Guide to great Creative Commons books and music

By Cory Doctorow at 9:39 pm Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

Sam sez, "The Best Media in Life is Free is a wonderful blog, now entering its second month. It posts carefully chosen links to music, audio and ebooks licensed under the Creative Commons system. Its proprietor is apparently having a birthday today and in honour of the occasion would like people to spread the word about the blog and 'bring new people onto the CC love train.'" Link (Thanks, Sam!)

San Francisco: Interactive City Summit next week

By David Pescovitz at 4:00 pm Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

If you're in the Bay Area, BB pal Eric Paulos is organizing a free public conference August 7-8 to discuss the future of urban life. The event is part of the huge International Symposium of Electronic Arts taking place in San Jose next week. Speakers at the Interactive City Summit include the likes of Matt "Blackbelt" Jones, Trokia, Rebar, and Erik Davis. From the event info page:

I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul. –J. G. Ballard

As our megalopolis expands, fragments, and warps, we look towards governments, industry, world leaders, and pop stars to guide the way. The party rhetoric echoes a future vision filled with beautiful, delicious urban technologies that will sooth the souls of our communities, generate playful neo-geo-landscapes, and celebrate our omni-connected harmony? But what do we truly aspire, desire, and admire? Emerge from the labs, galleries, homes, offices, and suburbs. Break free and engage in the first open forum Interactive City Summit.

Link

Total Eclipse of the Heart as a mournful appliance-smashing dirge

By Cory Doctorow at 3:57 pm Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

In this stunning music video, a Norwegian band that looks a little like a ginger ZZ Top performs a slow, mournful version of the 80s megahit "Total Eclipse of the Heart." The percussionist plays a collection of derelict appliances, smashing them with unabashed vigor. Link (via Making Light)

Update: Scott sez, "The band is called Hurra Torpedo."

Update 2: Paul sez, "My friend worked on the film crew that followed them around during their North American tour. They will be producing a rockumentary."

Update 3: Nathan sez, "The band features Kristopher Schau, who also is also lead singer of The Cumshots. They made headlines two summers ago during the Quart Festival in Norway by featuring a live sex show by members of Fuck For Forest - a porn company that donates its profits to forestry charities."

Felten's blog classed as "hacking" site by firewall

By Cory Doctorow at 3:39 pm Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

Freedom to Tinker, the security blog maintained by the Princeton's esteemed engineering prof Ed Felten, has been blocked by a personal firewall from a company called Barracuda, which has classified the site as a "hacking" site.

Censorware and firewall companies are incapable of accurately judging and categorizing the Internet. Boing Boing's guide to defeating censorware can help you do something about it. Link

Update: Dave sez, 'The network at a previous job of mine had Barracuda, and at various times they blocked BoingBoing as "hacking," Wonkette as "pornography," and all sites associated in any way with computer games as "game playing" (while leaving open all sites having to do with sports, of course).'

Prank on WiFi leeches

By Mark Frauenfelder at 3:11 pm Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

(Note: I am in favor of keeping your WiFi network open so that neighbors and passers-by can use it. But I still think this is funny. -- Mark)

Ntwiga says: "Your neighbors are leaching off your wireless internet connection.

What to do? Well this guy took the high road.

He suggests that rather than shutting down access to the router, have some fun. First, separate the networks into trusted and untrusted segments. Then, send all traffic on the the untrusted segment to kittenwar.com

Or even better, set up a squid proxy that takes all images coming in to the untrusted segment and turns them upside down before serving them up. Or just make all the images blurry . . . to create "blurry-net".

Link

Schedule a fake call to get out of a boring meeting or other event

By Mark Frauenfelder at 2:47 pm Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

The Popularity Dialer is a service that lets you schedule an automated call to your phone at a specific time and date.

Have you ever been in a situation where you wished your cell phone would ring? Maybe you wanted to look extra important or popular on that hot date. Or maybe you just needed an excuse to escape from an unpleasant meeting.

With "The Popularity Dialer", you can plan ahead. Via a web interface, you can choose to have your phone called at a particular time (or several times). At the elected time, your phone will be dialed and you will hear a prerecorded message that's one half of a conversation. Thus, you will be prompted to have a fake conversation and will easily fool those around you.

