I'm on holidays in Wales, at my in-laws' cottage, in a little coastal town where my wife and her family seem to make up a substantial chunk of the local population. One set of cousins have a 1950s prefab bungalow just down the hill, built by Woolaways of Taunton. This weekend, they unearthed the manual that Woolaways provided to all the new bungalow owners -- and it's a masterpiece of oddly stilted technical writing, effusive sell-copy, and dire warnings about the depredations of damp. I took photos of the booklet and stuck 'em in my Flickr stream so everyone could enjoy 'em. The Care of Your New Bungalow

Excavating Kafka, a new book by James Hawes, includes (for the first time) material gleaned from Kafka's hardcore porn stash, booklets that were published by the same publisher who published Kafka's own work.

Even today, the pornography would be "on the top shelf", Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. "These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action... It's quite unpleasant."

"Academics have pretended it did not exist," Dr Hawes said. “The Kafka industry doesn’t want to know such things about its idol."

He added: "Perhaps Kafka's biographers simply don't like the idea that their literary idol was helped out in this... way in the vital early stages of his career... Of the world's authors, only Shakespeare generates more PhDs, more biographies, more coffee-table books... Everything Kafka wrote, every postcard he ever sent, every page of his diary... is regarded as a potential Ark of the Covenant... Yet no-one has ever shown his readers Kafka's porn."

Franz Kafka’s porn brought out of the closet (Thanks, Sherry!)

Tor.com's got great coverage of last night's Hugo awards. Many congrats to the deserving and wonderful writers and creators, especially those we've featured here, like John Scalzi (Best Fan Writer), Mary Robinette Kowal (Campbell Award for Best New Writer), Neil Gaiman (Stardust, Best Film), Locus (Best Semiprozine) (again!), Elizabeth Bear (Best Short Story, Tidelines), Ted Chiang (Best Novelette, The Merchant at the Alchemist's Gate), David Hartwell (Best Long Form Editor), Gordon van Gelder (Best Short Form Editor), Connie Willis (Best Novella, All Seated on the Ground) and Michael Chabon (Best Novel, The Yiddish Policeman's Union). Hugo Award Winners

See also:
Chabon's "Yiddish Policemen's Union": wonderful blend of hard-boiled and Yiddish ironies

The International Association of Book Towns ("a small rural town or village in which second-hand and antiquarian bookshops are concentrated") collects information about delightful bibliophiles' paradises. I once spent a magical day combing the shops of one of these places and by the end of it I was drunk on binder's glue, ink, and silverfish. I.O.B. - International Organisation of Book Towns (Thanks, Marilyn!)

A Comcast tech showed up at Consumerist reader's grandad's house and totally failed to understand how their cable was set up and billed. So he called them thieves, cursed at them, and disconnected their cable. Naturally.

I come outside to witness my grandpa and the Comcast guy in a screaming match. The Comcast tech is threatening to leave and I ask "What the heck is going on?!" Well, my Grandpa starts telling me that he disconnected his cable and says we do not have a cable account with Comcast and basically accuses my Grandpa of hijacking cable. Okay, last time I checked, most 74 years old probably don't know how to hijack cable. So my Grandpa gets really upset and starts back for the house. I'm trying to find out from the Comcast tech what is going on and my Grandpa comes back out 2 seconds later with a Comcast bill in his hand. He goes to hand it to the Comcast tech and he rudely replies "Sir, I don't want to see your fucking bill. If you don't go back in your house and quit disrespecting me, I'm going to just leave."

Meanwhile, I ask my Grandpa to try and let me straighten it out and go inside for a minute because I could tell at this point he was getting really upset. So I continue to ask the guy what the hell is going on all the while he is telling me he isn't going back in the house to hook up my internet because he doesn't appreciate my Grandpa "disrespecting him". Well, from what I saw, my Grandpa didn't really deserve to get his cable turned off and treated in such a way. I finally talk him into hooking up the internet (I needed it for school as my homework is submitted online). But the issue still remains with my Grandpa's service. So I ask the tech why he thinks we don't have cable. He replies "When I look up the phone number on the account, it only shows internet, no cable television. That's a red flag mam."

