Tony sez, "Attached is a stop-motion video my filmmaker friend Justin Grizzoffi and I made a couple of years ago. It was super easy to make - we simply edited together a couple hundred still photos of Post-Its stuck to a wall and scored it using samples from an old Casio SK1 keyboard."

Post-It Note Atari (Thanks, Tony!)

Ravensblight has a great collection of free spooky papercraft models, just in time for Hallowe'en.

free Human Skull paper model (via Paper Forest)

Wonder what healthy baby-poo looks like? Wonder no more: here's a gallery of normal, healthy steaming baby excreta:

This photo guide to baby poop will give you a good idea of what's normal and what's not as your newborn grows, drinks breast milk or formula, and starts eating solids. You'll find out when not to worry and when it's wise to be concerned.

As a general rule, if you see anything completely out of the ordinary in your baby's diaper, play it safe and call the doctor.

Fair warning: These are pictures of real baby poop! Please view only if you're comfortable with that. If not, you can read this description without photos instead.

Baby poop: A visual guide (via Neatorama)

(Image: Diaper pail, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Ingamun's photostream)

Bre sez, "Fynflood used his MakerBot [ed: 3D printer] to create a ring and then proposed with it! She said yes!"

The ring I printed, and then used to propose to my girlfriend.

I printed it with black ABS, and then printed a small white cube and set it with some magic glue eagleapex left at Hive.

I drew the 2d shape in gimp, then had a friend render it in 3d using sketchup (I fail at 3D). I made some adjustments using Blender for the final print.

She said yes! Now to get our MakerBot to print with white gold.

MakerBot LOVE (Thanks, Bre!)

Rina writes,

Saturday is Litquake Day! And we have a very special reading for you.

Color Me SF: The Science Fiction Worlds of Octavia Butler and Carl Brandon

Our guests reading will be Jewelle Gomez & Claire Light. There will also be discussion on Butler and Brandon,and Q & A moderated by Terry Bisson. We will be charging $5 at the door, with all of the money going to the Octavia Butler Scholarship. Bar proceeds for the night will also go to the Scholarship. Tips, as usual, will go to Variety Children's Charity of Northern California.

At The Variety Preview Room, The Hobart Bldg., 582 Market St. @ Montgomery, 1st floor of The Hobart Bldg. Entrance is between Quiznos and Citibank
Doors Open 6:00pm
Readings start 7:00pm
Seating is limited; first come first seated; we will have the event miked so that you can hang in the lounge and listen.

Saturday is Litquake Day

A reader writes, "Disney's Imagineers realize that the eyes convey emotions and a two-foot eye prototype showcases the newest concept for animatronic models."

Imagineers realize that the eyes convey emotions and a two-foot eye prototype showcases our newest concept. It's a new type of mechanism that uses electromagnets to create realistic eye motions. There is only a single moving part -- the eye itself -- and no wear points. That means faster, more realistic movement and longer life.

As Disney Parks continues to experiment and innovate, as with our newest Autonomatronics technology, we'll certainly be talking about it on this blog. Stay tuned.

Hands, Eyes Convey Emotions For Disney's Audio-Animatronics Technology

Joe sez, "My friend Julia is a choreographer who is doing some really interesting work looking at how sampling and fair use questions apply to the world of dance. This link is an artist's statement on an upcoming show, Punk Yankees:

I had the good fortune of receiving a choreographic fellowship from the Maggie Alessee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) to support the research and initial development of Punk Yankees, which is the title of our anniversary concert. While at MANCC, I began working with the ensemble to address my research questions: What defines "fair use" in dance? Is it permissible to "borrow" choreographic devices if the movement is reinvented? If the dancers can't execute the movement in the way it was originally intended, is there something interesting about that failure? If someone "stylistically" references a choreographer, should it be acknowledged as a derivative work, or is it what naturally occurs through dance education and lineage? Ultimately what we created was a work-in-progress that experimented with meta-theatrical devices and formal conventions to elucidate these provocative questions with transparency and humor.

The title Punk Yankees came from some research I was doing online about piracy and art. Matt Mason, author of the book The Pirate's Dilemma, talks about the fact that piracy and appropriation (in the sense of intellectual property) has historically been linked to the creation of new markets, which he calls a form of "punk" capitalism. He also traces the word "Yankee" to an old Dutch slang word "Janke," meaning pirate. Ironically, Matt Mason was recently a keynote speaker at Dance/USA's Annual Conference in Houston, TX (June 3-6), in the session "Fair Use and Piracy: How They Each Support a Sustainable Dance Field."

