Posts Tagged ‘little-help’

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

Here’s a totally amazing and fascinating story about hyperinflation crashing the economy of Blizzard’s massively multiplayer online RPG Diablo 3. Blizzard blew its economic strategy for Diablo 3 by making the “sinks” (places where gold is taken out of the economy) unattractive, adding in real-money-for-stuff trades, and then letting a bug run wild. Before you        

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In-game hyperinflation

Marina Litvinenko, widow of Alexander Litvinenko (a British citizen who was assassinated in London by two former KGB agents who poisoned him with radioactive polonium) has accused the British government, Secretary of State William Hague, and PM David Cameron of sabotaging the coroner’s inquest into her husband’s death. Hague and Cameron intervened in the coroner’s        

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Top UK government officials tamper with inquest into Brit assassinated by Russian spies in London, suppress evidence

I’ve written before about Moran Cerf — celebrated neuroscientist, former military hacker, and good-guy bank robber — who also happens to be a great storyteller. Here’s a video in which Cerf recounts some clever and fascinating neuroscience experiments that use neurofeedback to help people resolve competition between different thoughts and wills in their minds. The        

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Brain hacking: using neurofeedback to master conflicting wills in your mind

Here’s a video of biologist Brad Josephs’s GoPro camera being eaten by a grizzly bear in Alaska; he’d set it out in order to get footage for a BBC documentary. The grizzly went above and beyond the call of duty. A grizzly Ate My GoPro!!! GoPro HD (Thanks, Hugh)        

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Grizzly bear eats video camera: close up of terrifying maw

Jaime sez, “In honor of Children’s Book Week, I’m sharing a link about a book written by 8-year old Griffin Hehmeyer. His mom tells the story of how Griffin wrote a book, enlisted his friends and classmates for help editing and illustrating it, and eventually published it. The book serves as a model for children        

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Fantasy novel by an eight-year-old

What better subject for a t-shirt than an Adventure Time/Katamari Damacy mashup? Adventure Time Ball        

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Katamari Adventure Time

This bloody cleaver purse — which hides the handbag cavity in the cleaver bag — is $33 at Vampire Freaks. No idea if it’s remotely practical, but it does look like a giant, bloody cleaver. Bloody Cleaver Clutch Purse (Thanks, Neha!)        

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Purse that looks like a bloody cleaver

Stephen sez, “I recently helped set my grandad get set up on his new PC and spotted a photo of him from when he was about 20 years old. It was in a sorry state, so I emailed it to myself and posted it on Reddit, where the community came together and restored it beyond        

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Grandson explains reddit-restored, 60-y-o navy portrait to amazed Grandad

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

As I blogged earlier this week, the Syrian Electronic Army hacked The Onion’s Twitter account and used it to post a bunch of dumb messages attacking Israel, the US, and the UN. Now, the Onion’s IT administrators have posted a detailed account of how Syrian hackers used a series of staged and careful phishing attacks        

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Anatomy of a state-sponsored phishing attack: how the Free Syrian Army hacked The Onion

Levskaya’s Eschersketch is a GitHub-hosted web-toy that produces Escher style tessellated drawings that are very good fun to make and elaborate upon. Eschersketch (Thanks, Hugh!)        

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Eschersketch: automated tessellated Escher-esque drawing toy

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

The Onion got hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army, who proceeded to send out a bunch of tweets that could have been mistaken for actual Onion tweets making fun of the sort of thing that Syrian propagandists would tweet if they hacked the Onion’s Twitter (see after the jump for the full list). But no,        

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Onion gets hacked by Syrian propagandists, responds with funny article

Vincent sez, “Our high school film class from Oak Park High in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada made this zombie-themed PSA to spread the message about a worker’s right to refuse unsafe work. It’s a big issue. In Canada, in 2010, 1014 workplace deaths were recorded in Canada – that’s almost three deaths every day! Between 1993        

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Zombie work safety PSA made by high school students

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

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~5/mHt9bRNfbpE/STF13042802_Stephenson.mp3 Slate, the New America Foundation and Arizona State University have kicked off a new podcast called “Future Tense,” hosted by Internet scholar Tim Wu. The inaugural episode is an interview with Neal Stephenson wherein Neal and Tim talk about where the future has gone — why we no longer seem to dream of jetpacks and        

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Future Tense: Neal Stephenson and Tim Wu talk future, sf and tech

With just a few steps, you can turn one of Adafruit’s Massive Red Arcade Button kits into a working (ish) HAL9000 computer: Devoted film fans will spend countless hours and hundreds of dollars (occasionally even thousands) to create flawless replica props for their personal collections. The iconic eye of HAL 9000 from 2001: a Space        

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HOWTO make a HAL9000

What better way to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the publication of Watson and Crick’s landmark paper on the double helix structure of DNA than by making your own double-helix out of jellybabies and licorice? Dr Mark Lorch’s method for making edible DNA models promises to capture the “elegant simplicity” of DNA. You’ll need: Two        

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HOWTO make a DNA model out of licorice and jellybabies

Canada Post — a failing, state-owned Crown Corporation — not only claims a copyright on the database of postal codes (a collection of facts, and not the sort of thing that usually attracts copyright). They also claim a trademark on the words “postal code,” and have sent legal threats to websites that use the words        

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Canada Post claims exclusive use of the words "postal code"

Science fiction author Michael Swanwick sez, “In my adopted hometown of Philadelphia there’s a move afoot to put up a plaque where Isaac Asimov lived while he was working (and writing seminal Foundation and Robot stories) at the Naval Yard during WWII. Asimov hated Philadelphia while he lived here but came back for the conventions        

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Petition to get a plaque commemorating Isaac Asimov in Philadelphia

Into The Fire is a film with a difference. Besides being a hard hitting documentary which shows the plight of refugees and migrants amidst a collapsing Greek economy, it’s also an experiment in new film production and distribution techniques.        

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Documentary on hidden victims of Greek austerity that’s crowdfunded, free & CC-licensed

From IfIndustries, an (apparently?) unavailable but rather clever line of Pac-Man hoodies (one ghost shown, all ghosts in set). Pac-man & Ghosts Hoddies (via Geeks Are Sexy)        

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Pac-Man hoodies

Catherine sez, On Monday, the Boston Marathon was bombed. On Monday night I was feeling blessed and thankful to not know anyone directly affected by the bombs. But on Tuesday morning I woke up to an email from my colleague Chris Peterson at the MIT Center for Civic Media. For years Chris’ family has had        

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MIT student raises funds for young Boston bomb victim’s family

For years, Viacom has been embroiled in a bizarre lawsuit against Google, asserting that Google had a duty to figure out exactly which videos uploaded by it users infringed on Viacom’s copyrights and stop them from showing (Viacom’s internal memos showed that they themselves had paid dozens of companies to secretly upload Viacom videos disguised        

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Viacom gets its ass handed to it again by a court in its YouTube lawsuit