G toilet in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

7. The actual content is as bland as a piece of Juicyfruit with the flavor chewed out. Link (via FM Publishing)

"The publisher, Multnomah, has already changed the cover art on the book, converting the penis into a cliff

"Amazon has updated their cover art when you click 'Search inside this book' but their product page thumbnail still shows the old image."
Link

Capio, 18"x6x15", 2002

Antique lamp parts, bone, universal joints, springs, brass standoffs, leather

Update Juergen, who runs the site, says: "Our server is trying it's best to digest the traffic and if you can't get into the page right away to be patient and check back in short while ... the server should level itself out very shortly."

I've always had a fascination with them ever since I was a little kid. Seeing these somewhat surreal and fanciful paintings depicting the foods that I would be eating later that day. Taco stands, bars and restaurants will make their way on this site as well. This is my tribute to those paintings and the artists that made them. Bon apetit!

"What's Wrong: You hook up a VCR to your DVD player and make copies of your movie collections as gifts for your pals."

Sorry. You try to hook the two together but Macrovision prevents you from getting a clear picture, even when the movies you want to copy are no longer in print or you're trying to extract scenes to add to commentaries. You probably won't be able to find a Macrovision-less VCR, because Macrovision has been suing their makers for patent infringement.

In conjunction with the release of issue #16 (with a cover by Boing Boing fave Tim Biskup), Blab! is holding an art show at Track 16 Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, CA

Copro/Nason Gallery proudly presents “THE BLAB! SHOW,” the United States’ first-ever Group Art Exhibition featuring the provocative artists from BLAB! magazine. America’s leading anthology of illustration, found graphics, and sequential storytelling showcases the boldest offerings from the leading lights of narrative illustration and painting.

Artists represented in the exhibition are: Gary Baseman, Tim Biskup, Stephane Blanquet, Greg Clarke, Donald Owen Colley, Amy Crehore, Brian Cronin, Andrea Dezso, Drew Friedman, Tom Huck, Teresa James, Peter Kuper, Laura Levine, Mats!?, Walter Minus, John Pound, Christian Northeast, Jonathon Rosen, Sergio Ruzzier, David Sandlin, Owen Smith, Spain, Fred Stonehouse, Marc Rosenthal, Gary Taxali, Esther Pearl Watson, And Mark Todd.

Guests attending the opening include: BLAB! founder Monte Beauchamp, Gary Baseman, Tim Biskup, Drew Friedman, Fred Stonehouse, Laura Levine, Greg Clarke, Gary Taxali, Owen Smith, Esther Pearl Watson, Mark Todd, Teresa James, and Tom Huck.

Oh, and the all-new BLAB! Vol. 16, with stunning covers by Tim Biskup, will debut at the show’s opening!

Where: Track 16 Gallery at Bergamot Station 2525 Michigan Ave C1, Santa Monica, CA 90404

When: Sept. 24, 2005 through October 8, 2005 Reception & Party: Sept. 24, 2005: 8:00 -11:30 p.m. Link

"All shook up I am, hmmmmmmm." Black velvet kitsch overfloweth in this Flickr photo pool. Sad clowns, E.T., Jon Benet Ramsey, "Satan on the potty," Smurfs galore. Link (Thanks, Robin!)

The researchers used three types of data-density of cellphone calls, origins and destinations of the calls, and position of users tracked at regular intervals-to create computer-generated images that can be overlayed with one another and with geographic and street maps of a city to show the peaks and valleys of the landscape as well as peaks in cellphone use.

"For the first time ever we are able to visualize the full dynamics of a city in real time," said project leader Carlo Ratti, an architect/engineer and head of the SENSEable City Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "This opens up new possibilities for urban studies and planning. The real-time city is now real: a system that is able to continuously sense its condition and can quickly react to its criticalities," he added.

"It's tens of times smaller in length, and thousands of times smaller in mass than previous untethered microrobots that are controllable," says (researcher Bruce) Donald. "When we say 'controllable,' it means it's like a car; you can steer it anywhere on a flat surface, and drive it wherever you want to go. It doesn't drive on wheels, but crawls like a silicon inchworm, making tens of thousands of 10-nanometer steps every second. It turns by putting a silicon 'foot' out and pivoting like a motorcyclist skidding around a tight turn."

The future applications for micro-electromechanical systems, or MEMS, include ensuring information security, such as assisting with network authentication and authorization; inspecting and making repairs to an integrated circuit; exploring hazardous environments, perhaps after a hazardous chemical explosion; or involving biotechnology, say to manipulate cells or tissues.

1) "The Little Man From Mars" "This is the very first recording I did for Vanguard. It is special to me because it was the very first experiment with tape loops, despite Pierre Shaeffer's (negative) advice!"

2) "Spooks in Space" "The first one I made with the crazy loops. The idea of crazy tape loops had been inspired to me by a dream I had about Jean Cocteau and Edith Piaf."

3) "E.V.A." "Because it had been suggested to me by Walt Disney, and it is timeless and futuristic. Also, it is a tribute to the first man who walked on the moon."

4) "Baroque Hoedown" "This was a "co-composition" with Gershon Kingsley. I'll put "Baroque Hoedown" down because it became the theme song for the Disneyland's Electrical Parade, 6 years after Walt Disney passed away. But Walt is still alive in my heart and my soul."

5) "Visa to the Stars" "It became an Esso commercial, co-composed with Andy Badale (Angelo Badalamenti,) and also has something related to science fiction."

It's so unfair! You're in trouble again, just because you called your uncle - or rather, your new stepfather, Claudius - a usurping git. It's true, though. Your real dad was SO much better than that guy. Too bad he was found mysteriously dead in the orchard a couple of weeks back. Anyway, your mother (who was, incidentally, looking quite something today in a sparse leather number, er...) sent you to your room, and here you are.

Bedroom
You are in your luxurious palatial boudoir, all of ten feet square. There is a four-poster bed, and not much else. A portrait hangs on the wall. An exit leads north.

Part two of a diary written by a friend who's a television news cameraman working in New Orleans.

New Orleans - September 9th

I’ve been here in New Orleans a week and on a daily basis I’m witnessing the staggering expanse of Katrina’s destruction. I’ve driven over a thousand miles around the city and the individual tragedies stretch from block to block. Whether traveling by air boat (remember the tv show “Flipper”?) or Humvee or by foot, every single street contains the remnants of someone’s life. Endless debris fields - entire life savings. The wreckage crosses all economic lines.