How do appropriation and copyright inform your work?

Steal this Dance

Warren Ellis has put an open call out to Whitechapel readers who have Etsy stores for their crafts to pimp their offerings for early Xmas shopping. So far, we've got wool candy, steampunk jewellery, surreal paintings, paintings of demon cats, handmade jewellery, custom toys, fashion, goggles, felted dissected animals, hand-dyed wool, chainmail, etc etc. Instant clicktrance!

Warren's Pub Table: [Sticky] Etsy People Stand Up (late 2009)

(Image: Knitted Fetal Pig Biology Project)

Spotted in the wild by the inestimable Fipi Lele, a modded US dollar bill with extra juvenile hilarity. I've seen lots of variations on this theme, but these two gags are new to me.

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Oh, the unfortunate irony. The annotations on this Google Map are all in Chinese, so it's of little utility for a non-Chinese-speaker like myself -- but it's the most extensive such documentation I've seen about the jail locations of persons in China imprisoned for online dissidence. (via @rmack)

German expressionism meets film noir meets Saturday morning cartoon funnies. Quickdraw Noir. "The rare noir episode of Quickdraw McGraw that featured Peter Lorre. With music by Andy Prieboy." Created by the great Merrill Markoe, who is perhaps best known as David Letterman's original head writer -- she won 5 Emmys for the show. She oughta get one for this, IMHO. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin)

The groovy video for this new track "Sunlamp Show" by The Aliens is Yellow Submarine-esque madness. A Scottish band, The Aliens feature Gordon Anderson, John Maclean, and Robin Jones, formerly of Beta Band. The Aliens' new album, Luna, was released in the US today by Birdman Records. The Aliens (Thanks, DKN!)

Jim Bumgardner has created a lovely sound project that brings to life the music of the spheres: "Wheel of Stars."

I downloaded public data from Hipparcos, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 1989 that accurately measured over a hundred thousand stars.

The data I downloaded contains position, parallax, magnitude, and color information, among other things.

Sean Bonner, upon whose blog I discovered this, says, "I highly recommend fullscreen and the use of headphones. Listening to this is hypnotic. I want it to play constantly in the background of my life."

(Update: From a French documentary film, says this 2004 snopes item.) This minute-and-a-half long YouTube video appears to show a mommy giving birth to her baby in a pool of water, while a curious dolphin swims and pokes around. What I don't know: Is this real life? Is it viral marketing? A film trailer? Fodder for some new furries fantasy site? Is the idea of a dolphin poking around the mom's ladyregions cute or disturbing? What does the infant think? How long can infants breathe underwater while connected via umbilical cord? Where did the video come from? Why can't I stop watching? Discuss. (via @tara, and others)

I sure like Booker White's slapping technique!

As a huge fan of FlowingData, NPR and electricity, I'm super excited about this interactive map that gives you a clear view of the structure of the U.S. power grid. Clicking through, you'll see how areas of the country currently are (and aren't) connected to one another, what's in the works to improve the system, and why that matters (a lot) when you start talking about alternative energy sources. Good stuff.

In this picture, you can see the yellow lines that really seem to do a good job of efficiently linking up the whole country. Those power lines haven't been built yet. In the interactive part, you can take those off, revealing a clearer view of our current transmission infrastructure that looks more like a series of occasionally connected river systems than a grid.

Bob Self of Baby Tattoo says:

A massive 6 x 3 foot drawing (that's 72 x 36 inches, woo!) that Gary Baseman created while visiting Chaing Mai, Thailand is being auctioned on eBay. All proceeds will go to Cultural Canvas Thailand, a Chiang Mai-based organization that uses visual arts, dance, music and drama to give a voice to struggling and marginalized social groups in the local community.

Giant-sized Gary Baseman drawing for charity

This flag, for the long-defunct Benin Empire, may just be the ne plus ultra of sigils. I think that when I am god-emperor of some distant land, I shall install it as my standard.

Flag of the Benin Empire (via Kottke)

NCBI ROFL spotted this 1994 scientific paper extract describing an Indian man in the UK who blamed his crimes on ghostly possession. When exorcisms failed, he was treated for paranoid schizophrenia. That apparently helped. From the abstract in the British Journal of Psychiatry:

Treatment commenced using trifluoperazine and clopenthixol. RESULTS. The patient underwent remission during neuroleptic treatment, despite previous evidence of genuine possession. CONCLUSIONS. Many cultures give rise to apparently genuine cases of ghost possession. Neuroleptics may relieve symptoms of exorcism-resistant possession.