Comcast Tech Accuses 74-Year-Old Man Of Stealing Cable Service (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Robbo sez, "Thomas Hawk was forcibly removed from the San Francisco MOMA by two security guards at the direction of the over-zealous Simon Blint, Director of Visitor Relations. How ironic is that? Why? Taking photos in the atrium. SF MOMA policy on this? Their own web site specifically allows photography in the atrium. Hawk had also previously confirmed this personally with Thea Stein in the Marketing and Communications Department of the museum. Didn't matter to Simon Blint who, according to Hawk, went all aggressive and power-trip happy, even trying to eject his companion."

If the museum has a photography allowed policy in their atrium as explicitly expressed on their website and someone identifies themselves as a photographer, artist and paying and supporting member of museum I would expect less hostility, aggression and harassment. Photography is an art and those of us who choose to practice the great art of street photography ought not be targeted by bullies like Blint. Many of the great artists, artists being shown in the SF MOMA itself were practitioners of street photography. It is ironic that the great Cartier-Bresson, who took thousands of photographs of unsuspecting people in his work, hangs in the museum while a photographer practicing the same type of work gets ejected by a power-trippy asshole. It's hypocritical and disappointing.

Simon Blint, Director of Visitor Relations at the SF MOMA, Yeah You Asshole, Photography is Not a Crime (Thanks, Robbo!)

Researchers at DefCon in Vegas have demonstrated that they can make "high security" Medeco key-blanks out of the plastic used in credit-cards, and then whittle them into working keys by referring to low-resolution photos of original keys.

"Basically, we've destroyed Medeco's key control, because we can make (plastic keys) for any of their M3 locks and a lot of their Biaxial locks, which is their last generation of locks," says Tobias, who authored the book Open in Thirty Seconds, with Bluzmanis.

The researchers demonstrated the technique using a Medeco mortise cylinder that Threat Level purchased in California before leaving for Las Vegas. After buying the lock, Threat Level scanned the key and e-mailed the image to the researchers, who then created several plastic keys. When Threat Level arrived in Las Vegas with the lock, it took about six seconds to open the lock using a plastic key.

"It's keys by e-mail," says Tobias. "It's key-mail."...

The Medeco M3 key does have an extra feature to secure the lock -- a step protrusion on the side of the key that's designed to move a slider inside the lock. But last year at DefCon, Tobias and his colleagues showed how they could simply insert the end of a bent paper clip into a Medeco high-security lock to push back the slider, rendering the slider ineffective as a security layer. Once that is done, they're then able to insert the plastic key in this new attack, to lift and rotate the pins.

Researchers Crack Medeco High-Security Locks With Plastic Keys

(Image: Dave Bullock (eecue)/Wired.com)

Kevin Fu (associate prof at the UMass Amherst/director of the Medical Device Security Center) gave a Black Hat presentation in Vegas yesterday in which he demonstrated a way of remotely disabling a pacemaker, using open radio technology. It sounds like other implantable devices, like those used for auto-administering drugs, would also be vulnerable to the attack. The attack relies on the fact that the control protocol for these devices does not use any cryptographic security -- that sounds like it'd be easy enough to fix for future models. Not sure how you'd field-patch the 2.6 million devices that have already been... installed to date, though.

A computer acts as a control mechanism for programming the pacemaker so that it can be set to deal with a patient’s particular defribrillation needs. Pacemakers administer small shocks to the heart to restore a regular heartbeat. The devices have the ability to induce a fatal shock to a heart.

Fu and Halperin said they used a cheap $1,000 system to mimic the control mechanism. It included a software radio, GNU radio software, and other electronics. They could use that to eavesdrop on private data such as the identity of the patient, the doctor, the diagnosis, and the pacemaker instructions. They figured out how to control the pacemaker with their device.

“You can induce the test mode, drain the device battery, and turn off therapies,” Halperin said.

Translation: you can kill the patient.

Defcon: Excuse me while I turn off your pacemaker, Pacemakers and Implantable Cardiac Defibrillators: Software Radio Attacks and Zero-Power Defenses (Thanks, Kiltak!)

These Swiss casemodding overclockers have a sweet gallery of a case that looks like an old flying wing aircraft. Looks like it'd get good airflow, too. Gernsback Continuum Casemod (Thanks, James!)

ProQuo's Top 10 Creative Responses To Junk Mail has lots of good ideas for meatspace spam (making venetian blinds is a particularly good one). My favorite junkmail hack is to just write DECEASED on the envelope and put it back in the mail. Top 10 Creative Responses To Junk Mail (via Craft)

The FBI disclosed today that it had "improperly obtained" phone records of reporters at the Indonesia bureaus for the New York Times and Washington Post in 2004.

Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., disclosed the episode in a phone call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, and apologized for it. He also spoke with Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post, to apologize. F.B.I. officials said the incident came to light as part of the continuing review by the Justice Department inspector general’s office into the bureau’s improper collection of telephone records through “emergency” records demands issued to phone providers. The records were apparently sought as part of a terrorism investigation, but the F.B.I. did not explain what was being investigated or why the reporters’ phone records were considered relevant.

F.B.I. Says It Obtained Reporters’ Phone Records (NYT)

Recently at Boing Boing Gadgets, we saw a powerful point-and-shoot from Nikon, a backlit coaster, a remote controlled robot zombie, and a demented erotic chess set.

There was a pretty engraved MacBook Pro, a beautiful retro handset from Sony Ericsson (and a handheld PC design fantasy we based on it), and a cyborg goatee shaving guard. Some hackers got kicked out of a hacking conference for hacking, and Lotus wants to make hybrid cards noisier.

John spotted a great handheld SNES, General Electric's television of today from 1978 — "Do you have a seraglio of a thousand slaves to help you lift it out of the store?" — and found a forest nymph to be the light of his life.

Rob found a $1,975 set of energy phase-correcting wooden blocks for audiophiles, imagined what Ikea's cell phone might look like, and wondered why everything ever is "stylish and elegant." Then he was struck on the head by a bad-assed 3lb heavyweight tape dispenser.

Finally, before you hit the weekend, check our our gallery of 101 Classic Computer Ads.

John Kricfalusi alerted me to these hilarious toys he designed depicting the presidential candidates. John Kricfalusi's presidential candidate toys

The ACLU has set up a form that makes it easy to tell Congress to overhaul the broken terrorist watch list and to require reasonable suspicion for electronic searches at the border.

With no suspicion and no explanation, the U.S. government can seize your laptop, cell phone, or PDA as you enter the United States and download all your private information -- including your personal and business documents, emails, phone calls, and web history. The Department of Homeland Security confirms that this is the official policy.

What happens if you refuse to let the agents download your personal photos? Or if you have encrypted your private information? Then Border Patrol -- which is now an agency of the Department of Homeland Security -- can simply copy your entire hard drive or even take your device and hang on to it indefinitely.

Unfortunately, seizing laptops and cameras at the border isn’t the only travel security measure that infringes on our civil liberties.

Just last month, the U.S. government's "terrorist watch list" surpassed one million names and is growing by over twenty-thousand names per month. The watch list includes the names of prominent people, like Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), plus hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans -- many of them with common names like Robert Johnson and James Robinson. Your name might be on the list, but there's no way to know for sure until you are delayed -- or even detained for hours in a back room. If you discover your name is on the list, it's nearly impossible to get off. It actually took an Act of Congress to get Nelson Mandela off the list. No joke. An Act of Congress.

These abuses have something in common: They make all of us into suspects, with no rule of law and no accountability.

Tell Congress to rein in DHS travel abuses (ACLU)

Volume 8 of CRAFT, sister publication to MAKE, is on stands now. Here's the teaser video.

Inertia-Labs makes these cool little surveyor robot kits. The BP Explorer site in Australia built a miniature city and populated it with five surveyor bots you can control over the Web. BP Explorer

Thanks in advance for the nightmare, Kitschy Kitschy Coo.

Not as crazy as the pulp treatment for Orwell's 1984 that Cory found, this silly cover for Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is still worth a gander.

Brave New World pulp exploitation paperback (via Hang Fire Books)

Bernann McKinney from California paid a South Korea cloning lab £25,000 to make a duplicate her dear departed pitbull Booger from a piece of the dog's ear tissue. When the story hit the news with photos of McKinney, many people in the UK said Bernann McKinney looks an awful lot like an infamous fugitive named Joyce McKinney who has been on the lam for 30 years.

In 1978, Joyce McKinney jumped bail and disappeared after being charged with kidnapping a 17-stone male Mormon missionary, whom she had chained to a Devon cottage bed with mink handcuffs and forced to have sex.

At the time, she famously said of her victim: 'I loved him so much that I would ski naked down Mount Everest with a carnation up my nose if he asked me to.'

Were these two blonde, American, dog-loving and, yes, quite possibly barking mad, Miss McKinneys one and the same person?

