I know nothing about this R2D2 cooler-mod, except that it seems to consist of 8 retro game consoles shoehorned in glorious higgeldy-piggeldy into R2, with a projector.
Gabe sez, "ASCIIpOrtal uses portals (in the style of Valve software's game) in a 2D ASCII-character setting. An early video was featured on BB a few months ago. And now, it's been released. I've done a big 2 part interview with the creator, where he discusses bug-finding, "trumpet voiced" sarcastic computers, and the possibility of a user-voted system for finding cool homemade maps."
What was the most difficult thing to get right?
I've never made a game like this, so every step had its own challenges. I spent so long thinking about things before I even wrote 1 line of code.. that the "getting it right" was done before I started. I think the hardest part, was making a whole framework... so I could add a new thing to the game without having to rewrite everything. I had to rewrite the main movement algorithms twice and I still don't think I have it's right.
Matt Jones, creator of many useful ideas including warchalking, has a wonderfully titled and fascinating essay up on IO9: "The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future," that examines the futures of cities that respond in realtime to their inhabitants.
Which leads me back to science-fiction. Warren Ellis created a character called Jack Hawksmoor in his superhero comic series The Authority.
The surname is a nice nod toward psychogeography and city-fans: Hawksmoor was an architect and progeny of Sir Christopher Wren, fictionalised into a murderous semi-mystical figure who shaped the city into a giant magical apparatus by Peter Ackroyd in an eponymous novel.
Ellis' Hawksmoor, however, was abducted multiple times, seemingly by aliens, and surgically adapted to be ultimately suited to live in cities - they speak to him and he gains nourishment from them. If you'll excuse the spoiler, the zenith of Hawksmoor's adventures with cities come when he finds the purpose behind the modifications - he was not altered by aliens but by future humans in order to defend the early 21st century against a time-travelling 73rd century Cleveland gone berserk. Hawksmoor defeats the giant, monstrous sentient city by wrapping himself in Tokyo to form a massive concrete battlesuit.
Do you use Twitter? Now you can use it to suggest links! All you need to do is follow BBSuggest and start tweeting @ it.
For example, if you're an amateur astronomer and spot a report concerning Earth's impending destruction at the hands of a planet-destroying robot the size of the moon, tweet "Unicorn chaser! [link here] @bbsuggest" -- easy! Your contributions will head into our bloggin' brains -- and then into the collective superconscioussness of the Boing Boing trend tracker, an info-dense visualization of the topics and trends hit up by BB readers.
Many thanks to Palm, which is sponsoring the tracker, as you'll doubtless notice when you visit it.
The Smithsonian Institution has an online collection of seed catalog art. If King Corn ever runs for president, I'll vote for him, because his crown is cool.
(Via City Farmer)
[W]e installed a photography studio on a random subway car. We claimed that the MTA had hired us to take photos of every single person who rides the subway and that we'd be producing a yearbook at the end of the year. Most people were happy to pose for us, and the resulting photos show just how diverse New York subway riders can be.
Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds writes: "This South African commercial from Allan Gray Investment, with creative by the King James agency, is really a showstopper.
What if James Dean had lived?
Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.
I'm on the bill tonight (along with wino Kathryn Borel Jr. and others) at HEEB Magazine's Toronto installment of their popular Storytelling event. It's at the Drake- come check it out!
Boing Boing Video presents a remix of "Synesthesia," a documentary directed by Jonathan Fowler, about people whose senses blend, or mix. For instance: a synesthete might see colors when listening to music, or taste flavors when hearing a spoken word.
Synesthesia was once thought of as a disease or disorder, but many who experience this alternate form of perception think of their anomaly as an advantage -- or, for them, simply what is normal. In this piece, Dr. David Eagleman of the Baylor College of Medicine explains this condition, and four synesthetes explain how they perceive the world.
Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.
PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, is an online marketplace connecting radio producers with radio programmers. But it's also a massive library of searchable content- some of it very good- that you can get lost in for hours.
You'll need an account to listen, but sign-up is free. Go nuts! (link)
Some friends of mine who were working at a call center at the Minnesota Dept. of Human Services told me they were working on a "throwback" system that hasn't really been overhauled for a few years.
Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest bloggger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.
Yesterday I posted the prelude to 500 Pound Planet, the cartoon I spent a few years making with my buddy Josh Dolgin when I was younger. Here's chapter one, wherein we meet our "heroes", Spencer and Blue, voiced by me and Josh.
Josh and I were your typical college film geeks at the time; we had just been exposed to Italian Neo-Realist cinema, Film Noir, Cassavetes- all that stuff. But we were also comic book/animation geeks.
We were curious about how much of these styles and techniques could be applied to animation. We came up with rigid "naturalist" rules for 500 Pound Planet: all music had to come from actual sources in the scene. Characters would talk like normal people talk- stepping over each other, mumbling... The camera would be a fly on the wall, intruding as little as possible. We played with Orson Welles' "deep focus" technique. In our minds we were visionaries, auteurs, pioneers! In reality, we were pretentious nerds.