"Exorcism-resistant ghost possession treated with clopenthixol." (Br J Psychiatry)

While searching for the whole paper, I found a great analysis of the case by Vaughan over at Mind Hacks.

Designer Stefan Ulrich has come up with what could be an early prototype of a real body pillow girlfriend. He calls it Funktionide, an "emotional robot" that changes form depending on how you hold it. Combined with advanced robotics, this could yield something that is soft, cuddly, humanoid, and capable of intelligent conversation. Yes, and it breathes. You can see a slightly intimate video of a guy and his Functionide above.

Funktionide by Stefan Ulrich

Say you're an average medieval Euro-Joe and you want to have sex with your wife. But first, you need to know, IS IT SINFUL? Digging through all those manuscripts of canon law can take forever (plus, as average medieval Euro-Joe, you can't read, anyway). Luckily, James A. Brundage has prepared a handy flow chart for sexual decision making the summarizes the medieval Christian church's take on when sex was OK (Think: In the dark, Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays only), and when you were totally going to go to hell.

Unfortunately, I'm not cool enough to figure out how to gank a picture from a Google Books page, so you'll have to follow this link to see the flow chart in all its glory.

Last month, Xeni blogged about the photoshop disaster that is this Ralph Lauren advertisement, in which a model's proportions appear to have been altered to give her an impossibly skinny body ("Dude, her head's bigger than her pelvis"). Naturally, Xeni reproduced the ad in question. This is classic fair use: a reproduction "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting," etc.

However, Ralph Lauren's marketing arm and its law firm don't see it that way. According to them, this is an "infringing image," and they thoughtfully took the time to send a DMCA takedown notice to our awesome ISP, Canada's Priority Colo. One of the things that makes Priority Colo so awesome is that they don't automatically act on DMCA takedowns. Instead, they pass them on to us and we talk about whether they pass the giggle-test.

This one doesn't.

So, instead of responding to their legal threat by suppressing our criticism of their marketing images, we're gonna mock them. Hence this post.

As Wendy Seltzer from the Chilling Effects project said, "Sounds like a pretty solid fair use case to me. If criticism diminishes its effectiveness, that's different from the market substitution copyright protects against. And I've rarely seen a thinner DMCA form-letter."

So, to Ralph Lauren, GreenbergTraurig, and PRL Holdings, Inc: sue and be damned. Copyright law doesn't give you the right to threaten your critics for pointing out the problems with your offerings. You should know better. And every time you threaten to sue us over stuff like this, we will:

a) Reproduce the original criticism, making damned sure that all our readers get a good, long look at it, and;

b) Publish your spurious legal threat along with copious mockery, so that it becomes highly ranked in search engines where other people you threaten can find it and take heart; and

c) Offer nourishing soup and sandwiches to your models.

Update: Looks like Photoshop Disaster's ISP caved to a similar notice.

DMCA Infringement Notification

Update:: Ralph Lauren accepts responsibility for the dodgy 'shop, but no word on its DMCA takedown.

Teen Brit ukulele sensation Rocky and Balls have a new song, called "Love Cake."

We love cakes. We love eating cakes and making cakes, so we wrote this song to sing whilst making said cakes.

Photo: Dagmara Nall

When Aleki Taumoepeau, a 42-year old ecologist, dropped his wedding ring in the murky waters of a New Zealand just months after he and his wife Rachel got hitched, he was determined to find it at all costs. Everyone — including Rachel — thought he was crazy. Quite miraculously, Aleki found the ring at the bottom of the sea a year and a half later. I got on the phone with Aleki recently to find out how he lost and found his wedding ring in the ocean. It's a story of love, faith, obsession, and GPS coordinates, and it starts in a beautiful harbor town on the southern tip of New Zealand's North Island.

The fine artisans at Pressure Printing have been busy, following up their stunning Ron English piece with this lovely intaglio fine art print from a drawing by Amsterdam-based painter Femke Hiemstra. Femke also has a new book out, Rock Candy, collecting her phantasmagorical fairy tails. Last year, my wife purchased a small Hiemstra original from Roq La Rue Gallery as a birthday gift for me and it brings me spooky joy every day. The new piece from Pressure Printing, in a signed/numbered edition of 100, is 8.75" x 12.75" and sells for $150. It's titled "Haniwa." The Pressure Printing blog has terrific photos of the drawing and printmaking process.
Femke Hiemstra's Haniwa

Ella ja Aleksi is a Finnish musical group featuring two four-year-old rappers. This video for the song "Yöjuna Rovaniemelle " is an absolute delight. (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

Private equity firms use borrowed money to buy undervalued companies, suck the cash out of the companies in the form of special dividends and other fees, and then rake in more fees when they unload the damaged and desperate company to another private equity firm, which squeezes more value out of it, repeating the cycle until the company is bankrupt.

