Miro is the new name for the awesome Internet TV player previously known as "Democracy Player." Now that Democracy has gone 1.0 (almost, see below), it's got a new name, new features, and an incredible future ahead of it. Miro is easy: just pick some channels -- video podcast feeds -- and Miro will download all the video from your channels. Miro downloads with Bittorrent, meaning that there's never a problem with popular sites going down because they're clobbered by too many requests. Miro can play any video, because it incorporates the free/open video player called VLC, which plays practically every video format under the sun.

Miro also grabs YouTube videos, and has access to more HD content than any other source online or off.

The future of Internet TV is too important to belong to one company. Internet TV needs to live atop something open and free, the way that the Web lives on top of the open and free Firefox browser. That's why Miro is licensed under the GPL, the gold standard in open/free licensing, meaning that anyone can take Miro and run with it, improve it, sell it, or give it away.

Miro is created by a charitable foundation called the Participatory Culture Foundation, an organization that also makes complimentary, free packages like Broadcast Machine (for publishing your own video channels) and VideoBomb (like Digg, but for video). The foundation pays programmers to improve the technology, and it's entirely free to use and improve.

Miro is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Link

(Disclosure: I am honored to serve on the Participatory Culture Foundation's Board of Directors)

Update: Nicholas Reville of PCF sez, "We're not quite at 1.0, this is called Public Preview 1 (0.9.8). We wanted to give ourselves a little room for refinement before we slap on the 1.0 label."

Jeremy sez, "Night Shade Books is having a 50% off sale, until midnight on Sunday, July 29th. All in-stock and forthcoming Night Shade books are eligible. Use the coupon code NSB0750: there is a four book minimum order. We've announced a bunch of new titles, including new novels from Greg Egan, Walter Jon Williams, and Liz Williams, and a post-apocalyptic anthology called Wastelands."

The new Harry Potter novel -- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows -- has hit the Internet days before its publication. The publisher spent a reported $20 million on keeping the book secret. Was the money well-spent? As Bruce Schneier points out, the kind of person who downloads a series of photos of the pages of a giant novel is also the kind of person who'll line up and buy a copy the night it comes out.

Me, I'm just glad to finally know what happens who dies at the end of the final Harry Potter novel -- SPOILER ALERT! Select the text below to read it.

The publishing industry.

Seriously, though. With the last book, the publisher was so freaked out about ebook "piracy" that they refused to release an official electronic edition. The result? Fans made their own electronic text in 24 hours. And other fans translated the book into German in 45 hours.

That'a a lot of fan-energy, sitting out there, looking for ways to love these books. Surely there's a smarter way to deal with that kind of love than attempting to suppress it?

Four days before it hits bookstores, I've got a copy of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." I downloaded it from a link posted at the Bittorrent file-sharing site the Pirate Bay. But hold on. It's not as sweet as it sounds. What I've got is not really the book but a series of photographs of the book -- someone has meticulously snapped shots of each page. Some who've discussed leaked copies say that they've seen only Pages 1 through 495. But the copy I have includes all the pages; I could, if I wanted to, tell you the very last line of the very last Harry Potter book right now.

Link, Link to Deathly Hallows torrents on The Pirate Bay

Jim Woodring's latest work of art is a doozy!

5,000,000 sunsets later, all that remains of our fatally flawed species, which introduced the concept of tragedy to the local cosmos, is an intriguing architectural motif and the unusual second and third layers of crust which cover so much of the surface of the planet. The world has become an interdimensional crossroads where nothing is capable of having a bad result. How strange we were!

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• New stuff from Jim Woodring
• MP3 interview with Jim Woodring
• Woodring animated
• New Jim Woodring figurine from StrangeCo
• Jim Woodring profile on STRANGEco
• Jim Woodring handpressed prints
• New Jim Woodring toy: Mr Bumper
• Woodring and Frisell's Mysterio Simpatico
• The Comics Journal Audio Archives: Jim Woodring
• Cool Jim Woodring animations
• Jim Woodring's pop-up Moleskine art
• Jim Woodring's Mr. Bumper toy sculpture
• New Jim Woodring toys: "Imperial Newts"
• Jim Woodring Interview
• Woodring's amazing plastic pals
• More wonderful Woodring Weirdness
• New Jim Woodring print: "The Confidence Bird"
• Jim Woodring interview
• Woodring-esque Salamander from old German kids' books

Damon Burke wanted to use the recharger he built from a Minty Boost kit to juice up his iPod so he could watch movies on a long flight, but the TSA was afraid it was a bomb designed to blow up the homeland.