Jérémie Zimmermann from the French digital liberties org La Quadrature du Net sez,
The French Parliament has adopted HADOPI 2, a law aimed at establishing a so-called "three-strikes" policy in order to fight file-sharing. The Constitutional Council made groundbreaking decision on June 10th 2009 that recognized access to the Internet as essential to the full exercise of free speech, and invalidated the sanctioning power of HADOPI 1. The law HADOPI 2, despite the internet cutoff now being handled in an expedient form of judicial justice, it is as flawed and dangerous as its predecessor, for it was only designed to circumvent the Constitutional Council's decision. The war on sharing continues its way as HADOPI 2 will go through the constitutional test again. ***
After an expedient democratic debate, in which valid alternatives to the war on sharing and possible futures for the cultural economy were systematically ignored by the bill's proponents, the "three strikes" policy might become law. It has already been a long process, after the Members of the European Parliament expressed on three occasions their strong criticisms of the French government's plan. After a first rejection of the law and a second vote in France, the Constitutional Council eventually followed the European Parliament in stating that Internet has become a vital component of the freedom of expression and communication, thus invalidating punitive provisions of the HADOPI 1 law.
Yet, this new law is still as dangerous and flawed as the previous one. First of all, HADOPI 2 fails to guarantee the right to a due process. Instead of giving sanction powers to an executive agency, as HADOPI 1 did, it makes possible to judge copyright infringements and order Internet cutoff through a "simplified judicial procedure". This procedure does not include any contradictory debate or public hearing, and all kind of prior judicial investigation will be left out. Moreover, the Internet cutoff can be ordered as a complement for a standard fine for "negligence" in securing one's Internet access.
Second, alleged infringers would still be convicted on the sole basis of IP addresses that cannot be considered as valid evidence, and which are collected by private actors. And since one has no material way of opposing the validity of these "evidences", this new version of the graduated response still clearly violates the presumption of innocence. It is now up to the Constitutional Council to examine the law, and draw the necessary conclusions.
I'm headed to Canada for some speaking gigs in the coming week, in PEI, Ottawa, and Waterloo:
Waterloo: Sat, Sept 26, 2:30-4PM, University of Waterloo, Arts Lecture Hall. Free, open to the public. Sponsored by the Independent Studies Programme, where I'm a Scholar in Virtual Residence.
Ottawa: Mon, Sept 28, 7PM, Ottawa Writer's Festival, Saint Brigid's Centre for the Arts and Humanities, 314 Saint Patrick Street (at the corner of Cumberland). $15/$10 Student or Senior (Free for Festival Members and Carleton Students)
Charlottetown, PEI: Tues, 30 Sept, Hackfest, $30 for conference registration.
Charlottetown, PEI: Wed, 1 Oct, 8:30-9:30AM, Access 2009, "Copyright vs Universal Access to All Human Knowledge and Groups Without Cost: The State of Play in the Global Copyfight"
I love coming home to Canada, and it's a delight to be getting out of the usual Toronto/Montreal/Vancouver rut. I'm looking forward to seeing you!
Bassam Tariq resides in New York City. He is the co-author of the blog 30 Mosques which celebrated the NYC mosques during the blessed Islamic month of Ramadan.
Bronx Princess follows a young girl from the Bronx, Rocky Otoo, as she leaves her mother to reunite with her chief father in Ghana. I saw the documentary last December at a small viewing and loved it! Musa Syeed and Yoni Brook, the co-directors of the film, have crafted a powerful and intimate story a young girl transitioning from high school to college all with the pressures of an immigrant family. The generational gap issues raised in this film are ones that many immigrant kids, like myself, can relate to. There is a trailer on their site, but it doesn't give justice to how good the movie really is. It's hot off the international film festival circuits and is having its nationwide premiere tonight on PBS at 10PM EST. Please catch it if you can.
Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast
This week on my podcast, Beijing journalist Jennifer Pak delivers a chilling report on China's Internet addiction "rehab" centers, where one youth was recently beaten to death. I also look at last week's 9/11 hoax in Germany and compare it to a media/web hoax I pulled 11 years ago, in which I convinced the local news that I had 6-month old babies around the world surfing the web. The question: is the press actually dumber about the Internet today then than it was back then?
Johannes writes in with the news of this year's sex/tech Arse Electronika conference in San Francisco:
We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. And that's why our annual conference Arse Elektronika deals with sex, technology and the future. As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough. "Bizarre enough for what?" -- you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century.
Don't you think, replicants?