A cloned dog, a Mormon in mink-lined handcuffs and a tantalising mystery (Daily Mail)

In today's edition of the journal Science, R. Graham Cooks, a professor of chemistry at Purdue University, describes a mass spectrometry technique that to test fingerprints to learn what the person has been touching, including drugs, explosives, and poisons.

Because the spatial resolution is on the order of the width of a human hair, the Desi technique did not just detect the presence of, for instance, cocaine on the surface, but literally showed a pattern of cocaine in the shape of the fingerprint, leaving no doubt who had left the cocaine behind.

Fingerprint test tells much more than identity (IHT)

My friend Joe Hutsko contacted with the intriguing offer to serialize his novel, The Deal, on Boing Boing. I jumped at the chance. I read The Deal when it first came out in 1999 and loved the thrilling story about a Apple-like company's undertaking to create an iPhone-like device.

Here's a link to Chapter 10 as a PDF or a text file. (Here's chapter 1 and an introduction to the book, and here are the previous chapters)

To buy a paperback copy of the book, visit JOEyGADGET or purchase directly from Amazon.

The California State Supreme Court has ruled that non-compete clauses in employment contracts are not enforceable in California. I'm reminded of the study from the Duke Center for the Public Domain that concluded that the reason that the tech corridor on Route 128 near Boston had grown so much more slowly than Silicon Valley was that Massachusetts has enforceable non-competes, while California does not. The researcher concluded that in California, the best talent moved to the best companies, while on Route 128, crummy companies could lock up great people for years at a time through non-compete agreements.

Note that none of this invalidates confidentiality agreements -- you're still not allowed to disclose secrets -- but you're allowed to work for whomever will hire you, without the cold dead hand of your last boss tugging on your belt.

Californians have the right to move from one company to another or start their own business and can't be prohibited by their employer from working for a competitor in their next job, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

In a unanimous decision, the justices said state law since 1872 has forbidden what are called noncompete clauses that restrict management employees' options after they leave a company.

State Supreme Court rejects noncompete clauses (via /.)

At this year's HOPE hackercon in NYC, participants were asked to wear RFID-enabled badges that followed them around and spied on them as part of the Attendee Meta-Data (AMD) project. Now the project has released the data it gathered, as well as the sourcecode for the devices and their readers.

The AMD social networking site lets visitors "tag" themselves based on a diverse set of interests. Old-school hackers, network security experts, cryptographers, political activists, law geeks, lockpickers, reverse engineers, bloggers, privacy advocates, and far more—visitors can label themselves with multiple interests, to become discoverable by fellow visitors from around the world with similar interests, in the same room or across the building. Attendees can then use email or text messages to "ping" the people they discover on the site—new contacts and old friends alike.

The AMD Project (Thanks, Aestetix!)

See also: RFID badges at HOPE hackercon form automatic social nets and irony

On Salon, Andrew Leonard ruminates on a new paper that tries to analyze gold farming (doing repetitive in-game tasks to earn money that is sold to players) with international development. Richard Heeks's (University of Manchester) new paper "Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold Farming": Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games" is the first paper to explore gold farming from a development perspective, and as the title suggests, it is mostly a literature review and an attempt to define the areas for future research on the topic.

This was a pure-gold find for me, as I'm working on a young adult novel called For the Win that expands my story Anda's Game (about union organizers who sign up gold farmers in the developing world), and I've been reading everything I can get my hands on about gold farming. Heeks's paper is absolutely enthralling (for me, at least), a very broad and thorough survey of what we know, what we think we know and what we definitely don't know about gold farming -- it was even worth putting up with the world's least readable typeface (though it gave me a splitting headache). (Coincidentally, Andrew Leonard is the Salon editor who bought and published Anda's Game in the first place).

Continuing survival of the sub-sector also relies on overcoming some severe information failures – absence, uncertainty, asymmetry, and communication problems. These have produced many examples of both opportunism and adverse selection, with trading bringing uncertainty, risk and negative consequences. As expected, these seem likely to have suppressed real-money trading well below its "natural" level, and to have induced sellers into (potentially-hollow) assertions about their trustworthiness. Because of its virtuality, though, real-money trading has seen only a little of the localisation and intermediation one might otherwise expect in the presence of such information failures.

