DJ Riko, the mashup genius behind Whistler's Delight, has released a 70-minute MP3 mix-CD of his favorite Xmas oddities, including rarities, non-English songs, and lots of upbeat holiday tuneage:

I'm happy to announce that Merry Mixmas 2005 is now available for download. It's my fourth annual mix of Christmas music, and has been given the official thumbs-up by Santa himself. The mix includes songs that are very old and very new, sung in English, Spanish, Japanese and other languages, and played on banjos, guitars, strings, horns and other instruments...

1. Intro
2. Singers Unlimited - Caroling Caroling
3. DJ Riko featuring Marcie - My Chimney
4. Luscious Jackson - Let it Show
5. The Free Design - Now Sound of Christmas
6. Lou Monte - Dominick the Donkey
7. Louis Armstrong - Cool Yule
8. Mr Hanky - Santa Claus is on His Way
9. The Ventures - Silver Bells
10. George W. Bush - Twas the Night Before Christmas (Jima edit)
11. Kids of Widney High - Christmas is the Time
12. Ringo Starr - Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
13. Madness - Insanity Over Christmas
14. Augie Rios - Donde Esta Santa Claus
15. Disney - Santa's Rap
16. Pizzicato Five - Snowflakes
17. Chet Baker - Winter Wonderland
18. Neil Diamond - Santa Claus is Coming to Town
19. Big Ben Banjo Band - Christmas Medley 2
20. Alvin and the Chipmunks - Chimpunk Song (Slow Version)
21. Bright Eyes - Little Drummer Boy
22. Tenchi Muyo vs. The Singing Dogs - Jingle Bells
23. Wayne Newton - Jingle Bell Hustle
24. Buchanan & Goodman - Santa and the Satellite
25. Esquivel! - Frosty the Snowman
26. Huey Piano Smith and the Clowns - All I Want for
Christmas
27. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - Santa Claus is Coming to Town
28. Santa Claus - A Visit From Santa Claus
29. Little Bobby Rey - Corrido de Auld Lang Syne
30. Santa Outro

Torrent Link Updated Torrent Link, MP3 Link (Thanks, DJ Riko!)

Giant, 450lb jellyfish are plaguing the fisheries of China, South Korea and Japan, killing fish, breaking nets, and poisoning the catch.

They are 6ft wide and weigh 450lb (200kg), with countless poisonous tentacles, they have drifted across the void to terrorise the people of Japan. Vast armadas of the slimy horrors have cut off the country’s food supply. As soon as one is killed more appear to take its place...

In the meantime locals are making the best of it — rather than just complaining about jellyfish they are eating them.

Jellyfish are an unusual ingredient of Japanese cuisine but are much more prized in China. Coastal communities are doing their best to promote jellyfish as a novelty food, sold dried and salted.

Link (via Collision Detection)

Steve collected all the weird crap you can have your sequenced genome turned into, including:

* Portraits of your DNA
* A tie
* A tuning fork
* Music
* Jewellery
* Mirrors
* Champagne Flutes Link (Thanks, Steve!)

My eight-year-old daughter and every one of her girlfriends has a Nintendo DS and the Nintendogs cartridge. She has been playing it daily for a couple of months and she and her friends talk about their virtual puppies all the time.

Joshua Berman at the LA Weekly has nice essay on Nintendogs, about how "virutal pets represent a new development in the man-machine interface."

Therein lies Nintendogs inexorable pull: It’s the first game powered by empathy. These things are much more convincing than the Tomogatchis, those rudimentary keychain creatures from the first virtual pet craze a decade ago. Nintendogs go a long way toward satisfying a sort of canine Turing test: If they look and act enough like dogs, then at a simple cognitive level, they’re a pretty good substitute. It’s rewarding when your digital dogs bring you a present, upsetting when they try to eat trash on walks, and they’re so cute that when you find a big green floppy hat you want to make them wear it until you see in their little faces that they know the big green floppy hat is really a form of humiliation and you half-reluctantly take it off.

Link

I'll be host Kristie LuStout's guest on CNN International at 345PM PT/645PM ET today. We'll take a look at the latest crop of handheld devices for watching movie trailers, TV episodes, video podcasts, and the like. Link

Shown here, Sunhere Sapne (1–10), hand–painted b/w photographs, 1998, 9" x 7". Link, more about the artist in this post on Bruce Sterling's blog. Oh, look, here's an article about her from 2002 on Hindu.com.

From aaron Dunlap, the same fine fellow who sells the 9V USB charger-in-an-Altoids-tin kit, here the mini LED flashlight kit. Just $8.50.

It's lit by a single LED that's unbelievably bright. My initial design called for 3 LEDs (the kind you can get from Radio Shack) in a series (at a painful $3 per LED), but from my parts supplier I found this industrial-grade LED that can get the same amount of lumines from just the one. LEDs are great for flashlights because they don't burn out for something like 1000 years, and they require a very small voltage current so you won't have to replace the batteries for a loooong time.

