Gavin of Small Beer Press sez,

It's tax day in the USA and we all need cheering up. We're celebrating at Small Beer Press by publishing John Kessel's first collection of short stories in ten years, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, as well as releasing it as a free download in a number of completely open format -- with, of course, no Digital Rights Management (DRM).

The Baum Plan is licensed under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license allowing readers to share the stories with friends and generally have at them in any remixing/interpretation/Web 2.0 huddly-cuddly noncommercial manner. The collection is provided in these formats: low-res PDF, HTML, RTF, and text file. We encourage any and all conversions into other formats.

Kessel's a superb writer and this is an amazing collection -- well done, Small Beer! Link (Thanks, Gavin!)

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

The State of Oregon is sending out cease and desist letters to sites like Justia and Public.Resource.Org that have been posting copies of Oregon laws, known as the Oregon Revised Statutes.

We've sent Oregon back two letters. The first reviews the law and explains to the Legislative Counsel why their assertion of copyright over the state statutes is particularly weak, from both a common law perspective and from their own enabling legislation.

The position of the Legislative Counsel is that their public access obligations have been fulfilled by their web site. However, their web site has over 500,000 HTML errors, does not meet Section 508 accessibility requirements, has no metadata, as our second letter points out.

Particularly galling is the fact that Thomson West has also made a copy of these statutes and has done so without a commercial license, but the Legislative Counsel explicitly told Tim Stanley of Justia that they weren't going to send cease and desist letters to West. Evidently, it is much easier to pick on the little guys.

Oregon is not unique in asserting copyright over state law, but they are definitely one of the more aggressive in this kind of FUD campaign. Justia and Public.Resource.Org have decided this is an important issue to resolve and we're going to hold firm on this. Anybody else who is making a mirror of the Oregon law should drop me a line and let me know.

Link (Thanks, Carl!)

Jan Korbes's Garbage Architecture is a trove of beautiful things made out of salvage and trash, from a chair made out of radials to a staircase made out of timbers from a castle. Link (via Cribcandy)

Wired's got a great article on all the diverse uses that hackers are coming up with for the Chumby, the adorable, hackable, wide-open bean-bag computer that does anything you can think of.

The Chumby is designed in a way such that its core electronics can be easily separated from its outer shell. This lets Chumby owners create that exact look they want. Some enterprising crafters have already stuffed the screen into teddy bears and footballs and even exquisitely designed wooden cases.

Carlos Camargo, an assistant engineering professor at the National University of Columbia, has taken to hacking both the Chumby's hardware and its software. His current project, which centers on constructing a Chumby-based vehicle-tracking system, will let the Chumby communicate with a cellular modem and with GPS to measure the driving habits of people in Columbia.

"The Chumby's accelerometer will be a good driving indicator, storing the mean speed and acceleration and the strong changes in the acceleration," says Carmargo, who is currently writing the source code and developing his user interface with Qt application-development framework.

Indeed, with so many sensors and potential applications for the Chumby, it's often hard to keep track of the myriad projects developers, hackers and crafters are embarking on, Maxwell says.

Link

Etsy seller Hannapt's catnip eyeballs are a grisly hoot -- love the idea of little Moggy chewing ferociously on a felt eyeball, a glazed, feral, stoned gleam in her eye. Link (via Craft)

KQED TV's science program QUEST visited the MAKE: magazine laboratory where Jake McKenzie showed how to make a desktop biosphere, complete with shrimp, snails, and pond scum. Once you seal the biosphere, you never have to open it again! Link (Thanks, Shawn Connally!)

Continuing in our week-long retrospective of viewer favorites on Boing Boing tv (we're a big honkin' six monfs old now!), a look back at this epic Lego time-lapse from Boing Boing Gadgets editor Joel Johnson:

Here are several evenings of my life condensed into 3:38 of time lapse footage as I assemble the "Ultimate Collectors Millennium Falcon" LEGO set, the largest yet sold, with over five thousand individual elements.