Thirdly, continuing survival of gold farming relies on dealing with the many threats it faces. Some of these are business-generic such as ease of entry intensifying competition, or rising labour costs. Others are business-specific but just a low-level nuisance such as character killing or account and IP banning or fraud. Others still – patching, game redesign and marketing channel blocks – require constant innovation to stay one step ahead. And a final category is much more serious such as game company substitution or legal action by governments or game companies. Game companies probably take such action through a mix of economic, moral and personal in-game experience rationales. But one must recognise that gold farming bringsa benefits to these companies, while action against gold farming brings both anticipated and perhaps unanticipated costs.

World of development economics Warcraft, Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on "Gold Farming": Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games (PDF) (Thanks, Patrick!)

In this final installment of our TCHO Chocolate trilogy, Xeni and Pesco go on a magical mystery taste test tour -- think Willy Wonka meets The Trip. Former NASA software developer Timothy Childs founded the tech-minded chocolate company, and was joined by WIRED co-founder Louis Rosetto.

In previous BBtv episodes we learned about the hacked-together, home-tinkered machines and high-tech wizardry that keep their factory humming.

Today we dive in to the genetics of chocolate plants, and the hedonics -- the tasting experience -- of the finished product, where science meets sensuality meets sugar.

Oh hell, who are we kidding, you guys? We sat around and GOT HIGH on neuroactive cocoa alkaloids. We freebased theobromine and we LIKED IT. We liked it a LOT.Warning: this episode is NSFC (not safe for chocoholics).

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Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with viewer discussion, downloadable video, and podcast subscribe instructions.

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Previously on Boing Boing tv:
* TCHO, part 1: chocolate origins.
* TCHO, part 2: magical machines, mysterious molecules.

Related: read a feature about TCHO by David Pescovitz in the current issue of MAKE Magazine, Timothy and the Chocolate Factory.

Here are some iPhone snapshots from Xeni on Flickr: TCHO, Boing Boing tv.

(Special thanks to Amy Critchett, and Wayne & Breanna)

A study by Dr. Steven Schrader of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Cincinnati and others concluded that the "nose" of a bicycle seat was implicated in "penile numbness" and erectile dysfunction in bicycle cops. It's been a decade since I was a regular cyclist, but I'm here to tell you that the "perineal discomfort" of a bike seat was no fun at all.

“For the first time, we have a prospective study of healthy policemen riding bikes on the job, using wider, no-nose bike saddles for 6 months. Not only did their sensation improve, their erectile function also improved. Changing saddles changed physiology. This is a landmark study for our field that that is important for future riders, and modification of lifestyle showing improvement without any active treatment.”

No-nose Bicycle Saddles Improve Penile Sensation And Erectile Function In Bicycling Police Officers

Danny O'Brien's new essay "Copyright, Fraud and Window Taxes (No, not that Windows)" makes a really good point about the way that people view copying on the Internet: copying is a ho-hum, every day thing (after all, in order for you to read these words, they had to be copied dozens, if not hundreds, of times) but "passing off" (plagiarism, fraud) is more frowned-upon than ever.

Copying is important in the process of creative remuneration, I feel, because it used to be an excellent tapping point from which to extract value and distribute it back to the creator. Copying cost money, and the only reason you'd do it would be to sell the produced copy for cash. Therefore, it was a perfect statutory location to place a money-pipe back to the artist. Matters blurred when radio broadcasts and performance rights came along, but fortunately the term "copying" could still be stretched to cover these events without anyone feeling too uncomfortable. It always took money and effort to make a copy: costs that you'd almost always only pursue for commercial gain.

In a digital world, many people don't see the act of copying as a particularly momentous or profitable event. Copying isn't what we do as an act of purchasing; copying is a thing we do to our valuable artifacts. People are scandalised when its suggested that you should pay for a copy copied to backup drives, or iPods; they're amazed when vested interests demand that cached copies or transitory files should count as extra purchases. Copying is no longer a good proxy for incoming revenue; which means it is no longer a good place to extract remuneration...

Nowadays, copying isn't always the core part of remunerative creative business. But accurate accreditation very much is.