Link

Moleskine stops a bullet, saves man's life (It was a joke)

By Mark Frauenfelder at 2:40 pm Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

(Update: see below) This blog entry is skimpy on details, so I can't vouch for its veracity. If true, it's a great story:

I was walking down the street in New York City when I heard a light "thwap" followed by a sense of pressure on my chest. I reached for the area instinctively and felt only the Moleskine. notebook in the inside pocket of my jacket. It wasn't until I looked inside the jacket at my shirt that I found the small mangled piece of lead along with the shredded paper from my notebook. A rogue bullet had gone through my jacket and into my Moleskine. Evidently, the two outer covers and the tightly packed pages of the notebook were enough to slow the bullet down. The ink from my journal entries may have played a small role as well. For whatever reason, the bullet had stopped right between the notebook and my shirt - leaving me without a scratch....

Link (Via Moleskinerie)

Reader comment: Mack Reed says: "Hate to be the bearer of a correction, but the Moleskine owner just outed himself as a hoaxer."

Scott Adams hopes a secret cabal is pulling the strings

By Mark Frauenfelder at 1:36 pm Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

Dilbert creator Scott Adams has a great entry on his blog about his fervent hope that a secret society of puppetmasters is really running things, instead of the miserable morons (of both stripes) in Washington.

My favorite conspiracy theory is the one that says the world is being run by a handful of ultra-rich capitalists, and that our elected governments are mere puppets. I sure hope it’s true. Otherwise my survival depends on hordes of clueless goobers electing competent leaders. That’s about as likely as a dog pissing the Mona Lisa into a snow bank.

...

I know some of you will say that it’s obvious that corporate money influences the government. But that’s not enough to make me feel comfortable. I want to know there’s an actual meeting of the puppetmasters every Thursday at 3 pm. I want to know that when one of them suggests a new policy that the group votes by pressing buttons on their chairs and if the idea is deemed bad, the offender drops through a hole in the floor and is eaten by a golden shark. You can’t tell me that democracy produces better policies than the golden shark method.

Link (Thanks, Coop!)

Three-clawed crab

By David Pescovitz at 11:39 am Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

Claudette is a three-clawed crab netted by fisher Jeff Brown off the Cornish coast. She is in quarantine at the Blue Reef aquarium in Newquay for a few days and then will be put on display. From the BBC News:

The aquarium believes Claudette's ability to re-generate lost limbs became confused and, rather than replacing a missing set of claws, she grew an extra pair instead.

Link

Seaweed capacitors

By David Pescovitz at 11:27 am Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

French scientists demonstrated that seaweed, when burned to a crisp, is a great material for making supercapacitors that could provide more power than traditional batteries. Today, the electrodes in supercapacitors are usually made from activated carbon. According to Francois Béguin of the CNRS Research Centre on Divided Matter and his colleagues, cooked seaweed carbon can be charged to much higher voltages making small supercapacitors to power, say, laptops, more of a practical possibility. From News@Nature:

"People working on carbons are always looking for improved properties," says Mildred Dresselhaus, a specialist in carbon materials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She points out that coconut shells are already used as a source of porous carbon for water filtration and other applications. "Low-tech routes are commonly used when they do the job," Dresselhaus says...

The French team cooked alginate (abundant in brown seaweeds) in an air-free enclosure, turning it into a black powder. They then combined this with a polymer binder to make a hard material, which they shaped into electrodes for supercapacitors.

The amount of electrical charge and energy that these devices can hold is comparable to that of capacitors made from commercial activated carbons. But the seaweed capacitors can be charged to voltages twice as high without breaking down, and the material is twice as dense. They hold up well over time, too: their charge-storage capacity declines by only 15% after 10,000 cycles of charging and discharging.

Link

Digital art that responds to emotional state

By David Pescovitz at 10:11 am Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

Computer scientists have created a digital artwork that changes based on the mood of the viewer as expressed in his or her face. A webcam tracks eight facial features and then changes the digital image in response. The researchers from the University of Bath and University of Boston University call the technique "empathic painting."