SGI -- formerly the titanic Silicon Graphics company -- has released a "personal supercomputer" that can handle up to 80 cores and up to a terabyte of RAM. I used to do work for an SGI VAR and we had a running joke about the merged SGI-Cray unit shipping a water-cooled laptop. This isn't that far off.
Octane III is office-ready with a pedestal, one-by-two-foot form factor, whisper-quiet operations, easy-to-use features, low maintenance requirements and support for standard office power outlets. While a typical workstation has only eight cores and moderate memory capacity, the superior design of the Octane III permits up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly 1TB of memory for unparalleled performance...
Octane III is easily configurable with single- and dual-socket node choices, and offers a wide selection of performance, storage, graphics, GP-GPU and integrated networking options. Yielding the same leading power efficiencies inherent in all SGI Eco-Logical compute designs, Octane III supports the latest Intel processors to capitalize on greater levels of performance, flexibility and scalability.
Green tech writer for TreeHugger and Planet Green.
This week's most wonderful posts from Treehugger:
5 Places Riding Your Bike is Banned or Illegal (You'll Be Surprised)
So many places exist in the world where it is actually illegal to ride a bike. Perhaps the funniest example is Baldwin Park, California, where it is prohibited to ride a bike in a swimming poo. The saddest is the injunction against Saudi Arabian women bikers: read on for wild and crazy rules, keeping bikers from their bikes.
First Living Building Successfully 'Grown'
Living walls are great--they can reduce pollution, better insulate buildings, and lower the need for maintenance--but it's time to expand the concept. Introducing the 'living building', where trees are grown into the structure of a building and melded with cables and metal supports. Talk about 'green buildings!'
The NYC Resistor hackers have installed an MP3 player in a decommissioned training hand-grenade, because they could, and because it is the kind of deliciously bad idea that is hard to resist. Receipt of the grenade in its shipping box occasioned something of a stir at NYC Resistor, it appears.
There was much fear and freak out. But cooler heads prevailed and a phone call was made. "Hey Matt, did you order metal objects of a dubious nature?" "Yes, yes I did." There was a great deal of internal strife over this particular event as ordering munitions to the space is strictly forbidden. Upon review and discussion it was decided that while purchasing decommissioned training grenades was not in fact illegal in NYC (as far as we know), it was not something we would ever do again. That being said. I immediately set forth on a childhood dream project. I put an 1/8th inch jack into the pin hole for the gr3nade. It looked GOOD. Totally flush... very pretty. So I decided to run with it. I ran the cabling into the gr3nade... hacksawed it open. Inserted a Sansa 2 GB mp3 player. And then tried to SMD rework it. This ended poorly as the first sansa basically got burned by the rework station and died. The second I avoided using the rework station and instead recruited bre and his arms for a session of intense soldering onto very tiny solder points.
Etsy seller Curious Goods Curios has a nice wrinkle on the now-traditional steampunk clockwork ring; these ones spin around and around. I'd buy one, but there's no UK shipping.
Princeton's CU Boulder's Paul Ohm writes about Netflix's insane new plan to release millions of customers' personal information -- ZIP code, gender, year of birth -- as a sequel to its Netflix Challenge. Latanya Sweeney's famous study on de-anonymizing data has shown that date (not just year) of birth, gender and ZIP are sufficient to personally identify 87% of Americans. In other words, Netflix is about to put the behavioral data about viewing choices for millions of Americans into the public domain, despite its legal duty to keep this information private.
Because of this, if it releases the data, Netflix might be breaking the law. The Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), 18 USC 2710 prohibits a "video tape service provider" (a broadly defined term) from revealing "personally identifiable information" about its customers. Aggrieved customers can sue providers under the VPPA and courts can order "not less than $2500" in damages for each violation. If somebody brings a class action lawsuit under this statute, Netflix might face millions of dollars in damages.
Additionally, the FTC might also decide to fine Netflix for violating its privacy policy as an unfair business practice.
Either a lawsuit under the VPPA or an FTC investigation would turn, in large part, on one sentence in Netflix's privacy policy: "We may also disclose and otherwise use, on an anonymous basis, movie ratings, consumption habits, commentary, reviews and other non-personal information about customers." If sued or investigated, Netflix will surely argue that its acts are immunized by the policy, because the data is disclosed "on an anonymous basis." While this argument might have carried the day in 2006, before Narayanan and Shmatikov conducted their study, the argument is much weaker in 2009, now that Netflix has many reasons to know better, including in part, my paper and the publicity surrounding it. A weak argument is made even weaker if Netflix includes the kind of data--ZIP code, age, and gender--that we have known for over a decade fails to anonymize.
Octane III is office-ready with a pedestal, one-by-two-foot form factor, whisper-quiet operations, easy-to-use features, low maintenance requirements and support for standard office power outlets. While a typical workstation has only eight cores and moderate memory capacity, the superior design of the Octane III permits up to 80 high-performance cores and nearly 1TB of memory for unparalleled performance...