I'm reminded of the fact that the original Creative Commons license allowed creators to choose whether they wanted their works attributed to them or not, but after a year or two, it was discovered that nearly every CC user turned the attribution switch on while generating the license -- everyone wanted correct attribution, even when they were giving away free copies. Copyright, Fraud and Window Taxes (No, not that Windows)

The Stonehenge Robotic Clock from Norris Labs is a robot arm that tells time by plucking numbered cards from an array around its body, setting them down in front of itself, waiting, then doing it again with fresh cards. Depending on the time-change, it can take more than a minute to advance by one minute -- the robot knows this, so it skips those minutes and jumps straight to the next one, timing its motions to finish the advance right on the dot. Stonehenge - A Robotic Digital Clock (via Make)

The Fright Catalog's Dead Fred runs on two 12V battery and sports four separate motors that allow it to sense passers-by, rise up out of the earth and chase them, howling and growling and dragging its entrails behind it. It's $2650, so it's a little pricey for Hallowe'en, but that sum does compare favorably with the total cost of ownership for a pet dog or cat, so when the kids start complaining that they need a companion who'll follow them around and do tricks, this might be a good choice. Dead Fred Zombie Chaser (via DVice)

Julianna Parr's first gallery show opened yesterday at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center's Advocate and Gochis Gallery. Parr's show is a collection of over 1400 postcards that she has painted/drawn/illustrated/scribbled over the last 10 years. Her subject matter from robots to loss to portraits to popemobiles. Timestamp: A Diary in Postcards (Thanks, Cristin!)

Marque's kinetic steampunk sculptures, built from junk, are very striking -- I'm really fond of "self-portrait," the first piece in the video. Marque made 'em 1993-1996, and he says, "Back then, I was calling it 'Victorian ParaTechnology'. The moniker of Steampunk flows so much better." Early Steampunk Kinetic Sculptures 1993-96 (Thanks, Marque!)

Our fearless band manager John Battelle is the co-host, along with Tim O'Reilly, of the Web 2.0 Summit, a huge confab where Internet heavyweights talk big vision. Combined, John and Tim know everyone on the Internet (and their brothers) and so they always line up great talkers. They've just announced the speaker list for this year's Web 2.0, to be held November 5-7 in San Francisco. It's no "insider baseball" Internet conference. Indeed, the big thematic question of Web 2.0 2008 is: "How can we apply the lessons of the Web to the world at large?" Folks like Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Saul Griffith, Elon Musk, and Michael Pollan will attempt to provide some answers. From Battelle's post on Searchblog:

As we convene the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, our world is fraught with problems that engineers might charitably classify as NP hard—from roiling financial markets to global warming, failing healthcare systems to intractable religious wars. In short, it seems as if many of our most complex systems are reaching their limits.

It strikes us that the Web might teach us new ways to address these limits. From harnessing collective intelligence to a bias toward open systems, the Web's greatest inventions are, at their core, social movements. To that end, we're expanding our program this year to include leaders in the fields of healthcare, genetics, finance, global business, and yes, even politics.

Increasingly, the leaders of the Internet economy are turning their attention to the world outside our industry. And conversely, the best minds of our generation are turning to the Web for solutions. At the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, we'll endeavor to bring these groups together.

Speakers: Web 2.0 Summit 2008 (O'Reilly Media), "Al Gore Joins the Lineup at Web 2.0" (John Battelle's Searchblog)

This handsome, expensive table has solar top that tilts up so you can charge its built-in batteries.

Place SunTable in a sunny outdoor location and it automatically stores backup energy. Get hours of power for laptops, cellphones, lights, radios, water purifiers, and more. Perfect for entertainment and vital during electrical blackouts.

The SunTable is designed for ease of use and weather-resistance. The solar cells charge the battery even when partially covered. A charged battery provides more than 4 hours of laptop use.

The teak frame and edging are low-maintenance and moisture-resistant. The stainless steel legs are resistant to weather. All the outer electronics are designed for outdoor use. Stainless leveling feet ensure an even tabletop surface. Zero moving parts. Hose down to clean.

The voltage meter displays the voltage of the battery, and the hour meter displays the total hours the table has been on. Its electrical output is 12 volts DC, like a car. With the included inverter, you have a regular wall outlet.

Sun Table: $2200.00

The blog "I'm Learning to Share!" asks, "How many things can you find wrong with this old magazine ad?"

"You're a Bad Mommy!" 1941 Fletcher's Castoria magazine advertisement

The GoateeSaver protects your beard as you shave.

You just chomp on this bit and then you can shave around it for perfect results every time. And you adjust three rollers's width, flawlessly conforming to your face, and also to your notion of what a real goatee looks like.

As soon as someone comes up with a PonytailSaver and SideburnSaver, the Blackwater/DEA hipster will have all his grooming accessory needs filled.