For people daunted by all the fidgety work involved in the USB kits, this LED flashlight project should be just the ticket. I just put one of these together in 5 minutes.

Link

Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman considers whether the mysterious cat-size creature caught on camera in Borneo may actually be a rediscovery of a Hose's Palm Civet, previously thought to be extinct. (Link to World Wildlife Fund's story from yesterday about the strange animal caught on film.)
Link to Cryptomundo

Viggo Mortensen and actor / photographer David Newsom have collaborated to produce Skip, a beautiful book about Newsom's developmentally disabled older brother. I met with Newsom earlier this week in Los Angeles to speak with him about the project, and to take a look at a copy fresh off the presses. Mortensen's Perceval Press printed the book in Spain, and it looks terrific. Skip is a moving portrait in Newsom's prose and images, and I loved it.

Link. (Thanks, Lance Mazmanian)

Last year, photographer and New Orleans native Clayton James Cubitt used much of his life savings to buy a trailer home for his single, working-poor mom and teen brother to live in. This year, hurricane Katrina destroyed it. Clayton has been traveling from NYC to New Orleans since then to help mom and brother get back on their feet and navigate aid application nightmares. Now comes more bad news: FEMA refuses to give his mom any disaster relief money because he lives in New York, and the trailer was purchased in his name. Link to first-person account. (thanks, matt leclair)

"Internet journalism received a leap in recognition Wednesday as the Pulitzer Prize Board widened its submission guidelines to include online material for all of its journalism categories." Link (Thanks, Bob)

The Consumerist is a new blog that exposes retail scammers, poorly engineered products, and lousy customer service. Gawker chief Nick Denton says it's "a shopping site, with the Gawker signature, of bitterness and frustration. Think Consumer Reports, if written by someone who's been on hold for an hour with customer service in Bangalore." I love it. Link

Jamma Forever develops and releases free, open source video games intended for play on modified arcade cabinets running MAME. They've got two games online now, Stompin' Game, based on Dinosaur Comics and Whose Round is it Anyway?, a bar-quiz game. They're looking for new contributions, too.

Most people who grew up with games like Street Fighter 2 and Raiden Fighters will have fond memories of the Old-School arcades; row after row of upright JAMMA cabinets, each one containing a wonderful surprise for the pittance of twenty British pence - as opposed to the ten enormous machines you're lucky to find in an arcade these days, stinging you for a quid each game. Nowadays, those old JAMMA cabs are good for nowt but MAME and nostalgia. But the JAMMA system is flexible and adaptable enough to allow you to wire up just about anything, including a PC running whatever software you like. There are tons of websites out there dedicated to the pursuit of building MAME-converted arcade machines - so what's this site for?

This site exists to make new games for old JAMMA cabinets. We live in a time when a single person can make a 90's style shoot-em-up in a couple of months. Old PC hardware is being thrown away, along with knackered JAMMA cabinets. Seems a shame to waste such flexible technology.

Link (Thanks, Caveman Joe!)

This morning, I blogged about a bug that EFF discovered in the Mediamax spyware that Sony includes on 50 of the CDs it releases in Canada and the US. EFF got Sony to release a bug-fix for it, but it turns out that the uninstaller leaves your computer more insecure than the bug!

Sony seems incapable of writing programs to uninstall the malicious software it secretly installs on your computer when you play its CDs (Mediamax installs on your PC even if you decline the agreement and eject the CD). Sony also seems incapable of producing a DRM system that doesn't contain rootkits, spyware, and/or security vulnerabilities. The combination is deadly.

# SonyBMG has released a patch that purports to fix the problem. However, our tests show that the patch is insecure. It turns out that there is a way an adversary can booby-trap the MediaMax files so that hostile software is run automatically when you install and run the MediaMax patch.

# The previously released MediaMax uninstaller is also insecure in the same way, allowing an adversary to booby-trap files so that hostile software is run automatically when you try to use the uninstaller.

Link

Previous installments of the Sony Rootkit Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV

(Cool Sony CD image courtesy of Collapsibletank)

I have an editorial about the effect of programmable logic on gizmo design on the front page of today's New York Times Christmas Circuits section:

PLASTIC created the age of whimsical forms. Suddenly a radio could look like a moo cow. A chair could look like an egg. Toy ray guns could bulge and swoop. The exuberant designers of the golden age of plastic explored all the wacky, nonfunctional, decorative shapes that household objects could take.

Now that same plasticity is coming to microcontrollers, the computer chips that act as brains for the chirping, dancing, listening and seeing devices that line our knickknack shelves and dashboards and fill our pockets. The proliferation of cheap and cheerful programmable chips promises a new age of "whimsical logic," chips that power devices whose functions are as delightfully impractical as their forms, the sort of thing you find in a stocking but keep on your desk forever.

Link