Posts Tagged ‘boing-boing’

Cassette Is Not Dead refurbs cassette tapes into handsome lamps. They operate on a barter economy — send them 40 homemade mix-tapes and they’ll send you a wallet made from one tape; send them 80 pre-recorded tapes and they’ll send …        

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Lamps made from cassette tapes

Matt Alt, author of ” Yokai Attack ,” gives a Pecha Kucha talk on how to survive some of the ickiest monsters from spooky Japanese fairy tales. And below, Matt writes: A few months back, I gave a talk about …        

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How to survive a Japanese monster attack

Glenn Fleishman at The Economist: Chris Hadfield has captured the world’s heart, judging by the 14m YouTube views of his free-fall rendition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, recorded on the International Space Station (ISS). The Canadian astronaut’s clear voice and capable guitar-playing were complemented by his facility in moving around in the microgravity of low-earth        

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Copyright in space

A good read in The Daily Dot about a “major piece of the puzzle” in Tumblr’s origin myth that’s often overlooked: “[Founder David] Karp wasn’t the first person to create a tumblelog, the term used to describe the stripped-down blogging and content curation he has become known for. He wasn’t even the second. The true        

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The unsung heroes of early Tumblr culture

A first music video from the long-awaited new album ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’ by Boards of Canada .        

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Boards of Canada: Reach for the Dead (from "Tomorrow’s Harvest," 2013)

Margaret Killjoy sez, “Steampunk Magazine #9 is out and available for order. The pdf is up as well. New orders and pre-orders will be going out this weekend! 118 ad-free, Creative-Commons pages of steampunk mad science, lifestyle, fiction, and history. Including an interview with Cory Doctorow and how to make hydrogen airships out of condoms.”        

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Steampunk magazine #9

Two US Navy dolphins discovered an antique torpedo off the coast of San Diego, CA. The Howell torpedo is one of 50 produced, remarkable as it is the first locomotive torpedo developed and was fly-wheel powered. Surprisingly this marks the 24th recovered! Check out HNGN for the story: An early naval torpedo was discovered deep        

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Navy dolphins find antique torpedo

Here’s a excerpt from Jeffrey Brown’s latest book, Vader’s Little Princess. In this irresistibly funny follow-up to the breakout bestseller Darth Vader and Son, Vader—Sith Lord and leader of the Galactic Empire—now faces the trials, joys, and mood swings of raising his daughter Leia as she grows from a sweet little girl into a rebellious        

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Vader’s Little Princess: Excerpt

Here’s a clip from an upcoming documentary on the enormous gap between the food described by Zachary is a fourth grader at a large New York City public elementary school. Each day he reads the Department of Education lunch menu online to see what is being served. The menu describes delicious and nutritious cuisine that        

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Yuck! NYC fourth grader sneaks camera into school, makes documentary about gross cafeteria food

Cartoonist Jess Fink, creator of the erotic Victorian-era robot graphic novel Chester 5000-XYV has a new memoir out called We Can Fix It: A Time Travel Memoir. It’s got a premise that reminds me of something Nicholson Baker would come up with: Fink invents a time machine and travels into the past to visit younger        

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We Can Fix it! – a graphic novel time travel memoir

Kevyn Jacobs snapped this knit (crocheted?) Dalek bollard cover at the corner of West Magnolia Street and Commercial Street in Bellingham, WA. No clue as to the manufacturer of said confection, but bravo. #Knitted #Dalek bollard cover (Thanks, Hagrid!)        

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Bollard transformed into yarn Dalek

In The remixing dilemma: The trade-off between generativity and originality [PDF], a paper just published in American Behavioral Scientist, Benjamin Mako Hill and Andrés Monroy-Hernández analyzed a data-set of projects from the Scratch website that had been made available for download and remixing. They were attempting to identify the formalattributes that made some projects more        

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What makes a project remixable?