GoateeSaver (LikeCool)

I enjoyed this video of a youngster climbing through the prize-dispenser chute of one of those ripoff claw games. (via haha.nu)

Instructables user Gmjhowe created this "Steampunk Dystopian Sniper Rifle " prop, which "fires a compressed sliver of frozen mercury at ultrahigh velocity" (this last part is imaginary). The process of building it is well-documented, and the result is fab.

I decided to make it recognizably steampunk, while staying true to my own style.

Ive used a lot of metal, and a lot of card. and a lot of other stuff, so much inf act that there is no point me creating a list of items. The main barrel is made from metal, and the handle and stock is mostly card, dense card with a layer of corrugated.

Ok, this is about 5 weeks of work, off and on, i will try my best to explain, but its pretty length, so im gonna try and keep it short and sweet.

Steampunk Dystopian Sniper Rifle (Mercury Bow)

The headline says it all, doesn't it?

A Chicago Police officer has been suspended and ordered into counseling after she was found guilty of demanding free Starbucks coffee from five different stores on the North Side from 2001 to 2004, sometimes flashing her badge, displaying her gun and screaming at employees.

Officer Barbara Nevers of the Belmont police district was suspended for more than 15 months, according to records the Chicago Police Board released today.

Cop demands free coffee, but not at this Starbucks (via Starbucks Gossip)

Siva Vaidhyanathan's book The Anarchist in the Library identifies a theory implicit in much of the copyright wars called, "If value, then right." It holds that if something has some value, then the person who made it has a right to be compensated for using that value.

For example, your DVDs have value as discs you put in a player, which you pay for when you buy them at a store. But when you rip the disc and put it on a portable player, then you realize some new value. According to "if value, then right," the studio that made the DVD has the right to be compensated for that new value. Otherwise, you're stealing.

Exploring this idea, David "Everything is Miscellaneous" Weinberger has compiled a list of "20 things I’ve stolen" according to the "If value, then right" theory.

1. I took an extra napkin from a Taco Bell for unspecified use “later.”
2. I sat on a bench on a hot day, enjoying the breeze as the man next to me fanned himself.
3. I read the headlines of a newspaper that was for sale in a kiosk box.
4. I divided a single-serving DingDong in two, and had it for dessert on two consecutive days.
5. I listened all the way through to a Metallica song emanating from my neighbor’s radio, but closed my window when the commercial came on.
6. I remembered the movie times in my newspaper from the day before so I wouldn’t have to buy a copy of the paper today.
7. When a friend’s cat chose my lap to sit in, I petted it, precisely to discourage it from moving to the lap of its rightful owner.
8. I said “What a long, strange trip it’s been” without air quotes.
9. On the Amtrak “quiet car,” I listened to a man in the seat ahead of me explaining to the bored woman next to him how he gets such a great shine on his shoes. I have since used his technique, successfully.
10. I have stared carefully at reproductions of great paintings.

20 things I’ve stolen

Worldchanging's Morgan Greenseth has a nice piece up on the future of malls in America -- as many malls and mall-chains fail, they open up lots of possibilities for urban renewal, a fact that has been noticed by the New Urbanist movement, who are busily cooking up plans for turning dead malls into town squares.

As malls across the country start to fade into obsolescence, what is to become of these massive structures? After spending some time searching out the most creative alternatives to abandonment and massive landfilling of these former monuments to chain-store consumerism, I've found that the future of shopping malls is hopeful and creative:

The Factoria Mall in Bellevue is currently losing many stores, but redevelopment will begin soon in the hopes of creating a more useful, long-term multipurpose community space. The new Marketplace @ Factoria will still house retailers, but the redesign will add pedestrian walkways, outdoor dining, and even residential units.

The Future of Shopping Malls: An Image Essay

(Image: Brian Lutz)

Our pals at Pressure Printing and Hi-Fructose Magazine teamed up to produce this incredible Travis Louie fine art print, titled "Bride of Stan." It's an intaglio print encased in a hand-cast resin frame with dome glass. As always with Pressure Printing, the attention to detail in the production process is incredible. The edition is limited to 50. Each one is signed, numbered, and sells for $350.
Travis Louie: Bride of Stan (Pressure Printing), How to order Bride of Stan (Hi-Fructose)

UPDATE: Pressure Printing proprietor Brad Keech just informed me that the amazing frame was cast from an early 1900s original frame. Wow. They sure don't make frames like that anymore. Well, not usually anyway.