A particularly tragic moment was walking through personal items left behind at the Louisiana Superdome. Most of the people who were evacuated there are dirt poor. They live on the street or in shacks or tenements in this city that has more than it’s share of poverty. Their lives could easily be stored in a shopping cart or suitcase. As the Bush administration was shamed into action, this sad cargo was loaded onto buses - but told to leave behind anything that couldn’t fit on their laps. They were not even allowed to take their pets, which is one of the many reasons people have stayed behind in their homes. Cats and particularly dogs were roaming through the empty parking lot of the Superdome looking for their owners. National Guardsmen took some as pets and mascots on their “deuce and a half” cargo trucks.

There are still thousands of residents who remain in their homes. Some are doing ok, they have water and food, and are willing to do what it takes to stick it out. It seems as though they will eventually have to leave. The cops and army troops are now well deployed and some are handing out water and small amounts of food, mostly MRE’s. They don’t want anyone to become too comfortable, and it seems as though they will soon start to remove people.

I witnessed an emotional scene yesterday as a Louisiana state senator traveled through his district talking to firemen and cops. He spoke to some of his constituents as they alighted from boats that had just plucked them from their flooded homes in St. Bernard Parish. As the senator was introducing himself to a woman holding a small dog, the tension was immediate. “Why do we have to leave? This is all we have. I don’t want to go, this is my home. My sister is dead, and now you want to send me somewhere but you don’t know where, why are you doing this to me?” The desperation and fear is so personal, I feel unworthy even witnessing such deep heartfelt pain. But it is everywhere and it is the same scene over and over - and there is nothing that anyone can say or do that will make it any better. Everyone here is suffering the loss of a relative or friend or home or a job. And it goes on for miles and miles and miles.

What is striking is the incredible toll Katrina has taken emotionally. We often tend to focus on the dollar amount, the material costs and time. It’s as though all of the emotion and suffering is compounded by the shear enormity of the disaster. It’s hard to put into words just how much pain is concentrated in this region. So many people have lost their homes, their possessions, and loved ones.

I keep returning to the scene last Thursday at an overpass on I-10 in Metarie, just outside New Orleans. Every minute or so, a helicopter would land with flood survivors stunned and confused, many in tears having been plucked from their roof after days without food or water. Some were angry, not knowing where their loved ones were, or whether they were even alive. Many would just suffer in silence sitting under the hot sun. If you were lucky - you had an umbrella or a piece of cardboard for shade. These are poor people and for some of them this disaster is another chapter in a life of poverty that they have come to accept….quietly.

For others, suffering quietly was not their choice, and they were drawn to me as if carrying a tv camera meant that I had the answers. Where are we going? What are we going to do? Where is my baby? Why are the cops aiming their guns at us? So much emotion packed into such a small area, it was as if the world was literally coming to an end in one spot. You can’t imagine what it was like to see so much tragedy unfold in one small place. By 3pm there were close to 3,000 people, the lucky ones seeking shelter in the shade under an overpass. Elderly people, newborn babies, diabetics, amputees, heatstroke victims, and no more than 8 or 10 paramedics overwhelmed by hundreds victims, some of whom looked as though they were dying. It’s an eerie feeling driving or boating through the empty city knowing that these are the souls that once inhabited these empty homes and streets. And so many that didn’t make it out are left behind - some of them rotting on the sidewalk even today.

The lack of a plan is still the big story. Who is in charge? What is going to be done first? What are the goals? Evacuation? No evacuation? The New Orleans Police Department is trying to rebuild itself, and the National Guard seems to be the most organized. But there are way too many cops from as far away as Reno driving around with shotguns and M-16’s.

This is like a giant summer camp for law enforcement. There are hundreds of black and whites, armored cars, assault vehicles, and lawmen carrying every type of firearm ever made. It’s as though every police chief in the country put 20 officers in 5 cars and sent them to New Orleans - on overtime.

Of course, many are helping, but some have no orders or task to complete. So they drive around all day taking pictures, and then they go and sleep in their cars with the engine running and the air conditioning on. They are sightseers with guns taking “happy snaps” to show to all the folks at home. Complete with long tales of how they saved New Orleans.

Previously:

A cameraman's journal in NOLA

Image: New Orleans, shot September 11 by Joel Johnson.

Jacob Appelbaum blogs from New Orleans:

This is an Army truck that drives around the area alerting people to daily messages.

Yesterday the whistle sound (something like the legend of zelda according to Joel Johnson) played and alerted people to a message about a chemical air drop over the city. The Army stated that this would include low flying aircraft spraying chemicals to stop mosquito breeding. The times were about an hour before dusk and an hour before dawn. Do not be alarmed.

I can attest that the bugs here are terrible. I’ve been bitten on my left arm over 20 times. It’s a problem, no doubt about it. I wonder if the chemical will cause problems later on or if it’s totally safe?

When I asked Army officials what the spray was, they did not know. Does anyone know [...]?

In other news from Algiers, Cindy Sheehan and Veterans for Peace visited the neighborhood where Joel and Jake are providing geek aid; Food Not Bombs also showed up with kitchen gear. And...

Joel busted his ass all day to raise an antenna mast. 94.5FM is now live and rolling. All of New Orleans within line of sight should be able to tune in.

Previously:

Radio Free NOLA

Katrina: Strange fruit

Wardriving occupied New Orleans on 9/11

Bloggers Joel and Jake visit NOLA for geek aid

Blackwater gets carte blanche

Katrina account of Malik Rahim: "This is criminal.... genocide."

Snip from San Francisco Chronicle story:

A long caravan of white vans led by an Army humvee rolled Monday through New Orleans' Bywater district, a poor, mostly black neighborhood, northeast of the French Quarter. Recovery team members wearing white protective suits and black boots stopped at houses with spray painted markings on the doors designating there were dead bodies inside.

Outside one house on Kentucky Street, a member of the Army 82nd Airborne Division summoned a reporter and photographer standing nearby and told them that if they took pictures or wrote a story about the body recovery process, he would take away their press credentials and kick them out of the state.

"No photos. No stories," said the man, wearing camouflage fatigues and a red beret.

