• LuLL Flowering Lamp Concept

• Leatherman Skeletool: Lightest Full-Sized Multi-Tool

• Confirmation: No Bluetooth in iPod Touch

• Blowing Out the Dust: Afternoon Edition

• Cabinet Jack: Multi-Tool for Cabinet Makers

• Sony HES-V1000 Home Entertainment Server

• Alienware Rack-Mount Hanger 18 HD Media Server

• Wordsearch Wallpaper

• Skull Made from Melted Rawk Cassette Tapes

• WAVE Street Surfboard

• HP Back in the Smartphone Game with New iPAQs

• Bang & Olufsen Beo 5 Remote

• Holland Electro Wave: TV and Microwave in One

• Samsung Files Patent for Sentry Robot Turret

• Morning Tech Deals Highlights

• A Few Minor Updates

• Apple launch day funny, 140 characters or less: Jesse Thorn

Harold McGee writes in the NY Times about gelatin filtration:

-- a way to make sparklingly clear liquids that are intensely flavored with ... well, whatever you like: meats, fruits, vegetables, cheeses, breads, any and all combinations of ingredients.

Why would anyone want to make such a thing? Think of such liquids as essences. They have no fibers, no pulp, no fat, no substance at all. They’re just flavor in fluid form, perhaps with a tinge of color, like a classic beef consommé. In fact chefs are calling these essences consommés, and they often use them the same way, as a soup or a sauce. And they can be delightfully surprising, because their appearance often gives no hint of the pleasure they’re about to deliver.

Link (Thanks, Carl!)

I've started a new gig as an essayist/columnist for Search Engine, a new show on CBC Radio. They've got me reading adaptations of my Guardian columns, starting with my piece on Digital Lysenkoism. They've done a great job with the editing -- it's nice having other people around to help me sound smart! Link, Search Engine podcast feed, MP3 Link

Bruce Sterling calls Joel Garreau's Washington Post interview with William Gibson, "One of the best William Gibson interviews ever." Garreau interview Gibson about Spook Country, his new novel that is so futuristic, it could only have been set in the recent past, and digs into the meaning and purpose of sf and literature in general, and how it ties into a world of technological change and splintering subculture. Garreau pinged Bruce for good, meaty Gibson questions, something I did for my 1999 interview with him for the Globe and Mail (Bruce said, "Ask him about the shoes"). It's good advice -- the Sterling questions evoke some of the most interesting material in this piece.

"Every hair is being numbered -- eBay has every grain of sand. EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It's like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement.

"Every toy I had as a child that haunted me, I've been able to see on eBay. The soft squeezy rubber frog with red shorts that made 'eek eek' noise until that part fell out. I found Froggy after some effort on eBay, and I found out that Froggy was made in 1948 and where he was made and what he was made of. I saw his box, which I'd long forgotten. I didn't have to buy Froggy, but I saved the jpegs. So I've got Froggy in my computer.

"This is new. People in really small towns can become world-class connoisseurs of something via eBay and Google. This didn't used to be possible. If you are sufficiently obsessive and diligent, you can be a little kid in some town in the backwoods of Tennessee and the world's premier info-monster about some tiny obscure area of stuff. That used to require a city. It no longer does."

Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

(Photo credit: cropped, downsized thumbnail ganked from a larger image credited to Pouya Dianat -- The Washington Post.)

See also:
BoingBoingBoing #15: William Gibson
William Gibson's Spook Country
Original proposal for William Gibson's Spook Country
William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present
William Gibson on writing in the age of Google

Joel "Boing Boing Gadgets" Johnson has just posted this Leatherman Skeletool, a full-featured Leatherman tool whose every non-essential surface has been swiss-cheesed with holes to lighten its weight to a mere five ounces. It costs $72 -- or you can go lighter with a carbon-fiber model for $96. I miss my multitool days -- after losing half a dozen to the TSA, I had to give up a years-long habit of always carrying one. Since there, there must have been one billion moments where I wished I had my pliers, knife, and hoof-pick still attached to my hip. Link, Discuss on Boing Boing Gadgets

Olia Lialina's illustrated essay "Vernacular Web 2" builds on her earlier work, which is to "collect, classify and describe the most important elements of the early Web - visual as well as acoustic - and the habits of first Web users, their ideas of harmony and order." The earliest days of the web were unkind to traditional designers, many of whom took some time to come to grips with floating window sizes, user-selectable fonts, and the limited palette of design elements in early HTML. The result was a folk-aesthetic, where untrained eyes and sensibilities dominated the look of the net. Much of that original look is gone now, but Lialina's work brings it back and starts to delve into what it all means -- and how its progeny still can be found online today.