Now for sale on eBay, lifelike (deathlike?) latex replicas of the Montauk Monster, the mysterious beast that has captured the hearts of millions. Loren Coleman has the details over at Cryptomundo. Montauk Monster replica (Cryptomundo)

• Gakwer reports on "monster" washed ashore
• More on the Montauk Monster

BBtv guest correspondent and blog pal Todd Lappin of Telstar Logistics takes us inside a steam-powered World War II "Liberty Ship," the SS Jeremiah O'Brien.

We marvel (!) at the cool old retro-technology that kept this behemoth boat running to and from the beaches of Normandy, and we meet the volunteer caretakers -- obsessive nerds just like us, only with white hair! -- who keep her ship-shape today. Did you know that shipyards in the San Francisco Bay Area once churned out Liberty Ships like this in 4 days or less, during the heat of the war? Watch and learn, li'l skippers.

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Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with discussion, downloadable video, and podcast subscribe instructions.

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Todd has a rockin' photoset of images from the ship, too.

Shot for BBtv by Eddie Codel, during the Long Now Foundation's Mechanicrawl.

Danny sez,

Cheye Calvo, mayor of DC suburb Berwyn Heights, was raided by a SWAT team after 30lbs of marijuana was delivered to his home. They broke down his door, shot his two black labradors, and interrogated him and his wife as their dogs bled to death.

Turns out Calvo says he had no idea about the package, which was still outside, unopened and perhaps waiting for its real recipient to pick it up. Police say they still had sufficient cause to break in (even though they did not have a "no-knock warrant").

Another Police Raid; More Dead Dogs (Thanks, Danny!)

Last spring I sat down for an interview with Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune to talk about Little Brother, copyright, civil liberties, blogging and pretty much everything else. We covered some different territory to the usual interview and it turned out well (I think!).

There’s this broad consensus that the Virginia Tech murders had something to do with violent video games. When you actually read the coroner's inquest report, video games are mentioned twice. The first is his mother saying he never wanted to play those video games. The second is his roommate saying, "We always thought he was weird because he never wanted to play video games." Yet it’s still a truism that violent video games must be responsible for Virginia Tech.

We have the capacity to surveil and control adolescents ion a way we’ve never done before. We chase them indoors and then we tell them that all the virtual places they might gather, we need to surveil them because of the ever-present threat of pedophiles and because of the ever-present need to market to them. We've really hemmed in adolescence in a way we never have before.

Link

David from Wondermark sez, "I thought you guys would appreciate this retro-futuristic poster I designed! It was painted by Carly Monardo, whom you might know from her work on the webcomic Dr. McNinja -- she dug into old Popular Science covers to really get the proper retro feel. " Futurism Print [preorder] (Thanks, David!)

The HP Lovecraft Historical Society has an amazing and extensive collection of Lovecraft-inspired fonts for use in your Cthulhoid cosplay, larp and role-playing adventures. HPLHS Prop Fonts (via Beyond the Beyond)

A tinsy little virus called "Sputnik" with only 21 genes preys on larger, more developed viruses, infecting them and hijacking their resources to reproduce and spread:

With just 21 genes, Sputnik is tiny compared with its mama — but insidious. When the giant mamavirus infects an amoeba, it uses its large array of genes to build a ‘viral factory’, a hub where new viral particles are made. Sputnik infects this viral factory and seems to hijack its machinery in order to replicate. The team found that cells co-infected with Sputnik produce fewer and often deformed mamavirus particles, making the virus less infective. This suggests that Sputnik is effectively a viral parasite that sickens its host — seemingly the first such example.

The team suggests that Sputnik is a ‘virophage’, much like the bacteriophage viruses that infect and sicken bacteria. “It infects this factory like a phage infects a bacterium,” Koonin says. “It’s doing what every parasite can — exploiting its host for its own replication.”

'Virophage' suggests viruses are alive (via /.)

Jwilly's "Rich People Rooftops NYC" Flickr set collects images of posh, elaborate rooftop gardens over the penthouses of New York. Rich People Rooftops NYC (via Kottke)

The Mario Scarf Blog document's Cassie's "extreme-geek knitting" project: to knit a long strip of cloth that depicts the entire first level of Super Mario Brothers. This is the utter apotheosis of geek crossover passtimes. The Mario Scarf (via Craft)