From a press release:

For example, when the viewer is angry the colours are dark and appear to have been applied to the canvas with more violent brush strokes.

If their expression changes to happy, the artwork adapts so that the colours are vibrant and more subtly applied...

“The programme analyses the image for eight facial expressions, such as the position and shape of the mouth, the openness of the eyes, and the angle of the brows, to work out the emotional state of the viewer,” said Dr John Collomosse from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath.

“This kind of empathic painting only needs a desk top computer and a webcam to work, so once you have the programme and have calibrated it for the individual viewer, you are ready to start creating personalised art based on your mood.

“The empathic painting is really an experiment into the feasibility of using high level control parameters, such as emotional state, to replace the many low-level tools that users currently have at their disposal to affect the output of artistic rendering.”

Link

Steampunk cartoon from SciFi channel: Amazing Screw-On Head

By Cory Doctorow at 7:52 am Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

SciFi.com is hosting the entire pilot of a proposed new animated steampunk toon called "The Amazing Screw-On Head," based on the comics of the same name. They're asking for feedback from the net about the show, and if it's positive enough, they've promised to commission and air the rest of the series. I'm watching it now and loving it:

In this hilarious send-up of Lovecraftian horror and steampunk adventure, President Abraham Lincoln's top spy is a bodyless head known only as Screw-On Head.

When arch-fiend Emperor Zombie steals an artifact that will enable him to threaten all life on Earth, the task of stopping him is assigned to Screw-on Head. Fortunately, Screw-On Head is not alone on this perilous quest. He is aided by his multitalented manservant, Mr. Groin, and by his talking canine cohort, Mr. Dog.

Can this unorthodox trio stop Emperor Zombie in time? Does Screw-On Head have a body awesome enough to stop the horrors that have been unleashed? Where can we get a talking dog?

All these questions (O.K., maybe not that last one) will be answered when you watch the thrilling tale of The Amazing Screw-On Head!

Link (Thanks, Ryan!)

Update: Apparently SciFi is blocking access to this by region, here's a YouTube mirror, thanks, Sergio!

Update 2: Here's an alternate YouTube link: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 (Thanks, Raincaster!)

Sf story: gender-bending, identity-shifting post-cyberpunk coolth

By Cory Doctorow at 7:45 am Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

Ruth Nestvold has a new short story on the site Futurismic, a fine little gender-gending, identity-shifting piece called "Exit Without Saving."

Spending credit illegally was difficult, but there were ways, if you were clever. There were always ways. Using a morph unit illegally was even more difficult, but to Mallory it was worth the risk.

Friends like Lorraine made it possible. Lorraine was a lab technician for Softec, and she was both clever and greedy; to make a little extra on the side, she allowed Mallory to use the units during off hours. Mallory had no idea if any of the other morph agents were also clandestine customers -- Lorraine could be trusted to keep her mouth shut.

"I don't understand why they don't market these things for entertainment purposes," Lorraine said as she adjusted the download cap on Mallory's head.

Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

Test for Network Neutrality

By Cory Doctorow at 7:37 am Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

Dan Kaminsky, DNS hacker and rootkit infection sleuth, has devised a test for checking to see if your Internet connection is "neutral" -- that is, whether your connection is being filtered, throttled, slowed down, or monkeyed with secretly by your ISP:

Kaminsky calls his technique "TCP-based active probing for faults." He says that the software he's developing will be similar to the Traceroute Internet utility that is used to track what path Internet traffic takes as it hops between two machines on different ends of the network.

But unlike Traceroute, Kaminsky's software will be able to make traffic appear as if it is coming from a particular carrier or is being used for a certain type of application, like VoIP. It will also be able to identify where the traffic is being dropped and could ultimately be used to finger service providers that are treating some network traffic as second-class.

I've suggested that a keystone of any solution to the Net Neutrality problem will be keeping the ISPs honest -- even if we pass a law prohibiting the auction of access to your connection to Internet companies, there's no guarantee that the Bells won't do it, and without a tool like this, it could be very hard to spot. If this works, maybe Google or Alexa (two companies that rely on a neutral net) will put it in their toolbars. It would be very good if there was some public place where data about different ISPs could be aggregated as a real-time Internet health report. Link (Thanks, Damon!) (Thanks to Eecue for the pic!)