And today, in the end of June 2007, when we hear of amateur culture more often than ever before, the cultural influence of "Welcome to My Home Page" web pages looks especially interesting. People who created them and their ideas of what the Web is, how it can be used and how the pages should look, these people's likes and mistakes gave the today's Web its current shape.

To me, what defines the history of Web is not just the launch dates of new browsers or services, not just the dot-com bubbles appearing or bursting, but also the appearance of a blinking yellow button that said "New!" or the sudden mass extinction of starry wallpapers.

Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel has spotted this plastic skull made from melted down classic heavy metal cassettes from the heyday of the boombox and the walkman. The artist, Brian Dettmer, has also made an entire skeleton the same way. Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Thomas Crampton cornered me in China this week with a video camera and asked me how to blog -- here's a video of my answer. In a nutshell: pretend you're a wire-service stringer and you'll end up writing better headlines. Link

Nick Mathewson from the Tor project (a free tool that helps with anonymity and privacy online) says:

I guess you've really arrived when botnet spammers start using your name to trick hapless users into install their malware.

Around this morning, people started getting Spam with subject lines like "What you do online is at risk" and "Careful, you.re being watched" and "You are being watched online."

The message contents tell people to download Tor.

Obviously, this spam doesn't come from us, and the links aren't links to the real Tor software. Instead, if you click the links, you'll get a bunch of nasty javascript to try to fool your browser into installing a botnet client.

As always, you can find the real Tor software at https://tor.eff.org/. All legitimate Tor packages are signed; you can find instructions for verifying the signatures here [ Link ].

Ben Laurie has funny comments here [ Link ]; f-secure has a writeup here [ Link ].

Joel Johnson quashes the rumors about bluetooth in the new Apple "Touch" iPod, over at Gadgets.BoingBoing.net: Link.

A federal judge today struck down portions of the US Patriot Act, saying investigators must obtain court approval before they can order ISPs to turn over records without informing their customers. Link (Thanks Danny)

Looks like the big money men got to the Justice Department -- today, the DoJ said ISPs should be allowed to charge higher fees for "priority" traffic on the internet. This is supremely bad news.

The agency told the Federal Communications Commission, which is reviewing high-speed Internet practices, that it is opposed to "Net neutrality," the principle that all Internet sites should be equally accessible to any Web user.

Link to Associated Press item.

Here is the full text of the DoJ statement: Link, subtitle is "Antitrust Division Says Regulatory Proposals Could Limit Consumer Choice and Deter Network Investment." (Thanks, Gary in Florida, and many others)

The National Security Archive is suing the White House to obtain and preserve more than 5 million government e-mail messages believed to have been deleted from White House computers between March 2003 and October 2005. Snip from announcement:

The lawsuit filed this morning in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia names as defendants the Executive Office of the President and its components that are subject to the Federal Records Act, including the White House Office of Administration (OA), and the National Archives and Records Administration (which is responsible for long-term preservation of federal and presidential records), under the records laws and the Administrative Procedure Act.

White House officials ranging from spokesperson Dana Perino to counsel Keith Roberts have acknowledged in press and Congressional briefings that e-mail is missing from the White House archive, and that the EOP in 2002 abandoned the electronic records management system put in place by the Clinton White House. Whistleblowers cited in conjunction with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) have alleged that more than 5 million e-mail messages are missing from the White House servers.

"The Bush White House broke the law and erased our history by deleting those e-mail messages," said National Security Archive director Tom Blanton. "The period of the missing email starts with the invasion of Iraq and runs through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina."

Link.