On Saturday, after being challenged in court by CNN, the Bush administration agreed not to prevent the news media from following the effort to recover the bodies of Hurricane Katrina victims. But on Monday, in the Bywater district, that assurance wasn't being followed.

Image: "A National Guardsman from Oklahoma holds a gate open as FEMA workers remove a body from a home in New Orleans. Dallas Morning News photo by Barbara Davidson via Associated Press."

Every time protesters gather outside of our Locust Street health center, our patients face verbal attacks from them. They see graphic signs meant to confuse and intimidate. They are sometimes blocked from entering the building and occasionally they are videotaped. They are offered anti-choice propaganda and free rides to the closest “crisis pregnancy center.”

Staff and volunteers are also seen as targets. We are all called murderers, are lectured to about committing sins, and are told we will pay the “ultimate price” for our actions. You can stand with others in the community against these acts of intimidation and harassment.

Here’s how it works: You decide on the amount you would like to pledge for each protester (minimum 10 cents). When protesters show up on our sidewalks, Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania will count and record their number each day from October 1 through November 30, 2005. We will place a sign outside the health center that tracks pledges and makes protesters fully aware that their actions are benefiting PPSP. At the end of the two-month campaign, we will send you an update on protest activities and a pledge reminder.

Example: If you pledge 30 cents per protester, and PPSP has 100 protesters in October and 160 protesters in November, your donation would be 78 dollars for the entire two-month campaign…

It's offered to your attention the "space pants" for macaque small monkey to wear it during the experimental space flight. This pants has been used for animals (monkeys) experiments in 1950-s - 1960-s in the USSR Institute of Biomedical Problems (IMBP, Moscow). The monkey's "space pants" are designed with many clasps to fit bigger or smaller monkey. Below are the front and the back views.

Blog Search is Google search technology focused on blogs. Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. Whether you're looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice.

Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger; our blog index is continually updated, so you'll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results; and you can search not just for blogs written in English, but in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages as well.

Frank Finlay and Keith Barron, Johnny and the Bomb comes from the makers of the award- winning CBBC dramas Feather Boy and Stig of the Dump...

When Johnny Maxwell and his friends come across mysterious old bag lady Mrs Tachyon in an alleyway, they soon realise there is more to her than a squeaky trolley and a bunch of black bags.

As Johnny gets to know her, he realises that she holds the key to different times – including the Blackbury Blitz of 1941.

Suddenly now isn't the safe place he once thought it was as he finds himself caught up more and more with then.

Just got back from 5 days at Perdido Beach, FL, which is just slightly to the east of Mobile, AL. Perdido and points east are pretty much undamaged and operating normally, though we saw significant straight-line wind damage inland (trees, damaged roofs, etc.). Some of our party drove in from Shrevesport, LA via Hattiesburg. Hattiesburg is a disaster.

Of interest -- There were a very large number of military helicopters flying almost directly overhead heading mostly west (toward Mobile) and some back east (probably 80-20 West-East). I mean something like one or two every few minutes during daylight hours, continuously. Most of them were what looked like US Navy cargo variant UH-60 Blackhawks. There were some number of what looked like SH-60s (rescue version of the Blackhawk helicopter...open sides with overhead winch), and significant numbers (maybe 20-25% of the total) of CH-53 "Sea Stallion" heavy transports.

There were also a small number of older heavy transport 'copters I think were UH-3 "Sea Kings" (most with orange-and-white Navy or CG rescue paint jobs, unlike the olive drab on all the others).

Looked like there is a *lot* of stuff being moved to the west by military helicopter, and not that many of those helicopters immediately moving back east.

For the conspiracy theorists, none of them appeared to be combat variants (and there weren't door guns visible through binoculars, and no 30mm chin cannons or anything like that).

Even more interesting, there were at least 2 Kearsarge-type hovercraft amphibious assault ships going west. Couldn't really tell what was on them (looked like containers...they can land an awful lot of tonnage), but they never came back east while we were there.

Mona Lisa reconstructed in Rubik Cubes by the artist known as Space Invader. Link
(Thanks, Sean Bonner)

Image: SpaceShipOne rested under wraps at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum last week. It will soon be moved from this spot at the end of the main corridor to the main entry space, where it will be displayed next to the Spirit of St. Louis and the X1. Link to full size, shot by Gregory La Vardera.

Prodigem has launched an API allowing any webapp out there to connect in and have us do the dirty work of creating, managing and seeding BitTorrents for you. ('We're excited to see what you come up with now that every web application out there can have a 'make me a torrent' button. Or maybe it will be called a 'save my blog from this slashdotting' button, or perhaps a 'our fanbase is community of people already looking for ways to help us' button, or...')

I am happy to share this music library of excerpts from some of my favorite old kiddie records. Copyright permitting, I can make custom CD recordings of these old records from my collection. Just contact me with your requests. The records shown here are just a very small sample of what I have. They are by no means all that I have available. I have over 12,000 vintage kiddie records, so there is very good chance that I have just the one(s) you are seeking. Enjoy the experience and thanks for looking!

Snow White - Show 36 - Sep 07, 2005
This is a historic audio broadcast from 1938 regarding Snow White. Listen to Mickey, Goofy, Donald Duck and even Walt Disney himself as they promote the release of Snow White. I have re-encoded this show to have enhanced audio.

Song Of The South - Show 35 - Sep 01, 2005
Listen to a radio broadcast that promotes the movie Song of the South even though the Disney studios will not re-release the movie. Disney has Splash Mountain at both theme parks which is based on this movie.

The field is rich. TiVo and a few other mainstream PVR vendors have dominated the market while simultaneously eschewing features that upset Hollywood executives like Larry Kenswil, the Universal exec who said "Fair use is the last refuge of the scoundrel" and Turner Broadcasting's Jamie Kellner who called commercial-skipping theft and promised only "a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom."

Competing, but less-known products have a stupendous array of features that TiVo users have only dreamt of. One such is the Interact TV. Their flagship TeraTelly is a Linux-based PVR that holds 1.2 terabytes' worth of ripped DVDs, CDs, downloadable Internet videos, digital photos and recorded programs. Anything on your TeraTelly can be moved to your computer, and you can program your TeraTelly from work via a web-browser.

TeraTelly is expensive (though the company has other, cheaper products). There's still lots of room for low-end PVRs that do all of this with slightly less storage, cutting costs to those comparable with commodity PVRs like TiVo's. Looking to fund a cool business-plan? Look for someone building and selling one of these for $400. Link (Thanks, Kieth!)