I tell him it is a battery charger for my iPod. He asks if I made it myself, to which I reply that I purchased a kit over the internet. He says that he can't let me on the plane with it. I explain to him that I have flown with it 4-6 times a month for a year now and nobody has questioned it. He says, "Not on my watch and not with my people."

He swabs the device and runs it through the calorimeter. Again, no residue.

I ask why it can't be taken on the plane and he said, "Because it looks like an IED."

Link (Via Make)

The wonderful Mitch O'Connell has designed a set of stitching patterns for Jenny Hart's Sublime Stitching. They look great! Link (Via Craft)

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Interview with artist Mitch O'Connell

Here are nine YouTube videos arranged to re-create the famous intro to the Brady Bunch. Link (Via otomano)

The Mouse Trap reports on a New Scientist article that looks at the roots of punishment and revenge.

Another article in the New Scientist , takes this one step forward and looks at motivations and mechanisms behind why we punish. The researcher, Terry Burnahm, asks the question as to why people indulge in a punishment behavior, though the punishment comes with a cost to themselves. Is it driven by a moral sense outrage, a desire for fairness or due to some other biological mechanism. The paradigm they use is the ultimatum game, wherein one person is given some money (say 10 $) and he is supposed to share it with another person. If the second person accepts the money, both get to keep the money; else both lose their money. Experimentally it is found that if low offers are made (say 1 $), they are usually rejected by the second person. This is due to the fact that the second personal wants to punish the first person for making an unfair offer.

What Terry discovered was that the propensity to refuse low offers was correlated with testosterone levels in males. Testosterone levels have also been correlated with aggression in the past and with dominance seeking behavior. The author suggests that the high testosterone connection is due to dominance seeking behavior of humans and by refusing to accept the low bet, the male saves putting himself in a subordinate position. It is presumed that this was beneficial in evolutionary times and thus has been selected for.

Link (Via Mind Hacks)

Someone created the obligatory animated GIF based on the photo of Homer Simson and the aroused Pagan deity I posted yesterday. Link (Thanks, minifig!)

"Look! I'm writing a check on my 1983 Apple telephone!" Link

Engadget has a long interview with Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn, the Dublin compnay that says it has a device that can produce more energy than it consumes.

Not a lot of new information is disclosed in this interview (McCarthy's explanation for why the Orbo demo failed on July 4th is still troubling), but it's interesting to hear McCarthy talk about his company.

I think he either (mistakenly) believes he's onto something, or is doing this as a publicity stunt to get attention for something else the company is really working on.

ENGADGET: So that's the company, let's talk a little bit more about the technology that you guys have supposedly developed here. Laws of thermodynamics basically state that you can't achieve 100% efficiency in any apparatus and that there are always transfers of heat and energy in any system. But obviously you guys are claiming 100%+ efficiency. Do you have a statistic or number of what you estimate the energy efficiency level of your machine is? Is it 110% or 150%?

MCCARTHY: It varies from configuration to configuration. I think the largest efficiency that we would have physically measured would be about 485%. These numbers can be misleading. For example we might be getting 485% per joule, which means were getting 4.85 J out, but there could be a configuration that's could be delivering 130% efficiency yet delivering 10 joules. So, the technology itself is pretty well researched in terms of punch line efficiency it's 485%, but that wouldn't be the optimum output of the system. Obviously we're more focused on direct power output of a device than the punchline numbers. 485 to 1 is 4.85, but we could easily say, 10 to 12 joules off of a system is going to have a lower punch line efficiency. And power output is obviously the key factor, energy output is obviously the key factor.

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Exploded view of Steorn's perpetual motion device
• Video of Steorn CEO explaining why its perpetual motion device failed at demo
• Huffington Post on Steorn's "free energy"
• Steorn's "free energy machine" to be unveiled today
• More on "free energy" company
• Company claims to have generator with more than 100% efficiency

For the next month, Imaginary Foundation, the surrealist design/art/culture thinktank and clothier, will exhibit a new collection of paintings and sculpture at the Stussy San Francisco store. The opening reception is this Thursday, July 19, from 8-11pm at Stussy, located in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Local turntable heroes DF Tram and DJ Centipede will provide audio landscapes at the event. For those who can't make the trip--and it will be a trip--here are several exclusive preview photos of the work. Click on the images for a better look. Some of the art is also available on limited-edition t-shirts from the Imaginary Foundation site.

Link to Imaginary Foundation

Dr. Graham J. Murphy, a prof in the Cultural Studies and Department of English at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, has written a swell academic paper about my novel Eastern Standard Tribe. The essay, "Somatic Networks and Molecular Hacking in Eastern Standard Tribe," was originally published in Extrapolation Vol.48, Issue 1 (2007), from The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College. Graham and his publisher have given me permission to put a PDF of the article up, too!