My thanks to Matt Goodell for cutting me a great deal on this set. It was even better than new, since he even sorted out all the pieces for me. Thanks also to Judson "Cicada" Cowan for letting me use the track "Earth's Assault on the Enemy A.I.," one of my favorite tracks of 2007. Finally, thanks to Brian Lam and Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo who had the idea first but were kind enough to give me permission to run my version before theirs to celebrate the 50th anniversary. Thanks, everyone!

I captured one frame out of every 150. It's a great set; much more fun to put together than the giant Star Destroyer. Far fewer repetitive sections. Now the ultimate question: keep it on my shelf to scare potential dates, sell it, or press its parts into service to build more ships of my own design?

(Don't miss: My snazzy sweatpants with the hole in the knee, then my realization that I have a hole in the knee after, like, a day of filming.)

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

Over at the Paleofuture blog, a post with digital scans of the rare book 2063 A.D., published in 1963 by General Dynamics Astronautics. Snip:

The book asked politicians, military commanders and scientists to speculate as to where humanity would be, a hundred years hence, in the great push towards space.

A copy of the limited print book (only 200 are believed to have been produced) was included in the time capsule at General Dynamics Astronautics headquarters in San Diego. The building was torn down in the late 1990s and the time capsule is believed to have perished. The book gives some great insight into the general sense of optimism that so typifies 1960s futurism. Space colonies? Sure! Martian life? Why not! Teleportation? Easier than commercial space flight!

Link to post with free PDF of scans, and you can buy a print copy from Lulu. (thanks, Susannah Breslin, via nevver.tumblr.com.)

My friend Wayne de Geere is in Vegas this week for NAB, cruising the halls for cool stuff. He shares this snapshot of one of the more interesting products on display -- the "Flying-Cam," a methanol-powered aerial vehicle with on-board camera, used in the production of such films as Harry Potter (3 of 'em), 007 (at least 3 of 'em), Van Helsing, and The Kite Runner. The company's website contains a bunch of groovy Quicktime movies that show the device in action.

Erik says: "Now that Canada’s fishermen are almost done with clubbing seals for the year, the Canadian government has turned its attention to the pigs. Ottawa has just approved a massive bail out of pig farmers at taxpayer expense. They’ve worked out a deal for pig farmers to kill of 150,000 pigs by the autumn, in exchange for a $50 million payout. Not a single ounce of that flesh will become ham or back bacon — it’ll all be ground up into pet food or otherwise disposed of so as to prop up pork prices." Link

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets we looked at a new handheld camcorder from RED and the future of digital cinema (as well as all the various resolutions, some of which I assembled into the chart you see above); Nintendo's newly announced price for the Wii Fit balance board ($90); Rob's impressions of the Fujitsu P8010 laptop after a month; a new do-everything open gaming platform from the makers of the GP2X; a concept bag that doubles as a bike seat; the 'Wi-Fi Predator,' which slurps up remote Wi-Fi connections and shares them locally; listened to Tom Whitwell's review of the Sony PFR-V1 head-mounted speakers (not headphones!); Blue Jeans Cable's ESaD response to a cease-and-desist from Monster Cable; the Datto 500, a NAS that also mirrors your data off-site if you pay them a monthly fee; lamented the worsening state of CAPTCHA; saw this nitro-powered R/C car possible break 240MPH (according to reader estimates); noted that it is possible to sell a laptop bag without the actual bag; the K2, a light with metal teeth that can be exposed to make hurting; the Sigma DP-1 was reviewed by Richael Reichmann, who said even its beautiful images don't make up for its horrible UI; caught you up on today's Tetris news; discovered that yes, it is possible to make a shopping cart belch flame; and had fun playing Video Store Clerk, a new game that uses real customer ratings to simulate customers, then rolls your answers back into a big crowdsourced...look, it's fun if you like movies, I'm saying.

How many things can you find wrong with this depressing old photo of a performing chimp at Jungle Land? Link

The folks at my daughter's preschool say they learned this trick on a kibbutz in Israel: plastic bags filled with water, and hung from tree branches to scare the bugs away. Does it work?