Update: Jesse Jack sez, "So for your users who would prefer to run their media center off of Windows, I would highly recommend the free-as-in-beer (I don't know what license they use, though) Media Portal from mediaportal.sourceforge.net. It is still beta but I've found it to be very stable in its current version (at least for US cable standards) and has great features beyond just PVR (jukebox, internet browsing, LCD support, AM/FM radio cards, shout- cast, etc.)"

Update 2: Eirikso has a great roundup of PC-based PVRs you can play with at home.

Update 3: Stephen sez: "One word, SageTV. I built a SageTV box two and a half years ago and it has been running flawlessly ever since. It beat the hell out of TiVo then and it still does. It records with no DRM, has full network connectivity, automatc listings, automatic series recording, mp3 and ripped DVD play, multiple tuners, trainable IR recieve/transmit. I watch recordings on my gameboy play-yan and PSP whenever I want, burn DVDs etc.

"Once the system is setup, it just works. A single licence is $69 and they have great package deals on tuners and IR dongles. A pre-assembled box is available from VMB."

Some genius got scratched by his cat. The cat's claw hooked into his earlobe and went halfway through. He pulled the cat's claw out, thought to himself, "wow, I want an ear piercing right now," and pushed an old earring stud the rest of the way through the open wound. That's right, he let his cat pierce him. How tragically hip.

"For the dime toss game, where you try to land a dime or other coin on a glass plate placed several feet back from where the mark stands, the winning ingredient is saliva." from SP33

"For knocking over milk jugs games, most players mistakently aim for the intersection of the 3 jugs, which means striking the bottom 2 at the top of the jug. problem is, the jugs have a couple pounds of lead in the bottom, making them behave like weebles. if you can hit the base of the bottom 2 jugs you have a much better chance of success." from SP33

...The Ghost Dance isn’t danced merely in Madrassahs, or fundamentalist churches, but throughout the Global Village, from American churches to Shanghai malls to halls of power in Washington D.C. and capitals around the world. It was Armageddon-obsessed Christians who helped elect George W. Bush. Prominent Christian pundits as well as some in the Pentagon have cast the Iraqi War as a holy war of biblical prophesy. The “strict constructionism” of American constitutional conservatives is a political Ghost Dance. Elsewhere, political uncertainty leads to other nostalgic looks back. Communism seemed discredited in the ’90s, but after a decade of corruption and widening divergence between rich and poor in the former Soviet Republics, a small but vocal minority advocates returning to the old order.

It is not just the past-lovers who embrace the Ghost Dance, for the Ghost Dance often exhibits itself as an utter rejection of the old in favor of leaping into appealing but unknown new worlds. Techno--theoretic “extropians’’—believers in an unbounded technological future—argue that technology is not moving fast enough. While some ghost dancers desperately want to put on the brakes, these technological believers are convinced that redemption can be achieved only by stepping on the gas and fleeing into the future.

Stan: What about the hand movement?

Tom: Actually we saw the silhouette of the body, and as we were watching this thing the arm comes up as if to touch its face. And then we see the hand go back down. And I mean this was slow motion, it moved up as slow as it went down slow.

I had [info]buttercup666 stand in my neighbor's cubicle and take a picture of me hard at work. Then I straightened the photo, undistorted it, and cropped it to the area in the doorway. I took it to Kinko's where they printed it onto vinyl, and grommeted the top with a kit that [info]matrushkaka bought me. The result: The Work Blind. Think of it as the modern version of Jughead drawing eyes on his eyelids so that everyone thinks he's awake and paying attention all day, or Wile E. Coyote painting a tunnel entrance on the side of a cliff.

* A Postcard from Jurassic Park

* Mapping Cellular Signals

* Geochemistry Underfoot

* J. Robert Oppenheimer, Doctor Atomic

The agent told the researcher: "A lot of the research is still carried out in the traditional manner using skin from the executed prisoner and aborted foetus." This material, he said, was being bought from "bio tech" companies based in the northern province of Heilongjiang, and was being developed elsewhere in China.

He suggested that the use of skin and other tissues harvested from executed prisoners was not uncommon. "In China it is considered very normal and I was very shocked that western countries can make such a big fuss about this," he said. Speaking from his office in northern China, he added: "The government has put some pressure on all the medical facilities to keep this type of work in low profile."

The agent said his company exported to the west via Hong Kong."We are still in the early days of selling these products, and clients from abroad are quite surprised that China can manufacture the same human collagen for less than 5% of what it costs in the west." Skin from prisoners used to be even less expensive, he said. "Nowadays there is a certain fee that has to be paid to the court."

It used to be that it was hard to explain the TiVo. I'd tell people, "It's like a VCR, but it's smart enough to program itself."

Now I've got a new description: "It's like a VCR, but it it's evil enough to screw you over if some rightsholder demands it."

Hey, TiVo: since 1984's Betamax decision, Americans have had the right to record TV shows even if the rightsholder doesn't like the idea. That's straight from the Supreme Court's mouth. I don't know what kind of special privilege the enteraintment industry has offered you in exchange for this spectacular display of wanton shark-jumping, but it wasn't enough. I sold my TiVo when I left California. You can be goddamned sure I won't be buying another one. Ever.

Note to potential TiVo competitors: MythTV is like TiVo except it includes all the features that the entertainment industry has intimidated TiVo into leaving out. And it's free. Go make a product out of it, put it in stores, and you will sell a squillion of them. Now that TiVo's blown its brains out, the field is wide open. Link (via Waxy)

During the years of internment I saw a great many adults weakened by hunger and malaria, gradually losing hope that the war would ever end. Parents in the camp were unable to feed their children, protect them or even keep them warm. Lunghua was in effect an enormous slum, and as in any slum the teenage boys ran wild. Though I was not aware of it, all this probably led to the estrangement between my parents and myself that lasted all my life.

At the same time, I would never have become a hyperactive adolescent, impatient with English life, who in middle age began to wonder if his whole life had been a strange and avoidable accident, prompted by a misguided British prime minister and a Japanese emperor who was unable to restrain his generals but believed that he was a god.

The Sun brilliantly sums up all the dilemmas that surround war and peace.

Nevada officials apparantly had no qualms about issuing this fellow a RAPER license plate, though they should have arrested him immediately for wearing those shorts.