Art’s Tribal activities as an agent-provocateur are obviously Doctorow’s satirical critique of a wired marketplace that regularly has the end-user tied to the whims of a hostile corporate culture. Admittedly, Art is initially part of the end-user problem because his loyalty to the ESTribe requires his work at V/DT to be founded on maximizing end-user hostility. It is not until he is in the sanatorium that he has an epiphany that his life has been wasted. After roof-Art has been hurt while trying to escape off the roof, he is introduced to Dr. Szandor, a medical doctor who stands diametrically opposed to the sanatorium’s psychiatrists. Unlike the mental-health practitioners who have repeatedly ignored Art’s claims of wrongful incarceration and have opted to put him on medications that leave him in a drugged stupor, Dr. Szandor actually talks to Art and learns a great deal about the man. A key topic of discussion is the problems with mental-health facilities. During those discussions Art begins to sketch out potential alternatives to the sanatorium system that has him caged, a theoretical facility he dubs HumanCare. Dr. Szandor is noticeably impressed with Art’s acute vision of HumanCare while Art feels “a familiar swelling of pride. I like it when people understand how good I am at my job. Working at V/DT was hard on my ego: after all, my job there was to do a perfectly rotten job, to design the worst user experiences that plausibility would allow. God, did I really do that for two whole goddamned years?” (179). Art comes to recognize that the last two years of his life at V/DT have been a waste because his agent-provocateur mission, founded on end-user hostility and corporate stagnation, has stifled what amounts to his innate skills as a molecular hacker.

PDF Link

John K produced a very funny new animated commercial for Comcast. He's got production notes and crew bios on his blog. Link

Subterranean Press has just put Charlie Stross's killer short story, Snowball's Chance, online as part of their latest issue, which also includes some great Elizabeth Bear audio and fiction, as well as fiction from Charles de Lint, Gene Wolf and Joe R Lansdale.

The louring sky, half past pregnant with a caul of snow, pressed down on Davy’s head like a hangover. He glanced up once, shivered, then pushed through the doorway into the Deid Nurse and the smog of fag fumes within.

His sometime conspirator Tam the Tailer was already at the bar. “Awright, Davy?”

Davy drew a deep breath, his glasses steaming up the instant he stepped through the heavy blackout curtain, so that the disreputable pub was shrouded in a halo of icy iridescence that concealed its flaws. “Mine’s a Deuchars.” His nostrils flared as he took in the seedy mixture of aromas that festered in the Deid Nurse’s atmosphere–so thick you could cut it with an axe, Morag had said once with a sniff of her lop-sided snot-siphon, back in the day when she’d had aught to say to Davy. “Fuckin’ Baltic oot there the night, an’ nae kiddin’.” He slid his glasses off and wiped them off, then looked around tiredly. “An’ deid tae the world in here.”

Link (via Futurismic)

Warren Ellis has just posted chapter one of his forthcoming novel Crooked Little Vein, a gonzo hard-boiled detective story that takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the ickiest subcultures on the Internet. I loved this book -- I'll be publishing a review shortly -- and I'm pleased to note that we'll be having Warren on the Boing Boing Boing podcast in August to talk about it.

I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug. It was a huge brown bastard; had a body like a turd with legs and beady black eyes full of secret rat knowledge. Making a smug huffing sound, it threw itself from the table to the floor, and scuttled back into the hole in the wall where it had spent the last three months planning new ways to screw me around. I’d tried nailing wood over the gap in the wainscot, but it gnawed through it and spat the wet pieces into my shoes. After that, I spiked bait with warfarin, but the poison seemed to somehow cause it to evolve and become a super-rat. I nailed it across the eyes once with a lucky shot with the butt of my gun, but it got up again and shat in my telephone.

I dragged myself all the way awake, lurching forward in my office chair. The stink of rat urine steaming and festering in my mug stabbed me into unwelcome wakefulness, but I’d rather have had coffee. I unstuck my backside from the sweaty leatherette of the chair, fought my way upright, and padded stiff-legged to the bathroom adjacent to my office. I knew that one of these days someone was going to burst into the office unannounced to find a naked private investigator taking a piss with the bathroom door open. There was a time where I cared about that sort of thing. Some time before I started living in my own office, I think.

Link

See also:
Warren Ellis's NEXTWAVE: subverting the underwear perverts
Warren Ellis' graphic novel FELL #1 online for free
Warren Ellis's Desolation Jones - Savage noir spy comic
Warren Ellis's Mek and Reload omnibus edition
Complete Warren Ellis comic online
Transmetropolitan #1 as a free download
I come to praise Transmetropolitan