I'll be interviewing Douglas Rushkoff in IRC in 90 minutes if you'd like follow along and ask questions of your own. We'll post a transcript later. Transcript after the jump! [Details]

The last time I saw this commercial was over 40 years ago. Even as a wee tyke, I remember thinking, "That man sure is a shithead." (via Retro Thing)

Yesterday I posted a photo of an honor payment system at a bookstore in Ojai, California, and a lot of readers shared heart-warming stories about other honor payment systems. Today, I came across this article in the Daily Yomiuri Online about people ripping off unmanned produce stands in Japan. What a bummer.

Many of the managers reportedly complain that they make only 80 percent to 90 percent of what they should. However, some of them consider it cheaper than having to hire and pay someone to manage the stalls.

To combat the problem, Toshio Asakawa, a 65-year-old farmer in Asaka, Saitama Prefecture, introduced four vending machines to sell his vegetables.

"Before the introduction of the machines, more than half of my vegetables were stolen every day," Asakawa said.

He had to spend 3 million yen on the machines, but it seems to have paid off as his sales have increased by 50 percent, he said.

Link (via Japan Probe)

Derrick Bostrom of Bostworld provided an invaluable service to the world by scanning a vintage Classroom Filmstrip and uploading it to YouTube.

Classroom Filmstrips have been a staple of kitch fans since time immemorial (that’s about four decades, in Kitsch Years), yet the Web still lacks a truly marvellous repository of the things. Collectors are apparently afraid to let them out of their little plastic tubes for fear they’ll crumble in the air. Others would rather compile them onto equally crumbly paper and weigh in on the matter with their own two cents.

Thusly, I couldn’t resist a box of Sunday school filmstrips during a recent antique store outing. I also couldn’t resist scanning a couple of them, adding the included soundtrack records, and combining the whole mess into a couple nifty QuickTimes files — just the thing for an upload to YouTube. The colors have faded and dust has burned permanently into the images, but the somber message for our little ones is as clear as on the day these filmstrips were manufactured. After weighing the pros and cons of simulating the film-roll experience, I ultimately ruled it out. It would have been too much trouble.

Today’s lesson is the intriguing story of the little cloud who gave his life to help humanity. Not only is it a terrific primer for helping kids visualize fluffy Casper-like supernatural beings floating overhead affecting our lives, it also introduces children to the concept of self-sacrifice (very important in a society that relies upon a standing military), the value of prayer in an agrarian economy, and the scientific role of cloud sadness in the production of rain.

Link

"Up and Then Down," Nick Paumgarten's New Yorker feature on elevators, is centered around Nicholas White’s ordeal of being trapped in an elevator for 41 hours after he left his office at Business Week to go downstairs for a cigarette. The article is accompanied by an extraordinary time-lapse video of White in his cage, rattling back and forth like a trapped insect:

At a certain point, he decided to open the doors. He pried them apart and held them open with his foot. He was presented with a cinder-block wall on which, perfectly centered, were scrawled three “13”s—one in chalk, one in red paint, one in black. It was a dispiriting sight. He concluded that he must be on the thirteenth floor, and that, this being an express elevator, there was no egress from the shaft anywhere for many stories up or down. (Such a shaft is known as a blind hoistway.) He peered down through the crack between the wall and the sill of the elevator and saw that it was very dark. He could make out some light at the bottom. It looked far away. A breeze blew up the shaft.

He started to call out. “Hello?” He tried cupping his hand to his mouth and yelled out some more. “Help! Is there anybody there? I’m stuck in an elevator!” He kept at it for a while.

Link, Link to article (via Kottke)

Cartoonist John "RobotJohnny" Martz drew his mom's entire 1968 high school yearbook. That's more than 1,000 faces. Martz says, "Good cartooning, to me, is all about simplification, and this was a fun experiment in distilling each person’s likeness down to a simple cartoon version and learning to draw efficiently, with both speed and as few details as possible." He posted all of the pages at Flickr and also made a book of the project. Link to RobotJohnny blog, Link to Flickr set (via Laughing Squid)

The Onion "reports" on, er, Hollywood plans to adapt the insanely popular Iron Man trailer into a full-length feature film.
Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

Phoebe Washer, a young and highly talented San Francisco artist, tragically died on Monday. The 20-year-old was hiking with a friend in the Marin Headlands when she fell off a cliff. We send our condolences to Phoebe's friends and family. She left us with a beautiful body of work. Link to Pheobe Washer's site, Link to SF Gate article (Thanks, Greg Long!)