See also this previous Boing Boing post:
NPR "Xeni Tech" - How Long Should Government E-Mail Linger

Steve Jobs offers a $100 store credit consolation prize to early iPhone adopters who got boned by yesterday's $200 price cut announcement: Link. Here's some iRage from angry customers on the Apple boards: Link.

(image above) -- Tech/fashion designer Angel Chang recently presented a new collection inspired by a visit to the International Spy Museum in Washington DC. Snip from Style.com: "One of Chang's most delightful innovations for Spring is a Manhattan map print that she developed in conjunction with Red Maps (they also did the show invite), which publishes guides for the design-centric crowd. The heat-sensitive print only becomes legible when exposed to warmth—from the touch of a hand, say. One thing to keep in mind: Chang's newfangled, lo-fi take on the GPS pretty much eliminates the 'I got lost' excuse for tardiness."

Meerkats prefer Canon SLRs: Link

War Comes Home: "hidden costs on the US, as told by veterans who have served." Link.

Glamour magazine has photoshopped "Ugly Betty" star America Ferrera into the size zero for their latest cover: Link.

The Rape of the Real Doll: ultrarealistic sex dolls and the people who use them (and sometimes have relationships with them, or simulate rape with them, or -- eh, just read the article). Link, see also this previous Boing Boing post: When Amber Met Amber.

Yahoo Finance launches an ajaxy "sentiment scraper" to sniff out and display the "bullish/bearish" vibe of a given online discussion, which can then be compared to actual stock value. Link.

Seven crack cocaine addicts recently were paid to test the affects of mixing cocaine with the Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder drug atomoxetine (also known as Strattera), which creates a sensation similar to a low dose of coke. Good times! Link

(Thanks, Manolo, Michael Manoochehri, Susannah Breslin, Jeff, Jonathan)

Liam Gowing of the LA Times says, "The consistency is kind of like a gummi bear. But a gummi bear that's alive and writhing around in your mouth." Link to video (thanks Charlie Amter)

MAKE contributing editor and Hooptyrides proprietor Mister Jalopy (seen here on the cover of MAKE Vol 11 astride his Urban Guerrilla Movie House) and I will be on KPCC LA Public Radio today. As Mister Jalopy says, "We will discuss a variety of terrifically fascinating topics that will be sure to delight young and old alike."

From KPCC:

... Thursday, September 6
Remember the guy on your street who was the neighborhood Mister Fixit... and in his spare time he tried to build a solar-powered toaster or a better backyard rocket? Anything the factory manufacturer did, they can do better. Spend a little time with the men and women of the Maker movement.

We are on:

Patt Morrison! Live!
KPCC 89.3FM in Los Angeles!
September 6, 2007
Show starts at 2:00 PM, we are on around the half way point.

Podcasts, live internet listening and archived streams: Link

Mark Dery says: "Salon.com just posted my personal essay "Remembrance of Tacos Past," a cultural critique-cum-social history of Taco Bell that attempts to illuminate the mystery clouding the American Mind: How can a partial-birth monstrosity like Taco Bell's Crunchwrap Supreme survive in a country flooded by Mexican immigrants, where the Real Thing (authentic Mexican food) is easier and easier to find, at least in most big cities?"

Before I bite into my Original Taco, I perform a "CSI"-like necropsy of it, anxiously examining what the Taco Bell menu insists is "crisp, shredded lettuce" and what I insist is limp, dispirited lettuce. Dissecting it with my fork, I probe the "real cheddar cheese" (accept no substitutes!) and tiny mound -- a tablespoonful or two, at most -- of what is purportedly "seasoned ground beef."

I think of the Carolina highway patrolman who found a freshly hawked lunger, courtesy of one disgruntled employee, dangling from one of his Taco Bell nachos. I think of the scores of people poisoned, in 2006, by the E. coli outbreak in Taco Bells throughout the nation. I think of the plague of rats gamboling contentedly around a Greenwich Village Taco Bell; NBC reporter Adam Shapiro described one showboating rodent climbing onto an upside-down stool, then dangling from it "like a gymnast." Cute, in a Willard meets "Ratatouille" sort of way.