In the short video accompanying a New York Times article about the 133-year-old Simmons Bedding Company's fatal entanglement with the private equity industry, Charles Duhigg, a financial projects reporter, remarked, "When I was in business school, there was nothing sexier in this entire world than private equity. It's exactly where you went if you wanted to one day own an island -- and one of my classmates just bought an island."

These private investors were able to buy companies like Simmons with borrowed money and put down relatively little of their own cash. Then, not long after, they often borrowed even more money, using the company’s assets as collateral — just like home buyers who took out home equity loans on top of their first mortgages. For the financiers, the rewards were enormous.

Twice after buying Simmons, THL [Thomas H. Lee Partners of Boston] borrowed more. It used $375 million of that money to pay itself a dividend, thus recouping all of the cash it put down, and then some.

A result: THL was guaranteed a profit regardless of how Simmons performed. It did not matter that the company was left owing far more than it was worth, just as many people profited from the mortgage business while many homeowners found themselves underwater.

At Simmons, Bought, Drained and Sold, Then Sent to Bankruptcy

At Amsterdam's Platform21 design museum last month, kooky Japanese product designers Yuri Suzuki and Masa Kimura — both former assistants at the wonderful art collective Maywa Denki — showed a three-week-long installation that followed the process of him making a giant, functional Rube Goldberg machine that would automatically churn out a full breakfast — coffee, toast, and an omelet. The Breakfast Machine is quite big and impractical, but nonetheless wonderful.

There's a video of the machine at work after the jump.

Over at Credit.com I have a post about online matchmaker OKCupid's blog, which analyzes the messages its members send to each other and generates interesting charts and graphs from the data.

The OKCupid blog crunches data collected from millions of messages sent back and forth between its subscribers and reveals what kinds of messages and terms result in the most responses (along with the ones that are sure-fire turn offs). Even if you aren't looking for a romantic partner, you'll find that the graphs and charts offer fascinating insights into human nature.

Especially interesting is the post titled "Online Dating Advice: Exactly What To Say In A First Message." OKCupid analyzed the terms and phrases in 500,000 "first contact" messages. They found, for instance, that "the worst 6 words you can use in a first message are all stupid slang," such as ur, r, u, ya, cant, and hit. Using ur will drop the response rate from 32 percent to 6 percent! Another mistake is complimenting someone on their looks. If you say someone is "sexy" you'll almost halve your chances of hearing back from them. On the other hand, a greeting of "How's it going?" will boost the response rate to 53%. People also respond well to messages that make it clear you actually read the person's profile and have something to say about it (using "you mention" in a message increases the response rate to 49%).

Charts to Help You Succeed in Online Dating

Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade is reported to have commissioned a 160-ft high bronze statue commemorating the "African Renaissance." The AP says it costs $27 million to build. As you can see above, the stature, "shows a muscular man in a heroic posture, outstretched arms wrapped around his wife and child, who is balanced on one of his biceps," Note: Senegal contains no volcanoes. Cyrus Farivar blogs:

* President Wade, according to the AP: "[maintains] he is entitled to 35 percent of any tourist revenues it generates because he owns "intellectual rights" for conceiving the idea, with the rest to go to the government."

* AP adds: "Nearly 50 North Korean workers from the state-run Mansudae Art Studio in Pyongyang were brought in to build the statue because of their expertise with bronze art, and some Senegalese have complained of its communist-era design."

African Renaissance statue in Dakar angers locals

Photographer Anthony Citrano roamed the burning hills above Los Angeles as the recent Station Fire spread. He captured a few photos of the spot where later, authorities would say the fire began. So why aren't law enforcement agencies or fire investigators returning his calls? Read his blog post, with photos, here. And in the LA Times, related reading: "Three weeks ahead of the Station blaze, the Forest Service sought to limit the use of local firefighting resources." Say it loud, people: no public option for firefighting!

When I was asked to join on with BoingBoing as a contributing editor, my first thought was, "OMG, I'm a Boinger!"