I sent an email to the distributor asking them why the film was not subtitled. Their reply was:

"Thanks so much for your interest. I'm sorry, but it will not. We made the decision not to subtitle the prints for two reasons: the visual aspect of the film is as important as the aural, and the director felt (and we agreed) that the subtitles would be hurtful; and because much of the movie deals with sounds that subtitles cannot deal with. Since the film will be available in closed caption format when it is released on DVD, we settled for that as the way to go, though we know we are disappointing some people, such as yourself, for which we truly are sorry.

Excerpt from a personal diary written by a friend who's a news cameraman working in New Orleans. Name and affiliation withheld by request. This was written on Sunday, September 4th, six days after the storm hit.

New Orleans - The Real Story

It’s September 4th in New Orleans, and unfortunately - no one is getting it right, not the Feds, the State, the Local folks or the media. I’m sure that many people are trying, but for what ever reason- it is a rotting, deteriorating mess.

I’m only writing this because of what I watched on tv last night. It was the first chance I’ve had to see some of the coverage and what I watched was pathetic. I sensed it yesterday when, amongst the chaos of the unfolding disaster, you realized some of the differences between what is happening here compared to major calamities we’ve endured recently.

There are almost no news crews in the field trying to cover the story. Hundreds, if not thousands of media people are in the region - but I have driven back and forth through some of the worst neighborhoods in the city and you don’t see them. You don’t see the National Guard…..you don’t see ANYONE, except for the poor unfortunate souls wandering the streets looking for food or water. Many of them are on their last legs; they are literally not long for this world. It is surreal; it’s like a zombie scene from Dawn of the Dead. It’s disgraceful that in our times, we are seeing the complete disintegration of our ability to care for our own.

This is a racist issue, there’s no other way to look at it. These are the poorest of the poor. The people left behind in New Orleans are there for one reason only; they had no means to remove themselves from the city. Everyone who could get out, got out.

What’s missing from the rescue is apparent to anyone. A simple plan. It’s like no one ever gave it a real thought. Simple things like storage of emergency rations, clothing, tents, etc. in strategic locations….communications that allow different entities to talk to one another, emergency plans and routing for moving large numbers of people (easily done with the hundreds of public and school transit buses available locally), and the list goes on. Everyone on the street that I have met is so grateful for anything that you can give them. You have to be careful or you could start a riot just giving away a bottle of water.

Driving or walking through the flood area, you see people in the shadows on every block. As you walk around - they come out and they are so dehydrated, carrying babies, or leading you to their father or their mother or a friend who needs help. They all say that they want to get out; they just don’t have a way. And they uniformly complain about the police not stopping to help. Over and over you hear the same thing....”They just drawin’ down on people”, meaning they are pulling their guns.

I can only judge from what I saw, but in walking through the worst areas, every looter I saw was taking food and water. They could be shot for entering supermarkets, which by the way are mostly fully stocked with food, water, juices and soda. It’s disgraceful, it’s been almost a week and yet there seems as though no one in Washington, or Baton Rouge who gets the enormity of what is unfolding.

There are dead bodies on the street. Yesterday, I watched as a man tried to flag down a cop. There was a middle aged woman who had been dead for days, and yet no authority seems concerned. We can see that there was no plan for the living, but you would think that there would be some respect for the dead. When he was finally able to get a cop to stop - not an easy thing to do since they drive through at such high speed…. the cop said that they didn’t care about removing bodies. Someone’s mother, or child, she was still there late last night as I drove out.

I have driven from one end of New Orleans to the other - a drive of over 7 miles, and repeatedly not seen one cop, guardsman, trooper…. And where is the Red Cross? Not ONE. Everyone on the street says, “Where’s the Red Cross? I gave them so much money after 9/11 and the tsunami - where’s the Red Cross”. The cops I’ve asked say they are not here because they are afraid. The Red Cross says that the authorities are not letting them in the city. I find that hard to believe. The police can’t even secure a few blocks, let alone keep the Red Cross out. Helping victims in New Orleans is exactly why the Red Cross was created.

People are dying, I’ve seen it personally, and the main organization we look to is no where to be seen. Just like the media who sit on a safe block, or hang around the Superdome or the convention center because it is safe, maybe they are shunning the poor because they are scared. If they are being truthful, then they should take a stand, and deploy their personnel. Otherwise, they are complicit in an ill conceived plot to starve survivors out.

What is particularly sad to me is that I’m no hero. I’m basically a coward, but I don’t find anyone I’ve met on the street to be threatening. They are suffering and desperate and no one has uttered a word other then “help me” or “thank you”.

I watched one of these news robots on the air last night standing at Camp and Canal Street - where it is safe - doing a national live shot saying that “everything is in place now” and “food is being distributed”, and “the National Guard is deployed in force….on the street” - it was pure fiction. This guy hasn’t left the safety of his air conditioned trailer complete with Subway sandwiches (from Baton Rouge) and Gatorade. It’s pathetic.

One can only hope that our Federal officials will get a handle on the Herculean task ahead and that the citizenry will hold them responsible for the unnecessary loss of life.

As for the media… do a little fact checking, read more than one paper. Stay away from CNN, MSNBC and Fox. NPR and Nightline do a good job of looking beyond the headlines. By the way, The Salvation Army is here and they have been able to help in some places. This is a racist/socioeconomic situation.

We all know that if it were somewhere else, like an affluent resort town or a Bush county in Florida, things would be different. Yes, there was looting and gunfire, and there are criminals out there, but they were a small minority of the population. There were tens of thousands of poor, black folk who stayed out of it, and they are still waiting today for any kind of help.

Jacob Appelbaum blogs from Algiers, Louisiana:

Today one of the better adhoc hacks I’ve seen came into town.

Behold the glory of a lunch pail made into a low power FM station.

I’ve been told that this radio station is planned for 94.5 FM.

[This man] interrupted [Naomi Klein's interview with Malik Rahim] to speak at length about how Malik basically saved his life and the life of the community with no outside help.

He talked about the hell of the Superdome and how it was suicide to go inside.

He actually took over the interview with his emotional response but everyone was listening to him. Cameras were rolling.