Global warming beer made from melting ice-caps

By Cory Doctorow at 7:31 am Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

A Danish brewery in Greenland is brewing beer using water from the melting Arctic ice-cap. As AccordionGuy sez, "when life gives you SARS, make sarsaparilla," or in this case, "When life gives you catastrophic global warming, get drunk."

The brewers claim that the water is at least 2,000 years old and free of minerals and pollutants.

The first 66,000 litres of the new dark and pale ales are on their way to the Danish market.

Link (via Warren Ellis)

Japanese cosplayer band packs houses in the US

By Cory Doctorow at 7:28 am Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

2,200 goths showed up for a show by the Japanese cosplayer band Dir en grey in LA, despite the fact that the band has never released a CD in the US, sings in Japanese, and has no US airplay. The fans organized elaborate, synchronized stunts via LiveJournal, and sang along phonetically with the words.

"Half the songs, I don't know what I'm saying," admits Joy, one of the diehards. She's attending the show despite warnings from her doctor - a recent injury has left her confined to a wheelchair. Lauran is equally obsessed: Pulling her striped socks up above her shin-high combat boots, she recounts how she took the red-eye to New York to see the band on Tuesday, flew back to the West Coast on Thursday, and joined the queue outside the Wiltern eight hours before showtime to secure a prime spot in the mosh pit. Lauran got hooked on Dir en grey five years ago when she stumbled across an audioclip on the Web. She bought her first Dir en grey DVD on eBay - a Chinese copy that required a region 1 decoder. Others discovered the group through its videogame music or merchandise displays at anime conferences. The band also maintains a popular MySpace page with blog entries and videoclips.

Link

Update: Tom sez, "I tracked down free, legal full-length samples of several of their songs."

Update 2: DJ Kidna sez, "I'm a DJ for WKNC 88.1 FM in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I host a show called Made In Japan, specializing in music from Japan. Dir En Grey happens to be one of my top requests, and I play them pretty often"

Update 3: James sez, "The band has released their latest album, Withering to Death worldwide, and in the US on May 16th of this year. It's available at most major retailers such as Best Buy."

Camouflage any webpage as "work-safe" Word file

By Cory Doctorow at 7:24 am Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

WorkFriendly is a proxy that will reformat any web-page to look like a Word document, so that your snoopy boss and cow-orkers won't catch you reading non-work-related sites. Link (via Kottke)

Foodgasm v. Porngasm: Can you tell the difference?

By Cory Doctorow at 7:20 am Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

Here's a slideshow of people pulling faces of "beautiful agony" -- ecstasy so intense, it might be pain. The gimmick is that some of these are celebrity chefs and food commenters pulling faces after tasting a delicious morsel, and some are porn-stars in the throes of (possibly faked) ecstasy. You have to guess which. Link (via Kottke)

Darth Smartass, hilarious video remix from Empire Strikes Back

By Cory Doctorow at 7:02 am Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

In Darth Smartass, youtuber Doomblake has done an hilarious job of remixing a the little sequence in Empire Strikes Back where Vader is sitting in his clamshell commander's chair, scrubbing different shots back and forth with great precision to produce the effect that Vader is sarcastically opening and shutting the clamshell every time his subordinate opens his mouth. By the end of this, I was laughing aloud. Great work. Link (via Wonderland)

HOWTO make a clandestine card-counter machine

By Cory Doctorow at 6:58 am Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

Here's a pretty simple HOWTO for making your own card-counting machine. It's easy enough to detect that it'll probably get your knees busted in Vegas, but you could probably work it at your kid's next birthday party. Link (via Make Blog)

Fast food table with unicycle wheels

By Cory Doctorow at 6:54 am Thursday, Aug 3 • Comments • Share

This "Fast Food" table looks like one of those outdoor round McDonald's tables where all the seats are affixed by radial spokes coming from the support; but beneath each seat is a unicycle wheel. The visual pun made me grin, but I'm blogging it because it's got very handsome lines. Link (via Cribcandy)