Ben Marks, our pal at Collector’s Weekly, says, “I just wrote a piece about Matt Eichen, the yarmulke-wearing, oral-surgeon founder and designer of Musicvox, whose Spaceranger guitars were used in the last Austin Powers movie. After taking an almost decade-long hiatus due to his daughter’s bout with cancer (she’s fine now), he’s back at it,        

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Oral surgeon’s quest to reimagine the garage-band guitar

Photo: Xeni Jardin [Guatemala City] — Above: Elena Caba Ijom of Nebaj, El Quiché, Guatemala, reads news about the trial as all of us in the courtroom here await a verdict in the genocide trial of Rios Montt and Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez. The judges are expected to announce their decision at 4pm local time, despite        

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Guatemala: Waiting. Snapshots from Ríos Montt genocide trial courtroom, verdict imminent

It’s always fun to cruise through Fantagraphics’s store in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle. You never know what you might stumble across amid the new comics releases, independent zines and assorted odd runs and old stock there. I happened upon a copy of Justin Green’s Sign Game (ST Publications and Last Gasp Of San Francisco).        

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Sign Game: tricks of the trade from a professional sign painter

Photo: Xeni Jardin. Ixil Mayan women read news about the trial, while waiting for day 26 of the proceedings against Ríos Montt and Rodriguez Sanchez to begin in the courtroom. The former de facto dictator and his head of Intelligence are accused of genocide and crimes against humanity committed against the Ixil Mayan people during        

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Guatemala: Ríos Montt trial enters closing arguments, 75 years in prison sought by public ministry for genocide, crimes against humanity

Video above: “From Guatemalan Soil, Unearthing Evidence of Genocide,” a report I produced with Miles O’Brien for PBS NewsHour on the science behind the historic genocide trial that is in its concluding phase today, here in Guatemala City. Complete transcript of the video report is here. Forensic science, data analysis, satellite images, and a massive        

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Guatemala: The science behind historic genocide trial of General Ríos Montt (video report)

As the saga of the porno copyright trolls Prenda Law moves into its end-game (likely to involve disbarments and jail time for the fraudsters behind the multimillion-dollar scheme that relied on bogus legal threats and sloppy accusations of copyright infringement), it’s worth asking, how, exactly, this scam was able to go on for so long,        

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Welcome to the century of the copyright troll: Prenda Law was just the beginning

I don’t have a Pandigital WikiReader so I don’t know if it’s any good or not, but I love the idea of a $10 hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. I ordered one just because it has a “Random” article button. if you have one, please let us know what you think of it in the        

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$10 gadget contains "the entire English Wikipedia with 3 million topics"

An illustrator and games publisher have teamed up to kickstart “Adventure Maximus!”, a streamlined, cards-and-dice RPG aimed at kids eight and up (though there’s an endorsement from a six-year-old on the site). The gameplay looks pretty clever and I really like the art. It’s a minimum $35 pledge to get a finished game, though you        

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Kickstarting an RPG for kids 8 and up

David Goodsell of the Scripps Research Institute made this lovely watercolor illustration of a cell of Mycoplasma mycoides. This bacterium is the cause of a deadly respiratory disease that affects cattle and other cud-chewing animals. If you’ve ever read much about zoonoses — diseases that pass from animals to humans — then you know that        

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A beautiful bacterium

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~5/Me2xalhhmJk/gweek_093.mp3 In this episode of Gweek, I talked to the terrific crime writer Duane Swierczynski. Duane has a new book out today, called Point & Shoot. It’s the third and final novel in his Charlie Hardie series (see my review here). Next week, Dark Horse is releasing X #1, written by Duane

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Gweek 093: Crime writer Duane Swierczynski

Just what you always needed, but did not know until it existed, and it exists now: “A super detailed T-Rex eating fried chicken leg,” which is available in dark oxidized silver or gold brass and sterling silver. Endorsed by Zach Galifianakis. Has crystal eyes (the ring, not Mr. Galifianakis). A hundred bucks.

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Gold ring in the form of a dinosaur eating a chicken leg

Have at it. My top score is 11 because I can’t type.        

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Drop: Minecraft creator’s latest game is a typing tutor (or seems like one)

In various cities in Mexico on Sunday, journalists from newspapers and independent online news organizations marched to protest “violence that has claimed the lives of co-workers and silenced news media in parts of the country.” Demonstrators chanted “Justice!” and “Solution!,” and demanded that authorities investigate a string of murders, kidnappings and threats—like the unsolved brutal        

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Reporters, bloggers in Mexico march to protest violence against news media