With these thoughts as an amuse-bouche, I take my first bite. I chomp through the millimeter-thin shell, flavorful as corn-fed cardboard and eerily crunchless in the soggy-armpit humidity of a New York summer. Chewing, I ruminate on the L.A. Weekly food writer Jonathan Gold's comment to me, "I don't think there's any such thing as authentic Mexican food" -- this from a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic who also told me, with palpable excitement, about his lard connection, a guy who sells "manteca de carnitas ... the liquid lard rendered in the process of making carnitas [fried pork], liquid gold. I fried a few batches of chicken in it last night, accompanied by fiery red salsa and homemade tortillas, and I'm pretty sure I saw god herself."

Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Mark Dery's reading list
• Mark Dery on toes
• Mark Dery on the netporn crit conference
• Mark Dery on the "Not One More Damn Dime" boycott
• Mark Dery's Wunderkammer
• Mark Dery on spam literature
• Mark Dery on Paradise Lust
• Jonathan Gold praises lardo
• Jonathan Gold on Okonomiyaki (aka Japanese pizza)
• Dorkbake competition wrap-up

Artist Cayetano Ferrer, best known to BB readers for photographing the landscape hidden by billboards and street signs and pasting those images on the signs, has a new show of work opening Friday at the ThreeWalls gallery in Chicago. The show runs until October 13 and there are several images from the exhibition on Cayetano's site. For example, seen here is a photo of an installation where Cayetano resurfaced a cardboard box on the street to show what it obscures.

From the description of the show, titled Eight Corners:

Ferrer uses existing forms in order to engage in a dialog about the constant flux of the built, contemporary environment. Using inkjet prints on existing objects/architecture that reveal what these objects ultimately obscure, Ferrer exposes the relationship between the built and the rebuilt, surface and hidden, as well the delicate matter of history and memory as the present paves over the recent past in a bid to enrich economies. Ferrer’s work is a gentle push/pull between permanence and obsolescence, inviting consideration of evolution, mutation and modification in our relationship to our immediate environment

Link

Previously on BB:
• Billboard made "transparent" Link
• Cayetano Ferrer's "erased" products displayed on city street Link
• Transparent street signs Link

During a recent football game, Kyle Garchar of Hilliard Davidson High School in Ohio and his pals pulled a great prank on their rivals from Hilliard Darby High School. Before the game started, they placed a black or white card on each seat in three sections of the stadium where the Hilliard Darby fans would be sitting. Attached instructions urged the fans to hold up the cards at the start of the third quarter to collectively spell out the message "Go Darby." In reality, the cards spelled out "We suck." Yay! Garchar and his co-conspirators were rewarded with three days of in-school suspension and were banned from school activities for the semester. Boo! The prank was inspired by a similar trick pulled on Harvard by Yale in 2004.
Link to news video (Thanks, Charles Pescovitz!)

UPDATE: In the Discussion, AFO points out that the Great Rose Bowl Hoax of 1961 may have been the forefather of this genre of prank! Link

Scientists have discovered that Moray eels have a second set of mobile jaws behind the skull. The eel's regular jaws grab its prey and then, in a move reminiscent of the Alien mother, the secondary jaw shoots forward and pulls the meal back for swallowing. Researchers from UC Davis captured the amazing sequence using ultra-highspeed video and x-rays and are now studying how the jaws may have evolved. They published their discovery in this week's issue of the scientific journal Nature. From News@Nature:

Unlike Sigourney Weaver's big-screen nemesis, these moray eels cannot extend their second set of jaws out beyond their first. But the ability to deliver not one but two bites is still a potent weapon in helping the eels feed, say Rita Mehta and Peter Wainwright of the University of California, Davis, who made the discovery...

Many fish species have extra jaws in their throats, which can function to filter food from water or to grind prey when swallowing. But the eel's extendable jaws are the first throat jaws known to be adapted to help catch prey, rather than simply to help swallow it, the researchers explain in Nature1 this week...

(Mark Westneat of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago) says the discovery harks back to an age when scientists discovered natural phenomena, rather than developing theories and testing them. He calls it "a classic example of discovery-based science, stemming from a 'wow' moment".

Link to News@Nature, Link to video, Link to UC Davis press release

Previously on BB:
• Nessie down under Link
• Unagi implant Link