This afternoon, right before a visit from Naomi Klein & crew, we lost our Verizon uplink. That sucked a lot—not only did we lose internet for ourselves and our immediate neighbors, we had another EVDO card coming in from another worker today that would be useless. Jake and I scrambled to find an alternate uplink before the curfew, but even though we had power back we couldn't dial up. I called a few people to see if they'd help me blog a few short things, but we resigned ourselves to going through the nearby affluent neighborhood to see if anyone would let us piggyback off their DSL or cable modems.

Fortunately, we regained connectivity just a couple of hours ago, so we're back in business. Tomorrow we can wire the medical center and begin helping the low-power FM station get online. I scavanged some materials from the street that I should be able to rig into an antenna tower for all our transmissions. I'm looking forward to building that tomorrow.

It's finally starting to come together and there's tons more work to be done. I'm sorry this isn't very interesting writing, but I'm just too brain dead to do more than journal our progress right now.

We're starting to get a little snippy with each other, but a lot of that was when the internet was down. Never get two geeks into a place with no internet.

Katrina: Strange fruit

Wardriving occupied New Orleans on 9/11

Bloggers Joel and Jake visit NOLA for geek aid

Blackwater gets carte blanche

Katrina account of Malik Rahim: "This is criminal.... genocide."

Up to six music folders can be displayed as CDs one to six on the radio or navigation system screen. Any information that has been stored for the music files – for example, the number of the song and the timer – will be displayed. The scan, search and shuffle functions can be selected using the radio buttons as you would for CDs.

When you switch the radio off, the track being played will be stopped and will then continue when you turn it back on. The supported formats include MP3, of course.

Tim McKinney, a geographer and a Boing Boing reader, offers an explanation of what happens in soil and structures during flooding and heavy precipitation events -- and one possible explanation for rumors among evacuees that the levees "were bombed."

I've tried to explain a little more, in completely nontechnical terms, some of the forces at work. What may also is how once a failure threshold is reached, the result may be a slump or a more drastic rapid flow or blowout.

I mention this in light of unsubstantiated comments posted which referred to unnamed persons hearing sounds like explosions around the time of the failure. If a levee fails abrubtly and the canal containment wall above it tears loose, it could generate a significant noise, perhaps like a rumble or an explosion even.

Update: Tonx sez, "Google also does this. Simply SMS GOOGL with an ISBN number and it returns prices from Alibris, Powells, Amazon, etc."

Update 2: Nick sez, "we've been doing this on Txtbux.co.uk in the UK for nearly 3 years!"

Joel Garreau in WaPo: "A Sad Truth -- Cities Aren't Forever... The city of New Orleans is not going to be rebuilt." Link

"Interdictor" on the presence of armed security contractors: "I asked them about civilians carrying weapons and he said there's no point in carrying here (which is what we had already decided several days ago), but that if we went to anywhere outside the CBD, we'd be silly not to be packing." Link

FEMA to set up camp cities to house 200K for 3 years: Link

Report from Democracy Now's Amy Goodman on armed security contractors in New Orleans: Link, and "is the government trying to stem the tide of images?" Link

Firms with Bush ties snag engineering, cleanup, rebuild deals: Link

First responders to abandon "ten codes" for plain English: "When the changes go into effect later this year, instead of saying fire engine is responding 10-39, fire fighters will say we're responding with the siren and red lights.'"Link

Wireless broadband lines set up for emergency reconnect: "Networks relying on such technologies as Wi-Fi and WiMax can be established more quickly and more cheaply than crews can right telephone poles and cellular towers or bail water out of flooded switching stations." Link

Map of zip codes where mail delivery service has been disrupted. Link

Mos Def: "Its dollar day for New Orleans, its full of water everywhere and people dead in the streets...a million poor since 2004, and they got illions and killions to waste on the war and to make you question what the taxes is for or the cost to reinforce the broke levee wall... Mr. President's a natural ass, he out treating niggers worse than they treat the trash." Link

(Thanks, Mitchell Nussbaum, Ned Sublette, Steven Ng, Frank Keeney, Mike Outmesguine, John Brockman)

According to Bank of Japan, the number of coins in Japan decreased first time in the history (the 0.05% decrease was observed at the end of July 2005.) Nikkei Shimbun discusses that this would be because of the increased use of digital cash and credit cards (i.e., coinless payment) at supermarkets and convenience stores.

Jacob shot this photo of a body they encountered in a schoolyard in a mostly black, low income neighborhood of Algiers. Late yesterday, Jacob blogged:

This man is three blocks from the house where I’m staying. Algiers is a poor area and it’s not getting the help that it needs. Do you see this body? This body has been sitting here for over a week.

(...) This area isn’t worth while to the authorities to spend time cleaning up. When a policeman saw me taking these photos he started talking with Joel. When I came back to the area where the policeman was Joel was talking about taking photos of the body in hopes that someone would be motivated to come remove it. People have been calling and telling the police for over a week!

The police officer was nice. He didn’t bother us about the photos. Then something changed, I didn’t think he was so nice after all. I realized why he didn’t care about the photos. It took me a moment but then he laughed about someone coming to pick it up when we asked. That’s why he didn’t care about the photos, these aren’t his people. These are the people from Algiers and the authorities don’t care.

How can anyone say they have respect for this community when there’s a body laying in plain view?

On September 11th we remember Americans and what America stands for.

[W]hen I woke up this morning I was motivated to bury it myself. The first thing I did when I woke up was ask Malik what he thought of the idea. He said something along the lines of: “The police said they would arrest me, I would have buried it already otherwise.”

I’d like to think it’s someone that read the blog making calls but it’s more likely it happened because they’ve finally finished with the areas they care about. Who knows? I know everyone is happy that the body was finally removed.

Wardriving occupied New Orleans on 9/11

Bloggers Joel and Jake visit NOLA for geek aid

Blackwater gets carte blanche

Katrina account of Malik Rahim: "This is criminal.... genocide."

The rain (over 10-inches worth; I actually made two trips outside to empty the rain gauge so that I would have an accurate estimate) is blown with such force that it becomes kinda frothy and sticky, like an oil. Oddly enough, it is also white in color almost like snow—think wet, wild, warm blizzard. The only thing that really bothered us was the loss of our beautiful backyard forest. Fifty-to-sixty-foot tall trees fell over like beer bottles after a fun Friday night. The ground would actually shake as each one hit. In case you're keeping score at home, pine trees will snap in half, while the leafy deciduous trees fall over. Very impressive. All told, we lost $100,000 to $200,000 worth of trees, but that's ALL. We were OK, our house was OK, and so we erroneously thought everything else would be OK, too.