And that immediately triggered a flashback to my childhood, specifically the part I spent rifling through my father's comic collection. If you're familiar with old, classic Bloom County, then you may recall Billy and the Boingers (née Deathtongue), a heavy metal band made up of Bill the Cat, Opus the Penguin, Hodgepodge the Rabbit and Steve Dallas the Formerly Sensitive Male. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, then run, don't walk, to your nearest bookstore and purchase yourself a copy of Billy and the Boingers Bootleg, which contains all the associated strips, as well as an LP of the ostensibly hit songs "You Stink, But I Love You" and (yes) "I'm a Boinger." Perhaps, with luck, your 8-year-old will get a hold of it and the circle of dorky life will continue.

With that, ladies and gentlemen, may I present "I'm a Boinger" as performed by the Harry Pitts Band.

Dave sez, "On a trip to Shanghai to install an artwork, my cohorts and I stumbled on an area along Beijing street that was heaven for hardware geeks like me. I've loved hardware stores all my life, but I've never seen anything quite like this. I shot way too much video, and even felt compelled to sing about it later. It was that good."

China is full of places like this -- Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai... It's the world's factory, and there's plenty of making stuff all over the place.

Hardware Heaven (Thanks, Dave!)

At least, not tame yeast.

That's the gospel according to Ed Wood, a retired pathologist and sourdough bread expert. I called on Wood because I wanted to know where sourdough came from. Bear with me, because I'm about to sound a wee bit stupid, or at least baking-impaired.

Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan is the first volume in one of the most exciting new young adult series to come along since Uglies (or, for that matter, The Borribles). Leviathan is set in an alternate steampunk past, in which the powers of the world are divided into "Clankers" who favour huge, steam-powered walking war-machines; and "Darwinists," whose hybrid "beasties" can stand in for airships, steam-trains, war-ships, and subs (they even have a giant squid/octopus hybrid called the kraken that can seize whole warships and drag them to their watery graves).

Set on the eve of WWI, the story's two main characters are Aleks, the incognito orphan of the freshly assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand (fleeing his murderous uncle Emperor Franz Josef from Austria to the safe haven of Switzerland in a liberated battle-walker); and Deryn, a Scots girl who has dressed in boys' clothes to muster into Britain's Darwinist air-corps and finds herself a midshipsman on the Leviathan, a floating ecosystem a quarter-mile long, made up of whales, bats, bees, six-legged hydrogen-sniffing dogs, and all manner of beasties that make her the meanest thing in the sky.

Filled with gripping air and land-battles, political intrigue and danger, science and madness, Leviathan is part Island of Dr Moreau, part Patrick O'Brien. And to top it all off, the volume is lavishly illustrated with fabulous ink-drawings of the best scenes from the book, executed in high Victorian style by Keith Thompson. Thompson also produced contrafactual propaganda maps of alternate Europe for end-papers.

Westerfeld writes gripping, relentless coming-of-age novels that are equally enjoyable by boys and girls, adults and kids, and Leviathan is no exception. I'm looking forward to volume two -- and many more to come.

Leviathan is also available as an unabridged 8-hour audiobook on DRM-free CDs for a very reasonable $20. The reading is by Alan Cummings, who absolutely nails it, and the production -- bed music, editing -- is just superb, bringing the whole swashbuckling tale to life.

Leviathan

One night more than twenty years ago, Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair fired up the photocopy machine at Mark's work and cranked out the first issue of bOING bOING, the print 'zine.* (Our new/old hand-drawn logotype at the top of this page is from that era!) Since those heady, dot matrix days of staples, stamps, and cyberpunks, quite a lot has changed. But some things haven't. Click to 2009. We're just a few months from our ten year anniversary as a blog, and are proud to have nearly 70,000 posts in the archives. We're honored that millions of people resonate with Boing Boing's take on technology, culture, and high weirdness. Thank you for your continued support. But as happy mutants, we must continue to evolve. And so we're pleased to present this re-imagining of Boing Boing.

As you probably noticed, we have a new design. Our goal with it is to highlight our most exciting, provocative, anomalous, and newsworthy posts, even after they've floated down the blog river off the front page. So, please do check out the "display case" of featured stories at the top and right of the site. Speaking of features, there will be more of those. Of course, we'll keep curating and contextualizing the most interesting things we find online, but we're also going back to bOING bOING's 'zine roots by presenting originally-reported articles. Who's writing those? We are, and the "we" is expanding in marvelous ways. We're thrilled to have several fantastic, and familiar, voices joining us on the front page:

• Rob Beschizza and Lisa Katayama, two of our favorite tech writers in the world, are shifting their efforts from BB Gadgets to the front page of Boing Boing. If you're a BB Gadgets reader, don't fret -- now all of that material will be hosted right here. Meanwhile, Rob and Lisa will also get a chance to go beyond the gadget realm to explore the other microuniverses that fascinate them. Rob is also busy as Boing Boing's first ever managing editor -- he does a masterful job of keeping us all in line, even if that line is quite curvy.