Security expert Bruce Schneier wrote a great essay for Wired called "Inside the Twisted Mind of the Security Professional." He says "Good engineering involves thinking about how things can be made to work; the security mindset involves thinking about how things can be made to fail."

Uncle Milton Industries has been selling ant farms to children since 1956. Some years ago, I remember opening one up with a friend. There were no actual ants included in the box. Instead, there was a card that you filled in with your address, and the company would mail you some ants. My friend expressed surprise that you could get ants sent to you in the mail.

I replied: “What’s really interesting is that these people will send a tube of live ants to anyone you tell them to.”

Security requires a particular mindset. Security professionals — at least the good ones — see the world differently. They can’t walk into a store without noticing how they might shoplift. They can’t use a computer without wondering about the security vulnerabilities. They can’t vote without trying to figure out how to vote twice. They just can’t help it.

SmartWater is a liquid with a unique identifier linked to a particular owner. “The idea is for me to paint this stuff on my valuables as proof of ownership,” I wrote when I first learned about the idea. “I think a better idea would be for me to paint it on your valuables, and then call the police.”

Really, we can’t help it.

This kind of thinking is not natural for most people. It’s not natural for engineers. Good engineering involves thinking about how things can be made to work; the security mindset involves thinking about how things can be made to fail. It involves thinking like an attacker, an adversary or a criminal. You don’t have to exploit the vulnerabilities you find, but if you don’t see the world that way, you’ll never notice most security problems.

Link

I'm thrilled to report that Federated Media Publishing, the company founded by Boing Boing band manager John Battelle, has just received a $50 million minority investment from Oak Investment Partners. This is huge news for FM, a company that handles ad sales and other publishing services for Boing Boing, Ars Technica, Dooce, and a slew of other sites.

I don't know much about venture capital, multiples, or valuations. But I do know a little about blogging, and I've met quite a few of people over the years (some well-intentioned, some, er, less so) who think they know the secret to successful online publishing. Turns out, they're almost always wrong. John and his incredible team at Federated Media, including Jason Weisberger, Chas Edwards, and many other folks, not only get business, but they get blogging too. That's a very rare combination.

John's been part of Boing Boing since 2004, back when "conversational marketing" was just a riff in the back of his mind and FM didn't even exist. In the years since, John and FM have enabled us to focus on what we love doing--sharing Internet esoterica, anomalies, and curiosities with you--and grow beyond what we ever imagined possible when BB was just a photocopied 'zine. We're proud to be part of the extended FM family. Congrats to Federated Media!

This week marks 6 months since Boing Boing tv was inserted into earth's atmosphere by alien insurgents. To celebrate, we're looking back at the "best of BBtv" as chosen by you, our viewers. Today we revisit a pre-dotcom-crash edition of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, through the eyes of the one human on earth capable of matching E3's hyperkinetic chaos with ample frenzy of his own.

In this BBtv episode, "comedy terrorist" Tim E. Woodsman high-kicks, dry-humps and generally freaks the hell out all over the LA Convention Center. Press access rules changed forever after this incident. E3 isn't huge and awesome anymore, either, so there's not much left to bum rush anyway.

This episode was cut from rediscovered footage produced for a CrapTV internet-boom-era TV pilot. Danny Diamond provided us with access to his footage vault (we pulled Bad Fairies from the same source), and BBtv's editors reassembled this short spazzfest for your nostalgic pleasure.

The crew of video guerrillas who made this happen this back in the day say: "We dedicate this to the memory of Tim E Woodsman, 1972 - 2007. We miss you. -- Jason, Jolon, Glasgow, Martha, Brody, Danny, Push, Tony, and everyone who made CRAPtv possible."

Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with discussion and downloadable video.

(Special thanks, Jolon Bankey, and happy birthday!!! Music: includes a clip from Klubbheads).