I phoned a pal in the 'hood on my mobile to ask if she knew anything. She didn't, and said "I guess this means I'm paranoid, but the first thing I did when the lights went out was change from heels to sneakers and get ready to run."

People were trapped in elevators, cars bumping into each other, streets are chaotic. When the power goes out, all stoplights are supposed to convert to four-way stop signs -- but in Hollywood, nobody can count that high. Ohwaityestheycan, you just have to stick a little dollar sign in front of each number... or precede them with the words "Star Wars Episode."

Link

UPDATE: Whups -- LA Times reports that the blackout was "caused by an employee who inadvertently cut a power cable." Link

Wrong answers so far: clock, can opener, knife, shelf hinge, drawer roller-thing, compass, testicle separator, level, and fan.

(please, don't email me with your guess. If you want to guess go here.)
Link

Reader comment: Jeremy says: "In reference to the what's-this-picture story... you have the correct answer listed as a "wrong guess". It actually IS a testical separator." Link

Multiple Partners is an exhibition that explores the range of connections a female artist can find with one and one and one and one of her male artist contemporaries. Sociological or biological factors may influence women to express themselves differently from men, but other far-ranging factors, from our shared humanity to similar tastes in literature, music, and science, produce commonalities and linkages in our creative output. Without expectations for a conclusive sum total, this show explores the possibility that artists of both genders can look to the same influences and belong to the same history.

The team... has so far created a model skin made up of 192 separate cells. Behind each cell is an impact sensor and a processor equipped with algorithms that allow it to communicate only with its immediate neighbours. Just as ants secrete pheromones to help guide other ants to food, the CSIRO algorithms leave digital messages in cells around the system, indicating for instance the position of the boundary around a damaged region. The cell's processor can use this information to route data around the affected area.

Salon magazine has begun to serialize the book, and they will publish a section every Monday for ten weeks. By that time, I hope act two will be done and Salon will be interested in it, though of course there's no guarantee of either (but act one is self-contained and stands on its own). When the whole thing is done, Tor will publish it between covers and I'll be doing my normal Creative Commons release, but I relish the opportunity to do what Dickens did -- write a novel in serial form just a few weeks ahead of my readers.

Andrea Fleeks almost never had to bother with the blue blazer these days. Back at the height of the dot-boom, she'd put on her business journalist drag -- blazer, blue sailcloth shirt, khaki trousers, loafers -- just about every day, putting in her obligatory appearances at splashy press conferences for high-flying IPOs and mergers. These days, it was mostly work at home or one day a week at the San Jose Mercury's office, in comfortable light sweaters with loose necks and loose cotton pants that she could wear straight to yoga after shutting her PowerBook's lid.

Blue blazer today, and she wasn't the only one. There was Morrow from the NYT's Silicon Valley office, and Spetzer from the WSJ, and that despicable rat-toothed jumped-up gossip columnist from one of the U.K. tech-rags, and many others besides. Old home week, blue blazers fresh from the dry-cleaning bags that had guarded them since the last time the NASDAQ broke 4000.

The man of the hour was Landon Kettlewell -- the kind of outlandish prep-school name that always seemed a little made up to her -- the new CEO and front for the majority owners of Kodak/Duracell. The despicable rat-toothed Brit had already started calling them Kodacell. Buying the company was pure Kettlewell: shrewd, weird and ethical in a twisted way.

"Why the hell have you done this, Landon?" Kettlewell asked himself into his tie-mic. Ties and suits for the new Kodacell execs in the room, like surfers playing dress-up. "Why buy two dinosaurs and stick 'em together? Will they mate and give birth to a new generation of less-endangered dinosaurs?"

"You know what Google is?"

"Yes," I said. I was running low on patience.

"No, I mean, do you really know? More than just the site?"

Reluctantly, I shook my head.

"You ever meet anyone who worked for them?"

"Don't think so."

"You haven't. Nobody works for them anymore."

I shrugged, and took the man's empty pint. I didn't offer to refill it.

"They're self-contained. It's all automated, in there. It's underground."

I nudged the basket of pretzels in his direction. "Why don't you eat something?" I suggested. He shook his head with so much force that I thought he might knock himself off of the stool.

"Listen. Hear me out. You know how Google works," he said, but didn't want for a response. "They cache things, right? Like they send out these spiders and take pictures of everything on the web, so when you're searching, you're not even searching the internet."

I've heard that before, but it never made much of a difference to me. "Same thing, though," I said.

"You ever wonder why Google doesn't cache it's own searches?"

The Radiant City
The Industrial Revolution gave the world a new idea of the ideal society. "Try sniffing the abominable stench behind the piles of books," wrote Japanese Futurist Hirato Renkichi in 1921. "How many times superior is the fresh scent of gasoline!" This is a line that Beatty, fire chief of Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, would have loved. In the first three decades of the 20th century, an architectural aesthetic emerged that demanded absolute mastery over nature and necessity. Movements like Futurism and Constructivism worshipped machines, fetishized war ("war—the world's only hygiene," wrote Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti), rejected the burdens of history, and embraced totalitarian governments like Fascist Italy or Soviet Russia. Their modernist allegiance to technology concealed a cavernous, angry irrationalism.

Update: Not a full 4.1 billion dollar purchase -- but $2.6 billion in cash and stock with the remaining 1.5 billion from rewards for company performance. Link to BBC article, Link to NYT story. (Thanks, Tyler Wiethorn)

The story-line of this sketch is as follows: A character called “Hard Gay” (by comedian “Razor Ramon”) thinks that the “Hoo!” in Yahoo! is stolen from his often used exclamation and goes to visit Yahoo! headquarters to try to get a deal. He wants to be in their ads, even goes to prove that he's popular by auctioning off his hat to Yahoo! online auction site. Sure enough, the hat's bidding jumps to about $250 pretty quickly. It's obvious Yahoo! cannot use this character for promotion, so “Hard Gay” goes off to prove what he can do. There's no shocking material in this unless you're offended by hip-thrusts. Whether or not it's funny is up to you. Note that Yahoo! offices sport a massage room.

Image: a New Orleans resident who remains in the city, and says he will not leave. Behind him, code markings left by rescue and/or disaster mortician teams. Shot in NOLA today by Jacob A., Link to his photostream (contains graphic images of dead).