• Over at Offworld, Brandon Boyer has spent months charting the esoteric interzone of indie games. Henceforth, he'll also post columns and game reviews at Boing Boing that showcase the best bets for pixelated pleasure.

• Earlier this year, Maggie Koerth-Baker spent two weeks as a guestblogger and delighted us with revelations about giant squid, nasty cytokine storms, and parasites we should know and love. Now, Maggie will be here every day feeding our insatiable appetite for weird science, natural curiosities, odd anthropology, and the edges of eco-tech.

This relaunch was a major undertaking, and several people deserve a tip of the ol' propeller beanie: Rob Beschizza lit a fire under us, did the design, managed its implementation, and kept us calm. He is a creative force of quantum proportions. Master coder Dean Putney did the vast majority of the software development. As always, our stellar sysadmin, Ken Snider, kept things humming in the Jefferies tubes. Thanks to George Triantafyllakos, creator of BPreplay, the open source font we're using for headlines. And thank you to our partner John Battelle, our friend Jason Weisberger, and Federated Media's Mugs Buckley, Neil Chase, and Pete Spande for their business sense (and cents).

So with that, we hope you enjoy this evolutionary leap. Welcome back to Boing Boing: the brain mutator for higher primates.

(* Mark insists he reimbursed his former employer for the paper and toner!)

Tom sez, "A wonderful selection of suburban playgrounds and parks circa 1970: robot slides, space cruiser climbing frames and more."

These litigation magnets made me the lad I am today. I miss 'em. Sniff.

Playgrounds From the 70's (Thanks, Tom!)

(Image via George Campbell)

Glyn sez, "The Royal Mail has sent a 'cease and desist' letter to ErnestMarples.com, a website that provides a post code API allowing social projects to perform post code lookups [ed: due to the bonkers British law on database copyrights, the record of which post-code corresponds to which address is privately owned, though it was developed a public expense; the public can only use the database it paid for if it pays again for a license from the Royal Mail]. Amongst the many non-profit services that face closure today is Job Centre Pro Plus, which allows you to find jobs near you. Royal Mail is currently looking to reduce its workforce of 121,000 postal workers.

Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group adds, "It's outrageous that Royal Mail should be sacking workers and at the same time trying to close a service that might help them find work. Post codes were created with public money, so they need to be used for the widest public benefit. Ernest Marples have been showing how this can be done. Their ideas need to be legalised for non-profit use, not shut down. Intellectual property rules need to work for society, and not the other way round. An amicable solution to allow non-commercial use of post code data would be easy to create, via a key given only to non-profit organisations. Clearly, something that allows greater use of post codes is needed right now. Better access to information means more social and democratic benefits.

On Friday the 2nd October we received correspondence from the Royal Mail demanding that we close this site down (see below). One of the directors of Ernest Marples Postcodes Ltd has also been threatened personally.

We are not in a position to mount an effective legal challenge against the Royal Mail's demands and therefore have closed the ErnestMarples.com API effective immediately.

We understand that this will cause harm and considerable inconvenience to the many people who are using or intend to use the API to power socially useful tools, such as HealthWhere, JobcentreProPlus.com and PlanningAlerts.com. For this, we apologise unreservedly.

Ernest Marples Postcodes has been threatened by the Royal Mail

Royal Mail: closing job search over data dispute while sacking workers (Thanks, Glyn!)

Churba sez, "Leeds Hackspace is holding an Open Hack Day on Oct 10 at Old Broadcasting House, all tickets are free, with various events such as a Scrapheap Challenge, Micro-controller Workshop, the OpenLeeds Code-a-thon, and lightning talks, where anyone who knows about a topic can give a ten minute presentation about it. All are welcome, tickets are free, And Leeds Hackspace is Desperately Seeking New members, as they're one of the smaller hackspaces in the UK, and only recently started."

Announcing LHS HackDay! Saturday, October 10th 2009 (Thanks, Churba!)

Wondermark's wonderful Genre Fiction Generator

(Thanks, David!)