Jacob Appelbaum and Joel Johnson are in the New Orleans area, helping with communications reconnect efforts and documenting what they witness. They have connectivity, a solar-powered backpack, iChat capabilities, and the ability to do live streaming video.

This morning, I woke up to my cellphone ringing with Jacob on the other end. He and Joel were on foot inside NOLA, seeing corpses in the streets. Jacob was trying to decrypt the markings spray-painted on a trash dumpster by DMORT (disaster mortician teams).

"What does '9705 CF' mean? Does CF mean corpses found?" asked Jacob. From what I could figure out, still half-asleep, the markings meant that a team visited this spot on Sep. 7 and observed that there were dead at this location. Four days later, the body (or bodies) had not been removed from the road.

"I gotta hang up," he said, "the death smell is too much, we have to get away from this spot now. This place is a perfect example of duality in response. Some parts of the city are heavily guarded and under repair, other parts of the city are flooded and full of locked, unsearched houses."

On the phone with another friend who's there with a television news network -- my friend says, "This place looks a lot like Iraq. Only in Iraq, when there's a dead body, it's never on the street for more than an hour -- someone, Iraqi or US forces, rertrieves it right away. Here, they're just sittiing out there for days, weeks, rotting."

Jacob blogs:

We’re heading into the [New Orleans] city center for various reasons. I’m bringing a gps unit, a laptop with a 200mw 802.11b card and a laptop on the car power inverter. We’re going to log and then make maps tonight. If I provide kismet logs with GPS information is anyone interested in making a google maps hack? It’s certainly possible to make this a once a day operation.

As I’m sitting here, the only light I can see is the light of my laptop illuminating my fingers. My cell phone would light up if people could call in. Only rarely does that work, no one has left voicemail but when they do get through they tell me they’ve rung for hours, upwards of two dozen times.

We didn’t have to pass through a single check point to enter the city, we simply went around them. There was much debate about the amount of danger we would be in by coming here and so far I feel pretty safe. We didn’t bring a gun, partly because we didn’t want to believe it would be so bad that we would need one and because it was probably impossible to get one at such short notice. I don’t think that was a mistake, we don’t need firearms. I do find it pretty surprising that the American government has recently hired Blackwater security forces to patrol the streets here. At the same time they’re removing firearms from citizens who rightfully feel they need them. It’s a strange future we’re living in and have no doubt about it, we’re living in the future. It’s too bad that we’re living in that other future, the dystopian one. The one with terrorists, murderers, corruption at the highest government levels, global wars and a world with an environment being destroyed by serious pollution. A world where people are now literately drowning in it.

(...) We recently got video streaming working from one of our laptops. Some of the best hackers on the planet decided that our neo-gonzo journalism was worth some bandwidth, I’m pretty flattered and I hope I don’t let them down. I hope they’re ready to watch Joel and I cook food, build computer networks, scout antenna locations and otherwise talk about the current state of New Orleans.

There’s that light again, the patrol seems to be pretty frequent. The helicopters are flying overhead again. I wonder if they have thermal imaging gear? Certainly they’re working overtime to patrol the skies but I wonder what they’re collecting data on and what they plan to do with it.

The people on the ground here, Malik being the main man, are really righteous people. They’re getting ready to help the citizens of this parish to live, to eat, to be clean, to sleep safely, to communicate with the world.

(...) Hopefully all the plans we have will actually work out, hopefully we will be able to get more fuel into the generators, hopefully we’ll get more generators on the ground. Hopefully we’ll be able to get better uplinks without having to resort to using the cell network but it seems doubtful. I haven’t heard back from the people at DirectNIC. I suppose they’re busy with something else, hopefully someone else can supply these people with uplinks to the real world.

It’s late and I have to be up in the morning because the military is going to march down the road here in some sort of security exercise. I want to photograph it because I can’t believe it’s happening in an American city.

Image: Corpse at a school in the Algiers region (15th Ward). "It has been there for probably 10 days," says Joel Johnson, who shot this photo, "but despite the neighborhood informing the police, it has not been removed... we asked two federal officers about it and they were unconcerned." Link to his photostream (contains graphic images of dead.)

Joel blogs about the damage to New Orleans, and gear requests:

Jacob was kind enough to write up an updated list of equipment. If you can ship this stuff to Baton Rouge, we can probably use it. No worries if you can't, but the more we have, the more we can deploy. We expect to deploy everything we brought with us from Houston, save perhaps the big Wi-Fi antenna (but you never know). Also, Verizon, if you'd like to loan me an activated Samsung i730, I can give it back to you when I'm done.

According to Huss, he was given over $25,000 worth of medical supplies by the Red Cross in Covington. He claims he was given all the necessary credentials and Red Cross workers helped him load up his 1989 Dodge Caravan. But not less than 10 minutes later, he found himself staring the barrel of a gun at a Homeland Security checkpoint on the north side of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. According to Huss, a state police officer told him the Red Cross had requested he be detained.

Shortly after a Red Cross official showed up and said he wasn’t authorized to have the supplies (The Red Cross is officially mandated by FEMA to act as their on-the-ground medical and relief agency). Huss says his van was ransacked and the supplies were confiscated. He says he was interrogated for hours by state police officers, who asked him about his entire background, and even accused him of being a child molester because he had baby supplies in the van. Huss said he had just went through an FBI background check.

Huss said he wasn’t released until 12:40 AM Sunday morning, after 11 hours of detention. He says he was only given one bottle of water and was held for most of the time in the back of a police cruiser. He was given his van back, but the supplies were confiscated. “They are keeping supplies from people who are in need,” Huss told me. Huss also accused the Red Cross of hoarding much-needed supplies. Huss is now on his way back to Texas, demoralized and angry. “Tell the people of Algiers I’m sorry,” he said.

Joel blogs about confrontations with armed private security contractors from Blackwater:

We got yelled at some by police and official-types who wanted us out of areas where they were operating. Herding media isn't really their job, but they weren't rude about it (just brusque). The Blackwater employees, on the other hand, were phenomenally unpleasant. Jake has a lot more to add soon, I'm sure, but there's a serious question as to the authority of these mercenaries.

Previously:

Bloggers Joel and Jake visit NOLA for geek aid

Blackwater gets carte blanche.